Auteur : Nicholas Pohl

The section Political Sociology – Contempory Challenges has been accepted for the ECPR General Conference at Hamburg Universität, August 22-25, 2018.

Section chairs: David Swartz (Boston University), Niilo Kauppi (University of Jyväskylä)

Abstract: At the dawn of the twenty-first century there were signs of a new political sociology emerging that would broaden the focus beyond classical concerns such as the social basis of political participation, voting and political parties, anti-democratic right-wing and left-wing extremism and bureaucratization, elite domination, and the modern state. Attention was shifting to historical change at a global scale (globalization). Culture (language, symbols, religion, the media) was coming to be seen as central to the exercise of power. New linkages among global, society-wide organizations and group levels were being thought about. The formation of social identity and new social movements became key concerns. And data and methodologies integrating structure with agency became the order of the day. Now is a good time to assess how those shifts in attention are working out in light of contemporary challenges such as migration, regional conflict, populism, citizenship, transnational organizations, and particularly those phenomena that challenge established institutions and state-centered analyses. This Section will invite Panel proposals that take up contemporary challenges to the new political sociology.

The Academic Convenors have provisionally allocated the Section 7 Panels. Panels (with 4-5 Papers) and individual Papers can be submitted as of now. The following links are available:

Click here to propose a Panel with Papers (login with your MyECPR account)

Click here to propose an individual Paper (login with your MyECPR account)

Please note, if you included Panels in your Section proposal, these will need to be submitted formally via MyECPR using the links provided above.

The deadline for Panel and Paper proposals is midnight UK time on 15 February 2018.  However, Niilo and I are asking that you submit everything by February 1 so that we can review all submissions and have time to adjust panels and papers and request an additional panel if the number of paper submissions warrant it.

Thanks,

David L. Swartz

ECPR General Conference, Hamburg, August 22-25, 2018

Section chairs: Romain Carnac (Universit of Lausanne), romain.carnac@unil.ch; Alexandre Lambelet (University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland) alexandre.lambelet@eesp.ch

Questions of public utility, and the role of private actors in promoting the public interest are intimately linked to changing conceptions of the role of the state in society. Over the past decades, neoliberal ideology and policies have questioned the scale of the welfare state; political, economic and financial crises have further eroded state capacity and social policies. And most European countries have experienced over the past decades a number of reforms questioning in different ways the role of the state, its domains of action, and the division of tasks between public and private actors.

Tax policies and fiscal tools are crucial in regard to this question (Reich 2010). Studying fiscal welfare (Morel, Touzet and Zemmour 2016) or the « Hidden Welfare State » (Howard 1993), and more specifically the political debates on the question of public utility recognition and on tax legislations related to the involvement of private fortunes or organizations in social policies, is a way to analyse the transformations of the welfare state (or welfare mix) in western countries. What kind of fiscal tools are promoted as a way to encourage third sector development or private investment in welfare policies? If there is a need of a « public utility recognition » by some authorities to enjoy a tax exemption, what are the conditions under which tax exempt status is granted and how have they evolved during the last decades? How are public authorities involved in these topics?

In order to start a dialogue between researchers from different disciplines working on a variety of national contexts, we are looking in particular for: 1) Theoretical and methodological contributions addressing the ways tax expenditures are applied in contemporary welfare states, their evolution over time or the comparison between different national contexts and different sectors of activity. 2) Empirical analyses of the ways the notion of « tax expenditures for public utilities » is applied in different sectors of activity. Contributions could in particular speak to one of the following three axes (but other aspects and panel contributions are possible too):

1) Fiscal policy debates and the welfare state: Since the 1990s, all European countries have embarked on a series of reforms to promote philanthropy. Using a political sociology perspective, with a special attention for the role of politics and ideas in shaping the reform process, this axis asks questions such as: What are the policy debates with regard to philanthropy and fiscal expenditures? Who intervenes in these debates? How does the conception of what public utility is evolve? What is the legitimacy of different fiscal tools? And what do these debates tell us on the welfare mix and his evolutions in different countries? What is the role of international contexts and debates (for instance, competition to welcome large non profit organizations).

2) Inquiring fiscal policy at the « street-level »: The Street-level bureaucracy perspective (Lipsky 2010) has shown the importance of lower-level administrators in public policy implementation, but has rarely been used in regard with fiscal policies. This axis addresses this level of analysis and questions the role of administrators in fiscal policy decision-making. What are the dilemmas the front-line workers in public services (for exemple: fiscal autorities employees) have to deal with? How do fiscal administrations’ employees enact public policy in their routine work? What are the systematic and practical dilemmas these employees must overcome? What are the methodological difficulties for studying tax policy at this level, and how to overcome research barriers?

