Project acronym DIPLOFACE
Project Diplomatic Face-Work - between confidential negotiations and public display
Researcher (PI) Rebecca Adler-Nissen
Host Institution (HI) KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2015-STG
Summary The rise of social media, coupled with intensifying demands for more transparency and democracy in world politics, brings new challenges to international diplomacy. State leaders and diplomats continue to react to traditional media, but now also attempt to present themselves proactively through tweets, public diplomacy and nation branding. These efforts often take place simultaneously and sometimes interfere directly with closed-door negotiations and its culture of restraint and secrecy. Yet the relationship between confidential diplomacy and public representation remains understudied.
DIPLOFACE will develop a sociologically and anthropologically informed approach to studying how state leaders and diplomats manage their nation’s ‘faces’ in the information age. The project will explore the relationship and tensions between confidential diplomatic negotiations and publicly displayed interventions in various media, applying the micro-sociological concept of ‘face-work’. DIPLOFACE will analyse the complex interactional dynamics that shape the diplomatic techniques and strategies used to convey a nation’s ‘face’ or ‘image of self’. Such face-work is increasingly important for national leaders and diplomats who perform simultaneously on the ‘back-stage’ and the ‘front-stage’ of international relations. DIPLOFACE will identify, theorize and analyse the repertoire of face-saving, face-honouring and face-threatening practices that are employed in confidential negotiations and in public.
DIPLOFACE advances our theoretical understanding of diplomacy in the 21st century significantly beyond existing International Relations and diplomatic theory. Combining participant observation, interviews and media analysis, DIPLOFACE will generate important new knowledge about the relationship between public and confidential multilateral negotiation, how state leaders and diplomats handle new media, and the role of face-saving and face-threatening strategies in international relations.
Summary
The rise of social media, coupled with intensifying demands for more transparency and democracy in world politics, brings new challenges to international diplomacy. State leaders and diplomats continue to react to traditional media, but now also attempt to present themselves proactively through tweets, public diplomacy and nation branding. These efforts often take place simultaneously and sometimes interfere directly with closed-door negotiations and its culture of restraint and secrecy. Yet the relationship between confidential diplomacy and public representation remains understudied.
DIPLOFACE will develop a sociologically and anthropologically informed approach to studying how state leaders and diplomats manage their nation’s ‘faces’ in the information age. The project will explore the relationship and tensions between confidential diplomatic negotiations and publicly displayed interventions in various media, applying the micro-sociological concept of ‘face-work’. DIPLOFACE will analyse the complex interactional dynamics that shape the diplomatic techniques and strategies used to convey a nation’s ‘face’ or ‘image of self’. Such face-work is increasingly important for national leaders and diplomats who perform simultaneously on the ‘back-stage’ and the ‘front-stage’ of international relations. DIPLOFACE will identify, theorize and analyse the repertoire of face-saving, face-honouring and face-threatening practices that are employed in confidential negotiations and in public.
DIPLOFACE advances our theoretical understanding of diplomacy in the 21st century significantly beyond existing International Relations and diplomatic theory. Combining participant observation, interviews and media analysis, DIPLOFACE will generate important new knowledge about the relationship between public and confidential multilateral negotiation, how state leaders and diplomats handle new media, and the role of face-saving and face-threatening strategies in international relations.
Max ERC Funding
1 493 062 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31
Project acronym INATTENTION
Project Behavioral and Policy Implications of Rational Inattention
Researcher (PI) Filip Matejka
Host Institution (HI) NARODOHOSPODARSKY USTAV AKADEMIE VED CESKE REPUBLIKY VEREJNA VYZKUMNA INSTITUCE
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH1, ERC-2015-STG
Summary This proposal outlines agenda which aims to improve our understanding of policies in environments with cognitively limited agents. It seeks to extend and apply the theory of rational inattention developed in macroeconomics. Citizens are inattentive to details of tax codes, government bureaucrats cannot inspect all data about people in need, and voters are highly uninformed about politicians’ campaign platforms. The agenda is specifically targeted at applications where human inability to digest all available information has strong implications for public policy formation. It falls into three broad parts.
First (macroeconomics), the proposed research will develop a new model of risk-sharing in a typical modern-macro setting with heterogeneous agents. Instead of incentive constraints, the imperfections will be driven by the government’s or citizens’ inability to process all available information. What are the properties of the resulting system of redistribution? Why do taxes often take a simple form? Can minorities be left behind because they attract less of the government’s attention?
Second (behavioral economics), it will extend the rational inattention theory to model how agents simplify multidimensional features of the environment. Among many applications, the theory is likely to provide an alternative explanation for mental accounting, when people have separate budgets for different types of expenditures (critical to consumption decisions, especially of the poor), and for salience of different elements of the tax code.
