Search

This article introduces the concept of bundle as a new powerful tool in the study of party reforms. The intensive and intricate nature of the engineering political parties undertake to preserve the status quo amidst a challenging environment tends to be obscured by the focus on their so-called 'conservative nature'. Applied to the process tracing of a large sequence of reforms implemented by the Belgian French-speaking liberal party (MR) between 2019 and 2022, the bundle concept provides the opportunity to go beyond the narrow vision of party reforms only defined and empirically studied so far through their type, size and success. I triangulate a variety of sources to uncover mechanisms through which a handful of key party actors - as powerful steering agents - perceive and translate environmental factors into specific reforms. The bundle analysis brings notably to light a key sequencing mechanism – a snowball effect – explaining how the sequence actually unfolded and fed on itself, challenging our hitherto accepted understanding of party engineering. This study also offers a transferable conceptual framework with valuable insights for wider use in the field, providing an avenue for theory building through causal analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami's notion of identity is original and challenging to liberal political theory, but still largely unaddressed by it. In a nutshell, Bilgrami characterizes identity as holding certain values and commitments with a crucial addendum: as we want to continue living by those values and commitments in the future, we erect some social and legal barriers to prevent them from change. Liberals of a Millian and/or Rawlsian cast of mind, in turn, arrange political institutions to enable such change, as they assume that we are the kind of creatures that change their minds. In this sense, the identitarian and the liberal mindset are, as the philosopher claims, "mirror opposites". This article engages with Bilgrami's view in two senses: on the one hand, it highlights some potentially problematic areas that may call for further clarification and reinterpretation of the liberal canon, as well as offering other set of tensions that arise with non-liberal philosophical traditions. On the other hand, it contends that Bilgrami's ultimate claim is not merely that the identitarian mindset is more rational than the liberal mentality, as he does, but that it makes political demands that should be assessed against the liberal ideal of justification. While it may be the case that identitarianism is rationally superior to certain versions of comprehensive liberalism, the paper concludes that it loses out to political liberalism, to the extent that Bilgrami's identitarianism is willing to display the state's coercive muscle in oppressive ways, in a way that political liberalism does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable consequences for the party and for Swedish politics. Moreover, the selection involved the breakdown of a long-established procedure for leader selection in the party. We seek to explain this deviant case. We emphasise an unexpected cascade of decisions by regional party branches to hold membership ballots on the leadership candidates. This event, we argue, was critical for the outcome. We also suggest a causal mechanism, a shifting perception of procedural legitimacy, that facilitated the outcome—a mechanism that could be useful in understanding leader selection and moments of party change more generally.

Michelle Schwarze's I Recognizing Resentment i is a useful scholarly treatment of the role of "spectatorial resentment", resentment on behalf of others, in the history of the liberal tradition, as read through the figures of Bishop Butler, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Hume, as Schwarze recognizes, thus owes us some account of the passions that explains how the virtue of justice is motivated. As Schwarze puts it, on Hume's account, 'artificial virtues ... were actually invented by human beings to maximize their long-term advantage in society and to ensure security despite natural passions that might preclude it' (76). [Extracted from the article]

The meaning of skin color in America has often been understood in the context of Black–White racial dynamics. However, as the soon-to-be largest ethnoracial group in the United States, Latinos are positioned to reshape the meaning of color and its relationship with many consequential outcomes. Drawing upon a survey that incorporates both the newly validated, interval-level Yadon–Ostfeld Skin Color Scale for human assessments of skin color, as well as more socially objective machine ratings of skin color, we are able to differentiate the physiological and social connotations of skin color. Our findings illustrate that politics are intertwined with how Latinos label their skin color. Latinos who overestimate their lightness (darkness) take less (more) liberal positions on racialized political issues than those who do not. Overall, we illuminate how skin color identification operates as a political statement for many Latinos, as well as how these patterns magnify racialized inequalities in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note considers the relationship between international travel experience and one's political views. The findings reveal that those who travel internationally have strongly differentiated views from those who do not, but that these are neither necessarily more liberal nor conservative than those who have not traveled abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Parliamentary Archives being the official archive of the House of Commons and House of Lords. Topics include the House of Lords Record Office has adopted the subsidiary title of Parliamentary Archives to better represent, the department's role as custodian of both House of Lords and House of Commons records, and the Beaverbrook papers contain correspondence and a variety of papers, photographs and other images.

The article focuses on five women has discussed here represent change in the overt influence of women in politics and specially in the Liberal Party in the twentieth century. Topics include Charlotte Campbell Bannerman, has provided a benchmark did the wives and mistress of two prime ministers have influence, Asquiths were emotionally has constipated whereas Margot being orally incontinent, and Margot being not concerned about Asquith's women friends until has entranced by Venetia Stanley.

