Abstract
66.6827 ADIDA, Claire L., et al. —
Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. [R, abr.]
66.6828 AHMAD, Aijaz —
The Indian polity of today seems to be undergoing a historically unprecedented process: the irresistible rise of the extreme right to dominance in vast areas of culture, society, ideology, and economy, albeit with commitment to observe virtually all the institutional norms of liberal democracy. This will to a “long march through the institutions” and to capturing total state power not through frontal seizure, but through patiently engineered and legally legitimate takeover of those institutions by its personnel from within, raises a very different kind of question: is there really an irreconcilable contradiction, an unbridgeable gap, between institutions of liberal democracy and takeover of the state by the extreme right? In other words, can the extreme right rule and pursue its own agenda through liberal institutions? [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6829 Al-ANANI, Khalil —
The emergence of the political Salafism in Egypt after the 25 January uprising took many observers by surprise. Salafis, whom once deemed politics as heresy and religiously prohibited, became a key political force after the uprising. The Al-Nour Party, the main Salafi party, played a key role in Egypt's politics with undeniable political propensity. However, after the removal of the Muslim Brotherhood from power in 2013, Al-Nour Party's image and credibility was significantly affected. The party supported the coup against President M. Morsi which undermined its clout and appeal among Islamists. After the coup, Salafis came a full circle and began to rethink politics as it is non longer a blessing but a curse. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7488]
66.6830 ALBERTAZZI, Daniele —
Scholarly literature has [focused] the declining number of party members in post-industrial societies, arguing that parties now lack the incentives to maintain a large membership. However, some right-wing populist parties rely on activism by being rooted at the local level and by fostering the creation of closed communities of ideologically committed members. In short, they have adopted the organizational model of the mass party. By focusing on one of these organizations, the Italian Lega Nord (Northern League, LN) under the leadership of U. Bossi (1991–2012), and by drawing on individual and group interviews with party members, this article explores the latter's experiences of activism. It highlights the reasons why activists stayed in the LN and what they gained and provides evidence of the strength of their commitment to their party. [R, abr.]
66.6831 ALEXANDRE-COLLIER, Agnès —
Since 2003, hundreds of open primaries for the selection of parliamentary candidates have been held by the British Conservative Party as a means of democratizing party organization and enhancing representativeness. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, only 26 primaries could be identified. This article applies the analytical framework provided by Hazan and Rahat to demonstrate that the relative failure of the experiment in terms of intra-party competition, participation, representation and responsiveness is counterbalanced by the benefits brought by this procedure, both as a tool of party branding at the national level and as a strategy for raising the profiles of candidates at the local level. [R, abr.]
66.6832 ALLEN, Peter —
In a political context, the “glass ceiling” is shorthand for the barriers faced by women politicians, resulting in them being less likely to reach executive roles at the same rate as their male colleagues. This article outlines a case where there was sex equality in executive appointments: a cohort study of British Labour Party MPs elected at the 1997 parliamentary election. Examining executive appointments at the cabinet and subcabinet level, descriptive analysis shows no statistically significant differences in the proportion of men and women reaching executive positions, or the prestige and gender type of these positions. Regression modeling confirms this, and sex is not found to be a significant driver of these patterns. Three factors combined to achieve this — critical actors, favorable context and a left-wing party in government. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6334]
66.6833 ALLISON, Michael E. —
The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) fought one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in recent Latin American history. In 1996, the URNG and the Government of Guatemala signed a Firm and Lasting Agreement ending the country's civil war and initiating the URNG's postwar life as a political party. After finishing third in its initial electoral competition, the URNG has since been unable to capture more than 4% of the vote, on its own or in coalition, leaving it a minor political party. What explains the poor electoral performance of the URNG as a political party? Based upon fieldwork, elite interviews, and analysis of electoral data, I argue that the URNG's minor party performance was caused by both organizational and institutional factors. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6381]
66.6834 ALSABBAGH, Soufiane —
D. Trump's gains in the US opinion polls have taken all observers by surprise; some are now rushing to predict his presidential victory over [H. Clinton]. What they may be forgetting is that the numbers have a life of their own. Regardless of who its candidate may be, and even before the first vote is cast, the Republican party is many lengths behind the Democrats in the race for the White House. One should always remember that the U.S. election is played out in fifty constituencies. There are two major obstacles in Trump's way: the electoral college (the States fielding the most electors are Democrat-inclined) and the demographic trends (the proportion of voters from minority communities, who usually tend to vote Democrat, keeps growing). [R, abr.]
66.6835 ANASTASOPOULOS, Lefteris —
While the number of female candidates running for office in US House of Representative elections has increased considerably since the 1980s, women continue to account for about only 20% of House members. Whether this gap in female representation can be explained by a gender penalty female candidates face as the result of discrimination on the part of voters or campaign donors remains uncertain. I estimate the gender penalty in US House of Representative general elections using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). Using this RDD, I assess whether chance nomination of female candidates to run in the general election affected the amount of campaign funds raised, general election vote share and probability of victory in House elections between 1982 and 2012. I find no evidence of a gender penalty using these measures. [R, abr.]
66.6836 ANDERSON, Sarah E.; BUTLER, Daniel M.; HARBRIDGE, Laurel —
Legislators' actions are influenced by party, constituency, and their own views, each weighted differently. Our survey of [US] state legislators finds that legislators' own views are the strongest influence. We also find that institutions are an important source of party leaders' influence. Legislators in states where members rely more on party leaders — states without term-limits, with less professional legislatures, and where the majority party controls the agenda — put more weight on leaders' preferences. Beyond direct party influence, the views of party leaders are preemptively incorporated into legislators' preferences when the rules of the legislature make party leaders more powerful. [R]
66.6837 ANSON, Ian G. —
This paper analyzes the effects of biases in economic information on partisans' economic perceptions. In survey experiments, I manipulate the presence of partisan cues and the direction of pro-attitudinal information in news stories about the American economy. Results demonstrate that although pro-attitudinal tone in factual economic news stories most strongly affects partisans' economic perceptions, inclusion of partisan cues alongside pro-attitudinal information results in weaker shifts in economic sentiment relative to stories lacking partisan content. These findings suggest that the relatively subtle process of agenda-setting in economic news may be the most effective tool used by partisan news outlets to drive polarization in citizens' factual economic perceptions. [R]
66.6838 APFELD, Brendan; BRANHAM, Alexander —
This article investigates the effect of exogenous shocks during an election cycle on electoral outcomes. Specifically, we examine the impact of the unexpected death of a prominent candidate, Eduardo Campos, in the 2014 Brazilian presidential election on support levels for the three main parties. Did the effects die out relatively quickly, providing only a temporary “bounce” or dip in support levels? Or did they alter the fundamentals of the campaign environment and produce a lasting change or “bump” in support levels that lasted until the election? Our results show that while the shock did have short-term effects on all parties' support, it was only the party that lost its leading candidate where any longer lasting shift in support is detected. [R, abr.]
66.6839 ARIGA, Kenichi, et al. —
While the existing literature has identified a sizable incumbency advantage in single-member district (SMD) races in developed democracies, we argue that some political and institutional contexts of Japan's Lower House elections would undermine the incumbency advantage. Our regression discontinuity (RD) analysis indeed shows little advantage, and further examination suggests this as largely due to the “best-loser” provision in Japan's mixed-member system, which gives a loser of SMD competition a chance to be a “resurrected” incumbent. We also show no evidence of sorting — i.e., systematic difference between bare winners and bare losers — in close SMD races and thus add further evidence to support the methodological argument that the election RD analysis is a viable and promising research design. [R]
66.6840 ARZHEIMER, Kai; SCHOEN, Harald —
According to much of the literature, partisanship in Britain exercises little independent influence on the vote but merely reflects voters' prospective and retrospective evaluations of the parties' performance with regard to their management of the economy, national security, and public services. In this view, partisanship comes close to M. Fiorina's model of a “running tally” of political experiences. Similarly, R. Dalton's notion of “cognitive mobilization” suggests that seeking out political information should undermine both the need for and the likelihood of party identification. Applying Mixed Markov Latent Class Analysis to the British Election Study Panel 1997–2000, we challenge these perceptions by demonstrating that partisanship is more stable than previously thought, and that high levels of political interest are linked to higher levels of partisanship and possibly also to higher levels of stability. [R, abr.]
66.6841 ASHOK, Vivekinan, et al. —
The nature of turnout has changed in the US: a shift in state policies has transformed a singular Election Day into a multi-week voting period. During the 2012 election, we assembled daily snapshots of early voting records. We observe where and when individuals with key demographic characteristics voted. By measuring the timing of voting by demographic subgroups within small geographic areas, we assess how the early voting period may differentially affect various politically relevant subsets of the electorate. We find that partisans and older voters disproportionately take advantage of early voting, and that political independents and younger individuals who vote early do so much later in the early-voting window. We discuss policy implications, and we also conduct an exploratory analysis of the relationship between early vote-timing and campaign events. [R]
66.6842 ASLANIDIS, Paris; ROVIRA KALTWASSER, Cristóbal —
The Great Recession triggered an unprecedented level of political turmoil in Greece, leading to a major readjustment of the party system and the near disappearance of the once-mighty socialists of PASOK. Gradually, SYRIZA — a radical-leftist-turned-populist party — rose to become the key electoral player under the aegis of its young and popular leader, Alexis Tsipras. SYRIZA eventually won two general elections in 2015 and ruled together with the populist radical right Independent Greeks (ANEL) as junior partner, a coalition of great analytical significance, representing the first ever governing alliance of left-wing and right-wing populist parties in Europe. This contribution investigates reactions to the SYRIZA-ANEL government, giving special emphasis to measures undertaken by domestic and external actors. [R, abr.]
66.6843 BAEK Kanghui; KIM Yeolib —
This study examines the relationships between the use of mobile applications and two types of political behavior: political information-seeking and political discussion. Based on a 2012 national survey of smartphone users in South Korea, this study found positive relationships between (1) the use of e-commerce, information, literacy, and utility apps and (2) political information seeking and political discussion. By contrast, this study found that the use of relational apps was negatively related to political information seeking and not related to political discussion. The use of entertainment apps was not associated with either behavior. This study provides a starting point for examination of mobile apps as they continuously grow and develop toward user engagement, and furthermore shed light on their effect on political participation. [R]
66.6844 BAIER, Walter —
The idea of the modernized radical right usually consists of a conception of right-wing populism as a deviation from liberal democracy. It hardly makes sense, however, to subsume the radical left, which aims at extending democracy, and the radical right, which aims at reining in if not even abolishing democracy, under the single concept “populism”. Is it political competitors who seek to defeat their opponents in the competition for popularity who are motivated by opportunism? Or is it the mass media, which act as gatekeepers in vying for the consent of the masses for commercial reasons? Indeed, is all political communication populist? And how can a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism manage to become a political project with considerable prospects for success? [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6845 BAILEY, Michael A.; HOPKINS, Daniel J.; ROGERS, Todd —
To date, field experiments on campaign tactics have focused overwhelmingly on mobilization and voter turnout, with far more limited attention to persuasion and vote choice. We analyze a field experiment with 56,000 Wisconsin [US] voters designed to measure the persuasive effects of canvassing, phone calls, and mailings during the 2008 presidential election. Focusing on the canvassing treatment, we find that persuasive appeals had two unintended consequences. First, they reduced responsiveness to a follow-up survey among infrequent voters, a substantively meaningful behavioral response that has the potential to induce bias in estimates of persuasion effects as well. Second, the persuasive appeals possibly reduced candidate support and almost certainly did not increase it. This counterintuitive finding is reinforced by multiple statistical methods and suggests that contact by a political campaign may engender a backlash. [R]
66.6846 BAILEY, Tom; DRIESSEN, Michael —
This editors' introduction opens a special issue on “Mapping Contemporary Catholic Politics in Italy”. It briefly identifies the political, sociological and ideational changes that have occurred in Catholic politics since the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party, and introduces the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the common threads and the important divergences in their analyses. [R] [Introduction to a series of articles of the same title. See Abstr. 66.6854, 6859, 6895, 7044]
66.6847 BAKER, Travis J. —
Americans expect the president to lead Congress, but Congress's partisan divide typically widens on presidential priorities. More often, presidents are reduced to leading their co-partisans rather than Congress as a whole, but why? I argue that competition for White House control creates incentives for parties to disagree on presidents' policy agendas, regardless of the contents. I use an original data-set of members' roll-call vote decisions on presidents' agendas between 1971 and 2010 to show that partisan polarization is larger on presidents' priorities and largest on their top priorities, above and beyond what we would expect from members' ideologies and standard party effects. These findings persist over time and under a wide range of alternative model specifications, bringing us closer to understanding the partisan conflict so prevalent in today's politics. [R]
66.6848 BALLARD, Andrew O.; HILLYGUS, D. Sunshine; KONITZER, Tobias —
Online advertising is an increasingly prominent part of political campaigning. Research on other online political communication — especially candidate websites, blogs, and social media — tends to conclude that these communications are aimed primarily at turning existing supporters into campaign donors, activists, and volunteers. Is a similar communication strategy found in online display ads — those ads placed adjacent to website content? In one of the first systematic analyses of the nature, content, and targets of online display advertising, we examined 840 unique online display ads from the 2012 [US] presidential campaign. We show that the policy content, ad location, and interactive elements of the ads varied based on the audience, with persuasive appeals aimed at undecided or persuadable voters and engagement appeals aimed at existing supporters. [R, abr.]
66.6849 BANDA, Kevin K.; WINDETT, Jason H. —
Scholars have spent a great deal of effort examining the effects of negative advertising on citizens' perceptions of candidates. Much of this work has used experimental designs and has produced mixed findings supporting one of two competing theories. First, negative ads may harm candidates who sponsor them because citizens tend to dislike negativity. Second, negativity may drive down citizens' support for the targeted candidate because the attacks give people reasons to reject the target. We argue that the mixed findings produced by prior research may be driven by a disregard for campaign dynamics. We present a critical test of these two theories using data drawn from 80 statewide elections — 37 gubernatorial and 43 US Senate contests — from three election years and public opinion polling collected during the last 12 weeks of each campaign. [R, abr.]
66.6850 BARRETT, David —
The election was the first contest since the “Earthquake” election of 2011, which saw a historic change in the Irish party system, with the near total demolition of Fianna Fáil and the first- and second-place finishes of Fine Gael and the Labour Party. It would be the first test of the permanency of this shift. It was also the first contest following the serious economic adjustments pursued since then, as well as the first since the introduction of the Gender Quota in 2012, a measure expected to change the kind of candidate selected — and thus elected — for the Dáil. Ultimately, the election returned a defeat for the government, and a fragmented new Dáil, but at the time of writing, it is unclear what, if any, government will be formed. [R, abr.]
66.6851 BEALL, Alec T.; HOFER, Marlise K.; SCHALLER, Mark —
In the studies reported here, we conducted longitudinal analyses of preelection polling data to test whether an Ebola outbreak predicted voting intentions preceding the 2014 US federal elections. Analyses were conducted on nationwide polls pertaining to 435 House of Representatives elections and on state-specific polls pertaining to 34 Senate elections. Analyses compared voting intentions before and after the initial Ebola outbreak and assessed correlations between internet search activity for the term “Ebola” and voting intentions. Results revealed that (1) the psychological salience of Ebola was associated with increased intention to vote for Republican candidates and (2) this effect occurred primarily in states characterized by norms favoring Republican Party candidates (the effect did not occur in states with norms favoring Democratic Party candidates). [R, abr.]
