Jonathan Wheatley

The Origins of Social Capital Evidence From a Survey of Post-Soviet Central Asia

This article investigates the determinants of social capital by analyzing an original survey of post-Soviet Central Asia. It tests hypotheses derived from two related questions: whether networks, norms, and trust are empirically related and the extent to which four factors—culture, regime type, perceptions of government responsiveness, and development interventions—predict levels of social capital. The results show that trust and norms diverge from networking. Interaction is higher under less repressive regimes and is further increased by development interventions; trust and norms are higher under conditions of greater repression. Culture does not affect any indicators of social capital, but perceptions of responsiveness correlate with higher levels of trust. As such, disaggregating social capital is a promising new direction for research. Scholars should investigate why the components of social capital sometimes correlate but at other times diverge, and they should consider the possibility of distinct causal mechanisms in their development.

The dimensionality of the Scottish political space Results from an experiment on the 2011 Holyrood elections

This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to identify latent policy dimensions from a dataset obtained from a VAA carried out in Scotland in 2011. These dimensions are used to map the policy positions of supporters of five Scottish political parties. We argue that this tool allows more leverage on understanding the relative locations of parties ‘in the electorate’ in multidimensional policy space.

Using VAAs to explore the dimensionality of the policy space: experiments from Brazil, Peru, Scotland and Cyprus

Research into Voting Advice Applications (VAA) has hitherto been concerned with technical issues over the use of VAAs as a tool to help people vote. This paper shows that data generated by VAAs can also be used for research into how policy preferences of voters can be conceptualised in terms of a multi–dimensional policy space. Specifically, analysis of data extracted from VAAs deployed in Brazil, Peru, Scotland and Cyprus reaffirm the importance of existing concepts of Left and Right, as well as a second dimension of social conservatism versus social liberalism (sometimes known as GAL–TAN), as defining features of the policy space. This paper also shows how data from VAAs can be used to map the ideological profiles of party supporters.

Managing ethnic diversity in Georgia: one step forward, two steps back

This article attempts to explain how the Georgian state sought to manage ethnic diversity at the same time as (re-)building state institutions within a (nominally) democratic framework, from the collapse of Soviet power to the present day. It is suggested that the explanation for the slow and uneven progress in accommodating national minorities within the Georgian state derives from four principal factors: first, the collapse of the Soviet state and the consequent inability of the newly independent state to provide basic public goods; second, the lack of a ‘civic’ model for the accommodation of minorities; third, the continuation of the Soviet norm of arbitrary exercise of power by leaders, which is ill-suited to accommodating diversity and resolving conflict; and, finally, the Soviet legacy of ethnofederalism, which carved out three autonomous territories – Abkhazia, Achara and South Ossetia – from within Georgia that would (violently, in the case of Abkhazia and South Ossetia) resist the encroachments of the new Georgian state, and would later (in the case of South Ossetia) provide a pretext for military conflict between Russia and Georgia.

The Disruptive Potential of Direct Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies

This paper focuses on the use of referendums that decide on the future status of a given territory: namely whether or not such a territory will become independent. I first identify two fundamentally different sub-types of such a referendum: the referendum-as-a-weapon, which is a device used by political elites to augment their own powers, and the referendum-as-a-solution, which is a device agreed to by all sides as part of a conflict resolution process. Empirical evidence appears to show that the referendum-as-a-weapon is more frequently used in a non-democratic context. Moreover, the referendum-as-a-solution is rarely used after a period of violent conflict, despite its potential for conflict resolution. Using examples from the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, I argue that, far from being a solution to fundamental conflicts within society, the referendum-as-a-weapon, when used to decide the status of a given territory, can often exacerbate such conflicts. I conclude that if such a referendum is held in deeply divided societies in which state institutions are weak and the state’s capacity to maintain a monopoly over the use of force is challenged, there is a high risk of civil war.

Dimensionality of Policy Space in Consociational Northern Ireland

A criticism of consociational power sharing as an institutional response to violent conflict is that it buttresses rather than ameliorates the underlying (linguistic, religious or ethno-national) divide, hence prohibiting the emergence of new dimensions of political competition (such as economic left-right or moral liberal-conservative dimensions) that are characteristic of ‘normal’ societies. We test this argument in the context of the illustrative Northern Ireland case, using data from expert coding of party policy documents and opinion data derived from two Voter Advice Applications (VAAs). We find evidence for a moral liberal-conservative dimension of politics in addition to the ethno-national dimension. Hence, we caution against assuming that consociational polities are unidimensional.