The Governance Podcast

Sovereignty and International Law: In Conversation with Carmen Pavel

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Carmen Pavel from the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. This episode is titled “Sovereignty and International Law”, which features Carmen’s recently published book with Oxford University Press Law Beyond the State.

How Neo-Liberal are Contemporary Modes of Governance? In Conversation with Will Davies

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Will Davies from Goldsmiths, University of London. This episode is titled “How Neo-Liberal are Contemporary Modes of Governance?”

Culture, Science, and the Predicament of Climate Change: In Conversation with Michael Hulme

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Michael Hulme from Cambridge University. This episode is titled “Culture, Science, and the Predicament of Climate Change”, where he suggests looking at climate change challenges as predicaments for human societies to cope with.

Money and the Rule of Law: In Conversation with Daniel Smith

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Assistant Director Dr. Bryan Cheang interviews Prof. Daniel Smith from Middle Tennessee State University. This episode features his latest book Money and the Rule of Law, published by Cambridge University Press and co-authored with Alexander Salter and Peter Boettke. Drawing on a wide body of scholarship, this volume presents a novel argument in favor of embedding monetary institutions into a rule of law framework. The authors argue for general, predictable rules to provide a sturdier foundation for economic growth and prosperity. The authors argue that a rule of law approach to monetary policy would remedy the flaws that resulted in misguided monetary responses to the 2007-8 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Understanding and Misunderstanding Governance in Afghanistan: In Conversation with Jennifer Murtazashvili

On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington, interviews Prof. Jennifer Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh. This episode features her latest book Land, the State and War, published by Cambridge University Press. The book employs a historical narrative, extensive fieldwork and a national survey to explore how private property institutions develop, how they are maintained, and their relationship to the state and state-building within the context of Afghanistan. This episode also discusses the long running governance challenges in Afghanistan, and the recent problems associated with the actions of foreign powers.

Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy: In Conversation with Mikayla Novak

On this week's episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington, interviews Dr Mikayla Novak from the Australian National University. This episode features her latest book Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy, which explores social movement activities and outcomes through the lens of liberal political economy. Using historical and contemporary case studies, this book illuminates how social movements fluidly organise in often repressive environments to achieve freedom, equality, and dignity.

 

 

The Guest

 

Dr Mikayla Novak is a doctoral student in sociology at The Australian National University. Her research interests are wide-ranging, and include: classical sociology; economic and fiscal sociology; inequality and social stratification; network theory and analysis; rational-choice sociology; social movement studies; and social theory.

 

Mikayla has extensively written on matters of social thought and policy, invariably attuned to the complex intersections between sociological, economic and political phenomena. In 2018 her first book, Inequality: An Entangled Political Economy Perspective, was published by Palgrave

 

Prior to her transition into academic sociology, Mikayla was an economist with a doctorate in economics awarded at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) and a First Class Honours economics degree at The University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia).

Should Everything Be for Sale? In Conversation with Mark Pennington

On this week's episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast, Professor Mark Pennington (King's College London) argues that if not quite everything, then a great many things, ought to be legally for sale. From kidneys, to drugs, to sex, to votes, how much ought the market be allowed to freely trade in?

The Bloomington School: beyond the romance of ideologies with Prakash Kashwan

In the latest issue of the Governance podcast Mark Pennington interviews Prakash Kashwan of the University of Connecticut. The conversation considers the political economy foundations of the Bloomington school with in-depth discussion on the role of power, institutions, and incentives in the analysis of common pool resource problems. 

Identity Politics as Modern Duelling? In Conversation with Clif Mark

What can early modern practices of duelling teach us about the contemporary 'culture wars' over identity politics? According to Dr Clif Mark, a lot more than you might think. Join us for this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast.

Post Truth Politics? In Conversation with Matt Sleat

That we live in an era of 'post truth politics' has become a widespread mantra since the shock of the Brexit vote and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. But Matt Sleat (University of Sheffield) believes this is a mistake: politics is no more 'post truth' now than it has ever been. To understand what has been happening, we need to look elsewhere. Join us on this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast.

Universal Basic Income: Free Money for All? In Conversation with Diana Popescu

Diana Popescu (Department of Political Economy, King's College London) joins the Counterintuitive Series of the Governance Podcast this week to argue that Universal Basic Income - the state giving money to everybody, for free, and unconditionally - is a realistic and desirable policy, one that governments around the world should take seriously.

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The Guest

Dr Popescu works on distributive justice, recognition theory, and the relation between the two with respect to recognition struggles, disability rights, minority discrimination and social exclusion. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics, where she worked as a Fellow in Government from 2014 until 2017. She is also interested in public policy, and has contributed to projects aimed at assessing progress in combating the social exclusion of the Romani minority within the European Union. Her current research interests include discrimination theory, post-truth, and applications of recognition struggles to social polarisation.

