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English Pages [1025] Year 2017
The SAGE Encyclopedia of
Political Behavior
Editorial Board Editor Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University
Editorial Board Rom Harré Oxford University Leonie Huddy Stony Brook University Deborah Prentice Princeton University Donald M. Taylor McGill University Tom Tyler Yale Law School Michael Wessells Columbia University
The SAGE Encyclopedia of
Political Behavior 1
Editor Georgetown University
FOR INFORMATION:
Copyright © 2017 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
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B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483
Names: Moghaddam, Fathali M., editor. Title: SAGE encyclopedia of political behavior / editor, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Georgetown University. Description: First edition. | Thousand Oaks, California : SAGE Publications, Inc., [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017004456 | ISBN 9781483391168 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Political psychology. | Political science– Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC JA74.5 .S23 2017 | DDC 320.01/9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004456
Acquisitions Editor: Maureen Adams Editorial Assistant: Jordan Enobakhare Developmental Editor: Sanford Robinson Production Editor: Jane Haenel Reference Systems Manager: Leticia Gutierrez Copy Editors: Diane DiMura, Kim Husband Typesetter: Hurix Systems Pvt. Ltd. Proofreaders: Scott Oney, Susan Schon Indexer: Robie Grant Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Kate Brummitt
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Contents Volume 1 List of Entries vii Reader’s Guide xi About the Editor xvii Contributors xix Introduction xxix Entries A 1 G 319 B 53 H 351 C 73 I 373 D 161 J 419 E 215 K 429 F 285 L 435
Volume 2 List of Entries vii Reader’s Guide xi Entries M 455 T 821 N 511 U 859 O 551 V 885 P 563 W 903 R 679 Y 917 S 729 Index 919
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List of Entries Absolutism Activism Advocacy Affirmative Action Aggressive Capitulation Agonism al Qaeda Alienation Allegiances Allocation American Dream. See Self-Help Ideology American Exceptionalism Anti-Semitism Art in Political Campaigns Assassinations/Violence in Politics Assimilation Asymmetric Warfare Attitudes Attribution Theory Authoritarian Personality Authoritarianism
Civilian Intervention Civil-Military Relations Clash of Civilizations Clientelism Closure, Need for Cognitive Dissonance Collective Action Command of the Commons Communism. See Socialism and Communism Competitive Authoritarianism Confirmation Bias Conflict Theory. See Conflict Theory, Realistic; Social Dominance Theory; Social Identity Theory Conflict Theory, Realistic Conflicts, Protracted Conformity Conservatism Conspiracies Contact Theory Corporatism Corruption Counter-Elite Counterinsurgency Crisis Decision Making and Management Cyberactivism Cyberwar
Bandwagoning State Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Bellicism Bicameralism Biopolitics Blaming the Victim Blue-Dog Democrats Brand Identity and Loyalty Bully Pulpit Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic Structure Business in Politics
Death of Leaders Decision Making Decision Making, Political. See Political Deliberation Defense Planning Democracy Dependency Theory Deterrence and Crime Deterrence and International Relations Development, Theories of Deviance and Control Dictatorship Diplomacy Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Discrimination Disengagement Distributive Justice Districting
Calculus of Dissent Capitalism Caste System Charisma Citizenship Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Civic Engagement Civil Disobedience Civil Wars vii
viii List of Entries
“Do No Harm” as a Code of Action Dogmatism Dominant Power Politics Drones Duverger’s Law on Elections Economic Judgment Economic-Based Voting Blocs Economics and Political Behavior Ecopolitics Egocentrism Egoistical Relative Deprivation Election Rigging Election Turnouts. See Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Electoral Systems Electoralism Elite Decision Making Elite Theory (Pareto) Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions and Voting End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) End of History Thesis for Corporate Law End to Terrorism, Theories of Energy Competition English-Only Movement Environmental Skepticism Equality of Opportunity Equity Theory Essentialism Ethics in Politics. See Political Morality Ethics of Political Behavior Ethnic Revival Ethnicity Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Ethnocentrism European Union Expected-Utility Model Extended Contact Extradition False Consciousness Fascism Feckless Pluralism Feminism First Ladies Followership and Personality Framing Effects Fraternal Deprivation. See Group Relative Deprivation Free Market Free Rider Problem F-Scale Functionalism Gender Bias Genetic Determinism. See Genetic Essentialism
Genetic Essentialism Genocide Gerontology, Sociopolitical Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff Globalization Governmentality Gray Political Organizations. See Advocacy Greed Versus Grievance Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership Group Ideologies Group Relative Deprivation Groupthink Hearts and Minds Approach Hegemony Heuristics Hierarchy of Needs Hostage Taking Human Duties Human Rights Human Trafficking Hybrid Regimes Hypocrisy Paradigm Identity Politics Images and Theory in International Relations Imagined Contact Immigration Implicit Association Test Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting Indoctrination Insurgency International Criminal Court International Humanitarian Law International Security Internet Jihadism Intractable Conflicts Irrationality Islam Versus Islamism Islamic State Jihad Judicial Appointments Judicial Review Just War Theory Justice Motive Keynesian Economics Language Death Legitimacy, Forms of Liberalism Life Cycle Effects Lobbying
List of Entries ix
Locus of Control Lone Wolf Terrorism Machiavellianism Malthusian Cycle Management. See Crisis Decision Making and Management Maritime Terrorism Marxism Mass Communication Mass Political Behavior Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Media Framing Mediation Skills Meritocracy Migration Military Action Minority Voters Mission Statements Modernization Theory Moral Dilemmas Moral Hazard Morality and Politics Motivated Reasoning Multiculturalism Multilateralism Mutual Radicalization Name Order Narcissism Narcissistic Personality Inventory Narcoterrorism National Character National Language Nationalism NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Negative Peace Neoliberalism Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power New Left News, Television Non-Aligned Nations Nonviolence North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nuclear Taboo Obedience Oligarchy Omniculturalism Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Pacifism Parental Worldview and Children Parliamentarism Partisanship
Party Identification Party List Party Systems Patriarchy Patrimonialism Patriotism Peacemaking Personality Traits Persuasion. See Hearts and Minds Approach Physical Appearance and Political Candidates. See Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Pluralism Political Apologies Political Campaigns Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Political Crimes Political Deliberation Political Discourse Political Ideology Political Indoctrination Political Mandates Political Morality Political Participation Political Persuasion and Rhetoric Political Plasticity Political Psychologies of Terrorism Political Socialization Political Symbolism Politics After Tragedy Polling Positioning Theory Positive Peace Poverty Trap Powerlessness Praetorianism Prejudice Presidential Character. See Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Presidentialism Pressure Groups Print Media Prisoner’s Dilemma Procedural Justice Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Profiling Proletariat and Capitalism Propaganda Prospect Theory Psychobiography Psychodynamic Theory Public Goods Public Opinion Race and Ethnicity Racism. See Symbolic Racism
x List of Entries
Radicalization Rational Choice Rawls, John. See Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Realism Realistic Conflict Theory. See Conflict Theory, Realistic Reasoning, Motivated. See Motivated Reasoning Reconciliation Refugees Relative Deprivation Theory Religion-Based Voting Blocs Religiosity Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior Representative Democracy Resource Mobilization Retributive Justice Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution Risky Shift Ritual in Politics Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral Rule of Law Rural Voters Saber Rattling Self-Categorization Theory Self-Esteem Self-Help Ideology Selfish Gene Significance, Need for Similarity-Attraction Slavery in America Sleeper Effect Social Capital Social Categories Social Class Social Cognition Social Contract Social Darwinism Social Dominance Orientation Social Dominance Theory Social Identity Theory Social Influence Social Investment Theory Social Movements Social Networking Social Revolts Social Stratification and Inequality Social Welfare Socialism and Communism Sociobiology Source Bias “Spoiler” Effect in Politics Springboard Model of Dictatorship Stability-Instability Paradox Stag Hunt
State Development State-Sponsored Terror Stereotypes Strong President Model Suburban Voters Sultanism Symbolic Racism System Justification Talking Heads and Political Campaigns Term Limits Terror Management Theory Terrorism, Theories and Models Terrorist Networks Theories of Development. See Development, Theories of Theories of Terrorism. See Terrorism, Theories and Models Theories of Voting Behavior. See Voting Behavior, Theories of Third Party Tokenism Tolerance for Ambiguity Torture Totalitarianism Trafficking of Persons. See Human Trafficking Tragedy of the Commons Transitioning Fragile States Transitology Trust Unicameralism United Nations United Nations Security Council Universal Declaration of Human Rights Urban Voters Utopia Values Values and Politics Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Voter Disenfranchisement Voter Identification Voter Mobility Voting, History of Voting Behavior, Theories of Voting Blocs. See Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs; Religion-Based Voting Blocs Wars of Attrition Weber’s Protestant Ethic Women and Leadership Women’s Liberation Movement Youth and Political Change
Reader’s Guide The Reader’s Guide is provided to aid readers in identifying entries on related topics. It classifies entries into 11 general topical categories: (1) Cognitive Processes; (2) Group Identities and Influence; (3) Individual Political Behavior; (4) International/Comparative Perspectives; (5) Justice and Political Behavior; (6) Media, Discourse, and Communications; (7) Policies and Political Behavior; (8) Political Systems; (9) Security and Terrorism; (10) Social Political Movements; (11) Theories of Political Behavior; and (12) Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns. Entries may appear in multiple categories, and often do. Cognitive Processes
Assimilation Civil Disobedience Conflicts, Protracted Conformity Death of Leaders Deviance and Control Egocentrism Ethnic Revival Ethnicity Ethnocentrism Feminism First Ladies Gender Bias Genetic Essentialism Genocide Group Ideologies Groupthink Identity Politics Intractable Conflicts Mass Political Behavior Mutual Radicalization National Character Nationalism Nonviolence Obedience Patriotism Political Plasticity Political Psychologies of Terrorism Pressure Groups Race and Ethnicity Slavery in America Social Class Social Networking Social Stratification and Inequality Sociobiology
Attribution Theory Closure, Need for Collective Action Confirmation Bias Decision Making Hearts and Minds Approach Images and Theory in International Relations Insurgency Locus of Control Moral Dilemmas Morality and Politics Political Morality Political Plasticity Prejudice Risky Shift Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral Self-Categorization Theory Significance, Need for Similarity-Attraction Social Categories Social Cognition Source Bias Stereotypes Symbolic Racism Tolerance for Ambiguity Group Identities and Influence Activism Aggressive Capitulation Agonism American Exceptionalism xi
xii Reader’s Guide
Values and Politics Women and Leadership Individual Political Behavior Attitudes Authoritarian Personality Authoritarianism Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character Bully Pulpit Charisma Cognitive Dissonance Cyberactivism Economics and Political Behavior Emotions and Voting False Consciousness Followership and Personality F-Scale Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership Irrationality Lone Wolf Terrorism Machiavellianism Military Action Narcissism Narcissistic Personality Inventory Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power Optimal Distinctiveness Theory Parental Worldview and Children Patrimonialism Political Plasticity Powerlessness Praetorianism Psychobiography Psychodynamic Theory Saber Rattling Self-Esteem Selfish Gene Sultanism Values and Politics International/Comparative Perspectives Allegiances Bandwagoning State Calculus of Dissent Civic Engagement Civil Wars Civilian Intervention Dependency Theory Economic Judgment Ecopolitics Energy Competition
European Union Free Market Globalization Hegemony International Criminal Court International Humanitarian Law International Security Judicial Review Language Death Migration Modernization Theory Multilateralism National Language Non-Aligned Nations North Atlantic Treaty Organization Political Crimes Poverty Trap Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior United Nations United Nations Security Council Universal Declaration of Human Rights Justice and Political Behavior Affirmative Action Anti-Semitism Biopolitics Blaming the Victim Command of the Commons Corruption Discrimination Distributive Justice “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action Equality of Opportunity Equity Theory Ethics of Political Behavior Free Rider Problem Glass Ceiling and Glass Cliff Governmentality Greed Versus Grievance Human Duties Human Rights Judicial Appointments Just War Theory Justice Motive Moral Hazard Political Plasticity Procedural Justice Profiling Public Goods Retributive Justice Rule of Law
Reader’s Guide xiii
Stag Hunt Tokenism Torture Tragedy of the Commons Utopia Media, Discourse, and Communications Art in Political Campaigns Assassinations/Violence in Politics Business in Politics Conspiracies Cyberactivism Cyberwar Diplomacy Dogmatism Hypocrisy Paradigm Mass Communication Media Framing Mediation Skills Mission Statements Mutual Radicalization Name Order News, Television Personality Traits Political Apologies Political Campaigns Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of Political Deliberation Political Discourse Political Indoctrination Political Mandates Political Persuasion and Rhetoric Political Socialization Political Symbolism Politics After Tragedy Polling Print Media Propaganda Public Opinion Source Bias Talking Heads and Political Campaigns Policies and Political Behavior Caste System Citizenship Civil-Military Relations Counterinsurgency Crisis Decision Making and Management Defense Planning Deterrence and Crime Deterrence and International Relations
Districting End to Terrorism, Theories of English-Only Movement Environmental Skepticism Extradition Feckless Pluralism Hearts and Minds Approach Immigration Keynesian Economics Multiculturalism Negative Peace Omniculturalism Peacemaking Positive Peace Public Goods Reconciliation Refugees Rentier State Rent-Seeking Behavior Social Welfare “Spoiler” Effect in Politics State-Sponsored Terror Third Party Values and Politics Political Systems Bicameralism Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic Structure Capitalism Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Clientelism Competitive Authoritarianism Conservatism Corporatism Democracy Dictatorship Direct Versus Indirect Democracy Duverger’s Law on Elections Election Rigging Electoral Systems Electoralism Fascism Hybrid Regimes Islam Versus Islamism Marxism Oligarchy Parliamentarism Partisanship Patriarchy Political Ideology Presidentialism
xiv Reader’s Guide
Procedural Versus Substantive Fairness Proletariat and Capitalism Public Goods Representative Democracy Socialism and Communism Strong President Model Term Limits Totalitarianism Unicameralism Security and Terrorism al Qaeda Asymmetric Warfare Drones Hostage Taking Human Trafficking Islamic State Maritime Terrorism Mutual Radicalization Narcoterrorism Nuclear Taboo Political Psychologies of Terrorism Refugees State Development State-Sponsored Terror Terrorism, Theories and Models Terrorist Networks Transitioning Fragile States Wars of Attrition Social Political Movements Alienation Biopolitics Brand Identification and Loyalty Cyberactivism Gerontology, Sociopolitical Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts Internet Jihadism Islam Versus Islamism Jihad Mutual Radicalization Neoliberalism Pluralism Political Plasticity Radicalization Ritual in Politics Self-Help Ideology Social Darwinism Social Influence Social Movements Social Revolts
Values Values and Politics Women’s Liberation Movement Youth and Political Change Theories of Political Behavior Absolutism Bellicism Clash of Civilizations Conflict Theory, Realistic Contact Theory Counter-Elite Development, Theories of Dominant Power Politics Egoistical Relative Deprivation Elite Decision Making Elite Theory (Pareto) End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) End of History Thesis for Corporate Law End to Terrorism, Theories of Essentialism Extended Contact Functionalism Group Relative Deprivation Imagined Contact Indoctrination Legitimacy, Forms of Liberalism Malthusian Cycle Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives Meritocracy Nationalism New Left Pacifism Positioning Theory Prisoner’s Dilemma Realism Relative Deprivation Theory Resource Mobilization Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution Sleeper Effect Social Contract Social Dominance Orientation Social Dominance Theory Social Identity Theory Social Investment Theory Springboard Model of Dictatorship Stability-Instability Paradox State-Sponsored Terror System Justification Terror Management Theory Terrorism, Theories and Models
Reader’s Guide xv
Transitology Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory Voting Behavior, Theories of Weber’s Protestant Ethic Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns Advocacy Allocation Blue-Dog Democrats Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Decision Making Disengagement Economic-Based Voting Blocs Emotions and Political Decision Making Emotions and Voting Ethnicity-Based Voting Blocs Expected-Utility Model Framing Effects Heuristics Hierarchy of Needs Implicit Association Test Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting
Life Cycle Effects Lobbying Minority Voters Motivated Reasoning Party Identification Party List Party Systems Political Participation Political Plasticity Prospect Theory Rational Choice Religion-Based Voting Blocs Religiosity Rural Voters Social Capital Suburban Voters Trust Urban Voters Voter Disenfranchisement Voter Identification Voter Mobility Voting, History of Voting Behavior, Theories of
About the Editor Fathali M. Moghaddam, PhD (University of Surrey, England), is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, and the editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology (a quarterly journal published by the American Psychological Association). Dr. Moghaddam was born in Iran, was educated from an early age in England, and worked for the United Nations and for McGill University before joining Georgetown in 1990. He returned to Iran in the “spring of revolution” in 1979 and was researching there during the hostage-taking
crisis and the early years of the Iran-Iraq war. He has conducted experimental and field research in numerous cultural contexts and published extensively on radicalization, intergroup conflict, human rights and duties, the psychology of dictatorship and democracy, and causal explanations. He has received a number of prestigious academic awards, and his most recent books include The Psychology of Democracy (2016), The Psychology of Dictatorship (2013), and Questioning Causality: Scientific Explorations of Cause and Consequence Across Social Contexts (2016, with Rom Harré).
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Contributors Hyangseon Ahn Georgetown University
Badri Bajaj Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, India
Parveen Akhtar University of Bradford, UK
Anjana Balakrishnan University of Western Ontario, Canada
Kara S. Alaimo Hofstra University
Paolo Balduzzi Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
Bethany Albertson University of Texas at Austin
Danny L. Balfour Grand Valley State University
Jo-Ann Amadeo Marymount University
Rasa Balocˇkaite˙ Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
Kenneth T. Andrews University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Smita C. Banerjee Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Arije Antinori CRI.ME LAB “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy
Chris Barker Southwestern College
Elena Aoun Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Daniel Barnhizer Michigan State University College of Law
Robert Apel Rutgers University
David Barnhizer Cleveland State University, Marshall College of Law
Jean-Louis Arcand Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
Brock Bastian University of Melbourne, Australia
Robert W. William Armstrong University of North Alabama
Alexander Baturo Dublin City University, Ireland
Jamie Arndt University of Missouri, Columbia
Roy Baumeister Florida State University
Jacob Aronson University of Maryland
Cristiano Bee Kadir Has University, Turkey
Lonna Rae Atkeson University of New Mexico
Jean-François Bélanger McGill University, Canada
Catherine Atwong California State University Fullerton
Laura N. Bell West Texas A&M University
Daniel Augenstein Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Lihi Ben Shitrit University of Georgia
Constantina Badea Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, France
Arthur Asa Berger San Francisco State University
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xx Contributors
Christofer Berglund Uppsala University, Sweden
Howard Campbell University of Texas at El Paso
Sten Berglund Örebro University, Sweden
John L. Campbell Dartmouth College
Joan Berzoff Smith College
Sierra Campbell Georgetown University
Tina Besley University of Waikato, New Zealand
Diana Cárdenas Université de Montréal, Canada
Robert J. Bies Georgetown University
David Carment Carleton University, Canada
Thomas A. Birkland North Carolina State University
Edward G. Carmines Indiana University
Madeleine Blackman Georgetown University
Michael Carrell Northern Kentucky University
Sarai Blincoe Longwood University
William Case City University of Hong Kong
Klaus Boehnke Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH, Germany Louis Bolce Baruch College
Emilio J. Castilla Massachusetts Institute of Technology Viktorija L. A. Cˇeginskas University of Turku, Finland
Angela L. Bos College of Wooster
Ivan Cerovac University of Trieste, Italy
David Bradley La Trobe University, Australia
Amanda Chappell Longwood University
Cindy Brock University of Wyoming
Ioannis Chapsos Coventry University, UK
David Brulé Independent Scholar, Sweetwater, Tennessee
Benoît Cherré Université du Québec a Montréal, Canada
Justin P. Bruner Australian National University, Canberra
Daniel J. Christie Ohio State University
Dominic Bryan Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Kursat Cinar Bilkent University, Turkey
Kenneth Bryant Jr. University of Missouri
Andrew Civettini Knox College
Heather E. Bullock University of California, Santa Cruz
Lorenzo Cladi Plymouth University, UK
Michael N. Bultmann University of Missouri, Columbia
Michele Anne Clark George Washington University
Tom R. Burns Uppsala University, Sweden
Harold D. Clarke University of Texas at Dallas
Fredrik Bynander Swedish Defence University
David Coates Wake Forest University
Michael A. Cacciatore University of Georgia
Raphael S. Cohen RAND Corporation
Lindsey Cameron University of Kent, UK
Meghan Condon DePaul University
Contributors xxi
Corey L. Cook University of Washington Tacoma
Judith Escuin Checa Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Rachel Corbman Stony Brook University
Victoria M. Esses University of Western Ontario, Canada
William Costanza Marymount University
Aaron Ettinger University of Waterloo, Canada
Rory Costello University of Limerick, Ireland
Giuseppe Eusepi Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Lauren Covalucci American Psychological Association
Natasha Ezrow University of Essex, UK
Richard J. Crisp Aston Business School
Mark Fagiano University of Tennessee
Ruth Dassonneville Université de Montréal, Canada
Lisa Farwell Santa Monica College
H. Louise Davis Miami University
Nathan Favero Texas A&M University
Paul K. Davis Pardee RAND Graduate School
Lars P. Feld University of Freiburg, Germany
Roxane de la Sablonnière Université de Montréal, Canada
Stanley Feldman Stony Brook University
Gerald De Maio Baruch College
Melissa Fellin Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Tim Dekkers Leiden Law School, The Netherlands
Ana Mar Fernández Pasarín Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain
Samuel C. Dicke University of Missouri
Andrew Fiala California State University, Fresno
Myrthe Doedens Georgetown University
Joël Ficet Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
James M. Dorsey S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore
Olivier Fillieule University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Steven N. Durlauf University of Wisconsin
Eerika Finell University of Tampere, Finland
Megan Earle Brock University
Matthew Fowler Indiana University, Bloomington
Eric C. Edwards Utah State University
Joshua A. Freeman University of Georgia
Boia Efraime Mozambican Association of Psychology
Charles (Chuck) D. Freilich Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government
Nir Eisikovits Suffolk University, UK
Bruce K. Friesen University of Tampa
Said Elbanna Qatar University
Shana Kushner Gadarian Syracuse University
Michael Ent Florida State University
Barry L. Gan St. Bonaventure University
Secil Ertorer York University, Canada
Daniel J. Gilman Federal Trade Commission
xxii Contributors
Fernand Gobet University of Liverpool, UK
Arnold K. Ho University of Michigan
Grigorii V. Golosov European University at St. Petersburg
Gordon Hodson Brock University, Canada
Kevin H. Govern Ave Maria School of Law, Naples, Florida
Anke Hoeffler Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford, UK
Kellen Gracey University of Iowa
Karla Hoff World Bank
Bligh Grant University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Tom Hoffman Spring Hill College
Wyn Grant University of Warwick, UK
R. Lance Holbert Temple University
Roger Griffin Oxford Brookes University, UK
Stephanie Seidel Holmsten University of Texas at Austin
Amos N. Guiora SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah
Peter Hough Middlesex University, UK
Ingrid J. Haas University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Charles Howard Georgetown University
Amjad Hadjikhani Uppsala University, Sweden
Leonie Huddy Stony Brook University
John R. Hall University of California, Davis
Christopher G. Hudson Salem State University
Eran Halperin Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel
Kathryn K. Hughes Independent Researcher, Alexandria, VA
Leah K. Hamilton Mount Royal University, Canada
William G. Huitt Valdosta State University
Nazir N. Harb Michel Georgetown University
J. Guido Hülsmann Université d’Angers, France
Heidi Hardt University of California, Irvine
Brandon T. Humphrey Miami University
Carmen V. Harris University of South Carolina Upstate
Swen Hutter European University Institute, Italy
Ann (Chen) Hascalovitz University of Cambridge, UK
Vincenzo Iacoviello University of Geneva, Switzerland
John Dixon Haskell University of Manchester, UK
Jason Imbrogno University of North Alabama
Helen Haste Harvard University, Graduate School of Education
Molly Inman Georgetown University
Erica Heinsen-Roach University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
Galen A. Irwin Leiden University, The Netherlands
Matt Henn Nottingham Trent University, UK
Tami Amanda Jacoby University of Manitoba, Canada
Victoria Hesford Stony Brook University (SUNY)
Peter J. Jacques University of Central Florida
Luke Hinsenkamp Ohio State University
Rusi Jaspal De Montfort University, UK
Contributors xxiii
Thijmen Jeroense Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Daphne Jeyapal Thompson Rivers University, Canada Svein Tvedt Johansen Harstad University College, Norway
Alexander Kleibrink Free University Berlin, Germany Chiranjeev Kohli California State University Fullerton Efi Kokaliari Springfield College
Adam Jones University of British Columbia, Canada
Andrey Korotayev National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia
Garett Jones George Mason University
Andreas Krieg King’s College London
Melina Juárez University of New Mexico
Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr. University of Alabama
Frank Jake Kachanoff McGill University, Canada
Andre Krouwel VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana Georgetown University
Andreas Kruse University of Heidelberg, Germany
Kerem Ozan Kalkan Eastern Kentucky University
Clara Kulich University of Geneva, Switzerland
Vinod Kannuthurai Stimson Center Washington, DC
Jon Kvist Roskilde University, Denmark
Stefanie Kappler Durham University, UK
Sameer P. Lalwani Stimson Center, Washington, DC
S. Paul Kapur United States Naval Postgraduate School
Jacques Launay Oxford University, UK
Jacob Kathman University at Buffalo
Christopher N. Lawrence Middle Georgia State University
Karen M. Kaufmann UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Chia-yi Lee Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Mark V. Kauppi Georgetown University
Anne Leiser Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Germany
Steven T. Keener Virginia Commonwealth University Thomas Keil University of Zurich, Switzerland Joshua B. Kennedy Georgia Southern University Menusch Khadjavi Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany Michael King Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society
Gerhard Leitner Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Shana Levin Claremont McKenna College Aharon Levy Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel Michael S. Lewis-Beck University of Iowa Martin Libicki U.S. Naval Academy
Bert Klandermans Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands
Darren G. Lilleker Bournemouth University, UK
Samara Klar University of Arizona
Eunjung Lim Johns Hopkins University
xxiv Contributors
Maria Livaudais University of New Mexico
Marilyn McMorrow Georgetown University
John Benedict Londregan Princeton University
Shana M. Mell Virginia Commonwealth University
Jennifer Long Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Alexandra Mello Mozambican Association of Psychology
Jasmine Lorenzini European University Institute, Italy
Jochen I. Menges WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Management, Germany
Bernice Lott University of Rhode Island
Peter Merrotsy The University of Western Australia
Patrick L. Lown University of Essex, UK
Melissa R. Michelson Menlo College
James Loxton University of Sydney, Australia
Franklin G. Mixon Jr. Columbus State University
Giacomo Luciani Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland
Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University
Klarissa Lueg Europa-University Flensburg, Germany Bernd Luig University of Mannheim, Germany Diane M. Mackie University of California, Santa Barbara Heather E. Madonia Northwestern University Leena Malkki University of Helsinki, Finland Xavier Márquez Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand Anthony J. Marsella University of Hawaii at Manoa Martha A. Martinez DePaul University Takaaki Masaki Postdoctoral Research Fellow, College of William and Mary
Oscar Molina Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain Jose G. Montalvo Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Cristina Jayme Montiel Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines Caitlin Moore Georgetown University Cornelia Mothes The Ohio State University Ronaldo Munck City University, Dublin, Ireland James Murphy University of the West of England, UK Daniel S. Nagin Carnegie Mellon University Amos Nascimento University of Washington Barbara Nevicka University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lilliana Hall Mason University of Maryland, College Park
Olivia Newman Rider University
Miriam Matthews RAND Corporation
Dennis Nigbur Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Angie Maxwell University of Arkansas
August H. Nimtz University of Minnesota
Daren Maynard University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Jacqueline Nolan-Haley Fordham University School of Law
Allen R. McConnell Miami University
Math Noortmann Coventry University, UK
Contributors xxv
Deborah L. Norden Whittier College
Andrew Pilecki Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel
Erin O’Brien University of Massachusetts, Boston
Robert D. Plotnick University of Washington
Thomas Christopher O’Brien University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Michael J. Pomante II Northern Illinois University
Alanna O’Malley Leiden University, The Netherlands
Joseph G. Ponterotto Fordham University–Lincoln Center
Edward Orehek University of Pittsburgh
Jeannette H. Porter University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hannah Osborn Ohio University
Jerrold M. Post Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
Danny Osborne University of Auckland, New Zealand Riku Österman Aalto University, Finland Victor Ottati Loyola University Chicago Patrick Overeem Leiden University, The Netherlands Richard L. Pacelle Jr. University of Tennessee, Knoxville Eleonora Pasotti University of California, Santa Cruz
Rodrigo Praino Flinders University, Australia Anthony R. Pratkanis University of California, Santa Cruz Janosch Prinz Queen’s University Belfast, UK Devon Proudfoot Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business John Quiggin University of Queensland, Australia
Jenny L. Paterson University of Sussex, UK
José Ramos Honorary Fellow, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, Australia
Janet V. T. Pauketat University of California, Santa Barbara
Amy E. Randel San Diego State University
T. V. Paul McGill University, Canada
Halim Rane Griffith University, Australia
Rebecca Pearse University of Sydney, Australia
Elizabeth Rata University of Auckland, New Zealand
Frederic S. Pearson Wayne State University
Christopher D. Raymond Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
Rasmus T. Pedersen University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Hilde Eliassen Restad Bjørknes University College, Norway
William V. Pelfrey Jr. Virginia Commonwealth University
Liana Eustacia Reyes-Reardon New York University
Stéphane Perreault Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada
Marta Reynal-Querol Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Michael A. Peters University of Waikato, New Zealand
Katherine J. Reynolds Australian National University, Canberra
Andrew Peterson Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Stephen M. Rich University of Southern California
Richard Petty Ohio State University
David Rigby University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
xxvi Contributors
Heidi Rimke University of Winnipeg, Canada
John S. Seiter Utah State University
Kimberly Rios Ohio University
Petros G. Sekeris Montpellier Business School, France
Steven C. Roach University of South Florida
Maor Shani Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
David L. Roberts University of Texas Health Science Center
Steven Shepherd Oklahoma State University
Steven Othello Roberts University of Michigan
Jae Hyeok Shin Korea University, South Korea
Nicholas W. Robinson Temple University
Chris G. Sibley University of Auckland, New Zealand
Martin Rosema University of Twente, The Netherlands
Daniel Silander Linnaeus University, Sweden
Ewa Roszkowska University of Bialystok, Poland
Joanne Silvester Cass Business School, City University London, UK
Leonard I. Rotman Dalhousie University, Canada Andrew Rowcroft University of Lincoln, UK Desiree Ryan Humboldt State University David L. Sam University of Bergen, Norway Gabriel R. Sanchez University of New Mexico Omar Sanchez-Sibony Texas State University Kyla Sankey Queen Mary University of London, UK Mehwish Sarwari Buffalo State University
Alberto Simpser ITAM, Mexico Manoj Kumar Sinha Indian Law Institute, New Delhi, India Ronald Skeldon University of Sussex, UK Heather J. Smith Sonoma State University William Smith The Chinese University of Hong Kong Frederick Solt University of Iowa Nicholas Sosa Ohio University
Ryan Schacht University of Utah
Brian G. Southwell University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Richard K. Scher Professor Emeritus, University of Florida
Ramón Spaaij Victoria University, Australia
Elizabeth Schmitt University of Arizona
Seth M. Spain Binghamton University
Stephen P. Schneider University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Mary Stegmaier University of Missouri
Lee Schrader United Nations University/Waseda University, Japan
Daniel Stockemer University of Ottawa, Canada
Scot Schraufnagel Northern Illinois University
Peter Strelan University of Adelaide, Australia
Contributors xxvii
Elizabeth Suhay American University
Agnieszka Tymula University of Sydney, Australia
Sara A. Sutherland University of California, Santa Barbara
Dinoj K. Upadhyay Indian Council of World Affairs, India
Paulina Tambakaki University of Westminster, UK
Brian R. Urlacher University of North Dakota
Kegon Tan University of Wisconsin, Madison
Eric M. Uslaner University of Maryland
Raymond Tatalovich Loyola University Chicago
Bethany Van Brunt National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, Berwyn, PA
Donald M. Taylor McGill University, Canada Laura Taylor Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Brian Van Brunt National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, Berwyn, PA
Simon Teune Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Dirk Van de Gaer Ghent University, Belgium
Kevin Theakston University of Leeds, UK
Maartje van der Woude Leiden Law School, The Netherlands
Tobias Theiler University College Dublin, Ireland
Joop J. M. Van Holsteyn Leiden University, The Netherlands
Leslie Paul Thiele University of Florida
Jacquelien van Stekelenburg Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands
Naomi Thompson Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Martijn van Zomeren University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Clint Thomson University of Western Ontario, Canada
Richard Vernon University of Western Ontario, Canada
Michele E. Tolson University of Massachusetts, Boston
Barbara Vis Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Robert Tomes St. Augustine Hall
Sebastian von Einsiedel United Nations University, Japan
Mariano Torcal Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Jeppe von Platz Suffolk University
Judith Torney-Purta University of Maryland
Konstantin M. Wacker University of Mainz, Germany
Aris Trantidis George Mason University
Michael Wahman University of Missouri, Columbia
Linda R. Tropp University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Alan Walks University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada
Marlene E. Turner San Jose State University
Peter Wallensteen Uppsala University/University of Notre Dame
Rhiannon N. Turner Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Kevin Wallsten University of California, Berkeley
Jim Twombly Elmira College
Ching-Hsing Wang Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston
xxviii Contributors
Bernard Weiner University of California, Los Angeles
Ernest J. Yanarella University of Kentucky
Aaron C. Weinschenk University of Wisconsin, Green Bay
Heather E. Yates University of Central Arkansas
Harper Weissburg Georgetown University
Sara K. Yeo University of Utah
Gary D. Wekkin University of Central Arkansas
Gozde Yilmaz Uppsala University, Sweden
John J. Welch University of Cambridge, UK
Omar Yousaf University of Bath, UK
Gordon Welty Mercy College
Chi-Wa Yuen University of Hong Kong
Dennis Lu-Chung Weng State University of New York at Cortland
Marie-Joëlle Zahar Université de Montréal, Canada
Anne Wetzel University of Mannheim, Germany
Oleg Zaznaev Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Russia
Chase Wilson Loyola University Chicago
Yahong Zhang Rutgers University, Newark
Luke B. Wood Indiana University
Cristina Zogmaister University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy
Joshua D. Wright University of Western Ontario, Canada
Corri Zoli Syracuse University
Introduction “Your article has to be written in a clear, jargon-free style so that students and the general public will find it interesting, instructive, and easy to understand but, at the same time, insightful and novel enough so that experts will also find it useful as a resource.” This is the challenging guideline followed by the authors who have contributed to this encyclopedia. I am happy to say that we succeeded in this ambitious goal. It is essential that The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior be accessible to a wide audience, because it is part of a broader effort to improve political and civic education and engagement. We can agree that this is a very worthwhile goal, irrespective of our political allegiances. This encyclopedia plays an important part in spreading knowledge about how people behave in the political domain. I strongly believe in the dictum that knowledge is power and that by spreading knowledge more broadly we are also spreading power more evenly, giving the general public greater opportunities to participate in political processes and influence the most important political decisions. Of course, this increased participation is essential to move us toward societies that are more open and in which political power is more evenly distributed among the population. Spreading knowledge about political processes and political behavior runs counter to the current trend of increasing the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This is a global trend, which has accelerated in recent decades. We learn from the 2016 Oxfam Davos Report that the 62 richest people in the world now own as much wealth as half of the world’s population. Since 2010, the wealth of the 62 richest people has increased by 1.76 trillion U.S. dollars, while the wealth of the poorest half of the world has declined by about 1 trillion U.S. dollars. This trend of increasing wealth inequality can be changed and even reversed through better knowledge dissemination, giving greater power and political influence to ordinary people. Our globalized world should not and does not have to be stuck in the age of robber barons. Better education, of which this encyclopedia is a part, must concern itself with improving the understandings of citizens about political behavior. In this context,
political behavior is interpreted very broadly to mean any and all behavior that influences the distribution of resources in society. Such resources include knowledge, information, and skills, as well as wealth and income. Very importantly, “resources” include understandings, such as the understanding of how important it is to engage in the political process. At present, barely 50% of the eligible population vote in even the most important elections in the United States, and those who vote tend to be richer, whiter, and older. Even in most relatively “advanced” democracies, the majority of the population remains disengaged and lacks understanding of, and influence in, key decision-making processes. This lack of engagement by vast numbers of people, mostly minorities, weakens democracy. Will the major democracies survive in the long term? Will dictatorships expand and overtake the more open societies, perhaps by the end of the twenty-first century? The most important rising economic and military power in the world is China, a dictatorship that shows no signs of becoming more politically open. Under the dictatorial leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russian militarism has become resurgent. Iran, North Korea, and various other smaller dictatorships are becoming more confident and active, attempting to influence events outside their borders. A number of countries that until recently seemed to be becoming more open, such as Venezuela, Poland, and Turkey, are becoming less open and even sliding back into dictatorship. The European Union is deeply troubled by ethnic, cultural, and other group-based divisions, giving new opportunities for the growth of extremist, antidemocratic movements. The “democratic experiment” is under pressure from dictatorial states and movements throughout the world. We have gotten used to living with the lazy assumption that democracy will win out against dictatorship, that the societies of tomorrow will be freer and more open than ever before. History teaches us the folly of resting on this assumption. From the democratic movements of Athens 2,500 years ago and of Rome 2,000 years ago to those in evidence during recent revolutions (Iran 1979; Egypt and other Arab Spring countries from 2010), it is clear that forward movement toward
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democracy is not guaranteed. Societies do not inevitably change in only one direction; they can and often do change back toward dictatorship. I returned to Iran (my country of birth) with the revolution in 1979 to taste freedom on Tehran streets when the momentum toward democracy seemed unstoppable. The seemingly invincible dictatorship of the Shah, supported by vast oil resources and an expansive security apparatus, had been toppled. The road to freedom and democracy seemed wide open. But only a year after the dictatorship of the Shah crashed to the ground and he fled the country, we were back under another dictatorship. This time it was absolute rule by the mullahs, with their state-sponsored religious terror. Democracy has extremely powerful enemies in the 21st century, and some of them are new. The populist antidemocratic movements of the 20th century, using fascism, communism, and other “isms” as (often misleading) ideologies, have been replaced. The major authoritarian states that formerly used communism as a justification, such as China and Russia, now rely on a complex mixture of ideological justifications, including nationalism and manipulated forms of capitalism. For example, China is supposedly a communist state, but it now has more billionaires than does the United States. The most prominent common characteristic of China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and other such countries is not adherence to communist ideology but to authoritarianism and enmity toward openness. These are all dictatorships, heavily invested to prevent movement toward democracy—in some cases, despite the facade of putting on “elections.” The most prominent new enemy of democracy comes under the guise of Islam. One shape of this antidemocracy front is dictatorial regimes, such as those that rule in Iran and Saudi Arabia. These regimes use Islam to justify repression, violations of human rights, and lack of basic freedom and justice. They are particularly harsh on women and on religious and ethnic minorities, persecuting them and depriving them of even the most basic human rights. What these regimes have in common with non-Islamic dictatorships is a high level of corruption: Because ordinary people do not have the right to protest inefficiency and waste, the level of corruption in all dictatorships rises higher and higher. Paying bribes and buying favors is part of everyday life in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other dictatorships that use Islam as a front. But there is a second, more insidious global antidemocratic front that comes with an Islamic face. This is the consequence of Islamic terrorism. As the threat of Islamic terrorism has spread across the globe, governments have used the excuse of a “need for security” to restrict freedoms, increase surveillance, and generally
attain tighter control of information flow. In the name of “defending freedom,” governments have limited freedoms and restricted openness—including in democratic societies such as the United States. This has become clear from the information leaks made by Edward Snowden and others. It is highly ironic, and very unfortunate, that an open society must rely on computer hackers for its defense. Without Snowden, we would remain blind to the extent of government surveillance, some of it probably illegal and certainly against the spirit of democracy. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior, then, serves an important role as part of a larger effort to strengthen civic and political education in the effort to support movement toward democracy and openness.
Organization of the Encyclopedia This encyclopedia is composed of nearly 700,000 words, which make up 365 alphabetically arranged entries ranging in length from 1,000 to 3,000 words. Each entry is developed and written to be self-contained, but is linked to particular other entries through a “See also” list. The fact that every entry has a “See also” list means that the reader could begin with an entry and continue reading other associated entries using these cross-references. In this way, readers actively develop new networks of ideas and discussions by creatively reading across connected entries. This is the first way in which readers can further explore the topic of an entry; in this case, the emphasis being on achieving more breadth by exploring the interconnections across topics. The second way in which readers can further explore the topic of an entry is by following up on the list given under the heading “Further Readings” at the end of each entry. Each list of readings is designed to include a small set of core works. In this case, the emphasis is placed on achieving greater depth in discussion of a topic. The selection of topics has been made to include, first, the most important “classic” topics on political behavior and, second, the most important cutting-edge topics in political behavior, the ones that reflect surging new interest. For example, topics such as Dictatorship and Feminism are well established and have become classics, whereas we are witnessing a surge of new interest in topics such as the International Criminal Court and “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action. Through very careful diligence and assessment, we have achieved a successful balance between classic and cutting-edge topics, as well as between topics that are more important in research and those more important in practice.
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Readers will also find that we have purposely crossed disciplinary boundaries, moving through political science, psychology, sociology, communications studies, and other major fields to achieve the goal of providing solid and innovative coverage of political behavior. Clearly political behavior in everyday life does not stop at the boundary of any academic discipline, and we should not adhere to such boundaries in this kind of project. Reflecting this broad, inclusive perspective, our authors come from many different educational and professional backgrounds. The geographical distribution of authors is also wide. What authors have in common is a very high level of expertise and professionalism and a strong motivation to communicate their ideas and knowledge to a wide audience. In selecting the topics for this encyclopedia, using expert advice and classic and current literature, the following broad categories served as a general guide: Cognitive Processes Group Identities and Influence Individual Political Behavior International/Comparative Perspectives Justice and Political Behavior Media, Discourse, and Communications Policies and Political Behavior Political Systems Security and Terrorism Social Political Movements Theories of Political Behavior Voting Behavior and Political Campaigns
This encyclopedia provides a balanced coverage of topics in all of these major areas. To achieve further breadth on a topic, readers can follow the “See also” lists provided at the end of each entry; and for further depth, the readings listed at the end of each entry.
Acknowledgments The completion of this large multidisciplinary encyclopedia, with 365 entries and almost 400 contributors scattered across the world, was only possible through the enthusiastic support and hearty cooperation of a great number of people. I am very grateful to the Editorial Board and the authors for their contributions. All of their names appear in the encyclopedia. The names that are less visible are those of the diligent and creative individuals who worked in the background to bring this encyclopedia to life. Maureen Adams played a key role in initiating the project with SAGE; I owe a great deal to Diana Axelsen and Sanford Robinson for skillfully guiding the project to completion. I am also indebted to Sue Moskowitz for her highly efficient work and timely interventions. Diana, Sanford, and Sue are the magical hidden hands that make such highly complex projects run smoothly. I also want to thank Nancy Swartz, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, for helping create a departmental atmosphere in which this large and complex project could be successfully completed. Finally, I am as always deeply indebted to Maryam, my wife, for her indefatigable support of my academic projects. Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University
A of scripture. For Lutherans as well as other Protestants who were skeptical of Calvinist theology, the doctrine of predestination and the above concomitant eschatological doctrine were considered absolutistic primarily because they denied free will; and thus, they didn’t provide good reasons for why humans are responsible for their actions. For if God has knowledge of what we will do and our actions could not be otherwise, then how could we be held accountable for our actions? How could we have free will? If we don’t have free will yet we are held eternally responsible for our sins, how can we say that God is just? Beyond the doctrine of predestination, theological absolutism in both Western and non-Western traditions (especially within monotheistic religions) will sometimes refer to any rigid, absolutistic belief, system of beliefs, doctrine, and/or practice, that asserts a divine or ultimate reality to be in control of the collective will and fate of humankind in a way that could not be otherwise.
Absolutism Absolutism refers to the act of believing that certain principles, values, claims, and doctrines are universally valid independent of their relation to different contexts of, and variations within, experience. Although it is occasionally viewed in a positive light (especially by those who hold these beliefs), absolutism is generally a pejorative term signifying the existence of a rigid permanence and order within and among things and their relations, the natural world, and/or social political systems. Though absolutism is manifested within a variety of social dynamics and experiential circumstances, historically it has been recognized within four interrelated traditions of thought: theology, politics, philosophy, and morality.
Theological Absolutism Derived from the Latin absoluˉtus (meaning complete, unconditional, and perfect), theological absolutism—as with all other types of absolutism—could be applied to earlier times in human history. But in the modern era, it arose during the 18th century as a pejorative term for the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Though there are many articulations of it, this doctrine centrally holds that whatever comes to pass is in accord with God’s foreknowledge and will. Based on interpretations of the Christian Bible and the concept of original sin, this theological belief gave rise to and supported the eschatological doctrine that both the salvation and damnation of individual souls have already been determined (even before time began). It wasn’t the Calvinists, of course, who held their doctrine to be absolutistic; rather, it was centrally Lutherans who leveled this charge of absolutism against Calvinists’ interpretations
Political Absolutism Political absolutism refers to those political doctrines, ideals, and practices of a government that are believed to be authoritarian, tyrannous, and/or despotic. Political absolutism as a pejorative term likewise arose during the modern era, and although what constituted such absolutism is debated, it generally, and without too much controversy, refers to the rule of absolute monarchs throughout Europe during the Age of Absolutism (c. 1550–c. 1789). The ruling power and practices of these monarchs were legitimized by a central theological and absolutistic belief called the “divine right of kings.” The divine right of kings is simultaneously a theological and political doctrine claiming that a monarch’s right to rule is derived from and justified by the will and mandate of God. In John Locke’s Two 1
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Absolutism
Treatises of Government, we find the most convincing and influential argument against this combination of theological and political absolutism. In these treatises, Locke’s critique of Patriarcha (a work by Robert Filmer that defended the idea of the divine right of kings), his arguments for representative governments, the consent of the governed, and the right of revolution contributed to a historical dissatisfaction with absolutistic monarchical rule and served as an impetus toward the establishment of Western democratic governments. Thomas Hobbes’s social-political vision in Leviathan, some argue, while also contributing to the historical turn away from theological-political absolutism, was, at the same time, a secular justification of a monarch’s absolute power. Hobbes’s political philosophy, with its primary idea that bestowing absolute power upon one individual (or an assembly of individuals) will contribute to the goal of establishing a functional and peaceful society, is absolutistic in that under Hobbes’s vision the legitimacy, sovereignty, and power of a ruler or rulers cannot be challenged. Though political absolutism is most commonly a reference to both theological and secular monarchies, the term may also be applied to any political doctrine, ideal, or practice within a socialpolitical system that is considered to be true beyond question, irrefutably necessary, and/or not subject to change.
Philosophical Absolutism Absolutism in philosophy is widely accepted as being synonymous with monism. And while there are many different types of monism, all doctrines of monism attrib ute oneness to reality or some dimension of it and favor singleness over plurality. One type of monism, called substance monism, posits that among the multiplicity of things, there is one single substance that underlies all of them. In Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, examples of this one single substance include the Tao (Taoism) and Brahman (Hinduism), while in ancient Greek philosophy this substance was conceived as being a variety of things, for example Water (Thales), Air (Anaximenes), Number (Pythagoras), Fire (Heraclitus), and so on. A modern example of substance monism is exemplified in Baruch Spinoza’s belief that only one infinite substance exists, God or Nature, and this substance has all possible attributes. Another monistic doctrine, priority monism, puts forth the view that the whole is prior to its parts and that the parts are fragments dependent upon the unity and oneness of the whole. Neoplatonism exemplifies this doctrine, namely with the claim that things overflow from the “One” and all things are in some way dependent upon the One. In contemporary philosophy, there are many other
efinitions and types of monism, such as idealism (all is d mind), materialism (all is matter), and neutral monism (all is neutral, neither mind nor matter). With the exception of neutral monism, which is fundamentally pluralistic, the absolutistic dimension of monist doctrines is noted by a common methodological approach that involves a movement from the whole to the parts; that is, a top-down approach that starts with the idea of a whole and builds downward. All such monistic, absolutist projects (e.g., G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) are totalizing projects wherein the varieties, relations, and differences among the parts are excluded from the ultimate character of the whole. In direct opposition to the methods of absolutism, pluralistic methods call for a bottom-up approach in order to grasp the contextualized relations of a variety of experiences and historical circumstances.
Moral Absolutism Moral absolutism is the belief or system of beliefs that hold certain standards, principles, and actions to be intrinsically right or wrong. Absolutism in this form has been historically noted throughout the history of different religious beliefs usually in the form of commandments of some type of divine moral revelation written down in a text. Moral absolutism in many religious traditions, then, involves directives, not simply beliefs. Beyond these religious manifestations of absolutism, moral absolutism is sometimes supported and sustained by philosophical frameworks in which moral standards, principles, and actions are thought to be valid or good independent of their relation to different contexts of, and variations within, experience. In antiquity, we find the most glaring example of moral absolutism in Plato’s theory of the Forms, specifically in what Plato called “The Form of the Supreme Good.” But in the modern era, it is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, or deontology, which is most commonly interpreted to be an absolutistic moral theory. Derived from the Greek deon meaning duty or obligation, deontology is a form of moral philosophy that holds that the morality of an action can only be determined by its relation and adherence to moral laws or rules. For Kant, there is one thing and one thing alone that is good: a good will. One’s will (or one’s moral intent) is considered good not by the consequences it produces through action but by its adherence to the maxims (principles of action) that are both rational and universally valid. Our actions are moral, then, according to Kant, whenever they are in accord with the categorical imperative rather than hypothetical imperatives. Hypothetical imperatives tell us how to act in order to achieve a specific goal, for example, “Do ‘X’ to achieve ‘Y,” or “Work hard to
Activism
become successful.” These types of imperatives, in which our actions are instrumental, are not grounded in the moral law, and thus for Kant, they do not help us to determine what makes a will good. The only way to determine the goodness of our wills is by noting how our actions follow or do not follow the categorical imperative. Kant formulates this imperative in different ways, each of which describes the duty we have to the well-being of others and to the moral law within. For example: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law, or Never act in such a way that you treat Humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. The reason why these imperatives (and deontology in general) are considered to be absolutistic is that for Kant, moral goodness can only be determined in this way, namely one must follow the directives and principles of the categorical imperative in order to act morally. The consequences of our actions do not matter; only principles do. Despite such a claim, evidence within contemporary moral social psychology suggests that this belief in the power of our principles to affect our actions is somewhat illusory.
Absolutism, Relativism, and Contextualism Absolutism is often contrasted with relativism, in which the former signifies belief in unalterable truths or timeless realities, while the latter holds truth to be relative and reality to be ultimately perspectival. This distinction is as simplistic as it is problematic, for there are many different types of absolutism, and what people mean by “relativism” isn’t uniformly the same. Moreover, relativism itself is often absolutistic. We might clarify this last point by distinguishing between what might be called absolutistic relativism and relationalism. Absolutistic relativism is a perspective that “anything goes,” that one’s perspective on any particular issue is just as good or valid as any others, and since there is no way to judge objectively the truth or value of anything, my vision of the good life is just as valid as another’s, and yours is just as good or valid as mine. This is a very common narrative of relativism, but in truth people only believe this narrative superficially. That is to say, once one is asked a series of contextually specific questions about the truth or validity of certain standards, principles, and actions, stalwart belief in this type of relativism begins to falter. Relationalism is a type of relativism, which we might call a pluralistic relativism, in which multiple experienced relations between things provide the foundations for different dimensions of contextualized truths. Accordingly, reality is never, nor ever to be, wholly complete, and since our lives are always in
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process, all things are works in progress. All forms of absolutism, therefore, are not only distortions of reality but also conceptually incoherent. Mark Fagiano See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Corruption; Dictatorship; Fascism; Rent-Seeking Behavior; Torture
Further Readings Batson, D. (2016). What’s wrong with morality: A socialpsychological perspective. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Beik, W. (1989). Absolutism and society in seventeenth-century France. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Filmer, R. (1680/1991). Patriarcha and other writings (J. P. Sommerville, Ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Guthrie, W. K. C. (1950). The Greek philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle. London, England: Methuen. Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/1977). The phenomenology of spirit. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. (1651/2008). Leviathan (J. C. A. Gaskin, Ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. James, W. (1909/1996). A pluralistic universe: Hibbert lectures at Manchester College on the present situation of philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. James, W. (1912/1996). Essays in radical empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Johnson, R. (2004/2016). Kant’s moral philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#Cat HypImp Kant, I. (1785/1981). Grounding for the metaphysics of morals: On a supposed right to lie because of philanthropic concerns [J. W. Ellington, Trans.]. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Locke, J. (1680–1690/1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Activism Activism refers to single or repeated actions taken by individuals and groups in order to promote a cause, which usually involves a social, political, or economic agenda. Activism takes place in both authoritarian and democratic states, but typically only the latter offer citizens legal means of nonviolent protest, including public meetings, demonstrations, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and more. Since the early 2000s, information technologies are becoming increasingly important for activism. In modern history, activism has been a major force
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Activism
behind fundamental social and political reforms, including the fall of dictatorships and national revolutions, the abolition of slavery, women’s emancipation, gay rights, and many other social and political changes. Nevertheless, activism has also been utilized to support violent causes, such as promoting wars and restricting minority rights. This entry reviews major themes in research on and practice of activism. It first reviews several definitions and typologies of activism, followed by an introduction to social psychology research on activists, their motivations, and their characteristics. The third section provides a general overview of activist groups, organizations, and social movements. Thereafter, a discussion of basic approaches of social and political activism is offered. The text concludes with remarks on the current state of activism and possible future developments.
Typologies of Activism What constitutes activism is in the eye of the beholder. The academic literature classifies types of activism by looking at the topical spectrum of activism domains, as well as at the extent and scope of the envisioned goals. One common distinction refers to the methods of activities, which can be understood in either a narrow or broad sense. A broad view of activism encompasses all forms of political behaviors, regardless of their context. From this viewpoint, one may even argue that the mere awareness of social problems and injustices is a form of activism. The narrow understanding of activism distinguishes between protest activism and conventional activism. Democratic participation in conventional politics is concerned with the role citizens play in e lections (e.g., voting) and parties (e.g., campaign work) with the aim of influencing the government’s composition. Protest activism, on the other hand, includes c ause-oriented actions such as mass demonstrations, petitions, boycotts, and even political violence. This article focuses on the latter understanding of activism. However, the extent to which the distinction between conventional and protest activism remains appropriate in the 21st century is a matter of scholarly debate. Both formal and informal political actors use a mixture of traditional and alternative modes of activism, and political parties increasingly make use of protest activism methods for recruitment and advocacy. Although activism is often identified with progressive and liberal causes such as promoting equal rights and freedom, activists may also choose to act for the preservation of existing social conventions, to protect the government or powerful individuals and institutions, and even to limit the rights of others. Nevertheless, most activists in Western democracies push for
liberal reforms in laws and policies. Whether a particular activist’s goal is seen as—normatively—positive or negative depends on social and cultural values and situation specifics. Activism goals can be particular or abstract. Activists can push not only for reforms in actual policies but also to encourage a fundamental change in the political system and social institutions. Many global social movements are oriented toward broad, ambitious, and sustained goals, such as achieving reconciliation after conflict or global nuclear disarmament. Another continuum to characterize activism is the one ranging from local to global. Activists may fight to preserve an ancient structure in one specific town, or they may campaign for broader issues of national or global importance, such as women’s rights or the environment. Global campaigns spread across a wide array of advocacy circles, creating powerful coalitions of groups and networks. Local goals, however, can even be focused around a particular person, such as activists fighting against wrongful convictions. They can also focus on change in the immediate vicinity of activists’ residence areas. Such activism is sometimes apostrophized pejoratively as NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) activism. Activism can also be characterized by its target. While most activists’ strategies aim to influence laws and policies, they may also be directed toward non-state actors in the public and private sectors. For example, activists have targeted food corporations such as McDonald’s with demands in the domain of labor and animal rights. Some activists also aim at changing the public’s behavior and not that of any political institution. Finally, while certain social movements are temporary and push for an immediate governmental reaction, some movements are oriented toward long-term goals. The former type of movement is often triggered by particular circumstances, situations, or events, and they tend to dissolve once the goal has been achieved or become irrelevant. The latter type, however, may continue to be active for a longer time. For example, within the peace movement, some activist groups have been focused on preventing or ending specific wars, while others have been promoting the idea of world peace. In many cases, the goals of activists are related to prevalent cultural values and ideologies in their respective societies. In the West, core issues have shifted from survival concerns to self-expression-related topics such as globalization, equality, and the politics of sexual or ethnic identities, and this change is reflected in the causes promoted by activists and social movements in the 21st century. In developing societies, however, grassroots activism is still mainly concerned with basic livelihood means such as food, health, and education, and with basic freedoms and the reduction of inequalities.
Activism
Activists and Their Characteristics Who is an activist? Similar to the action itself, the definition here may also vary between broad and narrow. Some people become activists for a short period of time, or occasionally engage in activism throughout their lives, while others make activism their life’s work. Some activists begin with small actions like passively attending meetings and demonstrations, and gradually become more involved in a movement. Evidently, everyone can perform acts of activism with or without being perceived by themselves or others as activists. Some activists are also scholars (conversely some scholars are also activists), who often conduct research on topics related to their activist causes. Universities constitute one of the most important places where activism takes place, and it is rather common for students to be involved in activism campaigns during their studies. Youth activism is also prevalent in certain societies. Youth are often passionate about their ideas and are motivated to transform their communities and even the world. Generational replacement theory explains youth activism as filling generational gaps, leading to the formation of new political groups among youth and young adults. Some scholars see youth involvement in activism and volunteering as an important step in their sociopolitical development. In many societies, there are mechanisms for youth to be involved in social and political activism, such as school clubs, youth movements, and volunteering organizations. Activism is commonly performed at the grassroots level, by individuals and groups who are interested in challenging governmental policies and actions that cause them or others harm. Citizens engage in various forms of political activities for various reasons. Level of education, income, occupational status, and demographic factors (gender, age, or ethnicity) as well as motivationally engaging factors (culture-specific attitudes and internal and external efficacy) impact the degree of activism. People who feel well informed and do care about a cause, while believing that they or their movement can make a difference, are more likely to become activists. Research has also shown that people with ideological consistency, whether liberal or conservative, who also hold strong negative views of political adversaries, are more likely to become politically engaged and active. Social identity theory explains collective action by emphasizing the role of identification of activists with their political and ideological groups, who motivate them to commit to their norms and goals. Accordingly, studies on peace activists have found that their motivation was linked to personal networks with other activists. The desire to avert threat of social or political change was also found to be a powerful motivator for activism.
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Research has supplemented the sociopsychological framework with contextual factors. For example, political and civic institutions, such as political parties and voluntary associations, also play a role in mobilizing individuals to act. The mass media, including newspapers, television, and the Internet, also promote awareness of social problems, and thereby raise political involvement. In particular, studies on social mobilization in the 21st century have found that the use of Internet and social media is linked to greater involvement in social movements. For many activists, activism is a vocation, and it often involves adopting a particular lifestyle. Studies show that activists are psychologically rewarded by their involvement in activism. They develop interpersonal contact and strong ties with peers, enjoy mutual support, and gain a sense of belonging. Studies also revealed long-term psychosocial consequences of activism, particularly among youth. A study on young activists in the 1980s German peace movement found that activists report having better mental health and wellbeing than nonactivists with similar levels of concern about war 25 years later.
Activist Groups and Social Movements Although activists can operate individually, activism almost always requires an organizational structure, to a varying degree of formality and centralization. Working in groups is necessary for both organizational and social reasons: groups enable activists to perform activism tasks more efficiently, to use specialists and professionals, and to organize events of large magnitude, such as mass demonstrations and nationwide campaigns. Moreover, activist groups provide their members mutual support, solidarity, and encouragement. In many cases, activists in groups develop strong and emotional ties and loyalty to other group members, which increase their motivation for sustained action and contribute to their sense of efficacy. Some activist groups oppose hierarchy and leadership from an ideological stance and embrace egalitarian practices such as role sharing and methods of consensus decision making. Activist groups are usually nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations. However, mostly in authoritarian states, government-organized nongovernmental organizations (so-called GONGOS) also exist. Activist groups consist of both volunteers and paid staff and dedicate much attention to fund-raising, lobbying, and other behind-the-scenes activities, as well as recruiting new activists and training them. Activists usually go through stages of training as they become increasingly involved in their organization. Although education and training of activists is done mostly in an informal manner in the
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Activism
field, some activists and groups disseminate manuals with information about the cause, inspiring messages, and practical guidelines for activism (see, e.g., Shaw’s 1991 The Activist’s Handbook). When a coalition of groups and individuals join forces to promote a common goal, they become a part of a social movement, which is a framework for activists to promote a common cause, push for social change, and engage in collective action. Some scholars see in social movements the culmination of democracy and the main social institution within which influential and effective citizen activism can take place. Similarly to organizations, movements include mobilizing features that enable activists to organize actions, and social features such as networks and support mechanisms. In social movements, activists face challenges together, show internal solidarity, and engage in sustained interaction. Nevertheless, movements’ structure is more informal and nonhierarchical, with fluid boundaries. It is seldom required that all organizations in the movement coordinate their activities, but the movement provides a framework for communication between activists and groups, and enables them to learn from each other and plan common strategies. Activists from different organizations included in a movement may still act independently. Research on social movements has focused on their structure, as well as on the process through which they are formed and developed, the methods they use to mobilize, and their demise. One of the challenges of social movements is first to gain momentum and attract activists, and later, to preserve the initial enthusiasm. Eventually, most social movements collapse or become institutionalized, for example, by becoming a part of the formal political system through elected parties. When a movement fades out, the cause may be kept alive by a small number of dedicated activists, but their impact is likely to be marginal. Activism is increasingly utilized by global, international, and transnational organizations and movements. The rise of global activism is rooted in the emergence of broad online social communities, and in the transformation of social structures and identities in the postindustrial era, in which personal narratives replace ethnic and national ones. Global social movements are concerned with issues such as trade policies, social justice, and the environment. They not only include networks of a ctivists from different parts of the world but also frequently engage with non-state and transnational targets such as corporations and international monetary institutions. The environmental movement is one of the most influential global movements, which has managed to remain highly active for decades while constantly adapting their specific causes based on developments in
relevant fields. The movement consists of a diverse coalition of activist groups and professional organizations, covering the entire political spectrum. The e nvironmental movement demonstrated a successful institutionalization of a social movement, as is evident by the popularity of “green” parties in the Western world, and by expanding governmental attention to environmental issues.
Approaches to Activism Cause-oriented activists have a large, diverse, and everincreasing repertoire of tools to express themselves politically and bring forward their demands. The variety of methods activists use can be divided into traditional approaches that have been practiced by activists and social movements in the real world and new, Internet-based activities that have become prominent in the 21st century. Here we cover only traditional activism approaches; for Internet-based forms of activism, the reader is referred to the entry on cyberactivism in this encyclopedia. Traditionally, activism takes place in the form of direct and nonviolent public protests. The most common approaches to public protest include demonstrations, marches, and rallies. Organized mass demonstrations surged in established democracies during the 1950s, for example by the U.S. civil rights movement and by antiwar campaigns in Europe, and occasionally even became trendy in social movements concerned with peace and war, women’s rights, and the environment throughout the second half of the 20th century. Whereas demonstrations were considered a radical political activity until the 1970s, they have since become widespread and an integral part of mainstream political life. Other popular activism approaches are signing petitions, organizing conferences, lobbying, making public speeches, and writing letters to the media. Activists’ collective actions also include civil disobedience (i.e., refusal to obey laws that are considered unfair), strikes, sit-ins, and occupying economic and political institutions. Economic activism is mainly practiced through boycotting specific shops, companies, and even countries that do not conform to the activists’ values or demands. An example of a successful civil boycott c ampaign is the worldwide boycott of South Africa’s apartheid regime from the early 1970s until its abolition in 1994. Recently, buycotting—intentionally buying certain products that are deemed to aid a particular political goal—has become an approach in economic activism. An example for the buycotting strategy is the global support for the purchase of fair-trade products.
Activism
Innovations in approaches to nonviolent activism are continually introduced. Activism is also practiced using art such as literature and music, sporting events, and public performances such as so-called flash mobs. Activists sometimes go beyond mere protesting and engage in community building and enhancement, such as organizing community projects to improve accessibility and environmental health. Activism can also be conducted using destructive and even violent methods, from blocking roads, to violent demonstrations and vandalism, to assassinations and even terrorism. In some cases, nonviolent methods include violent elements, such as demonstrations that are accompanied by damage and arson, whether as a result of a deliberate strategy or on the spur of the moment. The decision on approaches to activism by social movements is influenced by many factors. In general, the more activists believe that their cause is perceived as legitimate by the public, and that they can convince policy-makers to change their policies, the less likely they are to adopt disruptive and violent tactics. If, however, the government delegitimizes the campaign and shows little willingness to change, activists might turn to less conventional modes of protest. In the present century, advances in technology and communication have led to new and efficient modes of digital and online activism, sometimes called cyberactivism; for details, see the separate entry under that title.
Current and Future Trends in Activism Scholars and public figures are divided as to whether a high level of conventional and cause-based political participation is necessary for democracy to function well. While some scholars suggest that even limited and minimal civic engagement is sufficient to achieve an accountable system, others advocate for more extensive public involvement in political activism. Nevertheless, both camps agree that activism makes governments more accountable and more attentive to citizens’ will. Is activism in decline? During the 1990s and the 2000s, studies have systematically documented the decline in political participation, volunteerism, and membership in traditional agencies such as trade unions and cooperative associations in many democracies. However, people’s willingness to attend lawful protest activism events has consistently increased since the mid1970s. Moreover, while some argue that activism has seen periods of outbreaks and declines, cross-national survey data indicate that there is a linear increase in popular protest acts, such as demonstrations and petition signing, in both established and emerging democracies.
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Although it is not safe to predict that activism will increase and become more effective in the future, we can be sure that as long as social problems exist, individuals, groups, and movements will continue to promote their causes. The repertoire of activism methods is also likely to continue to expand and to diversify in the future, in parallel to innovations in technology. New and more accessible methods of cyberactivism are likely to continue engaging more and more people all over the world, possibly increasing activism in nondemocratic countries, where activists face major challenges and threats. The declining autonomy of states and processes of privatization and transnationality may suggest that the target of activism will continue to expand from state actors to intergovernmental organizations and private corporations. Activists may find it more and more difficult to make real changes when aiming only at the official state-level systems. Research still needs to pay greater attention to new elements and forms of activism, to global and transnational social movements, and to emerging activism in authoritarian states, as well as engage more in systematic and comparative examination of activism between social groups, over time, and across cultures. Klaus Boehnke and Maor Shani See also Citizenship; Collective Action; Obedience; Resource Mobilization
Further Readings Boehnke, K., & Wong, B. (2011). Adolescent political activism and long-term happiness: A 21-year longitudinal study on the development of micro- and macrosocial worries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(3), 435–447. Fischer, C., & Boehnke, K. (2004). “Obstruction Galore”: A case study of non-violent resistance against nuclear waste disposal in Germany. Environmental Politics, 13, 393–413. doi: 10.1080/0964401042000209630 Norris, P. (2007). Political activism: New challenges, new opportunities. In C. Boix and S. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative politics (pp. 628–651). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Olesen, T. (Ed.). (2010). Power and transnational activism. New York, NY: Routledge. Reitan, R. (2012). Global activism. New York, NY: Routledge. Shaw, R. (2001). The activist’s handbook: A primer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Valocchi, S. (2009). Social movements and activism in the USA. New York, NY: Routledge.
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Advocacy
Advocacy Advocacy in the legal sense is very much like advocacy in the ordinary sense of the word: supporting, recommending, or pleading on behalf of a person, organization, or position. Advocacy before government bodies includes diverse forms of petitioning commonly p rotected by constitutional or statutory provisions: representation in court, lobbying legislative bodies, and participation in administrative processes. Private individuals, firms, and interest groups—stakeholders—engage in advocacy directly and through professional advocates. This entry focuses on a type of advocacy conducted by government authorities themselves. Particularly in complex regulatory states, overlapping authority or legislative mandate can prompt interagency cooperation. Agencies can share information and work to avoid conflicts as they administer areas of mutual concern. Government advocacy occurs when agencies advocate for particular policies with other government bodies. This is akin to public lobbying, often for a clear and legally established public interest. Advocacy is a type of soft law, as government bodies use their expertise and authority to inform and persuade each other, often when neither has legal authority over the other. This entry begins by sketching two theories of regulation, the market failure theory, called normative analysis as a positive theory (NPT), and the economic theory of regulation (ETR). It then illustrates government advocacy, and advocacy’s role in regulation, by describing the competition advocacy program of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which seeks to promote competition and ameliorate competitive harm that other government actors might do. This is by no means the only government advocacy program—or even the only competition advocacy program; the Department of Justice also conducts competition advocacy in the United States, and competition authorities in other nations have analogous programs. Still, it is a longstanding, wide-ranging, and, often, apparently effective example of government advocacy.
Theories of Regulation NPT sees regulation as a response to market failure. For example, the notion of a natural monopoly might explain why an area has only one electric power company. A monopoly power company does not, on its own, need to offer low prices or reliable service to compete because it has no competitors. Regulation can seek to moderate these problems by, for example, setting prices: in theory, high enough to prompt adequate production but low enough to approximate competitive pricing.
Information asymmetries might explain regulation in areas such as health care. If a patient cannot obtain the same information about her condition and treatment as a doctor or hospital, then she will be at a disadvantage when she decides, with a provider’s advice, what health care services she needs or where she should obtain them. In response, expert regulators might set minimum standards for hospitals and practitioners, providing at least some assurance of a basic level of care. Regulators might also make information more accessible. ETR, developed by George Stigler, Sam Peltzman, and Gary Becker, begins with two basic observations. First, if NPT seems to fit well with some regulation, it seems to fit poorly with much else, either because a systematic market failure is not demonstrated or because a particular rule is not an effective or efficient response to a demonstrated problem. Second, lawmakers are themselves interested parties, subject to preferences—notably a preference for reelection—and economic constraints. ETR models a concern that a sort of political market failure will be common, as legislatures respond to stakeholders and, through agencies, assign different regulatory costs and benefits to different stakeholders. Coordination or collective action problems—organization costs and the risks of free riding—can dilute the influence of large numbers of private stakeholders, particularly when each stakeholder has many voting (and contributing) interests. Information costs can even make it difficult for small stakeholders to know what policies affect them and to what degree. But concentrated interests—such as those of a corporation, trade association, or union—might have fewer coordination problems and secure outsize benefits. Both NPT and ETR have applications and, as Peltzman and others recognize, limitations in explaining or predicting various areas of regulation or deregulation. Government advocacy has a role to play under either approach or in a mixed model of regulation.
Competition Advocacy The FTC, created in 1914, has law enforcement authority over competition and consumer protection matters in most sectors of the economy. The FTC Act, which establishes and authorizes the FTC, also gives the FTC a research, education, and policy mission. In particular, the FTC is to investigate and report on market developments in the public interest and make legislative recommendations based on its findings. Economic research and competition advocacy have been part of the FTC’s statutory mission since the agency’s creation, and the FTC has maintained a distinct program of competition advocacy since at least the early 1980s.
Affirmative Action
At the request of federal or state policy-makers, the FTC and its staff may advocate on the likely competitive effects of existing or contemplated regulations. Published reports, comments to legislatures, testimony, and amicus briefs have addressed competition concerns in areas such as health care, e-commerce, occupational regulation, transportation, and real estate. Such advocacies do not generally seek to replace existing policy priorities. Rather, the advocacies seek to convince policy-makers to consider competitive effects and consumer impact too, and to reference FTC economic and enforcement experience in doing so. In brief, the FTC pushes a research-based approach to asking and answering several questions: Do existing or proposed regulations address demonstrated consumer harms? Are regulations effective and efficient? Are regulations narrowly targeted to avoid unanticipated or undue competition problems—barriers to free market competition, unnecessary price increases, reduced access to goods and services, or diminished innovation? Are there less harmful alternatives? Competition advocacy can be expert agency input under NPT—testing for systematic and durable market failures and analyzing whether regulatory responses are effective and efficient. It can also work as a counterweight to special interest lobbying and rent-seeking behavior under ETR—helping identify inefficiencies and the relative winners and losers of regulatory r estrictions, and helping ameliorate harm to competition, as self-interested stakeholders seek advantages at the expense of competition and the larger population. Daniel J. Gilman Author’s Note: This article represents the views of the author alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner. See also Collective Action; Economics and Political Behavior; Free Market; Lobbying; Rent-Seeking Behavior
Further Readings Cooper, J. C., Pautler, P., & Zywicki, T. (2005). Theory and practice of competition advocacy at the FTC. George Mason Law Review, 72, 1991–1112. Ohlhausen, M. K. (2006). Identifying, challenging, and assigning political responsibility for state regulation restricting competition. Competition Policy International, 2, 151–166. Peltzman, S. (1976). Toward a more general theory of regulation. Journal of Law & Economics, 19, 211–240. Stigler, G. J. (1971). The theory of economic regulation. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2, 3–21.
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Affirmative Action Affirmative action refers to a broad range of policies and rules in which the ethnic, gender, or other group characteristics matter in the determination of education and labor market opportunities. Policies of this type are in effect in many countries, with historical context determining the targeted groups. For example, India has an extensive reservation system that allocates seats at educational institutions in a way that provides quotas for disadvantaged castes. Castes are social classes within Indian society transmitted across generations with strong restrictions on intermarriage. Another prominent example along racial lines is the privilege given to Bumiputera members (primarily Malay and other indigenous ethnicities) in Malaysia and Brunei, although in this case affirmative action is in favor of the majority ethnicity rather than minorities. A 2004 book by Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action, provides an international survey.
Background The term comes from an executive order issued during the Kennedy administration that “affirmative action” be taken by government contractors to ensure employment opportunities regardless of ethnic or religious class. Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1965, provided a famous justification for such policies: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
The key idea underlying this justification is that the consequences of past injustices should be addressed in setting rules for the allocation of opportunities and resources in a society. In particular, affirmative action policies constitute a set of interventions into the process of matching in education and in labor markets to facilitate equality between groups of individuals who have experienced either a history of racial discrimination or contemporary biases. For the United States, the history of affirmative action policies is comprehensively surveyed and placed in the context of general race-based policies by John David Skrentny, in his 1996 book The Ironies of Affirmative Action. The United States is also a uniquely informative case study due to the wealth of data and policy analysis that has been performed. This entry therefore centers on affirmative action and its costs and
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Affirmative Action
benefits in the United States, while acknowledging that many other societies also implement or are considering the implementation of affirmative action policies.
The Policies and the Courts Affirmative action policies have engendered enormous political opposition. Further, Supreme Court decisions have delimited the bases on which it can be i mplemented, particularly in higher education. Regents of California v. Bakke (1976) was seminal both in banning explicit racial quotas and in treating diversity as a “compelling state interest” in education. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) upheld the basic Bakke logic as have the decisions in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016). The preservation of affirmative action across different ideological compositions of the Supreme Court suggests that current policies are likely to survive future legal challenges. In contrast, it is easy to imagine that states, following California (1996), Michigan (2008), and Texas (1997) among others, might ban the policy via legislation, executive order, or referendum.
Studies and Critiques There is substantial evidence that affirmative action matters; that is, it materially affects the allocation of students across colleges and workers across firms. For higher education, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok conclude that for five private elite colleges, eliminating affirmative action would reduce the conditional probability of admission for an African American applicant from 42% to 13%. Other studies that include public universities draw similar conclusions. Mark Long (2004) finds that for top decile schools, elimination of affirmative action would reduce minority enrollment from 10.6% to 7.8%. While one cannot determine how many of these students would simply not have been admitted anywhere, these studies indicate that a large number of minority students are affected by affirmative action. The literature also uncovers similar results at the graduate level. Other evidence of the efficacy of the policies may be deduced from bans implemented against the policy. David Card and Alan B. Krueger examine this with respect to college admissions, exploring the elimination of affirmative action in California and Texas between 1996 and 1998. They found that Black and Hispanic admission rates fell at top state schools but did not change the SAT-score-sending behavior of highly qualified minority students. Other papers link variation in race-neutral admissions with college choice and find effects consistent with those of Card and Krueger.
Other work has explored the interplay of class-based versus race-based affirmative action. Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter present data from a larger number of states including Texas, California, Florida, and Michigan. They argue in favor of reducing the reliance on race by university admissions officers and emphasizing classbased affirmative action instead. They show that the removal of race-based affirmative action does not end affirmative action in general, although the distribution of its effects is changed. Recent research has focused on how affirmative action interacts with educational experiences and outcomes. Richard H. Sander received wide attention in arguing that affirmative action results in a “mismatch” between some students and law schools. The idea is that students with weaker academic backgrounds have difficulty completing more selective law schools, or succeeding in postgraduation employment, so that the policy reduces the number of Black lawyers. Sander’s work has been subject to substantial criticism, mounted using evidence based on the same data that Sander examines. Peter Arcidiacono and Mike Lovenheim survey evidence on mismatch throughout higher education. For the case of law schools, Black students who are reasonably competitive can reap the positive effects of elite law institutions, but those who are less competitive do not. Enrollment effects of affirmative action are also much larger at selective schools, although they caution that these may be overestimates. Further, they note that the effect of mismatch on passing the bar weakens over time from graduation. Whether these findings should be controversial is open to question. Students who benefit from affirmative action on average will have weaker educational backgrounds and have experienced relatively more socioeconomic disadvantages. It is perhaps not surprising that these factors matter in subsequent educational experiences. Nor is it the case that mismatch evidence justifies reduced affirmative action. Rather, it suggests that affirmative action does not create a blank slate. Similarly, affirmative action has had important effects on Black unemployment (see Holzer & N eumark, 2000). They discuss the trend of increasing Black employment in federally contracted firms from the early years of affirmative action policy to the 1990s and note that most of the increase occurred by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Another feature of interest is the heterogeneity at the firm level with regard to engaging in affirmative action. This heterogeneity implies that current estimates may understate the effects of affirmative action if firms that are more likely to have affirmative action policies also have higher minority shares to begin with. Other papers examine similar phenomena
Affirmative Action
in other employers such as police departments, and recent work explores another dimension of affirmative action, the duration of its impact after the policy is removed. While the obvious objective of affirmative action policies is to diminish racial disparities, a distinct question involves the ways that affirmative action policies alter individual decision making. Theoretical models of the effects of affirmative action have addressed such questions and are surveyed by Hamming Fang and Andrea Moro. Much of this literature has focused on how these policies interact with the decision processes of the individuals involved in matching workers to firms or students to colleges. Shelly Lundberg and Richard Startz showed, in an early paper, how affirmative action can be efficiency enhancing when White employers have relative difficulty in distinguishing quality among Black job candidates as opposed to White ones. In contrast, Stephen Coate and Glenn Loury advanced a classic argument that affirmative action can create disincentives for individual effort that, in principle could create situations in which a “patronizing” equilibrium emerges in which the only minority candidates admitted to schools are those who require affirmative action. Empirical work has yet to provide direct evidence on these mechanisms; in our judgment, this is a major challenge for future empirical studies and means that structural approaches to empirical work are especially needed. Similarly, while general equilibrium analyses of affirmative action programs have been developed, they have yet to be integrated in empirical work. Other theoretical work has focused on understanding the effects of the design of the policies. An early topic is the consequences of shifting from race-based to class-based policies, as discussed by Roland G. Fryer and Glenn Loury. An important theme of Fryer and Loury is the inefficiency associated with substituting class for ethnicity when the objective is increasing enrollment of ethnic groups. Recent research has analyzed affirmative action from a market design perspective. Fuhito Kojima demonstrates how, depending on the preference of parents, affirmative action policies can inadvertently harm minorities. Affirmative action policies have generated a rich philosophical literature. One facet of ethical debates amounts to asking whether a blanket ethical proscription on discrimination places affirmative action outside the domain of legitimate policy tools. Other aspects of the debate focus on the dimensions of distributive justice. Advocates of affirmative action focus on a range of arguments. Some arguments are compensatory, that is, affirmative action is justified as it diminishes unjust historical and contemporaneous
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inequalities. The most compelling of these types of claims, in our view, involve equality of opportunity. Following ideas such as those developed by John Roemer, if differences in school or employment applicants derive from factors for which they are not responsible, then inequalities in outcomes are unjust. From this vantage point, affirmative action reverses inequalities that derive from the legacy of discrimination as well as current socioeconomic inequalities across families and communities. Arguments against affirmative action often focus on whether the policy violates notions of desert. The premise of this position is that slots in schools or firms are more deserved by some than others, and the conclusion is that affirmative action violates this. This is equivalent to the basic meritocratic argument against affirmative action. George Sher, an important defender of desert in the philosophy literature, has analyzed the interplay of desert and affirmative action defenses and concluded that the better affirmative action justifications need to be compensatory. A related objection to affirmative action is that it concentrates the costs of compensation for past injustices onto a small subset of individuals who are not responsible for the injustice that led to the need for affirmative action. Steven Durlauf argues that even if desert is the proper criterion for admissions, there is little reason to believe that acceptance rules that are based on test score and grade thresholds can be said to reward the deserving. The reason for this is that admissions and hiring are forward-looking decisions and not rewards; that is, efficiency-based notions of desert, for example, depend on the quality of the match of an individual to a position. What has yet to be delineated is how equality of opportunity and desert claims can be mapped into admissions and hiring policies. Steven N. Durlauf and Kegon Tan See also Activism; Discrimination; Ethnicity; Multiculturalism; Omniculturalism; Self-Esteem; Symbolic Racism
Further Readings Arcidiacono, P., & Lovenheim, M. (2016). Affirmative action and the quality–fit tradeoff. Journal of Economic Literature, 54(1), 3–51. Bowen, W. G., & Bok, D. (2000). The shape of the river. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Card, D., & Krueger, A. (2005). Would the elimination of affirmative action affect highly qualified minority applicants? Evidence from California and Texas. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 58(3), 415–434.
Aggressive Capitulation
Coate, S., & Loury, G. (1993). Will affirmative-action policies eliminate negative stereotypes? American Economic Review, 83(5), 1220–1240. Durlauf, S. (2008). Affirmative action, meritocracy, and efficiency. Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 7, 131–158. Fang, H., & Moro, A. (2011). Theories of statistical discrimination and affirmative action: A survey. In J. Benhabib, A. Bisin, & M. Jackson (Eds.), Handbook of social economics. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier. Fryer, R., & Loury, G. (2005). Affirmative action and its mythology. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(3), 147–162. Holzer, H., & Neumark, D. (2000). Assessing affirmative action. Journal of Economic Literature, 38(3), 483–568. Johnson, L. B. (1966). Commencement Address at Howard University, June 4, 1965. In Public Papers of the President of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, vol. 2, 635–640. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Kahlenberg, R., & Potter, H. (2012). A better affirmative action: State universities that created alternatives to racial preferences. New York, NY: The Century Foundation. Kojima, F. (2012). School choice: Impossibilities for affirmative action. Games and Economic Behavior, 75, 685–693. Long, M. (2004). Race and college admissions: An alternative to affirmative action? Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(4), 1020–1033. Lundberg, S. J., & Startz, R. (1983). Private discrimination and social intervention in competitive labor market. American Economic Review, 73(3), 340–347. Sander, R. (2004). A systemic analysis of affirmative action in American law schools. Stanford Law Review, 57(2), 367–483. Skrentny, J. (1996). The ironies of affirmative action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sowell, T. (2004). Affirmative action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Aggressive Capitulation
Persuasion
Figure 1
Overview Individuals and groups throughout history have sought to impose their will on others, employing tactics ranging from persuasion to physical force. Aggressive capitulation is one such tactic whereby a person or organization seeks the capitulation—or submission—of another individual or organization to a desired outcome by using fear. Aggressive capitulation falls shy of the use of physical force on this spectrum of tactics, using coercion to achieve its aims. The defining elements of aggressive capitulation are the use of intimidation as its mechanism to achieve its preferred outcome (see Figure 1).
Intimidation . . . Unlike rhetorical persuasion, aggressive capitulation uses rhetoric to implicitly or explicitly threaten the audience into desired behaviors. It does not seek to convince or win over its target but rather to intimidate or bully the target audience. This tactic of using intimidation may overtly threaten harm or consequence—for example, by rhetorically highlighting how the target audience will be punished for a failure to capitulate. Alternatively, intimidation may implicitly be conveyed through allusions to others’ fates for a failure to capitulate. Regardless, the use of intimidation is central to aggressive capitulation.
. . . to Control Behavior
Aggressive capitulation is the use of fear to compel individuals and/or groups to surrender or yield to the demands of an aggressor. It is a psychological tool used by individuals, groups, and states to achieve domination. Aggressive capitulation involves a threat—explicit or implicit—designed to compel individuals or groups to behave a certain way out of fear of the consequences for failing to submit to the aggressor’s demands. This entry first provides an overview of the elements of aggressive Rhetorical Persuasion
capitulation, focusing on how the use of threat shapes the individual’s or group’s response to demands, concluding with a brief discussion of the efficacy and vulnerabilities of such an approach. It then introduces and discusses recent trends in the use of aggressive capitulation by terrorist organizations, using the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as a mini case study.
The purpose of the threat is to achieve control over the target audience’s behavior and can have as its intended outcome a discreet, near-term action, such as getting a voter to vote a certain way, or a long-term behavior, such as acquiescence to an individual’s or group’s rule. Studies have found that threats can be an effective way to achieve desired actions or behaviors. For example, Aarti Iyer and colleagues, in two studies conducted in 2008 and 2010, examined how participants
Aggressive Capitulation
Physical Force
Coercion
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Agonism
responded to threats of violence from Osama bin Laden if troops were to remain in Afghanistan. These studies concluded that a heightened fear response resulted in aggressive capitulation that was characterized by submission to the demanded action. Specifically, these studies found that participants were more likely to support troop withdrawal if they were first primed with a fear reaction to Osama bin Laden’s threats of violence for a failure to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
Vulnerabilities of Aggressive Capitulation Strategy The use of this psychological tool by individuals and groups may effectively win over supporters in the near term but likely will not result in an enduring, cohesive support base. Nehemiah Friedland and Ariel Merari find that terrorism is highly effective in inducing fear but fails to produce underlying attitudinal change. Similarly, Iyer and colleagues’ research concludes that, although fear-inducing threats did result in aggressive capitulation, it also produced a deeper commitment to combating the source of the threat. Collectively, this body of research points to a clear vulnerability of aggressive capitulation; that is, it may solidify hostile, internal feelings that may provoke a more enduring commitment to countering the source of the threat, even as aggressive capitulation is producing a desired near-term action or behavior.
