Since 2012, China has experienced an official revival of Maoist culture and politics, as part of a generalized invigoration of ideology under Xi Jinping. Despite the huge human cost of Mao’s rule, on 1 October 2019 (the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China) the Chinese Communist Party celebrated Mao as august builder of the party and nation. This ideological, authoritarian retrenchment, alongside the PRC’s newly assertive foreign policy, has alarmed Western governments.

The literature on organizational performance and self-regulating feedback loops tends to focus on reform under-reactions. Why, despite multiple negative stimuli, do organizations fail to adapt sufficiently to reduce the gap between aspirations and achievements? Explaining the reverse situation, in which disproportionately large remedial action is undertaken in response to only slight organizational errors, usually involves entirely different ways of theorizing organization-environment relations, such as neo-institutionalist accounts of legitimacy-seeking managers.

Discussants: Alida Haworth and Giuseppe Spatafora

Moral rhetoric in party messages can be seen as parties' attempts to represent voters' moral values. It is unclear, however, how voters feel about such messages of moral representation. Do voters want parties to use moral rhetoric? Based on insights about the link between morality and politics, I argue that moral rhetoric is preferred by a broad set of voters, including copartisans and non-copartisans. I posit that moral rhetoric is appealing to not only supporters of the party, but also non-supporters who hold high moral convictions about politics.

Discussant: Andrés M. Guiot-Isaac

Discussant: Hayley Pring

To what extent can minor states constrain great powers? Do institutional practices shape state behavior? This study presents the argument that great powers engage in informal power- sharing in international organizations to attain unanimity, which enhances the signaling e ect of these institutions. The pursuit of unanimity lends weight to additional votes beyond those needed for decision-making under the formal rules. In turn, informal power-sharing to attain unanimity enables minor powers to exert more influence than they could if only material power and formal rules were decisive.

The series

For Trinity Term we are focussing on research methods. The aim of these sessions is really to excite an interdisciplinary audience of graduates to understand how different methods are being used creatively across the social sciences. The panel discussions will be held during the first four weeks of term and will focus on 'interviews' in week 1, 'numbers' (quant methods) in week 2, 'archives' in week 3, and 'ethnogrpahy' in week 4.

Panellists:

[Joint work with Tugba Bozcaga, Harvard University)

Does land inequality undermine democratization and development? The dominant consensus is that land inequality provides incentives for landed elites to block democratization and undermines the provision of public goods. Two key assumptions underlie these theoretical accounts: that landowners identify uniquely with land-related activities and that asset mobility is exogenous. In this paper, I propose an alternative explanation on how land inequality affects landed elites' calculations on both democracy and the provision of public goods that breaks with these assumptions.