The Case for Direct Democracy: In Conversation with Jonathan Benson

Given the upheavals unleashed by the Brexit referendum of 2016, many are now wary of direct democracy. But Jonathan Benson (Utrecht University) argues that to improve our current politics we need more, not less, direct involvement of the people in decision-making. Join us on this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast.

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The Guest

Jonathan Benson is Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at Utrecht University (j.d.benson@uu.nl). His general research interests are in political and democratic theory, political epistemology, and theoretical political economy. He has published on issues such as deliberative and participatory democracy, the relationship between democracy and the market, the limits of markets, and environmental politics.

Should the State Recognise Marriage? In Conversation with Clare Chambers

In the first episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast, Professor Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge) defends the ideal of the marriage free state. She argues that for reasons of justice and equality, the state should not legally recognise - and therefore, privilege - any particular form of marriage. And until it ceases to do so, we must consider its actions unjust.

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The Guest

Clare Chambers is Professor of Political Philosophy and a Fellow of Jesus College. She came to Jesus College and to the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge in 2006. Previously she held academic positions at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, and has twice been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

Prof Chambers is on leave from College duties from October 2018 until October 2021. During that time she has a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to work on a project titled Intact: The Political Philosophy of the Unmodified Body.

Prof Chambers is a Council member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the UK’s leading independent body informing policy and public debate about the ethical questions surrounding medical and biological innovations and research. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Res Publica, a journal of moral, legal, and political philosophy; a member of the Executive Committee of The Aristotelian Society; and the Secretary of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought.

Political Parties And the Health of Democracy: In Conversation with Ian Shapiro

Why are political parties important for liberal democracy? Which institutional reforms can alleviate the burdens of globalisation on the working class? Join us on this episode of the Governance Podcast for a conversation between Steven Klein (King’s College London) and Ian Shapiro (Yale) on the major governance challenges facing advanced democracies and how they might be solved.

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Read the Books

The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It by Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz

Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself by Ian Shapiro and Frances McCall Rosenbluth 

The Guest

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro also served as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies from 2004-2019.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Shapiro is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Keio University in Tokyo, and Nuffield College, Oxford. 

His most recent books are The Real World of Democratic Theory (Princeton University Press, 2012) Politics Against Domination (Harvard University Press, 2016), and, with Frances Rosenbluth, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (Yale University Press, 2018). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.

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0:42: I wanted to begin with your 2018 book on Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself, which you co-authored with Frances McCall Rosenbluth. It’s a spirited defence of the importance of parties for democracy. Before we get into your argument, I wanted to see if you could say a little about why you think political parties are so vital for democracy, as well as why you think their value tends to be overlooked or neglected in popular debates.

5:33: This is a question of democracy bypassing elections altogether. Another issue you deal with in the book is debates about democratising political parties themselves. So some people say that political parties are necessary evils, or they have these positive effects but they can also lead to capture by elites within the party, and so what we need is good democracy within the parties. And in the book you’re also sceptical of that—could you tell us more about your worry?

9:24: This raises a really interesting puzzle which you don’t entirely address in the book, which is, if this is so harmful to parties, why do they do it?

13:30: I think another interesting aspect is the decline of the traditional sources of mobilisation for political parties. So one thing I wanted to ask is, there are two dimensions to political parties—one is the coordination function, which is bundling issues together, building those compromises, integrating various interest groups—but parties also exist to get people to vote and to mobilise their constituencies. If you look at the debate in the last two primaries in the Democratic party and in the UK, it seems like one of the issues is how you balance the coordination function while ensuring that the core constituencies of the party will viably vote. And it seems like one of the big stories has been the gradual decline of some of these reliable sources of mobilisation.    

17:57: So the book is a defence of parties and you’re trying to push back against a lot of scepticism towards political parties—you defend large scale, catch all political parties—your ideal, it seems, is the Westminster, British model where you have large catch all parties who can come into power and govern on their own. You also say some interesting things about coalitions… But there is a worry about political parties in general that I feel doesn’t come through in the book… which is that when you have this sort of system, parties have an incentive to take controversial or particularly challenging issues off the political agenda.

28:08: I’m probably slightly more sympathetic to referendums than you because there’s an interesting democratic theory puzzle that comes in—so if it’s a basic constitutional issue, what other mechanism is there for altering the debate? Would a better designed referendum worked better in the UK?

33:25: This brings us back to what you said earlier and is a theme of your new book, which is that a lot of these changes in the party system are being driven by larger structural changes in the political economy of advanced capitalist societies.