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and psychological factors that begins to explain how such a hated and feared terrorist group can expand its support base and gain power as it pursues territorial control in pursuit of a worldwide caliphate. While this terrorist group’s expansion is best understood in this broader context of sectarian conflict, poverty, and regional power struggles, one element of the group’s recruitment success and ability to gain supporters has been its effective use of aggressive capitulation. The ISIL propaganda machine has successfully used violent and graphic images and messages of torture and murder to convey a clear, implicit and explicit threat to its target audience that they face a choice to either capitulate to the organization’s worldview or face horrific torture and death. Through this intimidation, ISIL has been able to coerce individuals in parts of Syria and Iraq to acquiesce to their governance and provide support for their cause—demonstrating how the use of aggressive capitulation relies on intimidation to effect a desired outcome. However, this strategy is not without vulnerability. The terrorist group’s difficulty in retaining supporters when ISIL’s immediate threat to locals declines demonstrates this. As the terrorist group has physically withdrawn from a specific territory, ISIL has faced challenges in retaining governance of that territory, suggesting that the tactic of aggressive capitulation is unlikely to result in enduring attitudinal changes. Kathryn K. Hughes See also Terrorism, Theories and Models
Aggressive Capitulation as a Terrorist Strategy: The Case of ISIL Fear Allah as he should be feared and do not die except as Muslims. . . . Go forth, O mujahidin in the path of Allah. Terrify the enemies of Allah and seek death . . . for the world will come to an end, and the hereafter will last forever. —Abu Bakr al-Husayni al-Baghdadi,
Further Readings Friedland, N., & Merari, A. (1985, December). The psychological impact of terrorism: A double-edged sword. Political Psychology, 6(4), 591–604. Iyer, A., Hornsey, M. J., Vanman, E. J., Esposo, S., & Ale, S. (2014). Fight and flight: Evidence of aggressive capitulation in the face of fear messages from terrorists. Political Psychology, 36(6), 631–648.
Self-Proclaimed Caliph, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
As illustrated by Abu-Bakr’s quotation encouraging violence, modern terrorism today, particularly as embodied by the terrorist group ISIL, uses aggressive capitulation as one strategy to proliferate its power and secure its successes. As ISIL continues to attract fighters of various nationalities, reports of their violent, inhumane tactics proliferate. A discerning observer of international affairs recognizes that within this puzzling juxtaposition lies a tangled web of political, religious, cultural, economic,
Agonism Agonism refers to a form of limited contest considered necessary for contemporary democracies. It gives political expression to differences and guards against the emergence of extreme forms of conflict that aim at fragmenting, if not undermining, democratic life. Theorists who have developed an agonistic account of democracy include William E. Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, and James Tully. This entry
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Agonism
briefly introduces the main tenets of agonistic theory and discusses the different versions that agonism takes in the work of its main proponents. It concludes with a discussion of the distinctive impact of the agonistic perspective on democratic theory.
Agonism and Democracy The idea that agonism strengthens democracy is rooted in a set of theoretical assumptions about the nature of sociopolitical life. The first assumption is that differences are ever-present and constitutive of sociopolitical life. They are constitutive because they define and shape identities. This means, first, that differences contribute to the formation and coherence of identities. Subjects acquire their identity in relation to some (designated) difference and, as a result, difference constitutes an inseparable component of individual and collective identity. Second, the type of disagreements that such constitutive differences give rise to are existential in nature. They issue from deep-seated assumptions and experiences of selfhood and, thus, run deeper than disagreements that issue from plural interests in the course of the negotiating process. In contrast with the latter, the former defy easy resolution through recourse to state mechanisms. Existential disagreements also defy appeals to common reason. To prevent, therefore, their mutation into a dangerous antagonism, their agonistic expression must be encouraged. Agonistic expressions of difference are tamed and moderate. They are contests between subjects who respectfully voice their disagreements with others who differ from them. They are also political and democratic contests. They are political because they foster a politicization of difference. They encourage its political expression and, thus, do away with its more dangerous antagonistic manifestation. At the same time, agonistic contests are democratic contests because they exemplify an ethos of critique and disturbance that helps secure pluralistic openness. It follows that the second related assumption lodged at the center of the agonistic perspective is that democratic pluralism—the enduring presence of constitutive differences—supposes openness. Agonistic contests secure this openness by exposing and challenging the closures, normalizations, and exclusions generated by dominant practices, norms, and institutions—the ways in which they silence and repress differences. In so doing, agonistic contests pluralize—open up, expand, and extend—the perspectives, practices, norms, and sites of democratic politics. What counts as an agonistic contest is a topic on which theorists who identify with agonism show pronounced differences.
Different Versions of Agonism William Connolly, a leading theorist of agonism, develops the idea of agonistic respect. Agonistic respect, he argues, is a civic virtue that if cultivated leads political actors to express their constitutive differences in a respectful and self-limiting manner. The virtue of respect gives root to an ethical attitude of interacting with difference that draws its source from an appreciation of the diversity constitutive of life. Therefore, subjects who cultivate such an ethic of care and take on board this larger perspective on life develop an awareness of the contingency, interdependence, and contestability of their different value systems. In so doing, they moderate their response to the conflicts that erupt as a result of these differences, and they politicize—contest and challenge—differences that have become naturalized or hegemonic. By contrast, Mouffe speaks not of agonistic respect but of agonistic politics. Agonism for Mouffe is different from antagonism. It involves a contest between adversaries. Adversaries are not enemies. They agree on the importance of liberty and equality for all, that is, on the liberal democratic framework, but they disagree on the way they interpret liberty and equality. The common ground that adversaries share is what serves to limit and moderate their confrontation. Therefore, Mouffe’s version of agonism does not require the cultivation of the virtue of respect. Agonism is already a democratic and, thus, limited form of conflict. Connolly’s and Mouffe’s versions of agonism are those most discussed in the relevant literature. However, Honig’s and Tully’s versions of agonism are also worth mentioning because they respectively draw attention to the need for the pluralization of agonistic practices (Honig) and dialogical participation in relations of governance (Tully). Alongside Connolly’s and Mouffe’s, Honig’s and Tully’s versions have challenged dominant—liberal and deliberative—assumptions of democratic theory.
Agonism and Democratic Theory Agonistic theory has, first, challenged the focus of mainstream liberal theory on institutional and rightsbased accounts of politics. Democracy does not just exceed institutions, according to agonistic theorists, but also institutionalizes means often to close off and exclude from politics that identity which does not conform to dominant norms. While formal rights and constitutional recognition of difference are important from an agonistic perspective, they are not enough. Drives toward pluralization, argues Connolly, will always arise to destabilize formal arrangements, and
al Qaeda
this highlights the need for critical responsiveness to demands for difference. In dissociating pluralism from the formal, institutional, and governmental process, agonistic theory challenges the restrictive focus on interest group pluralism, dominant in American political science for the greater part of the 20th century. At the same time, agonistic theory challenges the optimism, manifest in deliberative accounts of democracy, that the right mixture of procedures and open exchanges of reasons might resolve constitutive differences and conflicts. The way that agonistic theory proposes to address such conflicts is a topic that merits further attention. Paulina Tambakaki See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Democracy; Pluralism
Further Readings Connolly, W. E. (1991). Identity/difference: Democratic negotiations of political paradox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honig, B. (1993). Political theory and the displacement of politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London, England: Verso. Tully, J. (2008). Public philosophy in a new key, Vol. 1, Democracy and civic freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wenman, M. (2013). Agonistic democracy: Constituent power in the era of globalisation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Wingenbach, E. (2011). Institutionalizing agonistic democracy: Post-foundationalism and political liberalism. Surrey and Burlington, England: Ashgate.
al
Qaeda
The creation of al Qaeda may be traced back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The struggle between the Soviets and the Muslim fighters, the Mujahideen, became the root of the modern global jihadist movement, as notable Islamist activists like Abdullah Azzam called for Muslims worldwide to unite in support of their brethren in Afghanistan. In 1984, Azzam issued a fatwa (religious decree), declaring that the infidels had invaded Muslim territory and degraded Muslim inhabitants. He claimed that fighting the Soviets was the duty of all Muslims throughout the world. As a result, a flow of foreign fighters journeyed to join the fight against the “communist infidels.” Among them was Osama bin Laden, whose participation in the infamous 1987 Battle of Jaji secured him the
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reputation as a mighty warrior who stood up to a superpower. For the Arab-Afghans, the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and its ultimate collapse was seen as major victory and a model strategy for future conflict: to lure “infidels” into a territory where they could be surrounded and attacked by Muslims. The steady supply of foreign fighters eager to wage jihad provided the perfect foundation for the subsequent conception of a larger mission following the war. In 1988, Osama bin Laden founded al Qaeda. Inspired by the ideas of jihadist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, Bin Laden sought to create a global jihadist movement that would organize and direct the resources of Muslims worldwide. However, from its inception, the al Qaeda movement involved Sunni Muslims and shunned the minority Shi’a Muslims, who make up only about 10% of the global Muslim population. Shi’a Muslims live for the most part in Iran and Iraq, with much smaller numbers in Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and India. After the 1978/1979 revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini attempted to win leadership of the Muslim world, but his leadership was rejected by the Sunni majority. The rise of Sunni and Shi’a extremism has been associated with considerable bloodshed between the two groups since the late 1970s, including the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war and the continuing factional Sunni–Shi’a fighting in Iraq and Syria. On February 23, 1998, bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri issued a fatwa outlining their grievances against the West, particularly the United States. The statement declared that it was the duty of all Muslims worldwide to kill Americans and their allies, irrespective of whether they are military or civilians. On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding thousands. These attacks represented a shift in al Qaeda activity as this was the first operation that was truly international in its scope. The attacks’ success required the involvement of al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, Kenya, Yemen, the United Kingdom, and Egypt; and the level of sophistication exhibited by these coordinated strikes brought al Qaeda to the forefront of U.S. security concerns. In the years leading up to 9/11, the world would witness a number of al Qaeda sponsored and inspired attacks demonstrating the group’s increasing influence, skills, and capabilities. The attacks on September 11, 2001, were the deadliest terrorists attacks in history, killing almost 3,000 people. The mastermind behind the attack was a Pakistani national, born and raised in Kuwait, by the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, whom U.S. intelligence officials would later refer to as KSM. A former engineering student at North Carolina’s Agricultural
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al Qaeda
and Technical State University, KSM became disillusioned with the United States as result of U.S. policy in the Middle East, especially U.S. support for Israel. Although KSM began plotting the 9/11 attacks in 1996, he did not affiliate with al Qaeda until late 1998 or early 1999, at which point bin Laden approved the “planes operation” and invested as much as $500,000 into the attack. On September 11, 2001, 19 al Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial airplanes: two flew into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroying both; one flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and one crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania, having been prevented by its passengers from reaching its intended target, probably the U.S. Capitol or the White House. Although the 9/11 attacks were praised by some in the Muslim world and secured al Qaeda a reputation of notoriety, many Islamist and religious leaders denounced the attacks and al Qaeda’s actions. In fact, as many as 46 leaders from various Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jamaat-e Islami, and others, went so far as to sign a declaration stating that the attacks were against all Islamic norms. Al Qaeda responded with a detailed statement outlining the religious justifications for the attacks. The statement cited passages from the Qur’an and questioned the credentials of al Qaeda’s critics, accusing them of corruption. It claimed that U.S. policies such as sanctions against Iraq, the bombing of Iraq in the 1990s, and its close relationship with Israel were justifications for jihad. The statement also cited U.S. support for the killing of Palestinian civilians as justification for the killing of American civilians. Although many extremist groups subscribe to these types of arguments to validate violence and brutality, the mainstream Islamic consensus continues to be that such actions are not justified within Islamic tradition. Mainstream Muslims regard the “greater jihad” to be the purification of the self through an internal struggle, rather than external physical violence. U.S. military action following 9/11 dealt a big blow to al Qaeda’s operational capacity. In cooperation with a group of anti-Taliban fighters known as the Northern Alliance, the United States toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan, eliminating some key al Qaeda leaders and robbing the group of its safe haven in Afghanistan. Additionally, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated a massive anti-terror campaign, rounding up jihadists, monitoring activities, and d isrupting recruitment and fundraising attempts worldwide. By the end of 2002, U.S. actions had significantly weakened al Qaeda capabilities. Due to U.S. disruptions in Afghanistan, al Qaeda began to rely more heavily on its geographically dispersed affiliates and invest more in the propagation of
its ideology, a trend that would continue during the U.S. war in Iraq. Nevertheless, the group continued to operate and attempt to carry out attacks with varying success. Many attacks were disrupted; some notable failures include the 2001 shoe-bomber case (as well as the unrelated 2009 underwear bomber case). Nevertheless some attacks were carried out with a resulting loss of lives, like those in Tunisia and Indonesia in 2002, Spain in 2004, and London in 2005.
Goals and Strategy In general, al Qaeda has four main objectives. First, al Qaeda seeks to end the U.S. presence in the Middle East. From al Qaeda’s perspective, the United States is an imperialist nation that bolsters repressive regimes, condones the killing of Muslims, and robs the Muslims of their endowment by lowering oil prices. Second, al Qaeda aspires to destroy Israel, believing Israel to be a Western pawn that has stolen Muslim lands. Third, al Qaeda seeks to promote a Salafi-jihadist worldview among Muslim fighters worldwide through propaganda and recruitment to its various training camps. Fourth, al Qaeda is committed to opposing “apostate” regimes in the Muslim world, claiming that rulers in places such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others are not true Muslims and must be ousted. Additionally, in the future, al Qaeda aspires to create a true Islamic state, a caliphate. However, al Qaeda leaders are unclear about when the caliphate should come to fruition or how it would actually function. Al Qaeda believes that severing ties between the Islamic world and the West will enable like-minded militant organizations to overthrow “apostate” regimes and establish revivalist Islamist governments in their place. Al Qaeda’s pursuit of its goals is often opportunistic and contingent upon the political, economic, and social contexts in any given theater. Further, the prioritization of targets and goals often differs between the al Qaeda core and its affiliate organizations. While the al Qaeda core concentrates on the United States and its policies in the Middle East, the local groups are often more concerned with anti-regime violence and regionally relevant social issues. In order to achieve its goals, al Qaeda utilizes a strategy of attrition warfare to exhaust its enemies, often capitalizing on economic, political, and military weaknesses in order to advance its agenda. Attacks against the West, particularly the United States, are typically intended to weaken morale and reinforce the idea that U.S. presence in the Middle East will never succeed in its goals. Furthermore, by launching attacks against an enemy homeland, al Qaeda hopes to create financial difficulties as well as divisions
al Qaeda
between allies as nations become increasingly alarmed and concerned about defense and security. Dramatic attacks like those of 9/11 support several of al Qaeda’s main objectives by intimidating enemies, inspiring fellow Muslims, and provoking an expensive and likely destructive response that may also be used to further inspire Muslims worldwide. Finally, a core tenet of al Qaeda strategy is suicidal martyrdom, which is a frequent feature of al Qaeda attacks. Suicide bombings have many practical advantages over other terrorist tactics mainly because they are highly effective, relatively inexpensive, and generally pretty simple. Targets of such attacks tend to be both symbolic and strategic in the hope that the event may serve as propaganda for the group as well as to benefit the overall attrition strategy.
Ideology Al Qaeda adheres to a Salafi interpretation of Islam. Salafists maintain that all Muslims should emulate the actions of the first three generations of Muslim leaders, known as the Salaf (pure), and embrace a literal interpretation of Islam. They reject the religious jurisprudence that emerged after this early period, instead championing a narrow focus on the Qur’an and the life (sunna) and teachings (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafi Muslims believe that sharia (Islamic law) is a complete system that does not require analogy, interpretation, or any form of adaptation in order to apply to the modern world. Salafi Muslims uphold that the interpretation of the stories and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad by religious clerics has corrupted Islam. Some key thinkers that have influenced the jihadist ideology include Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Sayyid Qutb, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, Abdullah Azzam, and Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Other strict interpretations of Islam such as Wahhabism, Deobandism, and Ahl-e Hadith are also considered part of the Salafi movement. It is important to note that most of these movements’ adherents are not jihadists. Within the Salafi jihadist movement, there is debate over the appropriate use of violence in defense of Islam. For example, many criticize the indiscriminate nature of suicide bombings and the resulting collateral damage, condemning the slaughter of other Muslims or innocent civilians. Consequently, some Salafi jihadists have been forced to embrace the doctrine of takfir, arguing that some Muslims victims are not “true” Muslims due to their support for an apostate regime, cooperation with infidels, and so on. Nevertheless, the majority of Muslims condemn suicide bombings; and while Salafi Muslims are highly conservative and may share some of
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the same beliefs as jihadists, many of them focus their energies on spreading Islam through proselytizing rather than physical violence.
Leadership Osama bin Laden A member of a wealthy family from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s early involvement with jihad involved generous donations to various jihadist groups, intended to help them sustain themselves. In doing so, bin Laden was able to create connections with experienced jihadists such as his eventual partner, Ayman Zawahiri. Over time, bin Laden’s charisma would enable him to become the most influential al Qaeda leader. Despite his calm and quiet demeanor, bin Laden was able to inspire his followers and ultimately a large portion of the Muslim world. He had a vision, and in his rhetoric, he utilized both historical and religious references, identifying a plethora of problems facing Muslims around the world. Furthermore, bin Laden had strong organizational skills. He created the al Qaeda movement in such a way that it could operate in both a centralized and decentralized manner. Al Qaeda aspired to be an elite organization made up of experienced operatives. Bin Laden’s wealth enabled him to institute and nurture affiliate organizations, create and distribute propaganda, establish training camps, and launch attacks worldwide. His movement was notorious for its patience and persistence, and his leadership and wealth helped to mitigate the inevitable tensions between affiliate groups that resulted from differences in ideology and personality. The survival of al Qaeda after the death of bin Laden and the number of analogous movements that have emerged throughout the Muslim world is a testament to bin Laden’s legacy and leadership capabilities.
Ayman al-Zawahiri Although Zawahiri was not as wealthy as bin Laden, he was born into a pious family that was part of Egypt’s elite. He was well educated and became involved in politics as early as age 15 when he established his first revolutionary cell. Critical of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s peace deal with Israel, relations with the United States, and enthusiasm toward westernization, Z awahiri and his comrades sought to capitalize on the resurgence in religiosity in Egypt and turn the country into an Islamic state. Zawahiri’s cell eventually merged with other likeminded groups, forming the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—the group that would ultimately assassinate Sadat
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al Qaeda
in 1981. Eventually, EIJ would become an affiliate of al Qaeda, and Zawahiri’s followers would make up the core of al Qaeda’s leadership, bringing with them some of the lessons they had learned through their struggles to overthrow the Egyptian government—including the efficacy of suicide bombings, the use of martyrdom videos as propaganda, and finally the importance of secrecy, preparation, and training for successful operations. Although Zawahiri lacks bin Laden’s charisma, he shares his pragmatism. He is adaptive and flexible in his approach, learning from his mistakes, working with groups that are not perfect ideological matches, and recognizing the benefits of common enemies.
Organizational Structure Depending on the circumstances, al Qaeda has been known to utilize both centralized and decentralized organizational styles, making it difficult to pinpoint one form of al Qaeda organization. Although the headquarters of al Qaeda central have traditionally been located in Afghanistan and Pakistan, recent developments indicate that al Qaeda’s central command may not be limited to this base. Since 9/11, al Qaeda has spawned several affiliate groups in areas of North Africa and the Sahel, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. The leaders of each group are required to pledge their allegiance to al Qaeda’s emir, formerly bin Laden and now Zawahiri. In addition, al Qaeda has an advisory committee made up of its top members that functions as the second-highest decision-making body, often playing a direct role in important operations. Notwithstanding these formal bureaucratic s tructures, al Qaeda today is largely a decentralized movement, operating as a network hierarchy. Levels of command authority are sometimes unclear, and personal connections between jihadists often trump the command structure. Leaders tend to focus more broadly on managing the organization’s actions and messages than on the activities of affiliates, allowing the focus to stay on al Qaeda as a movement and granting affiliate organizations a certain level of autonomy. The following is a list of al Qaeda branches, affiliates, and known collaborators: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) Al-Mouribitoun—West Africa Al-Shabaab—Somalia Ansar al Sharia—Libya
Khorasan Group—Syria Nusra Front—Syria and Iraq Lashkar-e-Taliba—Pakistan Jemaah Islamiyah—Indonesia Haqqani Network—Afghanistan Benghazi Brigade—Libya
Islamic State In 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declared bayah, or religious allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and created a new terrorist movement in coalition with al Qaeda, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Between 2004 and 2014, the group would go by several different names including the Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and finally the Islamic State. However, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the relationship was fraught with disagreement. While bin Laden and Zawahiri were focused on attacking U.S. targets, for Zarqawi and his followers, Shi’a Muslims were the real enemy. The group became an agent for sectarian chaos, distinguishing their goals from those of al Qaeda central and establishing a reputation of incredible brutality. Following the death of Zarqawi and also of his immediate successor, Abu Omar al Baghdadi, AQI began to pursue territory and power under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Capitalizing on the chaos in Syria in 2011, the jihadist group expanded, taking over large swaths of t erritory and changing its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Between 2011 and 2014, ISIS would increase its popular support and solidify its legitimacy in both Iraq and Syria. In the summer of 2014, ISIS swept Iraq, simplifying its name to the Islamic State and declaring that its intention to bring all Muslims under its rule was not constrained to any particular national boundary. Although Zawahiri had initially encouraged AQI to move into Syria, he had intended to create a separate group in the region led by local jihadists. The al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra was intended to be such a group. However, on April 9, 2013, Baghdadi announced the supposed merger of AQI and al Nusra, yet neither the leader of al Nusra nor the leader of al Qaeda had agreed to any such union. Zawahiri declared the two groups to be separate al Qaeda affiliates: al Nusra would be the official al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and AQI would be the official al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq. Nevertheless, Baghdadi continued to claim al Nusra’s
Alienation
subordinance to AQI. His refusal to accept the distinction eventually led to a violent confrontation between the two groups. Finally, in February 2014, Zawahiri denounced AQI, now referring to itself as ISIS, stating that the group had no organizational relationship with al Qaeda. Ultimately, al Qaeda and the Islamic State are both competing to be the leader of the contemporary international jihadist movement and share the same ultimate goal—the establishment of a global caliphate ruled by sharia law. However, the respective approaches of each group in its efforts to achieve this goal are in some respects different. While al Qaeda prioritizes its battle with Western powers and the plight of the Muslim world over the creation of the caliphate, the Islamic State seeks to build the caliphate now, eliminate its proximate enemies, consolidate control of territory in Sunni sections of Iraq and Syria, and continue to expand. This desire to conquer is vital to the distinction between the Islamic State and al Qaeda. Today al Qaeda maintains a strategy of clandestine expansion, covert affiliations and front groups, and a surreptitious organizational tactic that favors the gradual infiltration of communities and the development of broad support before engaging with an enemy. Meanwhile, the Islamic State seeks immediate military confrontation, operating in the open, exercising extreme brutality, and disseminating its propaganda to massive audiences in order to rapidly develop a support base. Thus, the al Qaeda model is one that favors long-term sustainability by exploiting regional upheaval, fostering popular support, and keeping a low profile, whereas the Islamic State model is one that favors immediacy and conquest, demonstrating its military capabilities through aggressive territorial expansion and publicizing operations for propaganda.
Current Status Among government officials, scholars, and analysts there is debate around the current status of al Qaeda. In addition to killing Osama bin Laden, the United States has eliminated several key personnel through its drone campaign, and the rise of the Islamic State has led many to believe that the al Qaeda movement is now overshadowed by the Islamic State. However, while al Qaeda central was severely weakened by the war on terror, the group’s larger network of affiliates endures and represents a decentralized jihadist movement with a different set of strengths and vulnerabilities. Al Qaeda thrives in areas where it can embed itself within local movements and exploit subsequent tensions in order to promote radicalization and the al Qaeda ideology. The Arab
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Spring that spread across the Middle East in early 2011 and the emergence of IS presented al Qaeda with an opportunity to regroup and expand operations in various unstable regions such as Syria, Libya, Northern Africa, and Yemen with very little opposition or attention from international audiences. Consequently, al Qaeda remains an active global jihadist movement that continues to pose a threat. It maintains the ability to radicalize and recruit from a distance and persuade groups and individuals to carry out attacks in its name. In this way, it could be argued that al Qaeda’s threat today is more diffuse and in some ways more difficult to detect. Madeleine Blackman and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Authoritarianism; Civil Wars; Clash of Civilizations; Conflict Theory, Realistic; End to Terrorism, Theories of; Fascism; Internet Jihadism; Islamic State; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Propaganda; Terror Management Theory; Terrorism, Theories and Models
Further Readings Byman, D. (2015). Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the global jihadist movement: What everyone needs to know. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2008). How globalization spurs terrorism. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Wright, L. (2016). The terror years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State. New York, NY: Knopf. Zelin, A. Y. (2014, June). The war between ISIS and al-Qaeda for supremacy of the global jihadist movement (Research Notes 20). Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Alienation Alienation refers to the isolation or estrangement of individuals and groups in relation to their sense of self, their status within their particular sociocultural communities, and their sense of control within the world of which they are a part. Throughout history, alienation has taken on various meanings within different traditions, conceived both as an internal psychological state and as a social relationship to the external world. It has emerged as a key concept for political and social theorists as a means of explaining certain aspects of human behavior, particularly related to subjective feelings and perceptions and how they relate to external conditions.
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Alienation
Origins in Antiquity The notion of alienation in Western thought is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition that views the disobedience of Adam and Eve as the defining moment marking the estrangement between God and human beings. In the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and in early Greek literature, the idea of estrangement was a common theme played out in narrative stories of the family that served as a metaphor for the human family’s contentious relationship with the divine. In Asian religious traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, adherents confront the alienating and never-ending struggle of earthly life along the transitory path toward the liberation of the soul. Alienation finds similar expression in Neoplatonism, in which the souls of human beings are corrupted by material concerns that lead to a separation, a self-alienation, from their true divine selves.
The Emergence of the Industrial State As nation-states emerged and the relationship between individuals and the state changed and became more intensely debated, the notion of sociopolitical alienation, the disengagement of political participation, became a central concern. In his original formulation of the political creation of civil society, English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) posited that individuals should be bound together by their commitment to each other and by a common understanding of how to govern their territory. The diversity of ethnic and cultural heritage that compose the polity becomes integrated into a shared national identity. In practice, efforts to impose a national identity have often led to marginalization of minority groups within territories where assimilation and integration have become problematical. In the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–1883), alienation of humankind is conceived within the context of an individual’s relationship to the means of production. Marx argued that inherent in human nature is the need to create. The individual engages in labor to transform the world in order to create a product and control its means of production. In Marx’s view, the individual becomes alienated when the product is taken away and is no longer under the individual’s control. For Marx, money and markets distribute products and labor, resulting in the individual’s loss of control and subsequent alienation. In contemporary market economies, however, Marx’s conception of the causes of alienation is seen as less forceful in light of the desire by individuals to seek employment as a means of upward social mobility. Within this context, some scholars argue, specialization and the division of labor have created
economic opportunities for individuals to more fully participate in the distribution of goods and services. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was similarly concerned with the social and moral consequences of a division of labor in modern industrial societies. However, his main focus was on how the division of labor impacts the ability of a society to effectively integrate to form a cohesive civic and social political organization. In his terminology, anomie, a sense of rootlessness, is analogous to Marx’s conception of alienation. In Marx’s formulation, the division of labor fosters class conflict and potentially a restructuring of society. For Durkheim, it is the debilitating effects of anomie, the social breakdown between different occupational groups as a result of the division of labor, which inhibit the growth of societal integration.
Existential Despair The idea of alienation became an important theme in existentialism, a philosophical system that grew in prominence during the post–World War II period exemplified in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism holds that individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions and are thus free to make choices in response to a hostile and indifferent universe. There is a strong emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual and the consequent isolation that results from having to navigate a purposeless existence in search of one’s authentic self. Alienation emerges as individuals begin to experience a distancing between themselves and the world around them. Anxiety in the individual grows and is fostered by a sense of abandonment and belief that there is no purpose or meaning to life. The meaninglessness, lack of norms to guide behavior, purposelessness, and ultimately social isolation comprise the elements that generate the sense of alienation in an irrational world. In this regard, existentialism redirects the focus of the causes of alienation from structural flaws in societies to individual responsibility for one’s own choices. Alienation is the sense of despair at having to create oneself in a world where there are no objective standards to guide one’s free will to make life choices.
Impact of Digital Social Networks In contemporary expressions of alienation, it is often the marginalization of individuals or groups brought about by social and political exclusion that leads to civic disengagement and isolation. The impact of this marginalization is particularly felt among developing youths, whose search for meaning is inextricably tied to an emerging personal identity that must often reconcile multiple roles or identities in order to resolve one’s ambiguous social status
Allegiances
in society. The globalization of communications has paradoxically fostered ties between alienated individuals and groups through instantaneous connectivity via the Internet, which in turn has catalyzed the growth of a diverse range of new social, political, and religious relationships. The enabling impact of these social networks has had both positive and negative effects on the level of alienation experienced by marginalized individuals and groups. On one hand, social networks have empowered individuals by allowing them to gain greater access and influence in political processes, thus reducing their sense of alienation. Social networks have also reduced the sense of alienation by allowing marginalized individuals to become involved in entrepreneurial, prosocial projects that provide an opportunity for substantive reengagement with their social and political environments. For example, efforts to promote literacy via Internet-based programs sponsored by public and private organizations have empowered individuals and communities by providing them with the means to more fully take advantage of the benefits of global engagement. On the other hand, social networks have also served as conduits to attract alienated individuals to extremist causes that seek to undermine established authority, as in the case of groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which employ various modes of cyber outreach via the Internet to attract vulnerable youth to serve as foreign fighters. Consequently, while social networks have reduced individual alienation by nurturing prosocial civic engagement, they have also demonstrated the potential for facilitating group conflict within the broader society. William Costanza See also Disengagement; Ethnocentrism; Marxism; Multiculturalism; Proletariat and Capitalism; Youth and Political Change
Further Readings Giddens, A. (1971). Capitalism and modern social theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Oaklander, L. N. (1996). Existential philosophy: An introduction (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Allegiances Allegiances are the vital and socially integrative relationships, affiliations, and loyalties that generate different
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processes of personal and collective identity formation. Individuals possess multiple cultural and sociopolitical allegiances that are meaningful for constructing a sense of belonging to a specific culture, group, society, or place. Associated with issues of identity formation or transnational migration, allegiances are discussed especially in terms of constructing inner-group solidarity and exclusive sociocultural identities that may generate political action. In the historical context, the term allegiances referred to the reciprocal relationships and obligations of diverse duties that structured the European feudal society’s political and economic system. This entry focuses on the relevance of allegiances for constructing cultural differences as part of all processes of social and personal identity formations that result in politically relevant identities and cultural stereotypes, and it discusses the presence of multiple allegiances in social relationships. The entry concludes with a brief reference to conflicting allegiances in social interactions.
Cultural Allegiances Concepts of membership and belonging are based on an ideology of cultural and social differences among diverse categories of people, which is also psychologically meaningful for the individual’s personal ways of self-representation in relation with others. Multiple cultural allegiances assist in creating a cultural bonding between different individuals who share a common system of concepts, values, customs, symbols, and norms of conduct. Individual and group cultural identifications depend on language use, religion, gender, age, lifestyle, social class, ethnicity, nationality, or any kind of association with a group that has its own distinct cultural practices, preferences, and shared experiences. Contrasting situations of cultural contact produce notions of difference and construct frameworks or boundaries that allow for the development of exclusive sociocultural identities in relation to other group identities and outsiders alike. A sense of belonging may also derive from identification with a geographical region, persons, or groups other than the membership in an ethnocultural group, based on shared interests, responsibilities, and objectives in welfare. Some allegiances may have a strong emotional relevance for the individual, such as her family bonds or linguistic identity.
Social Identity and Belonging Distinguishing between approaches of personal and social identity formation, social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner proposed that people steadily attempt to preserve a positive social identity in terms of
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Allocation
a distinct group membership. Social relationships with family, cultural, and social groups on the one hand and with institutions and political systems on the other enable individuals to identify with and become an integral part of a particular social environment or system. According to Tajfel and Turner, social allegiances induce feelings of belonging among members of a distinct social, political, cultural, linguistic, religious, or economic group in relation to other groups as well as strengthen the interest in the preservation of this particular in-group or society. Socially constructed collective identities, such as gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality, facilitate political control and re-create categorical differences between groups, whose notion of constituting a distinctive and bounded group is affirmed from within and from outside.
Multiple Personal Allegiances Despite possessing a certain notion of bonding with a large number of other individuals, every person has her own specific set of allegiances that may create a sense of communality with multiple cultural groups, based on personal attachments and experiences. Psychologist Jean Phinney proposed that through processes of identity development in young adulthood, human beings begin to critically examine the norms and values of their childhood home, surrounding society, and authorities. Although social categories seemingly fix differences as politically relevant identities, it is important to note that allegiances are processual and relational. Individuals may continually develop new allegiances or change existing ones, depending on the context and over the course of time. As a result, every individual develops his own understanding and commitment to an ethnic group, as Phinney points out. On a personal level, individuals may therefore possess multiple and at times contradictory forms of allegiances that enable them to construct complex networks of social membership and solidarity within and across national and cultural boundaries. Overlapping local, regional, national, and supranational allegiances determine the relationships between individuals and society and affect issues of integration and citizenship. In particular, members of transnational families or second-generation migrants may sense allegiance to two or several cultures, groups, and places across the boundaries of nation-states without necessarily always sharing citizenship or cultural and historical ties.
Conflicting Allegiances Cultural boundaries are central to discourses of power relations, identities, and social cohesion within and
across nation-states. A shared language and culture are significant prerequisites for constructing a sense of group solidarity and assist in conceptualizing one’s belonging in terms of exclusive relationships with a particular entity that is defined by distinctive cultural features. The prevailing political ideology of nationstates has led to the expectation that the individual possesses exclusive allegiances that are coherent with a single nation: its language, culture, history, ethnicity, citizenship, or territory. Membership in multiple, overlapping polities or in nondominant cultural, ethnic, or national groups has therefore the potential to create sociopolitical conflicts. Theories of ethnic and national identities address the concerns over possibly ambiguous and conflicting allegiances that may lead to tensions and antagonistic expectations between culturally distinct groups as well as the resulting psychological and legal consequences for individuals with multiple allegiances to two or more cultures. Viktorija L. A. Cˇeginskas See also Citizenship; Globalization; Migration; Minority Voters; Multiculturalism
Further Readings Benhabib, S., Shapiro, I., & Petranovic´, D. (Eds.). (2007). Identities, affiliations and allegiances. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Brown, R. (2000). Social identity theory: Past achievements, current problems and future challenges. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30(6), 745–778. Maalouf, A. (2000). On identity (B. Bray, Trans.). London, England: Harvill Panther. (Original work Les Identités meurtrières published in 1998) Trimble, J. E., & Dickson, R. (2005). Ethnic identity. In C. B. Fisher & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Encyclopedia of applied developmental science (Vol. 1, pp. 415–420). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Allocation Allocation refers to the apportionment of resources to serve different purposes. Since resources are scarce, individuals or groups compete to gain a share of such limited resources to achieve their own goals. There are different mechanisms of allocation. In economics, for example, the price system is one mechanism that determines the way resources (e.g., goods and services) are distributed to meet the demands of consumers. Politics is another such mechanism. The issues of allocation are
Allocation
particularly pertinent to the topic of political behavior as the primary role of politicians (e.g., elected representatives) lies in allocating resources to best serve the competing demands of their own supporters (e.g., voters). This entry introduces research on allocation in the context of political behavior and explains how politics plays a role in determining allocation decisions.
Markets and Politics Politics is about the allocation of resources. Unlike the market system where decisions over allocation are decentralized across a countless number of different producers, politicians ultimately control purse strings and make decisions about how state resources should be allocated. Their aims of resource allocation are diverse, some of which may be for the public interest while others are more selfish. The government, for instance, plays a critical role in mobilizing resources for public goods, which are difficult to provide if resource allocation is left to market forces alone. Private companies are not necessarily willing to invest their resources in providing goods and services whose benefits can be shared by others who do not bear any costs of production, an issue known as the free rider problem. The presence of such market failures (e.g., externalities, public goods, noncompetitive markets) often serves as justification for the role of politics in resource allocation. On the other hand, such political interventions may also lead to a wasteful allocation of resources. Neoclassical economics claims that politics is often, if not always, distortionary in nature and inefficient because it is not based on economic rationality. What politicians are primarily concerned about is not necessarily the pursuit of economic welfare but, rather, their own political survival. In a democracy, elected representatives may secure resources to cater to the parochial demands of politically salient individuals or groups. Even in a nondemocracy, rulers still feel pressures to materially reward a cadre of individuals whose political allegiance is critical for them to stay in power. Worse still, public officials may squander resources for corrupt purposes and self-aggrandizement. As such, politics may significantly skew the distribution of resources in favor of certain individuals or groups, which may undermine economic welfare as a whole.
The Role of Politics in Resource Allocation Political Business Cycle Research in distributive politics often discusses the issues of allocation in the context where politicians are
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pressured to meet the competing demands of voters so as to win an election. There are a number of different ways through which the electoral game can shape resource allocation decisions. At the national level, the urge to win an election may result in a political business cycle (PBC) or a temporal boom and bust in government deficits, spending, and money supply generated by electoral cycles. Traditional PBC theory argues that since voters are myopic in nature and care about the health of the pre-election economy in making their voting decisions, opportunistic incumbent politicians seek to stimulate the economy by adopting expansionary fiscal and monetary policy just prior to the election. These temporary expansions may induce various economic woes like inflation, unsustainable debts, or destabilization in foreign trade, if pushed to the extreme.
Core Versus Swing Voter Models Electoral incentives may also affect resource allocation at the subnational level. There is an ongoing scholarly debate over two competing models that seek to explain how voter behaviors affect politicians’ subnational allocation decisions: the core- and swing-voter models. Both models often assume the presence of two competing parties seeking to win an election. The core-voter model posits that a party distributes resources to reward its own loyal supporters or districts and penalize opposition supporters with a lower level of resource allocation. The model often invokes the idea of a clientelistic relationship between politicians (or patrons) and voters (or clients), the former providing distributive goods to reward the latter in exchange for their electoral support. In Africa, for instance, politicians work with local patrons to distribute resources (e.g., cash, subsidies, food) to voters as a political instrument to cement their loyalty. In contrast, the swing-voter model posits that a party rewards swing voters or voters whose voting choices are divided between the two competing parties. The swingvoter model predicts that such voters can be more easily persuaded to switch their voting decisions by material rewards compared with core voters whose voting decisions are somewhat prefixed due to their strong ideological preference for one party over the other. Thus, from the rationalist perspective, there is a reason for a vote-maximizing party to target swing voters with a greater amount of resources to buy votes more efficiently. Research on distributive politics finds evidence for both of these two competing models, and the literature is divided over which model is a more effective strategy to win an election. Politics is not a panacea for market failures. That is to say, like the market system, the government also fails in allocating resources in an efficient and productive
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American Exceptionalism
manner. Distributive pressures from various stakeholder groups with narrow, private interests often complicate the government’s pursuit of the public interest. Politicians need to strike a delicate balance between winning the political game and also expending resources to serve society as a whole. This dilemma is present in any political system, be it a democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, or otherwise, though to varying degrees. If the narrow interests of a few politically salient individuals or groups capture state coffers, politics can do more harm than good in achieving public goals. Takaaki Masaki See also Clientelism; Corruption; Democracy; Dictatorship; Economics and Political Behavior; Free Market; Free Rider Problem; Neoliberalism; Public Goods
Further Readings Cox, G. W., & McCubbins, M. D. (1986). Electoral politics as a redistributive game. Journal of Politics, 48, 370–389. Lindbeck, A., & Weibull, J. (1987). Balanced budget redistribution and the outcome of political competition. Public Choice, 52, 273–297. Stokes, S. C. (2005). Perverse accountability: A formal model of machine politics with evidence from Argentina. American Political Science Review, 99, 315–325.
American Dream See Self-Help Ideology
American Exceptionalism American exceptionalism is a concept connoting the political superiority of the United States. There are mainly two ways social scientists approach American exceptionalism: as a subjective or as an objective concept. This entry provides an overview as well as critiques of both approaches to studying American exceptionalism.
Overview Throughout history, great powers have conceived of themselves as superior to others. Some examples include the Ottoman Turks, 19th-century Russia, imperial Great Britain, and the idea inherent in France’s mission
civilisatrice. It is, in other words, not exceptional to think one is exceptional. Thinking of one’s country as superior to other countries falls under the subjective definition of American exceptionalism. By subjective is meant exceptionalism defined as a constructed identity or set of ideas that Americans identify with. In this sense, American exceptionalism is a kind of American identity, nationalism, or civil religion. The objective approach, on the other hand, defines exceptionalism as a set of observable qualities that one can use to compare the United States with other countries.
The Subjective Definition of American Exceptionalism The subjective definition of American exceptionalism refers to a constellation of ideas that are central to the belief Americans have about themselves as a nation apart from and above others. This entry defines American exceptionalism as consisting of three interrelated ideas that Americans generally believe in. First is the idea that the United States is distinct from the “Old World”; second, it has a special and unique role to play in world history; and third, the United States will resist the laws of history (meaning that it will rise to great power status but will not decline). It is important to note, however, that one will find many different variations of the subjective definition in the humanities and the social sciences. First, let us examine the idea that the United States is distinct from the Old World. Originally, this referred to Europe, but today the United States is considered distinct from the rest of the world in general. Seeing the United States as “distinct” does not simply entail categorizing the United States as different from the rest of the world in terms of political, cultural, and economic institutions. Rather, it invokes superiority. The idea that the New World was superior to the Old is traceable to the period before the United States was founded and can be found in the Puritan religious communities in New England of the mid-1600s. Whereas the Pilgrims fled Europe never intending to come back, the Puritans were on a mission to teach their old country, England, the correct religious doctrine. The hope was that the old country would come to its senses and learn from the “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, put it in his discourse called “A Modell of Christian Charity.” The same idea of superiority was then later invoked by the nation’s founders, pointing to the new nation’s political, rather than religious, exceptionalism. The vanquishing of the British Empire, along with the establishment of the first modern democratic republic, was seen as heralding a new era in world history, one in which the United States
American Exceptionalism
would lead the way toward progress. This idea has been nurtured throughout U.S. history. Indeed, U.S. polling bureaus such as Gallup and Pew Research Center routinely poll Americans on their adherence to American exceptionalism, often defined as a belief that the United States is the greatest country in the world because of its history and Constitution. Because of its perceived miraculous founding and political genius, the United States, it was and is believed, should play a unique role in shaping the world. This is the second core idea that underpins the subjective definition of American exceptionalism. References to this missionary role of the United States on the world stage abound in presidential rhetoric. Most famous, perhaps, is Woodrow Wilson’s call for the United States to “make the world safe for democracy.” Exemplifying Wilson’s adherence to American exceptionalism was his belief that even though the United States eventually entered the First World War on the side of the Triple Entente, the United States was above the European conflict and would teach Europe how to conduct international relations correctly by setting up the League of Nations. The third and last idea is that the United States shall—as the only nation ever to do so—circumvent the laws of history by rising to power without subsequently declining. Proof that the United States will resist the laws of history, it is believed, can be found in its own history. First, the United States successfully wrested independence from Great Britain; then it successfully conquered a continent (nearly exterminating its native populations as well as thwarting British and French imperial designs); furthermore it extended across the oceans—vanquishing yet another powerful empire (Spain); and finally won two world wars, first over Imperial Germany and then over Nazi Germany, thereby allowing the United States to establish an international order over which it still rules. With the end of the cold war, American exceptionalism was vindicated seemingly for all eternity: The United States had proven itself to be that special nation that shall lead all other nations toward the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama argued in 1989. Inherent in this thesis was the idea that the United States was the vanguard of civilization, in that U.S.-style democracy was where the rest of the world was headed. While this may have sounded like mere post–cold war triumphalism, in fact this idea can be traced far back in U.S. history.
American Exceptionalism in International Relations/U.S. Foreign Policy In terms of political behavior, belief in American exceptionalism is argued to help push U.S. policy-makers toward choosing certain kinds of foreign policy
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approaches over others. Historians and political scientists usually depict American exceptionalism as having two versions: (1) exemplary (citing John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” speech), or (2) missionary (citing Woodrow Wilson’s quest to make the world “safe for democracy”). The exemplarist version of American exceptionalism portrays the New World as superior to the Old World, a status that can only be maintained by isolating the New World from the Old. Traditionally, historians argued that this exemplary identity inspired an isolationist foreign policy tradition, especially in the early years of the Republic. This was the foreign policy said to be favored by the nation’s founders (for instance, George Washington counseled against “permanent alliances” in his Farewell Address) and meant that the United States was reluctant to involve itself in the outside world, content instead to nurture its own superior political experiment. It was, in other words, how exemplary exceptionalism was expressed in foreign policy. The missionary version of American exceptionalism casts the United States in the role of a missionary, promoting its values of democracy and capitalism around the world. This means an active involvement in world affairs, leading the rest of the world in the right direction. An internationalist foreign policy is often argued to have won over isolationism after the so-called turnaround in U.S. grand strategy from isolationism to internationalism with the events of World War II. Viewing American exceptionalism as inspiring various periods of either isolationism or internationalism is now an outdated perspective in diplomatic history, however. Whereas political science has been a bit slower to absorb the new consensus, the new conventional wisdom is that the United States was always actively involved in international relations. After the Revolution, the United States was actively involved in trade, for example. More importantly, westward expansion meant waging direct or indirect wars against European empires that also harbored imperial designs in North America (not to mention the near extermination of the native population). Conquering the vast territories to the west of the original post-Revolutionary border (the Mississippi River) is now acknowledged to signify foreign policy rather than “frontier” history (which was and is designated as domestic politics). This is related to a revisionist view of how the era of manifest destiny and continental expansion during the 19th century should be studied in the field of history. A country can hardly be expansionist (or even imperialist) as well as isolationist, as historians of U.S. foreign relations point out. Recognizing that isolationism is an outdated concept that no longer holds much sway among historians, the more recent debate in the field is over whether the United States has been more multilateral or unilateral in its
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American Exceptionalism
internationalism, especially since World War I. Political scientists G. John Ikenberry and John Gerard Ruggie argue that American exceptionalism has been the cause of the U.S. commitment to multilateralism since 1945. However, in surveying the U.S. commitment to multilateralism, several authors, such as Michael Ignatieff, have found this commitment to be selective at best, and the reason for this to be American exceptionalism. Hilde Restad argues American exceptionalism in fact helps explain a steady U.S. foreign policy tradition of unilateral internationalism since the inception of the Republic. In conclusion, American exceptionalism is said to help push the United States to choose one foreign policy tradition over others, but there is little consensus among historians and political scientists over what kind of foreign policy tradition has won out.
The Objective Definition of American Exceptionalism It was French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville who first observed that the “position” of the Americans was “exceptional.” In his famous work Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville pointed back to the Americans’ “strictly Puritanical origin” as the first factor explaining this exceptional position. In the 20th century, it was Marxist observers who first applied the objective definition of American exceptionalism in an effort to explain the apparent failure of Marxist socialism in the United States. A famous example of this is the German economist Werner Sombart’s 1906 work Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? By the 1920s and 1930s, Marxists had concluded that the United States proved an “exception” to Marxist class patterns. The historian Max Lerner was the first one introducing the term American exceptionalism, in his book America as a Civilization. In the 1950s and 1960s, scholars as well as social and political commentators argued that the United States was exceptional because of its unique political, social, cultural, and/or economic qualities or characteristics. These analyses stressed the importance of a predominant middle class, the absence of class conflict, and the lack of divisive debates among rival social ideologies. Louis Hartz’s 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America is one of these famous works, which Seymour Martin Lipset built on when writing American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996).
American Exceptionalism in Domestic Politics American exceptionalism is also said to have important consequences in domestic politics. For instance,
Tocqueville not only wrote on what he saw as positive aspects of the United States’ exceptional democracy (at the time), but also noted its negative aspects. For instance, Tocqueville argued that while U.S. society was more free and open than those of Europe, this was only true to a certain extent. A person could say or write almost anything they pleased, but if someone were to stray beyond the bounds of the accepted views of the majority, he or she would quickly experience the limits of “freedom.” Here, Tocqueville was warning against a “tyranny of the majority.” Building on Tocqueville, Hartz argued in The Liberal Tradition in America that the real danger to American society lay in a “tyranny of unanimity” because of the hegemonic ideology of liberalism, which he saw as a kind of objective American exceptionalism. In fact, Hartz was worried about the disciplining consequences of this hegemonic ideology on domestic debate (Hartz was partly reacting to the era of McCarthyism). In electoral politics, American exceptionalism has become an important rhetorical tool since 2008. While it has a long history of being extolled—as Ronald Reagan, for instance, did when invoking the “shining city on a hill”—the term American exceptionalism was not explicitly uttered by political candidates until 2008. In the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, critiques were leveled at candidate, and then president, Barack Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism.
American Exceptionalism and Its Critics Both the subjective and objective definitions of American exceptionalism are contested in social science. First, while the objective approach seems “scientific,” it may be closer to the subjective definition than is commonly supposed. Why use the term exceptional if one does not mean superior? American exceptionalism seems to go beyond the assumption that every nation is unique in its own way. One could argue that undertaking research based on the assumption that the United States is more unique than other countries is itself an expression of a belief in American exceptionalism. The historian Ian Tyrrell has argued that earlier American historians too often simply assumed that the United States was exceptional. This creates a national identity feedback loop—feeling exceptional leads to scholarship based on this assumption, which strengthens the general sense of exceptionalism. Critics of Seymour Martin Lipset’s work have pointed out that his studies do not, in fact, conclusively show that the United States is exceptional when compared with other European countries. For instance, when it comes to collected tax revenues and beliefs in levying higher taxes on the rich, Great Britain is closer to the United States than to the other continental European countries Lipset looks at, as Michael Lind has pointed out.
Anti-Semitism
Second is the critique of historical accuracy. To what extent (if at all) are academics reading contemporary ideas of American exceptionalism too far back into U.S. history? Political scientist David Hughes argues that rather than an old idea or identity, American exceptionalism is in fact a post–World War II discourse. Indeed, as Richard Gamble has shown in his book In Search of the City on a Hill, the speech, or “discourse” as he labels it, we now think of as famous—“A Modell of Christian Charity,” written by John Winthrop in 1630 and today known for containing the phrase “a city upon a hill”— was not always famous. It was President John F. Kennedy’s “city upon a hill” speech in 1961 that inaugurated the phrase’s ubiquitous quotation in political speeches, and of course Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase “shining city on a hill” in his 1989 farewell address that further cemented it in the American national narrative as the defining image of the United States in the world. In short, some authors now argue that the Puritans’ legacy was insignificant and that tracing American exceptionalism back to before the founding of the Republic is disingenuous. This critique is technically correct—the Puritans were a small group with a religious mission that indeed failed after a few generations (long before the United States became a country). Certainly, the English colonies in North America were made up of more than just Puritans; they were also made up of other religious groups (Quakers and Anglicans) as well as colonists with more earthly missions (exploration and profit). What the Puritans arguably did for the nascent American identity, however, was to provide it with early lore and symbols that could be picked up by future generations constructing an American identity. Indeed, because the new American identity had to be constructed in explicit opposition to the British one, the ideology of American exceptionalism became the definition of “American” rather than linguistic, ethnic, religious, and historical ties to Great Britain. The images of the New World as a new beginning (religiously or in other ways) fit particularly well with the United States as a new political experiment in world history. Arguing that American exceptionalism somehow defines the American identity does not equal arguing that the term exceptional—or the term city upon a hill—must be traceable to 1776, or even 1630. It entails arguing that the self-understanding as exceptional must be traceable. In conclusion, American exceptionalism has two different usages in the social sciences and humanities—the subjective and the objective. In addition, the subjective definition is itself contested and comes in many variants. And yet, the concept is repeatedly invoked by researchers, politicians, and Americans in general and is an important piece in the American political and historical puzzle. Hilde Eliassen Restad
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See also End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Liberalism; Multilateralism; National Character; Nationalism; Patriotism
Further Readings Ceaser, J. (2012). The origins and character of American exceptionalism. American Political Thought, 1(1), 3–28. de Tocqueville, A. (1835/2002). Democracy in America (H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, J. A., & Weiss, D. (Eds.). (2011). The rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Gamble, R. (2012). In search of the city on a hill: The making and unmaking of an American myth. New York, NY: Continuum Books. Greene, J. P. (1993). The intellectual construction of America: Exceptionalism and identity from 1492 to 1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hughes, D. (2015). Unmaking an exception: A critical genealogy of American exceptionalism. Review of International Studies, 41(3), 527–551. Ignatieff, M. (Ed.). (2005). American exceptionalism and human rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lind, M. (1996). The American creed: Does it matter? Should it change? Foreign Affairs, 75(2). Retrieved from https://www .foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1996-03-01/ american-creed-does-it-matter-should-it-change Lipset, S. M. (1996). American exceptionalism: A double-edged sword. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. McCrisken, T. B. (2002). Exceptionalism. In A. DeConde & R. D. Burns (Eds.), Encyclopedia of American foreign policy (2nd ed., p. 63). New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Restad, H. E. (2014). American exceptionalism: An idea that made a nation and remade the world. Oxon, England: Routledge. Sombart, W. (1906/1976). Why is there is no socialism in the United States? (P. M. Hocking, Trans.). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Tyrrell, I. (1991). American exceptionalism in an age of international history. The American Historical Review, 96(4), 1031–1055. Wilsey, J. D. (2015). American exceptionalism and civil religion. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism is a negative attitude (evaluation) of Jewish people and their culture relative to other social groups. Like most prejudices, this negative attitude functions to marginalize the target (Jews), limiting their power and influence. Holding and expressing antiSemitic attitudes has a range of implications for political life and social conflict (vs. cohesion). Some of the most
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Anti-Semitism
pressing geopolitical concerns, most notably those in the Middle East, involve consideration of attitudes toward Jews (and/or Israel), including their rights and responsibilities. This entry discusses Jewish stereotypes and attitude trends, various forms or types of anti-Semitism, similarities and differences between anti-Semitism and other prejudices (e.g., sexism), contextual factors that aggravate the prejudice, and several of the more important consequences of anti-Jewish attitudes.
Thinking (Negatively) About Jewish People There is a long historical record of prejudice against Jewish people, culminating in mass genocide by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the mid-20th century. Despite a decline after World War II, negative attitudes toward Jews have persisted in the Middle East and have resurged in 21st-century Europe and America. Accompanying prejudicial attitudes are several widely shared stereotypes about Jews; that is, beliefs about their characteristics and dispositions. Many of these stereotypes are negatively valenced (e.g., manipulative, divided loyalties, materialistic, aggressive, own-group-oriented), although some are positive (e.g., intelligent), and others have meanings that can vary by context or insinuation (e.g., shrewd, powerful, religious). In broader terms, these stereotypes render Jews targets of envious prejudice; Jews are generally considered very competent but relatively unfriendly, providing an illustration of how perceptions of competence and intelligence can nonetheless be used against a group.
Forms (or Types) of Anti-Semitism Like other “isms” (e.g., racism, sexism), both theorists and laypeople have proposed multiple “reasons” underlying or explaining anti-Semitism present in others or themselves. These include factors such as group threat and social position (i.e., power and status used against one’s own group), beliefs that Jews are collectively responsible for killing Jesus, conspiracy beliefs about global domination, identity threats or confusions supposedly faced by nations (Jews often considered more loyal to Israel than their resident countries), declarations of Jews of being a “chosen people,” and the result of targeted propaganda (sometimes produced or at least supported by governments). Like other prejudices, antiSemitism has taken on new forms as social attitudes in the West have become increasingly tolerant, making open expressions of out-group bias less acceptable. Reflecting these distinctions, research highlights several forms (or types) of anti-Semitism. Traditional anti-Semitism is largely blatant, overt, and negative. These expressions often revolve around
religious themes, such as the killing of Jesus, and the socalled “blood libel,” the allegation that Jews historically murdered (often Christian) children for ritualistic purposes. Another, more secular, version focuses on the notion of Jewish conspiracy, the idea that Jews secretly run major businesses, banks, politics, and governments, with global domination their shared goal. In countries such as Poland, the endorsement of Jewish conspiracy typically represents the strongest predictor of a nti-Jewish orientations and actions. Following the Holocaust, there has also emerged in Europe a secondary anti-Semitism. This particular bias centers on the notion that Jews create (and thus are responsible for) prejudices against themselves, a result of inducing guilt in other nations for causing (or allowing) the Holocaust to occur. Secondary anti-Semitism often takes the form of denial and unwillingness to discuss the Holocaust or Jewish suffering more generally. Finally, people can hold more subtle, covert, and relatively unconscious (i.e., implicit) antiSemitic attitudes. These are typically detected through reaction times to stimuli presented on computers (e.g., implicit association tests), with researchers comparing the strength of positive-negative evaluations of different social categories (e.g., Jewish vs. Christian).
Similarities and Differences With Other Prejudices The systematic study of intergroup prejudices increased after World War II, as social scientists struggled to make sense of the global intergroup strife and the genocide of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe. Many influential texts, such as The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno and colleagues, understandably focused heavily on anti-Semitism and authoritarianism, shaping subsequent thinking about prejudice more generally. But an intriguing statistical phenomenon also emerged: those more prejudiced against Jews (e.g., authoritarians) were also more prejudiced toward other marginalized or less powerful groups, such as Blacks, women, the disabled, and so on. This came to be known as generalized prejudice and has proven to be a valuable concept in understanding individual differences in prejudicial attitudes. In this very basic way, anti- Semitism shares roots with other prejudices and forms of intolerance. As noted above, anti-Semitism shares with other prejudices (e.g., sexism, racism) the presence of more traditional (and overt) versus contemporary (and covert) forms, with negative expressions toward out-groups increasingly disapproved of by institutions and schools. In other important ways, however, anti-Semitism is relatively distinct from other prejudices. For one, there exist marked differences of opinion about the
Anti-Semitism
categorization of “Jewish” people; that is, whether being Jewish concerns religion, ethnicity, or social identity. (As race and sexual and gender identities become increasingly more “fluid” and “self-identified,” antiSemitism may become less unique in this regard). Another distinction concerns the relatively small size of Jewish populations. Proportionally, Jews compose only 1% of the population in Europe and 2% in the United States. Other disadvantaged groups are considerably more numerous. Women, for instance, compose 50% of most populations, and Blacks compose approximately 15% of the U.S. population. Despite the proportionally small size of the Jewish population, however, anti- Semitism persists in Europe, in what some observe rather paradoxically as “anti-Semitism without Jews.” This suggests that concerns over power, influence, and group position (see conspiracies above) drive anti- Jewish attitudes, not mere presence or clashing cultures. Relatedly, in Europe Jews are often regarded as the “hidden enemy,” less visible than some other minorities. And, as noted earlier, the presence of secondary antiSemitism illustrates that Jews are blamed for prejudices against themselves (in ways not common or overt with regard to other groups). Yet anti-Semitism also differs from other “isms” in ways that are less problematic for Jews relative to other groups. For instance, there is less social distancing of Jews than of other marginalized groups, with a relatively high degree of social and cultural integration. Moreover, a 2012 Gallup poll indicates that whereas more than 90% of Americans are willing to vote for a Jewish president, less than 70% would vote for a gay person, and less than 60% would vote for a Muslim or atheist. Relative to other social groups, Jews in the United States have been described as a “successful” minority that can provide insights for other marginalized groups seeking better social conditions.
Contextual Aggravators In addition to individual differences in anti-Semitism, for example, as a function of authoritarianism or generalized prejudice, cultural factors play a strong role. The economic hardships experienced by Germans following World War I, in part because of heavy reparations paid to other nations, are commonly credited with ratcheting up resentment toward Jews as a scapegoat target (i.e., a weaker group generally not responsible for the problems). Such external aggravators persist. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, for instance, research demonstrated that among German participants (in both large-scale surveys and experiments) the financial crisis was associated with increased ethnic prejudice if immigrants were held accountable for the financial collapse,
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but was associated with greater anti-Semitism when bankers and financial speculators were held responsible. Here, relatively diffuse threats (e.g., financial collapse) can have grave consequences for specific targets (e.g., Jews), presumably as a result of commonly held stereotypes of Jews as bankers and secretive power brokers.
Consequences of Anti-Semitism Holding negative attitudes toward Jews is associated with negative outcomes for Jewish group members. The Nazis started by taking property and jobs from Jews, but discrimination quickly escalated to genocide, enabled by representations of Jews as both subhuman and responsible for societal ills. Although Jews in the 21st century experience less social distancing than do other minority groups, it is nonetheless the case that those holding anti-Semitic attitudes are more biased against voting for Jews (i.e., allowing them to hold office), support more discrimination in legal outcomes affecting Jews, offer fewer public funds devoted to pro-Jewish causes, and desire greater social distancing. Desecration of Jewish cemeteries and places of worship also surface to express anti-Semitism. Politically, antiSemitism represents a stumbling block to improving relations in the Middle East, one of the hot-button issues for international relations, destabilizing trust and hampering peace talks. Psychologically, anti-Semitism exerts multiple effects. In the United States, most Jews consider anti-Semitism a problem, particularly those highly identified with being Jewish, and those poorer or older. Concerns among Jews also spike following media coverage specifying anti-Semitic phrases, and among those living in areas experiencing more antiJewish action. Reducing anti-Semitism would also benefit other targeted or stigmatized groups, to the extent that prejudices are intercorrelated, and that social movements protecting the rights of one group (e.g., Blacks, women) generally extend over time to others (e.g., gay people). Yet psychological research on anti-Semitism, relative to other types of prejudices, is relatively sparse, with research on the reduction of anti-Jewish attitudes even more in demand. Given the existing research, interventions focusing on guilt over past anti-Semitic transgressions look unpromising given that such an emphasis can fuel secondary antiSemitism. In addition, dominant groups often dehumanize disadvantaged groups when reminded of their own group’s past mistreatment of the disadvantaged. More promising are interventions that would focus on challenging perceptions of group threat based on group position and power, challenging Jewish stereotypes that seem closely linked and relevant to
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Art in Political Campaigns
anti-Semitism, and fostering more inclusive mental representations of Jews as members of nation-states and the global community. Gordon Hodson and Megan Earle See also Discrimination; Genocide; Prejudice; Stereotypes; Symbolic Racism
Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper. Becker, J. C., Wagner, U., & Christ, O. (2011). Consequences of the 2008 financial crisis for intergroup relations: The role of perceived threat and causal attributions. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 14, 871–885. Bergman, W. (2008). Anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe: A comparative perspective. Journal of Social Issues, 64, 343–362. Bilewicz, M., Winiewski, M., Kofta, M., & Wójcik, A. (2013). Harmful idea, the structure and consequences of anti-Semitic beliefs in Poland. Political Psychology, 34, 821–839. Cohen, J. E. (2010). Perceptions of anti-Semitism among American Jews, 2000–2005: A survey analysis. Political Psychology, 31, 85–107. Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902. Imhoff, R., & Banse, R. (2009). Ongoing victim suffering increases prejudice: The case of secondary anti-Semitism. Psychological Science, 20, 1443–1447. King, R. D., & Weiner, M. F. (2007). Group position, collective threat, and American anti-Semitism. Social Problems, 54, 47–77. Schneider, D. J. (2004). The psychology of stereotyping. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Simon, R. J., & Shaler, J. A. (2007). Anti-Semitism the world over in the twenty-first century. Current Psychology, 26, 152–182. doi:10.1007/s12144-007-9012-8
Art
in
Political Campaigns
The term political campaigns conjures up visions of candidates running for elective office: signs and billboards and TV advertisements, outlandish claims and promises, negative personal attacks, rallies, and hoopla. But there are also other kinds of campaigns: those for or against constitutional amendments or local ballot initiatives; for or against particular policies (gay marriage, gun rights, civil and voting rights, etc.); those
seeking to sway the hearts and minds of people to support an existing regime or to demand a new one; and the ultimate political campaign, war. What all political campaigns have in common is the intent to persuade: for or against a candidate, a policy proposal, a power structure. The sole raison d’être for any campaign is to convince voters, or the public generally, that its candidate or message or position is the only right one—and to motivate them to act accordingly. There are many ways to do this, of course, but the use of art—in all of its manifestations—has proven over millennia to be among the most effective means of human communication. One thinks of the Neolithic cave paintings at Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira, and elsewhere, depicting early humans’ encounters with powerful natural forces or the tomb paintings of ancient Egypt, meant to deify the deceased. The sculptures and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome are important not just as statements of lyrical beauty, but of the glory and power of the individual depicted, or indeed of the state itself. In more recent times, films have been employed to win over the public to the purposes of the state: for example, Triumph of the Will (1935), by Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany, or Frank Capra’s Why We Fight film series (1942–1945) sponsored by the U.S. government to bolster public support for fighting World War II. All art forms can be used to convey messages and to persuade. Poetry and prose, architecture, and even dance have been used in political campaigns. In this brief essay, we have space to consider only two: visual arts and music.
Visual Arts Paintings of wars, powerful if violent iterations of political campaigns, go back millennia; vases from ancient Greece show how dramatically they could be depicted. In European painting, battle scenes often showed the bravery and power of victorious generals and armies, and the weakness, even degradation, of the losers. But the power of painting to portray the anguish and horrors of “war as political campaign” is even more convincing than the paintings that glorify it. Two Spanish painters peerlessly demonstrated this in their works illustrating this theme: Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808, and Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937). The same could be said of August Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais (1889). During the 1930s and 1940s, the Works Progress Administration of the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) administration supported hundreds of artists across the full range of artistic genres. Among them a substantial
Assassinations/Violence in Politics
number of painters, writers, and musicians were criticized in some political circles for the leftist messages their art conveyed. Perhaps the most famous was Diego Rivera, the communist Mexican muralist, whose work in Detroit and elsewhere proved highly controversial. Posters have been the most common form of visual art used to persuade voters during election campaigns. In the United States, they were first used in the early 19th century, and no campaign nowadays is complete without them. Robust colors, forceful designs, and a simple but powerful message are their hallmark. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Shepard Fairey’s “HOPE” poster of Barack Obama became a worldwide icon. Posters play an especially important role in campaigns where there are multiparty systems, or where some portion of the population has low literacy rates. Voters learn to identify particular parties with particular colors, or colorful designs, printed on posters. Sometimes they are printed on ballots as well, to help voters locate their desired party and candidates. The most important medium for influencing voter opinion is television commercials. Even local political campaigns now use them extensively. Whether or not they qualify as art is a matter of opinion. But the care and sophistication with which they are designed rival that of any other creative visual presentation featuring powerful images advocating a political viewpoint or mobilizing people for political action.
Music Music has long been a part of political campaigns; what better way to attract public attention than a loud marching corps of brass and drums? The Romans employed this tactic often, and they were undoubtedly not the first. Campaigns to strengthen nationalism and patriotism always employ music, usually of a heroic or bombastic nature: What else is the purpose of national anthems, such as “The Star Spangled Banner,” “La Marseillaise,” or “Deutchland Über Alles”? But music has also been used to build public support for wars: “Yankee Doodle” (1780s), “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (1863), “Over There” (1917), and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” (1912). Similarly, it is used for campaigns about freedom, self-determination, and nation building: Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1805) and Verdi’s highly nationalistic operas, especially Nabucco (1841), are examples. And what July 4th celebration is complete without John Philip Sousa’s marches? Electoral campaigns have relied on music to draw public attention and support. In 1840, William Henry Harrison was the first to employ bands extensively during his presidential parades and rallies; thereafter, all
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candidates did. Perhaps the most famous campaign song was “Happy Days Are Here Again” (1929), used in FDR’s successful 1932 presidential campaign; in more recent times, candidates have borrowed (sometimes illegally) popular tunes of the day to drum up support at rallies. Richard K. Scher See also Activism; Democracy; Identity Politics; Lobbying; Mass Communication; Public Opinion; Social Movements; Values
Further Readings Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. New York, NY: Viking. Edelman, M. (1995). From art to politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. hooks, b. (1995). Art on my mind: Visual politics. New York, NY: New Press. Howells, R., & Negreiros, J. (2012). Visual culture (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity.
Assassinations/Violence in Politics Assassination is the intentional targeting and killing of a prominent individual or group of individuals based upon their role or standing in political society. These acts of violence are distinctly political in nature and have occurred throughout history. Empirical studies of assassination events are sparse, yet these events may have a significant impact on societies and political systems. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 is often described as the spark that ignited World War I. Over time, the types of assassination targets have changed and may still include heads of state (in line with the traditional view of assassination), but contemporary assassinations also include other prominent individuals such as local mayors, law enforcement officials, journalists, and leaders of extremist organizations. This entry briefly introduces the history and norms of assassination, the differing types of assassination, and the state of research into assassination outcomes.
Motivations, Norms, and Legality Violence in politics occurs for any of a number of reasons, such as the desire to destroy the state, to overthrow political elites in power, or to force policy change. Motivations may not always be clear, and questions of
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Assassinations/Violence in Politics
conspiracy often surround assassination events. Assassination is a violent tactic utilized for achieving goals in politics. Prior to the 1600s, assassination was deemed virtuous by some thinkers and considered a legitimate foreign policy tool. Hans Morgenthau argues that assassination was a tool of power politics before the morality of killing leaders came under question in the mid-1600s. Ward Thomas argues that an international norm against the use of assassination emerged, resulting in the prohibition of “treacherous killing” included in the Hague Convention of 1907. Despite the codified prohibition against assassination, many governments, groups, and individuals continue to employ assassination as a tool in achieving goals. The U.S. government instituted several failed assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and devised a plan to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba before his death at the hands of the Congolese and Belgians in 1961. The U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (also known as the Church Committee for its chair, Senator Frank Church) investigated the role of the U.S. intelligence community in assassination plots, resulting in an Executive Order in 1976 by President Gerald Ford banning assassination. President Ronald Reagan reiterated the ban on U.S. government employees’ involvement in assassination by signing Executive Order 12333 (Section 2.11).
the use of assassination has expanded and now reaches beyond the historical understanding of political assassination. Extremist groups such as the Shining Path in Peru and Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain are known to have carried out hundreds of assassinations as part of their revolutionary or separatist campaigns against their respective governments. States such as the United States and Israel also assassinate individuals deemed as risks to national security, such as the U.S. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. Contemporary assassinations suggest three categories: leader, terrorist, and state sponsored. Leader assassinations are isolated events occurring outside of broader campaigns of violence. Examples of leader assassinations include Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Anwar Sadat. Terrorist assassinations occur as part of a broader campaign of violence and target a range of prominent individuals from local government officials to journalists. Examples of terrorist assassinations include the killing of Brigadier General Abbas Hassan Jabr, a militia commander in Iraq, and the failed attempt on the life of Yassin Nur Gas, an interim government official in Somalia, both in 2014. State-sponsored assassinations, as noted earlier, target individuals deemed security risks by sovereign states, such as the targeting of Hamas leaders by Israel and the assassination of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by the United States.
Contemporary Assassinations
Outcomes Research
Despite the outlawing of this form of political murder, assassinations are a commonly used tactic in violent politics in contemporary society. State leaders such as U.S. president John F. Kennedy, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto have all been victims of assassination in modern history. Societal leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Russia were also assassination victims, and certain revolutionary groups (such as the Shining Path in Peru) utilize assassination in their fight against governments. Extremist groups across the globe regularly assassinate members of local governments, and states target members of extremist organizations in the fight against terrorism. Thus, contemporary assassinations encompass varying targets and a range of motivations and goals, which makes it necessary to distinguish assassination types.
A Typology of Assassinations State rulers such as monarchs and presidents are the traditional targets of assassins, but in contemporary times,
Research into the outcomes of assassination events is nascent but studies indicate that leader assassinations in stable democratic states have no impact on the political system and societal repercussions are short-lived. After an assassination event, the public is anxious owing to the shock of the event and the resulting power transitions in government. The public mourns the loss of a leader, but the disruption to society usually does not result in significant societal changes. However, further research is needed in other political systems. Certain assassination events, such as the deaths of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon in 2005 and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan in 2007, have resulted in rioting and violence, with the former resulting in a massive protest known as the Cedar Revolution. Terrorist assassinations are the most prevalent assassination type across the globe, and the broader violent environment within which these killings occur poses significant challenges to empirical research. State- sponsored assassinations are utilized increasingly by states in the war against extremism and are often referred to in the literature as targeted killings. This assassination type is receiving scholarly attention, but
Assimilation
challenges exist in that much of the data are classified and the data that are available are not always reliable. All assassination types merit further scrutiny, and the insight gained into this method of political violence holds the potential to enhance our understanding of violence in politics. Laura N. Bell See also Conflicts, Protracted; Death of Leaders; Drones; Lone Wolf Terrorism; Political Crimes; Relative Deprivation Theory; State-Sponsored Terror; Terrorism, Theories and Models
Further Readings George, D. (1988). Distinguishing classical tyrannicide from modern terrorism. The Review of Politics, 50(3), 390–419. doi:10.1017/S0034670500036317 Iqbal, Z., & Zorn, C. (2006). Sic semper tyrannis? Power, repression and assassination since the Second World War. Journal of Politics, 68(3), 489–501. doi:10.1111/j.14682508.2006.00440.x Thomas, W. (2000). Norms and security: The case of international assassination. International Security, 25(1), 105–133.
Assimilation Assimilation refers to the pressures that ethnic minority groups face to adopt the established norms and values of the dominant group at the expense of their own cultural heritage. Political policies of assimilation attempt to homogenize a population rather than recognize differences between subgroups. This entry provides an overview of the origins of assimilation research, predictors of assimilation ideology endorsement, and a summary of current perspectives on assimilation research.
Overview During the 2014 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola released an advertisement that featured the United States’ patriotic song “America the Beautiful” sung in multiple l anguages, such as English, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic. The ad received immediate pushback and ignited a controversy over whether ethnic and cultural differences between groups in the United States should be celebrated or minimized. Advocates of celebrating differences made various comments about the importance and value of cultural diversity (e.g., “It’s absolutely beautiful that
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America has such diversity; that’s something that should be embraced, not hidden.”). In contrast, advocates of minimizing differences made various comments about how English should be the only language spoken in the United States (e.g., “An American song in other languages . . . not cool.”). Moreover, still other individuals expressed the belief that ethnicity should be irrelevant in the conversation (e.g., “America is for any person whether they are White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.”). These comments reflect opposite perspectives on how diversity should be handled in the United States. One perspective, reflected in the favorable comments about the ad, is referred to as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the belief that ethnic and cultural differences should be recognized and celebrated. Thus, multiculturalism is often associated with positive evaluations of minority group members and their heritage. Another perspective and the focus of the present entry, reflected in the unfavorable comments about the ad, is referred to as assimilation. Perspectives consistent with assimilation are typically related to higher levels of prejudice and ethnocentrism than are perspectives consistent with multiculturalism. Moreover, majority group members (i.e., White Americans) tend to endorse assimilation to a greater extent than do minority group members because assimilation helps preserve their group’s dominant status. An ideology that is somewhat related to assimilation is color blindness. Color blindness is the belief that ethnic differences should be ignored in favor of judging people as individuals. Although assimilation and color blindness converge on the notion that ethnic and cultural differences between groups should be de-emphasized, color blindness is associated with positive evaluations of minority group members as individuals. By contrast, assimilation is associated with negative evaluations of minority group members, coupled with a desire that minorities abandon their cultural heritage and adopt majority group values, beliefs, and practices. In this way, assimilation—more so than color blindness—can function to preserve social inequalities. Assimilation, therefore, de-emphasizes the importance of ethnic differences by encouraging minority group members to relinquish their culture and identity. The next section presents a brief overview of the origins of assimilation research, followed by a discussion of predictors of assimilation endorsement among majority group members.
Origins of Assimilation Research How do diversity ideologies develop, and moreover, contribute to outcomes of intercultural contact? Research on assimilation and other “diversity ideologies” aims to
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Assimilation
answer such questions. Assimilation research stemmed largely from the efforts of John Berry, a prominent researcher in cultural psychology. In response to political policies touting the need for a single “national identity,” Berry sought to identify factors that give rise to various ideologies surrounding diversity in complex societies so as to inform alternative political policies. He came up with eight such “modes of group relations” that arise as a function of whether or not societies (a) are composed of diverse groups that retain their ethnic identity and characteristic cultural features, (b) allow diverse groups the choice to retain their ethnic identity, and (c) emphasize positive intergroup relations. Of particular importance to the present discussion, two forms of assimilation emerged from Berry’s theorizing. Under the “melting pot” form of assimilation, ethnic groups voluntarily give up their ethnic identity to adopt the majority group identity. In contrast, under the “pressure cooker” form of assimilation, diverse ethnic groups give up their ethnic identity because of the demands of the majority group. In other words, both kinds of assimilation involve ethnic minority groups giving up their diverse identities in order to promote positive intergroup relations. Their distinction lies in whether or not diverse ethnic groups are allowed to exercise a choice in forgoing their ethnic identity. Berry’s diversity ideologies reflect perspectives on a broader concept called acculturation, briefly defined as the psychological and cultural processes involved in intercultural contact. When ethnic minorities encounter a new culture, how do they decide whether to retain or forgo their ethnic identity? Evidence suggests that two dimensions operate to produce a range of acculturation strategies: the degree to which people value (a) maintaining their ethnic identity and (b) upholding positive intergroup relations. Based on this perspective, assimilation emerges as an acculturation strategy resulting from the devaluation of one’s ethnic identity and cultural characteristics in order to maintain positive intergroup relations. In sum, assimilation research originated in response to political policies that de-emphasized cultural differences as an alternative strategy for improving intergroup relations. Assimilation can be distinguished from other diversity ideologies in that it touts the sacrifice of diverse ethnic minority identities (sometimes by choice) to ultimately promote the majority group identity.
Predictors of Assimilation Minority group members who endorse an assimilationist ideology experience poorer mental health outcomes and reduced well-being (e.g., lower self-worth, depression), and they evaluate their own group less favorably, than
do those who do not endorse assimilationist ideology. Given the negative consequences of endorsing assimilation among minority group members, it is important to understand when majority group members will be more versus less inclined to adopt assimilationist viewpoints and encourage minority group members to abandon their cultural heritage. Next, four predictors of assimilation endorsement are discussed: perceived threat, conservatism, social dominance, and group identification.
Perceived Threat Research has shown that perceived threats to the majority group can lead its members to adopt a variety of ethnocentric and assimilationist responses to minority groups. One type of threat that the majority group may perceive is the notion that they are no longer the most prototypical ethnic group in their nation. Indeed, many White Americans believe that their ethnic group is the most representative of the “typical American,” and threats to this belief may elicit a variety of negative responses to minority groups. For example, when White Americans are informed that they may no longer be the ethnic majority in the United States in the future, they show an increase in support for cultural assimilation of minorities and a general resistance toward diversity. Perceived threats to majority group identity may be elicited not only by minority groups, but also by foreign countries. In one series of studies, for instance, American participants were brought into the lab during the 6-month anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks so that they were induced to perceive foreign threat. They then read a U.S. senator’s policy document on foreign and domestic intergroup relations. The senator’s document was manipulated to endorse either assimilation or multiculturalism. The results found that when a foreign threat was salient, participants endorsed assimilation as a foreign policy to a greater extent than multiculturalism. Interestingly, however, participants preferred multiculturalism to assimilation as a domestic policy because in that context, minorities were perceived as a common in-group with whom Americans could band together to deal with outside threats (i.e., from foreign countries). Perceived threats, therefore, may influence ideology endorsements differently depending on which perspective best ensures the safety of one’s group and which group (i.e., one’s ethnic group versus one’s nation) is threatened.
Political Conservatism Political conservatism generally refers to the preference for public policies that preserve rather than change the status quo. Assimilation ideology is considered
Assimilation
consistent with political conservatism because it emphasizes the notion that minority group members should change their values to match those of the majority group. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is generally considered inconsistent with political conservatism because it leaves open the possibility that minority group members’ values may change the status quo. In support of the idea that assimilation best preserves the status quo, research has shown that political conservatives are more inclined to endorse assimilation than they are to endorse multiculturalism.
Social Dominance Orientation Social dominance orientation (SDO) refers to the endorsement of social hierarchies and inequalities, and is typically conceptualized as an individual difference that measures the desire to see some groups of people dominate others. SDO is similar to political conservatism in that both emphasize preservation of the status quo. SDO is unique, however, in that it explicitly focuses on support for inequality. For example, people high in SDO tend to support public policies that legitimize group-based inequality (e.g., no same-sex marriage), yet they tend to oppose policies that legitimize group-based equality (e.g., affirmative action). Given that SDO is a measure of support for inequality, it is consistent with the assimilationist perspective that members of the minority group must relinquish their cultural heritage in favor of the majority group’s values. Indeed, correlational research has found that social dominance orientation is positively related to endorsement of assimilation, but negatively related to endorsement of multiculturalism. Moreover, majority group members express greater prejudice against minority group members who resist inequality and strive to maintain their cultural heritage. Interestingly, however, some research demonstrates that SDO is also associated with greater hostility toward minority group members who seem “overly” eager to assimilate to the majority group. According to this research, majority group members may fear that minority group members who are too eager to assimilate are untrustworthy and threaten their group’s cohesiveness.
Group Identification Majority group members who identify strongly with their ethnicity (i.e., who consider their ethnic group membership an important part of their self-definition) are more inclined to endorse assimilation than do those who identify less strongly with their ethnicity. Indeed, among White Americans, ethnic identification is positively correlated with endorsement of assimilation. In contrast,
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among minorities, ethnic identification is unrelated to endorsement of assimilation but is positively related to endorsement of multiculturalism. Together, these findings suggest that ethnic identification may encourage a preference for ideologies that are consistent with the best interests of one’s group (i.e., assimilation for the majority group, multiculturalism for minority groups). Related to the idea that ethnic identification predicts attitudes toward diversity-related policies, high levels of national identification (i.e., importance of one’s nationality to one’s self-definition) have similar effects. For example, in one study, Americans (both White and nonWhite) who read a short article that depicted a foreign (versus domestic) threat had higher subsequent levels of national identification. Importantly, national identification predicted the endorsement of assimilationist ideology as a foreign policy. In a related study, among participants who were high (rather than low) in national identification, assimilation endorsement reduced tolerance of minority groups who wished to maintain their cultural heritage. In other words, high national identification increased the desire to see minority groups assimilate to the status quo. Although ethnic and national identification produce generally similar effects on assimilation endorsement among White Americans, minorities appear more willing to endorse an assimilationist ideology when their national rather than ethnic identification is high. One possible explanation is that national identification is reflective of perceived membership in a superordinate, overarching category (i.e., one’s nation), which bands people together against a common threat irrespective of their ethnicity. In sum, there are several predictors of support for assimilationist ideology, including perceived threat, political conservatism, social dominance orientation, and group (ethnic and national) identification.
Current Perspectives on Assimilation Research Current perspectives on assimilation research continue to define and analyze factors that give rise to assimilationist ideologies, while simultaneously identifying possible solutions to the potential negative consequences of holding such beliefs. Following is a discussion of perspectives that inform the development of assimilationist ideology. Next, perspectives on alternative ideologies related to assimilation are described.
Fourfold Structure of Interethnic Ideology The Fourfold Structure of Interethnic Ideology introduces two orthogonal dimensions that predict diversity ideologies. The first dimension is the degree to which
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Assimilation Emphasis on group differences Low – differences should be overcome
High – differences should be emphasized
Positive
Colorblindness
Multiculturalism
Negative
Assimilation
Separatism/Segregation
Evaluation of the outgroup
Figure 1 The Fourfold Structure of Interethnic Ideology Source: Hahn, A., Judd, C. M., & Park, B. (2010). Thinking about group differences: Ideologies and national identities. Psychological Inquiry, 21, 120–126. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2010.483997/ Copyright © 2010 by Taylor and Francis. Reproduced by permission.
group differences are emphasized (e.g., “We’re all fundamentally the same.” versus “Each group is unique.”). The other dimension involves evaluations of out-group members (positive versus negative). Based on these dimensions, the researchers obtained evidence for four distinct interethnic ideologies: color blindness, multiculturalism, assimilation, and separatism/segregation (see Figure 1). In particular, this diversity ideology framework contends that multiculturalism and color blindness are associated with positive evaluations, whereas assimilation and separation/segregation are associated with negative evaluations of out-group members. Further, color blindness and assimilation are related to the belief that group differences should be overcome, whereas multiculturalism and separation/segregation uphold emphasis on group distinctiveness. Assimilation, then, promotes negative out-group evaluations as well as a reduced focus on group differences, in order to facilitate adherence to a majority group identity. To illustrate, when asked about possible means of increasing ethnic diversity, participants holding assimilationist beliefs endorsed statements such as “If minorities are coming to America, they should give up their ethnic identities and start acting American.”
Individualistic-Collectivistic Model An alternative framework aimed at understanding assimilation posits that the type of culture to which one assimilates can predict when and how assimilation will occur. Specifically, the present model makes a distinction between individualistic versus collectivistic home cultures (where immigrants originated) and host cultures (where immigrants move). Briefly, individualistic cultures are characterized by an emphasis on the individual over the group, whereby individuals are valued for being independent and acting
in the service of their personal interests. Collectivistic cultures, on the other hand, emphasize the group over the individual, whereby individuals are valued for being interdependent and acting to serve the needs of the collective group. The individualistic-collectivistic model contends that assimilation occurs as a result of degree of matching between the home and host cultures. According to this theory, collectivistic immigrants will assimilate more easily into a collectivistic host culture (as will individualistic immigrants into an individualistic host culture). Conversely, assimilation becomes more difficult to navigate when one is assimilating into a host culture with incongruent cultural values (i.e., individualistic immigrants assimilating into a collectivistic host culture and vice versa).
Alternatives to Assimilationist Beliefs Since the early 2000s, research on assimilation has increasingly identified ways to counteract negative evaluations of minority groups and instead promote more diversity-friendly beliefs and attitudes. One solution contends that positive intergroup relations can be achieved by emphasizing in-group–out-group commonalities while simultaneously affording in-group–out-group distinctiveness. Two models provide empirical support for this: the Common In-Group Identity Model and the In-Group Projection Model, both of which are discussed in the sections that follow. Common In-Group Identity Model The Common In-Group Identity Model (CIIM) posits that intergroup bias is reduced via “superordinate categories” of identification that encompass both majority and minority groups. For example, White Americans and African Americans share the superordinate category “American.” Focusing on what it means to be
Asymmetric Warfare
“American,” then, heightens commonalities between White Americans and African Americans while allowing the expression of each group’s distinct characteristics. Empirical findings show that when people are reminded of their membership in a superordinate (versus subordinate) group, they subsequently exhibit decreased racial bias and increased intergroup cooperation. Thus, the CIIM serves to promote more diversity-friendly attitudes by emphasizing similarities yet retaining differences between groups. The In-Group Projection Model The In-Group Projection Model is quite similar to the CIIM in its emphasis on superordinate category salience as a mechanism through which out-groups can be evaluated more positively. However, this model differs from the CIIM in how, specifically, these out-groups are evaluated. In particular, the In-Group Projection Model contends that when a superordinate category is made salient, people project the qualities and characteristics of the in-group onto the superordinate category, which includes both the in-group and out-group. Outgroup members, then, are evaluated using “in-group” criteria and standards of evaluation. If the out-group’s characteristics align with these in-group criteria, outgroup members are evaluated favorably. If not, outgroup members may be evaluated unfavorably. Under the In-Group Projection Model, then, the salience of a superordinate category still has the potential to evoke negative out-group evaluations. Interestingly, the in-group projection model offers an explanation for how assimilation and separation/ segregation ideologies (both of which, according to the fourfold structure of interethnic ideology, involve negative out-group evaluations) arise. Specifically, assimilation and separation/segregation may result from ethnic minorities being evaluated according to the standards and criteria of the ethnic majority. In other words, assimilation and separation/segregation may occur because ethnic majorities are “projecting” their in-group’s characteristics onto out-group members and demanding that the out-group adhere to these characteristics.
