Political Science

The 20th century was a bloody one, full of armed clashes which destroyed Europe, withered an entire generation’s hope of European-level peace. After the Versailles Treaty, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes uttered this prophecy: ”With such a peace treaty, you’ll be at war again within 20 years”. John Maxwell Coetzee, an important South-African novelist, called the 20th century “Satan’s century”. A tough statement yet extremely true unfortunately. Besides war, the past one hundred years also witnessed terrible totalitarian regimes occur, (...) such as the Nazi and fascism. The hardness of those regimes at least equaled the suffering caused by the world wars. One wouldn’t be wrong to call such regimes state terrorism: a leader suppressing his own citizens just to satisfy his own fantasy. The hugeness of their deeds goes beyond human imagination according to the number of victims. A classical word of wisdom describes terrorism as follows: ”It kills a few, but terrifies more”. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the resurgence of geographic factors in the study of uneven development is not due simply to the recurrent nature of intellectual fashions, nor necessarily because arguments that rely on geographic factors are less simplistic than before, nor because they avoid racialist, imperialistic, and deterministic forms they sometimes took in the past. Rather, this paper argues that geographic factors have been turned to once again because they are an indispensable part of explanation, playing a special role that (...) has not been properly understood, a role especially crucial for the explanation of the inherently spatial questions that development studies seek to address. The paper is made up of two sections and an appendix. The first section discusses why geographic factors are necessary for explanations of uneven development with a brief example from the ‘institutions versus geography’ debate. The second section discusses why the reflexive rejection by social scientists of geographic and environmental factors is misguided, with a separate note on geography and geographers. The ideas in this paper were in part arrived at inductively while surveying instances where social scientists in some way attempt to account for real-world locations/distributions of social phenomena (as opposed to discussing a social theory or process aspatially or with its distribution taken as a starting point). A number of these are included with discussion as an appendix. (shrink)

O ameninţare uriaşă planează asupra uneia dintre cele mai dezvoltate ţări ale lumii. Miracol economic şi sociala al secolului XX Japonia se confruntă cu o problemă gravă , îmbătrânirea populaţiei şi scăderea natalităţii. Populaţia este un factor de putere extrem de important în istoria unui stat. Fără o populaţie numeroasă un stat nu poate fi bine dezvoltat. O populaţiei mare este mărirea capacităţii economice a unui stat , într-o primă instanţă. Ulterior dezvoltarea economică ţine de un cumul de diverşi factori (...) cum ar fi diversificarea producţiei , forţa agricolă dar şi altele. Acest „câlcâi a lui Ahile” afectează Japonia , îmbătrânirea provoacă diverse consecinţe precum încetinirea economică , dezechlibrul balanţei între sexe şi chiar extincţia totală a populaţiei într-un viitor îndepărtat. (shrink)

Essays from the political website CounterPunch. - Requiem: Dies Non, Not Dies Irae (September 18, 2001) - Mouth Wide Shut (April 8, 2002) - So Long Frank O. Gehry? (April 28, 2002) - Bête Noire (May 22, 2002) - “All politics is local?”: The Unbearable Lightness of NGOs (May 24, 2002) - Bush and Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Ideology (June 1, 2002) - The Adventures of Mademoiselle M.: Or Getting Screwed in Paris (June 8-9, 2002) - Loose Lips: (...) Liberty, Democracy and Bush (July 6, 2002) - Go Tell Karl Rove!: The Anti-Republican Party (July 13, 2002) - Be Still My Beating Heart (July 15, 2002) - Grave New Urbanism: The World Trade Center Burlesque (July 20, 2002) - Roamin’ in the Gloamin’: Van Morrison: In September (July 25, 2002) - Sublime Žižek: Guarding Lenin’s Tomb (July 27, 2002) - Vox Populi: Everyone’s a Critic (August 3, 2002) - Auteur-Driven Vehicles: The New New Laocoon (August 19, 2002) - Beaux Rêves, Citoyens!!! (September 5, 2002) - Immortality: The Quest for Fire (August 31, 2002) Parting Shots: A Refracted History (Summary) Of The Twentieth Century (November 2, 2002) - New Books Christmas 2002: Livres Deluxe (December 23, 2002) - The Drunken Flower (July 26, 2003) - The Infernal Machine: “Architectures” in Service to Nothing (August 23, 2003). (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a conceptual analysis of fake news. In essence, I suggest analysing this notion as a species of Frankfurtian bullshit. This construal, I argue, allows us to distinguish it from similar phenomena like bad or biased journalism and satire. First, I introduce four test cases. The first three are, intuitively, not cases of fake news, while the fourth one is. A correct conceptual analysis should, hence, exclude the first three while including the fourth. Next, I go (...) through some factors that could explain the difference between the first three cases and the fourth one before I offer my explanation. After that, I propose an analysis of fake news and show that it matches our intuitions about the four test cases. Finally, I consider a possible objection to my proposal. (shrink)

