I Political science : method and theory / Science politique : méthodes et théories
| DOI | 10.1177/0020834520906570 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Abstracts |
1
I
POLITICAL SCIENCE : METHOD AND THEORY
SCIENCE POLITIQUE : MÉTHODES ET THÉORIES
70.1 AERTS, Saskia — Historical approaches to epistemic
authority: the case of Neoplatonism. Journal of the History
of Ideas 80(3), July 2019 : 343-363.
"Authority" is a term widely used by scholars from various fields of
studies, including the history of philosophy, but its actual meaning often
remains obscure. This paper aims to show how a philosophical reflection
on the structure of epistemic authority can shed light on this phenome-
non and facilitate a better understanding of its meaning in historical
research. It will present an analytical model that serves as a tool to get a
better grasp on authority relations in historical texts. The benefit of the
described model will be demonstrated by a case study on the question of
authority in Neoplatonism. [R]
70.2 AHMAD, Khaqan — Artificial intelligence and the chang-
ing nature of warfare. Stratagem 1(2), Dec. 2018 : 57-72.
Software is eating the world and Artificial Intelligence is eating software,
but weaponry is breathing Artificial Intelligence. Weaponry and warfare
are inextricably connected. Important features of weaponry have re-
mained dependent on technology. From ancient times to current, every
technological breakthrough has made weaponry more advanced by
enhancing their capacities. Some of the distinct features which Artificial
Intelligence has added to the field of weaponry now include perception,
cognition and action (will). Currently, autonomous weaponry is between
semi and fully autonomous stages of development. If the change per-
sists, human control over weaponry will gradually diminish. If technologi-
cal singularity is materialized, it will be done at the expense of invincible
weaponry and extinction of Homo sapiens. [R]
70.3 AHMADOV, Anar K. — Breaking the fourth wall in political
studies: exploring politics through interactive theatre.
European Political Science 18(3), Sept. 2019 : 554-573.
This article presents an interactive theatre tool that aims to facilitate a
nuanced, holistic exploration of different topics in political science. Its
approach builds on insights drawn from the work of four playwrights who
provide fascinating, in-depth examinations of social and political topics:
Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal.
Two features that distinguish the method I present here from other
techniques are student ownership and interaction with the audience. At a
time when political science is increasingly criticised for becoming over-
specialised, irrelevant, and unstimulating, this paper offers a promising
and flexible tool that can help synthesise ideas from thriving but often
ingrown areas of political science research, contextualise them, and
examine their practical relevance. [R]
70.4 ALBERTUS, Michael — Theory and methods in the study
of distributive politics. Political Science Research and
Methods 7(3), July 2019 : 629-639.
While many scholars have moved toward using individual-level data to
test theories of distributive politics, no studies have ever explicitly exam-
ined differences between individual and aggregate analyses of a distribu-
tive program. By leveraging nationwide individual-level data on both
revealed voter preferences and the actual receipt of particularistic bene-
fits through a contemporary Venezuelan land reform initiative, this article
demonstrates that scholars can most effectively test and refine individu-
al-level theories of distributive politics by combining both individual- and
macro-level data. There are two advantages to doing so. First, compar-
ing and contrasting findings from data at different levels of analysis can
enable researchers to paint a more complete picture of distributive
targeting. Second, when distributive benefits can be impacted or redi-
rected by subnational politicians, individual-level data alone can generate
mistaken inferences that are an artifact of competing targeting attempts
at different levels of government instead of initial targeting strategies. [R,
abr.]
70.5 ALEXANDER, James — A genealogy of political theory: a
polemic. Contemporary Political Theory 18(3), 2019 : 402-
423.
Here is a sketch of a genealogy of political theory for the last century.
This is a genealogy in Nietzsche’s sense: therefore, neither unhistorical
taxonomy, nor a history of political theory as it is written by historians, but
a typology in time. Four types of modern political theory are distin-
guished. These are called, with some justification, positive, normative,
third way and skeptical political theory. Seen from the vantage of the
twenty-first century, they form an instructive sequence, emerging as a
series of reactions to the canonical political theory that was established
in the universities in the late nineteenth century. None of the four should
be excluded from our conception of what political theory has been,
though most of them, when seen genealogically, reveal their defects
more clearly than they do when treated purely theoretically. Since this is
a skeptical finding, the genealogy is a polemic against the first three
types of modern political theory in favour of the last. [R]
70.6 ALEXIADOU, Despina ; GUNAYDIN, Hakan — Commitment
or expertise? Technocratic appointments as political re-
sponses to economic crises. European Journal of Political
Research 58(3), 2019 : 845-865.
Why do prime ministers or presidents appoint non-elected experts, also
known as technocrats, during economic crises? Do they appoint them for
their expertise or for their commitment to pro-market reforms? Answering
this question is crucial for understanding and predicting the longer-term
role of technocrats in democracies. With the aid of unique data on the
political and personal background of finance ministers in 13 parliamen-
tary and semi-presidential European democracies this article shows that
commitment, not expertise is the primary driver of technocratic appoint-
ments during major economic crises. Technocrats are preferred over
experienced politicians when the latter lack commitment to policy reform.