66.6852 BERG-NORDLIE, Mikkel; TKACH, Olga —
This article examines power relations between state and civil society in formal governance networks, the representativeness of “diaspora organizations”, why the state structures want to include these diasporas in the formal governance networks, and why the diasporas are interested in participating. As is common in Russian network governance, state-based actors firmly control the networks through a variety of mechanisms. The diaspora leaders are generally not recent labor immigrants themselves, and do not rely on the latter group's approval to represent them. This disconnect, and the hierarchical and securitized nature of Russian immigration politics, severely limits the target population's possibility for input into policy-making or implementation. Non-state networks members evaluate participation as leaving no visible imprint on policy, and rarely on implementation, but still giving a heightened potential for influence. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6582]
66.6853 BERTI, Benedetta; GUTIÉRREZ, Beatriz —
After winning the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections and subsequently taking control of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007, the Palestinian Hamas — a hybrid political, social and military actor — undertook a complex process to ascertain authority and control over Gaza. The article focuses on understanding Hamas's performance as a political party and a “rebel government” as well as the impact of this newly acquired role on the group's strategy. Relying on primary sources, field-work and interviews with members of the Hamas government and its security sector, the study looks at Hamas's role as a security-provider and analyzes the complex relationship between the institutionalized security sector and the group's insurgent armed wing. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6381]
66.6854 BIONDI, Lorenzo —
This article analyzes the history of the Lega democratica, a group of Catholic intellectuals active between 1975 and 1987, and its impact on Catholic debates in Italy's Second Republic. Despite its small membership, the group's heritage influenced Italy's post-1994 center-left and shaped its leadership. First, the group was central to a decade-long failed attempt to reconcile different souls of the Italian Catholic laity, which anticipated the end of the Christian Democratic party. Second, the Lega democratica theorized the impossibility of a “historic compromise” between Communists and Christian Democrats. Third, the group's history reveals a growing generational split on how to achieve political reform (mediation vs. rupture). Finally, the emerging idea of a “primacy of civil society” in the political sphere partly defined the Ulivo coalition's ideology. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6846]
66.6855 BIRD, Karen, et al. —
This study tests for the presence of gender and ethnic affinity voting in the Toronto mayoral election of 2014, where Olivia Chow was the only woman and only visible minority candidate among the three major con- tenders. Our analysis, which draws on a survey of eligible Toronto voters, is the first to examine the interactive effects of sex and ethnicity on vote choice in Canada in the context of a non-partisan election and in a non-experimental manner. We find strong evidence of ethnic affinity voting and show that Chow received stronger support from ethnic Chinese voters than from other minority groups. Our results also reveal that gender was related to vote choice but only when connected with race. [R, abr.]
66.6856 BOBBA, Giuliano; McDONNELL, Duncan —
Does right-wing populist discourse change when parties move from opposition to government? How do different ideological types of right-wing populist parties express this discourse? Through an analysis of the Lega Nord and Forza Italia/Popolo della Libertà between 2006 and 2013, we find that while the switch to office does bring some changes, the main elements of their populist discourse remain largely the same. We also show how their respective emphases on “elites” and “others” distinguish the parties: FI/PDL focuses overwhelmingly on “elites” while the LN places similar emphasis on both “elites” and “others”. [R]
66.6857 BODET, Marc André; THOMAS, Melanee; TESSIER, Charles —
Do voters in districts newly recovering from a national disaster punish or reward incumbents for their response to the disaster when compared to their counterparts in unaffected districts? The City of Calgary [Canada] is used here as a case study. In June 2013, rivers flooding devastated 26 neighborhoods and displaced approximately 75,000 people. Four months later, a municipal election was held. When analyzed as a natural experiment, results suggest that support for the incumbent mayor increased city-wide between the 2010 and the 2013 elections, but at a lower rate in areas that experienced residential flooding. However, flooded areas differ systematically from areas not flooded in ways key to the election outcome. When analyzed more conservatively, results show that the flood had no effect on incumbent support or voter turnout. [R, abr.]
66.6858 BOLLEYER, Nicole; IBENSKAS, Raimondas; KEITH, Daniel —
Why do constituent parties that participated in a party merger that was intended to be permanent decide to leave the merger to re-enter party competition separately? To address this question, merger termination is conceptualized as an instance of new party formation, coalition termination and institutionalization failure. Building on this conceptualization, three sets of factors are presented that account for which mergers are likely to be terminated by constituent parties and which are not. To test these three sets of hypotheses, a mixed-methods design is used. Survival analysis is applied to a new dataset on the performance of mergers in 21 European democracies during the postwar period. Two theory-confirming case studies are then analyzed: one case of merger survival and the other of termination. [R, abr.]
66.6859 BOLZONAR, Fabio —
By investigating the ideological development of Italian parties and some key policy reforms that they introduced after the fall of the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), this article explains this “Christian democratization of politics”, a process by which Catholic ideals and symbols acquire a decisive impact on the Italian party system. Three types of Christian democratization are individuated and analyzed: the gradual replacement of liberal values with Catholic political ideas in the positions taken by liberal-oriented parties; the novel synthesis between social Catholicism and social democracy by moderate left-wing coalitions; and the Lega Nord's use of Catholic values to stress populist positions and identity issues. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6846]
66.6860 BORGES, André; LLOYD, Ryan —
This article [examines] how concurrent presidential and gubernatorial elections in strong federal systems affect electoral coordination and coattails voting between national and subnational levels of government. We seek to determine whether the nationalizing effect of presidential elections can overcome the strong incentives for regionalization that can arise in federal systems. We use individual-level survey data and time-series cross-sectional electoral data from Brazil, a federal country with decentralized electoral institutions that has recently adopted concurrent presidential and gubernatorial elections. We find that the congruence between national and subnational elections increases when elections are temporally proximate and the effective number of presidential candidates is low. In short, the coattails effect can not only operate “horizontally”, by shaping national legislative elections, but also “vertically”, by shaping subnational elections. [R]
66.6861 BORNEMANN, Basil; SMEDDINCK, Ulrich —
Nudging refers to a much-debated political steering approach that relies on gentle interventions in decision architectures of individuals with the aim to shape their behavior in a direction that is beneficial for them and/or for the society as a whole. For some, nudges have the potential to address grand societal challenges in an efficient and effective manner; others regard nudges as inappropriate means of political steering that open the door for manipulating citizens. But the existing criticism is characterized by dramatization, lack of differentiation, normative exaltation, problematic demarcations and comparisons as well as numerous omissions. [R, abr.]
66.6862 BOSWELL, John —
Although narrative has become an important concept in political analysis, the empirical focus has largely been limited to narrative as text. This article puts equal emphasis on narration as act. Drawing on tools and techniques associated with performativity, I analyze how actors perform a critical counter-narrative on obesity as a policy issue across democratic settings in Australia and the UK. I show that this political narrative is watered down, muted and confused the closer it gets to formal governing institutions; this avowedly “cohesive narrative” becomes fuzzy, inconsistent and overlapping, such that the ticking “fat bomb” described in open public debate fizzles out before it even approaches these institutions. I argue that these findings add considerable nuance to our understanding of how and to what effect narrative manifests in political affairs. [R]
66.6863 BOTTEL, Maxime; MAZZOLENI, Oscar; PALLAVER, Günther —
This article highlights how the process of mainstreaming has affected regionalist parties that have experienced lengthy periods of government participation. Adopting an analytic framework based on party goals, issues and styles, we investigate the conditions under which the process of party mainstreaming is favored. A comparative-historical approach enables us to conduct an in-depth study of the development of three successful regionalist parties of recent decades: Italy's Südtiroler Volkspartei and the Union Valdôtaine, and Switzerland's Lega dei Ticinesi. Underlining the crucial role of party strategy, intra-party dynamics, multi-level institutional settings and external shocks, the analysis shows that as far as pivotal regionalist parties are concerned, mainstreaming is not a homogenous process that can be taken for granted. [R]
66.6864 BOUTECA, Nicolas; DEVOS, Carl —
Parties tend to proceed with caution when programmatic changes are made. This article formulates and investigates two risk-reduction methods as hypotheses. First, we claim that parties prefer changing the amount of attention issues get in a manifesto to the positions they defend. Second, the amount of change is related to the ideological and electoral importance of the issue. In other words, we assume that parties are less likely to make positional changes on issues they own because this can possibly bring about loss in credibility and contradicts the fact that politicians and party members are policy driven. These hypotheses are examined with new data gathered through the content-analysis of the party manifestos of the Belgian Liberal party and the social-democratic party for elections held between 1961 and 2010. [R, abr.]
66.6865 BRESSANELLI, Edoardo —
The European elections of May 2014 proved to be a key trial run for several actors within the Italian party system. Academic literature on these elections has often viewed EP elections as “second-order” elections, that is, as expressions of opinion on the incumbent national government. This chapter analyzes whether this model still applies. It shows that the EP elections were an unusual form of second-order election, in that they allowed voters to reward the Renzi government, which was still enjoying a honeymoon period. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6934]
66.6866 BROMWICH, David —
H. Clinton's most recent comments leave no doubt that she continues to believe in the healing virtue of smart power and humanitarian intervention. An incorrigible belief in the purity of one's motives is among the most dangerous endowments a politician can process. [R]
66.6867 BURKEY, Maxwell; ZAMALIN, Alex —
Recent decades have seen an upsurge in interest in patriotism among progressive intellectuals and in progressive politics, while recent manifestations of black politics in the era of [US] President B. Obama have utilized patriotic narratives. We question this turn to patriotism on the grounds that it is a questionable manner in which to pursue racial justice in our post-Civil Rights political landscape. Patriotic appeals to civic virtue always invoke or imply the anti-patriot who lacks that virtue and is therefore less capable of exercising exemplary citizenship. The idea of the anti-patriot could provide another vocabulary for displacing responsibility for addressing racial inequality away from white Americans and onto black Americans. [R, abr.]
66.6868 BUZGALIN, Alexander; KOLGANOV, Andrey, et al. —
The collapse of the USSR and the formation of independent states remain among the most important historical events for understanding the processes and contradictions both within these countries and between them. It is against the backdrop of the socio-economic transformations that produced positive as well as negative effects on both post-Soviet countries that the emergence of conservative statism and right-nationalist discourse as the dominant political ideologies in the post-Soviet area in general, and Russia and Ukraine in particular, needs to be understood. The socio-economic transformation occurred in more or less the same way in both Russia and Ukraine, producing in both cases a bureaucratic-oligarchic form of capitalism, which in turn led to the formation of right nationalism in Ukraine. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6869 BYTZEK, Evelyn; BIEBER, Ina E. —
Several studies have shown that participants who take part in online surveys differ significantly from those in other surveys. Still, since electoral research aims primarily at explaining voting behavior (i.e., looks at slopes and intercepts in statistical model output), online surveys are deemed to be useful tools if models based on this data source arrive at similar conclusions than models based e.g. on random-sample face-to-face or telephone surveys. This paper analyzes these relationships by comparing models of voting behavior based on data from various survey modes with different sample selections conducted by the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2009. The results indicate that the data quality of the different survey types is comparable; online surveys are thus useful for electoral research. [R]
66.6870 CAMPBELL, Rosie —
The manner in which political parties respond to women voters is shaped by both the information they receive about women voters' preferences, from the news media, pollsters and other sources, and by gendered party type. Analysis of parties' attempts to target women voters can help us understand whether parties perceive women as typical or average voters. I conduct two case studies on the influence of gendered news-frames on party policy and inter-party competition in the US and Great Britain to formulate a preliminary analytic framework designed to facilitate research to assess how parties' responses to portrayals of women voters vary according to institutional and contextual factors across time and space. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6334]
66.6871 CAPPELEN, Cornelius; KUHNLE, Stein; MIDTBØ, Tor —
We examine the extent to which Norwegians think it is fair to share their welfare benefits with labor immigrants from the EU. We use a survey experiment — the list experiment — to uncover whether people say what they really think about this issue. On comparing the results from the experiment with results from direct questioning, we find that many under-report welfare chauvinistic attitudes, indicating that welfare chauvinism is a sensitive issue associated with so-called social desirability bias: the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others. [R]
66.6872 CARRERAS, Miguel —
Proponents of compulsory voting argue that this institution leads to higher levels of political engagement. Opponents of mandatory voting instead argue that forcing people to vote can increase feelings of political alienation and generate lower levels of political engagement. The empirical record on this issue is scarce and inconclusive. This paper revisits this question with a series of multilevel models that evaluate the impact of compulsory voting on different forms of political engagement, using data from all the waves of the Americas Barometer Survey (2004–2014). The results suggest that compulsory voting has a negligible effect on political engagement. However, the results also reveal an interesting interaction. Citizens with low levels of education are more likely to be cognitively engaged with the political process when voting is mandatory. [R]
66.6873 CASTRO-HERRERO, Laia; HOPMANN, David Nicolas; ENGESSER, Sven —
This study assesses the degree and direction of media bias towards political parties in Central-Eastern and Western European democracies. Previous research has argued that despite policy efforts to detach the media from the political domain, journalism in former Eastern Bloc countries is still characterized by a more partisan style than in Western Europe. Our analysis employs data from the European Parliament Election Study 2009 (EES) and the European Media Systems Survey 2010 (EMSS), covering 187 parties and more than 120 media outlets in fifteen Western and ten Central and Eastern media systems across the EU. To analyze partisan media bias, we look at (1) how well audience patterns correlate with partisan preferences of media users and (2) the extent to which media outlets favor specific parties according to experts. [R, abr.]
66.6874 CECCARINI, Luigi; BORDIGNON, Fabio —
Despite the predictions of observers and opponents, the Five-star Movement continues to hold center stage in Italian politics. The article retraces the phases of the Movement's development and consolidation from the point of view of its electoral performance, its internal organization and the socio-demographic and ideological profiles of its voters, concentrating on the most recent period. In particular, it focuses on the difficulties that emerged in the wake of the European elections of 2014. The consequent birth of the so-called Five-star Directorate and the new direction of change internally and externally confirm that the study of this “movement party” has relevance beyond the Italian case and throws light on the crisis of contemporary representative democracies. [R]
66.6875 CERON, Andrea; CURINI, Luigi; IACUS, Stefano M. —
The rise of social network sites reopened the debate on the ability of traditional media to influence public opinion and act as an agenda-setter. To answer this question, the paper investigates first-level and second-level agenda-setting effects in the online environment by focusing on two heated Italian political debates (the reform of public funding of parties and the debate over austerity). By employing innovative and efficient statistical methods such as the lead-lag analysis and supervised sentiment analysis, we compare the attention devoted to each issue and the content spread by online news media and Twitter users. [R, abr.]
66.6876 CHA Che-po —
Hong Kong student movements before the Umbrella Movement showed a political outlook within the establishment norm, using “peaceful, rational and non-violent” approaches, acknowledging the authorities of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and mainland Chinese governments and recognizing attachment to the motherland China. Today's new emerging political outlook of the Hong Kong student movement has a profile of anti-establishment, using more assertive means and not excluding radical behavior, distrust of the HKSAR and mainland authorities and assertion of radical localism. In the last two years, Hong Kong students have undergone a rapid change in their orientation, resulting in today's outlook. This paper argues that the Umbrella Movement is the key for the turnaround and it testifies to the birth of a new social and political consciousness amongst Hong Kong students. [R]
66.6877 CHAN Sze Chi —
This article first unravels the ideology of Hong Kong's political parties by examining the ideology of a founder of the Democratic Party, Yeung Sum, [and] his idealistic thinking of political cooperation with the SAR government, with an aim of peaceful power-sharing. His idea of political parties is a new vision of a political subjectivity that caters to the whole, conforming with G. Sartori's theory that an authentic party must be part-of-the-whole. The article then details the inauguration of an effective oppositional party after the Grand March of 2003. Thus was born the League of Social Democrats [which] ushered in an effective oppositional party. Yet in the end the League [underwent] internal split that tremendously dwindled its oppositional thrust. [R, abr.]
66.6878 CHEN Feng; KANG Yi —
Concurring with the approach stressing the role of contentious politics in (re)shaping state institutions, this study explores how disorganized popular contentions configure local institutional building in China. As Chinese citizens are not legally allowed to take organized collective action to express their grievances and demands, popular contentions, despite their common origins, similar claims and identical targets, break out here and there in large numbers without clear organizational shape. This compels the government to build institutions able to map scattered conflicts, detect potential problems and defuse them on a case-by-case basis in a timely fashion. [R, abr.]
66.6879 CHENG, Edmund W. —
his paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society. [R, abr.]
