Creating a Collective Identity in The Digital Age: The Perspective of Behavioural Economics

This paper comprises four related parts. The first part presents hypotheses regarding the forms of creating a collective identity in the age of digitization and the adopted theoretical assumptions, including conceptualization of concepts. The concept of Daniel Kahneman’s thinking systems is quoted, which was used to analyse the presented phenomenon in relation to the political decisionmaking process. The second section is a presentation of the research problem as a concept that is equivalent to the category of behavioural economics. Next, we explain the pattern of the transition from the left-wing identity policy to its right-wing response. The final part represents an analysis of the Internet collective identity in relation to political risk and profit, while the epilogue presents the political implications of the use of collective identity by measurement tools and consulting entities managing the flow, collection and compilation of data.

Return to Status Quo Ante: The Need for Robust and Reversible Pandemic Emergency Measures

This paper presents a normative analysis of restrictive measures in response to a pandemic emergency. It applies to the context presented by the Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak of 2019, as well as to future pandemics. First, a Millian-liberal argument justifies lockdown measures in order to protect liberty under pandemic conditions, consistent with commonly accepted principles of public health ethics. Second, a wider argument contextualizes specific issues that attend acting on the justified lockdown for western liberal democratic states, as modeled on discourse and accounted for by Jürgen Habermas. The authors argue that a range of norms are constructed in societies that, justifiably, need to be curtailed for the pandemic. The state has to take on the unusual role of sole guardian of norms under emergency pandemic conditions. Consistently with both the Millian-liberal justification and elements of Habermasian discourse ethics, they argue that that role can only be justified where it includes strategy for how to return political decisionmaking to the status quo ante. This is because emergency conditions are only justified as a means to protecting prepandemic norms. To this end, the authors propose that an emergency power committee is necessary to guarantee that state action during pandemic is aimed at re-establishing the conditions of legitimacy of government action that ecological factors (a virus) have temporarily curtailed.

Discursive Strategies and Speech Acts in Political Discourse of Najib and Modi

Election campaigns are constantly regarded as a persuasive campaign to convince the nation to vote for the leader of a country. Being said such, this study investigates the discourse of twitter of two political premiers in Asia: Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak (henceforth, Najib) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (henceforth, Modi), in the aspects of discursive strategies and speech acts during election campaigns. The discourse of Najib and Modi are selected due to their active participation on Twitter throughout election campaigns. The data were collected over 3 months throughout the national elections of both the countries, which were from February to April 2013 in Malaysia and January to March 2014 in India. This qualitative study employs Wodak’s discursive strategies to analyze the lexical choices utilized in the election tweets and Searle’s speech act taxonomy to analyze the speech acts used. The presence of two major speech acts was highlighted during the elections: commissives and directives. These two speech acts collaborated under the hood of discursive strategies of predication and perspectivation that empowered Najib and Modi to establish a strong contact with citizens while creating a sense of integrity and oneness. This study is significant as it creates political and language awareness to citizens by denoting how political figures establish power through mutual consent with citizens using Twitter. Furthermore, this study enlightens citizens on how the 140-character tool can influence the political decisionmaking of a community.

The evolution of public policy attitudes: comparing the mechanisms of policy support across the stages of a policy cycle

We analyse the importance of legitimacy on public policy support by comparing how drivers of public policy attitudes evolve across the policy process consisting of the input (the processes forgoing acquisition of power and the procedures permeating political decisionmaking), throughput (the inclusion of and interactions between actors in a governance system) and output (the substantive consequences of those decisions) stages. Using unique panel data through three phases of the implementation of a congestion tax in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, we find that legitimacy is indeed important in explaining policy support. Moreover, we find a lingering effect where support in one phase depends on legitimacy both in the present and in previous phases. Hence, our study takes us one step further on the road to understand the complicated dynamic mechanisms behind the interactions between policymaking, policy support, and the legitimacy and approval of politicians and political processes.

Antipolitics and the Hindrance of Performance Management in Education

Performance management reforms are a popular way to try to create responsive and improving government. These types of reforms have become commonplace in education policy and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART) has been one of the leading venues for research on these topics. However, under-analyzed are the ways in which performance management policies represent antipolitical bent to education reform. We outline an argument that avoiding political decisionmaking in favor of reforms that create authoritative or purportedly neutral data risks undertaking policy change are not as meaningful as hoped. We select eight articles that represent research on performance management broadly and are thought provoking for a broader consideration of performance management in education policy.