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The study utilises data on major Indian states for the period 1980–2004 to explore the impact of political competition on state-level income and fiscal variables. The findings suggest that an increase in political competition leads to an increase in state per capita income and growth. In terms of magnitude, a proportionate increase in political competition, measured in terms of vote margin, raises per capita income by roughly 0.001. Focusing on fiscal variables, the analysis indicates that tighter political competition increases economic expenditure. The evidence also appears consistent with the career concern hypothesis, which suggests that politicians increase developmental spending in order to improve their re-election prospects.

The revival of pragmatism has brought renewed enthusiasm for John Dewey's conception of democracy. Drawing upon Rawlsian concerns regarding the fact of reasonable pluralism, I argue that Deweyan democracy is unworthy of resurrection. A modified version of Deweyan democracy recently proposed by Elizabeth Anderson is then taken up and also found to be lacking. Then I propose a model of democracy that draws upon Peirce's social epistemology. The result is a non-Deweyan but nonetheless pragmatist option in democratic theory.

The status of citizenship and the rights extended to non-citizens are among the most contentious and hotly debated political issues in numerous Western polities. Some scholars, most notably Seyla Benhabib, have deemed the contemporary changes a 'disaggregation of rights claims', in which the interplay between ideals of particularism and universalism lead to an 'unbundling' of civil, political and social rights with formal national membership. Yet this theoretical framing harbors deficiencies that complicate our understanding of the contemporary politics of immigration. In this article, I critically examine this account to show both its theoretical shortcomings and the incomplete explanations to which these deficiencies lead. In particular, I focus on the case of the 2006 protests in response to restrictionist immigration reform in the United States. Furthermore, I suggest ways in which an agonistic pluralist approach to citizenship and immigration issues provides us with a richer account of the political negotiations under way, as well as a means to re-conceptualize democratic voice and, at least in part, to begin democratically legitimating borders and access to political membership.

The article discusses a fundamental problem that has to be faced if the general capability approach is to be developed in the direction of a theory of justice: the selection and justification of a list of capabilities. The democratic solution to this problem (defended by Amartya Sen) is to leave the selection of capabilities to a process of democratic deliberation, while the philosophical solution (defended by Martha Nussbaum) is to establish this list of capabilities as a matter of philosophical theory. The article investigates the debate between these two different positions and argues in favour of the philosophical solution. First, it distinguishes political from epistemological reasons for (not) making capability lists. Second, it shows that the democratic position must incorporate at least some philosophical theorising in general and a theory of democracy in particular. Third, the article argues that the democratic position presupposes that the philosophical position will bypass the democratic process while actually it does not. The philosophical position is actually more respectful of democracy than the democratic position. Fourth, while philosophers may exercise caution and connect their capability lists to actual democratic debates and other empirical sources, this kind of epistemological virtue ironically may heighten the chance of receiving reproaches on the political level.

This article considers how UK governments use the Speech from the Throne (also known as the Gracious Speech and the King's or the Queen's Speech) to define and articulate their executive and legislative agenda. The analysis uses the policy content coding system of the Policy Agendas Project to measure total executive and legislative attention to particular issues. This generates the longest known data series of the political agenda in the UK, from the date of the first Parliament Act in 1911 right up to the end of 2008, nearly a century of government agenda setting. Using these data, the article identifies long-run institutional and policy stability in this agenda-setting instrument, and variation in its length and executive–legislative content due to the focusing events of world wars and party control of government. It assesses the degree to which the policy content of the speech is persistent (autoregressive) over time and identifies long-term trends in the total number of topics mentioned in each speech (scope), and the dispersion of government attention across topics (entropy). It also identifies important variation over time that indicates change in the agenda-setting function of the speech and evolution of the agenda in response to policy challenges faced by modern British governments in the period since 1911. Overall, the analysis demonstrates the robustness of the speech as a measure of the policy agenda and executive priorities in the UK.