Conclusion In sum, assimilation, or the process by which ethnic minority groups adopt the values and customs of the majority, can take several different forms (e.g., it can occur as a result of the minorities’ choice, or as a result of pressure from the majority). Furthermore, endorsement of assimilationist ideology is correlated with a multitude of personality, political, and sociocultural
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variables among both ethnic majority and minority group members. Although endorsement of assimilation often predicts negative intergroup attitudes, such as majority group members’ prejudice against ethnic minorities, research on assimilation in the 21st century has focused on how the ideology may be modified to increase tolerance and acceptance of out-groups. Hannah Osborn, Nicholas Sosa, and Kimberly Rios See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Conservatism; Ethnicity; Group Ideologies; Immigration; Multiculturalism; Race and Ethnicity; Social Dominance Orientation
Further Readings Berry, J. W. (2001). A psychology of immigration. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 615–631. Davies, P. G., Steele, C. M., & Markus, H. R. (2008). A nation challenged: The impact of foreign threat on America’s tolerance for diversity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 308. Hahn, A., Banchefsky, S., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2015). Measuring intergroup ideologies: Positive and negative aspects of emphasizing versus looking beyond group differences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 1646–1664. Levin, S., Matthews, M., Guimond, S., Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., Kteily, N., . . . Dover, T. (2012). Assimilation, multiculturalism, and colorblindness: Mediated and moderated relationships between social dominance orientation and prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 207–212. Verkuyten, M. (2005). Ethnic group identification and group evaluation among minority and majority groups: Testing the multiculturalism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 121. Verkuyten, M. (2010). Assimilation ideology and situational well-being among ethnic minority members. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 269–275. Wolsko, C., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2006). Considering the tower of Babel: Correlates of assimilation and multiculturalism among ethnic minority and majority groups in the United States. Social Justice Research, 19, 277–306.
Asymmetric Warfare Asymmetric warfare describes armed conflict dynamics in which belligerents differ in their relative military power and capabilities, often significantly. Contemporary examples include modern professional armies arrayed against non-state actors, insurgencies fighting government regimes, and transnational armed groups
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Asymmetric Warfare
using terrorist tactics against “soft” (i.e., civilian) targets. The concept’s usage grew throughout the 1990s and especially after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States homeland. Increasingly, asymmetric warfare has evolved to describe not only mismatched capabilities among armed forces but also the complexity of power in war: namely, the idea that a militarily weaker actor can turn a stronger party’s strengths against it or exploit its unrecognized vulnerabilities (e.g., abiding by the laws of war, open societies, technological sophistication) to achieve u nexpected victories. As Ivan Arreguín-Toft notes, asymmetric warfare is “how the weak win wars.” Importantly, asymmetric tactics have long been a core element of warfare and military strategic theory well before their prevalent modern use. Whether the Greek phalanx, Odysseus’s “Trojan horse,” or American Minutemen harrying British redcoats, as Sun Tzu’s ancient Art of War emphasizes, “all warfare is based on deception.” Accordingly, Sun Tzu detailed guidelines for avoiding direct conflict by feigning weakness, by “holding out baits to entice the enemy,” by evading him “if he is superior in strength,” by attacking him where he is unprepared, and by pretending “to be weak, that he may grow arrogant” (1910, n.p.). Over the course of history, each new military tactic, technology, or invention—guns, air power, submarines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), human shields—likewise have spurred such asymmetries, thus changing the power of opponents over each other and creating new conditions for power projection, victory, and defeat. In this way, asymmetric warfare encompasses a broad range of unconventional and unorthodox tactics designed to achieve broad-based strategic effects under specific circumstances. Recent social science scholarship and strategic debate have revolved around whether asymmetric warfare signals a transformation in the nature and forms of warfare or, as Mary Kaldor notes, even the advent of “new wars.” As a species of nonconventional or irregular warfare, asymmetric approaches are often distinguished from 20th century state-centric models in which uniformed armies faced off against one another on defined battlefields, while civilians remained distant from the front lines. In the post–cold war period—with its often brutal proxy, guerrilla, and civil wars and liberation struggles, low-intensity conflicts, and insurgencies— postmodern conflict has changed: non-state actors outpace states, irregular forces replace professional armies, and combat operations move well beyond traditional battlespaces into cities, social media, civilian infrastructure, cyberspace, and economies. For John Kiszely (2006), postmodern warfare is not just new but d ifferent, involving “challenges that are not primarily overcome with the tools of modernity: more advanced technology, firepower, lethality, speed, stealth, digitization, logistics,
network-centric warfare or hi-tech ‘shock and awe’” (p. 177). Likewise, the line between war and peace is eroded, enemies are not easily identifiable as their status and identity may fluctuate, and victory is achieved not on the traditional battlefield but in the public domain and by winning public support. In asymmetric conflict, the fight is not so much military as political, dependent upon winning the support of local populations and institutions of governance. In this respect, Carl von Clausewitz’s classic definition of the fundamental purpose of war—from On War, first published in 1832—remains, even while contemporary asymmetric warfare defies neat delineation: “War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.” In a 2001 U.S. Army War College report, Steven Metz and Douglas Johnson (2001) summarize asymmetric warfare by describing its strategic ends, as “acting, organizing, and thinking differently than opponents in order to maximize one’s own advantages, exploit an opponent’s weaknesses, attain the initiative, or gain greater freedom of action” (p. 5). These authors then echo Clausewitz’s classic definition of war—and acknowledge the “politics by other means” trope—by positing that asymmetric war can be “political-strategic, military-strategic, or a combination of these.” It should be noted that Metz’s and Johnson’s expanded definition of asymmetric warfare highlights both the vast terrain of strategies and tactics it covers, as well as the concomitant difficulties the massive, mostly traditional military force of a nation state can have in combatting it. Their analysis of asymmetric wars reveals varying combinations of length (“shortand long-term”); of planning (deliberate use of asymmetric tactics versus default use, or indeed versus use of traditional warfare); and of “psychological and physical dimensions.” Asymmetric warfare, in other words, “can entail different methods, technologies, values, organizations, time perspectives, or some combination of these.” Corri Zoli See also Civil Disobedience; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Dictatorship; Nonviolence; Social Revolts; Terrorism, Theories and Models
Further Readings Arreguín-Toft, I. (2005). How the weak win wars: A theory of asymmetric conflict. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kaldor, M. (2013). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. New York, NY: Wiley. Kiszely, J. (2008, December). Post-modern challenges for modern warriors (The Shrivenham Papers, No. 5). Australian Army Journal, 177.
Attitudes Mack, A. (1975, January). Why big nations lose small wars: The politics of asymmetric conflict. World Politics, 27(2), 175–200. Meigs, M. (2003). Unorthodox thoughts about asymmetric warfare. Parameters, 33(2), 4–18. Metz, S., & Johnson, D. V. (2001, January). Asymmetry and US military strategy: Definition, background, and strategic concepts. Strategic Studies Institute of the US War Army College Report. Sun Tzu. (1910/1994). The art of war (Lionel Giles, Trans.). Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/ 132.txt von Clausewitz, C. (1982). On war. New York, NY: Penguin.
Attitudes Attitudes are evaluations that include emotional and cognitive components. People can form an attitude about anything, including people, such as politicians, and issues, such as universal health care and global warming. This entry describes two major types of attitudes, how they form, and their relationship with behavior, and summarizes the ways in which attitudes are changed, whether by others or by the attitude holder himself or herself.
Attitude Types Humans occupy busy, complex social environments in which the brain constantly makes categories. Attitudes help make categories of “like” and “dislike” or “approve” and “disapprove.” Many people use the word attitude interchangeably with belief, but there are important distinctions. Beliefs are subject to change if sufficient evidence is presented. When Adam tells his friend that Governor X is going to declare herself a candidate in the next presidential election, he is stating a belief. Based on what Adam has read in the news, he believes this to be true. If Adam discovered evidence to the contrary, his belief could change. Attitudes are how people feel about a topic. If Adam tells his friend that he really likes Governor X and wants her to win the presidential election, he is expressing an attitude; this attitude may be based on some of his beliefs. For every attitude object, people have two types of attitudes. The first type is an automatic, or implicit, attitude. This is a quick, “gut level” evaluation. The second type is a deliberate, or explicit, attitude. This is the careful evaluation made after reflection. Often automatic and deliberate attitudes tell the same story, but sometimes they are surprisingly inconsistent. To measure a deliberate attitude, researchers typically use a self-report measure. For example, to identify a
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deliberate attitude toward the Democratic Party, Cindy could rate the degree to which she prefers the Democratic Party over the Republican Party: strongly prefer, moderately prefer, no preference. Measuring automatic attitudes is a more difficult process. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular tool for measuring automatic attitudes. Words or images are flashed in the center of a computer screen, and test takers have to press keys to sort the words or images into categories of “good” or “bad” as quickly as possible. Speed is important to avoid measuring the explicit attitudes. On the Project Implicit website, volunteers can take an IAT to measure their implicit attitude toward Barack Obama, as opposed to other recent U.S. presidents. In the first round of the test, images of President Obama are sorted into the good category whereas images of other recent presidents (e.g., Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan) are sorted into the bad category. In a later round, this task is repeated with the reverse pairings (Obama with bad, other presidents with good). Attitude is measured as a function of reaction time. If Cindy has a stronger automatic association between President Obama and good, then she should be able to make those pairings more quickly than pairings of President Obama with bad. It is important to understand implicit attitudes because people are sometimes motivated to conceal their explicit attitudes about controversial attitude objects. For example, an individual who dislikes Hispanics may be reluctant to express that attitude on an explicit attitude measure because such views are considered inappropriate or anti-normative. For attitude objects in politics, such as presidential candidates, implicit attitudes tend to be consistent with explicit attitudes; therefore, public opinion polls that measure attitudes through self-reporting tend to be accurate, particularly when the polls are conducted anonymously.
Attitude Formation There are several different explanations for how people form attitudes in the first place. In many cases, attitudes are learned through a combination of social learning and operant conditioning. Social learning refers to the human tendency to observe others and repeat what they do. Operant conditioning is a type of learning that occurs because people are more likely to replicate rewarded behaviors and less likely to replicate punished behaviors. In the case of political party affiliation, most people learn their attitudes from family members. They observe and model the allegiances of the family, which are typically rewarded through mechanisms such as praise. As a result of this learning, people rarely switch
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Attitudes
political parties after they reach middle age. By tracking the attitudes of American adults who participated in national elections between 1956 and 1980, researchers found that over a 4-year period, attitudes changed the most for the 18- to 25-year-olds but hardly any change occurred for the 34- to 86-year-olds. Another way to form attitudes is via the mere exposure effect. Imagine that Danette is asked about her attitude toward a candidate in a local election. She actually knows nothing about the candidate. She has never seen the candidate’s face and doesn’t know anything about the candidate’s positions on the key issues, but she has seen the candidate’s name over and over again because her neighbor has an election sign in his yard. Despite her lack of knowledge, Danette feels positively about the candidate. Through “mere exposure,” she has formed an implicit attitude toward the candidate. As long as an attitude toward an object, like a political candidate, is initially neutral or positive (rather than negative), more exposure can create more positivity. At first, Danette did not have any attitude toward that unfamiliar candidate; her attitude could be described as neutral. But after driving and walking past her neighbor’s sign over and over again, she feels some positivity when she sees or hears the name.
Attitude Change Once an attitude is formed, there is a strong motivation to maintain and justify it. People convince themselves, and others, that their attitudes are reasonable. But the complexity of life tends to create inconsistencies. When Bill learns that Candidate X (about whom he has a positive attitude) engaged in an extramarital affair (about which he has a negative attitude), the inconsistency between these two attitudes creates a tension. Psychologists call this tension cognitive dissonance and suggest that people are motivated to reduce or remove the tension. One way to remove cognitive dissonance is to change one of the incompatible attitudes. For example, Bill could remove the cognitive dissonance created by Candidate X’s extramarital affair by changing his attitude toward Candidate X (e.g., adopting a negative attitude toward Candidate X). Another option for reducing dissonance is to add a set of beliefs that can bridge the gap between attitudes. In the case of Candidate X and the extramarital affair, Bill could develop some new beliefs about the reasons for Candidate X’s affair that leave Bill with a more positive attitude toward the extramarital affair. Cognitive dissonance can be reduced by attitude change, as just described, but it can also be reduced by changes in behavior. A smoker may experience dissonance between the action of smoking and the belief that smoking is
undesirable for one’s health. The smoker could reduce dissonance by changing a behavior; he can quit smoking. Decision making often produces cognitive dissonance because a decision can be inconsistent with an attitude. In a classic study of this form of cognitive dissonance, female homemakers rated eight different household items, such as a toaster and coffeemaker. Then, they were offered two of the items and given the choice to keep one of them. After making their choice, the women rated all eight items a second time. Some of the women were given an easy choice; they had to decide between one item that they originally rated as desirable and one that they had rated as undesirable. The researchers expected that these women would not experience any dissonance and would give similar ratings before and after the choice. The other women were given a difficult choice; they had to decide between two items that they had previously rated as similarly desirable. The researchers expected that dissonance would occur in this hard choice condition because the women had positive attitudes toward both items. By choosing one product over the other, these women were making a choice that was inconsistent with one of their attitudes. The women who were forced to make this hard choice dealt with the dissonance in their post-choice ratings. They rated the chosen item as more desirable than before and the rejected item as less desirable than before. This strategy for dealing with postdecision dissonance is known as “spreading the alternatives.” In the case of the foregoing research study, a fairly simple decision was able to create dissonance and alter attitudes toward a set of common objects. Elliot Aronson offers an example of how postdecision dissonance shaped societal attitudes toward a global event. As president, George W. Bush believed (based on his interpretation of reports from the U.S. intelligence community) that Saddam Hussein, then leader of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction. He held a negative attitude toward Hussein and Iraq; they posed a threat to the well-being of America. Based largely on this attitude, the United States launched an invasion of Iraq, but no weapons of mass destruction were found. For months, the American administration insisted weapons would be found and that the delay was due to the size of the country. Their insistence was one way to reduce dissonance. No weapons were ever found, so President Bush, and many others, had to find other ways to reduce the dissonance produced by the invasion’s high monetary and human costs. Ending the American presence in Iraq was one option for removing the dissonance, but this was, for many reasons, effectively impossible to do. Another option, and the one taken by President Bush, was to add new, or strengthen
Attitudes
existing, beliefs in support of the negative attitude toward Hussein and the action of invading Iraq. He may have then cultivated an alternative belief in the idea that the invasion would liberate the Iraqi people and bring democracy in place of dictatorship.
Attitudes and Behavior In the case of President Bush and the Iraq war, action followed attitude, but do attitudes reliably predict behaviors? In the 1930s, a time when prejudice against Asians and Asian Americans was high, Richard LaPiere traveled the country with a young Chinese couple. They drove more than 10,000 miles, stopping at more than 200 restaurants and accommodations along the way. At every place they stopped, LaPiere secretly recorded the behavior of the owners and staff. At most establishments, they were received and served in a friendly way; only one campsite owner refused to accommodate them. Months later, back at home, LaPiere wrote to each of the places they visited, plus many that they hadn’t. In the letter, he requested accommodation for himself and a Chinese couple. Of the dozens of places that replied to his letter, 92% said they would not accommodate Chinese guests. Assuming that these letters are a reasonable indication of the proprietors’ attitudes, why did their behavior differ so dramatically when the Chinese couple actually showed up? People tend to assume that behaviors follow attitudes because people like to be consistent. But research and personal experience reveal contradictions. Does this mean that the efforts of public opinion pollsters, who attempt to predict voting and other behaviors from measurements of attitudes, are inadequate or inaccurate? In fact, attitudes can reliably predict behavior under certain circumstances.
Attitude Accessibility First, highly accessible attitudes are more predictive of behavior. Although people can generally produce an attitude toward anything and everything, most attitudes are not readily accessible. In other words, they don’t come to mind without a very explicit prompt. Imagine that Meredith, a college student, is asked how she feels about the U.S. government’s policy of not paying ransom for hostages. Meredith has never thought about this issue before and no attitude comes readily to mind. No one will be surprised Meredith decides not to attend a campus demonstration on this issue. Now imagine that Meredith is asked how she feels about her university’s policy of requiring foreign language study. She quickly describes her hatred for this policy and dread of foreign language study. Because people are more likely
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to act in accordance with highly accessible attitudes, it is reasonable to expect that Meredith will act on her attitude. She may avoid the foreign language classes for as long as possible and try to find an “easy” way to meet the requirement. Knowledge of an attitude’s accessibility has been used to make predictions about voting. About five months before the presidential election of Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale, two researchers went to a shopping mall. They asked shoppers to give their opinions on different issues, including an evaluation of each of the two candidates. Using a microcomputer, they measured the speed with which individuals provided their evaluations. This is how the researchers measured attitude accessibility. After the presidential debates, the researchers followed up with the shoppers to see what they thought about the candidates. They followed up once more after the election, asking who they voted for. Individuals who had the fastest responses to the candidate evaluation questions back at the shopping mall were more likely to perceive their candidate’s debate positively and to have voted for their favored candidate. Attitude accessibility predicted behavior 5 months in advance.
Measurement Specificity A second important consideration for the prediction of behavior from attitudes is measurement specificity. Asking someone a general attitude question (e.g., How important do you think it is to reduce environmental pollution?) is not going to predict specific behaviors (e.g., Do you regularly recycle paper and glass at home?). But specific attitude questions (e.g., How important do you think it is to recycle at home?) have a much better chance of predicting specific behaviors. If the goal is to assess the relationship between a general attitude and behavior, it is better to ask about a range of behaviors. For example, responses to the question “How important do you think it is to reduce pollution?” are more likely to predict behavior when behavior is measured as recycling glass, watering the lawn, and using public transportation instead of driving a car.
Theory of Planned Behavior Finally, any prediction of behavior will always be insufficient if it only accounts for attitudes. According to Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior, attitudes are one of three factors that combine to predict a behavioral intention (the aim of acting in some specified way). The other two factors are social norms and control. Social norms are the values or rules, typically unwritten, of a social group. If friends or family members have certain norms
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Attitudes
for a behavior, those expectations can overcome an individual attitude. For example, Emily may have a neutral attitude toward the candidates in an upcoming presidential election. As such, she is unlikely to go out and vote. But if her family members expect political participation and her friends plan to vote, those norms could be strong enough to send her to the polls, despite the lack of strong attitudes. A behavior is also more likely when it is under a person’s control. Emily is more likely to cast her ballot if she has off from work on Election Day and can drive herself to the polling location. In summary, easily accessible attitudes are better predictors of behavior, especially when the behavior in question is easy to control and supported by social norms.
Persuasion Politics is full of attempts to persuade or change someone’s attitudes; research on persuasion has its roots in politics. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, American soldiers were unmotivated to fight Japan. The U.S. Army hired social psychologist Carl Hovland to conduct experiments on the ability of a series of films to persuade the soldiers; ultimately, the films were successful at relaying facts but motivationally ineffective. Hovland went on to develop a program of research on persuasion in messages. His program focused on three components: the source, the content, and the audience.
Source A credible message source is one that is both expert and trustworthy. Most politicians can demonstrate their expertise, but the public tends to believe that politicians are uniquely untrustworthy. To be effective persuaders, politicians need to be seen as trustworthy. Research suggests that trustworthiness can be enhanced by acting contrary to one’s self-interest. In one experiment, participants read about a political candidate who was attacked in an opponent’s advertisement. Participants then read one of three responses by the candidate: selfpraise, counterattack, or praising the opponent. When the candidate acted against self-interest by offering genuine praise for the opponent, he was considered more trustworthy. Participants even expressed more willingness to vote for the opponent-praising candidate, regardless of party affiliation.
Content On the campaign trail, politicians attempt persuasion with carefully rehearsed speeches and arguments, but most political advertising, particularly on television, appeals to the emotions of potential voters, rather than
their sense of reason. Researchers have found that feelings of anxiety can increase attention to campaigns and interest in the outcome of a race. In the 2004 U.S. presidential race, many advertisements used anxiety- provoking images, such as wolves, to focus attention on national security and the war in Iraq. Fear can also motivate people to support their leaders; increases in presidential approval ratings predictably follow increases in government-issued terror warnings. Laboratory research suggests that the amount of fear generated matters. Both too little and too much fear can undermine persuasion. For a fear appeal to be optimally effective, it must contain a clear, reassuring message about how to cope with the threat.
Audience Many Americans dread election season for its abundance of campaign advertisements. Although the perception of political campaigns tends to be that they are more negative than in the past (and voters tend to disapprove of negative campaigning), the evidence may suggest otherwise. Statements made in newspapers by political candidates and major party spokespersons have not grown more negative in tone, nor has the rate of negative ads on television changed markedly. The rate has held constant at around 30% of ads. The public perception of increased negativity is likely due to the increase in reporting and research on negative campaigning; media outlets report on negative ads more regularly (which includes replaying them), leading to the perception that they are more common. In a laboratory study, participants who saw both sides in a campaign use negative ads ended up viewing both candidates more negatively. After hearing the negative ads, the participants even said they were less likely to vote, particularly if voting was inconvenient to do. Sarai Blincoe and Amanda Chappell See also Emotions and Political Decision Making; Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting; Political Campaigns; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Polling; Routes to Persuasion, Central and Peripheral
Further Readings Ajzen, I. (2012). The theory of planned behavior. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 438–459). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Aronson, E. (2012). The social animal (11th ed.). New York, NY: Worth. Beasley, R. K., & Joslyn, M. R. (2001). Cognitive dissonance and post-decision attitude change in six presidential elections.
Attribution Theory Political Psychology, 22, 521–540. Retrieved from http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3792425 Combs, D. J. Y., & Keller, P. S. (2010). Politicians and trustworthiness: Acting contrary to self-interest enhances trustworthiness. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 32, 328–339. doi:10.1080/01973533.2010.519246 Lau, R. R., & Rovner, I. B. (2009). Negative campaigning. Annual Review of Political Science, 12, 285–306. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.071905.101448 Ridout, T. N., & Searles, K. (2011). It’s my campaign and I’ll cry if I want to: How and when campaigns use emotional appeals. Political Psychology, 32, 439–458. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-9221.2010.00819.x
Attribution Theory It is widely accepted that those differing in political ideology (e.g., liberals/left-wing supporters as opposed to conservatives/right-wing supporters) differ in their actions as well as disagree in their attitudes concerning what constitutes “correct” responses to a wide variety of social issues including poverty, abortion, rights for same-sex couples, crime, and welfare (public assistance). In this entry, attribution theory, which addresses perceptions of causality, is used to explain these disparities by identifying the processes that mediate the relations between political ideology and attitudes and behavior. It is reasonable to believe that attribution theory can shed light on these processes because beliefs about causation lie at the very heart of political ideologies. Attribution theory was introduced into psychology by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider in the 1950s and elaborated primarily by Edward Jones, Harold Kelley, and Bernard Weiner. The guiding principle of this framework is quite simple: Identification of the causes of events or outcomes influences emotional reactions and behavioral responses to those occurrences. For example, suppose that your car does not start. Negative events, particularly when unexpected, arouse “why” questions—one pauses to ask: “Why did the car fail to start?” Possible causes may come to mind, or information could be sought to determine the answer to this question. The fuel gauge provides some important evidence, as might inspection of the car’s battery, and so on. If the gauge indeed reads “empty,” then the behavioral response will be to put gasoline in the tank. This attribution-based motivation sequence can be represented as follows: Event (Car not starting)—Causal search (Fuel gauge) —Cause (No gasoline)—Action (Add gas)
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Attribution theorists have most studied these issues in the achievement domain where, for example, perceptions regarding the causes of failure (e.g., low ability, lack of effort, a biased teacher, etc.) influence self- and other-directed emotions, future achievement strivings, and interpersonal behavior. But differences in causal beliefs explain emotional and behavioral responses in a wide variety of contexts, including political behavior.
The Attribution Process The failed car scenario previously introduced provides a simple example of the attribution process. However, the causally instigated behavioral sequence is more complex within the context of human failures. In considering a social “failure” such as poverty, for example, a large number of causes have been proposed, including laziness and a lack of available jobs. Attribution theorists have noted that such causes not only differ qualitatively but also quantitatively on basic characteristics or properties. One such characteristic or so-called causal dimension is labeled locus—whether the cause lies within (internal to) or outside (external to) the person. In this example, laziness is a property of the person, whereas lack of jobs is located in the environment. A second characteristic of causes is labeled controllability, that is, whether the cause is subject to volitional change. Laziness, for example, is regarded as controllable (“It could have been otherwise.”), whereas this appears not to be true regarding job opportunities. A third fundamental property of causes is their stability, that is, whether they appear relatively permanent or changing. Causal controllability is of special importance in the political context because if the cause of a social failure, such as poverty, is perceived as controllable (e.g., lack of effort), then the lazy individual is held responsible for the problem. This is not the case if poverty is perceived as due to factors that are outside of personal control, such as an economic downturn. Consistent with emotion appraisal theory, which specifies that thoughts determine feelings, responsibility judgments given negative events arouse anger and annoyance—we are angry when our child does not study and fails a test and when an impoverished individual does not seek employment owing to laziness. Conversely, if our child fails because of illness or if a person is unemployed because of an economic downturn, then sympathy is experienced, which is a dominant emotional reaction to uncontrollable negative outcomes. These emotions, it is hypothesized, respectively give rise to antisocial (punishment or neglect) versus prosocial (help-giving) reactions. In sum, the attribution process in these examples regarding poverty may be depicted as follows:
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Attribution Theory
Event (Poverty)—Cause (Laziness)—Properties (Internal, controllable)—Personal inference (Responsible)—Emotional reaction (Annoyance, anger)—Action (Antisocial) Event (Poverty)—Cause (No available jobs)—Properties (External, uncontrollable)—Personal inference (Not responsible)—Emotional reaction (Sympathy) —Action (Prosocial)
Political Ideology and Causal Beliefs Political ideology may affect all the components in this behavioral sequence, particularly the perceived cause of an event, outcome, or state. There are various reasons why there might be a linkage between political ideology and perceptions of causality. Conservatives tend to resist social change and value the free market. Hence, they would not be expected to ascribe poverty to the existing system, which would indicate that modifications to that system are needed. Rather, conservatives most often believe that one gets ahead through hard work and that individuals are responsible for their life outcomes. They therefore are likely to place causality for poverty on the poor themselves. Conservatives also are relatively tolerant of inequality, and this causal ascription allows them to justify the disparity between the rich and the poor. Liberals, on the other hand, favor altering the existing system and place causality for poverty on society. This promotes social change and supports their contention that income inequalities are undeserved and not justified. Thus, just as is the case with conservatives, liberals endorse causes of poverty that preserve their pre-existing belief systems. These ideological disparities are illuminated by the metaphor of the father as a strict disciplinarian, which captures the ideology of conservatives. The father expects hard work and places responsibility for outcomes on the children themselves, rewarding high effort and punishing failure to try. In contrast, liberals are captured by the metaphor of the nurturing mother as a source of unconditional love and comfort. The mother offers solace when things go wrong and does not blame the child.
Elaborating Ideological Differences in Attributions for Poverty In the remainder of this entry, attribution theory is used to further explain the different responses of conservatives and liberals to poverty, followed by an examination of reactions to pregnancy abortion and lesbian/gay rights. Because the majority of research has addressed
differences in attributions for poverty, that will be the main focus of concern. A major strength of using attribution theory to explain ideological differences in response to poverty is that a large number of distinct causes can be reduced to subsets that share causal properties. Some research in this area classified explanations for poverty into three causal categories: individualistic causes (internal and controllable by the impoverished person), social causes (external to the poor and uncontrollable by them), and fate (uncontrollable by anyone). Individualistic causes, such as lack of financial management and laziness, are endorsed more by conservatives than by liberals to explain poverty. On the other hand, liberals are more likely than conservatives to attribute poverty to social causes such as discrimination in the job market, economic downturns, or an absence of educational opportunities. Fate-based explanations such as bad luck, sickness, and genetic differences in ability are less marked by ideological differences than are the former two categories of attributions. Ideological differences in attributions for poverty are evident in various settings. Across multiple countries, those supporting right-wing parties blame the poor more for their destitution than those supporting leftwing parties. As a result, conservatives express less support than liberals for policies that provide governmental assistance to the poor (e.g., welfare assistance, foodstamp programs). This has been documented in countries including Australia, Canada, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While there are ideologically based differences in people’s willingness to help the poor, the manner in which social policies are described can also affect public support for programs aimed at assisting those in need. For example, individuals express less support for poverty assistance when the programs are described as aiding “welfare recipients” as opposed to “the poor.” This is due to the fact that stereotypes about welfare recipients evoke stronger perceptions of personal responsibility than do stereotypes about the poor. There are multiple individual differences and belief systems capturing core features of political ideologies that also influence attributions for poverty. For example, high endorsement on personality scales assessing the Protestant work ethic and the belief in a just world are positively associated with both conservatism and attributions that blame poverty on the poor. In contrast, support of egalitarianism and prodiversity beliefs are positively associated with liberal ideology and negatively with attributions for poverty that blame the poor. In turn, these profoundly shape the amount of support that individuals are willing to provide for the poor.
Authoritarian Personality
Abortion Research on abortion attitudes also indicates that an attribution perspective can explain ideologically driven differences in responses to this issue. Overall, conservatives are less supportive of abortion than are liberals, regardless of whether abortions are sought because of pregnancy caused by rape or because the mother/family does not want more children. But certain aspects of conservatism are stronger predictors of abortion attitudes than is overall political ideology. Moral traditionalism, a component of conservatism that captures beliefs in traditional family values and conventional gender roles, particularly relates to higher attributions of controllability, responsibility, and blame for unwanted pregnancy. These attributions elicit less sympathy and willingness to help pregnant women. In a similar manner, traditional gender role attitudes relate to conservatism and opposition to abortion. “Benevolent sexism” (positive views toward genderconforming women) is linked with greater opposition to abortion regardless of the reason for seeking to end the pregnancy. On the other hand, “hostile sexism” (negative attitudes toward women violating traditional gender roles) is only associated with opposition to abortions sought for reasons within the woman’s control, presumably because in these cases the woman is responsible for the pregnancy. Additionally, there are cross-cultural differences in the impact of ideology on abortion attitudes. People in the United States are more influenced by ideological factors such as conservatism and moral traditionalism, which are linked to causal beliefs, than are individuals in Japan, where abortion is not as strongly associated with religious and moral beliefs. Hence, abortion attitudes are more or less influenced by causal information, depending upon the cultural context of the evaluator.
Gay/Lesbian Rights Attributions of same-sex attraction to innate (uncontrollable) causes have increased over several decades. Attributions to genetic causes predict support for gay/ lesbian rights across a wide variety of issues (e.g., job opportunities, adoption rights). The recent global trend toward legalizing same-sex marriage may partly be a reflection of people’s changing beliefs about the causes of same-sex attraction. This attribution change may be due, in part, to decreases in the amount of influence people believe that parents have on the sexual orientation of their children. The connections between political ideology and attributions regarding gays and lesbians also have changed
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over time. Surveys conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s document that Democrats (i.e., liberal Americans) and Republicans (i.e., conservative Americans) were equally likely to endorse innate causes of same-sex attraction. More recently, however, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to endorse less controllable causes. This, in turn, produces more favorable attitudes in regard to same-sex relationships. In sum, linkages between political ideology, causal beliefs, attributions of controllability, inferences of responsibility, and the emotions of sympathy and anger are consistent, pervasive, and central to understanding attitudes and actions regarding many social issues. Bernard Weiner, Danny Osborne, and Lisa Farwell See also Attitudes; Group Ideologies; Political Morality; Values
Further Readings Farwell, L., & Weiner, B. (2000). Bleeding hearts and the heartless: Popular perceptions of liberal and conservative ideologies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(7), 845–852. doi:10: 1177/0146167200269009 Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York, NY: Wiley. Osborne, D., & Davies, P. G. (2012). When benevolence backfires: Benevolent sexists’ opposition to elective and traumatic abortion. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42(2), 291–307. doi:10: 1111/j.1559-1816.2011 .00890.x Sahar, G. (2014). On the importance of attribution theory in political psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(5), 229–249. doi:10.1111/spc3.12102 Weiner, B. (2006). Social motivation, justice, and the moral emotions: An attributional approach. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Authoritarian Personality The authoritarian personality describes an individual who has a need for security and order. The authoritarian personality is characterized by adherence to a conventional set of values, rigidity, conformity, and unquestioning obedience. This construct is clearly a highly relevant issue in prejudice and cross-cultural studies. This entry introduces the concept of the authoritarian personality and its characteristic elements, provides an overview of the history and d evelopment of the construct, and outlines how the construct has been applied by reference to one of its core elements, intolerance of ambiguity.
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Authoritarian Personality
Understanding the Authoritarian Personality The authoritarian personality is a construct derived from a concatenation of personality traits that relate to a need for security and order. This construct describes an attitude or state of mind that is characterized by a conventional set of values, rigidity, unquestioning obedience and scapegoating, and a desire for structured lines of authority. The extreme expression of the authoritarian personality is found in individuals or systems that demand strict obedience or submission to their own authority and maintain this authority through the oppression of subordinates, which usually includes hostility toward minority or nontraditional groups and scapegoating of individuals from these groups.
Historical Development of the Concept The concept of the authoritarian personality developed from psychiatrist Erich Fromm’s work in the 1930s on the authoritarian character, and apparently the term authoritarian personality was first used in 1943 by Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist. Then, from 1943 until 1950, the scholar Theodor Adorno (well known for his contributions to the Frankfurt school of critical theory) and psychologists Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford conducted a long-term, anti-fascist research project, examining the traits of the authoritarian personality. Their study involved the construction of a series of instruments to measure prejudice and included an “A-S [for anti-Semitism] Scale,” a “PEC [for political- economic conservatism] Scale,” and a ranking scale called the “F [for fascist, or for pre-fascist, or for potentially fascist] Scale,” which, for so-called politically correct reasons, later morphed into the “E [for ethnocentricity] Scale.” The findings from their search were published in 1950 in a monumental and now classic 990-page tome titled The Authoritarian Personality.
The Authoritarian Personality Type The findings that were presented by Adorno and his colleagues included a clear picture of the authoritarian personality type. The authoritarian personality •• gives blind allegiance to a particular set of accepted, conventional beliefs or cultural norms; •• sees right and wrong in black-and-white terms; •• has a preference for simplistic answers and sloganistic polemics; •• is resistant to creative and innovative ideas; •• has a need for strong, uncompromising leadership; •• shows respect for those who submit to acknowledged authority;
•• holds a negative view of people in general; •• acts aggressively toward people who do not hold conventional beliefs, or who think and act differently; •• projects feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anger onto a scapegoated individual or group; and •• has a preoccupation with violence and sex.
The extreme expression of the authoritarian personality reflects each of these elements to a high degree, and in particular shows prejudice and acts aggressively toward all minority groups, such as indigenous minorities, Jews, Blacks, gays, migrants, refugees, and people with disabilities.
Intolerance of Ambiguity Adorno and his colleagues also demonstrated, or at least strongly suggested, a close correlation between these deep-rooted traits of the authoritarian personality and ethnocentricity. Here, overt ethnic prejudice is set over against its supposed opposite, which was termed ethnic unprejudice. Central to this dichotomy, according to Frenkel-Brunswik, is the construct portrayed by the variable intolerance of ambiguity, set over against its supposed opposite, tolerance of ambiguity. She argued that the struggle between these two orientations is basic to our civilization. She found that the denial, avoidance, or elimination of ambiguities, often expressed as some kind of distortion of reality, could be understood in terms of a rigid adherence to a norm. No matter how misconceived, outlandish, and out of keeping with reality they are because of the neglect of relevant aspects, assumptions and beliefs, once made, are held and repeated over and over again and are not corrected in the face of new evidence.
Applications of the Authoritarian Personality The authoritarian personality construct is important in the field of psychology in general, and in the specific fields of cognitive, clinical, organizational, educational, occupational, and social psychology. It has many applications, such as in the study of ethnic cultures and national cultures (in particular, with respect to continually evolving understandings of ethnocentricity and ethnic prejudice); in the study of organizations, including business management and the armed forces; and in the study of personality. Specific correlates of the authoritarian personality have also been linked to a broad range of processes such as schizophrenia and creativity. For example, in 1953, and with all due deference given to Frenkel-Brunswik, Morris Stein applied elements of the authoritarian personality, or rather their
Authoritarianism
supposed converses, to understanding the creative personality. Central to Stein’s reworking of these concepts was the creative person’s capacity to tolerate ambiguity, which includes flexibility of thought; tolerance of, or toward, other people; and lack of ethnic prejudice. Sixty years later, tolerance of ambiguity is still cited as a trait of the adult creative personality, as well as a personality trait of both the creative child and the gifted child, even though the research support for each of these is quite weak. Since the 1980s, and following the work of Bob Altemeyer, research on authoritarianism has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. For example, the right-wing authoritarian follower has a personality that features a high degree of submission to established authority, high levels of aggression to support and maintain that authority, and a high level of conventionalism. The right-wing authoritarian leader, on the other hand, wants also to have power, to dominate, and to control others. Peter Merrotsy See also Anti-Semitism; Authoritarianism; Ethnocentrism; Fascism; F-Scale; Personality Traits; Prejudice; Tolerance for Ambiguity
Further Readings Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D., & Sanford, N. (1950). The authoritarian personality [Studies in prejudice series, Vol. 1]. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Retrieved from www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=6490 Altemeyer, B. (2006). The authoritarians. Retrieved from http:// members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1949). Intolerance of ambiguity as an emotional and perceptual personality variable. Journal of Personality, 18(1), 108–143. Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1951). Personality theory and perception. In R. R. Blake & G. V. Ramsey (Eds.), Perception: An approach to personality (pp. 356–419). New York, NY: Ronald. Furnham, A., & Ribchester, T. (1995). Tolerance of ambiguity: A review of the concept, its measurement and applications. Current Psychology, 14(3), 179–199. Merrotsy, P. (2013). Tolerance of ambiguity: A trait of the creative personality? Creativity Research Journal, 25(1), 232–237.
Authoritarianism Authoritarianism is a political and social system in which free thought and plurality are limited, sometimes severely so, for the sake of the survival of a rigid regime. Mass participation is coerced, and subservience to the
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regime’s authority is expected. Obedience of the people is held as a virtue, and dissension is not t olerated. Obedience and conformity are enforced particularly strongly among the ruling elite because authoritarian leaders recognize the grave danger of rebellion among the politically active elite. Political activities and participation among the masses is severely constrained and controlled. These conditions are most commonly met under totalitarian or dictatorial governments, such as 21stcentury China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. However, there can also be elements of authoritarianism in oligarchies, monarchies, or even democracies. The bureaucratization of societies, including democracies, can increase authoritarianism. For example, the enormous bureaucracy of the European Union government system has been criticized as moving Europe away from democracy and citizen participation in decision making. Except for brief periods, most empires and regimes prior to the 19th century were authoritarian. Exceptions include Greek democracy, which functioned at a limited level briefly about 2,500 years ago. The Roman Empire experienced more openness for brief periods, but was also authoritarian for most of the 500 years or so that it survived, particularly when the first emperors were taking power. In addition, the influence of the Catholic Church upheld authoritarian regimes in places like Spain, Italy, and France through the Middle Ages up to the Enlightenment. The divinely ordained right to rule was cited as the reason to keep certain monarchies in power. As it was God’s will that these families continue to rule, any rebellion against their law was not only treason, but elevated to blasphemy. Rather than categorize regimes as “authoritarian” or “democratic,” it is useful to conceptualize a continuum, with “Completely Authoritarian” at one extreme and “Completely Democratic” at the other extreme. Completely Authoritarian
Completely Democratic
There are no 21st-century societies located at either extreme; all societies are located somewhere in a middle ground, usually leaning more toward one direction than the other. Some societies, such as those of North America and the European Union, have made relatively more progress moving toward the “completely democratic” end, but are still far from reaching this ideal in practice. For example, in the United States, voting in political elections is considered a right (and even a privilege, by some), but even in the most important elections barely half the population take advantage of this right. Indeed, some elites are intent on preventing mass participation
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Authoritarianism
in elections by instituting laws—such as requiring photo ID to vote—that prevent marginalized groups from voting. Some other societies, such as China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, have made relatively less progress away from the “completely authoritarian” extreme, but they are some distance away from being absolutely authoritarian. Consequently, although for the sake of convenience we tend to describe societies in broad strokes as either authoritarian or democratic, we must keep in mind that these labels are to some degree misleading.
Emerging “Hybrid” Regimes Authoritarian regimes have been categorized as being of many different types, and there exist many different typologies of authoritarianism. Broad categories include populist authoritarianism, where a powerful, charismatic leader mobilizes the masses for support, such as Khomeini in Iran and Chavez in Venezuela; and personalistic authoritarianism, where rule is through informal relationships and bonds of patronage. This is often found in tribal, multiethnic societies. Scholars have also differentiated between non-electoral regimes, which can be militaristic or monarchical (or theocratic), and electoral regimes, which can be multipartisan, monopartisan, or without political parties. Efforts have also been made to recognize regimes that are a blend of one or more types. However, because of the rapid changes currently taking place across the world, the traditional ways of categorizing authoritarian regimes are not very useful. This is particularly because of the emergence of “hybrid” regimes, which attempt to maintain rigid political control in the hands of a small, unelected leadership, while at the same time adopting the rhetoric and some of the façade of democracy. Examples of this are Russia and Iran, which have been referred to as “democratic dictatorships.” These have been termed competitive authoritarianism, where the powerful unfairly use democratic processes to stay in power. They may leverage strategies such as electoral manipulation, extremely biased media access, and harassment by security forces. Of course, to some extent such manipulations happen even in Western democracies, suggesting that governments, even the most “democratic,” are emerging out of a background of authoritarianism. In both Russia and Iran, the leadership works within the existing constitution to enforce authoritarian rule. Vladimir Putin has shifted back and forth from being prime minister to being president, to enable him to continuously maintain control of the reins of power since the end of the 20th century. Each time he reaches a term limit as president, he can simply shift to being prime
minister—while maintaining absolute power in his own hands by placing one of his subservient followers as president. These “constitutional” maneuvers have enabled him to maintain absolute control and squash political opposition in Russia, imprisoning and outlawing viable opposition leaders. Putin also maintains tight control of the media in Russia. The outcome is that when elections are held, Putin and those who follow him are more likely to be “voted” into office. Similarly, in Iran, the ruling mullahs and their tightly knit band of supporters have worked within the constitution to maintain absolute political control. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran stipulates that the ultimate decider in all matters is a so-called Supreme Leader. This Supreme Leader is not elected by the people, but basically emerges from the political wrangling of the regime’s inner circle. The people do get to vote for candidates for political positions, such as president and members of Majlis (Parliament), but these candidates are heavily vetted, so that only those within the regime’s inner circle have any chance of being allowed to run for political office. Thus, on the one hand, Iranian citizens are severely pressured to participate in elections, but on the other hand the candidates they can vote for are all stooges of the regime. Also, even if “elected officials” decide to go in a different direction, according to the current constitution their decisions can be vetoed by the Supreme Leader. The examples of Russia and Iran demonstrate how even regimes that are clearly authoritarian see the need to try to legitimize themselves as in some ways democratic and inclusive of the wishes of the people. Even the brutal regime of North Korea includes democracy in its title: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Ideology and Authoritarianism The role of ideology in maintaining authoritarian regimes is complex. There are two key issues we need to consider: First, what is the role of ideology in the functioning of authoritarian regimes? Second, what is the relationship between rhetoric and practice, between what is said about an ideology and how it is actually put into practice? The traditional view has been that ideology functions to legitimize an authoritarian system and ensure its continuation. Under this view, capitalist ideology supports the political system in the United States, Marxism/Maoism supports the political system in China, and Islam supports the political systems in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The masses in each of these societies are supposed to adopt the appropriate ideology, and this (supposedly) leads the people to perceive the regime as legitimate and worthy of their support. There is no
Authoritarianism
doubt that for brief periods this scenario may play out, but in practice authoritarian regimes become corrupt and ideology fails to cover up the inefficiency and double standards that arise. Because it is extremely difficult and dangerous for ordinary people to criticize officials in authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China, corruption and inefficiency increase. Ordinary people learn that there is a rift between the ideology of the regime and the ideals it is putting forward (on the basis of Marx and Islam, for example), and they become dismissive of the ideology. However, ideology does play an important role in authoritarian societies by making the ruling elite more cohesive and providing a justification for the leadership to use violence to repress political opposition and control the masses. In authoritarian regimes, conformity and obedience are most rigidly enforced among the elite with respect to political orientation. This is because the leadership knows that the regime will be threatened if the masses recognize there is conflict within the ruling elite. The research by Stanley Milgram and others demonstrates that obedience declines when there is disagreement between authority figures. Authoritarian leaders often instinctively sense this and react extremely harshly against subgroups within the elite who might want to march to a different drum. The harsh treatment of a long list of elite dissidents, from Leon Trotsky in the Soviet Union under Stalin to Mousavi in 21st-century Iran, demonstrates this trend. Thus, in authoritarian societies, a rift opens up between the rhetoric of ideology and the practice of ideology. For example, in 21st-century China there is a growing rift between the rhetoric of Marxism and Maoism, and the practice of an increasing concentration of wealth in a small number of hands. Though Mao advocated the importance of the peasantry, today’s Chinese elite collect an enormous amount of wealth while exerting a great amount of governing force on the personal and economic lives of Chinese citizens. Famous modern examples are Internet censorship laws and the recently relaxed birth limits.
Plato and Popper Before democracy became the ideal, authoritarian rule was often taken as a matter of fact. In ancient Greece, when Plato described his version of the ideal society in his Republic, he emphasized the necessity of a single, powerful leader, assumed to be omniscient. At the head of both the culture and the government is this “philosopher king,” who will take the lead because of his virtue, nobility of mind, and facility at grasping the truth in all things. This philosopher king is the linchpin of the
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society, acting as the guiding conscience and ultimate authority. All others in the society fall into a hierarchy below this king, and all participants have a certain role to play. Karl Popper’s In Defense of an Open Society engages with Plato’s model in detail—the entire first volume is devoted to critiquing it. It fosters what he calls a “closed” society, in which an individual’s function is preordained. “True happiness, Plato insists, is achieved only by justice, i.e., by keeping one’s place,” Popper writes. “The ruler must find happiness in ruling, the warrior in warring; and, we may infer, the slave in slaving.” Popper overlooks the fact that Plato believed that social mobility is essential for the survival of a society, and insisted that the perfect society must allow for individual aptitudes to be recognized. Plato pointed out that parents who are “gold” can have “copper” children, and parents who are “copper” can have “gold” children. If gold children born to copper parents are not allowed to rise in society, and if copper children born to gold parents are not permitted to fall in social standing, then society will eventually collapse. Popper overlooks this aspect of Plato’s Republic; he describes the closed society as an organism; functioning, yes, but unable to be anything more than what it already is. Popper describes a closed society for the sake of promoting its alternative, the open society. Such an arrangement has inherent advantages, he says. Firstly, it is freer by nature. Because a closed society imposes constraints on class and duty, there is a sociological necessity of entering into some tasks or agreements. In the perfect open society, all relationships and agreements are entered into only by choice. This is echoed in a view falsely attributed to feminist scholars Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon; both were accused of claiming that all heterosexual sex is rape, as the oppressiveness of the patriarchy undercuts a woman’s ability to consent. Popper’s work is written to defend the view that an open society is inherently better than a closed, authoritarian one. However, authoritarian governments do have some attractive benefits. Many cultures flourished under authoritarian governments, if only for a time: consider the Renaissance art funded by the Medicis, for example. Authoritarian governments can often act much more efficiently than unwieldy democratic governments. For the Romans, the recognition of this efficiency led to the creation of dictatorships. As originally conceived, a dictator was elected by the republic for a 6-month term, and only in emergencies. Great pains were taken to appoint a man who would not seek power beyond that period. This way, the Roman government could default to the efficiency of single leader when the clumsiness of the Senate would be a liability to whatever crisis was at hand.
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Authoritarianism
Human Nature and Authoritarianism Authoritarian regimes and all-powerful governments now feel backward to the Western world and other democratic areas, despite the relative newness of widespread democracy. This attitude took over the West during the Enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th centuries. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans are intrinsically free, and to unduly limit this freedom with unbounded authority is a perversion of the natural order. This thinking was cited during the American and French Revolutions and continues to be a major influence in today’s democracies. Rousseau’s The Social Contract, for instance, states that a government’s legitimacy comes not from power or ideology but from the consent of its people. Likewise, Locke writes of one’s duty to rebel against an oppressive government, and Kant’s entire metaphysics and meta-ethics are based on the idea that maximizing freedom is humankind’s primary motivation. These Enlightenment thinkers, and many others, brought personal liberty to the forefront of human experience. They captured the overall tone of a world moving more toward democracy and away from restrictive governments. All rely on liberty being a fundamental human characteristic, a moral imperative, or something in between. This line of thought makes authoritarianism both immoral and unnatural, and something to be abolished. It still has strong echoes. Modern American foreign policy, for instance, still reflects this view, and it was given as a motivation for every war and conflict in the 20th century. However, this is also a good illustration of the authoritarian continuum: Much as the United States proclaimed moral causes for waging war in areas like Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, these acts were also an attempt to retain America’s influence over various parts of the globe. Human behavior and human history have a different story to tell. As noted, the move away from authoritarian governments is a recent one, relative to all the societies of the past. If personal freedom is such a powerful and natural motivator in humans, how did authoritarian regimes survive for so long despite the wishes of the people? It may be that, rather than seeking freedom, we naturally seek authority to make some of our difficult decisions for us, freeing up time and energy to focus on smaller matters. This may be as simple as letting monarchies fight over succession because one ruler or another does not greatly impact people’s everyday lives. Alternately, it may be as sinister as condoning morally outrageous actions out of a perceived lack of influence. Particularly after the Holocaust, psychologists became interested in how—yet
again—a citizenry could be complicit in a government’s heinous acts without rebelling. The question of “human nature” and authoritarianism is highlighted by a number of now classic psychological studies. Foremost among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram on Obedience to Authority, the title of his most famous book. Milgram demonstrated that under certain conditions, people with normal psychological profiles will obey authority figures to inflict (what they believe to be) serious and even lethal electric shocks on others. The prison simulation study of Philip Zimbardo demonstrates a similar tendency for ordinary people to inflict severe harm on others, in line with what they believe to be the norms and rules of the authorities. These studies, as well as historic cases of genocide, raise questions about how “natural” it is for at least some part of the human population to follow authoritarian dictates.
Globalization and Authoritarianism Perhaps the most important challenge of the 21st century is to safeguard and strengthen democracies, and prevent the growth of authoritarian rule. This is going to be a major challenge in the context of accelerating globalization. On the surface, globalization is leading to more open borders and increased international communications. Electronic communications and globalization are assumed to lead to more openness around the world. However, in practice, there are two factors that might result in the growth of authoritarianism in the present century. First, authoritarian regimes have been very quick at adopting advanced electronic technologies to further control their populations and strengthen their regimes. Surveillance is now much more sophisticated, and new methods and equipment (such as facial recognition programs) are allowing security forces to identify, track, and capture “dissidents” of all kinds. Authoritarian regimes are filtering and controlling communications for the masses and using these same communications systems to strengthen the regime. Second, globalization is taking place in a way that increases security threats. This arises from mass movements of refugees, terrorist attacks, and various security threats that have increased a sense of collective identity threat in Western societies. The result is that Western governments are moving, sometimes intentionally, to limit freedoms and curtail civil liberties. Some research shows that perceived threat magnifies authoritarian dispositions and motivates them toward intolerance or aggression. The presence of an external threat does not immediately correlate with governments passing more restrictive laws; rather, it brings out the worst in those already predisposed to authoritarian attitudes.
Authoritarianism
This is a more subtle way in which authoritarianism is increasing in the 21st century. Lauren Covalucci and Fathali M. Moghaddam See also Authoritarian Personality; Civil Engagement; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Conformity; Groupthink; Obedience; Social Revolts; Totalitarianism
Further Readings Casper, G. (1995). Fragile democracies: The legacies of author itarian rule. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the cold war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2013). The psychology of dictatorship. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Moghaddam, F. M. (2016). The psychology of democracy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Popper, K. S. (2012). The open society and its enemies. London, England: Routledge. Wahman, M., Teorell, J., & Hadenius, A. (2013). Authoritarian regime types revisited: Updated data in comparative perspective. Contemporary Politics, 19(1), 19–34.
B Stephen Walt, another key neorealist thinker who studied the diplomatic history of the Middle East between 1955 and 1979, believes it is important for a state whose power is on the rise not to appear threatening to weaker states. Walt also believes that states tend to balance rather than bandwagon. However, Walt argues that in some cases a state may choose to bandwagon. This can happen when a state is threatened by another state that is much stronger, when no other allies are available and when an armed conflict is already in progress.
Bandwagoning State In international relations, bandwagoning takes place when one state or a group of states ally with a more powerful state or group of states. Bandwagoning can happen when a state seeks to join an alliance as well as when a state relies on a more powerful partner within an existing alliance for its security. This entry provides an overview of three possible forms of bandwagoning and concludes with a discussion of the possible ways to further the study of bandwagoning.
Bandwagoning for Profit
Bandwagoning as Giving In to Threats
Walt’s theory, according to which states balance against threatening ones, opened up space for a discussion regarding weaker states’ tendency to bandwagon in international relations. Despite the fact that the majority of scholars of international relations argue that bandwagoning is a rare event, there is a tendency to understand bandwagoning as giving in to threats instead of countering them. Randall Schweller made an important contribution to seeing bandwagoning in a different light. In Schweller’s view, bandwagoning is not just the opposite of balancing but a strategy that a state can adopt in order to gain profit. Schweller’s research suggested that bandwagoning for profit is far more widespread than Walt suggested. A state chooses to bandwagon even in the absence of a threat to its security and with the hope of obtaining material rewards. As evidence of bandwagoning for profit, Schweller made reference to the Italian Wars from 1494 to 1517, the wars of Louis XIV from 1667 to 1679, and the Napoleonic Wars from 1806 to 1813. In these cases, bandwagoning was not only a strategy to
Kenneth Waltz, a key neorealist thinker, made a distinction between balancing and bandwagoning. Both balancing and bandwagoning share the same goal: to achieve security in a situation of potential or ongoing conflict. Balancing occurs when a state or a group of states seeks to curb the rise of a potential hegemon, whereas bandwagoning takes place as a state or a group of states allies with a stronger state. In Waltz’s view, balancing is more likely than bandwagoning to happen in international relations. In international history, each global empire has ultimately been balanced by rising powers. According to Waltz, this is because states tend to balance and not bandwagon. Therefore, balancing and bandwagoning offer two distinctive pictures of international relations. In the balancing picture, states whose power rises will attract opposition and prompt other states to coalesce in an effort to contain them. In the bandwagoning picture, states that bid for hegemony will be seen as potential allies by weaker states, as the latter may obtain benefits from them.
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avoid capitulation but a behavior aimed at reaping the benefits of joining a stronger governing entity.
Bandwagoning as Intra-Alliance Behavior Schweller’s theory underlined states’ tendency to bandwagon in terms of alliance formation. After the end of the cold war, and with the demise of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991, the United States of America emerged as the single most powerful state in international politics. More than 20 years later, we have still not witnessed a balancing effort against the United States, although transnational terrorist organizations have emerged. The majority of states in international politics, particularly in the Western hemisphere, have tended to bandwagon with the United States in the post–cold war period. European states have especially sought to maintain their alliance with the United States even in the absence of a common and overriding threat to their security. This has prompted scholars to study bandwagoning as intra-alliance behavior. Lorenzo Cladi and Andrea Locatelli have analyzed European states’ post–cold war defense policies and found no evidence of balancing against the United States in the post–cold war period. Rather, European states have sought to stay as close as possible to their more powerful Americanally. This behavior was defined as bandwagoning in terms of intra-alliance behavior. European states have bandwagoned and will most likely continue to bandwagon with the United States for two reasons. First, balancing against the United States has no purpose from an economic point of view and second, it is in the European states’ interest to behave as status quo powers, that is to maintain the existing conditions of the international system as they are. This form of bandwagoning should not be understood as mere free riding. In this situation, European states would benefit from U.S. resources without paying for them. Bandwagoning as intra-alliance behavior implies that weaker states contribute to the functioning of the alliance by, for instance, specializing in low-intensity security scenarios and leaving high-intensity military operations to the stronger state. Current studies on bandwagoning indicate that a state or a group of states can decide to bandwagon on the basis of their willingness to maintain an alliance with a more powerful state. A study of bandwagoning as intra-alliance behavior is relatively recent and deserves further attention. In fact, it represents a possible way to explain how states behave within important alliances in contemporary international relations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Lorenzo Cladi
See also Allegiances; Ecopolitics; European Union; Globalization; International Security; Nationalism; Realism; United Nations
Further Readings Cladi, L., & Locatelli, A. (2012). Bandwagoning, not balancing: Why Europe confounds realism. Contemporary Security Policy, 33(2), 264–288. Schweller, R. (1994). Bandwagoning for profit: Bringing the revisionist state back. International Security, 19(1), 72–107. Walt, S. (1987). The origins of alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character James David Barber is, perhaps, the best known p olitical scientist to have published in the area of the p sychological makeup of presidents and presidential candidates. Barber’s renown no doubt stems from his prediction prior to the inauguration of Richard Nixon that Nixon would be inclined to become defensive and cover up any major threat to his presidency (and self-esteem) stemming from a scandal. This prediction turned out to be spot on and focused the media spotlight on Barber and his work. His publication of the first edition of The Presidential Character in 1972 brought his earlier prediction into the larger context of his studies on personality and political behavior, a field dating back at least as far as the work of Harold Lasswell in the 1930s and 1940s.
Affect, Activity, and Self-Esteem Typically, voters think of character as roughly equivalent to honesty, integrity, ethics, or morality. Barber took a very different view of character. For him, character derives from two behavioral dimensions: affect and activity. Both of these are, to a certain extent, a function of an individual’s self-esteem. That is, some office seekers may engage in political activity to compensate for low self-esteem. Once established in politics, other politicians may avoid challenges to their self-esteem, especially by staff and advisers. These patterns, argued Barber, are developed very early in life and can be observed in an individual’s interactions with family, friends, and authority figures. In other words, how a child gets and keeps the attention of
Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character
his or her parents or teachers may demonstrate for us how that child will eventually attempt to get our attention or that of other political actors. Thus, if bullying on the playground was successful for them, then they may well turn to bullying in political settings. Such early behavior may also be a reflection of how the child is compensating for threats to his or her conception of self. Is the bullying behavior a mask or facade covering up for a child who lacks the ability to accept loss? Similarly, has the child retreated from unnecessary interactions because he or she deems himself or herself to be unworthy of the attention of others? Either scenario could have significant consequences for the behavior of that individual should he or she attain elected office.
Four Categories of Character The two dimensions Barber used to create his categories of character—affect and activity—intersect to create four different character types, usually described in a 2 3 2 matrix. The affect dimension describes the individual’s emotional approach to the job. More simply, does he or she like the work? Activity is a description of how the individual chooses to respond to his or her like or dislike of the job. Or does the individual engage physically in the job, is there an ambitious policy agenda, have the parameters of the office been expanded, or has the spotlight been sought out to make the officeholder’s case? The intersection of these two dimensions creates the four categories of active-positive, active-negative, passivepositive, and passive-negative. Barber’s intent, in part, was to provide a predictive tool to allow us to select that person best qualified (by his or her character) to serve as president. The four categories then could be used to determine which of the candidates seeking the presidency would be best suited to serve. The active-positive category is the “most desirable” category, in that an individual in this category of character would provide the best chance of a successful presidency and provide the appropriate exercise of power to achieve his or her goals. Individuals in this category have high self-esteem, are flexible, and easily admit to and correct their mistakes. As John F. Kennedy was able to accept responsibility for his administration’s mistakes in the Bay of Pigs invasion and later make adjustments to group decision-making processes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he serves as the ideal activepositive president. The active-negative category is the “least desirable” character type. This is the category epitomized by Richard Nixon, in Barber’s analysis. It is this placement of Nixon in this category that garnered Barber his greatest criticism, for being partisan in his assessment. Active-negatives suffer from low self-esteem and may
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compensate by working hard and striving for perfection. However, they get little psychological or emotional reward for that work. Barber argued that this extra effort may be an attempt at escaping from anxiety caused by that lack of self-esteem. The passive-positive character, like William H. Taft, tends not to be personally assertive and can be an affection seeker. Individuals in this category may compensate for their lack of self-esteem with “a superficial optimism.” Voters may find that optimism and an apparent ability to be agreeable and cooperative to be attractive political qualities. Politically speaking, other politicians may learn to take advantage of such qualities, setting these presidents up for failure and voters for disappointment. Officeholders like Dwight Eisenhower fit, according to Barber, into the last category, the passive-negative. Eisenhower is, perhaps, the epitome of this category. As a military officer, Eisenhower could easily have seen politics and the presidency as “dutiful service” and thus compensation for otherwise low self-esteem. Certainly, Eisenhower’s warnings of the dangers stemming from the “military-industrial complex” would fit with B arber’s assertion that these individuals would make statements inclining toward injunctions. Certainly, it has been argued that individuals in the two active categories are more likely to seek out their party’s nomination and the office. Of the more passive character types, the passive-positive is more likely to appear active by virtue of his or her agreeable nature. It is also logical to assume that under our current system of selection, the passive-negative individual would have a hard time first choosing to run for president, and second, convincing voters to support him or her. That is not to say that a passive negative could not attain the office; it is possible he or she could ascend to the office to fill a vacancy. Barber argued that the first four presidents each fit one of his categories. He compared George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower as a passive-negative since they were both sought out by others to serve. The reaction of John Adams to his defeat at the hands of Thomas Jefferson, Barber argued, was an indication of his lack of self-esteem, thus placing Adams in the active-negative category. Jefferson, on the other hand, being one of the first presidents to expand the government and the powers of the president, belonged in the active-positive category. Barber saw James Madison as a “constitutional philosopher” thrust into public service who allowed the country to “drift” into armed conflict with Britain, making Madison a passive-positive. Contemporary conservatives likely bristle at the idea that Barber had predicted Ronald Reagan would be a passive-positive president, but that was Barber’s
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Barber’s Typology of Presidential Character
prediction in the Washington Post on January 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s first inauguration. Barber noted that Reagan, having sought the office twice and waged a vigorous campaign each time, only appeared to be active. Barber argued that passive-positives, because of their agreeable nature, can often appear to be something they are not. Barber noted that as early as the summer of 1987 he was predicting George H. W. Bush to be an active-positive. Jimmy Carter certainly looked, to Barber, as though he would quite clearly be an active- positive, but by the 1992 edition of The Presidential Character Barber uses hindsight to hedge his bets a bit. Using the affect dimension as more of a scale than a dichotomy, Barber suggested that while on the whole still positive, Carter may not have thought of his term in as pleasurable a manner as other active-positives. Carter’s categorization, both the prediction and Barber’s review of it, provides insight into some of the inherent problems with Barber’s work. Carter himself admitted to being influenced by Barber’s first edition. Since the publication of the first edition of Barber’s book, presidents and presidential candidates have all wanted to try to at least appear to be active-positives. While this might not pose a problem for a determined researcher, it could certainly hinder the use of Barber’s methodology as a tool for making vote choices. So too, the case of Carter points to the related problems of the relative aspects of both activity and affect, or how active one president is versus another (or how positive one is versus another) and what Barber himself points to as the potential for circumstances helping to reshape a president’s character.
Responses by Other Scholars While many scholars praise Barber’s engaging style and presentation, they also note the difficulty with availability of appropriate data. One scholar, Ruth Morgan, has questioned the validity of using the “retrodiction” of past presidents to predict the behavior of future presidents. Barber’s work, while not perfect and subject to valid criticism, can be useful in helping to understand why presidents behave the way they do. Using biographical and other historical data to make comparisons of presidents on this basis can be effective in helping students understand the larger context in which presidential decision making and action take place. James David Barber is just one of many noted scholars to have tackled the psychology and style of presidents and the impacts of those factors on their behavior. The work of Alexander and Juliette George is frequently cited by those doing further research in this area. Dean Simonton has published in this field as well, but among the most prolific scholars working in this
field of study are Nelson Hargrove and Michael Nelson, who have also employed 2 3 2 matrices to help categorize and understand presidential personality. James Pfiffner has explored the relationship between presidential behavior and “sexual probity.” Among those who have attempted to apply other measures of personality to the study of presidential behavior are Ray Choiniere and David Keirsey, who endeavor to employ the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test to understand presidential behavior. There are no doubt many more scholars working in this area, and although the data are not always the easiest to obtain and the analysis may be free of bias for one president over another, it is an interesting and enjoyable subject—there is a certain “fun” involved in the attempt to psychoanalyze our leaders. Jim Twombly See also Authoritarian Personality; Bully Pulpit; Charisma; First Ladies; Political Candidates, Physical Appearance of; Self-Esteem
Further Readings Barber, J. D. (1992). The presidential character (4th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Choiniere, R., & Keirsey, D. (1992). Presidential temperament: The unfolding of character in the forty presidents of the United States. Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis. George, A., & George, J. (1988). Presidential personality and performance. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hargrove, E. (1966). Presidential leadership: Personality and political style. New York, NY: Macmillan. Hargrove, E. (1974). The power of the modern presidency. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hargrove, E. (1993). Presidential personality and leadership style. In G. Edwards, J. Kessel, & B. Rockman (Eds.), Researching the presidency: Vital questions, new approaches. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hargrove, E., & Nelson, M. (1984). Presidents, politics, and policy. New York, NY: Knopf. Lasswell, H. (1930). Psychopathology and politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lasswell, H. (1948). Personality and politics. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Morgan, R. (1975, February). Review of The presidential character: Predicting performance in the White House by James David Barber. The Journal of Politics, 37(1). Nelson, M. (2003). The psychological presidency. In M. Nelson (Ed.), The presidency and the political system (7th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Pfiffner, J. (1998). Sexual probity and presidential character. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 28, 4. Simonton, D. K. (1987). Why presidents succeed: A political psychology of leadership. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bellicism
Bellicism Bellicism refers to a war-centric approach to the state formation process, statecraft, and social change. The bellicist theory emphasizes a nonlinear process of political development and state formation. A prominent exponent of this theoretical orientation, Charles Tilly, wrote: “War made the state and the state made war.” In his 1990 book, Coercion, Capital, and European States: A.D. 990 to 1990, he advanced a war-centric military, political and social argument for state formation and evolution of state institutions. English historian Sir John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) and German historian Otto Hintze (1861–1940) noted that political development cannot be the result of solely internal dynamics. They referenced the external milieu and contextualized how “intense government” developed in “intense pressure.” Seeley explained the expansion of the British Empire and the struggle among the European powers for conquest for new territories. Hintze studied Prussian history and examined the development of Prussian political institutions. He, too, contextualized the exogenous factors and indigenous sociopolitical dynamics in the process of Prussian political structure and institutions. Subsequently, Jeffrey Herbst, Robert Bates, Miguel Centeno, and Cameron Thies have examined relations between external conflict and state building. The bellicist approach argues that states acquired territory, resources, arms, and men to wage wars. War making leads to evolution of the institutional apparatus of the modern state, which grew out of this war-making function. Cycles of extraction and coercion facilitated each other. Extraction refers to the extractive power of the state, such as collection of revenue, resources, and so on; coercion refers to the use of force. In war making, states may apply extractive power through coercive means. Bellicist theoreticians believe that states offer citizenship, and other civil and political rights such as universal suffrage, and parliamentary representation, as incentives to win popular support. Similarly, government welfare and social services are provided to extend the state’s capacity and to secure social legitimacy. The state monopolizes or acquires a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence through “war fighting” capacity. Finally, state military power evolves into civilian institutions, the army is institutionalized for fighting external war, and the police are responsible for maintaining law and order. From the bellicist perspective, the administrative structure is considered to be a by- product of making or preparation for war. The bellicist approach was developed on the premodern and modern European state system. It is primarily a Eurocentric account of the making of the
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modern state system. After the feudal system broke down and the monarchic system gradually declined in Europe, the modern European nation-state system emerged through war and territorial acquisition. Conquest and annexation of neighboring territory was the norm. Lord Curzon reflected in his Frontiers (1905) that “the majority of the most important wars of the century have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandizement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition . . . tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e., wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms” (quoted in Atzili, 2012, p. 28). European countries extracted resources to build the armies to wage war against each other. The evolution of modern state institutions was facilitated by the development of capitalism, modern technology, and the legitimacy of state coercion. Bellicist theory has been further elaborated in explanations of state formation in other continents; however, such applications have been contested. In some cases, war making leads to the development of strong institutions and enhanced state capacity. Elsewhere, it has had only limited success. In the case of Vietnam, scholars have found that war making has enhanced the capacity of state institutions, though only in limited terms. By contrast, war and persisting conflict, for instance, in Afghanistan, has destroyed state institutions. Cameron Thies demonstrated that both intrastate (internal) conflict and interstate rivalry affected the state in Latin America. The bellicist approach imagines a military-centric worldview. It primarily stresses the internal coercive power and hostile external environment. The relevance of bellicist theory in the contemporary world order is highly debatable. Europe itself has evolved into a supranational sui generis political system that was envisioned as leading to lasting peace and prosperity. Regional integration makes interstate military rivalry almost obsolete in Europe. In broader terms, the process of globalization, increasingly growing interdependence, proliferation of technology, and movement of people have gradually negated the boundaries created by states and impacted the concept of the war-centric approach to the institution of the state. As recent electoral trends indicate that far-right parties are gaining political momentum, however, it remains to be seen to what extent emerging antiglobalization sentiments will shape future policy. Dinoj K. Upadhyay Further Readings Atzili, B. (2012). Good fences, bad neighbors: Border fixity and international conflict. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
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Bicameralism
Taylor, B. D., & Botea, R. (2008). Tilly tally: War-making and state-making in the contemporary Third World. International Studies Review, 10(1), 27–56. Thies, C. G. (2005). War, rivalry, and state building in Latin America. American Journal of Political Science, 49(3), 451–465. Thies, C. G., & Sobek, D. (2010). War, economic development, and political development in the contemporary international system. International Studies Quarterly, 54(1), 267–287. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Bicameralism Bicameralism is a political system in which the legislative branch is composed of two chambers, usually known as the first and second chambers (or lower and upper houses). More than one third of all national p arliaments are bicameral. It is a system that is common in both presidential and parliamentary democracies, and it is particularly prevalent in federal countries. Where second chambers exist, they vary greatly in terms of powers and composition, and these two factors together shape the impact that they have on legislation. This entry provides an overview of the main characteristics and forms of bicameralism and concludes by discussing the main arguments regarding its merits.
Powers Bicameral systems are often classified as “strong” or “weak” depending on the powers of the second chamber. While the powers of second chambers vary along a number of dimensions, the most important distinction is between those that can veto legislation and those that cannot. Strong upper houses are particularly common in federal systems. Examples include the Swiss Council of States, which has a veto over all legislation, and the German Bundesrat, which has a veto on legislation that affects the interests of the federal states. Weak second chambers can only delay the passage of legislation and can ultimately be overruled by the first chamber. Examples include the British House of Lords and the Japanese House of Councillors. Many second chambers (including chambers that are weak in terms of their legislative powers) also have a role in protecting the constitution, and in several cases, constitutional amendments must be passed by a majority of both houses. Other important functions of second chambers include scrutinizing the government and providing advice on legislation.
Composition The impact that second chambers have on legislation is shaped not only by their formal powers but also by the nature of their composition. When second chambers are composed along similar lines to the first (sometimes referred to as “congruent bicameralism”), they are less likely to use their powers to veto or delay legislation. Usually, the two chambers of a bicameral system are designed to represent distinct sets of interests. While the principle of equal representation for all citizens in the first chamber is firmly established in all democratic systems, representation in second chambers can take many forms. Some second chambers were originally designed to represent a particular social class, such as the representation of the nobility in the British House of Lords. Others include seats that are allocated to particular groups in society, such as vocational groups (Ireland), linguistic communities (Belgium), or indigenous groups (Colombia). By far, the most common principle of representation in second chambers today is territorial. Under this system, seats in the second chamber are divided among subnational units. Following the original model of the United States Senate, some upper houses allocate an equal number of seats to each territorial unit, regardless of population. In other cases, such as Germany and Canada, more populous states are given greater weight, but smaller states are still better represented than they would be under a strictly proportional system. Territorial representation in the upper house is most common among federal countries and countries with strong regional or local government. Second chambers also vary in terms of how their members are selected. The most common method of selection is direct elections. However, in some cases, members of second chambers are appointed by state governments (for example, the German Bundesrat) or by an important officeholder such as the prime minister, governor-general, or president (e.g., the Senate of Canada). In yet other cases, members of second chambers are elected by members of local or state assemblies (e.g., the Austrian Bundesrat).
Merits and Effects of Bicameralism The merits of bicameralism have been debated for centuries. It has been argued that second chambers that depart from the principle of equal representation for all citizens are undemocratic, while second chambers that are based on this principle of representation are redundant as they replicate the first chamber. This argument was expressed by the 18th-century political writer Abbé Sieyès as follows: “If a second chamber dissents from the first it is mischievous; if it agrees it is superfluous.”
Biopolitics
Proponents of bicameralism tend to focus on the quality of legislation produced under the system. Bicameralism can prevent the problem of the “tyranny of the majority” (whereby the interests of the majority of the population are pursued by the government to the detriment of the minority), particularly if the second chamber has veto power and represents interests distinct from those of the first. The need for concurrent majorities in two chambers also makes decision making more stable and less prone to radical changes in policy. The flip side of this is that decision making can be slowed down to the point of gridlock, particularly when the party or coalition that holds a majority in the lower house does not control the upper house. Procedures usually exist to resolve disagreements between chambers so as to reduce the potential for gridlock. One common procedure is the conference committee, where delegates from each chamber meet to negotiate a compromise agreement. Some countries have abolished their upper house on the grounds of its being undemocratic or ineffectual, including New Zealand (1950), Denmark (1953), and Sweden (1970), while in some other countries (including Britain and Ireland) there have been ongoing calls for abolition or reform. However, where second chambers are based on the representation of territorial units, questions regarding their democratic merits are not as common. On the contrary, territorial representation is often viewed as a necessary counterbalance to the popular will represented in the first chamber, particularly in federal countries where there are significant regional imbalances in population. Rory Costello See also Decision Making; Parliamentarism; Political Deliberation; Representative Democracy; Unicameralism
Further Readings Heller, W. B. (2007). Divided politics: Bicameralism, parties, and policy in democratic legislatures. Annual Review of Political Science, 10, 245–269. Russell, M. (2001). What are second chambers for? Parliamentary Affairs, 54(3), 442–458. Shell, D. (2001). The history of bicameralism. Journal of Legislative Studies, 7(1), 5–18. Tsebelis, G., & Money, J. (1997). Bicameralism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Biopolitics The term biopolitics was first used by Rudolf Kjellén, a Swedish political scientist working at the University of
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Uppsala. As a student of Friedrich Ratzel, a German geographer, he developed organic state theory, suggesting the state to be an organic, living form. His 1916 book outlined the field of geopolitics, with Volk as a racial or ethnic conception of the state based on autarky or self-sufficiency. Adolf Hitler adopted policies based on Kjellén’s key principles. Biopolitics in its first generation of use refers to the intersection of two fields, as well as organicist and biologically based conceptions of the nation and state, and was part of Kjellén’s broader project of “geopolitics” concerning natural and border territories. French theorist Michel Foucault uses the term in his lecture series “Society Must Be Defended,” held at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1976. Foucault charts the shift from the power of sovereignty to power over life: “Make live and let die” represents the shift from human as body to human as species, marking the beginning of the birth of biopower. Biopower’s fields of application include control over population and the regulation of death that illustrate articulations of discipline and regulation. In a concrete example, Foucault refers to workers’ housing and sexuality and discusses relations between biopower and racism, especially with Nazism (see Lecture 11). In the Course Summary, Foucault writes: In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects. Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. And, finally, rather than privileging the law as manifestation of power, we would do better to try to identify the different techniques of constraint that it implements. (pp. 265–266)
Contrasting it to political power in the Middle Ages, Foucault gives the examples of “ratio of births to
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Blaming the Victim
deaths,” “the rate of reproduction,” and patterns of fertility. Biopower and biopolitics refer to a new technology of state power that extends over the physical and political bodies of a population considered as a global mass. Foucault first used the term biopower in The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1978), to refer to the emerging techniques for subjugating the body and controlling the population, and he used the term in relation to practices of public health. Biopower seen as the prerogative of the state defined a new technology of the power over life and death for the control of entire populations. In the lectures Security, Territory, Population (delivered at the Collège de France in 1978), Foucault (2009) refers to “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy” (p. 1). Foucault charts the emergence of the human sciences within disciplinary institutions and the transition from an anatomo-politics of the human body and the juridical form of sovereign power to a new set of regulatory techniques of the “scientific” state addressed to biopolitics of the population that made use of statistics as a stochastic power to “massify” the population. These new techniques reflect the growing maturity of the founding disciplines of life sciences, biology, mathematics, political economy, demography, and statistics, and their newfound applications for administering and controlling the life and health of a population. Since the 1970s, the concept and approach has grown very rapidly, with nearly 10,000 references in a database search on a huge variety of topics: biopolitics in Putin’s Russia, ecology, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, race, children’s bodies, information, data consumption and surveillance, property rights, terrorism, capital, urban planning, colonialism, health protection, international relations, immunity, globalization, and more. In the period since Foucault first used the concept in 1975, the twin concepts biopower and biopolitics have become used across the disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. In addition, major theorists like Giorgio Agamben (1998), Antonio Negri (Hardt & Negri, 2000), and Roberto Esposito (2008) have addressed these concepts. Agamben views the Holocaust as the ultimate exemplar of biopower; Negri and Hardt understand biopower as the extraction of some kind of value or surplus from that life, regulating all social life; Esposito focuses on the centerpiece of the “paradigm of immunization.” Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley See also Conflict Theory, Realistic; Ecopolitics; Group Ideologies; Nationalism; Partisanship; Race and Ethnicity; Sociobiology
Further Readings Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Esposito, R. (2008). Bíos: Biopolitics and philosophy (T. Campbell, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1978). Introduction. In History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Pantheon. [Reprinted as The will to knowledge. (1998). London, England: Penguin.] Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population. New York, NY: Picador. Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79 (M. Senellart, F. Ewald, & A. Fontana, Eds., & G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blaming
the
Victim
Victim blaming holds victims responsible, in some way, for their own misfortune. One might assume a natural sympathy for victims of crime or injustice, but that is not the case for many victim blamers. Victims can elicit a variety of negative social responses. People often derogate the poor and unfortunate due to deeply rooted myths about justice, innocence and guilt, defensive attitudes, and denial of unpleasant historical realities. Victim blaming can occur in a variety of contexts but has been increasingly linked to the criminal justice system and controversial political debates about health care reform, gender equality, the welfare state, and the “war on terror.” The term was coined by William Ryan in his book Blaming the Victim (1976). Ryan sought to discredit long-standing stereotypes in American society about race, gender, and class. He chastised the tendency of Americans to link poverty, illness, and underachievement in minority communities to ignorance and a general lack of motivation. Victim blaming is grounded in an individualist culture that sees “sinking or s wimming”— failing or succeeding—as based entirely on one’s own efforts. By this definition, minority children are often accused of being genetically and culturally programmed to fail; their parents are admonished for neglect and underachievement. Their unemployment and poverty are linked to family and culture. Victim blaming identifies personality traits, behaviors, or risk factors exhibited by victims as having contributed in some way to their plight. Victim blaming can result in focusing attention away from the perpetrators and the deplorability of their act, toward those who
Blaming the Victim
have experienced the harm. This may give agency to those previously silenced but it can cause other problems. The victim’s history often becomes a point of contention in determinations of blame and responsibility. A focus on the victim’s identity and behavior may illuminate facets of the crime but can also decrease its seriousness and call into question compensations the victim would otherwise have been due. Victims whose moral stock has been compromised in some way are apt to be discredited and denied. In all cases of victim blaming, victims are censured, dismissed, and portrayed in unsympathetic ways, r esulting in their further disempowerment. Blaming the victim tends to conceal the role that broader social structures play in systemic forms of oppression, discrimination, and violence. For example, laws, customs, practices, and institutions may perpetuate exclusionary boundaries based on race, class, or gender and thus absolve individuals who would otherwise be held personally accountable for discrimination. For example, seeing famine as an inevitable result of drought or other natural causes obfuscates the responsibilities that leaders have in promoting conflicts and inequitable policies that remove people’s capacity to mitigate famine’s harmful effects.
Victimology and the “Culpable Victim” Blaming the victim has a long history. However, it only recently entered the social scientific lexicon through academic studies of criminology. The subfield of victimology emerged as a study of the victim, the offender, and society as a whole in the 1940s and 1950s. The practice of victim blaming was present in research into victims from the very start. Some of the original pioneers focused on the interactions between victims and offenders in criminal justice cases. Benjamin M endelsohn suggested that many criminal incidents involved people who knew each other previously and even had strong interpersonal relationships. As a result, the victim was already implicated in some way in the crime. Mendelsohn’s notion of a “culpable victim” was introduced in a typology that measured the victim’s degree of innocence or guilt. Six categories of victims are (1) completely innocent victims, (2) victims with minor guilt, (3) voluntary victims, (4) victims more guilty than the offender, (5) victims who alone are guilty, and (6) the imaginary victims. Classifying victim types in this way accounts for the relative liability of victims in different circumstances. Through this framework, cases abound in which victims are perceived as careless, negligent, or provocative or as having exercised poor judgment. Hans von Hentig’s concept of “victim precipitation” also positioned the victim as a causal factor in the criminal act, particularly in cases of homicide. For example,
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in gang violence, a “hit” is often perpetrated against a gang—or rival gang—member who owed money. Implication of the victim in criminal activities can serve to reduce empathy that society would otherwise have toward a typically “innocent” or noncriminal victim.
Victim Blaming and Just World Theory Victim blaming was reintroduced by psychologists in the context of just world theory in the 1960s. Social psychologist Melvin Lerner studied why societies accept as valid social norms that perpetuate suffering. On the basis of extensive research, Lerner discovered that people blame victims for their suffering because they believe in justice. This belief is expressed by such platitudes as “what goes around comes around” or “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.” Innocent victims threaten this view and make the world seem a more random place. Belief in justice restores our sense of control and is thus found to promote greater happiness overall. At the same time, however, belief in a just world may reduce empathy for those who suffer. It is tempting to think that victims must somehow be responsible for defying the laws of justice. Lerner’s experiments involved administering electric shocks to participants. These experiments showed that subjects commonly denigrated victims whom they could not help or when they persisted in the experiment despite suffering inflicted upon them. In other words, suffering and situations of helplessness in this research generated disdain rather than empathy.
Contemporary Politics of Victim Blaming Victim blaming resurfaced after the Second World War with the convergence of key political trends that brought victims prominently into view. A growing international human rights regime promoted concepts of human security, humanitarian intervention, and Responsibility to Protect (R2P). These discourses rendered victims around the world the responsibility of us all. New kinds of victims were thus recognized as new kinds of offenders of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide came to be prosecuted. The host of new laws and institutions prompted many more victims than ever before to claim their rights. With new victims came new forms of victim blaming in contemporary debates about identity politics, sexual violence, the welfare state, and the “war on terror.”
Identity Politics and the Welfare State Victim blaming surfaced in response to the identity politics of the 1990s in Western industrialized countries.
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Identity politics describes new forms of political activism that first appeared at the margins of liberal democracies with their growing recognition of human rights. Identity groups coalesce around shared experiences of injustice rather than fundamental belief systems, political ideologies, or party platforms. Struggles for recognition of race, religion, gender, class, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and so on, bound people together by instilling pride and gaining social recognition for their plight. Feminists decried sexism and misogyny. African Americans denounced racism. And a host of others including—but not limited to—LGBT rights groups, the disabled, indigenous peoples, linguistic minorities, and religious groups appeared on the political agenda. The rise of identity politics prompted a virulent reaction from the majority, particularly as the world economy underwent recession in the 1970s and welfare states were faced with significant cutbacks. Victims were accused of inflating perceptions of harm in order to gain access to ever scarcer social resources. Critics pointed to the emergence of a “victim complex” by which the aggrieved were accused of exaggerating the negative intentions of others, refusing to take responsibility for their own actions, and even gaining short-term pleasures from self-pity. The broader accusation is that a “politics of trauma” has pervaded liberal democracies, wherein victimized groups must compete for recognition in a kind of “Victimhood Olympics.” So it goes, the greater the victimhood, the greater the recognition and benefits accrued to victim claimants. In her 2006 book, The Cult of True Victimhood, Alyson M. Cole argues that this coherent campaign against victims has propelled the backlash against affirmative action, multiculturalism, and the welfare state. This campaign curiously defines victimhood as weak, passive, and dependent on the one hand, and aggressive and criminal on the other hand. As the victim label generates increased criticism, terms like hero and survivor have gained traction. However, victim blaming has become a central tool in justifying racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, structural violence, and other discriminatory attitudes toward minorities. Victim blaming has been central to controversial debates about welfare reform and affirmative action programs. The motivation behind these programs was to “level the playing field” by giving preference to previously marginalized groups in college admissions, employment, and distribution of benefits. However, their legacy prompted widespread accusations of reverse discrimination: that is, the unfair treatment of majority groups resulting from such preferential policies being overused and manipulated. Many typically conservative White men complained that their ambitions were
obstructed by practices that favored a women or racial minorities. The enduring legacy of this perceived sense of entitlement, articulated from small-town America to White supremacist groups, was portrayed in Michael Kimmel’s 2013 book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Victims were accused of taking “more than their share” and, as television personality Bill O’Reilly put it, destroying the foundations of “traditional America.” In the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan blamed “welfare queens” for collecting excessive benefits and manipulating the system at the taxpayer’s expense. This accusation has been increasingly waged against political and legal systems that defend litigious clients. Consider, for example, the controversial case of Rose Cipollone, who blamed the tobacco industry for the fatal lung cancer she developed after smoking for 40 years. Cipollone sued and won damages to be paid by the cigarette manufacturer in the amount of $400,000.
