John Boswell
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 178264 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John Boswell |
| PRENOMES | John |
| SOBRENOME | Boswell |
| ASSINATURA | BOSWELL J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3018-8791 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 65 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 509 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 65 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1977 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Beyond blunders
British political studies has traditionally focused on the analysis of policy failures. This is reflected in a vast literature on catastrophes and crises which has uncovered a range of specific and systemic factors to explain failure. The central argument of this article is that this intense disciplinary negativity-bias risks creating an intellectual form of path dependency in which examples of successful public policy are rarely acknowledged, le…
A Chequered History but Positive Future for British Public Administration
Public services, public servants, and the study of Public Administration are operating in a context of global turbulence. Our review of the state of the discipline suggests that a core strength of British Public Administration has been the complementarity between scholarship and practice, responding to existential threats. We analyze changing relationships between the discipline and practice in British public administration over three eras: Appli…
Public Encounters
The sub‐field of public encounters has significant untapped potential to advance the study and practice of citizen‐state relationships. The main aim of this special issue is to put the spotlight on this growing literature on relational dynamics between citizens and agents of the state. In this editorial introduction, we synthesise emerging empirical and conceptual insights across the special issue articles and wider literature to explain the prof…
How should policy actors respond to buzzwords? Three ways to deal with policy ambiguity
New political science analysis of the renewed push for preventive health
The idea that 'prevention is better than cure' is often treated as self-evident in health policymaking: who would not want to shift resources from mitigating acute problems to their prevention? However, there is always a gap between rhetorical commitments and practice, producing cycles of enthusiasm then limited progress. If prevention returns to the top of the agenda, how can this time be different? To answer that question, we applied new politi…
Learning to govern
A quirk of the Westminster system is that Ministers invariably have to “learn on the job”. Yet “learning” has been surprisingly understudied in work on executive government in Britain especially. In this paper, we offer a systematic account of Ministerial learning based on a comprehensive analysis of the Ministers Reflect archive—the largest dataset of research interviews with former Westminster ministers ever assembled. We identify six distinct …
Power with Purpose? Further Reflections on Strengthening the Centre of Government
On 10 March 2024 the Commission on the Centre of Government published its final report: Power with Purpose . The aim of the commission had been to explore why Number Ten, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury do not always work as well as they should and to explore what could be done to improve the centre of government radically. Perennial concerns about the existence of a ‘hollow crown’ at the centre of British government were, the final report rec…
How does government feel? Toward a theory of institutional pathos in public administration
In the study of policy and administration, emotions are largely conceived as an exogenous factor that impacts on institutions and processes. Still ignored are the emotions felt and performed not just individually by civil servants, but collectively within government organizations. This article turns to insights on emotions from organizational studies to offer a conceptual framework through which to understand the lifeworld of government, or “inst…
The state of British policymaking
How can UK and devolved governments be more effective when addressing chronic problems like inequalities or crises like climate change? The dominant story is of pessimism: policymaking is bound to a Westminster tradition of short-termism, elitism, and centralization, and reform efforts are doomed to failure. We present a more cautiously optimistic account about the prospects for a more effective government, grounded in theory-informed lessons fro…
The (un)lucky country
Single-case studies, though once the foundation of political science, have become a high-risk strategy in the discipline. The risk is especially acute for scholars who do rich qualitative work about New Zealand and Australia. There is a double bind. On the one hand, the community studying Antipodean politics is not large enough or sufficiently well-defined to ignore trends and mores overseas. On the other hand, Antipodean politics is not exotic o…
The Potential of Meta-ethnography in the Study of Public Administration
The purpose of this article is to highlight meta-ethnography—the interpretive synthesis of ethnographic studies on a given theme—as a useful tool in the study of social policy and public administration. We claim this approach can maximize the impact of rich idiographic research to enable theory-refining and evidence-building efforts in the field. We illustrate these benefits through reference to a worked example focused on public encounters with …
Narrative Analysis
The ‘deliberative turn’ in normative political theory has coincided with something of a ‘narrative turn’ in empirical social science. Scholars in communication studies, psychology, sociology, politics, public administration, and beyond have increasingly focused their attention on the role that narratives play in social interaction. There is increasing awareness of the importance of narrative for those interested in assessing deliberation. After a…
Mending Democracy
In this piece we respond to three commentators of our book, Mending Democracy, and emphasize the ways the book seeks to contribute to the theory and practice of democracy. We reflect on the possibilities and limits of democratic mending in societies characterised by economic inequality and asymmetric power relations, as well as in countries with less established institutions of liberal democracy. We draw attention to the agency and creativity of …
Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance
Recent years have seen a “wave” of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly‐selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics , but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy…
Place-based Politics and Nested Deprivation in the U.K
‘Place-based explanations’ of politics in the UK draw on survey data to tell sweeping narratives about ‘Two Englands’, or of sizeable regions of the country that have been ‘Left Behind’, reinforcing popular accounts of a North-South or city-town divide. We introduce the concept of nested deprivation—deprivation that may occur in just one housing estate or even one row of flats within neighbourhoods that are otherwise affluent. We report on intens…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Seeing Like a Citizen
This paper presents a participant-observation account of my experience as a randomly selected participant at a Citizens’ Assembly. I reflect on what the unique experience of ‘seeing like a citizen’ can add to accepted understandings and practices of mini-public deliberation. I find that the experience, though energising, exciting and ultimately hugely worthwhile, also upended many of my prior assumptions grounded in academic scholarship and previ…
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
Democracy, Interpretation, and the “Problem” of Conceptual Ambiguity
Democracy is a notoriously ambiguous concept. Political scientists typically see this ambiguity as a problem that restricts measurement and causal explanation, especially for the comparative study of democratization. Increasingly ambitious data collection efforts and sophisticated methodological approaches attempt to resolve this problem - nowhere more so than in the recent, award-winning, and highly prominent Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) datas…
Mending Democracy
This book advances the idea of democratic mending in response to the growing problem of disconnections in contemporary democracies. Around the globe vital connections in our democratic systems are wearing thin, especially between citizens and their elected representatives, between citizens in polarized public spheres, and between citizens and their complex governance systems. The wide scale of disrepair in our democratic fabric cannot realistical…
Finding common ground
Deliberative democrats have abandoned the ideal of consensus in favour of a range of different, more realistic alternatives. But these alternatives provide little anchorage to guide or even evaluate deliberative practice – something acutely problematic given the contemporary context of accelerating polarization in many advanced liberal democracies. In this article, we turn to Stalnaker’s account of the ‘common ground’ – the shared pool of informa…
Mending Democracy
The fabric of democracy is threadbare in many contemporary societies. Connections that are vital to the functioning and integrity of our democratic systems are wearing thin. Citizens are increasingly disconnected from their elected representatives and from each other in polarised public spheres, and alienated from complex systems of public policy. In such disconnected times, how can we strengthen and renew our democracies? This book develops the …
The marriage of likeness
In this work, John Boswell attempts to prove that in pagan antiquity and during Christianity's first centuries - for around 2000 years in all - extensive legal sanction was given to pairing between males. He also shows that society had little difficulty in accepting homosexual relationships. The book claims that Christendom has had a major homosexual past which religious authorities have spent hundreds of years vigorously attempting to suppress a…
Deliberative systems
The central concept of this edited volume – one to which each contributor adds in some way – is that of the deliberative system: ‘a set of distinguishable, differentiated, but to some degree interd
The pandemic within
Studying public deliberation after the systemic turn
The recent shift towards a deliberative systems approach suggests understanding public deliberation as a communicative activity occurring in a diversity of spaces. While theoretically attractive, the deliberative systems approach raises a number of methodological questions for empirical social scientists. For example, how does one identify multiple communicative sites within a deliberative system, how does one study connections between different …
Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance
Recent years have seen a “wave” of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly‐selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics , but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy…
Why and how Narrative Matters in Deliberative Systems
Narrative has become a fashionable concept in the everyday practice and analysis of democratic politics. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, activists and commentators all talk about the importance of constructing and controlling narratives in democratic debate. Yet astonishingly, the pre-eminent way of thinking about public debate in democratic theory – deliberative democracy – has almost nothing to say about narrative. Drawing on the substanti…
Message received? Examining transmission in deliberative systems
With the systemic turn in deliberative democratic theory, there is renewed and broadened emphasis on the inclusion of all affected by a political decision in the making of those decisions. The key enabler of inclusion at a system level is transmission: theoretically, a deliberative system is more democratic if it can foster the transmission of claims and ideas across different sites, especially between informal sites of public deliberation and th…
The Kindness of Strangers
Looks at the abandonment of children in Western Europe in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book illuminates a vast area of social history and aims to enlighten us on attitudes to childhood, the nature of the family, property and the nature of birth control
Deliberating Downstream
