Institutional listening in deliberative democracy: Towards a deliberative logic of transmission

This article explores the role of institutional listening in deliberative democracy, focusing particularly on its contribution to the transmission process between the public sphere and formal institutions. We critique existing accounts of transmission for prioritizing voice over listening and for remaining constrained by an ‘aggregative logic’ of the flow of ideas and voices in a democracy. We argue that formal institutions have a crucial role to play in ensuring transmission operates according to a more deliberative logic. To substantiate this argument, we focus on two recent examples of institutional listening in two different democracies: Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the United States’ Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. These cases show that institutional listening can take different forms; it can be purposefully designed or incidental, and it can contribute to the realization of deliberative democracy in various ways. Specifically, institutional listening can help enhance the credibility and visibility of minority groups and perspectives while also empowering these groups to better hold formal political institutions accountable. In these ways, institutional listening helps transmission operate according to a more deliberative logic.

Counter-hegemonic leadership for democratic alter-politics in our times

This article sets out to grapple with strategic challenges facing democratic alter-politics in our times, dwelling on the question of leadership to explore ways of overcoming the frailties and risks that beset grassroots collective agency for democratic renewal. Discussion begins thus by fleshing out the notion of contemporary democratic alter-politics which breaks both with top-down statist rule and conventional activism, fostering openness, diversity, assembly-based democracy, attention to process, egalitarianism, prefiguration, work in everyday life along with mass mobilization, and engagement with institutions to effect change. In a second step, the argument brings out the strategic limitations of this alter-politics by engaging with relevant theories and reflections on strategy. The following key part of the article sketches the outlines of a strategy of counter-hegemony that could tackle some of these limitations by reconfiguring democratic leadership. Drawing on recent social movements and organizational studies, critical analysis will seek to indicate how the pursuit of effective leadership can be aligned with the alter-politics of egalitarian collective self-direction to boost and expand it in the political circumstances of the present. The nub of the argument is that ‘another leadership’ that is assembly-based, technopolitical, reflective, distributed, ‘servant’, and feminized can further democratic alter-politics.

Who wants COVID-19 vaccination to be compulsory? The impact of party cues, left-right ideology, and populism

Vaccine hesitancy is one of the major obstacles for successfully combating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate, calls for compulsory vaccinations have been discussed controversially. This study analyses what drives citizens’ attitudes towards compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we are interested in the impact of party- and expert cues on public attitudes. We further expect populist attitudes to be an important indicator of the rejection of compulsory vaccination due to their scepticism towards science. To test these expectations, we rely on a cueing experiment conducted on a sample of 2265 German citizens. We test for the effects of in-party and out-party cues as well as public health expert cues. We find evidence for in-party cues, meaning that respondents adjust their position on this issue in the direction of their most preferred party. Similar results can be found for public health expert cues. However, there is no evidence for out-party cues. Further analyses reveal that support for compulsory vaccinations is not affected by left-right placement directly. Instead, only the combination of right-wing attitudes and populism negatively affects support for compulsory vaccination.

Transgressing to teach: Theorising race and security through struggle

Recent interventions in critical security studies have argued that the field has struggled to account for the racialised/racist foundations of security politics. This article engages with the US Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that the Party did important work to show how security politics is dependent on racial violence. The idea that we can theorise global politics through struggle (`struggle as method’) is becoming popular within disciplinary International Relations (IR), but has longer lineages in Black radical thought. The BPP were important advocates of struggle as method, with tactics and strategies intentionally designed with a pedagogical purpose; through Panther actions (including community self-defence and survival programmes), and the state’s response to these, the mechanisms of capitalist white supremacy were laid bare. The article therefore acknowledges BPP action as a series of theoretical interventions, which demonstrated how the terms of US/white security are rooted in and dependent on anti-Blackness. It also shows how Panther tactics prefigured alternative, radical, anti-statist approaches to security, these conceptualised as `survival pending revolution’. The article closes by arguing that scholarship on critical security studies - especially as related to the racialised politics of security - should do more to work with and acknowledge its indebtedness to struggle as method.

IR, imperialism, and the Global South: From Libya to Venezuela

This article brings together two cases to contribute to the growing body of literature rethinking the study of international relations (IR) and the Global South: The Libyan Arab al-Jamāhīrīyah and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Drawing on media representations and secondary literature from IR and international political economy (IPE), it critically examines three main conceptual theses (authoritarian, rentier, and rogue) used to describe the historical socio-political formations of these states up to this date. Mixing oil abundance with authoritarian revolutionary fervour and foreign policy adventurism, Libya and Venezuela have been progressively reduced to the figure of one man, while presenting their current crises as localized processes delinked from the imperialist inter-state system. The article argues that these analyses, if left unquestioned, perpetuate a US-led imperial ordering of the world, while foreclosing and discrediting alternatives to capitalist development emerging from and grounded in a Global South context. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing and controversial debate on the meanings and needs for decolonizing the study of IR.

