Political Science

Why does public management—the art of the state—so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service, and what are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services, and are the forces of modernity set to produce worldwide convergence in ways of organizing government? This study aims to explore such questions, which are central to debates over public management. It combines contemporary and historical experience, and employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services—and contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management. The book has three parts. Part I, Introductory, has three chapters that discuss various aspects of public management. Part II, Classic and Recurring Ideas in Public Management, has four chapters that discuss various ways of doing public management. Part III, Rhetoric, Modernity, and Science in Public Management, has three chapters that discuss the rhetoric, and culture of public management, contemporary public management, and the state of the art of the state.

This collection of documents on Article 370 of the Constitution of India contains ‘temporary provisions’ with respect to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. This book presents documents on the five-month long negotiations which preceded its enactment on 17 October 1949. It explains the significance of the article, describes how it was eroded, and traces the Constitutional evolution of the State and its relationship with the Union of India thereafter. It covers the period from 1946 to 2010. From Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947 to the various negotiations thereafter, including Sheikh Abdullah’s arrest to the framing of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, and the replacement of Sadar–i–Riyasat, this book examines in detail the little-known constitutional history of the state.

When policies of or activities within one country and generation cause deleterious consequences for those of other nations and later generations, they can constitute serious injustices. Hence, anthropogenic climate change poses not only a global environmental threat, but also one to international and intergenerational justice. The avoidance of such injustice has been recognized as a primary objective of global climate policy, and this book aims to comprehend the nature of this objective–to explore how climate change raises issues of international and intergenerational justice and to consider how the design of a global climate regime might these aims into account. Enlisting conceptual tools from ethics as well as legal and political theory, it treats justice as concerned with equity and responsibility and considers how each is undermined by climate change but might be incorporated into climate policy. Various theoretical problems in applying norms of equity and responsibility across borders, over time, and to nations for their greenhouse emissions are considered, and responses are given to these challenges. Finally, an outline for a global climate policy that adequately incorporates norms of justice is articulated and defended, along with a case for procedural fairness in policy development processes. Demonstrating how political theory can usefully contribute toward better understanding the proper human response to climate change as well as how the climate case offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, the book offers a case study in which the application of normative theory to policy allows readers to better understand both.

Mediatic representation has become an integral part of politics and policy. The dominance of incident-oriented media formats has led students of politics and media to fear a trend of ‘dumbing down’: the privileging of style over content. This book takes issue with the ‘dumbing down’ thesis both on theoretical and empirical grounds. In particular it investigates how an authoritative governance is possible in crisis-ridden circumstances in a mediatized environment. Maarten Hajer comes up with a communicative understanding of authority, creating a new basis for an authoritative governance in a world marked by political and institutional fragmentation. Extending his discourse-analytical framework, Hajer uses both discursive and dramaturgical methods to study policy makers in their struggle for authority. Three elaborate case studies provide a wealth of details of the dynamics of authority in today's mediatized polity and the peculiar role of crisis and incidents in this. The message of the book is that in the age of mediatization governance needs to be performed. Hajer illuminates contours of a new authoritative governance that encompass different elements than usually get represented in the media or indeed in textbooks on media studies, public policy, or governance. The book shows new ways to recombine traditional government of standing institutions to notions of network governance. The book thus provides new ideas about authoritative governance which is based on the need to actively create relations with a variety of publics.

This book presents a scholarly edition of one of the greatest works on Buddhist writings, Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma. It was published posthumously without citations, bibliographies and other scholarly apparatus. This present edition is scrupulously annotated, with inclusions of references to the Buddhist scripture and other texts which have served as references for Ambedkar. It also includes explanations of those scriptures, comments on Ambedkar's interpretations, and modifications of his sources. The volume deals with Ambedkar's interpretation of the concepts of Buddhism and the possibilities the religion offered for the liberation and upliftment of the Dalits. It offers Ambedkar's reflections and interpretations on the life of Siddharth Gautama, the Buddha, his teachings, and the proliferation of Buddhism in India through series of anecdotes and narratives that details the life of Buddha and the spread of his Dhamma. The book also provides detailed analysis of the basic tenets, canons, and tradition of the Dhamma. It also addressed the unresolved dispute over Ambedkar's interpretation of the Buddha's dhamma by examining the accuracy and correctness of his citations and by providing sources not included in his citations and references. It also considers the modifications made by Ambedkar on his sources of materials.

