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Political Studies (political + studies)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	83%

Selected Abstracts

Critical Discourse Analysis in Political Studies: An Illustrative Analysis of the ,Empowerment' Agenda

POLITICS, Issue 2 2010
Michael Farrelly
In the first sections of this article I give a simple and general account of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and how it might contribute to the theoretical and methodological repertoire of political studies through its discourse-dialectical theory of how discourse figures as an aspect of social practices without reducing those practices to discourse. In the final section I give a short illustrative example of how a CDA approach to detailed textual analysis might also be applied to specific texts (or groups of texts) in the political arena: in the example I take the press release in which the national UK government heralded its recent ,empowerment' White Paper, ,Communities in Control'. [source]

Institutional Environments, Employer Practices, and States in Liberal Market Economies

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 2 2002
John Godard
This article draws on the new institutionalism in economics, sociology, and political studies in order to establish a foundation for analyzing how states shape employer human resource management and union relations. It then reviews and extends the available literature on this topic, establishing how, in addition to legal regulation, states help to shape the cognitive and normative rules that undergird employer decision processes, the social and economic environment within which employers act, and ultimately, the relations of authority constituting the employment relation itself and hence employer policy orientations. The article concludes with a discussion of the prospects for state policy initiatives in view of established employer paradigms, institutional logics, and state traditions, and identifies possibilities for further work in this area. A neoclassical world would be a jungle, and no society would be viable. Douglas North (1981:11) [source]

Analyzing Spatial Drivers in Quantitative Conflict Studies: The Potential and Challenges of Geographic Information Systems

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2009
Nathalie Stephenne
The objective of this literature review is to understand where Graphical Information Systems (GIS) can be useful to address security issues and how it has been used until now. While the geographic drivers of territorial conflicts have been extensively described by a number of political studies, the quantitative analysis of these drivers is quite new. This study traces an evolution from conceptual research to quantitative development. It then discusses the advantages and challenges of applying new geographic techniques to analyze spatial drivers of conflict. We identify the main spatial components in conflict and security, the existing types of information/data and the quantitative methods used. We describe the spatial component of security by looking at: (i) the main sociopolitical concepts linked to territory, (ii) the kind of geographic concepts linked to territory, (iii) measures used to describe such geographic concepts; and (iv) the issues raised in any attempt to integrate geographic concepts into a GIS. We conclude that GIS tools can be useful in the analysis of civil disputes, particularly where subnational level data exists. This paper shows that spatial processing tools in GIS allow us to represent some spatial components and to address new issues such as the fuzzy complexity of border permeability. [source]

Authoritarianism and Islamic Movements in the Middle East: Research and Theory-building in the Twenty-first Century

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2009
Oded Haklai
In the previous decade, many scholars with expertise in the politics of the Middle East pointed to an intellectual gulf between Middle East studies and mainstream international and comparative political studies. Common perceptions that the Middle East experience was too exceptional to be theory-relevant and that area studies work was excessively a-theoretical were said to be responsible for the alleged chasm. If these concerns are taken at face value, a review of research published on authoritarianism and Islamic movements in the first years of the twenty-first century in top academic presses and scholarly journals indicates that a counter trend has emerged. Middle East area experts are increasingly making use of theoretical frameworks produced by non-Middle East specialists. There is, however, variation in how well disciplinary social science analytical tools are applied and in the significance of various works to theory-building. More emphasis on theory-testing and construction (rather than just theory application) as well as cross-regional and cross-cultural comparisons will increase the comparative value of works produced by Middle East area studies specialists and will add to their visibility in the discipline at large. [source]

The Marriage of Politics and Marketing

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2001
Jennifer Lees-Marshment
Research into major party behaviour in Britain from a political marketing perspective finds that political marketing is broad in scope and offers fresh analytical tools to explain how political organizations behave. It is nevertheless a marriage between political science and marketing. It borrows the core marketing concepts of product, sales and market-orientation, and techniques such as market intelligence, and adapts them to suit traditional tenets of political science to produce an integrated theoretical framework. A party that takes a product-orientation argues for what it stands for and believes in. A Sales-Orientated party focuses on selling its argument and product to voters. A Market-Orientated party designs its behaviour to provide voter satisfaction. Exploring these three orientations demonstrates that political marketing can be applied to a wide range of behaviour and suggests its potential to be applied to several areas of political studies. [source]