Measuring and comparing migration, asylum and naturalisation policies:  The International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) Project
Dr Anna Boucher

Academics and policy-makers require a better understanding of the variation, determinants and effects of policies that regulate international migration. and asylum and that manage the naturalisation of resident immigrants. Yet, at present, there is no comprehensive cross-national, time-series database of immigration, asylum and citizenship policies—, rendering the analysis of policy trends across and within these areas difficult at best. Several new immigration databases and indices have been developed in recent years, but there is no consensus on how best to conceptualise, measure and aggregate migration policy indicators to allow for meaningful comparisons through time and across space. The International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) consortium advocates a historical, multi-dimensional, disaggregated and transparent approach to conceptualising, measuring and compiling immigration policies. The IMPALA consortium seeks to develop the world’s first comprehensive large-n database of migration law and policy, and new indices of national migration regimes’ openness and restrictiveness. In this paper, we first discuss some methodological challenges and how they have been dealt with by existing approaches. We then set out the IMPALA approach and its methodological innovations. We end by discussing some of the envisaged payoffs that the new approach will bring to the study of immigration.

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Inside the ‘flower vase’: The Chinese People’s Consultative Conference
Dr Minglu Chen

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is often ignored as a ceremonial and non‐functional government body. This research examines its role as an agency of governance. It is the major institution through which the Party‐state co‐opts private entrepreneurs and through which private entrepreneurs officially participate in politics by acting as advisors to and surveillance of the government. It also plays a crucial role in the Chinese Government’s united front work, by connecting the CCP, the non‐ Communist parties, mass organizations and different social fields. This research also highlights Chinese private entrepreneurs’ political interests and how private resources can be drawn upon to perform public functions such as philanthropy.

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Theorizing agency in international relations in Hobbes’ wake: The rational actor, the self and the speaking subject
Dr Charlotte Epstein

In this article the Hobbesian legacy provides the starting place from which to examine the models of the individual that implicitly or explicitly informs accounts of international politics. The rationalist-reflectivist divide in contemporary IR scholarship rests upon divergent conceptions of the individual, insofar as the starting point for reflectivist or, as it has come to be known, constructivist theorising was the realisation of the need to unpack the rationalist assumption that actors are ‘self-interested’, as Alexander Wendt put it, in order to examine who that self might be. This is what ushered in the concept of the self in the appraisal of agency, and the concept of identity for IR scholarship more broadly. The starting points for my enquiry are thus the rational actor and the self, the two archetypal individuals that ground rationalist and constructivist enquiries respectively.

My purpose is to find a model of the individual that can provide the foundations for a non-individualist basis for apprehending agency in international politics; one that is rid of what Wendt himself termed a ‘rump individualism’ that cuts across both the rational actor and the self. A third model is afforded, I suggest, by the concept of the speaking subject socially embedded in language that lies at the core of discourse theory.

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Metagovernance and the British State
Dr Paul Fawcett

This is a draft chapter in a monograph that I am currently completing on the Core Executive under Blair. The monograph compares and contrasts different models, or conceptualisations of the British state, in order to assess their utility in explaining the changes that took place in the core executive between 1997 and 2007. There are currently
four different approaches in the literature: the Westminster Model (WM); the Differentiated Polity Model (DPM); the Asymmetric Power Model (APM); and Decentred Theory. On the one hand, these models attempt to capture how the British state has evolved in response to some of the changes associated with the putative shift from government to governance, the most frequently cited trend being the growth in the number and influence of networked modes of governing. On the other hand, they are also concerned with a set of meso‐level concerns such as what impact, if any, these changes are having on the institutions, processes and ideas that underpin the British state, including the nature of: intergovernmental relations; parliamentary‐legislative relations; public sector reform; the core executive; and prevalent ideas about ‘political participation’ and the democratic process more generally. In other words, these models are organising perspectives by which I mean that they: ‘provide a framework for analysis, a map of how things relate, a set of research questions’ (Gamble 1990, 405). This means that organising perspectives, such as those discussed here, ‘are not falsifiable, they are always partial, more or less accurate, and never comprehensive or definitive’, but, they are, nevertheless, important, because they focus attention on what ‘should’ be studied and, ideally, identify aspects of the state that might otherwise be ignored (Rhodes 1997b, 31). For example, it is difficult to claim that the ideas of the Westminster Model have not had a significant influence over the way in which governments have been studied and understood in systems that are putatively underpinned by this approach, which was meant that, up until recently, it has been regarded by many as the organising perspective par excellence (Rhodes 1997b, 31). There has been a rigorous and robust debate between advocates of these different models over the past 15‐20 years, although, admittedly, one that has been largely restricted to British scholars studying the UK (yet, there is evidence that this is changing as these models, or aspects of them, start to be applied in other jurisdictions, including Australia and various
other countries in Western Europe). This chapter builds on this debate by presenting a fifth alternative, the metagovernance approach. A metagovernance approach argues in favour of the APM as a broad conceptualisation of the British state, but suggests that more conceptual weight can be given to some of its key arguments by drawing on the Strategic Relational Approach (SRA), a theoretical framework that is most closely associated with the work of Bob Jessop, and the one within which metagovernance, as a concept, originates. The chapter that follows this one shows how the conceptual arguments developed here can be applied to better understand past and present changes in the core executive under New Labour, the core executive being used here as a collective term to refer to the government departments and agencies that are responsible for achieving coordinated outcomes across the whole of government. In the UK, this is typically defined as Number 10, the Cabinet office and the Treasury. Subsequent chapters examine strategic policy setting, the introduction of targets, known as Public Service Agreements, and changes to the framework of public expenditure and control, known as the Spending Review process, as three different ways in which the core executive’s approach to metagovernance changed over the course of the period covered by this study. I look forward to receiving feedback on both the specific contents of this chapter and any ideas about how it maybe adapted into a separate paper suitable for journal publication.

