School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

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    Las paradojas del progresismo ecuatoriano: Una mirada crítica a su legado en lo social, económico y ecológico
    Rodríguez, D ; Herrera, S ; Molina, C ; Torres Davila, VH (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, CLACSO, 2020)
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    What is in the 'People's Interest'?" Discourses of Egalitarianism and 'Development as Compensation' in Contemporary Ecuador
    Fitz-Henry, E ; Rodriguez, D ; Gold, M ; Zagato, A (Berghahn Books, 2020)
    The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.
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    Green democracy
    Eckersley, R ; Morin, J-F ; Orsini, A (Taylor & Francis, 2020-09-01)
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    Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene
    ECKERSLEY, R (Sage Journals, 2017)
    The proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene, whereby humans have become the dominant geological force shaping Earth systems, has attracted considerable interest in the social sciences and humanities but only scant attention from democratic theorists. This inquiry draws out the democratic problems associated with the two opposing narratives on governing the Anthropocene – Earth systems governance and ecomodernism – and juxtaposes them with a more critical narrative that draws out the democratic potential of the Anthropocene as a new source of critique of liberal democracy and a new resource for democratic renewal. While Ulrich Beck welcomed reflexive cosmopolitan democracy (understood as a civil culture of responsibility across borders) as the appropriate response to the world risk society, this narrative develops an account of hyper-reflexive ‘geopolitan democracy’ based on a more radical extension of democratic horizons of space, time, community and agency as the appropriate response to navigating the Anthropocene.
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    Ecological democracy and the rise and decline of liberal democracy: looking back, looking forward
    Eckersley, R (Taylor and Francis Group, 2020)
    The critical environmental political theory (EPT) of ecological democracy emerged in the 1990s when liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism appeared to be on the rise. A quarter of a century later, as both went into decline in the western heartland, a new iteration of ecological democracy has emerged, reflecting a significant shift in critical normative horizons, focus and method. Whereas the first iteration sought to critique and institutionally expand the coordinates of democracy – space, time, community and agency – to bring them into closer alignment with a cosmopolitan ecological and democratic imaginary, the second has connected ecology and democracy through everyday material practices and local participatory democracy from a more critical communitarian perspective. The respective virtues and problems of each iteration of ecological democracy are drawn out, and the complementarities and tensions between them are shown to be productive in maintaining theoretical and methodological pluralism and enhancing the prospects for sustainability and a multifaceted democracy.
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    Capital Punishment in Singapore: A Critical Analysis of State Justifications From 2004 to 2018
    Yap, A ; Tan, SJ (Queensland University of Technology, 2020)
    This article examines state justifications for capital punishment in Singapore. Singapore is a unique case study because capital punishment has largely been legitimised and justified by state officials. It illustrates how Singapore justifies capital punishment by analysing official discourse. Discussion will focus on the government’s narrative on capital punishment, which has been primarily directed against drug trafficking. Discussion will focus on Singapore’s death penalty regime and associated official discourse that seeks to justify state power to exercise such penalties, rather than the ethics and proportionality of capital punishment towards drug-related crimes. Critical analysis from a criminological perspective adds to the growing body of literature that seeks to conceptualise social and political phenomena in South-East Asia.
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    Developing a Career Access Program (CAP) for people with intellectual disability in the Victorian public sector: The evidence base to inform the development and implementation of CAP
    McVilly, K ; Murfitt, K ; Crosbie, J ; Rouget, D ; Jacobs, P (Department of Health and Human Services and The University of Melbourne, 2019)
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    Should we talk about the weather? How party competition and coalition participation influence parties' attention to economic issues
    Goldring, E ; Park, BB ; Williams, LK (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2020-11)
    Media narratives of political campaigns paint a complex picture of parties carefully selecting communication strategies in response to the current social and economic climate as well as the strategic choices made by rival parties. Current empirical efforts based on simple ordinary least squares, however, fail to honor those complexities. We argue that ignoring the spatial and temporal dynamics at play produces misleading inferences about parties’ behavior. In an application of German parties’ attention to economic issues in official communications, we demonstrate that once scholars test the theories with a method that honors the inherent complexity of the process, the inferences about parties’ degree of responsiveness change. Indeed, proper specification of the model shows that scholars who ignore spatial dependence tend to overstate the degree to which parties are responsive to changing conditions (such as public opinion or economic indicators) and understate the role of other constraints. Most notably, we find that parties have varying levels of path dependence, parties emulate the strategies used by ideological neighbors, and coalition partners appear to coordinate their strategies. These findings have implications for understanding variation in parties’ messaging strategies and how voters perceive parties’ positions.
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    Pre-election violence and territorial control: Political dominance and subnational election violence in polarized African electoral systems
    Wahman, M ; Goldring, E (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2020-01)
    Cross-national research on African electoral politics has argued that competition increases the prospects for pre-election violence. However, there is a dearth of systematic research on the effect of political competition on pre-election violence at the subnational level. We theorize that in African democracies characterized by competition at the national level but low subnational competitiveness (polarization), violence is often a manifestation of turf war and a tool to maintain and disrupt political territorial control. Consequently, contrary to expectations derived from the cross-national literature, pre-election violence is more likely in uncompetitive than competitive constituencies. Locally dominant as well as locally weak parties have incentives to perpetrate violence in uncompetitive constituencies. For locally dominant parties, violence is a tool to shrink the democratic space in their strongholds and maintain territorial control. For locally weak parties, violence can disturb the dominance of the opponent and protect their presence in hostile territory. We hypothesize that pre-election violence will be particularly common in opposition strongholds. In such locations, ruling parties can leverage their superior repressive resources to defend their ability to campaign, while the opposition can use their local capacity to reinforce the politics of territoriality. We test our hypotheses with original constituency-level election violence data from the 2016 Zambian elections. Data come from expert surveys of domestic election observers and represent a novel way of measuring low-level variations in election violence. Our analysis shows patterns of pre-election violence consistent with our theory on pre-election violence as a territorial tool.