An important implication of the findings is that technocratic appointments
to top economic portfolios in West European countries are unlikely to
become the norm outside economic crises, assuming economic crises
are short-lived and not recurring. [R]
70.7 ANDERSEN, David — Comparative democratization and
democratic backsliding: the case for a historical-
institutional approach. Comparative Politics 51(4), July
2019 : online.
In light of the alleged democratic recession in recent years, comparative
democratization research is now taking a turn to more party-political,
agency-centered, and historically contingent explanations of democratic
backsliding. I review three recent books that represent this trend to
varying degrees. Based on a historical-institutional approach, I assess
whether the theoretical propositions of these books are fruitful for ex-
plaining the gradual backsliding to competitive authoritarianism and
illiberalism in recent decades. I find that the propositions in How Democ-
racies Die in particular risk leading to excessively voluntarist conclusions
that are insensitive to historical path dependencies. The other two books
better capture the ways in which domestic institutional legacies have
shaped democratic backsliding around the globe. I specify two models
that explain backslidings as institutional responses to (1) international
“exogenous” shocks or (2) “endogenous” demands unleashed by dynam-
ics of the democratic transition itself. [R, abr.]
70.8 ANDERSEN, David ; MØLLER, Jørgen — The transhistori-
cal tension between bureaucratic autonomy and political
control. Political Studies Review 17(3), Aug. 2019 : 284-295.
Political decision-makers operate under a constant tension between
bureaucratic autonomy on one hand and political control on the other.
Three recent books show this tension has a transhistorical relevance.
Francis Fukuyama’s two volumes on The Origins of Political Order
[Profile Books, 2012] and Political Order and Political Decay [Profile
Books, 2014] analyze the various ways the tension has been addressed
in the period before and after the French Revolution. In Democracy’s
Slaves [A Political History of Ancient Greece, Harvard U. P., 2017],
Paulin Ismard documents that the tension was relevant even in the
context of the direct democracy of Athens in the Classical period. We
show how politicians have attempted to balance autonomy and control in
Political science : method and theory
2
patrimonial, meritocratic, politicized, and neo-patrimonial types of admin-
istration. [R]
70.9 ANDERSEN, Mikael Skou — The politics of carbon taxa-
tion: how varieties of policy style matter. Environmental
Politics 28(6), Sept. 2019 : 1084-1104.
The momentum achieved for unilateral carbon taxes in seven European
countries is examined. Why is it that small countries, despite being
vulnerable to forces of international competition, have been able to
implement carbon taxes? A review of national experiences does not
suggest that the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix defines the room
for such taxes, or point to a strong role for traditional left-right ideology.
Rather, it is deep-seated patterns of national policy styles with neo-
corporatist traits, providing a protective device for the open economies of
small countries, which condition the introduction of carbon taxes. The
associated routines of decision-making offer coordination mechanisms
for proactive macroeconomic policies in which carbon taxation can find a
place. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 70.529]
70.10 ANDREAS, Peter — Drugs and war: what is the relation-
ship? Annual Review of Political Science 22, 2019 : 57-73.
What is the relationship between psychoactive drugs and war? This
review article identifies and traces five key dimensions of this relation-
ship: war while on drugs, war for drugs, war through drugs, war against
drugs, and drugs after war. The review provides empirical illustrations
across times, places, and drugs to demonstrate the importance of each
of these dimensions. Political scientists and other scholars have typically
either ignored the drugs-war relationship or focused on only one dimen-
sion. Placing both history and a wider range of drugs (legal and illegal)
front and center in the analysis provides a corrective that allows for a
fuller and richer understanding of the multiple linkages between psycho-
active substances and warfare. [R, abr.]
70.11 ANSELL, Ben W. — The politics of housing. Annual Re-
view of Political Science 22, 2019 : 165-185.
This review argues that political scientists need to take housing much
more seriously, not least because of the unprecedented surges and
collapses of house prices over the past two decades. The housing
market is both a proxy for and a cause of growing social cleavages that
shape how citizens view political issues from the size of the welfare state
to the attractiveness of populist campaigns. The article re-examines
classic work on property from the 19th c. as a still-relevant guide to the
winners and losers from property market shocks and regulations. It
examines the role housing plays in shaping contemporary political
preferences, both as a direct measure of individuals' wealth and welfare
and as a proxy for the relative fortunes of different places. [R, abr.]
70.12 ARES, Cristina ; LOSADA, Antón — Estado de bienestar y
oferta programática en España: una propuesta metodo-
lógica comparativa de los perfiles sociales de los par-
tidos (Welfare state and party political programs in
Spain: a comparative analysis of parties’ social profiles).