Criminal Justice and Rape Victims have become a central focus in the criminal justice system due to growth of the victims’ rights movement since the 1970s and the law-and-order movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Both trends resulted from increased concern about crime and the need for restitution to the victim in criminal proceedings. However, many criminal cases have actually worked against the dignity of the victim, particularly in relation to rape and sexual assault where focus often rests on the victim’s morality (not the perpetrator’s). In such cases, rape victims are incriminated for having abetted victimization. Women are blamed for dressing provocatively, walking alone at night, and thus “asking for it.” This recriminating attitude was evident in the infamous case of the Central Park Jogger in New York in 1990–1991. It was also blatantly expressed in the 2011 Cleveland, Texas, rape case in which the defense attorney described the preteen gang rape victim as a seductress. Crossexaminations of rape victims can often replicate the original suffering, leading many to accuse the system of perpetrating a second victimization or “raping the victim” a second time over.
“War on Terror” The war on terror has also brought about new understandings of what it means to be a victim in the international arena, prompting new forms of victim blaming. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, served to legitimize a host of punitive actions that minimized and even ignored the plight of the thousands of casualties— men, women, and children—who suffered at the hands of American and allied military power and sanctions abroad.
Blue-Dog Democrats
The many compromises made in pursuit of American and European security were defined as necessary to fight terrorism. With American patriotism at an all-time high and widespread belief in its democratizing mission, otherwise unjustifiable actions were justified. Perception of America’s enemies in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as less than human led to new classifications of “enemy combatants” (as opposed to “prisoners of war”) and their egregious treatment at the hands of American military personnel and CIA interrogators at Guantánamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The rise of Islamist movements worldwide served to further exacerbate victim blaming practices. This was evident when the aspirations of the Arab Spring turned sour in around 2011–2012. That Islamist groups gained power through the very structures intended to promote liberal democracy—as the 2012 presidential elections in Egypt confirmed—Middle Eastern peoples were blamed for rejecting progressive values and thus held responsible for their own plight. The lack of democracy in Middle Eastern societies continues to be attributed to “backward cultures” and the persistence of traditional norms and customs.
Conclusions It is unsettling for people to think they might play a part in broader systems of oppression and injustice. However, we are often complicit in victimizing processes. Blaming victims only serves to perpetuate suffering and deepens underlying systems of depravity and abuse. Victim blaming has been identified as a serious problem worldwide, particularly in cases of sexual violence and the persistence of rape culture. For this reason, an international day against victim blaming was established with the first “slut walk” in Toronto, Canada, on April 3, 2011. Since then, this day has been devoted to campaigning against victim blaming in all aspects of its practice and in support of victims and their plight. Obviously the blame approach is ineffective in resolving problems of violence and terminating cycles of abuse. As many scholars and advocates have noted, the only way forward is to substitute victim blaming with meaningful efforts toward empowerment and healing. Tami Amanda Jacoby See also Affirmative Action; Discrimination; Human Rights; Identity Politics; Race and Ethnicity
Further Readings Brown, W. (1993). Wounded attachments. Political Theory, 21(3), 390–410. doi:10.1177/0090591793021003003
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Cole, A. M. (2006). The cult of true victimhood: From the war on welfare to the war on terror. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Jacoby, T. (2015). A theory of victimhood: Politics, conflict and the construction of victim-based identity. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43(2), 1–20. Kimmel, M. S. (2013). Angry White men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York, NY: Nation Books. Lerner, M. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York, NY: Plenum. Meister, R. (2002). Human rights and the politics of victimhood. Ethics and International Affairs, 16(2), 91–108. Ryan, W. (1976). Blaming the victim. New York, NY: Random House. Wolfgang, M. E., & Singer, S. I. (1978, Fall). Victim categories of crime. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 69(3), 379–394.
Blue-Dog Democrats The Blue-Dog Democrats are a coalition of fiscal conservatives in the United States House of Representatives who advocate, among other things, a balanced federal budget and paying down the nation’s debt. Since the group’s inception in 1995, its positions on many issues have bridged the gap between the more ideologically extreme positions held by leaders of the two major political parties. When trying to understand the intersection of political science and other social sci ences, the rise of Blue-Dog Democrats is significant because it suggests the value of embracing a collective ideology to differentiate oneself for political purposes. What follows is a brief history of the Blue-Dog Coalition, a discussion of some of their early successes, and a narrative that elaborates some of the challenges the group faces in the second decade of the 21st century.
History In its brief history, the Blue-Dog Coalition has built a positive reputation as important actors in the policymaking process; however, their ability to broker compromise has waxed and waned over time. The group first formed in the 104th Congress (1995–1996) in an attempt to give a voice to conservative and moderate Democrats in the aftermath of large Republican electoral gains in the November 1994 congressional elections. The group’s colorful name is a spinoff from an earlier euphemism for Democratic Party stalwarts. The early terminology referred to loyal Southern Democrats as “yellow dogs.” In 1928, Senator Tom Heflin (D-AL)
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Blue-Dog Democrats
broke with his party and supported Herbert Hoover for president, over Al Smith. In response to Heflin’s disloyalty, party members from the South chastised him, maintaining they would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. The moniker Yellow Dog Democrat has alternatively been used in a positive light to distinguish party loyalty, and negatively, to denote a person who is loyal to a fault, one who fails to consult his or her conscience when determining his or her policy positions. Late in 1994, Representative Pete Geren (D-TX) allegedly used the label blue when he claimed moderate Democrats in the House had been choked blue or silenced by liberals within the Party. The new caucus combined Geren’s comment with the earlier moniker to name the group and distinguish itself as an independent voting bloc representing fiscally conservative policy positions. The contemporary group has Southern roots, which can also be traced to a group known as the Boll Weevils. The Boll Weevil label, however, is often rejected by members of the Blue-Dog Coalition because it is linked to the anticivil rights positions of White Southern Democrats. Importantly, over the past 2 decades, Blue-Dogs have been drawn from all regions of the country, albeit principally rural districts.
Early Successes In the 104th Congress (1995–1997), Blue-Dog Democrats played an important role in brokering a deal that produced an overhaul of the country’s welfare system. In the 107th Congress (2001–2003), Blue-Dogs helped to orchestrate passage of campaign finance reform legislation. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the group worked to inform the public about what they perceived to be the fiscally irresponsible tax policies of the George W. Bush Administration. Their argument was that tax cuts had gone too far and resulted in deficit spending and an accumulation of debt. In the 2006 midterm elections, the group led by Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) scoured rural areas of the country for electoral opportunities for fiscally conservative Democrats. The group was often successful, helping the Democratic Party regain majority status in the lower chamber in 2007. In the 111th Congress (2009–2011), the first Congress of the Barack Obama administration, the caucus had more than 50 members in the House and the group’s considerable influence was seen in the successful passage of health-care and Wall Street reform legislation. Many times their influence has pulled their more liberal party colleagues toward a more centrist policy position.
Blue-Dogs in the Second Decade of the New Millennium The electoral success of the Blue-Dogs was not sustained in the second decade of the 21st century. The group suffered electorally, particularly in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. In the 114th Congress (2015–2016) there were only 15 House members still recognized as part of the Blue-Dog Coalition. The drop in numbers came about as the result of electoral defeat and redistricting, which led to strategic early retirements. Republicans often targeted Blue-Dog Democrats because they guessed the more conservative-leaning districts, represented by Blue-Dog members, afforded electoral opportunity for Republican Party candidates. Though small in number, the caucus continues to tout its relevance by framing the group as a moderate voice capable of bridging the considerable ideological divisions that exist between mainstream Democrats and Republicans. Many who closely watch the legislative process believe the group represents an important opportunity for bipartisan compromise if, or when, the intense party polarization that exists in Congress subsides. Last, it should be noted that some Democratic Party leaders continue to criticize the Blue-Dog Coalition for ignoring the well-being of low-income Americans. They believe the group’s conservative economic positions ignore the needs of many poorer citizens in need of government services. Others argue the move to the right by these Democrats has cost the party the support of key constituencies. Scot Schraufnagel See also Conservatism; Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Group Ideologies; Identity Politics; Partisanship; Political Deliberation
Further Readings Carmines, E. G., & Berkman, M. (1994). Ethos, ideology, and partisanship: Exploring the paradox of conservative Democrats. Political Behavior, 16, 203–218. Fleicher, R., & Bond, J. R. (2004). The shrinking middle in the U.S. Congress. British Journal of Political Science, 34, 429–451. Forster, M. D., & Rehner, T. (2011). The White male Southern Democrat: Endangered species or already extinct? Race, Gender & Class, 18, 230–237. Lublin, D., & Voss, D. S. (2003). The missing middle: Why median-voter theory can’t save Democrats from singing the boll-weevil blues. The Journal of Politics, 65, 227–237. Schiffer, A. J. (2000). I’m not that liberal: Explaining conservative Democratic identification. Political Behavior, 22, 293–310.
Brand Identity and Loyalty Thomsen, D. M. (2014). Ideological moderates won’t run: How party fit matters for partisan polarization in Congress. The Journal of Politics, 76, 786–797.
Brand Identity
and
Loyalty
The field of brand studies suffers from relative conceptual fuzziness. There is no consensus on a definition of brand and several related terms, which are often used interchangeably. A brand can be defined as the ensemble of visual elements, histories, expectations, experiences, and practices that are associated with a given organization and differentiate it from competitors. It is an intangible asset of the organization that can have a major effect in activating a target audience. Therefore, organizations often invest heavily to build their brand identity. Brand identity refers to the way in which an organization wants a given target audience to perceive its brand, as the fundamental attributes of the organization. Therefore, brand identity refers specifically to an analysis internal to the organization. Sometimes brand identity is taken to refer only to the graphic-design solutions supporting the visual identity of the organization. This interpretation is too limited, as brand management requires instead a comprehensive understanding not only of visual communication but more broadly of how the organization presents itself to its members or employees as well as its various audiences. Brand identity needs to be distinguished from brand value and the related notion of brand reputation, which are concepts external to the organization as they refer to how an audience views and values the organization. If an actor (e.g., a consumer, voter, donor, institution) is willing to pay a premium or similarly promote the organization, then the organization enjoys positive brand reputation and value with that actor. Brand loyalty is related to reputation and refers to the degree to which the actor repeatedly chooses to pay a premium or support the organization in the face of competition by alternative organizations. The remainder of this entry examines the evolution of brand identity and loyalty studies, tracing how they expanded in focus from firms to political organizations. It concludes with a brief note on measurement.
Early Brand Management Theories Brand identity and loyalty generated a large body of research, starting in the late 1970s in the field of business and marketing. Studies were initially driven by management needs, rather than academic inquiry. From
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early on, a critical idea behind brand studies was that consumers identify themselves through their purchases. In other words, price and performance are not the only considerations in the acquisition of a product. Rather, purchases help consumers define the narrative and image they seek to project to the outside and to themselves—acquisitions thus become an integral part of how people understand who they are. The literature on brand identity and brand loyalty surged in the 1980s, as the field acquired a more complex and multifaceted understanding of the phenomenon, and the need to coordinate multiple fields such as overall vision, marketing communications, and organizational design. The field thereby abandoned the assumption that brand investments necessarily lead to positive returns, requiring instead empirical inquiry into the conditions that link investment and returns. Consequently, over the same period, scholars developed measures for brand identity and loyalty.
Brand Management Theories Adopted Beyond Firms In the 1980s, brand management was increasingly adopted by nonmarket organizations. A major constituency seeking the returns of brand identity was that of political leaders and political parties. With the rise of television and other forms of mass communication in electoral campaigns, political actors turned to investing in the expertise of marketing agencies and thus imported, adapted, and applied theories originally developed in the marketing and management literatures with the intention of maximizing firm equity and consumer purchases. In addition to the increased role of mass communication, the shift was imposed by a crisis of mass ideologies, an associated fall in traditional forms of mobilization and party membership, and a rise in voter volatility. Two major institutional groups joined politicians in pursuing brand management. Government organizations (e.g., departments, authorities) invested in b randing to reverse a broad and steady decrease in institutional trust and legitimacy. “Places” such as states, regions, and cities became particularly focused on building and projecting brand identity, which was considered a key tool in public diplomacy and in the regional and international competition that characterizes the post-Fordist and neoliberal environments. An important effect of this dramatic expansion in the deployment of brand identity was that citizens, workers, and voters became increasingly seen through the lenses of consumption. In this light, the goal of attracting support in the form of investment, votes, and approval
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Bully Pulpit
became understood through the same p arameters that firms deploy to attract purchases. This refocusing of political behavior in terms of consumption often limited the depth, breadth, and time horizon of political discourse. However, it also offered citizens new tools to exercise pressure on both the political and the corporate establishment, as consumption became an expression of social and political preferences and emerged as a key field in which political ideology is constructed and manifested. This phenomenon developed both at the domestic and at the international level, as global social justice networks learned to encourage shoppers to consider the political implications of their choices and pressure corporations to take responsibility for the social consequences of their policies. Brand management, with its focus on identity and loyalty, was adopted also by civil society actors (particularly in the nonprofit sector). In the largest organizations, the effort is recognizable through formal contracting with marketing experts, while smaller organizations, also attuned to the challenges and rewards of brand management, tend to shape their brands in-house.
Measuring Brand Identity and Brand Loyalty The study of brand identity and brand loyalty thus started in the fields of management, marketing, and consumer behavior but spread to architecture, arts, communication, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies. Scholars have taken different approaches to measuring brand identification and loyalty. The dominant method is the survey of the target audience, whether consumers, voters, or donors. Interviews and focus groups are also deployed. Experimental approaches are increasingly common. In each case, researchers ask questions to help them identify the attitudes or behaviors that reveal loyalty and brand strength in a specific industry or sphere of activity, as well as their determinants. Eleonora Pasotti See also Art in Political Campaigns; Framing Effects; Party Identification; Political Campaigns; Propaganda
Further Readings Dinnie, K. (2010). Nation branding. New York, NY: Routledge. Lock, A., & Harris, P. (1996). Political marketing—vive la difference! European Journal of Marketing, 30(10/11), 14–24. Micheletti, M., & Stolle, D. (2008). Fashioning social justice through political consumerism, capitalism, and the Internet. Cultural Studies, 22(5), 749–769.
Pasotti, E. (2010). Political branding in cities: The decline of machine politics in Bogotá, Naples, and Chicago. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bully Pulpit The term bully pulpit refers to the platform enjoyed by an elected official, especially the president of the United States, to communicate his or her views. This entry discusses the history of the term, the perceived power of the platform, its modern use by U.S. presidents, and the limitations of the bully pulpit.
History of the Term Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt famously declared the platform that the president of the United States commands to be a “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt did not intend for the phrase to contain diabolical implications; in the vernacular of his day, bully meant excellent, reflecting Roosevelt’s estimation that with the office came an opportunity to reach a wide audience, which was advantageous.
Power of the Bully Pulpit Perhaps no one on Earth occupies a more prominent position than the president of the United States. Today, the bully pulpit is widely held to equip U.S. presidents with a powerful megaphone to advance their messages and persuade the American people, lawmakers, and other actors in support of their positions. As Richard Neustadt argued, since U.S. leaders share authority but do not have influence over whether other officials hold their jobs, the only way for the president to convince others to do what the president desires is to persuade them. Therefore, Neustadt argued that the fundamental power wielded by the president is the “power to persuade.” The bully pulpit helps presidents harness this power by amplifying their messages.
Modern Use of the Bully Pulpit by U.S. Presidents Modern presidents are availing themselves of the bully pulpit more than ever. Jeffrey Tulis noted that the practice of contemporary presidents to constantly communicate with the American people is a radical divergence from the custom of chief executives before Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson. While 19th-century presidents had significant opportunities to speak to the
Bully Pulpit
people, Tulis found that they largely declined to do so, instead electing to communicate in written form to Congress. Tulis found that, in the 19th century, less than 1% of presidential communications were delivered via the spoken word; in the 20th century, 42% of presidential communications were delivered orally. Furthermore, Tulis calculated that 19th-century presidents delivered a total of about 1,000 speeches—an average of 10 per year. By contrast, George C. Edwards III noted that, on average, President Clinton spoke in public 550 times per year. This has ushered in an era that Tulis referred to as the “rhetorical presidency.” The expectation that the president will regularly communicate with the American people is so widely held today that it has essentially become part of the job description.
Limitations of the Bully Pulpit The U.S. president rarely speaks directly, however, to the American people. Edwards noted that the only circumstances in which the president is likely to do so are during the annual State of the Union address and during scandals or military actions. While presidents were previously able to command network television coverage when they wished to address the American people, Edwards noted that a “network rebellion” began in the 1960s. Since then, it has become difficult for the White House to convince television networks to interrupt programming in order to broadcast presidential addresses. As a result, rather than hearing from the president directly, the American people more often come to learn about the president’s messages through the filter of the journalists who report and pundits who comment on them. The modern rise in punditry has coincided with heightened investigation into and criticism of presidential claims. Whereas through the 1960s many reporters saw their jobs as being to convey the words of the president, numerous scholars have noted that the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War ushered in a new era of media scrutiny. Presidential statements no longer go uncontested; rather, a cadre of political and investigative journalists intensively fact-check and challenge official presidential communications. While the growth of technology and mass media is often portrayed as creating more opportunities for communication, they have also created more distractions— such as cable television shows that compete with the broadcast networks for viewers’ attention. Edwards noted that a popular program on one television network can command a greater share of viewers than when the president speaks on all three major networks simultaneously. Sebastian Mallaby argued that while
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new technology initially magnified the power of the presidential bully pulpit—for example, radio broadcast President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats into American living rooms, television allowed President John F. Kennedy to “charm the nation,” and advances in air transport allowed presidents to travel to speak directly to new audiences with greater frequency— today, the proliferation of new technology is having the opposite effect, by distracting the American people. Edwards found that, when presidents do speak directly to the American people in televised addresses, their approval ratings rarely increase. His studies of presidents who were widely considered to be skilled communicators, such as Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton, found that even these gifted leaders could not create public moods to their liking; they could only contribute to and benefit from the mood that already existed in the nation. Furthermore, the bully pulpit may hinder the president’s ability to achieve goals in Congress. A variety of scholars have noted that the modern practice of debating every issue in the press forces politicians to take positions early—perhaps before facts are fully established. This can make it more difficult to back down from the positions they have staked out later on in order to accept reasonable compromises. Furthermore, Fred Greenstein noted that debating in public may preclude the candid behind-the-scenes discussions and deal making that facilitate compromise. Although modern presidents have increasingly u tilized the bully pulpit, they have been unsuccessful in sustaining high approval ratings or achieving key goals. Rather, Greenstein noted that modern presidencies have been characterized by declining public support and an inability to convince Congress to act on major priorities. Kara S. Alaimo See also Greenstein’s Six Components of Presidential Leadership; Neustadt’s Theory of Presidential Power; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Public Opinion
Further Readings Edwards, G. C., III. (2003). On deaf ears: The limits of the bully pulpit. Chelsea, MI: Sheridan Books. Greenstein, F. I. (Ed). (1995). Leadership in the modern presidency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mallaby, S. (2000). The bullied pulpit: A weak chief executive makes worse foreign policy. Foreign Affairs, 79, 2–8. Neustadt, R. (1990). Presidential power and the modern presidents. New York, NY: Free Press. Tulis, J. K. (1987). The rhetorical presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Bureaucratic Politics
In particular, Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of administrative science and 28th president of the United States, argued for a clear distinction between bureaucracy and politics. According to this view, the operative part of the government works only as an agent for the concrete application of constitutional law. On the one hand, the administration is expected to keep out of all political conflicts associated with the basic decisions of lawmakers and the authoritative instructions of the responsible ministers. On the other hand, politicians are not allowed to personally infiltrate the administrative bodies and to manipulate the civil service. The motives of officials and the standards in administrative decision making should therefore be purely bureaucratic and only influenced by public spirit. In an ideal-typical analysis, pioneering sociologist Max Weber described the nature of bureaucracy as an “iron cage” of rationality. This metaphor at least partially corresponds to Wilson’s dichotomy of bureaucracy and politics. According to Weber, modern officialdom concentrates on highly formalized proceedings in hierarchical structures to achieve organizational purposes without genuine self-determination.
politics unfolds. Daniel Carpenter, for example, comprehensively explains how different agencies in the United States gained their autonomy during the period between the American Civil War and the Great Depression. In his study, he identifies some reasons for this development, which include unique goals of the bureaucracy, reputational advantages, and coalitions with interest groups. David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran go a step further and ask the question why the legislature in the United States delegates executive discretion despite of the risk of bureaucratic drift. Applying transaction cost and principal–agent theory, the authors find effects of united party government, legislative organization, and issue-area characteristics. In a more comparative study, John Huber and Charles Shipan address a similar question on the basis of the principal–agent theory. They explain how the policy conflict between the legislature and the implementer, the legislative capacity, the bicameral agreement, and the absence of nonstatutory controls influence the probability of detailed legislation and the establishment of safeguards against bureaucratic politics. Apart from the principal–agent literature, George Tsebelis uses the vetoplayers theory to examine bureaucratic discretion in the European Union (EU). According to him, the autonomy of the bureaucracy is positively correlated with the number of veto players in the legislature and the distances between them: The larger the conflict among legislative actors that have to agree to policy change, the more room for bureaucratic maneuver exists. Research that draws on veto-players theory and empirically investigates the extent of bureaucratic politics in the EU reveals a clear dominance of tertiary compared with secondary legislation (80% versus 20%). While tertiary acts are solely enacted by the bureaucracy (European Commission), secondary legislation is adopted by the representatives of the Member States in the Council, sometimes in conjunction with the European Parliament. Therefore, critics sometimes describe the EU bureaucracy as a prime example of overregulation that may intrude into the private lives of citizens. When bureaucratic politics increases in time of legislative gridlock, the machinery at least ensures the functional reliability of public policy. However, the dominance of bureaucratic activities creates a democratic deficit and may lower the reputation of the entire political system. Another potential problem is the budget-maximizing bureau as exemplified in William Niskanen’s public choice theory.
Bureaucratic Discretion
Government Bargaining Model
When administrative bodies deviate from the objectives set by political leaders or basically act on their own initiative, a so-called drift exists and bureaucratic
In foreign policy analysis, the bureaucratic politics approach also refers to a government bargaining model introduced by Graham Allison and complemented by
Bureaucratic Politics Bureaucratic politics results from the self-determination and self-interest of administrative bodies. Rational principles like hierarchical structures, strict rules of law, high division of labor, and detailed record-keeping typically indicate their bureaucratic activities. These machineries, operated by nonelected officials, are actually separated from political powers exercised by elected leaders. However, agency discretion and bureaucratic drift can arise from technical expertise, in particular when the uncertainty about implementation pathways is high and the policy conflict between legislators increases. After describing the classical dichotomy of bureaucracy and politics, this entry introduces research on bureaucratic politics that explains the autonomy of administrative bodies, quantifies its importance, and raises questions about democratic or economic drawbacks. Moreover, this entry outlines the more specific meaning of the bureaucratic politics approach in the area of foreign policy analysis, where a government bargaining model has been developed.
Classical Dichotomy of Bureaucracy and Politics
Bureaucratic Structure
Morton Halperin. This model does not assume a unified national government as sole player in international relations, but many actors that are hierarchically positioned. These bureaucrats represent different organizations within government and regularly perform bargaining to shape government decisions in foreign policy. They prefer policy solutions that are primarily of organizational, rather than national, interest. In addition to the selfseeking preferences of the bureaucrats, the n ontransparent bargaining process itself negatively affects the accountability of decisions and seriously undermines the democratic nature of foreign policy in general. Bernd Luig See also Bureaucratic Structure; Collective Action; Decision Making; Legitimacy, Forms of; Rational Choice; RentSeeking Behavior; Rule of Law
Further Readings Allison, G. T., & Halperin, M. H. (1972). Bureaucratic politics: A paradigm and some policy implications. World Politics, 24, 40–79. doi:10.2307/2010559 Carpenter, D. P. (2001). The forging of bureaucratic autonomy: Reputations, networks, and policy innovation in executive agencies, 1862–1928. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Huber, J. D., & Shipan, C. R. (2002). Deliberate discretion? The institutional foundations of bureaucratic autonomy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bureaucratic Structure A bureaucratic structure is an “ideal typical” form of administrative organization that is characterized by legal authority and rational principles such as hierarchical structures, strict rules of law, and high division of labor as well as detailed record-keeping. Administrative organization with a bureaucratic structure can exist in both the public and private sector. On the one hand, bureaucracy is classically associated with precision, unambiguity, continuity, and efficiency. On the other hand, bureaucracy has nowadays a pejorative meaning as a synonym for technocracy, impersonality, sluggishness, and red tape. After describing the historical emergence of the bureaucratic structure, this entry provides a detailed overview of its characteristics. The entry concludes with a general discussion of bureaucracy’s advantages and disadvantages.
Historical Emergence Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and the development of the constitutional state, modern
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bureaucracy was established in most countries in the 19th century. The growth of population, the creation of a money-based economy, and the expansion of governmental responsibilities required a new, more efficient structure for organizing administrative activities. Max Weber, one of the foremost theorists of bureaucracy, pointed out that traditional and charismatic authority were superseded by rational-legal authority. This type of authority was related to the common belief in the legality of the established order and the rule of law. Therefore, professional accountability, formal rules and procedures, and fixed salaries took the place of benefices and fiefs that formerly characterized the feudal, status-based systems. This process of rationalization and depersonalization concerned not only public administration but also private sector management, in particular in large companies.
Characteristics of the Ideal Type Weber applies the concept of an “ideal type” (or “pure type”) to abstractly model a particular phenomenon in social science. However, each empirical case does not necessarily have all the features of the respective phenomenon. In order to introduce the ideal type of a bureaucratic structure, Weber concisely describes 10 characteristics of the conduct of offices and officials. The first characteristic refers to impersonal obligations. Accordingly, officials are strictly bound to their objective duty and separated from all political affairs. The second characteristic is a fixed hierarchical structure of offices. This means both top-down control and centralized decision making in a cascading system of many management layers. The third feature of the bureaucratic structure focuses on jurisdictional competencies of the officials that are clearly defined and ordered by rules. Thus, administrative organization is characterized by jurisdictional responsibility and accountability, functional specialty, and a high division of labor. Fourth, contracts are used to fill the posts of modern officialdom. Personnel selection should therefore not depend on privilege, parentage, or relatedness. Following up on this, the fifth point requires appointments of officials based on technical qualifications that are recorded by exams or certificates. This also means, in Weber’s ideal type, that officials are not elected, in contrast to politicians. The sixth feature concerns fixed monetary salaries of the officials that correspond to their rank in hierarchy and their responsibility, pension entitlements of the officials, and (at least in public administration) the permanency of their appointment. This kind of remuneration is in contradiction with irregular and occasional income from estates, fees, or cronyism. Seventh, and closely related to the sixth point, each office should be the sole
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or main profession of the incumbent. Full-time officials that concentrate on specific administrative tasks ensure professionalization and technical expertise. The eighth characteristic of bureaucracy refers to the career prospects of the officials. Depending on seniority and proven professional competence, the superior should select officials for promotion. This contrasts a career development based on personal or political relations. Ninth, officials do not possess their offices and administrative resources. Rather, they are subject to strict rules, categorization, and formal procedures under rational-legal authority. Lastly, Weber points to an effective system of command and control that applies uniformly to all officials. This also includes detailed record-keeping by means of written documents (files) concerning their administrative activities. In conclusion, the bureaucratic structure appears to be an “iron cage” of rationality. Officials act with formalistic impersonality and utilitarian adherence to implementing rules and routines.
Advantages and Disadvantages According to Weber, bureaucracy marks a turn away from feudalism and solely traditional or charismatic authority. The advantages of the “rationalized cage” therefore include the rule of law, clearly defined activities, continuity, precision, and reliability. Weber even views the bureaucracy as the most efficient structure for administrative behavior. In contrast, Robert Merton, one of the first critics of bureaucratic structure, points to its negative consequences for the personality of the officials. In his opinion, attitudes and sentiments may correspond to the army-like discipline and pressure in the bureaucracy. Merton is afraid not only of strict adherence, timidity, and conservatism, but also of extreme stereotypical behavior that results in external conflicts. The officials could be superordinate instead of being servants of the people. Herbert Simon fundamentally questions the rationalism in administrative behavior. He argues that cognitive limits due to bounded rationality exist. Because the bureaucracy does not meet the reality of their social lives, officials would show divergent behavior with insufficient results. Other critics refer to the rigidity of rules and too little opportunity to develop creativity and innovation. These deficiencies can lead to sluggishness and red tape. Apart from that, the technocratic expertise and bureaucratic power in government administration may blur the political responsibility in democratic systems. Bernd Luig See also Bureaucratic Politics; Collective Action; Decision Making; Legitimacy, Forms of; Rational Choice; Rule of Law
Further Readings Merton, R. K. (1940). Bureaucratic structure and personality. Social Forces, 18, 560–568. doi:10.2307/2570634 Simon, H. A. (1997). Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations (4th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. Waters, T., & Waters, D. (Eds.). (2015). Weber’s rationalism and modern society: New translations on politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification (pp. 73–127). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Business
in
Politics
The question of how political organizations behave toward business firms has become increasingly prominent because people demand that politicians undertake measures toward the solution of problems like economic crises and the unethical behavior of some corporations. Business firms have to operate according to the political rules determined by local and national governments and international political organizations. This relationship raises various issues such as how governments make political decisions and the effects of lobbying and corruption, as discussed in the sections that follow.
An Overview Debates on how political decisions impact business firms have been extensive among political interest groups, business firms, and the media, as well as in society in general. It is well known that political organizations decide the political rules and business firms make decisions in response to them. In recent decades, business firms have had to manage not only the decisions made by local and national governments, but also those made by international political organizations. Internationalization of markets has also brought in the role of multinational political agents like the European Union (EU), with a duty to control the behavior of firms. Within the context of how political organizations impact business and how business firms respond, there are two perspectives. In one, firms employ responses such as adaptation; that is, political organizations decide the rules and the firms have to obey. The decisions are necessary because politicians have to deal with often urgent socioeconomic problems, such as workforce employment levels and national development. Political decisions sometimes concern all businesses and sometimes concern a specific industry or firm. Democratic
Business in Politics
states as well as international political organizations, such as the EU, gain their power from the people and have to demonstrate that their decisions are responsive to the needs of the people. Otherwise, voters will lose their trust in the political organization, and this failure can lead to loss of office in the next election, as voters turn to other parties for leadership. According to an alternative perspective, political organizations do not have such a power. It is true that sometimes governments can employ forcible actions toward business firms, but for their longtime survival, they need to consider the will of business firms because they are in part also dependent on business firms. A large political organization like the EU cannot easily make the decision to force local and international firms to follow political rules. Different business and social groups can exert pressure and influence EU politicians. Political organizations are best equipped to tackle political issues; that is, they have knowledge about the governing rules and regulations. However, political organizations also need information about markets, technologies, and social processes. For example, political organizations do not know exactly what the consumers’ needs are and how and with what means or technology these needs can be fulfilled. Business firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs, such as environmental organizations) have more knowledge about such issues. This makes the political organizations dependent on firms and NGOs. With respect to the relationships between states and business firms, the firms are dependent on the government because government regulations can give support, for example, by sustaining market stability that affects firms’ businesses. The governments are dependent on firms because firms make investments that, in turn, affect economic development and thereby the society and people on which the government depends. Political decisions may be categorized according to two types. Some are general; for example, governmental or EU decisions on environmental pollution, which all firms must follow. Others can be specific; for example, when the United States government decides to punish a specific bank for not following a specific political rule. A political rule can also be supportive; for example, firms developing new technology for the benefit of medical or environmental issues gain subsidies from the local government or from the EU. If a specific firm gets support, this is welcomed because it strengthens a firm’s competitive position in the market. Therefore, firms, especially large multinational corporations, establish units for lobbying governments. In some cases, especially in developing countries, this behavior can go too far and lead to corruption.
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Lobbying, Corruption Nowadays it has become normal that the corridors in EU buildings (for example in Brussels) or state organization buildings are full of lobbyists trying to influence political units and gain support. Lobbying has become more widespread in recent decades and is well accepted. The campaign ads of firms in the United States during election periods are well known. Lobbying does not necessarily aim to gain direct financial support but can strive to gain influence, which will ultimately support the firms’ business activities. Lobbying aims to persuade another party and influence their decisions in a particular direction. Lobbying strategies could involve presentation of new technology and showing how it fulfills the demands of the people; it is done, for example, by negotiation, recruiting former politicians and campaign contributions. Since the goal of business firms in lobbying is to gain support, situations arise wherein firms have gained benefit by means of unethical behavior, called corruptive actions. It can involve members of political organizations or agents connected to those organizations. Corruption is an illegitimate action against existing economic, political, and social values. It is the abuse of power for private benefit in contradiction of the existing rules. This problem does not concern the firm-state relationship only in developing countries. Recently, a previous Portuguese prime minister was accused of bribery for giving special privileges to some firms in exchange for money. Additionally, some EU politicians in the agricultural units were accused of getting financial resources from business firms. But this problem is much more widespread in developing and emerging countries. Corruption is expected to bring punishment when and if information about it is revealed. An example is when TeliaSonera, a Swedish telecommunications company, signed a contract with the government in Uzbekistan for 1.5 billion dollars. After 3 years, the media disclosed that TeliaSonera had paid several hundred million dollars to an agent whose boss was the prime minister’s daughter. This behavior was recognized as a case of bribery in Swedish and international media. TeliaSonera has now been made to pay several hundred million dollars in penalties and accused of corruptive behavior. The interesting issue is that while this behavior was recognized as unethical in Sweden, the government, society, and media in Uzbekistan had a completely different view. In Uzbekistan, the daughter of the president, the boss of the agency, stated that they were following the existing political values accepted by their own society. Thus, internationalization includes the issue of differences in the ethical values in political
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rules; that is, an action can be recognized as unethical in one country but ethical in another country. Amjad Hadjikhani and Gozde Yilmaz See also Capitalism; Clientelism; Corporatism; Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Economics and Political Behavior; Elite Theory (Pareto); Social Class; Values
Further Readings Amsterdam Research Colloquium. (2006, February 17–18). Corporate political activities in an internationalizing economy. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Author. Boddewyn, J. J., & Brewer, T. L. (1994). International-business political behavior: New theoretical directions. Academy of Management Review, 19(1), 119–143.
Cave, T., & Rowell, A. (2014, March 12). The truth about lobbying: 10 ways big business controls government. Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2014/mar/12/lobbying-10-ways-corporationsinfluence-government Drutman, L. (2015). The business of America is lobbying: How corporations became politicized and politics became more corporate. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hadjikhani, A., & Ghauri, P. (2001). The behaviour of international firms in socio-political environments in the European Union. Journal of Business Research, 52(3), 263–275. Transparency International. (2009). Controlling corporate lobbying and financing of political activities (Policy Position 6/2009). Retrieved from http://issuu.com/transparency international/docs/2009_6_pp_corporatelobbying_en?e= 2496456/3241158
C Calculus
of
commit themselves to accept any outcome coming from drawing lots without any recourse to force. This kind of result finds an explanation in an agreement based on the acceptance of the drawing-lots procedure when all players have the same probability to see their preferred political choices drawn. The specific character of the drawing-lots expedient leads us to describe this procedure as totally alien to a contractarian-based democracy because the emerging result entails one individual’s monopoly. Nevertheless, the individual knows that neither his own choice nor that of anybody else will have any chance to prevail in the public-good market. The underlying assumption is that each decision maker can be thought of as being overinformed rather than underinformed about results. Looked at from the perspective of a contractarian constitutional political economist, the decision maker seems to decide beyond a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, in which choices are of the marginal, not total, kind and have an equal weight for each individual in the polity. As a consequence, choices are mutually exclusive simply because they are at once equally weighing and diverging, choosing individuals being morally equal but with conflicting preferences. This analytical setting ensures that there is not any logical inconsistency in extending the contractual logic to the dissent case, where individuals precommit themselves to abide by the rule that will be drawn by lots. For example, consider a political setting of three voters—three equally weighing parties. If everyone votes for his own option in all the possible pairwise voting, every choice—apart from the voting sequence—will have one vote in favor by the proponent and two votes against by the nonproponents. The emerging solution, in which all alternatives get an equal number of votes in their favor, may be paradoxically labeled “the contractarian calculus of dissent” because the contractarian
Dissent
This entry is concerned with the specific problem of decision making in a contractarian constitutional democracy—based on unanimous consent over the rules—where all individuals have different preferences on matters of public goods. Fundamental to this predicament is the presumption that conflicts arise from the very circumstance that choice is public and decision makers’ preferences are unable to generate either consensual choices or majoritarian choices, which may be called the premise of democracy. When differences in preferences cannot be aggregated through voting, it is evident that the result is not consent over public goods but dissent even in the simplest three-individual setting. One might think that with heterogeneous preferences, there is no room for democracy. This is a simple but fallacious conclusion that would not withstand critical scrutiny. In fact, dissent can be overcome (calculated), provided that a significant change is introduced in the logical foundation of the contract, by shifting from a process-oriented contract to an outcome-oriented contract. Technically speaking, the latter type of contract requires the introduction of a spurious element that originates a methodological gap in the logical construction. In spite of the criticism that can be made of this idea, the spurious element is a useful expedient for making dissent consistent with the contractarian logic. This is because it allows an extension of the logic of consent over the process to the logic of consent over the outcome resulting from drawing lots. Yet though the two consents are different on methodological grounds, the consent over the outcome—where two out of the three individuals unavoidably suffer a loss—can pass a rationality test on the condition that the three of them 73
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Capitalism
component remains in the precommitment stage, and the procedural choice implies that all individuals in conflict refrain from using force. While the dissent problem can be solved at a precommitment stage, the results that the metarule gives rise to may turn out to be unfair ex post. Namely, results will be optimal for the individual whose choice has been drawn, while the other two individuals may find themselves, more or less, in an equally bad position if the choice drawn is the median one. If instead the alternative drawn is one of the extremes, the worst position is that of the individual who is positioned at the opposite extreme, while the position of the individual whose most preferred alternative is the intermediate one is worse but better than that of the opposite extreme. Contrary to the alleged equivalence deployed in contractarian literature, the calculus of dissent provides a very good example for holding that the concept of contract is wider than that of consent. This nonequivalence is of great heuristic value, for it allows the incorporation of the calculus of dissent into the contract. This prevents the residuum of consent from blocking democratic d ecisions and from falling back either to chaos or to dictatorship. A second sense of the calculus of dissent is external to contractarian democracy and does not call for an ex ante or prior acceptance of equiprobable results for the parties but for an imposition of results by one of the parties by using force. The two scenarios set forth here represent radical alternatives in the calculus of dissent both in terms of political values and in terms of moral values (individual freedom) as opposed to objective absolute values that can be imposed through the exercise of force. The two senses of the calculus of dissent broached here are irreconcilable radical alternatives, on the one hand an insurer of conflict resolutions (democracy), and on the other an explosion of conflicts (dictatorship and terrorism). Giuseppe Eusepi See also Decision Making; Dictatorship; Public Goods; Terrorism, Theories and Models; Veil of Ignorance in Rawlsian Theory; Voting Behavior
Further Readings Buchanan, J. M., & Yoon, Y. J. (2001). The efficacy of arbitrary rules. In R. Mudambi, P. Navarra, & G. Sobbrio (Eds.), Rules and reason: Perspectives on constitutional political economy (pp. 56–68). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Eusepi, G. (2002). The calculus of dissent: Constitutional completion and public goods. In G. Brennan, H. Kliemt, &
R. T. Tollison (Eds.), Method and morals in constitutional economics: Essays in honor of James M. Buchanan (pp. 213–236). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag. Eusepi, G. (2012). From the calculus of consent to the calculus of dissent: A personal promenade in the constitutional square. Public Choice, 1, 279–283. doi:10.1007/s11127012-9969-1. Sandler, T., & Lapan, H. (1988). The calculus of dissent: An analysis of terrorists’ choice of targets. Synthese, 76, 245–261.
Capitalism Capitalism is now the dominant way of organizing economic life. That was not always the case, however; so in order to understand capitalism’s contemporary dominance and current potential, it is necessary to know something of its history and core characteristics. It is also necessary to understand capitalism’s various contemporary forms and the debates surrounding the strengths and weaknesses of each. This entry is organized sequentially to cover that agenda.
Origins The word capitalism has been around in English for rather less time than the thing itself. The term was certainly in use by the end of the 18th century—Arthur Young used it in his Travels in France (1792)—and the notion of something called “capital” was well known to Adam Smith as he prepared The Wealth of Nations two decades earlier. But language invariably follows practice, of course, and the practice of organizing economic life on capitalist lines is of much longer duration. What brought the terminology into line with the practice from the end of the 18th century was the increasing ubiquity of capitalist ways of organizing economic life in Great Britain, in which both Smith and Young found themselves, respectively, before and after the French Revolution. At the core of a capitalist way of organizing economic activity is the buying and selling of things, and such commercial activity has been known and practiced ever since societies emerged with significant degrees of urbanization. For as soon as at least some people left the land, they needed to trade what they produced in the towns with food producers in the countryside, if only to ensure their own capacity to survive. At times in the distant past, indeed, such capitalist practices came to constitute a significant part of the overall economic activity of leading ancient societies—Rome at the height of its empire at the end of the second century CE being
Capitalism
a case in point—but even then the vast majority of economic activity was not organized in such a fashion. For capitalism is simply one way of organizing an economy. There are others in which the exchange of goods and services in return for money is not so central. As the Western Roman Empire declined, the scale of capitalist activity within it declined also, leaving western Europe for the next thousand years broadly organized on feudal, not capitalist, lines. In feudal economies, a peasantry tied in various ways to the land directly produced both the means of its own subsistence and a small agrarian surplus used to sustain a landowning aristocratic class and their military and spiritual supporters. Lords, soldiers, and priests did not labor in the fields. Most everyone else did, however; and only as towns and cities began to reconstitute themselves on any scale—primarily from the 11th century—were they then joined in any numbers by artisans and merchants making and trading manufactured goods and services. It was as the numbers of such nonagricultural producers grew, and as agricultural production was increasingly reset—moving from subsistence agriculture to one producing agrarian products for sale—that Western European economies eventually began to shift away from a feudal to a more capitalist way of organizing economic life. That shift was most developed initially in the independent cities of the Italian peninsula from the late medieval period before moving up the Rhine into northern Germany and the Low Countries and, by the 18th century, quintessentially into Great Britain. It was a move that brought new social actors into play in those countries: initially a class of merchants moving limited agrarian surpluses and simple manufactures between town and country and between towns themselves (some of whom began to focus on the financing of that trade through the development of primitive forms of banking and credit); a growing class of artisans developing skills and generating products for sale that were initially based primarily on the reworking of wool, leather, and simple metals; a new breed of commercial farmer, growing crops or rearing animals for transmission to first local and then more distant markets; a new labor force engaged in the business of moving both agrarian and urban-produced goods; and eventually—right at the end of the sequence—a class of men (it was normally men) owning factories in which manufactured goods were made, and a much larger class of both men and women (and indeed initially children) who actually did the making of the goods in return for an extremely modest wage. The sequence of development here is clear—merchant capitalism, agrarian capitalism, and finally industrial capitalism—all lubricated by an
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underlying system of financial capitalism whose importance in each capitalist economy grew steadily over time. As capitalist forms of economic life emerged in Western Europe from the late medieval period, they transformed the social structure surrounding economic activity in the societies in which these new forms appeared. Social formations anchored in feudal forms of economic life (broadly, peasantries tied to the land and aristocratic classes claiming ownership of that land) found themselves transformed into (or displaced by) social formations whose ability to survive and prosper depended on the making and sale of goods and services. For that transition to occur, even deeper social and political changes had to occur too, not least the development of a stable and reliable system of money; clearly specified property rights, and sustained levels of law and order; and—most important of all—the separation of many agrarian workers from any ties to the land on which they labored. Not all western European societies (and certainly no Asian ones except for Japan) made that transition between the 14th and 19th centuries, and those that did made it to differing degrees and at different speeds. The first to become “fully capitalist” in the modern sense were the British and the Dutch, followed quickly by the North Americans (who had no feudal past to shed) and by the French (who shed it rather brutally in the years of terror following the French Revolution). The Germans and the Italians only fully consolidated the capitalist transformation of their domestic economies after political unification in/around 1870, the very time at which a political revolution in Japan (the Meiji Restoration) triggered parallel changes there. And the Russians really only got their capitalist transformation under way after the abolition of serfdom in 1861—too late in the event to prevent their defeat later by first Japan and then Germany—defeats by more fully militarized capitalist economies that triggered not a capitalist revolution in Russia in 1917 but a state socialist one.
Definitions Understanding the emergence of capitalism as described in the previous sections enables us to define its core features by pointing out both what it is and what it is not. Capitalism is a way of organizing economic activity that is neither feudal nor state socialist. It is not feudal—in that what was produced in a purely feudal society were things that were almost exclusively consumed by those who actually made them, the vast majority of whom were agricultural workers tied to the land as a producing class denied the right to live and
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work elsewhere. Capitalism is also not state socialism— in that the things produced in socialist societies are indeed goods and services consumed by people other than those who actually make/provide them but producers who nonetheless do not own either the means of production with which they work or the products they themselves generate. Feudal societies do not produce things that are bought and sold. They are not commodity-producing economies. State-socialist ones do produce commodities, but those commodities are not the private property of either those managing or those laboring in the factories and offices from which they actually emerge. So capitalism is not feudalism: in capitalist economies, what are produced are things to be bought and sold. Nor is capitalism state socialism: instead, everything that is bought and sold in capitalist economies is the private property of those doing the buying and selling; and the force compelling economic activity is the pursuit of personal/corporate profit, not the meeting of state-specified output targets. Capitalism combines commodity production and private ownership; and because it does, it remains a far more dynamic form of economic organization than either the feudalism that preceded it or the state socialism with which it competed for most of the 20th century. In a capitalist economy, things are made in order to be sold. Most of what any one worker makes he or she does not personally consume. Instead, the things produced go off to market to be bought by others; and they start that journey as the private property of the class of men (and occasionally women) who both own the factories/fields/offices in which the goods and services are first created and the raw materials consumed in their production. But most of the people active in those factories/fields/offices do not own the buildings, the land, or the raw materials with which they labor. What they do own is their labor power, which they sell (as simply another commodity) to their employer in return for a money wage—a wage they then spend buying the products and services made by others. Survival in a feudal economy ultimately required access to land. Survival in a capitalist one ultimately requires access either to property or to employment. Those who lacked access in a feudal society invariably died. Lacking access to property or employment in a capitalist society, people once died but now more likely will be sustained by modest levels of social welfare. Either way, what surrounded the person in a feudal economy was the political structure of aristocratic landownership. What surrounds the person in a capitalist one is the political underpinnings of a more extensive system of private ownership. Feudal aristocrats grew more powerful by capturing land and resources from
aristocratic enemies, normally by mobilizing peasant armies to fight each other. Capitalists prosper by outcompeting each other in stable markets that occasionally benefit from wars but more normally flourish without them and by holding wages down relative to profits. Capitalism and feudalism occupy entirely different worlds.
Varieties of Capitalism For most of the last century, the bulk of the available scholarship on capitalism treated the private ownership of the means of production, the existence of labor and commodity markets, and the pursuit of profitability and greater market share as the defining features of a capitalist way of organizing economic life. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the recent move of the Chinese economy toward private ownership—both of which effectively removed the notion of state socialism as a major ideological alternative to capitalism—the space has recently opened up for a greater sensibility to the various ways in which those defining elements can be and historically have been combined. Recent scholarship has therefore become more attentive to how capitalism itself has altered over time and how different forms/models of capitalism have emerged in different periods. To round out our definition of capitalism, we too need to develop that sensitivity. The changes in capitalism over time are reasonably easy to spot. All capitalist economies began initially with some degree of commercialization of agriculture and some limited manufacturing sector in which the competing firms were tiny by modern standards (employing few people and modest amounts of what are, in modern terms, primitive technologies). They also emerged with a very limited banking sector and with trade flows that were normally rather limited and local, though invariably they also emerged with some statesponsored longer-term trade routes as shipping developed and the oceans were explored. But by the end of the 19th century, many of these early institutional forms had already changed in the most developed and successful capitalist economies. Each major economic sector by then had several large companies as well as many small ones. The size of individual factories was often larger and the number of people employed significantly greater. And with size had come new needs—for professional management, more extensive banking support, and access to larger and larger markets. Small-scale liberal capitalism, that is, was progressively giving way by the end of the Victorian period to large-scale, more organized capitalism—one moreover in which the state itself was coming to play an increasingly important and major role.
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Of course, political support for small-scale capitalism was vital from the outset. Even Adam Smith had the state providing defense, law and order, and a set of public goods (ones that private enterprise found it difficult to sustain)—in his case, primarily publicly provided education. But then, as the size of major capitalist units grew, new political needs arose as well: new social policies to offset the industrial unrest of large employed labor forces and new economic policies to guarantee the larger scale of purchasing power required in commodity markets if the goods produced by these companies were fully to be sold. The modern state developed, that is, both a welfare role and a role as economic manager that were missing from early capitalism so that in the modern era a capitalist way of organizing an economy has come to require the maintenance of a delicate balance between the needs and interests of those who own and manage the economy, those who lack that ownership credential and have only their labor power to sell, and those who—for whatever reason—neither own capital nor are able to participate in paid labor. Maintaining that balance is a key role for the modern state. How that balance is struck varies both over time and between national economies. In advanced industrial economies, capitalism had its fully developed welfare phase from 1945 to at least the 1980s and has been in a more neoliberal condition (with less active state management and more limited welfare provision) in many of them since. But now, as before, these economies remain organized on national lines. They each have their own state and their own culture, and each in that sense has settled into a slightly different form/model of what is basically still the same thing—capitalism. Some of those differences stretch back deep into the 19th century. Early capitalist industrializing economies like the British and the American were galvanized by strong and independent middle classes, requiring little state help beyond legislation to limit the economic power of the emerging working class. Later industrializers—Germany and Japan are particularly relevant here—began as “catch-up economies” led by aristocratic classes worried about colonization by more developed systems; and in those, from the beginning, the state management of the economy was greater, bigger companies were encouraged to operate more like cartels than competitors, and military spending was initially a greater fraction of the whole. Those later industrializers had a more traumatic route to contemporary modernity—passing through global military defeat and externally imposed reconstruction either side of 1945—and they now have a more managed form of capitalism than do their American and British counterparts. In Germany in particular, labor rights are stronger, trade union
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membership is higher, and levels of industrial concentration are greater than in the United States; and yet it is Germany and Japan, not the United States or the United Kingdom, that currently run the larger trade surpluses and the bigger manufacturing sectors. Capitalism began as a system of economic activity driven by unregulated competition. It has come down to us now as a system of competing models/types, a system in which the degree of public regulation and state activity necessary to longterm success is itself a matter of very deep disagreement and ongoing contention—contention about how to manage advanced capitalisms and contention about how to design emerging ones.
Debates There is nothing particularly new, however, about the existence of contention. For people have been debating capitalism ever since it arrived; and indeed there is an important sense in which disagreements on the character and consequences of capitalist ways of organizing economic life actually triggered the 19th-century emergence of social science as we now know it. Such disagreements certainly stood at the heart of the 20thcentury political debate on how best to organize advanced industrial societies; and they remain key elements dividing modern electorates in those societies, in former communist societies, and across the underdeveloped world. In a very real sense, the basic choices in play here remain what they have always been: to celebrate capitalism, to reform it, or to replace it with something better. Those who celebrate capitalism in its unregulated form are these days known as neoliberals. They see capitalism’s great strength to be its release of market forces and explain any pattern of economic underperformance primarily in terms of blockages on the free interplay of supply and demand. For neoliberals, the public regulation of businesses can easily become excessive, and the proper workings of labor markets can easily become distorted by overly generous welfare payments or by overly powerful trade unions. Neoliberal policy tends to be directed, therefore, against all three and, in doing so, invariably clashes with public policy designed by those less convinced that the free play of market forces is the best guarantee of individual freedom and the optimum allocation of resources. Neoliberalism is still challenged today by a social reformist strand of thought and politics that treats unregulated markets as creators of economic and social inequality and that accordingly advocates the democratic management of markets to ensure stability of demand and employment in the short term and a level playing field for all participants over the long run.
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Social reformers at least believe that capitalism can be properly managed in this fashion. To their left—fewer in number these days—are more radical thinkers who do not. Many of these more radical critics of capitalism trace their intellectual origins back to the writings of Karl Marx. Accordingly, they remain convinced that the contradictions between capital and labor in capitalist economies are ultimately irresolvable and that, in consequence, the best solution to the instabilities c reated by capitalist ways of organizing economic life is to replace those ways entirely by their socialist alternative. Capitalism is, in all its essentials, a way of organizing economic life based on choice: the choice of employer, the choice of commodity, and the choice of market. It is also, in all its essentials, a way of organizing economic life that invites choice of an intellectual and political kind. The best way to pursue that final kind of choice is to read on; see the recommendations that follow. David Coates See also Business in Politics; Civil-Military Relations; Conservatism; Development, Theories of; Elite Theory (Pareto); False Consciousness; Hegemony; Keynesian Economics; New Left; Procedural Justice; Social Class; Social Welfare; Socialism and Communism; Tokenism; Weber’s Protestant Ethic
Further Readings Coates, D. (2015). Capitalism: The basics. New York, NY: Routledge. Fulcher, J. (2015). Capitalism: A very short introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Ingham, G. (2008). Capitalism. Cambridge, England: Polity. Saunders, P. (1995). Capitalism: A social audit. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Caste System The caste system divides society in the Indian subcontinent into mutually exclusive, hereditary groups called castes, ranked by ritual status. Traditionally, South Asians believed that a man’s social capacities were known from the caste into which he was born, and his caste prescribed the occupations that he could enter. The most distinctive features of caste ideology are the emphasis on the innately unclean state of the lowest-ranked castes, formerly known as untouchables, and the strict exclusiveness of the so-called clean castes in relation to marriage. There is virtually no mobility of individuals
across different caste groups. Nothing quite like the caste system has evolved in other parts of the world. When India became independent in 1947, a political goal was to create a “modern,” casteless India. India abolished caste and created for the formerly untouchable castes a system of quotas (“reservations”) in university admissions, government jobs, and political posts. Since 2007, the poorest state of India (Bihar) has identified the worst-off castes and targeted initiatives to them. The reservations have helped keep the concept of caste very prominent in politics. The gap in average socioeconomic status between high and low castes remains large. This entry emphasizes the economic impact of the caste system. The word caste corresponds to two distinct concepts: jati (community) and varna (archetype). The jati is the community within which one is required to be married and which forms social identity. Dwellings in villages are usually clustered by jati. In contrast to the vast number of jatis, varna is a scheme with only four divisions, which are symbolic types: first, priests; second, warriors; third, merchants and agriculturalists; and fourth, laborers and servants. The formerly untouchable jatis occupy a place outside the varna scheme (they are “outcastes”), whereas all other jatis are within it. The usual name for the formerly untouchable castes is Dalits, which means oppressed in Sanskrit. The official name is Scheduled Castes. The name comes from the schedule made by the British colonial government in 1932.
Discrimination In standard economics, individuals are rational actors, and economic forces undermine institutions that impose large costs on them. In this view, discrimination in competitive markets will not persist, since the discriminators will have higher costs than the nondiscriminators. Behavioral economics, with the first papers appearing in the 1970s (most of them written by psychologists), has a different model of the individual: he is a “quasi-rational actor” influenced by seemingly irrelevant features of context, as emphasized in Strand I of behavioral economics, and an “enculturated actor” concerned with cultural meanings, as emphasized in Strand II. Behavioral economics helps explain the persistence of the caste system in South Asia. Discrimination is common in the workplace in India in part because employers value “family background,” a proxy for caste. In the rural sector, the “pollution barrier” between former untouchable castes and all others remains strong. A study of 565 villages in 11 Indian states found that despite legal bans, “untouchability” continues to be practiced in almost 80% of the villages.
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The following percentages indicate the proportion of villages in which each kind of discrimination was observed: restrictions barring Dalits from selling milk (47%); restrictions barring Dalits from selling any goods in local markets (35%); separate utensils in restaurants and hotels for Dalits and non-Dalits (32%); and denial to Dalits of access to water for irrigating their fields (33%). For the last example of discrimination, Siwan Anderson estimates the cost in north India. This study compares two types of villages: in the first type, the majority of the land is owned by higher castes; in the second type, the majority of the land is owned by lower castes. Since the origins of the distribution of land by caste groups go back hundreds of years, the distribution can be viewed as a “natural experiment,” and its causal impact can be identified. This natural experiment finds extensive and costly discrimination against Dalits by higher-caste owners in markets for groundwater for irrigation. In villages where lower castes own most of the land, they own the majority of the private groundwater extraction mechanisms and rent them to the lower-caste tenants. But in villages where higher castes own most of the land, it is they who own the majority of the private groundwater extraction mechanisms, and they rarely trade with lower-caste water buyers: a severe breakdown of groundwater markets occurs. Comparing the two types of villages, holding all else equal, lower-caste water buyers have agricultural yields 45% higher if they reside in a village where the majority of water sellers are of lower caste.
Stereotype Threat Standard economics proposes that the individual is autonomous. His preferences and traits do not have social influences. In contrast, psychology, sociology, and anthropology recognize that one’s sense of self and preferences are constituted through concepts and practices and social interactions that society makes available. Individuals have many social identities (that is, groups relevant to their sense of self): a person may, for example, think of himself as a parent, spouse, landowner, Hindu, member of a particular caste, and member of many other groups. Changes in context that change which identity is cued affect how the individual behaves. An experiment by Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey assessed the effect of the salience of caste on boys’ intellectual performance in classrooms. The students in a group, who did not know each other, were rewarded financially and in private for the number of mazes that they solved (which was never publicly revealed). The control condition, in which each student’s caste was not revealed, demonstrated that boys of
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former untouchable castes solve mazes just as well as high-caste boys. However, publicly revealing caste identities reduced the performance of the low-caste boys. Holding all else equal, low-caste boys solved 23% fewer mazes than high-caste boys if they were in a mixed-caste setting where caste was made salient by revealing caste identities. This is an example of stereotype threat: cueing a social identity stereotyped as mentally deficient actually impairs the performance of members of the group. Stereotype threat applies widely, for example, in the United States to women and African Americans, in China to rural household status categories (hukou), and in Slovakia to Romas (gypsies). The persistence of stereotypes of mental inferiority, even when they are pure fictions, can be explained with a simple model in which confidence boosts performance. The stereotype may cause stigmatized individuals to comparatively underrate their achievements, which undermines their self-confidence. With lower self-confidence, they underperform. The result is that there can be what Hoff and Joseph Stiglitz call “equilibrium fictions”: stereotypes that rank groups by intelligence actually create productivity gaps between groups that sustain the stereotypes. This is the point of the philosopher Ian Hacking about “making up people”: the creation of ways to categorize people produces behavior that would not occur in the absence of the labels. Psychologists have shown that categories have broad influences on behavior. For example, an experiment in the United States establishes the almost immediate and dramatic effects of gender salience in the classroom. The experiment manipulated the salience of gender in kindergartens over a two-week period. In the low-salience condition, children continued to experience a preschool environment in which the teacher did not make gender explicit. In the high-salience condition, the children experienced a preschool environment in which the teacher labeled individuals with gender terms (for example, the teacher said “Good morning, boys and girls,” instead of “Good morning, children”) and used gender-based organization (for example, assigning boys and girls to separate bulletin boards). This mild treatment made the children less likely to play with children of the other sex. Unlike the caste system, the treatment did not impose any prohibitions on interactions between the categories (boys and girls), yet the salience of the categories caused the children to segregate themselves by gender in free play.
How Did the Caste System Emerge? Whereas ideas of caste can be traced back to Hindu texts dated thousands of years ago, caste-like society
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began to take shape in South Asia as a rigid system of division in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ruling groups in the 18th century found that they could increase their legitimacy and consolidate their power by projecting themselves as heirs of a known heroic tradition, the warrior kings, and by naming and ranking classes of their subjects in a caste-like way. Sustained interaction between Muslim and Hindu dominion builders increased the significance of jati titles. In the 19th century, landowners in India faced volatile markets and greater revenue demands from the British East India Company. The landowners responded by turning ever-larger groups of tenants and laborers into “impure” menials defined by the criteria that had earlier applied only to the groups in ritually unclean occupations, such as waste removal and leatherwork. Being “unclean” meant that the groups’ caste status was to be defined as an inherited quality of servitude. Formerly open-ended labor and tenancy relationships were thus turned into caste-based service bonds. This sometimes occurred for casual labor in factories as well. The caste system is the product of the historical encounter between Indian and colonial rule. The 19th century represented a shift in the language and reality of social life. Caste became capable of expressing, organizing, and systematizing what had been diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization across India.
Why Caste Reproduces Itself Why does caste persist? Although the caste system lowers market efficiency and causes suffering, no one by acting alone has the power to abolish it. Given that it is in place, individuals have opportunities to use it as a resource. If everyone else is in a network, an individual normally wants to be in a network, too. Historically, most South Asians have not embraced castelessness but tried to use the caste system as a toolkit of concepts, shared community, narratives, and worldviews that could give them access to social insurance and to jobs and dominance over individuals in lower-ranked castes. Beliefs about the superiority of upper castes are held by almost everyone in the Indian subcontinent, and social structures support these beliefs. Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig provide a startling example of the persistence of networks based on caste. In Bombay, networks of lower-caste men have controlled particular occupations for generations and do not admit outsiders. Women do not participate in these networks. When the Indian economy opened itself up to the world market in 1991, returns to Englishlanguage schooling in Bombay (Mumbai) rose steeply for both boys and girls. English education increased the likelihood of obtaining a white-collar job, whereas
education in the local language channeled students into working-class jobs. However, the proportion of lowercaste boys schooled in English grew relatively slowly in the postreform 1990s (from about 20% to 35%), whereas the proportion of lower-caste girls sent to English-language schools almost quadrupled (from about 10% to almost 40%). The gender difference may reflect both a positive externality associated with men’s participation in the networks and also tacit restrictions on occupational mobility for the sake of preserving the networks in the working class. The long-run stability of the caste system requires caste endogamy. In an analysis of urban, well-off, highly educated Indians, Abhijit Banerjee and colleagues showed that 70% of people married within their caste. The authors argue that caste-based preferences in marriage are likely to persist because the cost to an individual is typically low: the observed matching is close to being what most individuals would have wanted on the basis of characteristics other than caste. In a survey, three fourths of Indians state that they are opposed to marriage of individuals from different jatis. An individual is never fully aware of his culture, since it shapes how he processes information. Culture is a social construction with public good (or public bad) properties in the sense that it affects everyone in the group. The influence of culture on cognition and its public good properties make it difficult to end the caste system despite its high social cost. In summary, the broadly accepted defining features of the caste system are hierarchy and difference, giving rise to “pollution,” endogamy, and occupational differentiation. Karla Hoff See also Discrimination; Stereotypes
Further Readings Akerlof, G. (1976). The economics of caste and of the rat race and other woeful tales. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90(4), 599–617. Anderson, S. (2011). Caste as an impediment to trade. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3, 239–263. doi:=10.1257/app.3.1.239 Banerjee, A., Duflo, E., Ghatak, M., & LaFortune, J. (2013). Marry for what? Caste and mate selection in modern India. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 5(2), 33–72. doi:10.1257/mic.5.2.33 Deshpande, A. (2011). The grammar of caste. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Dirks, N. B. (2001). Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Charisma Hilliard, L. J., & Liben, L. S. (2010). Salience in preschool classrooms: Effects on children’s gender attitudes and intergroup bias. Child Development, 81(6), 1787–1798. Hoff, K., Kshetramade, M., & Fehr, E. (2011). Caste and punishment—the legacy of caste culture in norm enforcement. Economic Journal, 121, F449–F475. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011.02476 Hoff, K., & Pandey, P. (2014). Making up people: The effect of identity on performance in a modernizing society. Journal of Development Economics, 106, 118–131. http://dx.doi .org/10.1016/j.jdevec0.2013.08.009 Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2010). Equilibrium fictions: A cognitive approach to societal rigidity. American Economic Review, 100, 141–146. doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.141 Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2016). Striving for balance in economics: Towards a theory of the social determination of behavior. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 126 B, 25–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeb0.2016.01.005 Kumar, H., & Somanathan, R. (2016). Caste connections and government transfers: The Mahadalits of Bihar. Delhi: Delhi School of Economics. Munshi, K., & Rosenzweig, M. (2006). Traditional institutions meet the modern world: Caste, gender, and schooling choice in a globalizing economy. American Economic Review, 96, 1225–1252. doi:10.1257/aer.96.4.1225 Shah, G., Mander, H., Thorat, S., Deshpande, S., & Baviskar, A. (2006). Untouchability in rural India. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications.
Charisma Charisma is a quality that may be attributed to an individual based on that individual’s behavior and the situation that the individual is in. This entry provides an overview of charisma, describes conceptualizations of charisma, explains to whom and when charisma is attributed, clarifies the importance of charisma, elaborates on how charisma works, and concludes with some trends in charisma research.
Overview Charisma is not a quality inherent to an individual; rather, it is those around who recognize and confer charisma upon that individual and who can withdraw this attribution if that individual is no longer seen as deserving. To elicit charisma attribution, individuals can engage in distinct behaviors. Such behaviors include crafting a compelling vision, giving stirring speeches, exuding optimism even in the face of adversity, showing self-sacrifice, and engaging in courageous symbolic acts that exemplify espoused values. The chances of being recognized as charismatic are further enhanced in
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situations that are conducive to the emergence of a charismatic leader—such as real or apparent crises. Once individuals enjoy the glow of charisma, they hold great sway over the thoughts and actions of others and, as such, seem destined to be leaders.
Conceptualizations of Charisma Despite the ease with which people use and understand the term, there is no consensual definition of charisma. In 2016, John Antonakis and his colleagues conducted an accounting of definitions of charisma and found that they feature more than 13 different elements. The term charisma first appeared in ancient Greek texts, in which it referred to a “gift,” often a spiritual one, that distinguished individuals who were believed to have a transcendental connection. For centuries, the usage of the term was confined to religious settings. In the 1920s, however, the German sociologist Max Weber transformed the understanding of charisma by establishing the idea of charismatic authority as an antidote to traditional authority and legal authority. Charismatic authority gave power to those who were able to appeal to others emotionally and influence them by way of values and beliefs rather than by exerting coercion based on a hereditary position or a bureaucratic mandate. Weber described charisma as an extraordinary quality that sets an individual apart while yet drawing others toward that individual. Charismatic leadership, Weber suggested, is evident in organizations and socie ties, particularly during times of change, potential danger, and turnaround. Weber’s work eventually led, in the 1970s and 1980s, to the beginnings of charisma being more widely used as a term and investigated in organization science, political science, sociology, and psychology. At the time, scholars such as Bernhard Bass, James MacGregor Burns, Jay Conger, James Downton, Robert House, and Ann Willner suggested that charisma was at the heart of successful leadership. In their respective writings, they proposed, in one form or another, a model of leadership that consisted of two approaches: a rational transactional approach, which describes leadership as an economic exchange process between leaders and followers, and an emotional transformational approach, which sees leadership as a relational process by which leaders draw upon charisma to inspire and empower followers to join in the pursuit of a collective goal. The combination of the two approaches, rather than one or the other, was thought to make leaders effective and successful. Charisma, thus, was captured in terms of leaders’ behaviors and traits as well as in terms of outcomes. The problems with these accounts have been twofold: first, these accounts mixed up
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charisma as a specific quality with an array of other beneficial leadership qualities; second, these accounts confused charisma with success, thus confounding charisma with its outcome. Despite such problems, these accounts referred to as new-genre leadership theories marked the start of an exciting era of charisma research. Although this research has not yielded a consensual definition of charisma, it has shown that charisma is an attribute that followers ascribe to their leader, depending on the leader’s behavior and the situation in which these behaviors are displayed. Essentially, charisma is in the eye of the beholder; it is not a quality or trait that a person naturally possesses.
Charisma Attributions The process by which followers attribute charisma to a leader involves a cognitive matching between the followers’ (culturally influenced) expectations concerning a charismatic leader and their perceptions of the leader’s actual characteristics and behaviors. To the extent that the expectations match reality, followers confer charisma upon their leader. Theory and research primarily conducted by Jay Conger and Rabindra Kanungo show that some behaviors are particularly conducive to charisma attributions. These include articulating a compelling vision that breaks with the status quo and offers a perspective for a brighter future; appealing emotionally to values, often during passionate speeches; remaining confident and optimistic even when facing great challenges; making self-sacrifices and risking personal losses for the benefit of the followers; and showing unconventional, courageous behavior that conveys the values for which the leader stands. To the extent that they display these behaviors, leaders enhance the chances of meeting followers’ expectations concerning charisma. The most common setting in which people attribute charisma to a leader occurs when the leader gives a speech. Patricia Wasielewski examined patterns of charismatic speeches and found that they generally follow three consecutive steps. In step 1, the leader evokes the emotions that are expected in the given situation and that are already shared by the audience. Because the leader seems to feel the same as the listeners, a community of shared feeling emerges that gives legitimacy to the leader and unites him or her with his or her listeners. In step 2, the leader revokes the emotions by questioning whether the communally shared emotions were appropriate to the situation. This introduces confusion among listeners and opens up the possibility for the leader to exert influence. In step 3, the leader reframes the emotions by explaining the appropriate emotions to be displayed and the action that listeners should engage in.
The delivery of the speech is important as well. Antonakis and colleagues identified a set of verbal and nonverbal influence tactics that enhance the speaker’s chance of being seen as charismatic. The verbal tactics include the usage of metaphors, stories, and anecdotes and of contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions; the articulation of high expectations paired with messages that strengthen the collective confidence that the expectations can be met; the display of strong moral conviction; and the expression of the sentiments held by the listeners. The nonverbal tactics include the usage of body gestures, facial expressions, and animated voice, usually in the service of conveying passion and emotion. Importantly, followers’ expectations concerning charisma are not fixed but change according to the situation or the context in which followers witness the leader in action. Weber and others pointed out that a real or apparent crisis is conducive to the emergence of a charismatic leader, as in such situations, people long for a courageous, optimistic leader with a vision. Furthermore, in the context of successful teams and organizations, leaders are more likely to be seen as charismatic. Interestingly, peripheral cues with little relevance to leadership can affect attributions of charisma, too. Juan Carlos Pastor and his colleagues found that when people are aroused (e.g., after having engaged in sport), they tend to attribute more charisma to leaders than when they are not aroused. Raina Brands and her colleagues found that male leaders are seen as more charismatic than female leaders when they are embedded in a centralized, hierarchical social network and that female leaders are seen as more charismatic than male leaders when they are embedded in a dense, egalitarian social network. Thus the chances of leaders being recognized as charismatic are not only dependent on the behaviors that the leaders display but also shaped by the situation or context in which the leaders find themselves.
The Importance of Charisma Charismatic leaders have been credited with changing the world, for better and for worse. Several meta- analyses, which examined the effects of charisma across many studies, empirically support the assumption that charisma adds to leaders’ effectiveness. Findings show that charismatic leaders achieve superior levels of performance, are remarkably persuasive and influential, transform followers’ values and aspirations, and motivate followers to exert extra work effort. Although charismatic leadership can inspire high performance and success, there is also evidence that charisma can come to depend on high performance and success. In a study of chief executive officers (CEOs) of major U.S.
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corporations, Bradley Agle and his colleagues found that organizational performance related to attributions of charisma to the CEO, but CEO charisma did not relate to subsequent organizational performance. Charisma is mostly described as a desirable quality, but research and history suggest that charisma can have a dark side. To differentiate between moral and immoral charismatic leaders, scholars including Robert House and Jane Howell have pointed to leaders’ motives. Those who pursue a personalized motive exude charisma to enrich and aggrandize themselves. They foster followers’ personal identification with the leader, which causes followers to become dependent on the leader. In contrast, charismatic leaders with a socialized motive tend to empower followers to seek benefits for a collective cause. Such leaders help followers reach higher levels of development and foster followers’ social identification with the cause or the organization that the leader serves. To avoid the dark side of charismatic leadership, Jane Howell and Bruce Avolio have offered a set of behaviors that leaders should engage in to offset negative consequences. These behaviors include, for example, engaging in open two-way communication, encouraging followers to think independently, and constructively considering and learning from criticism.
The Workings of Charisma Charisma has profound effects on followers. Boas Shamir and his colleagues argued that these effects are due to followers’ identification with the leader, internalization of leaders’ values, and strengthened efficacy beliefs and self-esteem. First, to the extent that followers identify with a leader, they seek to imitate the leader’s behavior and wish to please the leader. If they also identify with the group headed by the leader and with the social cause of the leader, they are likely to subordinate their own needs to those of the group and to be willing to exert extra effort in pursuit of the group’s collective goals. Second, internalization refers to the extent to which followers endorse the leader’s values and incorporate these values into their own self-concept. By internalizing these values, followers begin to strive for higher performance and see themselves as serving a common cause. Third, charismatic leaders strengthen followers’ beliefs in their own self-efficacy and the efficacy of the group by referencing past successes of the group, emphasizing the collective identity of the group, and raising followers’ self-esteem and self-worth. When followers believe that they collectively can actually achieve the leader’s vision, they are likely to set out to work toward the vision. Other scholars point out that a crucial element in the process of charismatic influence is emotion. Amir Erez
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and his colleagues argued that because charismatic leaders stir the hearts of followers, usually by communicating positive emotions, followers want to be around these leaders and open themselves up to their influence. Joyce Bono and Remus Illies found that charismatic leaders infuse followers with positive emotions by way of emotion contagion: charismatic leaders express strong emotions, and followers tend to mimic these emotions. Because positive emotions, in turn, facilitate performance, it has become a common explanation that the powerful effects of charismatic leadership on performance are due to the positive emotions that charismatic leaders evoke. Jochen Menges and his colleagues took this idea a step further by arguing that charismatic leaders’ emotional intensity, paired with their heightened social status, can leave followers “awestruck.” The psychological processes that kick in to deal with the emotions evoked by the leader are likely to absorb cognitive capacity, thus making followers vulnerable to the influence of the charismatic leader.
Trends in Charisma Research Because charisma is difficult to define and capture, charisma research has faced numerous challenges. Scholars such as Antonakis, Daan van Knippenberg, and Sim Sitikin have pointed out that further work is necessary to fully understand the causes and consequences of charismatic leadership. A specific focus in current research is on charisma attributions and the question of when and why charisma is attributed to a person. The downstream effects of such attributions, for both the leader on the receiving end and the followers who make the attribution, are under scrutiny. Temporal patterns are being explored, with a particular emphasis on the question of why and when charisma fades and whether it can be restored. Although the understanding of charisma is thus likely to evolve further in coming years, one insight has held true since Weber brought charisma to the attention of scholars. This insight is that charisma matters greatly and that those who come to be seen as charismatic hold a key in their hand to unlock the future. Jochen I. Menges See also Collective Action; Crisis Decision Making and Management; Emotions and Political Decision Making; Political Morality; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Women and Leadership
Further Readings Agle, B. R., Nagarajan, N. J., Sonnenfeld, J. A., & Srinivasan, D. (2006). Does CEO charisma matter? An empirical analysis of
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the relationships among organizational performance, environmental uncertainty, and top management team perceptions of CEO charisma. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 161–174. Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 293–319. Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. U. E. (2011). Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10(3), 374–396. Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1987). Toward a behavioral theory of charismatic leadership in organizational settings. Academy of Management Review, 12(4), 637–647. Howell, J. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1992). The ethics of charismatic leadership: Submission or liberation? Academy of Management Executive, 6(2), 43–54. Menges, J. I., Kilduff, M., Kern, S., & Bruch, H. (2015). The awestruck effect: Followers suppress emotion expression in response to charismatic but not individually considerate leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 26(4), 626–640. Shamir, B., House, R. J., & Arthur, M. B. (1993). The motivational effects of charismatic leadership: A self-concept based theory. Organization Science, 4(4), 577–594. Van Knippenberg, D., & Sitkin, S. B. (2013). A critical assessment of charismatic-transformational leadership research: Back to the drawing board? Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 1–60. Wasielewski, P. L. (1985). The emotional basis of charisma. Symbolic Interaction, 8(2), 207–222. Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization (Talcott Parsons, ed. and trans). New York, NY: Free Press.
Citizenship Citizenship refers to the legal status of membership of a political state. A citizen is an individual recognized in law as enjoying certain rights and possessing certain, limited responsibilities (obeying the law and paying taxes, for example). In political theory, citizenship is often understood in wider terms to invoke not only legal membership of a political state but also active engagement within one’s communities. Recent work on citizenship— centered on the notion of multiple citizenships—has sought to emphasize the complex and multilayered nature of citizenship in contemporary societies. This entry provides an overview of core elements of citizenship, a summary of conceptions of citizenship, and a synopsis of ways in which citizenship may be learned.
Overview Citizenship is a legal status, but it is also much more than this. To assert that “I am a citizen” of a given
jurisdiction (of this or that town or city, of this or that nation-state, of this or that community) is generally to claim membership in that entity, and all that it entails. It is also often to proclaim a particular identity, providing citizenship with an accompanying emotional bond or tie (usually in a way that is proud, though sometimes in a way that includes shame or regret). For these reasons, citizenship can be an inclusionary force—as, for example, when citizenship of a nation-state is granted to those seeking a new home—or it can serve to exclude— as for example when full citizenship rights are denied to particular individuals or groups. Reminding us that ideas of citizenship are intimately connected to principles of liberty, the Swiss-born French politician Benjamin Constant in 1816 distinguished between the “liberty of the ancients,” in which citizenship was essential in sharing collective governance, and the “liberty of the moderns,” in which citizenship serves to protect one’s private interests. This change is in line with increasing individualism. The way citizenship is understood is often affected by the size of a given political polity. In ancient times, citizenship was largely conceived as membership in a city-state and, where democratic structures were in place, could be enacted through direct involvement in political life (though the status of the citizen was heavily restricted to the few). From the early Enlightenment period, larger nationstates developed. Within these, the legal basis of citizenship came to the fore, with citizens being holders of certain rights (often prescribed within a codified constitution), subject to the laws of the nation-state, and participating through representative systems of government, though of course who was a citizen and how this was enacted remained heavily contested. Since the 1990s, there has been a surge of interest in the concept of citizenship as an important adjunct to wider debates on theories of justice and in particular in how a reinvoking of ancient notions of citizenship—which places an emphasis on individual character and service to one’s communities—may promote social capital in contemporary societies. Over the last 30 years, a body of evidence has developed across a number of nations to suggest that there has been a decline in “social capital,” with citizens tending to withdraw from public life in favor of pursuing their private interests. In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in Public Life, Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues (1985) identified a decline in local political affiliations and relationships across American society, while in his seminal text Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam (2000) pointed to a similar falling off of communal associations. To a large extent, the resurgence of interest in active conceptions of citizenship over the
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recent years can be seen as a response to this deterioration of citizenship within public life. That is, the thesis has developed that by focusing on active forms of citizenship and their associated responsibilities, more developed and sustained forms of democratic citizenship might be strengthened. This reaction and commitment to citizenship as a mechanism for reengaging political participation has found expression in the political discourse of many leading politicians—including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, José Zapatero, Barack Obama, and David Cameron—highlighting both the prominence and fluidity of the concept. However, critics of the “bowling alone” thesis have argued that although traditional community networks have declined, new electronic communities have emerged, often moving across traditional local and national boundaries. According to this argument, social capital has not so much declined as transformed.
Conceptualizing Citizenship All theories of citizenship posit the centrality of the concept of the “citizen” as providing a meaningful frame for understanding the normative and empirical nature of political behavior in contemporary societies. Where theories of citizenship differ is with regard to (1) the relationship between individual rights and the common good and (2) the recognition of multiple and sometimes competing levels of citizenship. Important to both of these are the extent of the level of expectation of political participation.
Individual Rights and the Common Good A standard refrain concerning notions of citizenship is that to understand what being a citizen entails, one must understand the nature of and relationship between rights and responsibilities. In classical liberal conceptions, citizens were holders of certain political and social rights that protected them from undue interference from either the state or their fellow citizens and enabled them to pursue their own private interests (or conceptions of the good life). The responsibilities of citizenship were limited—typically to obeying laws, paying taxes, perhaps some form of military service, and (for those entitled) to vote in periodic political elections. In his influential liberal interpretation of citizenship in the 1950s, T. H. Marshall understood citizenship as developing through rights, namely political, civil, and social. More recent theories of citizenship, while accepting the importance of rights, tend to reject this narrow interpretation of responsibilities and seek to place greater emphasis on the necessary and valuable political
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participation of citizens within their communities. For this reason, writers from a range of different perspectives—liberals, communitarians, and civic republicans—have extolled the importance of active notions of citizenship, that is, citizens playing a participatory role within their democratic, political communities. In this way, citizen responsibilities are widened from their n arrow remit in classical liberal formulations. A key question here, and one that separates different theorists, is the reason active citizenship is valued. For most liberals, political participation is important in allowing individuals to share their own interests, to monitor those of others, and to ensure that one’s right to pursue one’s own conception of the good life is not unfairly interfered with. In contrast, for most communitarian and civic republican theorists, democratic engagement is essential for human flourishing, either as the highest form of the good life (as in Aristotle’s classical formulation) or as a form of the good life that can be legitimately encouraged by the state. Of course, citizens can enact active citizenship in a number of ways. One way of framing different avenues of political participation is to differentiate between those actions that involve citizens engaging directly with the political decision-making processes (voting, interest/lobby group participation, standing for office) and those that occur between citizens as part of functioning communities (charitable work, membership of sports teams, taking care of one’s neighbors). These forums of action are not mutually exclusive and, indeed, often serve to mutually reinforce the others. For example, in the last two decades, a number of scholars (e.g., James Fishkin and Peter Laslett; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson) interested in the idea of citizenship have argued that political participation should be based on deliberation—the give and take of free, unforced, and informed political discussion—across a range of political and social forums, as it is through deliberation that citizens share their own interests while hearing those of others.
Multiple Citizenship A common criticism of the theories of citizenship that developed during the 1980s and 1990s was that they remained framed within the Enlightenment construct of the nation-state as the key organizing entity of citizenship. Scholars wishing to present an understanding of citizenship that reflected people’s complex range of associations identified two processes as particularly important to understanding citizenship in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: first, that many nation-states had become and were becoming increasingly diverse and heterogeneous; and second, that peoples around the
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world were becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent as a result of the extensive and widespread processes of globalization. There are a number of ways of conceptualizing multiple citizenship, including dual citizenship, multicultural citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, global citizenship, transpolitical citizenship, and postcolonial citizenship. In his work on multicultural citizenship, Will Kymlicka uses the distinction between (1) national minorities in multination states and (2) ethnic groups in polyethnic states to explore the nature of multicultural citizenship in modern societies. For Kymlicka, the former are groups that have a shared cultural and communal history, which usually includes a common language or languages and, crucially, have ownership rights over particular territories. A key challenge for modern nations is to recognize the specific citizenship rights of national minorities within or alongside the broader sense of national citizenship, for example through land treaties. The latter refers to groups of immigrants who possess a shared culture but do not hold any rights to land or territories and who are seeking to balance a commitment to national citizenship alongside the retention of core elements of their own cultures. A range of policies and mechanisms can support these ends, including freedom of religious expression and antidiscrimination laws. A different approach to conceiving multiple citizenship is provided by cosmopolitanism. Although a complex term, cosmopolitanism can be broadly understood as embodying the ideas that the world is a global community, that we share a common humanity, and that as such, obligations and political participation cannot be constrained by national forms of citizenship. This cosmopolitan ethic has ancient roots in the Cynic Diogenes’s assertion, when asked from where he came, that “I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês].” For cosmopolitans, such as Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, the communal attachments that underpin our different citizenship attachments can be considered as a set of concentric circles emanating from the individual (and including the family, the local community, the national community, and the global c ommunity) to the world. A further important aspect of this approach is its understanding of engagement in cosmopolitan communities as an increasing factor in our everyday lived experiences.
Learning Citizenship If citizenship and political participation are understood to be essential concepts in contemporary life, it is important to ask how best a commitment to participatory forms of citizenship can be cultivated. To this, there
are two common responses. First, the very process of participation is understood to be educative. Put simply, the more citizens engage, the more they learn how to engage and are encouraged to engage further. Not only this, but others come to respect this engagement and will be prompted to engage themselves. In this way, participation within one’s communities cultivates and breeds further participation, with learning citizenship being a lifelong process. Second, the education and schooling systems can act as key mechanisms for socialization into participatory forms of citizenship. Most jurisdictions around the world cite the goal of educating active, informed, and responsible citizens as one of the central aims underpinning their curricular arrangements. This goal is shaped by a host of processes and mechanisms that exist within schools, including student representative councils, extracurricular activities, servicelearning programs, and community initiatives. In addition, many nations include some form of civic education within their curriculum, either as a stand-alone subject or within wider humanities/social studies courses. Although ancient in origin, citizenship remains a central concept in understanding political behavior today. Though it permits different—often contested— interpretations, citizenship’s importance lies not just in political theory and public life but also in how we understand ourselves and our relationships to others within the various communities of which we are members. Andrew Peterson and Cindy Brock See also Activism; Civic Engagement; Civilian Intervention; Dictatorship; Direct Versus Indirect Democracy; Equality of Opportunity; Party Systems; Social Capital; Voting, History of
Further Readings Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London, England: Penguin. Barber, B. (2003). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (20th Anniversary Edition). Berkeley: University of California Press. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (Eds.). (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Constant, B. (1988). Constant: Political writings (B. Fontana, Ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Fishkin, J., & Laslett, P. (Eds.). (2003). Debating deliberative democracy. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Gutman, A., & Thompson, D. (2004). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Heater, D. (2004). Citizenship: The civic ideal in world history, politics and education. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1996). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Macedo, S., et al. (2005). Democracy at risk: How political choices undermine citizen participation, and what we can do about it. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and social class and other essays. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1996). Cosmopolitanism and patriotism. In J. Cohen (Ed.), For love of country (pp. 3–17). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Civic and Political Knowledge and Skills Possessing political and civic knowledge is widely believed to be an important, even essential component of good citizenship. Although political and civic knowledge are similar, there are some differences. Civic knowledge is generally thought of as foundational information about the political, social, and economic system in which one lives (for example, the names of the three branches of the federal government in the United States) and often includes understanding the function of certain institutions (e.g., why civil liberties or access to multiple sources of news are important in democracies). This has been of long-standing interest but has intensified with recent concerns about low voting rates, especially among young people. As civic education has expanded in the recent past, increasing attention has been paid to developing high-quality test instruments in this area, composed of multiple-choice questions with keyed correct answers. These assessments are usually designed for the age-group from early adolescence through young adulthood and often include a section measuring civic skills as well. Examples of civic knowledge and skills tests are the National Assessment of Educational Progress for Civics (NAEP) and the series of cross-national studies of civic education conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA, discussed later in this entry). In contrast, measures of political knowledge are usually designed for adults and ask them to identify the names of political leaders or to demonstrate awareness of current political issues or the stands taken by
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political parties. The next three sections deal with assumptions and evidence about both civic and political knowledge and skills and also consider recent changes in the nature and acquisition of civic and political knowledge brought about by the Internet and social media. A subsequent section compares U.S. adolescents’ civic knowledge and skills with those in other countries and describes associations among the cognitive dimensions, attitudes of political trust, and expected participation.
