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The EMU negotiations are identified as a ‘core executive’ activity and analysed in terms of their structural, strategic, and cognitive dimensions. EMU was a prestructured negotiating process, shaped by a historical inheritance of received ideas about vital interests, by institutional structures and policy style, by the hegemony of German monetary ideas, by globalization and deregulation of financial markets, and by policy beliefs and knowledge. EMU negotiations were also a strategic process involving power and interests and choice amongst a range of strategic options, and were both a two‐level game and a nested game. Finally, the EMU negotiations were a cognitive process, in which beliefs, the probing and restructuring of arguments, signalling behaviour, symbolic politics, choice of institutional venues, and policy entrepreneurship played key roles.

While most research has focused on federal faith‐based initiatives, what has gone largely unnoticed has been how extensive state faith‐based initiatives have become. State faith‐based initiatives are in fact more advanced in many ways than implementation at the federal level. States have passed significant faith‐based legislation, something the federal government has never been able to do, and state implementation of these initiatives has begun to shape governmental and faith‐based organizational culture. The consistent efforts of state liaisons and faith‐based conferences, with new faith‐based policies, have created greater opportunities for partnership between faith and government sectors, but have very rarely come up with the resources to make these new efforts work for extended periods of time. Analysis of data illustrates that state faith‐based policies and practices are creating an over‐arching cultural shift away from church/state separation to church/state cooperation.

Following the crisis of Italy's party system precipitated by the tangentopoli scandals of the late 1980s, proposals were made for electoral reforms to move away from a party system based on proportional representation towards a majoritarian, presidential system. In Naples, the 1993 elections saw Antonio Bassolino of the left-wing Partito Democratico della Sinistra emerge victorious to embark on a series of reforms. Bassolino's impact on the city was seen as nothing short of miraculous and the idea of a sudden and unexpected ‘Neapolitan renaissance’ rapidly took hold. The seven-year period of Bassolino's governance roughly coincides with the rise of the New Neapolitan Cinema (NNC), inviting the question as to the relationship between these two phenomena. Indeed, the NNC has often been seen as an expression of this wider Neapolitan renaissance, despite the fact that it slightly predates Bassolino's election. Murray Edelman's notion of ‘symbolic politics’ has been evoked by a number of commentators in relation to Bassolino's policies. A central part of Bassolino's symbolic politics was the way in which urban space was articulated.

One of the key criticisms of Dalit politics across India is that it is too focused on a politics of symbols and identity rather than issues like redistribution. Ambedkar images and statues—or his portrayal in school text-books—exercise as much time as campaigns against atrocities and for land rights. This chapter will chart the VCK’s politics in relation to these issues and engage with the debates over the primacy of symbolic politics. It will be argued that the distinction between ‘symbolic’ and ‘substantive’ politics is often blurred in a situation where Dalits can still be attacked for raising a flag or unveiling a statue.

Chapter 4 puts the early history of midnight basketball in a broader and more explicit political context. Specifically, it argues that these sport-based programs functioned in the media and were used by political leaders to promote a new, neoliberal approach to crime prevention and urban public policy to broad public audiences. These processes and politics are analyzed as examples of the symbolic or cultural politics of sport, highlighting especially sport's unique status as a "deep play" form. Racial coding is also addressed.

Evangelist Billy Sunday’s arrival in Boston demonstrated both the ephemeral nature of urban revivals and their complex role in constructing fundamentalist resistance. Dubbed the “Vaudeville revivalist” by his critics, Sunday’s moralistic, combative rhetoric quickly threatened to divide the city’s Protestants into pro- and anti-revivalist camps. But in the end, the Sunday campaign demonstrated the relative weakness of evangelicals in Boston — a prohibition vote in the midst of the campaign went down in defeat — and the relative resilience of liberal Protestants, as the city’s Unitarians launched a vigorous revival of their own in the wake of Sunday’s departure.

Asks the question “When is China?” to show how Chinese people produce and consume national identity on special days like National Humiliation Day. Comparing the differing practices of the holiday as it was celebrated in the early twentieth century and the early twenty‐first century, the chapter argues that in the early twentieth century the political performances aimed to produce a proper Chinese nation that was worthy of being saved. When National Humiliation Day was revived at the turn of the twenty‐first century, its activities focused on containing nationalism through a commemoration of the crises of the early twentieth century. Because national humiliation discourse has now spread beyond official control, the chapter concludes that we need to appreciate how Chinese people consume nationalism to produce a particular form of identity – and a particular type of security.

This chapter describes the punitive political consensus, or “carceral ethos,” that had developed by the mid-1990s and examines the consequences for Florida politics and penal policy. It argues that that investments in prison capacity created the potential and the ability for newly dominant Republican lawmakers to “govern through crime” where crime control legislation became symbolic politics. Republicans’ ability to pass their crime control agenda was facilitated by the structure of the state legislative process. In turn, the carceral ethos and Republican control of the state legislature empowered public prosecutors to re-write the state’s sentencing laws to emphasize prison time for low-level offenders. Finally, the chapter argues that the move away from the project for racial equality and the racialization of crime and victimhood made it easier for white lawmakers and the public to accept the carceral ethos that offenders were expendable. Yet, it also made it difficult for black lawmakers and their allies to oppose harsh crime control policies.