Contemporary just war theory is experiencing a period of renegotiation as scholars grapple with the dimensions the war on terror places on the relationship between justice and war. A closer examination of the history of the tradition reveals that such intellectual moments have occurred before, and represent a philosophical heritage which can be probed for insight into current questions. We turn to the 1550–1 Valladolid debates between Sepúlveda and Las Casas to gain insight into some of the questions facing just war theorists today because the debates lay bare the logic for expanding jus ad bellum in the case of those perceived to be barbarians, and a compelling counter-argument. Sepúlveda proposes that a more expansive understanding of jus ad bellum is necessary in the case of barbarians, defining just cause in terms of identity and the natural law, balanced by humanitarian ends such as saving the innocent and spreading the natural law. Las Casas illustrates the dangers of Sepúlveda's position and offers an alternative framework of jus ad bellum that focuses on injury and warns against including humanitarian benefits in the just cause criterion. Las Casas' ultimate wisdom lies in arguing for the restriction of jus ad bellum in the face of those who make compelling arguments, draped in moral universals and humanitarian imperatives, for its expansion.

This article explores whether the supranational EU polity can be legitimised without the nation state. It claims that modern political representation depends on establishing a tripartite distinction between state, government and civil society. This is contrasted with competing notions of the modern state, notably Rousseau's idea of popular sovereignty and the Jacobin notion of 'immediate democracy'. The tripartite system, it is argued, enhances three crucial components of democratic legitimacy: governing, sanctioning and mandating accountability. Within this framework, the idea of the nation and the associated national narrative is shown to benefit democratic legitimacy by providing a trans-generational concept of the common good to which government can be held accountable. Since the EU does not fit this model, two approaches have been touted to legitimise this supranational polity in a post-national manner: democratic governance and constitutional patriotism. Yet both are highly problematic forms of engendering legitimacy. Governance offers no guarantees as to how and why citizens will be better represented and does away with the idea of a common good. Constitutional patriotism presupposes the prior acquiescence of nation states to EU integration without problematising how such acquiescence is mandated. Thus the maintenance of a genuinely post-national polity – one that does not recreate the division between state, government and people – depends on the ability to incorporate EU integration into evolving national narratives.

Many environmental problems such as global warming, biodiversity loss and waste accumulation can be described as large-scale collective action dilemmas. Previous research on collective action in Common Pool Resource settings has demonstrated that institutional structures and social capital are important for successful management of natural resources. The objective of this article is to investigate the effect of such factors on large-scale environmental collective action. The analysis employs survey data and indicators of institutional quality for 22 countries. Two measurements of environmental collective action are used: (1) intermediate group collective action; and (2) latent group environmental action. Findings point to a dominating role for two factors – institutional quality and membership in voluntary organisations – as key determinants of participation in both latent and intermediate group environmental collective action. These results are interpreted as indications of a possible decoupling between trust and participation in large-scale collective action.

This article lays out and defends the role of political parties in cultivating a democratic ethos among citizens. It argues that citizens' commitment to the democratic idea of self-rule requires positive conviction of the worth of collective political agency, and suggests that this conviction draws on three main sources, characterised as normative, motivational and executive. The article shows theoretically why parties are able to cultivate all three sources in a way no other political actor can match, thus constituting a unique and indispensable mode of civic engagement. Moreover, it proposes that the widely noted shortcomings of parties in contemporary democracy leave this basic capacity unimpaired, indeed that certain important developments herald renewed opportunities.

The transformational impact of the ideational turn in political science has been profound, but academic inquiry into the role of discursive strategies has remained limited. This article examines this issue through a study of the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. The debate surrounding the Bill was characterised by two competing discourses of 'hope' and 'fear'. Established during previous debates over the regulation of research using human embryos, these contrasted the potential medical benefits to be derived with the social and ethical dangers of an unregulated science. This article deconstructs these discursive strategies and considers their impact on both the course of the debate as well as the mechanics of the Bill's passage through Parliament itself. It maintains that discursive and institutional contexts are mutually constitutive.

