Shura council election in Qatar: Influences that shape how voters select candidates

Qatar, a small Gulf Arab nation with a de facto absolute monarchy, held its first general elections ever for 30 Shura Council seats on October 2, 2021. This marked the first time in Qatar's history that citizens played a more direct role in government, moving beyond symbolic elections. This study aimed to examine the factors likely to have influenced voters' selection of candidates, the key issues that are significant to Qatari citizens, and the possible characteristics of candidates that are deemed essential. While informal conversations are the main method of data collection for this study, social identity theory, specifically group-based models, was used to understand the influences that shape Qatari voters' choices of candidates. Findings indicate that tribe-related and family-connected attributes constitute important influences on voters' choice decisions. Moreover, voters were concerned about candidates' characteristics and the issues and policies candidates deemed important. Discussion and recommendations are provided.     

Topic Modeling and Text Analysis for Qualitative Policy Research

This paper contributes to a critical methodological discussion that has direct ramifications for policy studies: how computational methods can be concretely incorporated into existing processes of textual analysis and interpretation without compromising scientific integrity. We focus on the computational method of topic modeling and investigate how it interacts with two larger families of qualitative methods: content and classification methods characterized by interest in words as communication units and discourse and representation methods characterized by interest in the meaning of communicative acts. Based on analysis of recent academic publications that have used topic modeling for textual analysis, our findings show that different mixed‐method research designs are appropriate when combining topic modeling with the two groups of methods. Our main concluding argument is that topic modeling enables scholars to apply policy theories and concepts to much larger sets of data. That said, the use of computational methods requires genuine understanding of these techniques to obtain substantially meaningful results. We encourage policy scholars to reflect carefully on methodological issues, and offer a simple heuristic to help identify and address critical points when designing a study using topic modeling.     

Credibility in Policy Expertise: The Function of Boundaries Between Research and Policy

As science becomes an increasingly crucial resource for addressing complex challenges in society, extensive demands are placed upon the researchers who produce it. Creating valuable expert knowledge that intervenes in policy or practice requires knowledge brokers to facilitate interactions at the boundary between research and policy. Yet, existing research lacks a compelling account of the ways in which brokerage is performed to gain credibility. Drawing on mixed‐method analysis of 12 policy research settings, I outline a novel set of strategies for attaining symbolic power, whereby policy experts position themselves and others via conceptual distances drawn between the “world of ideas” and the “world of policy and practice.” Disciplinary distance works to situate research as either disciplinary or undisciplinary, epistemic distance creates a boundary between complex specialist research and direct digestible outputs, temporal distance represents the separation of slow rigorous research and agile responsive analysis, and economic distance situates research as either pure and intrinsic or marketable and fundable. I develop a theoretical account that unpacks the boundaries between research communities and shows how these boundaries permit policy research actors to achieve various strategic aims.     

Rights to the rescue? The promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights and the rise of the Mexican security state

This article demonstrates how the promotion of Indigenous women's political-electoral rights in Mexico has furthered a conservative agenda of state securitization. To do so, it presents a discourse analysis of national media reports focused on the story of Eufrosina Cruz, a Zapotec woman who became the figurehead for state-led initiatives to promote Indigenous women's rights. It argues that a colonial rescue narrative constructed through Cruz's figure helped generate new hegemonic discourses of gendered indigeneity that portrayed Indigenous peoples' alternative political practices and spaces as anti-democratic and illegal. In an era where advancements in party democracy were linked to processes of state securitization, these categorizations helped justify new forms of state intervention into Indigenous peoples' lives. By exploring how rights initiatives were discursively constructed through racialized, spatialized and gendered constructions of indigeneity, this article contributes to a critical geography of indigeneity within political geography.     

Practicing decolonial political geography: Island perspectives on neocolonialism and the China threat discourse

Island peoples around the world remain entangled in colonial processes. Western and metropolitan powers are increasingly deploying discourse of a ‘China threat’ to justify neocolonial entrenchment in the form of greater Western militarisation and economic dominance. In this paper, we investigate how Western and metropolitan powers use the China threat and warnings of economic, environmental, demographic, and military disaster to maintain and deepen colonial influence in former colonies, with special focus on four island states and territories: Guåhan/Guam in Oceania, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland in the Arctic, Okinawa in East Asia, and Jamaica in the Caribbean. We undertake this investigation as a means of practicing decolonial political geography, collaborating as a group of scholars from around the world and drawing upon diverse epistemologies and experiences to inform collaborative research and writing. Due to the complexities we have confronted in our efforts to think outside coloniality, this paper foregrounds our decolonial methodology and process, even as we respect our empirical findings.     

Doing Great Basin archaeology recently: Coping with variability

Great Basin archaeologists spent the 1970s and most of the 1980s tearing down the Desert Culture hypothesis without presenting compelling means for dealing with the empirical variability that made it untenable. Recent research seeks to understand this variability by examining the effect of key variables in extreme environmental contexts, especially in wetlands and at high altitudes, and by developing and refining models of optimality that anticipate variability as the local expression of general evolutionary ecological principles. Research on intraregional and ethnic variability has lagged behind—the former because it is said to be costly, the latter because it is problematical in theory.     

An analysis of the Spanish ceramic tile industry research contracts and patents

In this work, we apply a systemic approach to the analysis of a particular geographic territory, the industrial district. We are particularly interested in analysing the interaction between the productive-technological environment and the scientific environment by an examination of research contracts and patents. Our analysis shows that R&D activity in the Spanish ceramic tile District Innovation System was mainly conducted by suppliers. Final producers’ innovation efforts were related to non-technological aspects and differentiation.     

Party Ideologies and Regional Inequality: An Analysis of Party Manifestos in Japan

ABSTRACT

Regional inequality within Japan has been a key political issue in Japanese politics throughout the entire postwar period. In this analysis, we examine how Japanese parties have positioned themselves on the question of regional inequality, focusing on how the party system response has been shaped by ideas and ideologies. The article analyses two 15-year periods separated by a quarter of a century (1960–75 and 2000–15) during which regional inequalities became a particularly salient and pressing issue. We compare institutional and socioeconomic contexts, broader governing ideas, and policy responses to this issue by major parties in their election platforms (manifestos). We find that party ideology and broader paradigms continued to shape party responses to regional inequality during both periods.     

Do Minorities Trust Less? Understanding Differences in Social Trust among Canada’s Major Ethno-Racial Groups

Using data from Canada’s General Social Survey, this article assesses ethno-racial differences in social trust. Bivariate findings reveal that the three most culturally distinctive minorities—visible minorities, the French, and Indigenous Peoples—exhibit the lowest trust of all groups. Multivariate analyses show that controls for “ethno-cultural markers” (religion, language, immigration status), socioeconomic influences (education, income), and social engagement indicators (voluntary association activity, ethnic diversity of friendships) explain the lower trust between the French and, less so, among visible minorities. Socioeconomic factors partly account for lower trust among Indigenous Peoples, but they still express comparatively low social trust even with controls. The article discusses how interpretations focusing on “social distance” and “social boundaries” processes help in understanding social trust differences across Canada’s major ethno-racial communities.