Assumptions and Evidence About Political Knowledge and Its Value Many scholars and opinion leaders identify a book written in 1996 by the political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter as providing the basic foundation for this topic. That classic volume, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, defined political knowledge as consisting of factual knowledge about current issues or about political parties and leaders; these questions had been asked to adults in telephone surveys. It is usually assumed that political information is useful to citizens, as it allows them to live their lives in conformity with the law. Furthermore, if voters know how to get information about candidates before an election, this political knowledge will allow them to support candidates who are likely to promote policies that will benefit them or their communities. One of the most quoted findings from this book focuses on individuals of lower socioeconomic status, a group that obtains low scores on these measures of political knowledge. The irony, the authors argue, is that these are the very individuals who could benefit from electing officials who hold positive views about concrete economic programs such as support for low-income housing or a higher minimum wage. Citizens in these groups are particularly likely to be disadvantaged by their lack of political knowledge. Henry Milner (a Canadian who worked extensively in Sweden) extended Delli Carpini and Keeter’s work. He argued that enhancing citizens’ political and civic knowledge, particularly about the issues and the positions of particular candidates, is a vital route toward greater participation in politics. Furthermore, he argued that when citizens are knowledgeable and display their knowledge in the choices they make in voting and advocacy, governments are more likely to be circumspect in their actions. These assumptions about the primacy of citizens’ knowledge over more emotional factors in making political choices and about governmental responsiveness represents an ideal for which there are historical and recent counterexamples, however.
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Until about a decade ago, it was assumed that the majority of up-to-date political knowledge would be acquired by reading a newspaper (or watching television) or by talking with friends, neighbors, family, or coworkers face to face. Now the variety of media by which such information is available has changed rather abruptly. As Sarah Soberierja and Jeffrey Berry (2011) noted in their article titled “From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News,” political information is currently disseminated, received, and assimilated in a wide variety of ways. These include talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere, and social media. The information from these sources, according to Soberierja and Berry, is often composed of facts that have not been checked for accuracy and of unedited opinion. It can be argued that factually verifiable information is playing less and less of a role in candidate choice and other aspects of politics. This may be especially consequential in certain age-groups. A survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2012 concluded that social networking sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) are an important component of political and civic engagement for Americans with 66% of social media users posting their views on issues, responding to others’ views, or encouraging others to act. The respondents between 18 and 29 years of age (the youngest group surveyed) were the most likely to use social media for civic or political activities. For example, the Pew researchers found that 42% of the 18- to 29-year-old respondents posted “thoughts on issues” whereas only 20% of the 65 and older respondents did so. The younger respondents were also more likely than any of the other age-groups to “follow o fficials/candidates on social media” (Pew Research Center, 2012, p. 5). Finally, in an analysis of Internet use of upper secondary students in Chile, Denmark, and England, Amadeo (2007) found a positive association between Internet use and civic knowledge and between Internet use and respondents’ expectations for future civic and political activities. In short, there is ongoing debate about whether the increasing political use of the Internet and social media is positive or negative for gaining political knowledge and fostering informed political participation.
Assumptions and Evidence About Civic Knowledge and Its Value In contrast to political knowledge, which is largely acquired during late adolescence or adulthood, many are convinced that civic knowledge should be transmitted during students’ compulsory education. This means requiring courses in government and American history
and civics that do not emphasize partisan political information or partisan choices. Textbooks, often packed with factual knowledge about governmental leaders and events, along with lectures, recitations, or testing, are the vehicles expected to transmit civic knowledge. Some assume that learning facts about the history and founding of American political institutions creates citizens who throughout their lives will experience deep respect for the heritage and traditions of the country (as David Lowenthal argues in his 1998 book The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History). It is assumed that knowledge of the names and functions of the three branches of the federal government (including the circumstances in which they were established) and the principles of checks and balances established in the Constitution (and other facets of American exceptionalism) will promote respect for the actions of elected political leaders and their decisions. Many who accept these premises become concerned when students are encouraged to debate issues such as the current struggles toward achievement of equality rather than being required to learn facts about what the U.S. Constitution contains.
Evidence About Political and Civic Skills A number of individuals and groups suggest that political and civic skills and the willingness to practice them are as essential as content knowledge for effective citizenship. One example of this is Michael Burowoy’s call for a public sociology, made during his address as president of the American Sociological Association and followed with handbooks and materials on curricular approaches. In his view, education should equip students with knowledge and also the participatory and cognitive skills necessary for improving their communities. This includes, for example, the ability to identify major social problems about which there are dis agreements and skills to judge the extent to which journalists and other media sources are providing accurate and actionable information about pressing issues or potential solutions. Fathali Moghaddam, in a book titled The Psychology of Democracy, has taken a more psychological approach, proposing a set of 10 convictions citizens in democracies should possess. His list includes a number of civic and political skills. For example, the democratic citizen must “critically question everything . . . , revise opinions as the evidence requires, and seek information and opinions from different sources” (2016, p. 51). Many authors distinguish between cognitive or analytic skills like these and participatory skills, which include being able to collaborate and cooperate with others who hold different opinions, as well as the skill
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to speak in an articulate way in contexts of public advocacy. In their well-known 1995 book Voice and E quality, Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady argued that civic skills often develop during adolescence. Of even greater importance is their conclusion that individuals who possess civic skills are likely to participate in civic life and to be effective. In the tests that compose the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the U.S. Department of Education makes a distinction between civic cognitive or intellectual skills and civic participatory skills when they measure students’ academic progress in the “civics” subject area (Amadeo, 2016). The intellectual or cognitive skills are described as the students’ ability to describe, explain, interpret, and analyze. The participatory skills assessed include “interacting, monitoring, and influencing” (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011, pp. 4–5). The NAEP tests are administered to students during Grades 4, 8, and 12. A 2015 review paper by Judith Torney-Purta and colleagues, which lays out a framework suitable for assessing college students, also distinguishes between cognitive and participatory skills.
Civic Knowledge and Skills of U.S. Adolescents Compared With Those in Other Countries Americans have become accustomed to hearing about the poor performance of their students in international tests of knowledge in fields such as science and mathematics conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). In contrast, when nationally representative samples of young people (aged 14) in 28 countries were tested using a 38-item assessment in the IEA CIVED Study, the U.S. sample achieved the highest score on the civic skills component (see TorneyPurta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001). This measure included, for example, the ability to comprehend a mock election leaflet and to tell the difference between statements of fact and statements of opinion. Scores on the test’s civic knowledge component for students in the United States were also above the international mean. Students from homes with low literacy backgrounds and who did not aspire to college education had substantially lower civic knowledge and skills scores, however. In fact, the distribution of civic knowledge scores in the United States was bimodal. In other words, there was a substantial group of respondents with nearly perfect scores and a substantial group answering at little better than a chance level. The IEA CIVED Study identified several schoolrelated correlates of high knowledge and skills scores,
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which suggest the kind of civic education that is likely to be effective. Students who reported classroom study of four specific U.S. political institutions had higher overall knowledge scores than those who did not report such instruction (Torney-Purta & Barber, 2004). These educational researchers as well as David Campbell and other political scientists have shown that an open and respectful climate for classroom discussion and deliberation is associated with higher civic competence and participation. What might be the mechanism here? Christopher Karpowitz and Chad Raphael in their 2014 book titled Deliberation, Democracy and Civic Forums reported a study of adults’ discussions in o rganized civic or public forums and concluded that “through exposure to the argument of others, deliberative talk can help participants . . . enlarge their knowledge of issues and perspectives, . . . correct false beliefs . . . and arrive at more sophisticated views” (p. 69). The congruence of research findings about the importance of open and respectful discussion for developing civic knowledge is striking, whether adolescents or adults are considered. Analyses of the IEA CIVED Study also found that students who possessed more civic knowledge and skills were more likely to expect to vote as adults and to obtain information about candidates before voting, a significant predictor in all 28 countries (Torney-Purta et al., 2001). More knowledgeable students in the United States also held more positive beliefs about the overall importance of citizens’ conventional civic participation (voting, keeping up with political affairs). Civic knowledge was less substantially associated with the expected likelihood of volunteering, contributing to charity, or planning to engage in political activism (Torney-Purta & Barber, 2004). The IEA CIVED Study (2001) and the subsequent International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) (2010), from which these findings come, also included assessments of attitudes (e.g., sense of political efficacy, trust in political institutions). In a 2015 review of publications based on these studies, Ryan Knowles and Marialuisa Di Stefano found that few scholars appear to have examined civic knowledge in isolation. Most analyses relate knowledge to attitudes and participation. To give just two examples, looking across countries, Torney-Purta, Barber, and Richardson (2004) reported that trust in government was positively associated with civic knowledge in many democracies. However, in some postcommunist and Latin American countries, there was either no association, or higher knowledge scores were associated with less trust. Jon Lauglo (2013) confirmed these findings about trust and also found a significant association between civic knowledge and support for women’s political rights
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(which he presented as an example of a rationally based civic attitude). However, it is important to recognize that the extent of political participation in adulthood or the choice of a particular candidate in an election depends only partially on political or civic knowledge. Possessing knowledge could allow a voter to obtain and comprehend information about which candidate most closely matches his or her own position on issues, but the choice of whether to vote and for whom depends on many other attitudinal and motivational factors.
Conclusion The formation of political and civic knowledge and skills is essential for informed and active participation in democratic life. This has become especially important in the context of a proliferation of new ways in which citizens are acquiring news and information about political issues, candidates, and events. Many researchers argue that knowledge and skills (in particular civic knowledge and skills) develop during adolescence. And most agree that those individuals with well-developed civic skills are more likely to be effective in participating in their communities. Therefore, assessing political and civic knowledge and skills is important, as well as attending to ways to increase effective classroom approaches such as open and respectful discussion of issues on which there are differing opinions. Judith Torney-Purta and Jo-Ann Amadeo See also Citizenship; Civic Engagement; Democracy; Political Participation; Social Networking; Voting Behavior, Theories of
Further Readings Amadeo, J. (2007). Patterns of Internet use and political engagement among youth. In P. Dahlgren (Ed.), Young citizens and new media: Learning for democratic participation (pp. 125–146). London, England: Routledge. Amadeo, J. (2016). Civic skills. In S. L. Schechter (Ed.), American governance ( Vol. 1, pp. 273–276). New York, NY: Macmillan Baum, M. A., & Groeling, T. (2008). New media and the polarization of American political discourse. Political Communication, 25(4), 345–365. Campbell, D. E. (2008). Voice in the classroom: How an open classroom climate fosters political engagement among adolescents. Political Behavior, 30(4), 437–454. Delli Carpini, M. X., & Keeter, S. (1996). What Americans know about politics and why it matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jeffries, V. (Ed.). (2009). Handbook of public sociology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Karpovitz, C. F., & Raphael, C. (2014). Deliberation, democracy and civic forums: Improving equality and publicity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, R., & Di Stefano, M. (2015). International citizenship education research: An annotated bibliography of research using the IEA ICCS and IEA CIVED datasets. Journal of International Social Studies, 5(2), 86–118. Lauglo, J. (2013). Do more knowledgeable adolescents have more rationally based civic attitudes: Analysis of 38 countries. Educational Psychology, 33(3), 252–282. Lowenthal, D. (1998). The heritage crusade and the spoils of history. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Milner, H. (2002). Civic literacy: How informed citizens make democracy work. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press. Moghaddam, F. (2016). The psychology of democracy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. National Center for Education Statistics. (2011). The nation’s report card civics 2010 (NCES 2011-466). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Pew Internet and American Life Project. (2012). Social media and political engagement. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Soberierja, S., & Berry, J. M. (2011). From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news. Political Communication, 28, 19–41. Torney-Purta, J., & Barber, C. (2004). Strengths and weaknesses in U.S. students’ knowledge and skills: Analysis of data from the IEA Civic Education Study. College Park, MD: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Torney-Purta, J., Barber, C., & Richardson, W. K. (2004). Trust in government related institutions and political engagement among adolescents in six countries. Acta Politica, 380–406. Torney-Purta, J., Cabrera, J. C., Roohr, K. C., Liu, O. L., & Rios, J. A. (2015). Assessing civic competency and engagement in higher education (Research Report No. RR-12-34). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Torney-Purta, J., Lehmann, R., Oswald, H., & Schulz, W. (2001). Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries: Civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~jtpurta Verba, S., Schlozman, K., & Brady. H. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic volunteerism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Civic Engagement Civic engagement consists of the expression of ideas, interests, feelings, knowledge, opinions, and attitudes toward the life of a given civic community. This can be articulated in different forms that can be of an individual
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or a collective nature. This entry provides insights into the different issues concerned with the definition of civic engagement and also the controversies surrounding its usage for conducting empirical research. It provides some examples of the implications of civic engagement as well as an overview of the ambiguities that are emerging regarding its usage in the current literature and also in policy practice. It also compares some indicators for measuring civic engagement with indicators traditionally used to measure cognate concepts, such as political engagement, civic participation, and political participation.
Overview In a historical period widely marked by an apparent decay in citizens’ interest in political and civic matters, civic engagement has become a key issue that is considered central at various levels. For example, policymakers consider civic engagement as indispensable in order to stimulate participatory behaviors; non-state actors—and the so-called civil society—refer to civic engagement as a crucial component for their everyday activities, which can include, for example, volunteering, lobbying, and fundraising; academics have considered civic engagement as a critical component for the fostering of social capital and to favor the reach of a common good for the community. Overall, there seems to be agreement on the idea that civic engagement is essential for establishing collective bases of participation in a given community, enhancing social solidarity, but at the same time for guaranteeing mutual respect and understanding between various social groups. In a seminal work published in 2000, Robert Putnam noted, for example, that social capital was declining in the United States. In his view, this reflected a growing and alarming lack of civic engagement and a dissolution in the social ties that brought together American citizens to engage in common activities in their communities. This, according to Putnam, was manifested in the ever-decreasing membership of individuals in civic organizations and in the relative decline in social interaction. This is a trend that is currently characterizing many consolidated and emerging democracies. However, other authors have argued that new forms of electronic networks and communities are emerging, replacing traditional ones. Civic engagement is often considered as a policy response to various social and public problems and is part of public policies aiming at stimulating active citizenship. The rationale is that civic engagement is central for community building and for the enhancement of social capital. Communitarian intervention, for instance, or community engagement, has been considered strategic by governments and by supranational organizations
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for favoring the fostering of forms of civic ownership in the community, whereby there is a lack of integration and solidarity between ethnic and social groups or generations. In research terms, the operationalization of civic engagement has attracted the interest of many scholars throughout the world who have been using indicators such as participation in volunteering groups, voting in elections, and personal interest in politics, among others, to measure levels of civic engagement in a given community. This unpacks the discussion relative to the ambiguities and controversies existing in finding a common denominator and definition of civic engagement. The concept is in fact a highly contested one. This is due to the multifaceted forms that it can take and to the various possible uses and operationalizations that can be made with it. It is important to note that in most cases, “civic engagement” is used interchangeably—and often mistakenly—with cognate but distinct terms such as “civic participation,” “civic activism,” “political engagement,” “political participation,” and, more broadly speaking, “active citizenship.” In this overview of the concept, the distinction is drawn between engagement and participation. Civic engagement is then compared with the associated—but dissimilar—concepts of political engagement, civic participation, and political participation. Last but not least, the importance of civic engagement as an essential element of active citizenship is noted.
Distinguishing Participation From Engagement In order to highlight the deep substance of civic engagement, it is essential to distinguish between engagement and participation. Martyn Barrett and Bruna Zani argued that engagement is more specifically based on the holding of interests, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes toward civic or political issues. Having an interest, a feeling, or an idea toward something, be it a civic or a political matter, does not necessarily imply assuming a participatory behavior. In a nutshell, an interest in a civic or political matter does not directly correspond to open participation in the polity or the community and does not necessarily lead to active forms of civic and political participation. For instance, someone could be interested in who is running for elections in a particular community, believing that, according to her or his opinion, a specific candidate should win, therefore following political blogs or TV shows where political issues are discussed but without participating in any campaigning for the support of such a candidate. Or, to draw another example, someone could have an interest in the well-being of everyone
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in the community and acknowledge the fact that there should be safety nets and mutual support for those who are poorer without actively participating in any volunteer activity or being part of an organization providing mutual help or lobbying policy-makers to introduce specific policies targeting such groups. The central issue here is therefore the level of distinction existing between cognitive and behavioral engagement, with the latter implying the assumption of participatory attitudes that may result in active involvement. In short, by referring to the first example, the support for a candidate at election time might result in either individual or collective efforts to support her or him: writing blogs or tweeting during the political campaign; supporting his or her political party by donating money; participating in public events in support of the candidate; and so on. With reference to the second example, having an interest in the more disadvantaged in the community might result in the individual joining a specific volunteer organization and actively participating in activities aimed at supporting and improving their life conditions; donating money to charity; or actively participating in a social movement that advocates for better living conditions. The distinction between individual and collective engagement and participation is also rather central in this context. Reading news, having personal feelings about a civic matter, and knowing about civic institutions are examples of individual forms of engagement, whereas the adoption of a certain lifestyle or the identification with a specific collective ideology have collective dimensions. Thus, an example of engagement in civic and political matters, at the individual level, could be considered as reflecting a personal interest in the life of the community. An example of individual participation in civic and political matters could be for instance adopting environmentally sustainable behaviors, such as for example recycling or donating money to a green organization or a charity, thereby supporting their initiatives. Last but not least, engagement is to be understood in light of its counterpart, which is disengagement. Again, the work of Putnam is essential in this sense, with a specific reference to his writings published in the second half of the 1990s that culminate with the publication of the book Bowling Alone. Disengagement can be described as, for instance, the lack of interest, knowledge, or emotional attachment to civic and political institutions and/or the refusal to recognize certain dominating ideologies or lifestyles. This results in a lack of behavioral and participatory attitudes toward the life of the community or polity. Different categories can be thought of in order to describe disengagement: apolitical, antipolitical, acivic, and anticivic. Each of them
indicates, for instance, a refusal, a lack of interest, and, in some cases, the expression of explicit forms of antagonism toward the existing civic and political institutions.
Civic Engagement: Three Perspectives The difficulty of providing a precise definition of civic engagement is due to the fact that this term is often used to refer to different forms of individual and/or collective involvement in the community and, more broadly speaking, in the polity of belonging. Three perspectives can be found in the literature:
1. a perspective inclusive of both community and political activities;
2. a perspective arguing for the replacement of civic engagement with alternative and more precise terminology; and
3. a perspective calling for a clear distinction between civic and political activities.
The first perspective takes into account a broad definition of civic engagement that includes both civic and political dimensions. Richard Adler and Judy Goggin argued—in their review of the literature on civic engagement—that definitions vary according to the different points of view and types of activity that are under consideration. In this regard, they claim that the existing literature can be summarized into four types that mix both civic and political elements and that entail forms of civic engagement such as community service, collective action, political involvement, and social change. However, approaches of this kind to the definition of civic engagement have been heavily criticized, with authors such as Ben Berger even calling for the necessity to find alternatives to replace a term considered ready for the dustbin. This second perspective points to various ambiguities, arguing that “civic engagement” is an overstretched term that has been used and operationalized with indicators associated with a variety of activities that assume both civic and political meanings and include volunteering in the civic community, following political programs, participating in interest groups, voting, and protesting, among others. The critique by Berger is important because it raises concerns about the exact meaning of the civic component of engagement, calling for a clear distinction from the political component. The third perspective, instead of refusing the usage of the term civic engagement, draws a separate line
Civic Engagement
between these two components. Civic engagement consists of the expression of communitarian attitudes that are central in determining the social capital of a given social setting. In this regard, Barrett and Zani, in underlining that “civic engagement” is a term used to denote an interest in the common good of a community, draw on examples such as having interests, feelings, and ideas that are exclusively referred to as civic dimensions. At the same time, they argue that political engagement clearly refers to holding an interest in a specific system of governance—be this local, national or supranational—and to public policy. Examples of these can be found in the expression of interest in political matters by following news regarding specific events but also in identifying with a particular political ideology. According to this perspective, holding awareness of the importance of civic institutions and gathering, for instance, information in order to acquire more knowledge about their functioning are considered important indicators in measuring civic engagement. On the other hand, following political affairs or events, having an interest in the working of political institutions, and acquiring further knowledge about their functioning are considered important indicators for measuring political engagement.
Prepolitical Elements of Civic Engagement Another question is that of how forms of civic engagement that are prepolitical can be accounted for. Berger’s criticism is illuminating, in the sense that much of the confusion in the literature regarding civic engagement has to do with the fact that most authors draw a link with formal and informal dimensions of political action and participation, attaching a strong political meaning to its definition. Joakim Ekman and Erik Amnå argue that this confusion has been created because civic engagement can be seen, in some cases, as a latent form of political participation insofar as it implies forms of engagement that might actually be of great significance for future political activities. The identification with a specific civic movement or ideology or the assumption of a specific lifestyle can in some cases result in the assumption of active political behaviors and in political participation. In short, showing an interest in crucial matters regarding a given community can eventually lead to forms of political engagement and political activism within the community. For example, showing an interest toward environmental matters and gathering information about this on the Internet can potentially lead to specific behaviors that could entail political activism, such as supporting a political party that advocates for a better environment or joining a protest organized in order to raise consciousness about
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environmental risk. In short, civic engagement can in some cases lead to political engagement and political participation.
Distinguishing Civic Engagement From Civic and Political Participation Engagement, either civic or political, can obviously but not necessarily subsume participation or lead to the activation of individual or collective participatory behaviors. Some of the literature on civic engagement includes in its measurement the use of indicators that are actually meant to be applied to cognate concepts, such as civic and political participation. Examples include enrolling in nongovernmental organizations that promote healthy living; voting in local or national elections; or rallying against a government to stop the implementation of a bill. All these cases count as examples of civic engagement, especially according to the first perspective introduced above. In light of the definitions and the discussion addressed by the third perspective on civic engagement, however, it is appropriate to argue that they are different. More precisely, they can be defined as examples of civic participation (participation in a group of interest focused on health), conventional political participation (exercising the right to vote), and nonconventional political participation (protesting outside formal channels of participation). Civic participation refers to the set of voluntary activities that are meant to provide, for example, mutual help or that try to face social and public problems emerging in the community. This of course implies a form of civic activism that is oriented toward the improvement of a particular society. Arguably, many activities of voluntary organizations are behavioral in the sense that they have the scope of promoting forms of mutual help and are based on the fostering of social solidarity. On the other side—and the seminal work of Sidney Verba is inspiring in this sense—political participation encompasses various modalities through which the influence on the political system and on public policy can be exercised, examples being voting, campaigning, protesting, expressing opinions or dissent through the use of social media, and actively joining a political movement. In short, it encompasses both conventional and nonconventional forms of political participation. The former include dimensions that are directly linked with the political arena and associated with electoral processes and therefore crucial for the survival of representative democracy. The latter instead involve a variety of actions that are usually not taking place in the normal channels of political representation and therefore can be located outside electoral processes.
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Civic Engagement and Active Citizenship Civic engagement is in most cases considered a prerequisite for active citizenship. This is a powerful concept used to denote all the processes through which citizens assume ownership of the community they live in by taking the responsibility to have a say in the elaboration of civic and political matters. On the one side, active citizenship can be thought of as a practice stimulated by public institutions through public policy with the aim of promoting civic and political engagement in order to shape participatory processes and ultimately improving the democratic bases of policymaking. From this perspective, active citizenship is an institutionally driven process aimed at favoring participatory behaviors with the purpose of facilitating access to the political system, to share responsibilities with the broad polity in determining public policies and also in promoting democratization. This is essential in neoliberal settings, where the aim is to enlarge the basis of democracy via the promotion of input legitimacy and to facilitate participation in governance, as well as to solve emerging social and public problems. Channels for participation can be different, but all serve the purpose of providing feedback and input to public institutions in planning specific policy interventions. Citizens, for example, will participate in the community in order to provide reciprocal assistance through volunteering, be actively involved in processes of deliberation regarding certain public policies by communicating with policy-makers about their preferences, join different organized interest groups in order to participate in community life, and express dissent from the making of a given policy by referring to the right to protest. On the other side, active citizenship can be thought of as a demand, which becomes particularly important whenever certain competing claims are made in civil society through different means by using both traditional and alternative channels of mobilization. This form of active citizenship is expressed outside formal channels of political participation—such as electoral politics—and takes expression thanks to the implementation of various forms of deliberation. At the same time, it takes place when public policy is insufficient or nonexistent, and individuals mobilize in collective action in order to solve a particular problem, therefore acting apart from—or in some cases replacing—public intervention. From this perspective, for example, c itizens will attempt to gain ownership of the social and political settings by trying to subvert the existing order (in the case of protests against an authoritarian government); self-mobilizing for the purpose of guaranteeing the wellbeing of the community, replacing the functions of
policy-makers when there is a lack of intervention; occupying and using abandoned public spaces for the organization of cultural and/or social activities, such as providing help for immigrants or acting as a meeting point for the support of disadvantaged people in a particular community. In both cases, Delli Carpini puts it very well: deliberation is a key component through which ideas, beliefs, and points of view are exchanged with the purpose of promoting the common good of the community. The centrality of civic engagement relies upon the activation of the cognitive understanding and the awareness of belonging to such a community. In short, it is an essential layer in the development of civic consciousness, both at the individual and at the collective level. This makes possible the recognition and acknowledgment of different values, orientations, and aims. Civic engagement is therefore at the basis of the adoption of participatory behaviors that make active citizenship possible. Cristiano Bee See also Activism; Citizenship; Democracy; Disengagement; Political Deliberation; Political Participation; Social Capital; Social Movements
Further Readings Adler, R. P., & Goggin, J. (2005). What do we mean by “civic engagement”? Journal of Transformative Education, 3(3), 236–253. Barrett, M., & Brunton-Smith, I. (2014). Political and civic engagement and participation: Towards an integrative perspective. Journal of Civil Society, 10(1), 5–28. Barrett, M., & Zani, B. (Eds.). (2015). Political and civic engagement: Multidisciplinary perspectives. London, England: Routledge. Bee, C., & Guerrina, R. (2014). Participation, dialogue, and civic engagement: Understanding the role of organized civil society in promoting active citizenship in the European Union. Journal of Civil Society, 10(1), 29–50. Berger, B. (2009). Political theory, political science and the end of civic engagement. Perspectives on Politics, 7, 335–350. Delli Carpini, M. X., Cook, F. L., & Jacobs, L. R. (2004). Public deliberations, discursive participation and citizen engagement: A review of the empirical literature. Annual Review of Political Science, 7(1), 315–344. Ekman, J., & Amnå, E. (2012). Political participation and civic engagement: Towards a new typology. Human Affairs, 22(3), 283–300. Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Civil Disobedience Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady. H. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic volunteerism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Civil Disobedience Civil disobedience is a political protest that is carried out in open defiance of legal or political authority. It necessarily involves a violation of law, such that its practitioners often anticipate that their protest will culminate in arrest and potential prosecution. The law that is violated is sometimes the focus of the protest, as was the case on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a White passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. It can alternatively be the case that uncontested laws are violated as a means of drawing attention to an unrelated set of grievances, as occurred throughout the autumn of 2014 when protesters in Hong Kong violated public order and traffic ordinances to demonstrate against the slow pace of democratic reform in the territory. Civil disobedience can be viewed as transgressive behavior due to its illegality, but it can also be situated on the outer edges of acceptable civic conduct. This is because civil disobedience is often characterized by an ethos of restraint and respect for others, not to mention a historical association with socially beneficial reforms in many democratic or democratizing societies. This entry surveys the tactics, rationale, conduct, and morality of civil disobedience before concluding with a brief discussion of its prospects.
Repertoires The repertoire of contention is a conceptual tool used in social movement studies to chart the range of tactics that are available to spatially and temporally embedded protest movements. Civil disobedience has become associated with a repertoire that includes but is not limited to sit-ins, occupations, trespassing, blockades, lock-downs, banner drops, tax resistance, illegal street theater, and jail solidarity. These tactics or similar ones have been deployed in various ways by a range of social movements, including the U.S. civil rights movement, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, the environmental movement, the feminist movement, gay-rights and disability-rights activists, the antiabortion movement, the Tea Party, and the antiglobalization and antiausterity movements. The repertoire of civilly disobedient tactics is not fixed but evolves over time to reflect activist innovation and
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technological progress. There is, for instance, an ongoing debate about the extent to which emergent online protest tactics, such as distributed denial-of-service attacks, should be characterized as an innovative form of electronic or digital civil disobedience. This debate touches upon the difficulty of determining whether a particular protest tactic or campaign should be categorized as an instance of civil disobedience. Once we move beyond the core idea of defiance to political or legal authority, it has proven to be surprisingly difficult to identify shared characteristics of civilly disobedient protest.
The Communication Thesis There have thus been extensive efforts to clarify the concept of civil disobedience by identifying its underlying rationale. The contemporary theoretical literature is, as Tony Milligan notes, dominated by a communication thesis, which states that the rationale for civil disobedience is to express opposition to contentious laws, policies, or practices and cultivate support for reform. The communication thesis is associated with the influential liberal philosopher John Rawls, who characterizes it as an appeal to the sense of justice of a particular audience. The thesis is also associated with the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who characterizes civil disobedience as a means of pushing issues into the center of the public sphere. The thesis can differentiate civil disobedience from other forms of political or legal disobedience, such as conscientious objection and direct action. Unlike civil disobedience, neither of these protests is guided by the aim of expressing opposition; the aim of conscientious objection is to avoid enrollment in contentious practices, and the aim of direct action is to obstruct and prevent contentious practices. Civil disobedience entails significant risks for those who practice it, such that political theorists have paid considerable attention to the reasons for its use. The communication thesis identifies two considerations that lead agents to favor civil disobedience over less risky forms of expression. The first is that the risks associated with civil disobedience render it an effective means of expressing the depth and sincerity of agents’ opposition. The decision to communicate opposition through civil disobedience rather than lawful forms of expression demonstrates that agents care so deeply about their cause that they are willing to risk the possibility of arrest and prosecution. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that civil disobedience is thus a good means of testing the convictions of a potentially apathetic majority, which might revise its views when faced with opposition from a minority that cares deeply about a particular issue.
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The second is that civil disobedience can be more efficacious as a means of generating publicity than lawful protest, as media outlets are often more likely to give coverage to protests that culminate in disruption to daily routines or confrontation with police. The possibility that civil disobedience will be prosecuted opens up further opportunities for publicity, as defendants and their associates or sympathizers might exploit the proceedings to gain further exposure for their views. The publicitygenerating potential of civil disobedience is hampered by the danger that media outlets may focus on the attendant disruption at the expense of the underlying issues, but this is a risk often judged to be worth taking given the obstacles that confront resource-poor agents in gaining access to and influence over the public sphere. The communication thesis is not universally accepted as an account of the rationale for civil disobedience. The appeal of the thesis is that it captures an important dynamic of some prominent historical campaigns. The activists associated with the U.S. civil rights movement, for instance, framed their campaign as a moral protest against the injustice of racial segregation, with civil disobedience used as a means of dramatizing their critique of an unjust system. The problem, though, is that the rationale for protest acts that are often seen as civilly disobedient is not always best captured by the aim of communicating opposition. Civil disobedience is often used not merely to communicate but also to exert pressure on political opponents. There was, for instance, a coercive aspect to U.S. civil rights protest, which can be seen in the efforts of some activists to drain the resources of the criminal justice system through filling jail cells and refusing to cooperate with officials. This challenges the communication thesis, because civil disobedience does not in this instance appear to be an effort to persuade opponents of the merits of a cause. This attempt to persuade through reason requires a long-term shift in the values and opinions of one’s opponents, which is unlikely to be achieved through the exercise of force or the imposition of costs. The use of coercion might be compatible with the communication thesis if it is presented as a temporary measure to compel recalcitrant opponents to enter a dialogue with protesters. This is, in fact, a theme that figures in Martin Luther King Jr.’s defense of civil disobedience against racial segregation. Coercion is harder to reconcile with communication, though, if it constitutes an attempt to impose a political outcome without the intermediary stage of a dialogic process. This kind of coercive protest calls upon us either to revise the dominant communicative paradigm or to insist that such protest should be categorized as direct action, or some other mode of contention, rather than civil disobedience.
Nonviolence The issue of whether civil disobedience should be seen as an essentially communicative act will influence our account of the conduct that is compatible with it. This can be illustrated through considering the issue of nonviolence. There is no agreement among scholars over whether civil disobedience should be defined as nonviolent, but as a practice it certainly has a strong association with the tradition of nonviolent resistance. This is perhaps a reflection of the role that figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. play in shaping popular perceptions about civil disobedience. A commitment to nonviolence is, furthermore, an intuitive way in which “civil” disobedience might be distinguished from “uncivil” disobedience, such as riots, terrorism, or guerrilla warfare. If we conceptualize civil disobedience as a mode of address, this can furnish further reasons for limiting civil disobedience to nonviolent acts. The thought that there is a tension between the goal of communication and the use of violence is an important aspect of the theories of civil disobedience developed by Rawls and Habermas. Their accounts affirm nonviolence for three reasons. The first is that civil disobedience is seen as a means of expressing disobedience to law within the limits of a general respect for the rule of law. The avoidance of violence expresses the intent of protesters not to invite a state of lawless anarchy through their actions but to bring about improvements to the constitutional order through nonviolent and discriminating acts of unlawful dissent. The case for expressing respect for the rule of law is, in fact, sometimes taken as a basis for further requirements on civilly disobedient conduct, such as acting in public and accepting the legal consequences of one’s actions. The second reason is that civil disobedience is seen as a means of reaching out to members of the public in a way that respects their rational agency. The thought here is that the intent to communicate entails a certain attitude toward our audience such that we recognize their capacity and right to engage with our arguments. This respect is difficult to reconcile with modes of action that have the intended or unintended effect of limiting their rational capacities, particularly violence associated with physical or emotional harm. The third consideration is that violence can often detract from the intended message of the protest, for instance, through giving opponents an opportunity to discredit protesters as extremists and thus avoid a meaningful engagement with their grievances. The association between civil disobedience and nonviolence is not universally accepted. In part, this reflects disagreement over whether civil disobedience should be
Civil Disobedience
conceptualized as a communicative act. If we contend that civil disobedience is often coercive rather than communicative, it is more likely that we will see at least certain forms of violence as compatible with its rationale. Even if we accept the communication thesis, it is not immediately obvious that we should insist that civil disobedience should be nonviolent. This is because, as Kimberley Brownlee has argued, although the intent to communicate is incompatible with the threat or use of egregious forms of physical and emotional violence, it may not be incompatible with all forms of conduct that could plausibly be categorized as violent. This has been illustrated through the case of violence against property, which is defined—following the philosopher Robert Audi—as vigorous, malicious, or incendiary damage or destruction. The use of property destruction has been embraced by radical elements of the antiglobalization movement, particularly by anarchists who deploy “black-bloc” tactics—wearing black clothing, ski masks, motorcycle helmets, and other face-concealing and protective gear—at large-scale demonstrations. The damaging of commercial property, such as smashing windows of Starbucks cafes or McDonald’s restaurants, can certainly be presented as a noncommunicative attempt to impose modest costs on corporate targets. It is, though, possible to read such acts in a different way, as part of a symbolic and performative critique of capitalist institutions that contains an important expressive dimension. These acts can be seen as dramatized expressions of opposition to corporate power; for instance, black-bloc activists have spoken about using property destruction as a means of shattering popular perceptions about the inevitability of globalization. If we suppose that black-bloc violence is limited and discriminate and respectful of the physical and emotional integrity of persons, some scholars would situate it within the communicative approach to civil disobedience.
Justification and Rights The communication thesis might be thought to support the belief that civil disobedience should be treated as a routine means of political participation within democratic societies. It might, on this view, be treated as a form of political speech that should be accorded the same kind of recognition as other modes of political expression. In fact, political theorists—not to mention political actors—tend not to converge on this view of civil disobedience. The reason is that civil disobedience differs from other forms of expression in being an unlawful act, thus conflicting with commonsense intuitions about the duty to comply with democratic decisions. Even if we doubt the existence of such a duty,
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civil disobedience is a mode of contention that can cause significant disruption, impose societal costs, and exacerbate political conflicts. This is the case even if protesters adhere to a strict code of nonviolence. There is thus a lively theoretical debate about how civil disobedience can be defended in light of these concerns. The literature on the justification of civil disobedience has been dominated by two influential perspectives, which derive respectively from the liberal and radical democratic traditions. These perspectives converge on the view that there is a presumption against civil disobedience in a democratic society but suggest that countervailing considerations can override this presumption. The idea is that civil disobedience can be justified insofar as it functions as a corrective to a certain kind of malfunction in the institutional or cultural fabric of a democratic society, with each perspective offering a contrasting account of those malfunctions. The liberal account focuses on the case for civil disobedience in circumstances where the government has enacted legislation or tolerated societal practices that amount to infringements of the rights and freedoms of citizens. This is the case if, for instance, a government enacts legislation that violates the religious freedoms of a minority or fails to guarantee equal treatment for all before the law. The liberal approach is thus particularly well suited to the appraisal of protest movements that coalesce around calls for equal rights, such as campaigns against racial segregation or in favor of same-sex marriage. The radical democratic approach, by contrast, focuses on the case for civil disobedience in circumstances in which government has enacted legislation or reached collective decisions in an insufficiently democratic fashion. This would be the case if, for instance, decisions are not preceded by sufficiently inclusive and robust public deliberation or if entrenched interests exert a disproportionate influence on proceedings. The radical democratic perspective is thus particularly well suited to the appraisal of protest campaigns in support of issues that are alleged to receive insufficient or partial consideration in policy-making, such as environmental concerns or the regulation of global capital. The debate about the justification of civil disobedience has, in recent years, been augmented by a discussion about the moral right to civil disobedience. This may, at first glance, appear to be essentially the same kind of discussion, at least insofar as we think that having a moral justification to carry out civil disobedience is the same as having a moral right to this activity. There is, in fact, a distinction to be drawn here, as can be seen through recognizing that justifications refer to the strength of the reasons that we have for our action, while
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rights refer to the claims to noninterference or assistance that we have against others in relation to our actions. It is possible to contend that civil disobedience can be justified without committing to any arguments about how others should treat the actors that engage in it. The philosopher David Lefkowitz has offered an argument in support of a moral right to civil disobedience in democratic societies, which entitles those who engage in it to certain kinds of fair treatment by public authorities. The right should be seen as an extension of our general right to political participation, such that citizens can engage in a suitably constrained unlawful protest as a means of appealing to the broader public. The right bestows a moral claim against legal punishment for civil disobedience, but it does not grant a claim against arrest, temporary incarceration, or the imposition of penalties. This argument is thus sensitive to concerns about a thoroughgoing routinization of civil disobedience, through using these potential costs as disincentives for engaging in frivolous or frequent unlawful protests. This rights-based argument is nonetheless useful for guiding moral criticism of the harsh and punitive sanctions that public authorities sometimes seek to impose on civilly disobedient citizens.
Prospects The mantle of civil disobedience is one that protest movements often seek to claim because of its historical association with democratic progress and self- constrained forms of conduct. There is, furthermore, a booming cottage industry offering “training” in nonviolent protest for activists, while the topic continues to generate significant scholarly and popular debate. The prospects for civil disobedience, however, are rather more unclear than one might think. On the one hand, despite the arguments for tolerant treatment, public authorities often adopt an aggressive stance toward civil disobedience. A recent report by the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, for instance, documents a pervasive pattern of escalating police repression against nonviolent political protesters in both democratic and nondemocratic societies. On the other hand, despite its historical status, some protesters have expressed a certain degree of hostility toward civil disobedience. Anarchists associated with the antiglobalization movement, for instance, have occasionally favored the label of direct action over civil disobedience, because the latter is perceived as too deferential to power. The long-term prospects for civil disobedience thus depend upon retaining its ambivalent status between tolerance and transgression. William Smith
See also Activism; Democracy; Human Rights; Nonviolence; Obedience; Political Deliberation; Political Morality; Rule of Law; Social Movements; Social Revolts
Further Readings Audi, R. (2009). On the meaning and justification of violence. In V. Bufacchi (Ed.), Violence: A philosophical anthology (pp. 136–167). Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Bedau, H. A. (Ed.). (1991). Civil disobedience in focus. London, England: Routledge. [Of particular note are the readings by Martin Luther King, John Rawls, and Peter Singer.] Brownlee, K. (2012). Conscience and conviction: The case for civil disobedience. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1985). Civil disobedience: Litmus test for the democratic constitutional state. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 30, 95–116. International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations. (2014). “Take back the streets”: Repression and criminalization of protest around the world. Available at https://www.aclu.org/ files/assets/global_protest_suppression_report_inclo.pdf Lefkowitz, D. (2007). On a moral right to civil disobedience. Ethics, 117, 202–233. Milligan, T. (2013). Civil disobedience: Protest, justification, and the law. London, England: Bloomsbury. Sauter, M. (2014). The coming swarm: DDOS actions, hacktivism, and civil disobedience on the Internet. London, England: Bloomsbury. Smith, W. (2013). Civil disobedience and deliberative democracy. London, England: Routledge.
Civil Wars A civil war is an armed conflict that concerns government or territory in which at least two parties of citizens of the same state use armed force to combat each other, one of them being the government. This entry discusses the genesis of civil wars, their causes, and prevention mechanisms.
The Genesis of Civil Wars The Copenhagen Consensus project, a nonprofit organization that uses cost-benefit analysis in considering possible solutions to global problems, identified civil conflicts as one of the basic priorities, or global challenges, for development. The experts of the panel noted that measures to reduce the number, duration, and severity of civil wars would rank very high among priorities for development if such measures could be expected with any confidence to succeed.
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Paul Collier and colleagues (2003) cover many aspects of the relationship between civil wars and development policy. As they note, since World War II, more than 80 million people have been killed in civil wars. As a matter of comparison, there were 71 million tobacco-related deaths between 1930 and 1999. Therefore, if we could find measures to prevent internal conflicts, we would have a serious impact on reducing the number of human losses. Moreover, conflict also generates mass displacements of people, which help the spread of infectious diseases like malaria and AIDS. Therefore, the impact of finding measures to prevent conflict should, without a doubt, be a priority for societal development. The Armed Conflict Dataset, a joint project of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies (Uppsala
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University) and the Center for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute (Oslo), uses an operational definition of armed conflict as a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory in which the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths. Figure 1 shows the evolution of conflicts since 1946 by type. The figure shows that the number of conflicts increased substantially until 1991, mostly due to the increase in civil wars. The number of conflicts decreased until 2004 to peak again in 2014. The increase in armed conflicts since 1946 is basically due to the civil wars in Africa. Asia is also a large contributor to civil wars, but its contribution has been mostly stable over time.
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Table 1 Transition Probabilities From Conflict to Peace and Vice Versa Conflict at Period t − 1
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Source: Authors’ calculations using data from the Armed Conflict Database (ACD) of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London.
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In addition, civil wars are persistent processes, as shown in Table 1. Of the countries with a conflict in a particular year, 78.8% will continue to be in conflict the following year. Conflicts and fragility are intimately related, and although not all fragile countries end up in a civil war, a latent conflict increases the risk of violence. Many definitions of fragility concerning the security and violence dimension are based on actual rather than potential violence. This is why not all fragile countries are conflict countries. However, they are all potential conflict countries; many fragile countries are at high risk of violence. A consensus exists that conflict is the ultimate manifestation of fragility and, therefore, the analysis of the main causes of fragility are closely linked with the analysis of the main causes of conflict. To describe the main drivers of fragility and civil wars, we can use the analogy of fire. In many situations of state fragility, civil wars are started by an exogenous or random factor that acts like a match, touching off a conflict that, given a propagation mechanism (analogous to oxygen), ignites into a full civil war. Countries that have these propagation mechanisms (potential for conflict) are fragile countries. In other words, fragile countries are those that, with the presence of shocks, are at high risk of a civil war.
The Causes of Civil Wars The timing of the outbreak of a civil war is extremely unpredictable. Hence, in order to understand the causes of civil wars, we need to identify the characteristics that make countries erupt into conflict in the presence of any shocks if we want to design appropriate long-term policies to prevent future conflicts. Therefore, we need to identify fragile countries and the presence of the propagation factors discussed in the previous section. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (2004) argue that political scientists tend to think about grievances as the main determinant of civil wars, while economists discuss this issue in terms of greed and opportunities. The greed-versus-grievances dichotomy can be investigated using proxies to identify these motives. For instance, poverty reduces the cost of enlisting as a rebel and provides an underlying reason for rebellion. Therefore, rebellions can occur when the amount of income rebels are sacrificing is negligible. In addition, if natural resources are plentiful, then rebels can anticipate appropriating those resources if they win the war. Social fractionalization can be interpreted in terms of economics (competition for opportunities) or as grievances (if a particular social/ethnic group is discriminated against). Other grievances are related to high inequality or lack of representation in the political process (bad institutions).
Poverty The World Bank report Investing in Development— Practical Plans to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, published by the UN Millennium Project in 2005, argues that “poor and hungry societies are much more likely than high-income societies to fall into conflict over scarce vital resources, such as watering holes and arable land [ . . . ] poverty increases the risks of conflict through multiple paths” (pp. 8–9). This understanding of the root causes of conflicts implies that “investing in development is especially important to reduce the probabilities of conflict” (p. 9). These prescriptions have been basically driven by two influential academic papers, namely the aforementioned 2004 paper by Collier and Hoeffler and one by James D. Fearon and David Laitin (2003). Collier and Hoeffler find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power with respect to the outbreak of a conflict. Conversely, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are more closely related to the viability of rebellion, have considerable explanatory power. Fearon and Laitin also find that lower per- capita gross domestic product has a significant and negative effect on the onset of a civil war; they argue that the factors that explain which countries have been at risk of the outbreak of a civil war are the conditions that favor insurgency. These include the incidence of poverty, political instability, rough terrain, and a large population size; income per capita is their proxy for the state’s overall financial, administrative, and police and military capabilities; once a government is weak, rebels can reasonably expect a higher probability of success. Although there is a strong correlation between poverty and civil war, the direction of causality is not clear. Though seemingly plausible and intuitive, the argument that poverty is the main cause of instability is based on weak empirical grounds because of the possibility that conflict also causes bad economic conditions. Simeon Djankov and Marta Reynal-Querol (2009) address the relationship between poverty and civil wars. They find that their correlation is spurious, and it is accounted for by historical phenomena that jointly determine income evolution and conflict in the post–World War II era. In particular, the statistical association between poverty (as proxied by income per capita) and civil wars disappears once they include country variables that are invariant over time. This means that the incidence of civil wars and poverty may be driven by the same determinants, some of which are often not included in the empirical analysis. The fact that poor countries suffer more conflicts than rich countries do seems to be the result of a spurious correlation.
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Inequality Inequality could potentially be another important determinant for conflict. Cross-country evidence on the relationship between inequality and conflict is weak due to the lack of reliable data on inequality measures, in particular for fragile countries. Most of the literature finds no consistent effect of inequality on the likelihood of civil wars.
Quality of Institutions There are very few studies that analyze the relationship between institutions and civil wars. Existing measures of the quality of institutions only capture some dimensions of what we mean by the institutional development of countries. For example, some studies use democracy as a proxy for institutions in order to capture constraints on the executive and political competition. Other studies work with measures that capture what researchers commonly name “quality of institutions.” That concept includes security of property rights or the rule of law of the country. The studies that focus on democracy, like those of Håvard Hegre and colleagues (2001) and Reynal-Querol (2002), find that partly democratic countries are more prone to civil war than are full democracies and full autocracies. This means that democratic and authoritarian states have fewer civil wars than intermediate regimes, which are the most conflict prone. This U-shaped relationship between democracy and conflicts can be interpreted if we consider the need of some degree of freedom for people to organize and start a civil war. Therefore, it seems that freedom is not a sufficient condition to prevent civil wars. Collier, Hoeffler, and Dominic Rhoner (2009) find that, although the net effect of democracy is ambiguous, whereas in rich countries democracy makes countries safer, in poorer countries, democracy increases proneness to political violence. Finally, some studies analyze the role of the democratic environment of neighboring countries and find that countries in regions with more democracies are less likely to experience conflict. Djankov and Reynal-Querol (2007) investigate empirically whether the quality of economic institutions has played a role in sustaining peace. In particular, they test the hypothesis that when governments cannot enforce the law and protect property rights, conflict emerges. The results indicate that a lack of secure property rights and law enforcement is an important cause of civil war.
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Polarization Most of the literature finds no relationship between ethnic diversity and civil wars. However, the relationship between social heterogeneity and civil wars is a complex
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one. Initially, one might suppose that the increase in diversity increases the likelihood of social conflicts. However, this does not have to be the case. In fact, many researchers agree that an increase in ethnic heterogeneity initially increases potential conflict, but, after some point, more diversity implies less potential conflict. Donald L. Horowitz argues that the relationship between ethnic diversity and civil wars is not monotonic: there is less violence in highly homogeneous and highly heterogeneous societies and more conflicts in societies in which a large ethnic minority faces an ethnic majority. If this is so, then an index of polarization should better capture the likelihood of conflict, or the intensity of potential conflict, than an index of heterogeneity. José G. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) argue that one possible reason for the lack of explanatory power of ethnic heterogeneity on the probability of armed conflicts and civil wars is the measurement of heterogeneity. In empirical applications, they propose, researchers should consider a measure of ethnic polarization instead of an index of ethnic fractionalization. The polarization index captures how far the d istribution of ethnic groups deviates from a bipolar distribution (for instance, the maximum level of ethnic polarization will happen when 50% of the population belongs to one ethnic group while the other 50% of the population belongs to another ethnic group), which represents the highest level of polarization. Collier and Hoeffler (1998) note that coordination costs would be at their lowest when the population is polarized between an ethnic group identified with the government and a second, similarly sized ethnic group identified with the rebels. Collier (2001) also emphasizes that the relationship between ethnic diversity and the risk of violent conflicts is not monotonic. Highly heterogeneous societies have even a lower probability of civil wars than do homogeneous societies. The h ighest risk is associated with the middle range of ethnic diversity. The polarization index satisfies this condition. All these arguments indicate that measures of polarization should better capture the potential for conflict than measures of h eterogeneity. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol find that ethnic polarization is an important determinant of the incidence of civil war. Having a polarized society is an important propagation mechanism for conflict. Jose G. Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol See also Civil Disobedience; Collective Action; Ethnicity; Pluralism; Resource Mobilization; Social Contract; Social Revolts
Further Readings Collier, P. (2001). Ethnic diversity: An economic analysis of its implications. Economic Policy, 32, 129–166.
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Collier, P., Elliott, L., Hegre, H., Hoeffler, A., Reynol-Querol, A., & Sambanis, N. (2003). Breaking the conflict trap: Civil war and development policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (1998). On the economic causes of civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 50, 563–573. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievances in civil wars. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4), 563–595. Collier, P., Hoeffler, A., & Rohner, D. (2009). Beyond greed and grievance: Feasibility and civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 61(4), 651–674. Djankov, S., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2007). The causes of civil war. CEPR working paper. Available at http://documents .worldbank.org/curated/en/791491468141578331/pdf/ wps4254.pdf Djankov, S., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2009). Poverty and civil war: Revisiting the evidence. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(4), 1035–1041. Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political Science Review, 97, 75–90. Hegre, H., Ellingsen, T., Gates, S., & Gledish, N. P. (2001). Towards a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992. American Political Science Review, 95, 33–48. Horowitz, D. (1985). Ethnic groups in conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press. International Institute for Strategic Studies. (2016). Armed Conflict Database. Available at https://acd.iiss.org/ Montalvo, J. G., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2005). Ethnic polarization, potential conflict, and civil wars. American Economic Review, 95(3), 796–816. Pettersson, T., & Wallensteen, P. (2015). Armed conflicts, 1946–2014. Journal of Peace Research, 52(4). doi: 10.1177/0022343315595927 Reynal-Querol, M. (2002). Ethnicity, political systems and civil war. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46(1), 29–54.
Civilian Intervention Civilian intervention refers to the efforts taken by members of the international community—states, intergovernmental organizations, and/or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—to address the human rights concerns of local populations affected by conflict and/ or natural disasters. These efforts apply to any military, diplomatic, and/or economic action taken by an actor to improve the security and well-being of civilians. When the government of a population is unable or unwilling to protect it, interveners respond to such issues in order to protect civilians and prevent future attacks against them. This entry provides a brief overview of the main theoretical approaches used to explain civilian interventions, major debates on the topic, and the effects of such interventions.
Theories of Civilian Intervention While neither the concept nor the practice of civilian interventions is a recent development, the post–cold war period has witnessed an increase in the number of interventions carried out in the name of human rights. As shown by interventions in Kosovo, Libya, and Sudan, the international community has demonstrated a responsibility to support and protect civilians from harm and contain the negative consequences that can emerge from threats against humanity. However, not every human rights situation has received an immediate or effective response (e.g., Angola, Chile, Guatemala, and Rwanda). This raises the question, Why does the international community react to some acts of civilian victimization and not others? In the field of international relations, three theoretical approaches are used to explain the motivations behind civilian interventions: realism, (neo)liberalism, and constructivism. Realism argues that the primary actors in the international system are states and that they are motivated by self-interest. With the absence of a world government to monitor state behavior, states must act in a manner to ensure their survival and sovereignty. Often using the 2001 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan as an example, realists point out that states intervene only in events that help them achieve their political objectives. Liberals and neoliberals claim that while states are key actors in the international system, international institutions and international law also matter. International actors have a responsibility to protect individuals victimized by state and/or nonstate actors. However, the motivation to intervene in such situations is driven by an interest to achieve long-term benefits (i.e., social and economic interests). The third approach, constructivism, emphasizes the role of norms to explain civilian interventions. The proliferation since World War II of human rights declarations (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the 2001 “Responsibility to Protect” report), as well as the activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC), signals the growing development of human rights norms. In effect, these norms influence actors to provide assistance to civilians whose security and rights are threatened. According to constructivists, self-interests and norms are not mutually exclusive. Rather, norms shape the interests of actors.
Major Debates State Sovereignty Versus Individual Sovereignty Traditionally, the term sovereignty has been reserved for states in synonymous identification of independence/ autonomy. As evinced by Articles 2.4 (principle of
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nonaggression) and 2.7 (principle of nonintervention) of the United Nations (UN) Charter, a state is prohibited from interfering in any matter that falls under the jurisdiction of another sovereign state unless the state is acting in self-defense. However, the term is no longer exclusive to states but applies also to individual human beings. As conveyed by the concept of “individual sovereignty,” discussed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the 2001 Responsibility to Protect report, the issue of civilian protection has become one of the primary concerns of the international community. Despite the recent shifts in the concept of sovereignty, realists continue to stress the notion of state sovereignty and question the legality of interventions based on humanitarian issues.
Who Should Intervene and When? The question of who should launch a civilian intervention has become a major issue of debate for academics and policy-makers. Should an intervention be unilateral, in other words launched by only one actor, or multilateral? Supporters of multilateral interventions claim that multilateralism increases legitimacy as a result of the consensus needed by a number of actors to participate in an intervention. Moreover, such interventions allow for actors to contribute fewer resources (i.e., personnel and financial) than those required if they were to individually launch an intervention. Advocates of unilateral interventions claim that although one actor is responsible for carrying the responsibilities of an intervention, leaders are able to engage in quick decision making when faced with a civilian crisis. The issue of when to launch an intervention has also attracted discussion. Should interveners wait until a certain number of civilians have been subject to abuse before participating in an intervention, or should they react to early signs of instability? Scholars often point to the case of Rwanda to illustrate the disastrous outcomes that can occur when actors are slow to respond to such a humanitarian crisis. However, a quick response can also yield a number of dilemmas, including the level of resources to invest to deter widespread victimization, the risk of starting a conflict, and the difficulty in obtaining international approval if there is little to no evidence of crimes against human rights.
The Effects of Civilian Intervention Literature on civilian intervention has focused on different types of civilian victimization, including intentional and targeted killings, sexual violence, and political violence. While some research finds that interventions can reduce civilian victimization, other research shows that interventions only constrain the behavior of government forces and can increase opportunities for rebel groups to
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engage in violence. The neutrality of an intervention can also affect the severity of civilian victimization. In the case of conflict, interventions that support one warring party can result in an increase in the use of civilian violence by an unsupported faction due to a loss of resources and civilian support. Additionally, civilian interventions can prolong conflict. Longer conflicts can lead to an increase in civilians becoming refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). This not only affects the lives of the civilians themselves but can also weaken the security and development of the locations to which they relocate. While extant research on civilian interventions has yielded interesting theoretical and empirical findings, there is still much work to be done on the topic. Mehwish Sarwari and Jacob Kathman See also Civil Wars; Genocide; Human Rights; International Humanitarian Law; International Security; Third Party
Further Readings Finnemore, M. (1996). Constructing norms of humanitarian intervention. In P. Katzenstein (Ed.), The culture of national security (pp. 309–321). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Holzgrefe, J. L., & Keohane, R. O. (2003). Humanitarian intervention: Ethical, legal, and political dilemmas. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Krieg, A. (2013). Motivations for humanitarian intervention: Theoretical and empirical considerations. New York, NY: Springer. Nardin, T., & Williams, V. (2006). Humanitarian intervention. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Civil-Military Relations The phrase civil-military relations refers to interactions between armed forces and civilians, especially the relations between military and political leadership. At its heart are such problems as defense and foreign policies that go awry due to tensions between the two sectors; difficulties in obtaining military compliance with government wishes; and, at the furthest extreme, militaries that directly rebel against civilian authorities, oust political leaders from power, and govern directly, often employing brutal force against those they seek to dominate.
Patterns of Civil-Military Relations Organizationally, the military constitutes a state institution, like any other part of state bureaucracy. Yet
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militaries differ from other state institutions because of their function and histories. As the body charged with defending a country against attackers, military forces are necessarily well armed and therefore more powerful than other bureaucratic organizations. Furthermore, the practice of separating the military from politics while subordinating it to civilian command is a relatively modern one. For example, under feudalism, the nobility also served as the military leadership. Even in the last few centuries, militaries have led independence movements and launched revolutionary movements, political roles that have been lauded and celebrated as key foundational moments in their nations’ histories. Despite this, modern civilian leaders would generally prefer that they rather than military officers govern their countries. This essential goal—ensuring civilian autonomy from military intrusion—remains the first priority in civil-military relations, followed closely by ensuring that militaries respond to civilian orders and building the collaboration necessary for good defense policies. These multiple dimensions of civilian control remain the central challenge of civil-military relations. This entry first looks at interventionist militaries and the fusion of civil and military authority before turning to the challenges of democracies, new and established.
Militaries in Politics In less economically developed countries, militaries often reside on the perimeter of power. Eric Nordlinger referred to these as praetorian militaries. In these socie ties, the armed forces alternately oversee civilian leaders, intervene to remove governments they find unacceptable, and often rule for prolonged periods of time. Long-term military rule has even occurred in countries that seemed to be well along the path toward modernization. Guillermo O’Donnell thus identified several military regimes that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as characterized by “bureaucratic authoritarianism” in reference to the military’s institutional and technocratic approach to governing. Yet politicized militaries may also partner with civilian leaders, especially in revolutionary regimes such as Communist China or Cuba. Here, revolutionary militaries helped found the new political order and transform the country. Political and military roles in these systems are thus fused rather than separate. Late-20th-century populist democracies, such as Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, also sought political-military fusion, bringing military officers into administrative roles and pursuing a shared ideology.
Building Civilian Control in New Democracies In most new, postauthoritarian democracies, the government’s overriding goal is to ensure that elected civilians can make policy without being threatened by the military. Samuel Huntington’s landmark 1957 analysis describes two ways in which civilians might control the armed forces: objective and subjective control. “Objective” control is a model based on an ideal of military professionalism and the separation between civilian policy-making and the military’s execution of those policies. “Subjective” control more closely resembles the fused model described earlier, with civilian elites seeking military leaders that share their political vision. Huntington associated objective control with modern, democratic states and professionalized militaries. Given their distrust of the armed forces, most new democratic governments have pursued objective civilian control. Anxious to extricate the military from governance and internal security, governments sought to redirect their armed forces toward external security and create civilian oversight of military affairs. These were challenging tasks. The new democracies lacked civilian experts in defense and faced “new” security threats, such as transnational crime, that made it difficult to direct militaries outward. Meanwhile, scholars debated such issues as whether domestic roles would damage civilian control or whether it mattered more who— civilians or military—decided on these policies. Yet the greatest assist to new, late-20th-century democracies was the end of the cold war. This momentous international shift drained international support from both guerrilla movements and potential military regimes, bolstering the fledgling democracies. Militaries continued to play political roles but became much less inclined to rule.
Civil-Military Relations in Stable Democracies In stable democracies, civilians rarely face coup threats from the armed forces. Nonetheless, here too, civilians have difficulty ensuring that the military follows orders. Ideally, governments seek a productive collaboration between civilian policy-makers and the military’s experts in warfare. But civil-military relations have evolved, making Huntington’s notion of an apolitical body of military professionals ever more elusive. For example, modern militaries include many specializations that parallel civilian careers, such as medical doctors, engineers, and computer scientists, while modern generals are administrators more than soldiers. This shift
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civilianizes the military, blurring the distinction between military and civilian experts. Contemporary threats such as terrorism also muddle the distinction between politics and the military. Despite this, other trends have led to a greater divergence between civilian and military values. In the United States, the lack of an active military draft since the early 1970s means that relatively fewer adults have served in the military than in previous generations, and they tend to come from a narrower sector of the population. A decade earlier, Morris Janowitz had encouraged retaining universal military service to facilitate shared values, but the subsequent unpopularity of the Vietnam War and mass protests against the draft argued for an end to conscription. Declining numbers of veterans could also contribute to a lack of civilian defense expertise, the same problem faced by newer democracies. From a principal–agent perspective, the values differences between the principals (civilian leaders) and the agent (military) could lead to tensions. Peter Feaver’s agency theory sees these relationships as a series of interactions shaped not only by differing values but also by the military’s desire for autonomy and civilians’ need to monitor their subordinates. Overly invasive management techniques could provoke a backlash from the armed forces, but lax monitoring could allow the military to avoid complying with civilian orders. This analysis thus suggests that military professionalism and autonomy do not guarantee compliance. Civil-military relations thus remain a challenge for policy-makers and scholars, even in stable democracies. It is a complex relationship shaped not only by professional roles and institutions but also by the societies in which these institutions exist and by the interactions between the relevant actors. Deborah L. Norden See also Asymmetric Warfare; Civic Engagement; Dominant Power Politics; Indoctrination; Moral Hazard; Nonviolence; Political Morality; Rule of Law; Social Revolts
Further Readings Feaver, P. (2003). Armed servants: Agency, oversight and civil-military relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huntingon, S. (1957). The soldier and the state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Janowitz, M. (1960). The professional soldier: A social and political portrait. New York, NY: Free Press. Nordlinger, E. (1977). Soldiers in politics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
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The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is the title of an influential foreign policy volume published in 1993 by Samuel P. Huntington, a professor at Harvard University and chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Prior to his post at Harvard, Huntington served as director of security planning for the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. He is considered a major architect of United States foreign policy. His thoughts, presented in lectures and his iconic book, became the foundation for alternative visions of a “new world order,” rooted within the interactions of diverse “civilizations” governed by beliefs, identities, and social formations alien or even antagonistic to other “civilizations.” While other scholars occupy major positions in shaping U.S. foreign policy (e.g., Francis Fukuyama, John Mearsheimer, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Rosovsky), perhaps none has had the enduring impact of Samuel Huntington and his original work. Huntington’s penetrating analysis and prediction of forthcoming struggles for world dominance, based on cultural deconstructions of those economic systems, political forces, religions, and historical roots shaping nonnegotiable values and identities, enabled him to persuasively portray a fixed future. Huntington published a follow-up to his initial publication, titled Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), offering certain caveats, but the die was cast. Huntington’s two volumes and competing volumes by two other eminent political theorists, Francis Fukuyama (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago), became the foundations for American foreign policy, each contributing positional insights into the nature and consequences of events and forces in our times and each reaching different conclusions regarding our future. The original volumes and their subsequent versions, replete with more details and time-tested “apologias,” constitute the sources of neoconservative American foreign policy. In this respect, we should be reminded of the deliberate hand of individuals in shaping what often appears to most as evolving and unpredictable historic waves of human destiny.
Controversy: Criticism and Support for Clash of Civilizations Huntington’s first book was considered controversial because it proposed that differences among nations, cast within conflicting commitments to historic and cultural
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traditions labeled as “civilizations,” constituted potential sources of predictable global conflict. Some political scholars and theorists argued the use of “civilization” as the unit of analysis is too broad for understanding the more micro variations in political, economic, and ideological arenas needed for accurate foreign policy analyses. Those disagreeing with the use of “civilizations” as the unit of analysis suggested that other factors, including national histories, government structures, geographical regions, population diversity, religion, and economic and financial systems, were more meaningful explanatory sources for recommending foreign policies. Critics also suggested Huntington’s perspective undermined peaceful efforts accommodating diversity, because Huntington considered differences to be sources of struggle and conflict. In the emerging era of respect and tolerance for diversity, Huntington’s labeling of “differences” as the causes of problems provoked immediate antagonism. Huntington’s initial publication in 1993 of an article titled “Clash of Civilizations,” in the summer issue of the influential publication Foreign Affairs (1993), ensured his reputation as the premier U.S. foreign policy maven. At this point, Huntington was considered to be one of the most important thinkers and advisers on foreign policy. He was positioned as the prestigious Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the John Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His prominence, however, was assured when he proposed the controversial but catchy term “clash,” eliciting an immediate image of international struggle and conflict. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order would become the defining work in political thought and action for foreign policy in the United States and other nations (see Council on Foreign Relations, 2013, for an updated discussion of Huntington’s work and enduring impact).
The 1980s: Conflicting Ideological Tensions in Europe The putative cold war ideological struggles of the 1980s between the Soviet Union and the West were showing signs of widespread political instability and upheaval across the European Continent, with the potential for war. Competition for ideological domination and hegemony between the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States of America were being played out in a score of smaller nations amid exorbitant military and development expenses and costs to human lives and well-being. Scores of nations around the world had become proxy sites of struggle for influence, control, and dominance as the world’s two most powerful nations pursued control. The fears of nuclear war had
emerged as victory-and-loss assessments were tabulated in Moscow and Washington, DC, revealing growing resistance among other nations to the alien determination of their survival and fate. Amid this decade of upheaval rooted in competing ideological and political-economic differences, the Soviet Union’s general secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed startling and unexpected progressive reformist policies of perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness) in an effort to calm anxieties. Gorbachev also was seeking to appeal to the global community to sustain Soviet status as a major power. Gorbachev’s policies offered an opportunity for rapprochement and a mutually beneficial end to continued ideological conflicts. However, these reformist policies served to inspire new visions among nations seeking to escape Soviet control. Events unfolded rapidly, eluding control and mastery by either side. Within days, the famed Berlin Wall, a source of extensive repression and isolation in East Germany, was breached and toppled on November 9, 1989. This watershed moment represented a worldwide revolutionary change as the two Germanys moved toward unification and Soviet-controlled Eastern European bloc nations collapsed into a disparate collection of nations in search of a future. A “new world order” was at hand, awaiting a talented master architect to capture the dynamics of the time and to offer an understanding of the future. For political theorists, it was a carpe diem moment, and many stepped forward with interpretations, seeking prized position and status as dominant figures in the determination of new American foreign policy.
The End of History, or . . . Continued World Conflict? Among the talented aspiring political theorists, Francis Fukuyama, Huntington’s student at Harvard, attracted considerable attention with a book arguing—however prematurely—that history was over. In his book with the captivating title The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama contended that ideological wars were now ended—the West had won! According to Fukuyama, the struggles of modern history embodied in the ideological “cold” and “hot” wars of Fascism, Communism, and Marxism (e.g., Fukuyama, 1989, 1992) were over. For Fukuyama, Western “liberal democracy” and “economic capitalism” could now be assumed to be the final forms of global government and political economy, needing only polishing and refinement. This was, however, a precipitous conclusion from Huntington’s point of view. Mearsheimer also disagreed. His “realistic
Clash of Civilizations
theory” view concluded a future of endless wars, the only consolation being their diminished size and consequence, but not his conclusion: “War is inevitable.” The assumption of an end to human history attributable to powerful ideological struggles was not unique to Fukuyama. He appears to have been influenced by similar notions advanced before in Marxism/Hegelian thought and also by the writings of the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Kojève proposed the course of human history would come to an end with a unified homogenized state of “shared morality” (e.g., Kojève, 1940; 1980 version). In brief, at the time of Huntington’s opus work, there was a swirling belief that a “new world order” was upon us. The future could be reshaped according to moral and economic principles consistent with “democracy” and “capitalism.” Huntington, however, concluded that such optimism was premature. There remained inherent conflicts because of different traditions of civilization. Imperialistic invasions and occupations of nations had bred instability, and impulses to establish their unique identity (i.e., identity politics), shaped within their own history and values, rather than those imposed by the West or the Soviet Union. How dare U.S. scholars call for homogenized versions of nations consistent with their perceived values! There were worldwide variations in culture, history, and religion. Many resented Western interference. There was fertile ground for new ideological conflicts and wars. The end of history had not arrived and perhaps never would. Although I could find no acknowledgment, Huntington seems to owe a debt of gratitude to the paradigmatic breakthrough of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge (1966). Berger and Luckmann theorized that human beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the “social” context of their acquired knowledge. They argued that a person’s or group’s social interactions create and sustain mental concepts, representations, and constructions of reality. Over time, these constructions become “habitualized” into roles, and the roles eventually become “institutionalized” in cultures and nations. Berger and Luckmann’s work became the foundation for cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous studies in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Subsequent contributions by other social science theorists in the areas of “symbolic interactionism” and “social constructivism” added to the validity and acceptance of Huntington’s essential assumptions. Huntington’s clashof-civilizations thesis became the conventional wisdom increasingly supported across the social sciences. For many political theorists, it was an indisputable
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foundation for foreign policy, assuring its acceptance across intelligence and security groups.
Consequences of Clash of Civilizations Fukuyama’s 1989 article “The End of History,” published in the journal National Interest, precipitated a wave of neoconservative thought and policy. This journal, affiliated with the “realist” school of foreign policy thought, was looking for a justification for the notion that conflict among nations and ideologies was inevitable and that it must be stopped immediately by attacks on potential rivals and enemies. National Interest was founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol, one of the most visible, strident, and powerful neoconservatives favoring aggressive military intervention as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. The neoconservatives were influenced by Leo Strauss, a distinguished sociology professor at the University of Chicago. The same university was also the location of Milton Friedman, a political economist, whose policies influenced numerous politicians on the right (e.g., Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher). Later, the University of Chicago became the home for John Mearsheimer, who contested Huntington’s conclusions, arguing that struggles and wars would continue endlessly. Neoconservatives welcomed this view. The intellectual dominance of Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman’s thought for U.S. foreign policy and economic policy circles helped shape the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), led by Richard Cheney. The PNAC supported establishing the United States as the world’s dominant superpower, responsible for supporting and protecting other nations, including Israel, because of their shared values and traditions. The PNAC called for a homogenized global culture.
Support and Contention Huntington’s conclusion of inevitable clashes among Asian, Arab/Islamic, and Western civilizations, rooted in differences in religion, ontological assumptions, and historical memories and inscriptions, served the hegemonic interests of United States and Western foreign policy and military scholars and authorities. While differences, codified by the term diversity, were advocated and praised to mollify critics, differences were simultaneously concluded to be major sources of conflict to be erased. The situation was set for an epic ideological global struggle between homogenization and multiculturalism (Marsella, 2014). Decades after Huntington, conflicts associated with “differences” assumed to be national gained prominence across many social protest
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movements, including (1) Black Lives Matter, (2) LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), (3) immigration reform and secure border policies, and (4) wealth disparity abuses. These social movements contest Huntington’s conclusion that differences are an inevitable source of conflict, violence, and war. In contrast, social movement leaders claim that the issue is actually one of exploitation, inequity, and abuse associated with power asymmetries. Diversity (differences) conflicts are also now endemic in Europe amid the chaos and confusion of massive migration waves of Middle Eastern refugees escaping wars and destruction. The sheer numbers of refugees, their contrasting religious and cultural heritages, and their extensive human needs have led to cries for assimilation and homogenization of migrants seeking refuge or for their rejection of asylum. Finally, as some observers have noted, life is, by its very nature, diverse. It seeks and supports variations as sources of survival. From this perspective, it may be legitimate to ask whether any effort to impose “homogenized” biological, cultural, and moral constraints by force places life in jeopardy. Anthony J. Marsella See also al Qaeda; Civil Wars; End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Globalization; Imagined Contact; Multiculturalism; Omniculturalism
Further Readings Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise on the sociology of knowledge. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Council on Foreign Relations. (2013). The clash of civilizations? The debate: Twentieth anniversary edition. New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history. The National Interest, Summer Issue. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York, NY: Free Press. Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72, 22–50. [First delivered as an address at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC. Subsequently circulated as an occasional paper for the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies, Harvard University.] Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, S. P. (2004). Who are we? The challenges to America’s national identity. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Kojève, A. (1969). Introduction to the readings of Hegel (Ed. James Nichols). New York, NY: Basic Books. (Originally published 1933)
Marsella, A. J. (2014, December). The epic struggle of our global era: Homogenization versus multiculturalism. Transcultural Media Service: https://www.transcend.org/tms/ search/?q=anthony+j.+marsella Mearsheimer, J., & Walt, S. (2007). The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Clientelism Clientelism is a selective, particularistic, and hierarchical mutual support system in which politicians and political parties offer material favors (such as jobs and goods) to electors in exchange for political support (usually in the form of votes). It is selective and particularistic because it is targeted toward an exclusive group of voters based on their political preferences, thereby discriminating against the remainder of the society. This entry provides a brief overview of clientelism by highlighting why we study clientelism and the conceptualization, determinants, and varieties of clientelism and concludes with a brief discussion of the political effects of clientelism.
Why Study Clientelism? Understanding the main linkages, determinants, and repercussions of clientelism is helpful to grasp the political realities and power dynamics of many countries throughout the world. Even the most centralized governments utilize an intertwined web of clientelistic relationships as they delegate power to notables in the periphery so as to continue and, if possible, strengthen their political clout at the center. To this end, clientelism enables politicians and political parties to minimize their electoral risk via ensuring political support from a wider group of the constituency. Clientelism is illuminating for some of the cases throughout the world, which could otherwise have been perceived as “irrational.” The compliance of low-status actors with a higher political authority and the reluctance of these actors to form horizontal alliances with their peers can only be grasped through the prism of clientelism. Clientelism exists in both developing and developed countries. Contrary to the predictions of the earlier works on clientelism around the 1960s and 1970s, clientelism does not simply wither away with economic affluence or socioeconomic and political development. Clientelism usually evolves into new forms in affluent, urban settings, which is the case in many industrialized nations such as Italy, Japan, and Belgium. There is a clear linkage between economic development and
Clientelism
clientelism in which poorer localities and nations are more likely to possess clientelistic networks. Yet it would be inaccurate to assume that clientelism would simply be eradicated with increased levels of industrialization and modernization. There has been a surge of interest in clientelism in scholarly works since the start of the new millennium, as clientelism has increasingly become relevant in many political settings throughout the world. Major puzzles in the clientelism literature as of the 2000s revolve around three major questions: (1) How does clientelism work? (2) What causes or prevents shifts away from clientelism? (3) Is clientelism consistent with the norms of democracy; why or why not? (see, e.g., Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007; Stokes et al., 2013). Recent scholarship on clientelism has produced works that have shed light on these puzzles and continue to do so. The following sections address these major puzzles in the study of clientelism.
Conceptualization of Clientelism As noted earlier, clientelism is an exclusive mutual support system between politicians and voters. Conceptually, it can take the forms of patronage and vote buying. Patronage entails the distribution of public resources (most typically public employment) by office holders in return for electoral support. In patronage, the political leader and party need to hold the political office (be it at the local or national level) to ensure patronage networks for their supporters. On the other hand, vote buying entails politicians’ provision of goods, services, and other material benefits in exchange for electors’ votes. Unlike patronage, any political party (assuming that it has the necessary material resources) can engage in vote buying, whether it is in office or not. Overall, clientelism incorporates both patronage and vote buying. Clientelistic exchanges differ from programmatic appeals of political parties. On the one hand, programmatic policies cover salient issues in a country, such as improving education, lowering the rate of unemployment, or curbing inflation. These policies are targeted toward an entire nation, which would benefit from them. Moreover, the criteria of distribution in programmatic policies are formalized and public. On the other hand, clientelistic relations are based on extending material benefits to certain groups of citizens in exchange for their political support. Programmatic party competition does not require direct individual contact with voters, whereas clientelistic exchanges include direct interaction between politicians (or their mediators) and citizens. Clientelism by its nature is based on exclusion of certain groups of individuals solely depending on their
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political preferences. Hence, it involves not only a rewarding mechanism for the supporters of a political party but also punishing those voters who do not vote for that particular party. Examples around the world, including Argentina and Italy, show us that political leaders openly threaten citizens who may vote against them to fire them from their jobs, obstruct their business contracts, and so on. Based on its level of analysis, clientelism differs from what is known as “pork barrel politics,” which entails preferential treatment of certain localities solely based on election results. Owing to pork barrel politics, public resources are allocated to certain localities that support the governing party and are withdrawn from those that oppose it. By its nature, pork barrel politics implies that all residents of localities would benefit from the provision of public services (or fail to benefit for certain cases), regardless of their political preferences. On the other hand, clientelistic exchanges are realized either at the individual level or in small groups. Only a select, small collection of citizens benefits from clientelistic relations contingent upon their continued political support for certain political parties. All in all, pork barrel politics discriminates across localities, whereas clientelism discriminates among individuals. Despite the fact that clientelism entails a corrupt, undemocratic network of relations, the concept should also be differentiated from that of corruption with regard to the flow of benefits. In clientelism, material benefits are provided by politicians to citizens, who are then expected to support them at the ballot box. In contrast, corruption in its general sense necessitates material benefits from citizens to politicians (additionally to bureaucrats in some cases) to ensure preferential treatment in acquiring public contracts, circumventing necessary bureaucratic procedures, and so on. Thus, the flow of material benefits runs in opposite directions in the cases of clientelism versus corruption.
Determinants of Clientelism Clientelism exists in many countries, both developing and developed. However, certain socioeconomic and political conditions increase the probability of clientelism. To begin with, many experts agree that clientelism is prevalent in societies with widespread poverty and with a relatively weak and ineffective state apparatus. In societies in which the state fails to provide basic services (such as security, infrastructure, and health), people seek alternative ways to satisfy these primary human needs. This is especially the case for poor citizens who cannot afford these services on their own and people who live in secluded localities beyond the state’s full coverage of basic public goods. To this end, clientelism stands as a
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substitute for these citizens, whereby they can acquire material benefits from their political patrons in exchange for their political support. In the case of more affluent citizens and societies, votes become exponentially more expensive to purchase. In these cases, clientelism becomes a rarer phenomenon. Another crucial determinant of clientelism is electoral institutions. Specifically, ballot types stand as a primary determinant of clientelism. Ballots that enable easier monitoring of voters’ choices clearly facilitate clientelism. For instance, some countries, including Argentina, Panama, and Uruguay, permit “party ballots,” which are produced by political parties. Similarly, other countries such as Spain allow political parties to use “ticket ballots,” which contain only the name(s) of candidates from one party’s list. Both practices enable political parties to have higher control over voters, as they can monitor who will vote for them or not. On the other side, “Australian (secret) ballots” are usually the norm in the new millennium. About 85% of countries today use Australian ballots, which are produced and distributed by public agencies. The Australian ballot permits the secrecy of the vote cast. However, despite the global predominance of the Australian ballot system, many political parties still try to monitor voters via alternative techniques, such as door-to-door canvassing by party workers or by providing voters with party badges to wear and party colors and signs for display. Parties’ monitoring of voters under the Australian (secret) ballot is of course an imperfect one. Hence, according to some experts, instead of “vote buying,” parties can be said to be conducting “turnout buying” by mobilizing supporters to show up at the polls. The clientelism literature is divided on the topic of the recipients of clientelism, that is, who benefits from clientelistic exchanges. Some experts assert that political parties target their core constituencies to engage in clientelistic exchanges. On the other hand, some scholars argue that, since the votes of the strong supporters of a political party are almost certain, political parties do not bother to attract their core supporters, and instead they try to lure weak opponents to their political camp by offering material, clientelistic inducements. Among experts there is no consensus on aspects of clientelism. Another determinant of clientelism is the nature of party competition. In competitive party systems in which elections are close between rival blocs of parties and there is a significant bloc of undecided voters, programmatic appeals prevail over clientelistic appeals. This is especially the case for democratic competition in more affluent societies, where it is very costly to buy off citizens via clientelistic appeals. On the other hand, conditions of low/medium economic development and/ or high income inequality may tilt the balance toward
clientelistic appeals over programmatic ones as political parties find it financially and politically feasible to attract voters to their parties. Overall, there are several determinants of clientelism, and these may interact with each other (as is the case for party competition and economic development) to define the extensiveness and limits of clientelism in a country.
Varieties of Clientelism: The Rural–Urban Divide Clientelistic relations can be found under many conditions. However, a distinction between rural and urban modes of clientelism can be helpful to grasp this sociopolitical phenomenon even better. To begin with, we observe normative bonds of deference and loyalty in rural clientelism, whereas urban clientelism is clearly linked with political competition between different providers of particularistic incentives by multiple political parties. Rural clientelism is usually observed in underdeveloped and secluded localities, such as Andalucía and Galicia in Spain and Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia in Turkey. On the other hand, urban clientelism is typically found in the peripheral areas of urban centers, such as shantytowns. Latin American urban centers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico provide us with abundant examples of urban clientelism in shantytowns (see, e.g., Stokes, 2005). Rural clientelism operates by way of highly hierarchical relationships between voters and local politicians, who act as the mediators (usually the only mediator) between the constituency and the central government. To this end, rural clientelism bears notions of Weberian traditional authority, in which the local leaders act as chiefs of the people in their locality. In rural clientelism, we observe affective ties between political patrons and the commoners. These ties are supported by ritual gift exchanges, which strengthen the feelings of obligation among the recipients (i.e., voters) and lower defection. The moral aspect of rural clientelism is emphasized heavily by local patrons so as to achieve the highest levels of adherence and commitment by the rural population. For instance, Allen D. Hicken reports that a Buddhist monk in rural Thailand declared that it was immoral to take money from one political candidate and vote for another. Intrinsic reciprocity rather than instrumental reciprocity is more central in rural clientelism. Due to the nature of rural clientelism, it yields intrinsic reciprocity in the eyes of the voters, in which voters are more willing to sacrifice their own material well-being in order to increase the payoffs for their political patrons who have been kind to them. This is contrasted with instrumental reciprocity, which is motivated by forwardlooking self-interest (see Finan & Schechter, 2012).
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Table 1 Differences Between Rural and Urban Modes of Clientelism Rural Clientelism
Urban Clientelism
Normative bonds of deference and loyalty
Competition between different providers of selective and particularistic incentives
Weberian traditional authority
Downsian motivations for political power
Affective ties between patrons and clients (ritual gift exchanges; moral obligation)
Political machines (more material inducements such as jobs)
Intrinsic reciprocity
Instrumental reciprocity
Underdeveloped and/or secluded regions
Usually in urban periphery (shantytowns)
On the other hand, urban forms of clientelism bear a Downsian framework, in which political leaders and parties are motivated by desire for power, income, and prestige. Political machines are central to urban clientelism. “Machine politics,” which is related to mobilizing supporters and demobilizing opposition for the purpose of winning elections and the spoils of office, clearly defines urban modes of clientelism. Material incentives such as jobs are exchanged for the votes of low-skilled, poorly educated citizens, and lucrative contracts for projects are exchanged for financial support from the entrepreneurial class. Table 1 shows an overall comparison of rural versus urban modes of clientelism. Surely, it would be misleading to assume that these rural versus urban forms of clientelism are strictly separated from each other. It is evident that increased institutionalization of party organization enables political parties to reach out to citizens in many rural areas in various nations. Alternatively, urban modes of clientelism in some shantytowns bear resemblances to certain notions of rural clientelism (such as affective ties between patrons and clients) due to geographical seclusion in metropolitan centers. To this end, the rural–urban divide in clientelism should be seen as a continuum rather than as two separate pockets of political vacuum. However, understanding the division and the underlying reasons behind rural and urban forms of clientelism is still very fruitful to comprehend the nature of political contestation in many countries at both the local and national levels.
