EIGHTH FORUM ON INTERNATIONALIZATION, GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC POLICIES
2013-2014 International & Interdisciplinary Seminars Series

27th June 2014
h: 14.30 in Room A, via Pace 10

"Comparing Political Communication Cultures in Europe – Towards a typology of the media-politics relationship"
Prof. Barbara Pfetsch Free University Berlin, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Institute for Media and Communication Studies

Abstract

Political Communication Culture relates to the milieu in which politicians and journalists relate to each other on a daily basis. It captures the subjective dimension of the media and politics interface in the expression of attitudes and beliefs of the actors and helps explain the conduct of political communication. The comparative study of political communication culture across European countries is meaningful because this culture is bound to vary by institutional context and national political culture. In European democracies recent studies about the values and beliefs of politicians and media people point to vulnerable exchange relations which are governed by ambiguity and cynicism. Moreover, within Western Europe, the political communication culture becomes more politicized and less professional the more we go south. In the seminar, we discuss a study that compares the perceptions and attitudes of politicians, political spokespeople and journalists of various European countries. Based on survey data of 2,500 political and media elites in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland a typology is developed that maps out typical patterns of the media politics interface. The study finds divisions among countries in Southern Europe, a German-language group, and a Nordic group of countries. The Southern European countries stand out since they maintained the tradition of commentary and advocacy in political communication culture. In the Nordic group, the relationship is geared towards distant professional media relations. The seminar ends discussing the conditions in media and politics which put the already frangible political communication cultures under stress.

13th June 2014

"Coordinated collective bargaining before and during the crisis: a tale of two Europes"
Prof. Paul Marginson
Warwick Business School

Abstract:

The continued viability of coordinated, multi-employer bargaining arrangements as a cornerstone of labour market regulation across western Europe has come under increased threat since the onset of the crisis. A key feature of multi-employer bargaining arrangements is the extent to which they are are articulated (Crouch 1993) or coordinated (Traxler et al. 2001) vertically across levels and horizontally between bargaining units (e.g. sectors). These arrangements are now being targeted by national and European and international public and financial authorities as standing for rigidity and impeding flexibility in the labour market. In their place, more marketized bargaining arrangements are advocated and, in the case of countries receiving international financial assistance packages, imposed.
Two main arguments are developed. First, from the 1990s onwards, employer-led, pressure for decentralisation has corroded the capacity of sector agreements to specify universal standards applicable at company level. Procedural mechanisms articulating the two levels have become looser and more open-ended. Cross-country variation is evident, and already prior to the crisis there was a distinction between countries in western continental and Nordic Europe, together with Italy, with relatively well-specified articulation mechanisms and some Mediterranean countries which lacked these. Second, the crisis has become a critical moment in the evolution of the coordination capacity of multi-employer bargaining, but with developments differing sharply as between two broad groups of countries. Amongst one, embracing 'northern' European countries with multi-employer arrangements, the response of employers' organisations and trade unions has been to extend the pre-existing trajectory of 'organised decentralisation' even further, whilst national authorities remain supportive of these arrangements. Amongst the second, covering mainly southern EU member states, change has been more contested and imposed. Governments and/or the European authorities and IMF have intervened in a concerted push to foster market-based determination of wages and conditions through company-level bargaining, involving a frontal assault on the coordination capacity of multi-employer agreements.
In conclusion, rather than undermining the coordination capacity of multi-employer bargaining arrangements in parts of southern Europe, the European and national public authorities need to recognise the macro-economic benefits associated with effectively coordinated bargaining, and adopt measures which promote the development of such capacity at cross-border level.

16th May 2014

"Conflict Processing Mechanisms"
Prof. Adam Przeworski
Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor, Department of Politics, New York University
Abstract:
The problem facing every polity is how to maintain political order in the face of conflicts that inevitably arise in the society, specifically, how to prevent conflicts from becoming violent. Political order can be maintained by a combination of exhortations to unity, repression, and cooptation. Alternatively, it can supported by institutional frameworks that process conflicts according to some rules, as long as these institutions succeed in structuring, absorbing, and regulating conflicts. Pluralistic elections that result in power sharing or in alternation in office provide one such mechanism. Such elections need not and often do not allow free entry into competition: they can coexist with some non-majoritarian, tutelary institutions. Distributional conflicts can be separately regulated by systems of collective bargaining as well as by judicial systems that individualize conflicts by processing particular grievances. The paper examines the logic of each of these mechanisms as well as the conditions under which these mechanisms are successful.

Friday 11th April 2014, h: 14.30

"Redemption: Race, Gender and Violence in Georgia (1875 - 1930). An application of QNA"
Prof. Roberto Franzosi Department of Sociology, Emory University

Abstract:

The talk focuses on the social relations of race in a US southern state: Georgia. It spans the period of American history between 1875 and 1930, after emancipation and reconstruction through the heyday of Jim Crow laws. It looks at the race and gender norms that regulated social life in the Deep South. Violations of those norms (and laws) carried stiff costs, for black men (lynching) and white women as well (shame and disgrace). The research behind the talk owes a great debt to new computer technologies and to the array of new methods that these technologies make available for socio-historical research (digital humanities scholarship). Lynching data of 492 Georgia lynching events (disaggregated by actors and actions and all their characteristics, such as time and place of action) were collected from newspaper narratives and coded through a computer-assisted approach to narrative developed by the author (Quantitative Narrative Analysis, QNA). These data lend themselves to data visualization and analysis in network graphs and in various GIS (Geographic Information System) software. Newspapers also provide evidence on miscegenation cases tried in court. United States historic population census records are used to track down the women allegedly "outraged" by the black men lynched.

