This study examines how negative oil shocks affect military expenditures and the quality of democracy in the oil rentier states of the greater Middle East using annual data from 1990 to 2018, ...inclusive. The theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in oil revenues decreases the government spending on patronages and public goods and may challenge the political power of the incumbent leader. The results of the impulse response functions based on the estimated panel vector autoregressive models indicate that the responses of the military burden and non-military expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) to negative oil shocks become negative and statistically significant after three to four years. Reductions in the financial capability of a rentier government and spending on patronages improve the political environment and quality of democracy. However, this political improvement takes some time to develop as the government may resist the reduction in its expenditures during the initial phase of oil shocks. The policy implication of these results is informative for organizations and policymakers interested in the security and political impact of oil sanctions. Restrictions on oil exports decrease the military spending of the oil rentier states and improve their democracy indices in the long run, although the short-run impacts can be negative. These results are not sensitive to different proxies for oil abundance, alternative data on military expenditures, different indicators of democracy, and different groups of oil-dependent countries.
Does the executive's institutional hegemony represent a risk to the survival of democracy? By hegemony, we refer to the president's ability to control other institutions, particularly the legislature ...and judiciary. To answer this question, we develop two indices of presidential hegemony and analyze the duration of democratic regimes in 18 Latin American countries between 1925 and 2016. The results show that executive hegemony is a major driver of democratic instability. This finding is robust to non-linear effects and to potential endogeneity in the relationship between presidential power and democratic backsliding. Our findings challenge traditional concerns about executive-legislative deadlock, and have significant implications for the nascent literature on democratic backsliding, which highlights executive aggrandizement as a risk factor.
Political scientists have repeatedly failed to establish a relationship between the money companies funnel into political campaigns and how members of Congress vote. Notably, studies have mainly ...examined how campaign contributions affect the voting of their direct recipients. However, considering the partisan divide and intense power struggle between the two major American parties, this paper proposes that the influence of campaign contributions operates at the party level. That means a member of Congress is more likely to side with a firm whose donations favor her party, even if the firm has not given to the member’s own campaign. Correspondingly, legislators should be less likely to vote in line with the policy preferences of firms whose donations predominately go to the other party. A quantitative analysis of campaign contributions, corporate policy positions, and roll-call votes in Congress bears out these propositions. While the paper also uncovers a recipient effect, the party effect is more substantial.
This symposium aims to broaden the way scholars theorise and empirically treat the increasingly complex relationships between robots and social life, especially in the context of our historically ...anthropocentric human geographies. The authors of this symposium engage a range of diverse epistemological, ontological, and methodological commitments, but all in some way address the power dynamics and shifting political economies involved in human–robotic interactions as well as possibilities for resisting and overcoming particular forms of domination and oppression. At the same time, the papers present new avenues for conceptualising the rise of robots and robotics and the everyday socio‐spatial relations of contemporary algorithmic life. In a rapidly evolving present and future, where life is increasingly managed in relation to algorithmic imaginaries and automated fantasies, these papers demonstrate the potential for geographers to make significant interventions and contributions to investigate the limits, contradictions, and messy contingencies of socio‐technical assemblages, to trace the shifting spatialities and temporalities of the geographies of algorithmic governance, and to envision radical democratic, post‐capitalist, emancipatory alternatives. These futures are unlikely to be “robot free”, so the question remains how will we build a future set of geographies that acknowledges this reality while also claiming space for the diverse and rich expansion of all forms of life, both human and non‐human?
This article aims to provide a better understanding of how the Iranian parliament building, as an assemblage of buildings, urban spaces, narratives and similar symbols, shapes, reshapes and ...negotiates the Iranian concept of its political self since the establishment of the parliamentary structure in 1906. It examines the political practices, ideologies and consciousness of people affected by different political concepts embedded in each regime. This article discusses the involvement of spaces in creating historical events. Despite similar historical studies, it focuses on where the history of constituting the Iranian Parliament happened. It does so by reviewing and analysing the archives, documents and new urban plans for the Iranian Parliament.