This chapter illustrates the representations of the Saffron Revolution by situating it in a transnational rather than a purely domestic context. The emergence of this movement shows how the dominant theoretical paradigm in social movement research gives insufficient attention to either the transnational or the symbolic dimensions of the political environment in Burma. The chapter argues that symbolic politics, both within and outside of Burma, played a critical role in the Saffron Revolution’s collective action. Attention to transnational networks affects the interpretation of these symbols, as well as the meaning of collective action (and inaction) that took place within Burma. Attention to the transnational context increases our understanding of the initial emergence of Burma’s statewide pro-democracy movement.

Chapter 3 is largely about the essentials of populism—its nuts and bolts, so to speak, that are absolutely necessary to facilitate its emergence—including notions of the people, political leadership, and symbolic discourse. The chapter introduces a fine distinction of three different subtypes of “the people,” each with their own characteristics and political mindset, going beyond easy generalizations about alleged uniformity. A comparative analysis of populist leaders follows, which, based on an original reconceptualization of political charisma, demonstrates a surprisingly high correlation between extraordinary leadership and populist success. Ordinary people and extraordinary populist leaders forge their relationship through specific narratives that are based largely on individual fears and deeply held social resentment. The last section in the chapter models the causality of populism, which is also presented as a concise diagram.

This essay examines post-Soviet Central Asia and suggests that it is an example that belies typical depictions of the Muslim world. It shows that anti-Americanism is not inherent to the region, to the people that inhabit it, or to the belief systems they claim. It also argues that Central Asians are not simply reacting to U.S. policies. The reality of emergent (and still fairly limited) anti-Americanism is more complex and hinges on the particular meanings that Central Asians in the 1990s came to ascribe to the United States as a symbol. More than a focus on U.S. policies or a focus on the properties of a faith system, a focus on the United States as an ambiguous and changeable symbol provides analytic leverage as we seek to understand anti-Americanism in Central Asia.

The availability of ethnic blocs is a prerequisite for the success of an ethnic party. This chapter illustrates how Dalits’ historical social mobilization weakens bloc voting. Dalit social movements generate mobilizers and mobilization symbols that increase competition for Dalit votes at the locality-level, lower the utility of caste for differentiating among parties, shift the emphasis to material goods over symbolic goods, and split Dalit voters’ party preferences. Non-movement states were denied these electoral effects of Dalit social mobilization and hence preserved the possibility of bloc voting. The chapter concludes by reconsidering some of the explanations for ethnic party success.

The available literature on the Telangana movement offers historical, political, and economic perspectives that define Telangana as a ‘backward’ region and the movement as an offshoot to this backwardness. The backwardness generally discussed pertains to the economic standing of the people of Telangana. From the vantage point of a fresh perspective, this chapter uses regional culture as a vantage point to understand the emergence of the mass movement. It explores the context in which the idea of separate statehood for Telangana took shape and discusses how the movement can be understood as a new social movement. The chapter also attempts to understand the contours of the movement’s history in terms of how the culture of Telangana was marginalized and how Telangana activists, especially employees and students, mobilized against the dominant Andhra culture, leading ultimately to widespread, robust cultural assertion.

This chapter discusses the results of the present study. It first deals with the issue of defining and estimating the volume of sex trafficking. Among the findings of the study are that the women studied, who would be counted as victims in many of the prevailing estimates of human trafficking, are not really victims at all, if based on the narrow definition that a transnational trafficking victim is one who is forced, deceived, or coerced to go overseas for commercial sex. It calls for the need to make explicit exactly how sex trafficking victims are being defined in any discussions of the scope and magnitude of the problem and of any antitrafficking policies. The chapter then turns to the notion of symbolic politics, which refers to a policy making situation wherein perceptions trump substance; where the appearance of action, sometimes without actually doing or intending to do anything, becomes paramount in reassuring political constituents. It is argued that the dispute about prostitution and sex trafficking may have fallen into this policy trap.

This chapter argues that grandstanding contributes to significant problems for politics in democracies. Politicians are notorious for grandstanding, likely because they have strong incentives to do so. Many voters choose candidates for their perceived character traits, so politicians grandstand to give the people what they want. Because people associate morality with taking unyielding stands, politicians who grandstand have strong incentives not to compromise with the opposing party. If they do, voters will treat them as flip-floppers. The same is true for activists, who risk being seen as having a weak commitment to the cause by other activists. Political grandstanders also tend to support expressive or symbolic policies, which seem to straightforwardly address a problem, but are actually ineffective. Finally, grandstanders sometimes have reason not to solve social problems at all, as doing so may eliminate opportunities to advance their interests.

Social mobilization has been the catalyst, guarantor, and pathway for fulfillment of human rights worldwide. Social movements represent marginalized populations, raise consciousness of new issues, establish or bridge compelling frames for social problems, foster transnational networks, translate international norms into locally appropriate vocabularies, advocate, occupy public and forbidden space, mobilize culture change, and persuade decision makers, elites, and mass publics. This chapter treats the complementary pathways of mobilization to contest violence against women: voice, advocacy, transnationalism, vernacularization, and information politics. We will see voice against femicide in Pakistan and Brazil, alongside public protest and lobbying for reform over all types of gender violence in the Philippines, Algeria, and Argentina. Transnational mobilization strategies in Mexico and Nigeria contrast with vernacular translation of international norms by grassroots movements in India. Meanwhile, online campaigns create new repertoires and vocabularies to protest harassment, rape, and honor cultures in Pakistan, Egypt, India, and Brazil.