Institutionalizing Neutrally Competent Policy Analysis: Resources for Promoting Objectivity and Balance in Consolidating Democracies

Creating institutions that foster the production of objective and balanced policy analysis is a challenging task for all types of regimes. The value of neutral competence often suffers in tradeoffs with the value of responsiveness, especially in the exercise of executive authority. Institutional designers, however, are not without resources for structuring arrangements to promote the production of objective and balanced policy analysis: organizations can be created with an incentive to achieve "reputations" for neutral competence; organizations can be isolated from being too politically responsive through forms of "independence"; for promoting interaction based on "professional norms" can be created to resolve conflicts about prediction; "participation in international organizations" can be leveraged to counteract domestic biases; and "transparency" can be employed to facilitate balancing of views or to shame severe abuses. This essay sets out the logic underlying design with these sorts of institutional resources, illustrates their use primarily in the U.S. context, and speculates on their application in consolidating democracies.     

Policy Analysis for What? The Effectiveness of Nonpartisan Policy Research Organizations

For the past several decades, scholars have studied the role of policy research in decision making. Depending how "use" is measured, the results have indicated only modest or indirect impacts. This study takes another direction to studying knowledge utilization, comparing the influence of nonpartisan policy research organizations in 19 states on their principal clients: state legislators. Nonpartisan research agencies represent a particularly rigorous test since the literature on knowledge utilization questions whether nonpartisan policy analysis organizations (NPROs) can remain neutral and contribute meaningfully to policymaking. Further, this analysis is comparative across states, studies institutions rather than specific reports or policy domains, and examines multiple types of "use." Using the results of surveys of both agencies and legislators, the results indicate a strong association between the size and type of policy research organizations and legislators' assessments of use, even controlling for political and ideological factors. This suggests that policy analysis organizations—even those in a highly politicized environment—have a significant impact on policymaking, mainly by providing information and analysis to decision makers but also in influencing public policy outcomes.     

Examining Implementation of the National Voter Registration Act by Nonprofit Organizations: An Institutional Explanation

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act authorizes nonprofit social service organizations to conduct nonpartisan voter registration drives, with the aim of making the process more accessible for low‐income citizens and segments of the population historically underrepresented in the political process. Although more than 15 years have elapsed since this important reform was enacted, very little is known about the extent to which nonprofits have embraced this practice, and what factors explain their decision to do so. Drawing upon institutional theory, this article examines the propensity of nonprofit social service organizations to carry out nonpartisan voter registration and voter mobilization campaigns in a national election year. A series of hypotheses are tested using data from a random sample of several hundred nonprofit service organizations in the United States that were surveyed prior to the 2008 election. Findings suggest that institutional factors, especially state laws, are highly influential in shaping the decision of local level nonprofits to register voters. The article concludes with a discussion of policy implications of this study.     

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.     

Electoral redistricting and minority political representation in Canada and the United States

This article compares the political representation of visible minorities in Canada and the United States, focusing on differences in federal redistribution (redistricting) practices and constituency composition. Although the two countries both use territorially‐based electoral systems, they operate under different legal standards and institutional environments for the creation of ridings (districts). In the US, redistricting is a highly political process, yet must respect strict population equality standards. Litigation over redistricting is common, and courts adjudicate voting and representation under a constitutional system enforcing strong individual rights. In contrast, Canada's redistribution process is relatively nonpartisan, permits large population variances among ridings, places more emphasis on community rights, and is seldom subject to extensive court challenges. Despite these differences, the two countries exhibit striking similarities in the overall level of visible minority representation relative to population share. Conversely, Canada's population inequalities among ridings create a systematic disadvantage for visible minorities. Political attention to visible minority representation is stronger in the US, but the means to achieve it are constrained both by the judicial limits on group representation and the constitutional limits on the use of racial identity. Canada has a framework for political representation that could easily accommodate significant visible minority representation but lacks the political imperative to use it, in part because doing so would run counter to Canada's multicultural image of these groups as immigrants rather than as non‐white minorities.     

Party responsiveness and voter confidence in Australia

Numerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. This article presents the results of a study investigating whether the responsiveness of Australian parties to what their voters want drives this lack of confidence. It analyses two aspects of party responsiveness: programmatic responsiveness in electoral manifestos and perceived responsiveness that centres on Australian voters’ assessment of how well their parties meet their demands. The analysis finds that programmatic responsiveness has no significant influence. Instead, how Australians perceive their parties to be responsive has a modest effect on their confidence in those parties. The study suggests that, however, it is incumbency which has the most powerful effect on voter confidence.     