Questi appunti si concentrano sul ruolo del Potere e sulla sociologia del Potere. L’analisi classica sul Potere è sempre basata sulla definizione a posteriori del Potere. “La storia di tutta la società, svoltasi fin qua, è storia di lotta di classe” sono le affermazioni che rappresentano il Potere come un effetto di un predeterminato rapporto fra gruppi costituiti. -/- Questi appunti invece vogliono partire dal Potere come un concetto di più alto livello nell’analisi sociologica. -/- Dopo il manifesto dell' Archelogia, (...) disciplina che cerca di sistematizzare il Potere come disciplina, si passa a dare una definizione del Potere e delle sue linee di analisi. -/- Si arriva ad un approccio semiotico (come segno) della verità e si tenta di iniziare dei ragionamenti sulla teoria del valore sotto il profilo dei segni. -/- These notes focus on the role of Power and the sociology of Power. -/- The classic analysis of Power is always based on the a posteriori definition of Power. "The history of the whole society, which has taken place this far, is the history of class struggle" are the statements that represent Power as an effect of a predetermined relationship between constituted groups. -/- These notes instead want to start from Power as a higher level concept in sociological analysis. After the manifesto of Archelogy, a discipline that seeks to systematize Power as a discipline, we move on to give a definition of Power and its lines of analysis. We arrive at a semiotic approach (as a sign) of truth and we try to start reasoning on the theory of value from the point of view of signs. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s theory of justifiable resistance to authority is complex and, at times, appears to conflict with his own practice, if not with itself. He distinguishes between the role of authority in “public” and “private” contexts. In private—e.g., when a person is under contract to do a specific job or accepts a social contract with one’s government—resistance is forbidden; external behavior must be governed by policy or law. In contexts involving the public use of reason, on the other hand—e.g., when (...) a person is faced with a moral decision or is engaged in a philosophical dispute—the freedom of conscience sometimes requires resistance, especially in cases where other persons inappropriately attempt to usurp authority over matters that are rightfully up to the individual to decide. In texts such as Perpetual Peace, Kant looks forward to a political situation wherein no political resistance (e.g., in the form of war) would be necessary. Yet in Metaphysics of Morals, he argues that a citizen never has the right to revolt against one’s government, suggesting we must cooperate even with war. On a personal level, Kant openly praised both the American and the French revolutions; yet when his own writings on religion were deemed by the censor to have come into conflict with the king’s edict, Kant failed to resist the (arguably unjust) authority; instead, he gave up his (apparently public) right to free philosophical expression, promising never to write or speak on religion again during the king’s reign. I shall argue that a key to resolving these tensions lies in the principle that universities must promote a healthy, public “conflict” between philosophers and all “private” employments of reason. The only ground for disallowing private resistance, therefore, is the underlying presence of genuine philosophical resistance. (shrink)

In this paper, I list a number of commonly cited negative effects of high or rising levels of income inequality and examine the literature in order to assess the statistical and empirical evidence in favor of or against the presence and/or strength of those negative effects. Given the prevalence of the topic of income inequality in contemporary political, economic and social discussions, it's important to have a good understanding of the effects of income inequality and to be able to identify (...) effects that are or are not supported by strong statistical evidence. Such an understanding will also help to improve policies intended to diminish income inequality or to mitigate its effects (such as, for example, progressive taxation or education subsidies). -/- Given the size of the literature, this overview is far from complete. However, it does manage to identify certain negative effects which have a strong factual basis and which vindicate some of the often strongly expressed concerns about income inequality. At the same time, however, the paper identifies other commonly cited effects for which there is no strong evidence or for which the evidence is contradictory. -/- I focus on measurable harms resulting from income inequality and leave aside possible objections of a moral or philosophical nature, although I do mention the latter briefly. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to describe the rationale behind recent Chinese Political-Legal Reforms. The article proposes an alternate to the “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”.

Book Review of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion.

In dit hoofdstuk presenteer ik de belangrijkste bevindingen en uitspraken uit mijn diepte-interviews met de respondenten. Ik geef hiermee antwoord op de deelvragen ‘Wat voor beeld wordt er gevormd in Nederlandse kranten over geweldpleging door de Staat in Nederlands-Indië?’, ‘Welk beeld in Nederlandse kranten is exemplarisch voor positieve of negatieve berichtgeving over geweldpleging door de Staat in Nederlands-Indië?’, ‘Wat zijn de belangrijkste reacties geweest van media, Staat of andere betrokkenen op de berichtgeving in kranten over Nederlandse oorlogsmisdaden in Indië?’ en (...) ‘Hoe kijken representatoren voor media, Staat, betrokkenen en/of nabestaanden zelf aan tegen de beeldvorming over de misdragingen in Nederlands-Indië?’ De vijf geïnterviewde experts hebben zich uiteraard uitgelaten over beeldvorming in Nederlandse kranten over verschillende perioden. Ik heb de paragrafen daar voor het gemak tevens chronologisch naar ingedeeld. (shrink)

Dit werkstuk betrekt zich op de vraag of de de facto legitimiteit van Knoet de Grote als koning van Angelsaksisch Engeland, te verklaren is aan de hand van de theorieën over legitimiteit zoals gepostuleerd door Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (1864—1920). Bestaande literatuur over Knoet de Grote zijn troonsbestijging, zoals dat van vooraanstaand 19e-eeuws historicus Edward Augustus Freeman, zou een ‘geromantiseerd’ beeld hebben geschetst van de kwestie. Dit werkstuk zal kijken of dit beeld, aan de hand van Webers theorie over waar (...) legitimiteit in gegrond kan zijn, ten eerste terecht te noemen is en, ten tweede, of het Knoets status als legitiem vorst van het ‘Angelsaksische’ volk goed kan verklaren. (shrink)

If Jewish Bolsheviks could put an end to the imperial rule of the Romanovs, could they pose a threat to the vision of a Third Reigh? A question the German National Socialists are likely to have asked themselves before and on the eve of plotting the rise of the Nazi regime. After all, Europe had had a long-standing relationship with blaming the Jews for the world’s miseries. A relationship Germany was ready to refuel, as indicated by German Field Marshal Walter (...) von Reichenau, when he stated that ‘the most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture.’ But the German fears of Jewish interference with their great scheme for Europe’s future, must surely have been inspired by more than just the age-old conspiratorial allegation that Jews were the main forces behind world politics. As such, this essay will seek to inspect the apparent rise of antisemitic fears at the time, and put a case forward to show how religion played into all this. (shrink)

Seeing how the idea of the ‘ruler cult’ and the necessary ‘myth-making’ to establish it exists to this day, as seen with the regime of a 21st century dictator like Kim Jong-il, it would be most interesting to see what parallels exist between cases of divine leadership and what we might learn about our contemporary cult rulers when looking at the dynamics of the two-millennia-old cult of the deified Emperor Augustus. As such, I have formulated a central question that focuses (...) on the reign of Divus Augustus, and in doing so provides opportunity to extrapolate from it new insights in similar but contemporary figures of leadership. A clear case of 'to understand motives in the present, one must look at actions in the past.'. (shrink)

