Abstract
66.4509 ABDULLAH, Walid Jumblatt —
This article analyzes the reasons for the Malay community's seeming support for the People's Action Party (PAP) government in Singapore, despite online discontent expressed towards the party immediately prior to the elections. The article makes three main arguments: (1) that the reasons explaining the community's support for PAP are similar to other Singaporeans, such as the death of founding leader Lee Kuan Yew and the risk-averse nature of the electorate; (2) that institutional impediments exist with regard to the community that heavily favor the government; and (3) that the main opposition party, the Workers' Party, has not been able to present itself as a viable alternative to PAP for the community in terms of either quality of candidates or ideas for governance. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4510 ACHILOV, Dilshod —
How do post-Soviet Central Asian citizens negotiate the tensions between partaking in and abstaining from elite-challenging collective protests? By analyzing cross-national attitudes in two Central Asian states, this article (1) systematically analyzes the variation in collective protests by testing rival macro-, meso-, and micro-level theories; (2) reintroduces a conceptual and empirical distinction between low-risk and high-risk collective protests; and (3) examines the conditions under which individuals participate in two distinct types of elite-challenging collective actions. Three conclusions are reached: (1) the evidence suggests that nuanced consideration of multi-level theoretical perspectives is necessary to explain contingencies of elite-challenging actions. (2) Economic grievances and resource mobilization emerge as leading factors driving both low-risk and high-risk protests. (3) Islamic religiosity and social networking robustly predict participation in high-risk collective action. [R, abr.]
66.4511 AHLER, Douglas J.; CITRIN, Jack; LENZ, Gabriel S. —
To improve representation and alleviate polarization among US lawmakers, many have promoted open primaries — allowing voters to choose candidates from any party — but the evidence that this reform works is mixed. To determine whether open primaries lead voters to choose ideologically proximate candidates, we conducted a statewide experiment just before California's 2012 primaries, the first conducted under a new top-two format. We find that voters failed to distinguish moderate and extreme candidates. As a consequence, voters actually chose more ideologically distant candidates on the new ballot, and the reform failed to improve the fortunes of moderate congressional and state senate candidates. [R]
66.4512 AÏT-AOUDIA, Myriam —
Based on the Algerian case in 1988, this paper analyzes the process by which riots develop into political crisis through the politicization of multisector rallies. This political crisis produces an unprecedented liberalization of the authoritarian regime. The paper focuses on the political and contentious dimension of these events, showing first that they cannot be labeled as “political”, as it were “from above”, often on the basis of an ex post analysis. Instead, one has to be attentive to the struggles for a legitimate definition of the event, and recreate the process by which a definition tends to impose itself on all the protagonists, sweeping all competing categorizations aside. Second, articulating a political judgment about an event is not taken for granted, nor is this political interpretation destined for success. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4079]
66.4513 AKARCA, Ali T. —
The results of Turkey's June and November 2015 parliamentary elections are put in perspective in light of economic voting literature and observed historical patterns. Usual and unusual factors that played roles in these elections are identified and their relative importance is assessed. It appears that a higher than usual number of strategic votes cast due to special circumstances were essentially behind the outcomes of both of these elections. The results also show that voters have consolidated in four camps more firmly than ever before and that the AK Party once more came close to a fifty percent vote-share, which is the long-run potential for conservative parties. [R]
66.4514 ALDRICH, John H.; LEE, Daniel J. —
Duverger's Law suggests that two parties will dominate under first-past-the-post (FPTP) within an electoral district, but the law does not necessarily establish two-party competition at the national level. The US is unique among FPTP countries in having the only durable and nearly pure, two-party system. We answer two questions. First, what contributes to the same two parties competing in districts all across the country and at different levels of office? Second, why is the US two-party system so durable over time, dominated by the same two parties? “Why two parties?” We propose the APP: ambition, the presidency, and policy. [R, abr.]
66.4515 ALDUY, Cécile —
The ascent of Marine Le Pen to the leadership of the Front national in 2011 represented a double shift in the history of the party: on the one hand, a renewing of the discourse, the leadership and the image of the FN; on the other, a clearly ascendant electoral momentum. Are the two things connected? The confrontation between the analysis of her speeches and a survey of the motivations of the FN voters indicates a shift rightward of the electorate rather than an ideological repositioning of the party. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4516 ALFIERI, Sara, et al. —
Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) young people are an emerging at-risk-of-social exclusion group in contemporary society. This research investigates NEETs' socio-demographic characteristics and some variables crucial in the transition to adulthood: perceptions about the future job opportunities, their desire to start a family, perceptions about the future, trust in the institutions and social participation. We compare NEET and non-NEET young people on these variables to understand the determinants of their political and social commitment. Results on a study led to 8112 Italians, aged between 19–29, show that NEETs and non-NEETs are not evenly distributed in the country and by gender. [R, abr.]
66.4517 ALPTEKIN, Hüseyin —
This article argues that the economic context of the June and November general elections differed to a great extent. While the economy was central in the June elections, its prominence was shadowed in November by rising security concerns. Second, while Turkey's macroeconomic indicators were pretty unpromising prior to the June elections, increasing growth figures before November, with the help of the AK Party's presentation of it, revived the public's optimism about the AK Party's economic performance. Third, in the June elections, the opposition parties plied the electorate with positive economic messages. The AK Party avoided this trend in June but joined the populist camp after seeing the voters' positive reactions to economic promises. [R, abr.]
66.4518 ALT, James E.; LASSEN, David D. —
Competence and ultimately vote economically? Since politically relevant information is often conveyed by actors with incentives to influence voter perceptions, the credibility of information sources can vary significantly. This article randomly varies whether voters receive an aggregate unemployment forecast from the central bank, government or main opposition party using a survey experiment in Denmark linked to detailed panel data. We find that politically sophisticated voters discern differences in institutional credibility and the political cost of the signal and update their unemployment expectations accordingly. Despite failing to differentiate political costs, unsophisticated voters still substantially update their expectations. However, while sophisticated voters intend to engage in substantial prospective economic voting, unsophisticated voters do not relate their new unemployment expectations to their vote intention. [R]
66.4519 ANCIANO, Fiona —
This article examines the concept of non-racialism primarily through the lens of South Africa's largest political opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), but relates its approach to that of the African National Congress (ANC). How has the DA conceptualized and instrumentalized the vision of non-racialism, historically and in post-apartheid South Africa? This article argues that neither the DA nor the ANC has been able to do so coherently. The idea of non-racialism is a fracture that deeply divides both parties; this division is also one that originated historically for both parties. The article concludes that there is a clear shift in how the DA envisaged non-racialism during apartheid and how the party instrumentalizes the concept today. [R, abr.]
66.4520 ANDRÉ, Audrey; DEPAUW, Sam —
The effect of party organization on performance is one of the most enduring debates about political parties. The conventional wisdom regarding the growing irrelevance of grassroots activity in the age of television has been increasingly challenged by studies of constituency parties' efforts to mobilize likely supporters on election day. Few studies, however, have looked at the electoral impact of grassroots activity outside plurality systems. In particular, we present a most intriguing case study — one where voting is compulsory and parties' efforts at mobilization likely superfluous. Using new and detailed data on grassroots party activity in Flanders, we demonstrate that grassroots activity has a positive and significant effect on parties' vote-share in the 2012 local elections, even after controlling for national tides and performance in the previous election. [R, abr.]
66.4521 ANGERBRANDT, Henrik —
This article explores how ethnoreligious conflict over boundaries and territoriality involves a politics of scale, that is, how positions and demands are framed by actors according to, for instance, local, regional, and national scales. The analysis focuses on how Muslim actors in a conflict in Kaduna State in Nigeria frame a regional, northern Nigerian identity that varies in content and form depending on the scalar context in which communal conflict is placed with regional and national politics yielding different identifications. [R]
66.4522 ATENG, Mathias Awonnatey; ABAZAAMI, Joseph —
CSOs in the Northern Region of Ghana have played significant roles in peace-building processes, resulting in the peaceful settlement of disputes. This paper examines the factors that have facilitated the successful entry of CSOs in peace-building processes in northern Ghana. Employing qualitative and quantitative research approaches, the study reveals that the neutrality and impartiality of CSOs have made conflicting parties to trust their work. Again, the capacity of CSOs, method of delivery and visibility has made their work more acceptable by all. Finally, the idea of coordination and networking has shaped the concept of peacebuilding and the avoidance of the duplication of efforts. This research concludes that CSOs are more recognized, respected and preferred by communities experiencing conflicts, than state institutions. [R]
66.4523 AUDEMARD, Julien; GOUARD, David —
The variable of ethnicity is rarely used for explaining electoral participation. When they do so, social surveys usually underline the fact that belonging to ethnic minorities is a factor of electoral abstention. This article analyzes the contrary hypothesis: how can ethnicity be a factor of electoral participation? To answer this question, the article is based on a study of the electoral participation of 10,475 voters from 10 voting stations of the city of Montpellier during French 2012 presidential and legislative elections. From the study of voting lists and by crossing this information with census data of INSEE, we have estimated the impact of ethnicity on electoral participation. [R, abr.]
66.4524 AUDETTE, Andre P.; WEAVER, Christopher L. —
Using data from the National Congregations Study, a representative sample of American congregations, we examine the impact of politicization on church membership rates at the congregational level. Employing ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and cross-lagged structural equation models, we show that more politically active congregations were more likely to see growth in membership over time. Using data from the General Social Survey, we also offer evidence that partisans on both ends of the political spectrum are more likely to engage in religious switching than independents, suggesting that those joining new congregations may be politically motivated. Thus, while political activity may cost religions adherents at the aggregate level, politicization benefits individual churches by attracting members from a politically motivated niche market, signifying that political outreach can be an effective strategy for congregations. [R, abr.]
66.4525 AUGHEY, Arthur; GORMLEY-HEENAN, Cathy —
This article [examines] the relationship between ideas and interests in British party politics, in particular that relationship within Conservative and Unionist politics. It examines a way of capturing paradoxical aspects of ideological thinking — that it is self-chosen or the result of a changing perspective and yet also apparently natural or in Conservative terms, “common sense”. It explores the intellectual lineage of “elective affinity” and assesses its value for understanding how political identities not only endure but also how those identities change. It gives some substance to that understanding by viewing through that lens of elective affinity the association between Conservatives and Ulster Unionists in its historical, ideological and institutional contexts. [R]
66.4526 AYBAK, Tunç —
Denial of the crimes committed against the Armenians during the late Ottoman Empire has been a permanent feature of modern Turkish diplomatic statecraft, which stems from Turkey's geopolitical anxieties closely tied with the nation-building process in the Anatolian lands at the expense of other non-Turkish and non-Muslim minorities. This article examines the current discursive debates and diplomatic statecraft in the construction of the denial policies of the Turkish state. Even though Turkey has now departed from collective amnesia and the Armenian genocide has been opened up to public debate, the denial policy has now become an integral part of the Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party's neo-Ottomanist grand strategy and its regional ambitions. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4784]
66.4527 BACHMANN, Klaus —
Since its election victory in the Autumn of 2015, the Law and Justice party has been undoing the Third Republic's system of institutions with revolutionary élan. Many observers suspect that this is an expression of greater social upheavals. But these are neither the result of social injustices since 1989, nor a radical right-wing revolt on the part of the youth or a belated reckoning with the communist People's Republic. Rather, the controversy feeds primarily on the conflict between town and country, between a small vanguard of post-materialist individualists in the major cities and a larger layer of collectivist and materialistic thinking traditionalists. Both claim to represent the nation. The majority is silent. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4528 BÄCK, Hanna; DEBUS, Marc; KLÜVER, Heike —
How do political parties arrive at their policy positions? We conceptualize position-formation in federalist countries as an intra-party bargaining process in which subnational parties compete with each other in an attempt to get their own positions into their national party manifesto. Drawing on theories about inter-party bargaining over ministerial portfolios, we hypothesize that the bargaining success of subnational parties depends on their parliamentary strength. We evaluate our hypotheses based on a comprehensive dataset on policy positions of national and subnational parties in Germany from 1990 until 2009. Our results show that German subnational parties powerful in the Bundesrat are particularly successful in shaping the manifesto of their national party. [R, abr.]
66.4529 BAKKAER SIMONSEN, Kristina —
This article examines the perceived discrimination of immigrants — a group for whom experiences of discrimination can be damaging for their long-term commitment and identification with the national core group. Taking its point of departure in the literature on national identity, the article argues that perceived discrimination should be strongest among immigrants in host national societies with an exclusive self-image. This hypothesis is examined by use of multilevel regressions on cross-national survey data from 18 Western European countries. It is found that where exclusive attitudes are widespread in the host population, the percentage of immigrants who perceive themselves to be part of a group discriminated against is significantly greater, all else being equal. [R, abr.]
66.4530 BAKKER, Bert N.; ROODUIJN, Matthijs; SCHUMACHER, Gijs —
What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Germany's Left Party? Populist parties have as a common denominator that they employ an anti-establishment message, which they combine with some “host” ideology. Building on the congruency model of political preference, it is to be expected that a voter's personality should match with the message and position of his or her party. This article theorizes that a low score on the personality trait “Agreeableness” matches the anti-establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. Evidence is found for this hypothesis in the US, the Netherlands and Germany. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account. [R, abr.]
66.4531 BAL, Ihsan —
As the successor of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turley has found itself the constant target of terrorism ever since the 1960s. Even though Turkey has had to deal with a variety of terrorist groups to varying degrees at various periods throughout its history, it is possible to single out the PKK as the most resistant, longest-lasting, and most destructive of them all. [R]
66.4532 BALCI, Şükrü; BEKIROĞLU, Onur —
The November 2015 snap elections mark a lost opportunity for Turkey to form a coalition government between the AK Party and other potential partners. The failure resulted from many factors — [especially] a significant resurgence in PKK terrorism, which led to increasing demands for stability, and the inability of the coalition partners to come to an agreement. The MHP occupied a power position of sorts, following the June elections, in which it won 16 percent of the vote. Its failure to capitalize on this power is due in part to its perception as a “Nay-Sayer”, its static position on the Kurdish issue, which it views from a nationalist, security perspective, and its inability to win the hearts and minds of the Turkish constituency through its campaign messages. [R]
66.4533 BALDERACCHI, Claudio —
The participatory innovations of the last few decades, particularly in Latin America, seem to suggest that the establishment of more participatory democracies is possible. However, limitations have characterized important participatory experiences. While the Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and Venezuelan attempts to promote popular participation have produced both positive and negative effects, some of these participatory experiences' limitations are useful to highlight more general problems and contradictions that seem to be inherently associated with the establishment of participatory democracy in poorly functioning liberal democracies and in exclusionary and unequal societies. This analysis suggests that, paradoxically, the establishment of effective and inclusive participatory institutions may be less feasible where participatory mechanisms appear, at first glance, as most needed and promising. [R]
66.4534 BALKIR, Canan; EYLEMER, Sedef —
The article compares the EU accession discourses, during the 2002, 2007 and 2011 elections, of Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) with those of the two main opposition parties, the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), tracking the continuities and shifts in their discourses. In the light of J. Habermas's distinction between pragmatic, ethical and moral justifications, the discourses are analyzed on the basis of three explanatory logics — interests, rights and identity — by means of a theoretically guided qualitative content-analysis of the election manifestos of these three political parties. These logics, emerging and shifting in line with periodical dynamics, have been instrumental to varying degrees in the discourses of Turkey's political elites. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4880]
66.4535 BARANOVITCH, Nimrod —
In May 2011, Inner Mongolia experienced the most serious ethnic unrest in the region for 30 years. I explore the broader context that led to the eruption of the protests, with a particular emphasis on environmental issues. I explain why environmental issues occupied such a prominent position in the protests, and how these issues were connected to ethnicity. After discussing the material and practical implications of grassland degradation for Mongolian herders, I analyze the symbolic implications of this environmental crisis for the Mongolian educated elite, who have linked environmental issues to ethnic politics and identity. [R abr.]
66.4536 BATURO, Alexander; MIKHAYLOV, Slava —
Examining the careers of democratic heads of state and government from 1960–2010, we find that one in every seven turns to the private sector after office. Distinguishing between the factors that attract leaders to business and those that render leaders attractive, we find that the global CEO compensation rates, cultural norms, having served in office in Anglo-Saxon countries as well as their personal background matter. We also find that certain economic outcomes and policies in office such as economic growth and reduction in state spending are often associated with post-tenure business careers. We do not find evidence, however, that leaders are able to implement policies with future careers in mind, which would in turn raise concerns over accountability. [R]
66.4537 BAVEREZ, Nicolas —
Contrary to other democracies, French liberalism is not a common ideal shared by government parties. It is diabolized and described as neoliberalism in order to reduce it to the supremacy of the market, the systematic hostility of the State, and the refusal of all forms of solidarity, which in turn is linked to conservatism and even reactionism. This is a profound and historic mistake in the age of globalization, especially given the challenges France is currently facing. Beyond being a historical paradox, therefore, France's systematic denunciation of liberalism explains not only its incapacity to adapt itself to economic and geopolitical change, but also its decline since the last quarter of the 20th c.
66.4538 BECKER, Amy B.; COPELAND, Lauren —
We test whether connective use of social media mobilizes individuals to engage in political consumerism. Analyzing data from a 2013 survey of LGBT adults (N = 1,197), we find that those who use social media for connective activities, (e.g., to meet new LGBT friends, discuss LGBT issues), are significantly more likely to engage in boycotts or buycotts to promote equality. We find significant interactions between connective social media use and political interest. Specifically, connective social media use mobilizes people with low levels of political interest to participate and reinforces the likelihood that people with high levels of political interest participate. [R]
66.4539 BERGOUNIOUX, Alain —
The current condition of the French Socialist Party is disturbing. Historically, the party has certainly been through various ups and downs and crises that have been at the brim of becoming fatal. Today, however, it is the very foundations of the party's historical existence that are at stake. One of the paradoxes related to the French Socialist Party is that its values and search for a balanced policy reflect some of France's and Europe's problems. A closer look at the party's historical background, its struggle to attain unification and define itself in opposition to the communist party sheds light upon current events and its worrisome future.
66.4540 BEVAN, Shaun; JENNINGS, Will; WLEZIEN, Christopher —
Scholars characterize decision-making in the EU as increasingly dispersed across different levels of political authority. This has implications for political representation. Yet, little is known about whether and how public opinion differs across levels of governance. In this article, we consider evaluations of issue priorities. Specifically, we use data from the Eurobarometer to evaluate the degree of correspondence between issues that citizens consider important to them personally, to their country and to the EU. We find generally weak relationships between these different levels, which suggests national issue priorities are distinct from both personal and EU priorities. The results indicate that more careful research is needed to understand how public priorities at different levels affect politics and policy in the EU. [R]
66.4541 BJARNEGÅRD, Elin; ZETTERBERG, Pär —
This article investigates the dynamics that gender quota reforms create within and between government and opposition parties in electoral authoritarian dominant-party states. A dominant-party state regularly holds relatively competitive elections, but the political playing field is skewed in favor of the government party. We investigate the circumstances [in] which gender quotas' goal of furthering political gender equality within political parties can be reconciled with parties' electoral concerns. We address these issues by analyzing the implementation of reserved seats by the three largest parties in the dominant-party state of Tanzania. The empirical analysis suggests that the uneven playing field leaves an imprint on the specific priorities parties make when implementing candidate-selection reforms. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4135]
66.4542 BO, Caterina; NAVIA, Patricio —
This article introduces the explanations that are likely to account for the presence of women in elected offices. Based on them, we analyze the evolution of women in elected office in Chile between the return of democracy in 1989 and 2009. We use data from 17 elections and 37,487 candidates? 19.4 percent of them were women. And only 16.3 percent of the 12,161 candidates elected to either the legislature or local governments were women. The number of female candidates and their success rate has increased, especially in local elections. Moreover, we show that in elections with lower levels of proportionality — as mayors, deputies and senators — there are fewer female candidates and winners. Left-wing parties present more female candidates, whereas right-wing parties manage to get a higher rate of their female candidates elected. Finally, we show that the election of Michelle Bachelet as Chile's first woman president did not have an impact on the number of female candidates or on their electoral success in the municipal elections of 2008 or the legislative elections of 2009. Institutional variables account for the higher number of female candidates in more proportional elections as well as their higher success rate both in local elections with higher proportional representation. [R]
66.4543 BOHAS, Alexandre —
This article examines the transnational politics of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the trade association of Hollywood major studios, from the viewpoint of the neopluralist. The MPA aims at stopping copyright violations by framing materially and discursively markets. For this reason, it maintains a worldwide spectrum of relations with other business associations, workers of the motion picture industries and governments. These relationships serve the MPA in a multitude of ways, from intergovernmental negotiations and litigations to anti-copyright violation efforts in association with law enforcement. Although the MPA has acquired an authoritative position beyond audiovisual sectors, its policy remains unachieved owing to pluralizing world spheres. [R, abr.]
