Secession and Secessionist Movements

Secession and secessionists movements have proliferated since the end of the Second World War. The academic literature has extensively explored these movements from different aspects. To begin, scholars have developed several legal approaches to explain when and if so how secession should take place, resulting in debates about the normative basis and legality of self-determination. Normative and philosophical approaches have sought to establish a number of necessary preconditions for secession. States, according to some of these authors, should allow secession to happen when they believe that it is morally and practically acceptable. The political economy of secession and secessionist movements has been another key area of research. Debates among scholars in this area have focused on whether wealthy or poor regions are more or less likely to pursue secession, how the presence of oil resources may establish more opportunities for the groups to secede along with incentives for the state to hold onto the territory, and what role state capacity and movement capabilities play in secessionist dynamics. Scholars have also emphasized economic approaches to the study of secession that highlight the costs and benefits of staying in the union compared to seceding. Others have studied secessionism from an international perspective and have particularly focused on exploring the impact of external kin on secessionist movements and on why and how self-determination movements obtain international recognition. International approaches have also explored the roles of ethnic ties and vulnerability in stimulating and curbing secessionist movements. Other scholars have focused on institutional approaches by exploring how different domestic and international institutions have shaped secessionist conflicts. In particular, research in this area has explored the relationship between democracy and secession, institutional legacies, and the role of autonomy and lost autonomy on separatism. Scholars have also examined the strategic choices and behaviors used by both secessionist groups (violence vs. nonviolence) and by states (concession and repression), and relatedly how reputational concerns for resolve and setting precedents shape state behavior toward secessionists. Some research shows that most states are more likely to fight against secessionist movements than to grant them concessions, particularly states facing multiple (potential) separatists. However, other scholars have challenged these claims, and shown that states can use organizational lines to grant some concessions to secessionist groups without damaging their reputations. Looking toward solutions, some scholars have emphasized institutional solutions, such as consociationalism, and still others have looked to international organizations to resolve secessionist conflicts, while skeptics have suggested that approaches like partition are often the only way forward. Finally, there are several new datasets for studying secession and secessionist movements, including All Minorities at Risk (AMAR), Family EPR, SDM, and others.

The Arab Spring

The Arab world’s resilient autocracies are a central puzzle in the comparative politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). But just as the Arab Spring was a critical juncture for MENA regimes, the popular uprisings that began in 2010 and 2011 also reoriented the study of MENA politics toward questions of social justice, redistribution, and inequality. Protesters, activists, and opposition groups articulated clear demands that aimed to dismantle systemic inequalities of political and economic opportunity after decades of failed neoliberal policies and cronyism. Identity groups and geographies conventionally considered peripheral to the study of MENA politics now featured as prime movers and arenas of contestation. This annotated bibliography focuses explicitly on these themes and their application to the study of the Arab Spring in comparative political science. The resources included in this guide fall under three main categories. The first grouping includes general and case-specific accounts of the Arab Spring. This includes not only zeitgeist cases like Tunisia and Egypt, but also those where the rapid spread of the Arab Spring forced changes to politics “as usual.” This includes second-wave cases like Sudan and Algeria, where protest movements coalesced several years following the Jasmine Revolution. The second category considers how structure and agency factor into analyses of regime strategy, contentious politics, political economy, the military, and political Islam. Third, the bibliography highlights the identity politics of the Arab Spring, including youth, minority populations, and gender.

Extension of Voting Rights to Emigrants

Emigrant voting rights can be broadly defined as the right to vote in elections granted to citizens who reside outside their country of citizenship. States offer different ways for emigrants to cast their vote, such as voting via post, in person in diplomatic missions, or upon physical return to the country. That said, research on emigrant enfranchisement has mainly focused on the voting practices that allow citizens to cast their ballot from abroad. Voting from abroad is not a new phenomenon. Several countries had already granted external voting rights by the beginning of the 20th century. However, these countries tended to restrict such voting rights to temporarily absent citizens with specific professions, such as diplomatic staff, soldiers, or seafarers. Only after the 1950s, states began to develop a more inclusive approach toward granting electoral rights to their nonresident citizens. Currently, more than two-thirds of all countries in the world allow voting from abroad. The majority of these countries have adopted external voting only during the last thirty years. Since the early/mid-2000s, the issue of external voting has attracted more intense scholarly attention. From a theoretical perspective, external voting rights challenge the traditional link between citizenship and territoriality and raise questions about how the relationship between states and nonresident citizens changes in times of mass migration and globalization. Today, the research on emigrant voting rights is a research field in its own right and informs related lines of scholarly inquiry on sending state policies, the political behavior of mobile citizens, the impact of the extraterritorial vote on domestic politics, and the cross-border outreach of political parties. In this article, the main contributions to the field of emigrant enfranchisement are divided into four main sections based on the chief four waves of research. It begins with the normative debate, followed by studies of why states grant emigrant voting rights. Third, studies on the creation of special emigrant representation systems are presented. Finally, works that move beyond the state as the main unit of analysis are reviewed by unpacking the role political parties play in the enfranchisement process. Overall, studies have drawn most prominently on the concepts of citizenship and transnationalism for theory building and their research designs. The rapidly growing literature on the consequences of emigrant enfranchisement, notably emigrant electoral participation and its impact on homeland politics, has not been included here.