Regulatory regionalism and the limits of ASEAN banking integration: The case of Indonesia

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) aims to integrate the banking industry in the region. To achieve this, ASEAN members have agreed to create the ASEAN Banking Integration Framework (ABIF) to support such integration. Despite being endorsed in 2014, the framework remains vague and lacks clear policy coordination arrangements as well as standardisation instruments that enable ASEAN member states to integrate their banking sectors. This article examines why the member states agreed to such regulatory arrangements. Building upon the regulatory regionalism approach, we argue that the regulatory arrangement is underpinned by a socio-political struggle among dominant social forces in ASEAN. The article further argues that the political endeavour to internationalise domestic capital through the banking integration project remains problematic, given that local banking players seem to largely focus on protecting and penetrating domestic markets rather than regional expansion. This has hindered the progress of regional banking integration in ASEAN. To substantiate this argument, we use Indonesia’s engagement in the process as a case study. This article contributes to the study of political economies of banking integration outside of the European experiment by emphasising the importance of state–society relations in shaping the outcome of regional integration.

The missing link: Studying political leadership from the followers’ perspective

Recent political developments suggest that political followership has played increasingly vital roles in modern democratic politics. However, scholarship seemingly lacks proper conceptual and methodological tools for analysing why and how citizens follow their leaders, and what the role of this relationship is in personalised politics and political leadership. Addressing the research gap, this article turns to generic leadership studies for help and introduces its follower-centric models into the field of political science. This venture opens with a review and comparison of some of the different perspectives about political followers in the scholarship on political leadership and personalisation, taking account of their limitations. It then moves on to assess follower-centric models and their empirical results, focusing on observers’ perceptions about the characteristics and behaviours of leaders in the attribution of leadership. Based on these models, the article offers a balanced perspective about leader–follower relations. Recommendations for future research directions are presented in the concluding sections.

Youth doing politics in times of increasing inequalities

Particularly in the current context of rapid political change it is key to understand the political participation of young people and what underpins their political engagement patterns as well the as the inequalities that may lay beneath them. While there is a rich literature on youth participation, to date we have lacked the data to carry out detailed subgroup analyses to understand differences in the political participation between different groups of youth cross-nationally. The papers in this Special Issue all examine different aspects of youth participation in the current context. They examine key questions for participation including the inequalities, socialising influences, polarisation, online participation, radical political views, tolerance, life engagement and opportunities for social inclusion. This Special Issue thus provides a contemporary analysis of youth participation in Europe in the current historical juncture.

Avatars of Eurocentrism in international political economy textbooks: The case of the Middle East and North Africa

The project to decolonise the curriculum revolves around rethinking margin and centre of the discipline. To the extent that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is at the margin of international political economy (IPE), it is the ideal entry point to decolonise the curriculum. I conduct a summative content analysis of the six most commonly used IPE textbooks. To what extent do they reproduce or challenge Eurocentric tropes in their treatment of MENA? The region is largely absent from IPE textbooks, suggesting it is accorded little agency in the making of the global political economy. To the extent that it is ‘brought in’, it is ‘ghettoised’ in a specialist chapter. A qualitative content analysis suggests the authors avoid overt orientalism but exceptionalise the region as a failure with too little democracy and economic growth and too much war. They acknowledge the role of continued colonialism in these failures but also deny agency of the colonised. They miss an opportunity to de-provincialise the Middle East by fostering ‘ecologies of knowledge’. The article provides an analytical framework for research on how IPE textbooks treat other world regions and of syllabi.

How does crisis affect the conflict between technocracy and populism? Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

The article focuses on the relationship between technocracy and populism during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis. On one hand, this relationship has been defined by populist denial, displacement of crisis, and rejection of the technocratic consensus on the need for urgent and decisive action in the face of the global pandemic. On the other hand, COVID-19 has also led to convergence between the two sides and populist approximation to technocracy more akin to ‘technopopulist’ compromises and politics. The article shows that this pattern of antagonism and approximation has been shaped by three constitutive features of the state of exception and emergency during the COVID-19 crisis: (1) discursive securitization of the threat, (2) the use of extraordinary tools and measures under the licence of precautionary principle, and (3) institutional concentration of power. While COVID-19 is an extreme case in all three respects, the lessons learned from the pandemic advance our general understanding of technocracy and populism as constitutive features of contemporary politics.