Democratic Punishment and the Archive of Violence: Punishment,Publicity and Corporal Excess in Antebellum New York

Nineteenth century American prisons were paradoxical institutions. Porous and impermeable, transparent and opaque, open to public view and occluded from sight; prisons clearly functioned as containers for raw coercion even as they were paraded as paragons of democratic transparency. How did New York State navigate between these countervailing positions and how did officials explicate the difference between them? In this essay I focus on the representation of institutional violence as a problematic of governance, I consider its impact on the development and transformation of public authority and track the role of state actors in navigating the scandals, crises and opportunities it engendered.     

Public Support for International Human Rights Institutions: A Cross‐National and Multilevel Analysis

The expansion of international human rights institutions has drawn much attention. Bringing together theories from sociology, political science, and international law, this article examines what factors promote public support for international human rights institutions, using the recent wave of the World Values Survey data (2005–2008). The level of public support displays both cross‐national and cross‐individual variations, so I conceptualize it as a two‐level process and employ the multilevel modeling. At the individual level, it is found that men, younger people, and individuals with more education and income show a higher level of support. At the country level, national affluence, political change (de‐democratization), and linkage to the world society are associated with more support. I further integrate individual‐level characteristics and country‐level social contexts, and pay special attention to education. Education is the institutional link between macro‐level social influences and micro‐level individual attitudes. I find that the support‐promoting effect of education is contingent on social contexts. It is more salient in wealthy countries and countries with strong ties to the world society.     

For better,for worse? Public support for the capitalist model of the economy

A capitalist market economy is based on several institutional elements, such as private ownership and competition. Does public support for this economic model rise if the economy prospers, and fall during a downturn? Or is public support largely independent of the ups and downs of economic cycles? We hypothesize that positive economic performance increases support and that persons profiting personally are more supportive of the economic system's constitutive institutional elements. Using multilevel regression we study the determinants of individual-level support for the economic system. We also test for differences in the perception of economic performance due to political attitudes and personal properties. The findings partly support the hypotheses, indicating that macro-economic factors matter for individual-level attitudes towards the economy. Attitudes towards different institutional elements of the economic system also differ in the degree to which they are political or economic, and influenced by economic performance. Individual features – education and personal economic stakes – affect attitudes towards the economy, but a substantial share of the individual-level variation in economic attitudes remains unexplained.     

Mobilizing Gender to Promote Peace: The Case of Machsom Watch

The binary model that presents women as peaceful and men as warfaring is a common conception of war and peace. Despite increasing levels of gender equality in most spheres of public life and decreasing gender segregation in institutions in many parts of the world, the associational link of men to war and women to peace remains widespread. Focusing on the Israeli women??s peace organization, Machsom Watch, this article uses a content analysis of interactions between Machsom Watch activists, soldiers and Palestinians to examine how gendered political opportunity structures affect and are affected by interactions between individuals, organizations and institutions. The paper highlights the contradiction between Machsom Watch??s form as a women-only organization and their framing and report language, which is non-gender specific. I argue that this contradiction emerges from their strategic negotiation of the gendered political opportunity structure as well as their culturally bounded experiences of gendered interactions and embodied gender norms. More generally, I argue that by understanding political opportunity structures as being bound by cultural norms that create distinct sets of opportunities and constraints for different groups of people, scholars can better understand the particular manifestation of social movement action and thereby more fully account for human agency in social and political structures. Additionally, this paper encourages social movement scholars to understand social movement framing as both a product of political opportunities and constraints as well as an influence in the formation of the political opportunity structure.     

Allocative Failures: Networks and Institutions in International Grantmaking Relationships

Using neo-institutional theory to guide my inquiry, I ask how foundations award international development grants in an institutionally complex environment, and if and how that process contributes to homophily in grantmaking. Employing a qualitative multiple case study method, I show that grants are awarded via interpersonal networks, a meso-level finding that suggests a second, macro-level research question: how are interpersonal networks institutionalized in this context? In my analysis, I contribute to a theoretical understanding of the recursive relationship between networks and institutions: I show how macro-level institutional practices and forms emerge from networks, and how the micro-level character of the network participants themselves ultimately shapes institutional forms. Combined, my results provide a mechanistic, multi-level understanding of the relationship between networks and institutions, as well as of how homophily operates in grantmaking. Because of the potential for social stratification and exclusion based on the structure of the network itself, I argue that such networks should be understood as “allocative failures.”     

