Perspectives on Politics | Political Science Now

Making Embedded Knowledge Transparent: How the V-Dem Dataset Opens New Vistas in Civil Society Research

July 21, 2017 By APSA

Making Embedded Knowledge Transparent: How the V-Dem Dataset Opens New Vistas in Civil Society Research

by Michael Bernhard, University of Florida, Dong-Joon Jung, Seoul National University, South Korea, Eitan Tzelgov, University of East Anglia, Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame, and Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Gothenburg

We show how the V-Dem data opens new possibilities for studying civil society in comparative politics. We explain how V-Dem was able to extract embedded expert knowledge to create a novel set of civil society indicators for 173 countries from 1900 to the present. This data overcomes shortcomings in the basis on which inference has been made about civil society in the past by avoiding problems of sample bias that make generalization difficult or tentative. We begin with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics. We then turn to the shortcomings of the existing data and discusses how the V-Dem data can overcome them. We introduce the new data, highlighting two new indices—the core civil society index (CCSI) and the civil society participation index (CSPI)—and explain how the individual indicators and the indices were created. We then demonstrate how the CCSI uses embedded expert knowledge to capture the development of civil society on the national level in Venezuela, Ghana, and Russia. We close by using the new indices to examine the dispute over whether post-communist civil society is “weak.” Time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2,999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012 fails to find that post-communist civil society is substantially different from other regions, but that there are major differences between the post-Soviet subsample and other post-communist countries both in relation to other regions and each other.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 342-360

The Escape from Institution-Building in a Globalized World: Lessons from Russia

July 20, 2017 By APSA

The Escape from Institution-Building in a Globalized World: Lessons from Russia

Karen Dawisha

by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, King’s College London, and Karen Dawisha, Miami University

Strong institutions and accountable governments are imperative for any country’s long-term prosperity. Yet the development of such institutions has presented a continuous challenge for many countries around the world. Using Russia as a case, this study brings attention to the unexpected negative impact of global interdependence and shows that institutional arbitrage opportunities have enabled economic actors to solve for institutional weaknesses and constraints in the domestic realm by using foreign institutions, thereby limiting the emergence of a domestic rule of law regime. We argue that such opportunities lower the propensity of asset-holders, normally interested in strong institutions at home, to organize collective action to lobby for better institutions. We demonstrate the main ways through which Russia’s capital-owners make use of foreign legal and financial infrastructures such as capital flight, the use of foreign corporate structures, offshore financial centers, real estate markets, the round-tripping of foreign direct investment, and reliance on foreign law in contract-writing and foreign courts in dispute-resolution.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 361-378

The Power and Limits of Russia’s Strategic Narrative in Ukraine: The Role of Linkage

July 19, 2017 By APSA

The Power and Limits of Russia’s Strategic Narrative in Ukraine: The Role of Linkage

by Joanna Szostek, University of London

Governments project strategic narratives about international affairs, hoping thereby to shape the perceptions and behaviour of foreign audiences. If individuals encounter incompatible narratives projected by different states, how can their acceptance of one narrative over another be explained? I suggest that support for the strategic narrative of a foreign government is more likely when there is social and communicative linkage at the individual level, i.e., when an individual maintains personal and cultural connections to the foreign state through regular travel, media consumption, religious attendance, and conversations with friends or relatives. The role of linkage is demonstrated in Ukraine, where a “pro-Russian, anti-Western” narrative projected from Moscow has been competing against a “pro-Western, anti-Russian” narrative projected from Kyiv. Previous accounts of international persuasion have been framed in terms of a state’s resources producing advantageous “soft power.” However, I propose a shift in focus—from the resources states have to what individuals do to maintain social and communicative ties via which ideas cross borders. In a competitive discursive environment such linkage can in fact have mixed consequences for the states involved, as the Ukrainian case illustrates.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 379-395

The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us?

July 17, 2017 By APSA

The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us?

by Stephen E. Hanson, College of William & Mary

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR naturally provokes us to reflect on the course of Eurasian and world history in the post-communist era. Upon closer examination, however, it is not clear what significance the precise time span of two and a half decades has for the scientific study of political and institutional change. A review of the social science literature indicates that we are very far from having any consensual understanding of how long processes of regime evolution typically take—and thus, how to establish the relevant time span for judging the scientific accuracy of initial predictions about the outcomes of post-communist “transitions.” I argue that the first step in assessing the lessons of post-Soviet political change to date, from a social-scientific point of view, lies in defining the term “regime” more precisely, so that scholars can at least agree when one regime has ended and another begun. In this respect, Weberian sociological theory provides useful conceptual materials for a more general theory of “regime evolution” within which the empirical results of the first twenty-five years of post-Soviet change can be situated.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 328-341

The Politics of Capitalist Diversity in Europe: Explaining Ireland’s Divergent Recovery from the Euro Crisis

July 13, 2017 By APSA

The Politics of Capitalist Diversity in Europe: Explaining Ireland’s Divergent Recovery from the Euro Crisis