66.4544 BO NAK, Büke —
While Europeanization of civil society in Turkey has received considerable attention, there has been much less interest in how environmental organizations, as key civil society actors, have been affected by Europeanization/de-Europeanization dynamics. Interviews with civil society representatives and EU and Turkish policy-makers indicate that the EU impact on environmental organizations has been ambivalent, and that Europeanization dynamics are intertwined with the adverse consequences of these processes. While Turkey's EU candidacy has empowered civil society through both EU-ization and Europeanization, there has also been a remarkable rise of skepticism towards the EU's civil society strategy and the EU has lost its attractiveness as a normative context in environmental debates. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4880]
66.4545 BRAUN, Robert —
This article hypothesizes that minority groups are more likely to protect persecuted groups during episodes of mass killing. The author builds a geocoded dataset of Jewish evasion and church communities in the Netherlands during the Holocaust to test this hypothesis. Spatial regression models of 93 percent of all Dutch Jews demonstrate a robust and positive correlation between the proximity to minority churches and evasion. While proximity to Catholic churches increased evasion in dominantly Protestant regions, proximity to Protestant churches had the same effect in Catholic parts of the country. This suggests that it is the local configuration of civil society that produces collective networks of assistance to threatened neighbors. [R, abr.]
66.4546 BRUCKMILLER, Aaron; SCHOLL, Franziska —
With the 2012–2015 Blockupy protests, the outrage over austerity politics prevalent in southern European countries spilled over to Germany. Following the Occupy movement, Blockupy in Frankfurt-am-Main managed to mobilize several thousand people to protest austerity policies over several years. The protest peaked at the opening of the new building of the European Central Bank in 2015, allowing Blockupy to establish itself as an actor able to mobilize protesters from different European countries. In Greece, Syriza's election success gave a short-term boost to left-leaning forces in Europe. But after signing the third austerity package, the European left is at an important turning point. The contribution describes the development of the Blockupy protests and examines its successful mobilization. Moreover, the authors discuss possible future developments, especially in relation to the German left. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4199]
66.4547 BRUMLIK, Michaùm —
Rightist ideologies are currently on the rise in Europe, as revealed by the good results of nationalistic movements and right-wing, populist political parties. Yet, the author concludes that the new right's political foundations lie in the old rightist mentality. He has highlighted the politicization of the environment in the frame of the emergence of a “Eurasian” ideology as well as the sacralization of politics, or, in other words, an orientation towards the transcendent.
66.4548 BRUNETEAU, Bernard —
The interpretation of Islamism as a “third totalitarianism” belongs without doubt to the liberal anti-totalitarian tradition. This interpretation can easily become the subject of political instrumentalization and leaves itself wide open to criticism in terms of the anachronistic nature of convergences between the two phenomena. It is, however, necessary to recall that communism and Nazism were political religions that owed their success to, among other things, a promise of salvation by offering some knowledge, a definition of Evil, and a fraternal community horizon. It is therefore significant that the Islamist's matrix thought has evolved in the same context of anomy as European totalitarian movements. Both react in similar ways by promoting an alternative order to Western modernity.
66.4549 BUCHOLC, Marta; KOMORNIK, Maciej —
In Poland, the party Law and Justice (PiS) has amended the Constitutional Court Act. In doing so, it has reduced the Constitutional Court's authority and paralyzed the pronouncement of judgments. As a result, a dispute has ensued over the relationship between legislature and judiciary and escalated into a veritable constitutional crisis. In essence, the president, the government, and the PiS majority faction in the Sejm have a different understanding of separation of powers, one based on a new definition of sovereignty, the source of which is not the political whole, the demos, but the “nation”. This thinking feeds on a conservative utopia. In the PiS understanding of the law, traditions from the interwar era and the Polish People's Republic are detectable. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4550 BUDAK, Ceren; GOEL, Sharad; RAO, Justin M. —
Through a combination of machine-learning and crowdsourcing techniques, we investigate the selection and framing of political issues in fifteen major US news outlets. Starting with 803,146 news stories published over twelve months, we first used supervised learning algorithms to identify the 14 percent of articles pertaining to political events. We then recruited 749 online human judges to classify a random subset of 10,502 of these political articles according to topic and ideological position. Our analysis yields an ideological ordering of outlets consistent with prior work. However, news outlets are considerably more similar than generally believed. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4283]
66.4551 BULLEY, Dan —
This article demonstrates how the concept of counter-conducts helps us understand Occupy by directing attention to the correlation between the way advanced liberalism works to control urban spaces and the way that control is countered through Occupy's tactics. It first outlines the term counter-conducts by looking to M. Foucault's short and undeveloped theorization. [It then] examines how advanced liberalism conducts conduct through the use of urban space, concentrating on London which comes to form a space of and for the mobility and circulation of goods, people and ideas. Occupy's tactics directly confront and counter such movement while engaging in its own forms of counter-circulation and (im)mobility. The third section examines how advanced liberal techniques have increasingly come to use a particular, heavily instrumentalized understanding of community in order to divide and control urban populations. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4740]
66.4552 BYMAN, Daniel —
The author examines the terrorism threat that jihadist foreign fighters pose to the US and Europe. He argues that the danger, while quite real, is at times exaggerated and that better policy can further reduce it. [R]
66.4553 ÇAKIR, Aylin Aydin; EKERCIOĞLU, Eser —
This study explains whether, and to what extent, the country's level of democracy moderates the impact of political awareness on public confidence in the judiciary. This study uses hierarchical linear models to analyze the interaction between individual and country-level factors by using the World Values Survey (2005–2009) data for 49 countries and various other data sources. Our empirical results show that in advanced democracies political awareness variables like education and political participation have a positive impact on public confidence in the judiciary, whereas in countries with weak levels of democracy higher political awareness leads to increased cynicism about the judiciary. These results suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to explain confidence in the judiciary is not possible when we are dealing with a wide range of societies that vary in terms of many characteristics. [R, abr.]
66.4554 CAMOBRECO, John —
Over the last several decades, scholars have noted a strengthening link between ideology and party identification among the public, but the causal direction of this phenomenon remains contested. The ideological realignment thesis holds that ideology now strongly influences party identification, but this position conflicts with literature suggesting that party identification remains the primary causal force behind most important political attitudes. This study examines the causal forces at work between ideology and party identification by focusing on the distinction between symbolic and operational ideology. The methodology involves the use of panel data that span several decades, and structural equation modeling. The findings indicate that between 1982 and 1997, symbolic ideology had a strong influence party identification, but operational ideology had little effect on party identification. [R, abr.]
66.4555 ÇARKOĞLU, Ali; YILDIRIM, Kerem —
This article analyzes the two general elections in 2015 that followed the local and presidential elections a year earlier. These elections illustrate how a predominant party builds its electoral base, loses, and then recovers votes to consolidate its support base. We demonstrate geographical patterns of voting across the country to illustrate how the electoral scene shifted in less than four months. We discuss the power and limitations of performance politics as a force that shapes electoral outcomes in contexts where security concerns override concerns about economic and social policy performance. We argue that lacking or diminished influence of performance politics is inherently harmful for Turkish democracy and given the divided nature of the electorate a consensus-building approach to policy reform and constitution-writing is more likely to succeed. [R]
66.4556 CARPINELLA, Colleen M., et al. —
We predicted that vote-choice judgments rely, in part, on the sex typicality of facial cues (i.e., the degree of facial masculinity and femininity) that vary as a function of candidate gender and partisan identification. Stimuli included image pairs of winners and runners-up in the elections for the 111th US House of Representatives. In Study 1, we found that female Republican candidates who appeared relatively more feminine and male Republican candidates who looked relatively less masculine in their appearance were more likely to win their election. Democratic candidates' electoral success was not related to their sex typicality. In Study 2, we found that relatively masculine-appearing Democrats and feminineappearing Republicans were more likely to be selected in a hypothetical vote choice task. Implications for US partisan politics are discussed. [R]
66.4557 CARUANA, Nicholas J.; McGREGOR, R. Michael; STEPHENSON, Laura B. —
We build upon the comparatively modest negative partisanship literature to consider the effects of negative partisan attitudes on a range of political behaviours. There are reasons to suspect that negative and positive partisanship may have different effects; thus, accounting for the unique influence of negative attitudes is important for understanding the full effect of partisanship on political behaviour. Our results, based upon Canadian Election Study data from 2008 and 2011, reveal that, in addition to vote-choice, negative partisanship influences voter-turnout and a range of political activities, both related and unrelated to parties. These findings provide evidence of the power of the “dark side” of partisanship. [R, abr.]
66.4558 CELIS, Karen; SCHOUTEDEN, Anke; WAUTERS, Bram —
This article critically evaluates explanatory theories about how representatives, and more specifically MPs, connect with interest groups. Central to this are the crucial questions of whether these contacts are party-based or identity-based. Our analysis includes five kinds of groups: two traditional cleavage-based groups (blue-collar workers and employers) with well-established contacts between parties (respectively, social-democratic and conservative parties) and interest groups (trade unions and employers' organizations) on the one hand, and three newer groups in society (women, young people and the elderly), on the other hand. Our analysis is based on the data Partirep MP Survey, which contains information about characteristics, attitudes and behavior of regional and federal MPs in 15 European countries. [R]
66.4559 CEPALUNI, Gabriel; HIDALGO, F. Daniel —
One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CV increases inequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socio-economic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result — the opposite that predicted by the existing literature — we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle- and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. [R, abr.]
66.4560 CHANG Wen-chun —
This study investigates the role of religion in shaping the norms of citizenship from a cultural perspective for an East Asian country that exhibits fundamental differences in social contexts from Western advanced democracies. Using data drawn from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, we find that the Eastern religions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Folk Religions are important for explaining the formation of the concept of being a good citizen. This study further examines the relationships between citizenship norms and various conventional and unconventional types of political participation. The empirical results herein suggest that duty-based citizenship and engaged citizenship have significant differences in their effects on political participation. [R]
66.4561 CHIA Yeow-Tong —
This article explores the role of education, in particular citizenship education, in shaping the Singapore electorate. An understanding of the history of citizenship education helps to shed light on the contemporary political culture in Singapore. Singapore's citizenship education has consistently stressed the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, patriotism, national identity and moral values — with the goal of nation-building and legitimizing the People's Action Party state. This reflective historical piece on Singapore's educational history adds a relatively unexplored facet to the discussions on the general election 2015 results as well as Singapore's subsequent political development. The results of the 2015 general election in Singapore, seen in this light, are not so surprising, as they reflect the success of the state's citizenship education in shaping the current political culture. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4562 CHIGUDU, Simukai —
I [examine] how marginalized women in the “Global South” — particularly in Africa — interpret, experience and negotiate feminist ideas to wield political power within the context of their social and moral worlds. I focus on women's organized resistance to violence and armed conflict, known as “women's peace activism”. Using a case study in Uganda mediated by Isis Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a wide range of activists in the organization and in its network in post-conflict areas in Northern Uganda. I argue that the feminist peace discourse is most meaningful when its universal values of equity and securing the dignity of women are appropriated and re-signified through the cultural institutions and the collective memory of activists in their local settings. [R, abr.]
66.4563 CHIN, James —
The 2015 Singapore general election saw the People's Action Party (PAP) reverse the decline in support. Many writers cited as some of the key reasons for PAP's strong showing: a flight to safety, the superior PAP campaign, the personal popularity of Lee Hsien Loong, the 50 years of Singapore's Independence (SG50) feel-good factor, changes in government policies since 2011, direct government subsidies to the pioneer generation, the passing of Lee Kuan Yew, and the mainstream media's attack on the credibility of the opposition. I offer an additional explanation: the policies laid down after Singapore's independence and some key cultural traits. The policy of depoliticization led to the creation of a social contract under which political liberties were voluntarily sacrificed in return for economic growth and prosperity. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4564 CHIPKIN, Ivor —
This article explores the electoral performance of the African National Congress (ANC) to argue that there is evidence of a two-fold movement. On the one hand, the ANC is weakening as a national organization, and on the other, the ANC is strengthening as a regional party based in KwaZulu-Natal. This article explores the significance of these developments for democracy in South Africa today and, more importantly, for the integrity of the South African nation. It argues that the ANC has historically been the main mover of an inclusive (“cosmopolitan”) vision of South Africa. As it weakens and metamorphoses, what will happen to its commitment to this brand of African nationalism? [R, abr.]
66.4565 CLARKE, Harold, et al. —
Similar to a number of other right-wing populist parties in Europe, Britain's United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has experienced increased public support in recent years. Using aggregate data from monthly national surveys conducted between April 2004 and April 2014, time-series analyses demonstrate that the dynamics of UKIP support were influenced by a combination of spatial and valence issues. A spatial issue, Euroskepticism, was fundamental, with UKIP support moving in dynamic equilibrium with changing public attitudes towards EU membership. In addition, widespread anti-immigration sentiment and dissatisfaction with the performance of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government combined with the “oxygen of publicity” to propel UKIP's surge. [R, abr.]
66.4566 COSTA, Giacomo —
Neither right nor left. This seems to be the current favorite political slogan in several European countries. The weakening of the contrast between the political categories of “left” and “right” is the result of the shift of the political comprehensive horizon from an ideological frame of reference to the invocation of political passions and emotions. This does not imply per se the elimination of conflictual situations, since it can be an ideal scenario for manipulation and leadership personality cult, which jeopardize democracy. Productive dialogue can reduce these threats and thus contribute to create a more harmonious society. [R, transl.]
66.4567 CÔTÉ, Isabelle; MITCHELL, Matthew I. —
Nearly one-third of ethnic civil wars since 1945 have been “sons of the soil” (SoS) conflicts that pit indigenous populations against internal migrants. Many [such conflicts] share a common trait as they often escalate during elections. Using insights from recent fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Indonesia, the article sheds light on the causal dynamics that link elections and diverging levels of SoS conflict. It illustrates how the severing of patronage networks and the shifting balance of power towards migrants create fertile contexts for political elites to instrumentalize local grievances. Elections are thus more likely to produce violent SoS conflicts when elites (national and local) [can] mobilize supporters by playing upon these grievances, often through the politicization of citizenship and/or the ethnicization of the local sphere. [R, abr.]
66.4568 CRAWFORD, Ewan —
In 1999, a devolved Scottish Parliament was established within the UK following a referendum two years earlier. The current governing party in that Parliament — the SNP — held a referendum on Scottish independence in September 2014, which resulted in a decision to stay within the UK. However, during the referendum campaign promises were made by the main UK parties to transfer further power away from the British Parliament to the Scottish Parliament in the hope this would satisfy demands for greater self-government in Scotland. This paper analyzes the rhetoric of the leaders of Britain's two main political parties in an effort to detect strategies used to construct and perpetuate Britishness in the context of devolution and a threat to the British state. [R, abr.]
66.4569 CRESPIN, Michael; EDWARDS, Barry —
We use redistricting to examine the relationship between representatives and a unique group of the public: individual campaign contributors. Our primary objective is to determine what happens to the contribution behavior of representatives and donors after district boundaries shift and the geographic ties between members and donors are undone. At the member level, we use a continuous measure of district change and examine twenty years of congressional elections. We find that as the geographic constituency changes, members receive larger shares of contributions from outside their districts. At the individual donor level, we match donors and contributions to districts before and after the 2012 round of redistricting. Here, we find donors who are drawn out of districts are less likely to support their “old” representative while contributors drawn into districts are more likely to give. At both levels, we find different results for Democrats and Republicans. [R, abr.]
66.4570 DAVENPORT, Lauren D. —
The 2000 US census was the first in which respondents were permitted to self-identify with more than one race. A decade later, multiple-race identifiers have become one of the fastest-growing groups in the nation. Such broadening multiracial identification poses important political ramifications and raises questions about the future of minority group political solidarity. Yet we know little about the opinions of multiple-race identifiers and from where those opinions emerge. Bridging literatures in racial politics and political socialization, and drawing upon a multimethod approach, this article provides insight into the consequences of the US's increasingly blurred racial boundaries by examining the attitudes of Americans of White-Black parentage, a population whose identification was traditionally constrained by the one-drop rule. [R, abr.]
66.4571 DAVIS, Nicholas T.; DUNAWAY, Johanna L. —
We utilize a variety of data to assess the influence of elite polarization, media fragmentation, and political interest on partisan-ideological sorting. We find that sorting is consistently connected to perceptions of polarization and qualified evidence that media fragmentation is related to partisan-ideological sorting. The expansion of cable and satellite programming is positively related to sorting, but this effect is isolated to individuals highly interested in news and politics. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4283]
66.4572 DEATH, Carl —
This article argues that a “counter-conducts approach”, drawing on the work of M. Foucault, can be used to disaggregate the concept of resistance and highlight how some resistant practices work to subvert dominant ways of being. One of the features of a “counter-conducts approach” is an attention to the interpenetration of forms of power and resistance, governmentality and alternative modes of subjectification. Such an approach can be used to interpret forms of social protest in new ways, particularly in terms of the ways in which they facilitate or hinder ethical self-reflection and militant lives. Examples are provided from contemporary South Africa, specifically the Occupy Umlazi protest and a township youth movement known as “izikhothane” or pexing. In very different ways these protests are public assertions that “we are not like that”. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4740]
66.4573 DeSANTE, Christopher D.; PERRY, Brittany N. —
Previous work has shown that context influences the political participation rates of certain minority groups. However, few have tested exactly what drives this relationship. In this article, we assess one possible mechanism: the effect of co-ethnic population size on the acquisition of political knowledge. Our argument is that ethnic context helps condition information acquisition among co-ethnics, which, in turn, affects political engagement. Focusing on Latinos, we show that co-ethnic population size in a county matters and importantly, that as the Latino population increases, political information gaps between citizens and non-citizens decrease considerably. Finally, we show similar results regarding levels of political interest and discuss how both knowledge and interest may condition behavior. [R]
66.4574 DETTERBECK, Klaus —
German parties have been characterized by strong vertical linkages between party levels, but recent changes in the German federal system and the territorialization of the party system have posed severe challenges to this organizational model. This article looks at party responses from two different theoretical perspectives. Rational choice institutionalism would predict rapid adaptation to a new political environment resulting in a significant increase of autonomy of the Land branches. Historical institutionalism, however, would expect more piecemeal party reforms and a good deal of organizational inertia. Studying the degree of vertical integration and sub-national party autonomy in the major German parties before and after re-unification, the article finds evidence for both theoretical approaches: Land parties more frequently use their formal organizational competences. Yet, many incentives [remain] for German parties to organize as integrated multi-level organizations. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4358]
66.4575 DÉZÉ, Alexandre —
While we seem now to have tremendous knowledge about the Front national, certain features of the party have been little studied so far. Such is the case for the organizational structure of the party. Yet, it is essential to grasp the structural dimension of the Front national phenomenon, not only to understand the functioning of the party, but also to assess its renewing — often more claimed than verified — since the election of Marine Le Pen as president in January 2011. Four features are examined more closely here: the organization chart of the NF, the internal operating logics of the party, its strategy for organizational development, its active members (cadres and grassroots). The article [considers] whether, in light of these features, it is possible to refer to a “new” NF. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4576 DOMONKOS, Stefan —
Using multi-level modeling, this study investigates the determinants of public opinion on personal income taxation (PIT) in Central and Eastern European countries. The analysis finds that socio-economic and demographic variables, such as household income, occupational social class, and age, are important in determining PIT preferences. However, beliefs about fairness and perceptions of corruption also play a significant role. Support for progressive taxation decreases with the acceptance of income differences as a reward for talent and effort. Also, distrust of the legal system and a conviction that tax authorities treat certain people more favorably than others increase support for progressive taxation, although this latter effect is constrained to the less affluent. These results indicate that progressive PIT might be understood by the public as a corrective measure vis-à-vis inequalities arising due to corruption. [R, abr.]
66.4577 DONNELLY, Michael J. —
This article addresses an understudied question in the comparative political economy of migration. How have trade unions shaped the attitudes of their members toward immigration? Unions are at the core of left-wing politics in most European countries, and support for immigration is usually a left-wing position. However, many of the core constituents of unions are those whose interests are most likely to be adversely affected by an increase in the supply of labor. The article shows that the pattern of European trade union leaders becoming supportive of open immigration policies has solidified over the past decade. It then provides evidence that this rhetoric has shaped the attitudes of union members and that the effect has become stronger over time. [R, abr.]
66.4578 DONOFRIO, Andrea; FUENTES, Juan Francisco —
This article studies the evolution of the concept of totalitarianism in Italy from its appearance in 1923. From that moment on, the concept went over different historical periods marked by the national as well as the international context, mainly related to fascism until 1945 and after with the cold war and its changing intensity. It is surprising that Italy stayed in general so far from the so called “totalitarian paradigm”, i.e., the leading uses and meanings in the Western world, particularly during the Cold War. The article shows the relative uniqueness of the concept in the Italian political discourse throughout its historical evolution and the keys that explain this “particular history”. [R]
66.4579 DÖRNER, Andreas; VOGT, Ludgera —
The “Heute Show” (broadcast on ZDF, a public-service television broadcaster) is a satirical news show that has gained great attention within the political public sphere of Germany over the last couple of years. The show reaches a broad public and especially appeals to a younger audience. It has successfully established a new kind of discourse in German political culture. This article focuses on the show's characteristics, lying between the genres of comedy and political satire. On the one hand the studio interviews offer politicians a stage for presenting themselves as sympathetic, self-ironical and popular individuals. On the other hand, the main strategy of the show is to criticize political actors for individual weak- nesses while political issues and discussions receive less attention. [R, abr.]