39:16: This is something you mentioned earlier but I wanted to reiterate- there is the insecurity but there is the decline of institutions that would buffer some of that insecurity like labour unions… and you have a lot of disaffected people who have an understandable distrust and distaste for politics in general… they don’t have institutions that can connect them with political parties and make them feel like their voice is represented. Then you get the elites trying to figure out how to re-engage those people and they don’t have a lot of tools.

Self-Governance in Public Policy: In Conversation with Simon Kaye

Join us on this episode of the governance podcast between Simon Kaye and Mark Pennington for a conversation on the impact of Elinor Ostrom's work on public policy. Simon Kaye discusses his latest report for the New Local on how the ideas of self-governance and community power can transform public services in the UK.

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Read the Report

Think Big, Act Small: Elinor Ostrom's Radical Vision for Community Power

The Guest

Having been awarded a PhD in democratic theory from the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London in 2015, Simon Kaye has worked as a researcher and educator in academia and think tanks, with roles at UCL’s Constitution Unit, The Hansard Society, Queen Mary, and King’s College London. His last role was as Research Director at the Project for Modern Democracy, running projects on Whitehall reform and the rebalancing of UK economic policy.  

Simon has written and spoken on a diversity of subjects, including democracy and voting systems, localism and self-governance, political economy, historical methods, constitutions, conspiracy theories, and post-truth. He has published work in venues including History and Theory, Critical Review, European Political Science, and The Fabian Society. He has also penned articles for popular publications such as The Independent, Politics.co.uk, CityMetric, and CapX. He has contributed to several podcasts to talk about his research, presented at festivals and international conferences, participated in public lectures and panel debates, won several competitive academic fellowships, and appeared on BBC News as a political commentator. 

Simon’s research at New Local is focused around the Community Paradigm, drawing on his expertise in democracy and political economy. His major projects include work on mutual aid groups, the new working practices and relationships that emerged during the 2020 pandemic, and the landmark research of Nobel Prize-winner Elinor Ostrom into governance systems and community management of common resources. New Local’s Ostrom project is a direct development of the original Community Paradigm and forms the intellectual grounding for much of our work on public service reform and the need for more autonomous and empowered communities.  

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00:26: the New Local have recently produced a very interesting policy report which tries to apply some of the ideas of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom to look at aspects of a possible policy reform agenda in the UK and perhaps other countries. Those of you who follow our podcast will know that the Ostrom’s work is quite important at our Centre because of their focus on the relationship between formal and informal institutions of governance. So Simon, welcome to the podcast. I wonder if we could start off by you giving a bit of background on what you do at New Local.

02:25: You’ve produced with New Local what I think is an excellent report on Ostrom. I wonder if you could say more about why and how the New Local has become aware of the Ostroms' work?

06:40: If we think about some of the ideas in the report, as part of this community paradigm, you are pushing an agenda which is emphasizing this idea of decentralisation, of communities taking control of how public services are delivered, or assets are managed—the idea of communities having the space to craft their own hybrids between communities, markets and states. What would you say to the idea that in the UK people have been arguing for decentralisation for many years, there’s lots of complaints in the British government about over-centralisation, and yet the decentralisation agenda never really seems to take root. What do you think it is about the Ostrom agenda that can possibly make that happen?

11:08: So you would say, for example, that the Ostrom agenda, in its capacity to appeal to people across the political spectrum, is different from --what we heard in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the Tony Blair premiership in Britain, was a lot of talk about stakeholderism and participation—and this Ostrom agenda has aspects of that but also appeals across political groupings in a way that perhaps that agenda didn’t.

12:46: Could you say a little bit about what you think she means by the phrase “beyond markets and states”?

18:26: So it’s really an argument there that there is no fixed boundary about what kind of institutional arrangement is appropriate for particular kinds of goods—that that is constantly moving and varying according to local circumstances.

20:11: That leads me to what I think is a strange paradox about British politics, which is that on the one hand we do get people complaining (and we’ve seen this in the context of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic) that there is too much centralisation and not enough scope for community decision-making. But at the same time, the minute you start to get local variety, you have people complaining that they don’t like the fact that there are different outcomes in different places—you often get the phrase “the post-code lottery” that people want there to be a uniformity of provision of outcome while the localism agenda is pointing to something else. How do you square that circle if you’re trying to sell this idea?

23:30: If I’m understanding your argument, you’re saying there needs to be some kind of levelling mechanism in that you need some kind of minimum standard which everyone as a citizen is entitled to, but then over and above that, that’s the space where local control should come into play. What would be your view on the levelling mechanism being something like a universal basic income?

