Political Studies
- Publisher:
- Sage Publications, Inc.
- Publication date:
- 2021-09-06
- ISBN:
- 0032-3217
Issue Number
- No. 71-1, February 2023
- No. 70-4, November 2022
- No. 70-3, August 2022
- No. 70-2, May 2022
- No. 70-1, February 2022
- No. 69-4, November 2021
- No. 69-3, August 2021
- No. 69-2, May 2021
- No. 69-1, February 2021
- No. 68-4, November 2020
- No. 68-3, August 2020
- No. 68-2, May 2020
- No. 68-1, February 2020
- No. 67-4, November 2019
- No. 67-3, August 2019
- No. 67-2, May 2019
- No. 67-1, February 2019
- No. 66-4, November 2018
- No. 66-3, August 2018
- No. 66-2, May 2018
Latest documents
- Towards a Concept of Political Robustness
How effective are different political institutions, policy-making processes and policies when it comes to mediating, mitigating and managing vertical and horizontal political tensions caused by disruptive societal challenges and political polarization? The present crisis for liberal democracy places this question high on the research agenda. A concept of political robustness is helpful for identifying the properties of political systems with a strong capacity for coping with political instability and conflict. This article defines political robustness, draws the contours of a conceptual framework for analysis of the political robustness of political systems and applies it illustratively to the political robustness of liberal democracies. We propose that the robustness of a political system depends on how much those who voice political demands—which differs greatly over time and between regimes—are involved in aggregating and integrating political demands into binding decisions.
- Educational Attainment Has a Causal Effect on Economic, But Not Social Ideology: Evidence from Discordant Twins
In this article, we examine the nature of the relationship between educational attainment and ideology. Some scholars have argued that the effect of education on political variables like ideology is inflated due to unaccounted-for family factors, such as genetic predispositions and parental socialization. Using the discordant twin design and data from a large sample of Danish twins, we find that after accounting for confounders rooted in the family, education has a (quasi)-causal effect on economic ideology, but not social ideology. We also examine whether the relationship between education and economic ideology is moderated by levels of economic hardship in the local context where individuals reside. We find that the (quasi)-causal effect of education on economic ideology increases in economically challenged areas.
- Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?
In recent years, a progressive “cancel culture” in society, right-wing politicians and commentators claim, has silenced alternative perspectives, ostracized contrarians, and eviscerated robust intellectual debate, with college campuses at the vanguard of this development. These arguments can be dismissed as rhetorical dog whistles devoid of substantive meaning, myths designed to fire up the MAGA faithful, outrage progressives, and distract from urgent real-world problems. Given heated contention, however, something more fundamental may be at work. To understand this phenomenon, the opening section defines the core concept and theorizes that perceptions of this phenomenon are likely to depend upon how far individual values fit the dominant group culture. Within academia, scholars most likely to perceive “silencing” are mismatched or non-congruent cases, where they are “fish-out-of-water.” The next section describes how empirical survey evidence is used to test this prediction within the discipline of political science. Data are derived from a global survey, the World of Political Science, 2019, involving almost 2500 scholars studying or working in over 100 countries. The next section describes the results. The conclusion summarizes the key findings and considers their broader implications. Overall, the evidence confirms the “fish-out-of-water” congruence thesis. As predicted, in post-industrial societies, characterized by predominately liberal social cultures, like the US, Sweden, and UK, right-wing scholars were most likely to perceive that they faced an increasingly chilly climate. By contrast, in developing societies characterized by more traditional moral cultures, like Nigeria, it was left-wing scholars who reported that a cancel culture had worsened. This contrast is consistent with Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence thesis, where mainstream values in any group gradually flourish to become the predominant culture, while, due to social pressures, dissenting minority voices become muted. The ratchet effect eventually muffles contrarians. The evidence suggests that the cancel culture is not simply a rhetorical myth; scholars may be less willing to speak up to defend their moral beliefs if they believe that their views are not widely shared by colleagues or the wider society to which they belong.
- Foreign-Born Population Growth, Negative Outgroup Contact, and Americans’ Attitudes Towards Legal and Unauthorized Immigration
Individual attitudes towards immigration are powerfully driven by ethnic context, that is, size of foreign-born population. We advance the literature by examining how the change (growth) in foreign-born population, in addition to its size (level), is related to two distinct outcomes: natives’ views on legal and unauthorized immigration. By analysing a probability US sample, we find that an increase in the state-level immigration population is positively related to Americans’ approval of a policy aimed at containing the flow of undocumented immigrants. The proportion of immigrants in a state, however, is not a significant predictor of support for such restrictive policy. With respect to legal immigration, neither the amount of recent change in, nor the size of, the immigration population matters. Our study provides strong evidence for contextual effects: net of compositional factors, a dynamic change in foreign-born population has an independent impact on how Americans view unauthorized, but not legal, immigration.
- Deliberative Democracy, More than Deliberation
What is the relationship between deliberation and democracy? Despite the volumes dedicated to this question, recent admissions by prominent deliberative democrats—that we need not pursue a necessarily deliberative political system, but merely a democratic one—suggest that this remains an open question. Here, I defend the deliberative model’s staying power against those who argue that it has been set normatively adrift. Addressing concerns of “concept-stretching,” I show that the deliberative model provides much more than a defense of the practice of deliberation. Indeed, its key contribution is the answer it provides to the question of what democracy itself means in large pluralistic societies. Moreover, I show that by de-centering the practice of deliberation from deliberative theories of democracy, we can acknowledge the weakness of deliberation and the strengths of non-deliberative practices, while retaining the model’s normative commitments.
- Public Reason, Partisanship and the Containment of the Populist Radical Right
- Small-Scale Deliberation and Mass Democracy: A Systematic Review of the Spillover Effects of Deliberative Minipublics
Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for future research.