The Meaning of Normality: the controversy about the mental health campaign in Sweden 1969

At the height of the Swedish welfare society, a campaign with the aim of promoting mental health issues within the Swedish labour market was launched. The title and purpose of the campaign, ‘Mental health – an action of increased understanding and solidarity at work’, was to illuminate mental health issues at work. Surprisingly to the organizers, the mental health campaign stirred up major opposition, especially from the political left. The idea of mental hygiene in an industrial and workplace setting, a cross-breed between the values of the Human Relations School and psychiatric science, was received with deep mistrust. The campaign caused an agitated debate in the media about power relations between employers and employees. The political disagreements were exposed in a number of articles in the daily newspapers and in the evening papers during the summer of that year. This article undertakes an investigation of the campaign literature and the media debate. The interpretation of the debate highlights different opinions about the meaning of normal mental health. Four different views of normality and mental health which demonstrate the complexity of the issue are presented. Mental health could mean adjustment and harmony, it could be a medical weapon to suppress the working class, it could even mean a neutral state of absence of mental problems, or lastly it could be a claim for the right to live a normal life.     

Gender and the Australian Parliament: Putting the Political Scientist into the Picture

This paper draws on a study of gender and politics in the Australian parliament in order to make a contribution to methodological debates in feminist political science. The paper begins by outlining the different dimensions of feminist political science methodology that have been identified in the literature. According to this literature five key principles can be seen to constitute feminist approaches to political science. These are: a focus on gender, a deconstruction of the public/private divide, giving voice to women, using research as a basis for transformation, and using reflexivity to critique researcher positionality. The next part of the paper focuses more specifically on reflexivity tracing arguments about its definition, usefulness and the criticisms it has attracted from researchers. Following this, I explore how my background as a member of the Australian House of Representatives from 1987 to 1996 provided an important academic resource in my doctoral study of gender and politics in the national parliament. Through this process I highlight the value of a reflexive approach to research.     

Civic Education and Political Knowledge in Australia

As part of the renewed emphasis on national identity and citizenship, interest in civic education in Australia has increased. Although both Labor and Liberal national governments have been committed to introducing civic education, there is little research to show that the politically knowledgeable citizen is the more sophisticated and competent citizen. This paper uses survey data collected in 1996 to examine the extent of political knowledge in Australia and to analyse its consequences for political literacy, competence, and participation. The results show that the median citizen could answer two out of seven factual questions correctly, with women, the young and those with less education being more likely to provide incorrect answers. The relationship between knowledge and attitudes and behaviour shows that factual knowledge increases political literacy and, to a lesser extent, competence. However, knowledge has little effect on political participation, a major goal for civic education among politicians. Overall, the increased political knowledge that civic education creates is more effective in generating positive views of democratic institutions, and less effective in shaping political behaviour. The democratic citizen is expected to be well informed about political affairs to know what the issues are, what their history is, what the relevant facts are, what alternatives are proposed, what the party stands for, what the likely consequences are. (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee 1966, 308)     

District Voter Turnout and Dyadic Representation in Congress

One of the most important tools by which citizens can influence their elected officials' behavior is through voting—the electoral connection. Previous studies demonstrate that the opinions of voters are better represented than the opinions of nonvoters within an electoral jurisdiction, but we do not know whether jurisdictions with higher levels of aggregate voter turnout are better represented by their elected officials compared to those with lower levels of turnout. Using data compiled across five congressional sessions (2003–2013), this article investigates whether congressional districts with higher voter turnout are better represented by their member of Congress (MC). We find evidence that district voter turnout positively conditions the relationship between district opinion and MC voting behavior even after accounting for the possible effects of electoral competition and district income and racial demographics. In addition, we uncover evidence that partisan differences exist in this conditioning effect such that higher voter turnout enhances roll call voting responsiveness among Democratic MCs but not among Republican MCs. These findings suggest that congressional districts as a whole benefit from a political responsiveness standpoint when more of their constituents turn out to vote and contribute to literatures on political representation, political participation, democratic accountability, and the U.S. Congress.     