Revista de Estudios políticos 184, Aor.-June 2019 : 67-101.
This paper presents a methodological proposal to define, in comparative
perspective, parties’ social policy profiles. It is based on the annotated
manifestos issued by the Manifesto Corpus (N. Merz, S. Regel and J.
Lewandowski, “The Manifesto Corpus: a new resource for research on
political parties and quantitative text analysis”, Research and Politics 2,
2016: 1-8) and on the Hirschman´s conceptual model. The latter summa-
rizes critiques of the Welfare State in three arguments of perversity,
futility, and jeopardy. Data from the Manifesto Project on the 94 general
elections held in the EU-15 from 1993 onwards are used. Parties’ posi-
tions on the expansion of welfare spending and emphases on social cuts
are examined, both at the meso-level of political parties and the macro-
level of national Parliaments. [R, abr.]
70.13 ASAVEI, Maria Alina — The art and politics of imagina-
tion: remembering mass violence against women. Critical
Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22(5),
Aug. 2019 : 618-636.
This paper addresses the role of artistic memory in processes of redress-
ing political violence and historical injustices. Combining philosophical
reflection, insights from memory studies and examples of artistic practic-
es, it focuses on how memory and imagination coalesce in problematiz-
ing mass violence against women and resisting its “official” oblivion. The
argument is that artistic memory work can foster collective memories of
the painful past in ways that overcome both individual and national
representations. To this end, this paper aims to explore various contem-
porary art productions as new models of m emorialization, which deal
with the representation of violence against women in armed conflicts and
under political repression. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 70.101]
70.14 AUSTIN, Jonathan Luke — A parasitic critique for interna-
tional relations. International Political Sociology 13(2), June
2019 : 215-231.
This paper introduces the concept of a “parasitic critique.” It begins by
theorizing the ethico-political positionality of “critical” researchers by
speaking with Michel Serres to introduce the figure of the parasitic-
researcher [The Parasite, John Hopkins U.P., 1982]. That device ex-
plores a tension in critical research between hearing “thick” descriptions
of our interlocutors’ lifeworlds before channeling them into “thin” meta-
theoretical accounts. The paper argues that this dilemma relates to the
rhetorical “style” of critical approaches in IR, which employ a certain
“suspicious hermeneutics” that is unwilling to take seriously the voices of
particular interlocutors. By contrast, a parasitic critique is laid out as a
critical orientating sensibility focused on reordering the methods of
critique, with the hope of cultivating a non-judgmental ethic of “care-full”
analysis and description. [R, abr.]
70.15 BAEKGAARD, Martin, et al. — The role of evidence in
politics: motivated reasoning and persuasion among pol-
iticians. British Journal of Political Science 49(3), July 2019 :
1117-1140.
Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at
odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase
the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information?
Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory
about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians
tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that
increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior atti-
tudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly.
These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments
with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample
are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish
citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that
politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. [R,
abr.]
70.16 BAGHDASARYAN, Vardan ; IANNANTUONI, Giovanna ;
MAGGIAN, Valeria — Electoral fraud and voter turnout: an
experimental study. European Journal of Political Economy
58, June 2019 : 203-219.
We experimentally investigate the consequences of electoral fraud on
voter turnout. The experiment is based on a strategic binary voting model
where voters decide whether to cast a costly vote in favor of their pre-
ferred candidate or to abstain. The electoral process is illicitly influenced
by applying ballot-box stuffing. In the experiment we implement two
different framings: we compare voter turnout in a neutral environment
and with framed instructions to explicitly replicate elections. This ap-
proach enables us to both test the model's predictions and to estimate
the framing effects of voting and fraud. Comparison of experimental
results with theoretical predictions reveals over-voting, which is exacer-
bated when fraud occurs. [R, abr.]
70.17 BANKOVSKY, Miriam — No proxy for quality: why journal
rankings in political science are problematic for political
theory research. Australian Journal of Political Science
54(3), 2019 : 301-317.
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 o fficially
ranked by the Australian Political Studies Association into four bands (A*,
A, B and C) from 2007 onwards. This article shows, first, that the as-
sumption 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 ad-
vantages other sub-disciplines. [R, abr.]
70.18 BARBEHÖN, Marlon ; MÜNCH, Sybille ; SCHLAG, Gabi —
Interpretationen in der Politikwissenschaft (Interpreta-
tions in political science). Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft
29(2), June 2019 : 141-151.
The analytical entities of political science, just like any other social
phenomena, do not exist with naturally given characteristics. Rather,
they emerge in processes of social construction which are again inter-
preted in the course of scientific analyses. In this sense, all types of
political science, whether positivist or constructivist, whether descriptive
or explanatory, are confronted with the challenge of conducting compre-
hensible and plausible interpretations. Against the background of these
fundamental considerations, this editorial introduces a special volume
with the aim of presenting an inventory of the status, practices and
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