This article analyses the impact of decision-making methods on democratic deliberation. An experiment was designed to study the effects of two distinct decision-making methods. This citizen deliberation experiment took place in November 2006. The topic was: 'Should a sixth nuclear power plant be built in Finland?' A random sample of 2,500 people was first polled and invited to take part in the deliberation experiment. Eventually, 135 people took part in the event where they read written information, heard an expert panel and deliberated in small groups. The participants were randomly divided into two treatments. In the first treatment, the small group decisions were made through a secret ballot. In the second treatment, each group was asked to formulate a common statement reflecting the group's opinion. The present article analyses changes in the participants' opinions and knowledge, as well as indicators of social pressures. There were no systematic differences between the treatments in terms of opinion changes but the participants' knowledge increased more in the common statement groups. When it comes to social pressures, the results show no systematic differences between the treatments.

Re-linking deliberative theory with empirical political science has become a major theme in the discipline. But when philosophical concepts are to be integrated into positive political science, researchers confront both theoretical and methodological challenges. Focusing on deliberative democracy, a major theoretical challenge is the practical implementation of deliberative ideals. Comparative scholars have explored institutional contexts that favour deliberation, but they have largely neglected actor-centric and cultural variables that might affect deliberative quality as well. Focusing on legislatures in Switzerland and Germany, we show that political institutions as well as partisan strategies and status strongly affect deliberative action, while the effects of culture are less clear. Methodologically, one (frequently neglected) challenge concerns the appropriate statistical tools with which to study deliberation. On the one hand, analysing deliberative processes is demanding and time consuming; hence we tend to have only few and non-randomly selected cases at the group or context level. In addition, the real world of deliberation presents us with a complex matrix of cross-classified speakers. We demonstrate that Bayesian multi-level modelling provides an elegant way to tackle these methodological problems.

In this article we develop a concentric containment policy for dealing with political extremism starting from the deliberative model of democracy. This model of democracy is particularly well suited because it overcomes the traditional opposition between procedural and substantive views of democracy. On the procedural side, deliberative democracy emphasises the importance of tracking all the relevant concerns of citizens in the public sphere, whereas, on the substantive side, it stresses the need for an adequate filtering which guarantees the compatibility of actual policies with the core values of liberty and equality. The twofold requirement of tracking and filtering translates into a guideline of decreasing tolerance towards extremist organisations as they approach the centres of formal ***decision-making power. We argue that the resulting containment policy, which listens to extremist voters and simultaneously puts unremitting civilising pressure on extremist parties, is not only desirable from a normative point of view; as shown by the empirical findings concerning the successes and failures of actual containment strategies, the twofold concentric approach, including, if necessary, a cordon sanitaire around the extremist party, might also turn out to be the most effective one.

If patriotism is love of one's country, the attempt to promote it in schools must count as a form of emotional education. Emotional education is defensible in so far as it consists in offering pupils good reasons and effective techniques for fostering or suppressing particular emotions. The question is whether we are in a position to offer pupils good reasons for loving their countries. In this article I set out an account of the rationality of emotions in general and of love in particular, and then identify two benefits and one drawback of patriotic attachment. I argue that there is room for reasonable disagreement on the desirability of patriotism and that we therefore ought not to promote it in schools but rather to teach it as a controversial issue.

Building upon the scholarly discussion concerning the growing blurring of domestic and foreign policy domains and the changing spheres of competences of states both within and outside their borders, this article focuses on inter-state cooperation in the field of migration and international relations. I attempt to answer two interrelated questions: how does collaboration on migration affect the bargaining dynamics between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries? And specifically, how does the contested process of externalisation of border control practices to third countries influence power relations between the two? Particular attention is paid to the agreements on migration between Italy and Libya, mainly between the late 1990s and 2009, and I examine how the putative process of externalisation of migration policies from Italy to Libya impacts upon their negotiations. I argue that this case of externalisation does not merely consist of a univocal delegation of sovereignty. Therefore I conclude that the theoretical debate is still open, both with regard to the applicability of the externalisation concept to this particular case, and to its broader representativeness.