Antigypsyism,education and the media: ways forward

ABSTRACT

This article is a self-reflection of my work over a decade of challenging school segregation of Roma across Europe. I look at how segregation has been framed and how communication around equality in education with the public took place. The education system is an important pillar in producing and reproducing antigypsyism in society. I see school segregation as an important mechanism that perpetuates antigypsyism. I explore ways to attract support for equality measures in education. One important strategy is to engage with media in transmitting messages to an audience that was usually not the target of inclusive discourses that promote diversity and equality as societal values.     

Transnational migration: taking stock and future directions

Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation incompatible with transnational membership? How does economic and social development change when it takes place across borders? This article takes stock of what is known about everyday transnational practices and the institutional actors that facilitate or impede them and outlines questions for future research. In it, I define what I mean by transnational practices and describe the institutions that create and are created by these activities. I discuss the ways in which they distribute migrants’ resources and energies across borders, based primarily on studies of migration to the United States.     

Ephemeral and Ludic Strategies of Remembering in the Streets: A Springboard for Public Memory in Chile

This article examines a profound turn in the commemoration and representations of the dictatorial past in Chile (1973–1990), where young people who did not experience firsthand the authoritarian order are publicly creating fleeting images, practices, and objects to remember the military dictatorship. These are urban ephemeral and ludic mnemonic assemblages (Freeman, Nienass, and Daniell 2015) that connect past and present events and demand new ways of talking, acting, and thinking about the past, thereby appropriating the public space. The participants in these actions stress the original, carnivalesque, and public dimensions of their practices, challenging the official politics of memory that has focused on the recognition of victims within the walls of museums or memorials. The following question guides this article: How do new public, ludic, and ephemeral strategies interact with and potentially change official ways of narrating the past? How do they create the space for political participation in postconflict societies? Drawing upon a qualitative and multimethod study that combines 60 in‐depth interviews, participant observations, and archival work, I maintain that, although this blossoming of the Chilean public memory has opened up new territories for activating memory, it has a transient temporality and, consequently, may have transitory political potential.     

Testing planets: Institutions tested in an era of uncertainty

Prior accounts of the experimenter’s regress in laboratory testing are set against the background of a relatively stable institutional context. Even if the tools are new or the object of investigation is unknown, participating entities are named, a certain degree of funding is presumed, and an organization exists to conduct the test. In this paper, I argue that this background assumption obscures the importance of institutional and organizational context to the sociology of testing. I analyze ethnographic data gathered among a NASA team whose funding is uncertain, whose mission organization is not yet established, and whose object of investigation is inaccessible. In what I characterize as “ontological flexibility,” I reveal how scientists shift their accounts of object agency in response to changes in their institutional environment. As they describe the moon as “uncooperative” or “multiple” while they make appeals to institutions at various stages of support in their exploration projects, this reveals the presence of an “institutional regress”: a previously overlooked aspect of the sociology of testing.     

Ideas in action: the politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839

This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors’ expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes.     

Who Wants a Deliberative Public Sphere?1

Democratic theorists and social scientists suggest that a deliberative public sphere would be good for democracy by maximizing emancipatory possibilities and providing broad legitimacy to political decision making. But do ordinary Americans actually want a deliberative public sphere? I examine this question in the context of four contentious “religion and science” debates. Through a multidimensional evaluation exercise with 62 ordinary respondents, I find that evaluation of public representatives in these debates tends to favor open‐mindedness and ongoing debate. Further, respondents explicitly discount elected representatives who participate in public debate precisely because they are seen as violating deliberative norms through their affiliation with electoral politics. Respondents want a deliberative public sphere. However, this desire reflects an understanding of the public sphere and institutional politics as disconnected arenas with incompatible rules and objectives, raising multiple questions for democratic theory and for political sociology.     

Dignity and development

This paper explores how expanding the notion of informal institutions in the broader institutional framework provides a more complete explanation for development. Specifically, I incorporate McCloskey's notion of ‘dignity and liberty’ as part of the institutional nexus. By doing so, a richer explanation and understanding of the importance of institutions in explaining different economic outcomes is offered. Focusing on bourgeois dignity offers a precise mechanism to explain how institutions matter to support economic growth. In addition, analyzing the changing attitudes toward the bourgeoisie provides a specific example of mechanisms that can lead to institutional change.     

Channeling advocacy? Assessing how funding source shapes the strategies of environmental organizations

ABSTRACT

All non–governmental organizations (NGOs) rely on funding to support their work. But how does the source of funding shape the types of advocacy groups engage in? Using novel panel data collected by the Environmental Funders Network, this research examines how funding from government, foundations, business, and members shape the advocacy work of environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in the UK. Past research suggests that elite funding sources channel groups into institutional advocacy, such as lobbying or litigation, and away from public advocacy, such as protesting. This paper confirms previous research while also showing that all types of funding channel group actions. Foundation and business funding is associated with more institutional advocacy, government funding is associated with non–political advocacy such as species conservation, and member funding is associated with public advocacy. By comparing across funding types, this study demonstrates the ways in which groups are both helped and hindered by funding from different sources.     