66.4580 DROZYNSKI, Charles —
This article is based on M. Foucault's theories on “heterotopias” and “analytical spaces”. It explores conduct and counter-conduct in spatial terms in the environment of Soviet reality in Poland, concentrating on the city of Nowa Huta. It explores [how] the principle of creating fluid and irregulated heterotopias worked in the framework of a regimented and structured architectural language of the Soviet influence. It investigates the political and architectural situation of the Eastern bloc in the 20th c. and Nowa Huta in particular as an example of typical Soviet urban planning. It also analyzes examples of ways that Polish people (particularly those of Nowa Huta) engaged in counter-conduct. This analysis focuses on an architectural example that fostered countering the conduct of the regime: the church of the Lord's Ark. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4740]
66.4581 DUFIEF, Élise —
Throughout the world, electoral processes were originally designed and promoted as the leading tool of democracy. These processes now reflect complex power hierarchies and serve multiple or even contradictory goals. This article shows how handily politicians in Ethiopia and Uganda manage relationships with international stakeholders during the electoral process. In one hand, officials and politicians demonstrate some signs of democracy, such as organizing elections and convoking election observers. On the other hand, they use these “democratic” resources to strengthen their control over the political sphere “democratic” resources to strengthen their control over the political sphere and to maintain power despite electoral term limits. In this, the tool that is supposed to open national political space actually helps close it. [R]
66.4582 EHRHARD, Thomas —
Since 2012, the electoral results of the French Front national have shown an ascending electoral momentum, but can it win? The paper studies the electoral rise of the party through the determinants of its victories within the electoral system of the Fifth Republic, and questions the future of the existing party system in view of the growing influence of the NF. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4583 ETE, Hatem; ALTUNOĞLU, Mustafa; DALAY, Galip —
The Justice and Development Party's (AKP) more than 13 years rule has ushered in a debate as to whether the AK Party has become a “dominant party” and if so, whether Turkey is experiencing a new type of party system, a dominant-party system. In this article, we first attempt to denote the terms “dominant party” and “dominant-party system”, and to shed light on the distinction between these two terms by drawing on the works of Duverger, Sartori, Pempel, and Greene. This article then analyzes Turkey's experience under the AK Party to determine whether it can aptly be categorized as a “dominant party”, and Turkey as having a “dominant-party system.” [R, abr.]
66.4584 EVANS, Geoffrey; MELLON, Jon —
Opinions are divided on whether the Conservatives or Labour need to worry most about UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the 2015 General Election. How do we reconcile evidence of substantial levels of UKIP support among traditional working class voters, and in Labour constituencies, with evidence that UKIP voters report voting Conservative in 2010? We resolve this implicit contradiction using long-term panel data to examine the sequencing of vote-switching from Labour to UKIP. We argue that Labour's move to the “liberal consensus” on the EU and immigration led to many of their core voters defecting before UKIP were an effective political presence. We show that not only is the working-class basis of UKIP overstated but the party is mainly attracting disaffected former Labour voters from the Conservatives and elsewhere. [R, abr.] [See also Abstr. 66.4597, 4689]
66.4585 EVANS, Matthew; JEFFRIES, Lesley —
We report on a corpus-based study of the lexical item “choice”. The current project investigates the use of “choice” in British general election manifestos between 1900 and 2010. We first of all carry out a quantitative study of the use of “choice” by the three main UK political parties across this time period, before undertaking a qualitative study of the use of the word in context. Our approach is informed by work in lexical meaning and critical stylistics, and demonstrates how ‘choice’ has taken on new semantic meanings in a political context. [R]
66.4586 EVERATT, David —
The article gives a sense of the fluidity and unpredictability of South Africa's political life. The author pits himself against those who argue that the loyalties of the South African electorate are fixed, driven more by racial identity than an evaluation of party performance. Through fine-grained analysis of ward voting, he shows that party allegiances in South Africa are much more flexible than many analysts commonly assume, and that the support the ANC has commanded, especially in urban South Africa and among the middle classes, is more contested that appears at first glance. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4418]
66.4587 EYAL, Hadas —
This original quantitative comparison of 50 Israeli NGOs examined two main issues: the impact of technology on the ability of organizations to achieve mass media and political success and whether some groups are better positioned than others to exploit technology to their advantage. A theoretical concept labeled digital fit was introduced and put to a statistical test using data from a survey of 50 NGO leaders and a survey of 15 key politicians who were asked to rank the political impact of organizations they are familiar with from relevant parliamentary committees they are members of. [R, abr.]
66.4588 FARES, Diego —
What vision of politics has Pope Francis brought forth and how does he express it? At all events, the Pope's second speech at the World Meeting of Popular Movements, taking place in Bolivia, has raised several questions amongst commentators and journalists. Was it a “conflicting message” in favor of the poor? Should it be considered as a “manifesto”, couched in “apocalyptic” and “utopian” terms, addressed to emotionality and not to reason? Or rather, can it be considered as a “catechetical event”, through which the Holy Father has reached the hearts of those who work for the collective good, illuminating them with the Church's social doctrine, preached with courage and passion? [R, transl.]
66.4589 FASANO, Luciano M.; SEDDONE, Antonella —
This article examines the promotion of open and direct procedures for selecting party leaders by focusing on the case of Italy. These inclusive procedures are presented as adaptive strategies adopted by political parties to deal with the deep-rooted anti-party sentiments that are spreading among citizens, and to enable them to re-connect with their own supporters, regardless of whether they are formally enrolled in the party or not. Taking the Italian Democratic Party (PD) as a case study, this article [examines] the extent to which the introduction of such inclusive methods may affect the party organization, by looking at the capacity of the party to mobilize supporters within and outside the party, and by looking at the relationship between the party and its members. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4721]
66.4590 FELDMAN, Ofer; KINOSHITA, Ken; BULL, Peter —
This paper examines how leading Japanese politicians cope with the communication problems posed during televised political interviews. Based on data gathered during the year 2012–2013, the paper replicates and modifies the Theory of Equivocation to detail the responsiveness of national and local level politicians (and for comparison also of nonpoliticians) to interview questions. Its main focus is on the extent to which Japanese politicians equivocate during televised programs, and the reasons underlying this equivocation. Overall, the paper identifies the motives behind interviewees' equivocation, thereby also assesses the significance of these talk shows in the broader context of political communication in Japan. [R]
66.4591 FERNÁNDEZ-ALBERTOS, José; MANZANO, Dulce —
This article investigates the determinants of citizens' preferences for the size of the welfare state. Previous studies have shown that individuals in lower socio-economic positions express stronger support for welfare state expansion. We argue that this support declines in dual labor markets (those in which there is a significant portion of the labor force not enjoying the working conditions of standard workers) because welfare state intervention is less redistributive as social protection policies tend to benefit the well-protected sectors of the labor force. As a result, the relationship between the socio-economic attributes of individuals and their views of the welfare state is conditional on the structure of the labor market. We use evidence from the European Social Survey to substantiate empirically this claim. [R, abr.]
66.4592 FERNÁNDEZ-VÁZQUEZ, Pablo; BARBERÁ, Pablo; RIVERO, Gonzalo —
Corruption scandals have been found to have significant but mild electoral effects in the comparative literature. However, most studies have assumed that voters punish all kinds of illegal practices. This article challenges this assumption by distinguishing between two types of corruption, according to the type of welfare consequences they have for the constituency. This hypothesis is tested using data from the 2011 Spanish local elections. We exploit the abundance of corruption allegations associated with the Spanish housing boom, which generated income gains for a wide segment of the electorate in the short term. We find that voters ignore corruption when there are side benefits to it, and that punishment is only administered in those cases in which they do not receive compensation. [R]
66.4593 FERNANDO, Jude Lal —
This article examines the impact of a natural disaster on the political dynamics of an ethno-nationalist conflict. The humanitarian space generated by the 2004 tsunami could have revived the peace process between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as evidenced by the joint mechanism that was formed for rehabilitation and reconstruction. However, the impact of the tsunami carried a potential for both peace-building and escalation of the conflict. The growing securitization of South Asia, led by the US, upheld a militaristic approach and strengthened the Sri Lankan state against the LTTE. The militaristic approach to the decades-long conflict was advanced and eventually resulted in a massive war which claimed thousands of lives. The tsunami was a missed political opportunity. [R]
66.4594 FLAXMAN, Seth; GOEL, Sharad; RAO, Justin M. —
Online publishing, social networks, and web search have dramatically lowered the costs of producing, distributing, and discovering news articles. Some scholars argue that such technological changes increase exposure to diverse perspectives, while others worry that they increase ideological segregation. We examine web-browsing histories for 50,000 US-located users who regularly read online news. We find that social networks and search engines are associated with an increase in the mean ideological distance between individuals. However, somewhat counterintuitively, these same channels also are associated with an increase in an individual's exposure to material from his or her less preferred side of the political spectrum. Finally, the vast majority of online news consumption is by individuals simply visiting the home pages of their favorite, typically mainstream, news outlets, tempering the consequences of recent technological changes. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4283]
66.4595 FOA, Jérémie —
This paper questions the main elements of the notion of “protagonism” in the light of the French wars of religion: there were, during this period (1562–1598), no revolutions strictly speaking, but it is possible to investigate the numerous critical situations, the seizure of cities and massacres, and the overblown testimonies, in order to examine the participation of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation? The article queries what it was — for this is the problem — that prevented the people of the late 19th c. from fully making their mark on history and proudly embracing active participation in the multitudinous events of the wars of religion. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4079]
66.4596 FONSECA GALVIS, Ángela; SNYDER, James M., Jr; SONG, B. K. —
We study the effect of competition on media bias in the context of US newspapers in the period 1870–1910. We measure bias as the intensity with which different newspapers cover scandals. Using automatic keyword-based searches, we collected data on 121 scandals and 159 newspapers. We also collected data on the partisanship, frequency of publication, and circulation of the newspapers in our sample, as well as of the newspapers circulating in the same cities or towns as those in our sample. Our results indicate that partisan newspapers cover scandals involving the opposition party's politicians more intensely and cover scandals involving their own party's politicians more lightly. More importantly, we find evidence that competition decreases the degree of media bias. [R, abr.]
66.4597 FORD, Robert; GOODWIN, Matthew J. —
G. Evans and J. Mellon's “Working class votes and Conservative losses: solving the UKIP puzzle” [See Abstr. 66.4584] seeks to resolve how substantial levels of UKIP support among traditional working class voters, and in Labour-held constituencies, can be reconciled with evidence that a majority of current UKIP supporters recall voting for the Conservatives in 2010. Evans and Mellon advance two arguments: (1) that the political impact of UKIP has been misunderstood due to a failure to consider long-term political shifts; (2) that the class basis of support for UKIP has been misunderstood due to poor measures of class. We find much to agree with on both of these points. This reply focuses on clarifying our arguments on three issues: the social basis of UKIP support; the role of value divisions and the importance of geography and the electoral system for understanding UKIP's longer-term prospects. [R]
66.4598 FOUÉRÉ, Marie-Aude —
On 8 April 2015, the University of Pau and Adour Countries (UPPA) hosted a colloquium titled “Elections in East Africa. New trends, practices and actors?”. Participants aimed to revisit one of the canons of political science — elections — by noting recent changes to the context, actors and practices of voting in East Africa. Experts in one or more East African countries and specialists from various disciplines shared their views about current efforts to make it easier to examine East African elections from different angles and/or a multidisciplinary approach. [R]
66.4599 FRANKS, Benjamin —
This article describes four types of ideological hybrid to examine a range of sub-ideologies and cross-breeds but concentrates on identifying and assessing the particular phenomena described as conservative (or “Tory”) anarchisms. The article demonstrates how an ideological hybrid's morphological relationship to its parent ideologies can alter in different geographical or historical contexts. Using this model, it argues that some differences between conservatism and anarchism are overstressed, while some important similarities are often overlooked. However, because apparently shared concepts are structured next to radically different core principles, these shared principles are interpreted in radically different ways. As a result, conservative anarchism is a deeply unstable hybrid rather than an innovative new ideological form. In most contexts, it stabilizes into a form of conservatism rather than a form of anarchism. [R, abr.]
66.4600 FRAUSSEN, Bert; BEYERS, Jan —
In most political systems, the community of policy insiders represents a small subset of the total interest group population. Therefore, one key question is which factors explain why some mobilized interests become insiders and others remain outsiders. By contrasting a bottom-up registration of interest groups with a top-down census of all groups that enjoy access to policy-makers, we present a unique approach to distinguish insiders from outsiders. This approach allows us to systematically analyze which factors — such as resources, constituency, scale of organization and policy portfolio — predict who becomes a policy insider. Our analysis focuses on interest group politics in Belgium, and shows that next to resources, the size of the membership, the scale of organization and a group's policy portfolio are strong predictors of the likelihood to gain access. [R]
66.4601 FREEZE, Melanie; MONTGOMERY, Jacob M. —
Prominent accounts of public opinion argue that citizens' preferences are unstable, with stated desires on policies varying wildly from survey to survey, and ideologically incoherent, with preferences on multiple policies evidencing little or no structure. In the aggregate, these findings suggest that many voters are not capable of fulfilling their normative role in the democratic system. We challenge this conventional view and argue that the apparent instability and incoherence among the public are both overstated and outdated. Using panel surveys from the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s, we conduct a multi-trait multi-method (MTMM) confirmatory factor analysis of citizen preferences in multiple issue areas. Our results reveal a surprising degree of preference stability in all three time periods across many policy domains. [R, abr.]
66.4602 GARNETT, Tanya Ansahta —
This article examines the nature of shifting gender roles in Liberia's postconflict reconstruction process. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which political authority is gendered and the agency that women in politics employ to justify their participation as they attempt to reduce gender inequalities at the institutional level. I argue that the intervention of the international community has been instrumental in providing space and resources for gender mainstreaming; however, in the absence of more in-depth intersectional analyses of gender dynamics, the unintended consequences of peace-building policies could hinder the sustainability of long-term peace. This article is based on a qualitative research country study conducted by the author in rural and urban Liberia following the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf [as President]. [R, abr.]
66.4603 GHERGHINA, Sergiu; JIGLĂU, George —
This article identifies the determinants of ethnic parties' access to coalition governments in Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia between 1990 and 2013. We conducted a cross-national and longitudinal analysis in which we took into account all the elections in which the ethnic parties gained parliamentary representation. With 21 cases over two decades — with the party at the election being the unit of analysis — and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as the method of analysis, this study concludes that the pivotal position is important for access to government coalitions, while organizational change and government incumbency have a limited explanatory power. [R]
66.4604 GIDENGIL, Elisabeth; KARAKOÇ, Ekrem —
Does the electoral success of Islamist parties depend on the support of religious voters or does it owe as much or more to their performance in dealing with key political and economic issues? The repeated electoral success of an Islamist-rooted party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkey, provides an important opportunity to answer this question. Using a nation-wide survey conducted in 2011 in Turkey, our findings suggest that in addition to religiosity the party's performance with respect to social services, the economy and democracy were determining factors in the AKP's success. We also found that the popularity of political leaders has an independent effect on party preference. We discuss similar tendencies in the aftermath of the Arab Spring elections where the Islamist parties emerged as the major winners. [R]
66.4605 GIULIO, Marco Di; MORO, Francesco Niccolò —
Internationalization constitutes a dominant strategy for former public enterprises, as they enter emerging markets in other countries. This article provides a firm-level analysis of the drivers of (and obstacles to) internationalization. It focuses primarily on the experience of Italian companies in the railway and utility sectors by comparing and contrasting them with major European companies as well as among themselves. The article shows the diverse degrees of internationalization of Italian companies and takes into account possible explanations, showing how the policy and regulatory environment do interact with the configurations of actors' preferences in shaping companies' strategies. [R]
66.4606 GMEINER, Jens —
The parliamentary election in Sweden 2014 did not lead to clear majorities. The center-right coalition that had governed for eight years was voted out of office. However, the new elected red-green minority government — supported by the left party — has been the weakest government for 30 years with its 38 per cent of the votes. The far-right populist Sweden Democrats became the third largest party, gaining 13 per cent of the votes. The red-green minority government failed to adopt its budget because the Sweden Democrats voted for the proposal of the four center-right opposition parties. Hence, Sweden suffered a dramatic parliamentary crisis after the election. Indeed, snap elections could be avoided by an agreement passed by the government and the four center-right parties. [R, abr.]
66.4607 GÖKMEN, Yusuf Can; TOSUN, Tanju —
The electoral will reflected at the ballot box on November 1 confirmed the hegemony of the AK Party in Turkey's party system and raised numerous questions about the future of its opposition parties. Having attempted an ideological and organizational restructuring, following the election of Kiliçdaroglu as the chairman, the CHP did not garner enough “voting power” to meet its expectations at the ballot box in November, [which] indicates that the party is facing a significant deadlock and has been unable to increase its votes. CHP's election results reflect political stalemate despite the efforts of its leader in the last two elections and his statements, which appear to respond to the concerns and demands of the voters. [R, abr.]
66.4608 GONZÁLEZ, Lucas —
This article studies the main factors that affect the allocation of nonearmarked federal funds to subnational units in Argentina between 1999 and 2009. It brings presidential popularity together with presidential structural and partisan preferences for distribution into the analysis. It argues that electorally strong and popular presidents tend to increase transfers to developing districts and reduce allocations to richer districts. Investing in developing provinces is more efficient, and governors from these districts tend to support redistributive presidents and be weaker political challengers than governors from richer units. In contrast, weaker presidents are less capable of resisting pressures from governors from larger and richer districts. There is also more distribution to developing regions when presidents have a larger share of partisan allies there and fewer in richer states. [R, abr.]
66.4609 GOUJON, Alexandra; SHUKAN, loulia —
The Ukrainian protest movement (“Maïdan”) of Winter 2013–2014 caused two types of protagonism to emerge among its ordinary participants. On the one hand, ordinary protagonism was displayed in the revolutionary routine, through the multiple activities organized in the public square (cooking, medical aid, safety patrols). It reflected peaceful forms of action that caused personalities to emerge on account of their long commitment, which was highlighted by the media and social networks. On the other hand, rebellious protagonism appeared when the protest became radicalized as a result of repression by the authorities. The opportunities for public recognition were enhanced when images of police violence against protestors were widely aired in the media. This type of protagonism relied on increased defiance toward the political elites. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4079]
66.4610 GUÉROT, Ulrike —
This deliberately provocative article argues against an uncritically enthusiastic support for “grassroots-driven” civil society politics. Even though Europe's multiple crises have increased calls for civil society participation and indeed led to the emergence of multiple movements, these actors lack adequate and comprehensive answers to Europe's fundamental systemic crisis. Calls for participation and protest are not enough. Civil society actors can at best scrape at the surface of the real problem, which is that the institutional set of the European Community and its actors have ceased to function. European civil society thus heralds European politicization, but not European politics. The article argues for a return to the emphasis on institutional politics in Europe and for a consistent Europeanization of political processes, bureaucracies and decision-making structures. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4199]
66.4611 GÜNTHER, Christoph; KADEN, Tom —
A sociological perspective on the Islamic State's regime paints a surprisingly multifaceted picture. Its appeal to a traditional order can be regarded as its most pervasive argument to garner obedience. But the Islamic State also manages to forge and maintain alliances on a rational inner-worldly, means-ends basis with various groups. The Islamic State's various claims to authority can be seen as legitimacy constructs offered to the population in order to increase the chance of their going beyond obedience out of fear. While it is still uncertain to what extent, and based upon which legitimizing narrative, it is seen as legitimate by the ruled, making it appear more plausible that it is, indeed, much more than a mere terrorist movement. [R, abr.]
66.4612 GUSTAFSSON, Jessica —
In March 2013, Kenya held its first election after the post-election violence (PEV) in 2008, which media were blamed for contributing to by partisan reporting and hate speech. Prior to the 2013 election, several organizations worked to raise awareness of the negative consequences of hate speech and the need of responsible journalism. This article sheds light on how Kenyan journalists perceived their role and evaluated their own reporting of the 2013 election and whether they were influenced by the experience of the PEV. It shows how the experience of the PEV became a reference point when discussing the election reporting and the role of journalists. Several journalists admitted that important issues were avoided due to fear of steering up emotions. [R]
66.4613 GVIRSMAN, Shira Dvir, et al. —
This study examines the effects of chronic (i.e., repeated and cumulative) mediated exposure to political violence on ideological beliefs regarding political conflict. It centers on these effects on young viewers, from pre-adolescents to adolescents. Ideological beliefs refers here to support of war, perception of threat to one's nation, and normative beliefs concerning aggression toward the out-group. A longitudinal study was conducted on a sample of Israeli and Palestinian youths who experience the Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand (N = 1,207). Two alternative hypotheses were tested: that chronic exposure via the media increases support for war and aggression and elevates feeling of threat, or that chronic exposure via the media strengthens pre-existing beliefs. [R, abr.]