66.6880 CHENG, Joseph Yu-shek —
The Occupation Campaign in Hong Kong reflected the protesters and pro-democracy groups' wish to [show] that they are not going to give up the cause of democracy and that they will continue to fight, [although] it will be extremely difficult to change the decision of the Chinese leadership in the short term. In the eyes of the supporters of the pro-democracy movement, the challenge facing Hong Kong people is not just fighting for a democratic electoral system, but also struggle to maintain their core values, their lifestyles, and their individual dignity — an uphill battle given that the local business community firmly toes the Beijing line. While the political struggles of the young people of Hong Kong are perceived to have brought hope to the pro-democracy movement, the prospects for democracy remain far from promising. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6896]
66.6881 CHILDS, Sarah L.; KITTILSON, Miki Caul —
We establish the existence of party member women's organizations, as one test of the first dimension of party feminization: the inclusion of women. We draw on new survey data of 17 European countries provided by Scarrow, Poguntke and Webb. We establish that almost half have a party member women's organization. The new data also permit analysis of relationships between party member women's organization and gender quotas for the top party leadership body (National Executive Committee (NEC)), women's presence among the party leadership and candidate quota rules. Together we see these (1) as a means to establish whether women are marginalized within the party, thereby limiting descriptive representation and (2) as surrogate measures for women's substantive representation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6334]
66.6882 CHOI Eunjung; WOO Jongseok —
While the importance of social and political trust has been well documented, there is a lack of scholarly consensus over where trust originates. This article tests three theoretical arguments — social-psychological, social-cultural, and political institutional — on the origin of political trust against three East Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). The empirical analysis from the AsiaBarometer survey illustrates that political institutional theory best explains the origin of political trust in East Asian cases. Citizens of these East Asian democracies have a high level of political trust when they believe that their governments perform well in management of the national economy and political representation of elected officials. Meanwhile, social-psychological and social-cultural theories explain the origins of social trust, but not political trust. [R, abr.]
66.6883 CHRISTENSEN, Henrik Serup; KARJALAINEN, Maija; LUNDELL, Krister —
This study examines the link between political trust and support for democratic innovations in Southwest Finland with a survey of 2000 respondents in 14 municipalities. The results suggest that distrusting citizens are less supportive of democratic innovations; hence it is unlikely that they increase political trust. [R, abr.]
66.6884 CLEMONS, Randy S.; PETERSON, Rolfe D.; PALMER, Carl L. —
Americans' low level of support for intervening in Syria presents a puzzle, raising questions about how democracies approach conflict. Scholars have noted that the US's public may need to view opponents in conflict as different from themselves before military force is used. But what is the tipping point between perceiving someone as “one of us” or “one of them”? Syrian President B. al-Assad's actions fit the model of a villain, but his appearance represents a divergence from recent leaders cast as enemies of the US. Using a unique experiment examining citizen evaluations of the Syrian crisis, we demonstrate that a subtle manipulation, darkening Assad's skin tone, led respondents to view him more negatively, as well as increasing support for US intervention to effect regime-change. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6888]
66.6885 CORMACK, Lindsey —
I propose a theory of legislator-to-constituent communication that describes a relationship between the types of votes a legislator reveals and the partisan composition of her constituency. To test this theory, I use an original data-set of 40,000 official communications containing 30,000 vote revelations from the 111th [US] Congress. I find evidence substantiating this theory; the extent to which a legislator endeavors to appear more ideologically extreme in communications varies systematically with the relative amounts of different types of voters in her district. This result is contrasted with an analysis of voting extremism where I find that the ideological preferences of donors better explain voting patterns. [R]
66.6886 COURTNEY, Michael —
Legislatures are arenas where diverse policy preferences are honed into practical policy proposals. Given that legislative membership is a result of free democratic elections, there is an assumption that the attitudes and opinions of MPs are representative of the population as a whole. Thus, pre-legislative bargaining is founded on an unbiased sample of public opinion. However, considerable opinion incongruence exists between citizens and the political elite in many systems, potentially undermining this ideal democratic starting point for legislative business. Candidate-centered voting systems offer the potential to remedy this disconnect. While citizens tend to emphasize personal characteristics as an explanation for vote-choice in one of the most candidate-centered systems in existence, proportional representation-single transferable vote, the disconnect of opinion congruence between citizens and elites persists. [R, abr.]
66.6887 COURTY, Guillaume; GERVAIS, Julie —
Based on a study of interest groups during the 2012 French presidential campaign, the present article offers a sociological approach to interest representatives, focusing on their social backgrounds and professional trajectories, as well as their mundane habits and daily activities during electoral periods. It argues that the reasons for their access to the political field lie in their shared interests, competencies and dispositions with politicians, as well as their position as social and professional counterparts to candidates' staff. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6320]
66.6888 CROCO, Sarah E. —
In recent years, the term “flip-flopper” has become increasingly prominent. Politicians employ the term in an attempt to make their opponents look unattractive to voters. The question of whether this tactic works, however, remains unanswered. Existing research demonstrates that citizens do not like inconsistency as a matter of principle, but we know little about its effects in practice. I conduct an experiment that allows me to ascertain the effect of a leader's inconsistency on citizens' assessments. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that citizens do not always react negatively to a leader who changes his position. Instead, they are generally indifferent between a consistent and an inconsistent politician provided that the leader supports the citizen's preferred policy in the current time period. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “Understanding foreign policy in the Middle East”. See also Abstr. 66.6759a, 6884, 7068, 7279, 7292, 7319, 7333, 7360, 7393, 7408, 7417, 7505]
66.6889 DASSONNEVILLE, Ruth —
The increase of electoral volatility in established democracies is typically interpreted as proof that short-term factors are increasingly important determinants of vote-choice. The empirical evidence to support this assertion, however, is relatively weak. This paper addresses this question by investigating the impact of both long- and short-term determinants on the vote-choices of stable and volatile voters in Britain. Analysis of three British election panels (1992–1997, 1997–2001 and 2005–2010) indicates that short-term factors — especially economic issues — do have more weight in determining the vote-choices of volatile voters compared with stable voters. However, the results also reveal that the growth in instability of voting behavior is driven mainly by the weakening impact of long-term factors and not by increasing importance of short-term determinants of the vote-choice. [R, abr.]
66.6890 DELLA PORTA, Dinatella; SBERNA, Salvatore; VANNUCCI, Alberto —
This chapter examines two periods of large-scale corruption that erupted in 2014: the procurements process for the MOSE tidal barrier project, which is intended to surround and protect Venice, and the contracts signed in the run-up to Expo 2015 in Milan. The chapter shows how networks of corruption have survived the “clean hands” scandal of the early 1990s and thrive in a world of neo-liberal policies that promote privatization, deregulation, and liberalization. These policies have not led to a reduction in corruption; rather, they have shifted governance structures toward private figures who, in the name of the free market, often end up with better opportunities to corrupt or to be corrupted. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6934]
66.6891 DESROSIERS, Marie-Eve; LAGASSÉ, Philippe —
This article looks at framing strategies behind the recent Canadian Conservative government's rhetoric on the military. Critics argue that Conservative rhetoric has politicized Canadian history and overemphasized the armed forces. Few scholars, however, have looked at the specific forms this rhetoric took and the strategies it suggested. The article presents the results of a systematic analysis of Conservative rhetoric between 2005 and 2015. It argues that three key frame alignment strategies were at the heart of the Conservative Government's rhetoric: extension, consolidation and transformation, with truly transformative rhetoric transpiring only in the last phase. While agreeing with critics that this emphasis on the military aimed to alter perceptions of Canadian identity, the article shows that Conservative rhetoric was far from and monolithic. [R]
66.6892 DESRUMAUX, Clément —
The article introduces a configurational analysis to explain differences among electoral campaigns as well as their unequal integration within national politics. Based on the British case and on fieldwork focusing on Labour and Conservative candidates, the article aims at understanding how they structure electoral mobilizations. Campaign styles vary according to the characteristics of the candidates, but depend also on the nature of the competition and the degree of integration to the central political game. Finally, by taking into account the trajectories of candidates as well as their personal or professional experiences, the configurational approach is a useful tool to understand how campaigns are effectively set up. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6320]
66.6893 DINAS, Elias; HARTMAN, Erin; VAN SPANJE, Joost —
Most issue-voting studies have adopted the basic premise of spatial models of voting — that voters compare parties' positions with their own ideal points and apply a rule to choose among these parties. Drawing on a natural experiment, this study shows that perceptual agreement between parties and voters is endogenous to voters' party affect. We use the murder of a Dutch politician amidst the data-collection period of the 2002 Dutch election study. The death increases respondents' feelings for his party without providing information about its issue stances. This upward shift in feelings translates into a significant increase in the perceived level of proximity with the party. The design also allows us to explore the mechanism bringing parties and voters closer. [R, abr.]
66.6894 DINESEN, Peter Thisted, et al. —
We provide new evidence on the much-discussed effect of education on political participation by utilizing the quasi-experiment of twinning. By looking at the relationship between education and participation within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs we are able to circumvent traditional sources of confounding of the relationship rooted in genes and early life family environment because MZ twins share both. The results of within-twin pair analyses based on surveys from the US, Denmark and Sweden show that while the relationship between education and political participation is highly confounded by genes and/or familial environment in all three countries, a positive impact remains of years of education in the US and of high school completion in Denmark. No effect is found in Sweden. [R, abr.]
66.6895 DIOTALLEVI, Luca —
Clerical “non-negotiable values” were actively promoted by right-wing governments in the 2000s, the Monti government that replaced them was strongly supported by the Vatican and the Italian bishops, and the current left-wing government is led by a former member of the Catholic popolari who attends Mass every Sunday. But this article argues that, rather than a new golden age of political Catholicism, the return of Catholicism to Italian politics has taken a “low intensity” form which lacks the robust combination of ideas, leaders, organizations, and interests that informed earlier, genuinely political forms of Catholic engagement. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the “Todi movement”, which played a crucial role in the Monti government, and on Matteo Renzi's current leadership of the Partito democratico and the national government. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6846]
66.6896 DIRLIK, Arif —
The recent popular uprising in Hong Kong — “Occupy Central” a.k.a. Umbrella Movement — has again [raised] the question of [Hong Kong's] relationship with Mainland China. This article argues that the protests have their origins in a consciousness born of the anxieties provoked by the prospect of unification in the 1980s–1990s, against the background of the unstable “one country, two systems” arrangement openly favoring the corporate and financial ruling class in Hong Kong, which is prepared to align its interests with those of the Communist regime in a mutually beneficial relationship. The movement's [roots] goes back to the 1980s — the emergence of a neoliberal global capitalism, of which the PRC has been an integral component, and the Tiananmen movement, one of the earliest expressions of the social and political strains created by shifts in the global economy. [R, abr.] [First of a series of articles on “Upon the second anniversary of Occupy Campaign/Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong: essays in honor of a pro-democracy sociopolitical movement”, edited by ESee also Abstr. 66.6880, 6951, 6990, 7002, 7003]
66.6897 DODEIGNE, Jérémy, et al. —
Political parties are often thought of as unitary actors that have consistent preferences. This “hidden assumption” means that heterogeneity within parties, and therefore intra-party dynamics, are overlooked in explaining attitudes. When it comes to devolution and federalization, parties or MPs belonging to the same region are also often implicitly considered to have homogeneous viewpoints and attitudes. Relying on an original survey of MPs carried out during the Belgian political gridlock of 2010–2011, this article uncovers some of the key dimensions of the intra-party dynamics through analysis of MPs' preferences towards institutional reform in Belgium. Far from being explained along party or community lines, our results demonstrate how MPs' political and sociological background, national/regional identity, political career, and intercommunity relations strongly shape their preferences. [R]
66.6898 DOLGERT, Stefan —
American political discourse in the era of Tea Parties, D. Trump, and “#BlackLivesMatter” is suffused with Nietzschean ressentiment. Left critical theorist W. Brown's “wounded attachments” characterize civil rights protesters, multiculturalists, anti-tax activists, and Christian conservatives alike: all are grounded in an identity thoroughly constituted by foundational wounding, which then provides a continuing impulse to fixate on perceived wrongs as the basis for political community. Rather than lamenting this, however, I defend ressentiment from the vantage point of a renewed Left in the US. This paper explores a strategic reclamation of ressentiment “well-used”, argues that its employment in past liberation struggles has been crucial to the successes of the Left, and proposes several specific tactics in political rhetoric and mobilization. [R, abr.]
66.6899 DONOGHUE, Matthew —
This article engages with popular narratives of community and cohesion, explored through a series of focus groups in Bradford and Birmingham. This article argues that the participants interviewed used discourses propagated by government to make sense of these narratives in their neighborhoods and communities. The use of these discourses constructs what Gramsci calls a “common sense” position, which legitimizes a specific and targeted notion of cohesion. However, participants can contaminate these discourses, which can lead to subtle changes or explicit challenges to dominant discourses on community and cohesion in the UK. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6472]
66.6900 DUDZIC, Marc; REED, Adolph, Jr. —
There is no left worth talking about in the US and there has not been one for quite a while. The formation of a serious anti-capitalist force in American politics will not be sparked by dramatic actions or events, not least because the constituency for that sort of left does not yet exist; it must be created. That is a lesson that must be taken from the reality of our defeat: on the one hand, the relentlessness of the post-crash capitalist offensive understandably feeds a sense of urgency in fighting back; on the other hand, their relentlessness is possible only because we do not have the capacity to challenge them. [See Abstr. 66.7028]
66.6901 EDEL, Mirjam —
Since the military coup in July 2013, repressive measures have intensified in Egypt. They are accompanied by an outspoken security discourse that seems to be of new quality and intensity. How are these two phenomena linked to one another, to what extend have they changed under al-Sisi, and how could we explain these developments? In order to grasp the links between actual repression and security rhetoric, a conceptualization of different addressees is introduced. Along these lines, the political discourses prevailing under al-Sisi and the modes of repression are analyzed, also considering the broader historical context. [R, abr.]
66.6902 EDGERLY, Stephanie, et al. —
This paper explores political expression on Facebook during the 2012 [US] presidential debates. We investigate how individuals and organizations appropriated media resources to craft responses to the debates, and what this reveals about sources of influence in political communication on social media. In particular, we compare the stream of posts that spread widely during the debates — content that “went viral” — with more mundane practices of personal expression to show differences between the viral content that caught the attention of news media coverage about the debates and the posting practices of individuals using their Facebook as a site for individual expression. [R]
66.6903 EDWARDS, B. M.; BEECH, Matt —
As part of this special issue examining policy transfer between the Labour parties in Australia and Britain, this paper explores the relationship between the two on ideological positioning. In the 1990s, there was substantial ideas-transfer from the Australian Hawke-Keating government to Blair “New Labour” in Britain, as both parties made a lunge towards the economic centre. This paper analyzes how the inheritors of that shift, the Rudd/Gillard government in Australia and the Miliband and Corbyn leaderships in Britain, are seeking to define the role and purpose of Labour parties in its wake. It examines the extent to which they are learning and borrowing from one another, and finds that a combination of divergent economic and political contexts have led to strikingly limited contemporary policy transfer. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6759b]
66.6904 EHRLICH, Avishai —
ere is no longer any clear distinction between “left” and “right” in Israel in socio-economic terms. The use of the terms “left” and “right” in Israel does not refer anymore to a worldview of socio-economic equality, notions of basic welfare entitlements or distributive justice. The considerable convergence between left and right in Israel, mostly on the terms of the right, goes back at least two decades. All parties in the Israeli parliament, with the possible exception of the Communist Party, are pro-capitalist and support an economic order based on private property and free markets. Understanding the influence of political Judaism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the country's politics helps shed light upon the trajectory to the right's 2015 electoral victory. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6905 ELEY, Geoff —
How might a history of fascism in interwar Europe help us with an understanding of the right today? In order to address this question, it is necessary to examine not just the particular ideas and practices that distinguish fascists from their rivals, but also the particular contexts that give them popularity and a credible claim to power. What are the circumstances that enable fascists to offer themselves as an effective and desirable extra-systemic solution, an alternative to the given practices of pluralism, negotiation, and coalition building associated with democratic constitutionalism? What is the character of the “fascism-producing crisis”? The specificities of the German conjuncture of the 1920s can be compared and contrasted with the circumstances of our own time. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6906 ERIKSON, Robert S. —
This article analyzes voting for [US] Congress in presidential election years. The national Democratic vote for the House increases with the Democratic vote for president but decreases with the Democrats' perceived chances of winning the presidency (anticipatory balancing). The evidence for coattails and for balancing become visible only when statistically controlling for the other. The aggregate evidence for coattails and balancing in presidential years is reinforced by the analysis of National Election Studies (NES) survey respondents. That analysis shows that politically informed voters are more likely to vote for Congress against the party that they believe will win the presidency. [R]
66.6907 EVANS, Elizabeth —
Women's organizations can help address some specific challenges faced by different groups of women during the political recruitment process. This article explores whether US and UK organizations do so. Legislative composition analysis confirms women of color are under-represented, although they are better represented in the US than in the UK; women with disabilities are under-represented in both countries, along with younger women in the US and older women in the UK. Interviews with US women's organizations reveal a greater attention to diversity, particularly with regard to women of color; however, the focus remains on increasing the overall number of women in both countries. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6428]
66.6908 EVANS, Elizabeth —
Western political parties have been in decline in recent decades and they continue to be viewed as male institutions. Despite this, electoral politics is important to the women's movement as a means by which to advance feminist interests. This article builds upon feminist critiques of political parties by analyzing original qualitative data undertaken with feminists in the US and UK in order to explore how activists view political parties. The research finds that although many hold negative views, in line with broader debates concerning disengagement, they also recognize the importance of electoral politics and the need to work with individual politicians. Party and feminist ideology shapes those views, whereby politicians on the left are viewed as feminist allies and those on the right are framed as strategic partners. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6334]
66.6909 EVANS, Mark; STOKER, Gerry —
This article explores the idea that citizens' relationship with their polity is contingent on and liable to change under certain conditions. Drawing from a survey of a representative sample of Australians, three insights emerge. First, although many Australian citizens are not directly engaged in political actions beyond voting, most do present a “standby” role that suggests potential to engage. Second, willingness to shift patterns of engagement may depend on general orientations towards the polity and we find extensive evidence of negative understanding of the political system as well as more positive endorsement of representative political practices. Our third finding is that citizens might be prepared to change their relationship with the polity depending on the kind of politics that is offered, hence providing a creative space for political reform. [R, abr.]
