When the Arab Spring of 2011 sparked a second revolution in Egypt (the first having occurred in 1952), it caught the longstanding Muslim Brotherhood almost by surprise. Arguably the oldest Sunni political mass movement in Egypt (having been established in 1928), it had proven remarkably resilient during more than eight decades of alternating repression and toleration by subsequent governments. Though its social composition changed over the years, its principles, as laid down by its founder Hasan al-Banna, continued to inspire large segments of the population in a quest for a state based on Shariʿa, and provided an alternative vision for a more just and moral society. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood built a wide network of social, educational, and welfare institutions.
From the early 1980s onwards, with Mubarak in power, the Brotherhood was condoned, if not officially recognized, and members were allowed to participate in several parliamentary and other elections. As an organization with formal traditional leadership bodies, but also a younger generation versed in the modern social media, the Brotherhood was seen to be slowly nearing a point where it would be able to make the transition to a party. It began to formulate a political platform and an economic blueprint for the country. A modicum of democracy was adopted, and more openness towards the integration of women was seen. After winning a relatively large (minority) representation in the 2005 parliamentary elections, the regime was scared enough to allow the Brotherhood to win only one token seat in 2010.
The revolution of 2011 ousted Mubarak and then led to relatively free elections with a solid victory for the Freedom and Justice Party, which had been formed by the Brotherhood, as well as a new Islamist-inspired constitution and the election of Muhammad Mursi as president. However, within a year the Muslim Brotherhood government had missed this historical window of opportunity. It proved inadequately prepared for efficient and orderly governance, did not bring order and stability, nor did it advance the aspirational goals of demonstrators. This is how the army, not for the first time in Egypt’s history, came to intervene and depose Morsi in July 2013, replacing him with Defense Minister ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi. It was not long before the Brotherhood was once more suppressed and outlawed. With many leaders in jail, but latent support continuing, observers tend to believe it is not the end of the Brotherhood’s existence.
Article
Religious Frames: Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood
Meir Hatina and Uri M. Kupferschmidt
Article
Religious Nationalism and Religious Influence
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Religious nationalism, or the fusion of religious and national identities and goals, is an increasingly salient aspect of nationalism. Rather than secular nationalism simply replacing religious identities and allegiances, religious and national identities coexist and even reinforce each other. Such religious nationalism becomes a powerful force in buttressing popular religiosity and attitudes, empowers religious organizations in influencing policy across a wide range of domains, and shapes the patterns of inter- and intra-state violence. The two implications of these findings are that we should invest in better measures and operationalization of religious nationalism and reconsider the logics of state- and nation-building.
Article
Religious Regulation in Brazil
Claudia Cerqueira and Guadalupe Tuñón
During the past three decades, the tide in religious affiliation has rapidly shifted in Latin America. The predominance of Catholicism in the region has been challenged by the expansion of Evangelicalism and the number of individuals with no religious affiliation. Changes in Brazil’s religious landscape are explained in part by the opportunities and restrictions that government regulations place on religious organizations. Regulation shapes religious competition by changing the incentives and opportunities for religious producers (churches, preachers, revivalists, etc.) and the viable options available to religious consumers (church members). Importantly, as our description of Brazilian regulations shows, the incentives defined by regulation affect religious denominations differently, creating winners and losers. Moreover, established religious groups are often able to reshape religious regulation, reinforcing the degree to which it favors them.
Article
Religious Regulation: The Regulation of All Religion in a Country
Jonathan Fox
Countries can regulate both the majority religion and minority religions. Although most countries do both, the motivations and dynamics of these two types of regulation are distinct. The regulation, restriction, or control by a government of all religion in a country, including the majority religion, can take multiple forms. These include regulating (1) religion’s role in politics, (2) religious institutions and clergy, (3) religious practices, and (4) other aspects of religion. At least one form of religious regulation is engaged in by 95.5% of governments, and religious regulation is becoming more common over time. Regulating, restricting, and controlling religion is the norm worldwide regardless of world region, government type, and majority religion.
Multiple motivations exist for regulating, restricting, and controlling majority religions. (1) Some countries have secular or anti-religious national ideologies. (2) Some countries support religion, but countries that support a religion often also want to influence and control that religion. In fact, control is a nearly inevitable consequence of support. (3) Politicians often fear religion’s potential political power and seek to keep it in check. (4) Autocratic governments often seek to restrict any aspect of civil culture they cannot control, and this includes religion. On the other hand, regulation is costly. It requires resources that can be used elsewhere, so regulating religion represents a decision to use resources despite these costs.