Key theorists and scholars of democracy have focused on understanding and enhancing the institutions and practices that shape decision-making. Indeed, the most influential contemporary normative account—the deliberative version—though increasingly adapted to the complex realities of contemporary politics, retains a tight focus on the conditions of legitimate will formation. This remains the core underpinning of the normative impetus for innovatio…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
State of the field
This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply…
Designing Democratic Innovations as Deliberative Systems
What does it mean to design democratic innovation from a deliberative systems perspective? The demand of the deliberative systems approach that we turn from the single forum towards the broader system has largely been embraced by those interested in designing institutions for citizen participation. Nevertheless, there has been no analysis of the practical implications for democratic innovation. Is it possible to design differentiated but intercon…
Hoisted with our own petard’
What makes evidence‐based policy making such a useful myth? The case of Nice guidance on bariatric surgery in the United Kingdom
There is widespread skepticism among policy scholars and practitioners about the move to rationalize policy making: The naive vision of “evidence‐based policy” is often contrasted with the reality of “policy‐based evidence.” Yet, the language of evidence‐based policy making (EBPM) continues to dominate policy debate about complex and contested issues. In this paper, I explore this apparent paradox by looking at what makes EBPM such a useful myth …
The state of British policymaking
How can UK and devolved governments be more effective when addressing chronic problems like inequalities or crises like climate change? The dominant story is of pessimism: policymaking is bound to a Westminster tradition of short-termism, elitism, and centralization, and reform efforts are doomed to failure. We present a more cautiously optimistic account about the prospects for a more effective government, grounded in theory-informed lessons fro…
Stoic Democrats? Anti-politics, élite cynicism and the policy process
Disenchantment with politics appears to be proliferating throughout contemporary liberal democracies, as outlined in the growing literature on anti-politics. Overwhelmingly, this literature has focused on the disaffection citizens express towards the policy process. Here, using policy-making on the issue of obesity in Australia and Britain as a case study, we show that disenchantment is not limited to citizen outsiders; the élite policy actors at…
The Kindness of Strangers
Why and how to compare deliberative systems
The systemic turn in deliberative democratic theory presents empirical researchers in this field with a problem. Deliberative systems are complex, porous and shifting in nature. These features cannot be adequately assessed by existing tools for measuring deliberative and democratic qualities. Such qualities only become apparent when set against practices in other systems. Meaningful analysis rests on comparison. However, in turning to the compara…
The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19
What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a ‘court p…
Julia Gillard's Citizens' Assembly Proposal for Australia
Many governments have embraced the rhetoric of inclusive citizen engagement. Greater public involvement promises to strengthen democratic institutions and improve the quality of policy decisions and services. How do these aspirations sit alongside the reality of Australian federal politics? This article investigates the responses of elite policy actors to the Gillard government's proposal to conduct a citizens’ assembly on climate change in 2010.…
Democracy, Interpretation, and the “Problem” of Conceptual Ambiguity
Democracy is a notoriously ambiguous concept. Political scientists typically see this ambiguity as a problem that restricts measurement and causal explanation, especially for the comparative study of democratization. Increasingly ambitious data collection efforts and sophisticated methodological approaches attempt to resolve this problem - nowhere more so than in the recent, award-winning, and highly prominent Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) datas…
The dilemmas of pursuing ‘throughput legitimacy’ through participatory mechanisms
Under pressure to open up the 'black box' of governance, technocratic bodies are increasingly seeking to include civil society participation in the policy process. We draw on empirical cases from the European Commission and NHS England to assess the extent to which the participatory mechanisms pursued by these institutions have been successful in eliciting 'throughput legitimacy'. We show that though these mechanisms have taken very different for…
Deliberative Bureaucracy
Deliberative democrats have long considered the trade-off between norms of inclusion and efficiency. The latest attempt at reconciliation is the deliberative systems model, which situates and links individual sites of deliberation in their macro context. Yet, critics argue that this move to scale up leaves inclusive practices of citizen deliberation vulnerable. Here, we seek to mitigate these concerns via an unlikely source: bureaucracy. Drawing …
Embracing impressionism
For its most prominent proponents, interpretive research is emphatically a ‘systematic’ craft; though iterative and creative, if practiced expertly it enables the researcher to progress towards a more coherent, comprehensive and convincing interpretation of both the political phenomenon under investigation and its scholarly significance. We argue that this process is neither as systematic in nature nor as satisfying in execution as such a charact…
The Potential of Meta-ethnography in the Study of Public Administration
The purpose of this article is to highlight meta-ethnography—the interpretive synthesis of ethnographic studies on a given theme—as a useful tool in the study of social policy and public administration. We claim this approach can maximize the impact of rich idiographic research to enable theory-refining and evidence-building efforts in the field. We illustrate these benefits through reference to a worked example focused on public encounters with …
Place-based Politics and Nested Deprivation in the U.K
‘Place-based explanations’ of politics in the UK draw on survey data to tell sweeping narratives about ‘Two Englands’, or of sizeable regions of the country that have been ‘Left Behind’, reinforcing popular accounts of a North-South or city-town divide. We introduce the concept of nested deprivation—deprivation that may occur in just one housing estate or even one row of flats within neighbourhoods that are otherwise affluent. We report on intens…