66.6910 FAROOQUI, Adnan; SRIDHARAN, E. —
This paper analyzes the defeat of the Congress Party in the India's 2014 election in which it plummeted to its lowest ever vote share (19 per cent) and seat tally (44 of 543). We argue that the defeat is the end result of a gradual decline punctuated by recoveries that began much earlier. We show that the Congress was gradually becoming less competitive in more and more states and constituencies as indicated by its falling to third position or worse. We relate this to the desertion of the party by social groups that once supported it in a number of states and other factors. The larger question is whether a Congress-type, encompassing, umbrella party can survive the sharpened politicization of social cleavages. [R, abr.]
66.6911 FEDORENKO, Kostyantyn; RYBIY, Olena; UMLAND, Andreas —
We examine the evolution of the party system in Ukraine, focusing on the extent to which the Euromaidan has addressed previous problems and weaknesses. So far the post-Soviet Ukrainian party system has been exceptionally unstable as electoral legislation, the factional composition of Ukraine's parliament, and the dominant parties in Ukraine underwent frequent changes. We argue that, despite advances in democratization as a result of the revolutionary events of 2013–2014, the essential features of Ukraine's party system have not changed. The legislative, ideological and organizational foundations of the Ukrainian party-political landscape and parliamentary politics have remained fragile. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7040]
66.6912 FEKETE, Liz —
For a variety of reasons, the threat posed by ultra-patriot movements is not taken seriously enough. This is not surprising given the close ideological affinity of counter-jihadism with neoconservatism, militarization and war, as well as their much-vaunted “philozionism”. The ultra-right is insurgent. Its growth represents a challenge to the neoliberal status quo inasmuch as the ultra-right sees neoliberalism as antithetical to a hierarchical, nationalist, monocultural society with a strong state. An anatomy of the ultra-right, from its various currents and mutations to its web of relationships, fanatical fronts, criminal subculture, provocations, and violence, demonstrates that the ultra-right has neither emerged in a political vacuum nor is it divorced from mainstream political culture, where the electoral extreme right plays a significant role. [First article of a thematic issue on “The politics of the Right”. [First article of a thematic issue on “The politics of the Right”. See also Abstr. 66.6828, 6844, 6868, 6904, 6905, 6915, 6944, 6976, 7005, 7022, 7070, 7072, 7077, 7090, 7529]
66.6913 FERNANDES, Jorge M.; PEREIRA, Miguel M.; PLESCIA, Carolina —
Do voters behave strategically in local elections? Does democratic experience influence voters' capacity to behave strategically? Is there a relation between education and voters' capacity to anticipate the mechanical effects of electoral statutes and adapt their behavior accordingly? Using an original data-set covering the complete democratic period, this paper studies strategic voting at the local level in Portugal. Using an ecological inference approach, we contribute to a vast body of literature on strategic voting by testing whether theories developed for national contexts travel to local contexts. Our findings suggest that (1) voters consistently defect to non-viable lists to support viable lists; (2) democratic experience helps voters to learn how to maximize their utility; and (3) education is important for voters' ability to identify a strategic setting. [R]
66.6914 FERNÁNDEZ, Juan J.; EIGMÜLLER, Monika; BÖRNER, Stefanie —
Increasingly, research on attitudes towards the European project focuses on transnational practices. This article furthers the transnational approach by offering the first systematic analysis of how domestic transnationalism — i.e., transnational practices conducted in the home country — influences the formation of pro-European sentiments. We argue that domestic transnational activities foster recognition of common, transnational interests and identities that support the European integration project. Using a 2013 Eurobarometer, we show the distinct need to pay attention to domestic transnationalism. Individuals engaging in more domestic transnational activities display more pro-European sentiments in four of our five dependent variables. Moreover, the effect of domestic transnationalism is particularly intense among less-educated citizens. [R]
66.6915 FLETCHER, Bill, Jr. —
In failing to come to terms with right-wing populism, the left is presented with a situation that it not only cannot fully grasp, but about which it cannot develop an appropriate counter-strategy. The right does not critique the origin of the nation-state (instead mythologizing it), but rather sets about redefining the nation-state, its history and the “relevant” population(s) constituting it. The existence of both the tendency towards the development of the neoliberal authoritarian state and the growth of right-wing populism creates major challenges for the left. By first recognizing that these developments are not one and the same thing, we make tremendous advances towards the construction of a political strategy of resistance and counter-attack. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6916 FLYNN, D. J.; HARBRIDGE, Laurel —
Scholars are increasingly interested in how partisan conflict in Congress affects public evaluations of institutional performance. Yet, existing research overlooks how the public responds to one of the most widely discussed consequences of partisan conflict: legislative gridlock. We develop expectations about how partisan conflict resulting in partisan wins, losses, and gridlock will affect evaluations of Congress, and how these relationships will differ across consensus and non-consensus issues. Results from two survey experiments indicate that partisan conflict resulting in a victory for one's own party boosts approval relative to compromise, but conflict resulting in gridlock substantially damages approval. However, the degree to which gridlock decreases approval hinges on the type of policy under consideration. On consensus issues, citizens reward legislative action by either party — their party or the opposing party — over gridlock. [R]
66.6917 FRANZ, Michael M.; FOWLER, Erika Franklin; RIDOUT, Travis N. —
Recent [US] court decisions have encouraged new types of interest groups to become involved in election campaigns. Yet questions remain about whether interest group sponsorship of advertising affects the content of the issues being discussed. The ability of interest groups to influence the campaign agenda has implications for the extent to which politicians can be held accountable by citizens. We present a new conceptual framework for explaining variation in interest group advertising strategies and examine the factors leading different types of interest groups to be loose cannons (diverging from the issue debates among candidates) or loyal foot soldiers (matching the candidates' issue debates). We find more evidence of loyal foot-soldier behavior among new multi-issue interest groups and among Republican groups and candidates. Fears of interest groups “hijacking” campaign agendas appear unfounded. [R]
66.6918 FRIEDMAN, Elie —
This study identifies gaps in official discourse between recognition of the other as a nation and recognition of the other's right to statehood within identity conflicts. Using as a case study the discourse of Israeli political leaders during three distinct periods [since] 1967 present, the study proposes analytical tools based on recognition theory to examine how the relationship between recognition of the other and constitution of the self impact recognition gaps. The study illustrates that partial recognition of the other — either affirmation of peoplehood coupled with denial of statehood or conversely affirmation of statehood coupled with denial of peoplehood — can result from an untenable view of self based on ontological dissonance. [R, abr.]
66.6919 FU King-wa —
Previous studies of the impact of social media on youth's participation in politics are largely inconclusive. It is partly attributable to a diverse conceptualization of political participation and media use. Using a holistic definition of political participation and an analytical approach of building a typology of political participation, this study constructed a four-group typology for young people's political participation in a randomized mobile phone interview with 672 Hong Kong respondents aged 20–29 years. Four groups were identified: critical citizens (14%); modestly politically active nonvoters (15%); voters (29%); and disengaged individuals (42%). The respondents' media use and political characteristics were also examined. [R, abr.]
66.6920 FUKS, Mario; CASALECCHI, Gabriel Avila —
When is it good to trust political institutions? We argue that trust is good when two conditions are met: the existence of an institutional context that justifies trust, and an adequate informational environment. We use data from a study about a program of political socialization in Brazil, the Youth Parliament in Minas Gerais State, 2008. The study was conducted as a quasi experiment with a pretest, a posttest, and control group. We conclude that through intense informational flow, the participants have increased their trust and acquired greater knowledge about Minas Gerais's Legislative Assembly. [R, abr.]
66.6921 GAINOUS, Jason; MARTENS, Allison M. —
Recent research has found that civic education improves the democratic capacity of students and that teachers who employ an “open classroom” approach seem to perform better at accomplishing this goal. We build on behavioral literature suggesting that variation in personality traits across ideology may account for why liberal middle school teachers would be more likely to foster an open classroom climate and as a result do a better job than their conservative counterparts at stimulating in their students' political knowledge, an important component of democratic capacity. We estimate a series of quasi-experimental multilevel models using data from a survey of American students and teachers. [R, abr.]
66.6922 GAMBLE, Andrew —
While the Conservative Party remains committed to maintaining the Union, a new English Toryism is emerging, which has a strong continuity with an older English Toryism which was partially buried by the ascendancy of Unionism. English Tories have always considered the Union to be desirable, but it comes second in their thinking to the need to protect the sovereignty of the British state, the core of which is England and its traditional institutions. What is new about the contemporary Conservative Party is that there is within it the revival of an English Toryism which is happy to discard the older clothes of Empire and Union once so important to Conservative identity and which is unabashedly English in its focus. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7501]
66.6923 GAUVIN, Jean-Philippe; CHHIM, Chris; MEDEIROS, Mike —
The 2011 Canadian federal election results changed the face of federal politics in Quebec. In a sudden and spectacular reversal of electoral fortunes, BQ support crumbled while that of the NDP surged. While most commentators focused exclusively on the 2011 election itself to explain what had happened, we offer an interpretation that takes a longitudinal approach. Using data from the Canadian Election Study and political party manifestos from 2006 to 2011, we propose a three-dimensional proximity model of voter/party congruence to explore the evolution of the ideological stances of Quebec voters and parties. Empirical results suggest these ideological distances between the NDP and Quebec voters decreased over time, whereas the BQ has distanced itself from voters. Furthermore, ideological distances between party and voters are a significant predictor of vote. [R]
66.6924 GERRITS, Lucas; SCHELLER, Henrik —
The part about tax issues in the manifesto of the Greens for the federal parliamentary election in 2013 met with rejection of political opponents and was also discussed within the party itself. To what extent did the reception of these opposing positions in the national daily newspapers reflect the ideological left-right orientation of the political party landscape in Germany? A framing analysis actually shows that print media with a conservative or moderate imprint of the journalistic left-right spectrum, largely rejected tax increases. Surprisingly, however, the reform plans of the Greens also learned a critical commentary from the Frankfurter Rundschau with its more left-wing editorial orientation. The analysis gives evidence that the competition about policy-interpretation cannot be won against the dominance of a published majority opinion that is critical. [R]
66.6925 GESLIN, Laurent; DÉRENS, Jean-Arnault —
countries of South-East Europe are a fertile hunting ground for Islamic State recruiters: per head of population, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo top the list of European countries supplying volunteers to the terrorist movement. Islam in the Balkans has often been held up as a model of tolerance and moderation, but that tradition is now in jeopardy. The slide towards fundamentalism of a fraction of Balkan Muslims dates back to the Bosnian War in the mid-1990s, when large numbers of jihadists from the Middle East came to fight alongside their fellow believers and stayed on after the conflict ended. Salafism is still a minority doctrine, but it now has a foothold in mainland Europe. The utmost vigilance is needed. [R]
66.6926 GHERGHINA, Sergiu —
Legislative defection in political systems characterized by party dominance and cartelization is usually seen as damaging the MPs' careers. Switching legislators does not portray an image of confidence and reliability and the MPs' re-election is unlikely. Drawing on a dataset that includes all defector MPs in post-communist Romania until 2008, this article indicates that one in five defectors gets re-elected. The quest for explanations focuses on individual and party features. Results indicate that re-election of defectors is a function of the strategic behavior (the choice of the destination party) and the legislative experience of the defector. All these items count against party and legislative activity. [R]
66.6927 GHERGHINA, Sergiu; GROH, Adriana —
Earlier research about the European citizens' initiative (ECI) focused on its normative value, functioning mechanisms, and the extent to which citizens are willing to engage with it. So far, little efforts were made to investigate whether the ECI has an effect on citizens' attitudes. This article provides an empirical assessment about how knowledge about the ECI and the willingness to use it may enhance a positive image about the EU. The explanatory power of these two variables is tested against other determinants identified in the literature as sources of a positive image about the EU: democratic performance, perception of representation, the pursuit of interests, and citizenship. The study draws on an original data-set collected through a web-survey at the beginning of 2015. [R, abr.]
66.6928 GOIDEL, Kirby; SMENTKOWSKI, Brian; FREEMAN, Craig —
Religious freedom in the US is widely enjoyed and vigorously protected. Yet, a substantial percentage of Americans believe that their religious liberties are threatened. This article investigates the origins of these perceptions, focusing on the role of political orientations, religious identities and behaviors, social issues (i.e., gay marriage and abortion), and news attentiveness. We found that perceptions of threat are related to political orientations (i.e., partisan affiliation, ideology, and Tea Party identification) and issue positions (i.e., opposition to gay marriage). Consistent with theories of elite cue-taking, the effects of partisan affiliation are contingent on news attentiveness. Republicans who pay closer attention to the news are more likely to state that their religious liberties are threatened. [R]
66.6929 GOIRAND, Camille —
Created in 1980, the Workers' Party (PT) has steadily enlarged its electoral forces. The beginning of the 2000s was a decisive turning point when its historic leader, Lula, won the Presidency. Gaining access to government and public administrations, at the local and national levels, had several consequences, such as the political professionalization of the party leaders, growing resources, changes in power balances within the organization, as well as in the social roots of the party. For the analysis of those changes, electoral campaigns may be a good indicator. This paper is based on ethnographic data, collected during several electoral campaigns between 1994 and 2010. During the “time of politics”, campaigning has always been pervasive in Brazilian big cities. Since the 1980s, the PT's electoral campaigns have passed through dramatic changes. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6320]
66.6930 GOSS, Kristin A., ed. —
Introduction by Theda SKOCPOL. Articles by Jeffrey M. BERRY, “Negative returns: the impact of impact investing on empowerment and advocacy”, pp. 437–441; Kristin A. GOSS, “Policy plutocrats: how America's wealthy seek to influence governance”, pp. 442–448; Sarah RECKHOW, “More than patrons: how foundations fuel policy change and backlash”, pp. 449–454; Steven M. TELES, “Foundations, organizational maintenance, and partisan asymmetry”, pp. 455–460; Alexander HERTEL-FERNANDEZ, “Explaining liberal policy woes in the states: the role of donors”, pp. 461–465; Rob REICH, “Repugnant to the whole idea of democracy? On the role of foundations in democratic societies”, pp. 466–472.
66.6931 GOURGUES, Guillaume —
The proliferation of participatory devices in a wide range of policies is rarely analyzed as an instrumentation process. However, the study of the administrative and technical aspects of participatory mechanisms reveals their co-production by public and private actors, which make possible a targeting of the “publics” invited to participate. Based on a monograph focused on the creation and the competitive uses of a tool (a central file of registered participants) within the Rhône-Alpes [France] regional council between 2004 and 2010, this article argues that the institutionalization of the supply of “public participation” enables public authorities to produce participatory devices opened to targeted publics, without any true concern about their utility and the social demands that they should satisfy. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6255]
66.6932 GRAEBER, David —
“No future” was the leitmotiv of three generations of British citizens. After decades of predominance of neo-liberalism, there was great disbelief in the possibility of social change for the benefit of the majority. According to the author, this period is over. Today, more and more British reject resignation and utopian thinking is becoming increasingly popular. A symbolic figure of this process of change is the new Labour leader, J. Corbyn.