从域外领土到飞地社区：人文地理学中的飞地研究进展

飞地是一个经典的地理学概念,也是一个重要的空间分析视角。目前国内关于飞地的研究日益增多,但对其内涵的梳理仍显不足,多种定义并存,并出现概念泛化的现象。在此背景下,本文对已有的飞地概念及其内涵进行了梳理,指出从域外领土、经济飞地到飞地社区的内涵演变历程,并根据飞地的宗主地-东道地关系,将其划分为行政飞地、经济飞地、飞地社区和飞地国家4种类型。本文研究指出,飞地概念的核心是其宗主地-东道地-飞地的三方构图,依托这一视角可以对当前的异域领土、经济飞地、乃至城市内部的族裔聚居区进行多尺度的空间分析,从飞地的不同功能出发,可以对其展开多维度的地理学透视,为进一步的实证研究和相关政策实施提供参考。     

Critical geopolitics and school textbooks: The case of environment-conflict links in Germany

This study explores the conceptual and empirical utility of studying school textbooks from a critical geopolitics perspective. School textbooks bind together various discourses, modalities and genres and can reflect the dominant knowledge in a given society. They therefore have a high potential to reveal the citational practices resonating between the domains of formal, practical and popular geopolitics. Studying school textbooks can also enrich the literature on children's and young people's (political) geographies by analyzing how the political worldviews and agency of young people are shaped by teaching materials. Empirically, the study draws on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to study how environment-conflict links are textually and visually portrayed in German geography and civics textbooks. The results suggest that German school textbooks significantly reflect the depictions of environment-conflict links in political, media and (popular) science discourses and thus reveal crucial citational practices. Drawing on the environmental security literature, it is further argued that these textbooks convey problematic geographical imaginations: they overemphasize the risk of environmental conflicts, reflect ideas of spill-over effects threatening the global north, and portray people from the global south as irresponsible and threatening.     

The Iron Triangle of Urban Entrepreneurialism: The Political Economy of Urban Corruption in Spain

Despite a cascade of corruption scandals over the last decade, the role of political corruption has yet to be accounted for in the scholarship on Spanish urban entrepreneurialism. This is an omission that extends to the broader literature on the topic as well. This paper looks at the theoretical causes of this neglect and explores ways of integrating corruption into the study of urban entrepreneurialism. To do so, it offers a systematic analysis of the role of clientelism in the political economy of Spanish inter-urban competition. Contrary to the existing literature, which at best explains away corruption as a logical outgrowth of intensified competition for real estate capital, this paper argues that corruption is rooted in a political structure that precedes the emergence of urban entrepreneurialism. This structure is identified as an “iron triangle”, a complex of colluding interests formed by the state, the real estate industry, and political parties.     

The transformation of local politics: manufacturing plant closures and governing coalition fragmentation

A theoretical problem remains in the urban regime literature in that the connection between fiscal strain and regime fragmentation and thus the potential for coalition breakdown is not fully elaborated. Whelan et al. (1994) demonstrate that a shifting electoral coalition, in particular the emergence of a black majority electorate, can also lead to regime instability and fragmentation and the subsequent political struggles for dominance in an emerging governing coalition. In this paper a second mechanism for regime change is suggested; that is, that under conditions of economic restructuring and the subsequent fiscal strain, non-local actors, in this case national political actors operating primarily through party connections, can manipulate local political dependencies to forge governing coalition fragmentation and a regime change in a particular direction. This first finding is important because it highlights the often neglected role of party politics in the governing coalition/urban regime and the local state literature. Secondly, the complexity of state relations uncovered here does not bode well for a theoretically coherent concept of the local state but does display how the historical development of local social relations interacts with the state apparatus at the state and national level to create a particular ‘local’ politics. Finally, this transformation requires a shift in the location of political consensus building from the local democratic political electoral arena to a non-democratic quasi-public arena: a corporate-led governing coalition.     

Constructing a national identity from a created literary past: Giosuè Carducci and the development of a national literature

Giosuè Carducci's conception of Italian literature differed from those of Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. He argued that Italian literature, together with a concomitant cultural identity and political mission, developed along a continuous, progressive and evolutionary path. This study analyzes Carducci's creation of an Italian cultural and political identity through literary history and his construction of a plausible model for its historical development by incorporating literary,scientific and political theories. Carducci gave Italians a past of which they could be proud, proof of Italy's leading role in Europe's civilizing mission, and a strategy to accomplish it. Carducci's conception of italianitÀ, defined in terms of a historic mission of grandezza , was one of several brands of Italian nationalism. His linking of literary history to aspirations of national unity and aggrandizement implied that the mantle of the Risorgimento now belonged to the educated elite. This linkage of literature and national identity to aspirations of cultural and political hegemony explains why Carducci was so popular with the Nationalist Party whose leaders invoked his literary history to legitimize their political program and to discredit their political opponents prior to World War I and under Fascism.     

