British Journal of Politics & International Relations最新文献

This article

• Offers a refined research design for analysing voting cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly;
• Demonstrates that ASEAN's integration process is unlikely to explain the observed high level of voting cohesion in Pacific Asia;
• Specifies the ASEAN-China and ASEAN-Japan alignment;
• Shows that the alignment of South Korea is closer with the USA than with North Korea in contested votes in the United Nations General Assembly.

In this paper, we propose a refined research agenda for analysing voting cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly. Although we respond specifically to Ferdinand, our four points of critique and suggestions concerning the research design are applicable to a larger corpus of literature. First, we include a longer period of observation to interpret the effects of regional integration. Second, we demonstrate the necessity to control for the year of accession of member states. Third, we propose to look at time series rather than arithmetical means to compare changes in voting cohesion. Finally, we exclude nearly unanimous votes from our analysis to enhance the explanatory values of our cases. This refined design has important effects on the analysis of Pacific Asia's voting cohesion in the UNGA. We conclude from our findings that regional integration is unlikely to explain the high level of voting cohesion within ASEAN and the region.

• Concepts from domestic and comparative politics can be applied in a transnational context; the article develops the notion of ‘transnational veto players’ to explain the practice of financial reform.
• Understanding the nature of constituency in a transnational context is important for explanations of actor preferences and the mode of policy that ensues.
• While actors involved in global standard-setting in finance have formal defined constituencies, when operating in a transnational setting their interactions render their constituencies diffuse, including peers and other interlocutors.
• In transnational settings, actors act as veto players by defining and delimiting the pool of ideas available for reform.
• ‘Too big to fail’ has been highlighted as an important target for reform but the resulting changes in the regulatory treatment of large financial institutions do not alter their core functions.

Policy processes in transnational settings are shaped by actors whose approval and consent are required for reform to take place. These ‘transnational veto players’ frame and delimit policy options. The concept of ‘transnational veto players’ is developed through an empirical analysis of global reforms in the regulatory treatment of large financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’. Actors debating and developing policy on ‘too big to fail’ may have formal defined constituencies, as regulators, academics or lobbying organisations, but in their transnational interactions they are also informed by a diffuse constituency of peers through their multiple associations within policy communities. These interactions determine which policy ideas are permissible and how they are adopted. The ‘too big to fail’ case shows how reform activity to curtail the risks posed by large financial institutions may also inadvertently strengthen their position as transnational veto players.

This article

• Gives clearer conceptualisation of what an idea is.
• Provides clearer conceptualisation of how ideas may change over time.
• Uses central arguments from relational sociology and conceptual analysis in discursive institutionalism.
• Provides new theoretical perspectives on ideational change in wake of the recent financial- and economic crisis.

How can we conceptualise the emergence of new political ideas? Demonstrating that the discursive institutionalist literature is silent on this question, the article links this theoretical lacuna to the problem of ideational infinite regress, i.e. that if we try to identify the absolute origin of an idea, we find that the relations to other ideational elements develop ad infinitum and the end or beginning of the idea never appears. Ideas do not emerge from an absolute origin but instead are created when a set of ideational elements are yoked together by political actors. Three ways that ideational change occurs is suggested: a change in the relations in the idea (recasting the idea), the replacement of at least one of the existing ideational elements with ideational elements hitherto not part of the idea (renewing the idea) and finally a wholesale change of ideational elements in the idea (revolutionising the idea).

• Empirical evidence of how Commission policy framing processes shape the Europeanization of Member States
• Analytical and empirical evidence of how and why Commission services develop and promote divergent policy frames in relation to children's rights
• Challenges faced by the EU's promotion of policy measures that have a cross-sectoral dimension
• Analytical and empirical evidence of how Commission services conceive their legal role and scope with respect to children's rights

This article examines how and why Commission policy framing processes impact on the Europeanization of children's rights at the national level. By employing the Hotline for Missing Children as a case study, it is demonstrated that Commission services failed to adopt a coherent policy line regarding the issue of missing children. Instead, Commission services promoted conflicting Hotline templates, which conveyed mixed messages and shaped the differential implementation of the Hotline at the national level. The contradictory Hotline templates are rooted in Commission services' embrace of divergent policy frames, which are determined by institutional fragmentation and conflicting interpretations of Commission legal competence to address the issue of missing children and the protection of child rights.

• This article contributes to the literature on ideational and institutional change at critical junctures more generally, and in the context of economic crises in particular.
• In the context of explosive economic crises critical junctures should be conceptualised as consisting of two distinct phases—a phase of emergency crisis management and a subsequent phase of purposeful institution building.
• The analytical significance of the crisis management phase lies in its tendency to create path dependencies for subsequent ideational entrepreneurs and institution building efforts.
• Crisis management is always ‘bricolage’. However, in order to understand why certain tools are ‘at hand’ during a crisis, one needs to take into account the variable of crisis preparedness. Contingency planning for non-normal times is a constitutive aspect of any economic policy paradigm.
• The empirical analysis shows that the euro area's lack of preparedness caused the ECB to assume a dominant position during the emergency phase of the crisis. This windfall gain in power for the ECB has already begun to shape the future institutional architecture of the EMU.