The first part of this book contains a selection of Leszek Nowak’s (1943-2009) works on non-Marxian historical materialism, which are published here in English for the first time. In these papers, Nowak constructs a dynamic model of religious community, reconstructs historiosophical assumptions of liberalism and considers the methodological status of prognosis of totalitarization of capitalist society. In the second part of the book, new contributions to non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. Their authors analyze mechanisms of the oligarchization of liberal democracy, (...) the democratization of real socialism, and the development of early modern Ottoman and post-war Chinese societies. The volume will be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as specialists who deal with the development of capitalist society, philosophy of history, the philosophy of social sciences and the political philosophy of liberalism. (shrink)

The authors of this book reconstruct the philosophical, methodological and theoretical assumptions of non-Marxian historical materialism, a theory of historical process authored by Leszek Nowak (1943-2009), a co-founder of the Poznań School of Methodology. In the first part of the book, philosophical assumptions of this theory are compared with the concepts of Robert Nozick, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank and analytical Marxism. In the second part, non-Marxian historical materialism is compared with the concepts of Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Andrzej Falkiewicz, Robert Michels, (...) Vilfredo Pareto, Theda Skocpol and Karl August Wittfogel. (shrink)

According to Streeck and Vogl, the neoliberalization of the state has been the result of political-economic developments that render the state dependent on financial markets. However, they do not explain the discursive shifts that would have been required for demoting the state to the role of an agent to bondholders. I propose to explain this shift via the performative effect of neoliberal agency theory. In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling claimed that corporate managers are agents to shareholding principals, which (...) implied that their main task was the procurement of shareholder value. Agency theory subsequently prescribes a series of measures to ensure the alignment of principal and agent interests in corporations. The diffusion of agency theory, however, moved beyond corporate governance to reconfigure the state. Due to its reliance on capital markets, the state supposedly likewise becomes an agent of the investment public and should procure bondholder value. (shrink)

A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature—namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, (...) and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly. (shrink)

We examined the relationship between moral foundations, empathic traits, and moral identity using an online survey via Mechanical Turk. In order to determine how moral foundations contribute to empathic traits and moral identity, we performed classical correlation analysis as well as Bayesian correlation analysis, Bayesian ANCOVA, and Bayesian regression analysis. Results showed that individualizing foundations (harm/care, fairness/reciprocity) and binding foundations (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity) had various different relationships with empathic traits. In addition, the individualizing versus binding foundations showed somewhat reverse relationships (...) with internalization and symbolization of moral identity. This suggests that moral foundations can contribute to further understanding of empathic traits and moral identity and how they relate to moral behavior in reality. We discuss the implications of these results for moral educators when starting to teach students about moral issues. (shrink)

A recently published paper in this journal establishes a statistical link between, on the one hand, Islamist terrorist campaigns – including terrorist attacks and online propaganda – and, on the other the growth of the Muslim population. The author explains this result by stating that successful campaigns lead some individuals to convert to Islam. In this commentary, we intend to reply to this article by focusing on the impact of terrorist attacks on religious conversion. We first show that Choi's results (...) suffer from theoretical flaws – a failure to comprehensively unpack the link between violence and conversion – and methodological shortcomings – a focus on all terrorist groups over a period where Islamist attacks were rare. This leads us to replicate Choi's analysis by distinguishing Islamist and non-Islamist terror attacks on a more adequate timeframe. By doing so, we no longer find empirical support for the relationship between terror attacks and the growth of the Muslim population. However, our analyses suggest that such a hypothesis may hold but only in contexts where the level and intensity of political violence are high. (shrink)

