While a great deal of attention is devoted to the Pacific region as the new chessboard of international politics, Pakistan remains a key actor in terms of both threat and potential. Two observations back this argument: first, Pakistan's fundamental roles as a state are challenged by its ongoing conflict with India and internal insurgencies. Second, due to a power-status gap, Pakistan experiences difficulties in holding specific self-conceived roles. In addition to hampering its socio-economic potential, these developments prevent Pakistan's quest for normalization in the system. As a consequence, we argue that engaging with Islamabad should be a priority for Washington so as to prevent the country from further aligning with Beijing, thus reinforcing China's regional leadership and status as peer-competitor to the United States. Indeed, as the potential for deviance in the international system arises from its normative dimension, the US, as the global leader, counts among its roles that of norm-setter and primary socializer for most states. Our research proposes to look at an old puzzle with new theoretical insights. By addressing the question of Washington's engagement towards non-conforming states, we aim to document a set of socialization processes as intervening variables linking American global role as leader and primary socializer to Pakistan's process of social integration (normalization/deviance). Drawing from sociology and social psychology, the paper seeks to explore the ability of the leader to act as a primary source of role location and status recognition towards non-conforming states so as to integrate them (back) into the US-led system.
The participation of non-state actors to international politics has been investigated since the creation of international institutions. Yet, the rules, principles and norms of global governance are no more discussed in single, isolated institutions. Rather, with the proliferation of international regimes and organisations, international issues are now negotiated in a context of institutional interactions known as "regime complexes". This poses new questions, in particular on the negotiation burden that these new processes place on international actors. To answer this question, this contribution compares non-state participation in both contexts (single regimes and regime complexes), using the international forest negotiations as a case study. It uses quantitative methods to measure the negotiation burden of single regimes and compare it to the negotiation burden of regime complexes. The negotiation burden of single regimes is found insignificant with political interest being the major motivation for participation, while the negotiation burden of regime complexes is found relevant, requiring a certain type of material and organisational resources for non-state actors to participate. Yet a certain diversity of non-state representation is maintained within regime complexes, with non-governmental organisations being dominant with respect to business groups.
From the beginning of the 1990's onwards, political analysts in all Western European countries discovered the contours of what they thought to be a widespread crisis of democracy. The alleged decline of political trust and public participation, and the rise of electoral volatility pointed out that the gap between politicians and citizens had never been wider. This political climate characterized by a deep-rooted crisis of democratic legitimacy offered an excellent breeding ground for critical reflection on the role, shape and function of democracy in modern societies. It gave rise to a fruitful quest for new and innovative ways of governing a democracy. It is in this turbulent period that the ideal of a deliberative democracy was coined (Dryzek 2000). A community of international scholars and philosophers, inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, became more and more convinced that a vibrant democracy is more than the aggregate of its individual citizens, and that democratic politics should be about more than merely voting. The quality of a democracy and the quality of democratic decisions, according to them, did not depend on the correct aggregation of individual preferences, but rather on the quality of the public debate that preceded the voting stage. Democratic decisions were thus no longer considered a function of mere compliance with aggregation rules. Instead, they are determined by extensive argumentation about political choices before voting on them. Because of its strong focus of public involvement in politics, this deliberative model of democracy started out in life as a theory of legitimacy (Benhabib 1996; Cohen 2002; Dryzek 2001; Parkinson 2006). By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation has important political merits: it is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Geenens & Tinnevelt 2007, p. 47). After all, talking about political issues allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to see their own perspectives represented in the final decision. As such, deliberative democracy seeks to score high on input, throughput and output legitimacy. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative democracy wants to contribute to increasing the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative events have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning before their outcomes can generate legitimate political decisions. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the internal legitimacy of one specific deliberative event, namely the G1000 project in Belgium (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2012a). Our research question is therefore: to what extent does the G1000 live up to the criteria of input, throughput and output legitimacy? The G1000 project takes a particular place in the world of deliberative practice because it was not only grass roots in its process and its results, but also in its organization. Most deliberative events are introduced and funded by either public administrations or scientific institutions. The G1000 was rather considered a citizens' initiative from its very inception. All of the organizers of the event were volunteers, and all of the funds were gathered using crowd funding. So instead of a scientific experiment, the G1000 was more of a democratic experiment by, through, and for citizens. This grass-root structure makes it a very interesting case for students of legitimacy, because as we will see later on it situated at the heart of the democratic trade-off between input and output legitimacy.
