Effectiveness of Incumbent’s Strategic Communication during Economic Crisis under Electoral Authoritarianism: Evidence from Turkey

To minimize damage to their popularity during economic downturns, rulers in electoral autocracies can draw on their propaganda advantage to keep the economy off the political agenda or shift the blame to other actors. How successful are these strategies in swaying citizens’ views? While electoral autocrats frequently resort to these strategies, there is surprisingly little evidence about their effectiveness. To address this gap, I took advantage of the recent economic crisis in Turkey and deployed a population-based survey experiment that mimicked incumbent’s use of these strategies. I find that incumbent’s efforts of shifting the blame fail to elicit intended effects among large parts of the electorate. In contrast, changing the political agenda away from the economy to an issue area that is more favorable for the incumbent is more effective for shoring up popular support. These findings contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms that help sustain electoral authoritarianism.

The contestation and construction of global governance authorities: A study from the global business and human rights regime

The contestation of global governance institutions can strengthen or weaken, as well as transform, them. This article analyses the productive potential of contestation and justification of global governance institutions by examining the multiple authorities that are invoked as auxiliaries in the process. It studies the (re-)construction of these authorities by dissecting authority into three components: power, legitimacy and connection to public interests. Empirically, the article focuses on the issue area of business and human rights, examining the highly contested process of drafting a binding instrument in the United Nations Treaty Process. The analysis shows that the success of the Treaty Process not only hinges on its direct reaction to contestation, but also on its ability to (re-)construct the multiple related authorities. Ultimately, the article argues that the contestation of global governance institutions involves (re-)constructing multiple authorities. This demonstrates how contestation can also affect global governance institutions, actors and norms beyond the specific field of deliberation.

Pool or Duel? Cooperation and Competition Among International Organizations

International organizations (IOs) increasingly pool resources and expertise. Under what conditions do they pool rather than compete when their activities overlap? Drawing on elite interviews, I argue that even though many cooperation decisions are made by staff possessing high degrees of autonomy from member state principals, IOs are more likely to pool resources when their leading stakeholders are geopolitically aligned. Regardless of whether member states directly oversee the negotiation of these arrangements, staff design policies that are amenable to major stakeholders. I test this argument with regression analysis of an original data set that documents patterns of co-financing and information sharing among IOs in the development issue area. I further supplement these tests with an elite survey experiment deployed via LinkedIn to bureaucrats from various development IOs. Across the board, I find evidence consistent with my theory.

The Political Economy of the Groundnut Value Chain in Malawi: Its Re-Emergence Amidst Policy Chaos, Strategic Neglect, and Opportunism

This paper explores the political economy of the groundnut value chain in Malawi. The paper uses a combination of insights from the theoretical perspectives of political settlement, rents and policymaking to examine this value chain. Fused together, these theoretical perspectives underpin a political economy analysis framework, which entails systematically mapping all key actors in an issue area; identifying their interests and recognising their forms of power (political, economic, social, and ideological); understanding their relationships with each other; and appreciating the issues, narratives, and ideas that shape how and why they interact with each other.

Prominent Security Risks Stemming from Space Hybrid Operations

To date, discussions concerning hybrid threats have been almost exclusively focused on the terrestrial and maritime domains, and space has been largely excluded from such international exchanges. This is despite the fact that, for the most part, the same actors, mindsets, and techniques are presently in play in the space domain as well. Moreover, hybrid operations conducted by adversaries in any of these domains have the potential to negate critical space systems. This chapter seeks to provide a better understanding of this complex new issue area for space and help identify and implement a more informed security policy framework. It suggests that strengthened resilience and deterrence, including through cross-domain response options, is required to protect against these space hybrid operations and the critical benefits and capabilities they target.

Chapter 6_Tổng quan tài liệu - Literature review in research

A literature review surveys, books, scholarly articles, and any other sources relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, and by so doing, provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have explored while researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study.

‘After fragmentation’: Notes from the global South

The contributions in the volume do a fine job of recounting the sites and modes of unravelling meaty issue-area ‘interface conflicts’ and studying their diverse implications. I have sought to consciously read these contestations here from the broader perspective of the global South. My overall plea is for more politics and not less when it comes to studying ‘interface conflicts’ and norm contestations. What this translates into is to embed the technicalities of norm conflicts in the backdrop of more fully fleshed out political currents and contexts. Methodologically speaking, while sympathetic to the process-driven agential micro-constructivist approach to studying these ‘interface conflicts’, I argue that ‘internalist’ accounts of perceptions must ideally tap on insiders to arrive at a richer appreciation of the anxieties and hopes surrounding particular norm contestations in specific issue-areas.

The Practices of Evaluating Entitlements: Rethinking “Reputation” in International Politics

How do reputations work in international politics? The dominant frameworks in international relations scholarship argue that reputation is subservient to real interest or past actions do not influence observers’ behavior in anarchy, and inconsistent reputational beliefs are irrational among policymakers who have miscalculated their interests. These substantialist accounts are problematic in the light of taking political practices seriously. I argue that reputations work within communities of practice through a tripartite process involving actor's entitlement claims, audiences’ relational evaluation of such claims, and the actor's performance to secure entitlements in issue-specific interactions. I illustrate the analytical usefulness of this conceptualization against conventional accounts by studying Brazil's multiple reputational concerns in the issue area of humanitarian crises in the post–Cold War period. The framework offered in the article has a wider relevance for examining how reputations work across states, for example, in India and China, and in different issue areas by foregrounding normative appraisals of each other by community members in distinct reputational games. It also sets the stage for further examination of the intersection of reputational practices upon other social capital such as status.

Working with and around Strong States

East Asia is a region dominated by developmental states that favour business and constrain advocacy organizations, yet Japan has been leading the world in emissions standards for decades, China has recently become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic panels and a world leader in renewable energy, and Korea and Taiwan have both embarked on major green initiatives that involve green business development, the creation of national parks, widespread energy conservation and comprehensive recycling efforts. This chapter discusses environmental organizations’ networking strategies to find allies within governmental and business echelons in order to affect pro-environmental changes. Focusing on the issue area of the environment, it argues that non-profit organizations play important roles in developing the coordinating networks that facilitate policymaking in challenging and diverse political contexts.