The effects of political participation on political efficacy: A simultaneous equations model

The absence of studies investigating the influence of political participation on individuals’ perceptions of political efficacy constitutes a significant gap in our knowledge of political behaviour. While many researchers have investigated the influence of efficacy on political participation, and there has been some endeavour to examine the reciprocity of the relationship between the variables, none has estimated a comprehensive model of the impact of individuals’ participation is different kinds of political activity on different aspects of their perceptions of political efficacy. We redress these particular deficiencies in our knowledge of political behaviour, investigating the influence of participation in three different modes of activity—partisan activism, community activism and political extremism—on individuals’ perceptions of internal and external efficacy; that is, their perceptions of political self‐competence and system responsiveness. Our findings confirm that the relationships between different modes of participation and efficacy are both reciprocal and varied, and that they vary in ways which have important implications for theories of participatory democracy.     

The political geography of macro-level turnout in American political development

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The result is a somewhat impoverished conception of turnout that often removes the political from political participation. In this article, I argue for a new, macro-level perspective that highlights the political dimension of turnout by placing turnout in the local political settings in which it has taken place. I contrast two competing explanations of macro turnout variation across local electorates, a political account and Elazar's cultural thesis, and discuss their implications for the political geography of macro turnout in American electoral history. I then examine this political geography by employing a local indicator of spatial association (a LISA statistic) to identify the spatial structuring of macro turnout in the United States from 1828 through 2000. I demonstrate that a political perspective provides greater leverage than Elazar's cultural perspective in explaining the political geography of macro turnout in the United States.     

The political contexts of calendars

Abstract

Calendrical systems and concepts of the measurement and passing of time vary from one society to the next, reflecting differences in technology, cultural preconceptions, and political processes. This paper illustrates this variation with reference to societies ranging from small groups of transhumant herders and agriculturalists in Ethiopia to those modern nation states which collaborate in maintaining the most advanced atomic clock.     

An anti‐racism methodology: The Native Sons and Daughters and racism against Asians in Nanaimo,British Columbia,Canada

Over the past number of years there has been increased interest in racism and anti‐racism amongst geographers. This paper focuses on one type of anti‐racism methodology that relates to critically interrogating my own white colonial settler ancestors and particularly the institutions and structures of which they were a part, and using those understandings to resist the contemporary increase in white supremacy and anti‐Asian racism. It also seeks to demonstrate the links between anti‐racism and decolonization. Particularly, I examine the Native Sons and Daughters of British Columbia, Canada, in the Nanaimo city area, where my great‐grandparents from northern England and Scotland settled as working‐class miners at the beginning of the 20^th century. I examine white working‐class settler racism against Asians, especially as practiced against Chinese and Japanese immigrants. While I do not argue that this is the only or even the most important type of anti‐racism methodology, this sort of research and associated production of knowledge can be useful in resisting present‐day anti‐Asian racism, even though I acknowledge that I am still embedded in colonial structures of racism and white privilege.     

The impact of feminist scholarship on Australian political science

The discipline of political science has remained male dominated in most parts of the world. Women have organised within political science associations both to raise the status of women in the profession and to try to transform the discipline. This article is a personal account of the 25‐year history of the Women's Caucus of the Australasian Political Studies Association and its successes and failures. While the status of women in the profession has improved and the journal has become more gender inclusive, the impact of feminist scholarship on political science curriculum remains patchy. Space has been made for gender scholarship and a chapter added to textbooks and disciplinary histories, but the approach is additive rather than transformative. One contributing factor may be increased fragmentation of the discipline.     

Viewing animal bodies: truths,practical aesthetics and ethical considerability in UK livestock breeding

This paper focuses on the production of aesthetic ‘truths’ in UK livestock breeding, drawing on detailed qualitative research with breeders and breed societies. It extends emerging interest in the aesthetic in human geographical research, examining how aesthetic judgements about non-human animals depend, in part, on the agency of the animal and their inter-subjective relations with humans in specific places. Aesthetic evaluation further produces implicit judgements about animals' ethical considerability, at the same time obscuring the effects of such judgements on their framing and treatment. Aesthetic evaluation is thus related to sets of material and ethical interests. The paper develops a more-than-human reading of Foucault's biopower, which explores how truths about visual evaluations of animals become established. Two empirical perspectives explore, first, a ‘relational practical aesthetic’ for evaluating beef cattle and sheep, exploring the implications of the aesthetic framing of specific animals and, second, the tensions involved in looking at animals when different aesthetic truths conflict and when traditions of aesthetic evaluation encounter genetic modes of evaluation. The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of ongoing transformations of evaluative modes in livestock breeding, suggesting that shifts away from inter-subjective modes of aesthetic evaluation further diminish the ethical status of animals.     

The evolution of international political economy

The 'invisible college' of international political economy (IPE) is a house divided. The field is split between the rationalist species that dominates in the US and a diverse genus of critical scholars. Recent developments in IPE suggest, however, that there is scope to rebuild the invisible college. An increasing awareness of normative questions should make rationalist scholars more receptive to critical work, while critical scholars are discovering an independent identity as they reinvent themselves in the tradition of classical political economy. There is much to gain from a renewed exchange between rationalist and critical scholars, particularly in the context of empirical work, as demonstrated by the vivid politics of the global bioeconomy.     

The political sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

The political sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, delivered between 1607 and 1622 on the anniversaries of the Gowrie and Gunpowder Plots, deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. Although he has often been called a Jacobean absolutist, Andrewes is better described as a political Elizabethan. The key to his intellectual originality resides not in his fundamental theoretical positions but rather in his method of exegesis. Andrewes was the first theologian or theorist to have worked out a coherent exposition of the doctrines of divine right and non-resistance which was founded on the formalist analysis of the Bible, for which achievement he deserves a place in the history of political thought. In his emphasis on providentialism, moreover, he reinforced the idea that monarchy was divinely ordained. By analysing these sermon sequences, we can see how he dismantled and interpreted Biblical texts in order to confirm commonplace political propositions.     

The foundations of modern political thought

This paper aims at setting Montesquieu's 1729 sojourn in the Dutch Republic within its specific Dutch context whilst reconsidering the impact this short period may have exerted on his work. Based on a wide variety of Dutch, English and French sources, the article offers a study of Montesquieu's Dutch networks and contacts, a comparative Franco-Dutch approach to taxation and fiscal policy and an insight into the history of the stadholderate under William IV. The main argument made in the paper is two-fold: first, that the Dutch Republic was a mirror Montesquieu held up to the French monarchy, allowing him to put a number of ideas of government to the test; secondly that, owing to the fluctuating nature of Dutch political events between 1729 and 1748, the Dutch model remained somewhat elusive in Montesquieu's broader understanding of the paradigm of republican regimes.