66.4614 HACKETT, Ursula —
In America's culture wars denominations increasingly ally with one another despite differences in theology, church organization, and membership. But these developments are not reflected in America's private K-12 school system or in patterns of public aid for children who attend them where divisions between religious traditions remain stark. I demonstrate, by means of an analysis of critical junctures in American political development supported by statistical analysis, that Catholics who desire a religious education for their children have historically tended to exit for the parochial sector while Evangelicals having similar desires lobbied for reform of the public school system. These differential group responses stem from differing conceptions of identity and belonging, theological understanding, and institutional structure. In American education policy, differences between religious groups are surprisingly tenacious. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4239]
66.4615 HÅKANSSON, Nicklas; NAURIN, Elin —
This study argues that three recent societal trends have increased parties' incentives to give election promises in campaigns: the increasing volatility of voters, the professionalization and marketization of politics, and the mediatization of politics. Arguments are empirically tested on the case of Sweden between 1991 and 2010. All promises presented in election manifestos by Swedish parliamentary parties are analyzed, enabling analyses of six elections, nine parties, 44 manifestos and almost 4000 election promises. We find that Swedish parties increased their pledge making considerably during the period, from an average of 46 per manifesto to 149. Specific promises have increased, as have the pledges that are unrelated to other parties' pledges. Altogether, the results point at an increasingly specific vote-choice for voters. [R]
66.4616 HAKLAI, Oded; NORWICH, Liora —
Attempts to build a coalition government whose survival depends on support from ethnic minority parties have resulted in both Canada and Israel in widespread public disapproval and political turmoil. In turn, such arrangements have been deemed untenable even though otherwise powerful political elites had an interest in minority party inclusion. The comparable outcomes in these two cases are intriguing because the two parliamentary democracies differ in general characteristics that much of the scholarship claims should produce different outcomes, including the electoral system, conceptions of national identity, and regional environment. Using the most-different systems method, with a similar value on the study variable but with dissimilar background conditions, we argue that inherited political traditions in both countries engendered widespread perceptions that minority-party inclusion diverged from the “appropriate way of doing politics” and was thus unacceptable. [R]
66.4617 HALE, Thomas; KOENIG-ARCHIBUGI, Mathias —
Some scholars and policy-makers argue [for] increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level. [However,] according to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of “problematic” diversity by examining how three variables — the heterogeneity, polarization and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices – affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. [R, abr.]
66.4618 HALL, Andrew B. —
This paper examines systemic effects of US campaign spending, looking at outcomes at the level of the legislature rather than the individual seat. Using a difference-in-differences design, state-level corporate campaign contribution bans are shown to have a large effect on electoral outcomes at the legislature level. A one percentage-point increase in a party's share of all contributions in an electoral cycle is estimated to increase its share of the legislature by roughly half a percentage point. Policy outcomes and campaign finance reforms occur at the legislature level; understanding the systemic rather than individual-level effect of campaign spending is therefore directly relevant. Aggregating estimated effects of individual-level campaign finance would not produce this same estimate owing to spillovers and other strategic dynamics. The analyses suggest that contribution bans have important electoral effects. [R, abr.]
66.4619 HAN Donglin; CHEN Dingding —
Does the experience of living in the US lead Chinese people to believe that China should pursue democracy? Our study produced mixed results, as we found that overseas study resulted in significant attitude changes by various means. Education in social sciences and consumption of foreign media were both associated with supportive attitudes toward democracy, and also led respondents to believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and to push for it. Conversely, living overseas had a negative effect on respondents' support for Chinese democratization, as the longer they had lived in the US, the better they understood Western democracy and were suspicious about whether China should pursue immediate democratization. Meanwhile, we also find Chinese media has a negative impact on public support for democracy, both instrumental and intrinsic. [R]
66.4620 HANSEN, Susan B. —
This article argues that the status of women continues to be a major issue in the ongoing culture wars over morality politics. While more scholarly and media attention has focused on abortion and gay marriage, since the 1970s, the Democratic and Republican Parties have also taken divergent positions on the status of women. Data from the American National Election Studies show that while the general public has become more supportive of equal roles for women, the presidential candidates are perceived to differ considerably on gender roles and positions on abortion. Since the 1970s perceptions of candidate differences on gender equity have been strong predictors of the presidential vote, even after controlling for party identification, abortion attitudes, religiosity, retrospective assessments of the economy, and perceived candidate differences on other issues, including abortion. [R]
66.4621 HARMEL, Robert; YEH Yao-Yuan —
This study addresses whether individuals who were sent down during the Cultural Revolution reveal different political attitudes from those who were socialized during the same period but were not themselves sent down. Using data from the urban sample of the 2006 General Social Survey of China, the authors find evidence that formerly sent-down youth — and particularly sent-down women — as compared to their not-sent-down peers, are today more willing to accept the class-struggle foundation of Mao's communist ideology but are, at the same time, more willing to assess the performance and structure of the communist regime critically. [R]
66.4622 HELFER, Luzia; VAN AELST, Peter —
We use the concept of news values to examine how journalists perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Taking an innovative approach, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values in the context of political news in a factorial survey experiment. This allows us to study those news values in relation to one another in a controlled experimental setting, an advantage over traditional gatekeeping studies. Political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands were asked to indicate whether they would consider these press releases for reporting or not. [R, abr.]
66.4623 HELLSTRÖM, Johan; BLOMGREN, Magnus —
Parties that are unified in their position on EU issues and parties that are heavily split speak about the EU, but others do not. Also, research has shown that political parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. It is argued that the focus should not be solely on intraparty conflict or whether or not a party's voters are hesitant or disunited, but rather on how these factors interact in order to better understand how parties act strategically regarding EU issues. We use a new dataset that relies on quantitative content-analysis of quality newspapers during the national election campaigns in the period 1982010 in France, Germany, the UK and Sweden. [R, abr.]
66.4624 HELLWIG, Timothy; KWEON, Yesola —
What determines popular attitudes toward immigration? Recent work emphasizes the importance of education rather than economic or labor market factors. Missing from this work, however, is a consideration of elite positions. This study extends education-based accounts in two key ways: by acknowledging the multidimensional nature of the immigration issue and by incorporating cues from party elites. Cues from trusted elites inform popular attitudes on immigration. But rather than serving as a heuristic for the less sophisticated, elite cues on immigration are disproportionately employed by those more educated individuals who rely on elite positions to form opinions on multidimensional issues, like immigration, on which they are cross-pressured. Theoretical expectations are supported by evidence from cross-national analyses of party positions and public opinion and from a longitudinal examination of mass and party positions in Denmark. [R, abr.]
66.4625 HERNÁNDEZ, Enrique; KRIESI, Hanspeter —
The electoral consequences of the Great Recession are analyzed in this article by combining insights from economic voting theories and the literature on party system change. Taking cues from these two theoretical perspectives, the impact of the Great Recession on the stability and change of Western, Central and Eastern European party systems is assessed. The article starts from the premise that, in order to fully assess the impact of the contemporary crisis, classic economic voting hypotheses focused on incumbent parties need to be combined with accounts of long-term party system change provided by realignment and dealignment theories. The empirical analysis draws on an original dataset of election results and economic and political indicators in 30 European democracies. [R, abr.]
66.4626 HERSH, Eitan D.; NALL, Clayton —
Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across US regions? Some answers have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income-based voting across local areas. We show that the political geography of income-based voting is inextricably tied to racial context, and only marginally explained by economic context. Within homogeneously nonblack localities, contextual income has minimal bearing on the income-party relationship. The correlation between income and partisanship is strong in heavily black areas of the Old South and other areas with a history of racialized poverty, but weaker elsewhere. [R, abr.]
66.4627 HETHERINGTON, Marc J.; LONG, Meri T.; RUDOLPH, Thomas J. —
This study uncovers strong evidence that polarization has developed in presidential candidate-trait evaluations. Unlike for ideology or policy preferences, the distribution of trait evaluations has become increasingly bimodal and clustered toward the poles. This change stems in part from a more polarized choice set, but perceptions of candidate extremeness are asymmetric, with partisans perceiving the other party's candidate, but not their own, as extreme. In addition, the increased salience of racial and moral issues helps explain trait polarization. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4283]
66.4628 HIDALGO, F. Daniel; NICHTER, Simeon —
Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ “voter buying” to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote-choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits — which undermined voter buying — decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. [R, abr.]
66.4629 HILTON, Adam —
By the late 1960s, the [US] Democratic Party had fallen into crisis. Vietnam, urban riots, and declining electoral fortunes marked a crossroads in the history of the party, raising questions about the meaning and trajectory of postwar liberalism. Amid the political chaos and economic crisis of the 1970s, a distinct political tendency running through the civil rights, feminist, labor, and antiwar movements demanded a new politics. The New Politics movement attempted to reform and realign the Democratic Party to the left. The reformers' project to democratize the Democratic Party began in the wake of the 1968 party crisis, and it ended ten years later with the failure to compel a sitting Democratic president and Democratic Congress to implement the party's program for full employment. [R, abr.]
66.4630 HIRSCH, Alexander V. —
We develop a formal model in which a principal and an agent disagree about the right policy for achieving their shared goals. Disagreement creates a motivational problem, but we show how both observing policy outcomes and experimenting with policies can ameliorate it. We also show that the principal often defers to the agent in order to motivate him, thereby generating more informative policy outcomes and building future consensus. Most surprisingly, she sometimes allows the agent to implement his desired policy even when she is sure it is wrong, to persuade him through failure that he is mistaken. Using the model, we generate empirical implications about performance measurement and Presidential appointments in US federal agencies. [R, abr.]
66.4631 HOLBEIN, John B.; HILLYGUS, D. Sunshine —
Recent research has cast doubt on the potential for various electoral reforms to increase voter turnout. We examine the effectiveness of preregistration laws, which allow young citizens to register before being eligible to vote. We use two empirical approaches to evaluate the impact of pre-registration on youth turnout. First, we implement difference-indifference and lag models to bracket the causal effect of preregistration implementation using the 2000–2012 Current Population Survey. Second, focusing on the state of Florida [US], we leverage a discontinuity based on date of birth to estimate the effect of increased preregistration exposure on the turnout of young registrants. In both approaches, we find pre-registration increases voter turnout, with equal effectiveness for various subgroups in the electorate. [R, abr.]
66.4632 HOLLIDAY, Shabnam J. —
Drawing on E. Laclau's concept of populist discourse and A. Gramsci's “national-popular collective will”, and using the case of Iran, this article puts forward the idea of the legacy of subalternity in the context of postrevolution governments. The concept of “national-popular collective will” facilitates an understanding of how the popular subject is constructed and the meanings embedded in that process. It is argued that Islamic Republic elites articulate a populist discourse that constructs the “self” (the Islamic Republic) as synonymous with “the people”. Embedded in this discursive construction is a legacy of subalternity that goes back to the 1979 Revolution's populist discourse. [R]
66.4633 IBENSKAS, Raimondas —
While party mergers can have important implications for the development of party systems, their causes have not been studied in a large-n comparative study. Using a new data-set that covers 24 European democracies in the postwar period, this study shows that parties merge to overcome electoral thresholds or to form one of the two or three largest parties with an important role in the formation of government coalitions. However, mergers are not motivated by the goal to establish a majority, strongly dominant or largest party. The costs of mergers include ideological differences and various transaction costs related to reaching and implementing merger agreements. These transaction costs are lower if parties previously cooperated and if the partisanship of their voters is low. [R]
66.4634 IJABS, Ivars —
Between 2011–2014, Latvia experienced a significant increase in the adoption and use of militant democracy measures — constitutional amendments, refusals of party registration, restrictions on referendums and popular initiatives. These events, triggered by a widely attended referendum on the introduction of Russian as the second state language, highlighted the problematic relations between democracy and nationbuilding in Latvia. Despite earlier expectations that the original militancy of Latvian democracy would decrease with the gradual integration of the Russophone minority, recent developments show that the defense of a particular type of nation-building has become an integral part of Latvian democracy. Contrary to earlier attempts to describe Latvia as an example of ethnic democracy, this article argues that the nation-building proceeds on the basis of a not fully consistent combination of elements of ethnic and liberal republican approaches. [R]
66.4635 IMAI, Kosuke; KHANNA, Kabir —
In both political behavior research and voting rights litigation, turnout and vote-choice for different racial groups are often inferred using aggregate election results and racial composition. Over the past several decades, many statistical methods have been proposed to address this ecological inference problem. We propose an alternative method to reduce aggregation bias by predicting individual-level ethnicity from voter registration records. Building on the existing methodological literature, we use Bayes's rule to combine the Census Bureau's Surname List with various information from geocoded voter registration records. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology using approximately nine million voter registration records from Florida [US], where self-reported ethnicity is available. [R, abr.]
66.4636 IRAK, Daǧhan —
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has developed its own economic and social network, creating a dominant-party system with hegemonic tendencies. The creation of pro-government media has constituted the cultural aspect of this transformation, as many mainstream media outlets have been seized by the government and sold to pro-AKP business ventures. Moreover, the state-run media Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) and Anadolu Agency (AA) companies have been subsidized and restructured in line with the government agenda. These public news producers have been controlled by officials from a small network close to the party leadership. This study explores the political concentration in Turkey's public media by means of an analysis of the Twitter interactions of AA board members, between August 2011 and February 2015. [R, abr.]
66.4637 IVALDI, Gilles —
Despite its recent evolution, the Front national maintains the distinctive features of the European populist and radical right, if one takes into consideration the continuation of its “niche” strategy around cultural issues such as immigration or Islam, and the durability of its authoritarian ethno-nationalist populism. In addition, the NF is at the forefront of the struggle against the EU and its program draws the outlines of a socialpopulist stance for a time of crisis. In systemic terms, today Marine Le Pen's party finds itself at the strategic “barycenter” of the European radical right, caught between its attempt at normalization and its radicalism. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4638 JACOBS, Kristof; SPIERINGS, Niels —
Does social-media usage (e.g., Twitter) influence candidates' number of votes? Recent studies have shown that a modest impact might exist. However, these studies used data on elections in which only a limited group of politicians used Twitter. In such a context it was easy for a candidate to stand out. It remains to be seen whether the effect holds in times of widespread usage. This study compares a low-usage with a widespread-usage election, the Dutch 2010 and 2012 national elections respectively. It utilizes unique data on all 1024 candidates of the “large” parties. Interestingly, even in the context of widespread Twitter usage we still find a positive association between Twitter use and preference votes. [R]
66.4639 JACOBY, Wade; BEHRENS, Martin —
Scholars have long conceptualized unions and left parties as powerful and independent social actors within national systems of the political economy. Yet a unique survey of more than 2300 German Social Democratic Party (SPD) activists provides new insights into the relationship of two, in fact, deeply intertwined organizations. Factor-analysis followed by multivariate regression of the survey results reveal two distinct dimensions of alienation that occur among party activists as they evaluate trade unions. “Content alienation” picks up on differences in political goals among unions and the SPD. Meanwhile, “contact alienation” builds on skepticism about union inclination or capacity. Novel data establish the magnitude and distribution of these two forms of alienation as measured by individual-level attitudes, which, in turn, have implications for debates on comparative political economy, political parties and corporatism. [R, abr.]
66.4640 JENSENIUS, Francesca R. —
Quotas for women and ethnic minorities are implemented to increase diversity in political institutions, but, as they usually target only one group at a time, they may end up increasing the inclusion of one underrepresented group at the cost of another. Recent work has emphasized the institutional underpinnings of the variation in such outcomes. I show how the intersectional effects of quotas may also vary within the same institutional context, as changes in the pressure to include excluded groups interact with the informal opportunity structures within political parties. Looking at the nomination of female candidates across India over time, I show that, as the efforts to include more women in politics intensified, much of the increase in female candidates occurred in constituencies reserved for ethnic minorities. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4135]
66.4641 JIRATTIKORN, Amporn —
The recent influx of Shan migrants from Myanmar into the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, provides the conditions for migrant public spheres to emerge. This paper explores aspects of mass-mediated forms of Shan migrant public spheres by focusing on two Shan-language radio stations, one state-run and the other a community station. While much of the literature on public spheres emphasizes the role of the media in allowing citizens to express and publish opinions, it largely excludes those who are marginal to the mainstream public sphere, such as transnational migrant populations. This paper therefore investigates the operations of two Shan-language radio programs, the community they serve and the effects they have on that community. [R, abr.]
66.4642 JOCHEM, Sven —
The Finnish election caused a change in government and a distinct center-right coalition in the Nordic country of great coalitions. For the first time, the right-wing populist Finns-Party is a part of government. In reaction to great economic and political challenges, the new government proclaims an austerity strategy, which in turn fueled protests and conflicts with the left parties and trade unions. The right-wing populist Finns-Party with its political goals and strategies implies one of the most severe challenges for the Finish negotiation democracy in the nearer future. [R]
66.4643 JOHNSON, Niki —
Quota laws have been widely adopted in Latin America, with significant increases in the number of women elected to parliament in some countries. However, it is far from clear whether the laws have produced the modifications in the gender regimes which inform internal party power structures and dynamics that would allow women to participate — as aspirants or selectors — on an equal footing with their male counterparts in the processes of candidate selection. This article identifies critical nodes where the interplay between the different institutions — systemic, normative and practical — of candidate selection intersects with gendered power relations to facilitate or hinder not only women's access to elective posts, but the terms of their access. This article employs a feminist institutionalist analytical framework. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4135]
66.4644 JOHNSTON, Christopher D.; BALLARD, Andrew O. —
We examine the responsiveness of the American public to information regarding the distribution of opinion among economists on five economic policy issues. We also examine the extent and role of citizens' trust in economists. We find that trust is tepid and find correspondingly small-to-moderate changes in public opinion when citizens are given information about expert opinion. Indeed, we provide evidence that responsiveness is larger when the consensus is attributed to a generic sample of people than when it is attributed to economists. We also find heterogeneity in responsiveness across issues, such that opinion-change is smaller on symbolic policy issues than technical ones. Further, on the former, but not the latter, we find that citizens use judgments of trust in economists in a motivated fashion, to reinforce prior opinions. [R, abr.]
66.4645 JUNGHERR, Andreas —
Twitter has become a pervasive tool in election campaigns. Candidates, parties, journalists, and a steadily increasing share of the public are using Twitter to comment on, interact around, and research public reactions to politics. These uses have met with growing scholarly attention. As of now, this research is fragmented, lacks a common body of evidence, and shared approaches to data-collection and selection. This article presents the results of a systematic literature review of 127 studies addressing the use of Twitter in election campaigns. I discuss the available research with regard to findings on the use of Twitter by parties, candidates, and publics during election campaigns and during mediated campaign events. Also, I address prominent research designs and approaches to data-collection and selection. [R]
66.4646 KALIBER, Alper —
This study discusses the dynamics of de-Europeanization and the changing impact of Europe on the politically mobilized civil society involved in the public debates concerning Turkey's Kurdish question. The article first critically assesses how and in what ways the legal and constitutional reforms on the freedom of assembly required by the EU changed the political structure in which civil society organizations (CSOs) operate in Turkey. It then examines the views of CSOs on the potential roles and limitations of the EU in the Kurdish question and the peace process which lasted between March 2013 and July 2015. It also delineates the reasons why the political context of Europeanization is not seen as instrumental by these CSOs to framing and justifying their arguments. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4880]
66.4647 KALININ, Kirill —
In authoritarian regimes, election polls can be polluted by the social desirability bias, which can contribute to inflation in the publicized estimates of an autocrat's electoral support and voter turnout, seeming to validate falsified election outcomes that match the inflated estimates. This study analyzes the magnitude of social desirability bias in polling estimates released before and after the 2012 Russian presidential elections by focusing on the implications of Noelle-Neumann's “spiral of silence” theory. The empirical data-analysis is based on list experiments from four data samples collected during the Russian presidential campaign. The estimated magnitude of the social desirability bias in V. Putin's electoral support is statistically significant and reaches approximately 15%. For voter turnout, however, I find social desirability bias of the same order as in Western democracies. [R, abr.]
66.4648 KARAKAYA, Süveyda —
Why do some ethno-political organizations resort to violence while others abstain? Are ethno-political organizations with a religious/Islamist ideology more violence-prone compared to non-religious ones? In addition to commonly cited factors such as grievances, political opportunities/constraints, resources, and organizational characteristics, I argue that the existence of youth bulges in a society also increases the probability of adopting violent strategies by ethno-political organizations. Frustrated young males under repressive and authoritarian regimes tend to be likely recruits for violent organizations. I use the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset, which includes 118 organizations in 16 countries of the Middle East and North Africa to test my hypotheses. [R, abr.]