Politics of the Philippines: From Rizal to Duterte

The heartland of former Spanish East Indies and once America’s sole colony in Asia, the Philippines is a land of mind-bending paradoxes, where swift changes have gone hand in hand with obstinate continuities. The Southeast Asian nation witnessed the birth of Asia’s first modern nationalist movement, initially led by the progressive sections of the Creole class and the so-called ilustrado mestizos, but reaching its apogee in the final years of the 19th century under the command of (Tagalog-dominated) provincial gentry and a broad coalition of petty bourgeois nationalists. In contrast, advanced state-formation came relatively late to the island nation, which has a limited history of large-scale polities in the precolonial era compared to neighboring Indonesia (Majapahit Empire) or Cambodia (Khmer Empire). A century since the advent of ‘first Filipinos,’ the country’s nation-building project remains glaringly unfinished, hobbled by persistent ethnolinguistic divides and Islamist and Communist movements that are among the world’s longest-running such insurgencies. For almost five centuries, Catholicism stood as the dominant religion in the country, but recent decades have seen homegrown evangelical groups become major forces in the country’s political landscape with the advent of denominational ‘bloc voting.’ A major entrepot during the trans-pacific Galleon Trade, the country became a regional economic powerhouse from the late 18th century up until the mid-20th century. Building on bouts of liberal reforms during Spanish colonialism and Commonwealth institutions under American tutelage, the Philippines also boasts among the oldest democratic institutions in the postcolonial world. The past half century, however, witnessed the country’s decline to the “Sick man of Asia” following decades of political instability and absence of sustained economic development. Amidst massive inequality and rampant corruption, the country has repeatedly relapsed into various permutations of authoritarian rule, from the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship to the resurgent populism of Rodrigo Duterte in recent years. In international politics, the Philippines has undergone a similarly turbulent trajectory, repeatedly caught in between rival empires, from Spanish–American Wars in the late-19th century to its strategic flirtation with a rising China despite its formal military alliance with America. What has remained largely constant is the composition of the country’s ruling elite, thanks to its remarkable geopolitical adaptability. The upshot is a weak state enfeebled by powerful interest groups and checked by a vibrant civil society. Accordingly, the study of Philippine politics should cover its troubled nation-state-formation, cacique-dominated political economy and attendant authoritarian temptations, as well as the unique brand of populist and liberal topes in its political discourse.

Postcolonial Political Theory

Postcolonial political theory is an emerging subfield of political theory, although its parameters and particular meanings are less than clearly defined and subject to contestation. Related to a more general critique of political theory’s traditional Eurocentric bias, postcolonial political theory is motivated by three key issues: first, how colonialism shaped the traditional Western canon; second, the broad silence on colonialism and its legacies in mainstream political theorizing; and third, the tensions, particularly within liberal political theory, between its universal pretentions and culturally specific Western location of articulation. The scope of inquiry in postcolonial political theory is broadly responsive to postcolonialism, a body of thought concerned with tracing, engaging, and responding to the cultural, political, social, and economic legacies of Western colonialism, particularly the period of European colonial rule between the 18th and mid-20th centuries. With a particular emphasis on the relationship between power and knowledge, postcolonial theories and approaches take the development of modernity as coterminous with European colonial and imperial projects, and therefore examine the ways in which modern systems of knowledge are implicated in colonial relations of power. Postcolonial political theory similarly treats political modernity as imprinted by Western colonialism and imperialism, making for distinct political dynamics, problems, and forms of injustice, on the one hand, and shaping the history of European political thought, on the other. In this regard, postcolonial political theory does not just call for a widening of the remit of political theory beyond the traditional European canon to include non-Western texts, voices, and perspectives. It also raises profound questions about the ways in which the categories, ideas, and assumptions of political theory have been complicit in and served to legitimize the domination of colonized peoples and indigenous, non-Western, and subaltern minorities. Postcolonial political theory seeks to articulate alternative modes of theorizing that can better speak to the concerns of justice for the formerly colonized, indigenous peoples, and those affected by the neo-imperial features of the current global order. An important element of this is concerned with methodology, in particular the use of multidisciplinary insights from history, cultural studies, and anthropology, among others, as well as thinkers and texts that would not conventionally be considered “political” according to dominant Western conceptions of politics.