26:34: Speaking of that, the government here is talking about a “levelling up” agenda. Is there any way in which what you’re talking about can inform what that might look like? Can you give some examples of cases where community control can facilitate levelling up?

31:30: I remember very well there’s a distinction Ostrom draws between what she calls a facilitator state and a controller state.    

33:55: I was going to say, if you’re starting from a position where a state – whether at the local or national level – is actually responsible for managing assets or resources, there’s no way it can just disappear. At the very least it needs a mechanism for transferring authority, however much authority we’re talking about. This is certainly not a laissez-faire approach. Let’s move on to discuss the pandemic: arguably a problem which requires a centralised response to a large scale collective action problem. How do you think the relationship between the centre and localities plays out in the pandemic?

39:23: This feeds back to an earlier dilemma I was describing, which is: isn’t part of the reason central government has followed such a top down approach that there has been a popular demand for centralised action?

44:16: So you don’t feel that what’s happened with the pandemic is that there is a permanent setback to the ideas of decentralisation—you think this is actually an opportunity to show what can be achieved by thinking in a different way.

Prisons and the Origins of Social Order: In Conversation with David Skarbek

David Skarbek (Brown University) describes his ethnographic work on prison governance as a historical analogy to the emergence of states. Join us in this episode of the Governance Podcast led by John Meadowcroft (King’s College London) for a vibrant discussion on how governance emerges (or doesn’t) in different social landscapes, from prisons and gulags to clans and nation-states.

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The Guest

David Skarbek is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His research examines how extralegal governance institutions form, operate, and evolve. He has published extensively on the informal institutions that govern life in prisons in California and around the globe.

His work has appeared in leading journals in political science, economics, and criminology, including in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, and Journal of Criminal Justice. 

His book, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (Oxford University Press), received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 William H. Riker Award for the best book in political economy in the previous three years. It was also awarded the 2014 Best Publication Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association’s 2014 Ethnography Award.

His work has been featured widely in national and international media outlets, such as the Atlantic, BBC, Business Insider, the Economist, Forbes, the Independent, and the Times.

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00:38: David, you’re well known for writing a book on prison gangs in California and America called The Social Order of the Underworld. Just to begin, tell us a little bit about that book.

2:01: You mentioned that prison gangs are often organized on racial lines. Why is that the case?

4:10: So race is a convenient way of organizing a large group of people. Is that what you’re arguing?

4:34: Does that mean this has changed over time? So as a prison population got bigger in America, gangs organized upon racial lines have become more important?

7:44: You mentioned that the convict code, if you like, was informal. Would you see gangs as providing more formal governance?

9:15: Would it be fair or is it a stretch to suggest that this is like a prison constitution?

10:53: One thing when you read the book that’s quite striking is there are lots of vivid descriptions of violence that occurs in prison. How do you reconcile that evidence with what you describe as some sort of order?

13:55: I imagine that the question that comes to many people’s minds when it comes to prison gangs, is what would happen if they went to prison? Would they have to join a prison gang, and if the didn’t, what would be the consequences?

15:26: So it’d be fair to say you cannot be a solitary individual, you cannot be a holdout, so to speak.

16:15: Could we then imagine that prisons are close to what we might think of the state of nature in social science?

17:05: This brings us to your latest work in this area, which I think is going to be called the Puzzle of Prison Order. How does it extend your previous work?

20:03: Maybe you can say a little more about English prisons. One senses that they don’t have that kind of gang organization that we observe in California. Why should that be the case?

23:39: One challenge this book takes on is trying to unpack all these different factors, all these different possibilities. So I guess one common sense question would be, looking at California, America, the UK, there is a presence of gangs on the streets. One might assume intuitively that the gangs on the streets are more well organized in California compared to England and Wales. Is that the case, and how does that play into what happens in prisons?

26:08: Another dimension which I think would be of interest is the difference between men’s and women’s prisons. What have you been observing?

29:44: Let me ask a more mischievous question: You’ve looked at prisons around the world and spent many years reading research on this. Is there a country or prison system that is completely opposite to what your theory would predict? For instance, where there is a small prison population but there are lots of gangs?

31:42: So it’s a story ultimately about governance, and much less about the size of prisons.

32:10: One thing that’s striking is, prisons have people with very few resources, they may be predisposed to violence… should this lead us to be hopeful about people’s capacity for self-governance?

35:06: So it’s undoubtedly impressive that prisoners are able to self-organize or self-govern in this way. Thinking of the comparative political economy of this, though, wouldn’t it be better if there was formal governance? Is that safer and less violent?

37:00: Essentially you’re engaging in qualitative research. Maybe the first question here is about the challenges of obtaining that kind of data from prisons around the world and how you go about overcoming that challenge.