Article
The Republic of the Congo: The Colonial Origins of Military Rule
Joshua Shaw and Brett Carter
The Republic of Congo secured its independence from France in 1960. The French colonial apparatus bequeathed an ethnically divided society. Native southerners dominated the sprawling civil service and, owing to their demographic advantage, elected Congo’s first two presidents, themselves both southerners. Native northerners, otherwise marginalized economically and politically, dominated the military’s rank and file. This cleavage has animated Congolese politics since. In 1969, a clique of northern military officers toppled the southern-dominated Brazzaville government. Among its members was former paratrooper Denis Sassou Nguesso, who has ruled Congo for all but 5 years since 1979. His tenure has been marked by massive corruption, gross economic mismanagement, and persistent human rights abuses. Accordingly, despite its status as one of Africa’s leading oil producers, Congolese citizens remain among the world’s poorest. To secure his political survival, Sassou Nguesso has used Congo’s longstanding ethnic cleavage as a tool: by directing state resources to northerners and using the northern-dominated military to repress southerners, who, after enduring nearly 50 years of northern rule, are profoundly frustrated.
Article
Revolutions and Constitutional Crisis
Johannes Vüllers
Revolutionary actions and constitutional crises are closely linked. However, research mainly looks at the two phenomena as distinct from each other. While studies on revolutionary actions are interested in the agency and the impact of the actions on the country’s institutions, legal research focuses on the constitution itself. The separation of the two strands leads to a limited understanding of their dynamics and complexity. What do we know about the relationship between revolutionary actions and constitutional crisis, and vice versa? The first question is how revolutionary actions trigger constitutional crisis, defined as a moment in which decision makers are unwilling or unable to manage the societal conflicts within the confinement of the constitutionally provided boundaries. Different types of revolutionary behavior—such as elite-led military coups, civil wars, and nonviolent resistance movements—trigger constitutional crises in many cases. They can lead to a new constitution with diverse implications for the political system. Whether the opposition or the old regime prevails in the constitutional crisis is a question of the power resources of both parties to the conflict. In some cases, the opposition movements succeed in making the political system more democratic. However, there are also cases where the constitutional crisis ultimately leads to more power for the ruling class.
The relationship also works vice versa: a constitutional crisis can trigger revolutionary actions. Constitutional coups, and processes of democratic backsliding and constitutional rot, can trigger violent and nonviolent revolutionary actions. Political elites can try to change constitutional norms for their own benefit, such as extending the presidential term of office. This often leads to a storm of public protest and can become a real threat to the regime’s survival. A constitution can enter a crisis phase for a long time if it no longer serves the needs of parts of society. The injustices that thus arise within society can be a strong motive for revolutions. The combination of agency and constitutional processes is a promising avenue for future research that could help analyze the complex relationship between constitutional crises and revolutionary actions. In addition to innovative theoretical approaches, new empirical data is needed to examine the process of constitutional negotiation in more detail.
Article
The Rise of the African Legislature?
Ken Opalo
What explains contemporary variation in legislative strength and institutionalization in Africa? Contrary to the widespread belief that African legislatures are uniformly weak, there is significant variation in both the institutional forms and powers of these institutions. Colonial institutional development and the nature of postcolonial single-party autocratic rule partially explain the variation in legislative strength and institutionalization in Africa. Legislative development (or lack thereof) under colonialism bequeathed postcolonial states with both institutional memory and intra-elite conceptions of executive–legislative relations (how legislatures work). The nature of postcolonial autocratic rule determined the upper bounds of legislative development. Relatively secure presidents tolerated legislative organizational development. Their weaker counterparts did not. These differences became apparent following the end of single-party rule in much of Africa the early 1990s. Legislatures in the former group exploited their newfound freedom to rebalance executive–legislative relations. Those in the latter group remained weak and subservient to presidents. In short, strong autocratic legislatures begat strong democratic legislatures.
Article
Romania and the European Union
Natalia Cuglesan
The accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union (EU) is portrayed as one of the most challenging enlargement waves in the history of the EU Integration Process. A member of the EU since 2007, Romania had to overcome significant obstacles to qualify for EU membership. Not fully prepared for EU accession, Romania required post-accession monitoring through the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism in order to stimulate compliance in the fields of corruption, the judiciary, and the rule of law.