Samuel Brazys and Aidan Regan, University College Dublin

The 2008 financial crisis hit few places harder than the Euro periphery. Faced with high levels of public debt, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain were each compelled to implement harsh austerity reforms. Yet despite this common policy response, the recoveries have shown significant divergence. In particular, Ireland seems to have managed to succeed economically in a way that the other peripheral countries have not. The prevailing narrative is that Ireland’s recovery from the crisis is due to “austerity” and improved “cost competitiveness.” Drawing upon theories from the study of comparative capitalism we challenge this narrative, and argue that the Irish recovery is an outcome of a state-led enterprise policy aimed at nurturing a close relationship with corporate firms from Silicon Valley. Using qualitative and quantitative investigation we find evidence that this state-led FDI growth model, rather than austerity induced competitiveness, kick-started Ireland’s recovery from crisis. As Ireland is a critical case for the “success” story of austerity in Europe, our findings represent a significant challenge to the politics of adjustment. It suggests the strategies of business-state elites, and not simply the workings of electoral coalitions, explains the politics of adjustment in advanced capitalism.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 411-427

Mapping Eurasia in an Open World: How the Insularity of Russia’s Geopolitical and Civilizational Approaches Limits Its Foreign Policies

July 12, 2017 By APSA

Mapping Eurasia in an Open World: How the Insularity of Russia’s Geopolitical and Civilizational Approaches Limits Its Foreign Policies

by Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University, and Nicole Weygandt, Cornell University

Russia’s Eurasian view of the world brings together anti-Western and state-centric elements. Placed at the center of its own geo-political sphere of influence and civilizational milieu, Russia’s worldview is self-contained and insular. What Russian policy slights is the global context in which its primacy over a heterogeneous Eurasia is embedded and which, when disregarded, can impose serious costs. This paper traces the broad contours of Russia’s geopolitical and civilizational Eurasianism, linking it to earlier scholarship on regions and civilization. We also explore selected aspects of Russia’s foreign security (Crimea and Ukraine) and economic (energy) policies as well as the constraints they encounter in an increasingly global world that envelops Russia and Eurasia in a larger context.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 428-442

Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse

July 11, 2017 By APSA

Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse

Ronald Inglehardt

Pippa Norris

by Ronald Inglehart, University of Michigan, and Pippa Norris, Harvard University

Growing up taking survival for granted makes people more open to new ideas and more tolerant of outgroups. Insecurity has the opposite effect, stimulating an Authoritarian Reflex in which people close ranks behind strong leaders, with strong in-group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and rigid conformity to group norms. The 35 years of exceptional security experienced by developed democracies after WWII brought pervasive cultural changes, including the rise of Green parties and the spread of democracy. During the past 35 years, economic growth continued, but virtually all of the gains went to those at the top; the less-educated experienced declining existential security, fueling support for Populist Authoritarian phenomena such as Brexit, France’s National Front and Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. This raises two questions: (1) “What motivates people to support Populist Authoritarian movements?” And (2) “Why is the populist authoritarian vote so much higher now than it was several decades ago in high-income countries?” The two questions have different answers. Support for populist authoritarian parties is motivated by a backlash against cultural change. From the start, younger Postmaterialist birth cohorts supported environmentalist parties, while older, less secure cohorts supported authoritarian xenophobic parties, in an enduring intergenerational value clash. But for the past three decades, strong period effects have been working to increase support for xenophobic parties: economic gains have gone almost entirely to those at the top, while a large share of the population experienced declining real income and job security, along with a large influx of immigrants and refugees. Cultural backlash explains why given individuals support Populist Authoritarian movements. Declining existential security explains why support for these movements is greater now than it was thirty years ago.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 443-454

The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century

July 6, 2017 By APSA

The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century

by Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago

When as a graduate student embarking on dissertation research I arrived in the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s, what struck me was that the mundane but exhilarating reality of the place resembled neither the grim vision of Western theorists of totalitarianism nor the vaunted image of Communist self-congratulators. The schematic, theoretically-informed but empirically-flimsy accounts that passed for science in the Cold War fog—consider anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Gorer’s explanation of Soviet authoritarianism as a product of the swaddling of infants, or the intricate, Talmudic inferences of political scientists that Stalinism was prefigured in the works of Marx or Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?—had prepared neither me nor my cohort of budding scholars for the texture and variety of what was before us. Honest observation was difficult under the circumstances, in part because of the obstacles placed in our way by the Soviet authorities but in even greater part by the hegemony of negative preconceptions that most exchange students brought with them. Confirmation and attribution biases, along with cognitive dissonance, worked their magic on the perception of what we experienced. Only prolonged exposure and recognition of the distance between the everyday and the preconceived began to break through the limits of the prejudgments we had brought with us.

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Perspectives on Politics / Volume 15, Issue 2 / June 2017, pp. 455-464

Making Embedded Knowledge Transparent: How the V-Dem Dataset Opens New Vistas in Civil Society Research

Making Embedded Knowledge Transparent: How the V-Dem Dataset Opens New Vistas in Civil Society Research

The Escape from Institution-Building in a Globalized World: Lessons from Russia

The Escape from Institution-Building in a Globalized World: Lessons from Russia

The Power and Limits of Russia’s Strategic Narrative in Ukraine: The Role of Linkage

The Power and Limits of Russia’s Strategic Narrative in Ukraine: The Role of Linkage

The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us?

The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us?

The Politics of Capitalist Diversity in Europe: Explaining Ireland’s Divergent Recovery from the Euro Crisis

The Politics of Capitalist Diversity in Europe: Explaining Ireland’s Divergent Recovery from the Euro Crisis

Mapping Eurasia in an Open World: How the Insularity of Russia’s Geopolitical and Civilizational Approaches Limits Its Foreign Policies

Mapping Eurasia in an Open World: How the Insularity of Russia’s Geopolitical and Civilizational Approaches Limits Its Foreign Policies

Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse

Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse

The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century

The Left Side of History: The Embattled Pasts of Communism in the Twentieth Century

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