40:27: What’s your sense of the challenges of comparing different ethnographic studies?

44:26: So you were trained as an economist originally. How do economists view this sort of methodological approach, and would they be concerned about your ability to give causal answers?

46:04:  As a political scientist, you see political science going in the direction of causal identification and experimental results. Should we be concerned about that and is it limiting the types of questions we can ask?

48:18: I assume you’re not going to be working on prisons forever. What other ideas do you have going forward?

Poverty, Informality and Politics in India: In Conversation with Tariq Thachil

Slums are home to 850 million people worldwide, making them prime territory for distributive politics. In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Tariq Thachil (Vanderbilt University) sits down with Irena Schneider (King’s College London) to discuss the counterintuitive ways in which governance emerges amidst poverty and informality in Indian cities.

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The Guest

Tariq Thachil is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on political parties and political behavior, social movements, and ethnic politics, with a regional focus on South Asia.

His first book examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India, and was published by Cambridge University Press (Studies in Comparative Politics) in 2014. This project has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, and 2010 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics, all from the American Political Science Association. It also won the 2010 Sardar Patel Prize for best dissertation on modern India in the humanities and social sciences.

His current research focuses on the political consequences of urbanization, and draws on extensive qualitative and quantitative research among poor migrants in Indian cities. An article from this project, coauthored with Adam Auerbach, received the 2018 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in the previous calendar year.

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00:58: As a political scientist, what prompted you to take an interest in the politics of Indian slums?

1:53: You talk a lot about machine politics in India—It’s a core element of your book. Historically when we think about machine politics, you also mention in your book that the big examples are US democratic party machines in New York and Chicago which emerged in the 19^th century by giving out material benefits to poor European immigrants in exchange for political support. We’re seeing similar trends happening across the developing world today. Masses of migrants are flooding to cities, living in slums, and end up being governed by powerful machines. But you’re observing something uniquely different about how politics emerges within Indian slums. Quite specifically, you’re noticing that the process is a lot more democratic than we thought. What have you been observing? What’s counterintuitive? 

7:56: That’s really interesting because it really has to do with this unique competitive environment. Why is it so competitive? Why is no one able to take over and become a boss in some of these Indian slums?

11:23: You argue that slum residents don’t really choose leaders on the basis of petty gifts or cash. Clientelism doesn’t boil down to something so simple. What criteria do residents really use to choose their leaders? 

14:13: The picture you’re painting is that slum residents are much more empowered to choose among competing brokers rather than being passive or manipulated rule takers. How much power do they really have over their local brokers and local politicians? Can they really hold their brokers accountable in ways that would mimic what would happen under a formal democratic institution?

18:54: One of your most interesting findings is that when people are choosing their slum leaders and brokers, they’re not necessarily using the basis of caste or ethnicity—and a lot of what really matters is things like education. Talk a little more about that. Are we seeing a crowding out of forms of choice based on old kinds of hierarchy?

23:16: I want to talk a little more about the brokers themselves. They’re intermediaries between the slum dwellers and the state. You’re finding interesting mechanisms that keep brokers honest. As intermediaries, there’s always the concern that they will take state resources for themselves rather than distributing them back to the population. You find that they’re not actually pocketing the resources. What incentive to do they have to be honest?

26:56: Do you see these informal institutions as a healthy phenomenon in Indian democracy? Are they effectively a really benign form of bottom up self-governance that fills in the vacuum of the formal state?

29:58: What does this kind of competitive local governance mean for Indian political development in the long term? Do you see political machines in the global south eventually declining in the same way they did in the US in the early 20^th century? 

35:20: Tying that into questions of economic development in India, as these slums develop over time and residents, having gotten used to a somewhat deliberative process and being somewhat involved in getting public service provision, do you think that will put a long term pressure on the formal system of governance?

37:48: This is a one country example. There is often the question in social science about external generalizability. What lessons are pertinent for the study of political development and urbanization around the world? 

41:28: What are the future paths in your research program? 

43:00: On a more methodological point, you’ve been using different kinds of methods, from ethnography to experimentation and survey work. Talk a little bit about the challenges of doing that ethnographic work. What have you been finding most rewarding and challenging? Any advice for young scholars trying to do this kind of fieldwork?

Womanhood in Tocqueville's Democracy: In Conversation with Sarah Wilford

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that American democracy was rooted in associational life. What role did women play in building this capacity for association? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr Sarah Wilford (University of the Andes) sits down with Dr Irena Schneider (King's College London) to discuss how the domestic sphere shapes free societies and stems the tide of democratic despotism. 