66.4649 KATSANIDOU, Alexia; OTJES, Simon —
Where some authors saw a limited impact of Europeanization on national party politics, others proposed that, in addition to the pre-existing economic left-right dimension, a separate EU dimension structures the national political space. This article looks at the Greek bail-out during the European sovereign-debt crisis to examine how Europeanization can change the national political space. The bail-out came with memoranda that set the main lines of Greek economic policy for the coming years. Accepting these policies was connected with remaining in the Eurozone. This restructured the political space: the economic and European integration form one dimension. A second relevant dimension focuses on cultural issues. The economic/European dimension is a stronger predictor of vote-choice than the cultural dimension. [R]
66.4650 KAUFFMANN, Grégoire —
Created in October 1972, the Front national found its origins in the “revolutionary nationalism” ideology upheld by the young neo-fascist activists of the movement Ordre nouveau (New Order). At the time, J.-M. Le Pen represented a “moderate” tendency among 179 the French far-right groups, but he was the man the activists of Ordre nouveau would chose as president of the Front national. Yet, their journey together was short-lived and, in the end, Le Pen remained the sole leader of the movement. Part of the Front national DNA, the failure of this reunification attempt highlights the contradictions of a party torn between the denunciation of the “system” and the temptation to integrate the political game, between its glorification of violence and its conservatism. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “[The French] National Front”. See also Abstr. 66.4515, 4575, 4582, 4637, 4669, 4726, 4734, 4769]
66.4651 KEATING, Avril; JANMAAT, Jan Germen —
This article examines the impact of the introduction of activities that seek to teach “education through citizenship” at school. In short, “education through citizenship” involves formal and informal learning opportunities that enable students to acquire civic skills and knowledge through hands-on experiences. School councils, debate teams and/or mock elections are some of the most common [such] activities in schools in England, and drawing on data from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study, this article shows that such activities can indeed have an effect, not just in the short-term, but also in the medium-term. School activities can have a lasting and independent impact on youth political engagement and provides support for the continuation of education through citizenship, as well as about citizenship. [R, abr.]
66.4652 KERNECKER, Theresa —
This article captures the nature of legislators' ambitions and explores to what extent their career paths within a context of party competition lead to progressive versus static ambition. The findings show that their previous career path and retrospective loyalty towards the party influences which offices they seek. Progressively ambitious legislators also seek offices in less competitive environments, but this finding holds for the regional executive branch or the presidency. An additional robust finding shows that ideologically conservative legislators tend to be statically ambitious. This is a first step towards mapping out ambitions in Latin America by drawing on cross-national data. [R]
66.4653 KESTILÄ-KEKKONEN, Elina; SÖDERLUND, Peter —
This study tests the power of institutional performance theory in explaining the differences between individuals in political trust (cross-sectional) and fluctuations of political trust over time (longitudinal). Indeed, the dominant scholarly debate has concerned whether political trust is stable and dependent of endogenous factors such as political socialization and social trust, or whether it is exogenous (i.e., in constant fluctuation due to later experiences with institutions and the outputs they produce). In terms of cross-sectional differences, the aim is to assess the relative impact institutional performance on political trust of a citizen. As regards the longitudinal approach, political trust varies over time and from an explanatory perspective it is important also to understand how well the institutional performance theory predicts over-time variation of political trust. [R, abr.]
66.4654 KIISEL, Maie; LEPPIK, Marianne; SEPPEL, Külliki —
Within Europe, there is a clear difference in the strength of political activism between old and new member states. Taking R. Dalton's differentiation between old and new types of participation, “duty” and “engaged” citizenship, as a point of departure, the article explores the major predictors for the new, network-based and horizontal political practices among young people. It uses data from the 2006 and 2012 rounds of the European Social Survey to explore country and age group differences within the EU to seek out structural reasons for the trends in duty and engaged citizenship. [R, abr.]
66.4655 KIM Sung Eun; URPELAINEN, Johannes; YANG Joonseok —
When and why do individual companies lobby on environmental policies? We use data from lobbying disclosure reports on all major climate bills introduced during the 111th US Congress (2009–2010). We then link the lobbying disclosure reports to detailed data on the fuel choices of all electric utilities in the US along with socioeconomic, institutional and political data from the states where the utilities operate. The expected winners (renewable energy, natural-gas-users) from climate policy are much more likely to lobby individually on federal legislation than the expected losers (coal-users). We find that expected winners lobby for specific provisions and rents as a private good, whereas expected losers concentrate their efforts on collective action through trade associations and committees to prevent climate legislation. [R, abr.]
66.4656 KIOUPKIOLIS, Alexandros —
The paper inquires critically into Podemos as an instance of left-wing populism in contemporary European politics. The broader thesis is that a dualist politics, which welds together horizontalism and verticalism in a conflictual bind, is a prima facie plausible strategy for renewing democracy in the present critical context. But a political organization like Podemos will be able to redeem its democratic promises as long as it maintains a constructive balance between these two political logics, avoiding the reassertion of centralized leadership and the suppression of pluralism which are typical of the populist tradition. [R, abr.]
66.4657 KÖSE, Talha —
Identity politics was one of the major dynamics in shaping the results of both the June and November 2015 General Elections in Turkey. The parties affiliated with Kurdish and Turkish ethno-nationalism, the HDP and the MHP, increased their votes significantly in the June elections. The AK Party was able to pull some of those votes back in November. The HDP tried to transform itself from being a regional or ethnic Kurdish party into a national party. The PKK's goal of becoming an influential regional actor in the Middle East hindered the HDP's goal, thus leading to a decline of HDP votes in November elections. [R, abr.]
66.4658 KOUIKI, Hara; FERNANDEZ GONZALEZ, Joseba —
The economic and financial crisis has particularly hit the European South, where austerity policies imposed by international and European institutions and adopted by national governments have provoked a strong wave of massive protests. The Indignados in the squares of Spain and Greece both challenged party politics and representative democracy institutions putting forward horizontal and participatory types of mobilization. Soon afterwards, the left-wing Syriza became a ruling party in Greece and Podemos in Spain a real alternative to traditional bipartisanism: both parties dispute domestic and European political elites and adopt an anti-austerity discourse and agenda reflecting popular grievances. To what extent has the overwhelming wave of protests in Greece and Spain modified party politics? We examine the organizational structures of those parties and whether these reflect mobilization structures and concerns. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4199]
66.4659 KOUSIS, Maria, et al. —
The crisis has hit parts of the Greek society severely and social problems increased. As a reaction several organizations were founded to provide social support beyond the welfare state. The article provides a first overview over such initiatives for the whole country and specifically for two localities. Using a web-based analysis of alternative-action organizations, the authors identified a wide spectrum of organizations. Nearly all of the groups provide support for basics needs for the population. Focusing on Chania and Heraklion (both on Crete), the analysis shows an increase in supportive activity, organized by independent groups, local authorities and formal organizations. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4199]
66.4660 KRUPNIKOV, Yanna; PISTON, Spencer; BAUER, Nichole M. —
Much of what we know about the responses of voters to Black candidates and female candidates comes from experimental research. Yet the accuracy of experimental data can be threatened by the possibility that social desirability pressures contaminate self-reporting. We address this threat in a project that considers psychological approaches to reducing social desirability pressures. Offering participants the opportunity to explain their decisions about sensitive subjects, such as voting for a Black or female candidate, can lessen social desirability pressures. We analyze this approach across three commonly used samples: undergraduate, adult convenience, and adult national. [R, abr.]
66.4661 KRZEMIŃSKI, Adam —
The “national conservative revolution” in Poland has its own vocabulary, to be deciphered using the same methods of the classics. Aggressive linguistic stereotypes or the stigmatization of political opponents as “traitors to the people” or “Poles of a lesser kind” today remind those who analyze Law and Justice's vocabulary of “totalitarian propaganda”: at the same time, a positive “newspeak” has formed, to which key concepts such as “good change” or “national” belong. Behind this lies an attempt to co-opt the entire nation rhetorically and ideologically for the legitimation of its own actions. This splitting of society finds expression in a polarizing language. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4662 KSELMAN, Daniel M.; POWELL, Eleanor Neff; TUCKER, Joshua A. —
This paper explores the conditions under which new political parties will form in democratic states. Our approach hinges on the manner in which politicians evaluate the policy implications of new party entry alongside considerations of incumbency for its own sake. We demonstrate that if candidates care sufficiently about policy outcomes, then the likelihood of party entry should increase with the effective number of status quo parties in the party system. This relationship weakens, and eventually disappears, as politicians' emphasis on “office-seeking” motivations increases relative to their interest in public policy. We test these predictions with both aggregate electoral data in contemporary Europe and a data-set on legislative volatility in Turkey, arguing that party system fragmentation should positively affect the likelihood of entry when policyseeking motivations are relevant. [R, abr.]
66.4663 KUMBARACIBAŞI, Arda Can —
This article analyzes the dynamics of the party system in Turkey by focusing on the AKP and construct an aggregate-level analysis of the electoral environment it operates in using regression models (1950–2011). Findings show strong patterns of continuity in the electoral geography of Turkey since the 1970s, mapping electoral strongholds of center-right, ultra-nationalist and pro-Islamist parties compared to those of the AKP. As of 2015, the AKP seems to have achieved a great deal of stabilization electorally and there is now handful of data that can identify and answer some of the questions related to the AKP, especially regarding its ideology, origins, electoral strength and appeal. [R]
66.4664 LAMPLAND, Martha; NADKARNI, Maya —
Since 1989, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have mourned the death of jokes in post-socialist societies. While in fact humor has not gone away, the everyday experience of sharing jokes as an intimate form of political criticism has indeed vanished. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the history of Hungarian humor, this article contributes a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarship on Soviet laughter, by examining the “loss of the joke” as both a cultural phenomenon and a critical discourse in post-socialist Hungary. [R, abr.]
66.4665 LANG, Kai-Olaf —
With Law and Justice (PiS) and Fidesz, two parties that have a great deal in common are in power in Poland and Hungary. Both are striving for a neo-traditional reorganization of state and society. They understand democracy as majority rule, separation of powers as something at odds with the mission the people gave them at the ballot box. In the EU, PiS and Fidesz rely on national sovereignty. Due to differences over foreign and European policy — especially with regard to Russia policy — this will not lead to the emergence of a national-conservative axis in East Central Europe. The EU, however, must reckon with an anti-liberal and sovereignist alliance of convenience. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4666 LANZ, Simon; SCIARINI, Pascal —
This paper analyzes the short-term dynamics of issue-ownership and its effect on electoral choice. We hypothesize that voters who change their mind with regard to the party they deem most competent to handle the top issue are more probable to change their vote-choice, than those who do not change their evaluation of competence. Second, we claim that the impact of a change in perception of party issue-competence increases with the electoral strength of the party benefiting from this change. The analysis is based on data from a Rolling-Cross-Section with a panel component carried out in the 2011 Swiss Election Study. The results show the expected effects of change in issue competence assessment and the conditional role of party size. [R]
66.4667 LARREGUY, Horacio; MARSHALL, John; QUERUBÍN, Pablo —
Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout-buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations — and thus electoral information about broker performance — in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station. [R, abr.]
66.4668 LAYMAN, Geoffrey C.; WEAVER, Christopher L. —
Prior work has shown party activists and religious divisions to be two of the leading causes of party polarization in American politics. Using the Convention Delegate Studies, we examine the interaction between these two culprits and their impact on party polarization. We leverage a novel measure of secularism in the latest wave of the Convention Delegate Studies to demonstrate that active secularism is distinct both conceptually and statistically from low religiosity. Furthermore, we show that both religiosity and secularism drive party activists to take more extreme policy positions, to identify themselves as more ideologically extreme, and to exhibit less support for compromise. As the Democratic and Republican Parties have become more secular and religious, respectively, these results suggest religious polarization may compound existing divisions between the two parties and exacerbate the partisan divide in American politics. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4239]
66.4669 LEBOURG, Nicolas —
While Marine Le Pen's Front national has intensified its sovereignist stance, it nevertheless remains embedded in an international political ecosystem. The generational change between father and daughter has not revolutionized the geopolitical understanding of the party, all the more so as the theoreticians of the radical far-right have provided a varied legacy of available conceptions. Nevertheless, the stance of the NF is now much more pro-Russian, and this is also clear in the transnational relations of the party, as Moscow has replaced Rome as the major partner. Finally, the NF is also trying to organize the European far-right thanks to its presence in the European Parliament, which also provides practical and financial advantages for the national electoral competition. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4670 LEINAWEAVER, Justin; THOMSON, Robert —
Why do some governments have more environmentally friendly policies than others? Part of the answer involves governing parties' ideological positions on environmentalism and the constraints imposed by executive institutions. Here, this party-based explanation is elaborated and tested with uniquely comparable indicators of national environmental policies for governments in 27 countries in the EU. The findings show that governments with parties that emphasized environmental protection in their manifestos are more likely to propose pro-environment policies during EU-level negotiations. However, the effect of ideology is mediated by the centralization of the national executive branch. In centralized national executives, the environmental positions of prime ministers' parties affect policies, while in decentralized national executives, the positions of environment ministers' parties are relevant. [R, abr.]
66.4671 LERMAN, Amy E.; SADIN, Meredith L. —
In studying the electoral fortunes of Black candidates, scholars have almost exclusively focused on White voters' attitudes. We employ a set of randomized experiments and [US] nationally representative survey data to examine how both Black and White voters evaluate the ideology of racially diverse candidates. In line with previous research, we find evidence that White voters stereotype Black candidates as being more liberal than White candidates in three of our four tests. In contrast, we find that Black voters — particularly those who identify as politically conservative — project their own ideology onto Black candidates. These findings have electoral importance because, as we show, vote choice for both Blacks and Whites is substantially mediated by perceived ideological distance from a candidate. [R, abr.]
66.4672 LESTON-BANDEIRA, Cristina —
Faced with declining levels of trust, the UK Parliament has invested considerable time and resources to new activities focusing specifically on engagement: e.g., educational resources and cultural events. This article analyzes the aims of public engagement and its consequences for representation. We explore the potential representative role of public engagement, identifying key changes that have affected the relationship between public and parliament. We utilize evidence from documentary analysis and elite in-depth interviews with parliamentary officials to show that public engagement planning aims to develop among the public a sense of connectivity that relies on more collective and symbolic forms of representation, which seek to present the institution detached from its actors and politics. We utilize constructivist representation theories to support our analysis. [R, abr.]
66.4673 LEVENDUSKY, Matthew S.; MALHOTRA, Neil —
Building on work in social psychology, we argue that Americans perceive more polarization with respect to policy issues than actually exists, a phenomenon known as false polarization. Data from a nationally representative probability sample and a novel estimation strategy to make inferences about false polarization show that people significantly misperceive the public to be more divided along partisan lines than it is in reality. Also, people's misperceptions of opposing partisans are larger than those about their own party. We discuss the implications of these empirical patterns for American electoral politics. [R, abr.]
66.4674 LEWIN, Eyal —
This article claims that the Jewish population in Israel is split into two competing groups: stakeholders versus deprived. These categories of social identity are psychological states of mind in which no matter how the national resources are distributed, the stakeholders will always act as superiors, even if they are in inferior positions, while the deprived will always take the role of eternal underdog even if all of the major political ranks come under their control. This article brings about a review of over a century of ideological debates within the Zionist movement; it reveals how understanding the logic of the Israeli political discourse as a competition between the two newly defined social groups enables a better comprehension of the inherent tension between them. [R, abr.]
66.4675 LEWIS, Andrew R. —
Recently, conservatives have become advocates for expanded free speech rights. For Evangelicals Protestants, this advocacy would have been highly controversial only a generation ago, offending the base's ordered liberty sentiments. I suggest that abortion politics is a primary contributor to the evangelical free speech advocacy shift. Using a variety of data, I detail the evangelical shift toward expanded free speech by exploring the topics of radical protest, campaign finance, and obscenity. While rank-and-file evangelicals are less supportive of free speech than the general-public, elites have routinely used abortion politics to frame the shift toward individual free speech rights. Elites have diverged from their constituents to support a higher-priority issue (abortion), and the constituents have been supportive. Abortion politics has come to dominate evangelical advocacy decisions and has cultivated an evangelical rights culture. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4239]
66.4676 LI Lianjiang —
This paper argues that popular trust in the Chinese central government is significantly weaker than five national surveys suggest. First, the surveys show that between one- and two-thirds of respondents hold hierarchical trust — i.e., they have more trust in the central government than they do in local government. Second, all other things being equal, people who are less satisfied with political democracy in China tend to be less trusting of the central government. Finally, hierarchical trust holders tend to be less satisfied with political democracy in the country than those who express equal trust for central and local governments. Put together, the three findings show that hierarchical trust-holders are less trusting of the central government than equal trust-holders with regard to developing political democracy, although they sound equally confident. [R, abr.]
66.4677 LOPEZ DE LEON, Fernanda Leite; RIZZI, Renata —
This paper estimates the effects of the compulsory voting legislation on individuals' political orientations though a regression discontinuity framework. The identification comes from Brazil's dual voting system — voluntary and compulsory — whose exposure is determined based on citizen's date of birth. Using self-collected data, we find that compulsory voting legislation has sizable effects on individuals' political preferences, making them more likely to identify with a political party and to become extreme-oriented. [R]
66.4678 LÓPEZ LABORDA, Julio; SANZ ARCEGA, Eduardo —
Based on a survey of international literature, this paper proposes the classification of citizens' preferences for redistribution in three categories that shape those preferences: imperatives of social justice, risk aversion and the institutional framework. With the data provided by the “Spanish Institute for Fiscal Studies Fiscal Barometer” an empirical application for the Spanish case is carried out. We use a probit model when the endogenous variable is dichotomized, and a linear model estimated through ordinary least squares when the dependent variable is an index constructed by principal components. The results, consistent with the theory and international experience, show that the preferences under study, homogeneously distributed throughout the country, are based on the three described determinants. In particular most of the variables are significantly associated with the description of the institutional framework. [R]
66.4679 LOVENDUSKI, Joni —
This contribution [examines] the supply-and-demand model of selection and recruitment, developed by J. Lovenduski and P. Norris. The core understanding of this model was that candidate selection was an interactive process in which both selectors and aspirants affected outcomes that were organized in several sets of institutions. The model illuminates power in particular institutions — British political parties — and was designed to examine the various effects of the selection process. This contribution reflects on the model and puts forward ideas and arguments about what might be done differently, taking into account the theoretical and methodological innovations of the succeeding generation of scholars who have used the model. It also suggests that the supply and demand model is sufficiently flexible that it can still travel across national, system and party boundaries. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4135]
66.4680 LOXBO, Karl; BOLIN, Niklas —
We study the impact of three unique measures of organizational development on the electoral performance of the Sweden Democrats (SD) in four consecutive local elections between 2002 and 2014. When controlling for crucial demand- and supply-side factors, while holding the appeal of the national leadership constant, we find that the size, competence, and stability of the local candidate base were all decisive for explaining the success of the SD. These findings suggest that a developed organizational base matters not only to the long-term persistence of radical-right parties, but also to their electoral breakthrough. Additionally, we suggest that party organizations are likely to have a greater impact in countries where radical-right parties are already established. [R, abr.]
66.4681 LUCA, Marino De; ROMBI, Stefano —
Until 2013, primary elections had been held in a limited number of regions where there were presidential and legislative-assembly elections. The 2014–15 period, however, has seen an explosion in the use of primaries, with eight taking place in a few months, almost as many as in the previous 8 years. To these should be added the closed and online primaries of the Five Star Movement. This article [examines] the 17 regional primaries organized by the Italian center-left parties. We analyze the level of participation of the selectors, the results and the level of competitiveness. Finally, particular attention will be paid to the performances of the primary-election candidates and those of the selected candidates in the subsequent elections. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4721]
66.4682 LUTTIG, Matthew D.; LAVINE, Howard —
We argue that individuals' personality dispositions influence the relative success of different rhetorical strategies of political persuasion on policy issues, and thus function to constrain the behavior of elite actors in their attempts to win support for favored policy outcomes. Drawing on the psychological concept of functional matching, we propose that policy persuasion can be understood in terms of the “fit” between the regulatory focus of the individual on prevention or promotion and the framing of policies in terms of losses or gains. Using an experimental research design, we find that the success of policy appeals is conditional on the interaction of the policy frame and citizens' personality. These effects are especially pronounced among the less politically sophisticated. [R, abr.]
66.4683 MAATSCH, Aleksandra —
The article examines the factors that determined the attitude of parliamentary parties towards Eurozone anti-crisis measures. Using a statistical logit model, it demonstrates that, while all governing parties supported such measures, opposition parties were divided. The support of the former is explicable in terms of international obligations. The positions of opposition parties reflected their attitude towards European integration: Euroskeptic parties tended to oppose anti-crisis measures. Furthermore, whereas negative votes were less likely in countries marked by higher levels of popular trust in government and satisfaction with the problem-solving capacity of the EU, the likelihood of no votes increased as a function of the level of trust in national parliaments. The policy preferences of opposition parties, measured on the economic left–right scale, did not provide significant explanatory potential. [R, abr.]
