II Political Science : Method and Theory / Science Politique : Méthodes et Théories
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208345231194169 |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
523
II
POLITICAL SCIENCE : METHOD AND THEORY
SCIENCE POLITIQUE : MÉTHODES ET THÉORIES
73.4412 ACEMOGLU, Daron ; ROBINSON, James A. — Weak, des-
potic, or inclusive? How state type emerges from state
versus civil society competition. American Political Sci-
ence Review 117(2), May 2023 : 407-420.
We develop a theory of the accumulation of state capacity as the outcome
of a political competition between elites and (civil) society. State capacity
is accumulated by elites, and it is productive as well as useful in control-
ling society. However, society can fight back and accumulate its own ca-
pacity, facilitating collective action. The theory leads to three distinct equi-
libria depending on initial conditions. One type, a weak state, emerges
when society is strong relative to the elite. Another, a despotic state, orig-
inates where the elite is initially relatively powerful. A third type, an inclu-
sive state, emerges when the elite and society are more evenly matched.
[R, abr.]
73.4413 ADAM, Antonis ; TSARSITALIDOU, Sofia — Serving two
masters: the effect of state religion on fiscal capacity.
Public Choice 194(1-2), Jan. 2023 : 181-203.
This paper examines the effect of having a state religion on fiscal capac-
ity. Our analysis extends the legitimization argument, which postulates
that a state religion legitimizes the revenue-raising motives of the state.
We then argue that the effect reduces the incentive of the state to invest
in fiscal capacity. First, we build a simple theoretical model to highlight
our central idea and derive our testable hypothesis. The model shows
that in the presence of a legitimization effect, countries with a state reli-
gion face weaker incentives to invest in fiscal capacity, as they can raise
revenue by exploiting the legitimizing power of the church. Next, we test
the hypothesis in a potential outcomes model, which models the selection
on observables using both recent and historical data. We show, always
following our theoretical model, that countries with a state religion have
lower fiscal capacity. [R, abr.]
73.4414 ANTONAZZO, Luca ; STROUD, Dean ; WEINEL, Martin —
Institutional complementarities and technological trans-
formation: IVET responsiveness to Industry 4.0 — Meet-
ing emerging skill needs in the European steel industry.
Economic and Industrial Democracy 44(1), Feb. 2023 : 25-46.
Digital technology is gradually changing the organisation of production
and work. In this article, the authors explore the implications of such de-
velopments for workers through the lens of skill, and the skill needs de-
veloping out of the shift towards Industry 4.0 technologies now being em-
ployed within the European steel industry. Specifically, the article exam-
ines the preparedness of initial vocational training systems to support ad-
aptation to Industry 4.0 and the changes in work and employment that will
follow. The article addresses such developments from the point of view
of institutional theory, analysing how different institutional architectures
influence responses to change. [R]
73.4415 ARAGÃO, Roberto ; LINSI, Lukas — Many shades of
wrong: what governments do when they manipulate sta-
tistics. Review of International Political Economy 29(1),
2022 : 88-113.
A considerable number of recent analyses report statistical evidence in-
dicating that governments manipulate official macroeconomic indicators.
Employing creative strategies to identify systematic biases in statistical
outputs, these studies have shown that political manipulation of economic
statistics does occur. But they have paid less attention to the ques-
tion how official statistics are being manipulated. To shed light on the pro-
cesses behind data manipulation, this article examines three recent high-
profile cases in depth: Greece’s public deficit figures, controversies about
Argentina’s inflation statistics, and the Brazilian “fiscal pedaling” scandal.
We make two main contributions: first, macroeconomic indicators are
much more ambiguous than it is commonly realized. Second, in recogni-
tion of this ambiguity we introduce a typology distinguishing four types of
manipulation: outright manipulation (type 1), politically motivated guessti-
mating (type 2), the opportunistic use of methodology space (type 3), and
indicators-management through indirect means (type 4). [R, abr.]
73.4416 ARI, Bariş — Democratization as an impetus for peace
talks in civil wars. Conflict Management and Peace Science
40(2), March 2023 : 162-186.
Costs associated with recognizing an internal armed challenger as a le-
gitimate bargaining partner deter governments from initiating peace talks.