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The Guest

Dr Sarah Wilford is an assistant professor of politics at the University of the Andes in Santiago. Her research focuses on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville regarding family, women, and democratic conditions. Other research interests include the relationship between religion and liberty in Tocqueville, womanhood during the nineteenth century, and the use of Tocqueville in later twentieth and twenty-first-century political theory and political science. She received her PhD in Politics from King's College London in 2018.

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00:51: Tocqueville is a very popular writer to turn to nowadays, particularly when we think about modern questions of the loss of associationalism, virtuous citizenship, and community values. But we don't often think about Tocqueville in terms of gender and the domestic sphere. That's where you have been working and I wanted to ask just to get started, how did you get interested in the gender angle on Tocqueville? 

3:13: To delve into the details, what exactly is the role of womanhood and the domestic sphere in Tocqueville's work?

07:23: My first reaction is-- you talked about paternal authority and that being a prime element in democratic citizenship, and being the first school of citizenship. What about the mother and womanhood in general? How does that contribute to the raising of virtuous, democratic citizens?

9:30: To delve further into the question of authority, both maternal, paternal, and the domestic sphere, it seems almost like an oxymoron to say that respect for authority leads to more democratic norms and civil society. How does that transition play out in Tocqueville?

11:30: Tocqueville really is seen as a scholar of civil society, of associationalism. We throw around these terms but we're not often very clear by what Tocqueville meant by them. When he observed these things in American society, what was he talking about? What does governance and associationalism mean for Tocqueville in this sense?

17:21: A lot of times, when it comes to Tocqueville, we hear the term, 'the habits of the heart and mind.' A lot of the network that exist within civil society are driven by people's common acceptance or commitment to certain values or beliefs or ideas. That is a kind of glue that ties society together and is generated within the domestic sphere. Can you talk a little more about the habits of the heart and mind that a self-governing citizenry is supposed to have?

21:08: Tocqueville has been used and appropriated by many modern scholars in social science, from thinkers like Robert Putnam to Vincent Ostrom, and others. And they often use Tocqueville to address modern issues or crises of democracy. You've certainly worked a little bit on how they interpreted Tocqueville. What did they get right, and what did they get wrong?

28:04: What is your contribution on these perspectives? Are they hitting the point? Are they being accurately Tocquevillian, or are they misunderstanding parts of his argument?

37:44: I think part of the difficulty in transmitting this more 19th century perspective into the 21st is that society doesn't really look the same as when Tocqueville observed it. You talked a lot about the virtues of a self-governing society in which women take a disproportionate role in bringing up children and transmitting the virtues of citizenship, where religion plays a big role in people's lives that does constrain morality, where there is a tendency to respect authority more, where information and authority are not democratised. We live in a completely different world now. And you might say that women's empowerment is a completely positive achievement and that women shouldn't be spending the majority of their time in the domestic sphere transmitting these virtues to citizens. So there are a lot of tensions in taking the Tocquevillian example and being perfectly Tocquevillian in the 21st century. Should we be Tocquevillian nowadays given that society has completely changed?

44:44: Do you think we're in a period of democratic despotism today?

48:13: In light of this potential that we are living in a period of democratic despotism, we're more secularised, atomised, lonelier; we're lacking a lot of the social ties and mores that existed in the 19th century, especially in urban environments. We lack a lot of those central ingredients of democratic citizenship that Tocqueville was talking about. It seems like an opportune time to go back to the literature and ask, how do we replicate those mechanisms nowadays given that we've lost a lot of it in the process, and throughout history?

The Case Against the Sovereign State: In Conversation with David Thunder

David Thunder (University of Navarra) argues that many modern political theorists, from Hobbes to Rawls, overstate the importance of state sovereignty. He envisions an alternative, polycentric form of social organisation that can support one’s freedom to flourish. Tune in for his argument in this episode of the Governance Podcast led by Billy Christmas (King’s College London).

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The Guest

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer in political and social philosophy at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra. Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting positions at Bucknell and Villanova Universities, and a stint as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. David earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, tentatively entitled May I Love My Country? In Search of a Defensible Patriotism; and Sovereign Rule and the Still-Birth of Freedom: A Preface to Confederal Republicanism. 

David’s academic writings include Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (edited volume, Springer, 2017), and numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, The Journal of Social Philosophy, and the Journal of Business Ethics. His writings cover a wide range of questions including the pros and cons of individualism, the ethics of financial trading, the complicity of citizens in collective injustice, the concept of moral impartiality, and the scope of duties of beneficence. He writes occasionally for The Irish Times and RTE’s Brainstorm page. For more information, see www.davidthunder.com. 

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00:59: What is sovereigntism? Why are you so critical of it?

2:18: Is your criticism of it primarily in terms of as a theory of political organisation, as an approach to justice in normative political theory? Or is it a critique of empirical reality? Is it that you think this is the system we do in fact have, and it's bad for a number of reasons?