John Tomasi's new book, Free Market Fairness, has been well-received as "one of the very best philosophical treatments of libertarian thought, ever" and as a "long and friendly conversation between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls—a conversation which, astonishingly, reaches agreement". The book does present an authoritative state-of-the-debate across the spectrum from right-libertarianism on the one side to high liberalism on the other side. My point is not to question where Tomasi comes down with his own version of "market democracy" as (...) a remix of Hayek and Rawls. My point is to use his sympathetic restatements of views across the liberal spectrum to show the basic misframings and common misunderstandings that cut across the liberal-libertarian viewpoints surveyed in the book. As usual, the heart of the debate is not in the answers to carefully framed questions, but in the framing itself. (shrink)

Rousseau’s embrace of ceremony and festivals in his Considerations on the Government of Poland demonstrates one way for republican political thought to develop a substantive treatment of civic virtue. Differentiating the narcissism of spectacle and theater that Rousseau critiques in the Letter to d’Alembert from the Considerations’ call for a generous affect, I demonstrate that the latter is compatible with a republican ethos premised on civic virtue and patriotic attachment to the nation-state. Rousseau argues for the instantiation of political practices (...) that constantly cultivate political virtue and their associated affective orientations. His treatment of civic ceremonies in the Considerations should be read as an attempt to inculcate patriotic affect in republican citizens via constitutional measures. (shrink)

Responding to recent calls made within UK Parliament for a government-backed definition of Islamophobia, this article considers the unanticipated consequences of such proposals. I argue that, considered in the context of related efforts to regulate hate speech, the formulation and implementation of a government-sponsored definition will generate unforeseen harms for the Muslim community. To the extent that such a definition will fail to address the government’s role in propagating Islamophobia through ill-considered legislation that conflates Islamist discourse with hate speech, the (...) concept of a government-backed definition of Islamophobia appears hypocritical and untenable. Alongside opposing government attempts to define Islamophobia (and Islam), I argue that advocacy efforts should instead focus on disambiguating government counter-terrorism initiatives from the government management of controversies within Islam. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the governmental adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism by promoting a new definition of Islamophobia, we ought to learn from the errors that were made. We should resist the gratuitous securitization of Muslim communities, rather than use such definitions to normalize compliance with the surveillance state. (shrink)

Public support for protection is typically attributed to economic self-interest. Beyond pocketbook anxieties, a competing approach, however, contends that sociotropic attitudes dictate foreign policy preferences. Researchers, however, have faced difficulty in disentangling sociotropic attitudes from pocketbook concerns in observational studies. This article addresses this problem by utilizing a priming experiment to examine the relationship between socio and egotropic attitudes. In line with the predictions of the sociotropic framework, individuals are less certain about the egotropic effects of trade and sociotropic attitudes (...) are found to influence egotropic perceptions by reducing uncertainty about the pocketbook effects of trade. In contrast, the study fails to find support for the hypothesis that individuals project egotropic concerns onto societal evaluations. The results of the study suggest that future research should pay careful consideration to the relationship between socio and egotropic attitudes when modeling and analyzing trade-policy preferences. (shrink)

We propose six axioms concerning when one candidate should defeat another in a democratic election involving two or more candidates. Five of the axioms are widely satisfied by known voting procedures. The sixth axiom is a weakening of Kenneth Arrow's famous condition of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). We call this weakening Coherent IIA. We prove that the five axioms plus Coherent IIA single out a method of determining defeats studied in our recent work: Split Cycle. In particular, Split (...) Cycle provides the most resolute definition of defeat among any satisfying the six axioms for democratic defeat. In addition, we analyze how Split Cycle escapes Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and related impossibility results. (shrink)