Yet peaceful termination of conflict requires formal negotiations between
the belligerents. This article presents evidence that democratic reforms
provide a window of opportunity for peace talks. Democratic reforms rep-
resent an opportunity to break away from the past policies of the state
and render the conflict as an artifact of the preceding authoritarian insti-
tutions. The article contributes to the research field by enhancing our abil-
ity to predict negotiations. It also highlights that democratic reforms can
be undertaken during an ongoing civil conflict. [R]
73.4417 ARNON, Daniel ; HASCHKE, Peter ; PARK Baekkwan — The
right accounting of wrongs: examining temporal changes
to human rights monitoring and reporting. British Journal
of Political Science 53(1), Jan. 2023 : 163-182.
Scholars contend that the reason for stasis in human rights measures is
a biased measurement process, rather than stagnating human rights
practices. We argue that bias may be introduced as part of the compila-
tion of the human rights reports that serve as the foundation of human
rights measures. An additional source of potential bias may be human
coders, who translate human rights reports into human rights scores. We
first test for biases via a ma chine-learning approach using natural lan-
guage processing and find substantial evidence of bias in human rights
scores. We then present findings of an experiment on the coders of hu-
man rights reports to assess whether potential changes in the coding pro-
cedures or interpretation of coding rules affect scores over time. We find
no evidence of coder bias and conclude that human rights measures have
changed over time and that bias is introduced as part of monitoring and
reporting. [R]
73.4418 ASLAM, Ali — The politics of repair. Contemporary Political
Theory 22(1), March 2023 : 3-23.
This article turns to the theoretical and practical aspects of recent aboli-
tionist praxis to illuminate an expanded notion of politics that is attentive
to lived experience and concerns for self-preservation, on the one hand,
and to state- and citizen-oriented forms of political action, on the other.
The incorporation of healing justice practices and self-care within move-
ment spaces, the mutual-aid of homecoming rituals for those bailed out
of jail, the development of transformative justice processes, link what
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the fugitive sociality of these spaces
as opposed to direct political action. Challenging an opposition between
sociality and politics, I argue that abolitionist praxis recognizes how re-
storative activities and fugitive spaces are not opposed to politics but are
rather important and necessary ways of stimulating and sustaining activ-
ism. [R, abr.]
73.4419 BALI, Azad Singh ; HOWLETT, Michael ; RAMESH, M. — Un-
packing policy portfolios: primary and secondary as-
pects of tool use in policy mixes. Journal of Asian Public
Policy 15(3), 2022 : 321-337.
A recent resurgence of interest in policy design has fostered renewed
efforts to better understand how specific combinations of policy tools arise
and shape policy outcomes. However, to date, these efforts have been
stymied by under-th eorization of the dif- ferent purposes to which tools
are directed in policy mixes and a corresponding failure to acknowledge
both these in conceptual work on the subject and in policy practice. Ex-
isting frameworks do not adequately recognize the complexity of contem-
porary policy tool mixes, especially their hybrid and multilayered features,
and how procedural and substantial tools operate and interact together in
priority and supportive roles. To close this gap, we propose a revised tool
framework that distinguishes between first and second-order aspects of
instruments used in policy mixes and highlights the particular salience of
procedural tools within them. [R]
73.4420 BARDON, Aurélia, et al. — Disaggregating civility: polite-
ness, public-mindedness and their connection. British
Journal of Political Science 53(1), Jan. 2023 : 308-325.
Calls for civility feature prominently in public discourse, and the concept
has received growing attention by political philosophers recently. But
what does it mean to be civil? The existing literature distinguishes be-
tween two main understandings of civility: civility as politeness and civility
as public-mindedness. The objective of this article is to show that these
conceptions and the different normative claims associated with them can
all fit together. We argue that civility and incivility should be disaggregated
in order to uncover fruitful connections between different aspects of the
concept. We introduce a distinction between two dimensions of civility as
public-mindedness (moral and justificatory), as well as a new distinction
Political science : method and theory
524
between the means and ends of civility. [R, abr.]
73.4421 BEHRENZ, Lars ; MÅNSSON, Jonas — Why don’t employ-
ers hire long-term u nemployed entitled to a wage sub-
sidy? The employer’s perspective on subsidised employ-
ment. Economic and Industrial Democracy 44(1), Feb. 2023 :
161-183.