The problems of the unfinished transition have impacted on its positive post-accession evolution in the first 10 years of EU membership. It has accomplished limited results in the field of democratic consolidation, combating high-level political corruption and experiencing episodes of democratic backsliding. Also, in this period, it has failed to materialize strategic opportunities; it proved unsuccessful in its efforts to join Schengen or in adopting the currency. Playing a more substantial role in EU policymaking proved to be another shortcoming of the Romanian political elite, stressing the incremental pace of Europeanization.
Still, despite this pessimistic account, in many respects, Romania has not fallen behind. It had a general compliant behavior with EU legislation, in line with other EU member states; support for the EU has remained high throughout the decade, an indication of the benefits it has brought to broad categories of people. It is not surprising, as more than 3 million people work in an EU member state. Economic growth was another positive side of the first 10 years—despite the adverse effects of the economic crisis—with a substantial GDP growth rate. And not to be dismissed , a great benefit was the consolidation of civil society.
Article
Romania: Civil-Military Relations in the Modern Age
Marian Zulean
Romania has no tradition in militarism despite its history of authoritarian regimes in 20th century. The process of modernization and democratization that started in the middle of 19th century was interrupted for about half a century by the authoritarian regime of King Carol II (1938), followed by a military dictatorship during World War II, and continued with a Communist dictatorship until 1989.
The transition to democracy started in 1990 from a very low level, Ceausescu’s regime being one of the fiercest dictatorial regimes. However, Romania succeeded in building up a functional democracy and market economy with Western assistance that transformed it into a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). One basic conditionality to the admission into NATO and the EU was putting the military under civilian control and building up democratic civil–military relations. Thus, Romania has no history of military involvement in politics. After three decades of transition, Romania implemented a complex mechanism of democratic control of the military. However, issues regarding the incomplete internalization of democratic norms of control of the military, resistance to change through the system of military education, an obsolete national security legislation, and some legacy practices related to rights abuses perpetrated by intelligence services need to be addressed in order to consider Romania a consolidated democracy.
Article
Russia and the European Union
Tom Casier
Relations between the European Union (EU) and Russia have gone through a dramatic journey from close partnership to confrontation. The narratives of the crisis that erupted over Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 are diametrically opposed. The root causes of the crisis are primarily related to colliding visions of the European order that have existed ever since the end of the Cold War. Yet, to understand why the escalation happened at that time, one also needs to understand the dynamics of a process of increasing tensions and dwindling trust. The Ukraine crisis was thus both the outcome of an escalation of tensions and a radical rupture.
In the run-up to the Ukraine crisis (2003–2013), EU–Russia relations were characterized by a Strategic Partnership. The latter was launched in 2003, closing a decade of asymmetrical EU-centric cooperation and redressing the balance in a formally equal partnership, based on pragmatic cooperation and a recognition of mutual interests. Despite high aspirations, the Strategic Partnership gradually derailed into a logic of competition. Tensions eventually crystallized around colliding integration projects: the Eastern Partnership (aiming at Association Agreements) on the EU’s side and the Eurasian Economic Union on Russia’s side. The crisis erupted specifically as the result of the choice Ukraine had to make between the two options. This choice radicalized the negative geopolitical reading that Moscow and Brussels had gradually developed of each other’s behavior.
Since the start of the Ukraine crisis (2014), EU–Russia relations have been characterized by a harsh confrontation in the field of high politics. The Strategic Partnership was suspended and the EU imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine. Moscow retaliated and relations became highly acrimonious. Security-related issues dominate the agenda: Russia accuses the West of neo-containment, while Moscow is blamed for undermining the pan-European border regime and security order.
The stalemate between Russia and the EU (and by extension the Euro-Atlantic Community) is ambivalent. On the one hand, it has taken the form of a systemic crisis, where both parties risk running from incident to incident in the absence of effective pan-European instruments that may constrain or reverse the conflict. On the other hand, in the field of low politics, in particular trade and energy, business often seems to continue as usual.