A prominent feature of the contemporary society in the last couple of decades is the phenomenon of globalization. While globalization has brought immense benefits to Africa on the one hand, Africa’s entrance into and participation in the global scene has also precipitated a crisis of confusion and identity for Africa–a situation which is analogous to the effect of her encounter with colonialism, so that unless the dialectic of identity and difference that inevitably arises from this situation is constructively managed, it (...) will be difficult for Africa to make the best of the opportunities inherent in globalization. Given that no one can make the best of any opportunity for interaction with others unless one is clear about one’s identity and priorities, a major challenge Africa has to address in the context of globalization is the need to assume personal responsibility in defining her priorities and interests such as to allow these to inform her engagement with the various participants in the global world. More often than not, the Achilles heel of Africa is lack of clear focus in respect of her priorities as well as failure to allow her interests to drive her engagement with other participants in the global system. To reverse the situation of dependency which this mode of operation fosters, we argue that, Africa needs to relocate the locus of control internally and put in place a strong regime of internal democracy based on rule of law to tackle the menace of corruption and mismanagement that has undermined development initiatives since independence. (shrink)

The state is plagued with problems of political short-termism: the excessive priority given to near-term benefits at the cost of future ones (González-Ricoy and Gosseries 2016B). By the accounts of many political scientists and economists, political leaders rarely look beyond the next 2-5 years and into the problems of the next decade. There are many reasons for this, from time preference (Frederick et al 2002, Jacobs and Matthews 2012) to cognitive bias (Caney 2016, Johnson and Levin 2009, Weber 2006) to (...) perverse re-election incentives (Arnold 1990, Binder 2006, Mayhew 1974, Tufte 1978), but all involve foregoing costly action in the short term (e.g. increasing taxes, cutting benefits, imposing regulatory burdens) that would have larger moderate- to long-run benefits. Such behavior fails not only the generations of people who are to come, but also the large number of existing citizens who still have much of their lives left to lead. -/- One type of mechanism for ameliorating political short-termism that receives much attention these days involves apportioning greater relative political influence to the young. As the story goes: younger citizens generally have greater additional life expectancy than older citizens, and it therefore looks reasonable to expect that they have preferences that are extended further into the future. If we apportion greater relative political influence to the young, it therefore seems that our political system as a whole will show greater concern for the future. -/- In light of this story, a number of particular mechanisms have been proposed for apportioning greater relative political influence to the young, including lowering the voting age (Piper 2020), weighting votes inversely with age (MacAskill 2019, Parijs 1998), disenfranchising the elderly (Parijs 1998), and instituting youth quotas in legislatures (Bidadanure 2016, MacKenzie 2016). -/- In what follows, I argue that merely apportioning greater political power to the young is unlikely to make states significantly less short-termist, but underexplored age-based mechanisms may be more successful. In particular, states might mitigate short-termism by employing age-based surrogacy and liability incentives mechanisms within a deliberative body of young people charged with representing the young. (shrink)

In Korean society, regionalism has deep historical roots and has had a great influence on elections. A historic event occurred in 2014 when a conservative party candidate, Lee Jung-hyun, was elected as a member of the National Assembly in Suncheon-si, Jeollanam-do, where liberal parties have been in the midst of powerful political influence. This was possible because voters responded to the candidate's appeal to vote based on benefits to the local economy, that is, securing greater funding from the central government. (...) Exploiting the synthetic control method, this article identifies how this different choice has affected the budget of the local district. The results show that the community budget has increased dramatically, and a battery of robustness checks also supports these basic results. On the basis of the empirical evidence, the study suggests the possibility of overcoming a long-standing parochial regionalism in Korean politics through economic voting and its practical benefits. (shrink)

In the wake of 9/11 and the assessment of Iraq's WMD, several inquiries placed the blame primarily on the Intelligence Community. Part of the reform that followed was a codification of analytic tradecraft standards into Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 and the appointment of an analytic ombudsman in the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence charged with monitoring the quality of analytic products from across the intelligence community. In this paper we identify three assumptions behind ICD203: (1) (...) tradecraft standards can be employed consistently; (2) tradecraft standards sufficiently capture the key elements of good reasoning; (3) good reasoning leads to more accurate judgments. We then report on two controlled experiments that uncover operational constraints in the reliable application of the ICD203 criteria for the assessment of intelligence products. Despite criticisms of the post-9/11 and post-Iraq reform, our results highlight that ICD203, properly applied, holds potential to improve precision and accountability of intelligence processes and products. (shrink)

This teaching and learning guide accompanies the following article: Mintz-Woo, K., 2022. Carbon Pricing Ethics. Philosophy Compass 17(1):article e12803. doi:10.1111/phc3.12803. [Open access].