State power has been a bedrock concept in international relations for centuries, but it has taken a backseat in recent years to other topics—information, interests, identity, audiences, to name a few. Back to Basics brings state power back to center stage and sets an agenda for new theorizing about its role in international relations. In this volume, some of the field’s top scholars tackle a wide array of “puzzles about power” and offer new ways of thinking about the role of both states and power in the contemporary world. They explore many “faces” of state power and diverse pathways by which it creates its effects. They theorize a rich environment in which states use their power and explore ways in which this thickly normed and institutionalized world can create surprising outcomes. They also reflect on how variation and change in the nature of sovereignty may influence not only the ways states exercise power but also the ways power is exercised upon them. Taken together, these essays open up new lines of thinking on the changing role of state power in both international relations theory and world politics. Includes essays by Stephen Krasner, Robert Keohane, David Lake, Thomas Risse, Etel Solingen, Peter Katzenstein, Benjamin Cohen, Richard Steinberg, Peter Gourevitch, Arthur Stein, Lloyd Gruber, Daniel Drezner, Robert Jervis, Martha Finnemore, Judith Goldstein.

Does globalization erode the nation state's capacity to act? Are nation states forced to change their policies even if this goes against the democratic will of their electorates? How does government action change under conditions of globalization? Questions like these have not only featured highly in political debates in recent years, but also in academic discourse. This book contributes to that debate. The general question it addresses is whether globalization leads to policy convergence — a central, but contested topic in the debate, as theoretical arguments can be advanced both in favour of and against the likelihood of such a development. More specifically, the book contains detailed empirical case studies of four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland) in a policy area where state action has been particularly challenged by the emergence of world-wide, around-the-clock financial markets in the last few decades, namely that of the regulation and supervision of the banking industry. Based on careful analysis of historical developments, specific challenges, the character of policy networks and institutions, and their interaction in the political process, this book argues that nation states still possess considerable room for manoeuvre in pursuing their policies. Even if they choose supranational coordination and cooperation, their national institutional configurations still function as filters in the globalization process.

We live in an increasingly prosperous world, yet the estimated number of undernourished people has risen, and will continue to rise with the doubling of food prices. A large majority of those affected are living in India. Why have strategies to combat hunger, especially in India, failed so badly? How did a nation that prides itself on booming economic growth come to have half of its preschool population undernourished? Using the case study of a World Bank nutrition project in India, this book takes on these questions and probes the issues surrounding development assistance, strategies to eliminate undernutrition, and how hunger should be fundamentally understood and addressed. Throughout the book, the underlying tension between choice and circumstance is explored. How much are individuals able to determine their life choices? How much should policy-makers take underlying social forces into account when designing policy? This book examines the possibilities and obstacles to eliminating child hunger. This book is not just about nutrition, it is an attempt to uncover the workings of power through a close look at the structures, discourses, and agencies through which nutrition policy operates. In this process, the source of nutrition policy in the World Bank is traced to those affected by the policies in India.

Contemporary political science assumes that ‘institutions matter’. But the governing institutions of the European Union are widely presumed to matter more than most. A commonplace assumption about the EU is that those working within European institutions are subject to a pervasive tendency to become socialised into progressively more pro-integration attitudes and behaviours. This assumption has been integral to many accounts of European integration, and is also central to how scholars study individual EU institutions. However, the theoretical and empirical adequacy of this assumption has never been properly investigated. This study examines this question in the context of an increasingly important EU institution, the European Parliament. The book integrates new theoretical arguments with a substantial amount of original empirical research. It develops a coherent understanding, based on simple rationalist principles, of when and why institutional socialisation is effective. This theoretical argument explains the main empirical findings of the book. Drawing on several sources of evidence on MEPs’ attitudes and behaviour, and deploying advanced empirical techniques, the empirical analysis shows the commonplace assumption about EU institutions to be false. European Parliamentarians do not become more pro-integration as they are socialised into the institution. The findings of the study generate some highly important conclusions. They indicate that institutional socialisation of political elites should be given a much more limited and conditional role in understanding European integration than it is accorded in many accounts. They suggest that MEPs remain largely national politicians in their attitudes, loyalties and much of their activities, and that traditional classifications of the European Parliament as a ‘supra-national’ institution are misleading. Finally, the study offers broader lessons about the circumstances in which institutions effectively socialise those working within them.

This book challenges the habit of conventional historiography of taking the ‘essential’ state – a ‘bounded entity’ equipped with a ‘sovereign’ central power — for granted in any period and of not taking period political terminology seriously. It refutes the idea, current both in historiography and in International Relations theory (in particular Realism), that the fundamental nature of ‘international’ politics is historically immutable. Nothing akin to what we call the ‘state’ existed before the 19th century: it is a recent invention and the assumption that it is timeless, necessary for society, is simply part of its legitimating myth. The development over the past three millennia of the political structures of western civilization is shown here to have been a succession of unrepeatable but path-dependent stages. In examining structural change, the book adopts a constructivist approach based on the analysis of period political discourse. This approach both reflects and illuminates the evolution of western political thought: on the one hand, political thought is a vehicle of the political discourse of its period. On the other hand, the assumption that political theory must in any age somehow be centred on the ‘state’ has forced our understanding of it into a straight-jacket: abandoning this assumption permits fresh and unexpected insights into the political thinking of earlier eras. Close attention, however, is also paid to the material constraints and opportunities (e.g., ecological and economic factors, or military technology) impacting on the evolution of society.