Article
Rwanda: Civil–Military Relations
Marco Jowell
The army has been a central part of Rwanda’s political system from the precolonial period until the early 21st century and is intrinsically part of the construction and politics of the state. Civil–military relations in Rwanda demonstrate not only the central features of transitioning a rebel group to a national defense sector but also how some states construct their armed forces after a period of mass violence. Since the civil war and genocide in the early 1990s, the Rwandan military has been the primary actor in politics, the economy, and state building as well as in regional wars in central Africa and the Great Lakes region. Practical experiences of guerrilla insurgency and conflict in Uganda and Rwanda, postconflict military integration, and the intertwining of political and economic agendas with the ruling party have shaped civil–military relations in Rwanda and have been central to how the Rwandan defense sector functions. Contemporary Rwandan civil–military relations center around the two elements of service delivery and control, which has resulted in the development of an effective and technocratic military in terms of remit and responsibilities on the one hand, and the creation of a politicized force of coercion on the other hand. The military in Rwanda therefore reflects the pressures and dynamics of the wider state and cannot be separated from it. The Rwandan army is thus a “political army” and is part and parcel of the political structures that oversee and govern the Rwandan state.
Article
The Sahel: Regional Politics and Dynamics
Sebastian Elischer
Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Chad are some of least researched countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Since independence from France in 1960 these four countries have experienced two distinct yet interrelated struggles: the struggle for statehood and the struggle for democracy. Each country has experienced violent conflict between the central authorities in the capitals and security challengers on the peripheries. Prominent examples are the Tuareg uprisings in Niger and Mali, the various rebel insurgencies in Chad, and the conflict between black Africans and Arabs in Mauritania. The emergence of jihadi-Salafi groups in the West African sub-region affects all four countries and poses a particularly strong security challenge to Mali. All these conflicts are unresolved. The liberalization of the political sphere in the late 1980s and early 1990s has led to considerable political diversity across the Sahel. In Niger and Mali meaningful multiparty competition and basic civil liberties have taken root despite many setbacks. Civil society is strong and in the past has successfully mobilized against autocratic tendencies. In Mauritania and Chad, democratic institutions exist on paper as autocratic rulers have managed to stay in office. The national armed forces remain the preeminent political actors. Civil society is not strong enough to achieve political change for the better. Stagnant living conditions, social immobility, the ongoing war against Islamic terrorism, and weak accountability mechanisms remain the most important political challenges for the Sahel.
Article
Saudi Arabia: The Role of the Military in Politics
Ayman Al-Yassini
More than any other time in Saudi Arabia’s history, Saudi nationalism and the role of the military in society are becoming a major source of regime legitimacy. Military expenditure is exceeding allocations to other ministries, and Saudi Arabia surpassed its past spending on the military to become one of the world’s main importers of arms, particularly from the United States.
The process of increased militarization corresponded with the concentration of power in the hands of Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Muhammad Ibn Salman. It ushered in a period of drastic restructuring of military and security agencies to consolidate his rule. On the regional level, Saudi Arabia increasingly projects itself as the leader of the Arab world, including the Gulf region, in fighting terrorism and in direct challenge to Iran’s positioning to assume regional dominance. However, the surge in spending on equipment and training has never translated into an effective fighting force that would enable the kingdom to protect itself internally or engage in military ventures abroad. Consequently, and in the process of consolidating his power, Ibn Salman initiated a number of changes. He secured the support of the younger generation of royals but sidelined the more senior members of the royal family. He pacified the religious establishment and restructured the military leadership. He became deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs, Chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs, and Minister of Defense. Ibn Salman’s role as Minister of Defense enabled him to assert full control over the military and national security agencies. Throughout this process, Wahabbism, tribalism, economic rewards, and the steady flow of advanced armaments ensured the military’s continued allegiance to al-Saud and Ibn Salman’s vision for Saudi Arabia.
Ibn Salman introduced a top-down plan (Vision 2030) intended to create employment, to diversify the economy, and to reshape the social and cultural life of the kingdom. The kingdom adopted a more aggressive foreign policy, and the military became an important instrument of this policy. In departure from long-standing practices, the kingdom deployed air and ground forces outside its borders. It joined the U.S.-led air raids against the Islamic State (ISIS), and air and ground forces have been deployed in the campaign in Yemen. It also resorted to traditional means of influencing regional politics through financing local allies and the promotion of the kingdom as the guardian of Sunni Islam.
The rentier base of the Saudi economy enabled the kingdom to spend billions of dollars to purchase an impressive array of military hardware from the United States, Britain, France, and other countries, making Saudi Arabia among the top nations in the world in terms of spending for the military. However, the military’s performance on the battlefield, such as in the Yemen war, have shown that heavy spending is not translated into an effective fighting force that would protect the kingdom internally or externally. Restructuring the military organization did not produce a modern fighting force. Tribalism, lack of transparency, and discrepancy between ambition and reality continue to prevail. It remains to be seen if Ibn Salman’s national modernization process, including a push to build a domestic armament industry and to reform the military establishment as a whole, will succeed. The challenge for Saudi Arabia today is how to balance its development initiatives with maintaining the traditional bases of regime legitimacy.