Political Effects of Clientelism There are very important political indications of clientelism. To begin with, clientelism hinders economic development by favoring certain groups of individuals
in a society solely based on their political preferences and excluding others. Many people that would have benefited from public goods provision based on either need or merit are clearly discriminated against due to clientelistic relationships. To this end, clientelism harms not only these excluded segments of the society but also the society at large, since it downplays the full potential of the society that would have otherwise been fulfilled via meritocratic relationships. Clientelism also damages democracy by distorting people’s political preferences and skewing the equality of the ballot. Political preferences of certain groups of voters become distorted in exchange for side payments such as goodies, jobs, and contracts. Voters who may otherwise vote for other political parties end up supporting a political party just because they receive material benefits. Furthermore, clientelism vitiates democracy, as political parties with broad networks of clientelism gain an upper hand over other political parties. This clearly results in an undemocratic situation in which political parties do not compete on an equal footing. Besides its deleterious effect on democracies, clientelism is also used by dictators to hold onto power. Clientelistic relationships are widely utilized in autocratic regimes to ensure ongoing political support for suppressive leaders by rewarding the supporters of the regime and punishing the opponents. All in all, with its relevance and extensiveness in developing and developed nations, poor and affluent localities, and democratic and autocratic regimes, clientelism continues to be a central concept of the politics and political science of our age. Kursat Cinar See also Democracy; Electoral Systems; Party Identification; Political Participation; Rural Voters; Urban Voters; Voting Behavior, Theories of
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Further Readings Cinar, K. (2016). A comparative analysis of clientelism in Greece, Spain, and Turkey: The rural–urban divide. Contemporary Politics, 22(1), 77–94. Finan, F., & Schechter, L. (2012). Vote-buying and reciprocity. Econometrica, 80, 863–881. Hicken, A. (2007). How effective are institutional reforms? In F. C. Schaffer (Ed.), Elections for sale: The causes and consequences of vote buying (pp. 45–160). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Keiser, R. A. (2001). Political machine. In J. Krieger (Ed.), The Oxford companion to politics of the world (2nd ed., pp. 666–667). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kitschelt, H. (2000). Linkages between citizens and politicians in democratic polities. Comparative Political Studies, 33(6/7), 845–879. Kitschelt, H., & Wilkinson, S. (2007). Patrons, clients, and policies: Patterns of democratic accountability and political competition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Magaloni, B. (2006). Voting for autocracy: Hegemonic party survival and its demise in Mexico. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Nichter, S. (2008). Vote buying or turn-out buying? Machine politics and the secret ballot. American Political Science Review, 102(1), 19–31. Stokes, S. C. (2005). Perverse accountability: A formal model of machine politics with evidence from Argentina. American Political Science Review, 99(3), 315–325. Stokes, S. C. (2009). Political clientelism. In C. Boix and S. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative politics (pp. 604–627). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Stokes, S. C., Dunning, T., Nazareno, M., & Busco, V. (2013). Brokers, voters, and clientelism: The puzzle of distributive politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Closure, Need
for
Consider a candidate who suddenly drops out of a presidential race. If you are an expert in U.S. politics, you are probably quite capable of explaining why this might be the case (poor party support, potential scandal in the making if elected, will be named vice president, etc.). While being capable of providing explanations as to why a candidate dropped out of the race is one thing, it is quite another to have an interest in doing so. While a certain amount of motivation may be needed to generate hypotheses (or reasons) as to why a candidate suddenly dropped out of a presidential race, it is also important to distinguish between two dimensions that can explain an individual’s motivation for such an action. The first dimension refers to an individual’s desire to seek closure (closing one’s mind) or avoid cognitive closure (keeping
an open mind) on this particular topic. The type of motivating closure, the second dimension, can be nonspecific (any answer is better than nothing) or of a specific kind (a particular answer). When both dimensions are combined, four motivational orientations are produced to explain why the candidate dropped out of the presidential race: namely, the need for nonspecific closure, the need for specific closure, the need to avoid nonspecific closure, and the need to avoid specific closure. The need for nonspecific closure (also known as the need for closure) is defined as an individual’s desire for a quick answer. Also, a quick, firm answer is believed to be better than ambiguity or being confused. For example, an individual would have a need for nonspecific closure if she wanted to know which of two reasons explaining the departure of the candidate was the most pertinent regardless of political ideology. The need for closure is thus characterized by a person who closes her mind with the aid of a rapid answer. In contrast, the need for specific closure is biased in that the individual is seeking a particular answer. In this particular case, the person is closing her mind but will do so once she finds the quick answer that suits her. For example, a college student interested in becoming a politician later on in life is likely to care about this issue to a greater extent than he is in the grade obtained on an exam in his pottery class. Individuals can also be motivated to avoid nonspecific closure. When motivated in such a manner, individuals remain open-minded and keep their options open, and “judgmental noncommitment” is deemed important. An individual who is afraid that she might judge the departing candidate incorrectly and has much time to gather information about the reasons the candidate left the presidential race can be seen as having a need to avoid nonspecific closure. Finally, an individual may be motivated to avoid specific reasons the candidate left because the reasons are threatening. The person’s mind is open. Yet it is also frozen. For instance, for an individual who favored the departing candidate, the need to avoid knowing the reasons the political candidate left may be identical to her desire to know the reasons the candidate left. Being fatigued and feeling time pressure are factors that can influence an individual’s need to find a quick, firm answer. While such situational factors can affect an individual’s need for closure, researchers have shown that individuals vary in a stable manner with respect to their motivation to open or close their mind. To measure such individual differences, Donna Webster and Arie W. Kruglanski developed the Need for Closure Scale. The scale has been translated into more than 10 languages, and it has led to a better cross-cultural understanding of open- and closed-mindedness. A high score on the Need for Closure Scale indicates that an individual prefers order and predictability, is
Cognitive Dissonance
intolerant of ambiguity, is quick to decide, and is closedminded. In the realm of political psychology, a high score on this scale has been found to be associated with a greater amount of authoritarianism, negative stereotyping, greater political conservatism, a more favorable attitude toward the death penalty, the endorsement of tougher counterterrorism tactics, and a right-wing orientation. When compared with individuals with a low need for closure, individuals with a high need for c ontrol have also been shown to hold strong anti-immigrant attitudes, to be less supportive of multiculturalism, to be more nationalistic, and to prefer a centralized form of political power. In the case of a political conflict, a high need for closure has been found to be related to more competitive approaches to dealing with conflict. This finding is especially true for political actors whose identity makes sharp friend–foe distinctions or who are aggressive in their conflict-resolution style. However, this tendency to prefer competition in intergroup conflict can be neutralized by having negotiating parties focus on a cooperative approach to conflict resolution. Thus, the relationship between need for closure and being aggressive in a conflict-resolution situation depends on whether the context is competitive or cooperative. While the evidence points to a link between need for closure and variables associated with a conservative orientation, it is important to note that this association needs to be qualified. Need for closure is indeed positively related to a traditional view of the world. That is, the greater the need for closure, the more an individual values both the past and religion. However, a high need for closure is also positively related to a modern view of the world, which focuses on progress and the importance of scientific reasoning. Finally, the need for closure is negatively correlated with a postmodern view of the world, which entails acceptance of some degree of cultural and moral relativism and the notion that individuals largely create themselves. This is an interesting finding because it supports the idea that individuals with a high need for closure seek predictable views of the world and reject uncertain worldviews. Moreover, both right- and left-wing political orientations can serve to create a stable and secure framework. Stéphane Perreault See also Cognitive Dissonance; Confirmation Bias; Framing Effects; Heuristics; Indoctrination; Irrationality; Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
Further Readings Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Sulloway, F., & Kruglanski, A. W. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.
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Kruglanski, A. W. (1989). Lay epistemics and human knowledge: Cognitive and motivational bases. New York, NY: Plenum Press. Kruglanski, A. W. (2004). The psychology of closed mindedness. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 1049–1062.
Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance can be defined as the inconsistency between pairs of related cognitions or between related cognitions and actions. In order to better understand this definition, it is essential to specify the meaning of the term cognition as well as the relationship that exists between pairs of cognitions, as well as cognitions and actions. Within the framework of cognitive dissonance theory, cognitions refer to the knowledge that an individual possesses about objects (e.g., I know that dollar bills are green), oneself (e.g., I know that I am a liberal), and the environment (e.g., I know that it is cold today). Furthermore, pairs of cognitions, as well as cognitions and actions, can be unrelated or related consistently or inconsistently with each other. In keeping with this proposition, there is no apparent relationship between knowing what color a dollar bill is and knowing how cold it is today. These two “knowledges” can thus be thought of as being unrelated. A consonant relationship exists between pairs of cognitions, or cognitions and actions, that are consistent with each other. For example, if an individual views herself as a liberal, then that person should vote (action) for a liberal candidate in an election. Notice that voting for a liberal candidate follows seeing oneself as a liberal (the action is in line with the cognition). In short, voting is consonant with the political preference of the voter. However, if a liberal votes for a conservative-party candidate, a dissonant relationship between pairs of cognitions and actions is believed to exist, because voting for (i.e., taking action in support of) a conservative candidate does not follow from perceiving oneself as a liberal.
A Brief Overview of Cognitive Dissonance Theory Leon Festinger, the founder of cognitive dissonance theory, proposed in 1957 that changes in the environment and interactions with others generate new information which, in turn, may become dissonant with existing knowledge. Stated another way, exposure to new knowledge creates pairs of cognitions that are unrelated, consonant, and, more central to cognitive
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dissonance theory, dissonant to varying degrees. Furthermore, individuals experiencing cognitive dissonance feel psychologically uncomfortable, and feeling this way motivates them to reduce the inconsistency between pairs of related cognitions and between cognitions and actions. More importantly, these individuals attempt to eliminate their cognitive dissonance in hopes of achieving harmony between pairs of related cognitions and cognitions and actions. The magnitude of the inconsistency between two related cognitions or cognitions and actions depends on how these are valued by a person. For instance, if being a liberal is very important for an individual, then voting for (taking action in support of) a conservative-party candidate should elicit an important amount of cognitive dissonance. The magnitude of cognitive dissonance is also influenced by the number of elements linking the two related cognitions. In keeping with our political example, if all of the cognitive elements (I like the candidate’s position on the environment, the fact that the candidate is a woman, and that she has a great deal of experience in politics) are in accordance with voting for a given political candidate for a potential voter, no cognitive dissonance should be experienced by this person. However, voting for a male candidate with a questionable environmental policy and very little experience in politics should elicit an important amount of cognitive dissonance for the individual who believes that all three of these elements are important when voting for a candidate. Thus, the number of consonant and dissonant cognitive elements associated with voting is an important factor to consider when estimating the magnitude of cognitive dissonance. To reduce the dissonance that an individual feels and achieve consonance between pairs of related cognitions or cognitions and actions, an individual can avoid situations and information that elicit cognitive dissonance. Moreover, Festinger argued that people can reduce their cognitive dissonance by changing their behavior or by changing the cognitions associated with this behavior. For example, if a person smokes and learns that it is unhealthy to do so, by quitting smoking, that person automatically eliminates the cognitive dissonance he or she feels. Nevertheless, smokers don’t always change their behavior in response to new information. Rather, they rationalize their smoking behavior by denying the validity of the information (“There is no clear link between chronic bronchitis and smoking”). A smoker’s cognitive dissonance can also be alleviated by adding new elements to the newly discovered information, such as that the death rate is higher in automobile accidents than for smoking, or by modifying the newly presented information by arguing that “life is too short to worry about such things.”
Eliciting Cognitive Dissonance Cognitive dissonance can be elicited in adults, children, and university students in both natural and experimental settings. In line with this idea, a high level of cognitive dissonance is expected to occur when individuals are exposed to information that is not consistent with their beliefs. Consider the members of a group who are expecting that the world is about to come to an end. When faced with the reality that it hasn’t, they should experience a significant amount of cognitive dissonance. The same can be said for pledges who are attempting to join a prestigious fraternity. Fraternity initiations are renowned for having pledges perform activities that are boring, unpleasant, and, at times, even dangerous. Note that in everyday life, pledges have no interest in taking part in such activities. Yet they do so, thus creating a natural setting in which cognitive dissonance is created. Completing boring tasks in a laboratory setting has also been used by researchers in order to foster cognitive dissonance within students. In addition, rewards of varying sizes are sometimes promised to students by researchers in order to justify their taking part in such unpleasant activities. Theoretically, offering a large reward reduces the cognitive dissonance felt by participants because they can justify their behavior with the reward received, thus leaving their belief system intact. However, providing a small reward provides an insufficient justification for performing the unpleasant task. This situation leaves room for an individual to change his or her attitude toward the boring activity, thus reducing the cognitive dissonance being felt. Another strategy that has been used by researchers to create cognitive dissonance is to have individuals publicly commit to a particular behavior, such as the importance of regular physical exercise, and reminding them that they do not. Decision-making tasks have also been utilized by researchers to evoke cognitive dissonance. For example, imagine that a person has to decide which political candidate he or she likes best. More precisely, this person is asked by the researchers to rank a series of 10 political candidates according to how much he or she would vote for them. After ranking the candidates, the person is then asked to pick one candidate. Which decision would be more difficult for the person to make: making a choice between two closely ranked candidates or choosing between candidates who are ranked farther apart? The answer is the former. By asking people to choose between two alternatives that are desirable, cognitive dissonance is elicited, because choosing a candidate is tied to the idea they are rejecting a candidate they also like. Such a choice generates much more cognitive dissonance than choosing a candidate from a pair that is ranked farther apart. Finally, cognitive dissonance has
Cognitive Dissonance
also been induced by researchers by having individuals watch a fellow group member behave inconsistently with their values. To highlight this last point, consider a political candidate who is expressing enthusiasm for a new social policy even though you have heard him, in the past, argue against it. Moreover, you realize that he is discussing the policy with its promoter. Although you understand that it is important to be polite in such a situation, you are, nevertheless, quite surprised. You start to feel uncomfortable (feel cognitive dissonance) from imagining yourself in the candidate’s position.
Reducing Cognitive Dissonance Over the past 60 years, researchers have utilized natural and experimental settings to examine how individuals whose beliefs are challenged or who act inconsistently with their values make efforts to restore consonance. Theoretically, information that completely contradicts an individual’s political stance can lead to proselytizing (i.e., an attempt to persuade others that one’s beliefs are correct). Furthermore, information about a politician should be selected according to one’s political preference because it is consonant. From an environmental point of view, reducing the discomfort felt between dissonant cognitions can account for water conservation and for why people (who experience dissonance vicariously) will become passionate defenders of sunscreen usage. Finally, politically speaking, restoring consonance can help explain why voters, as compared with nonvoters, change their evaluation of presidential candidates after an election. It would seem that the reduction of cognitive dissonance can lead to changes in people’s attitudes as well as in their behavior. However, some qualifications need to be made with respect to the information presented earlier. The first qualification has to do with the duration of a change in attitude. Evidence suggests that it can persist for up to a month. The second qualification is that not everybody experiences cognitive dissonance in the same manner. To illustrate this point, individuals who are highly dogmatic (rigid, defensive, and biased in their thinking) experience greater mental discomfort when placed in a dissonance-provoking experiment. The final qualification deals with the link between cognitive dissonance and culture. Dissonance can be induced in both individualistic and collectivistic cultures. However, in collectivistic cultures, a social referent such as a friend or a group member needs to be present to elicit cognitive dissonance within a fellow group member.
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examined the assumptions of cognitive dissonance theory. In essence, the meaning of cognitive dissonance has changed from being one that emphasizes inconsistency between two related cognitions to a definition that incorporates the idea that it is discomforting. Researchers who have studied dissonance using the perspective that it is discomforting have defined the concept as an aversive state, a bad mood, feeling guilty, or the psychological distress or an uncomfortable arousal that results from a cognitive discrepancy between two related cognitions or related cognitions and actions. Furthermore, defining dissonance in this manner has led researchers to evaluate its presence with physiological measures such as skin conductance and neural activity.
The Legacy of Cognitive Dissonance In the late 1950s, the counterintuitive hypothesis associated with the reduction of cognitive dissonance stimulated much research. However, the change in attitudes witnessed in cognitive dissonance experiments was challenged in the 1960s by self-perception theorists as not being the result of cognitive dissonance reduction but by the idea that people infer their attitudes from their behavior. Creating favorable impressions was also proposed to explain why people modified their attitudes in cognitive dissonance experiments in the early 1970s. Research attention for cognitive dissonance then waned after 1976 but was rekindled slightly by theorists who suggested a radical version of cognitive dissonance theory in the 1980s. A shift in the meaning of cognitive dissonance also sparked interest for cognitive dissonance research. Cognitive dissonance, in the 1980s, was not the result of an inconsistency between a pair of related cognitions but, rather, aroused by the perception that a person is responsible for bringing about a negative event. Finally, in the early 1990s, the suggestions that dissonance is the result of acting inconsistently with one’s self-concept and that it is equivalent to psychological discomfort vaulted the study of cognitive dissonance back to where it was in the 1960s. The legacy of cognitive dissonance as well as cognitive dissonance theory is impressive in that it has generated a considerable amount of research and various theoretical challenges and revisions as well as fostered many mini-theories of human behavior. Stéphane Perreault
The Meaning of Cognitive Dissonance The meaning of the term cognitive dissonance has changed over the years because various theorists have
See also Closure, Need for; Discrimination; Justice Motive; Moral Dilemmas; Political Persuasion and Rhetoric; Positioning Theory; Risky Shift; Source Bias
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Further Readings Aronson, E. (1992). The return of the repressed: Dissonance theory makes a comeback. Psychological Inquiry, 3, 303–311. Beasley, R. K., & Joslyn, M. R. (2001). Cognitive dissonance and post-decision attitude change in six presidential elections. Political Psychology, 22, 521–540. Cooper, J. (2012). Cognitive dissonance theory. In Paul A. M. Van Lange, Arie W. Kruglanski, & E. Tory Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 377–397). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson. Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (Eds.). (1999). Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Collective Action Collective action pertains to synchronized actions done by a plurality of individuals primarily to improve the conditions or promote the interests of one’s in-group. This entry provides a discussion of the features, production, and goals of collective action; the determinants and social psychological theories that explain the factors leading to collective action; a brief introduction to the different forms it may take; and the outcome and effectiveness of collective action.
Features of Collective Action Sociological perspectives equate collective action with mass behaviors of group members acting in concert. In this view, the smallest sociological unit is a collective such as a protest movement, a political party, or a labor union. Their collective actions are understood as singular acts of groups rather than synchronized multiple acts of different individuals. Such singular group acts move toward a shared goal but do not require group members to be physically together while engaging in group-serving behaviors, nor do unified members need to act at the same point in time. Social psychological researchers conceptualize collective action as actions marked by an individual’s psychological features such as in-group social identity and group-enhancement intent. Hence, from a psychological standpoint, collective action becomes possible only when a person identifies with a group and acts with the intention to improve the group’s situation or advance its goals. Collective action may rest on the individual’s level of self-categorization and progroup intentions. It
may include behaviors done by individuals acting alone, such as writing a letter, signing a petition, or staging an individual hunger strike, as Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi had done in protest against British colonizers in the early to mid-1900s. Group members who engage in collective action often come from low-status or disadvantaged groups that experience injustice and inequality. Collective action becomes a means for them to challenge the social structure. For example, through collective protest actions, prodemocracy movements challenge an authoritarian regime and its centralized political structures. However, members of high-status or advantaged groups also engage in collective action, often in response to threat and with the intention of maintaining the existing social structure. For example, extended family members of a dictator can consolidate their clan ties within military institutions to squelch any mass-based uprisings. There are also cases wherein advantaged members engage in collective action on behalf of disadvantaged out-groups (i.e., males supporting females; Whites supporting African-American racial issues). In such cases, self-categorization may be based not on groups that are formed around socially constructed categories (e.g., men or women; Whites or African-Americans) but on groups formed around common interests or ideology (e.g., feminism; racial equality). The concept of belief-based groups explains how individuals from different social categories come together for a common cause. When collectives are formed on the basis of opinion or around issues, groups are defined not by demographic categories but by idea sharing or the common stance they take regarding an idea. In belief-based groups, advantaged group members engage in collective action on behalf of disadvantaged groups due to moral imperatives, or strongly held beliefs about right and wrong. On the emotional plane, empathy, guilt, or shame may lead advantaged members to act on behalf of disadvantaged groups. A number of theories, including classic elite theory and the modern Five-Stage Model, highlight the role of talented counter-elites in the mobilization of disadvantaged groups. The central idea here is that if talented individuals are not allowed to rise in the hierarchy, they will eventually mobilize the nonelite to rebel against the elite. High social mobility is seen as a way to ensure that people will give priority to individual rather than collective action. Social scientists have specified two particular forms of collective action: normative and nonnormative action. Normative action pertains to behaviors that conform to existing social norms, whereas nonnormative action pertains to behaviors that violate these social norms. Whether an action is normative or nonnormative may vary across different social contexts
Collective Action
and even across time. Social norms are based not on the rules of the in-group but on the rules of the social system to which both in-group and out-group members belong. In many cases, normative action pertains to more common activities such as petition signing, peaceful demonstrations, or political participation. Since normative strategies often involve less risk, group members are likely to consider these first. If there are no avenues in which normative action can be exercised or if normative actions prove to be unsuccessful, nonnormative actions could be considered. These are often more disruptive. Actions that are extraconstitutional, violent, or radical often fall under nonnormative action. Unlike normative action, which recognizes and procedurally abides by the rules of the social system, nonnormative action directly challenges the social system. It is explained to be more effective in provoking target out-groups to respond. Nonnormative, disruptive strategies may more effectively challenge the social system than normative strategies do. Nonnormative strategies exert more leverage, unlike normative strategies, which tacitly support the social system by recognizing and procedurally abiding by its rules. But exaggerated disruptive mass actions may likewise create backlash against the in-group’s goals, threatening and building resistance among outgroups and the third-party public. For example, street graffiti that invites passersby to join the armed struggle against an authoritarian regime may increase fear and anger among passersby. Group members may sometimes use both forms of collective action either simultaneously or sequentially. One sequential example of normative and nonnormative actions can be gleaned from Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. Local prodemocracy protests started with normative street protests that followed social norms of legitimate complaints. However, as conflicts intensified and governments turned more repressive, antigovernment collective actions likewise broke conventional boundaries, and legitimate protest movements transformed themselves into heavily armed liberation armies. Normative or nonnormative actions cannot be equated with nonviolent and violent actions, respectively. In some social contexts, violent behavior can be considered normative behavior (e.g., conflict between gangs or rebel groups) and nonviolent behavior can be considered nonnormative (e.g., nonviolent civil disobedience).
Producing Collective Action: Networking, Mobilizing, Conscientizing How do marginalized groups produce collective action, especially if they have no access to conventional sources
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of social force like arms, military and paramilitary forces, and money—or, as the Filipino expression goes—guns, goons, and gold? The power of collective action emanates from huge numbers of people mobilized into a synchronized social force and purposefully group-directed toward a single goal of challenging the status quo. To produce such collective actions entails three concrete tasks: networking, mobilizing, and conscientizing. Networking involves building operational links with like-minded individuals and groups in order to create an interlocking web of individuals and groups, ready to move together against the status quo. For example, prodemocracy movements in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Arab Spring countries established antidictatorship united fronts by networking and linking together an extensive web of sympathizers among religious leaders, students, laborers, and business managers, and even within the ranks of military institutions, albeit discreetly. However, unless such social webs are mobilized, networks remain static and not dynamic collective action. Mobilization transforms collective inertia or readiness into dynamic collective action, as networked individuals and groups operate in unison during episodic actions that confront the status quo. For example, among prodemocracy activists, mobilization would occur during street rallies; with labor unions, mobilizations take the form of collective bargaining or workers’ strikes. Networking and mobilization operate in political space, while conscientization is a liberating kind of education process that produces alterations in a group’s shared cognitions about the status quo and the group’s ability to transform its relationship with the status quo Other. We can refer to such shared cognitions as a collective action frame, or a way of seeing things in a similar way, so large groups of people can move in a singular direction to try to change the status quo. The pedagogical style of conscientization promotes equality to avoid the rise of a new vertical culture of intellectual domination alongside the intensification of collective actions.
Goals of Collective Action Collective actions are primarily group serving. Various researchers have classified collective goals according to scope (incidental or structural), target of action (outgroup, in-group, or public-at-large), and nature of intergroup engagement (competitive or conversionary). These goal categories are not mutually exclusive and can coexist with each other during the implementation of collective action. Oftentimes, collective actions confront incidental or structural disadvantages in society. Incidental
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disadvantage pertains to episodes that produce unfavorable situations such as the approval of open-pit mining, an increase in public train fares, or the burning of a mosque. Structural disadvantages, on the other hand, are based on the sociostructural order in society in which injustices or inequalities are more deep-rooted. Discrimination based on social class, gender, race, or religion exemplifies structural disadvantage. Collective action may likewise advocate an ideology or crusade for moral convictions such as environmentalism, human rights, or respect for religious identities. Episodic group protests are often utilized as a first stage to mobilize individuals for larger mass actions aimed at structural change and ideological goals. For example, as protests mobilize against a local open-pit mine, organizers escalate and enlarge their networks and reach out to international nongovernment organizations. Such a move is carried out by shifting the protest narrative and enlarging their protest network to target global capitalist ventures that are destructive to the world’s environment. Collective actions aim to effect changes among the out-group, the in-group, and the third party party- at-large. Such mass actions are mobilized to influence out-group members in an attempt to persuade or convert them to concede to, recognize, or adopt the perspective or goals of the in-group. Joint action likewise influences fellow in-group members to participate in communal activities. Further, such actions may be done as a form of psychological coping, especially among victimized collectives. It enables groups to find mental strength in numbers and deal with the psychological stress that comes with the experience of injustice. An example of this would be the prayer or peace rallies organized by Pakistani Christians after the Peshawar school massacre in December 2014. Collective actions can likewise aim to influence the public-at-large to ally with or support the protest activities. For example, South Africa’s antiapartheid street protests in the 1980s not only aimed to consolidate Black political force or threaten the White regime but also intended to win over worldwide sympathy through international media coverage. Successful collective actions throughout the country resulted in Nelson Mandela’s ascent to power as the leader of a new nonapartheid South African government in 1994. Most studies have focused on collective action as competitive. When group members perceive the social order to be illegitimate and capable of being changed, they engage in competitive action to improve their status. Often, this also involves negative attributions of the out-group. However, not all communal actions are combative; some are conversionary.
Conversionary collective action aims at converting nonmembers (e.g., out-group, general public) to recognize and embrace the in-group’s worldview. The goal here is in-group migration, or to get other people to be part of the group. Out-group members are perceived as misguided and in need of education. Some environmental movements and religious conversions are examples of conversionary action. However, when conversionary strategies prove unsuccessful, competitive collective actions may be considered.
Determinants of Collective Action Social psychologists have underlined the significance of group identification and self-categorization to collective action. For an individual to undertake actions that promote group interests, one must consider oneself a member of that group, and this membership becomes the basis for one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Intergroup comparison is perceived as fundamental to motivate an individual toward collective action. Intergroup comparisons happen in contexts in which intergroup relationships are salient and where there is a clear us and them. However, mere identification and self-categorization may not be sufficient to propel an individual toward collective action. Identifying oneself as a woman, for example, does not necessarily result in feminist collective action. Researchers have introduced the concept of a politicized collective identity. Through group comparison, an individual gains awareness of the in-group’s disadvantaged position and subsequently regards this disadvantaged position as unacceptable. Identifying with a specific group likewise develops an action-oriented identity such as social movement organizations or activist groups. A politicized collective identity is much more likely to inspire collective action than is a nonpoliticized collective identity. Collective actions that highlight a superordinate identity (e.g., American identity of Black and White Americans) between the in-group and out-group is seen to be another way to obtain effective collective action. This may reduce negative attitudes between groups and may challenge perceptions about the legitimacy of intergroup inequalities, thus motivating action to remedy this illegitimacy. However, it was also noted that salience of a superordinate identity may blur perceptions of inequality and illegitimacy among both advantaged and disadvantaged members such that reparatory actions may no longer be considered. Social psychological concepts have been used to explain how self-categorization and social comparison lead to collective action among disadvantaged groups. Both relative deprivation theory and social
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identity theory identify motivational forces behind group actions.
Relative Deprivation Theory and Group-Based Emotions Relative deprivation theory postulates that group members are motivated toward collective action due to perceptions and feelings of deprivation that arise when comparing their group with other groups. It is not the objective experience of injustice or inequality, per se, that leads to collective action but the subjective interpretation of the group’s experience of disadvantage. Furthermore, for collective action to ensue, relative deprivation should be interpreted as a group rather than a personal experience. This deprivation is also blamed on an out-group or illegitimate social structures. Relative deprivation theory also clarifies how emotional responses such as anger, resentment, outrage, and a feeling of entitlement often accompany perceptions of disadvantage. Such group-based emotions are stronger predictors of collective action than subjective perceptions alone. Apart from anger and resentment, feelings of contempt are often associated with radical forms of collective action. During conscientizing processes against an abusive government, prodemocracy forces can use relative deprivation effects to persuade more members of the public-at-large to join collective mobilizations. One common strategy propagandizes the wealth of those in power, displaying their lavish drinking parties, mistresses and mansions, and luxurious jewelry. Such images intensify perceptions of relative deprivation among populations marked by desperate poverty and persuade more members of the public to participate in collective street protests.
Social Identity Theory Social identity theory maintains that group members engage in collective action to improve the position and esteem of the in-group, and respond to the threat against their social identity. A person’s participation in collective action depends on whether that person perceives his or her in-group as capable of executing the necessary actions to achieve the desired change. This sense of collective agency is also termed collective efficacy or the extent to which an individual perceives the group as capable of achieving its goals. A group member’s propensity to engage in collective action also depends on whether his or her perception of the social context favors successful group actions. More specifically, collective action is more likely if one searches and finds favorable cues that
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mark existing social conditions as impermeable, illegitimate, and unstable. Permeability pertains to intergroup boundaries and the extent to which group members can move from a low-status group to a higher-status group. When boundaries are perceived to be impermeable or where individuals are hindered from obtaining an advantaged position regardless of effort or merit, group members may consider collective action to challenge this. If, however, boundaries are perceived to be permeable, individuals would likely pursue individual action over collective action to obtain an advantaged position. Legitimacy refers to the extent to which disparities between groups or conditions within the social system are seen as acceptable, fair, or just. Similar to relative deprivation theory, perceptions and feelings of injustice or illegitimacy motivate participation in collective action. Stability, on the other hand, pertains to how much group members perceive the status quo to be changeable. When group members are able to envision a society in which the status of their in-group can be improved, collective action will likely develop. If, however, group members perceive their situation as unchangeable, interest in collective action will be weak.
Consequences of Collective Action Participation in collective action has been linked to a number of psychological outcomes. Collective action often affects identity, emotions, and well-being. Participation in collective action allows one to express emotions such as anger against out-groups. Joint actions enhance one’s social identity with a sense of satisfaction and happiness. Such participation may also bring about a sense of joy and empowerment, which motivates further engagement in collective action. Effectiveness of collective action is seen to depend on the target out-group’s responsiveness to change as well as its vulnerability to disruptive collective action. Sociological studies show conflicting evidence for the effectiveness of collective action in promoting social change. Some research indicates that policy change, for example, is influenced by public opinion rather than by collective action. Other sociological and political studies provide evidence that collective action is in fact effective for policy change. Social psychologists, on the other hand, suggest an indirect effect between collective action and policy change, proposing that the success of mass action may be measured by the extent to which it is able to influence public opinion, which would then lead to policy change. Cristina Jayme Montiel and Daniel J. Christie
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See also Activism; Calculus of Dissent; Civil Disobedience; CounterElite; Elite Theory (Pareto); Ethnic Revival; Insurgency; Political Socialization; Poverty Trap; Powerlessness; Radicalization; Resource Mobilization; Social Class; Social Revolts
Further Readings Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. J. (2011). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Duncan, L. E. (2012). The psychology of collective action. In K. Deaux & M. Snyder, The Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology (pp. 781–803). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Louis, W. R. (2009). Collective action—and then what? Journal of Social Issues, 65(4), 727–748. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560 .2009.01623.x McGarty, C., Bliuc, A., Thomas, E. F., & Bongiorno, R. (2009). Collective action as the material expression of opinion-based group membership. Journal of Social Issues, 65(4), 839–857. Montiel, C. (2001). Toward a psychology of structural peacebuilding. In D. Christie, R. Wagner, & D. Winter (Eds.), Peace, conflict and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century (pp. 282–294). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tausch, N., Spears, R., Saab, R., Siddiqui, R. N., Becker, J. C., Christ, O., & Purnima, S. (2011). Explaining radical group behavior: Developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action. Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 101(1), 129–148. doi:10.1037/a0022728 Thomas, E. F., & Louis, W. R. (2013a). Doing democracy: The social psychological mobilization and consequences of collective action. Social Issues and Policy Review, 7(1), 173–200. Thomas, E. F., & Louis, W. R. (2013b). When will collective action be effective? Violent and non-violent protests differentially influence perceptions of legitimacy and efficacy among sympathizers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(2), 263–276. doi:10.1177/0146167213510525 Wright, S. C. (2001). Strategic collective action: Social psychology and social change. In R. Brown & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes (pp. 414–430). Oxford, England: Blackwell. Wright, S. C. (2009). The next generation of collective action research. Journal of Social Issues, 65(4), 859–879. doi:10.11 11/j.1540-4560.2009.01628. Van Zomeren, M. (2013). Four core social-psychological motivations to undertake collective action. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(6), 378–388. doi:10.1111/spc3.12031
Command
of the
Commons
In an influential 2003 article, political scientist Barry Posen invoked the phrase “command of the commons” to explain the foundations of American military
egemony. The concept borrows from an economics h literature that treats the “commons” as a rival but nonexcludable good. In the context of the international system, however, the domains of air, sea, and space are less rivalrous because many actors can use them without depletion, but these domains are more prone to exclusion through deliberate denial of access. Defining the commons as “areas that belong to no one state and that provide access to much of the globe,” Posen argues that through a preponderance of economic and military capabilities, mastery of the commons affords a military a unique ability to freely access and leverage the domains of air, sea, and space for purposes of transit, information, and denial. Command of the commons is itself built on a foundation of significant economic resources, a scientific research and industrial development base, a highly skilled workforce, and a well-trained professional military. Command is routinely executed through global infrastructure of logistics capabilities, military bases, prepositioned matériel, and a unified command plan. Only the United States possesses this mastery at present because its disproportionate influence over air and sea can credibly threaten to deny others access to these commons. For example, no other navy can deny or disrupt access of the American navy through international waters without the high risk of destruction, but the United States can credibly threaten just such an action to other potential adversaries. For its part, dominance of space can be leveraged for information and communications to facilitate commercial activity or military operations anywhere, anytime, or to deny other domains. In sum, command of the commons not only affords the United States the ability to deploy its military superiority anywhere for a decisive outcome but also the time to gradually build up localized capacity, study an adversary for vulnerabilities, and interdict and isolate an adversary to weaken it. The concept is not complete without an understanding of what Posen terms the “contested zone,” where operational freedom exercised in the commons can face significant constraints. Specifically, contested zones are areas closer to the territory of an adversary where familiarity of terrain, an asymmetry of stake, manpower advantages, and the ubiquity of cheap close-range combat and denial technologies enable a local adversary to raise the costs of a conflict. Thus, adversaries in contested zones can potentially deter or defeat a state with mastery of the commons by raising financial or manpower costs to an unacceptably high level.
New Developments in the Commons It is worth noting two new developments in the international security environment since Posen’s initial
Command of the Commons
conceptualization of “command of the commons”: the cybercommons and advanced military denial technologies. The emergence of cyberspace as a new domain of the global commons constitutes the first major development. Much like air, sea, and space, cyberspace is a common-use realm of communication and movement, which has become a pillar of both the global economy and major power military operations. For example, global stock markets, heavily reliant upon open cyberspace for transactions, process tens of trillions of dollars of transactions annually. As major powers, most notably the United States, have turned to network-centric warfare and electronic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for operations, they have become increasingly dependent on the cybercommons for data transmissions as well. The cybercommons is unique in that it remains relatively ungoverned by global regimes and predominantly owned and operated by the private sector, though it is increasingly being treated like a national asset. Unlike the other three realms, no power, including the United States, possesses dominant control of cyberspace. The near-universal access, the ease of anonymity by both state and nonstate actors, and the absence of control allow for ample disruptions. Although the United States remains the most technologically advanced country to leverage the cybercommons for information, coordination, and even disruption of other activities, it has struggled to deny actors in China, Russia, and North Korea from using the cybercommons to negatively impact other states and private entities. The United States has established U.S. Cyber Command and taken other actions to deal with the growing threats in this space, but it still retains no decisive eminence in the cybercommons. The second major development is that rising access to advanced military technologies enables state and nonstate actors to project greater power beyond the littorals into international waters. Some fear that sophisticated antiaccess and area denial (A2/AD) weapons can target ships at much longer ranges and horizontally expand the contested zones to threaten the maritime commons. These developments reflect the increasing multipolarity of the international system due to shifts in the global distribution of economic and military power. The growing trend toward multipolarity is significant because rising powers may expand their interests, further exploit the commons for military activity, and even attempt to disrupt or deny American command. China’s development of A2/AD capabilities most typically reflects these concerns. In particular, China is feared to pose a threat to freedom of navigation, particularly in the East China and South China Seas, and to significantly raise the costs of military action in that
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theater. Although American military spending and capabilities continue to dwarf those of other countries, some scholars contend the degree of U.S. superiority is slowly eroding. Nevertheless, the threat posed to the commons is likely not one of the present but of the future, based on projections of growth in technology, acquisitions, and doctrinal integration, which would take decades for a potential adversary to develop. Even if a credible challenge to the United States were to emerge, some scholars argue that contestation would not actually threaten American access to the maritime commons. This is because for the foreseeable future, the limitations of military technologies render the successful denial extremely difficult, except within an adversary’s own territory or immediate sphere of influence.
Competing Interpretations of Command Policy-makers and analysts have articulated two types of command to safeguard the commons—seen as the connective tissue of the international system itself— from rising challenges. One variant of command involving “control of the commons” demands a more activist, preemptive, and dominant approach to defend the entirety of the commons. In contrast, a second variant of command involving “security of the commons” affords a more relaxed posture that relies on the inherent resilience of the commons alongside heightened contributions of other states toward collective goods. Both concepts share the core assumption that the United States must retain access to the commons and must be able to deter/defeat challengers to American command. However, they differ significantly on the urgency of the threats to American command, the resilience of the commons, cost sensitivity, the incentives of other states, and prescriptions for sustaining command of the commons. Control of the commons, closely associated with the assumptions of primacy, perceives disruptions and rising challengers as immediate threats to American economic and military interests in a highly fragile commons. The approach fears the psychological impact and contagion effects of any challenge to the commons. Unrest can yield disorder and even closure of the commons, with disastrous implications for the United States and others. This approach then charges the United States, as the keystone defender of the commons, to take preemptive, costly actions to dissuade, outcompete, and possibly even disarm potential challengers to American dominance of the commons. In contrast, security of the commons is a variant of command more closely aligned with grand strategies of selective engagement or restraint. It conceives of the commons as highly resilient because of numerous workaround mechanisms and capable parties interested in
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dampening disruptions. Since nearly all states view openness of the commons as in their best interests, especially economically, the credibility of threats to the commons or a serious challenge to American command remains low. In contrast to the control perspective, the impacts of nonstate disruptions to the commons are viewed as much less destructive because of workarounds and substitutes available to the United States. Consequently, the security approach emphasizes a more hands-off policy that relies on regional actors to counter potential disruptions to the commons based on their own incentives to retain market access and balance against regional threats. This approach accepts higher near-term risk, but in doing so, it seeks to reduce freeriding by other actors, avoid entrapment in regional disputes, conserve finite economic resources to prevent overextension, and reinvest in the foundations of state power, such as domestic economic growth. In many ways, command of the commons remains similar to what Posen articulated more than a decade ago. The United States possesses a preponderance of economic and military power to retain its dominance in air, sea, and space. However, the emergence of the cybercommons and new military technologies for denial constitute significant developments in the international security environment that could alter the future of the global commons. Two perspectives—control of the commons and security of the commons—offer two competing assessments of these developments and the threat to American command. Especially with the rise of China as a global economic and military power potentially posing a challenge to American hegemony, command of the commons will remain an important topic of debate for the foreseeable future. Sameer P. Lalwani and Vinod Kannuthurai See also American Exceptionalism; Civil-Military Relations; Cyberwar; Deterrence and International Relations; Drones; International Security; Military Action; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Saber Rattling; Stability-Instability Paradox; United Nations
Further Readings Biddle, S., & Oelrich, I. (2016). Future warfare in the western Pacific: Chinese antiaccess/area denial, U.S. airsea battle, and command of the commons in East Asia. International Security, 41(1), 7–48. Denmark, A. M. (2010). Managing the global commons. The Washington Quarterly, 33(3), 165–182. Denmark, A. M., & Mulvenon, J. (Eds.). (2010). Contested commons: The future of American power in a multipolar world. Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security.
Friedberg, A. L. (2014). Beyond air sea battle: The debate over U.S. military strategy in Asia. London, England: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Itzkowitz-Shifrinson, J. R., & Lalwani, S. (2014). “It’s a commons misunderstanding: The limited threat to American command of the commons.” In Christopher A. Preble & John Mueller (Eds.), A dangerous world? Threat perception and U.S. national security (pp. 223–244). Washington, DC: Cato Institute. Murphy, T. (2010). Security challenges in the 21st century global commons. Yale Journal of International Affairs, 5(2), 28–43. Posen, B. R. (2003). Command of the commons: The military foundation of U.S. hegemony. International Security, 28(1), 5–46. Posen, B. R. (2014). Restraint: A new foundation for U.S. grand strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Raymond, M. (2014). Puncturing the myth of the Internet as a commons. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 57–68. Scheinmann, G. M., & Cohen, R. S. (2012). The myth of “securing the commons.” Washington Quarterly, 35(1), 115–128. U.S. Department of Defense. (2010). 2010 quadrennial defense review. Washington, DC: Department of Defense. Watts, B. D. (2011). The maturing revolution in military affairs. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Communism See Socialism and Communism
Competitive Authoritarianism Competitive authoritarianism is a kind of hybrid regime, or a political regime that combines elements of both democracy and authoritarianism. In competitive authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held regularly and are hard-fought affairs. However, the “playing field” is uneven: control of the media, abuse of state resources, coercion, and/or limited fraud give incumbents an unfair advantage over the opposition. Because elections are not free and fair, these regimes are not democratic. Yet neither are they fully authoritarian. Although unfair, they are not totally meaningless. In competitive authoritarian regimes, there is real competition and some uncertainty regarding the outcome of elections.
Hybrid Regimes The concept of competitive authoritarianism was developed by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way to describe a
Competitive Authoritarianism
kind of hybrid regime that became increasingly common after the cold war. To be considered a democracy, a regime must possess four key attributes: free and fair elections, full adult suffrage, protection of a broad range of civil liberties, and the absence of unelected “tutelary” bodies that restrict elected governments’ ability to govern. This is called the “procedural minimum definition of democracy.” Some regimes possess most of these attributes but not all; these are “hybrid regimes,” of which there are various kinds. For example, an otherwise-democratic regime in which there is not full adult suffrage is a constitutional oligarchy. An otherwise democratic regime in which the military restricts the ability of elected governments to govern is a tutelary regime. According to Levitsky and Way, it is necessary to add a fifth attribute to the procedural minimum definition of democracy: the existence of a reasonably level playing field between incumbents and opposition. An otherwise-democratic regime in which the playing field is uneven is a competitive authoritarian regime. There are various tools that incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes can use to tilt the playing field in their favor. One common tool is control of the media, especially television. Another is abuse of state resources: incumbents may use public finances to fund their campaigns, deploy the machinery of the state (buildings, vehicles, public employees, etc.) on their behalf, or use the state’s distributive and regulatory powers to reward supporters and punish opponents. A third common tool is coercion, ranging from the selective use of “legal” repression, such as libel laws, to threats and physical violence. Finally, incumbents may use limited fraud. While Levitsky and Way specify that fraud cannot be so massive as to make elections meaningless (when this occurs, the regime is fully authoritarian, not competitive authoritarian), incumbents may use limited to fraud to secure victory.
Competitive Authoritarianism After the Cold War The post–cold war period saw a proliferation of competitive authoritarian regimes. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower, political elites in developing and postcommunist countries faced pressure to adopt the outward forms of democracy. Yet adopting the forms was not the same as adopting the substance: many countries began to hold multiparty elections, but these were not free and fair. While observers noted the shortcomings of these regimes, they often described them optimistically as being in the midst of prolonged transitions to democracy.
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Levitsky and Way challenged this “democratizing bias.” They argued that it was time to stop thinking of these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking about the specific types of regimes they actually were. These were not diminished subtypes of democracy or regimes on the inevitable path to democracy; they were competitive authoritarian. And they were widespread. By Levitsky and Way’s count, 35 countries in the world had competitive authoritarian regimes in the 1990 to 1995 period. These could be found in postcommunist Europe (e.g., Belarus, Ukraine), Africa (e.g., Ghana, Kenya), Latin America (e.g., Peru, Mexico), and Asia (e.g., Taiwan, Malaysia). They were particularly common in Africa and the former Soviet Union, where they outnumbered democracies.
Divergent Trajectories The competitive authoritarian regimes that emerged after the cold war followed three different trajectories. Some democratized. Others remained stably c ompetitive authoritarian (or even became fully authoritarian). And others were cases of unstable competitive authoritarianism: incumbents were defeated, but the governments that replaced them also governed in a nondemocratic manner. According to Levitsky and Way, two major variables determined whether regimes democratized or not. The first was “linkage to the West.” Linkage refers to the density of economic, political, social, and organizational ties, as well as cross-border flows of capital, goods, people, and information. In cases of high linkage, instances of autocratic abuse (e.g., fraudulent elections, acts of repression) were likely to receive greater attention in Western countries, resulting in pressure on the abusing regime. Similarly, linkage created domestic constituencies interested in democracy, whether out of conviction or in order to bolster the country’s reputation. Finally, high linkage strengthened domestic democratic actors by giving them powerful international allies, whether in the form of Western governments, parties, international agencies, or nongovernmental organizations. The second variable was incumbents’ “organizational power.” This refers to the state’s coercive capacity and the strength of the ruling party. Regimes that could draw on strong states and ruling parties were better equipped to withstand democratic challenges. Strong states allowed them to spy on and intimidate the opposition more effectively and meant they could rely on state agents to carry out controversial orders, such as to kill protesters or engage in fraud. Strong parties made it easier to mobilize voters at election time and decreased the likelihood of defections by party leaders.
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According to Levitsky and Way, international linkage was the more important of these two variables: of their 35 cases, every one of the high-linkage cases had democratized by 2008. In cases of lower linkage, incumbents’ organizational power was the crucial factor, since it affected the opposition’s ability to mount a serious challenge and the likelihood of a defection-fueled regime collapse. James Loxton See also Authoritarian Personality; Authoritarianism; Dictatorship; Tolerance for Ambiguity
Further Readings Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2002). The rise of competitive authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive authoritarianism: Hybrid regimes after the cold war. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Confirmation Bias Confirmation bias describes a preference of individuals for information that confirms their existing expectations and beliefs. It has been widely studied in political contexts to explore the effects of citizens’ political attitudes on media use, political deliberation, and political participation. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that affects the way people deal with information in several aspects: It impacts how people decide which information they approach or avoid, how people process and interpret information, and how they recall it from memory. In the 21st century, the concept is often used to explain the development of so-called echo chambers— that is, ideologically homogeneous (online) information environments that reinforce the belief systems of their users while suppressing contrary viewpoints. This entry gives an overview of confirmation biases in information selection, processing, and retention and discusses their underlying mechanisms. Human strategies to preserve existing beliefs have been examined since the 1940s, stimulated by research on persuasion during World War II, and have attracted reinvigorated scholarly interest in the wake of increasingly complex information environments in the Internet era. Most scholarly attention has been devoted to confirmation biases that emerge during selective exposure to information. Selectivity biases play a key role in the study of human communication in general and political
communication in particular, as only information that we turn our attention to has a chance to impact our cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. In political contexts, selectivity bias is reflected in a preference for information that complies with a person’s political ideology, partisan stance, or attitudes toward specific issues. For example, a person who supports the implementation of minimum wages will more likely read an article that emphasizes positive outcomes of minimum wages. By reaffirming the need for minimum wages, the article adds further evidence to a person’s existing beliefs that minimum wages are necessary. Accordingly, the person is less inclined to pay attention to an article that points out the downsides of minimum wages, because it would disconfirm prior beliefs. Although there is little doubt that beliefs and expectations have an impact on selectivity patterns, selective exposure depends on a wide variety of circumstances. For instance, selectivity bias is stronger for closed-minded individuals and people with dogmatic belief systems. It is also contingent on the perceived relevance of the attitude being attended to, with selective exposure being weaker if the information addresses opinions with little importance to the person. A similar effect occurs for negative information. Owing to an automatic propensity for negative messages, individuals tend to overcome confirmation biases in order to satisfy more universal needs of surveillance. Further, the search for attitude-consistent messages was shown to be stronger than the actual avoidance of attitude-discrepant information. As a result, most individuals—despite their psychological preference for congenial information—are unlikely to entirely disregard viewpoints that contradict their existing beliefs. The media system in the United States may illustrate this pattern. Although U.S. media are known for increasingly tailoring their news products to niche audiences with specific political ideologies, even the most biased programs (e.g., Fox News or MSNBC) still attract a substantive share of viewers with contrary political viewpoints. If a person is not able or willing to avoid an incongruent message in the first place, the person can still prevent discrepant information from being integrated into his or her cognitive system during information processing and interpretation. Once a message has been approached, it undergoes significant alterations and reductions based on a person’s existing beliefs. These beliefs are protected by various cognitive defense mechanisms. One of these defense mechanisms is the process of motivated reasoning. It builds on counterarguments that individuals generate in order to reject opinionchallenging content and to reinforce previously held attitudes. Another mechanism is biased assimilation, by
Conflict Theory, Realistic
which individuals discount the overall informational value of incongruent content without necessarily elaborating on specific lines of argumentation. For instance, people tend to (mis-)perceive congruent messages as being of generally higher importance and quality (e.g., in terms of their objectivity or credibility) in comparison with messages that do not support their hypotheses about reality. The perceived superiority of information complying with established arguments becomes stronger with every new piece of information that is added to corroborate prior beliefs. People thus integrate belief- congruent information more readily into their existing cognitive structures, while noncompliant messages are more likely to be discarded in the wake of information processing. Accordingly, attitude-consistent content is also better remembered than incongruent content during information recall. Research shows that individuals exhibit confirmation biases in information retention even if they do not prefer belief-compliant messages during information exposure. Various theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain the human tendency to protect established cognitive structures. Cognitive theories, on the one hand, explain confirmation biases mainly by a limited capacity of human beings to process information. Cognitive theories suggest that messages challenging prior beliefs do not readily fit into existing cognitive structures, thereby requiring more time and resources to understand their contribution to a person’s existing assumptions about reality. From a cognitive perspective, people thus prefer congruent information to inconsistent messages mainly because they deploy their limited resources available for information processing in parsimonious ways. Motivational theories, on the other hand, explain confirmation biases by a human desire to reduce or avoid psychological discomfort. Motivational theories assert that individuals aspire to a state of cognitive harmony. This harmony will be threatened if individuals notice that their behaviors contradict their beliefs or— in more general terms—encounter information that proves their attitudes wrong, thereby implying behavioral consequences that would contrast with their existing beliefs. This disturbance of cognitive harmony translates into increased psychological arousal and aversive emotional reactions that motivate a person either to restore harmony by dissolving inconsistencies or to avoid anticipated disturbances in the first place. Cornelia Mothes See also Assimilation; Attitudes; Closure, Need for; Cognitive Dissonance; Heuristics; Motivated Reasoning; Political Ideology; Stereotypes
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Further Readings Hart, W., Albarracín, D., Eagly, A. H., Brechan, I., Lindberg, M. J., & Merrill, L. (2009). Feeling validated versus being correct: A meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 555–588. doi:10.1037/a0015701 Meffert, M. F., Chung, S., Joiner, A. J., Waks, L., & Garst, J. (2006). The effects of negativity and motivated information processing during a political campaign. Journal of Communication, 56, 27–51. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466 .2006.00003.x Stroud, N. J. (2011). Niche news: The politics of news choice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50, 755–769. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006 .00214.x
Conflict Theory See Conflict Theory, Realistic; Social Dominance Theory; Social Identity Theory
Conflict Theory, Realistic Realistic conflict theory, sometimes also known as realistic group conflict theory, concerns how different groups interact, come into conflict, form in-group solidarity, and exercise out-group cooperation under different levels of resource competition. This theory grew out of social psychology but has important applications to any study of how groups of people interact. Simply stated, realistic conflict theory asserts that when groups come into competition over scarce resources, hostility ensues, but that when a common goal exists, they can work together successfully. The scarcer the resources, the greater the competition; the resulting escalation in intergroup tension can lead directly to violent conflict. Whether these resources are material or symbolic, perceived or real, it is the reality or the perception that their appropriation by one group or another is zero sum—if one group gains, the other group loses—that causes conflict. This winner/loser process creates conflict between and among groups who all want the same resources. Increased competition also increases in-group identification and solidarity while also increasing denigration of out-groups. Members of the same group develop and value common symbols and markers of group membership and in the process devalue markers of nonmembership.
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Realistic conflict theory has an important role to play in both research and practice, because it can help us better understand racism, ethnic conflict, prejudice, and discrimination. According to realistic conflict theory, these negative social phenomena are products of competition and hostility and not inevitable or immutable results of interactions in diverse societies. Consequently, this theoretical perspective envisages psychological experiences (hatred, shame, need for revenge, and so on) as determined by competition over resources. In traditional experimental terms, the psychological experiences become dependent variables. The following discussion outlines the history of the theory’s development, offers some further clarification and examples of how the theory applies, presents some critiques of the theory, and concludes with a brief explanation of its relationship to the literature of international conflict theory.
History Realistic conflict theory came out of the observation in psychology research that individual-level psychology functions differently from group-level psychology and that theories applied at the individual level seem oversimplified when applied to the group level. In 1965, Donald Campbell coined the phrase realistic group conflict theory and defined the concept. However, Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues in the Robbers Cave Experiment provide some of the most famous evidence and support of the theory. Their experiment in 1954 brought together two groups of 12-year-old boys with similar backgrounds, none of whom knew each other before the experiment. The two groups were brought to a Boy Scout camp in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. The groups were kept separate from each other initially but were encouraged to bond within their groups through pursuit of common goals. Each of the groups chose names for their groups and symbols representing them. After one week, the two groups were brought into competition. They played a series of sporting contests in which the winners were rewarded and losers received nothing, and the overall winners with the highest accumulated group score would win a trophy. Other situations were devised to induce competition between the groups over scarce resources, such as one group being delayed in arriving at a picnic and finding that the other group had eaten all of the food. The expression of tension between the two groups began as verbal taunting and name-calling but escalated to property destruction and physical aggression by the end of the second week. The boys tended to attribute positive qualities to their own group and negative ones to the other group when asked
to characterize them. In the third week, the two groups were brought together and required to resolve a problem with the drinking water in the camp and were able to work together successfully toward this “superordinate” goal, defined as a goal that both groups want to achieve but neither can achieve without the help of the other. The researchers intended to test theories of in-group formation, intergroup competition and hostility, and intergroup cooperation integration toward a common goal. They found that introducing even small amounts of competition between the groups of boys created hostility between the newly formed groups, as well as increasing camaraderie within them. Other research has found that relations between groups tend to be more competitive than relations between individuals. Although the speed and degree to which the intergroup conflict escalated is alarming, the relatively quick resolution of the conflict through intergroup socialization and cooperation in pursuit of a common goal is a positive sign that these cleavages can be overcome.
Application and Examples This theory is useful in understanding relationships between groups, such as ethnic or racial groups, based on resource competition rather than on preconceived animosities arising from some ancient fear, incompatibility, or hatred. For instance, some theories suggest that some groups simply have ancient antagonisms based on incompatibility or perceived incompatibility of cultural norms and ways of life. Samuel Huntington articulated a form of this argument as a “clash of civilizations.” However, realistic conflict theory asserts that the content of the group identification is less important than the level of competition for resources between and among groups, regardless of differences in religion, culture, language, and so on. Groups that are very similar, such as the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, can have very high levels of violent intergroup conflict, while culturally very different groups in other places are able to cooperate. Some observers point to the struggle for independence in many European colonies as a process that united diverse populations, but that once this common goal had been achieved, the competition for political power and distribution of resources created cleavages between groups, which has subsequently led to violent conflict. As another example, groups in the United States may resist the equality of minority populations if they fear that such equality will lead to increased competition for jobs. Under this theory, opposition to immigration from other countries also stems from a fear of job or wage competition rather than some inherent dislike for the immigrant population. As competition, perceived competition, or fear of growing future competition increases, in-group
Conflict Theory, Realistic
identification and solidarity will increase, and out-group devaluation and factionalism will also increase. Realistic conflict theory helps to explain why communities that have more diversity, and therefore more opportunity for competition for resources between groups, can exhibit more intergroup conflict. It also suggests that reducing this fear of competition may alleviate this conflict without having to alter other less malleable social constructs. If we think of political power as the ultimate resource that controls the distribution of all other resources, this theory also can explain why electoral violence is not uncommon in diverse societies, especially those that do not have a history of peaceful democratic transitions between leaders. If the norm in a given country is that once a group comes to power, it takes as much as it can for the group and stays in power by all means necessary, who comes to power can be seen as an existential matter for groups in competition. Additionally, unscrupulous leaders wishing to consolidate support from their in-group constituencies may instrumentalize and emphasize intergroup competition for their own purposes. By stoking out-group animosity and promoting in-group solidarity, they attempt to gain political support necessary to gain political power, electorally or otherwise. While the competition may be a real one, its salience has been artificially increased. The implications of realistic conflict theory for conflict prevention and resolution indicate that reducing competition between groups, or more realistically regulating it, could be effective in reducing intergroup conflict. For instance, promoting inclusive political systems that guarantee or strongly support inclusion of all groups in governing such as proportional representation systems might be better for conflict mitigation than a winner-take-all system in which one group can dominate the political system. If competition is the driving force in intergroup conflicts, thinking of ways to reduce this competition and encourage cooperative problem solving of benefit to both or all groups could potentially be a powerful conflict-resolution tool.
Critique The Robbers Cave experiment has been criticized on multiple grounds. Ethically, the boys were not informed of their participation in an experiment and did not consent to it. Of course, being informed of the purpose ahead of time would likely have biased the results, but nevertheless, more should have been done to protect the boys from psychological and physical harm. Additionally, many have claimed that the sample was biased, in that 12-year-old American, White, Protestant boys at camp are not representative of the global population and that sporting competitions do not provide realistic
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analogies for competition over essential resources between population groups. However, the uniform characteristics of the boys ensured that only the divisions introduced by the researchers impacted the intergroup relationships in the experimental context. With regard to realistic conflict theory more generally, less a critique than an omission is that it does not explain why groups form in the first place and why people belong to them. Because this would seem an important element of explaining how groups come into conflict, realistic conflict theory is often paired with social identity theory (see entry in this volume). Explaining why groups exist and why people adhere to them is essential for explaining why they compete as groups with one another and why they tend to endure.
Realist Conflict Theory The social psychology theory already described is not to be confused with the realist theory of conflict that has grown out of the international relations conflict literature. When applied to the international system, it makes four assertions: (1) states are the central actors in the system; (2) the system is anarchic with no supranational entity governing states; (3) states (or their leaders) act rationally to maximize self-interest; and (4) all states want power for self-preservation. It has also been applied to internal wars and armed conflicts, particularly in failed states in which there is no government with a legitimate monopoly over the use of force and in which there are powerful armed groups, approximating a state of anarchy in which armed groups are the highest level of governance. Realist theory has its roots in the work of Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, but Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980) developed and studied the modern version of the theory and its implications in the international relations field of political science. For instance, according to the concept of the security dilemma, one state’s actions to increase its security can cause other states to fear that such measures will increase that state’s military capabilities, thus encouraging those other states to take similar actions, resulting in increased international tensions and making conflict more likely. Molly Inman See also Dominant Power Politics; Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives; Oligarchy; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution; Social Identity Theory
Further Readings Campbell, D. T. (1965). Ethnocentrism and other altruistic motives. In David Levine (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on
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motivation, (Vol. 13, pp. 283–311). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Insko, C. A., Schopler, J., Kennedy, J. F., Dahl, K. R., Graetz, K. A., & Drigotas, S. M. (1992). Individual–group discontinuity from the differing perspectives of Campbell’s realistic group conflict theory and Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 55(3), 272–291. Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The Robbers Cave experiment (Vol. 10). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. The social psychology of intergroup relations, 33(47), 74.
Conflicts, Protracted Despite its being widely discussed in academia and the policy world, there is no consensus about the definition of protracted conflicts. There are two primary approaches to understanding and classifying protracted conflicts. One focuses on the conflict issues and the other focuses on conflict dynamics.
Rationalist Approach to Protracted Conflicts The rationalist approach to understanding protracted or intractable conflicts, as they are often termed, is squarely entrenched in the international relations and comparative politics fields and focuses primarily on the issues of the conflict. Rationalist approaches generally assert that individuals, groups, and countries make decisions in their own rational self-interest based on the information available to them, considering both the costs and benefits of decisions and actions. What constitutes the content of that self-interest is often interpreted in material terms. However, some thinkers loosen this restriction, allowing self-interest to include social and symbolic interests. In the context of conflict, when individuals, groups, or countries want something another has or have something another wants, they consider whether costs of fighting for it outweigh the costs of not having or losing it. They also consider the likelihood that they will win based on the information available about their own capabilities and those of their adversaries. If a party thinks that the probability of winning is high and that the costs are acceptable, then it is likely that it will choose to fight. The adversary must consider its own probability of winning or not losing and the costs associated with conflict and either making concessions to avoid fighting or engaging in the fighting.
One interesting part of the rationalist theory of protracted conflict is that it asserts there is always a point at which both parties would do better not initiating fighting or not continuing fighting but that this point is unknown to those in the dispute. The parties each have private information about their own relative capabilities and about their own resolve to fight that their adversary does not know. They also have an incentive to misrepresent this information to their adversary to be able to bluff the other into making concessions rather than fighting if the adversary is led to believe that the party is stronger or more resolved than it is in reality. For instance, a rebel group may try to convince the central government that it has the capability and resolve to defend territory successfully after secession even if it cannot do so in order to push the central government into some sort of autonomy arrangement. However, the central government may believe the rebel signals but refuse to cede any power for fear of developing a reputation for being soft on rebels and encouraging other groups to follow suit. In such a situation, a conflict might ensue even though both would be better off with a negotiated settlement. The rebels successfully bluffed that they were more capable than they are, but this backfired because the government did not believe they would accept an agreement short of independence given this inflated capability. Because of this private information as well as the incentive to bluff, parties often do not find the mutually preferable negotiated settlement short of conflict initiation or continuation. James Fearon has powerfully articulated this argument, although it was already a prominent theory prior to his work. Parties are also concerned about their adversaries reneging on negotiated settlements if they agree not to fight or to stop fighting, putting them at a disadvantage. For instance, if the government does not believe that the rebels can credibly commit to laying down their arms as part of an agreement to end the conflict, then the conflict will continue even though both sides would like to stop fighting. One proposal to address the concern of reneging is to have a very slow and incremental approach to implementation of peace agreements in which each step in and of itself would not severely disadvantage a party if the adversary reneged and can be verified before taking the next step. Another prominent approach in this tradition to ending protracted conflict is to have a third-party enforcement-of-peace agreement implementation. Barbara Walter has outlined and tested this part of the theory in detail. Empirically, the majority of violent protracted conflicts since the end of World War II have been internal conflicts between groups within countries rather than international conflicts between countries. While much of the rationalist protracted conflict theory developed
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out of the international relations literature, the growth in the study of civil wars and other internal armed conflict has employed it in domestic settings. Starting in the early 2000s, the debate over whether greed or grievances caused armed conflict to begin and to be sustained as protracted conflict gained prominence, and the prominence of this debate is attributed to Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler.
Protracted Social Conflict The protracted social conflict approach focuses on internal conflict, particularly in the developing world, but it is in direct contrast to rationalism. It points out that so much of the post–World War II conflict research focused on understanding interstate war but that, as noted, the majority of conflict has occurred within states. This theory asserts that protracted social conflict occurs when basic needs such as security, recognition and acceptance, access to political institutions, and economic participation are not satisfied based on communal identity. It also emphasizes that the actors are internal and external to the state and that the causes and dynamics of the conflict are multiple and change over the course of the conflict, in part because the interpretations and motives of the groups change over time. The goals of the actors involved can also change during the conflict, as can the actors themselves. For instance, a group may start a conflict with the goal of secession but then continue the conflict in pursuit of material spoils. Additionally, groups themselves may splinter, giving rise to new actors, or new combatant groups may form. Additionally, protracted social conflict theory acknowledges that there is often no clear beginning or end of these conflicts but that they wax and wane over long periods of time as conditions and actors change. Protracted social conflict theory contains four categories of preconditions that can lead to intensified conflict. The first is a strained relationship between communal/identity groups and the state. While in an ideal case, the government of a country has the responsibility to ensure the welfare of all the people within its jurisdiction, many governments discriminate against segments of society or allow such discrimination if not actively involved. An extreme example would be apartheid South Africa, which enshrined a complex system of legal discrimination against the non-White population, but many countries have more subtle policies that privilege some identity groups and disadvantage others. The second precondition for protracted social conflict under the theory is deprivation of group needs. This precondition differs from the first in that it goes beyond the merely strained relationship between the government and a group to the point of denying needs, which can
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include disenfranchising a group and therefore denying a group’s need for representation or denying economic opportunities and therefore the need for access to livelihoods. This deprivation can also be manifested in banning the use of a group’s language and/or refusing to allow it to be taught in schools or preventing a group from constructing houses of worship or worshiping in those places freely. Third, low state capacity and/or desire to meet all citizens’ and groups’ needs are a precondition for protracted social conflict. The theory has the underlying assumption that these preconditions are likely to exist in multiethnic states that tend to be dominated by one majority group. If that majority group and the leaders in charge do not actively deprive other groups of their needs but do nothing to ensure they are met, then this precondition is met. With limited resources available, the state leaders may decide to distribute them among the people in their group who support them and keep them in power and not to other groups that may not support the government or would have little political impact even if they did. The last precondition is international economic, political, and military linkages in the form of clientelism and dependency. These external conditions may allow or force the state to operate in a fashion that adversely affects a particular group. One such example might be allowing a multinational corporation to exploit natural resources in a region that impacts one particular group adversely. The state may callously sacrifice that group’s welfare for personal or national gain or might not have a choice given the power and historical presence of some industries. Whether any of these preconditions leads to conflict depends on the strategies and actions of both the group and the state. If there is an event that acts as a trigger igniting latent group conflict, then violence is likely. How the government responds to group grievances, whether through repression or attempted cooption, also impacts the conflict process. Another process element that the theory incorporates is that of the view of the other by all sides in the conflict. Once violent conflict begins, long-lasting social conflict is likely to lead to increasingly negative perceptions of the other and contribute to violent behavior among belligerents. These negative perceptions of other groups also become entrenched and make conceiving of a solution among participants in the conflict extremely difficult. The theory assumes that these conditions are more likely to exist and lead to conflict in multicommunal countries. Edward Azar and John Burton are the primary founders and proponents of protracted social conflict theory. Once conflict begins, the protracted social conflict explanations for continuation and state collapse approach those articulated in rationalism, invoking the
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language of interests and private information. Wars have their own private winners as the war economy unfolds, often drawing on and strengthening criminal networks that benefit from the chaos and new demands caused by war. Additionally, because of the private information that groups have about their capabilities and resolve, even actions intended to be defensive may be misinterpreted as offensive. Arming all of the members in a community might allow them to defend themselves from attack, but it could also be interpreted as planning for attack, creating what rationalists call a security dilemma. Unlike the rationalist approaches, however, protracted social conflict theory does come explicitly from a conflict resolution tradition and thus has prescriptive elements as well for preventing and ending it. For Azar, the main way of resolving protracted social conflict is by development or through the reduction of underdevelopment, particularly inequality in the levels of development within a society. Others have noted that material solutions such as development alone will not address social elements of protracted social conflict and propose focusing on resolving identity-based conflict through a four-stage approach. The first stage focuses on breaking down antagonism among the groups and understanding its content. The second phase focuses on why the conflict exists and who is involved in a process called resonance. The third phase focuses on how the groups might resolve the conflict together through invention. Finally, the fourth phase focuses on plans for action from the process. Together these steps are known as the ARIA approach as an acronym for the steps; Jay Rothman and Marie Olson are its main proponents. Molly Inman See also Civil Wars; Counterinsurgency; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Ethnocentrism; Greed Versus Grievance; International Criminal Court; International Humanitarian Law; International Security; Ripeness Theory and Conflict Resolution
Further Readings Azar, E. E. (1990). The management of protracted social conflict: Theory and cases. Brookfield, VT: Gower. Burton, J. W. (1987). Resolving deep-rooted conflict: A handbook. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4), 563–595. Fearon, J. (1995). Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414. Rothman, J., & Olson, M. L. (2001). From interests to identities: Towards a new emphasis in interactive conflict resolution. Journal of Peace Research, 38(3), 289–305.
Walter, B. F. (2002). Committing to peace: The successful settlement of civil wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Conformity Conformity is the convergence of one or more individuals’ thoughts, feelings, or behavior toward an explicit, implied, or imagined social norm. The speculations of early political theorists have been borne out in decades of empirical work: political beliefs, allegiances, and behavior are significantly affected by conformity.
Definitions and Processes A social norm is a generally accepted way of thinking, feeling, or behaving that most people in a group or social network agree on, follow, and endorse. The social norms that people conform to can be descriptive, representing what other people think, feel, and do, or they can be injunctive, representing what thoughts, feelings, and behaviors other people approve of. “Citizens vote” is a descriptive norm if it is true that most people cast ballots in elections, whereas “Citizens vote” is an injunctive norm when it embodies the idea that good citizens should enact the rights and responsibilities of citizenship by casting ballots in elections. Conformity can occur to descriptive or injunctive norms that are explicitly stated (“Most University of California, Santa Barbara students say ‘No’ to hooking up,” “All rise for the playing of the national anthem”). Norms can also be represented by the actions of directly observed others (as when an individual adopts the speech cadence or stride rhythm of another individual he or she is speaking to or walking with or when an individual joins a protest in the presence of others who are protesting). Norms can even be imagined or implied (as when an individual thinks about his or her parents’ political preferences and casts a ballot for a conservative candidate in line with these imagined preferences or is reminded of membership in a particular group and takes political action associated with that group). Since norms can be transmitted in a number of different ways, including being psychologically recalled, deduced, or constructed, conformity can occur even when other group members are not physically present. In addition, since norms that are recalled, deduced, or assumed can be objectively incorrect, people can sometimes conform to norms that don’t actually exist. This situation—when people perceive a norm incorrectly but nevertheless follow or endorse it—is referred to as pluralistic ignorance. In fact, people often overestimate the
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support a group has for a particular thought, feeling, or behavior. As a result, conformity (to the incorrectly extremitized) norm outperforms the existing norm and leads to further extremitization of norms. Social norms campaigns use conformity to change behavior by providing objective norm information designed to correct misperceived norms.
Why Do People Conform? Conformity offers multiple adaptive benefits. First, following the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors favored by multiple others increases the likelihood of successful interaction with the environment. Such responses have been used and tested by many individuals and thus carry the presumption of being efficient and valid (if everyone goes back for seconds on the peach pie but not the apple pie, it’s reasonable to assume that the peach pie is objectively better than the apple). The “more heads are better than one” homily is empirically correct across a wide variety of domains. Simulations have shown that agents conforming to the behavior of others are more likely to solve adaptive problems than are agents who repeatedly try individual idiosyncratic solutions. This is at least partially because information filtered through many others increasingly represents behaviors that are more successful and reliable than any strategy based on limited personal experience. Such findings explain why people are even more likely to conform to others’ responses when the stakes are high—hence the number of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants who use the “Poll the audience” option later in the show. Second, conformity fulfills connectedness needs, binding individuals to groups and group members to one another. Conformity (thinking, feeling, saying, or doing the same thing as others) increases intragroup attachment, cooperation, and cohesion, sometimes to the point that an individual cannot cognitively distinguish his or her own actions in the group from those of other group members. Conformity increases individual self-esteem and well-being, and individuals who endorse norms are accorded more respect and authority in a group. Marginal members of a group—those whose group belonging has been called into question or who are threatened with ostracism—are more likely to conform when given the opportunity. Conformity to norms is associated with feelings of pride and satisfaction about the group and about membership in the group, and failure to conform—deviance—with shame and embarrassment. Deviance results first in attention from the group focused on rehabilitating the rogue group member, followed by isolation, derogation, and potentially expulsion.
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Third, conformity of thought and action increases coordination of interaction and thus solves recurring coordination problems (evaluating options using the same criteria; driving on one side of the street), improving group outcomes as well as individual ones. Such powerful immediate benefits of widespread conformity sometimes make changing group outputs and behavior difficult, even when a less widely shared evaluation and behavior is available. Thus, although popular opinion often casts conformity in a negative light, objectively, conformity confers many adaptive benefits—so much so that some have argued that conformity is in fact the crucial prerequisite for the evolution of culture.
Automatic Conformity It is certainly true that some forms of conformity occur spontaneously and without conscious awareness, consistent with the idea that humans are equipped with evolved mechanisms that facilitate conformity. For example, people automatically mimic others’ facial, vocal, and emotional expressions, a process that often culminates in identical internal states in the observer as in the actor. Such conformity occurs even when the expressions are presented subliminally, providing strong evidence for the automatic nature of the process. Other internal states are also automatically inferred and conformed to: seeing someone else being ostracized leads observers to feel loneliness, and observing others’ accomplishments causes observers to experience satisfaction, for example. People also automatically mimic others’ behaviors, from eyeblinks and button presses to face touching, foot jiggling, and even goal striving. Seeing another perform a behavior activates the neural activity associated with that behavior in the observer, setting the stage for conformity and making later performance of the same behaviors more likely, faster, and more skillful. This neural preparation is substantial enough that later observers may not accurately recall whether they had personally performed the behavior. Thus, the benefits of conformity in coordinating group and interpersonal actions may be explained by the automatic nature of mimicry. The fact that this kind of conformity occurs without conscious awareness and sometimes even when people are warned against its possibility underscores its automatic nature. A human predisposition to conformity is also suggested by the fact that people conform to social norms that they imagine or infer. Even casual interaction with others whose political opinion can be inferred by their demographic characteristics causes convergence toward those imagined views. For example, when students whose
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parents hold opposing political viewpoints are asked first to think about a past interaction with either their mother or father and then in an apparently unrelated task to report their own political ideology, the students’ private political proclivities shift toward the attitudes of the momentarily salient parent, even when the recalled interactions have nothing to do with politics. People are also highly attuned to norm-relevant information. First, they pay more attention to and recall norm-relevant information than other kinds of information. Second, people spontaneously categorize others as violators versus endorsers of norms, much as we spontaneously categorize others based on sex and age. These findings converge to suggest that humans come equipped with evolved mechanisms that facilitate conformity.
Conformity Is In-Group Delineated Unless it is made obviously untrue, people assume that the norms they conform to are universal and generalized— that they represent “the way the world is,” “a wellknown fact,” and “what everyone thinks.” In reality, however, norms are group specific. Different groups form and maintain different norms, and so conformity produces behavior that converges on the behaviors sanctioned by a particular group. In addition, the group to whose norms an individual conforms can change quite fluidly. When a young single Latina thinks about herself as a Latina, norms associated with that group are salient and will guide behavior: Her voting behavior will reflect concern with immigration, official language laws, quality of schools, and so forth. If she thinks about herself as a woman, conformity to norms she perceives as endorsed by that group will increase: issues to do with insurance covering contraceptive costs, glass-ceiling barriers, and marriage equality might be more focal, and so forth. Many factors—the presence of fellow group members, hearing a particular accent, competition with out-groups, being treated as a group member, and so forth—can increase the likelihood that any individual thinks about him- or herself as part of a particular group at any time. Conformity occurs exclusively to in-groups. People view others with whom they share particular features as appropriate guides for thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The particular shared characteristics vary depending on the behavior that is called for. When physical judgments or statements of fact are required, many other people can be appropriate guides, because many people have the knowledge and skills to verify the solutions to such tasks. The appropriate guides for a valueladen or opinion-based judgment are those who share similar values, attitudes, and relationships. Thus, conformity occurs most often to others “just like us.”
For example, it is the expressions, emotions, and behaviors of in-group rather than out-group others that are automatically mimicked and conformed to. Readers and viewers are much more likely to adopt the personality characteristics of in-group rather than out-group protagonists in movies and books (a process with significant consequences for social behavior if in-group role models are lacking or cast in negative or deviant roles in these media). Conformity to the in-group (and deviance from the out-group) is a convenient heuristic (“If the Tea Party thinks this, it must be right!” or “If Democrats support this, I must oppose it!”). However, when cognitive and motivational resources are available, norm-relevant information from the in-group receives considerable attention. Communications about what in-groups think, feel, and do are processed more carefully than similar communications from an outgroup. For example, research has shown that both liberal and conservative students favor a social policy if they learn that the political party they identify with (Democrats and Republicans, respectively) expresses support for it but oppose the exact same policy if a political out-group supports it. Such conformity is not necessarily a knee-jerk reaction, however. When questioned more closely, students indicated that in-group endorsement had resulted in some deep and thoroughgoing thinking about how they saw the issue. All of these effects occur more strongly for individuals psychologically invested in or identified with the group.
Theories of Conformity Private Versus Public Conformity A key distinction is between private conformity and public conformity. Private conformity occurs when people willingly and privately accept group norms as their own beliefs, feelings, or behaviors and continue to follow those norms whenever they think about themselves as a group member, even if the group is not physically present. Private conformity is also sometimes referred to as internalization, because the responses of others have become the individual’s own. Because private conformity results in changes that are long lasting, resistant to later change, and sustained without external monitoring, most psychological and political scientists are primarily concerned with the antecedents and consequences of private conformity. Public conformity, in contrast, occurs when people respond to real or imagined pressure and adopt in public thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that they do not privately accept. Public conformity is sometimes referred to as compliance, a superficial and short-lived convergence with others’ responses. However, even public
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conformity can trigger changes that have long-term and thoroughgoing behavioral consequences. Compliance can often be induced in circumstances that eventually lead individuals to attribute the behavior to themselves rather than to the external pressure to publicly comply with norms that originally prompted the behavior. For example, a committee member might vote for the mayoral candidate obviously favored by the rest of the committee. After the vote has been cast, the operation of many psychological processes, such as cognitive dissonance, consistency striving, need for control, and groupthink, to name a few, make it likely that the individual will eventually come to see the vote as self-chosen rather than as a result of public conformity. In addition, the connectedness benefits of conformity to the group (and the disincentives of deviance) come into operation regardless of whether conformity was internally or externally produced.
Informational Versus Normative Influence A classic distinction suggested that conformity occurs via informational or normative influence. Informational influence occurs when people privately conform because they believe that the evidence or arguments that a group can offer reflect reality. Normative influence, in contrast, results in superficial public conformity unaccompanied by information exchange and motivated by individuals’ desire for approval from and inclusion in the group. Although the distinction between informational and normative influence has triggered extensive research, it appears increasingly indefensible. First, any delineation between the exchange of information about what a group prefers and the exchange of information about why the group prefers it is probably untenable. When people exchange information, the recipients of that information assume that the transmitters agree with the information they pass on (thus norms are transmitted with evidence). When people share only that they support an opinion, the recipients of this normative information generate the reasons the transmitters hold that view (thus information is transmitted with norms). Thus norms and arguments are spread simultaneously in social networks and groups and even in experimental sessions designed to separate them. Second, it has become clear that conformity that occurs because of connectedness concerns can be as deep rooted and long lasting—that is, it is private conformity—as any change typically associated with informational influence.
Referent Identity or Social Identity Influence The most widely supported alternative is the referent informational or social identity theory of conformity.
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This approach is an amalgam of social identity theory, which argues that group memberships are essential aspects of self-identity, and self-categorization theory, which specifies the processes by which one becomes, and the consequences of becoming, a group member. When social group membership is psychologically salient, individuals redefine themselves primarily as interchangeable members of a group rather than as distinct individuals. Under these conditions, individuals base their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on the norms of fellow in-group members, especially “prototypical” members of the group who exemplify the essence of the group vis-à-vis relevant out-groups. When individuals uphold the norms of their group, they feel certainty, since the in-group position is valued. When group members notice a difference between themselves and a fellow in-group member, they experience uncertainty, which is typically resolved by becoming more similar to the prototypical group member. From this perspective, the classic distinction between informational and normative conformity makes no sense. Information is valid only if it is normative of the group, and normative influence reflects internalized acceptance of group membership; normative influence conceived of as compliance occurs only when influence is attempted by non–group members or toward anormative positions. To the extent that a social identity or group membership is more central and important to an individual, these processes occur more strongly.
Conformity Effects in Political Behavior Media and Mass Communication Effects, Framing, and Agenda Setting Public opinion (basically, norms) matters in politics, especially in democracies. Public opinion can alter individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, affect the efficacy of political campaigns, determine the fate of politicians, and change the outcome of an election. Thus, getting the public to conform to a certain political position, opinion, or course of action has significant political consequences. The idea that mass communications could develop, organize, and influence public opinion on political issues first emerged in the 1940s and has gained significant empirical support from the 1960s onward. Two well-established phenomena are framing effects and agenda setting. Framing effects occur when the media structure communications so as to highlight particular points of view on an issue around which consensus (and thus norms) might form. Frames act as a general structure to both organize the information directed at the public and serve as a lens to color how the public views certain
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issues that may have multiple perspectives, such as abortion. Framing is especially important given the complexity that surrounds most political issues. Agenda setting occurs when certain issues become prioritized in the news media, leading people to believe that “everyone” cares more about these issues than others and that these issues therefore matter more. Agenda setting might also draw attention to one rather than another evaluative dimension, such as the morality of a potential candidate upon the media uncovering an illicit affair. Consequently, the political focus shifts to these issues, norms develop, and conformity is triggered. Perhaps consistent with the referent identity approach, mass media conformity efforts seem less effective with committed voters than with swing voters and to involve both conscious, effortful information processing and unconscious, automatic processing.
Bandwagon Effect In forming political opinions, individuals conform to those who have publicly displayed their own opinions and intentions. The bandwagon effect occurs when people adopt the position that is seen as attracting greater support or as attracting rapidly growing support. In other words, they jump on the bandwagon. This is seen when voting increases for candidates who appear successful, popular, and more likely to win, even if voters originally disfavored the candidate and even in the face of information disconfirming public opinion. Political issues can also benefit from bandwagon effects, as a given “hot button” issue becomes much more important to voters in an election than it was previously or would be again in the future. For instance, as marriage equality has become a prime political issue in the 2000s, more and more voters proclaim concern with this issue, and previously “crucial” issues, such as climate change or defense spending, have taken a backseat.
Political Polarization In randomly assembled rather than real groups, there is typically a range of varying stances on any given issue. When the group interacts, people exchange viewpoints and information that expose a group norm. Real groups (often based on homophily) typically favor one position or one course of action over another. For both randomly assembled and real groups, conformity processes can produce a polarized, extreme position on the issue. For example, in jury discussions, in both experimental and courtroom settings, this process of group polarization can lead to exaggerated judgments of both guilt and innocence. Polarization occurs as a
result of group members moving toward the “prototypical” group member and distancing themselves from out-groups or from deviants. Polarization also results from processing the arguments of the majority in the group, which are often more numerous and more confidently and thoroughly discussed than nonnormative arguments. Polarization in politics can lead to distinctly divided and cohesive parties despite, perhaps, rather similar ideological stances between parties. This polarization, in turn, may lead to greater conformity to the prototypical group member. Although polarization affects political groups, there is currently little evidence to suggest that it dramatically affects policy outcomes toward liberal or conservative agendas.
Network Effects Social networks provide a structure through which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors flow and circulate until they converge on similar perspectives, reflecting the emergence of a norm. Networks can also reinforce individual and group identities via shared norms, especially as the nodes within a network become denser and more closely connected. Network analysis in political science offers an effective and fine-grained method through which to track the emergence and reemergence of norms as well as the kinds of connections between individuals and between networks that facilitate or inhibit conformity. For instance, the extent to which an individual’s political beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are influenced depends on the frequency and distribution of these activities in the network and on the individual’s structural (multiple ties among people with whom an individual has ties) and relational (multiple different ties to others) embeddedness. Network analysis has provided an important face-to-face interaction complement to social psychological theories of conformity understanding of the development and transmission of norms. The integration of these two approaches appears to be an avenue of great potential for the understanding of conformity. Diane M. Mackie and Janet V. T. Pauketat See also Framing Effects; Groupthink; Mass Communication; Mass Political Behavior; Party Identification; Political Socialization; Social Identity Theory; Social Networking
Further Readings Campbell, D. E. (2013). Social networks and political participation. Annual Review of Political Science, 16, 33–48. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-033011-201728
Conservatism Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.142015 Coleman, S. (2007). Popular delusions: How social conformity molds society and politics. Amherst, NY: Cambria. Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629–636. Flanigan, W. H., Zingale, N., Theiss-Morse, E. A., & Wagner, M. W. (2014). Political behavior of the American electorate. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Heerdink, M. W., van Kleef, G. A., Homan, A. C., & Fischer, A. H. (2013). On the social influence of emotions in groups: Interpersonal effects of anger and happiness on conformity versus deviance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 262–284. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033362 Heyes, C. (2011). Automatic imitation. Psychological Bulletin, 137(3), 463. doi:10.1037/a0022288 Kiesler, C. A., & Kiesler, S. B. (1969). Conformity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Lee, F. E. (2015). How party polarization affects governance. Annual Review of Political Science, 18, 261–282. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-072012-113747 Pool, G. J., Wood, W., & Leck, K. (1998). The self-esteem motive in social influence: Agreement with valued majorities and disagreement with derogated minorities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(4), 967. doi:10.1037/0022-3514 .75.4.967 Simon, H. (1990). Reason in human affairs. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2016). Representation and incorporation of close others’ responses: The RICOR model of social influence. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(4), 311–331. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations. New York, NY: Doubleday. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Turner, J. C. (1991). Social influence. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Conservatism Conservatism is a dominant political philosophy and ideology that is predicated upon the notion that change should not come from premeditated design. Rather, traditional values and customs should be preserved. This political ideology has played a pivotal role in the development of political systems around the world. In
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particular, the American system has been strongly influenced by conservatism’s strong alignment with the tenets of the U.S. Constitution and the protection of private property. Traditionally, conservatism has sought to preserve the existing structures of society in fear that a vast rearrangement of societal institutions would produce more negative outcomes than positive outcomes. The modern usage of the term conservatism is often synonymous with right-wing political views that stand opposed to the left-wing views along the political spectrum that are associated with liberalism. A more philosophical perspective of conservatism depicts it as doubtful of the utility of abstract reasoning in politics; however, it has not been given the same type of philosophical focus that has been present in liberalism. Some scholars argue that its resistance to abstract and theoretical reasoning makes it unqualified to be an ideology. The question then becomes whether this way of thinking has developed in a reactionary manner to major events throughout history or whether it is a political way of thinking that has existed for centuries. A specific focus on the history of American politics highlights that conservatives were disturbed by the Depression-era New Deal and the Fair Deal, which promoted the need for social welfare. Today, conservatives continue to fight against expanded powers of the federal government, increased government assistance for the needy, high tax rates, and a host of other issues that plague the concerns of the modern conservative agenda. Conservatism operates under a fear that if a centralized federal government gains an increasing amount of power, it will result in a loss of independence by the states and subsequently the citizens of those states. In order to develop a better understanding of conservatism, this entry continues with a description of its origins. These origins can be traced back centuries, with a strong connection to the opposing schools of thought surrounding the French Revolution (1789–1799). The work of influential writers such as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville are closely connected to the origination of conservative thought, as they sought a balance of individual rights and the social order that can be provided by government. Next, the common beliefs of conservatism are discussed, with a specific focus upon rights to private property, rule of law, and constitutional government; this is followed by an outline of an array of noted types of conservatism, including Burkean conservatism, social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, neoconservatism, and progressive conservatism. The entry concludes with a discussion of the differences between conservatism and liberalism, with a specific focus on how these schools of thought differ on modern American political issues.