- Does Europe Need an Emergency Constitution?
The European Union is increasingly shaped by emergency politics as a mode of rule. Other than the state of exception in domestic constitutions, emergency politics at the European level is largely unregulated—with important negative effects for the integrity and normative quality of the European Union’s legal and political order. This article discusses whether and how a European-level emergency constitution could dampen the costs to constitutionalism by formally pre-regulating the assumption and exercise of emergency powers in the European Union. It proposes design principles that a European emergency constitution would need to meet in order to be desirable. They include prescriptions on who should declare an emergency and who should wield emergency authority up to what constitutional limit. While a European emergency constitution could theoretically alleviate some of the normative concerns about emergency politics, it is plagued by issues of implementation that only a fundamental constitutional overhaul of the European Union could address.
- Educational Attainment Has a Causal Effect on Economic, But Not Social Ideology: Evidence from Discordant Twins
In this article, we examine the nature of the relationship between educational attainment and ideology. Some scholars have argued that the effect of education on political variables like ideology is inflated due to unaccounted-for family factors, such as genetic predispositions and parental socialization. Using the discordant twin design and data from a large sample of Danish twins, we find that after accounting for confounders rooted in the family, education has a (quasi)-causal effect on economic ideology, but not social ideology. We also examine whether the relationship between education and economic ideology is moderated by levels of economic hardship in the local context where individuals reside. We find that the (quasi)-causal effect of education on economic ideology increases in economically challenged areas.
- Voter Decision-Making in a Context of Low Political Trust: The 2016 UK EU Membership Referendum
Using volunteer writing for Mass Observation, we explore how British citizens decided whether to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum was the biggest decision made by the British electorate in decades, but involved limited voter analysis. Many citizens did not have strong views about EU membership in early 2016. The campaigns did not help to firm up their views, not least because so much information appeared to be in dispute. Voters, often characterised as polarised, were reluctant and uncertain. Many citizens took their duty to decide seriously, but were driven more by hunch than careful analysis. In 2016, voters reacted against elites they did not trust at least as much as they embraced the ideas of trusted elites. This contrasts with the 1975 Referendum on the Common Market, when the vote was driven by elite endorsement. In low-trust contexts, voters use cues from elites as negative rather than positive stimulus.
Featured documents
- Reviews: La Politique de la Solitude: Essai Sur la Philosophie Politique de J.-J. Rousseau, Rousseau and Nationalism, The Concept of Justice, Staat Und Souveränität, Band 1: Die Grundlagen, Representation, Equality, Governing without Consensus; An Irish Perspective, Ulster; A Case Study in Conflict Theory, Parliament and Congress, Administrative Theory and Public Administration, Management in Government, Studies in The Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, The Price of Amenity: Five Studies in Conservation and Government, State Enterprise: Business or Politics?, Politics, Finance and the Role of Economics: An Essay on the Control of Public Enterprise, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, Le Pouvoir Et Les Groupes de Pression: Etude de la Structure Politique Du Capitalisme, Comparative Communist Politics, Studies in Opposition, Latin American Legislatures: Their Role and Influence, Israel's Parliament: The Law of the Knesset, The Nigerian Army, The Nigerian Military, Ibo Politics. The Role of Ethnic U
- Rational Choice and Interpretive Evidence: Caught between a Rock and a Hard Place?
Following Green and Shapiro's critique, debate about the value of rational choice theory has focused upon the question of its relationship to what we call ‘external’, largely quantitative, empirical evidence. We argue that what is most striking about rational choice theory is, however, its neglect...
- A Moral Defense of the ‘Moral Values’ Voter
How should citizens in a democracy decide for whom to vote? Liberal political philosophers, following Rawls, have held that voters should think of the candidate as a proxy for the policies he or she will predictably help put in place, and then vote according to which policies are best supported by...
- Symbolic Rewards: Being Bought off Cheaply
Symbolic rewards are shown to be of two types. One variety—that which promises future material rewards—is inherently deserving of scorn, for promises must necessarily be less valuable than actual delivery. But there is another sort of symbolic appeal which is essentially ‘affective’, playing on...
- British Politics
- The Politics of Monetary Leadership and Followership: Stability in the European Monetary System since the Currency Crisis of 1992
Despite widespread scepticism, there is a fundamental continuity in the stability of the European Monetary System (EMS) before and after the 1992 crisis. Although speculative pressures provoked European leaders to widen the fluctuation bands of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), thus altering...
- The Iranian Revolution
- Public Opinion, Public Policy and the Welfare State
A recurring problem in political analysis is to link public opinion to public policy. Public opinion has often come to mean the replies to structured questions in representative surveys. The task of connecting opinion and policy is complicated by the difficulty in interpreting replies to these...
- Book Reviews: The End of Post-War Politics in Italy: The Landmark 1992 Elections, Dal PCI Al PDS, Turkey and Europe, Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities, Women as National Leaders, Women Prime Ministers and Presidents, 1960–1992, Joseph A. Schumpeter: His Life and Work, Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher and Politician, the Spirit of the Age
- Book Reviews: A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, Natural Right and History, The Age of Absolutism, 1660–1815, Hitler's Europe. Survey of International Affairs 1939–1946, Japan's New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937–45, European Parliamentary Procedure, Politics in Post-War France: Parties and the Constitution in the Fourth Republic, Administration Et Politique En Allemagne Occidentale, the Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan and Burma, Problems of Public Administration in India, Radical Leicester: A History of Leicester, 1780–1850, the Communication of Ideas, Social Changes in South-West Wales, Social Mobility in Britain, the Neglected Child and the Social Services, Power and Influence, Le Parti Liberal Dans Le Système Constitutionnel Britannique