Article
The Schuman Plan and the Start of Supranational European Integration
Piers Ludlow
France turned to European integration out of an awareness of the weakness of its international position in 1950. In particular it was conscious of the way in which it had been marginalized in the debate about the treatment of postwar Germany, forced to watch as a much stronger Federal Republic re-emerged than the French were comfortable with. But it was this defeat that spurred the radicalism of the Schuman Plan—the bold announcement by the French foreign minister in May 1950 that his country was willing jointly to operate its coal and steel sectors with Germany and whichever other European states felt able to join. The idea of building a strong European structure to control both French and German heavy industry was not an idealistic move, but something that would help avoid the likely triumph of German industry and the damage it could do to French recovery. In the process it would save the Monnet Plan, the economic blueprint for French postwar reconstruction put together by the author of the Schuman Plan, Jean Monnet. But it also would advance the wider goal of establishing a European framework within which Germany’s re-emergence could be controlled. That same framework, furthermore, appealed to Adenauer’s Germany as one that would both facilitate the new state’s international rehabilitation and bind the country securely to the Western bloc. To this central Franco-German bargain four other European countries would rally, partly out of enthusiasm for the wider goal of European unity, partly through fear of exclusion from a Europe built exclusively by their two largest neighbors. But crucially for future developments the United Kingdom would choose to abstain principally because it was too content with the European status quo of 1950 to need to embark on institutional experiments. This constituted a choice, the repercussions of which have endured into the early 21st century. The Schuman Plan thus constitutes a vital formative episode in the European integration process: it inaugurated a key French tactic and German response, it determined the cast list of the early integration story, and it introduced an institutional structure and modus operandi that, significantly modified, still lie at the heart of the 21st-century European Union.
Article
Secularism and Religion
Steven Kettell
The boundary between the religious and the secular spheres of life is contested in many parts of the world. From the latter decades of the 20th century, controversies over issues such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, assisted dying, and freedom of speech, as well as clashes around reproductive rights and equality issues, have all featured highly on national political agendas. Set against a backdrop of the “return of religion” to public life, these debates and tensions have given rise to the notion that secularism might be in a state of crisis or moving toward some form of post-secular condition. The term “secularism” is itself also contested. The precise nature of the “secular” and the “religious” spheres of life is subject to interpretation, and secularism in practice can be manifest in a number of ways. This ranges from exclusivist forms of secularism in countries such as the United States and France to inclusive secularism in the case of India. Supporters of a role for religion in public life maintain that religion provides a range of valuable public goods and gives individuals a sense of meaning and identity. Secularists, on the other hand, claim that the separation of church and state provides the best framework for upholding the rights and freedoms of all citizens regardless of their religion or belief.
Article
Serbia’s Civil-Military Relations
Filip Ejdus
When, how, why, and to what effect did the military involve itself in Serbia’s politics? Due to its decisive role in national liberation and state-building, the Serbian military has always enjoyed high societal reputation. Since the 19th century, the military also played an important role of a nation-builder and social elevator for the lower strata of society. However, Serbia also has a very long tradition of military involvement in politics with several coups that decisively shaped the course of national history. Since the outset of Serbia’s state-building in the first half of the 19th century, Serbia experienced four successful military coups and many occasions when its armed forces were used to quash domestic unrest. The reasons behind the robust involvement of armed forces in Serbian (and Yugoslav politics) have been diverse and ranged from an ambition to provide internal stability and defend national or corporate interests to a desire to change the country’s foreign policy orientation. Since the end of the Cold War, the military played an ambiguous role on some occasions undermining democracy, while on others being an agent of democratic transformation. Since 2006, the military of Serbia has been placed under civilian democratic control and seems to have internalized its role of a politically neutral and professional force with a mission to defend the country, support civilian authorities in the event of emergency, and contribute to international peace and security. Still, the ongoing democratic backsliding, the lack of clarity about the state’s strategic outlook, and the still unresolved status of Serbia’s former province Kosovo all preserve the potential for civil-military tensions in the future.
