State (polity)

About: State (polity) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36954 publications have been published within this topic receiving 719822 citations. The topic is also known as: state (polity).

A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India

Abstract: Radhika Singha looks at law-making as a cultural enterprise, one in which the colonial authorities were compelled to draw upon normative codes of rank, status, and gender so as to realign them to a new, more exclusive definition of the state's sovereign right.

Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race–Class Subjugated Communities

Abstract: Against the backdrop of Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, we ask what the American politics subfield has to say about the political lives of communities subjugated by race and class. We argue that mainstream research in this subfield—framed by images of representative democracy and Marshallian citizenship—has provided a rich portrait of what such communities lack in political life. Indeed, by focusing so effectively on their political marginalization, political scientists have ironically made such communities marginal to the subfield's account of American democracy and citizenship. In this article, we provide a corrective by focusing on what is present in the political lives of such communities. To redress the current imbalance and advance the understandings of race and class in American politics, we argue that studies of the liberal-democratic “first face” of the state must be complemented by greater attention to the state's more controlling “second face.” Focusing on policing, we seek to uns...

Ideas, Paradigms and Institutions: Agricultural Exceptionalism in the European Union and the United States

Abstract: The differing trajectory of agricultural policy reforms in the 1990s in the world's two most important agricultural powers, the United States and the European Community/Union (EC/EU), can only be fully understood by appreciating the role that ideas play in policy outcomes. The idea of agricultural exceptionalism underwrote a paradigm of state assistance in the US and the EC/EU. By the mid-1980s, the state assistance paradigm was under stress, and subject to a number of anomalies in both the US and the EC. But while the paradigm was overthrown and replaced with a market liberal model in the US grain sector in the 1990s, it remained intact in the European Union. Explaining why agricultural exceptionalism and the state assistance paradigm has endured in the EU while it has withered in the US highlights three factors: the importance of the political institutional framework in locking in—or not—policy principles and instruments; the degree of fit of a sectoral policy paradigm with the broader societal ideational framework regarding appropriate relations between the state, the market, and the individual; and the capacity of a paradigm to adjust in the face of challenges and anomalies.

Policing as a Public Good: Reconstituting the Connections between Policing and the State

Abstract: The gradual de-coupling of police and state is an increasingly well-documented phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we set out in this article to reformulate and defend a positive (rather than pejora...