3) Tax expenditures as public policy instruments: In a socio-economic perspective, we would like to analyse reform processes of the welfare states through the development of specific policy instruments, namely tax expenditures for public utility purposes, which remained a blind spot in much of the welfare state literature. What are the consequences of the use of this kind of techniques or policy instruments to attain social goals on the welfare state? How do these transformations in the fiscal system shape the welfare state?

Papers and/or panel proposals must be submitted through the MyECPR platform by February 15, 2018.

https://ecpr.eu/Events/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=115

Click here to download the pdf of this call for papers.

Lipsky M. (2010). Dilemmas of the individual in public services. In: Lipsky M, editor. Street-level bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation; 2010.

Reich, R. (2010). Toward a political theory of philanthropy. Giving well: The ethics of philanthropy, 177–95.

Morel N., Touzet C., Zemmour M., 2016. Fiscal Welfare and Welfare State Reform: A Research Agenda. LIEPP Working Paper, 45.

Howard, Christopher (1993). « The Hidden Side of the American Welfare State », Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 108, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 403-436

Conference organized by COSMOS/SNS, ECPR/SG P&M, ESA/RN25

At Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy

23-25 of May 2018

2018 will mark the anniversary of the 1968 social movements mobilization: from Frenc May, over Anti-Vietnam War protests or the Tlatelolco massacre, to Prague Spring. The 1968 protest cycle considerably shaped social movements, political parties, universities, states, and societies as well as the social movement scholarship. Taking the 1968 anniversary as a stimulating moment for reflection, this conference seeks to provide space for looking at the implications of that period on social movement research as well as addressing a number of key questions in current social movement research. For instance: How have the theoretical and methodological approaches in the social movements field evolved in the aftermath of 1968? How did issues of protest change: which have emerged, disappeared of taken new forms? What is the impact of protest? When do movements bring social change? How do social movements select their strategies? How do they interact with other actors like parties, interest groups or NGO’s? Where do protestors end up in the aftermath of mobilization? What is the role of memory in social movements mobilization? What is the impact of individualisation on contentious politics? What is the role of media coverage and new communication technologies?

We invite submissions from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives and using a variety of methodologies. The midterm conference aims to bring together distinguished scholars and younger researchers not only from sociology and political science, but also from related disciplines, including economics, geography, anthropology, psychology, history, international relations, and area studies.

To submit an abstract, please email an abstract of no more than 250 words to fiftyyearsafter68@gmail.com.

The deadline for all abstract submissions is the 8th of January 2018.

Applicants will be informed of the outcome by email no later than the 29th of January, 2018. Those offered places must confirm their participation within 10 days, after which places maybe offered to applicants on the reserve list. Participants to the Conference are required to write and submit a max. 7000-8000-word paper no later than 1st of May 2018, papers should be sent to fiftyyearsafter68@gmail.com. Oral presentations should not last more than 10 minutes. Discussants are given 5 minutes per paper.

The conference will open with a mentoring session for young scholars. Young scholars (doctoral and postdoctoral level) will be invited to submit research proposals of up to five pages upon which they would wish to receive feedback. To apply for the mentoring session, send an abstract (250 words including “mentoring session” in the title) to fiftyyearsafter68@gmail.com no later than 8th January 2018. Research proposals should be then sent to fiftyyearsafter68@gmail.com, no later than 1st of May 2018. They will be coupled with two senior scholars who are specialized in the proposal’s subject, and who will read the proposal. The young scholar will get 30 minutes with each senior scholar to receive feedback and to get to know their more senior colleagues.

The conference will feature keynote speeches from:

-Professor Donatella Della Porta, COSMOS, Scuola Normale Superiore

-Professor Olivier Fiellieule, University of Lausanne

-Professor Marco Giugni, University of Geneva

-Professor Béla Greskovits, Central European University

-Professor James Jasper, City University of New York

-Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute

-Professor Michele Micheletti, Stockholm University

-Professor Eva Anduiza, Autonomous University of Barcelona

A roundtable will be organized discussing a book:

– Roggeband, Conny and Klandermans, Bert, eds. 2017. Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Springer.

The Conference has no fees and will provide a dinner.

With best regards,

Lorenzo Bosi (SNS, COSMOS), Joost de Moor (Keele University) and Kate?ina Vráblíková (OSU)