White Identity Politics

The attitudes that whites have about race have been a defining component of their political views since at least the American Civil War. Most of the social science research to date, however, has not focused on the attitudes white people have about their own group. Instead, it has examined almost exclusively the attitudes that white people have toward racial and ethnic minority groups, and especially toward black people. Indeed, the study of attitudes that white people have toward “out-groups” in the form of racial prejudice, racial stereotypes, and racial resentment has been an important and growing component of political science research. Less research, however, has attended to the attitudes that white people have toward their own group and the political consequences of these beliefs. On the one hand, this lacuna is somewhat surprising, especially given the extent to which work in political science has otherwise noted the important role of group identities—or the psychological attachments individuals have toward relevant social groups—in driving political preferences and behavior. On the other hand, a focus on related concepts like whiteness, white identity, or white consciousness has been limited because researchers have assumed that whites’ dominant status in Western societies means that they are less conscious of their race. In other words, because white people have historically composed the numerical majority of the population in the United States and in Western European countries, and because they have possessed the lion’s share of social, political, and economic power in the United States and Western Europe, whites have been able to take their race for granted in a way that racial and ethnic minorities have not. To the extent that previous scholarship has considered whiteness, it largely focused on whiteness as an ideology of oppression or whiteness as an invisible group identity. More recently, however, renewed attention has been paid to whiteness as a visible social identity, with scholars arguing that the growing demographic diversity, increases in immigration, globalization, perceptions of anti-white discrimination, and status threat make it more likely today that whites will see their racial group as a salient one with shared political interests. As a result, white identity is politically consequential for a range of political attitudes and behaviors, including opinion on immigration policy, contemporary political candidate and partisan preferences, attitudes about diversity and globalization, preferences for certain social welfare policies, opinion toward far-right parties, and more. It is also important to note that most of the research in this domain has been US-centric, but a growing body of work has attended to whiteness and white identity in Western Europe.

Genetic Underpinnings of Political Attitudes and Behaviors

At present, few political scientists would argue that biological processes do not influence political attitudes and behaviors. In large part this is because of the pioneering work of political scientists who merged political science with biology, and genetics in particular. In the early years, traditional political scientists were alarmed by these findings; in part because of popular misunderstandings about what it means for a trait to be genetically heritable. In the intervening decade, the literature is clearer about what it means for a trait to be genetically heritable and why it is important for political scientists to incorporate this into their theories. Unfortunately, the cost to develop and maintain samples of subjects with genetic information makes it difficult for political scientists to pursue this kind of research without large collaborative groups operating with considerable funding. As such, developments in genopolitics are slow and only occur within small research groups dedicated to this kind of research. Very few graduate programs train PhD students in genopolitics, and jobs in this subfield are scarce. It is too early to determine if we are witnessing the beginning of a research agenda that will have long-lasting impact on the field of political science, or a flash in time that simply forced political scientists to acknowledge that biology plays some role in the development of political attitudes and behaviors.

Labor Migration: Dynamics and Politics

Much of the early research on labor migration drew on the push-pull factors of migration. The emphasis was on economic and individualistic assumptions with little notion of institutions, power, and politics. Since the early 1970s, the interest has shifted toward historical and institutional processes and structural factors and their explanatory power regarding the dynamics and patterns of labor migration. The national and international regimes of migration control have expanded and directed scholarly attention toward border and migration policies and their production of migrant categories. Migration policy research has also extended the focus from receiving countries toward complex dynamics and interactions between the labor-sending and labor-receiving countries. The migration trajectories from the global South to North have been studied extensively and more and more attention is paid to South–North, South–South and North–North migrations. Different types of labor migration and mobilities are also subject to different regional, national, and international policies and policy change. In current literature, the heterogeneity of migration is underlined, as well as how labor migration politics and policies address high-skilled migrants in different ways than low-skilled ones. However, the categories of migration are in many ways arbitrary. Labor migration is a highly complex and politically contested issue that intersects and forms a continuum with other types of migration and migration politics. Migration politics and the precarious conditions of foreign workers have been studied, among other ways, in explorations of what influence the temporal nature of migration and restricted permission to stay in the foreign territory have. Moreover, although labor migration is usually understood in terms of voluntary migration, the conditions of migrants sometimes resemble those of unfree labor, illustrating the complexity of determining what is counted as labor migration and what politics it concerns. The recent research on migrant rights and political atmosphere brings together the subjects of different migrations and how migrants navigate between different legal and political statuses. The literature is organized chronologically into eight themes that have a similar theoretical approach or similar thematic perspective to labor migration: (1) Theoretical and Historical Overviews, (2) International Division of Labor, (3) the Political Economy of Labor Migration, (4) Regulation and Management of Labor Migration, (5) Regional Migration Governance, (6) Skilled Labor Migration, (7) Temporary and Precarious Labor Migration, and (8) rights and protection in a Rights-Based Approach. The historical and geographical migration trajectories are visible through the themes, revealing how and why the particular aspects of labor migration have become questions of politics in different parts of the world.

