scholarly journals Opportunistic Accountability: State–Society Bargaining Over Shared Interests

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (8) ◽  
pp. 979-1011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelby Grossman ◽  
Jonathan Phillips ◽  
Leah R. Rosenzweig

Conflicting preferences between the state and society underpin most accountability mechanisms by providing a credible way for society to impose costs on the state. Adapting a classic bargaining framework, we argue that broader conditions can support state–society bargaining. Policies that both the state and society value can also enhance society’s negotiating power, provided society has a relatively lower valuation and is more patient than the state. By threatening to sabotage their own interests but hurt the impatient state even more, citizens can compel the state to deliver broader policy benefits. We illustrate this logic with the case of polio vaccination in northern Nigeria, where entire communities have resisted the vaccine as a strategy to bargain for more desired services. To resolve and preempt noncompliance, the Nigerian government has enhanced service delivery in other areas, demonstrating the opportunity for improved accountability in the presence of shared-interest policies.

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Thurston

This article examines northern Nigeria’s mainstream Salafis – figures who advocate exclusive, literalist, exoterically-minded readings of scripture, but who oppose the violence of the fringe Salafi sect Boko Haram. The article argues that the emergence of Boko Haram has placed mainstream Salafis in a complicated position vis-à-vis both Salafi-leaning audiences and the state. In the face of accusations by state and society that all Salafis are connected to Boko Haram, mainstream Salafis have worked to undermine Boko Haram’s messages and Salafi credentials in order to maintain influence over Salafi-leaning youth. Along with other voices in northern Nigeria, mainstream Salafis have also externalized blame for Boko Haram’s violence, attributing Boko Haram’s existence to the state, to Christians and Jews, and/or to Western powers. They have also criticized the state’s response to Boko Haram. Finally, they advocate for perceived northern Muslim interests but attempt to avoid being seen as pro-government.


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 613-620
Author(s):  
Igor N. Tyapin

The author of the article uses the works of L.A. Tikhomirov as the basis when examining the problem of criticism of the conditions of the state and society in monarchic Russia during the last decade of its existence from the part of the conservative figures who not only advocated the necessity to preserve the autocracy but also substantially contributed to the working out of the main principles of Russian social development. In particular, the “creative conservators” managed to accomplish the deep philosophic conceptualization of Russian history while trying to find the previously lost ideal of social organization. Tikhomirov’s relevant concepts of the mutual conditionality of Russian national consciousness underdevelopment and state degradation, as well as of the necessity to realize the model of the moral state of justice on the basis of the national idea, were not accepted by the bureaucratic system that resulted before long in the collapse of Russian monarchic state.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-165
Author(s):  
Mansoor Mohamed Fazil

Abstract This research focuses on the issue of state-minority contestations involving transforming and reconstituting each other in post-independent Sri Lanka. This study uses a qualitative research method that involves critical categories of analysis. Migdal’s theory of state-in-society was applied because it provides an effective conceptual framework to analyse and explain the data. The results indicate that the unitary state structure and discriminatory policies contributed to the formation of a minority militant social force (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – The LTTE) which fought with the state to form a separate state. The several factors that backed to the defeat of the LTTE in 2009 by the military of the state. This defeat has appreciably weakened the Tamil minority. This study also reveals that contestations between different social forces within society, within the state, and between the state and society in Sri Lanka still prevail, hampering the promulgation of inclusive policies. This study concludes that inclusive policies are imperative to end state minority contestations in Sri Lanka.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-105
Author(s):  
Feruza Davronova ◽  

The purpose of this article is to study the image of socio-political activity of women, their role and importance in the life of the state and society.In this, we referred to the unique books of orientalists and studied their opinions and views on this topic. The article considers the socio-political activity of women, their role in the state and society, the role of the mother in the family and raising a child, oriental culture, national and spiritual values, traditions and social significance of women


Author(s):  
T.B. Mikulin ◽  
IU.S. Panov ◽  
L.I. Krugliak

развитие цифровых технологий сформировало современный тренд к переходу на цифровую экономику для многих развитых государств, что требует кардинального трансформирования многих сфер деятельности государства и обществаthe Development of digital technologies has formed a modern trend towards the transition to a digital economy for many developed countries, which requires a radical transformation of many areas of activity of the state and society.


Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.


Author(s):  
Kevork Oskanian

Abstract This article contributes a securitisation-based, interpretive approach to state weakness. The long-dominant positivist approaches to the phenomenon have been extensively criticised for a wide range of deficiencies. Responding to Lemay-Hébert's suggestion of a ‘Durkheimian’, ideational-interpretive approach as a possible alternative, I base my conceptualisation on Migdal's view of state weakness as emerging from a ‘state-in-society's’ contested ‘strategies of survival’. I argue that several recent developments in Securitisation Theory enable it to capture this contested ‘collective knowledge’ on the state: a move away from state-centrism, the development of a contextualised ‘sociological’ version, linkages made between securitisation and legitimacy, and the acknowledgment of ‘securitisations’ as a contested Bourdieusian field. I introduce the concept of ‘securitisation gaps’ – divergences in the security discourses and practices of state and society – as a concept aimed at capturing this contested role of the state, operationalised along two logics (reactive/substitutive) – depending on whether they emerge from securitisations of the state action or inaction – and three intensities (latent, manifest, and violent), depending on the extent to which they involve challenges to state authority. The approach is briefly illustrated through the changing securitisation gaps in the Republic of Lebanon during the 2019–20 ‘October Uprising’.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-541
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Speelman
Keyword(s):  

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sussan Siavoshi

The evolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the dynamics of the relationship between the Iranian state and society can be explored by examining the postrevolutionary regime's policies toward intellectuals, particularly as expressed in its regulation of cinema and book publication. This relationship—at least in the period from the early 1980s to the early 1990s—was complex and nuanced. Factionalism within the regime provided an opportunity for intellectuals to engage the state in a process of negotiation and protest, cooperation and defiance, in pushing the boundaries of permitted self-expression. The degree of their success depended in part on which faction controlled the government and its regulatory agencies during particular phases in the evolution of the postrevolutionary regime.


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