66.6933 GROTZ, Florian; WEBER, Till —
Government-formation in multi-party democracies is notoriously ridden with information uncertainty. Uncertainty is aggravated when new parties enter parliament, which generally suggests a “newcomer handicap” in government-formation. However, relegating newcomers to the opposition comes with uncertainty in its own right, which suggests immediate cabinet participation as new leaders seize the opportunity and established parties pursue containment. We explore elite responses to this strategic problem in the post-communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) where new parties often gain parliamentary representation. Even in CEE, a newcomer handicap in government-formation is apparent, controlling for other detrimental party attributes. However, this applies to small newcomers only. For larger parties the handicap turns into a bonus, an effect only qualified once the newcomer outnumbers its competitors. [R, abr.]
66.6934 GUIDI, Mattia —
The rise of M. Renzi is one of the most significant political events of the year. This chapter analyzes Renzi's leadership of the Partito Democratico (PD), looking at both the internal politics of the party and the party's position within the Italian party system. Within the PD itself, Renzi has brought take-it-or-leave-it proposals to the party executive, which has upset a vocal minority. More broadly, Renzi has moved the party to the center on the left-right scale, while adopting a more expansionary fiscal stance, effectively marginalizing other parties. The chapter concludes that the most serious opposition to Renzi today may come from within his own party. [R] [Introduction to a thematic issue on “The year of the bulldozer [in Italy]. See also Abstr. 66.6563, 6591, 6605, 6622, 6713, 6865, 6890, 7133, and the chronology of Italian political events, 2014, compiled by Rinaldo VIGNATI, pp. 1–28]
66.6935 HAFNER-FINK, Mitja, et al. —
lobbying strategies of national interest organizations within the EU's multilevel political system. Both our theoretical framework, which includes the determinants of a national interest organization's decision to act at the EU level, and the data analysis from the INTEREURO MultiLevel Governance Module (MLG) reveal [inter alia]: (1) the greatest differentiation among interest organizations (IOs) appears to be between those IOs from the older member states (Germany, the UK and the Netherlands), which exhibit above-average levels of activity, and those from the newer EU member states (Sweden, Slovenia), which exhibit below-average levels of activity. (2) The variations in IO activity levels are much greater from country to country than from one policy field to another. [R, abr.]
66.6936 HAGENE, Turid; GONZÁLEZ-FUENTE, Íñigo —
This study explores how a communitarian lifeworld prepares the ground for practices of political clientelism without requiring the “foundational favor” noted in other contexts. Based on the encounter between ethnographies from two different communities of the Mesoamerican tradition in Mexico, the article argues that this lifeworld is forged by the habitual ways in which most collective tasks are carried out, that is, by forming and participating in networks. First, we offer a concrete description of the operation of two problem-solving networks of political clientelism in these communities, legitimate since they appear to be part of the communitarian practices. Second, we observe that the state often fails to reach out to the citizens with many social benefits, and we maintain that the problem-solving networks bridge the gap between the citizens and the state. [R, abr.]
66.6937 HAN, Hahrie; McKENNA, Elizabeth —
This paper considers the challenges and opportunities of conducting a thick, qualitative study of a 21st c. [US] presidential ground campaign. Our goals are to describe phenomena that are not commonly examined in most studies of field campaigns, namely (1) the purportedly transformative impact of the campaign on both individuals and collective contexts, (2) the holistic interaction of different strategic elements of the campaign, and (3) the processes the campaign used to develop citizen leadership to scale the campaign. We also consider the limitations of our approach, the reception of a book intended for both academic and practitioner audiences, and underexploited research agendas in the study of campaigns. [R]
66.6938 HANLEY, Seán; SIKK, Allan —
This paper discusses a new group of parties that we term anti-establishment reform parties (AERPs), which combine moderate social and economic policies with anti-establishment appeals and a desire to change the way politics is conducted. We analyze the electoral breakthroughs of AERPs in central and eastern Europe (CEE), the region where AERPs have so far been most successful. Examples include the Simeon II National Movement, Movement for the European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) (Bulgaria), Res Publica (Estonia), New Era (Latvia), TOP09 and Public Affairs (Czech Republic) and Positive Slovenia. We examine the conditions under which such parties broke through in nine CEE states in 1997–2012 using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). We find five sufficient causal paths combining high or rising corruption, rising unemployment and party system instability. [R, abr.]
66.6939 HARMAN, Sophie —
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brings to light the legitimacy problem with global philanthropy. The legitimacy problem here is twofold: first, with regard to the criteria used to assess the presence or absence of legitimacy in global governance; and, second, how analysis of legitimacy does not fully account for how we understand the legitimate basis of rule drawn from private wealth. This article begins to address this lacuna by analyzing the legitimacy of an actor that wields considerable authority in the field of global health politics and has growing prominence in contemporary global governance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. [R]
66.6940 HAYTON, Richard —
The rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been one of the most dramatic and widely discussed features of British politics in recent years. One vital but largely overlooked facet of this phenomenon has been the politics of national identity. Despite UKIP's ostensibly unionist stance, Englishness is an important pivot around which key elements of the party's appeal revolve, notably in terms of its Euroskepticism, its opposition to immigration and its anti-establishment narrative. The Anglo-Britishness promulgated by UKIP allows space for the celebration of English identity rather more easily than of other sub-state national identities, as it does not challenge the legitimacy of the UK state, seen as the expression of Anglo-British identity and sovereignty. Scottish nationalism, on the other hand, is seen as a threat to the Union and therefore anti-English. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7501]
66.6941 HELLWIG, Timothy; McALLISTER, Ian —
Does the economy matter for how Australians vote in federal elections? International studies show an association between economic performance and elections, but research on Australia finds that the impact of the economy on voting is modest. What explains this relative absence of economic voting? How do Australians perceive the economy? And how do economic perceptions inform their decisions at the polls? Our results confirm the lack of an association between economic indicators and incumbent vote-shares. Analyses of survey data from 1996 to 2013 show that political factors condition perceptions of economic performance, while preferences for — and perceptions of — the government's unified control over economic policy shape the influence of economic perceptions on voter choice. Overall, responsibility attributions are the key to economic voting in Australia. [R]
66.6942 HENDERSON, John A.; SEKHON, Jasjeet S. —
We show that when redistrictors draw legislative boundaries in California's [US] 1990, 2000, and 2010 apportionment cycles, they systematically sort higher-participating Hispanic voters into majority-Hispanic (MH) jurisdictions represented by co-ethnic candidates, biasing subsequent comparisons of Hispanic participation across districts. Similar sorting occurs during redistricting in Florida and Texas, though here the pattern is reversed, with less-participating Hispanic voters redistricted to MH districts. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in redistricting largely unknown or underappreciated in previous research. Ignoring this selection problem could significantly bias estimates of the effect of Hispanic representation, either positively or negatively. After we correct for these biases using a hierarchical genetic matching algorithm, we find that, in California, being moved to a district with an Hispanic incumbent has little impact on Hispanic participation in our data. [R, abr.]
66.6943 HENNINGS, Valerie M.; URBATSCH, R. —
How candidates are selected, such as through nomination by party elites or election by primary voters, potentially influences the underrepresentation of women in political office. Partisan differences suggest that primary voters in right-leaning parties might select fewer female nominees than would their left-leaning counterparts even if both parties' elites are equally likely to select female nominees. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of lieutenant governors in the US, a position that varies in whether candidates are appointed by party elites or elected by primary voters. In cases where lieutenant-governor candidates are appointed, Democratic and Republican gubernatorial nominees are equally likely to choose female running mates; where primary voters select the lieutenant governor, Republicans are less likely to nominate women. [R]
66.6944 HENWOOD, Doug —
The American right, never on the ropes for very long, is on the march again and it is striking how once-extreme views have become quite mainstream. By most conventional political science measures, US parties have undergone a large ideological polarization, mainly because of the rightward move of the GOP, though the migration of conservative southern Democrats across the aisle to the Republican delegation helped. Though it feels like the entire US political spectrum has moved to the right, these measures are not equipped to confirm that; what they do register is increasing difference at any moment in time. A closer look at the entire 20th c. demonstrates that the right's ascendancy in American politics looks inseparable from its takeover of the Republican Party. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6945 HESS, Steve —
This article investigates why a growing number of wealthy Chinese, the primary beneficiaries of China's economic rise, have opted to exit China, through both capital flight and emigration, over the last decade, instead of using voice, engaging the political process, and leveraging their power and influence to effect policy change. [R]
66.6946 HOLBEIN, John —
Using multiple big datasets — which link for the first time large-scale school administrative records and individual validated voting behavior — I show that citizens react to exogenous school failure signals provided by No Child Left Behind. These signals cause a noticeable increase in turnout in local [US] school board elections and increase the competitiveness of these races. Additionally, I present evidence that school failure signals cause citizens to vote with their feet by exiting failing schools, suggesting that exit plays an underexplored role in democratic accountability. However, performance signals elicit a response unequally, with failure primarily mobilizing high propensity citizens and encouraging exit among those who are white, affluent, and more likely to vote. Hence, while performance signals spur a response, they do so only for a select few, leaving many others behind. [R, abr.]
66.6947 HOOKER, Juliet —
This essay [examines] the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens — who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the US in the 21st c. — can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to ask blacks to enact “appropriate” democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison's meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt's critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. [R, abr.]
66.6948 HOYT, Crystal L.; GOLDIN, Aleah —
We demonstrate the powerful role of “ingroup” favoritism, rather than hostility, in American intergroup biases. Specifically, we take a novel perspective to understanding the relationship between political ideology and discrimination against ethnic-minority Americans by focusing on the role of patriotism. Across three studies, we show that political ideology is a strong predictor of resource-allocation biases, and this effect is mediated by American patriotism and not by prejudice or nationalism. Conservatives report greater levels of patriotism than liberals, and patriotism is associated with donating more to American, as opposed to ethnic-minority American, organizations. [R, abr.]
66.6949 HUFFMON, Scott H.; KNOTTS, H. Gibbs; McKEE, Seth C. —
In a time of unprecedented racial polarization in partisan voting, and in a staunchly Republican Deep South state, one black Republican managed to reach the pinnacle of public office. This article examines Tim Scott's rise by analyzing precinct-level data to better understand his 2010 election to the US House and data from the Winthrop Poll to explore his more recent US Senate victory. To better understand support for Scott, we also report results from an embedded-survey experiment to assess respondents' favorability toward Scott when he is characterized by two different frames: (1) “Tea Party favorite”, and (2) “first African-American Senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction”. We found that conservatives, evangelicals, and less-educated individuals respond more positively to Scott when he is described as a “Tea Party favorite”. [R, abr.]
66.6950 HUGHES, Melanie M. —
Despite growing interest from practitioners, politicians and the media, the political representation of Muslim ethnic minority women in the West has received scant scholarly attention. I address this gap with new data on the representation of Muslim ethnic minority women and men in 20 national legislatures from 2000 to 2010. Results reveal that Muslim ethnic minority women are increasingly elected in countries with proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, whereas Muslim ethnic minority men have been elected across a range of electoral systems. The benefits of PR electoral systems to “women” apply to ethnic minority women from Muslim backgrounds. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6428]
66.6951 HUNG, Steven Chung Fun —
The political movement in 2014 Hong Kong was unprecedented. Benny Tai advocated the Occupy Central Movement that he intended to promote democratization of the Hong Kong constitutional reform in 2014. The campaign was aimed at the Chief Executive election in 2017 and the Legislative Council election in 2020, which was the promise by the National People's Congress on the proposal of Hong Kong democratization reform. This was a civil disobedience movement in Hong Kong, which blocked roads and expected to paralyze the central financial area, in order to fight for genuine universal suffrage for the elections. The movement was quite successful in calling forth the consciousness of Hong Kong people and the occupation [lasted] 79 days, but could not attain any constitutional democratic or political reforms in Hong Kong. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6896]
66.6952 IGLESIAS CAVICCHIOLI, Manuel —
Neo-conservatism is a movement and a doctrine present in American politics for more than forty years. Although it had its peak of influence a decade ago, during George W. Bush's first term, it is necessary to go back to its formative and development years in order to properly comprehend its vision of the world. This article analyzes how the Cold War plays a key role in understanding the origins of neo-conservatism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as in its evolution until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, the idea that international politics and US foreign policy were a minor issue in the first neoconservative epoch is contested. However, the Cold War is also fundamental to enlighten the study of its present. [R, abr.]
66.6953 IM Dong-Kyun; MENG Tianguang —
This study investigates the policy-opinion nexus in China. Using nationally representative survey data and propensity score matching, it examines the effect of policy on opinions in four welfare domains: pension, educational subsidies, health care, and minimum livelihood assistance. Our findings show that individuals' experience with welfare policy tends to reinforce the idea that the government should take responsibility for welfare, and this experience also influences their opinions about other welfare programs. This paper contributes to the literature by using a novel methodological approach and using a new dependent variable concerning individuals' feeling of entitlement for social welfare. [R, abr.]
66.6954 INSEL, Ahmet —
In June 2015, R.T. Erdogan skillfully maneuvered to prevent the formation of a coalition thus forcing another election and eventually accessing power. By summing up voters to choose between him and chaos, and by not hesitating to stage this chaos, he succeeded in finding a comfortable parliamentary majority at the outset of the November elections. This is the starting point for understanding Erdogan's new Turkey, which is sinking deeper and deeper into chaos. With his nearly totalitarian obsession to lock the entire state apparatus and reform society according to conservative Islam's cultural codes, Erdogan has become the principal instability factor in Turkey. So far this situation surprisingly seems not to suggest a measure other than the AKP's hegemony and Erdogan's popularity with his electorate.]
66.6955 ISAKSEN, Joachim V., et al. —
Using data from 16 countries and employing multilevel analysis that encompasses the national, regional, and individual levels, we find that both economic and social factors trigger anti-immigrant attitudes among Europeans. Regional per capita GDP is positively correlated with tolerant attitudes while the regional unemployment rate drives prejudice. We find a moderating relationship between immigrant population size and per capita GDP, which suggests that, as the size of the immigrant population increases, prejudice rises but only in poorer regions. In more affluent regions, an increase in the immigrant population corresponds to increased tolerance. [R]
66.6956 ISANI, Mujtaba; SILVERMAN, Daniel —
This article examines how Western foreign policy opinion reacts to the perceived Islamic character of foreign actors. Studies show that the target actor's dominant religion is a key ingredient in foreign policy opinion: Western audiences react more hostilely to “Muslim” than “Christian” targets. Yet, actors differ not only in which world religion they belong to but also how that religion is politicized by themselves and by others. We argue that Islam can be politicized in three major ways — via Islamic rhetoric, policies, and labels — that shape foreign policy attitudes. We field a survey experiment in which we attach common Islamic rhetoric, policies, and/or labels to a foreign actor in the context of the Syrian civil conflict. These cues strongly harm attitudes toward the actor, and the results vary widely by type. [R, abr.]
66.6957 ISHIYAMA, John; PULIDO GOMEZ, Amalia; STEWART, Brandon —
What impact does violence have on ethnic identity? Do acts of violence tend to create greater segmentation and “hardening” of identities among ethnic groups? We empirically assess the claim that violence inevitably leads to the hardening of ethnic identity (which we operationalize as expressions of ethnic particularism over a national identity). Using survey data from Kenya covering the period 2005–2008, integrated with geocoded data on conflict events in Kenya during that period, and employing multilevel logistic regression analysis, we do not find support for the contention that ethnic identity hardens inevitably as the result of violence. Rather, our findings suggest support for a more nuanced view of the effects of violence on ethnic identity. [R]
66.6958 JAGER, Nicola de; STEENEKAMP, Cindy Lee —
The early elite of the African National Congress (ANC) embraced values of moral improvement, individual responsibility and a sense of social consciousness. The ANC now governs South Africa, but with what appears to be a different set of principles. The current scourge of corruption, increasing state control, coupled with a general lack of service delivery point to behavior of the ruling party which is inward-looking, self-seeking and self-preserving. Arguing that political culture and its accompanying values and attitudes is a prime motivator of behavior, the paper [examines] the changing political culture of the dominant party. To understand the political culture of the ANC, we use interviews with ANC MPs and ANC supporters conducted in 2006–2007 and 2013 as well as an analysis of the ANC's policy documents. [R, abr.]