From the beginning of the 1990's onwards, political analysts in all Western European countries discovered the contours of what they thought to be a widespread crisis of democracy. The alleged decline of political trust and public participation, and the rise of electoral volatility pointed out that the gap between politicians and citizens had never been wider. This political climate characterized by a deep-rooted crisis of democratic legitimacy offered an excellent breeding ground for critical reflection on the role, shape and function of democracy in modern societies. It gave rise to a fruitful quest for new and innovative ways of governing a democracy. It is in this turbulent period that the ideal of a deliberative democracy was coined (Dryzek 2000). A community of international scholars and philosophers, inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, became more and more convinced that a vibrant democracy is more than the aggregate of its individual citizens, and that democratic politics should be about more than merely voting. The quality of a democracy and the quality of democratic decisions, according to them, did not depend on the correct aggregation of individual preferences, but rather on the quality of the public debate that preceded the voting stage. Democratic decisions were thus no longer considered a function of mere compliance with aggregation rules. Instead, they were determined by extensive argumentation about political choices before voting on them. Because of its strong focus of public involvement in politics, this deliberative model of democracy started out in life as a theory of legitimacy (Benhabib 1996; Cohen 1997; Dryzek 2001; Parkinson 2006). By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation has important political merits: it is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Geenens & Tinnevelt 2007, p. 47). After all, talking about political issues allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to see their own perspectives represented in the final decision. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative democracy wants to contribute to increasing the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative events have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning before their outcomes can generate legitimate political decisions. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. Our research question is therefore: to what extent can deliberative mini-publics live up to the criteria of democratic and political legitimacy? In this paper, we set out to assess the internal legitimacy of one specific deliberative event, namely the G1000 project in Belgium (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2012). The G1000 project takes a particular place in the world of deliberative practice because it was not only grassroots in its process and its results, but also in its organization. Most deliberative events are introduced and funded by either public administrations or scientific institutions. The G1000 was rather considered a genuine citizens' initiative from its very inception. All of the organizers of the event were volunteers, and all of the funds were gathered using crowd funding. So instead of a scientific experiment, the G1000 was more of a democratic experiment by, through, and for citizens. This grass-root structure makes it a very interesting case for students of legitimacy, because as we will see later on it situated at the heart of the democratic trade-off between input and output legitimacy.
Recruiting candidates for local elections is a complex task. Even though some parties find difficult to attract candidates (mainly due to the decreased party membership and the lack of interest for local politics), one of the most important concerns is related to the subtle balance between different types of candidates on the list. Local parties need candidates who embody two main functions: (1) to attract votes (in open list systems) and (2) to serve the interests of the party once elected. As a result, party leaders place on their electoral list candidates who belong to the party structure (incumbent councilors, party members, etc.) as well as candidates who would attract more votes (for example by including 'external' candidates on the list). Following a large data collection process, this paper relies on a quantitative analysis of the 986 lists that participated in the 2012 local elections in the 262 Walloon municipalities (Belgium). The presence of different types of candidates (incumbent mayor and alderman, incumbent councilor, party member, party activist, external candidate, etc.) will be measured for each individual list. In a second stage, the paper will identify the factors that explain variation of the presence of such candidates across lists and municipalities with the help of demographic factors (size of the municipality, rural vs. urban, etc.), political factors (ideology of the list, independence from the national party, etc.) and party competition factors (number of competing lists, electoral alliances, etc.). Overall, this research seeks to uncover the diversity of local electoral strategies guiding local recruitment and why it matters for the electoral results of the lists.
In the literature, the political impact of metaphors has often been taken for granted from metaphor analysis in political discourse, be it elite discourse or media discourse. However, a more global understanding of what this political impact could consist of, is still lacking from the current research agenda. As Koller (2009:121) puts it: "metaphor helps construct particular aspects of reality and reproduce (or subvert) dominant schemas." To be able to account for how metaphors, through discourses, actively shape the political reality, it is important to look at the relationships between metaphorical discourses and their environment. Based on the idea that metaphors do not only reflect the perceived reality, but also function as cues through which citizens come to understand complex political processes and through which they shape political behaviors, the aim of this study is precisely to look at how specific metaphors might impact on the citizens' framing of Belgian federalism. To measure the impact of metaphors on the citizens' political representations and attitudes, we developed an experimental set-up based on an article published in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (13-14 July 2013) in which Belgian federalism was deliberately compared to a Tetris game. The original article included a picture and a text (208 words), which were used as authentic experimental material. For this experiment, we distinguished three experimental conditions and one control condition. In the first experimental condition (full condition), the participants were exposed to the original article (including the text and the picture). In the second and third experimental conditions, the participants were respectively exposed either to the text (text condition) or the picture (picture condition). In the control condition, the participants weren't exposed to any metaphorical material at all. In the second stage of the experiment, the participants were asked to achieve three interrelated tasks: (i) a free description task, based on a free description of their own perception of Belgian federalism, (ii) an association task, in which they had to select a picture which they found the most appropriate to describe Belgian federalism, and finally (iii) a questionnaire measuring the participants' political knowledge of Belgian federalism and attitudes towards its future development. In a post-test held four weeks after the first experiment, the three tasks of the second stage have been replicated. This experiment has been conducted in autumn 2013 among 400 students. Comparing the various experimental conditions will make it possible (i) to measure the impact of the Tetris metaphor on the citizens' perceptions and representations of Belgian federalism, (ii) to assess to what extent the different metaphorical media differently contribute to this impact and (iii) to measure the long-term impact of this metaphor on the citizens' political representations and attitudes. In answering these questions, this study will contribute to a better understanding of the role and functions metaphors play in political discourse, and more globally in our everyday political interactions.