4:06: Could you say a bit more about how this aspiration to sovereignty is so harmful to these kinds of associations? 

5:58: What do you think is worth protecting about associational life? What would you say to someone who takes the opposite approach and says that these small associations are undermining the authority of the national government and that undermines our sense of national identity, a more cosmopolitan and open ended form of human cooperation and really these associations are just old fashioned things which we can now do away with now that we have nation states.

8:47: So you start off with this tentative defense of associational life that, while any kind of associational life is not always good, it is a necessary condition that we are able to form and live in associations. And the aspiration of the sovereign state is parasitical or cannibalistic upon that. If the goal of associational life is this common flourishing, friendship and knowledge, generational solidarity, is there a need for external regulation of associational life in order to, not guarantee, but certainly regulate and offer some predictability that associational life will not go to the worst case scenario?

12:35: It sounds like you do want there to be political institutions to provide that kind of regulatory framework for associational life, but it's important that it be fragmented perhaps in a federal way. Do you see federal systems such as Switzerland, the US, Germany, I suppose also India and Nigeria, are those viable models for what you would call a polycentric polity?

15:24: You mentioned that fiscal authority is particularly important. Could you say why it has particular importance?

17:15: So the emphasis on localised fiscal authority is not necessarily a claim about entitlement to wealth-- it's not a libertarian claim. It's more based on an empirical worry that more centralised and distant authorities, when they have fiscal power, they are able to squander that money to engage in clientelism or bad forms of redistribution. Whereas at the local level, when people observe corruption or clientelism, they are able to quickly exercise some voice in the matter.

20:24: So the extent to which the polity is decentralised, it's always going to be a matter of degree- it's not the case that a state is either fully sovereign or fully polycentric. 

23:19: You want to see these units in competition with each other or engaging in some kind of bargaining or negotiation and that would be a healthy symptom of the system. 

26:03: So your image of how constitutions ought to be is that they should be open-ended in a way, open to re-negotiation and revision from sources of authority which the constitution may not recognise. I suppose the question that a constitutional theorist in the mindset of a sovereigntist imagination would say, that sounds perfectly nice but who maintains the open-endedness of the constitution? 

28:51: A good example of polycentric authority is private arbitration, which is a very common practice. Some may argue that it already takes place against the backdrop of an already monopolised legal order that says if you sign contracts where you nominate third parties and you renege after that, we will then come after you.

32:04: The reputational cost of reneging on contracts definitely induces compliance in a lot of scenarios, but typically, I think we should expect that disciplinary power of repeated dealings and reputational effects to occur with business people -- economic actors that have an interest in securing long-term cooperation to yield predictable income flows. What about in cases where you're not interested in making money, you're interested in committing genocide, say?

36:55: When we talk about polycentric governance and you mention that it's very important to localise fiscal control, an argument for that is when you shrink down the size of jurisdictions... you make exit less costly... an important part of your work previously has focused on citizenship and democratic participation which emphasizes that rather than just your ability to vote with your feet, it emphasizes the ethical importance of participation. How do you see that work speaking to your current work on the critique of the sovereign state?

40:57: You referred to your views as a form of republicanism, or consociational republicanism. In my background, contemporary political philosophy, republicanism refers usually to neo-Roman republicanism, which sees the most important goal of the polity as liberty as non-domination. I take this view to be suspicious of group life, associational life; it sees the republican state as something which liberates you from these kind of parochial forms of domination. How does your view of consociational republicanism relate to the neo-Roman republicanism of someone like Pettit?

47:40: A separate strand of your critique of the sovereign state -- I'm not sure how much of the book is dedicated to it, but you've mentioned in your talk that the notion of a sovereign state to protect freedom was a kind of deduction of the ontological or moral individualism of the Enlightenment. Could you say a little bit more about why you think ontological or moral individualism is problematic and why you think it entails the ideal of sovereignty? 

52:55: You said in your talk that you take that your case for a polycentric form of governance to be a perfectionist one; it's grounded in the ethical good of persons. You don't describe it as a liberal case and you don't make too much mention of protecting freedom. It's more about protecting valuable forms of life. Perfectionism is not a fashionable position in contemporary political philosophy- everyone goes out of their way to show that their view is a form of liberalism. Do you take your perfectionism to be illiberal or at odds with a liberal anti-perfectionism? 

Socialism and the Future of Heterodox Economics: In Conversation with Geoffrey Hodgson

Is socialism feasible? What is the future of heterodox economics after the financial crisis? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington (King's College London) sits down with Geoffrey Hodgson (Loughborough University London) for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of social democracy, neoliberalism, and new paradigms in economics.

