Search

The age of cities is an unexplored factor in democratic research. What may it reveal about democracy that we did not know before? What new approaches to explain or manage crises of democracy may it suggest? This chapter argues that explanations of democracy in an age of cities should take into consideration how democracy extends beyond individual states. Democracy beyond the state refers to a democracy constituted by the people of more than one state, e.g. all human beings, or by people whose politics is significantly independent of their individual state for other reasons, e.g. because they inhabit a powerful city. Originally constructed to explain outcomes of international politics, the concept of democracy beyond the state holds a unique capacity to register how democracy is transformed in the age of cities. Both concepts describe structures at a global level of analysis, including all humans in single descriptions of their political rule (varying levels of democracy) and their life place (spread variously across cities and the country). This chapter thus offers a conceptualization of democracy that supports a full engagement with the age of cities in democratic research. As a preliminary proof of concept, the chapter also provides an original and parsimonious explanation of today’s crisis of democracy, as observable in democratic backsliding within many countries across the world.

This paper introduces and elaborates on a distinctively political approach to study and manage existential risks with artificial intelligence (AI). In contrast to research in ethics, economics, and computer science, a political approach to interactions between AI and humans emphasizes the possibility and effects of persisting disagreements. The paper introduces issues of how humans and AI exercise power while neither side is able to control, or enslave, the other (1); how persisting disagreements between humans and AI may induce either mutual learning and value-creation, or destructive conflicts and large-scale violence (2); how knowledge of political dynamics between states, classes and sexes/genders applies to imagine models for safe co-existence between humans and AI at present as well as in a post-singularity future with super-human AI (3); how human/AI relations should be constructed to reap the opportunities of AI while minimizing existential risks for humans (4).

Publicerad 2022-12-23.

Can political institutions be too legitimate for their own good? The standard view of legitimacy treats it purely as a resource—political institutions that enjoy legitimacy can draw on voluntary cooperation among their subjects to reach their aims, which is believed to make them more effective than institutions that lack legitimacy and must instead use coercion or bribery to reach aims. We challenge this conventional wisdom by advancing a more general theory that is sensitive also to the costs of legitimacy. High levels of legitimacy, we suggest, can make political actors complacent about the status quo and cause them to pay insufficient attention to problems related to implementation. In contrast, low levels of legitimacy—or legitimacy crises—can serve as a wake-up call and motivate actors to work harder to reach their original or wider goals. We illustrate this theory through a case study of the African Union, assessing when and how legitimacy serves as a cost or as a resource for political institutions, with implications for decision-making, implementation, and effectiveness.

Publicerad 2022-05-01

This article introduces an innovative method to describe data with sounds in political science. The method, known in ecology, physics, and musicology as sonification, operates by linking sound signals to quantifiable observations. We us it to compose a choir of legitimacy crises in global governance from 1994 to 2014, and to negotiate a familiar divide in research on how legitimacy should be measured. Scholars predominantly prefer one of two approaches to measure legitimacy quantitatively, either looking at political trust or public contestation of political institutions. We illustrate the usefulness of sonification to subsume both positions in this divide. More generally, we argue that sonification can enhance public communication of scientific results and extract meanings from observations that go unnoticed in visual and verbal representations, in particular with relevance to describing time series data on anything from the spread of pandemics to violent conflicts and economic inequalities.

Democratic practices exist in politics within and beyond individual states. To date, however, it is only the democratic practices within states that have been analyzed in search for causal explanations of political outcomes, for example, peace and human rights protection. Having established the problematic nature of this situation, the purpose of this article is to explain why the situation emerges in political science and then to suggest a strategy to overcome it. The lack of attention to global democracy, or democracy beyond the state more generally, in explanatory theory is suggested to depend on prevalent but unnecessary conceptual delimitations of democracy which contradict standard assumptions about international politics. Those contradictions can be avoided, however, by defining democracy as rule by the largest group. It is argued that the concept of rule by the largest group, while protecting traditional virtues of democracy such as freedom and equality of individual persons in politics, allows scholars to describe a wider range of international practices than have been available for empirical research based on the dominating conceptions of democracy in normative and empirical literatures. Most fundamentally, it frees future research on the effects of democracy beyond the state from a key risk of self-contradiction.

While scholars commonly assume that Global Governance Institutions (GGIs) need legitimacy to perform effectively, there are few systematic empirical studies assessing the consequences of legitimacy (or the lack thereof) for the functioning of GGIs. Inspired by the new institutionalism in organization theory, which predicts that more legitimate organizations will get more resources than illegitimate ones, we look into how legitimacy affects the resourcing of GGIs. We assess how crises of legitimacy affect the staff and financial resources of 21 GGIs from 1985 to 2015. Multivariate statistical analysis suggests that the effects of legitimacy crises on GGI resourcefulness are interesting but surprisingly weak, often GGI specific, and dependent on time and the source of the challenge. Specifically, we find that elite criticisms of GGIs lead to deep resource cuts in the short and medium term, while the effect of mass protests takes longer. The paper concludes by setting an agenda for further theorizing and empirical testing of the consequences of legitimacy in global governance.

This chapter outlines a new research agenda on the consequences of legitimacy for the effectiveness of global governance institutions. The chapter sets the stage for systematic investigation of this issue by disaggregating consequences into empirically observable components and by outlining a research strategy to study these different impacts. Specifically, the chapter highlights four sequential types of consequences, relating to: (a) the resources committed to an institution; (b) the scale of policy output produced by an institution; (c) the actor compliance with an institution’s policies; and (d) the problem-solving effectiveness of the institution. The chapter illustrates the empirical fruitfulness of new quantitative measurements of legitimacy crisis, and argues for its usefulness to test effects of legitimacy in global governance.

Given the choice, most PhD students would prefer to receive individual supervision rather than be supervised alongside their peers as part of a collective. This is understandable, given the undivided attention and precise, directly relevant advice one would receive. However, Hans Agné and Ulf Mörkenstam have compared the experiences of individually and collectively supervised students on the same doctoral programme and found that collective supervision, during the first year at least, is correlated with significantly shorter times to thesis completion compared to individual supervision., This blog post is based on the authors’ article, “Should first-year doctoral students be supervised collectively or individually? Effects on thesis completion and time to completion”, published in Higher Education Research & Development (DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2018.1453785).

As a prelude to the three themes in the volume, this chapterexplores more generally the turn towards legitimacy in globalgovernance research. The chapter suggests that this turn ispartly explained by shortcomings in normative research onglobal democracy, and the potential of research on legitimacyto overcome those problems. The chapter discusses the meritsand demerits of alternative conceptualizations of legitimacy inserving these purposes. The chapter concludes in favor of anormative-sociological understanding of legitimacy that issensitive to beliefs among members of relevant audiencesabout the normative qualities of political institutions that areultimately specified by analysts