66.6959 JANG Jinhyeok —
This paper provides an overview of the dimensional structure of bill co-sponsorship networks in the Legislative Yuan from 1992 through 2012. This paper's exploratory analysis presents two empirical findings. First, about one-fifth of the legislators' bill co-sponsorship activities can be explained by the Pan-blue vs. Pan-green cleavage. Second, the other dimensions are mainly responsible for the minor party members, who want to differentiate themselves from the two major parties, namely, the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party. [R]
66.6960 JANKOWSKI, Michael —
While most of the literature on information shortcuts in open-list PR systems focuses on the importance of ballot position effects, the influence of a candidate's localness has widely been ignored by existing studies. I argue that voting patterns in open-list PR systems are more versatile than existing research would suggest. By analyzing a special characteristic of the open-list PR system employed in the parliamentary elections of Hamburg, it is shown that a large portion of voters chooses to vote for local candidates irrespective of the ballot position of the candidate. The paper further controls for factors conditioning the effect and finds that it remains strong even after taking them into consideration. [R, abr.]
66.6961 JARVIS, Lee —
This article explores findings from focus group research in which UK publics were asked, If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism? After situating our research within contemporary “bottom-up” work on counter-terrorism, we discuss the diversity of answers we received to this question, which included improving education, addressing social fracture, and the need for more punitive counter-terrorism powers. These exercises in public political imagination are important, we argue, for several reasons. These include the questions they pose for widespread claims about public disconnection from (security) politics as well as their likely impact on the everyday lives of our research participants. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6472]
66.6962 JENNINGS, Will; STOKER, STOKER —
A dynamic of global economic development means that many countries are experiencing uneven development and their citizens are increasingly split between those who can access high-skill jobs and those who cannot. As a result some citizens are living in cosmopolitan areas of growth and others in backwater areas of decline. There are emerging out of these processes two versions of England. In cosmopolitan areas we find an England that is global in outlook, liberal and more plural in its sense of identity. In provincial backwaters we find an England that is inward-looking, relatively illiberal, negative about the EU and immigration, nostalgic and more English in its identity. This bifurcation of England is already having political effects, reflected in the outcome of the 2015 general election. [R, abr.]
66.6963 JOHNSON, Craig; MIDDLETON, Alia —
The Liberal Democrats' performance in the 2015 general election provides an opportunity to examine the only case in the post-war period of a national junior coalition partner in British politics. Comparative research highlights competence, trust and leadership as three key challenges facing junior coalition parties. This article uses British Election Study data to show that the Liberal Democrats failed to convince the electorate on all three counts. The article also uses constituency-level data to examine the continued benefits of incumbency to the party and the impact of constituency campaigning. It finds that while the incumbency advantage remained for the Liberal Democrats, it was ultimately unable to mitigate the much larger national collapse. [R]
66.6964 JOHNSON, Janet Elise —
I look at the case of Putin's Russia as one of the authoritarian-leaning regimes that have promoted women into politics while simultaneously becoming more misogynist. Building on feminist institutionalism and the study of Russia's regime dynamics, both of which are extending the study of informal institutions, I claim that women are being fast-tracked into politics informally, not just formally such as by party or legislative quotas. Yet these women are then boxed in by informal rules and by parallel institutions and posts, with virtually no opportunities to advocate for women's interests. This exercise in concept-building suggests a framework for thinking about the importance and operation of informal institutions, sustained by gendered and homophobic rules, as a bulwark of male dominance that undermines women's representation. [R, abr.]
66.6965 KALYVA, Eve —
The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitical and economic changes at a global scale call for reconsiderations of the relation between art and power and its role in processes of democratization. This article examines art's social function and its understanding as transformative social praxis — an activity that reflects upon the world and seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically reflects upon its own condition and relation to that world. It specifically suggests the idea of art's rhetoric in order to conceptualize art's critical potential and identify processes that generate and displace meaning across artistic, sociopolitical, and discursive contexts. [R, abr.]
66.6966 KANTOLA, Johanna; ROLANDSEN-AGUSTÍN, Lise —
We analyze transnational party politics in the EU from a gender perspective, a subject neglected both by mainstream European studies on party politics and by gender scholars who work on political parties. Drawing on the insights of these two research traditions, we build toward an analytical framework to study gender and transnational party politics. Our empirical analysis focuses on two policy issues, the economic crisis and the sexual and reproductive health and rights, analyzing EP reports, debates and voting on the issues from 2009 to 2014. By focusing on gender equality constructions and the way in which consensus and contestation are built around them within and between party groups, we argue that shared constructions about gender equality are issue specific and change over time. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6334]
66.6967 KARITZIS, Andreas —
Is there any room for maneuver towards emancipatory politics in the current global context? The everyday inability to implement alternative policies through traditional government means has created the conditions for the emergence of a new awareness inside Syriza: that this requires a qualitative shift in our organizational and methodological principles. But in order to engage in such a shift we must abandon the tendency to think that things will change easily and quickly through revival of the institutional and political configuration of post-war liberal capitalism. We must radically transform our political imagination and finally confront the reality that neoliberals are burning the bridges to the past behind them.
66.6968 KARLSSON, David; GILLJAM, Mikael —
There is a cost-of-ruling effect for parties who are part of ruling coalitions in local multi-party elections. Results from the case of Sweden (based on 8,892 election results of parties in local elections 1998–2010) indicate that a party on average loses almost a quarter of its share of the votes after an election period in government. The results also indicate that this cost-of-ruling effect varies depending on the party's prominence and its political company within the ruling coalition. The voters punish anti-establishment parties who enter into ruling coalitions especially hard. [R]
66.6969 KATZ, Gabriel; LEVIN, Ines —
Scholars have argued that adherence to regime principles in emerging democracies can be threatened by the political system's inability to respond to critical events like natural disasters. However, little is known about the dynamics of the causal relationship between system performance and system support. This paper examines the time-varying effects of the 2007 Ica earthquake in Peru on political support. The authors find that, in the short run, the poor government response not only reduced support for political actors, but also for democracy. Over the longer run, however, Peruvians continued to relish the game of democratic politics even though they no longer liked the players. The authors conclude that democratic preferences in fragile states, while volatile, can be resistant to massive policy failures. [R]
66.6970 KAWASHIMA, SHIN —
This article introduces the background of the [2016] presidential and congressional election and discusses the reason for the results. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won both the presidential and congress members' elections, which signals emergence of the first real regime change in Taiwan. However, the style of the Tsai government isn't the same as that of the Chen Shui-bian government and will probably adopt a more modest policy on the cross-Strait issue. On the other hand, the Nationalist Party (KMT) lost the election so severely that it's so difficult to recover the situation. On this point, it's possible that the policy framework of Taiwan, like a two party system, will change drastically in the near future. Foreign policy, especially policy regarding Japan, will be changed by the new government. [R, abr.]
66.6971 KEFFORD, Glenn —
[Between] December 2006 and October 2013, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) fought three federal elections. In 2007, they won government after 11 years in opposition. In 2010, they were required to form a minority government to stay in power and in 2013 they were comprehensively defeated. Beneath the surface though, party leaders were able to exercise agency to stretch their influence beyond their prescribed authority and to contribute directly to unexpected structural reform in the party. Altering the way the party leader was selected had up to this point been resisted by Australia's major parties. This article explores the context in which this period of stretch and reform occurred and compares the ALP case to the pre-existing literature on institutional stretch and expansion of the leadership selectorate. [R, abr.]
66.6972 KEFFORD, Glenn; McDONNELL, Duncan —
Founded and led by the billionaire businessman, C. Palmer, the Palmer United Party (PUP) achieved what was arguably the best debut result of recent decades at the 2013 Australian federal election. This article examines PUP's ideology, organization and campaigning strategies along with the implications of its experiences to date for Australian party politics. Based on an analysis of original party documents, policies, media communications and semi-structured interviews with PUP candidates and key figures across Australia, we find evidence of a party utterly dominated by its leader, which was deliberately never built to last, whose ideology cannot be easily classified and whose campaigning was well-funded but extremely disorganized. We conclude that its experience shows how more professionalized new personal parties in Australia should be able to do even better electorally in the future. [R]
66.6973 KELLY, Kristin J. —
Given the vagueness in the [US Supreme] Court's definition of the “appearance of corruption”, campaign finance cases since Buckley v. Valeo [1976] have relied on survey data to measure perceptions of corruption. These data indicate high levels of perceived governmental corruption among the public but are silent on the question of whether these perceptions influence behavior. This study investigates the actual impact that perceptions of corruption have on individuals' levels of political participation. Adapting the socio-economic status model developed most fully by S. Verba and N. H. Nie [Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality, New York, 1972], I estimate extended beta-binomial regressions using maximum likelihood techniques on data from the 2009 University of Texas Money in Politics survey and the 2012 American National Election Studies Time-Series survey. [R, abr.]
66.6974 KEOHANE, Nannerl O. —
This essay clarifies the relationship between leadership and equality as two essential constitutive factors of a democratic political system. The essay is motivated by concern about increasing inequalities in the political system of the US and other countries that describe themselves as democracies. The first section notes the logical tension between leadership and equality, and spells out my understanding of the key terms I use in this essay. I show how the tension between leadership and equality poses a conundrum for democratic governance. Yet the crux of my argument is that profound socio-economic inequalities pose the more basic threat. I identify disparities in power, as distinct from leadership, as the root of the problem here. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue “On political leadership”, edited by Archie BROWN. See also Abstr. 66.6301, 6331, 6368, 6378, 6388, 6393, 6717, 6745, 7087]
66.6975 KETELHUT, Jörn, et al. —
More and more often since the early 1990s, there are complaints about democratic and legitimacy deficits of the EU. In the EU member states, new parties took up this issue. In the literature this new political line is termed “Euroskepticism”. The newly developed typology of Euroskepticism allows for the first time to differentiate between its various political manifestations. Based on a qualitative study on electoral manifestos of German parties participating in the 2014 European election, topics of Euroskeptic criticism can be distinguished and insights into the ideological background as well as the rigidity of criticism can be gained. Drawing on this framework there are participatory, regional-autonomist, nationalfiscal and identity-related types of Euroskepticism. [R, abr.]
66.6976 KIPFER, Stefan; SABERI, Parastou —
In France as in Canada, resurgent hard-right populism has taken the initiative from left mobilizations. In both contexts, right-populist politics has reached new heights in response to the current conjuncture of economic crisis, imperial war, and oppositional mobilization. Instead of merely echoing the contentions of the right populists, it is necessary to emphasize the contradictions and contingencies of popular support for populism by means of a historically and spatially nuanced approach and by focusing on the current manifestations and the historical and geographical formation of the organizations, ideologies, think tanks, intellectuals, and governing regimes of political parties that can be characterized as right-wing or authoritarian populist. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.6977 KIPGEN, Nehginpao —
The election helps the democratization process move forward. However, the nature of power transition suggests that some authoritarian elements are likely to remain entrenched. The article (which gives a full account of the election including the election process, the parties involved, the results and the negotiations following the elections including those involving Aung Sang Suu Kyi) argues that holding of a free and fair election is important for democratization but does not guarantee a successful transition to consolidated democracy. [R]
66.6978 KIRKLAND, Justin H.; HARDEN, Jeffrey J. —
Legislators are often placed in the position of representing the interests of their constituents against the preferences of their own party leaders. We develop a theoretical framework indicating that these cross-pressured legislators are more likely to initially support legislation and subsequently change their minds than are legislators whose constituents and leaders share similar preferences. Moreover, we expect this pattern to be most pronounced among members of majority parties than minority-party members. We test our expectations using data on bill cosponsorship and final passage votes from 46 lower state legislative chambers and the US House, finding considerable support for our theory. [R]
66.6979 KLEIN, Elad —
Stemming from ambition theory, a vast body of studies has demonstrated how politicians' pursuits of different goals can explain their behaviors. Politicians strive for re-election or to attain a better office. However, little is known about the way politicians prioritize these goals. This article uses the phenomenon of legislative party-switching to address this void and examines how hierarchy between goals determines legislator strategies. The study exploits the 2008 Romanian electoral reform. Drawing on data from more than 3,900 individual-level observations over the period from 1996 to 2012, this article shows how vote incentives alter the trade-offs between re-election and office motivations. The findings suggest that politicians will pursue office goals only if the goal of re-election is to be achieved. [R, abr.]
66.6980 KLINGELHÖFER, Tristan —
I reflect on the delegation model of multi-level party politics, a theoretical perspective of great importance, arguing that the accuracy of the model depends on two critical assumptions. Based on these theoretical considerations, I develop the model further and apply it to the case of the two main Spanish state-wide parties, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and the Partido Popular (PP). The programmatic positions of their regional branches are analyzed, and it is shown that the framework manifestos issued by the national party organizations shape these to a large extent. While this case is used to illustrate the illuminating potential of the extended delegation model, the paper is similarly attentive to the limitations of the model and also hints at the implications for our conception of democracy in multi-level systems. [R, abr.]
66.6981 KÖLLN, Ann-Kristin —
Research on party membership development commonly reports figures aggregated to the country level and/or using only a few time-points. These choices hide major differences between parties and conceal short-term fluctuations. Additionally, they are inappropriate for studying individual party trajectories. This is necessary, however, to better describe and ultimately explain the phenomenon of membership decline. The article analyzes 1,653 observations across 47 parties in six western European countries between 1960 and 2010 to test hypotheses pertaining to individual party membership development. Using multilevel modeling and time-series analyses, the results show what aggregated data with few time-points cannot: membership decline is by far not a universal phenomenon. Additionally, membership decline appears to be part of a party's life-cycle. The more consolidated parties are, the fewer members they have. [R, abr.]
66.6982 KOSTENKO, Veronica V.; KUZMUCHEV, Pavel A.; PONARIN, Eduard D. —
This article analyzes the relationship between support of democracy and attitudes to human rights, in particular, support for gender equality, in the countries covered by the first wave of the Arab Barometer project. We use cluster-analysis and negative binomial regression modeling to show that, unlike in most countries of the world, correlation between support of democracy and gender equality is very low in the Arab countries. There is a group of people in the region who support both democracy and gender equality, but they are a small group of elderly and middle-aged people characterized by higher education and social status. A substantial number of poorly educated males express support for democracy but not for gender equality. Many people are against both gender equality and democracy. [R, abr.]
66.6983 KRINER, Douglas; WILSON, Graham —
Building on recent efforts to bridge the elites/events dichotomy in the wartime opinion literature, we test the explanatory power of, and offer a theoretical extension to, the elasticity of reality hypothesis using the case of British support for the war in Afghanistan from 2001 through 2010. Marshaling an array of aggregate, individual-level and experimental survey data, as well as an original database of 2677 content-coded newspaper articles, we find evidence that the unshaken elite consensus behind the Afghan campaign failed to sustain strong support for war, even among the most politically engaged segments of the British public. However, we do find evidence that elites retained a measure of influence over citizens' prospective attitudes about the war's future conduct. [R, abr.]
66.6984 KROOK, Mona Lena; NUGENT, Mary K. —
The political representation of women and ethnic minorities has received growing attention among political parties around the world. Focusing on the British case, we map data and debates concerning the selection of female and minority candidates, highlighting the simultaneous and interactive role of gender and race in shaping citizens' opportunities to stand for and win election. Utilizing data from the Labour Party, our analysis illustrates the implications of distinct strategies to include members of politically marginalized groups — as well as provides evidence for the potential of “tandem quotas” to result in positive outcomes for minority women. Taken together, these findings suggest the need for stronger measures on the part of Labour to encourage the selection of minority candidates. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6334]
66.6985 KUHN, Sebastian; TAUSENDPFUND, Markus —
Due to the striking distance between citizens and politicians within their communities, the local level offers the best possibilities for political participation. However, protests such as “Stuttgart 21” suggest that the crisis of representative democracy has now reached the local level and that local political elites more and more leave local citizens behind. Whether such alienation between citizens and political elites can be demonstrated is analyzed on the basis of a German survey of over 12,000 citizens and 720 local politicians in 28 municipalities. There are significant local differences in the pattern of relations between citizens and politicians. A clear pattern of alienation between citizens and politicians can, however, not be determined. [R]
66.6986 KULESZA, Christopher; WITKO, Christopher; WALTENBURG, Eric —
As politics and policy-making appear to increasingly benefit “special interests” rather than the mass public, reformers, politicians, and the public have often embraced campaign finance reform. A number of states have undertaken major overhauls of their campaign finance systems in recent decades. We discuss these changes to [US] state campaign finance law since the early 1990s. In the process, we update and validate Ch. Witko's [“Explaining increases in the stringency of [US] state campaign finance regulation, 1993–2002”, State, Politics and Policy Quarterly 7(4), Winter 2007: 369–393; Abstr. 58.5413] measure of state campaign finance stringency for the period of 1992 to 2012. In the [conclusion], we discuss what effect recent US Supreme Court and state court rulings will have on future reform efforts. [R, abr.]
