Wind Turbines, Public Acceptance, and Electoral Outcomes

Despite a widespread public support for wind energy in general, wind turbine proposals attract a considerable amount of public opposition. At a time of political commitments to building more wind turbines for climate risk mitigation, we study the potential causes of this opposition and their electoral effects. Our analysis draws on a survey experiment in Switzerland, where the number of wind turbines will grow from a couple of dozens to many hundreds in the next three decades. We find that exposure to wind turbines increases public acceptance, but this affect does not translate into electoral turnout or vote choice. Moreover, locality or politicisation does not seem to have an effect at all—neither on acceptance nor on electoral outcomes. Our results suggest that voters do not reward or punish political parties for their positions on wind energy, even when turbines might soon be rising in their local area.

It’s not enough to be right! The climate crisis, power, and the climate movement

The demands of the climate movement ‐ for rapid and profound change ‐ are based on scientific findings and the political commitments to the Paris Agreement. The activists are, therefore, factually “right”. However, being right is not enough to justify or to accelerate the practical implementation of knowledge and decisions. We explain which social factors are at work, and how the climate movement can benefit if they incorporate these factors into actions for social change.

The international politics of truth: C. Wright Mills and the sociology of the international

C. Wright Mills's critical work on international relations is well known, but is often dismissed as being unscholarly, reductionist, and overly polemical. However, seeing the work in the context of his earlier career can allow for a new perspective, with Mills's activist views on war and militarism shaped very clearly by his earlier theoretical and political commitments. Mills developed a distinctive political sociological understanding of international politics, theorising the state as a historically-situated structural determinant of international power: a network of elite power that was contextualised by the influence of the socially constructed realities of the international created by elites. Mills's crucial critical contribution was to see the role of the intellectual as criticising these realities through the imaginative reconceptualisation of the world, which he called the ‘politics of truth’. The article argues the international politics of truth was not only Mills's distinctive theory of the international, but that it was clearly supported by his early theorisation of the international. A revised view of the importance of Mills's international relations work can help to situate Mills as part of a broader tradition of IR scholarship, a lost lineage of the critical historical and political sociology of the international.

Expressive Survey Responding: A Closer Look at the Evidence and Its Implications for American Democracy

Concerns about public opinion-based threats to American democracy are often tied to evidence of partisan bias in factual perceptions. However, influential work on expressive survey responding suggests that many apparent instances of such bias result from respondents insincerely reporting politically congenial views in order to gain expressive psychological benefits. Importantly, these findings have been interpreted as “good news for democracy” because partisans who knowingly report incorrect beliefs in surveys can act on their correct beliefs in the real world. We presently synthesize evidence and commentary on this matter, drawing two conclusions. First, evidence for insincere expressive responding on divisive political matters is limited and ambiguous. Second, when experimental manipulations in surveys reduce reports of politically congenial factual beliefs, this is often because such reported beliefs serve as flexible and interchangeable ways of justifying the largely stable allegiances that guide political behavior. So when circumstances render it costly to endorse a partisan belief, assessments of that belief become less diagnostic of the political predispositions that matter most, not more diagnostic of sincere views that will override partisan commitments. The expressive value of acting on political commitments should be viewed as a central feature of the American political context rather than a methodological artifact of surveys.

“This is Not Who We Are”: Students Leading for Anti-Racist Policy Changes in Alexandria City Public Schools, Virginia

This paper centers the voices of students who successfully struggled alongside justice-minded school board members and other concerned citizens to create anti-racist policy changes in Alexandria City Public Schools, Virginia. Specifically, we examine the history behind, and political processes involved with, changing the names of two local schools due to the racist political commitments of their namesakes. Lessons learned include the need to carefully structure the policy change process to include students, families, and other community members in critical dialog and amplify the voices of those most impacted by the structural racism that needs to be dismantled: The students.

Empire and Arab Indology

This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a “Lebanese Palestinian,” as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.