Coalitions,institutions and big tents: the new strategic reality of armed intervention

Armed interventions of the past decades demonstrate that strategic leadership can give way to lofty campaign plans, conflicting strategic narratives and concern with tactical, as opposed to strategic, issues. The intervention debate rightfully emphasizes the need for both leadership and institution‐building to rectify this situation, but then breaks down into discord: some critics argue that stronger leadership by big nations is necessary, others that this type of leadership wrecks the collective institutions that are needed in a new age of multilateralism and interdependence. This article argues instead that strategic leadership grows out of the effort to connect the three distinct political arenas that have come to dominate armed interventions: coalitions, institutions and big tent diplomacy. Strategic leadership is not about choosing between coalitions or institutions; it is about building bridges among these political arenas. The article embeds this argument within the strategic literature and demonstrates how it emerges from an engagement with modern armed interventions. It engages in two in‐depth assessments of NATO's experiences in Afghanistan and Libya and then undertakes a more general discussion of the steps that can be taken to encourage strategic leadership.     

Serpent Mound: Still Built by the Adena,and Still Rebuilt During the Fort Ancient Period

Radiocarbon dates from the base of Serpent Mound in Ohio demonstrate that it was built 2,100–2,300 years ago during the Adena period but was subsequently rebuilt or repaired about 900 years ago during the Fort Ancient period. We describe the basis for supporting the chronology of this building sequence, why it is the best and most complete explanation from the data at hand, and discuss the errors and misconceptions that critics of it have put forth. Our interest is in establishing a chronology of mound construction in order to address questions about cultural continuity/discontinuity, appropriation, and reuse of cultural monuments and religious/political symbols. We also plead that researchers jointly collect new data from Serpent Mound to end the back-and-forth questioning of chronological context and research competence.     

鲁北地区考古发现与春秋时期齐国灭纪

进入春秋时期,西周形成的传统政治格局开始发生改变,社会开始出现一种比较宽松的发展局面.各诸侯国凭借当时宽松的政治环境竞相发展自己的实力.齐国成为首先发展起来的国家,在其发展过程中,它不断吞并周围的小国,其中纪国是第一个被吞并的国家,主要原因是齐国为了占有纪国丰富的海盐资源.     

On the Relevance of Literature to Life: The Significance of the Act of Reading

What can literary education contribute to moral education? In this article the inherent practical, moral or political, relevance of literature and literary education is defended, which is opposed to a moralist approach to (children's) literature. A much debated danger in literature and the arts, viz. that it gives rise to a flight into a "promised land" instead of having relevance for real life and the real world, can be overcome by bringing to the fore the active part the reader plays in realizing the "world of the work." The classical idea of mimesis (i.e. of art mirroring reality) then makes room for a historicity of reading with an ongoing interplay of the (real) worlds of readers and the (fictive) world of the text. This idea is elaborated on from the point of view of Ricoeur's hermeneutics and from that of Iser's reception aesthetics, respectively. In realizing the world of the work the world of the reader is transcended and opened up towards the possible. In this reconfiguration lies the practical relevance of literature. Books, therefore, do not have to mirror the actual world in order to be morally or politically relevant. It is in the act of reading that the lasting significance of so-called classics is renewed time and time again.     

No proxy for quality: why journal rankings in political science are problematic for political theory research

ABSTRACT

Journal rankings for political science have been regularly published, from the 1970s onwards, by the American Political Science Association’s ‘state of the discipline’ journal. Politics journals have also been officially ranked by the Australian Political Studies Association into four bands (A*, A, B and C) from 2007 onwards. This article shows, first, that the assumption grounding these exercises (namely, that disciplinary journal rankings can serve as proxies for the quality of articles in their pages) is undermined by the findings of the broader research evaluation literature, especially with respect to sub-disciplines (like political theory, Australian politics, and some types of qualitative comparative politics) that bear certain characteristics. Next, outlining the findings of a 2018 survey, it is argued that the disciplinary use of journal rankings in political studies not only has damaging effects on research in political theory, but also advantages other sub-disciplines. The paper closes with two recommendations.