66.6987 KULMALA, Meri —
This article seeks to understand the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in contemporary Russian society. Rather than looking narrowly at advocacy groups, the investigation focuses on less-studied socially oriented organizations, including more recently established CSOs as well as the so-called Soviet-type voluntary organizations, which have been almost completely neglected by Western scholarship on Russian civil society. In contrast to the argument that Russia's socially oriented CSOs are apolitical — an argument often made in Western scholarship on Russian civil society — the research found that organizations from both categories — the old Soviet-type and the more recent post-Soviet — were engaged in both political advocacy work and service provision, although they were engaged in political and social action to varying extents. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6582]
66.6988 KULYK, Volodymyr —
The essay examines the impact of the Euromaidan protests and the subsequent Russian aggression on Ukrainian national identity. It demonstrates that national identity has become more salient vis-à-vis other territorial and non-territorial identities. At the same time, the very meaning of belonging to the Ukrainian nation has changed, as manifested first and foremost in increased alienation from Russia and the greater embrace of Ukrainian nationalism. Although popular perceptions are by no means uniform across the country, the main dividing line has shifted eastwards and now lies between the Donbas and the adjacent east-southern regions. [R] [See Abstr. 66.7040]
66.6989 KWAN, Justin P. —
The rise of civic nationalism in both Hong Kong and Taiwan indicates a prominence of democratic liberal values which are contributing to the further rejection of an ethnonational Chinese identity imposed by Beijing. Using the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan as case studies, this paper examines how the rise of civic nationalism is furthering the nation-building project of Hong Kong and Taiwanese identities. Following a comparison between the movements in terms of the sequence of events, the paper identifies their impact on both societies through an examination of their successes and failures, the rise of new political forces and party politics, as well as political institutions. The paper discusses the implications of the widening identity gap of Hong Kong and Taiwan from China. [R, abr.]
66.6990 LAGERKVIST, Johan; RÜHLIG, Tim —
The 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong has been the most important pro-democracy protest on Chinese soil since the Tiananmen Movement of 1989, [which] politicized a generation of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong [and] shaped Hong Kong's vibrant civil society. However, while this “Tiananmen generation” has been crucial for the preparation and initial stage of the Umbrella Movement, the actual occupation was dominated by a new generation that is almost exclusively concerned with local Hong Kong politics. This paper compares the two democracy movements. The external environment and their goals are markedly different; however, [there are] striking similarities between the two movements, e.g. their internal structure and framing. The Chinese party-state will need to utilize different means to pacify the Umbrella Movement [from] what was done to placate democracy activists after the 1989 crackdown. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6896]
66.6991 LAPINSKI, John —
What do citizens want from their members of Congress? Do they expect them to be constituent servants? Do they expect them to work on local problems? Or do they expect them to represent them on the national issues of the day? While citizens expect members of Congress to perform all of these roles, we argue that, in the contemporary political environment, citizens especially value members who represent them on the salient national issues of the day. We also argue that such behavior will be especially pronounced among those who are the most educated and partisan. We show, using several recent nationally representative surveys, that citizens prioritize this sort of issue representation, and that such evaluations shape member approval and vote choice. [R, abr.]
66.6992 LARSEN, Martin Vinaes —
Previous research has not been able to identify a relationship between objective economic indicators and support for governing parties in the Scandinavian countries. This is potentially problematic, as it suggests that political leaders are not held electorally accountable for the economic conditions they provide for their electorates. This article suggests that this null-finding is a result of the particularities of the Scandinavian electoral context, which makes it difficult to identify the effects of the economy on electoral support. To bolster this argument, the relationship between unemployment, economic growth and support for prime minister parties is re-examined in two datasets. The first is a dataset of Scandinavian elections, and the second is a yearly Danish vote function, which was constructed using election polls. [R, abr.]
66.6993 LAUDERDALE, Benjamin E.; HERZOG, Alexander —
We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Irish Dáil, we show that the dominant dimension of speech variation is government-opposition, with ministers more extreme on this dimension than backbenchers, and a second dimension distinguishing between the establishment and anti-establishment opposition parties. In the US Senate, we estimate a dimension that has moderate within-party correlations with scales based on roll-call votes and campaign donation patterns; however, we observe greater overlap across parties in speech positions than roll-call positions and partisan polarization in speeches varies more clearly in response to major political events. [R, abr.]
66.6994 LAWLESS, Brandi; CHEN Yea-Wen —
The authors examine the interrelationship between culture, media, globalization, and social movements through a critical discourse-analysis of international news discourses on the Arab Spring and the US-based Occupy movement(s). Following several calls to pay closer attention to democratic discourses and/or practices within globalized social movements, they explore the ways in which news discourses about the Arab Spring and Occupy reinforce dominant ideologies related to global capitalism, cultural imperialism, and Eurocentric democracy. The authors further delineate differences between the ideology of democracy and the practices of democratization. [R, abr.]
66.6995 LEE Kil-ho —
The conservative government of Lee Myung-bak (2008–2012) founded the Presidential Council on Nation Branding (PCNB) to promote the Korean nation's brand on the international scene. This policy of soft power shows how a participatory policy is implemented in contemporary South Korea. The PCNB has invited, in the name of public-private cooperation, various categories of private agents into the development of its programs in ways that go beyond the usual boundaries between domestic and foreign areas or between public and private affairs. This form of participationism is based on depoliticized and consensual procedures that tend to neutralize any criticism of the neoliberal and “expansionist” character of the PCBN's action. Thus the PCNB is the product of a social belief based on singular participationism mobilizing around economic patriotism in post-authoritarian period. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6255]
66.6996 LEFEBVRE, Rémi —
The Socialist party undertook a door-to-door campaign of unprecedented scale and character during the presidential election in 2012. This operation was the product of the mobilization of three young activists involved in [US President] B. Obama's campaign in 2008, who helped to spread it in France. These reformers set out a door-to-door procedure that does not conform to the pragmatic and intuitive forms of this traditional practice. They espouse a rationalized approach to door-to-door which, according to them, must be managed, systematized, targeted, and quantified. The article analyzes this rationalization of door-to-door practice, emphasizing the reasons for its success, but also the limitations it faces. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6320]
66.6997 LELKES, Yphtach; MALKA, Ariel; SHEETS, Penelope —
Israel is viewed unfavorably among wide segments of the public within several European democracies, despite being regarded itself as a Western democracy. Does drawing attention to Israel's democratic attributes improve views toward Israel? In two surveys with Dutch national samples, anti-Semitic affect, low anti-Arab/Muslim affect, and left-wing political orientation independently predicted anti-Israel sentiment. However, in experiments embedded within the surveys, making salient Israel's democratic attributes had opposite effects on Israel attitude across those on the right and the left — slightly decreasing anti-Israel sentiment among those with a right-wing orientation but slightly increasing anti-Israel sentiment among those with a left-wing orientation. We discuss potential explanations grounded in social psychological theory as well as implications for the strategic communication efforts of groups seeking to influence attitudes toward Israel. [R]
66.6998 LENTO, Camillo; DADGOSTAR, Bahram —
This study analyzes the relationship between provincial election outcomes and campaign spending. This study is novel as it utilizes only those expenses that should have a causal link with election success. OLS regression controlled for candidate quality, incumbency, and economic conditions reveals a positive (negative) relationship between campaign (challenger) spending and election succession, while logistic regression results in a 93% correct prediction rate. Two-staged least-square regression corroborates the findings. The results suggest that although campaign spending is useful, incumbency status and experience are more important. Additionally, campaign spending is less important during close elections and has a diminishing marginal return. [R]
66.6999 LEUPRECHT, Christian; SKILLICORN, David B. —
Incumbent US presidential candidates have been overwhelmingly successful over the past 150 years. Explanations have examined both structural advantages enjoyed by incumbents and differences in rhetorical and linguistic style in campaigning, although it is less clear why incumbency conveys an advantage here. This article finds that the language used by US presidential candidates over the past twenty years has an underlying structure associated with electoral success: (1) speech patterns of incumbents differ notably from those they used in their first-term campaign; and (2) speech patterns of winners are different from those of losers. Both differences are consistent, and can therefore be postulated to indicate strength of influence. [R, abr.]
66.7000 LEVY, Morris; WRIGHT, Matthew; CITRIN, Jack —
We argue that widely accepted elitist and “clientelist” models of immigration policy in the US unduly minimize popular pressure on policy-making. These models portray majority opinion in ways that fail to recognize divergence between the public's abstract goals for immigration policy and its support for the concrete policy changes needed to achieve them. As a result, they obscure many important instances in which immigration policy accords with public preferences despite counter-pressure from elites and organized lobbies. We demonstrate this point by identifying and explaining gaps between generalized attitudes and beliefs about specific policies in the domains of both legal and illegal immigration, showing that status quo legal admissions policies are not starkly at odds with majority preferences. [R, abr.]
66.7001 LIENESCH, Michael —
Although “constitutional conservatism” has become commonplace among American conservatives, its meaning has proven elusive. Revisionist historians and political scientists have looked to its origins in the early 20th c., when Republican Party elites constructed a conservative interpretation of the Constitution and put it into practice in the era of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Yet constitutional conservatism was also the creation of a network of activists and groups who in the 1920s constructed a nationwide campaign to instill a conservative understanding of the Constitution in the American public. This study examines how they built their campaign, defined its purpose, framed a conservative reading of constitutional history and theory, and conveyed it to the public in a bitterly contested political process. [R, abr.]
66.7002 LIN Zhongxuan; LIU Shih-Diing —
This article illustrates the practices and implications of “prefigurative politics” during Hong Kong's Occupy Central Movement. We argue that the occupation not only demanded, but also prefigured, new forms of democracy. But such prefiguration should not be seen as a pure “ethics” of politics, but rather as a new way of “doing” politics, raising deep questions about representation and leadership in contemporary protest movements. From the outset of the movement, there had been ensuing struggles over leadership among different actors in the movement, while none of them were able to assume effective leadership. The undecidability of leadership ultimately provided the condition for various kinds of experiments by the crowds themselves. We argue that these prefigurative practices have set seeds of possibility for future political processes. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6896]
66.7003 LO Wai Han —
Citizen camera-witness is a new concept by which to describe using mobile camera phone to engage in civic expression. The use of mobile phone recordings in Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement is examined to understand how mobile cameras are employed as personal witnessing devices to provide recordings to indict unjust events and engage others in the civic movement. This study has examined the Facebook posts and YouTube videos of the Umbrella Movement between 22 September 2014 and 22 December 2014. The results suggest that the camera phone not only contributes to witnessing the brutal repression of the state, but also witnesses the beauty of the movement, and provides a testimony that allows for rituals to develop and semi-codes to be transformed. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6896]
66.7004 LODGE, Tom; MOTTIAR, Shauna —
South Africa is experiencing record levels of protest. Interpretations of protest fall into two groups. First, there is the argument that protests represent only limited rebellion and that though unruly, they are a mechanism for political re-engagement. A second understanding links “new social movements” that address general grievances to wider hegemonic challenges. This article addresses the issue of whether these upsurges in militant mobilization threaten or complement democratic procedures. The article draws from a study of two protest “hotspots” in Durban. [R]
66.7005 LÖWY, Michael; SITEL, Francis —
It would be wrong to claim that there are no fascist parties in Europe today, even though we have nothing equivalent to Hitler's party of the 1930s. A tentative typology distinguishes between three different types: parties with a directly fascist and/or neo-Nazi character; semi-fascist parties with fascist roots; far-right parties that do not have fascist origins but do share in their racism and xenophobia. Whatever its transformation and “modernization”, the far-right still represents a real threat to democracy. One of the arguments used to show that it no longer has much to do with fascism, is its acceptance of parliamentary democracy and the electoral route to power. If the FN came to power by electoral means, what would remain of democracy in France? [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.7006 LUDLAM, Scott —
Some things are missed in our three-year electoral cycle. Foreign policy takes a back seat during an election, and if it presents at all, it is as caricature: foreign wars, the nameless families who flee them, or massive defense procurements to meet undefined threats. The rest of the planet is meant to form a one-dimensional backdrop to our domestic drama. Whether we like it or not, this is all going to change. Australia remains an island in geographical name only. In terms of culture, economics, security and even the weather patterns that threaten our homes or ruin our crops, our lives are bound up with people all over the world who are also trying to build safe and prosperous lives for themselves and their families. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7263]
66.7007 LÜHISTE, Maarja; KENNY, Meryl —
The 2014 EP elections produced a record proportion of women MEPs overall (37 per cent). Yet, these results vary widely across countries and parties. This article explains these variations, evaluating not only who the elected representatives are, but also how they got there. Are the paths to the EP the same for women and men? Are there gender differences in terms of MEPs' political experience? A unique dataset listing more than 700 elected MEPs and their background, party and country characteristics is used to empirically examine who makes it to the EP and through which route. The results of the analysis suggest no significant gender differences in the pathways to the EP. [R, abr.]
66.7008 LUSTIG, Carola; OLEGO, Tomás —
The following research explores the general perception of Argentine citizens about the orientation of foreign policy towards Brazil. Also, it explores the effects of information and its influence on citizens. In particular, it studies the psychotropic and socio-tropic attitudes of Argentinians about foreign policy toward Brazil. Based on a survey experiment, the research evaluates the impact of economic and political information (framing-effects) on the public's opinion of foreign policy (dependent variable). The experimental treatment was designed in an ordinal model by providing different pieces of information. The experiment also introduces “Citizen Perception” as a covariate generated from a summation index with the scores of two variables (Preference for the actions of Argentina toward Brazil and the Position of Brazil in a charted preference of potential investor countries). [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7259]
66.7009 LYONS, Terrence —
Parties whose origins are as victorious insurgent groups have different legacies and hence different institutional structures and patterns of behavior [from] those that originated in breakaway factions of ruling parties, labor unions, non-violent social movements, or identity groups. Unlike classic definitions of political parties, post-rebel parties are not created around the need to win elections but rather as military organizations focused on winning an armed struggle. Key attributes of victorious rebel movements, such as cohesive leadership, discipline, hierarchy, and patterns of military administration of liberated territory, shape post-insurgent political parties and help explain why post-insurgent parties are often strong and authoritarian. This article identifies the mechanisms that link rebel victory in three East African countries (Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda) to post-war authoritarian rule. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6381]
66.7010 MacGINTY, Roger; FIRCHOW, Pamina —
Based on findings from the Everyday Peace Indicators project, the article considers how top-down and bottom-up narratives and understandings of conflict often differ. The article posits that top-down narratives are often the result of a peculiar framing system that imposes imaginaries on conflicts and those experiencing them. The bottom-up narratives, based on research in South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe, show that localized perceptions of peace, safety and security are not only articulated in different ways to top-down narratives but also raise different issues. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6472]
66.7011 MAGALHÃES, Pedro C. —
Most of the literature examining satisfaction with democracy has focused on the direct effects of both economic and procedural fairness indicators or evaluations. This study takes as its starting point a large number of studies in social psychology showing that procedural fairness moderates the effects of outcome favorability in the explanation of citizens' reactions to authorities. It expands those findings to the macro-political level, using representative samples of European populations in twenty-nine countries. It reveals that the general depiction of satisfaction with the way democracies work in practice as a fundamentally “performance-driven attitude” needs to qualified: economic evaluations matter, but they do not matter in the same way in all contexts and for all people, with procedural fairness playing a relevant moderating role in this respect. [R, abr.]