People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes and (...) consequences of resistance to belief change for five diverse and less contentious socio-political issues. After participants chose initially to support or oppose a given socio-political position, they were provided with reasons favoring their chosen position (affirming reasons), reasons favoring the other, unchosen position (conflicting reasons), or all reasons for both positions (reasons for both sides). Our results indicate that participants are more likely to stick with their initial decisions than to change them no matter which reasons are considered, and that this resistance to belief change is likely due to a motivated, biased evaluation of the reasons to support their initial beliefs (prior-belief bias). More specifically, they rated affirming reasons more favorably than conflicting reasons—even after accounting for reported prior knowledge about the issue, the novelty of the reasons presented, and the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. In many cases, participants who did not change their positions tended to become more confident in the superiority of their positions after considering many reasons for both sides. (shrink)

This article explores the construction of extremism in media discourse, the factors driving specific constructions and the implications of these constructions for counterterrorism policy. We contend that extremism has predominantly and increasingly been framed as a security issue. This article explores the implications of this practice through the framework of securitisation. We measure the average intensity of security framing in 38,616 articles found in three major US newspapers, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, between 20 January (...) 1993 and 19 January 2017 comprising the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies, and look at factors influencing the shift in intensity over time. Through our analysis, we show that it is possible to return to a pre-9/11 discourse but that the confluence of real-world events and the strategic choices of political actors have so far prevented this from fully occurring. We then explore the effect of securitisation on public perceptions of the threat from terrorism, finding that increases in the intensity of security framing artificially increases the public’s worry about becoming a victim of terrorism. We conclude by discussing implications for the communication of counterterrorism policy and the requirements for an after, after 9/11 approach. (shrink)

Why do Japan–South Korea relations remain tense despite repeated efforts to overcome the past? Elite narratives in Japan and South Korea reify the bilateral relationship as a difficult problem. For the Japanese policy elites, the difficulty is due to South Korean unwillingness to embrace a future-oriented relationship; whereas for the South Korean policy elites, the source of the problem is the unwillingness of the Japanese to sincerely address past wrong-doing. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy of an intractable mutual misapprehension, (...) suggesting that the difficult relationship is here to stay. I analyse pronouncements by both the Japanese and South Korean policy elites appearing in official documents and media reports for clues into the manner in which the bilateral relationship is reified into a difficulty purportedly due to the recalcitrance of the neighbour. The narratives consistently show that both the Japanese and South Korean policy elites consider the onus of improvement lies with the troublesome/insincere neighbour. In short, the bilateral relationship is a clash of realities, with the logical conclusion being that the difficult relationship will persist for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

This paper shows how an uneven electoral system in Japan shapes political parties' mobilization strategies by utilizing a majoritarian electoral system with heterogeneous district magnitudes, which in turn contributes to the gap in turnout across districts. Scholars have long debated the relationship between electoral systems and turnout; it is known that countries with proportional representation electoral systems – those with larger district magnitude – tend to have higher turnout rates than countries with majoritarian electoral systems, especially single-member district systems. The (...) current discussion on turnout and district magnitude of an electoral system assumes a monotonic relationship between these factors: the larger the district magnitude of the electoral system, the more participatory the electorate, due to competitiveness and mobilization efforts by political parties and other relevant groups. In contrast, this paper shows a mixed relationship between district magnitude of the electoral system and party mobilization and subsequent turnout, investigating a majoritarian electoral system with uneven district magnitude in the Japanese Upper House. During the survey period, the party system in Japan consisted of two major parties and a few smaller parties; consequently, the two major parties focused their efforts on SMDs in order to maximize their seat share, while smaller parties focused their resource on districts electing more than two members. In combination, these party strategies have resulted in the lowest mobilization and turnout rates in districts with two members. (shrink)

Le architetture della lotta armata e le domande di Antigone.