Despite a generous system with high wage subsidies for the long-term
unemployed and newly arrived immigrants, many Swedish employers do
not make use of this opportunity. This study seeks to increase knowledge
of why some employers use the opportunity and others do not. Both reg-
ister and survey data and combined register and survey data are used.
One finding is that employers lack information about the subsidy pro-
grammes, although employers that had previously employed subsidised
workers were much more likely to employ them in the future. Thus, a key
policy question is how to present these subsidies to employers to reduce
this barrier. The study also found that some employers hired people from
these groups from altruistic motives. However, some employers re-
sponded that they would not employ a person entitled to a subsidy, re-
gardless of the content of the subsidy scheme. [R]
73.4422 BELARDI, Susan ; KNOX, Angela ; WRIGHT, Chris F. —
"The circle of life": the role of life course in understand-
ing job quality. Economic and Industrial Democracy 44(1),
Feb. 2023 : 47-67.
This article seeks to examine the role of life course in understanding job
quality. It uses a qualitative case study analysis of Australian restaurants
and reveals how chefs at different life stages can subjectively perceive
the same objective job characteristics differently. The findings extend pre-
existing knowledge by demonstrating how workers’ subjective percep-
tions of job quality are shaped by their life stages. [R]
73.4423 BERKOVSKI, Y. Sandy — Moral criticism, hypocrisy, and
pragmatics. Philosophical Studies 180(1), Jan. 2023 : 1-26.
A good chunk of the recent discussion of hypocrisy concerned the hypo-
critical “moral address” where, in the simplest case, a person criticises
another for
𝜙
-ing having engaged in
𝜙
-ing himself, and where the critic’s
reasons are overtly moral. The debate has conceptual and normative
sides to it. We ask both what hypocrisy is, and why it is wrong. In this
paper I focus on the conceptual explication of hypocrisy by examining the
pragmatic features of the situation where accusations of hypocrisy are
made. After rejecting several extant views, I defend the idea that moral
criticisms are best understood as moves in an agonistic or hostile conver-
sation, and that charges of hypocrisy are attempts to prevent the hypo-
crite from gaining an upper hand in a situation of conflict. [R, abr.]
73.4424 BETZ, Timm ; POND, Amy — Politically connected owners.
Comparative Political Studies 56(4), March 2023 : 561-595.
Political connections provide substantial benefits to firms. We emphasize
the ownership of firms as an important channel through w hich political
connections operate and identify a resulting link between political turno-
ver and turnover in the ownership of firms: political turnover prompts
newly politically connected individuals to take, and newly disconnected
individuals to cede, ownership of firms. This pattern should be more pro-
nounced in countries with weaker property rights, among firms with pub-
licly recorded owners, and among firms with more immobile assets. More-
over, firms that experience changes to ownership during periods of polit-
ical turnover should have elevated political connections and therefore pay
less taxes and earn higher profits. Analyses of the ownership structure of
firms in 87 countries are consistent with the theory. [R, abr.]
73.4425 BIVENS, Nicola Davis ; MILLER, DeMond Shondell — Policy
for temporary crisis or sustained structural change in an
age of disasters, crises, and pandemics. Studia z Polityki
Publicznej 9(3), 2022 : 9-28.
This paper employs cases to discuss the impact of information, disinfor-
mation, and the evolution of scientific data as part of public health policy
development in the COVID- 19 pandemic. The two areas of policy devel-
opment center on (1) risk and public health precautions (e.g., mask man-
dates, cleaning protocols, and social distancing) and (2) risk and eco-
nomic/travel policy (e.g., regional economic shutdown, travel restrictions,
border closures). Key to the analysis is the understanding of social risk
production and public trust in institutions and individuals within those in-
stitutions that craft emergency, interim, and long-lasting public policy. The
paper concludes with recommendations for enhancing public trust in gov-
ernment institutions and the management of risks during times of disas-
ters, crises, and pandemics. [R]
73.4426 BOUSQUET, Chris — Work and social alienation. Philo-
sophical Studies 180(1), Jan. 2023 : 133-158.