Article
Slovakia: Creating and Transforming Civil-Military Relations
Matej Navrátil and Michal Onderco
The civil-military relations in Slovakia have been marked by rapid transformation after the collapse of communism, including the expansion of the civilian power over armed forces, a gradual shift that has meant a great loss of autonomy for the armed forces. The dominance of civilians over the military happened through various means. First and foremost, there was a massive legal and legislative shift in the institutional distribution of power. However, the power of civilians over the military has been cemented through the adoption of a business-like structure, a change in military education, as well as “the power of the purse.”
Overall, Slovakia’s case is not unique among the countries of the former communist bloc, where the desire to integrate into NATO and the EU has led to significant changes in the way the domestic societies are organized. However, Slovakia’s case is interesting because it demonstrates that the establishment of civilian dominance over the military can potentially lead to absurd consequences such as the inability to pay petty expenses.
Notably, the desire to integrate in NATO led Slovakia to adopt numerous external recommendations with far-reaching consequences for domestic legislation. In a process that is not unlike what the scholars of European integration call “Europeanization,” Slovakia’s case shows that the goal to demonstrate one’s readiness to join international organizations can lead to a complete transformation in the nation’s defense policy.
Conversely, and perhaps more speculatively, if one were to perceive civilian control over the military as the total subordination of all its components to the elected representatives, the situation is much less straightforward in the case of military intelligence. Under Vladimír Mečiar (in 1994–1998), the state secret (civilian) and security apparatus served not the public interest, but the interest of the ruling coalition. Military intelligence, however, remained autonomous and was not exploited to serve to Mečiar. Although from the normative standpoint, this might be perceived as a positive development, it demonstrates that this component of the military was at that time out of the government’s reach, even the reach of an authoritative ruler such as Mečiar.
Article
Small States in the European Union
Diana Panke and Julia Gurol
Smaller European Union member states face size-related challenges in the EU multilevel system, such as weighted voting in day-to-day policymaking in which EU secondary law is produced or high workloads and fewer resources during intergovernmental conferences (IGC) to set EU primary law. Coping with these challenges is paramount to smaller states’ success. Thus, they can use different strategies, most notably selective engagement and negotiation strategies that do not require much material power, such as persuasion, framing, and coalition-building, as well as the Council Presidency as a window of opportunity to influence the agenda. Applying these strategies allows small states to punch above their weight. Yet, doing so is easier the longer states have been members of the EU. Older, smaller states have more extensive networks, more insights about past policies, and in-depth knowledge on best practices that help them in effectively navigating day-to-day EU negotiations as well as IGCs.
Article
Social Complexity, Crisis, and Management
Emery Roe
Because social complexity is rarely defined beforehand, social science discussions often default to natural language concepts and synonyms. Assert a large sociotechnical system is complex or increasingly complex, and notions are triggered of many unknowns, out-of-sight causal processes, and a system difficult to comprehend fully. These terms intimate the potential for, if not actuality of, catastrophes and their unmanageability in the sociotechnical systems. It is not uncommon to find increasing social complexity credited for the generation or exacerbation of major crises, such as nuclear reactor accidents and global climate change, and the need to manage them better, albeit the crises are said to be far more difficult to manage because of the complexity.
The costs of leaving discussions of “complexity, crisis, and management” to natural language are compared here to the considerable benefits that accrue to analysis from one of the few definitions of social complexity developed and used during the past 40 years, that of political scientist Todd R. La Porte. Understanding that a large sociotechnical system is more or less complex depending on the number of its components, the different functions each component has, and the interconnections (including interdependencies) among functions and components highlights key issues that are often missed within the theory and practice of large sociotechnical systems, including society’s critical infrastructures. Over-complexifying the problems and issues of already complex systems, in particular, is just as questionable as oversimplifying that complexity for policy and management purposes.
Article
Sociological Institutionalism and European Integration
Sabine Saurugger
Sociological institutionalism is part of the larger group of new institutionalisms that share the basic understanding that institutions matter in social processes. Opposing a more descriptive, “old” institutionalism and a rational-choice version of institutionalism, which defends the idea that actors have the option to choose independently from a large number of attitudes, sociological institutionalists introduced the notion of logic of appropriateness, influenced by a specific strand of the sociology of organizations. This understanding, however, led to limits in the explicatory force of the approach: institutional change, as well as continued conflict and differentiated power relations among actors, could not be explained well. More recent approaches that took sociological institutionalist assumptions very seriously offered a series of possible solutions to those difficulties. While elements of rationality and power exist implicitly in different conceptualizations of sociological institutionalism, these authors explicitly brought together both actors’ rational behavior and their embeddedness in broad institutional frameworks through concentrating on the power relations that exist among agents.