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Origins of Conservatism The terms conservative and liberal were coined in the early 19th century principally to represent the polarized opinions surrounding the French Revolution. A journal in 1818 that was led by François Rene de Chateaubriand, the uncle of Alexis de Tocqueville, endorsed the monarchy and the church against participants of the revolution and was named Le Conservateur. This journal supported religion, the monarchy, and liberty. French conservatives were proponents of the old alliance of the throne and church against the uprising forces in the Revolution. These opposing forces often referred to conservatives as reactionaries that wanted to preserve what the Revolution aimed to destroy. Conservatives claimed that they did not want a return to feudalism; rather, they wanted the order and liberty that the monarchy provided. The term conservative was used in England to label individuals who aimed to preserve the monarchy and aristocracy. The term represented individuals opposed to the Reform Bill of 1832. Scholars during this time began to identify conservatism as an ideology because it grouped simplified ideas together that were rooted in elaborate political philosophies. Ideologies are meant to inspire political loyalty and bring rationalization to political action. The conservative ideology was opposed to government-forced equality in terms of resources, secularism, and atheism. English conservatives were most concerned with liberals’ criticism of monarchy and aristocracy, but they also were not fond of bureaucratic tyranny. British-Irish statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was a key figure in the origination and spread of modern conservatism. Burke did not create conservatism, but he was an important spokesperson for the ideology, as he advocated for a balance of individual rights and social order. Burke famously criticized the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by predicting many consequences that would follow the revolution as a result of the disorder it caused in Europe. Conversely, Burke, as a member of the British Parliament, sympathized with the American Revolution. Burke’s commitment to liberty led him to supporting religious liberties for Catholics in Ireland, an impeachment campaign aimed at Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, for mistreating the native population, and conciliation with the American colonies. Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution helped him become a leader of the conservative section of the Whig Party. French lawyer and aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville followed the work of Burke decades later when he visited the United States of America in the 1830s and later
wrote Democracy in America. This book detailed the rise of democracy in America and the entities that threaten it, such as the tyranny of the majority, materialism, and desire for equality. He wrote that people would never find an equality that satisfied them. Both Burke and Tocqueville have been characterized as liberal conservatives as a result of their shared support of colonialism, being wary of government-forced equality, fear of socialism, and the subsequent need to rely on property holders to resist it, thus leading them away from radical reforms that could have alleviated pressures on the poor. They also shared a distrust of uprisings led by individuals who simply wrote letters and articles based on abstract knowledge, as compared with pragmatic politicians forced to face the realities of laws and institutions. Other shared beliefs that shaped their form of conservatism include the notion that religious beliefs are needed for the foundations of every good civil society and a need for pluralism to protect liberties.
Common Conservative Beliefs A fundamental conservative belief revolves around private property and the notion that an individual should have the right to possess it. Conservatives strongly value independent liberty that is free from government oppression, and they oppose a government that allocates equal amounts of private property to its citizens. Rather, they support the notion that individuals who are successful should be able to purchase more private property than those who are less successful. A natural inequality will be produced, but conservatives champion this inequality as a difference between individual success and failure, which is a natural by-product of a free society. Conservatives argue that in a free society, all individuals have the opportunity to succeed or fail, but this success or failure should not be predetermined by the government. Conservatism does not necessarily oppose those who seek to increase equality; however, it fears that the efforts taken to increase equality will result in increased government intervention, which will in turn take rights away from its citizens. When a free society allows individuals to both succeed and fail without intervention in search of greater equality, a division of classes will inevitably arise. While conservatism does not specifically advocate for this hierarchy in society, it does desire that successful individuals be rewarded for this success rather than that their success be redistributed to all individuals. Conservatives would argue that the rise of individuals in the social class hierarchy is just a natural by-product of their success, and a free society gives all individuals the same chance to rise in the society without government restrictions. A counterargument to this notion would be that there are never equal
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opportunities for success for all individuals, as some citizens are born into privilege and have an increased chance of success compared with those who are not born into privilege. Conservatives would argue that a free society allows the individual born into the privilege and the individual not born into the privilege the same opportunities to succeed because success is a result of hard work rather than a result of inheriting a high-ranking social class as it occurs in traditional aristocracy. Another popular conservative belief is centered upon the rule of law and how it should organize individuals into a civilized society. Conservatism views these laws not as restrictions of freedom but as guidelines for the proper way for citizens to conduct themselves in a civil manner. These laws do not tell citizens what they have to do, but they provide a set of limitations for the actions that citizens choose to engage in. For example, the rule of law does not force an individual to drink alcohol. However, if someone chooses to consume alcohol, there are laws in place to guide the consumption of alcohol to ensure the safety of themselves and others. One of these laws attempts to prevent individuals under the influence of alcohol from operating a vehicle. This law does not force someone to drink alcohol or prevent them from consuming it. Rather, it provides guidelines to ensure that if an individual freely chooses to consume alcohol, he or she does so in a responsible manner (where “responsible” is defined through a value judgment). Conservatives advocate for a constitutional government with the primary goal of maintaining the rule of law in order to preserve the property rights of individuals, providing and maintaining a judicial system, providing a national defense in order to ensure the safety of the country, and maintaining law enforcement in order to assure that the rule of law is followed. A fine line for law enforcement exists for conservatives, as these officials seek to preserve the rule of law and not impose beliefs and values held by the government upon individuals. This demands a delicate balance of government to ensure that it takes the necessary steps to maintain order and the rule of law but does not force conformity among citizens and thus violate the foundations of a free society. Conservatives fear a government that takes overzealous steps to try to perfect some type of idealized social order because it could suppress individual freedoms and minimize the potential for the positive externalities that can arise from individuals free to be inventive.
Types of Conservatism Burkean Conservatism Burke served as a leading figure in conservatism, similar to the role of Karl Marx in fostering socialism.
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Burke shared the Whig Party’s belief in limited government, and he strongly valued individual liberties and the right to own private property. Christianity inspired Burke’s political writings, and he thought that the protection of liberty should be the main priority for rulers as they use their power. The moral natural law established by Christianity guided Burke’s political values, and he thought that moral principles should guide the establishment of legal constitutions that define governmental power and, more importantly, the limitations of this power, present in organized societies. The individuals in power are entrusted with their authority, and these rulers’ actions are held accountable to God under natural law and citizens of the society under constitutional law.
Social Conservatism Social conservatism is a branch of conservatism concerned with how moral issues, cultural traditions, and religious institutions should be preserved as society progresses. Specifically, social conservatives aim to preserve traditional norms and beliefs that are threatened by social progressivism. Social conservatism argues that history and traditions are vital to the development of society, and accomplishments within a society depend on maintaining the foundation established by these traditions. Modern social conservatism has largely been built upon a foundation of religious beliefs. Social conservatism in the United States has now been largely shaped by Christianity, and individuals within this niche place a great deal of focus upon political issues such as abortion, homosexual marriage, and access to birth control. This group can also be identified as religious conservatives that are concerned with the values of their religion being preserved by government policies. In the modern United States political system, social and religious conservatives have become difficult to distinguish. Some individuals specify a distinction between cultural and social conservatism, with cultural conservatism focused upon preserving the shared culture of a country and social conservatism primarily focused upon preserving traditional values.
Fiscal Conservatism Fiscal conservatism is an aspect of the conservative ideology that is primarily concerned with economic matters rather than social issues. Fiscal conservatives often share similar values with social libertarians that argue for government to be limited in both fiscal and social aspects. This belief of limited government in economic matters is embodied by reduced government spending, lower taxes for citizens, limited regulation,
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free trade, and strong property rights for individuals. Fiscal conservatism is largely embodied by the work of economic thinkers ranging from the likes of Adam Smith to the contemporary Milton Friedman.
Neoconservatism Neoconservatism is a modern branch of conservatism born in the United States that arose as a result of contention against communism and the counterculture movement in the United States in the 1960s. American neoconservatives largely promote the extension of American influence in international affairs. For example, neoconservatism became widely known when it gained influence at the national level during the George W. Bush presidential administration (2000–2008) and helped promote the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the American military. Irving Kristol is credited with influencing a number of neoconservative ideals beginning with his work with the magazine Encounter, which he cofounded in the 1950s, and he later used the term neoconservative in an article he wrote in 1979 titled “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative.’” Neoconservatism continues to play a role in national-level policies, especially those dealing with foreign policy.
Progressive Conservatism Progressive conservatism in the United States can be traced back to the Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft administrations, as they advocated for a coupling of progressive and conservative values. This form of conservatism has stronger roots in Europe, specifically the United Kingdom and Germany, where it was concerned with how to handle poverty. Progressive conservatisms are less stringent about the restriction of government, as they recognize its ability to properly implement regulations, as well as its ability to redistribute wealth in a limited fashion.
Conservatism Versus Liberalism The conservative ideology may be best understood when compared against its political opposite, liberalism. A specific look at the differences between conservatives and liberals on modern American political topics can help give insight into how the modern conservative ideology has been shaped. Conservatives generally tend to favor a reduced federal government in favor of greater states’ rights and reduced involvement of the federal government in citizens’ lives. Modern conservatives have embraced Christian religious values and strongly support a number of social agendas that align with these religious values. Conservatives oppose many laws
that give women the opportunity to have an abortion, identifying themselves as “prolife,” yet they tend to support capital punishment. Conservatives are also opposed to homosexual marriage rights, but specifically, they argue that issues such as homosexual marriage, abortion, and capital punishment should be left for each state to decide. Conservatives also tend to oppose welfare and other similar government funding, as well as universal health care. On the other hand, conservatives tend to support increasing the federal budget for the military. Modern liberals oppose conservative stances on these issues, as they favor increased abortion rights, homosexual marriage rights, increased government assistance for the needy, universal health care, environmental restrictions on businesses, and a progressive income tax. Steven T. Keener and William V. Pelfrey Jr. See also Bureaucratic Politics; Democracy; Economics and Political Behavior; Liberalism; Mass Political Behavior; Religion-Based Voting Blocs; Values and Politics
Further Readings Allitt, P. (2009). The conservatives, ideas and personalities throughout American history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Broad, C. D. (1913). Lord Hugh Cecil’s “conservatism.” International Journal of Ethics, 23(4), 396–418. Dunleavy, P., Kelly, P. J., & Moran, M. (2000). British political science: Fifty years of political studies. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Graham, G. (1986). Politics in its place. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kirk, R. (2008). The conservative mind: From Burke to Eliot. New York, NY: BN Publishing. Lakoff, G. (2002). How liberals and conservatives think (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lurie, J. (2012). William Howard Taft: The travails of a progressive conservative. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Murrell, P. (1992). Conservative political philosophy and the strategy of economic transition (IRIS Reprint No. 13). College Park: University of Maryland: Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector. Nisbet, R. (1986). Conservatism. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press. Sanford, L. (1998). Tocqueville, Burke, and the origins of liberal conservatism. Review of Politics, 60(3), 435–464. Schneider, G. (2003). Conservatism in America since 1930. New York, NY: New York University Press. Shannon, J. B. (1962). Conservatism. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 344(1), 13–24.
Conspiracies Skorupski, J. (2015). The conservative critique of liberalism. In Steven Wall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to liberalism (pp. 401–422). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Conspiracies Conspiracies, or conspiracy theories, are beliefs shared by people that multiple actors—often powerful individuals within organizations—are working together to accomplish hidden, malevolent, or unlawful goals affecting others. Such beliefs are often resistant to falsifying evidence and tend to be driven by an overarching view that governments, in particular, are purposefully deceiving the general public. This entry defines conspiracies, identifies individual differences and situational factors that influence conspiracy belief, and discusses the relationship between conspiracy belief and political behavior.
Conspiracy Theories Opinion polls find that the majority of the U.S. public endorses beliefs in some sort of conspiracy theory. Among the most popular contemporary conspiracy theories are beliefs that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11, 2001 (9/11), terrorist attacks, that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the work of multiple assailants rather than the lone work of Lee Harvey Oswald, and that the U.S. president and other world leaders are secretly controlled by a clandestine group of powerful people known as the New World Order, or Illuminati. It is important to note that some major world events are, in fact, the result of conspiracies. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were an attack on symbols of American capitalism and democracy coordinated by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was also the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by John Wilkes Booth and three companions who planned to kill the president, vice president, and secretary of state in an attempt to revive the Confederacy following defeat in the American Civil War. In the modern lexicon, alleged conspiracies are often labeled with the suffix “gate” in reference to the Watergate scandal, a conspiracy perpetrated during the Nixon presidency in which presidential aides broke into the DC headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex to record conversations for political advantage.
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The Conspiracist Identity Many researchers have examined the link between different personality traits and endorsement of conspiracy theories. Although the so-called Big 5 personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) do not consistently relate to conspiracy beliefs, other traits do. Low levels of interpersonal trust and feelings of anomie and powerlessness consistently predict increased belief in conspiracies. Individuals who generally endorse conspiracy theories also tend to distrust government and authority figures, are often unaccepting of “mainstream” or commonly endorsed reasons given for major events, and often hold anomalous beliefs that defy conventional understanding of reality (e.g., paranormal beliefs). One robust finding is that those who believe one conspiracy theory are likely to believe multiple theories, even when the theories are contradictory. Such findings led researchers to coin the term conspiracist ideation—a general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracist ideation is argued to be monological, in that virtually any conspiracy, regardless of the degree (or lack) of relation, can be used to support belief in other, seemingly unrelated conspiracies. For example, researchers found that the more people believed Osama bin Laden was already dead when Navy SEAL forces invaded his compound, the more likely they were to also believe that Bin Laden is still alive—although these beliefs are contradictory, they both support conspiracist ideation that the government is lying to the general public and cannot be trusted.
Psychological Processes and Situational Effects Belief in conspiracies may fulfill psychological functions by providing answers to complex questions and providing meaning to the world, especially in light of tragic events and societal problems. Belief in nefarious intent on the part of world leaders (whether true or not) can provide a sense of understanding and predictability to an otherwise chaotic world. Multiple lines of research support this idea. For example, conspiracy beliefs may provide a sense of control and understanding for those who chronically feel powerless. Likewise, temporary feelings of uncertainty increase belief in conspiracies, and events that have profound consequences are more likely to be perceived as the result of conspiratorial agendas. Personal relevance is also a factor in specific conspiracy beliefs. For example, people who were in New York on 9/11 are more likely to believe conspiracy theories about 9/11 than those who were elsewhere.
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Likewise, African Americans, for whom HIV and AIDS rates are particularly high, are more likely to believe that the government created AIDS to kill off Black Americans—this belief is particularly concerning, as those who believe in such conspiracies are less likely to be tested or seek treatment for HIV.
Conspiracies and Politics Although conspiracist ideation is often linked with right-wing ideology, recent evidence suggests that both liberals and conservatives are likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs and that conspiracy belief is positively correlated with political extremism. Researchers propose that the conspiracist mentality is a generalized political attitude—similar to political ideologies such as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)—characterized by a monological belief system perceiving powerful individuals as responsible for negative political, economic, and s ocietal events. Although RWA and SDO legitimize authority and social structure and predict prejudice toward low-status groups (e.g., ethnic minorities and disabled people), conspiracist ideation is marked by distrust toward high-status others and prejudice toward groups perceived to wield high power and influence (e.g., Jewish people, who are often linked to alleged conspiracies about world domination and societal control).
Conclusion The availability of information provided by the Internet, television, and other media has likely made conspiracy theories more widely disseminated than ever and may have negative repercussions. For example, exposure to conspiracy theories increases feelings of powerlessness and distrust in government and can reduce willingness to engage in politics, vote, or participate in proenvironmental behaviors. Although questioning authority is important, healthy skepticism of conspiracies is advised, as analytical reasoning produces better political judgment and decreases belief in unsupported conspiracy theories. Corey L. Cook See also Closure, Need for; Confirmation Bias; Corruption; Death of Leaders; Environmental Skepticism; Locus of Control; Propaganda
Further Readings Douglas, K., Sutton, R. M., Jolley, D., & Wood, M. J. (2015). The social, political, environmental and health-related
consequences of conspiracy theories: Problems and potential solutions. In M. Bilewicz, A. Cichocka, & W. Soral (Eds.), The psychology of conspiracy (pp. 183–192). London, England: Taylor and Francis. Wood, M. J., Douglas, K. M., & Sutton, R. M. (2014). Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 767–773. doi:10.1177/1948550611434786
Contact Theory The contact that members of different groups (e.g., ethnic, religious, political) have in a society is critical for understanding political behavior pertaining to intergroup relations. Intergroup contact theory explains how close, positive contact experiences between members of different groups have the potential to foster political behavior that promotes harmony. According to the theory, contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and fosters trust and cooperation in diverse societies. These positive effects are in contrast to the potentially negative effects of living or working near out-groups without engaging in close contact, such as in cities segregated across ethnic lines. Especially for members of groups that are of different relative status (e.g., White Americans interacting with Black Americans, citizens of a nation interacting with immigrants and refugees in that nation), these interactions not only increase comfort and liking toward those individuals but also toward the groups they belong to. However, the positive effects that contact has on enhancing harmony are sometimes coupled with a negative effect, reducing motivation for social change among members of lowerstatus groups. This entry outlines the positive effects that contact can have on enhancing harmony and cooperation while also reviewing recent research on the potential for contact to slow social change.
Early Research on Intergroup Contact Through the first half of the 20th century, blatant prejudice against Black Americans was normative among White Americans. Along with deep-seated structural inequalities that persist to the present day, prejudice and discrimination created discord and distrust that often led to violent conflict in the forms of lynching and rioting. Early contact research thus focused on reducing this blatant prejudice and hostility that White Americans held against Black Americans, which was made apparent across several domains of public life. Contact theory, as noted by social psychologist Gordon W. Allport, originally specified four conditions
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for contact to reduce prejudice: equal status, shared goals, cooperation between groups, and support from an authority. These conditions can be hard to meet when groups have unequal power in society. Fortunately, meta-analyses of contact studies show that these conditions are not necessary for contact to effectively reduce prejudice. But these conditions do facilitate contact’s positive effects, as illustrated by early tests of the theory. For example, desegregation of the U.S. public service sector, such as with the military, increased close contact between Black and White public servants. Evidence suggests that when desegregation led to close contact experiences, it effectively reduced prejudice in these professional settings. A study of seamen after desegregation of the U.S. merchant marine found that the more trips White seamen took as part of a desegregated unit, the less prejudice they expressed. White police officers in Philadelphia who had experience working with Black police officers were more cooperative taking orders from Black officers and more willing to work with Black officers. These studies highlight how close, positive intergroup contact experiences can foster cooperative behaviors critical for the successful implementation of public policy.
Close, Positive Contact Versus Proximity to Out-Groups Living, working, or studying in close proximity to outgroups may present the opportunity for contact, but it does not necessarily lead to close or positive contact experiences. When proximity, or opportunity for contact, does not lead to the kinds of close, positive intergroup contact experiences that reduce prejudice, it may instead lead to feelings of threat, distrust, and negative intergroup attitudes. Proximity to members of different out-groups, if not coupled with close positive contact experiences like cross-group friendship, can potentially reduce trust, consistent with conflict theories. It is also important to understand when proximity leads to negative contact experiences, because negative contact may exacerbate prejudice more than positive contact can reduce prejudice. Research on desegregation in school settings shows that the more negative preexisting relations are between the groups, the more likely that proximity will lead to negative rather than positive contact experiences. Hostility between Black and White students at the University of Alabama, where strong norms fostered negative interracial relations, increased following desegregation of the university in 1963. How people perceive their environment influences how they approach other groups and the contact
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experience. For example, in contrast to the proposition that more out-group members in one’s neighborhood or city enhance perceptions of threat directly, representative samples of native Germans’ attitudes toward foreigners shows that higher numbers of foreigners enhance ethnic Germans’ perceptions of threat only indirectly, by first increasing their perception of a high proportion of foreigners. Perceiving foreigners as threatening in turn increases prejudice toward them; thus, perceiving that there are large proportions of “the other” more reliably predicts threat than the actual proportion of foreigners. At the same time, people who live in areas with larger proportions of foreigners have more friends who are foreigners; these cross-group friendships reduce perceived threat and prejudice toward foreigners. Both the context and how people subjectively perceive that context influence whether people take advantage of the opportunity for close, positive contact experiences. As mentioned, even though Allport’s optimal conditions for contact are not always necessary for contact to effectively reduce prejudice, when they are not present, or when the situation sets the stage for particularly negative relations between groups, positive contact experiences may be less likely. For example, positive norms for contact can encourage close, positive contact experiences, whereas norms of distrust and hostility could foster negative contact experiences. However, research has yet to show a clear set of moderators integrating both contextual and perceptual factors to determine when opportunity for contact leads to the close, positive contact experiences that reduce prejudice.
Contact Can Reduce Intergroup Violence and Promote Equity Although preexisting conflicts and tensions between groups can foster negative contact experiences, positive intergroup contact also has the potential to curb conflict and promote cooperative political behaviors between groups during periods of open hostility. For example, White and Black residents of Detroit who had greater numbers of cross-group friends resisted the violence that members of both groups were using against each other in the riots of 1943. Non-Jewish residents of Nazi-occupied areas who had Jewish friends and friends from other ethnic groups outside their own (e.g., crossgroup friends) were significantly more likely than others to hide Jewish residents trying to escape the Nazis. Although these studies of extreme situations are correlational, taken together with experimental and longitudinal studies demonstrating causal effects of intergroup contact, they strongly suggest that close, positive
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intergroup contact experiences promote political behaviors that benefit society via intergroup cooperation and helping even in extreme situations. For members of historically advantaged groups, who hold the most power in society, positive contact experiences may also promote support for policies to increase integration and equity. For example, in a representative sample of White South Africans only a decade after the fall of apartheid, Whites who had more positive contact experiences with Blacks expressed less opposition to policies promoting racial equality. Surveys from the late 1980s and early 1990s showed that Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland with more intergroup contact experience expressed more support for integration (e.g., mixing the two groups in educational and recreational settings; intergroup marriage) and more support for abstaining from violence and forgiving the outgroup. Additionally, White American university students who had more contact experience with racial out-groups at the beginning of their first year expressed more support for policies that would promote ethnic diversity among students and faculty at the end of their first year; these effects emerged even after controlling for students’ attitudes toward these policies at the beginning of the year, political ideology, and other important controls.
Contact Is Effective Even When Indirect or Imagined More recent developments suggest that beyond having direct contact experience with members of other groups, contact may also be experienced indirectly or even imagined, and these forms of contact can also reduce prejudice. One form of indirect contact is known as extended contact. Knowing that members of one’s own group have out-group friends predicts fewer negative attitudes toward out-group members. This effect, which has been replicated in several experiments and tested over time, occurs because knowledge of cross-group friendships reduces the anxiety people feel about contact and creates more positive perceptions of norms for intergroup relations among one’s in-group and from the out-group. Extended contact effects occur above and beyond the direct contact experiences that people have, and they can emerge even when participants have been made to perceive that the groups are in conflict. Further research has shown that extended contact is most effective in changing attitudes among people who have little actual, direct contact. Related work has also shown that other forms of indirect contact—such as exposure to media depicting positive intergroup interactions—can lead people to develop more positive intergroup attitudes.
Contact may even reduce negative intergroup attitudes when it is imagined. Experiments have shown that mentally simulating positive intergroup encounters can make people project more positive characteristics to the out-group, reduce intergroup anxiety and negative stereotypes, and increase positive intergroup attitudes. The effects of imagined contact have proven consistent beyond potential effects of alternative explanations, such as positive emotional states or demand characteristics of the experiment. Richard J. Crisp and Rhiannon Turner, who conducted the first experiments on imagined contact, have argued that its value as an intervention lies in its potential in the absence of opportunities for direct contact. Thus, they propose that imagined contact could be particularly useful to prepare people for direct contact. Moreover, the positive effects of imagined contact may lead people to open themselves up to situations in which they might experience contact, thus making direct and positive contact experiences more likely when the opportunity occurs.
Contact Is Less Positive for Members of Low-Status Groups The effects of contact also depend on whether someone is coming from a group that is of relatively low or high status. In general, contact typically reduces prejudice to a greater degree among members of historically advantaged groups than among members of historically disadvantaged groups. Feeling disempowered in the contact situation or subjected to prejudice and discrimination may also weaken the positive effects of contact for members of lower-status, disadvantaged groups. In particular, members of low-status groups have a greater need to feel empowered, as they are typically disempowered. From a functional perspective, “getting along” with the high-status group may cement the unequal conditions characterizing the relationship between the two groups. Moreover, positive contact with members of highstatus groups has the potential to reduce motivation for social change among members of low-status groups. Evidence for this effect is supported by a convergence of correlational data from South Africa and Israel, longitudinal evidence with U.S. college students, and experimental evidence between laboratory-generated groups. Contact may reduce motivations for social change because it increases the expectation that members of high-status groups will treat the low-status group fairly, which, if true, would imply less need for social change. Although less well researched, it is also possible that members of low-status groups may not support social change for strategic or instrumental reasons, as they may rely on positive relationships with those from
Corporatism
high-status groups for their livelihoods. For example, the only Black employee in a predominantly White work environment might fear that speaking out about racial inequality could result in ostracism or even losing her job. Additionally, it is important to note that intergroup contact need not inevitably dampen low-status group members’ motivation for social change. Understanding whether and when contact leads to reduced support for social change will require further study and better understanding of the nature and dynamics of the contact situation. Some preliminary research is encouraging; members of an LGBTQ community did not show reduced support for collective action in favor of samesex marriage when they had non-LGBTQ friends who clearly expressed that inequality between non-LGBTQ and LGBTQ communities was not legitimate.
Future Directions for Contact Research Studying the content of contact interactions, along with the specific needs of members of low-status, historically disadvantaged groups, will lead to a better understanding of the conditions under which contact does or does not reduce motivation for social change. This research will lead to a better understanding of when intergroup contact can promote political behaviors that promote harmony and social justice as mutually reinforcing rather than opposing one another. Decades of research have demonstrated the importance of close, positive contact experiences for enhancing intergroup harmony, trust, and cooperation in diverse societies. Contact research has made progress in understanding the conditions that will foster those close, positive experiences in contrast to negative contact experiences, but more research is needed to understand when people will choose to engage in close contact experiences under conditions that are not ideal, such as when there are norms fostering negative relations between the groups. Future research on contact must also identify conditions under which contact will promote intergroup cooperation toward social justice rather than promoting intergroup harmony, trust, and cooperation at the expense of social justice. Thomas Christopher O’Brien and Linda R. Tropp See also Activism; Affirmative Action; Collective Action; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Conflicts, Protracted; Prejudice
Further Readings Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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Becker, J. C., Wright, S. C., Lubensky, M. E., & Zhou, S. (2013). Friend or ally: Whether cross-group contact undermines collective action depends on what advantaged group members say (or don’t say). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(4), 442–455. Crisp, R. J., & Turner, R. N. (2009). Can imagined interactions produce positive perceptions? Reducing prejudice through simulated social contact. American Psychologist, 64(4), 231–240. Dixon, J., Durrheim, K., & Tredoux, C. (2007). Intergroup contact and attitudes toward the principle and practice of racial equality. Psychological Science, 18(10), 867–872. Dixon, J., Levine, M., Reicher, S., & Durrheim, K. (2012). Beyond prejudice: Are negative evaluations the problem and is getting us to like one another more the solution? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(6), 411–425. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2011). When groups meet: The dynamics of intergroup contact. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. F., & Pratto, F. (2009). The irony of harmony: Intergroup contact can produce false expectations for equality. Psychological Science, 20(1), 114–121. Saguy, T., Tropp, L. R., & Hawi, D. (2013). The role of group power in intergroup contact. In G. Hodson & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Advances in intergroup contact (pp. 113–132). London, England: Psychology Press. Tausch, N., & Becker, J. C. (2012). Understanding the psychological processes involved in the demobilizing effects of positive cross-group contact. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(6), 447–448.
Corporatism Corporatism is a form of interest representation and intermediation in which functional interests of society, namely capital and labor, are granted a monopoly of representation by the state that shares its policy-making power with them. In order to perform this role, organizations of labor (trade unions) and capital (employer organizations) must be sufficiently encompassing and centralized.
Overview Corporatism is a contested and ambiguous concept used to characterize very different realities in different historical moments. It was originally coined to define the organization of interests under totalitarian regimes inspired by the social doctrine of the Catholic Church
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that viewed in corporatist ideas a solution to the social question posed by industrialization and the growth of the proletariat in the late 19th century. However, a similar organization of socioeconomic interests could also be found in several European democracies in the post–World War II period, where trade unions and employer associations were organized along unitary and centralized associations that shared significant decision- making powers with governments. Neo- corporatism, or social corporatism, was accordingly used in order to distinguish its democratic form from state corporatism in totalitarian or nondemocratic regimes. The growth of scholarly interest in corporatism in the late 1970s and early 1980s was caused by mounting evidence of a relationship between countries with neocorporatist institutions or policy-making methods and some indicators of social and economic performance. Moreover, research on transitions to democracy showed how neo-corporatist forms of policy-making contributed to smooth and peaceful transitions to democracy in some countries in those years. A cyclical character has characterized neo-corporatism, hence becoming less relevant in the late 1980s and experiencing a revival in the 1990s. Already in the 21st century, scholarly interest in neo-corporatism has significantly declined to a large extent due to the membership and organizational erosion experienced by organized interests and, in particular, trade unions.
Dimensions and Conceptions of Corporatism At the most abstract level, corporatism is used to describe a specific configuration of the relationship between civil society and the state. The work of Alan Cawson illuminates the three main different ways in which corporatism has been used by scholarship. First, some authors consider corporatism as a form and process of interest representation, as a distinctive way in which interests are organized and interact with the state. Other authors think of corporatism as a differentiated model of policy-making with a significant involvement of organized interests, in which corporatism emerges alongside and eventually dominates a parliamentary form of democracy. This view would be close to the concept of policy concertation. Finally, corporatism has also been used to refer to a novel political economy model different from capitalism and socialism, close to the ideal type of what have been called coordinated market economies (CMEs) in the political economics literature (e.g., Varieties of Capitalism, ed. Hall and Soskice, 2001). Efforts to develop a general and comprehensive theory of the corporatist model have highlighted four core
dimensions to it: (1) the role of the state, guiding the economy but without ruling it; (2) a mostly privately owned economic system; (3) the existence at least of a circumscription upon the role of liberal democratic institutions in policy-making; and (4) organizations of producers that both perform an intermediary role between state and societal actors and act as a regulatory agency on behalf of the state (Williamson, 1985, p. 10). Both (2) and (3) can be considered structural conditions in the framework developed by Williamson, whereas (1) and (4) emphasize behavioral patterns. A similar characterization can be found in the work of Alan Siaroff, according to which an “ideal-type” neo-corporatist political economy regime involves four different aspects: (1) structural features, namely the characteristics of interest groups (centralization, concentration, encompassingness, etc.); (2) functional roles, referred to as the involvement of labor and business organizations in decision making; (3) behavioral patterns; that is, the search for consensus in policy-making through compromise and political exchange; and (4) the existence of a favorable context, including a consensusbased political tradition, the dominance of social democratic parties, and a welfare state with high social policy expenditure.
Corporatist Theory Origins The idea of organizing society in large corporations as a mechanism to avoid social conflict dates back to the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim. It was embraced enthusiastically by the Catholic Church in its social doctrine and then implemented by some of the fascist totalitarian regimes both in the pre–World War II period and afterward. The first usages of corporatism contained a strong normative and ideological component being advocated by fascist and communist ideologues and activists for widely divergent motives, interests, and reasons, having as a common feature the advocacy of an institutional relationship between the systems of authoritative decision making and interest representation. Accordingly, the term as used for political reasons referred to a form of strong and dominant state. After World War II, Andrew Shonfield’s work signaled the “official” renaissance of the theoretical and political debate on corporatism. He provided empirical evidence supporting the validity of Mihail Manoïlescu’s (1936) argument, which predicted the gradual “corporativization” of Western capitalist economies. Shonfield observed that modern economies, in order to reach a high macroeconomic performance path within the
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Keynesian framework, had promoted centralized bargaining processes between the major interest groups in order to steer the economies along the desired policies. In the case of Western Europe, state corporatist experiences in countries like Portugal and Spain coexisted with forms of democratic, social, or neo-corporatism in Western European democracies, hence providing support to the corporativization thesis.
From State Corporatism to Social or Neo-Corporatism The decade of the 1970s witnessed the consolidation of scholarly interest in corporatism, with a milestone 1974 article by Philippe C. Schmitter. The existence of similar logics of interest representation in modern liberal democracies to those observed in right-wing authoritarian regimes obliged the establishment of some distinction between these two forms of corporatism. The difference between state and social corporatism or neo-corporatism was related not only to the existence (or not) of a democratic regime within which similar structures of interest representation could be observed but also to the policy-making role of corporate actors. Corporatist writers’ common concern was the general phenomenon of continuous, structured participation of interest organizations in the policy-making process and other stages of the policy process, especially policy implementation. Neo-corporatism soon started to be considered as another social science model, an “approach, an intellectual framework, a way of examining and analyzing political phenomena across countries and time periods” (Wiarda, 1997, p. 23). Neo-corporatism offered an overarching and coherent model for understanding how liberal economies and democratic societies work, thus losing gradually the negative ideological and political content associated with state corporatism. At the same time, there was a shift in the place occupied by corporatist literature in academia from political theory to political economy. This shift was provoked by the large divergences observed in the responses and performance of economies before the difficult economic context of the oil crisis. However, under the label of neo-corporatism, works conveyed very different realities. In some cases, authors pointed out the existence of distinctive forms of policymaking in which corporate actors played an important role alongside governments. Other authors paid more attention to the way in which interests were represented and structured. A difference was then introduced between corporatism as a structure of interest intermediation and corporatism as a form of policy-making that could be associated with policy concertation. A 1982
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essay by Schmitter used the term “neo-corporatism2” to refer to a system characterized by the involvement of social partners in public policy design and implementation, hence highlighting its intermediation function. By contrast, “neo-corporatism1” emphasizes the organizational characteristics of social partners, thus characterizing neo-corporatist systems based on the way in which social actors are organized in society. The character of actors involved in the decisionmaking process as well as their number and relations with the state were the main dimensions to distinguish a corporatist from a pluralist system of representation and formed at the same time a key dimension to establish a link between institutional configuration, policy- making, the character of policies, and policy outcomes. The positions of C. Crouch (1983) and R. Martin (1983) were representative of the two main points of view in this debate. According to the former, the difference between pluralism and corporatism has to be found in the character of actors and their internal arrangements rather than in their role in the policy machinery. Martin instead argued that the crucial difference between pluralism and neo-corporatism had to be found in the degree of integration of organized interest groups into the policy-making arenas of the state. There were two major and interlinked extensions of the corporatist literature during the 1980s. First is the subconcept of meso-corporatism, whereby the relevant collective actors are not peak class associations but organizations defending specific interests of sectors and professions. Their power dependence relationships with state agencies are monopolistic and exclusive but not necessarily tripartite. Second is the concept of privateinterest governments, which refers to the collective private self-regulation by industry associations of capital and labor, with more or less state assistance. This was considered an alternative form of economic coordination to either market liberalism or state interventionism. Thus, it can be argued that while the 1970s served to limit more clearly the concept of corporatism as well as to introduce greater rationality in its debate, the 1980s served to empirically apply the concepts as well as to enter into an in-depth analysis of the logic behind neo-corporatism, identifying mechanisms as well as neo-corporatist structures.
Neo-Corporatism and Political Exchange The concept of political exchange is particularly important to characterize the way in which policy-making takes place in neo-corporatist countries. The concept was developed by Alessandro Pizzorno and later on incorporated into the mainstream of neo-corporatist theory. Cawson, for instance, defined neo-corporatism
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as “a specific socio-political process in which organizations representing monopolistic functional interests engage in political exchange with state agencies over public policy outputs which involves those organizations in a role which combines interest representation and policy implementation through delegated selfenforcement” (1986, p. 38). Thus exchange relations can be considered as an intrinsic element of corporatist systems. Political exchange is nonetheless different from the exchange taking place in collective bargaining between trade unions and employers in the industrial relations sphere. Crouch affirms that “if collective bargaining [as a form of market exchange in the area of Industrial Relations] is the characteristic mode of exchange in pluralistic industrial relations, GPE is the characteristic mode of neo-Corporatism” (1990, p. 72).
Neo-Corporatism and Economic Performance The study of neo-corporatism in the 1980s was linked to the experiences of response to the economic crisis of the 1970s and, more specifically, to strategies of wage moderation implemented in order to curb inflation. This literature detected a relationship between the existence of neo-corporatist structures and policy-making processes and positive macroeconomic performance. In those countries with more centralized and encompassing- interest organizations, wage restraint by trade unions could be achieved more easily than in countries with more decentralized actors and collective bargaining systems. Centralization and encompassingness allowed trade unions to internalize the negative effects of their policy demands, including wages, hence explaining their responsible economic behavior. Neo-corporatist structures that were present in several European economies started to come under pressure due to technological and social developments as well as to the extension of neo-liberal policies in most European economies. Because of this, several works at the end of the 1980s claimed the extinction of the neocorporatist “beast” due to its institutional erosion as well as to the decline of concertation and tripartite macropolitical bargaining. During the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in neo-corporatist theories before evidence of an increase in tripartite social dialogue and social pacts, particularly in those countries facing problems in the adjustment toward the European Monetary Union. Compared with the previous decade, a shift took place toward a more generalized usage of neo-corporatism as a form of policy-making due to the apparent erosion of the structural characteristics of neo-corporatist systems. Neo-corporatist forms of policy-making contributed to
achieving wage moderation in many of the countries in which the institutional setting had historically struggled to deliver wage restraint. In spite of the general erosion occurring in neo-corporatist structures, new forms of neo-corporatist concertation took place in Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s, thus attracting the attention of several authors interested in analyzing the characteristics of the new neo-corporatist wave. The return of neo-corporatism led another group of scholars to wonder about its cyclicality and the reasons for it.
Measuring Corporatism One of the main problems of neo-corporatist theory has been the weak evidence provided to support some of the claims made in the literature, including the fact that it was genuinely distinct from pluralism or that it correlated positively with economic performance. This was not so much a problem of neo-corporatist theory itself but of the way it developed. Hence, while the gradual broadening of the research and policy agenda led to considerable clarification of what was meant by and the consequences of corporatism, there was a gap in the understanding of the mechanisms or processes that linked the structures with the outcomes. Until the early 1980s, there was a tendency to underplay the refinement of the central components of the corporatist model, what we might term the operation of corporatism; that is, the establishment of a link between the corporatist polity and the corporatist policies, or, put another way, the role and characteristics of corporatist politics. There were a set of formal policy-making practices that were regarded as neo-corporatist (social pacts, tripartite negotiations at national or peak level, forms of policy concertation) but few insights about the mechanisms operating behind these practices, that is, about the logic underpinning neo-corporatist processes. The proliferation of the neo-corporatist literature during the 1980s led accordingly to a search for improving available empirical evidence. The problems in measuring neo-corporatism lay precisely in the very different uses of the term and its several dimensions, as it has been used to characterize all three aspects of the political phenomena (i.e., polity = structures/institutions, politics = processes/mechanisms, and policy = outcomes). Lane Kenworthy identified four categories of works on quantitative indicators of corporatism according to their main focus: •• Interest group organization: union centralization, union concentration, union density, business centralization or concertation •• Wage setting and collective bargaining arrangements: wage bargaining centralization, wage bargaining coordination, coverage of collective bargaining
Corruption •• Interest group participation in policy-making •• Political-economic consensus: strike rates
Relying on the quantitative indicators and rankings elaborated in those years, many works concluded that a positive relationship existed between macroeconomic performance and the neo-corporatist character of institutions during the period from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, especially when comparing corporatist with noncorporatist countries. However, before the erosion of neo-corporatist organizations and structures in the 1980s and 1990s, some works showed how the relationship between economic performance and neocorporativism had eroded. Oscar Molina See also Business in Politics; Clientelism; Economic-Based Voting Blocs; Lobbying; Moral Hazard; Political Morality; Realism; Rent-Seeking Behavior
Further Readings Cawson, A. (1986). Corporatism and political theory. London, England: Basil Blackwell. Crouch, C. (1983). Pluralism and the new corporatism: A rejoinder. Political Studies, 31, 452–460. Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hemerijck, A., & Schludi, M. (2000). Sequences of policy failures and effective policy responses. In F. Scharpf & V. Schmidt (Eds.), Welfare and work in the open economy: Vol. 1. From vulnerability to competitiveness (pp. 125–228). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Kenworthy, L. (2000). Quantitative indicators of corporatism: A survey and assessment. Discussion Paper 00/4. Cologne, Germany: Max Planck Institut fuer Gesellschaftsforschung. Manoïlesco, M. (1934). Le siècle du corporatisme [The century of corporatism]. Paris, France: Felix Alcan. Martin, R. (1983). Pluralism and the new corporatism. Political Studies, 31, 86–102. Molina, O., & Rhodes, M. (2002). Corporatism: The past, present, and future of a concept. Annual Review of Political Science, 5(1), 305–331. Pizzorno, A. (1977). Scambio politico e identità colletiva nel conflitto di classe [Political exchange and joint identities in the class conflict]. Rivista Italiana di Scienza Política, 7(2), 165–198. Regini, M. (1986). Political bargaining in western Europe during the economic crisis of the 1980s. In O. Jacobi et al. (Eds.), Economic crisis, trade unions and the state (pp. 61–76). London, England: Croom Helm. Regini, M. (2000). Between deregulation and social pacts: The responses of European economies to globalization. Politics and Society, 28(1), 5–34.
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Rhodes, M. (1998). Globalisation, labor markets and welfare states: A future of “competitive corporatism”? In M. Rhodes & Y. Mény (Eds.), The future of European welfare: A new social contract (pp. 178–203). London, England: Macmillan. Schmitter, P. (1974). Still the century of corporatism? Review of Politics, 36(1), 85–131. Schmitter, P. (1982). Reflections on where the theory of neo-corporatism has gone and where the praxis of neo-corporatism may be going. In G. Lehmbruch & P. Schmitter (Eds.), Trends towards corporatist intermediation (pp. 259–274). Beverley Hills, CA: SAGE. Schmitter, P. (1989). Corporatism is dead! Long live corporatism! Reflections on Andrew Shonfield’s modern capitalism. Government and Opposition, 24, 54–73. Schmitter, P., & Grote, J. (1997). Sisifo corporatista: Passato, presente e futuro [Corporatist Sisyphus: Past, present, and future]. Stato e Mercato, 50, 183–215. Shonfield, A. (1965). Modern capitalism: The changing balance of public and private power. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Siaroff, A. (1999). Corporatism in 24 industrial democracies: Meaning and measurement. European Journal of Political Research, 36, 175–205. Wassenberg, A. (1982). Neo-corporatism and the quest for control: The cuckoo game. In G. Lehmbruch & P. Schmitter (Eds.), Trends towards corporatist intermediation (pp. 83–108). Beverley Hills, CA: Sage. Wiarda, H. (1997). Corporatism and comparative politics: The other great ism. New York, NY: Sharpe. Williamson, P. (1985). Varieties of corporatism: Theory and practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Corruption In its traditional sense, corruption means moral impurity or decay that harms the public interest. It could take place in both the private and public sectors. One example of corruption in history was the improper sale of indulgences in the Catholic Church, which triggered the Protestant Reformation. Nowadays, corruption often refers to misconduct in the public sector. The World Bank defines corruption as the abuse of public office for personal gain. Transparency International provides a similar definition that corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. The abuse of public power is not limited to economic improprieties, such as bribery, embezzlement, and wire fraud. It includes social improprieties as well, such as patronage and nepotism. This entry provides an overview of corruption, the popular forms of corruption, how to measure corruption levels, and consequences of corruption.
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Overview of Corruption There are many definitions of corruption in the literature. For example, J. S. Nye in his 1967 article “Corruption and Political Development” defines corruption as an action that deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains or an action that violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence. Carl Friedrich states that the pattern of corruption may exist whenever a power holder is induced to take actions that favor whoever provides the rewards and thereby does damage to the public and its interests. In these definitions, the damage to the public interest is the essence of corruption. If an official abuses a child or steals in a supermarket, it is not corruption, although it is a crime. Corruption is viewed as a social disease that particularly needs to be addressed in the public sector because the public interest is vulnerable. Leslie Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, explains in his book Corruption: A Very Short Introduction that the vulnerability of public interest stems from the lack of competition and choices in the public sector. In most cases, if we are dissatisfied with the goods or services of one private company, we can switch our custom to another, as market economics is based on competition. But government has a virtual monopoly. If we do not trust any part of the government, the judiciary or police for example, we cannot turn elsewhere for law enforcement. In addition, in cases of disagreement, a part of the government, the court for instance, is an arbiter between individuals and organizations. Therefore, the term corruption is often limited to misconduct by public officials and public employees. Corruption is a multidimensional phenomenon. According to the different actors and different purposes of interest involved, distinctions can be made between administrative corruption, political corruption, and state capture in the public sector. Administrative corruption, or bureaucratic corruption, refers to the situation in which bureaucrats and public servants use public office for pecuniary gain or financial benefits. Administrative corruption takes place in public services such as education and health systems. Political corruption involves the use of public office by elected politicians for gaining political power or support. Political corruption manifests as favoritism in the form of giving preferences to private organizations in order to directly receive political support or gain campaign funds to buy political support. State capture takes place when corrupt political actors formulate or change the regulations and institutions of the state in favor of their interests
and the interests of their political allies and supporters. With state capture, institutions are not operationalized to serve for the general public, but instead become the tools for preserving corrupt interests. State capture could be a phenomenon of undue influence of the state by powerful firms, in which multinational and domestic firms as a whole suffer by losing equal opportunities and legal protection. In a comparison among the three types of corruption, administrative corruption is the most widespread and sometimes is treated as a narrow definition of public corruption. State capture is the most fundamental and influential corruption because it makes the trespass of public good for the people in power legalized by changing game rules in the society. When a country is in a position of state capture, it is no longer a real or consolidated democracy. American political scientist Arnold Heidenheimer made distinctions between what he called “black,” “gray,” and “white” corruption, according to the severity level of corruption. “Black corruption” refers to misconduct that a majority consensus of both elite and mass opinion would condemn and would want to see punished as a matter of principle. “Gray corruption” signifies that some part of the community, either elite or mass, may want to see the corrupt behavior punished while others may not, and the majority may be ambivalent about it. “White corruption” indicates that the majority of both elite and mass opinion would tolerate the action and would not support the attempt to punish, although it is still formally perceived as corruption. In other words, corruption could be coded as severe violations (black), violations with some opprobrium (gray), and tolerable violation of moral and legal norms (white). The common forms of corruption include bribery, kickbacks, embezzlement, extortion, fraud, conflicts of interest, patronage, and nepotism. Each of the forms is briefly described in what follows.
Bribery Bribery refers to a situation in which public officials receive financial benefits from businesses or citizens, and as exchange they offer (or promise to offer) favorable treatment or services to the bribe providers. The financial benefits may vary from cash or other valuables to less tangible ones such as future employment positions. Bribery may involve a petty amount of benefits, such as greasy money paid by citizens to public officials in order to speed up the process of getting licenses or other services. Petty bribery is more likely to occur in local government facilities of licensing, utilities, taxation, policing, and the judicial systems. Bribery could involve
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a greater amount of financial benefits as well, especially when the bribery is associated with large-scale public projects of government contracts or procurement. When decisions are made without transparency, public officials might offer contracts to those who are willing to pay high-value bribes. With grant bribes to public officials, the quality of the public project may substantially suffer, and its financial costs to the public may substantially increase. A well-known bribery case in U.S. history took place in the New York Police Department (NYPD) and was investigated by the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption (known as the Knapp Commission, after its chairman Whitman Knapp) in 1970–1972. After testimonies were heard from whistleblowers, commissioners, corrupt patrolmen, and the victims of police shakedowns, as well as public hearings, the Knapp Commission confirmed that bribery had rampantly existed in the NYPD. More interestingly, the report of the Knapp Commission identified two particular classes of bribery, which it called “grass eating” and “meat eating.” “Grass-eating” bribery refers to the situation in which officials will accept a bribe if offered, while “meat-eating” corruption indicates more predatory bribery, in which officials actually solicit bribes in exchange for favorable treatment of the bribe provider. The Knapp Commission found that a significant number of NYPD officers were guilty of “grass eating.” It also concluded that “grass eating” was performed under peer pressure—police officers learned to do so from other cops or from imitating the deviants they watched and investigated every day. “Meat-eating” officers spent a good deal of time aggressively looking for situations they could exploit for financial gain. An example of “meat eating” was shaking down illicit drug dealers for money. In addition to the foregoing classifications of bribery, scholars also distinguish between “corruption with theft” and “corruption without theft.” According to scholars Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny, “bribery with theft” occurs when the regular payment to the government is not made to the government but instead to the government official. For instance, customs officials may allow goods to enter the country without the importer paying a duty to the government, but instead they intercept the charge for themselves. “ Bribery without theft” involves instances in which officials receive bribes but still pass on the regular payment to the government. For example, an official may charge a bribe in addition to an import license fee from a business, but then he passes the license fee on to the government treasury. In bribery without theft, the bribe provider pays an additional amount to the government official.
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Bribery is the most widespread form of corruption; thus in many circumstances, corruption merely denotes bribery. However, “corruption” is a more general term than “bribery” and covers various forms of misuse of authority for personal gain.
Other Forms of Corruption Kickback A kickback is a negotiated deal in which a commission is paid to a public official in power as a reward for rendering a government contract or grant to the payer. The commission is normally negotiated ahead of time and might be in the form of money, goods, or services handed over to the government official. For example, a government contract manager may give a contract to a company that is not the best bidder or allocate more than they deserve. In return, the company makes a kickback payment to the contract manager, which is a portion of the amount the company received from the government.
Extortion Extortion as a form of public corruption signifies an instance in which a public official uses his office power to take money or property from a private party by means of illegal compulsion. The victim is forced to make a payment to the public official out of fear of getting other possible punishments if he does not cooperate with the public official. Extortion involves coercive approaches such as threat to induce cooperation. In the case of extortion, a public official may falsely claim authority to which he is not lawfully entitled in order to promote his personal interest. For example, a highway department officer oppressively solicits extra money for his personal gain from a tax-delinquent automobile owner under the pretense that he is collecting a fine. The automobile owner as a victim is not voluntarily making the payment but is forced to do so by the official authority.
Embezzlement Public-sector embezzlement refers to the illegal action in which public officials steal public funds, property, or other valuables, directing them into their pockets or to someone they entrust with receiving them. For instance, a school accountant could embezzle funds from the account of free and reduced-cost lunch programs to his or her pocket. In a case of public-official embezzlement, the public official has access to the public fund, property, or other valuables because he is in a
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position to take care of the public resources and he is trusted. Embezzlement may involve only a small proportion of the total resources the public official takes care of in an attempt to minimize the risk of detection of the misallocation. When successful, embezzlements may continue for years (or even decades) without detection. It is often only when a relatively large proportion of the funds is needed at a single time that the public organization realizes that the resources have been missing and that they have been duped by the embezzler.
Financial Fraud In the public sector, financial fraud occurs when a public official uses fake documents to exploit benefits from government grants, compensation schemes, or any other resources for his private gain. Cheating is the key element in fraud. A government official can perform fraud by claiming reimbursement for inauthentic business travel, for instance. In this case, only the official is involved in the fraud. It could involve multiple parties. An example took place in a housing development compensation program in a developing country, where the local government planned to redevelop an urban district and subsidize residents’ relocation to other places. A group of officials from the government notary, property ownership registration, housing dismantling, and cartography services conspired to forge certificates of property ownership that needed to be relocated in order to claim a large amount of government compensation and share the booty. In addition, fraud may be combined with kickbacks. For instance, a business firm may collude with government officials to forge documents in order to get additional benefits from the government or pay less than they should to the government. As an exchange, the officials get kickbacks from the firm.
Patronage and Nepotism Patronage refers to rewarding political supporters with government employment. It may be legitimate when a newly elected government changes the top officials in the administration in order to effectively implement its policy. Patronage becomes corruption when incompetent persons are selected over more competent ones in order to pay back political supporters. Patronage is relatively more widespread in nondemocracies, where no political leaders are elected through a public voting system, and all important government positions are appointed by a higher-level organization or supervisor. Then political loyalty rather than competence is heavily considered in the selection process. Nepotism is a synonym for cronyism, whereby a public official appoints relatives or personal friends to government
positions. In nepotism, personal relationships rather than competence determine who is hired to fill government positions.
Conflict of Interest Conflict of interest becomes a form of corruption when the private interests of a public official affect his public duty. One may distinguish between legislative conflict of interest and bureaucratic conflict of interest according to the form of interest. An example of the former is that a legislator owns stock in a food manufactory and votes for a bill that will give tax concessions to that company. In the legislative conflict of interest, the form of interest is the legislation that favors the legislator. Bureaucratic conflict of interest involves more straightforward monetary benefits to the public official. For example, a public procurement manager purchases office supplies from a company owned by his relatives. Or he establishes a part-time consulting firm that gives advice to private clients who are seeking government contract and procurement opportunities.
Measuring the Corruption Level It is hard to measure the actual extent of corruption in any society because the phenomenon and involved population are inherently secret. In research, scholars primarily use two types of indicators to measure corruption: official statistics and conceptual surveys. Official statistics typically report on up to five dimensions: the number of corruption cases reported, the number of corruption cases investigated, the number of prosecutions, the number of convictions, and the number of sentences meted out. When the numbers are used to compare corruption levels between countries (or between states/local governments), they should be weighted by the population size. This set of measures looks objective and straightforward. However, they might be misleading given different levels of law enforcement across countries. For example, Country A may investigate corruption cases on a more haphazard basis, while Country B makes more efforts in detecting corruption and investigates cases in a more consistent manner. As a consequence, Country A may have fewer corruption cases revealed and punished than Country B. But the real case might be that we see only the very tip of the huge iceberg in Country A, while we are able to view a much larger proportion of the overall corruption picture in Country B. Alternatively, perceptual surveys are widely used in research to compare corruption levels across countries. The most prominent measure of such an approach is the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published annually
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by Transparency International (TI) since 1995 to measure citizen perceptions of public sector corruption in each individual country. According to the 2015 CPI report, among the 167 countries surveyed in total, the most corrupt countries are Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan, and Angola, with their CPI scores from 8 to 15 in a 0–100 scale; the least corrupt countries are Denmark, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Norway, with CPI scores between 87 and 91. However, the CPI is also criticized for the data sources, because TI does not conduct actual surveys itself; instead, it compiles and standardizes information from comparative perception surveys conducted by other institutions, including the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, Bertelsmann Foundation, World Justice Project, and Economist Intelligence Unit, to produce CPI scores and rank order countries. Since some of the surveys, such as World Bank’s Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Report (GCR), seek perceptions mainly from businesspeople and specialists, the CPI score may not be able to accurately capture the corruption perception of the general public in each country.
safety can be severely threatened. A salient corruption case disclosed in China took place in the high-speed railway projects in 2011. A large, corrupt network of high-level officials was discovered to have accepted a huge amount of financial benefits from the contractors at the expense of sacrificing construction quality. The substandard railway led to a series of accidents, including a fatal collision in Wenzhou in 2011 that killed at least 40 passengers. In addition, corruption may generate long-term damage to the cultural system. Corrupt practices are immoral and unethical, involving lying, fraud, threats, and conspiracy. Such activities will spread widely and deeply to every corner of a society if there is no effective control over them and ultimately become socially acceptable and institutionalized. Therefore, pervasive corruption practices will create a culture of corruption in which more and more honest people succumb to the temptation to misuse the power entrusted to them. Moreover, corruption induces injustice and will eventually generate mistrust in government. Then mistrust creates more conflicts between citizens and government, which in turn raises the level of corruption and further impairs popular trust. In this way, corruption and mistrust feed each other, producing a vicious circle.
Consequences of Corruption Corruption is a disease that plagues every government in the world, especially the governments in developing countries. Yahong Zhang and Jose Vargas-Hernandez, in the book Government Anti-Corruption Strategies, summarize the economic, political, and social damages that corruption may cause. First, corruption cripples equal competition in the market. Corruption adds costs to the government and business, violates established rules, and creates uncertainty for businesses and citizens. A higher level of corruption in a country is usually associated with greater government intervention in the economy, which threatens investment intention of foreign capital investors. On the contrary, countries with low levels of corruption attract more capital for investment. Therefore, corruption will eventually decrease economic efficiency. Second, corruption degrades the quality of life and even causes severe safety problems for citizens. For instance, corruption in the forms of embezzlement and fraud may divert public funds from paying for public goods, such as safety, social services, infrastructure, and public schools. In the case of bribery that leads to violations of laws and regulations—including building codes, environmental controls, traffic laws, prudential banking regulations, and so on—public well-being and public
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Yahong Zhang See also Bureaucratic Politics; Clientelism; Conspiracies; Election Rigging; Ethics of Political Behavior; Free Rider Problem; Political Crimes; Tragedy of the Commons; Utopia
Further Readings Friedrich, C. (2002). Corruption concepts in historical perspective. In A. Heidenheimer & M. Johnston (Eds.), Political corruption: Concepts & contexts (pp. 15–24). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Heidenheimer, A. (2002). Perspectives on the perception of corruption. In A. Heidenheimer & M. Johnston (Eds.), Political corruption: Concepts & contexts (pp. 141–154). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Holmes, L. (2015). Corruption: A very short introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Nye, J. S. (1967). Corruption and political development: A costbenefit analysis. American Political Science Review, 2, 412–427. Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. (1993). Corruption. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3), 599–617. Zhang, Y., & Vargas-Hernandez, J. (2015). Introduction: Corruption and government anti-corruption strategies. In Y. Zhang & C. Lavena (Eds.), Government anti-corruption strategies: A cross-cultural perspective (pp. xiii–xxv). Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis.
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Counter-Elite Counter-elites are individuals whose views and goals differ significantly from those of the ruling body of a country and who, by their abilities, by their wealth, and/ or by their heritage, occupy positions of influence in a society. In classic elite theory as developed by Vilfredo Pareto, counter-elites are more likely to mobilize against the ruling elite when social mobility is low and talented individuals are prevented from rising up the status hierarchy. A defining characteristic of counter-elites is their ability to mobilize for their cause parts of the society that are able to exert pressure on the ruling body either because of their numbers or through their financial or military power. The ruling group and counter-elites diverge in their opinions over which economic, social, or national security policies to follow. The disagreement may be latent or manifest. Open disagreement may take the form of lobbying, political discourses, mobilization of masses, protests, and, in its more extreme form, violent action. The type of opposition adopted by the counter-elites is a direct consequence of the regime’s tolerance toward the former’s actions. As democratic regimes do not persecute opposition leaders, counterelites tend to be both more active and more peaceful. The higher the degree of persecution of a regime against opposition forces, the more concealed the counter-elite’s activity is, and if the latter’s actions become open, they tend to be more violent.
Counter-Elites’ Basis of Support Counter-elites draw their power from the support of subordinates and allies. As no individual can reasonably exert political pressure on her own, one needs to gather support that translates into coercive power. Consequently, the divergence in views between ruling elites and counter-elites reflects the underlying divergence in their respective subordinates’ views. It is therefore not uncommon for ruling elites to attempt coopting counter-elites in power-sharing agreements, since the elimination of a specific member of the counter-elite will usually not remove the underlying threat. The divergences in the subordinates’ preferences are based on ethnic, religious, or purely ideological grounds. Counter-elites whose support rests on ethnic or religious characteristics possess more loyal followers but are equally more constrained in the capacity to expand the numbers of their subordinates. These counter-elites therefore represent a permanent threat to the central regime, given that their power is highly resilient to actions by the ruling elites. Notable examples can be found in the Kurdish independence
movement in modern Turkey and in the Shia–Sunni opposition polarizing the Arab world in the 21st century. James De Nardo developed an entire theory showing that in instances in which the divide is ideological, counter-elites have flexibility over their precise ideological positioning, allowing them to garner more support. On the other hand, ideological subordinates are less loyal, and by extension the counter-elites’ power is more volatile. Alliances among counter-elites whose objectives differ are not uncommon. The opposition to Bashar alAssad in the ongoing Syrian civil war initially was a mosaic of groups representing different ethnicities and ideologies. Yet as became apparent during the Syrian civil war, in which Syrian opposition forces started a sub-civil war against the armed forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as DAESH), such alliances are by construction short lived: when the power balance starts shifting in favor of the opposition forces, these coalitions break down, and a contest for power among counter-elites emerges.
Counter-Elites in Democracies In democratic regimes, counter-elites occupy key positions in political parties and attempt to influence political outcomes, for example by proposing an election-winning policy and in some cases by lobbying in favor of their preferred electoral outcome. As party candidates, counter-elites propose policies in anticipation of the voters’ policy preferences. The electorate is then called to cast votes for their preferred party. In the archetypal conceptualization of political competition, Anthony Downs demonstrated that in a two-party system, world ideologies should not matter, whereas increasing the number of political parties made ideological positioning more salient. More elaborate models of political economy introduce political leaders with ideological preferences that result in the proposed policies of the counter-elites diverging from the ones of the incumbent party and being closer to their own ideology. Counter-elites may equally resort to lobbying practices, whereby resources are devoted to tilt the voters’ preferences toward their own. In democratic regimes, the opposition of counterelites to the ruling government is therefore expressed via nonviolent means, with resources being wasted in the race for power in the presence of lobbying.
Counter-Elites in Autocracies Under autocratic regimes, the opposition of counterelites to the central power is either latent or else violent.
Counterinsurgency
In mild authoritarian regimes, counter-elites are given some latitude for expressing their preferences. Given, however, that autocratic regimes do not feature fair and open elections, the opposition of the counterelites is necessarily tainted by violent actions. The mildest forms of opposition are organized protests and urban riots. Harsher regimes typically repress opposition movements by extensively implementing purges, jailing and deporting suspected counter-elites, and, in some extreme cases, killing them. Counter-elites in such instances are unable to openly garner support for their cause, pushing them to remain silent, to go underground—which necessarily limits their visibility and capacity to act—or else to seek political asylum in other countries. The threat of counter-elites is therefore latent or else translates into isolated acts of extreme violence (terrorist attacks; sabotage). In a classical book on dictatorships, Ronald Wintrobe spells out the dictator’s dilemma: since expressing one’s discontent toward the central regime exposes oneself to repression and purges, the most repressive dictators will face less open resistance. The dilemma lies in that this latent threat fuels the dictator’s fear of sudden violent opposition, thus further incentivizing him to coerce. In such regimes, exemplified by the rule of Joseph Stalin in the USSR or Kim Jong-un in North Korea, counter-elites represent a latent threat and will grasp any opportunity that may emerge to violently depose the ruler. Historically, the Soviet Union captures the different degrees of coercion faced by counter-elites. In the early days of the regime, opposition was mildly tolerated. For instance, Leon Trotsky—once a key member of the ruling elite—openly expressed his discontent toward the implemented policies before being forced into exile and later assassinated in Mexico. In the last days of Stalin’s rule, repression was at its peak, and the regime witnessed no open opposition. Petros G. Sekeris See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Calculus of Dissent; Clientelism; Democracy; Dictatorship; Elite Theory (Pareto); Lobbying; Political Ideology
Further Readings Bueno de Mesquita, B., Smith, A., Siverson, R., & Morrow, J. (2003). The logic of political survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Nardo, J. (1985). Power in numbers: The political strategy of protest and rebellion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
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Wintrobe, R. (1998). The political economy of dictatorship. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Counterinsurgency Counterinsurgency originated in British military and foreign policy during the 1940s. It later emerged as a showcase strategy among American foreign policy advisers and military strategists in the early 1960s. Eventually, it evolved into a major component of cold war strategy, and what became known specifically as “counterinsurgency theory” played a significant role in the planning of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War forced planners to become far more sober minded about the limitations of the theory, but many of its general principles, nonetheless, found their way into cold war applications for years to come and contributed to the intellectual groundwork of 21st-century counterterrorism efforts.
The 1940s: A World in Transition The conclusion of World War II, in many ways, concluded themes of human history that had their roots in the 15th century. The rise of nation-states and empires created a fragile global balance of power that in 1914 would be torn apart by two world wars. By 1945, the last two European empires to still have global stakes were Great Britain and France. Both hovered on the financial precipice of accumulated war debt, and both faced numerous nationalist independence movements within their realms. In addition, a new force contributed to instability: aggressive, Sovietbacked communist insurgencies. Inspired by leaders such as Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, who preached the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare, and often given technical assistance from the emerging communist superpowers in Moscow and Beijing, these movements threatened the stability of European colonies across Asia and fledgling regimes elsewhere. The insurgents called for the expulsion of foreign powers and revolution of political systems while relying almost entirely on nonconventional means of warfare. The cult of the guerrilla, championed by Ernesto (“Ché”) Guevara, a leader of the Cuban Revolution, urged the creation of a new world order through long underground wars of attrition. Whereas the methods of guerrilla warfare— ambush, sabotage, assassination, intimidation of innocent civilian populations, employment of political cadres and ideology, hit-and-run tactics—would transform the face and nature of war into our time,
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several key fundamental shifts would challenge the basis of conventional military and diplomatic strategy that had been in place for centuries. Counterinsurgency was an attempt by those in power to come to terms with ideologically driven guerrilla warfare on its own ground: to meet and defeat the guerrilla on his terms with the realization that deployment of conventional forces in certain situations would only play into the guerrillas’ hands. In this context, British strategist Robert Thompson developed a plan to fight guerrillas in Malaysia in the 1940s, and British units were assembled along lines similar to today’s military Special Forces. Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA operative of the cold war era, began his career in the predecessor to the CIA, the Army’s Office of Special Services, also in covert Asian operations.
The United States and the Cold War Implicitly, counterinsurgency was conceptually linked to “containment,” the theoretical foundation for American cold war policy formulated by diplomat and historian George F. Kennan shortly after the delivery of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of 1946. Kennan understood Soviet communism as ideologically incompatible with American values and interests and driven by expansionist goals. Realizing that the Kremlin would support communist insurgencies in all forms where it could do so unchecked, Kennan proposed “containment” as a flexible yet globalist posture for American policy. If the Soviet Union unleashed covert operations or supported local guerrillas to advance their side of the struggle, the United States, in Kennan’s view, must do the same to assert its interest and to fulfill its moral duty as the leader of the “free world.” Cold war policies ranged from conventional military alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to major economic policies like the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of postwar Europe but also paid enormous attention to fifth columns and covert operations. Early in the cold war, U.S. planners saw the need to win the “hearts and minds of the people” in contested areas where power vacuums and struggles developed. Early efforts focused on Europe. By 1960, concerns over South and East Asia grew as the former colonies of Great Britain and France displayed increasing volatility.
Counterinsurgency and the Vietnam War At the conclusion of the French Indochina War in 1954, the United States set out to establish an independent, Western-aligned, anticommunist nation-state in South Vietnam. This was an act of unilateralism in defiance of
the Geneva Accords, which were not signed by the United States. To install the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, the United States deployed Edward Lansdale, a CIA operative with vast Asian experience. Covert operations, propaganda campaigns, American intelligence and surveillance, economic assistance, and military advisory functions all played key roles in establishing and supporting the Diem regime and fight against the indigenous Viet Minh and Viet Cong movements. However, it was not until 1961, when Robert McNamara became U.S. secretary of defense and set out to modernize the Pentagon, that “counterinsurgency” became official parlance and theory. A Harvard graduate who had worked in intelligence on the Allied air war in Europe, McNamara had caught President Kennedy’s attention by transforming the Ford Motor Corporation in the 1950s. Kennedy sought McNamara’s assistance in transforming the Pentagon in the same way—employing business models and paying enormous attention to quantitative analysis in the procurement and allocation of resources. Counterinsurgency in the Pentagon evolved from the crunching of numbers and projection of outcomes. The formation of the National Liberation Front, an alliance between Northern and Southern Vietnamese communists, led to a deterioration of conditions for the Diem regime in 1961. Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited South Vietnam, and a new team was assembled in Washington to deal with the problem. General Maxwell Taylor, Ambassador Fred Nolting, and important Defense Department personnel like Roger Hilsman all acknowledged a need to develop better ways to win the minds and hearts of the people of South Vietnam and drum up support for the Diem regime. In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet Plan began to unfold, again an application of counterinsurgency. Unable to identify, isolate, and remove insurgents from villages, the Strategic Hamlet Plan bulldozed old v illages and built new ones, hoping to quarantine the villagers from insurgents and thus create safe harbors. Lt. Col. Lucien Conein was assigned initially to conduct covert operations against North Vietnam and later in 1964 to establish support for post-Diem regimes in Saigon. His role would be that of a latter-day Lansdale. By 1966, many American planners had come to see the importance of gaining the support of the local populations, a key problem that would persist until the end of the conflict. Despite every imaginable effort to adjust and calibrate to the local situation, the United States never did win the minds and hearts of the people in South Vietnam. Why? First, as the example of the American Revolution illustrates, in wars of independence and civil wars, insurgents develop an enormous “home field advantage” if they are able to sustain the conflict long enough to become
Crisis Decision Making and Management
a nagging war of attrition. Second, foreshadowing 21stcentury wars, the insurgents were willing to sustain extremely heavy losses and not be deterred by further threats of punishment. In the end, they were willing to pay a human cost for war unacceptable to the United States.
The Changing Face of 21st-Century War Counterinsurgency in a general sense has become fundamental to all contemporary conflict. The advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 brought a cessation to “total” wars leading to unconditional surrender, replacing them with more limited “small wars.” Wars between nation-states have often been transcended by wars within nation-states or people’s wars across transnational borders. In all of these, the distinctions between soldiers and civilians have diminished, and military strategies and policies have become bitterly entwined with politics. Counterinsurgency is hence embedded in “people’s wars.” Terrorism has also transformed counterinsurgency efforts but again with a significant change. Whereas the guerrilla movements of the cold war era were largely founded to eventually establish independent nation-states that the guerrillas ultimately hoped to lead—and Mao, Ho, and Fidel Castro all accomplished this—today’s terrorists are more interested in changing or shaping policies. For example, in attacking the United States, Osama bin Laden’s goal was to change American policy toward Saudi Arabia. Counterterrorism, while embracing many of the principles of counterinsurgency, is by its nature much more broad and varied in its scope. Conventional warfare remains important, but achieving military aims and goals without securing political stability has proven fruitless again and again. The changing face of war has forced traditional armed forces to respond in nontraditional ways. Robert Tomes See also Civil Wars; Hearts and Minds Approach; Indoctrination; Insurgency; Political Ideology; Realism; Social Revolts; Wars of Attrition
Further Readings Bobbitt, P. (2002). The shield of Achilles. New York, NY: Penguin. Bobbitt, P. (2008). Terror and consent. New York, NY: Anchor. Karnow, S. (1983). Vietnam: A history. New York, NY: Penguin. Smith, R. (2005). The utility of force. New York, NY: Penguin. van Creveld, M. (2008). The culture of war. New York, NY: Presidio Press.
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Crisis Decision Making and Management Crisis management studies is a research area that analyzes how public and private actors respond to events that threaten individuals and society. There are many organizational and societal processes that enter this empirical space, and several social science disciplines have contributed to the development of this research area, such as sociology, political science, psychology, public administration, and international relations. A core question when studying the management of crises will always be: What characterizes high-stakes decisions made under pressing circumstances? When starting to answer this question, we need an understanding of both psychological and institutional forces that surround the situation in order to see the individual decision maker in context.
Overview Societal crises, according to a well-established definition, are characterized by a threat to core societal values, time pressure, and uncertainty. The concurrence of these factors, each a potentially destabilizing influence on situational awareness and social interaction, constitutes a unique combination of organizational and psychological challenges for arriving at collective decisions. Individuals experience a heightened level of stress, typically causing an effect on performance that describes an inverted U-curve. In modest amounts, psychological stress increases performance of mental tasks, but above a certain level, decision makers experience an impaired ability to evaluate the circumstances and deal with complexity. Decision making under stress is hampered by deterioration in information processing, the incorporation of fewer tactical and strategic options, and a restriction in the number of individuals involved in the decision-making process. For all the mental and organizational limitations introduced by stress, some benefits can also be identified in the literature: More attention is often devoted to the problem at hand, resources can be redistributed to deal with it, and allies can be summoned to contribute to managing the situation. An increasingly central way of categorizing human decision making is to differentiate between the cognitive systems 1 and 2. System 1 consists of the instinctive identification of a dominant option based on a cursory scan of previous experiences. This is how numerous everyday decisions are made, and their instinctive quality makes them virtually effortless. The problem is that if the potential consequences are serious, system 1 does
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not help us assess the complexity of the decision or its risk structure. In the more consequential situation, decision theorists claim that we are better served by system 2, which has a more formalized approach to the problem. The decision maker assesses the relative satisfaction to be gained from each outcome and the likelihood that it will come about. Systems 1 and 2 are useful ways to describe the processes of choice that are pursued by individuals as well as collectives of individuals.
Theories of Decision The classical way to look at decision making, whether in a crisis or any other context, is to take the view of the rational actors. The decision then becomes a strategic choice based on the utility and likelihood of different possible outcomes, a distilled version of what was previously described as system 2. A rational actor methodically picks the option with the highest expected utility. This school of thought is still dominant in many social science disciplines, including economics, from which it originated. Even though many of its proponents acknowledge that it does not perfectly describe every instance of individual choice, it arguably captures consequential choices on average and is thus the best approximation possible. The critiques of the rational-actor approach are manifold but will here be represented by two primary principled objections: One says that the risk neutrality in human decision making assumed by rational choice theory has been disproven. When weighting a medium to large likelihood against a dismally small one, most people overestimate the latter. The other objection comes from the observation that individuals evaluate the relative losses and gains to be had from an alternative rather than the value of the exact outcome. This effect is known as the framing effect on choice and has certain repercussions for crisis decision making: Crises often pose decision occasions in which the stakes are high (implying a need for system 2) and the sense of possible losses is high (creating a framing effect on decision makers). To many crisis-management scholars, this creates the need for a more process-oriented theory of choice that probes the psychological context for the decision makers and the resulting pressures on risk perceptions.
Group Decision Making A decision-making unit that is common in sensitive political situations is the small group. Due to needs for discretion, issues of trust, and time pressures, it is common that leaders gather a small group of principals or advisers to prepare and make decisions. Social
psychology is highly informative about the specific characteristics that can arise under the social pressure of group dynamics, and crisis-management studies have taken notice. Many seminal events in recent world history have been analyzed through the perspective of group decision making. When this mode of analysis first became prominent in the 1960s, the detrimental effects of group dynamics on decision making were emphasized. Groups, many argued, can easily be isolated from the larger organizational setting, can be subject to pressure from the outside, and can develop unsound procedures for assessing risk and reaching internal consensus, in the worst case leading to a pathological phenomenon called groupthink. More recently, the view on group decision making has become more nuanced. The social meaning of groups for their members, however, is given analytical power, and developmental phases of relationships in a government can be observed over time and give clues as to the influence of certain individuals or the predominance of certain strategic alternatives. Fredrik Bynander See also Blaming the Victim; Decision Making; Peacemaking; Political Crimes; Positioning Theory; Reconciliation
Further Readings Boin, R. A., ‘t Hart, P., Stern, E., & Sundelius, B. (2005). The politics of crisis management: Public leadership under pressure. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458. Vertzberger, Y. Y. I. (1994). The world in their minds: Information processing, cognition, and perception in foreign policy decisionmaking. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Zsambok, C. E., & Klein, G. (Eds.). (2014). Naturalistic decision making. London, England: Routledge.
Cyberactivism Also known as online activism or digital activism, cyberactivism is the gamut of Internet-based strategies and methods utilized by individuals and organizations for organizing, managing, and performing various types of activism. Cyberactivism aims to generate c itizen-based movements for specific causes, similar to traditional activism (see entry on Activism). It gained prominence with the emergence of social media and mobile technologies.
Cyberactivism
This entry reviews various facets of cyberactivism: online actions to promote awareness of causes, actions for organization and mobilization of followers, and actions substituting or enhancing traditional forms of activism. It goes on to show examples of cyberactivist movements and concludes with an overview of the critical debate on cyberactivism.
Types of Cyberactivism First, online activism enables the dissemination of information to large audiences. Social networks have increased the level of independence of activists from mainstream media by providing alternative platforms in which unedited and uncensored information can be spread. Grassroots information networks disseminate valuable information for activists worldwide in real time. Messenger services facilitate communication among activists and with the wider public. Streaming platforms enable easy sharing of videos, documenting everything from opinions to live events. This upheaval of traditional gatekeeping mechanisms of the media allows individuals to be involved in the information gathering and distributing process, a phenomenon termed “citizen journalism.” Second, activists use new technologies to mobilize and organize individuals in social movements. The Internet has enabled activists to coordinate both local and global protests with thousands of members in a short period of time. The Battle of Seattle in 1999 is an early example of worldwide protests coordinated through online activist networks. Finally, the Internet creates arenas for direct political action and alternatives to offline collective action. Activists can sign online petitions and instantly send them to governments, corporations, or organizations. They can raise money using crowdfunding platforms, which help gather contributions from a wide public of supporters. Activists can also directly contact government officials via social media channels. While we can conceptually differentiate the aforementioned forms of online activism, in reality they often converge, as cyberactivism aims to engage a wide variety of people both offline and online. The international Occupy movement of 2011 emerged in the fall of 2011 as a network of diverse activist groups concerned with social inequalities. While the movement relied heavily on cyberactivism in social media, it also mobilized people to physical protests in more than 950 cities around the world. In authoritarian countries, social media may undermine a regime’s legitimacy by empowering people to organize resistance and to expose wrongdoings of the regime. As such, they have the potential to challenge
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conventional power relations. Online communication and information networks became the catalyst for the Arab Spring of 2011. Social media created new gateways for mobilization and engagement when other means of organization were suppressed by the regime. The large-scale protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were initially organized through Facebook, triggering social and political reactions that led to the fall of the incumbent government. Another form of cyberactivism is Internet hacking. Hacktivists are non-government-affiliated individuals and groups. They promote self-proclaimed ethics such as sharing, openness, decentralization, free access, and world improvement and act against ideological enemies. Their activities often cross the border of legal behavior and include taking down websites, breaking into websites, altering content, and making classified data available to the wider public. Whereas some hacktivist groups, such as the European Chaos Computer Club, have established themselves as legitimate political actors, others, such as the structurally loose collective Anonymous, remain a symbol of illegal hacking activity, targeting organizations and individuals worldwide.
Criticism of Cyberactivism The extent to which cyberactivist efforts are effective compared with traditional methods of action is a matter of debate. On the one hand, the loose organizational structure of online activist networks may reduce the potential for creating strong bonds and mutual trust among activists. On the other hand, it is precisely their decentralized structure that enables cybermovements to be effective in mobilizing spontaneous global activism and in creating broad coalitions that are capable of adapting to changing circumstances. Low costs and barriers of the online realm, coupled with high reactivity of social media, provide an environment in which minimal participation is rewarded. Usergenerated content, such as Internet memes, is becoming increasingly popular, allowing users to instantly comment on political debates and to express their views. Individuals can contribute to social movements by performing undemanding tasks, such as sharing or liking content, using hashtags, and signing petitions, often without being subjected to direct mobilization efforts, and remaining anonymous in the process. Although such actions often characterize successful contemporary campaigns, some refer to cyberactivism as clicktivism or slacktivism, terms that imply effortless and feel-good online actions with minor real-life impact. Some are worried that even if the Internet helps engage people in activism, it could decrease traditional activism and long-term commitment to a cause. Moreover, the
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possible increase in online activism at the expense of offline activism has been criticized for deepening the digital divide, keeping citizens of low socioeconomic status and the elderly out of the activism arena.
Conclusion Digital communication has changed the way activists raise awareness, mobilize followers, organize protests, and conduct campaigns. While some movements remain solely in the online world, many cyberactivists utilize myriad methods of online and offline activities to promote their causes and to generate reactions from governments, corporations, or organizations. A clear line between online and offline activism can therefore not easily be drawn, as both realms are closely intertwined in many social movements. Cyberactivism demonstrates how public opinions can be formed through online political discourse and how information can be obtained through citizen journalism. The speed and breadth of cyberactivism’s reach is as of yet unparalleled in the offline world. While it is unlikely to replace traditional activism altogether, it may continue to enhance conventional forms of citizen participation and create new avenues for political self-expression. Maor Shani and Anne Leiser See also Activism; Collective Action; Social Movements
Further Readings Christensen, H. S. (2011). Political activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or political participation by other means? First Monday, 16(2), 2–7. Hill, S. (2013). Digital revolutions: Activism in the Internet age. Oxford, England: New Internationalist. McCaughey, M., & Ayers, M. D. (Eds.). (2013). Cyberactivism: Online activism in theory and practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Cyberwar Cyberwarfare consists of those operations that use digital communications to inject binary information into the networks and systems of others in order to make them behave incorrectly—meaning that they are deceived, degraded, disrupted, or (occasionally) destroyed. By such means, one side can usurp another’s command and control over its own information
systems. In many cases, this power extends to the physical instruments (e.g., machines) controlled by such information systems (hence the potential for destruction). Cyberwar also includes attacks on the Internet infrastructure that serves a targeted system in order to clog its input pipes or intake servers (also known as DDOS: distributed denial-of-service attacks) or to misdirect communications (e.g., by manipulating the Border Gateway Protocol). Cyberwarfare can be used in support of military operations (e.g., blinding an adversary’s radar); this is referred to as operational cyberwar. It can also be used independently, much as strategic bombing was used in World War II; this is referred to as strategic cyberwar. For obvious reasons, people attempt to build their systems in a way that minimizes having their command and control usurped by others, particularly competitors. More to the point, there is no forced entry in cyberspace. If someone has managed to penetrate a system or network, it is largely by convincing the system or network that what it is absorbing from the outside is authorized and benign—when the contrary is true. Cyberwarfare is a matter of guile rather than force. For its part, guile relies on surprise rather than numbers. Once an attacker has compromised a system, it can extract information from it (cyberespionage) or create effects within it (cyberattack). The exfiltration of data is usually difficult to detect; thus cyberespionage can be carried out for extended periods. The effects of cyberattack are often easier to see; once seen, the effects can be halted and often reversed. As a general rule, once a target has been penetrated (or, what is similar, once a system has been proven to have a vulnerability) and the target realizes as much (and is hurt or scared badly enough), it makes changes that (are intended to) frustrate easy repetition of the original attack. These changes can be a mix of specific (e.g., a software patch) and general (reduced access or user privileges). Such changes do not make targets invulnerable thereafter; attackers may have more tricks up their sleeve, and the administration of these changes may be less than completely thorough. But it does mean that the same attack against different targets or against the same target at different times may produce completely different results. There is no munitions-effectiveness manual in cyberspace, nor can there be, by its very nature. Indeed, one of the difficulties of gauging the strategic impact of cyberwar is that physics cannot predict the effects. As for looking at examples for a guide, almost all of our experiences, to date, have been in peacetime—and hence an unreliable indicator of what wartime might bring. Because cyberattack techniques (i.e., cyberweapons) are unlikely to work if their particulars are exposed, these particulars are highly classified. No one
Cyberwar
really knows what others are capable of, and no one has figured out a foolproof way of demonstrating what they themselves are capable of without carrying out an attack that could nullify the particular technique used. That cyberespionage can persist and cyberattacks cannot creates a collect-or-take-down dilemma for war planners. It also makes it difficult to determine whether a successful penetration by the other side was meant for collection or to set up a future cyberattack. The importance of adjusting systems to prevent repeated cyberattacks means that there are both micro and macro measure–countermeasure contests going on. At the macro level, this can be seen, for instance, in the contest between Microsoft to create secure operating systems in which a measure (e.g., address-space layout randomization) begets a countermeasure (e.g., returnoriented programming) begets a partial counter to that countermeasure (e.g., EMET: the enhanced-mitigation experience toolkit). The need to penetrate systems prior to attack, coupled with the enormous variations among systems, means that the time required to set up an attack is highly unpredictable and that the failure to do so successfully can go unnoticed by the target. Once an attack is launched, however, the likelihood of initial success can be high—but whether the effects can be maintained is questionable. Cyberattacks can disrupt or corrupt, but destruction has taken place only on two occasions (the Stuxnet computer worm, which targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities, and what appears to have been a cyberattack on a German blast furnace). To date, no one has been killed as a direct consequence of a cyberattack. Attackers are more likely to waste their victims’ time and money than to create the sort of damage that implicates laws-of-armed-conflict (LOAC) concerns. Ambiguity is consequently a deeply embedded feature of cyberwar. It is often very difficult to determine who carried out an attack using technical means alone. Battle-damage assessment is also complicated by the need to access the attacked system to see how it was affected (there’s no equivalent to overhead reconnaissance) at a time when systems are likely to be withdrawn for repair. Against some types of attacks (e.g., to
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corrupt data or processes), not even the victim may be sure what was rendered amiss. In theory, cyberwar promises instant effects a nywhere in the world at low risk to individual cyberwarriors. This makes it possible for one country—or non-state actor—to help another (notably by defending another, given the high levels of secrecy associated with offense) without leaving home. These days (as opposed to the mid-1990s), almost all of the effort to penetrate a system is entailed in finding a usable vulnerability, building the attack tool, and monitoring the results rather than triggering the malware itself. Thus, the actual trigger puller (the responsible party under LOAC) can be anyone with the necessary expertise. The various components of cyberwar can be separated in ways unavailable to most conventional combat arts. However, when working against a system unconnected to the Internet, attackers may need physical proximity, and their effects may require waiting for some random event (someone inserting a USB stick, or flash drive, into an otherwise isolated system) to occur. The fact that hackers are at low risk and equipment requirements are inexpensive suggests that a cyberwar capability can be difficult to destroy but also that rogue cyberwarriors could operate without high levels of command and control. Martin Libicki See also Civil Disobedience; Conflict Theory, Realistic; Defense Planning; Drones; Internet Jihadism; Social Influence; Youth and Political Change
Further Readings Clarke, R., & Knake, R. (2010). Cyberwar. New York, NY: Ecco. Libicki, M. C. (2016). Cyberspace in peace and war. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Singer, P. W., & Friedman, A. (2014). Cybersecurity and cyberwar: What everyone needs to know. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Zetter, K. (2014). Countdown to zero day: Stuxnet and the launch of the world’s first digital weapon. New York, NY: Crown.
D Death
of
history and are even rarer in modern times. In some cases, it is not clear whether the death of a leader is “accidental,” an example being the death of the Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash in 1988.
Leaders
The death of a leader may have significant impact on the political environment, particularly if the death is sudden and unexpected. Leaders’ lives may be cut short due to political assassination, accident, suicide, or natural causes such as heart attacks or cancer. Regardless of the cause, power must be transferred after the death of a national leader, and this transition may create instability within the political structure of the state. Power transitions at the national level are substantially different in a democracy from power transitions within an authoritarian dictatorship. In any political system, the death of any national political or societal figure affects citizens and often leads to mass public gatherings, which may turn violent or may remain peaceful. After the death of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, several cities experienced violent riots, but after the death of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, mournful gatherings remained largely peaceful. This entry briefly addresses the varying causes of death of leaders, highlights two controversial deaths, and concludes with a discussion of the public response and policy ramifications of leader deaths.
Assassination/Coup d’État The killing of political leaders is a historical occurrence, with the killings of Julius Caesar of Rome, archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and Abraham Lincoln of the United States all receiving a plethora of attention in popular literature. The assassination of political and societal leaders, particularly heads of state, has become less likely with improved technology and improved security details. National leaders no longer ride in convertible vehicles as did John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, nor does the general public have access to their leaders as they did in 1901 when Leon Czolgosz was able to shoot U.S. President William McKinley from just a few feet away. Sitting heads of state are more likely to die from natural causes in contemporary times than from assassination. Leaders are also vulnerable to losing their lives during and after a coup d’état. Should internal military or security forces, for example, decide to overthrow a sitting head of state, the leader may be inadvertently caught in the crossfire or the leader may be executed after the coup event. A leader may also be targeted for death, such as in 1981 when Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh was shot and killed as part of a failed coup attempt by members of the military.