66.4684 MANSOURI, Fethi; KIRPITCHENKO, Liudmila —
This paper discusses the empirical manifestations of the notion of active citizenship in the context of the experiences of migrant youth. It focuses on involvement in social networks and creative civic engagement. It examines the complex and multi-faceted nature of social networking among migrant youth and the extent to which their approach to engagement is dependent on the specificities of the local environment, the type of social issues involved, and the cultural norms of one's own cultural heritage. Key empirical insights are derived from quantitative and qualitative research conducted among migrant youth of African, Arabicspeaking and Pacific Island backgrounds in Australia. [R, abr.]
66.4685 MARSHALL, John —
High school education is central to adolescent socialization and has important downstream consequences for adult life. However, scholars examining schooling's political effects have struggled to reconcile education's correlation with both more liberal social attitudes and greater income. To disentangle this relationship, I exploit a major school-leaving age reform in Great Britain that caused almost half the population to remain at high school for at least an additional year. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that each additional year of late high school increases the probability of voting Conservative in later life by 12 percentage points. A similar relationship holds when pooling all cohorts, suggesting that high school education is a key determinant of voting behavior and that the reform could have significantly altered electoral outcomes. [R, abr.]
66.4686 MARTIN, Pierre —
The French regional elections in December 2015 were marked, just like the departmental elections in March 2015, by the Left's heavy defeat, a strong surge for the National Front, which nonetheless massively failed at the second round, and a major victory for The Republicans-UDI-MoDem in terms of number of seats and regional presidencies. Following the elections, the political and social climate worsened for the government. A detailed analysis of the regional elections shows that there is a new, three-party electoral order that opposes the Left PS, The Republicans, and the National Front and that this order in turn has changed the nature of elections themselves.
66.4687 MASON, Lilliana —
Social sorting [can] play a powerful role in driving anger and enthusiasm, undercutting the perception that only practical disagreements are driving higher levels of political rancor. Because a highly aligned set of social identities increases an individual's perceived differences between groups, the emotions that result from group conflict are likely to be heightened among well-sorted partisans. An experimental design in a national online survey manipulates political threats and reassurances, including a threat to a party and a threat to distinct policy goals. Issue positions are found to drive anger and enthusiasm in the presence of issue-based messages, but not all party-based messages. Partisan identity drives anger and enthusiasm in the presence of party-based threats and reassurances, but not all issue-based messages. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4283]
66.4688 McALLISTER, Ian; WHITE, Stephen —
Various explanations have been offered for the commanding electoral support enjoyed by the Belarusian president A. Lukashenka since his original election in 1994. On the evidence of the authors' surveys, in particular post-election opinion surveys conducted in 2006 and 2011, there is an association between social structural variables and electoral support, and between perceptions of government economic performance and electoral support, but both largely disappear when appropriate controls are introduced. It is personal approval of Lukashenka on the part of voters, over and above these other circumstances, that makes by far the largest contribution. [R]
66.4689 MELLON, Jon; EVANS, Geoffrey —
In their reply to our article, R. Ford and M. Goodwin [See Abstr. 66.4597] argue that UKIP's support is derived primarily from the working class, that it may become an electoral threat for Labour, particularly in Northern seats, and that since 2010 it has taken votes that would otherwise have gone to Labour. We present evidence refuting all of these claims. First, while working class voters are a little more likely to support UKIP than other classes, numerically the bulk of UKIP's support comes from the middle classes. Second, using propensity-to-vote scores to measure which party's supporters are likely to be fertile ground for UKIP, we find that 45% of current Conservative supporters have UKIP as a second preference, compared with only 19% of Labour supporters. Labour has benefitted from UKIP's presence and is likely to continue to do so. [R, abr.]
66.4690 MEMCÜTEK, Zeynep Şahin —
The paper explores the understanding of external voting in the context of the 2014 Turkish presidential election in which migrants from Turkey were enabled to cast votes abroad. This first experience of external voting provided an opportunity for an inquiry into the motivations, expectations and concerns underlying emigrants' electoral participation. Drawing from original fieldwork investigation in Germany, this exploratory study finds that citizens' motivation for voting abroad was largely dictated by the symbolic dimension of citizenship, and desire to formally participate in Turkish politics. Also, evidences demonstrate that external voting led to growing concerns about public security as well as allegiance of immigrants in major hosting countries, particularly in Germany. [R]
66.4691 METZ, Thomas; JÄCKLE, Sebastian —
Members of the German parliament may force government to publicly answer questions by issuing minor interpellations (kleine Anfragen). We use 3,608 interpellations from the session 2009–2013 that have been signed by authoring and supporting members to construct the social network of support relations among members within the three opposition parties. We find that parties differ markedly in terms of internal structure. While social democrats organize hierarchically, Greens cooperate horizontally. The network for socialist Linke in contrast shows signs of homophily and social segregation. Our approach yields a novel perspective on intraparty politics in parliamentary systems which are notoriously difficult to analyze. [R]
66.4692 MILAZZO, Caitlin; MATTES, Kyle —
This article explores the relationship between perceptions of candidate attractiveness and election outcomes in Britain. It uses a computer-based survey to evaluate subjects' first impressions of real British candidates from the 2010 general election; looks at the perception that Conservative candidates and candidates who are relatively young are more attractive. It concludes that attractive candidates were more moderately more successful, even when we control for other important determinants of electoral success. [R]
66.4693 MILLER, Michael G. —
Using survey data from more than 500 legislative candidates in 17 states during the 2008 election, I examine whether US state-house candidates who devote more time to their campaign win a larger share of the majorparty vote. Consistent with previous work studying campaign spending in state legislative elections, I find a positive and significant association between campaign time and vote percentage for challengers — but not incumbents — in incumbent-contested elections. [R]
66.4694 MILLER, Susan M. —
Federal agencies award thousands of grants and contracts each year. Although we have considerable insight into the implications of these expenditures for politicians, we know little about their consequences for agencies. I develop a theory that links agency spending in citizens' states to their support of agency performance, with the expectation that this relationship is conditioned by citizen–agency ideological congruence. I contend that agency spending serves as an information shortcut for citizens when evaluating agencies because it is often visible in a way that other agency activities, such as regulatory decisions, are not. When a citizen fundamentally supports the policies and projects an agency is funding, the positive effect of spending may be enhanced. I find support for these expectations. [R, abr.]
66.4695 MOLINA ALLENDE, Ivan —
The anti-eviction movement in Spain is among a wide array of counterhegemonic practices that reflect the antagonistic interests between the elites and the popular classes. Currently, with a volatile political scenario and the appearance of anti-austerity forces, tension remains between attempts to consolidate and protect social rights and strategies to contain further attacks on the social model. Meanwhile, the financial sector aims to recompose the housing sector, continuing an economic model based on speculation around housing assets as a commodity. This development is characterized by the entrance of international actors (e.g. investment funds) that foster the hollowing out of political sovereignty. The article reflects on the political challenges for social movements to build effective social “counter-powers” able to reverse the democratic and social regressions suffered throughout the last years. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4199]
66.4696 MOSCOVITZ, Hannah —
This study analyzes the mainstreaming of radical-right ideology in Israel. Focusing on the political discourse used to describe the current asylum issue in the country, the article claims that features of radical-right ideology are not limited to the discourse of radical-right parties, but increasingly pervade the mainstream. Through discourse-analysis of parliamentary discussions over asylum, the study highlights the discursive strategies and linguistic properties used in the expression of radical-right ideology. The findings reveal the distinct manner in which both party families express radical-right ideology; while the radical-right discourse is explicit, overall, the mainstream discourse is implicit, with traces of explicitness observed. The Israeli case reveals significant insights into the scope of radical-right ideology. [R, abr.]
66.4697 MÜLLER, Jan-Werner —
Whether in France or the US, Poland or Germany, populist movements are on the rise. According to the author, this is due to a representation crisis: political parties no longer embody the interests of citizens, whose trust in their political representatives is plummeting. The answer to the problem can be found in neither “good populism” (i.e., left-wing populist movements) nor in technocracy, but in the choice for pluralism and a real democratic Europe.
66.4698 MÜLLER, Jan-Werner —
The widespread assumption that populists are unable to govern is wrong. Populists harbor a particular conception of politics. They are antipluralist and anti-elitist. Even in government, populists employ very specific techniques of rule. The style themselves as victims, suspect treason everywhere, and present their policies as action taken under a permanent state of siege. At the same time, they assert a moral claim to sole agency. Three aspects of this anti-pluralism as it is practiced in reality stand out: the usurpation of the entire state, the procurement of loyalty by mass clientelism, as well as the suppression of civil society and, if possible, the media. [R] [First article of a thematic issue, “Against the wall: the conservative revolution in Poland”, edited and introduced by Tiefe SPALTUNG. See also Abstr. 66.4279, 4375, 4403, 4527, 4549, 4661, 4665, 4761, 4775, 4782, 4793, 4861, 4890, 4900, 4930, 4954, 4961]
66.4699 MUÑOZ MÁRQUEZ, Luz M. —
Most research about NGOs is related to governments and international organizations. There is less research about how regulation constrains and defines the role of NGOs in the political systems where they operate. This article analyzes the evolution of regulations effecting NGOs in Spain, specifically those NGOs related to foreign aid. The goal is to explain how opportunities and organizational costs vary due to State intervention. Through the analysis of Spanish regulation it is shown that State intervention affects how NGOs organize and professionalize, and institutionalize the interaction between the two actors. State intervention constrains NGO's capacity to survive and to consolidate as major actors within the political system. [R]
66.4700 MURTAGH, Cera —
This article explores how civic mobilizations that emerge in deeply divided societies navigate their ethnopolitical frameworks and assesses their capacity to effect civic political change within such contexts. The article examines these questions through the case of a citizens' protest and direct democracy movement that emerged in the postwar state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014. It concludes that the movement adapted to its ethnicized political environment by adopting an approach of limited political engagement and that, rather than trying to effect short-term political change, it chose to pursue a long-term shift in civic consciousness. [R]
66.4701 NATTRASS, Nicoli; SEEKINGS, Jeremy —
Relationships between trade unions, the state and capital in South Africa have changed dramatically, especially in the clothing sector. The clothing workers' union became heavily dependent on its political alliances with the governing party, not only for the regulation of wages and industrial policies, but also for Black Economic Empowerment policies that helped it to acquire massive shareholdings, including in the largest clothing manufacturer. In terms of both its exposure to capitalist risk and its investments in the casino industry specifically, the union acquired a stake in “casino capitalism”, whilst relying on government to stack the odds in its favor. [R]
66.4702 NAVIA, Patricio; OSORIO, Rodrigo —
For different reasons, identification with political parties has been on the decline everywhere. Using polling data, we show that political identification in Chile increased in times of polarization before 1973 and in the transition to democracy in 1990 and fell under democratic consolidation. The decline comes primarily from falling identification with the largest party, the centrist Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Assessing the determinants of party identification, we report that while in the 1960s the PDC had a wide appeal as it attracted voters identified with the left, center and right, in recent years the PDC attracts support from centrists and older people. [R]
66.4703 NDUKWE, Thaddeus C. —
Research has generally shown that the church and mosque play some role in immigrant political integration, especially mobilization. In Finland, no research has yet examined it. This leaves a gap on whether the church and/or the mosque play such role. This paper uses Black African immigrants as a case study through in-depth interviews. The focus is on political mobilization at the municipal level where many immigrants in Finland have full local suffrage. The study does not just examine the role of the church and mosque in mobilization in conventional politics (such as voting, party membership, campaigning), but also in the unconventional (such as protests, strikes, boycotts). Findings, however, reveal that both religious institutions play a relatively small role in these two regards. [R]
66.4704 NEDELCU, Harry; DeBARDELEBEN, Joan —
The political representation of ethnic minorities in the party systems of Central and Eastern European states remains understudied. This paper asks what institutional factors influence the way ethnic minorities are represented in the party systems of Central and Eastern European states. It does so based on a comparison of ethnic minorities in two paired cases (Slovakia/Romania and Estonia/Latvia), each of which shows similarities in some regards but have different outcomes in terms of party representation. The paper examines explanations for the diverse forms through which minorities are represented in these four countries with a focus on three distinct types: ethnic particularist minority parties, integrationist minority parties, and accommodative majority parties. We examine two institutional/political factors that influence specific minority party types: (1) electoral systems and (2) political strategies of the dominant ethnic elite. [R, abr.]
66.4705 NEVILLE, Kate J.; WEINTHAL, Erika —
Plans to replace an aging diesel backup energy plant with liquid natural gas (LNG) generators in Whitehorse, Yukon [Canada], resulted in a public outcry, involving community meetings, massive petitions, and demonstrations. Are these civil society protests just a case of a local siting dispute — a response to an unwanted industrial site in an urban neighborhood? We argue that siting debates are harnessed by activists to advance a broader environmental movement. By linking the LNG project to hydraulic fracturing, movement leaders portray the entire territory as part of the “local” for Whitehorse residents. Movement leaders rely upon two key mechanisms: claiming insider status, and identifying visible symbols. This case reveals the strategic use by environmental movements of local concerns to recruit support for broader campaigns, and the value of local, place-based activism for broader environmental movements. [R, abr.]
66.4706 NIŞANCIOĞLU, Kerem; PAL, Maia —
Deploying the Foucauldian concepts of “conduct” and “counter-conduct”, this article provides an analysis of “Occupy Sussex” — a two-month-long student occupation launched in opposition to the outsourcing of service staff at the University of Sussex. Situated in the context of a post-Fordist political economy, we argue that the British university constitutes an especial site of conduct-formation — a University Factory — wherein individuals are sorted and socialized as immaterial laborers. We argue that Occupy Sussex was a reaction to such conduct-formation. As such, counter-conduct is deployed as a concept that can effectively map the tactics and strategies undertaken by Occupy Sussex against the university management. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4740]
66.4707 NORRIS, Mikel —
External political efficacy, the belief that government is responsive to the demands of its citizens, has been declining in the US since the 1960s. However, scholars do not yet fully understand the reasons for its decline. Nor have they found suitable explanations for why it fluctuates within the electorate. Drawing on the growing literature on the effects of income inequality on public policy, I posit that increasing income inequality factors into the decline of external political efficacy. Using multilevel regression models accounting for individual and contextual factors, I find increasing state-level income inequality has a substantial negative effect on external political efficacy. It is greater than most state and national-level economic measures or individual-level variables on external political efficacy. [R, abr.]
66.4708 O'BRIEN, Diana Z.; RICKNE, Johanna —
Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment — a 50–50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches — to examine quotas' influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became more likely to select (but not reappoint) female leaders. Extending this analysis, we show that the quota increased the number of women perceived as qualified for these positions. Our findings support the notion that quotas can have an acceleration effect on women's representation in leadership positions, particularly when they augment the pool of female candidates for these posts. [R, abr.]
66.4709 O'DWYER, Emma; LYONS, Evanthia; COHRS, J. Christopher —
The present study investigates the relationship between the foreign policy orientation of Irish neutrality and national identity using a social representations approach (G. Elcheroth, W. Doise, S. Reicher [“On the knowledge of politics and the politics of knowledge: how a social representations approach helps us rethink the subject of political psychology”, ibid. 32(5), Oct. 2011: 729–758, Abstr. 61.7176], S. Moscovici [Psychoanalysis: its Image and its Public, Cambridge, 1961]. In four focus groups conducted in the Republic of Ireland, 22 participants discussed vignettes in which hypothetical conflicts were described. The findings pointed towards the dynamic relationship between neutrality and Irish national identity and more generally to the importance of macropolitical phenomena for identity construction. [R, abr.]
66.4710 O'MAHEN, Patrick —
Policy-makers in industrialized democracies often debate the efficacy of subsidizing public broadcasters. Surprisingly, however, past media and politics research analyzing the effects of public broadcasting on political knowledge does not isolate the effect of subsidies and instead treats all public broadcasters as equals. This study theorizes that subsidized public broadcasters have to worry less about competing with entertainment-oriented commercial broadcasters for advertising revenue than their unsubsidized peers. As a result, they can focus on providing more comprehensive public affairs coverage instead of only worrying about attracting the largest possible audience. To test this theory, I use Eurobarometer data measuring knowledge, media consumption, and demographic variables from 14 countries. [R, abr.]
66.4711 OCAKLI, Feryaz —
This article examines an important mechanism of political recruitment in developing democracies: party-civil society organization (CSO) linkages. Existing theories treat CSOs as arenas of civic participation rather than as political agents in their own right, which leads scholars to overlook their impact on electoral competition. This article argues that the distinct resource portfolios of CSOs influence their relative impact on candidate selection, and consequently, local politics. CSOs that represent the material interests of their constituents, such as resource-rich business groups and vote-rich identity groups, have significant influence over candidate selection. Issue-oriented CSOs tend to have less impact. Party-CSO relations often facilitate clientelist linkages between parties and voters, weakening democratic governance. Evidence is provided with an in-depth case study of CSO-political party relations in the industrial periphery of Istanbul, Turkey. [R, abr.]
66.4712 ODYSSEOS, Louiza —
Theorizing how human rights function as a liberal governing technology has largely eschewed concerted examination of the mobilization and impact of human rights in historically specific struggles. This has tended to divorce the theoretical concerns of critical rights scholarship from the specificity of political struggles, reifying rights and obscuring the agency of “the governed”. [Focusing on] human rights' potential destabilizations of conduct, the article examines M. Foucault's work into forms of resistance to “power that conducts” — “counter-conduct” — which is increasingly inspiring wide-ranging analyses of resistances to conducting power. Bringing together the “theorizing practice” of counter-conduct and the enduring campaigns for justice by survivors and activists of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, the article examines how human rights enable forms of self-formation that interrupt the subjectification of those constructed as disposable subjects. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4740]
66.4713 OLSON, Laura R. —
I compare progressive and conservative religio-political activists' commitment to their movements (the religious left and right, respectively). I rely on data from the Public Religion Research Institute's 2009 surveys of individuals they identified as religious left activists and religious right activists. Do these activists actually say they identify with the movement with which pollsters assume them to affiliate? How potentially influential do they perceive their movements to be? Third, to what extent do activists support their movement's core social movement organizations? I conclude by arguing that the evidence is mixed that the American religious left lacks influence because its activists tend not to be unified. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4239]
66.4714 OMELICHEVA, Mariya Y. —
How can Islam play multiple and contradictory roles as a source of violence and peace, and a marker of identity differences and national unity? This study argues that religion, as a system of beliefs, manifests itself through discourses, which not only render intelligibility to religious practices and beliefs but also serve as the instruments of social control and regulation. An infinite variety of organizational and ideological differences within Islam presents the possibility for instrumentalization of religion by stakeholders interested in accomplishing distinctive political aims connected to political legitimization. The study offers an empirical analysis of instrumentalization of Islam by governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and uses this evidence for developing a framework linking various discursive representations of religion to their political uses. [R]
66.4715 ONBAŞI, Funda Gençoğlu —
This study critically analyzes the Gezi Park protests of 2013. It argues that the practice of Gezi can be understood via the theory of radical democracy, whose core concepts and premises are particularly appropriate for making sense of what happened during Gezi protests. This study argues that (1) Gezi was a manifestation of the “undecidability and contingency of political identities”; (2) a highly suitable atmosphere developed during the protests for the emergence of a “(counter) hegemonic relationship” in the radical democratic sense of the term; (3) Kemalism unsuccessfully attempted to act as “the nodal point” to fix the free floating of ideological elements; (4) ultimately, no particularity managed to take over the representation of “the chain of equivalence” established among the elements excluded from the current neoliberal-conservative hegemony. [R, abr.]
66.4716 ONG, Elvin —
Recent political science scholarship suggests that when opposition political parties are able to coalesce into a united coalition against an authoritarian regime, they will perform better in authoritarian elections, and can more credibly bargain with the regime for liberalizing reforms. Yet, most of this literature pays little attention to the variety of ways in which opposition parties cooperate with each other. Drawing on the literature on the bargaining model of war, the author sketches out a theoretical framework to explain how opposition parties coordinate to develop non-competition agreements. Such agreements entail opposition parties bargaining over which political party should contest or withdraw in which constituencies to ensure straight fights against the dominant authoritarian incumbent in each electoral district. The author then applies this framework to explain opposition coordination in Singapore's 2015 general elections. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4717 OPPELLAND, Torsten; TRÄGER, Hendrick —
In three out of four cases (Sachsen-Anhalt 2006 and 2011; Thuringia 2009 and 2014) in which the SPD had the pivotal choice between a coalition led by Die Linke or by the CDU, she opted for the latter. Only in Thuringia in 2014 did she choose the new model of a coalition led by Die Linke. This article compares all four cases in order to determine which variables are most responsible for the Thuringian SPD's decision in 2014. The comparison shows that the party's electoral defeat in the state election which led to a shift in the intra-party power relations distinguished the 2014 case most from the other three cases. Another important variable was that the SPD in Thuringia had not explicitly excluded a coalition led by Die Linke before the election. [R, abr.]
