Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This paper evaluates the policy impact of analytical communities in three Russian regions (Karelia, Tatarstan and Saratov). Based on the existing methods to assess the political power of think tanks, the authors develop a method to evaluate this impact. The authors test this method using the empirical data and findings from interviews, workshops with representatives of analytical communities of the three regions, and from observations and assessments of experts in regional politics. In conclusion, the authors argue that the capacity of analytical communities to impact policy change in a region depends on the level of political competition and pluralism and democratic institutions in the region; the level of consolidation of the analytical community, its autonomous political status and authority.

Self-Organized Publics in Mass Protests: An Introduction -- PART I: Dimensions of Protest Publics in the Recent Wave of Unrest -- Exploring Protest Publics: A New Conceptual Frame for Civil Participation Analysis -- Shoulder to Shoulder against Fascism: Publics in Gezi Protests -- Emergent Protest Publics in India and Bangladesh: A Comparative Study of Anti-Corruption and Shahbag Protests -- The Grammar of Protest Publics in Skopje, Macedonia, May 2015 -- Retracing Public Protest in Portugal: A Generation in Trouble -- Justification in Protest Publics: The Homeless Workers' Movement in Brazil's Crisis -- So Strong, Yet So Weak: The Emergence of Protest Publics in Iceland in the Wake of the Financial Crisis -- Five Stars of Change: The Transformation of Italian Protest Publics into a Movement Party through Grillo's Blog -- PART II: Protest Publics and Political Change in Different Political Regimes -- Cross-national Comparison of Protest Publics' Roles as Drivers of Change: from Clusters to Models -- Protesters as the "Challengers of the Status-Quo" in Embedded Democracies: The Cases of Iceland, the United Kingdom and the United States -- Protest Publics as the "Watchdogs" of the Quality of Democracy in Global South -- Protest Publics as the Triggers of Political Changes in Hybrid Regimes: The Cases of Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt -- Protest Publics as Democratic Innovators in an Authoritarian Environment -- The Transforming Role of Protest Publics in Processes of Sociopolitical Change in the Global South and Southern Europe: From Occasional Challengers to Institutionalized Watchdogs -- Conclusion: The Common Features and Different Roles of Protest Publics in Political Contestation

Studies on foreign policy consider government as the key actor in policy formulation and implementation. Research, apparently, has devoted far less attention to impact of knowledge brokers, such as think tanks, on policy-making. How and why do think tanks influence US foreign policy? An analysis of five think tanks that differ in terms of their proximity to elites, origin, and ideology reveals two types of nonstate actors' impact on foreign policy. Think tanks either advocate for own alternative policy proposals, solutions, and actions ("alternatives' facilitators"), or clarify, justify, and legitimize those of the governments ("policy legitimizers"). These two roles dictate special mechanisms and think tank impact directions. In the first type, think tanks are less oriented toward mass media, but more oriented toward coalitions with nonstate actors and influence the opinions of elites. The second type is the opposite: higher orientation toward mass media and more pronounced connections with elites, and influence on the public. Different origins and strategy of think tanks may be the reasons for some observed differences.

AbstractStudies on foreign policy consider government as the key actor in policy formulation and implementation. Research, apparently, has devoted far less attention to impact of knowledge brokers, such as think tanks, on policy-making. How and why do think tanks influence US foreign policy? An analysis of five think tanks that differ in terms of their proximity to elites, origin, and ideology reveals two types of nonstate actors' impact on foreign policy. Think tanks either advocate for own alternative policy proposals, solutions, and actions ("alternatives' facilitators"), or clarify, justify, and legitimize those of the governments ("policy legitimizers"). These two roles dictate special mechanisms and think tank impact directions. In the first type, think tanks are less oriented toward mass media, but more oriented toward coalitions with nonstate actors and influence the opinions of elites. The second type is the opposite: higher orientation toward mass media and more pronounced connections with elites, and influence on the public. Different origins and strategy of think tanks may be the reasons for some observed differences.

AbstractIn this paper, we answer the multiple calls for systematic analysis of paradigms and subdisciplines in political science—the search for coherence within a fragmented field. We collected a large dataset of over seven hundred thousand writings in political science from Web of Science since 1946. We found at least two waves of political science development, from behaviorism to new institutionalism. Political science appeared to be more fragmented than literature suggests—instead of ten subdisciplines, we found 66 islands. However, despite fragmentation, there is also a tendency for integration in contemporary political science, as revealed by co-existence of several paradigms and coherent and interconnected topics of the "canon of political science," as revealed by the core-periphery structure of topic networks. This was the first large-scale investigation of the entire political science field, possibly due to newly developed methods of bibliometric network analysis: temporal bibliometric analysis and island methods of clustering. Methodological contribution of this work to network science is evaluation of islands method of network clustering against a hierarchical cluster analysis for its ability to remove misleading information, allowing for a more meaningful clustering of large weighted networks.

AbstractIn this paper, we examine the contribution of Network Science journal to the network science discipline. We do so from two perspectives. First, expanding the existing taxonomy of article contribution, we examine trends in theory testing, theory building, and new method development within the journal's articles. We find that the journal demands a high level of theoretical contribution and methodological rigor. High levels of theoretical and methodological contribution become significant predictors of article citation rates. Second, we look at the composition of the studies in Network Science and determine that the journal has already established a solid "hard core" for the new discipline.