Accidents Leaders are not immune from the risk of injury or death from accidents. While rare, leaders have died in plane crashes, such as Ahmed Ould Bouceif of Mauritania in 1979 or Samora Machel of Mozambique in 1986. Other accidents such as the house fire that killed Bjarni Benediktsson of Iceland in 1970 and the horse-riding accident that killed Don Stephen Senanayake of Sri Lanka in 1952 also occur. These accidental events are rare in
Natural Causes Leaders are more likely to die from natural causes such as heart attacks and cancer while in office than any other reason. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela died in 2013 161
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from cancer, Hafiz al-Assad of Syria died in 2000 from a heart attack, and William Henry Harrison of the United States died in 1841 from pneumonia only 32 days after his inauguration.
a positive effect on that state’s transition to a democracy and may affect fiscal policy. Current knowledge is not robust, and the impact of leader deaths merits additional interdisciplinary scholarly attention from fields such as psychology, political science, and criminal justice.
Suicide Suicide among leaders is rare. Possibly the most wellknown leader suicide is that of Adolf Hitler of Germany in 1945. Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide reportedly by consuming cyanide pills to avoid capture in the last days of World War II. Salvador Allende of Chile is reported to have shot himself in 1973 during a coup d’état by the Chilean military, also in order to avoid capture.
Controversial Events Causes of death for certain leaders are controversial in nature. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, died in Paris in 2004, and his cause of death was originally ruled as natural due to illness. In 2013, evidence surfaced suggesting that Arafat may have died from polonium-210 poisoning, resulting in conflicting reports on the cause of death. Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat, has long argued that her husband was assassinated. Preceding the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the plane carrying President Juvenal Hbariymana of Rwanda and President Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi crashed, killing everyone on board the plane. Evidence showed that the plane was hit by a missile, but investigations have been unable to determine who was responsible for the attack.
Public Reaction and Public Policy Studies indicate that the death of a leader in a democratic state has little to no effect on the stability of the state. The sudden death of a leader certainly has a psychological and emotional impact on citizens, and it is not uncommon for people to gather to mourn their fallen leader. If the leader is assassinated, anger may be the primary emotion, resulting in further political violence. After Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated, an insurrection resulted in the death of 68 police and soldiers. In the United States after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, public anger resulted in the burning of newspaper offices and protests in the streets. Some Southern sympathizers were tarred and feathered. Scholarly inquiry into public policy changes after the death of a leader indicates that these events do not have an effect on policy in democratic states. In an authoritarian state, evidence indicates that the death of a leader, whether by natural means or by assassination, may have
Laura N. Bell See also Assassinations/Violence in Politics; Authoritarianism; Civil Wars; Conspiracies; Dictatorship; Mass Political Behavior; Political Crimes; Transitioning Fragile States
Further Readings Iqbal, Z., & Zorn, C. (2006). Sic semper tyrannis? Power, repression and assassination since the Second World War. Journal of Politics, 68(3), 489–501. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508 .2006.00440.x Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A. (2005). Do leaders matter? National leadership and growth since World War II. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), 835–864. Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A. (2009). Hit or miss? The effect of assassinations on institutions and war. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 1(2), 55–87.
Decision Making Decision making is a dynamic and interactive process incorporating a sequence of events from the time when decision makers recognize the need to solve a problem until the time when they authorize a course of action to solve it. This definition shows that the process by which a decision is implemented is not part of the decision-making process itself, although both processes are complementary. In other words, decision making and implementation are related but distinct concepts. The process of decision making can be based on rational, intuitive, or political processes. This entry presents the political perspective on decision making in organizations by providing an overview of the concept and aspects of political behavior in decision making, the types of political actors, the link between political behavior and rationality, and tactics of political behavior. The entry concludes with a model of political behavior in decision making which incorporates the conditions that favor the presence of political behavior, along with its dynamics and consequences.
Overview Decisions involve a technical problem of struggling to reach a relevant choice which takes into account
Decision Making
various contextual factors as well as the political problem of reconciling conflicts among subgoals and demands. The political view/problem in decision making has been accepted as a central characteristic of the decision process, intriguing both scholars and practi tioners. It focuses on the way in which concerned people exercise power together with other political tactics to make decisions on behalf of their organization. This view emerged in the literature of political science in the 1950s and looks at an organization as an arena of political games in which decision makers attempt to ensure that their personal goals are met by the organization’s decisions; as a rule, the preferences of the most powerful people prevail. Such a view can offer a compelling portrayal of the way in which decision makers actually make organizational decisions.
The Concept and Aspects of Political Behavior In line with the behavioral theory of the firm, actions, interactions, and counteractions among people, along with their conflicting interests and motivations for getting involved in decisions, are common features of organizational work that lead the decision-making process to be largely political in nature. In the same vein, differentiation between people and organizational units within an organization tends to encourage political activities among interest groups as they seek to defend their own goals. Political behavior can be defined as intentional actions taken by people to defend their own goals, those of the organization, or some combination of these. This definition reflects several facts about political decision making. First, political behavior is a planned or intended activity. In other words, political actors practice politics deliberately. Second, politics can be practiced by decision makers who directly participate in the decisionmaking process or those who are not involved in this process but can affect it and have their own interests at stake in its outcomes. For example, an employee with a personal agenda may spread rumors and lies about a candidate whose promotion would be well deserved, in order to adversely influence the attitude of those who will decide on this case; and the candidate may retaliate in kind. Third, although political behavior often has a negative connotation in people’s minds and, equally, although researchers have overstated its negative aspect, it is a broad and multidimensional concept which can be seen in two ways: the constructive, functional, or positive way and the destructive, dysfunctional, or negative one. While the former refers to the cases where political actors are interested in defending organizational
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interests, the latter stresses the fact that people play politics to secure their own positions and interests even if these are hostile to those of their organization. Both aspects coexist in organizations with every possible variation, although there is scant research, if any, that empirically examines their simultaneous existence. This multidimensional nature of political behavior shows the need to develop new constructs to show its evolving concepts and to develop measures of these constructs to reveal a more faithful and dynamic picture of political behavior in decision making. The evidence discussed in the literature of decision making indicates a general negative influence of political behavior on organizational outcomes. This may be due to factors such as the delays and extra costs resulting from tracking back in the process to undermine the power of the antagonists, taking counteractions to override opposition, manipulating information to defend preferred outcomes, and, finally, coercion by superior power holders to block a viable option or weaken competing demands. However, some commentators counter this conclusion, arguing that if decision makers possess good intentions toward organizational interests accompanied by the required skills to deal constructively with political behavior, the effect may be to produce a diversity of arguments, neutralize negative politics, assist an organization to learn and adapt, lead to a better strategy, and secure enough support for it.
Types of Political Actor Because interaction between people within the organization and through its recognized borders is a fundamental feature of political behavior, political actors can be categorized into four types according to the relations involved. The first type refers to members of an organization and their endeavors to influence decision processes in order to serve their own interests. The second type points to the concept of the interest group, which is essential for understanding the interorganizational impacts on the decision-making process. Interest groups can be seen as organized social entities whose members recognize that they have substantial common demands and who thus tend to work together in order to defend their demands from those of others. In so doing, interest groups may play politics within themselves and across their formal boundaries. The third type accommodates political behavior among the organization’s units and considers their attempts to sway the decision-making process to defend the interests of these units, for instance by securing organizational resources. The final type incorporates external parties, such as stakeholders, customers, unions, funding institutions, governmental agencies, and community
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bodies, and refers to their influence on the decisionmaking processes for the sake of meeting institutional demands. This last type is of increasing importance nowadays, since organizational decisions are increasingly judged by reference to social criteria and organizations are increasingly extending their external networks. In some cases, certain important decisions may be an arena for the political maneuvers of a range of political actors such as internal organizational actors— individuals, groups, or units—in addition to external parties. What links these types of political actors together is the belief that people, whether insiders or outsiders, need to engage in politics to defend their personal, group, unit, or institutional interests.
Political Behavior and Rationality Exponents of the political decision-making model reject the notion that organizational members are rational, since their interests and expectations about the future usually conflict with those of their organization. On these grounds, this model contrasts with rationality and at the same time impinges on it. For example, strong power variation, as a political tactic, may restrict the exchange of knowledge and impose a blind spot wherever relevant information, views, and formal analyses are concerned if they conflict with self-interests. Otherwise, politically motivated behavior may increase the scope for intuition, in particular when there is no objective criterion for success. Although more important decisions, rather than less important ones, may stimulate political behavior because they may be crucial to the interests of decision makers, paradoxically, the same decisions may greatly need rationality for functional reasons, such as reducing the risk and cost for the organization, and for symbolic reasons, such as spotlighting capable decision makers. Several commentators support this notion and argue that the decisionmaking process can be best described as an “interweaving” of rational, intuitive, and political processes. This lack of consensus ultimately reflects the need for further research on the relationship between decision politics and other distinct characteristics of the decision-making process: reflexivity, conflict, intuition, and rationality.
Tactics of Political Behavior Political tactics can be split into two classes, depending on their source. The first class depends on power and contains mainly those who exercise the formal authority of their superior hierarchical positions. Decision politics is a field for exercising influence, and power is a reservoir of potential influence; hence, the use of power can be considered as the most effective political tactic.
The link between power and political behavior is direct, though the ways in which political actors use power are diverse and complicated. One way to use power is to alter the analytical techniques when they do not conform to what is preferred. Another way, notably in less developed countries, is to appoint less qualified people to key positions. Such appointments provide a power base from which top managers, such as CEOs, general managers, and leaders of governmental organizations can steer the decisions made by lower managers in the desired direction as well as driving the decisions made at higher levels toward predetermined ends, rather than what are necessarily the best ends for the organization. Similarly, decision makers can use their power to change decision premises and targets, prevent an issue or option from being considered, control key appointments or other resources required to implement decisions, use the general right of veto and final approval, and, finally, enhance the ability of decision makers to use the second class of political tactics, which are discussed in what follows. Power is neither synonymous with political behavior nor the only political tool that decision makers can use, since those without power are still able to exercise politics through the second class of tactics. This class incorporates the tactics engaged in by people occupying positions similar to, or lower than, others in the hierarchy who are also involved in the decision process. It includes tactics such as persuasion, repeated negotiation or bargaining, co-opting, threats, the manipulation of credibility and the reputation of others, rewards or the exchange of favors, the forming of coalitions, agenda control, limiting the apparent alternatives, the tactics of timing that affect communications and meetings, the use of outsiders such as experts or consultants to support preferred options, and tactics relating to the control and manipulation of critical information. For example, a manager can restrict the flow of information to lower and top managerial levels in order to feed encouraging information in favor of his or her personal benefits and to bias the information about the benefits of his or her opponents. Similarly, agendas and meetings can be controlled by setting the order in which problems are discussed so that the early decisions are likely to exclude less preferred alternatives. In practice, political tactics are rarely used singly; rather, political actors usually use a combination of the above tactics.
A Model of Political Behavior in Decision Making Although any modeling of political behavior in decision making is suggestive rather than conclusive, two modes
Decision Making
of modeling can provide a way forward. One is concerned with process analysis, and the other focuses on variance analysis. The former is oriented toward the sequence of events in the phenomena of theoretical interest, which in our case is the political process of decision making; the latter directs attention to predicting the variance in the antecedents and outcomes of political behavior. The model shown in Figure 1 presents an analysis of political behavior in decision making that builds upon these two modes in addition to other concepts and issues discussed in this entry and related research. It is divided into three stages: antecedents, dynamics, and consequences. The model starts with the antecedent conditions that may stimulate political behavior. As proposed in this model, the variance in political behavior dynamics is likely to be predicted by the factors associated with four perspectives. These are (1) demographic and personal-based antecedents, (2) decision-based antecedents, (3) organization-based antecedents, and (4) environmental and externally based antecedents. For example, certain features of decision makers, such as propensity to risk, and those of the decision in
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question, such as its significance for resource allocation and organizational survival, may intensify political behavior. Similarly, some organizational characteristics, such as the level of horizontal differentiation, the hierarchical centralization of power, and the existence of occupational groups, are likely to encourage political behavior. A further antecedent of political behavior is external factors such as environmental hostility and the dependence on external bodies for resources or approval. Political behavior dynamics represent the second stage in the proposed model. They can be depicted in terms of (1) political tactics, such as the use of power, manipulating information, lobbying, co-opting, and secret communication; (2) political purpose, such as constructive and destructive politics; and (3) the level of political intensity and hence politicking. The third stage in the proposed model indicates the influence that political dynamics have on decision outcomes. Most previous research has provided several reasons for political behavior to have an adverse impact. For example, many political tactics, such as manipulation and secret communication, are likely to distort relevant information and lead decision makers to take
Antecedents Demographic and personal-based antecedents • Age, tenure, experience, education, occupational groups • Affect/emotion, self-confidence, propensity to risk, cognitive styles, mood status, jealousy Decision-based antecedents • Ambiguity, uncertainty, motive, complexity, significance/urgency
Organization-based antecedents • Size, age, performance, corporate control, hierarchical centralization of power, horizontal differentiation, slack, organizational culture
Environment- and external-based antecedents • Environmental hostility, turbulence, complexity, and instability • Reliance on other organizations for resources • National context
Dynamics
Consequences
Tactics • Power • Lobbying and co-optation of key external parties, manipulating information, secret communication, bargaining, tactics of timing
Purpose • Constructive/positive/ functional politics • Destructive/negative/ dysfunctional politics
Intensity • More intense politicking • Less intense politicking
Figure 1 A Model of Political Behavior in Decision Making
Negative • Organizational outcomes compromised • Less commitment to decision implementation • Additional costs and delays in the decision process
Positive • Decision quality enhanced • Considering various views • More careful decision making • Improving organizational adaptation • Obtaining external support
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decisions on the basis of inadequate information, which results in poor performance. Similarly, political behavior may give rise to impaired understanding of the contingencies of the decision, such as its environmental constraints, which also discourages an accurate and broad examination of decisions and therefore increases the likelihood of disappointing outcomes. Interestingly, some commentators, as discussed earlier, argue that political behavior can be helpful in certain situations. For example, in a rapidly changing environment, political behavior may be a mechanism for prompt organizational adaptation. It may also contribute to considering new assumptions for making the decision, endorse a necessary change blocked by those who may have conflicting demands, and ease the path for implementing the decision. Finally, the relationships depicted in Figure 1 may not be as simple as shown, since interactions are expected among the components of each stage in this model, such as the possible impact of political tactics on political intensity. Similarly, consequences of previous politics-based decisions may have an impact on antecedents and dynamics of political behavior in future decisions. Studying such interactions needs to continue, in order to improve our understanding of political behavior in decision making. Said Elbanna See also Civic Engagement; Crisis Decision Making and Management; Direct Versus Indirect Democracy; Lobbying; Partisanship; Political Participation; Third Party; Women and Leadership
Further Readings Child, J., Elbanna, S., & Rodrigues, S. (2010). The political aspects of strategic decision making. In P. C. Nutt & D. C. Wilson (Eds.), The handbook of decision making (pp. 105–137). Chichester, England: Wiley. Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Elbanna, S. (2006). Strategic decision-making: Process perspectives. International Journal of Management Reviews, 8(1), 1–20. Elbanna, S. (2016, February). Managers’ autonomy, strategic control, organizational politics and strategic planning effectiveness: An empirical investigation into missing links in the hotel sector. Tourism Management, 52, 210–220. Ferris, G. R., & Treadway, D. C. (Eds.). (2012). Politics in organizations: Theory and research considerations. London, England: Routledge. Hickson, D. J., Butler, R. J., Cray, D., Mallory, G. R., & Wilson, D. C. (1986). Top decisions: Strategic decision-making in organizations. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Mintzberg, H., Raisinghani, D., & Theoret, A. (1976). The structure of “unstructured” decision processes. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 246–275. Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985). Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6, 257–272. Pfeffer, J. 1981. Power in organizations. London, England: Pitman.
Decision Making, Political See Political Deliberation
Defense Planning This entry is about U.S. defense planning, which is a special case of strategic planning, the process through which an organization decides on objectives, strategies, and particular actions. This includes allocating resources and establishing controls for implementation.
History Modern U.S. defense planning owes much to four events, all of which sought better alignment of responsibilities, authorities, and incentives. Under President Harry S. Truman, the 1947 National Security Act created a new cabinet position: the secretary of defense, to whom the Departments of Army, Navy, and Air Force report. The act also created statutory unified and specified commands (i.e., joint commands), the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Congressional amendments gave the secretary of defense substantially more statutory power, but the army, navy, and air force still had separate budgets and pursued agendas that were sometimes service–parochial rather than nationally coherent. Interservice rivalries sometimes caused inefficiency and ineffectiveness. In 1962 under the Kennedy administration, secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara was the first secretary to exploit the new responsibilities and authorities. He introduced reforms that applied lessons of management theory and practice, which included clarifying objectives, strategy, and implications for defense programs. He sought to integrate and balance foreign policy, military strategy, force requirements, and the defense budget, and to approach all defense planning in a rational and analytical way based on the national
Defense Planning
interest. Although McNamara is often remembered negatively for his role in the failed Vietnam War, the essence and benefits of his reforms have endured for more than 50 years. The third event was congressionally driven during the Reagan administration. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 elevated the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to that of the principal adviser to the secretary of defense and the president on military matters, supported by a large joint staff. The act also created the vice chairman, who was to have a major role in the defense planning process. The act also sharpened and streamlined the military command system. Authority flows from the president to the secretary of defense, and then to combatant commanders without going through the armed services. The chairman is not in the command chain, but usually communicates leadership orders to combatant commands, and otherwise assists the secretary of defense in execution. A fourth event was the 2001 introduction of capabilities-based planning, by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under the George W. Bush administration. The impetus was again the desire to improve jointness and related integration, in this case in developing future forces. This recognized continuing barriers to planning for effective joint operations that cut across service boundaries, as discussed in the mid-1990s by the joint staff’s study, Joint Vision 2010 (followed later by Joint Vision 2020), the Defense Science Board, and others urging what were then called force transformation. Rumsfeld also renamed his system the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE), rather than the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS).
Process The process of defense planning is very complex because of the number of, and relationships among, planning documents, the number of organizations, and the frequent departures from nominal schedules. Figure 1 provides one idealized schematic showing major elements (actualities vary). Time is shown left to right. The president’s national security strategy (NSS) records and explains national interests, objectives, and top-level strategy. Many aspects of these are enduring. The secretary of defense issues a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) every four years as a requirement of Congress. The QDR is supposed to have a short embedded national defense strategy (NDS) closely tied to the NSS, but specialized to the Department of Defense (DoD). The QDR is explicitly consistent with the NSS but adds substantial DoD- relevant detail. By congressional mandate, however, it is
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still nominally “resource unconstrained.” The Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) is more detailed than the QDR and is typically classified. It provides specific guidance, with respect not only to goals, priorities, and objectives but also to fiscal constraints. The military services then develop their separate programs and budgets (called project objective memoranda or POMs). In reality (as distinct from Figure 1), the services start their program building much earlier, but they do so with a fair understanding of what guidance is likely to be. The POMs are then reviewed by the secretary and adjusted in various ways to be consistent with both policy and final fiscal guidance, which often comes late because it reflects painful and controversial political decisions. After White House approval, the “president’s budget” goes to Congress. Congress then reviews and adjusts, sometimes quarreling with the secretary and president until a final bill is passed and signed into law by the president. The cycle then continues. Disputes between Congress and the executive branch are sometimes dramatic, regarding, for example, continuation, cessation, or cancellation of a major weapon system, but the final budget is usually rather close to the president’s budget overall. Many additional events occur along the way. In particular, the secretary of defense receives formal reports from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the National Military Strategy and the Chairman’s Risk Assessment. The secretary receives other advice and recommendations in a variety of forms from the chairman, combatant commanders, and military services. Finally, the secretary often requests special reviews, such as the 2013 Strategic Choices and Management Review. The process and outcomes are easily criticized, and often are. However, the defense planning process has long been admired by other government agencies and other nations because, to a significant degree at least, it accomplishes goals such as being “strategic.” Further, U.S. military forces today are extraordinarily effective in significant part because of the long investment in promoting jointness.
Current Issues There continue to be many challenges in defense planning. In the second decade of the 21st century, political gridlock in Washington led to the infamous “sequestration fiasco,” which has caused great difficulties for defense planners. Further, the United States now has an unprecedented combination of challenges involving Russia, China, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. After 15 years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, U.S. forces have readiness problems with respect to their
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President, Congress Secretary of Defense
National Security Strategy
Ad hoc Sec Def Reviews
Chairman, Joint Chiefs, Combatant Commanders
Fiscal Guidance
Quadrennial Defense Review and National Defense Strategy
President’s Budget
Defense Planning Guidance
Congressional Budget, Signed by President
Program/Budget Reviews and Adjustments
National Military Strategy Chairman’s Risk Assessment
Services
Other Assessments and Recommendations from Chairman, Combatant Commands, Services
Service Plans (POMs)
Figure 1 An Idealization of the Defense Planning System
other worldwide missions. Profound challenges exist that will require substantial changes in concepts of operation, organization, and weapon systems. Paul K. Davis See also Deterrence and International Relations; “Do No Harm” as a Code of Action; Nationalism; Negative Peace; Non-Aligned Nations; Pacifism; Positive Peace; Saber Rattling
Further Readings Dale, C. (2013). National security strategy: Mandates, execution to date, and issues for Congress (Congressional Research Service Report 7-5000). Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Hagel, C. (2014). 2014 quadrennial defense review. Washington, DC: Department of Defense. Perry, W. J., & Abizaid, J. P. (2014). Ensuring a strong U.S. defense for the future: The National Defense Panel Review of the 2014 quadrennial defense review. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute for Peace.
Democracy Democracy is a contested concept. While some perceive it as essentially contested, others observe consensus regarding core assumptions and thus speak of a boundedly contested concept. Such core assumptions relate to democracy as rule by the people and political equality among people. But the common ground is limited. One major difference in understandings of democracy concerns the sphere to which it applies. From a broad perspective, democracy refers to every context in which collectively binding decisions are taken, which includes the family or the workplace. From a narrower perspective, it refers to the form of
government within a state. This entry focuses on the latter and provides a brief overview on democracy’s historical roots, normative and empirical democratic theory, and measurements of democracy, and concludes with a brief discussion of challenges to democracy in the early 21st century.
Historical Roots Democracy literally means rule by the people. The original Greek term demokratia consists of the two components demos (people) and kratein (to rule). However, it does not specify who belongs to “the people” and how ruling should be organized. Opinions about both have changed over time, as is visible in shifts toward the inclusion of women and representation instead of direct participation. In ancient Greece, democracy had a negative connotation. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle feared the involvement of the poor and uneducated in decision making. For Aristotle, democracy was corrupted because it implied that the people only governed for the good of themselves instead of the common good. The mainly negative attitude toward democracy persisted to the 18th century, the “age of Enlightenment,” when the French and American revolutions stimulated the emergence of new models of democracy. The revolutionaries found support in ideas developed by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Comte de Montesquieu. Although both were no enthusiasts of democracy, they contributed important concepts to the debate: the former with his concept of popular sovereignty and the latter with concepts such as the distribution of powers and the value of checks and balances between branches of government. Robert Dahl conceives the history of democracy as a sequence of three great transformations. The first took place during the fifth century BCE, when the Greek city-states became democracies with assemblies as their central institutions. When nation-states emerged with
Democracy
the decline of feudalism, a second transformation occurred to adapt democracy to these larger scale entities, notably by establishing a system of representation. During the ongoing third phase, globalization and the development of transnational systems are contributing to the blurring of national boundaries and a further increase of the scale of the political system. According to Samuel Huntington, democracy has spread around the world in three waves, with the first lasting from the 1820s to the 1920s, the second from the 1940s to the 1960s, and the third starting in the mid-1970s. Both the first and the second waves were followed by reverse waves.
Conceptions of Democracy There are countless definitions of democracy, and myriad adjectives have been devised to describe it. At the same time, there have been attempts to group conceptions of democracy according to several criteria. One major distinction is often made between normative and empirical theories of democracy. Generally speaking, normative democratic theories focus on ideals and deal with the questions of how a democracy should be and how it can be justified. Empirical democratic theories focus on existing democracies. They describe different types of democratic political systems and aim to establish causal relationships with regard to their development, stability, or performance. It is clear that this differentiation is not absolute but a matter of degree. Neither are normative democratic theories detached from their real-world contexts, nor can empirical approaches completely dismiss normative decisions. A second way of classification locates democracy along a continuum ranging from minimalist to midrange to maximalist conceptions. The former two have in common that they are restricted to institutions and procedures and are therefore also called procedural definitions. They relate to the “input dimension” of political processes. The latter, in contrast, also take into account the results that a political system produces. In doing so, they add a focus on the “output dimension.” Therefore, these concepts are also characterized as substantive.
Normative Democratic Theory Minimalist conceptions of democracy take their point of departure in Joseph Schumpeter’s competitive elitist model, which he devised in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In this model, which understands democracy as a method and in analogy to a market, elections are a sufficient characteristic. In the 1950s, Anthony Downs developed an economic theory of democracy, which has
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its roots in Schumpeter’s work. Based on the assumptions of rational choice and methodological individualism, it expects actors to make choices that maximize their individual utility. Schumpeterian conceptions of electoral democracy have more recently been employed by Samuel Huntington and Adam Przeworski. Midrange conceptions share the view that democracy cannot be reduced to the institution of elections. Beyond this, however, they differ considerably. Major differences exist between the liberal and republican strands of democratic theory. Among the former, pluralist conceptions view democratic society as characterized by manifold, that is, pluralistic, interests. This is reflected in multifaceted intermediary institutions connecting state and society. The involvement of citizens and their organizations constrain the government. At the same time, pluralist democracy advocates representation instead of direct democracy. In his book Democracy and Its Critics, Dahl, one of the most well-known representatives of pluralism, identifies five criteria of a democratic process: (1) voting equality, (2) effective participation, (3) enlightened understanding, (4) control of the agenda, and (5) inclusion. In order to satisfy these criteria in practice, political systems must embody the following seven institutions: (1) elected officials, (2) free and fair elections, (3) inclusive suffrage, (4) the right to run for office, (5) freedom of expression, (6) alternative information, and (7) associational autonomy. These institutions are specifications of two of the underlying basic characteristics of polyarchies, inclusion and contestation. (It is important to note that Dahl does not use the term democracy for existing political regimes, but reserves it for an ideal; real-world political systems that approximate democracy are called polyarchies.) The republican strand of democratic theory, on the other hand, includes participative and deliberative approaches. Participatory democracy, as initially developed in the works of Carol Pateman and C. B. Macpherson, stresses the participation of citizens in the political process beyond elections. As one of the most prominent representatives, Benjamin Barber argues in favor of a “strong democracy,” based on the idea of self-government, and stressing civic education and civic attitudes. As explained in the work of Jürgen Habermas, deliberative democracy emphasizes the role of public deliberation for preference formation and transformation as well as decision making. Some feminist works are linked with both approaches. Iris Marion Young develops a concept of inclusive “communicative democracy” on the basis of deliberative approaches. Maximalist conceptions of democracy extend the focus to the political output and outcome. As an instance, social democracy not only advocates extensive
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participation on the input side but also points to the importance of social equality and welfare.
Empirical Democratic Theories Empirical democratic theories deal with the functioning of existing democracies. They are related to several debates about how to best describe and explain democratic politics. In the 1950s, Anglo-American political systems were presented as prime examples of the majoritarian or “Westminster” model of democracy. In the 1960s, in particular Arend Lijphart and Gerhard Lehmbruch developed opposing nonmajoritarian models. The second and third waves of democratization, in turn, advanced debates about the conceptualization as well as advantages and disadvantages of parliamentarian, presidential, and semipresidential political systems. In addition, in particular the third wave of democratization has sparked the development of new typologies of democracy, including diminished subtypes. Since the early 2000s, empirical research on deliberative democracy has gained momentum.
Majoritarian, Consensus, and Consociational Democracy The notions of majoritarian, consensus, and consociational democracy are closely connected with the work of Lijphart, although he borrowed the terms themselves from earlier work. In his landmark studies, he distinguishes between the majoritarian and nonmajoritarian models of democracy. The essence of the former is that governing is done by the majority of the people. The model is exclusive and competitive; power is concentrated in the hands of the majority. In Patterns of Democracy, Lijphart lists the following characteristics of majoritarian systems: (1) concentration of executive power in single-party majority cabinets, (2) executive-legislative relationships with a dominant executive, (3) two-party systems, (4) majoritarian and disproportional electoral systems, (5) competitive pluralist interest group systems, (6) unitary and centra lized government, (7) concentration of legislative power in a unicameral legislature, (8) flexible constitutions, (9) parliamentary sovereignty, and (10) dependent central banks. The consensus model agrees with the majoritarian model in that it accepts the majority rule. The difference is in the kind of majorities it seeks. These majorities involve as many people as possible, and rules and institutions are designed with this aim. Power is shared, dispersed, and thus limited. Decision making is inclusive and relies on bargaining and compromise, which justifies calling this model a negotiation democracy.
Corresponding to the ten criteria for majoritarian democracies, the consensus model is characterized by (1) executive power sharing in broad multiparty coalitions, (2) executive-legislative balance of power, (3) multiparty systems, (4) proportional representation, (5) coordinated and corporatist-interest group systems aimed at compromise and concertation, (6) federal and decentralized government, (7) division of legislative power, (8) rigid constitutions, (9) judicial review of legislation, and (10) independent central banks. Matched with their respective counterparts, all variables form continua and can be grouped into an executive-parties dimension (1–5) and a federal-unitary dimension (6–10). Lijphart refers to similar distinctions between “populistic” versus “Madisonian” democracies suggested by Dahl, “populism” versus “liberalism” by William A. Riker, or “adversary” versus “unitary” democracy by Jane Mansbridge. Consociational democracy is another instance of nonmajoritarian democracy and together with consensus democracy is sometimes subsumed under the label of power-sharing democracy. However, while there are overlaps between the two, they remain separate. Lijphart’s definition of the term has changed over time. Initially, consociational democracy was presented as a (deviant) case of fragmented but stable democracies, where the behavior of the political elites is essential for stability. Through their cooperative behavior in a context of fragmented political culture, leaders deliberately turn democracy into a more stable system. Later on, Lijphart defined consociationalism in terms of the following four characteristics: (1) grand coalition, (2) cultural autonomy, (3) proportionality, and (4) minority veto.
Parliamentary, Presidential, and Semipresidential Democracy The main difference between parliamentary and presidential democracies lies in the government’s responsibility to the elected legislature. In a presidential system, government and parliament are largely independent. Most importantly, the legislature cannot remove the government without cause, that is, except in cases of impeachment. This applies to the United States of America, often mentioned as the most prominent example of a presidential system. In a parliamentary system, the legislature has the constitutional power to remove a government from office. The respective mechanism is the vote of no confidence. This is the case in the United Kingdom. In 1980, Maurice Duverger introduced the concept of a semipresidential system, which is characterized by a popularly elected president who enjoys considerable constitutional authority and who coexists
Democracy
with a prime minister and cabinet that are subject to the confidence of the parliamentarian majority. M atthew Søberg Shugart and John Carey have further subdivided semipresidentialism into premier-presidential and president-parliamentary forms. The advantages and disadvantages of parliamentary versus presidential systems have been discussed at length in the literature. Evidence suggests that presidential systems have a negative effect on democratic consolidation and stability, especially in combination with a highly fragmented legislature, which made Juan J. Linz speak of the “perils of presidentialism.”
Diminished Subtypes The third wave of democratization and especially developments after 1989 have confronted scholars with an unprecedented variety of postauthoritarian regimes. The sudden challenge of grasping these new political systems empirically entailed conceptual confusion and led to the mushrooming of new labels. A widely used strategy consisted in the creation of “diminished subtypes.” In order to arrive at these, scholars proceed from a predefined democratic standard, that is, a root concept, and identify attributes that are missing in specific cases. For instance, regimes that lack civil liberties but where elections take place have been called electoral democracies or illiberal democracies. Some of these diminished subtypes have been arrived at inductively; others were developed by systematic variation of the respective root concept of democracy.
Measuring Democracy Measures of democracy and autocracy help in classifying political systems, comparing them with others, assessing their quality, and, eventually, advancing causal arguments. Some measures include both democracies and autocracies, whereas others deal with democracies in depth. Among the former, the Democracy-Dictatorship Index divides the 202 included countries into democracies or dictatorships for the period 1946 to 2008. In addition, it subdivides democracies into parliamentary, semipresidential, or presidential and dictatorships into military, civilian, or royal. Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy represents a parsimonious approach based on Dahl’s concept of polyarchy. Tatu Vanhanen includes just one indicator for each of the two dimensions of competition and participation. The latest version covers 187 countries over the period 1810 to 2000. The Polity IV project’s Polity Score measures a regime authority spectrum ranging from fully institutionalized autocracies to fully institutionalized democracies. It covers 167 countries over the period 1800 to 2014. Since 2006, the Economist
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Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index has classified 167 countries into full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes. Freedom House, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., has provided yearly data covering 195 countries and 15 territories since 1972. Although by measuring political rights and civil liberties, Freedom House does not strictly offer a measure of democracy, it is often used as such. Similarly, the Worldwide Governance Indicators project offers an assessment of six dimensions of governance, including Voice and Accountability and Rule of Law, for 215 countries over the period 1996 to 2014. Particular attention to developing and transition countries is paid by the Bertelsmann Transformation, which has rated 129 countries since 2003 on the basis of comprehensive country reports. With the Combined Index of Democracy, which measures the regime quality in 161 states between 1996 and 2010, there exists a meta-index combining data from Freedom House, Polity, and the Governance Indicators collected by the World Bank. The resulting measure is supposed to overcome shortcomings of these individual measures. Whereas in general there is a strong correlation between the different measures of democracy, significant deviations exist especially with regard to hybrid regimes, which are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. Measures that focus on determining the quality of democracy include the Democracy Barometer, which rests on the three principles of freedom, control, and equality and includes 70 countries over the period 1990 to 2012. The Democracy Ranking combines a political dimension with five socioeconomic dimensions, including health and environment. By including seven high-level principles of democracy, the Varieties of Democracy project does justice to the various conceptions of democracy, such as electoral, deliberative, or egalitarian democracy. It covers 173 countries from 1900 onward. A special type among the measures of democracy are self-assessments undertaken by the citizens of their respective countries. The methodology, which was originally developed for the Democratic Audit in the UK and is supported by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, has in the meantime been applied in more than 35 countries. According to Polity, there were 94 democracies in 2013. Freedom House counted 86 free and 59 partly free countries in the world in 2016, which corresponds to almost three quarters of the world’s polities.
Challenges to Democracy Despite these numbers, Freedom House sees democracies in distress and points to a decade of decline in global freedom. Some observers, however, do not share this
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assessment and instead refer to democracy’s resilience. Still, scholars and advocates alike state a variety of challenges to democracy. With regard to participation and representation, they are concerned about decreasing turnouts and the resulting decrease in the representation of the lower social classes. Denationalization, globalization, and supranationalization have been mentioned as concerns in this regard, too. On the one hand, they lead to the erosion of the congruence between decision makers and those affected. On the other hand, long chains of legitimacy may erode citizens’ support. International migration raises questions about who should be included in the demos. With regard to civil liberties such as the freedom of information, scholars have identified mediatization—that is, the growing role of the media logic into fields such as political communication—as a challenge because it may eventually lead to increasing commercialization of news, a lowering of their quality, a shift toward media as agenda setter, and depoliticization. Technological innovations that enable large-scale surveillance of citizens are also a case in point. With regard to performance, some scholars doubt democracy’s longterm problem-solving potential. It is feared that present problems may be deferred to future generations. In view of economic and financial crises, some scholars wonder about the poor performance of democracies. Colin Crouch has expressed his discomfort with what he calls “post-democracy,” a condition in which nontransparent elite interaction takes place within formally intact democratic institutions. While discussions about the challenges to democracy are continuing, Philippe C. Schmitter speculates about the development of democracy into a “post-liberal” configuration. Reforms such as devolution, participatory budgeting, the nomination of “future commissions,” the adoption of freedom-of-information acts, and the development of e-government contribute to the transformation of liberal democracy. Thus, democracy seems here to stay, even if modified by yet another adjective. Anne Wetzel See also Dictatorship; Electoralism; End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama); Liberalism; Parliamentarism; Presidentialism; Representative Democracy; Rule of Law; Totalitarianism; Transitology
Further Readings Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barber, B. R. (1984). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Blaug, R., & Schwarzmantel, J. (Eds.) (2001). Democracy: A reader. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A., Shapiro I., & Cheibub, J. A. (Eds.). (2003). The democracy sourcebook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diamond, L., & Plattner, M. F. (Eds.) (2009). Democracy: A reader. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Held, D. (2006). Models of democracy (3rd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity. Lijphart, A. (1999/2012). Patterns of democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dependency Theory Dependency theory proliferated in the 1960s as a Marxist-inspired political economy paradigm seeking to explain economic underdevelopment. The many varieties of dependency combine Marxism with economic nationalism. While economic liberals describe underdevelopment as a condition from which countries can exit, dependency theorists consider underdevelopment as a process that was inherent in the way the international economy operated. Its novelty as a school of thought was that most of its leading theoretical fathers (including Andre Gunder Frank, Theotonio dos Santos, Celso Furtado, and Fernando Henrique C ardoso) were intellectuals from the Third World, unlike those of other ideological paradigms, which were usually imported from the First World. Dependency stood in sharp contraposition to modernization theory. Modernization theory posits that economic development in the Third World could be constructively guided by the First World via foreign aid, trade, and investment. Dependency theorists, by contrast, held these interactions with the developed “North” to be a hindrance to economic development in poor countries. Dependentistas maintained that the world economy was best conceptualized as divided between a core (the North) and a periphery (the South), and that the relationship between the two is what determines economic outcomes (wealth and poverty across countries). Gunder Frank, one of the founders of the dependency school, famously theorized that the same process that shapes the economic development of the North undergirds the underdevelopment of the South—“the development of underdevelopment.” The First World had become rich by siphoning off resources away from the South, and by keeping it underdeveloped; the northern capitalist class thus ensured a cheap supply of raw materials for
Dependency Theory
northern factories. A key element of dependency theory rests on the role played by the dominant (capitalist) classes of the South, which in alliance with the North, were theorized to promote the protection of global capitalist interests. These dependent bourgeoisies (chiefly composed by the rural oligarchy) had interests in the modern sector in trade and services. The underdevelopment of southern nations was thus functional to the interests of dependent bourgeoisies, who therefore rejected a national industrialization strategy. Dependency theorists made a number of arguments to explain the pernicious consequences stemming from the economic interaction with the North. International trade was biased against the South because, over time, the terms of trade (the average price of exports divided by the average price of imports) declined for exporters of raw materials. The monopolistic and oligopolistic nature of industry in the rich North ensured that the prices of manufactured goods would increase over time in relation to the prices of raw materials, which belonged to markets close to perfect competition. Investment from the North also failed to promote development in poor countries because it was capital intensive (and therefore did not generate much employment in local economies) and because profits were repatriated to the North and not reinvested in the countries that were home to foreign direct investment. Foreign aid was often “tied aid,” that is, used to promote economic interests of the industrialized North. The dependency school became dominant in Latin America, led by intellectuals such as dos Santos, Furtado, and Cardoso. It also gained prominence among African intellectual elites, some of whom contributed their own insights, including Samir Amin. While grouped under one paradigm, the writings of dependency theorists showcased significant variety in terms of their theoretical edifices, as well as their proposed solutions to underdevelopment. The most radical versions of dependency, such as that propounded by Gunder Frank, asserted that the only way out of poverty for these underdeveloped nations was to sever links with the world economy and embark upon a socialist revolution. Cardoso, by contrast, spearheaded a new wave of theorists for whom dependency relations could spur economic development under some conditions—what was termed associated dependent development. These writers saw development as historically open-ended, and therefore were less deterministic than earlier dependency scholars. They allowed for different degrees of dependency between particular countries and the North, and also allowed for the possibility that the nature of dependent relations could change over time. The most prominent work representing this line of thought was Cardoso and Enrico
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Faletto’s 1967 work Dependency and Development in Latin America. By the 1980s, dependency theory had become largely discredited among mainstream experts in economic development and in the economics profession. (However, the theory still finds some adherents in Africa and Latin America.) The motives for the decline of the dependency school are widely recognized: one is methodological, the second is empirical. The first relates to the development of social science as a discipline and economic science’s increased level of professionalization. Dependency theory came under a barrage of criticism on the grounds that it was not rigorous enough. These critics held that the “theory” could not be put to the test, and as such, violated one of the first cardinal rules of scientific inquiry, as laid out by Karl Popper: for a theory to be scientific, it needs to be testable. Adherents to the paradigm were not able to answer such criticisms to the satisfaction of most economists. A second set of reasons for the decline of the dependency school lies in empirical developments in the world economy. The enormous economic progress witnessed among the “Asian tigers” (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong) and other countries negated the major basic tenet of dependency theory: the impossibility of economic catch-up with the North. These countries demonstrated that economic convergence was indeed possible and, more damaging still to the dependency view, that it was possible via integration with the world economy—rather than isolation. The fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the Eastern bloc also did much to undermine the intellectual standing of Marxist-derived theories, such as dependency. One of its founders, Cardoso, publicly disavowed the theory in the 1990s, upon becoming president of Brazil. It was symptomatic of the paradigm’s much-diminished standing. Ultimately, the scientific value of dependency was undermined by its politicization, because its theorists desired not only economic growth for their countries but also the development of their societies in a particular political direction: an independent, equitable, and industrialized nation-state. Scientific inquiry was thus marred by placing political ideology (neo-Marxism) above an impartial, bias-free analysis of economic underdevelopment. Omar Sanchez-Sibony See also Development, Theories of; Non-Aligned Nations; Totalitarianism
Further Readings Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1967). Dependency and development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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dos Santos, T. (1980). Imperialismo y dependencia [Imperialism and dependency]. Mexico City, Mexico: Ediciones Era. Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Packenham, R. (1992). The dependency movement: Scholarship and politics in development studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Palma, G. (1978). Dependency: A formal theory of underdevelopment or a methodology for the analysis of concrete situations of underdevelopment. World Development, 6(7/8), 881–924. Seers, D. (Ed.). (1981). Dependency theory. London, England: Frances Pinter. Smith, T. (1979, January). The underdevelopment of development literature: The case of dependency theory. World Politics, 31(2), 247–288. Sunkel, O. (1969, October). National development policy and external dependence in Latin America. Journal of Development Studies, 6(1), 23–46. Valenzuela, A., & Valenzuela, S. (1978, July). Modernization and dependency: Alternative perspectives on the study of Latin American underdevelopment. Comparative Politics, 10(4), 535–557.
Deterrence
and
Crime
The criminal justice system dispenses justice by apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing individuals who break the law. These activities may also prevent crime by three distinct mechanisms—incapacitation, specific deterrence, and general deterrence. Convicted offenders are often punished with imprisonment. Incapacitation refers to the crimes averted by offenders’ physical isolation during the period of their incarceration. Specific deterrence and general deterrence involve possible behavioral responses. Specific deterrence refers to the reduction in reoffending that is presumed to follow from the experience of being punished. There are many sound reasons for suspecting that the experience of punishment might actually increase reoffending. The threat of punishment might also discourage potential and actual criminals in the general public from committing crime. This effect is known as general deterrence and is the subject of this entry. The theory of deterrence is predicated on the idea that if state-imposed sanction costs are sufficiently severe, criminal activity will be discouraged, at least for some. Thus, one of the key concepts of deterrence is the severity of punishment. Our review of severity effects focuses on research findings concerning imprisonment. Severity alone, however, cannot deter. Another key concept in
deterrence theory is the certainty of punishment. In this regard, the most important set of actors are the police— absent detection and apprehension, there is no possibility of conviction or punishment. For this reason, we discuss what is known about the deterrent effect of police.
The Deterrent Effect of Imprisonment Six studies nicely illustrate large differences in the deterrence response to the threat of imprisonment. One that examines the use of imprisonment to enforce fine payment and another that examines the effect of swift and certain punishment for violations of conditions of probation find substantial deterrent effects, whereas study of the deterrent effect of California’s third-strike provision finds only a modest deterrent effect. Still other studies of respectively the deterrent effect of prison sentence enhancements for gun crimes and the heightened threat of imprisonment that attends aging into the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court find no deterrent effects. The six exemplar studies suggest several important sources for the large differences in the deterrent effect of imprisonment. One concerns the length of the sentence itself. Figure 1 depicts two alternative forms of the response function relating crime rate to sentence length. Both are downward sloping, which captures the idea that increases in sentence severity deter crime. At the status quo sentence length, S1, the crime rate, C1, is the same for both curves. The curves are drawn so that they predict the same crime rate for a zero sanction level. Thus, the “absolute” deterrent impact of the status quo sanction level is the same for both curves. But because the two curves have different shapes, they also imply different responses to an incremental increase in sentence level to S2. The linear curve (A) is meant to depict a response function in which there is a material deterrent effect accompanying the increase to S2, Crime Rate C0 A
B C1 S1
S2
Figure 1 Marginal Versus Absolute Deterrent Effects
Sentence Length
Deterrence and Crime
whereas the nonlinear curve (B) is meant to depict a small crime reduction response, due to the diminishing deterrent returns to increasing sentence length. The authors’ reading of the evidence on the deterrent effect of sentence length is that it implies that the relationship between the crime rate and sentence length more closely conforms to curve B than to curve A. For example, Steven Raphael and Jens Ludwig (2003) found no evidence that gun crime enhancements deter; David Lee and Justin McCrary (2009) found no evidence that the more severe penalties that attend moving from the juvenile to the adult justice system deter, and find only a small deterrent effect of California’s third-strike provision. As a consequence, the deterrent return to increasing already long sentences is small, possibly zero. The fine payment and Project Hope experiments also suggest that that curve B, not curve A, more closely resembles what, in medical jargon, would be described as the dose–response relationship between crime and sentence length—the incremental change in crime that accompanies an incremental change in sentence length. While neither of these studies is directed at the deterrence of criminal behavior, both suggest that, unlike increments to long sentences, incremental enhancements to short sentences do have a material deterrent effect on crime-prone populations.
The Deterrent Effect of Police Research on the marginal deterrent effect of police has evolved in two distinct literatures. One has focused on the deterrent effect of police presence and crime, while the other has focused on the crime prevention effectiveness of different strategies for deploying police.
Police Presence and Crime Some of the most convincing evidence on the effect of police presence on crime comes from before-and-after studies in circumstances in which an abrupt change in police presence is clearly attributable to an event unrelated to the crime rate. For example, in September 1944, German soldiers occupying Denmark arrested the entire Danish police force. According to an account by Johannes Andenaes (1974), crime rates rose immediately but not uniformly. The frequency of street crimes such as robbery, whose control depends heavily on visible police presence, rose sharply. By contrast, crimes such as fraud were less affected. Contemporary tests of the police-crime relationship based on abrupt decreases in police presence investigate the impact of reductions in police
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presence and productivity as a result of large budget cuts or lawsuits following racial-profiling scandals. These studies consistently find that large reductions in police presence are followed by increases in crime. The ongoing threat of terrorism has also provided a number of unique opportunities to study the impact of police resource allocation in cities around the world. For example, Jonathan Klick and Alexander Tabarrok (2005) examined the effect on crime in the National Mall area of Washington, D.C., of the color-coded alert system implemented in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. The purpose of the alerts was to signal federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to occasions when it might be prudent to divert resources to sensitive locations, such as the National Mall. During high alerts, police presence increased by 50%. Such increases were associated with about a 15% reduction in crime.
Police Deployment and Crime Much research has examined the crime prevention effectiveness of alternative strategies for deploying police resources. One way to increase apprehension risk is to mobilize police in a fashion that increases the probability that an offender will be arrested after committing a crime. Strong evidence of a deterrent as opposed to an incapacitation effect resulting from the apprehension of criminals is limited. For example, studies of the effect of rapid response to calls for service find no evidence of a crime-prevention effect, but this may be because most calls for service occur well after the crime event, with the result that the perpetrator has fled the scene. Thus, it is doubtful that rapid response materially affects apprehension risk. The second source of deterrence from police activities involves averting crime in the first place. In this circumstance, there is no apprehension because there was no offense. In the authors’ view, this is the primary source of deterrence from the presence of police. One of the authors (Nagin) describes this as the sentinel role of policing. If an occupied police car is parked outside a liquor store, for example, a would-be robber of the store will likely be deterred because apprehension is all but certain. One example of a police deployment strategy that has been shown to be effective in averting crime from occurring in the first place is “hot-spots” policing. David Weisburd and John Eck (2004) propose a twodimensional taxonomy of policing strategies. One dimension is “level of focus” and the other is “diversity of focus.” Level of focus represents the degree to which police activities are targeted. Targeting can occur in a variety of ways, but Weisburd and Eck give special
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attention to policing strategies that target police resources in small geographic areas (e.g., blocks or specific addresses) that have very high levels of criminal activity—so-called crime hot spots. Just as in the liquor store example, the rationale for concentrating police in crime hot spots is to create a prohibitively high risk of apprehension and thereby to deter crime at the hot spot by completely eliminating the opportunity to offend in the first place. Anthony Braga’s (2008) informative review of hotspots policing summarizes the findings from nine experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations. All but two of the studies found evidence of significant reductions in crime. Further, no evidence was found of material crime displacement to immediately surrounding locations. On the contrary, some studies found evidence of crime reductions, not increases, in the surrounding locations—a “diffusion of crime-control benefits” to nontargeted locales. The second dimension of the Weisburd and Eck taxonomy is diversity of approaches. This dimension concerns the variety of approaches that police use to impact public safety. Low diversity is associated with reliance on time-honored law enforcement strategies for affecting the threat of apprehension, for example, by dramatically increasing police presence. High diversity involves expanding beyond conventional practice to prevent crime. One example of a high-diversity approach is problem-oriented policing. Problem-oriented policing comes in so many different forms that it is regrettably hard to define. One of the most visible examples of problem- oriented policing is Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, initiated in the spring of 1996. The objective of the collaborative operation was to prevent intergang gun violence using two deterrence-based strategies. One was to target enforcement against weapons traffickers who were supplying weapons to Boston’s violent youth gangs. The second involved a more innovative use of “focused deterrence.” The youth gangs themselves were assembled (and reassembled) to send the message that the response to any instance of serious violence would be “pulling every lever” legally available to punish gang members collectively. This included a salient severity related dimension—vigorous prosecution for unrelated, nonviolent crime such as d rug dealing. Thus, the aim of Operation Ceasefire was to deter violent crime by increasing the certainty and severity of punishment but only in targeted circumstances, namely if the gang members were perpetrators of a violent crime. Just as important, Operation Ceasefire illustrates the potential for combining elements of both certainty and severity enhancement to generate a targeted deterrent effect.
Three Topics for Future Deterrence Research An Integrated Model of the Effects of the Threat and Experience of Punishment At the outset of this review, a distinction was made between what criminologists call specific deterrence and general deterrence. The former is the response to the experience of punishment, whereas the latter is the response to the threat of punishment. There is no logical contradiction between the conclusions that the experience of punishment actually increases the propensity for offending, even as the threat of punishment deters it. Indeed, a review by Daniel Nagin, Francis Cullen, and Cheryl Jonson (2009) of the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism concluded that the great majority of studies point to the prison experience as increasing, not decreasing, subsequent offending. We see two major tasks related to developing an integrated model of the response to both the threat and the experience of legal sanctions. One involves extending deterrence theory to account for how the proclivity for crime is affected by the experience of punishment. This will require, at a minimum, consideration of the effect of the experience of punishment on sanction risk perceptions, as well as the limiting of legal alternatives to criminal behavior owing to factors such as stigma and human capital erosion. Because by construction this model will require a dynamic framework, consideration of the degree to which potential offenders anticipate and discount future consequences of crime and non-crime will be necessary. There is a vast literature that documents the present orientation of criminals. This raises difficult issues of how best to model this present orientation in the context of criminal decision making.
Measuring Perceptions of Sanction Regimes A sanction regime defines the sanctions that are legally available for the punishment of various types of crime, in addition to the way that legal authority is actually administered. A major theoretical and empirical gap involves how active criminals and people on the margin of criminality perceive the sanction regime. As (general) deterrence is the behavioral response to perceptions of sanction threats, establishing the linkage between risk perceptions and actual sanction regimes is imperative. Unless perceptions adjust, however crudely, to changes in the prevailing sanction regime, the desired deterrent effect will not be achieved.
Deterrence and International Relations
The Deterrent Effect of Shorter Prison Sentences and Identification of High-Deterrence Policies Crime prevention by incapacitation necessarily requires higher imprisonment rates and the attendant social costs. By contrast, if crime can be deterred from occurring in the first place, there is no perpetrator to punish. Steven Durlauf and Nagin express skepticism that there are large numbers of policies involving increases in sentence length that produce substantial deterrent effects. The one exception may involve short prison sentences. Sentence lengths in Western European countries tend to be far shorter than in the United States. Research based on European data of the deterrent effect of shorter sentence lengths should be a priority (Durlauf & Nagin, 2011). Durlauf and Nagin are among the researchers who express optimism that viable police-deployment strategies hold promise for having large deterrent effects. Specifically, they speculate that strategies which result in large and visible shifts in apprehension risk are the most likely to have deterrent effects that are large enough to reduce imprisonment as well. Hot-spots policing might have this characteristic. More generally, the types of problem-oriented policing strategies used in Operation Ceasefire have the common feature of targeting enforcement resources on selected high-crime people or places (Kennedy, 2009). Also, the multimodal approach to preventing crime among high-risk groups that combines deterrent and reintegration tactics described by Andrew Papachristos, Tracey Meares, and Jeffrey Fagan (2007) is a creative example of a carrot-and-stick approach to crime prevention. Although the effectiveness of these strategies for focusing police and other criminal justice resources has yet to be reliably demonstrated, priority attention should be given to their continued evaluation, particularly as they relate to the carrot component of the intervention. Indeed, the effectiveness of positive incentives as a crime preventive is an understudied topic. Daniel S. Nagin and Robert Apel See also Blaming the Victim; Conformity; Deviance and Control; Distributive Justice; Human Rights; Procedural Justice; System Justification
Further Readings Andenaes, J. (1974). Punishment and deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Apel, R. (2013). Sanctions, perceptions and crime: Implications for criminal deterrence. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 29, 67–101.
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Braga, A. A. (2008). Police enforcement strategies to prevent crime in hot spot areas. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Durlauf, S. N., & Nagin, D. S. (2011). Imprisonment and crime: Can both be reduced? Criminology and Public Policy, 10, 9–54. Nagin, D. S. (2013). Deterrence in the 21st century: A review of the evidence. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Papachristos, A. V., Meares, T. L., & Fagan, J. (2007). Attention felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhoods in Chicago. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 4(2), 223–272.
Deterrence Relations
and International
The period of relative peace and stability following the massive violence, destruction, and instability that pervaded the first half of the 20th century poses an important question: Why was there no World War III? Political scientists and theorists largely attribute the absence of a third world war to successful deterrence practiced by the world’s superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, during the cold war (1945–1989). War-ravaged Europe during the first half of the 20th century gave tragic visibility to how instability could manifest when not effectively managed, imbuing the pursuit of stability with a new significance. In a world without an overarching international sovereign, political scientists who subscribe to the realist interpretive framework of international relations believe that the ensuing anarchic nature of the international system makes instability the norm, conflict inevitable, and the status quo constantly under threat from states seeking greater resources. The post–World War II geopolitical landscape did not alleviate the inevitability of conflict, but rather systemically changed the ways in which it would come about. With the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) occupying the role of predominant hegemons in a newly bipolar international system, stability became contingent upon maintaining a balance of power between the two competing camps, with the United States leading the “West” and the Soviet Union representing the “East.” Striking a balance of power between the United States as a bulwark of capitalism and the communist expansion of the Soviet Union required maintaining this bipolar system, a new status quo under threat by communist expansion. The looming possibility of Soviet dominance motivated the United States’ defensive posture toward the bipolar status quo as a means to
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protect its own dominance within the international system and maintain stability in a post–World War II world. Security measures to safeguard the bipolar system and American hegemony within it do not fully explain why a third world war did not break out. Coercive strategies provide this necessary in-between. The coercive strategies at the United States’ disposal at the onset of the cold war included both deterrence and compellence. Compellence, unlike deterrence, is more offensive in its approach and entails coercing the opponent to take a specific action or to undo an action already done. In short, compellence is a method of coercion that seeks to change the status quo. Deterrence, by contrast, seeks to protect the status quo by dissuading the opponent from taking some unacceptable action that might alter it. Deterrence involves manipulating the cost–benefit analysis of the opponent in such a way that their initial intended course of action is no longer in their best interest. For example, if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack against the United States, then the United States would retaliate in such a big way that the Soviet Union could not rationalize attacking in the first place. Ultimately, the United States opted to pursue deterrence over compellence as its security strategy during the cold war for two reasons. First, because deterrence tactically prevented the Soviet Union from using force without the need for the United States itself to use force in a form of preventative coercion. Second, because American strategists decided it is easier to keep things the way they are than to try to change them—for instance, it’s unlikely the Soviet Union would get rid of their nuclear arsenals upon the United States’ request. Those characteristics of deterrence, among others, also help explain why the cold war never turned “hot” between the respective militaries of the superpowers themselves. Deterrence as both practice and theory predates the cold war and the nuclear age. Historically and still today, deterrence can involve a variety of tactics, including forming alliances, building up armies or arsenals, and dissuading potential attackers from attacking through fear-mongering or threats. The reason behind the close association between deterrence and the cold war, despite the widespread and historical practice of deterrence, will become apparent through the following discussions of how the introduction of nuclear weapons elevated deterrence from a routine military practice to the best-known way to prevent the end of the world.
Dealing With a Different World: Deterrence in a Bipolar System The cold war arose from systemic change in the international balance of power. Following World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union ascended the world
stage as the dominant superpowers and transitioned the world from its prewar multipolar status to a bipolar international system with the balance of power shared (and contested) between the communist “East” and the capitalist “West.” This new system and distribution of power problematized an already-existing security dilemma, the theory that in an anarchical international system an increase in one state’s security decreases the security of others. Because the global balance of power is maintained between only two great powers in a bipolar international order, the two actors focus solely on each other. The states are internally balanced due to their matched military capabilities, whereas in a multipolar system states form alliances to balance externally. Although a bipolar system’s balance of power is inherently more stable than a multipolar system, which produced both world wars, it is more difficult to determine in a bipolar system if the security measures taken by one party are offensively or defensively intended. This is because when one party undertakes a defensive measure it necessarily reduces the relative security of the other, thus leaving the other feeling threatened. The Vietnam War, for example, resulted in part from the United States overreacting to a potential gain by the Soviet Union. Proxy wars such as the Vietnam War are part of what makes the bipolar system unique: The relative stability allows both states to concern themselves only with the security measures of the other. As a consequence, deterrence works more effectively in a bipolar system because it is easier to communicate effectively among a smaller number of parties, and in doing so, dispel misperceptions about the balance of power that could lead to full-on war. Thus, the nature of a bipolar international system is such that the ambiguity of security measures taken by either superpower may cause a spiral effect toward instability or open conflict, even if such a result is against the interests and desires of both parties. For instance, if the United States defensively undertook to heighten its security by increasing its military strength, such an action might prompt Soviet leadership to feel relatively less secure. This, in turn, might cause the Soviet Union to respond with similar militaristic measures, heightening the United States’ own feelings of insecurity in return. This reciprocal process has the capacity to intensify tensions on both sides and increase the likelihood of conflict even if neither side truly desires it. Therefore, maintaining a balance of power requires open acknowledgment of each state’s strengths and vulnerabilities because capability, credibility, and clear communication are all crucial for deterrence to succeed and conflict to be avoided. The United States and the Soviet Union in turn had to learn how to pursue their interests in a bipolar world in which their
Deterrence and International Relations
decisions depended in part upon the actions of the rival power. Accordingly, the United States and the Soviet Union needed a way to predict the response of the other, and this new impetus gave rise to a revolutionary application of deterrence theory. Deterrence requires manipulating the cost-benefit analysis of the adversary in such a way that it no longer is in the adversary’s best interest to pursue a course of action that the other party sought to prevent. Thus, when either making or manipulating these cost–benefit calculations, both parties work under the assumption that the adversary is a rational actor. This baseline assumption made rational deterrence theory more central to cold war deterrence strategy and prompted the use of game theory, models through which to predict decision making by rational actors in a bipolar system. Originally a method for analyzing economic models, game theory helped explain why cooperation between two rational actors is more difficult to achieve in some circumstances than in others, even if cooperation is beneficial for both parties. One illustration of this is the now-famous prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a game theory model that explains why two “rational” actors—that is, two actors with their own best interests at heart and the ability to take logical action—might not cooperate. The game takes its name from an imaginary situation in which two perpetrators, who are in cahoots committing a crime, are incarcerated, taken into solitary confinement, and given no way to communicate. However, the police don’t have enough evidence to convict the prisoners, so they have to rely on the prisoners’ testimonies. If prisoner A testifies against prisoner B, that would be sufficient evidence for the police to convict prisoner B to a full sentence of 20 years and set prisoner A free. Alternatively, if they both stay silent (cooperate), they both will serve 1-year sentences, or if they both testify (defect), they will both serve 10-year sentences. Making this decision in isolation from one another, both prisoners, assumed to be rational actors, will decide to testify and avoid the possibility of a full sentence. The figure shown here depicts this phenomenon by providing numerical values that show the extent to which cooperating versus defecting—given the adversary’s action—serves one’s best interests. For example, if both participants cooperate, they settle for a lower premium of “2” in serving their interests than if they were both to defect and attain the higher premium of “3.” Thus, in the prisoner’s dilemma model, there is no solution that accommodates the best interests (“4”) of all participants. Each actor must therefore assume the other is only concerned with self-interest and defect unless each participant has reason to believe the other will cooperate. If prisoner A defects while prisoner B cooperates, as mentioned above, prisoner A goes free
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while prisoner B serves a maximum sentence. Consequently, striking a deal to cooperate involves more than communication—both actors must be credible. PRISONER’S DILEMMA COOPERATE
2
COOPERATE B DEFECT
DEFECT
A
1 4
2 4 1
3 3
The prisoner’s dilemma model found real application in the arms race, the competition for superior military capability, between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. The arms race presented three options for the United States and the Soviet Union with “armament” and “disarmament” operating as the proxies for defect and cooperate, respectively. The two parties could (1) both disarm, resulting in no arms race, lower military expenditures, and greater security for both parties; or (2) both arm, resulting in both parties pursuing an arms race, incurring heavy military expenditures, and reducing their mutual security by creating a more dangerous world; or (3) one party could arm and the other disarm, leaving one party more secure and the other more vulnerable. The prisoner’s dilemma model concedes that disarmament by both parties serves the security interests of all. However, despite the detrimental consequences, both the United States and the Soviet Union pursued armament during the cold war, so why was that the case? Without communication, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could be sure the other would cooperate and disarm, and the world became less safe as a result. As evidenced in the U.S.–U.S.S.R. arms race, cooperation only becomes a viable option when each participant has reason to believe the other will cooperate. But under what circumstances would this belief come about? This is explained by deterrence strategy. Successful deterrence requires accurate communication and signaling. Well-communicated, credible threats can change the cost–benefit analysis of an adversary, so that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the consequences of noncooperation. Theoretically, if Washington and Moscow had established an effective line of communication and mutually agreed to disarm, then pursuing armament would have come at the cost of retaliation, thus eliminating armament as a rational course of action.
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Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence Strategy The introduction of the United States’ nuclear arsenal to the global balance of power in 1945 with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, altered deterrence strategy in important ways. Reflecting this, President Eisenhower outlined a foreign policy that placed nuclear deterrence at the center of American strategy. Through the threat of “massive retaliation,” the Eisenhower administration in 1954 sought to deter communist aggression by offsetting the benefits of Soviet expansion with the high cost of a potential, retaliatory nuclear attack by the United States—the core of nuclear deterrence. This form of deterrence dominated U.S. foreign policy until the collapse of the Soviet Union created a seismic shift in the balance of power and ended the bipolar system. Although the Soviet Union first developed its nuclear capability in 1949, during the mid- to late 1950s it acquired second-strike capability, and the nature of the game completely changed. The Soviets had assembled a nuclear arsenal large enough to support nuclear retaliation if the United States were to launch a nuclear attack against them first. Thus, the “massive retaliation” deterrence strategy that characterized the Eisenhower administration became impractical and needed to be replaced. By the 1960s (coinciding with the Kennedy administration), the policy conversation had shifted along with the nuclear balance of power from deterrence to mutual deterrence. The late 1950s and early 1960s marked the golden age of nuclear strategy as game theorists grappled with the implications of mutual deterrence in particular. The bipolar balance of power at the time meant that neither superpower could gain advantage by nuclear attack without inviting mutually assured destruction (MAD), a theory holding that both U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals had grown so large that each superpower, if provoked militarily, had the ability to annihilate the other in a counterstrike. Thomas Schelling, famed game theorist, even went so far as to argue that because of MAD, nuclear weapons were useful only as deterrents in a bipolar system. The utility of nuclear capability in the cold war world thus resided in its defensive, deterrent power rather than in its offensive possibilities. Fittingly, the concept of “stability” became more prominent in nuclear deterrence discussions. The irony of stability during the cold war was that effective deterrence required each superpower to maintain a nuclear arsenal large enough to balance the nuclear power of the other. Both the United States and the Soviet Union issued nuclear threats as a deterrence strategy to prevent the other from upsetting the balance of power. Their threats operationalized the following
logic: If the Soviets were to attack the United States, the United States might not be able to prevent their attack but had the potential to retaliate in such a way that would deter the Soviets from attacking in the first place. Provided the Soviet Union was a rational actor, this logic reveals the importance of credible, capable, wellcommunicated threats as means to maintain stability. However, this entire system relied heavily on the quality of communications between the “great powers.” Without effective communication, the two countries found themselves at the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Coinciding with the golden age of nuclear strategy was a period of little to no communication between the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union, which complicated both sides’ ability to effectively implement deterrence. Deterrence strategies for both leaderships at this time frequently took the form of balancing nuclear power through signaling threats. That being the case, the decline of communications between the superpowers during the late 1950s and early 1960s made miscommunications inevitable. Without clear signaling in a bipolar system, defensive measures taken by one side could seem offensive to the other, and thus routine attempts to balance power could be (and were) misinterpreted or, worse, presumed to warrant retaliation. In theoretical terms, this is how the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis at the brink of the most devastating attack in human history.
Criticisms of Deterrence Theory Deterrence theory, as a political application of game theory, derives its legitimacy and predictive power from baseline assumptions about (1) human nature and (2) the nature of threat. Regarding human nature, deterrence theory assumes that the actors involved (both states and leaders) are rational and will work to safeguard and secure their best interests. Regarding the nature of threat, deterrence theory assumes that all threats are credible and could be precursors to an outright attack. When U.S. president Richard Nixon put American nuclear weapons on high alert in 1969, he employed a “madman” strategy so the Soviet Union would take his threats more seriously. Similarly, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s decision in 1960 to take off his shoe and pound the podium at a United Nations assembly was a calculated ploy to make himself appear crazy so that Westerners would take the threat of nuclear war more seriously. These memorable theatrics give the impression of credibility, but it cannot be assumed without confirming against other variables (such as the actor’s capability to act on said threat, whether it is in the actor’s best interest to carry out
Deterrence and International Relations
such a threat according to a cost–benefit analysis, etc.). Effective nuclear deterrence requires multifaceted confirmation of what the adversary is capable of and willing to execute. Otherwise, the (inherent) deterrent power of mutually assured destruction no longer holds. Likewise, the baseline assumption in deterrence theory—that the adversary is a rational actor who makes predictable decisions according to a cost–benefit analysis—has little basis in reality because of essential confounding factors. Rational decision making, for example, involves determining the best course of action based on available information. But what about situations in which there is asymmetric information—where one party knows less than the other? If rational decision making follows a cost–benefit formula, then party A’s unawareness of important variables that led to party B’s rational choice make party B’s subsequent behavior less predictable to party A. Additionally, the rational-choice model that underpins deterrence theory’s predictive power fails to account for the inseparable influence of the “irrational,” which includes emotion and biased beliefs. There are no one-dimensional actors who act only out of self-interest; humans are guided by both rational and irrational motivations, such that their future behaviors and actions cannot be predicted by mapping all available information onto a cost–benefit formula. For example, consider the case of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Could the United States rightfully characterize Saddam Hussein as a rational actor who would react to deterrence in a predictable way? Unlike the calculated madman strategies of Khrushchev and Nixon, Hussein’s decision to gas his own people contributed to his reputation, among Western powers, as a real madman. Given Hussein’s reputation as an aggressive and seemingly irrational leader, capable of hurting his own people, invading Kuwait, and more, the dangers of assuming an adversary’s rationality become apparent. Another criticism of deterrence theory developed during the heyday of nuclear strategy in the 1950s and early 1960s with the arrival of nuclear deterrence and the alleged deterrent power of MAD. Game theorists argued that in situations of mutual deterrence, like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, stability occurs from the balance of nuclear power. When the adversary acquires second-strike capability, the costs of nuclear attack o utweigh the benefits. In that event, the stable nuclear balance decreases the likelihood of nuclear attack. However, a crucial double standard exists. Why is it that a stable nuclear balance decreases the likelihood of nuclear attack but does little or nothing to reduce the probability of limited war, a war where neither side uses all the resources available to it? The resulting stability–instability paradox lies at the core of nuclear deterrence criticism: do nuclear
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weapons make the world safer? Answering this question requires a metric for measuring the success or failure of deterrence. United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, for example, exemplifies a limited, proxy war that erupted between the “West” and the “East” during the cold war despite both sides having nuclear capability. Does the use of force in Vietnam indicate deterrence failure? Ironically, the stability– instability paradox would hold mutual nuclear deterrence itself responsible for proxy wars like Vietnam, and more recent wars such as in Syria. A stable nuclear balance decreases the likelihood of direct war between two superpowers at the cost of allowing greater risk taking in indirect and lower intensity conflicts. Consequently, the nuclear peace hypothesis, which claims that nuclear weapons in certain circumstances (like those of the cold war) can lessen the likelihood of conflict and foster stability, fails to account for the instability that stems from such stability.
Conclusion The cold war did not mark the birth of deterrence theory, but it did usher in a new era for international relations. The bipolar international system that emerged following World War II changed the nature of the global balance of power, and introduced new difficulties in maintaining stability and preventing conflict. During this time of flux, deterrence strategy became a central stabilizing agent in the global balance of power. The cold war between the “East” and the “West” never became hot enough to spark a World War III despite both superpowers having significant nuclear capability. However, the crux of nuclear deterrence strategy arises from that irony. When the United States and the Soviet Union already have nuclear weapons arsenals, the balancing of nuclear power by (1) deterring further armament and (2) deterring nuclear attack results in relative stability. This form of stability does not preclude the possibility of limited war erupting, but it does reduce the likelihood of nuclear war or an interstate war between superpowers. The reverberations of cold war–era deterrence strategy are also seen in international relations theory. Deterrence strategy transformed international relations theory by, first, introducing strategic models used to predict an adversary’s likelihood of resorting to cooperation versus conflict and, second, striking a nuclear balance of power that precipitated relative stability. Few would have predicted that a world in which rival superpowers have nuclear capability would be the same world in which another world war seems less likely. Harper Weissburg and Fathali M. Moghaddam
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See also Aggressive Capitulation; Conflict Theory, Realistic; International Security; Materialism: Rational and Psychological Perspectives; Nonviolence; Realism; Wars of Attrition
Further Readings Allison, G. T. (1969). Conceptual models and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The American Political Science Review, 63(3), 689–718. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/ 1954423.pdf Ayson, R. (2004). Thomas Schelling and the nuclear age. Canberra, Australia: Frank Cass. Danilovic, V. (2002). When the stakes are high: Deterrence and conflict among major powers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jervis, R. (1978). Cooperation under the security dilemma. World Politics, 30(2), 167–214. Retrieved from http://www .jstor.org/stable/pdf/2009958.pdf?acceptTC=true Morrow, J. D. (1994). Game theory for political scientists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nye, J. S., & Welch, D. A. (2013). Understanding global conflict and cooperation: An introduction to theory and history. New York, NY: Pearson. Payne, K. B. (2001). The fallacies of cold war deterrence and a new direction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Rauchhaus, R. (2009). Evaluating the nuclear peace hypothesis: A quantitative approach. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53(2), 258–277. Retrieved from http://jcr.sagepub.com/ content/53/2/258.full.pdf Wells, S. F. (1981). The origins of massive retaliation. Political Science Quarterly, 96(1), 31–52. Retrieved from http://www .jstor.org/stable/2149675
Development, Theories
of
This entry provides a brief critical history of theories of development by reference to modernization, development theory, postdevelopmentalism, and sustainability. It focuses on recent theories of economic development within the context of globalization that highlight human capital theory and the role of education, and it examines the free-market ideology of neoliberalism in relation to development. The entry also introduces readers to the recent paradigms of the knowledge, creative, and innovation economies and examines alternative development possibilities of open science and open development.
Origins Theories of development have been a major feature of modernization and globalization theory since the end of
World War II, aimed at the development of a higher quality of life for humans and encompassing aspects of foreign aid, poverty reduction, gender equality, information and communications technology (ICT) and infrastructure development, human rights, and the environment. Increasingly, in the 21st century development has been tied to the Millennium Development Goals initiated and first formulated at the September Summit of 2000 when a large group of nations adopted the UN Millennium Declaration and committed themselves to a global partnership to reduce extreme poverty by 2015. At the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015, world leaders adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development including 17 goals. The notion of development is a contested concept with a very troubled history. In development studies, which emerged as an academic subject in the 1970s and became popular in the 1990s, the term development focused on economic prospects for countries following decolonization, often associated with modernization theory, with development economics and recently with critiques of Westernization and forms of neoimperialism. The concept came into view in the aftermath of World War II and in the cauldron of the cold war as the basis for securing young states and transition economies as part of the Western alliance of free market capitalism against the emerging and burgeoning Soviet communist system. At this early stage, these new states, many of which had only recently achieved independence from past colonial powers, were referred to as “undeveloped” countries, and the problems they faced were termed problems of “underdevelopment.” Two predominant views echoed the divisions of the cold war. In the West, the concept of development was seen as primarily an economic problem that could be conceptualized in stages following the model and industrializing experience of Western development. This linear concept of development in large measure was still strongly caught up in the metaphysics of the world history of “progress” most clearly illustrated by Walt Whitman Rostow’s anticommunist (1960) Stages of Development that postulated a structural model in which “take off” from traditional society leads to an age of high mass consumption. Rostow’s liberal model utilized ideas of free trade and the ideas of 18th-century economist Adam Smith. It was purportedly based on the historical experience of the United States and Europe and has been roundly criticized for being biased toward a Western model of modernization. In the Soviet bloc, by contrast, questions of development were seen as inextricably tied to the problem of domination and exploitation to be understood in terms of V. I. Lenin’s theory of imperialism that describes the function of financial capital in generating profits from colonization
Development, Theories of
as the final stage of capitalism. Lenin’s model, which hypothesized a core-periphery model of capitalist exploitation, has influenced Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and the dependency theory of Gunder Frank and others. Both sides in reality have been caught up in partisan political ideologies and historical assumptions about world history and Hegelian assumptions of development. Most recently, postdevelopmental theory, so called, holds that “development” is an ideological creation of the Western academy; on the basis of the critique of ethnocentrism and universalism, it sees “development” as an obstacle to genuine social progress. According to Arturo Escobar, postdevelopmental thought is interested in the potential of local culture and knowledge as well as pluralistic grassroots political movements based in solidarity and direct democracy.
Theories of Economic Growth Theories of economic growth have broadly followed four models. Classical liberal theory (Gerschenkron & Rostow) understands development as capital formation leading to large-scale infrastructure projects. This approach, typical of the 1960s, employed a historical stage model that hypothesized the shift from undeveloped countries to developed countries on the basis of the Western experience. Social theories of development emphasize the importance of human capital based on investment in education as the key to economic growth. Various approaches following this model tended to relate the rate of economic growth as more closed to poverty and inequality. Structural theories focused on the conditions of the Third World and the capacity to duplicate the Western experience of development in former colonies. Liberal approaches emphasized “import substitution” policies and government protectionism, and Marxist approaches tended to focus on the analysis of colonialism or “dependency” core-periphery relations, whereby poor countries became a source of raw materials for developed countries. Neoclassical theories tend to rely on free markets with an emphasis on the encouragement of private investment and increasing market efficiency at home. Neoliberalism has become the most prevalent form of this model of development, beginning in the 1980s with the election of Margaret Thatcher as UK prime minister in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States a year later. The major theorists are members of the Chicago school, including Milton Friedman, with advocacy of markets over government intervention, and Gary Becker on human capital. Neoliberal development theory charts the transition from education considered as primarily a social issue of integration to a new development paradigm whereby
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education is considered central to international economic development within a global knowledge economy. Investment in education is said to benefit the individual, society, and the world as a whole. The shift from state investment in education to investment by individuals took place in the 1980s and 1990s after the neoliberal privatization of state education systems. Yet there is a consensus that broad-based education of good quality is among the most powerful instruments known to reduce poverty and inequality. Education is considered not only fundamental to the construction of democratic societies but also the key to creating, applying, and spreading knowledge—and thus to the development of dynamic, globally competitive economies. The major difference has followed the neoliberal application of human capital theory. It was during the decade of the 1980s that Friedrich von Hayek’s political and economic philosophy and Chicago-school arguments were used by Thatcher and Reagan to legitimate the neoliberal attack on “big government” and the bureaucratic welfare state with a policy mix based on “free trade” and the establishment of the “open” economy. This doctrine was accompanied by a raft of policies that supported economic liberalization or rationalization characterized by the abolition of subsidies and tariffs; floating the exchange rate; the freeing up of controls on foreign investment; the restructuring of the state sector, including corporatization and privatization of state trading departments and other assets; “downsizing,” “contracting out,” an attack on unions and abolition of wage bargaining in favor of employment contracts; and, finally, the dismantling of the welfare state through commercialization,“contracting out,” “targeting” of welfare services, and increasingly individual “responsibilization” for health, welfare, and education. On this neoliberal view, there is nothing distinctive or special about education or health; they are services and products like any other, to be traded in the marketplace.
Financialization Financialization, along with globalization and neoliberalism, is one of three forces that structure global development. The rise of neoliberalism as the prevailing global policy paradigm is explained by the growing role and power of finance in the political economy of capitalism and in the finance class of owners and banking institutions. This shift since the mid-2000s is not just a quantitative expansion but a change in the nature of financial institutions that jettisoned traditional loanmaking functions to pursue the creation and sale of its own financial instruments. Financialization is a systematic transformation of capitalism based on (1) the massive expansion of the financial sector, where finance
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companies have taken over from banks as major financial institutions and banks have moved away from old lending practices to operate directly in capital markets; (2) large previously nonfinancial multinational corporations having acquired new financial capacities to operate and gain leverage in financial markets; (3) domestic households having become players in financial markets (the ascendancy of shareholder capitalism), taking on debt and managing assets; and (4) in general, the dominance of financial markets over a declining production of the traditional industrial economy. This shift is part of a larger change that favors new informational, cultural, cognitive, and biotech forms of capitalism. Richard Peet (2011) expresses the change in terms of a process increasingly formalized and expressed as abstraction represented in algorithmic regulation: Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include “everything.” We now live in the era of global finance capitalism. (p. 1)
Financialization has huge implications for “development” as the world integration of markets involves increasingly new forms of financial instruments and the growth of a shadow banking system alongside regional free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that takes away local control and favors the multinational control of forms of symbolic capital in the form of copyright and trademarks. Financialization is a term that describes an economic system or process that attempts to reduce all value that is exchanged (whether tangible, intangible, future, or present promises, etc.) into either a financial instrument or a derivative of a financial instrument. The original intent of financialization is to be able to reduce any work product or service to an exchangeable financial instrument. It is an aspect of increased symbolization, mathematization, and computerization of financial markets that are trends within knowledge capitalism. Neoliberalism is an expression of the power of finance that has gathered pace with the internationalization of capital and the globalization of markets. Algorithmic capitalism and its dominance of the market increasingly across all asset classes has truly arrived. It is an aspect of informationalism (informational capitalism) or cybernetic capitalism, a term that recognizes more precisely the cybernetic systems similarities among various sectors of the postindustrial capitalist economy in its third phase of development—from mercantilism to
industrialism to cybernetics—linking the growth of the multinational info-utilities (e.g., Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon) and their spectacular growth in the last 20 years, with developments in biocapitalism and the informatization of biology, and fundamental changes taking place with algorithmic trading and the development of so-called financialization. Some scholars suggest that neoliberalism and globalization are themselves expressions of finance, closely tied to the development of derivatives markets and the evolution of an international financial system where the international rentiers have managed to significantly increase their share of national income often on the basis of systematic fraud, corruption, and widespread criminalization of financial practices. The current financial crisis is a systemic crisis of the entire capitalistic system based on interconnected global financial markets. Christian Marazzi (2010), in The Violence of Financial Capitalism, indicates that the global crisis is a new type of crisis: “It is the capitalist way of transferring to the economic order the social and potentially political dimension, the dimension of the resistances ripened during the phase leading up to the cycle” (p. 85). He maintains it is the first systemic and global crisis of neoliberal financial capitalism that began with the crisis of the Fordist model of accumulation and the consequent deregulation of the banking system during the 1970s. One of the most significant alternatives to emerge against the entrenched power of neoliberalism and its market fundamentalism is the openness movement based on expanding the commons. The prevailing dogma of individual self-interest, individual property rights, market exchange, and globalized free trade has been called into question through the commons, or openness, movement, which demonstrates that a wide range of commons both in nature and in civic life especially the Internet as platform can provide stable, equitable, and ecologically sustainable outcomes in preference to the predation of markets. Development studies, in its infancy, focused on the world’s poorer countries and applied Western solutions to their problems focusing on industrialization and economic growth. Today, we are beginning to recognize that the impact of economic, political, and social forces are global and radically interconnected. It is also better understood that solutions need to reflect local values with grassroots participation based on the recognition of different cultures, histories, and identities. Perhaps most tellingly it is deemed that Western science and technology must work with and learn from indigenous knowledge systems. Even in these new partnerships, the term development looms large—development studies, cultural development, sustainable development—that
Deviance and Control
demonstrates the discourse has not yet fully liberated itself from the underlying linear logic and Hegelian metaphysics. Michael A. Peters See also Capitalism; Civil Wars; Democracy; Dictatorship; Energy Competition; Hierarchy of Needs; Keynesian Economics; Meritocracy; Religiosity; Rule of Law; Social Welfare; Socialism and Communism; Springboard Model of Dictatorship; Tragedy of the Commons; Weber’s Protestant Ethic
Further Readings Becker, G. (1964). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Escobar, A. (1995). Escobar: Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frank, A. G. (1966). The development of underdevelopment. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Friedman, M. (1962). Freedom to choose. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lenin, V. I. (2010). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1916/imp-hsc/ Marazzi, C. (2010). The violence of financial capitalism. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Peet, R. (2011). Contradictions of finance capitalism. Monthly Review, 63(7). Rostow, W. W. (1960). The stages of economic growth: A noncommunist manifesto. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015 U.N. Millennium Project. Retrieved from http://www .unmillenniumproject.org/goals/ Wallerstein, I. (1992). The West, capitalism, and the modern world system. Review, 15(4), 561–619.
Deviance
and
Control
Deviance is a highly contested concept in the social sciences and beyond. As with most scholarly topics, the research on deviance includes many competing perspectives and shifting historical frameworks that can generally be divided into two main camps: (1) positivism, or consensus theories; and (2) social constructionism, or conflict theories. The former approach can be described as conservative (conserving tradition) and is based on the premise that there is a shared
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understanding in society about social rules or norms, what constitutes the violation of norms, and how violations should be punished and regulated. Conflict theories are based on the premise that there is no underlying agreement about what constitutes norms or violation of norms, and that deviance is socially constructed based on the interests of those who hold or exercise power in society. Most broadly, deviance can be defined as any behavior that violates a social norm or a rule of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior. Deviance and conformity are forms of response individuals and groups make to real or imagined pressures or threats. Norms and laws are key elements of social control used to maintain order and conformity. Rules about deviance and conformity vary dramatically across cultures and over time, which is why most contemporary scholarship on deviance tends to focus on the social bases, process, rules, and responses to deviance constructionism. Social scientific research on deviant behavior takes two major forms: (1) quantitative research that measures crime rates, for example, by relying on statistics of criminal behavior; or (2) qualitative research as seen in critical discourse analysis or historical orientations, or based on interviews examining how people (individually and collectively) come to define some conduct as deviant and other acts as normative. Deviance and conformity are the social product of real or imagined pressures and threats. To understand the concept of deviance, it is also crucial to see it as inextricably intertwined with social control—regulating the way people think, feel, and behave. Norms and laws are key elements of social control used to maintain the social order and to ensure conformity. Depending on the controlling powers in a particular historical period, people classified as deviant are subjected to an array of social control practices, such as fines, shaming, beatings, incarceration, drugging, surgical interventions, involuntary hospitalization, and even torture and execution. Social control refers to the various tactics and means used by a society to bring its transgressive members back into line with social norms. Social control can be seen in two ways: The first is internal or self-control: the processes of internalizing the norms of society, accepting them as valid, and personally investing in them. Internal social control operates by way of different agents of socialization such as the family, school, peers, and mass media. The second is external social control, which refers to the formal, semiformal, and informal (see below) efforts on the part of society to enforce social conformity. There are three general types of social control that may work in concert or separately: formal social control, semiformal social control, and informal social
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control. Formal social control relies on agents and institutions such as the police, courts, and corrections that possess the legitimate authority to force conformity or impose punishment. Semiformal social control is enacted by social institutions and social agents, such as psychologists, social workers, counselors, and mental health workers in psychiatric hospitals, who treat individuals for the purpose of the resocialization of those who break formal (law) and informal rules (norms). Semiformal agents are experts who exercise power by virtue of their specialized training and credentials; although they do not possess the power of arrest and detention, they may have an important role to play in the formal deviant’s criminal justice outcome. Informal social control refers to expressions of displeasure with, or approval of, someone’s actions, such as frowning or smiling. Given that most individuals are approval seeking, informal social control forms a cornerstone of everyday life. The social control of deviance can also be referred to as criminal and noncriminal deviance. Crime is defined as the violation of formally enacted criminal laws and can be referred to as formal deviance such as robbery, theft, assault, rape, and murder. The second type of deviant conduct refers to violations of informal norms or social rules that have not been codified into law but may elicit a negative social reaction or response. Formal social control provides functions that include (1) retribution—the idea that people should pay for a crime they have committed; (2) deterrence— punishments, such as incarceration, intended to prevent people from committing future crimes; (3) rehabilitation— society should work to reform or rehabilitate criminals to transform them into productive members of society; and (4) societal protection— removing the formal deviant from the community to protect the safety of nondeviants. Lastly, a new paradigm has been emerging calling for a restorative paradigm: rather than causing harm through the damaging and traumatic effects of incarceration, it provides a communal and collective healing for all parties involved. Most contemporary approaches study the social construction of deviance both historically and contemporarily by examining religious, scien