66.4718 OSIPIAN, Ararat L. —
This paper considers new challenges for Russian universities and the state, including flourishing and widespread corruption, politicization and state pressure, and student activism, and hypothesizes on how these three may be linked. It uses systematic research of media accounts from 2007 to 2012 in order to investigate student activism and its possible links with corruption and university politicization. It develops a theoretical extension that explains the corruption and coercion mechanism as applied to student activism, and places emphasis on higher education corruption and state pressure applied to universities. It concludes that students are more interested in fighting for their economic rights and fulfillment of contractual obligations by the universities, while remaining politically inactive. [R, abr.]
66.4719 PANOV, Petr; ROSS, Cameron —
The institutionalization and nationalization of Russia's party system, which is dominated by United Russia, has played a major role in the building of V. Putin's “power vertical”. Nevertheless, [although] formal relations within UR are highly centralized, informal practices allow for far greater degrees of regional autonomy. Focusing on UR's candidate-selection for the 2011 Duma election, this article provides an examination of cross-regional variations in the relations between UR's Party Center and its regional branches. As electoral legislation requires the segmentation of party lists into “regional groups”, the composition of the regional lists, specifically the share of “native candidates”, is considered as an indicator of the level of autonomy of regional branches. Ordinal regression analysis confirms our main theoretical hypotheses. [R, abr.]
66.4720 PASQUINO, Gianfranco —
Italian primary elections are a successful instance of institutional imitation and adaptation. This article argues that, as practiced by the Democratic Party, they have contributed to greater transparency of the procedures through which candidates for public office are selected. They have solicited more participation and have been highly attractive to the media. Though often criticized, and though not yet fully understood in terms of their impact, they have been a stable feature of the Democratic Party for more than 10 years. A return to the past seems inconceivable, but improvements to the rules and procedures are possible and advisable. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4721]
66.4721 PASQUINO, Gianfranco; VALBRUZZI, Marco —
Primaries have become an almost indispensable tool of the political game in the Italian center-left coalition and, especially, within the Democratic Party. This article explores what has led to this important institutional change in the candidate and leadership selection processes. It assesses the consequences with reference to both competition and inclusiveness. It concludes by stressing that, frequent, undocumented and unfounded criticisms notwithstanding, Italian primaries have played, and promise to continue to play, quite a positive role in the Italian political system. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “Ten years after: a balance sheet of the Italian primaries”, edited by James L. NEWELL and Maurizio CARBONE. See also Abstr. 66.4589, 4681, 4720, 4736, 4745, 4772]
66.4722 PATTIE, Charles; JOHNSTON, Ron —
Does persuasion in conversation networks increase the gap individuals perceive between their own views and those of groups or parties opposed by their discussion partners? Building on work which suggests that ideological homogeneity within networks leads to increased polarization and drives individuals to relative political extremes, the article examines British voters' perceptions of parties whose views they do not share. The more internally homogeneous the partisan message coming from their main discussion partners, the more extreme individuals become in their views, and the greater the gulf they perceive between themselves and parties not supported by their networks. But the effect is evident only on issues which are politically salient, suggesting this is a real conversation effect. [R, abr.]
66.4723 PEIFER, Jared L.; KHALSA, Simranjit; ECKLUND, Elaine Howard —
Previous research suggests that while there is a mixed relationship between religiosity (measured in various ways) and environmentalism, political conservatives are unlikely to support pro-environment measures. Using nationally representative survey data, mixed results are found regarding the relationship of religiosity and environmental consumption: religious attendance and religious identity are positively related to environmental consumption, while belief in an involved God and biblical literalism are negatively related. Increased levels of religiosity, however, mute the otherwise strong negative effect of political conservatism. This suggests, surprisingly, that Green marketers and activists are likely to face less conservative resistance to environmental consumption among religious Americans. [R]
66.4724 PERRELLA, Andrea M. L., et al. —
Few have asked about political implications of increasing income inequalities in Canada. Over several generations, those in higher echelons have enjoyed considerable growth, while those in lower tiers have seen no growth, or worse, declines. This leads us to ask whether there also exists a bifurcation of political attitudes, with those in the lower income tiers showing more negative orientations compared to those who fare much better. More precisely, we examine whether growing income inequality — mainly the growing income gap — has any measurable effect on political attitudes. We approach this study by incorporating econometric data from Statistic Canada and survey date from the Canadian Election Study, spanning from the early 1990s to 2011. [R]
66.4725 PERRIN, Kristen —
This article suggests that new avenues need to be taken in order to truly understand what is taking place sociologically in the ICTY courtroom. Embedded within courtroom interactions are symbolic exchanges that can stand as both reflections of and implications for the success or failure of transitional justice as a tool to promote community understanding post-conflict. Using social psychology and cognitive linguistics, this article examines the significance of in-court references to memory, theorizing that the concepts of remembering and forgetting as discussed in transcripts reveal greater struggles between the witnesses and the court over narrative control. This ultimately raises questions about the nature of the relationship between international legal bodies and the individual victim-witness, and [underlines] failings that could make processes of reconciliation and community healing more difficult. [R, abr.]
66.4726 PERRINEAU, Pascal —
Since 2011, the FN has registered a constant increase of its electoral impact so much so that it is today the French party with the largest number of voters. This extraordinary dynamics can be explained by the deepening of the economic and social crisis of the country, the political and ideological aggiornamento of the party operated by Marine Le Pen, the deep disappointment with the left in power, a growing disillusionment with the painful and difficult reconstruction of the right, but also by the murderous terrorist attacks which have brought to the forefront of the political agenda the traditional themes of the NF such as security, immigration and Islamism. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4727 PICCOLINO, Giulia —
The 2015 presidential election in Côte d'Ivoire was seen as an important test for the country given the 2010 post-election crisis. Although the 2015 polls were peaceful, they were affected by problems not new to Côte d'Ivoire: lack of competition due to non-participation of major political actors, low voter turnout, mistrust in electoral institutions. The unpreparedness of the Commission Electorale Indépendante (CEI) was also problematic, especially with respect to the revision of the voter list. Due to the boycott of partisans of former president L. Gbagbo and because of the support of the Rassemblement des Houphouëtistes pour la Démocratie et la Paix (RHDP), President A. Ouattara's re-election was essentially a given from the start. With the ruling coalition firmly in control, Côte d'Ivoire appears stable. However, the country's democratic deficit might lead to renewed violence once the RHDP has to pick Ouattara's successor. [R, abr.]
66.4728 PISCOPO, Jennifer M. —
As gender quotas change the formal rules governing candidate selection, party leaders use informal practices in order to preserve the choicest candidacies for men. This article uses a critical case to highlight how the opposite also occurs. In Mexico, female elites built informal, crosspartisan networks that, in collaboration with state regulators, successfully eliminated political parties' practices of allocating women the least-viable candidacies. Traditional party elites rely on informal tactics to secure the status quo, but female party members devise their own strategies to force changes to candidate selection, signaling that informality cannot be theorized as wholly negative for women. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4135]
66.4729 PROSSER, Christopher —
The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a onedimensional “general left/right” form or a two-dimensional “economic left-right/social liberal-conservative” form leads to very different understandings of the way ideology has structured attitudes towards European integration, with the two-dimensional approach offering greater explanatory power. Second, existing approaches have modeled the influence of ideology on attitudes towards European integration as a static process. This article shows that the relationship between ideology and European integration has changed substantially over the history of European integration. [R, abr.]
66.4730 RAGUSA, Jordan M.; TARPEY, Matthew —
The authors look at whether local economic conditions affect voting behavior in the US. They argue that economic voting is principally a national phenomenon, with variation in the national unemployment rate having robust effects in both presidential and congressional elections. [R]
66.4731 RATTSØ, Jørn; SØRENSEN, Rune J. —
Political preferences of public employees differ from those of workers in the private sector. The former are more likely to vote for left-wing parties and orient themselves ideologically towards the left. This political cleavage can be understood as the result of occupational incentives, or alternatively, as ideological self-selection whereby individuals favoring government solutions seek employment in the public sector. We test the selection hypothesis by estimating the effects of public versus private occupational sector on political preferences before and after retirement. The data are from the Norwegian Election Surveys and cover nine national elections between 1977 and 2009. The research design addresses a series of cross-sectional data and the key challenge of endogenous retirement is handled with instrumental variables. [R, abr.]
66.4732 RAYMOND, Christopher —
The literature has difficulty explaining why the number of parties in majoritarian electoral systems often exceeds the two-party predictions associated with Duverger's Law. To understand why this is the case, I examine several party systems in Western Europe before the adoption of proportional representation. I argue that the emergence of multiparty systems was because of the development of the class cleavage, which provided a base of voters sizeable enough to support third parties. However, in countries where the class cleavage became the largest cleavage, the class divide displaced other cleavages and the number of parties began to converge on two. The results show that the effect of the class cleavage was nonlinear, producing the greatest party system fragmentation in countries where class cleavages were present — but not dominant. [R, abr.]
66.4733 RAYMOND, Christopher D.; OVERBY, L. Marvin —
In trying to understand the effects of political parties on shaping the voting behavior of legislators, research has attempted to separate the effects of preferences from rules used by party leaders to enforce discipline. However, little research has explored the prospect that party labels also reflect a social identity that is independent of legislators' preferences and the rules used by party leaders to enforce discipline. We examine that possibility, employing a data-set that permits us to control both for leadership-based effects and legislator preferences on a 2000 free vote dealing with stem-cell research. Using the British Representation Studies 1997 — which interviewed MPs regarding their preferences on several key issues related to the bill — we find significant evidence that party-as-identification plays a role in shaping how legislators vote, even after preferences and discipline are accounted for. [R, abr.]
66.4734 RAYNAUD, Philippe —
The relationships between the Front national and the intellectual milieu have always been shaped more by politics than by doctrinal affinities. The “first National Front” brought together groups with different leanings while at the same time trying to appear as the only coherent “right-wing” party. Marine Le Pen's “de-demonized” Front national has abandoned ambiguous references to World War II, and presents itself as a social, republican and sovereignist party, which leads it to make frequent use of authors and artists from the left without rallying their support. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4735 REEDY, Justin; GASTIL, John; MOY, Patricia —
Considerable research on political discussion has focused on identifying its antecedents and outcomes. The rise of voting by mail provides an opportunity to examine the subject in a new context — one in which voters discuss their views and electoral choices with others while filling out their ballots. We explored the possibility that conventional predictors of political engagement would predict who partakes in such discussions. Past research also suggested that those voters most likely to report changing their minds as a result of discussion would perceive their discussants as holding contrary views and higher levels of political sophistication. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed telephone survey data from two elections conducted in Washington State [US]. [R, abr.]
66.4736 REGALIA, Marta; VALBRUZZI, Marco —
[Before] the 2013 legislative elections, three political parties decided, for the first time, to use primaries as the main method of candidate-selection. This article analyzes some of the characteristics and consequences of the parliamentary primaries in terms of the socio-demographic composition of Parliament and the behavior of MPs. The evidence provided by the Italian experience shows that inclusive selectorates seem to promote a higher level of female representation in the assembly and the inclusion of younger people. As far as the legislative behavior of MPs is concerned, parliamentarians selected through primaries show the highest rates of attendance. Finally, with regard to the level of productivity and the frequency of rebellion, the results of our analysis do not lead to any clear conclusions. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4721]
66.4737 REVELLI, Federico —
This paper exploits variation in tax limits across over 7,000 Italian municipalities during the 2000s to investigate their impact on voter-turnout and local election outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on a panel-data estimator on about 14,000 municipal elections during the 2001–2010 decade and on a quasi-experimental approach focusing on the fiscal limitation treatment of municipalities (local income surcharge freeze) in the years 2001 and 2006, where the trajectory of local turnout in the concurrent general elections is used as the counterfactual. The evidence is compatible with the hypothesis that the imposition of tax limits lowers the ideological stakes of local elections, favors party-line crossing, and promotes vote convergence based on the valence of candidates. [R, abr.]
66.4738 RIVIERE, Emmanuel —
The French think less and less favorably of their institutions and governments. Negative opinions of national and European democratic leaders, however, vary from country to country. Governments in Germany and the Scandinavia generally tend to satisfy public opinion more than governments in the south. Eastern countries on the other hand are more favorable of European democracies than of their own national democracies. In Austria and the UK, however, the situation is the opposite. These countries are more favorable of their own institutions than of European ones. Southern countries are strict on both European and national levels. France belongs to this latter category, yet holds a specific position within it.
66.4739 RODRÍGUEZ, Javier Lorenzo; MADARIAGA, Amuitz Garmendia —
Political parties and candidates have not been immune to the changes that the internet and social media have introduced in electoral campaigns. Yet, as the use of digital media by political elites is becoming a norm in the US, in Europe, the decision to develop an online presence depends on the cross-national differences regarding candidates' constraints and incentives. EP elections present an exceptional comparative opportunity to measure this potential diversity. Using an original database on the online presence of more than 5000 candidates competing under the label of incumbent parties in 2014, we demonstrate that there are two relevant groups of nonadopters, and that candidates' online campaign intensity varies significantly depending on incumbency and the ballot structure in their countries. [R]
66.4740 ROSSDALE, Chris; STIERL, Maurice —
This article examines practices of counter-conduct in the context of Occupy movements that were keen to emphasize their openness, inclusivity, and their manifestation of processes which facilitate nonhierarchical and radically democratic social relations. As they criticized and work to unmake a global order marked by privilege, violence, alienation and extraordinary deprivation, they claimed to embody and explore alternatives rooted in solidarity and empathy. However, such grand narratives can serve to obscure the more contested or ambiguous practices of these movements. In the face of stories and (proclaimed) subjects of emancipation, we explore those instances where resistance breaks down, excludes, ignores, privileges, and where subjects attempt to resist resistance. We mobilize M. Foucault's concept of counter-conduct, which allows for power to be conceptualized as dispersed, networked, and as predicated on unstable and multiplicitous subjectivities. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on “Counter-conduct in global politics: theorizing the subjects and practices of contesting conduct”, edited and introduced by Louiza ODYSSEOS, Carl DEATH and Helle MALMVIG. See also Abstr. 66.4080, 4133, 4264, 4551, 4572, 4580, 4706, 4712, 4759, 5009]
66.4741 RUDERMAN, Nick; NEVITTE, Neil —
Satisfaction with the workings of democracy seems to have declined in Canada, as it has in other established democracies. Political scandals are one frequently invoked explanation for that shift. But there is substantial scholarly disagreement about whether political scandals undermine democratic satisfaction. This paper uses evidence from a conveniently timed round of the CES (Canadian Election Study) from 2004, as well as the CES panel from 2004 and 2006, to explore this relationship more definitively than is usually possible. The results indicate that the scandal eroded satisfaction with the way democracy works but did not undermine support for democracy more generally. [R]
66.4742 RUNDLETT, Ashlea; SVOLIK, Milan W. —
Most electoral fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a multitude of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political organization of electoral fraud by studying the perverse consequences of incentive conflicts between incumbents and their local agents. These incentive conflicts result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent's point of view. Our analysis of the political organization of electoral fraud explains why even popular incumbents often preside over seemingly unnecessary fraud, why fraud sometimes fails to deliver victories, and it predicts that the extent of fraud should be increasing in both the incumbent's genuine support and reported results across precincts. A statistical analysis of anomalies in precinct-level results from the 2011–2012 Russian legislative and presidential elections provides preliminary support for our key claims. [R, abr.]
66.4743 SAAT, Norshahril —
e resounding victory of the People's Action Party (PAP) in the 2015 Singapore general elections surprised many observers. Analysts have spoken about PAP's hard work and the opposition's failures; this article, however, points out how Singapore's electoral system, especially the Group Representative Constituency (GRC), continues to favor the ruling party and why it should be rethought. Introduced in 1988, the scheme ensures minority candidates (non-Chinese) are voted into parliament. Candidates contesting in a GRC form a team of MPs with at least one minority candidate in each team. This article argues that the 2015 election results proves that Singaporeans no longer vote along ethnic lines, and non-Chinese MPs have comfortably led the GRCs and won in Single Member Constituencies. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4744 SALEH, Layla —
Why, in the current geo-political and strategic context seemingly in stark contrast to the “War on Terror”, does the emphasis on women in US foreign policy persist? Why the repeated references to the vulnerability of women who “need” US help to become “empowered” in the countries of the Arab Spring? An examination of US policy-makers' discourses indicates a neo-orientalist biopolitical construction of the (Muslim) female population as one in perpetual need of “empowerment”, presumably by American or western benefactors. Public statements by US foreign policy officials, discussions of government programs and Congressional testimony add to the repertoire of a western-constructed archaeology of neo-orientalist knowledge of Islam. [R, abr.]
66.4745 SANDRI, Giulia; VENTURINO, Fulvio —
We analyze the mayoral open primaries held from 2004 to 2015. We empirically assess their functioning and their effectiveness, especially in terms of competitiveness and turnout. We also explore the dynamics of diffusion of this instrument of intra-party democracy over time, across parties and across geographical areas. Moreover, we provide an exploratory account of the electoral consequences of mayoral primaries in terms of three dimensions of analysis: the type of municipality in which primaries are held, the features of the primary election contest, and the characteristics of the subsequent mayoral elections. Our results show that local primaries are characterized by two main features: they are fairly institutionalized, and a contagion effect across parties and geographical areas is emerging. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4721]
66.4746 SCHLOSBERG, David; COLES, Romand —
This article analyzes recent developments in environmental activism, in particular movements focused on reconfiguring material flows. The shift to a more sustainable materialism is examined using three frameworks: a move beyond an individualist and value-focused notion of postmaterialism, into a focus on collective practices and institutions for the provision of the basic needs of everyday life; M. Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopolitics, which articulate modes of power around the circulation of things, information, and individuals; and a new ethos around vibrant and sustainable materialism with an explicit recognition of human immersion in non-human natural systems. These frames allow us to see and interpret common themes across numerous, seemingly disparate initiatives focused on replacing unsustainable practices and forging alternative flows. [R, abr.]
66.4747 SCHREIBER, Ronnee —
Given the conflict between conservative views about gender roles and motherhood with economic and political realities, this article analyzes how conservative women's organizations framed Palin's and Bachmann's bids for national office. How did these advocates negotiate ideological beliefs about gender roles and motherhood with their interest in electing Republicans and promoting women in politics? Findings reveal that through frame transformation activists navigate through seemingly incompatible values. Far from shying away from discussing conservative women's roles as mothers, conservative women's groups highlight Palin and Bachmann's maternal statuses and argue that their willingness to showcase their families make them different, and more appealing kinds of leaders. In so doing, they also challenge feminist conceptualizations of women's interests and exemplify the importance of having conservative women participate in politics. [R]
66.4748 SETTLE, Jaime E., et al. —
How does living in a battleground state during a US presidential election affect an individual's political engagement? We utilize a unique collection of 113 million Facebook status updates to compare users' political discussion during the 2008 election. “Battleground” state users are significantly more likely to discuss politics in the campaign season than are users in uncompetitive “blackout” states. Posting a political status update — a form of day-to-day engagement with politics — mediates 20 percent of the relationship between exposure to political competition and self-reported voter turnout. This paper is among the first to use a massive quantity of social media data to explain the micro-foundations of how people think, feel, and act on a daily basis in response to their political environment. [R]
66.4749 SEYD, Ben —
Citizens expect much of politicians, yet governments are ill-equipped to deliver outcomes commensurate with those expectations. The net result is said to be a widespread disappointment: a negative balance between what citizens expect of government and what they perceive governments to deliver. This article offers one of the first empirical analyses of political disappointment. Drawing on a survey conducted in Britain, it provides a quantitative measure of political disappointment and explores its prevalence among citizens. It then considers which social groups might be more prone to disappointment than others. In particular, it explores whether certain groups are more disappointed by virtue of holding very high expectations of government or very low perceptions of government performance. The article considers what strategies might be open to policy-makers to alleviate political disappointment. [R, abr.]
66.4750 SIDES, John —
How much do factual information and other kinds of frames affect policy attitudes? And whose attitudes are most malleable? I address these questions via two original survey experiments about the estate tax. I demonstrate that correct information about who is potentially subject to the estate tax increased support for the estate tax. Furthermore, this information did not appear any less persuasive than pro- or anti-tax arguments that emphasized values such as equality or fairness. Finally, the effects of this information were concentrated among lower income conservatives and Republicans. These findings contrast with previous research on estate tax attitudes and have broader implications for the study of political information, framing, and policy attitudes. [R]
66.4751 SILVA TAROUCO, Gabriela da —
How does electoral governance affect the quality of elections? This article compares legislative elections in Latin America since redemocratization to verify the relationship between the models of electoral governance and the quality of elections. The logit panel analysis runs on an original dataset on electoral institutions to find that among other features of electoral governance, the delegation to non-partisan actors plays a critical role, being associated with institutional environments with no concerns about the fairness of elections. On the other hand, when political parties manage electoral competition, there is a greater likelihood of concerns about the fairness of the elections. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4099]
66.4752 SIMON, Pablo —
This article focuses on explaining the variation in turnout rates across districts within a country, a dimension of electoral participation with important political consequences. I argue that the nationalization of party systems is the main factor that drives heterogeneity in turnout rates. The causal mechanism operates through the impact of local party systems. When the nationalization of the party system is low, there are differences in the number and/or the type of local parties changing the voting incentives across districts. As a consequence, low nationalized party systems tend to enhance differences in turnout rates within the polity. Using data from Western Europe legislative elections and alternative nationalization indices, I provide evidence supporting this hypothesis. This article also considers the impact of modernization, ethnic fractionalization and different components of the electoral system. [R]
66.4753 SINGH, Bilveer —
While Singapore's 15th general election came about as expected, the ensuing results did not. In view of the opposition's performance in the 2011 general election and the general sense that the ruling party had done well despite its performance being anything but sterling, the results were somewhat shocking. Even the leaders of the ruling party were caught by surprise at the party's ability to garner 70% of the valid votes, 10% more than in the previous election. While many factors played a role, it was the opposition parties that lost the election rather than the ruling party that won it. Most of the opposition parties were rejected by the voters on grounds of not being worthy of support. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4754 SINGH, Udai Bhanu —
Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide majority in the openly contested elections Myanmar held in November 2015. The NLD won a convincing majority with 255 seats in the lower house, 135 in the upper house and 496 seats in the state and regional legislatures. This paves the way for election of President of its choice and forming a government. The election had 33.5 million eligible voters (over 18 years) of Myanmar's 52 million population. To ensure that the elections were largely above board, there were about 10,000 internal and international observers and extensive media presence. [R]
66.4755 SLATER, Dan; RUSH SMITH, Nicholas —
Counterrevolutions have received far less scholarly attention than revolutions, despite their comparable importance in shaping the modern political world. This article defines counterrevolutions as collective and reactive efforts to defend the status quo and its varied range of dominant elites against a credible threat to overturn them from below. Unlike analysts who see the origins of political order lying in mass-mobilizing revolutionary parties, the authors illuminate the distinctive order-producing attributes of elite-protecting counterrevolutionary parties. A comparative-historical analysis of five former British colonies in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa elaborates the causal mechanisms through which counterrevolutions can produce exceedingly durable, although not invincible, political orders. [R]
66.4756 SMETS, Kaat —
Recent trends call for a revaluation of the political life-cycle model and the way in which it explains voter turnout among young adults. This paper argues that variation in the timing of life events has been overlooked as an explanatory factor of generational differences in young adults' propensity to turn out to vote [in the UK]. With accumulating evidence that the decision to vote is to some extent habitual, a lack of life experiences may cause young adults to form the habit to abstain rather than to vote. If the mechanisms of the life-cycle model are indeed correct, later maturation should at least partially explain why young adults these days are less inclined to vote than their parents or grandparents in their younger years. [R, abr.]
66.4757 SMITH, Daniel M.; TSUTSUMI, Hidenori —
In the past decade, Japan's political parties have increasingly experimented with an “open recruitment” system for selecting new candidates for national elections, but the degree of centralization in the process varies by party. We use candidate- and voter-survey data to assess whether the new system of recruitment has resulted in intraparty differences in the policy positions of candidates, and their distance from party supporters and the median voter. We find evidence that the new candidate-selection method has resulted in the nomination of more centrist and urban-inclined candidates, an indication of greater responsiveness to voters, and that they exhibit higher levels of policy cohesion than their counterparts selected through traditional methods. However, these differences depend on the degree of party centralization in the process. [R, abr.]
66.4758 SMITH, Jacob F. H.; WEINBERG, Neil —
This article examines the extent to which advertising outside of an explicit campaign environment has the potential to benefit the electoral fortunes of incumbent politicians. We make use of a novel case of noncampaign advertising, that of North Carolina Secretary of Labor C. Berry (R-NC), who has initiated the practice of having her picture and name displayed prominently on official inspection placards inside all North Carolina elevators. We extend Mayhew's theory of advertising to a noncampaign environment and then theorize that Berry serves as a novel case of non-campaign-specific advertising via a priming mechanism. We then test our theory using spatial regression methods and find that Berry outperformed other statewide Republican candidates in the 2012 North Carolina elections. [R, abr.]
66.4759 SOKHI-BULLEY, Bal —
The riots that took place in England in August 2011 have widely been described as destructive, senseless and without purpose. This article, taking inspiration from M. Foucault's later work on revolt as counter-conduct, argues for a new understanding of how to read political expression and thereby calls for the riots to be thought differently, as a form of counter-conduct. This demands a new appreciation for the possibilities of revolt where spontaneous, impulsive, mundane and non-spectacular events like riots can be construed as political rather than purely criminal. It also opens up possibilities for how we might understand the ethos of the “revolting subject”. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4740]
66.4760 SOON, Carol; SAMSUDIN, Siti Nadzirah —
[In] the 2015 Singapore general election, the ruling People's Action Party saw an increase in their vote-share from 60.1% in 2011 to 69.9%. What role did social media play in this election? This study shows that, against prevailing assumptions, GE2015 was not a social media election. Through an online survey of 2,000 respondents conducted after polling day, it was found that mainstream media and their online counterparts were used most frequently and were trusted more as sources of information about the election. Online and offline political participation was also low. However, social media users were more interested in election issues, were more likely to discuss politics with others and participated more in offline political activities than non-users. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4761 STANISZKIS, Jadwiga —
For years, J. Staniszkis was the most famous intellectual within the Kaczynski camp. Now, in conversation with G. Gnauck, she is offering harsh criticism. J. Kaczynski and his ruling Law and Justice Party are subjugating the people, showing an almost Bolshevik understanding of law, and damaging the rule of law. As a result of Law and Justice policies, the distance between Poland and Western Europe is growing. Poland is moving farther to the East. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4762 SU Yen-tu —
Political parties are more than key players of democratic politics under the law of democracy. In addition to acting behind the scenes of election lawmaking, political parties regulate themselves in the name of “party autonomy”, and the extra-legal self-regulations they make often have external effects on the democratic political process as a whole. The most important function political parties perform is to select candidates for electoral competition, and how parties regulate candidate-selection in general and candidacy in particular exemplifies their role as coregulators of electoral democracy. Using Taiwan as a case study, this article explores how partisan self-regulation of legislative candidacies has diversified and complicated the qualifications for representatives. It also [considers] the normative significance and implications of partisan rules by theorizing a pluralism of the law of democracy. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4099]
66.4763 TAGHIZADEH, Jonas Larsson —
This article argues that the type of voter mobilized by protest activities plays a role in determining whether advocacy groups are able to influence political decisions. The explanatory value of this approach is demonstrated by a study of the geographic distribution of school closures among Swedish local governments during the 2002–10 period. School issues have been important drivers of contentious politics in Sweden. Two hypotheses are tested. The first hypothesis predicts that protesters in districts with numerous swing voters are more likely to achieve their goals. The second hypothesis predicts that protesters in districts with numerous core voters are more likely to achieve their goals. In line with the swing hypothesis, the main results suggest that protesters are more likely to stop school closures in volatile polling districts. [R, abr.]
66.4764 TAI Qiuqing —
Using evidence from an original survey experiment among 3,032 Chinese student immigrants in the US, I examine how exposure to Western media changes their evaluations of the Chinese government's performance and their trust in official discourse. My findings suggest that reading Western reports on China shifts immigrants' perceptions of government performance in different directions, depending on how similar reports are censored in Chinese media. On issues that are strictly censored, immigrants exposed to Western reports became more critical of their home government's performance and decreased their trust in official discourse. [R, abr.]
66.4765 THOMAL, Tobias —
The elections of the Canadian House of Commons 2015 surprised by an electoral victory of the once dominant Liberal Party of Canada which had been marginalized in the 2011 general election. The earthquake victory of the Liberals who were able to form a majority government after increasing their number of seats from 34 in 2011 to 184 in 2015 seems to move backwards in electoral history in many regards. The Canadian electorate, eager for change, reduced the Conservative Party to its core vote in Western Canada and rural Ontario. The earlier Official Opposition, the NDP, was not able to live up to its electoral success in Québec in 2011 and became only the second largest opposition party. The Bloc Québécois lost votes and confirms the loss of significance of Québec separatism. [R, abr.]
66.4766 THOMASSEN, Bjørn; FORLENZA, Rosario —
This article engages with the thought of A. Del Noce (1910–1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the 20th c. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic “modernity”, bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within the larger aim of recognizing attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective. [R]
66.4767 TORRE, Carlos DE LA —
Building on experiences of populism in Latin America, this article argues first that populist governments often include the excluded at the cost of disfiguring democracy. Second, during populist events the meanings of the ambiguous term “the people” are disputed. When social movements are weak, and when the institutions of liberal democracy are discredited, a populist leader may attempt to become the embodiment of the will of the people. Third, even though the concept of the people is central to populism, it could be constructed as heterogeneous and plural sharing one identity and interest embodied in a leader. Fourth, populism shares with fascism an imaginary construction of the people-as-one. Yet differently from fascism, populists staged their extraordinariness as winning popular elections and did not establish dictatorships. [R, abr.]
66.4768 TRAUGOTT, Mark —
The application of H. Burstin's concept of protagonism [Révolutionnaires, Paris, 2013] to the events of 1848 is complicated by the much shorter time-frame and equivocal outcome of the February Revolution. Not a single one of the principal actors fully corresponds to the model that Burstin has so skillfully described for 1789, in part because the Great Revolution and the decades of social turmoil that followed so dramatically transformed the consciousness of subsequent generations of political activists. The parallel between protagonism and the notion of the “repertoire of contention” is briefly explored, along with reflections on how profoundly and permanently the context for revolutionary action was changed by the experience of 1789. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4079]
66.4769 TURCHI, Marine —
The history of the Front national has been marred by numerous financial wrongdoings that reveal the highly personal and familial management of the party. J.-M. Le Pen and [his daughter] Marine Le Pen have set up a hyper-centralized system which allows them to keep a hand on the party finances, by the appointment of close collaborators as treasurers and the creation of their own mini-parties. Today, both the founder and the current president of the FN are the targets of several criminal investigations concerning the financing of the party as well as their own wealth. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4650]
66.4770 UTTLEY, Matthew R. H.; WILKINSON, Benedict —
The article analyzes the potential implications of a Brexit for defense procurement and industries in the UK and the EU member states. [After] exploring existing levels of EU defense procurement integration in the UK's and Europe's defense industries, it draws on J. Bátora's “institutional logics” framework to identify two pro-Brexit and two pro-Remain narratives, each employing differing assumptions on the relative benefits of national sovereignty and closer EU integration The final section analyzes [how] these “logics” or narratives will be deployed by their advocates in the run-up to the UK's EU referendum. The article concludes that the national security battleground in the 2016 referendum will be fought over competing narratives and arguments, partly because there is a dearth of data and evidence concerning UK and EU defense procurement and industries. [R, abr.]
66.4771 VAN DER MEER, Tom W. G.; WALTER, Annemarie; VAN AELST, Peter —
Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties' issue positions, thereby increasing voters' ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is contingent not only on voters' characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content-analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters' knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters' ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. [R, abr.]
66.4772 VASSALLO, Salvatore; PASSARELLI, Gianluca —
Important for their immediate outcome than they were important as crucial events for the institutionalization of primaries in the process of building the Democratic Party. Those held in 2012 were a second step in the same process. Since the two elections differed significantly and were both “exceptional”, we first propose a rational narrative of the political strategies leading up to each of them and of the political dynamics that followed. We also analyze indicators of the level of public interest in such a competition and the candidates' abilities to mobilize support beyond the party's traditional electoral constituency. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4721]
66.4773 VASU, Norman; CABUYAO, Priscilla —
This article considers the relationship between gender and Singaporean politics through the experience of the 2015 election and its results. It shows that while Singapore has moved some way towards assuaging the demands of liberal feminists for greater representation in the political sphere, much more has to be done in order for gender equality to be achieved. The article argues for the Group Representation Constituency method of electing parliamentarians to be adapted to ensure a greater number of female parliamentarians while a quota system may be required for cabinet to be truly representative of the female demographic of Singapore. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4778]
66.4774 VERGE, Tània; ESPÍRITO-SANTO, Ana —
About two decades after the introduction of party quotas, in the mid-2000s both Portugal and Spain enacted legislative gender quotas. The simultaneous implementation of party and legislative quotas raises questions about the potential interactions between two types of candidate quotas sharing the same goal — granting gender equality in political representation. Following a feminist institutionalist approach, this article disentangles [in] what circumstances compliance with legislative quotas is greater. By looking at the different party institutional contexts in which candidates are selected, a double comparative framework is set. First, we examine within country how legislative quotas affect political parties with dissimilar strategies to pursue equal gender representation. Second, we analyze across countries how they impact on political parties with differently institutionalized voluntary quotas. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4135]
66.4775 VETTER, Reinhold —
In 2015, Poland's national conservative party Law and Justice (PiS) won the biggest victory in its history. It holds the presidency with A. Duda, responsibility for government lies solely in its hands, and it has at its disposal an absolute majority of seats in the Sejm. With that, it now controls all of the levers of power. PiS owed their victory to a rebellion of the young generation, the resentment of the socially disadvantaged, and the widespread hatred felt in rural areas for the political and economic elites in the cities. The myth of 1989 has faded. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4776 VLIEGENTHART, Rens, et al. —
[Much] work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments. [R]
66.4777 VÖLKL, Kerstin —
What relative weight [do] political factors at the federal and Land level have for citizens' electoral choices in Länder elections. This article examines this question by using a pooled dataset of Land election surveys conducted between 1990 and 2013. Logistic regressions of Land voting behavior shows that party composition of the federal and Länder governments is an important context variable for the determination of the level-specific effects referring to both the federal and the Land level, following the logic of reward and punishment. In addition, the results show that the explanatory power of the federal and Land influence on Land voting decisions depends on the existence of a party identification, regional origin and the direction of the voting intention. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.4358]
66.4778 WELSH, Bridget —
This article looks at the reasons the People's Action Party (PAP) secured its decisive victory in the 2015 general election. It examines the impact of the campaign and pre-election period on voting behavior. While the opposition's performance before and during the campaign reactivated its core supporters, the PAP's control of the political narrative, rejuvenation of its grassroots machinery and effective use of resources provided an advantage that was instrumental in their electoral success. Most Singaporeans had decided how they would vote before the campaign began. The argument suggests that the 2015 election provides insights into the breadth of clientelist politics in Singapore and how important state patronage and the control of the state are for holding on to political power in the city-state. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on “The 2015 Singapore general elections”, edited by James CHIN. See also Abstr. 66.4509, 4561, 4563, 4716, 4743, 4753, 4760, 4773]
66.4779 WEST, Joe F.; CORLEY, Elizabeth A. —
This article explores the importance and communication frequency associated with legislator use of communication technologies (CTs). Demographic variations are examined. Our results suggest that significant complexity surrounds legislator utilization of CTs for their interactions with peers and constituents. For example, we conclude that: (1) legislators find mature CTs more important than Internet-enabled CTs; (2) legislator age and years in office impact the use of CTs, with older and younger legislators communicating less frequently; (3) gender is not a significant differentiator in CT use or importance; and (4) minority-party legislators communicate more frequently than their majority-party counterparts. [R]
66.4780 WHITELEY, Paul, et al. —
This article analyzes trends in public perceptions of the honesty and trustworthiness of British governments over the period 2000 to 2013. These perceptions are surprisingly volatile over time, but they are stimulated by general elections and even more so by a change of government. Perceptions of government honesty can be understood to be the product of both policy delivery and public attitudes to the way democracy works in Britain. If individuals feel that economic policies and the delivery of public services are working well and also that democracy is effective, then they will trust the government of the day. In addition perceptions of government trustworthiness are strongly influenced by the public's evaluations of the Prime Minister, since the voters use this as a heuristic to judge the honesty of a government. [R, abr.]
66.4781 WIESNER, Claudia —
This article undertakes a Franco-German comparison of the function national European Discourses can take on in the construction of European identity. After presenting the state of the art of research in the field and the research design, results of a comparative discourse-analytical study on the press discourses related to the ratification of the EU Constitutional treaty in Germany and France in 2005 are presented. To what extent do national European Discourses serve as means of constructing European Identity and at democratizing the EU? How do national European discourses of national elites in the quality press construct Europe and the EU? And how are these national European discourses influenced by specific national contexts and factors? [R]
66.4782 WIGURA, Karolina —
In Poland, two irreconcilable camps stand opposite one another: the “right-wing conservatives” and “liberal Poland”. In the self-perception of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), this stand-off is a Manichean struggle between good and evil for the “recovery” of a system that is seriously ill. The demonization of J. Kaczynski and his party on the part of the liberal camp follows the same Manichean logic. As a result of this confrontation, urgently needed reforms, such as those in healthcare, are at risk of being dragged out. And the way PiS has acted since taking over power calls to mind Edmund Burke's insight: change based on indignation can lead to disaster. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4698]
66.4783 WINTERS, Matthew S.; WEITZ-SHAPIRO, Rebecca —
There is a growing consensus that voters withdraw support from a politician when they receive clear information that the politician has engaged in corruption. But will voters punish an elected official for corrupt acts carried out under his or her watch even if the politician is not personally implicated in corruption? To answer this question, we present the results of an embedded experiment from a nationally representative survey in Brazil. Using vignettes that describe a hypothetical mayor, we find that citizens punish all mayors who are linked to corruption but that punishment is attenuated when members of the municipal administration, and not the mayor per se, are charged with corruption. The difference is particularly pronounced when corruption information comes from a credible source and among politically sophisticated respondents. [R, abr.]
66.4784 XYPOLIA, Ilia —
This paper challenges simplifications on race and racism in contemporary Turkish society. It draws a macro-historical context wherein the racist component of the Turkish national identity had been shaped. The paper traces the emergence of the core racist elements at the beginning of the 20th c. within the ideology propagated by the organization of the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocaklari). The Turkish History Thesis with its emphasis on “race” attempted to promote not only an affiliation but also a common ancestry between Turkish and Western civilization. These arguments were backed by commissioning research carried out in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics. The paper argues that the racist components of the national identity in Turkey have been the product of a Eurocentric understanding of world history by consecutive nationalist leaders. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “Identity, race and nationalism in Turkey”, edited and introduced by Bülent GÖKAY and Tunç AYBAK. See also Abstr. 66.4526, 4786]
66.4785 YAKOUCHYK, Katsiaryna —
How do China, Russia, and the EU facilitate or hinder political liberalization in Belarus? I highlight the competition that the EU faces with the Russian active autocracy-promotion in Belarus. The EU provides aid in exchange for democratic and economic reforms, which might be costly and endanger the persistence of ruling elites. Russia offers economic and diplomatic support to Belarus, conditioned by privatization of the Belarusian strategic assets in favor of Russian stakeholders. China, with growing international ambitions, also passively supports autocracy in Belarus, by providing financial aid without interfering with internal political affairs. For Belarus, whose leadership still enjoys legitimization by a large part of the population due to the economic stability, losing major state enterprises might weaken sovereignty. Thus, diversification of economic partners is of crucial importance for Belarus. [R, abr.]
66.4786 YEGEN, Mesut —
This essay examines the Marxist Turkish left's engagement with the Kurdish question in Turkey. It portrays, on the basis of some first-hand material, the theoretical inclinations and political attitudes of the main legal and illegal Marxist parties and organizations concerning the Kurdish question. It basically argues that the Turkish Marxists' stressful engagement with the Kurdish question can be viewed in four periods corresponding to four conditions: encounter, union, separation, and divorce. [R] [See Abstr. 66.4784]
66.4787 ZENG Qingjie —
Since the early 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has put in place a series of measures to allow more Party members to participate in the cadre-selection process. “Intra-party democracy” was promoted as a remedy to solve the corruption and social tension that resulted from overly concentrated personnel power. How effective are these formal procedures in constraining the appointment power of core Party leaders and institutionalizing the influence of a larger group of cadres? Drawing on archival research, interviews and quantitative data, this paper exami nes two components of intra-party democratic reform: “democratic recommendation”, which serves as a gateway to cadre promotion, and the semi-competitive elections at Party congresses. [R, abr.]
66.4788 ŻYCHLIŃSKA, Monika; FONTANA, Erica —
The Warsaw Rising Museum (WRM) is considered the first modern historical museum in Poland. It has influenced public imaginations of the Rising and subsequent museum trends in Poland. Using A. Wieczorkiewicz's concept of the “museal game”, we ask: what meanings does the WRM have for its various audiences, and how has it come to have these meanings? Drawing on analysis of the museum's founding documents and press coverage of the museum, interviews with visitors, and a review of scholarly literature, we [examine] the universe of meanings within which the WRM has become a sociocultural phenomenon. We argue that the strategies employed by the museum encompass interconnected political and poetical dimensions. We discuss how the museum attempts to foster Polish national identity by evoking personal identification among visitors by appealing to their emotions. [R, abr.]