Third (political economy), it will develop a unified framework to study implications of voters’ rational inattention (selective ignorance) for the outcomes of political processes, such as for popular demand for misguided policies, public good provision, and the complexity of announced platforms. Voters’ information acquisition and fragmented information processing will be studied in a field experiment.
Summary
This proposal outlines agenda which aims to improve our understanding of policies in environments with cognitively limited agents. It seeks to extend and apply the theory of rational inattention developed in macroeconomics. Citizens are inattentive to details of tax codes, government bureaucrats cannot inspect all data about people in need, and voters are highly uninformed about politicians’ campaign platforms. The agenda is specifically targeted at applications where human inability to digest all available information has strong implications for public policy formation. It falls into three broad parts.
First (macroeconomics), the proposed research will develop a new model of risk-sharing in a typical modern-macro setting with heterogeneous agents. Instead of incentive constraints, the imperfections will be driven by the government’s or citizens’ inability to process all available information. What are the properties of the resulting system of redistribution? Why do taxes often take a simple form? Can minorities be left behind because they attract less of the government’s attention?
Second (behavioral economics), it will extend the rational inattention theory to model how agents simplify multidimensional features of the environment. Among many applications, the theory is likely to provide an alternative explanation for mental accounting, when people have separate budgets for different types of expenditures (critical to consumption decisions, especially of the poor), and for salience of different elements of the tax code.
Third (political economy), it will develop a unified framework to study implications of voters’ rational inattention (selective ignorance) for the outcomes of political processes, such as for popular demand for misguided policies, public good provision, and the complexity of announced platforms. Voters’ information acquisition and fragmented information processing will be studied in a field experiment.
Max ERC Funding
950 424 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31
Project acronym JUDI-ARCH
Project The Rise of Judicial Self-Government: Changing the Architecture of Separation of Powers without an Architect
Researcher (PI) David Kosar
Host Institution (HI) Masarykova univerzita
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2015-STG
Summary Many European states have transferred decision-making powers regarding court administration and the career of a judge from political bodies to special organs in which judges have a major say. Judicial councils and other bodies of judicial self-government (JSG) spread particularly quickly during the European Union (EU) Accession Process. However, the effects of these bodies are not fully understood, as the traditional descriptive and normative scholarship is not able to capture them. JUDI-ARCH will fill this gap and address the implications of this phenomenon for the “new” as well as “old” EU member states.
The central research question of JUDI-ARCH is: how the rise of JSG has changed the concept of separation of powers? More specifically, the JUDI-ARCH proposal consists of three interrelated research aims. The first is to assess the impact of JSG on public confidence in and the independence, accountability, transparency and legitimacy of the domestic judiciaries of 14 European states and the two European supranational courts, both the actual and the perceived. The second aim is to examine what impact the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have had on domestic judicial design and, vice versa, how has domestic judicial design affected the selection of judges of the ECtHR and the CJEU. The third overarching aim is to analyse the impact of JSG on the concept of separation of powers.
A major innovation in our approach will be the integration of comparative legal perspective with sociological and political science approaches. We will conduct in-depth conceptual, qualitative and quantitative case studies on the impact of different models of JSG in both “new” and “old” EU Member States, including longitudinal quantitative analysis of the use of mechanisms of judicial independence and accountability before and after the creation of a JSG body and in-depth elite interviews.
Summary
Many European states have transferred decision-making powers regarding court administration and the career of a judge from political bodies to special organs in which judges have a major say. Judicial councils and other bodies of judicial self-government (JSG) spread particularly quickly during the European Union (EU) Accession Process. However, the effects of these bodies are not fully understood, as the traditional descriptive and normative scholarship is not able to capture them. JUDI-ARCH will fill this gap and address the implications of this phenomenon for the “new” as well as “old” EU member states.
The central research question of JUDI-ARCH is: how the rise of JSG has changed the concept of separation of powers? More specifically, the JUDI-ARCH proposal consists of three interrelated research aims. The first is to assess the impact of JSG on public confidence in and the independence, accountability, transparency and legitimacy of the domestic judiciaries of 14 European states and the two European supranational courts, both the actual and the perceived. The second aim is to examine what impact the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have had on domestic judicial design and, vice versa, how has domestic judicial design affected the selection of judges of the ECtHR and the CJEU. The third overarching aim is to analyse the impact of JSG on the concept of separation of powers.
A major innovation in our approach will be the integration of comparative legal perspective with sociological and political science approaches. We will conduct in-depth conceptual, qualitative and quantitative case studies on the impact of different models of JSG in both “new” and “old” EU Member States, including longitudinal quantitative analysis of the use of mechanisms of judicial independence and accountability before and after the creation of a JSG body and in-depth elite interviews.
Max ERC Funding
1 499 625 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