The three main types of policies for addressing climate change are command and control regulation, carbon taxes (or price instruments), and cap and trade (or quantity instruments). The first question in the ethics of carbon pricing is whether the latter two (price and quantity instruments) are preferable to command and control regulation. The second question is, if so, how should we evaluate the relative merits of price and quantity instruments. I canvass relevant arguments to explain different ways of addressing these (...) important policy questions, suggesting that carbon pricing is preferable to command and control regulation, and that price instruments have the theoretical edge over quantity instruments. [Open access]. (shrink)

A Critical Notice of: Across the Great Divide: Between Analytic and Continental Political Theory, by Jeremy Arnold, Stanford University Press, 2020, 232 pp., $29.52 (paperback), ISBN 9781503612150.

In September 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution that sparked controversy due to its equation of Nazism and Communism. The document made the USSR jointly responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War and accused the Russian government of whitewashing communist crimes and glorifying the Soviet totalitarian regime. This article presents the resolution as the latest expression of a broader discursive process that started with the accession process of the Central and Eastern European countries. To support this hypothesis, (...) I examine the genealogy of the resolution, namely the documents that originally outlined the stances expressed by the latter, as well as the debates at the EU Parliament that preceded its adoption. This analysis highlights in particular two fundamental tendencies, i.e. the entanglement of history and memory characterising the recent discourse on European integration and the frequent identification of the Central and Eastern European member states as victims. In the final paragraphs, I suggest that the construction of a shared ‘historical memory’ may represent a legitimising framework for the implementation of specific sets of political and economic ideas, but I also note that processes such as the one described in the article may ultimately damage the cohesion among the member states and the ability of the EU institutions to address relevant internal and external issues. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has not only ontological roots but also epistemic ones too; its cause lies in the main evolutionary trends in the development of science as a social institution. And only then the epistemic factors were transformed into existential-ontological ones, connected with the very existence of civilization and our biosocial nature. The way out of the crisis is the unalterable development of all sectors of technologies of controlled evolution. As a result, biopolitics extends the sphere of competence to interstate (...) and interethnic relations, becomes transbiopolitics, ie a global geopolitical factor responsible for the preservation of humanity and its self-identity. The coronavirus pandemic, like other manifestations of the civilization crisis, is politically generated by globalization. The same consequences of globalization contribute to the fragmentation of the geopolitical space and the inhibition of the actual globalization process. the pandemic scale of the crisis immediately brought biopolitics to the level of a systemic factor in interstate relations in both formal and substantive aspects. (shrink)

The world population of Muslims has increased exponentially in the past decade. Why is the world's Muslim population growing so quickly? This study offers a new theoretical perspective: the growth of the worldwide Muslim population is a result of a series of terrorist campaigns that inspire non-Muslims to convert to Islam. For empirical testing, this study employs a cross-national, time-series analysis of 152 countries from 1970 to 2007. Although there is lack of data on conversions that follow terrorist campaigns for (...) a direct test of the theory, this study finds a correlation between terrorist attacks and growth of the Muslim population. This finding is robust and consistent even after controlling for salient demographic reasons for growth, such as the level of fertility and immigration. (shrink)

This chapter aims at pointing out the consistency of Islam as a source for empowerment strategies of the Black population in the United States and the religion’s effective reinterpretation as a sort of contemporary gnostic self-realization in Hip Hop culture. Moreover, the link between hybrid identity constructions of Hip Hop artists that borrow from religious and cultural sources of Islam and corresponding traditions of spiritual realization in mystical Islam and Sufism is demonstrated in the course of the discussion.