Liberals can be distinguished from one another in a number of ways, including by what they regard as the greatest threats to liberty. According to Jacob T. Levy, "rationalist" liberals think that nonpolitical institutions are the chief threats to freedom and that democratic governance can free people from these private tyrannies. By contrast, "pluralist" liberals think that governments are the chief threats to liberty, and civil associations are a bulwark against encroaching state power. Levy has recently argued that the rationalist and pluralist strands of the liberal tradition cannot be combined into a single political theory. In this essay, I disagree. My strategy is to develop a version of contractarian political theory that treats associations as sources of legitimacy. This pluralist contractarianism solves two problems. It shows that the social contract theory can survive the pluralist critique. And since the social contract theory is often understood as rationalist liberalism par excellence, it shows that we can combine rationalist and pluralist insights into a single theory, contra Levy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a novel approach towards the analysis of a classic Spanish 20th century novel, Five Hours with Mario by Miguel Delibes. The author of the paper proposes two interpretative frameworks, of which The Moral Foundations Theory developed recently by Jonathan Haidt is the main one, and Karl Popper’s concept of the open and closed society, a complementary one. The interdisciplinary reading of Delibes’ masterpiece should help students and scholars revive and update their relationship to this worthwhile piece of fiction, as well as provide them with theoretical tools for an in-depth understanding of the differences between the moral outlook of liberals and conservatives, tools applicable both on the level of fiction, as well as in reality.

This study examines new open-ended and closed-ended survey responses among white liberals and conservatives in the US to assess the role they think their racial group membership plays in how they think about politics. It then uses insights from those responses to develop and test a new measure designed to capture how white identity operates politically. To date, much political science research on white racial identity documents the links between white identity and right-leaning candidate and policy preferences. Much less is known about the role of whiteness on the left. The analysis here shows that even though white liberals talk about anti-racism, privilege, and institutional racism when asked about race and politics and say that they have become more aware of their race in recent years, they generally do not view their own whiteness as a politically salient identity. The results indicate that it is important for scholars to use measures that distinguish between whites who appear "woke" but do not act on their "wokeness" from whites for whom an awareness of privilege motivates them toward an anti-racist agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author researches the constitutional history of the various Italian States in the period between 1796 and 1861, prior to the unification of Italy and against the background of a rising liberal and patriotic movement. The author traces the influence of the French and English institutional models on the formation of a specific Italian model, which found its origins in the "Statuto Albertino" granted by the King of Sardinia in 1848. This unique constitutional blend while formally reserving all the executive power to the Monarchy, opened the way to a kind of "parliamentary government", whereby, at least in part, the appointed executive body found political legitimacy by leaning on the legislative chamber. As a result of Parliament becoming the key institution of the State, the practice of "trasformismo", i.e. members of parliament switching allegiances, became paramount. The Author claims that this evolution was made possible both by the flexibility inbuilt in the Statuto Albertino, as well as by its transformative interpretation throughout the whole period in which Italy remained a Monarchy and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing the spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is a major challenge. We investigate one potential approach: having social media platform algorithms preferentially display content from news sources that users rate as trustworthy. To do so, we ask whether crowdsourced trust ratings can effectively differentiate more versus less reliable sources. We ran two preregistered experiments (n = 1,010 from Mechanical Turk and n = 970 from Lucid) where individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: (i) mainstream media outlets, (ii) hyperpartisan websites, and (iii) websites that produce blatantly false content ("fake news"). Despite substantial partisan differences, we find that laypeople across the political spectrum rated mainstream sources as far more trustworthy than either hyperpartisan or fake news sources. Although this difference was larger for Democrats than Republicans--mostly due to distrust of mainstream sources by Republicans--every mainstream source (with one exception) was rated as more trustworthy than every hyperpartisan or fake news source across both studies when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans. Furthermore, politically balanced layperson ratings were strongly correlated (r = 0.90) with ratings provided by professional fact-checkers. We also found that, particularly among liberals, individuals higher in cognitive reflection were better able to discern between low- and high-quality sources. Finally, we found that excluding ratings from participants who were not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the crowd. Our findings indicate that having algorithms up-rank content from trusted media outlets may be a promising approach for fighting the spread of misinformation on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers a history and radical political theorization of the analytics of white (liberal) ethicality in post-Reconstruction and mid-twentieth-century U.S. settler society. Topics discussed include the analytics of white ethicality as an apparatus of modern power/knowledge and the historical regimes of white liberal ethicality that form the conceptual grids against which the comportment, self-fashioning and politico-moral enunciation of black flesh was apprehended, judged and measured.