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The Guest

Geoffrey Hodgson is a Professor in Management for the Institute for International Management at Loughborough University London. He is a specialist in institutional and evolutionary economics, with a background in economics, philosophy and mathematics. His research has applications to the understanding of organisations, organisational change, innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Hodgson is also the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics (ABS rank 3). He has published 18 academic books and over 150 academic articles. He is the winner of the Schumpeter Prize 2014 for his book on "Conceptualizing Capitalism". 

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0:55: You've actually got two books out in the last year -- Is Socialism Feasible? and Is there a future for heterodox economics? I wonder if we could start by you talking us through-- first of all, how do you write two books in a year, but also the rationale for these two particular books?

8:44: I'd like to follow up on that last part and link it to the motivation for writing these books-- you're very clear to make a distinction between socialism and social democracy, so you do see yourself as a kind of social democrat who has been influenced by arguments in the liberal tradition. I wonder if you could say something about why you think, following the crash, there's been a movement toward going back to what you describe as 'big state socialism' as opposed to embracing a radical Keynesian view or some kind of interventionist or redistributive politics, which isn't about nationalising or controlling everything from the centre.

14:45: I really enjoyed this section of the book where you're talking about the use of terminology-- how the use of this term 'neoliberal' has meant that you almost can't have a conversation in certain areas because anything turns out to be neoliberal if it isn't full blooded socialism and I think there's a wonderful line in the book where you say that if you follow this kind of reasoning, when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy to save the Soviet people from starvation, this would have been described as a neoliberal policy by some of the contemporary left.

16:34: Why do you think that label [neoliberalism] has become so ubiquitous?

18:17: You mention some heterodox thinkers using the term, dismissing certain things as being right wing just because of that. Perhaps we can connect to the second book-- could you talk about the rationale for writing it?

26:32: Can we pursue that more, this issue about how effectively methodological questions seem to get confused with policy positions or ideological views in heterodoxy? This is something that's always frustrated me-- I consider myself to be quite heterodox in the sense that I'm very influenced by the Austrian school ideas. There are lots of debates I'd like to engage with people who are post-Keynesians or post-institutionalists or evolutionary thinkers, and I feel that we should have a club identity around those themes. But because we might divide on policy issues that seems to come apart. 

29:59: There is so much within neoclassical economics which promotes, if not radical socialism, although you could interpret some general equilibrium theory in that way, but it certainly promotes interventionism  -- it assumes away all the problems of tacit knowledge. 

30:33: You've given reasons why you think heterodox economics as a set of broad theories is not in as good a shape as you'd like it to be, and that's one of the reasons you've written this book-- I wonder if you could address institutional economics, which on some readings is a kind of subfield within the broad heterodox camp, but arguably with things like new institutional economics there are some overlaps with the mainstream. 

34:46: I would have thought there should be more overlap between some of the concerns of institutional economics-- you think about the role that soft institutions or beliefs play, or the way ideas are communicated, with a lot of the work that takes place in cultural studies or communication studies, these kind of areas which often see themselves as being antithetical to economic ways of thinking, but they're actually dealing with questions about how ideas spread, how norms change, and you'd think this is terrain where they should be interested in the kind of insights you'd get from these fields. 

39:07: This connects back to our earlier discussion about the socialism book-- within our research centre here we're very much concerned with governance questions. Of course within that area we focused on themes like markets and private property, state ownership. But one of the great contributions I think of institutional economics, certainly of people like Elinor Ostrom, is to point out this whole space that many people have missed, which is between markets and states. And there's even been the argument made that to speak in terms of markets and states is a kind of outdated mode of analysis, that we actually need to be seeing all solutions to social problems in some sense as being some form of hybrid. Do you think that is one of the most important contributions of institutional economics?

41:33: I'm struck by how few politicians are able to articulate that kind of language. You could say that some people used to talk about the third way as something different, but people spoke about a third way or looking for some notion of hybrids. 

46:50: Is there a way in policy terms where people can conceive of allowing different institutions to coexist so that we don't see this as being a choice between all markets or all something else; we actually have different kinds of organisation coexisting in a society? If you think about a solution to religious conflict -- it's to tolerate the fact that people have different religions. If we can tolerate the fact that some people prefer different institutional forms, we've got to figure out some way allowing them to coexist rather than seeking victory for one side. 

52:09: To reflect a bit on what is happening to economics -- to think about those questions post-crisis-- I remember the financial crash, there was a huge amount of activism by students and people in the profession saying that economics needs to rethink itself. Some of the issues we've talked about get to parts of that, but my understanding is that economics hasn't changed much at all these 15 years. Do you see any signs of change?