ABSTRACTOscar Larsson’s sympathetic critique of constructivist institutionalism calls for a clarification of my understanding of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and their mutual interdependence. That interdependence lies at the heart of any genuinely constructivist approach, just as the interdependence of structure and agency lies at the heart of any genuinely institutionalist approach. As such, I reject the charge of subjectivism just as I would that of voluntarism. Building on the social ontology of Berger and Luckmann, we can distinguish between subjectivity and intra-subjectivity and (...) proceed to show how the latter implies a notion of inter-subjectivity. An example of the social construction of a political crisis shows that social facts are made and remade through a fusion of inter- and intra-subjectivities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A factor that may account for the largely unanticipated victory of Brexit in 2016 is the difference in engagement, mobilization, and, ultimately, turnout between those for whom the question of Brexit was a valence issue and those for whom it was a positional issue. The declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may help to explain the newly resurgent populism (...) characteristic of Western liberal democracies. (shrink)

Despite the proliferation of ideational accounts in the last decade or so, the debate over the role of ideas remains caught up in a series of disputes over the ontological foundations, epistemological status and practical pay-off of the (re)turn to ideational explanations. It is thus unsurprising that there is still little clarity about just what sort of an approach an ideational approach is and about what it would take to establish the kind of fully-fledged ideational research programme many seem to (...) assume has already been developed. The contributors in this volume address these dilemmas in diverse but engagingly complementary ways. They argue that what plagues most attempts to accord ideas an explanatory role is the persistence of the perennial dualities in political analysis. In aspiring to eschew the current vogue for dualistic polemic, the present volume reveals elements of dualistic thinking in the ideational turn and assesses the impact of the persistence of these perennial dualisms in the attempt to accord ideas an explanatory role. (shrink)

Bold approaches to data collection and large-scale quantitative advances have long been a preoccupation for social science researchers. In this commentary we further debate over the use of large-scale survey data and official statistics with ‘Big Data’ methodologists, and emphasise the ability of these resources to incorporate the essential social and cultural heredity that is intrinsic to the human sciences. In doing so, we introduce a series of new data-sets that integrate approximately 30 years of survey data on victimisation, fear (...) of crime and disorder and social attitudes with indicators of socio-economic conditions and policy outcomes in Britain. The data-sets that we outline below do not conform to typical conceptions of ‘Big Data’. But, we would contend, they are ‘big’ in terms of the volume, variety and complexity of data which has been collated and ‘big’ also in that they allow us to explore key questions pertaining to how social and economic policy change at the national level alters the attitudes and experiences of citizens. Importantly, they are also ‘small’ in the sense that the task of rendering the data usable, linking it and decoding it, required both manual processing and tacit knowledge of the context of the data and intentions of its creators. (shrink)

(2001). The Invocation of External Economic Constraint: A Genealogy of the Concept of Globalization in the Political Economy of the British Labour Party, 1973—2000. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 233-249.

(2001). The Invocation of External Economic Constraint: A Genealogy of the Concept of Globalization in the Political Economy of the British Labour Party, 1973—2000. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 233-249.

(2001). The Invocation of External Economic Constraint: A Genealogy of the Concept of Globalization in the Political Economy of the British Labour Party, 1973—2000. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 233-249.