Focusing on the experience of the euro area in general, and the ECB in particular, this article argues that in the context of explosive financial crises a phase of emergency crisis management precedes the phase of purposeful institution building. Importantly for our understanding of policy change, crisis management measures create their own path dependencies. However, albeit often improvised, crisis management decisions are not entirely contingent. The article therefore introduces the notion of preparedness, which measures the extent to which the pre-crisis policy paradigm was prepared for the joint occurrence of, in this case, a systemic banking crisis and a sovereign debt crisis. The analysis shows that the Euro area's lack of preparedness caused the ECB to assume a dominant position in the euro area during the emergency phase of the crisis. This windfall gain in power for the ECB has already begun to shape the future institutional architecture of the EMU.

This article,

• is a contribution to the theoretical debate over whether the Bush administration's defection from international torture norms led to a norm cascade favouring the Bush administration's preference for a more lenient definition of torture;
• is a contribution to the theoretical debate over the relationship between material power and the ability to legitimate preferences in international society;
• is a clarification of the utility of material capabilities with respect to legitimacy;
• is a detailed historical presentation of the discursive interactions between the United States and other states within international society over the defection of the United States from the torture norm which is currently not present in the literature.

This article examines the effect of Bush administration's human rights preferences during the war on terror with respect to torture by analysing a large-n sample of public legitimation strategies of both the United States and other members of international society. The article asks two questions: first, has the defection of the United States from these human rights norms led to a ‘norm cascade’ that delegitimized the norms? Second, did the material preponderance of the United States help it to legitimate its preferences in international society? The article argues that despite initial ambiguity in the response to the Bush administration's preferences from key liberal states, there is little evidence by the end of the Bush administration's term that a core group of states supported their preferences, nor did its material preponderance help the Bush administration to legitimate its position.

The main contribution of this article is that it:

• Introduces a distinction between different pathways for junior partner influence on the foreign policy of coalition governments;
• Provides nuanced insights into the effects of coalition government on foreign policy as well as on the causal mechanisms behind these effects;
• Contributes to the ‘unpacking’ of coalitions and the analysis of coalition governance more generally;
• Features a comparative analysis of the current coalition governments in the United Kingdom and Germany.

This article contributes to research on the foreign policy influence of junior partners in coalition governments. In particular, it takes up the call to pay greater attention to different patterns and pathways of such influence. To this purpose, this article distinguishes two types of coalition set-ups for foreign policy making. In the first type, junior partners hold one or more departments in the foreign policy executive, and their foreign policy influence rests on the powers that controlling ministries in the field brings. In the second type, junior partners do not hold any department in foreign affairs, and their influence comes from their ability to constrain the discretion of the senior partner in foreign policy. The article exemplifies its theoretical contentions in comparative case studies on the current coalition governments in Germany and the UK, which represent the first and second type respectively.

• Within the European Union (EU), the neoliberal trade policy has not only survived the global financial crisis (GFC) and Eurozone crisis, but has been reinforced throughout these crises.
• This has been helped by a legitimizing discourse by the European Commission that has continuously depicted free trade in a favourable relationship vis-à-vis the GFC and the Eurozone crisis.
• Empirically, this article shows how between 2008 and 2012, the EU trade discourse has been subtly adapted to the changing crisis environment: from defensive, over offensive-desirable and offensive-necessary towards necessary-but-not-sufficient at the time of writing. In the tradition of critical discourse analysis, we also point at the problematic assumptions and logics held by the discourse.
• Theoretically, it is shown how subtly adapting discourse to a fluctuating context can effectively limit policy change and legitimize continuity.

The crisis starting in 2008 has not led to the demise but to the reinforcement of neoliberalism, not least within the European Union (EU). We argue that this can also be observed in the EU's external trade policy, where the European Commission's discourse has continued to legitimize neoliberal trade through subtle re-articulations of the relationship between free trade and the crisis. In this respect four stages can be discerned: defensive, offensive-desirable, offensive-necessary and necessary-but-not-sufficient. These subtle adaptations are articulated as coherent with the internal Eurozone crisis, although we show that their assumptions can be challenged. Theoretically, we engage in a critical analysis of the Commission's trade discourse in the context of the crisis. Empirically, we focus on the different EU Trade Commissioners' discourses between 2008–2012. The article shows how subtly adapting discourse to a fluctuating context can effectively limit change and legitimize continuity.

This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses

• Presents key assumptions discussed in the collection of articles, such as liberalism as a discourse and the conceptualization of discourses as networks.
• Offers an original typology of liberal discourses regarding State intervention.
• Introduces two models linking discursive interactions to discursive change, analogous to the operational code approach and to schema theory in cognitive science.
• Presents original data on DG Trade discourse, to illustrate simultaneous change and continuity.

This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses discusses three themes covered by all contributions: (i) the co-existence of several market liberal discourses in the European public sphere; (ii) interactions among these various discourses; (iii) and discursive changes resulting from these interactions.