Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Part I. Understanding Secularization: 1. The secularization debate 2. Measuring secularization 3. Comparing secularization worldwide Part II. Case Studies of Religion and Politics: 4. The puzzle of secularization in the United States and Western Europe 5. A religious revival in post-communist Europe? 6. Religion and politics in the Muslim world Part III. The Consequences of Secularization: 7. Religion, the Protestant ethic, and moral values 8. Religious organizations and social capital 9. Religious parties and electoral behavior Part IV. Conclusions: 10. Secularization and its consequences 11. Re-examining the theory of existential security 12. Re-examining evidence for the security thesis.

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Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Taking Rights Seriously

The aim of this article is to clarify the nature of the management style most suited to the emergence of networked governance. The paradigms of traditional public administration and new public management sit uncomfortably with networked governance. In contrast, it is argued the public value management paradigm bases its practice in the systems of dialogue and exchange that characterize networked governance. Ultimately, the strength of public value management is seen to rest on its ability to point to a motivational force that does not solely rely on rules or incentives to drive public service practice and reform. People are, it suggests, motivated by their involvement in networks and partnerships, that is, their relationships with others formed in the context of mutual respect and shared learning. Building successful relationships is the key to networked governance and the core objective of the management needed to support it.

Public Value Management: A New Narrative for Networked Governance?

While understanding interest group systems remains crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies, the study of interest groups remains a somewhat niche field within political science. Nevertheless, during the last 15 years, the academic interest in group politics has grown and we reflect on the state of the current literature. The main objective is to take stock, consider the main empirical and theoretical/conceptual achievements, but most importantly, to reflect upon potential fertile future research avenues. In our view interest group studies would be reinvigorated and would benefit from being reintegrated within the broader field of political science, and more particularly, the comparative study of government.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01402380802370443

Researching Interest Group Politics in Europe and Elsewhere: Much We Study, Little We Know?

This paper examines the place of groups in the consultative process in British policymaking. It stresses the importance of consultation even under the Thatcher government and distinguishes between consultation, bargaining and negotiation. The paper identifies the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The discussion revisits the insider/outsider typology often used to differentiate interest group strategies and status in policy development. It suggests that the insider group term is associated with a particular style of policy making, and offers amendments to the existing use of the terms to avoid the difficulties which occur from the conflation of group strategy and group status.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0143814X00001239

Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited

There is growing interest in the social sciences in the concept of social capital and the role it plays in facilitating collaborative and collective actions. Within political science, it is the work of Robert Putnam which has dominated social capital research. This paper argues that the ‘Putnam-school’ approach is lacking in two main respects. First, the role played by public authorities in the creation of social capital is neglected. Second, the implications for governance cannot simply be read off from associational activity and ‘stocks’ of social capital. The concept of the political opportunity structure is offered and adapted to develop a framework for social capital analysis. Original empirical material from Birmingham is drawn upon and compared to earlier studies of the city in order to support and illustrate the arguments of the paper.

Social Capital and Urban Governance: Adding a More Contextualized ‘Top-down’ Perspective:

Part 1 The inexorable growth of environmentalism? introduction environmental phases: the rise of environmentalism organizational transformation? the rise of the protest businesses environmental divisions Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth. Part 2 Old political science and new social movements: perspectives on environmentalism the significance of terminology the distinguishing characteristics of new social movements? novelty or loss of professional memory? FoE: ecological movement, social movement organization, interest group or protest business? 'extreme' interpretation of pressure group: voluntary, democratically accountable and individual-based. Part 3 How bumble bees fly - accounting for public interest participation: understanding public interest group motivations: competing explanations Olson's explanations explanations denying the paradox of participation different rationalities conclusions. Part 4 Who participates in 'mail order' groups? basic demographics - gender, education, occupation, class, age and income party orientation overlapping membership member profiles. Part 5 The dynamics of group membership: when? why? how: does the route into the organization make a difference? post materialism lapsing levels of activism. The contribution of marketing in an explaining membership: introduction: marketing interest group membership starting points for a supply side perspective marketing membership instability as a consequence of marketing: the 'revolving door problem' building the group into the membership decision. Part 7 Protest businesses and democratic activity: is 'more', more influential? the decay of parties and the growth of groups? the conflict between success and influence? customers or members: democratic participation?

The protest business? : mobilizing campaign groups

This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by default. The article seeks to distinguish between interest groups and other policy relevant bodies—often corporations or institutions. It finds disadvantages in adopting a functional interpretation of the interest group term (i.e. any organisation trying to influence public policy). While the wider range of organisations are crucial in understanding the making of public policy, it is confusing to assume that this wider population are all interest groups. The article instead advances the complementary notions of pressure participant, policy participant and interest group. This slightly expanded repertoire of terms avoids conflating important distinctions, and, in Sartori’s term permits ‘disambiguation’. The core assumption is that the search for comparative data and exploration of normative questions implies some harmonisation in the interest group currency. With few—if any—exceptions, concepts in the social sciences are poorly defined: indeed most prove popular precisely because they have an imprecision that allows promiscuous application. 1 Though the press and non-specialist political scientists think they know when an organisation is, or is not, an interest group, this is an area where more careful scrutiny produces less rather than more confidence. This article ‘tests’ a very basic ‘unit of analysis’ crucial to political science, the interest group, and finds that the elasticity of understanding among scholars in the area makes cumulative studies (unnecessarily) difficult. In the absence of definitional clarity, general conclusions about what sorts of groups dominate the democratic system—an important dimension to interest group study—are almost impossible to draw with any accuracy. The core proposition in this article 2 is that different authors cover different types of organisation in the field loosely delineated by the interest/pressure group label. While there is value in Karl Popper’s concern that we should not be ‘goaded into taking seriously words and their meanings’ (Popper 1976, quoted in Gerring 1999, 360), if there are no agreed language-tools there can be no comparison of conclusions.

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William A. Maloney

Papers

Researching Interest Group Politics in Europe and Elsewhere: Much We Study, Little We Know?

Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited

Social Capital and Urban Governance: Adding a More Contextualized ‘Top-down’ Perspective:

The protest business? : mobilizing campaign groups

Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions?