In conformity with decisions made at the SG business meeting in Hamburg August 2018, the steering committee of political sociology for the next three years (2018-2020) will be composed of a chair (Laura Landorff), co-chair (Oscar Mazzoleni), secretary (Carlo Ruzza) and treasurer (Tatjana Sekulic). In addition, during these three years an advisory committee will help the steering committee in its activities, composed of Cecilia Biancalana, Charlotte Galpin, Alon Helled, Niilo Kauppi, David Swartz, and Hans-Jörg Trenz.
Auteur : Nicholas Pohl
New Generation of Leadership of the Standing Group
8/31/18
Dear Members of the Political Sociology Standing Group,
To borrow from JFK’s famed inaugural address, Niilo and I are passing the torch on to a new generation of leadership of our SG; Laura Landorff will be Chair and Oscar Mazzoleni will be Co-Chair. This was decided In unanimity at the SG business meeting in Hamburg. Niilo and I congratulate Laura and Oscar on their new responsibilities and look forward to what we believe will be very strong leadership for the SG. Niilo and I will join the SG steering committee. We also welcome Tatjana Sekulic as our new Treasurer and Carlo Ruzza will continue as Secretary.
Laura and Oscar will be in touch with you soon for thematic and panel suggestions for the General Conference next year in Wroclaw, Poland.
David and Niilo.
Standing Group in Political Sociology Meeting in Hamburg: August 24th, 16:00-17:00
The Standing Group in Political Sociology will hold its meeting at the General conference in Hamburg on the 24th of August from 16 to 17 in room 208, building VMP 9.
CFP: Workshop « Community in Crisis? Political Identification in Europe »
12-13 October 2018 – Friedrichshafen, Germany
Once regarded as the bastion of peace, unity and progress, the European Union project may be in crisis. Populist and anti-European tendencies disrupt decision-making procedures and expressions of doubts regarding both the feasibility and legitimacy of the EU disturb its roadmaps and rationales. At the same time, however, this putative crisis may provoke a pertinent re-examination and reshaping of European institutions and practices. In this context, political identification is, more than ever, a crucial area of research. This workshop is intended to facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation on identification in Europe and aims to balance empirical with theoretical contributions. Held over two days on the shores of Lake Constance, the workshop will involve three panels. More details can be found here:
www.zu.de/forschung-themen/forschungszentren/zpk/workshop-political-identification.php
Doctoral Fellowships within the ERC Project “Labour Politics & the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime” at University College Dublin
Application deadline: 10 April 2018
Start date: 10 September 2018
The European Research Council (ERC) project Labour Politics & the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime at the Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin, invites applications for up to three doctoral fellowships. The PhD fellows will be supervised by Roland Erne (principle investigator and professor of European integration & employment relations) and Sabina Stan (senior social scientist and lecturer in sociology & anthropology). Successful candidates will be part of an interdisciplinary, multinational team and must enrol in the joint doctoral programme of the Graduate Schools of Business, Social Sciences and Law.
We welcome original and independent PhD project proposals. However, proposals should fit within the scope of the ERC project Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance Regime (www.erc-europeanunions.eu/about-the-project/). The proposal can be situated in labour studies, sociology, social anthropology, political economy, or comparative politics and may include:
- Contentious politics; social movements; trade unionism; transnational collective action; interest group politics; EU politics; political and social consequences of economic crisis; social justice; Euroscepticism, class politics, technocracy and democracy;
- Interactions between national and EU public policy (e.g. Germany, Italy, Romania and/or Ireland); access to public services (e.g. right to water, healthcare or transport); labour relations, labour law and social policy (e.g. wages, pensions, labour regulations).
Eligibility: Candidates must hold a master’s degree (or equivalent) in the social sciences and have received training in sociology, political sciences, social anthropology, industrial relations, or related disciplines. They should have experience with qualitative research and a good general knowledge of labour politics. A firm command of English is required. Working knowledge of one or two additional European languages is a strong advantage.
Fellowship conditions: Tax-free scholarship (€18,000 p.a. plus €6,170 p.a. fee remission grant); 4-year contract; access to structured PhD programme including language modules; laptop; conference and fieldwork expenses. Start date: 10/09/2018.
Application procedure
Required documents: a CV; a transcript of records from each university attended; a cover letter briefly describing your intellectual trajectory so far and discussing the topics that interest you (2 pages maximum); a PhD thesis project proposal (2,000 words maximum including abstract); and a writing sample such as an article, master thesis chapter, or term paper.
Please send the application compiled into a single PDF file to Bianca.Foehrer@ucd.ie by 10 April 2018 (with “PhD” in the subject line). Shortlisted candidates will be asked to nominate two academic referees and invited to an online interview. Final decisions will be made by the end of April 2018.
Informal inquiries can be sent to Roland.Erne@ucd.ie.
Call for Associate Editors, Political Research Exchange (PRX)
Call for Associate Editors, Political Research Exchange (PRX)
The ECPR will launch its new open access journal, Political Research Exchange (PRX) in January 2019 and is seeking a team of Associate Editors to work alongside the founding Editors in Chief, Alexandra Segerberg (University of Stockholm) and Simona Guerra (University of Leicester).
PRX will be published in partnership with Taylor & Francis and will aim to cover the full spectrum of political science and international relations, harnessing latest technology to provide fast publication, flexibility in article length and format coupled with the reach and access to all OA brings. PRX will be fully integrated into the structure of the ECPR through its Standing Groups and will be a key new membership benefit, providing significantly reduced article processing charges (APCs) for authors.
The Associate Editors, drawn from the ECPR’s Standing Groups, will provide a broad scope of subject expertise and will work with the Editors in Chief to shape the content and direction of the journal. A full job specification and application requirements can be found on the ECPR’s website, along with the aims and scope of the journal.
Interested candidates should submit an application to ECPR Communications Manager, Rebecca Gethen (rgethen@ecpr.eu) by the closing date of 5 March. Any queries about the role can also be directed to Rebecca in the first instance. After the closing date, the Editors in Chief, along with the ECPR’s Publications Subcommittee, will select a group of around 20 Associate Editors to take into the breadth of subject areas and methodologies reflected by the range of Standing Groups; Associate Editors will therefore work beyond their Standing Groups.
ECPR Joint Sessions at Université catholique de Louvain in Mons, April 2019
Dear Colleagues,
If any of you are planning to submit proposals for the 2019 Joint Sessions at Université catholique de Louvain in Mons, Belgium April 23-27 2019, this is a reminder that the deadline is February 1. You can submit proposals directly online at the ECPR web site (https://ecpr.eu/Events/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=121). If you are interested in getting Standing Group support, please submit your proposal to Niilo (niilo.t.j.kauppi[at]jyu.fi) and me (dswartz[at]bu.edu) by January 26 so that we and the SG Advisory Board will have a chance to review it before making a decision.
Trust 2018 is off to a good start for you.
David
Call for panel and paper proposals: Political Sociology – Contemporary Challenges (ECPR General Conference 2018)
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
Call for papers: Public Utility, Tax Expenditures and the Welfare State (ECPR General Conference 2018)
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
Call for papers: « 1968-2018, fifty years after: where is the social movements field going? »
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)