Impact of C-SPAN on US Democracy

In 1979, a new US cable television network was created. It was called C-SPAN, an acronym reflecting its origin. The Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network was created to record public affairs programming and deliver it by cable and satellite into US homes. Cable was a nascent industry at that time. It began mostly as a retransmission of broadcast signals into areas that had poor terrestrial reception. The satellite revolution of the 1970s known as “Open Skies” made it possible for new networks to deliver their signals to home satellite dishes, but more importantly, to cable operators who were offered new exclusive, nonbroadcast networks that they could sell to the local subscribers. Home Box Office, or HBO, was successful delivering movies this way, which allowed commercial-free content offered for a premium. Cable operators were thus interested in this new satellite-delivered content that would distinguish cable and give customers reasons to subscribe. Brian Lamb was one of these network entrepreneurs, who with a background in radio, broadcast television, public affairs, satellite policy, and cable television, envisioned a cable satellite network that would bring unedited, Washington, DC–based public affairs programming delivered over cable television systems to American homes. He convinced some cable television executives, with a complementary entrepreneur spirit, to invest in his idea. The result was a nonprofit network dedicated to public affairs events in their entirety. It would be paid for by monthly, per-home license fees paid by the cable operators to the network in exchange for receiving the television signal. This, however, was just half of the story of the origin of C-SPAN. While Brian Lamb was developing his idea and thinking of how content from Washington, DC, events could be delivered via satellite to cable systems, another group was also working on a similar idea. The year was 1977 and the group was the United States House of Representatives. The mid-1970s were a heady time for the US Congress. President Nixon resigned in 1974 after congressional investigations of the 1972 Watergate break in. Congress passed the far-reaching War Powers Act and Congressional Budget Impoundment Act over presidential vetoes to strengthen Congress over what noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote was the “Imperial Presidency.” When the US House of Representatives first televised its proceedings on 19 March 1979, C-SPAN began transmitting the signal via satellite and the new network was available.

Intersectionality in Political Science

At its heart, intersectionality is a study of relative power. As such, political scientists have employed this approach as both a theory and method to examine political behavior and the state’s interaction with social groups as citizens and noncitizens. Intersectionality is a framework that recognizes the interconnectedness of sociopolitical categories that overlap with systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The study of intersectionality is interdisciplinary and does not have one academic home. As such, we compiled a list of texts that have used this concept, methodological framework, or theoretical approach to answer questions using a political science lens with the goal of providing a broad summary of contemporary research in this field. Furthermore, we made an effort to represent research that highlights the variation among social groups, regions, and issues as a way to illustrate the diversity within intersectional research projects. In political science, intersectionality has been used as a normative theoretical argument and a methodological approach to empirical research. Rooted in Black feminist theory and praxis, intersectionality has been employed as an analytical tool to bring to light issues of marginalization and systematic oppression that were previously invisible by using a single axis approach. Much of political science research seeks to understand the experiences of those with one or more marginalized identities as political actors. The research in this field is diverse in the populations and questions examined as well as the methods employed. Contemporary research on intersectionality includes comparative and international research on nations around the world. It explores the role of institutions, culture, and context as well as individual political identities, attitudes, and behavior. This scholarship also examines the differences of experiences within populations—such as women and racial, ethnic, or religious minorities often grouped for analysis in other fields. In applying an intersectional analysis to political experiences of these populations, this research often highlights the ways in which different identities are associated with distinct attitudes, behavior, and political outcomes. As a result, intersectionality research in political science offers deeper insights into political phenomena that were previously examined with a single axis approach. For example, studies of women’s political involvement that did not account for difference among groups of women failed to account for how ethno-racial, sexual orientation, nativity, disability, or religion may have influenced women’s political experiences and political outcomes. Among the debates engaged by this literature are questions revolving around the political experiences associated with multiple marginalized identities. Specifically, do groups, candidates, or public officials who possess multiple marginalized identities experience a so-called double disadvantage? Some research indicates this is the case, while others find strategic advantage associated with intersectional identities.