1,721,207 research outputs found
Power, Luck and Freedom
The book collects thirteen previously published essays by Keith Dowding on social and political power, freedom, choice and luck. It is anchored by a substantial introductory essay that pulls together the different strands to demonstrate the coherence and connections between the different concepts discussed through the book. The book demonstrates the importance of the concept of power to political science and argues that comparative static definitions enable comparison of power structures in terms of agents’ resources. It shows the importance of systematic luck in understanding the power structure. However, static definitions are inherently unsatisfactory in dynamic settings. Here we need to apply game theory rather than game forms, and in dynamic settings luck is vital to our perception of freedom, responsibility and leadership.
Later chapters reveal the problematic evaluation of choice and freedom and how these relate to responsibility. The book concludes by demonstrating that freedom and rights exist in different senses, which matter for our understanding of how much freedom exists in a society. It shows that Sen’s liberal paradox is ambiguous between rights as claims and rights as liberties; how fundamental his paradox is to our understanding of the conflict between rights and welfare depends on the manner in which we evaluate freedom.</p
Comparative policy agendas: a review essay Policy agendas in Australia, by Keith Dowding and Aaron Martin, Basel, Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland, 2017, 263 pp., EUeuro83.29, ISBN: 978-3-31940-805-7 (eBook)
Comparative policy agendas: a review essay Policy agendas in Australia, by Keith Dowding and Aaron Martin, Basel, Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland, 2017, 263 pp., EUeuro83.29, ISBN: 978-3-31940-805-7 (eBook
Portfolio saliency and ministerial turnover: Dynamics in Scandinavian postwar cabinets
© 2013 The Author(s) Scandinavian Political Studies © 2013 Nordic Political Science Association. This is the accepted version of the following article: Hansen, M. E., Klemmensen, R., Hobolt, S. B. and Bäck, H. (2013), Portfolio Saliency and Ministerial Turnover: Dynamics in Scandinavian Postwar Cabinets. Scandinavian Political Studies, 36: 227–248, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9477.12004/abstract.Why do certain ministers remain in their post for years while others have their time in office cut short? Drawing on the broader literature on portfolio allocation, this article argues that the saliency of individual portfolios shapes ministerial turnover. The main argument is that ministerial dismissals are less likely to occur the higher the saliency attributed to the ministerial portfolio since ministers appointed to important posts are more likely to have been through extensive screening before appointment. Importantly, it is also posited in the article that the effect of portfolio salience is conditioned by government approval ratings: when government ratings are on the decline, prime ministers are less likely to reshuffle or fire important ministers than when approval ratings are improving. To test these claims, Cox proportional hazards models are applied to a new dataset on ministerial turnover in Scandinavia during the postwar period. The results strongly support the proposition that portfolio saliency matters for ministerial survival, and that this effect is moderated by government popularity
It’s the government, stupid : how governments blame citizens for their own policies
Book review of It’s the Government, Stupid: How Governments Blame Citizens for Their Own Policies by Keith Dowding, Bristol University Press, Bristol, 2020, ISBN 9781529206395
Should philosophy be a part of political science? Response to Dowding and Oprea
In this response, I reply to papers by Keith Dowding and Alexandra Oprea in a symposium on the topic of whether philosophy should be a part of political science
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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