An Antipodean History of Interpretation
In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these…
Power with Purpose? Further Reflections on Strengthening the Centre of Government
On 10 March 2024 the Commission on the Centre of Government published its final report: Power with Purpose . The aim of the commission had been to explore why Number Ten, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury do not always work as well as they should and to explore what could be done to improve the centre of government radically. Perennial concerns about the existence of a ‘hollow crown’ at the centre of British government were, the final report rec…
La crisis social y económica de Barcelona a mediados del Siglo XV . Carmen Batlle Gallart
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Illustrations Abbreviations Preface 1: Introduction 2: Definitions 3: Rome: The Foundation 4: The Scriptures 5: Christians and Social Change 6: Theological Traditions 7: The Early Middle Ages 8: The Urban Revival 9: The Triumph of Ganymede: Gay Literature of the High Middle Ages 10: Social Change: Making Enemies 11: Intellectual Change: Men, Beasts, and Nature 12: Conclusions App. 1: Lexicography and Saint Paul App. 2: Texts and Translations Freq…
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Journal Article Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, by John Boswell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, xviii + 424 pp. $27.50 Get access Robert Towler Robert Towler University of Leeds, England Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 42, Issue 2, Summ…
Christianisme et homosexualité au Moyen Âge
Diezmo eclesiástico y producción de cereales en el reino de Sevilla (1408-1503) . Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, Manuel González Jiménez
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Homosexuality in Renaissance England
Satan
The New Testament and Homosexuality
Homosexuality in Greek Myth. Bernard Sergent , Arthur Goldhammer
The Kindness of Strangers
The Kindness of Strangers
Looks at the abandonment of children in Western Europe in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book illuminates a vast area of social history and aims to enlighten us on attitudes to childhood, the nature of the family, property and the nature of birth control
Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality
Research Article| April 01 1990 Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality John Boswell John Boswell John Boswell teaches European and Medieval History at Yale University. His most recent work is The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (1990) 2 (1): 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2-1-67 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permission…
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
Why and how Narrative Matters in Deliberative Systems
Narrative has become a fashionable concept in the everyday practice and analysis of democratic politics. Politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, activists and commentators all talk about the importance of constructing and controlling narratives in democratic debate. Yet astonishingly, the pre-eminent way of thinking about public debate in democratic theory – deliberative democracy – has almost nothing to say about narrative. Drawing on the substanti…
Julia Gillard's Citizens' Assembly Proposal for Australia
Many governments have embraced the rhetoric of inclusive citizen engagement. Greater public involvement promises to strengthen democratic institutions and improve the quality of policy decisions and services. How do these aspirations sit alongside the reality of Australian federal politics? This article investigates the responses of elite policy actors to the Gillard government's proposal to conduct a citizens’ assembly on climate change in 2010.…
Introduction
Amid the clamour of recent calls for evidence-based policymaking, citizen-centred governance, open government, and any number of other international trends in the business of public administration, another, less-heralded one has quietly taken root in Australia: a call to put interpretation at the centre of our analysis. This is not to advance the notion of a new post-modern orthodoxy in thinking about Australian politics and policy—as fairly obvi…
An Antipodean History of Interpretation
In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these…
Hoisted with our own petard’
On making an impression
Embracing impressionism
For its most prominent proponents, interpretive research is emphatically a ‘systematic’ craft; though iterative and creative, if practiced expertly it enables the researcher to progress towards a more coherent, comprehensive and convincing interpretation of both the political phenomenon under investigation and its scholarly significance. We argue that this process is neither as systematic in nature nor as satisfying in execution as such a charact…
Toxic narratives in the deliberative system
The deliberative systems' account makes room for all sorts of communication and action that the classical account of deliberative democracy excluded. But should this leniency also extend to the representation of toxic narratives which aggressively oppose expertise and vilify marginalised groups? This comparative analysis explores the implications of marginalising such narratives from empowered sites of policy advice and formation. It contrasts th…
Stoic Democrats? Anti-politics, élite cynicism and the policy process
Disenchantment with politics appears to be proliferating throughout contemporary liberal democracies, as outlined in the growing literature on anti-politics. Overwhelmingly, this literature has focused on the disaffection citizens express towards the policy process. Here, using policy-making on the issue of obesity in Australia and Britain as a case study, we show that disenchantment is not limited to citizen outsiders; the élite policy actors at…
Sociology (48 obras) · Political science (46 obras) · Law (39 obras) · Politics (35 obras) · Law (34 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Democracy (20 obras) · Public Administration (19 obras) · Public Administration (19 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras)