The notion of ‘enterprise culture’ emerged in the United Kingdom as a central motif in political thought under Margaret Thatcher's administration. The notion represented a profound shift away from the Keynesian welfare state to a deliberate attempt at cultural restructuring and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the entrepreneurial self a shift characterised as a moving from a ‘cul...

Policy makers who embrace market-based approaches to environmental regulation, typically eschew carbon taxes in favor of the political advantages of cap and trade, which offers lower visibility of costs to consumers and the opportunity to allocate valuable permits freely to industry. Against this backdrop, the article examines two surprising proposals for carbon taxes, by the government of Brit...

The Austrian election held on 29 September 2013 resulted in all-time lows for both major traditional parties, the SPÖ and ÖVP, but they nevertheless secured their combined majority by a tiny margin. Whereas the populist radical right FPÖ was supported by every fifth voter, its split-off, the BZÖ, lost parliamentary representation. The Greens achieved moderate gains and two new parties entered p...

The Nigerian Shari’a crisis, with its layered and complicated processes, reveals contending perspectives, thoughts, and debates on governance and politics in contemporary Nigerian society. Significantly, this complex process is contested among Northern Nigerian Muslims themselves —not to mention the fierce contestations between Northern Nigerian Muslims and Northern non-Muslims, confrontations ...

This paper rejects the determinism of the realist position. Domestic politics or the nature of the regime does influence the foreign behavior of the states, and in turn, the probability of war, peace, and international security. In supporting the liberal argument, it will be argued that the spread of democracy will contribute to the promotion of international security. The argument is based on ...

Debates about decentralization raise cultural questions of identity and economic questions of redistribution and efficiency. Therefore the preferences of statewide parties regarding decentralization are related to their positions on the economic and cultural ideological dimensions. A statistical analysis using data from thirty-one countries confirms this: parties on the economic right are more ...

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Soci...

Health inequalities research has shown a growing interest in participatory ways of working. However, the theoretical ideas underpinning mainstream approaches to participation remain underexplored. This article contributes to theorising participatory practice for the kind of egalitarian politics to which many of those focused on reducing health inequalities are committed. First, we argue that th...

Politics is a manifestation of the uniquely human ability to debate, decide, and reach consensus on decisions affecting large groups over long durations of time. Recent neuroimaging studies on politics have focused on the association between brain regions and specific political behaviors by adopting party or ideological affiliation as a criterion to classify either experimental stimuli or subje...

Democracy used to be a word that international legal commentators preferred to avoid. At least by the second half of the present century, this was not because too few governments identified themselves as democratic. It was rather because too many did so. The world's most repressive regimes joined their more representative counterparts in claiming a title that had become synonymous with praisewo...