In this paper, I offer an account of social alienation, a genre of alienation
engendered by contemporary work that has gone largely overlooked in
the ethics of labor. Social alienation consists in a corruption of workers’
relations to their social life and the people that make it up. When one is
socially alienated, one’s sociality and close relations exist as a mere af-
terthought or break from work, while labor is the central activity of one’s
life. While one might think that existing solutions to alienated labor would
resolve this social alienation, I suggest that such solutions at best leave
the problem intact and may in fact contribute to it by giving labor the place
of priority in workers’ lives. Resolving social alienation, I suggest, requires
rethinking the amount of time we commit to work, the rigidity of the work
schedule, and most crucially, the value that we attribute to work as the
primary source of purpose in our lives. [R]
73.4427 BOYER, Dominic — Infrastructural futures in the ecologi-
cal emergency: gray, green, and revolutionary. Historical
Social Research 47(4), 2022 : 48-65.
In this article, I discuss the three dominant models of conceiving infra-
structural futures in the context of the contemporary ecological emer-
gency and what kinds of futures each model enables and forestalls. Gray
infrastructure conceives human-engineered material designs that are
able to produce predictable, controllable effects, often at a mass scale.
Gray infrastructure also conceives futures that by and large reproduce
present Anthropocene relations (e.g., a strict nature/culture divide medi-
ated by technology and human supremacy. Green infrastructure is a more
diverse paradigm but generally speaking pursues naturecultural collabo-
rations that seek to bend the Anthropocene trajectory. Still, much of what
passes for green infrastructure today fails to challenge industrial-capitalist
logics and in this way creates futures that are more reproductive of the
Anthropocene trajectory than they intend. Finally, I discuss my concept of
“revolutionary infrastructure” as an alternative to gray and green infra-
structural imagination. [R, abr.]
73.4428 BRUNKERT, Lennart ; SOEST, Christian von — Praising the
leader: personalist legitimation strategies and the deteri-
oration of executive constraints. Democratization 30(3),
2023 : 419-439.
In the face of current democratic backsliding and autocratization pro-
cesses, research has rediscovered issues of autocratic legitimation. How-
ever, the question of whether rulers’ personalist rhetoric to bolster their
legitimacy is followed by congruent political action remains underspeci-
fied. Using new expert-coded measures for 164 countries from the Vari-
eties of Democracy project, we examine the political rhetoric-action link
using using fixed effects models. The results confirm that shifts towards
personalist legitimacy claims are no cheap talk but oftentimes important
warning signals for a substantial deterioration of democratic quality, man-
ifested in weaker judicial and legislative oversight of the executive branch.
However, in contrast to much current concern, we show that liberal de-
mocracies seem to largely escape the negative repercussions of govern-
ment discourses that increasingly stress the uniqueness of the ruler. [R]
73.4429 BRUZELIUS, Cecilia ; SHUTES, Isabel — Towards an un-
derstanding of mobility in social policy research. Global
Social Policy 22(3), Dec. 2022 : 503-520.
Over recent years, there has been increasing attention to migration in
social policy research. Uniting this research has been a focus on cross-
national migration, and predominantly immigration. In the meantime, the
relationship between human mobility and social policy at other scales and
sites has gained much less attention. This is in spite of the salience of
multiple forms of mobility and measures for restricting, facilitating or pro-
moting mobility not confined to the territorial borders of the nation-state.
This article proposes an alternative mobility perspective for social policy
research that moves us beyond the limitations of current migration ap-
proaches. To do so, we draw on interdisciplinary mobilities theory and
research. Empirically, we apply a mobility perspective to examine how
systems of social provision are shaped by and shape mobility and immo-
bility, in restricting, facilitating or promoting the movement of people. [R,
abr.]
73.4430 BRYAN, Alexander — Structural domination and freedom
in the labor market: from voluntariness to independence.
American Political Science Review 117(2), May 2023 : 692-
704.
The claim that workers are subject to structural domination in the labor
market is a central contention of the recent radical turn in republican po-
litical theory, but it remains undertheorized. Two core components — the
claim that workers have “no reasonable alternative” to selling their labor
to capitalists and the relevance of exposure to potential interference in
such cases — remain unclear. I develop a revised defense of the central
claim through an analysis of these components. I clarify what it is to have
reasonable alternatives in the labor market but show that holding such
options is insufficient to avoid structural domination. I argue that the de-
pendence at the heart of structural domination can be constituted multi-
fariously and develop an additional criterion directed at capturing such
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