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Legislative regulation, judicial politics and the cartel party model
Dr Anika Gauja

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the legal regulation of political parties as competitors in, and as new entrants to, the electoral contest. The paper focuses on laws that regulate both ballot access and the registration of political parties as ‘official’ electoral actors. It explores the ways in which these laws are used as ‘gatekeeper’ provisions to control the degree of party competition in any given electoral system, and how specific laws (although applying equally to all parties) might privilege some parties (for example, incumbents) over others. The paper does not address the design of electoral systems, but rather ancillary provisions such as the minimum number of members required to register a party, levels of public support needed to gain ballot access and other structural requirements (for example, accounting rules) that political parties must provide for before they may contest elections. On a theoretical level, the paper explores the justifications for the regulation of party competition and whether such laws may contribute to the creation and maintenance of political cartels, and the role of the courts in this process. The paper examines the regulation of parties in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.

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Electoral politics
Prof Graeme Gill

This chapter is part of a larger work seeking to understand the bases of stability of authoritarian political systems. One factor which has been thought to be instrumental in this is elections. This paper opens by looking at the way elections have been structured in post‐ Soviet Russia. Rejecting the argument that this is simply a reflection of the Soviet experience, the paper analyses the notion of electoral/competitive authoritarianism. It then looks briefly at two cases of this, one in which democratic change did occur (Mexico) and one in which it has not (Singapore).

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 Elections, political instability, and mass killing: Do ballots lead to bullets?
Assoc Prof Benjamin Goldsmith

Serious instability and deadly violence have surrounded several recent elections, for example in Iran (2009), Kenya (2007-08), and Thailand (2005, 2007). The 1993 Burundi genocide was closely tied to the assassination of the newly elected Hutu president. Do elections in general make such violence more likely? Are elections especially dangerous in partially democratic or ethnically divided states? The quantitative analysis will answer the questions of whether national legislative and/or executive elections increase or decrease the chance of serious instability or mass killing, and whether current understanding of this process may be biased by failure to consider selection effects. We find that elections tend to reduce the chance of political instability in partially democratic regimes and in states with high ethnic fractionalization. Elections have no relationship to the outbreak of genocide or politicide. We also find strong evidence that selection bias is a risk when the two-stage process is not considered explicitly.

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Target hardening and terrorist signaling: The case of aviation security
Dr Justin Hastings

Why do terrorist groups attack hard targets, even when the chances of successfully doing damage, and the number of people likely to be killed, are so low? In this article, we focus on the relationship between hardening a target and the value that a terrorist group derives from attacking it. We first use a simple expected value framework to compare how the expected value of attacking a hardened target varies under two understandings of how terrorist groups think about attacks – a violence‐based approach, where terrorists are presumed to be maximizing the physical damage done to the target, and a signaling‐based approach, where terrorists are presumed to be maximizing the symbolic value of their attack. We find that, if it is proper to understand terrorist attacks (or at least ‘terrorist spectaculars’) as costly signals of terrorist strength or determination, hardening a target actually increases the expected value of attacking a target (relative to its value before hardening), even if the attack fails. We go on to test this understanding of terroris
attacks on hardened targets by examining the evolution of aviation security, and tracing how al‐Qaeda’s views of
airplanes and airports as targets have changed since 9/11. The Richard Reid shoe bomber plot, coming soon after
the 9/11 attacks, was viewed as a failure by al‐Qaeda. As aviation targets were hardened with increasingly onerous
security measures, al‐Qaeda began to see even attacks that did not result in detonation as successes, in large part
because of what they signaled about al‐Qaeda’s abilities (to get past state‐imposed security checkpoints), and the
ability of al‐Qaeda to impose costs on the US and other countries (in the form of defensive counterterrorism
measures) even in the absence of explosions. We close with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications
of our findings.