ABSTRACT
Is climate change discourse highly politicized and divisive, or has the debate instead become “post-political,” oriented around consensus, problem-solving and administrative management? ...Adjudicating this debate is important for pragmatic and theoretical reasons. Pragmatically, these divergent characterizations suggest different barriers climate discourse might pose for engaging public concern and citizen mobilization. Theoretically, these characterizations provide different understandings of how elites respond to structural crisis. Using automated text analysis to describe a large corpus of organizations’ press releases about climate change from 1985 to 2013 (N = 1,768), I find that this discourse has been largely expert-oriented and technocratic, neglecting concerns of values and identity widely believed to be important for social movement mobilization. Organizations predominantly frame climate change as a problem that, while real and serious, is best handled through the careful and deliberate work of scientific, political, and economic elites. Surprisingly, these observations remain true even among advocacy organizations. These findings provide empirical support that a “post-political” framing of climate change, where the issue is discussed in a way that neutralizes social and political power dynamics, dominates American organizations’ official pronouncements about climate change. To the extent that earlier scholars are correct that conflict-oriented discursive strategies—such as identification of a common antagonist—are effective at rousing public concern, this discourse is unlikely to mobilize strong public emotion and activism.
•Renewable energy communities (REC) are starting to shift political power structures.•These shifts are visible through increases in capacity, coalitions and social norms.•Electricity decision-making ...is rescaling from centralised levels toward the local and city level.•Where governments are not supportive, this rescaling can be subversive and uncoordinated.•Decentralised ownership may either transform economic and political structures, or conform to existing patterns.
The energy transition is increasingly high stakes, defined by the participation of new actors, and – above all – political. Renewable energy communities (RECs) are electricity system actors defined by local control and motivations beyond profit maximization. There has been much speculation about the potential impact of RECs on political systems, but little empirical investigation. This study examines (a) if RECs are shifting larger political power structures, (b) the mechanisms through which shifts are occurring, and (c) the implications of shifts for the future. It compares across the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Ontario, Canada. Findings reveal that political power is shifting but outright policy wins are rare. RECs are gaining capacity, building political coalitions and benefiting from changing norms. However, they are challenged by pressures from incumbents to maintain centralised ownership and control. Energy action, both sanctioned and subversive, is rescaling toward local levels. Implications for energy and social policies are significant.
Digital visualizations have seen an exponential rise in use by politicians, candidates, and other political actors. Digital visualizations are an informative and engaging genre, but when applied by ...political candidates, they may also be used to persuade or mislead. However, the ways in which different actors utilize them have yet to receive systematic scholarly attention. Informed by a comprehensive theoretical framework related to political power, digital visualizations, and social media campaigns, I perform grounded qualitative content analysis of all cost-of-living visualizations posed to Facebook during the 2015 Israeli election period, by both peripheral and primary political actors. I define two main argumentation strategies (Progress Makers & Hinderers and Re-Visualized Economy) reliant on different narrative, visual, and information-oriented strategies by different actors. An overview of the findings reveals digital visualizations as a meeting ground between the political power of actors, the rhetorical power of emotionality, and the cultural-political power of numbers. I conclude with a reflection on re-visualization as a means of expanding a fourth type of power, discursive power, wherein visualizations are used as a tool for resistance by weaker actors, against the narrative of reality promoted by stronger actors, relying on the rhetorical affordances of the digital political visualization genre to increase their political power. Digital visualizations thus offer a uniquely agile tool for political actors of all types to utilize in gaining discursive power in the competition over election narratives in the digital arena of social media.
Kim surveys the debate on the Ukraine crisis among scholars and the responses of Indo-Pacific countries in terms of balancing, hedging, and bandwagoning strategies. She focuses on explaining four ...types of strategies employed by secondary Indo-Pacific powers: it will present the concept of "balancing" in two separate ways, as well as the concept of "hedging." Not all balancing strategies develop in the same way, although there can be a shared objective. In this case, the objective is signaling an intention to show strong opposition to Russia's unprovoked armed attack on Ukraine. However, approaches to how to signal such an intention differ.
This article analyses the media coverage of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by progressive and conservative media outlets in South Korea from 2000 to 2018. Through systemic ...content analysis, the study reveals that the tones and content of PISA-related articles were largely influenced by the political alignment between the media outlet and the government in power, rather than the actual PISA results. This finding highlights the opportunistic and circumstantial nature of Korean media coverage of PISA, guided by their contrasting educational agendas towards excellence and equity. This research reveals PISA's function as a projection screen for reflecting local political intentions and as ammunition data to protect specific agendas from criticism. By uncovering the political expediency inherent in media reports on PISA, this study illuminates the role of PISA as a politicised science that shapes educational agendas and strengthens the OECD governance.
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