Beliefs about Climate Beliefs: The Importance of Second-Order Opinions for Climate Politics

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1279-1307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matto Mildenberger ◽  
Dustin Tingley
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Individual Support ◽  
Egocentric Bias ◽  
Mass Publics ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Intellectual Elites

When political action entails individual costs but group-contingent benefits, political participation may depend on an individual’s perceptions of others’ beliefs; yet detailed empirical attention to these second-order beliefs – beliefs about the beliefs of others – remains rare. We offer the first comprehensive examination of the distribution and content of second-order climate beliefs in the United States and China, drawing from six new opinion surveys of mass publics, political elites and intellectual elites. We demonstrate that all classes of political actors have second-order beliefs characterized by egocentric bias and global underestimation of pro-climate positions. We then demonstrate experimentally that individual support for pro-climate policies increases after respondents update their second-order beliefs. We conclude that scholars should focus more closely on second-order beliefs as a key factor shaping climate policy inaction and that scholars can use the climate case to extend their understanding of second-order beliefs more broadly.

Indigenous peoples as international political actors: a summary

Polar Record ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Tennberg
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Interests

ABSTRACTThe article discusses the results of a three year research project studying international indigenous political activism using case studies from the Arctic. Drawing on two different disciplinary starting points, international relations and international law, the project addressed two interrelated questions. The first of these was how relations between states, international organisations and indigenous peoples have been and are currently constructed as legal and political practices; the second was how indigenous peoples construct their political agency through different strategies to further their political interests. These questions are addressed from the point of view of power relations. The power to act is the basic form of political agency. However, this power may take different forms of political action, for example, self-identification, participation, influence, and representation. The main conclusions of the article are: 1) indigenous political agency is based on multiple forms of power; 2) practices of power that enable and constrain indigenous political agency change over time; 3) power circulates and produces multiple sites of encounters for states, international organisations and indigenous people; 4) indigenous political agency is a question of acting; and 5) there are new challenges ahead for indigenous peoples in claiming a political voice, in particular in global climate politics.

Conclusion: Political Philosophy and Political Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-278
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Ethical Choices ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures ◽  
Political Choices

The political environment to which Aboriginal people must respond has been constructed by others, and it does not respond easily or quickly to deliberative calls for change. Rather, it must be navigated instead, despite the difficulties and discomfort associated with doing so. The concluding chapter revisits the central claims of the book as a whole, arguing for the importance of careful normative analysis where the political choices of disadvantaged political actors are involved. It defends the importance of strongly contextualized work on the ethics of political action by groups facing particular patterns of persistent injustice and responding to particular political opportunity structures, while recommending nuanced comparative work on the ethical choices available to groups facing different patterns of injustice than those experienced by Aboriginal peoples (e.g., African Americans in the United States).

Strategies of Justice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Political Choices

Political theorists often imagine themselves as political architects, asking what an ideal set of laws or social structures might look like. Yet persistent injustices can endure for decades or even centuries despite such ideal theorizing. In circumstances of this kind, it is essential for political theorists to think carefully about the political choices normatively available to those who directly face persistent injustices and seek to change them. The book focuses on the claims of Aboriginal peoples to better treatment from the United States and Canada. The book investigates two intertwined issues: the kinds of moral permissions that those facing persistent injustice have when they act politically, and the kinds of transformations that political action may bring about in those who undertake it. The book argues for normative permissions to speak untruth to power; to circumvent or nullify existing law; to give primary attention to protecting one’s own community first; and to engage in political experimentation that reshapes future generations. The book argues that, when carefully used, these permissions may help political actors to avoid co-optation and self-delusion. At the same time, divisions of labor between those who grapple most closely with state institutions and those who keep their distance may be necessary to facilitate escape from persistent injustice over the long term.

Winning the Argument and Moving the Fight: The Legacy of a Grassroots Humanitarian

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Winning Strategy ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Trade Offs

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison

Aestheticism, Civil Society, and the Origins of Totalitarianism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Mangrum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
New Critics ◽  
Second World

This chapter argues that ongoing concerns about the rise of totalitarianism led writers and intellectuals in the United States to oppose social-democratic institutions after the Second World War. Familiar accounts about opposition to these institutions center on conservative politics. In contrast, this chapter argues that liberal thinkers invoked forms of aestheticism to combat what they perceived as the possible rise of totalitarianism in the United States. In order to document this under-explored trend in American political culture, this chapter establishes connections across writing by Lionel Trilling, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, the New Critics, and the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. These figures in postwar cultural life invoked aestheticism in the arenas of literature, philosophy, political action, and economics as a prophylactic to the perceived intrusions of an activist-managerial state.

Mobilized by Injustice

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah L. Walker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Depth Interviews

Springing from decades of abuse by law enforcement and an excessive criminal justice system, members of over-policed communities lead the current movement for civil rights in the United States. Activated by injustice, individuals protested police brutality in Ferguson, campaigned to end stop-and-frisk in New York City, and advocated for restorative justice in Washington, D.C. Yet, scholars focused on the negative impact of punitive policy on material resources, and trust in government did not predict these pockets of resistance, arguing instead that marginalizing and demeaning policy teaches individuals to acquiesce and withdraw. Mobilized by Injustice excavates conditions under which, despite otherwise negative outcomes, negative criminal justice experiences catalyze political action. This book argues that when understood as resulting from a system that targets people based on race, class, or other group identifiers, contact can politically mobilize. Negative experiences with democratic institutions predicated on equality under the law, when connected to a larger, group-based struggle, can provoke action from anger. Evidence from several surveys and in-depth interviews reveals that mobilization as result of negative criminal justice experiences is broad, crosses racial boundaries, and extends to the loved ones of custodial citizens. When over half of Blacks and Latinos and a plurality of Whites know someone with personal contact, the mobilizing effect of a sense of injustice promises to have important consequences for American politics.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

scholarly journals An Attack on the Separation of Powers? Strategic Climate Litigation in the Eyes of U.S. Judges

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8335
Author(s):  
Jasmina Nedevska
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
Research Plan

Climate change litigation has emerged as a powerful tool as societies steer towards sustainable development. Although the litigation mainly takes place in domestic courts, the implications can be seen as global as specific climate rulings influence courts across national borders. However, while the phenomenon of judicialization is well-known in the social sciences, relatively few have studied issues of legitimacy that arise as climate politics move into courts. A comparatively large part of climate cases have appeared in the United States. This article presents a research plan for a study of judges’ opinions and dissents in the United States, regarding the justiciability of strategic climate cases. The purpose is to empirically study how judges navigate a perceived normative conflict—between the litigation and an overarching ideal of separation of powers—in a system marked by checks and balances.

Red for Ed Teacher Movements: Exploring Roles and Symbols in the Politics of the Superintendency

2021 ◽  
pp. 0013161X2110344
Author(s):  
Michael A. Szolowicz ◽  
R. Aaron Wisman
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Instructional Leader ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
Embedded Case Study

Purpose: In recent years, a new wave of teacher-led political action has erupted resulting in work stoppages in several states across the United States. This study examines how superintendents navigated this Red for Ed movement in two representative states. Methods: Framed as a multisite, embedded case study, we drew from public documents and semistructured interviews with superintendents. We took a deductive approach to data analysis, seeking analytic generalization to the theoretical frameworks adopted herein. Findings: Red for Ed-motivated teacher job actions did create a political dilemma for superintendents. Superintendents addressed the dilemma by utilizing the roles of business manager, instructional leader, and politician as expressed through symbolic politics including assigning responsibility and vaguely supporting the Red for Ed cause. Superintendent responses are consistent with isomorphic tenants of sociological institutionalism. Implications: Considering the modern superintendency’s political nature, superintendents might benefit from preparation in political strategy and tactics.

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