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Human rights as a way of life
Dr Alex Lefebvre

It seems self‐evident that the purpose of human rights is to care for other people. They are designed to protect others, criticize power, and realize global social justice. In this seminar, however, I propose to look at human rights the other way around: as a form of selfcare. I will consider whether their central purpose is to bring about a transformation of the self, or, more pointedly, a transformation of oneself. Understood in this way, human rights would be a medium through which we relate to, improve upon, and care for ourselves. Note that this is the first part of the first chapter of my book‐in‐progress on Bergson, titled Human Rights as a Way of Life: on Bergson’s Political Philosophy. In these pages, I try to lay out the “bad view” of human rights: i.e., what Bergson is trying to overcome. In my presentation I’ll
sketch out some of the positive ways in which Bergson hopes human rights can turn us away from this view. So: this paper concerns the bad stuff we have to get away from and the presentation will push off from this and talk about the good stuff. In both cases, I have/will do my best to extract the problem of “human rights as a way of life” from the technicalities of Bergson’s philosophy.

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The four horsemen of the apocalypse: Understanding Human Security
Prof Pippa Norris

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non‐military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defense. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of Human Security, focusing on the welfare of ordinary people against a broad range of threats. This has aroused vigorous debate. Part I of this paper proposes an analytical model of Human Security. Part II argues that it is important to measure how ordinary people perceive risks, moving beyond state‐centric notions of Human Security. We examine new
evidence, drawing upon survey items specially designed to monitor perceptions of Human Security, included for the first time in the 6th wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), with fieldwork conducted in 2010‐2012.Part III demonstrates that people distinguish three dimensions: national, community, and personal security and then explores some structural determinants driving these perceptions. Part IV discusses why perceptions of Human Security matter, in particular for explaining cultural values and value change around the world. The conclusion argues that the shift from a narrow focus on military security toward the broader concept of Human Security is a natural response to the changing challenges facing developed societies, in which the cost‐benefit ratio concerning war has become negative and cultural changes have made war less acceptable. In this setting, valid measures of perceptions of Human Security have become essential, both to understand the determinants of Human Security among ordinary people, and to analyze their consequences.

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Towards a post-Islamist secular democracy in the Muslim world
Assoc Prof Lily Zubaidah  Rahim

The political advancements of Muslim‐majority secular‐oriented states such as Indonesia and Turkey and ongoing popular uprisings in the Middle East have highlighted the need for a conceptualisation of the socio‐political shifts and aspirations sweeping the Muslim World. These shifts are not exclusively secular or religious but represent an eclectic blurring of the secular and sacred. They also highlight a yearning for a political paradigm that accommodates the religious aspirations of Muslims whilst promoting democratic governance based on the principles of popular sovereignty and social justice.

Recent political developments in the Muslim World highlight a deep disillusionment with and resistance to authoritarian governance ‐ both Islamic and secular. Various global surveys and qualitative studies on Muslim attitudes reveal widespread support for an eclectic form of secularism located within a post‐Islamist framework of the passive secular democratic state. In keeping with these ideational shifts and political opportunity structures, many Islamist political parties appear to have pragmatically moderated their stance, particularly with regard to sharia and the Islamic state. This paper examines the global shift in Muslim aspirations in the secular‐oriented Muslim‐majority states of Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia. In these states, mainstream Islamist parties and Muslim organisations have focused on good governance within the post‐Islamist framework of the inclusive secular democratic state.

