Scott R O B E R T Patterson

Université de Montréal, Political Science, Post-Doc

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Papers by Scott R O B E R T Patterson

Domesticating Wealth Inequality

Relative wealth inequality between countries of the North and South has not improved since the er... more Relative wealth inequality between countries of the North and South has not improved since the era of decolonization, yet the LIO's economic regime has scarcely been challenged since the 1970s' New International Economic Order. This paper seeks to explain this puzzle by theorizing and empirically tracking a pervasive pattern of rhetorical “domestication” through which wealth inequality was framed as a domestic instead of an international problem. As part of a rhetorical process of “containment,” the NIEO challenge was met with two alternative, liberal discourses from the 1980s through the present: a “responsive” discourse embodied by the Brandt report and its social-democratic middle ground; and a “resisting” one typified by a speech delivered by Ronald Reagan in Cancun in 1983. Our empirical demonstration illustrates how LIO proponents discursively contained NIEO contestation through the spread of a domesticated rhetoric. Using a corpus of General Assembly annual debates from 1971 to 2018, our machine learning textual analysis reveals how a growing proportion of diverse countries address economic development in an increasingly managerial way. By tracking rhetorical tropes, we document a groundswell movement away from structural and political contestation of the LIO. Overall, our original methodology—based on an inductive and relational approach to machine learning text analysis—allows us to capture the many euphemisms that containment diplomacy at the UN entails, and more generally, how key political problems get muffled in global debates.

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With liberty and justice for some - democratic rights as a casualty of the global war on terror

This thesis seeks to address the relationship between States of Exception and the Quality of Demo... more This thesis seeks to address the relationship between States of Exception and the Quality of Democracy in Liberal Democratic States. The central argument is that States of Exception, embodied by counter-terror legislation, have an inverse causal effect on the Quality of Democracy, as operationalized through democracy indices. A linear regression is used to test 14 sub-hypothesis that eventually provide evidence supporting the main argument. Although the study cannot prove causality, it does show a significant correlation between counter-terror legislation and the quality of democracy in nearly all test countries. This thesis contributes a novel methodological approach to the theory of States of Exception and provides new theoretical backing to the extant literature on democratic backsliding.

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