Sustaining Democracy

Democracy is hard work. It can flourish only when citizens actively participate in the business of collective self-government. Yet political participation gives rise to deep political divides over core political values. In the midst of these divisions, citizens are required to recognize one another as political equals, as fellow participants who are entitled to an equal share of political power. Research shows that political engagement exposes citizens to forces that erode their capacities to regard their political opponents as their equals. In the course of democratic participation, we come to see our opponents as inept and ill-motivated, ultimately unfit for democracy. This tendency is especially pronounced among those who are the most politically active. Democratic citizenship thus can undermine itself. With this conflict at the heart of democratic citizenship, we must actively pursue justice while also treating those who embrace injustice as our equals. Sustaining Democracy navigates this conflict. It begins by exploring partisanship and polarization, the two mechanisms by which citizens come to regard their opponents as unsuited for democracy. It then proposes strategies by which citizens can mitigate these forces without dampening their political commitments. As it turns out, the same forces that lead us to scorn our opponents can also undermine and fracture our political alliances. If we are concerned to further justice, we need to uphold civil relations with our opponents, even when we despise their political views. If we want to preserve our political friendships, we must sustain democracy with our foes.

Literature of the 'Thirties

The literature of the 1930s occupies an important and complex position in critical accounts of modern British and Irish writing. Unlike terms such as modernism and postmodernism, writing of the 1930s does not announce itself as an “ism,” seeming at first glance to operate as a neutral label for writing that happens to have been published in the period 1930–1939. Like modernism and postmodernism, however—indeed in some ways even more so—the term is, in practice, associated with a specific set of thematic concerns, aesthetic approaches, and political commitments. The unique literary mythology of the “Red Decade” was being deliberately and self-consciously encoded by key protagonists before the decade was out, with W. H. Auden influentially regretting the “clever hopes” of a “low, dishonest decade” in his poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden’s own accounts of his dalliance with left-wing, committed writing and his subsequent disillusionment—mirrored by the trajectories of Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and others—helped to consolidate a narrative of the decade’s literature as one that began with the articulation of overweening “clever hopes,” and ended as these were exposed as dangerous, adolescent illusions. The thirties, for some time, operated as a convenient box for the idea of committed literature. The decade confronted students of modern literature like a carefully curated museum display designed to illustrate the folly of mixing political commitment with literature. Yet this familiar narrative of the decade’s writing is modeled around the particular experiences of a few, largely male, upper-middle-class poets. Since the 1980s, the general tendency of scholarship has been to complicate or unpick this narrative, expanding the canon beyond the Auden circle, emphasizing continuities with the modernism of the 1920s, and producing more nuanced accounts of committed literature that are not bound up with its inevitable failure. These shifts have gone along with a rising tide of scholarly interest in previously neglected women writers, including Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. In our own troubled political times, literature of the ‘thirties continues to provoke and fascinate because of the important questions it poses about writing and commitment, even while the forms of commitment and the range of writers studied under this heading have proliferated. Through this process an excessively tidy literary-historical narrative has increasingly been replaced by something messier, more open ended, and ultimately more interesting.

Use of Legally Non-Binding Instruments in Contemporary Practice of International Relations

The article explores the use of legally non-binding (informal) instruments in contemporary international practice by international political actors. In this context, the article examines definitions and main characteristics of legally non-binding instruments, as well as their effects. In addition, the use of this type of instruments was assessed as a practical response to the need of concerting between the political actors at the international plane due to their functionality and flexibility. It was concluded that these instruments implied a softer form, unlike treaties, and the act of their conclusion does not require conducting a formal and cumbersome procedures, such as parliamentary ratification. These instruments imply political commitments between their parties and their effects are usually shielded by the bona fides principle. Although these instruments are generally deprived of legally binding effects, they remain quite pragmatic tools in brokering political agreements at the diplomatic level between relevant international political actors.