A democratic government needs the support of its citizens to maintain its legitimacy. A stable and effective democracy does not depend on democratic institutions alone; rather, it requires a political culture that is conducive to democracy. This study utilizes data from the last four waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) to map the characteristics of a democratic community by means of a three-level (culture, structure, and process) hierarchical model in South Africa. The findings show that support for democratic rule is fairly high and higher than support for authoritarian rule; support for the current political system is steadily increasing; and South Africans generally condemn unconventional forms of political behavior and the use of force to gain political goods. At the same time, however, support for authoritarianism has more than doubled; confidence in governmental institutions is decreasing; and South Africans' positive attitude toward law-abidingness is in decline. Possible explanations for these contradictory results are presented, as well as an assessment of the likelihood of a democratic political culture persisting in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on future of Confucian Politics in East Asia. It states that rampant individualism should be replaced by Confucian harmony, when liberals talk of the autonomous self, they do not mean that a person can or does exist in isolation from community and political debate itself can be a ritual and thus something shaped by tradition more than by explicit rules. It mentions that point meritocrats and communitarians agree on is assumption of Confucian foundation for political values.

The charge that contemporary political theory has lost touch with the realities of politics is common to both the recent ideal/non-ideal theory debate and the revival of interest in realist thought. However, a tendency has arisen to subsume political realism within the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, or to elide realism with non-ideal theorising. This article argues that this is a mistake. The ideal/non-ideal theory discussion is a methodological debate that takes place within the framework of liberal theory. Realism, contrary to several interpretations, is a distinct and competing conception of politics in its own right that stands in contrast to that of liberal theory. While the two debates are united in a sense that contemporary liberal theory needs to be more realistic, they differ significantly in their understanding of this shortcoming and, more importantly, what it is to do more realistic political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses his goal of offering a taxonomy of constitutionalism in the hope of unsettling the view that liberal constitutionalism is just constitutionalism and all other varieties are defective. He cites examples of adjectival constitutionalism which are studies of regional constitutionalism such as Latin American constitutionalism, East Asian constitutionalism and the like. He suggests that a richer taxonomy of varieties of constitutionalist may be useful.

Both Iberian and Spanish American liberals in the early decades of the nineteenth century based their political stances upon a particular vision of Spanish history. This vision, nourished by the stereotypes of the so-called ‘black legend’, correspond to an extremely gloomy picture of the main events and processes that had been taking place in the Hispanic monarchy since the late fifteenth century, such as the discovery and conquest of America and the outcome of the Comunidades of Castile war. This essay shows how those first Hispanic liberals, many of whom spent several years in exile, hoping to make sense of that period of uncertainty and revolutionary crisis, sought inspiration in the philosophies of history which were beginning to spread from Northern Europe regarding the decisive role of Protestantism in the origins of modernity. In endorsing such a derogatory vision of the history of their own countries, which included an evaluation of Catholicism as a retrograde factor, those liberal writers and politicians bequeathed to their descendants an interpretative framework that would prove to be very long lasting. In fact, much of the political and intellectual historiography on the Iberian world would be conditioned for a long time by a paradigm which described its past as an anomaly in the Euroamerican context, and assumed the subordinate and peripheral position of the region, portrayed as a kind of ‘interior Orient’—that is, as an aberration of Western civilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ethical enigma kernelling concerns about actions against concerns about consequences have been dealt by philosophers and psychologists to measure “universal” moral intuitions. Although these enigmas contain no evident political content, we decipher that liberals are more likely than conservatives to be concerned about consequences, whereas conservatives are more likely than liberals to be concerned about actions. This denouement is exhibited in two large, heterogeneous samples and across several different moral dilemmas. In addition, manipulations of dilemma averseness and order of presentation suggest that this political difference is due in part to different sensitivities to emotional reactions in moral decision-making: Conservatives are very much inclined to “go with the gut” and let affective responses guide moral judgments, while liberals are more likely to deliberate about optimal consequences. In this article, extracting a sample from Western Europe, we report evidence that political differences can be found in moral decisions about issues that have no evident political content. In particular, we find that conservatives are more likely than liberals to attend to the action itself when deciding whether something is right or wrong, whereas liberals are more likely than conservatives to attend to the consequences of the action. Further, we report preliminary evidence that this is partly explained by the kernel of truth from the parodies – conservatives are more likely than liberals to “go with the gut” by using their affective responses to guide moral judgment.

Abstract: The most common assertion about U.S. foreign policy appearing in scholarly journals and opinion articles is that it is incoherent. This article will show that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is a growing cohesiveness from political science centered around the democratic peace thesis and a growing interdisciplinary consensus that western human rights need to be granted and enforced around that world that has fed into a highly cohesive, highly militarized, foreign policy of what will be defined as Liberal Imperialism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called “religious reasons” ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral questions. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that political liberals ought to be concerned primarily about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]