Friday, 28th March 2014, h: 14.30,

"Making Rules and Breaking Rules"
Prof. Kenneth A. Shepsle
George D. Markham Professor of Government Methods and Formal Theory (Harvard University)

Leaflet

Abstract:
Douglass North is famous for, among other things, making institutions the centerpiece of studies of political economy. Institutions are, for him, the humanly constructed rules of the game, a game form in the language of game theory. An alternative conceptualization, associated with Schotter (1981) and Calvert (1985), and responsive to concerns articulated by Riker (1980), conceives of North's game form as part of a more all encompassing equilibrium of rational human behavior. Whereas North takes the rules of the game as exogenous and seeks to identify the equilibria that arise when agents, abiding by the rules, bring particular preferences to a situation, what Shepsle (1979) called a structure-induced equilibrium, Schotter and Calvert allow for the possibility of non compliance with extant rules and, indeed, for moves that alter the game form altogether.
In the present talk, these two approaches are developed more fully. Examples drawn from the US Congress and elsewhere are used to exhibit the ways in which rules arise and change endogenously. Rational, self-governing agents are not as restricted by exogenous constraints as in North's formulation as to be unable to reformulate the ways they do their business.

Room A, via Pace 10

Tuesday 18th February 2013, h. 13:00

WORKSHOP Capturing Campaign Dynamics
Keynote speaker Richard Johnston (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)

Abstract:
During the past two decades research into the political effects of election campaigns (and to a degree also referendum campaigns) has seen a rapid development. Several recent studies have demonstrated that campaigns are not just political folklore customarily preceding elections and of no relevance for their outcomes. Rather, it has become clear that campaigns have systematic effects on how citizens make up their minds at elections, and ultimately on their political choices. However, it has become similarly clear that the study of campaigns is posing considerable methodological difficulties to researchers. This workshop is devoted to methodological aspects of research into the political effects of campaigns as events that unfold dynamically over time. With a primary focus on Rolling Cross-section surveys (RCS), but also addressing issues of panel analysis the workshop will deal with issues of data collection, such as survey design and questions of survey mode, as well as with strategies and methods for analyzing dynamic data of that kind.

with the partecipation of: Mauro Barisione, Giuliano Bobba, Guido Legnante, Paolo Mancini,
Antonella Seddone, Paolo Segatti and Cristiano Vezzoni

SPS Department Seminar Room (Lato Passione)

Friday, 7th February 2014, h: 14.30

"Flexicurity, activation, the Third Way, social investment.... The rise (and fall?) of centrist welfare reform strategies in Europe"
Prof. Giuliano Bonoli

Seminar Discussant is Prof. Anton Hemerijck (VU University Amsterdam)

Seminar Abstract:
The last two decades have seen the emergence of a range of new perspectives on social policy. These are different from the ones that dominated debates in the previous decades, in that they tend to regard social policy as a productive factor, playing an active role in promoting labour market participation and investment in human capital. These perspectives, which ideologically are generally located somewhere between traditional left and neo-liberal views, have much in common but are also seen as different by some of their proponents. This presentation will first look at the origins of the new policy orientation and at the factors that were responsible for its development in a range of European countries. Second, by looking at recent developments, it will consider the potential of these centrist perspectives also in terms of political feasibility.

Room A, via Pace 10

Friday, 13th December 2013, h: 14.30

"Economics and civil rights: Effects-based Civil Rights Law in Global Context"
Prof. Robin Stryker (Professor of Sociology, Law, and Government and Public Policy; Director of Research, National Institute for Civil Discourse, University of Arizona)
Leaflet

Seminar Abstract:
Strategic litigation based on rights discourse is increasingly mobilized around the world to promote social and economic transformation that benefits the economically disadvantaged and marginalized and the socially excluded. Between 1964 and 1968, the United States Congress enacted three potentially transformative civil rights laws: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act. Evidence suggests that of the three, voting rights was by far the most successful, fair housing was a general failure, and Title VII fell somewhere in between. This presentation (based on a forthcoming article and an in press book), develops a new explanation to explain these divergent outcomes--an explanation that can be reformulated as a research hypothesis that should be applicable world-wide. Such applicability must be explored because international treaties and conventions, national constitutions and national legislation increasingly include many economic and social rights (ESR) as well as many civil and political rights (CPR).

Room A, via Pace 10

Friday, 29th November 2013, h: 14.30

"Trade Unions and Redistributive Politics"
Prof. Jonas Pontusson (Département de science politique et relations internationales, Université de Genève)

Leaflet

Seminar Abstract:
Union density has declined dramatically in most OECD countries over the last two decades. This talk will explore the implications of this development for the politics of redistribution as well as the distribution of gross earnings from employment. Prof. Jonas Pontusson will engage in cross-national comparison of macro data on inequality and redistribution and also present evidence showing that union members are, in most countries, more likely to vote and more likely to support redistributions than other citizens."

Room A, via Pace 10