What Drives Progressive Policy? Institutional Politics,Political Mediation,Policy Feedbacks,and Early U.S. Old‐Age Policy

What drives progressive public policy? Because progressive policy challenges the interests of powerful people and interests that dominate policy making, it is puzzling that progressive policy ever happens. This article addresses this question by modeling and appraising institutional political, political mediation, and policy feedback theories and models of progressive policy making. Institutional political theory focuses on political institutional conditions, bureaucratic development, election results, and public opinion. Political mediation theory holds that social movements can have influence over progressive policy under favorable political conditions. Policy feedback theory holds that programs will be self‐reinforcing under certain conditions. The article goes beyond previous research by including and analyzing public opinion in institutional political and political mediation models and addressing positive policy feedbacks. We appraise five models derived from these three theories through fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses of the generosity of early old‐age policy across U.S. states at two key moments. We find some support for each theory, and the results suggest that they are complementary. Left regimes or social movements can initiate progressive policy, which can be reinforced for the long term through positive policy feedback mechanisms. We discuss the implications for current U.S. politics and for progressive policy elsewhere.     

The Who of Power?

How is the causative role of ideas appreciated in understanding the political economy of neoliberalism? What are the origin stories of neoliberalism and how are these related to the periodisation of capitalism? Is there a role for an explicit normative perspective in critiquing neoliberalism as a set of class relations? These broad questions are raised in this feature review, which looks at the latest work on the durability of embedded neoliberalism. It does so by highlighting the importance of revealing and critiquing ideas-centred assumptions within political economy in order to offer an alternative stance on the class relations, institutions, and ideology of present-day capitalism. As a consequence, reflecting further on the who of power remains an enduring challenge for political economy.     

Virus interruptus: An Arendtian exploration of political world‐building in pandemic times

Building upon a series of blog posts and conversations, two feminist scholars explore how political community, trust, responsibility and solidarity are affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic. We explore the ways in which we can engage in political world‐building during pandemic times through the work of Hannah Arendt. Following Arendt’s notion of the world as the space for human togetherness, we ask: how can we respond to COVID‐19’s interruptions to the familiarity of daily life and our relationship to public space? By extending relational accounts of public health and organizational ethics, we critique a narrow view of solidarity that focuses on individual compliance with public health directives. Instead, we argue that solidarity involves addressing structural inequities, both within public health and our wider community. Finally, we suggest possibilities for political world‐building by considering how new forms of human togetherness might emerge as we forge a collective ‘new normal’.     

How responsiveness works in mainland China: Effects on institutional trust and political participation

This study investigated whether and how institutional responsiveness, a constitutive element of dialogic communication, influences institutional trust and political participation among members of the public in mainland China. A total of 4068 respondents from mainland China completed questionnaires. Results demonstrated that institutional responsiveness indirectly reduced publics’ destructive non-institutional political participation by building institutional trust. Extending the public relations literature on dialogue, we found that this indirect relationship is conditional on online political information seeking rather than online political expression among members of the public. For people who frequently use the Internet to seek political information, institutional responsiveness is more likely to boost institutional trust, which decreases the likelihood of participation in offline political activities.     

Framing a welfare reform: the social benefits reform in Russia and Kazakhstan

This article addresses the question of why some non-democratic governments are more successful than others at reforming their welfare institutions. Using the example of the Russian and Kazakhstani social benefits reform, the author will illustrate that in modern non-democratic regimes the importance of framing and effective communication with the public for the purpose of effective policymaking and regime legitimization is equal to, if not greater than, in established democracies. The successful implementation of the Kazakhstani social benefits reform, as opposed to Russia’s protracted experience with reforming its social benefits system, was determined not only by the configuration of various institutional and political factors, but also the skilful actions of the Kazakhstani authorities, who used effective communication strategies and framing techniques that resonated with the public and generated broad support for reform. Based on extensive research conducted in Russia and Kazakhstan in 2006–2010 as part of the author's doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto, this paper enhances our understanding of political and public policy processes in transitional and non-democratic contexts and adds important details to our understanding of how post-Soviet autocrats run their countries and what methods they use to stay in power, manage their state affairs, and avoid public dissatisfaction.