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Getting tough with your banker: Australia’s response to economic dependence on China
Dr James Reilly

Influential theories generate diverging expectations over how middle powers will respond to deepening economic dependence upon a rising power. One set of Realist arguments suggests that negative threat perceptions toward the rising power will exacerbate concerns with economic dependence, encouraging balancing behavior against the rising power. An alternative argument is that economic dependence upon the rising power encourages closer alignment, or at least accommodation. To date, scholarship on East Asian responses to China’s rise has failed to fully address this issue, due in part to definitional vagaries on alignment behavior and a failure to distinguish hypothesized causes from states’ policy choices. This study engages this debate by examining Australia’s strategic response to economic dependence upon China from 2000 through 2011. The results reveal that across the range of domestic, foreign, and security policies, Australia has largely balanced against China rather than accommodating it. At the same time, Australian policymakers pursued closer economic relations with the US and US allies for their positive security externalities. This
suggests that in dyads characterized by negative threat perceptions, economic dependence and security alignment are inversely related: greater economic dependence encourages balancing. Conversely, in dyads with close security alignment and low threat perceptions, economic interdependence is seen as complementary to security ties. In assessing the influence of economic dependence upon alignment patterns, it matters very much with whom you trade.

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Climate justice, adaptation, and sustainability: A capabilities approach
Prof David Schlosberg

 The paper starts with a brief overview of a number of current approaches to climate justice, noting concerns about each. Next, two conceptions of justice currently unaddressed by these approaches, recognition and capabilities, are discussed. A broad capabilities-based approach to climate justice is then laid out, incorporating recognition, and focused on how the approach can be more directly applied to climate change and human interactions with the natural world. Finally, the policy implications of this approach are addressed, with a focus on the assessment of vulnerabilities and importance of public participation.

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Drawing the boundaries of Western Christianity: The causes of contemporary political anti-Mormonism
Dr David Smith

In this paper I explore the relative reluctance of Americans to support a Mormon candidate for President despite massive increases in acceptance of other predominantly white religious minorities. The fact that many Americans do not accept Mormons’ self-identification as Christians has long been posited as a major cause of political discrimination; I examine the distribution and political conditioning of this non-acceptance. I find that a general tendency to punish out-groups is probably the most important factor in willingness to vote for a Mormon, but that individual contextual variables such as ideology and membership of a religious group play a very important role in whether individuals include Mormons as part of the religious in-group or out-group.

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Australia: Representative bureaucracy in a post-colonial, multicultural society
Assoc Prof Rodney Smith

Australian public sector bodies regularly advertise their dedication to diversity and inclusion. Australian national, state and territory governments consistently emphasise four criteria when measuring and addressing public sector representativeness: indigenous status, ethno‐linguistic status, gender, and physical and intellectual disability. For many years, Australian governments had no expectation that the bureaucracy would be representative of broader society on such measures. From the 1970s, state and national anti‐discrimination legislation and EEO measures formalised the new expectation that the staff of bureaucracies would look increasingly like the wider society. This paper explores what this has meant for public sector representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and minority immigrant communities (the two broad categories of people most relevant to the concerns of the volume in which this paper will appear as a chapter).* In both cases, establishing a good measure of representation has proved difficult. Definitions of both groups are contested and data collection has been inconsistent. The available data suggest that although public sector agencies may not be perfectly representative, they are far more representative than they were until the 1970s. On one reading, the increased diversity of Australian public sector agencies is a triumph for the policies of multiculturalism, antidiscrimination and equal opportunity begun in the 1970s. On another reading, this diversity disguises a failure to ask fundamental questions about the best way to represent minority communities and deliver programs to them. This failure arises from Australia’s status as a postcolonial society, in which multiculturalism is constrained by dominant anglo‐celtic norms of citizenship.

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Realism, agency and the politics of nature
Prof Colin Wight

All social theories have embedded within them some notion of the human. To suggest this is to highlight the fact that insofar as theories or theorists make judgments about what is good, or not, for people they will already tacitly, or explicitly, presuppose a certain view as to it means to be human. Without a concept of the human, moral discussion in the human sciences and in society at large would be redundant. Yet the concept of the human is treated with deep suspicion in the social sciences. And with good reason. Concepts of the human all too easily meld with those of nature and seem to suggest that there are right and wrong ways of being human. From this it is all to easy to assume that ‘human nature’ stands for what ‘we’ do, and that those that do not do what ‘we’ do are somehow less than human. Allied to some of the excesses of some scientific worldviews that posit what it means to be human on the basis of some identified ‘material’ facts, such as eugenics, sociobiology a evolutionary theories of various kinds, it is all too easy to assume that what it means to be human can be articulated without recourse to the specificities of time and place, let alone culture. This chapter examines the concept of human nature from a critical realist perspective and argues we need to distinguish an ontological from a normative account of the human.

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