Standing group activities

Dear Colleagues,

This is a call for panel and paper proposals for the Oslo meeting September 6-9, 2017. Our Standing Groups has been allotted just five panels, the same number as for the Prague meeting. (We requested eight.). Several of you have already submitted tentative proposals and we encourage you to firm them up and resubmit them well before the official deadline of February 15. We have also received a few paper proposals. Completed panel proposals will need a good descriptive abstract plus the titles and authors names (with authors commitments to present their papers in Oslo) for four or five papers. Panel and paper proposal guidelines and procedures can be found on the ECPR website. Your Standing Group membership via MyECPR will need to be up to date.

This call to submit paper and panel proposals is open to all members of the Standing Group. If we end up with more than five solid proposals, we will petition the ECPR Academic Convenors for an additional panel or two. There is no guarantee that such a petition will be successful but the Convenors are open to considering such proposals. (The numbers of panels is partially constrained by the available rooms at the meeting site.). In addition, the Oslo meeting will include an Open Section set of panels so if by chance your proposal does not make it into the Political Sociology Section we can try to get it included in the Open Section. The same is true for proposed papers.

Below you will find a description of the Standing Group overall theme for the Oslo meeting. This has been approved by ECPR and panel and paper proposals will need to intersect in meaningful ways with the section theme.

Finally a reminder to renew your Section membership via My ECPR if you have not already done so.

Any questions or concerns, just email us.

Happy New Year 2017

Chair. Niilo Kauppi, University of Jyväskylä, niilo.t.j.kauppi[at]jyu.fi
Co-chair: David Swartz, Boston University, dswartz[at]bu.edu

WELFARE STATES IN CRISIS:  CHALLENGES TO SOCIAL SOLIDARITY AND GOVERNANCE

In recent years the European welfare state has come under several challenges: economically, socially, politically, and culturally. The recent migrant crisis, for one, is challenging numerous countries in terms of social support services, security, cultural identity, and legal provision. Populist movements are challenging the dynamics of migrant integration and assimilation and the way political leadership is dealing with them. Are traditional ideals of solidarity being replaced by others? Assumptions of traditional welfare provision are also being challenged by the policies of neoliberalism. Do growing forms of economic inequality undermine the traditional safety nets afforded by state welfare policies? Forms of social solidarity have been a central concern of political sociology from its very inception. It is the social causes and consequences of these challenges that will be the focus of the panels for this section. It seems particularly fitting for political sociologists to examine those challenges at a conference in Oslo since the Nordic countries have often been viewed as model welfare states. Does the Nordic model or any other welfare state model seem capable of addressing the contemporary challenges? Other challenges target the public sphere and debate, educational reform, governance driven by rankings and technocratic indicators, social movements, law, and gender. Panels will be organized around types of challenges welfare democracies are facing, such as the welfare crises in Eastern and Balkan countries, transnational forms of solidarity in the EU, the new legitimation crisis of political leadership, the social bases of politicisation/depoliticisation, measuring institutional competitiveness and decline, revisiting the Nordic model, and the politics of flexible solidarity.

KEYWORDS: Democracy, European Union, Governance, Migration, Welfare State, Solidarity

We would like to make you aware of the Joint Session « Transnationalisation of Problems and Agendas: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges » supported by our standing group. It will be held in Nottingham (25th- 30th April 2017). The topic might be of interest for all members of our group and for other scholars studying the construction and circulation of social problems at national/international level or related issues such as transnational expertise and mobilizations.

Deadline : 1st December 2016.

The proposals should be uploaded on the ECPR website: https://ecpr.eu/Events/PanelList.aspx?EventID=104

Abstract

How and why some events and topics are transformed into issues focusing public debate, media-attention and policy initiatives? Two different scientific traditions have brought their contributions to these puzzles. Strongly established in political science, the “agenda/s” paradigm maps the changing rankings of political and social issues, questions their interactions. Rooted in sociology, the “social problems” approach pays particular attention to actors who frame their claims successfully. It examines why some stakes become faster “problems” and policy targets.

This workshop opens up a forum to question the legacies, blind spots and possible cross-fertilizations between those research perspectives. Such debate is scientifically wothwhile when processes of transnationalisation and Europeanisation are changing the dynamics of social problems. New opportunities (and threats) linked to environmental changes, migrations and de-territorialisation are redefining supra-national agendas. Claims are travelling across borders, fostered by coalitions of actors internationally organized.

As a growing flow of research questions the internationalisation of social problem framing and policy treatment, as the availability of big data opens up new opportunities for comparative research on agendas the need for bringing these two major paradigms into dialogue is stronger than ever. This aim implies theoretical and empirical contributions.

For both approaches, the recent trends, their relationships and mutual improvements might be highlighted. For example, social problem studies suggest combining quantitative approach of media agendas with more qualitative explorations of news production and sources’ strategies or adding specific agendas to the classical agenda’s trilogy.

Empirical studies should focus on growing internationalised issues, especially “public health” issues (including here struggle against epidemics, risk management, food safety, environmental threats). How do claims on the definition and urgency of diseases travel? Who are the local and transnational actors involved in agenda setting and mobilization processes? How do national cultures, institutional patterns and mediascapes impact the construction of health issues?