66.7012 MAÎTROT, Mathilde R. L. —
This article offers an institutional and sociological analysis of knowledge generation and dissemination for policy in Bangladesh. Because institutions participating in knowledge generation remain largely understudied, the article focuses on analyzing the means and challenges to knowledge creation, and the complex agency and power relations among and within think tanks and universities. The article concludes that the scarcity of domestic financial resources and the political co-option of think tanks and universities weaken academic freedom, fragment the knowledge creation process, and contribute to depoliticizing research. Research-to-policy linkages are engineered through the personalized networks of a few strategic individuals. [R]
66.7013 MAJSTOROVIĆ, Danijela; VUČKOVAC, Zoran —
This paper investigates politico-media discourses of the international community revolving for the last few decades around the process of Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina from its Dayton inception until 2015. We first explain the contours of the BiH context and then use a critical discourse-analysis to assess the data collected between 1997 and 2015 drawn from a variety of textual resources such as mainstream newspapers, online media, and international community websites to explain the main trends of the Europeanization discourse in the country. Grounding our analysis within the postcolonial theory and post-communist studies, we critically examine the post-1996 peace and state building as well as Europeanization processes in BiH with respect to signs of postcolonial condition including perpetual transition and a state of exception. [R]
66.7014 MANRIQUE, Luis Esteban G. —
Peru's economic growth has been described as a “regional success”, and it owes much to former President A. Fujimori's “popular capitalism”. This economic policy alleviated the effects of hyperinflation (10,000% in 1989) and set Peru on the path to progress. However, the country's economic model is almost exhausted. This will affect the 2016 presidential election, which confronts A. Fujimori's daughter Keiko and P.P. Kuczynski. The scandals in the Fujimori family will also favor center-right Kuczynski's victory in the second round, but Fujimorismo is deeply rooted amongst popular sectors and its parliamentary representation will allow it to play a key role in the legislative process despite a defeat in the presidential election.
66.7015 MANSILLO, Luke —
Over the past half century, the Australian public has remained divided on the issue of whether Australia should retain the monarchy or become a republic. Clive Bean found remarkable stability on the issue and evidence of a long-term trend away from support for the monarchy with a sudden decline in 1992. This article adopts Bean's longitudinal cross-sectional methods to examine the social and political basis of public attitudes. It analyzes the Australian Election Study (1993–2013) to compare Bean's results and re-analyze earlier data from the National Social Science Surveys and Australian National Political Attitudes surveys (1967–1990). Public opinion has been fluid and is now at a crossroads between the 1980s high and the 1990s lows. Cohort analysis suggests socialization impacts long-term opinions. Gender and ethnic nationalism also influences opinion. [R]
66.7016 MARSCHALL, Melissa J.; RUTHERFORD, Amanda —
This study applies insights from principal-agent models to examine whether and how the language assistance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Sections 203 and 4(f)(4), affect Latino representation. Using panel data from 1984–2012, we estimate two-stage models that consider the likelihood and extent of Latino board representation for a sample of 1,661 school districts. In addition, we examine how policy design as well as federal oversight and enforcement shape implementation and compliance with the language assistance provisions. Our findings not only provide the first systemic evidence that the language assistance provisions have a direct effect on Latino representation, but also link the efficacy of the language assistance provisions to the duration and consistency of coverage and the presence of federal elections observers. [R, abr.]
66.7017 MARSH, David; VINES, Emma; HALUPKA, Max —
In a recent article [“In defence of British politics against the British political tradition”, ibid. 86(1), Jan.-March 2015: 41–51; Abstr. 65.4742], D. Richards and M. J. Smith critiqued Flinders' work on anti-politics, suggesting that there needs to be much more focus on supply-side explanations and recognizing that much of the problem lies with politicians, contra Flinders. Here, we argue instead that it is crucial to recognize how supply-side and demand side explanations interact. For us, politicians need to be more responsive to citizens, but, at the same time, citizens need to recognize problems of contemporary governing. Overall, much is changing in the way in which citizens engage and it is crucial that these changes are understood. [R]
66.7018 MATSUSAKA, John G. —
Many political practitioners believe that voters are more likely to approve propositions listed at the top than the bottom of the ballot, potentially distorting democratic decision making, and this belief influences election laws across the United States. Numerous studies have investigated ballot order effects in candidate elections, but there is little evidence for direct democracy elections, and identification of causal effects is challenging. This paper offers two strategies for identifying the effect of ballot order in proposition elections, using data from California during 1958–2014 and Texas during 1986–2015. The evidence suggests that propositions are not advantaged by being listed at the top compared to the bottom of the ballot. Approval rates are lower with more propositions on the ballot. [R]
66.7019 MATSUZATO, Kimitaka —
To make Crimea a bastion for his victory in the 2010 presidential elections, V. Yanukovych dispatched Vasily Dzharty, former mayor of Makeevka (Donetsk Oblast), as Party of Regions electoral curator of Crimea. Before and after the 2010 presidential election, Dzharty's team liquidated Crimea's consociational democracy to build a more effective government and reliable electoral machine. Humiliated Crimean indigenous elites nicknames Dzharty's team the “Macedonians”, but accepted their leadership as long as they secured Yanukovych's victory and subsequently pumped abundant subsidies from Kiev into developing Crimea. The Euromaidan Revolution brought to the surface the potential tension between the Macedonians and indigenous Crimean elites. [R, abr.]
66.7020 McANGUS, Craig —
Adopting a comparative case-study approach, this article looks at the case of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (SNP), both of whom entered government for the first time in 2007. Drawing on original and extensive elite interview data, the article examines how elites in both parties attempted to use the transition to government to portray their respective parties as mainstream and credible. The article finds that this aspiration is driven largely by a desire to change historically embedded stereotypes, but also, in the case of the SNP, to further the party's primary goal of Scottish independence. In the case of Plaid Cymru, having to become a junior coalition partner meant that the party felt obliged to take up stereotypical portfolios which undermined, in part, the purpose of governmental participation for some elites. [R, abr.]
66.7021 McCLENDON, Gwyneth H. —
Do politicians engage in ethnic and racial favoritism when conducting constituency service? This article presents results from a replication field experiment with local South African politicians that tested for racial bias in responsiveness to requests about public goods provision. The experiment represents an adaptation of similar experiments conducted in the US, extending the design to a different institutional environment, albeit one with a similar racially-charged history. Although one might suppose that politicians in South Africa would seek to avoid racial bias given the recent transition to full democracy, I find that South African politicians — both black and white — are more responsive to same-race constituents than to other-race constituents. [R, abr.]
66.7022 McCORMACK, Gavan —
Seventy years after defeat in war, Japan is led by Abe Shinzo, a politician who (in)famously looks with pride on Japan's feudal and fascist past, but who, Janus-like, is at once deeply hostile towards the US and utterly servile to it, being perhaps the most enthusiastically pro-American of contemporary world leaders. The type of chauvinist nationalism he displays is really what political scientist Nakano Koichi calls “air nationalism”. Yet Shinzo Abe, despite — or even perhaps because of — being the very epitome of “slavish mentality”, looks assured of a rosy political future. Virtually unopposed in the Diet, he seems set to become the longest-lasting and most “successful” of all modern Japan's prime ministers. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.7023 McGREGOR, R. Michael; MOORE, Aaron A.; STEPHENSON, Laura B. —
Voting behavior in municipal elections is understudied in Canada. Existing research is limited by the type of data (aggregate instead of individual-level) and the cases evaluated (partisan when most contests are non-partisan). The objective of this study is to contribute to this literature by using individual-level data about a non-partisan election. To do so, we use data from the Toronto Election Study, conducted during the 2014 election. Our research goals are to evaluate whether a standard approach to understanding vote choice (the multi-stage explanatory model) is applicable in a non-partisan, municipal-level contest, and to determine the correlates of vote-choice in the 2014 Toronto mayoral election in particular. Although it was a formally non-partisan contest, voters tended to view the mayoral candidates in both ideological and partisan terms. [R, abr.]
66.7024 MENDOZA, Manuel; NIETO-BARAJAS, Luis E. —
In all democracies, anticipating the final results of a national election the same day the voters go to the polling stations is a matter of interest, for television stations and some civil rights organizations, for example. The most reliable option is a quick count, a statistical procedure that consists in selecting a random sample of polling stations and analyzing their final counts to forecast the election results. In Mexico, a particularly important quick count is organized by the electoral authority. The importance of its results requires this exercise to be designed and executed with specially high standards far beyond those used in commercial studies of this type. In this paper, the model and the Bayesian analysis of the quick counts conducted by the Mexican authority, during the presidential elections in 2006 and 2012, are discussed. [R]
66.7025 MILLER, Charles —
Rational choice theories have claimed that small states exploit their large allies' defense spending. However, little work has been done on the foundations of free-riding at the levels of elite and public opinion. If smaller states free-ride, it is unclear whether they are following the expressed wishes of their constituents or something else. Using a novel method for measuring public support for free-riding in the Australian candidate and election studies together with Australian defense spending data, this article rectifies the gap. Neither Australian voters nor parliamentary candidates consciously support Australian free-riding on the US, but I find that Australia free-rides nonetheless. This suggests that rational state behavior may arise from elite calculation rather than pressure from below. [R]
66.7026 MILLER, Joanne M.; SAUNDERS, Kyle L. —
In American Conspiracy Theories, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide an important corrective to empirical work suggesting that conspiracy theories are the domain of paranoids. The authors provide convincing evidence that conspiracy endorsement is a motivated-reasoning process that connects conspiracy theories that buttress psychologically threatened identities to the ideological worldviews of those who feel anxious, alienated, or powerless. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6424]
66.7027 MITRA, Subrata K.; SCHÖTTLI, Jivanta —
Phrases like “watershed,” “historic,” and “epochal” were used to describe India's 2014 general election. The Bharatiya Janata Party secured the first single-party majority in three decades, forming the government as the National Democratic Alliance. We argue that the 16th Lok Sabha elections marked a realignment, not a clean break with the past. [R]
66.7028 MOODY, Kim; POST, Charles —
After nearly thirty years of political and economic retreat, the US labor movement is facing what is possibly its most serious crisis since the early 1930s. The dramatic decline of private-sector unionism since the 9170s is often wrongly attributed to deindustrialization or the flight of industry abroad. The major underlying causes of private-sector union retreat lie in the geographic shift in manufacturing and related industries to the South that began after the Second World War, on the one hand; and, on the other, in the enormous productivity increases since the early 1980s due largely to the generalization of “lean production”. While there might not be another upheaval any time soon, there are always signs of underlying class conflict. [First of four articles on “Labor and the Left in the USA”. See also Abstr. 66.6900]
66.7029 MOORE, Martin —
The Conservative Party spent £1.2 million on Facebook during the UK 2015 general election campaign. This enabled the party to target specific voters in marginal constituencies with tailored messages. Their use of Facebook in 2015 shows how central digital media had become to their campaign communication. It also shows, however, that this communication may be compromising the principles of fair and open elections in the UK, for example by allowing parties to effectively bypass constituency spending limits and avoid transparency. Unless electoral legislation and regulation are changed to take account of developments in digital media they are liable to become increasingly anachronistic and ineffective. [R]
66.7030 MORISI, Davide —
This study provides novel evidence of how issue-based arguments influenced voting preferences in the campaign for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The findings, based on a lab experiment and a follow-up survey with the experimental subjects, show that provision of information led to a one-sided persuasion effect, by increasing the support for independence mainly through reduction of indecision. This effect occurred regardless of the possibility to select the arguments and found further confirmation in the actual increase of Yes votes in the referendum. Additional analyses reveal that personal economic expectations significantly moderated the effect of information, since the support for independence increased only among those who did not expect future economic gains. [R, abr.]
66.7031 MUDDE, Cas —
In a very respectful response — titled with a classic rhetorical question: “Does Canadian Multiculturalism Survive through State Repression?” [See Abstr. 66.7069] — Ph. Ryan supports most of the arguments that E. Ambrose and I laid out in our article. However, he does question two particular claims: (1) that the Canadian state represses critique of multiculturalism and (2) that there are no other supply-side factors to explain the absence of the far right in Canada. I argue, first and foremost, that Ryan perceives Canada too much through an exclusively Canadian lens, exaggerating the tolerance of the Canadian state for far-right discourse as well as the criticism of multiculturalism by the Conservative Party of Canada. [R]
66.7032 MÜGGE, Liza M. —
This article contributes to explanations why ethnic minority women outnumber ethnic minority men in national parliaments of European immigration countries. Extending the intersectional lens it asks: which ethnic minority candidates are recruited and selected? Drawing on nine elections (1986–2012) in the Netherlands, I find that the success of ethnic minority women candidates is not related to a structural advantage: it changes over time and across and within groups. How gender and ethnicity intersect is informed by generation, (parental) birth country, a group's political starting position and how political parties in power incorporate gender or ethnic diversity. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6428]
66.7033 MURRAY, Rainbow —
This article nuances the argument that ethnic minority women experience cumulative disadvantage within politics. Drawing on the French case study, I demonstrate a complex relationship between gender and ethnicity. The gender parity movement saw ethnicity as competing with gender and rejected claims for ethnic minority representation, but still drew attention to the homogeneity of French politics. Descriptive representation of minority women is now slowly progressing, as they simultaneously promote gender and ethnic diversity within politics. However, their inclusion is conditional on their willingness to act as symbols of secularity and assimilation. This particularly constrains the substantive representation of Muslim women. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6428]
66.7034 NARDON, Laurence —
H. Clinton, the frontrunner in the upcoming US presidential election, cannot be accused of neglecting her foreign policy program. The Democratic candidate, Secretary of State during President Obama's first administration (2009–2013), sets out her official slate of action on her campaign website. The watchword is “getting the job done”. In the Middle East, she wants to see B. al-Assad gone and ISIS destroyed. To achieve this, she intends to arm the Kurds and put pressure on the Gulf states to cease funding radical groups. She will prioritize trade relations with China, while seeking to press for human rights wherever possible. As for V. Putin's Russia, she will talk tough on the Ukrainian issue — the only language the Kremlin understands and respects, in her view. [R, abr.]
66.7035 NEIHEISEL, Jacob R. —
While many Americans are operationally liberal and express support for liberal policy positions, in symbolic terms, the American electorate is much more conservative in nature and appears reluctant to hew to the liberal label. The uneven nature of partisan sorting and the observed symbolic/operational divide have both been linked to Republican efforts at making “liberal” a dirty word, but researchers have yet to offer a direct test of the effects of exposure to anti-liberal rhetoric. I rectify this shortcoming using the 2004 University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW)/Brigham Young University (BYU) panel study coupled with data on the content of candidates' campaign advertising from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. I find that exposure to anti-liberal campaign messages had a direct effect on evaluations of Democratic candidates, vote-intention, and vote-choice, but only in Senate races. [R, abr.]
66.7036 NIAKOOEE, Seyed Amir —
The Second Khordad Movement was a democratic social movement in contemporary Iran. Investigation of this movement revealed two images, of flourish and of decline, as the movement was first generally successful until early 2000 and thereafter began to regress from the spring of that year onwards. This article provides a comprehensive framework in which to examine the reasons behind the movement's failure and regression. It utilizes the literature on social movements, especially the political process model, and attempts to explain the initial success and subsequent decline of the movement based on elements such as political opportunity, framing processes, mobilizing structures, and the repertoire of collective action. [R]
66.7037 NIEDERMAYER, Oskar; HOFRICHTER, Jürgen —
Due to the great successes of the AfD in the three state elections of March 2016 there is an intensified discussion about the characteristics of the AfD's electorate at the national level. Who votes for the AfD? Are there any social groups with an above-average AfD affinity and what do we know about the socio-structural composition of the electorate? Does the AfD take away voters from all the other parties and which party suffers most? What can be said about the ideological positions of AfD voters, especially: how far-right are they? These questions are answered using mostly not yet released data from national representative Infratest dimap surveys. It is shown that although blue-collar workers have an above-average affinity to the party, AfD is not the party of the ordinary people. [R, abr.]
66.7038 NUNEZ, Lidia; JACOBS, Kristof T. E. —
Political parties are expected to change the electoral rules as a way to maximize gains or minimize losses. However, little work has been done on the question of why electoral reforms are so scarce in spite of these potential benefits. In this study, a wide range of both factors that may foster (“catalysts”) and ones that may hinder (“barriers”) the change of electoral institutions are investigated. A statistical analysis is performed of 16 West European countries from 1975 to 2005, covering 23 reforms of the proportionality of their electoral systems. It is found that procedural barriers are more effective for explaining the likelihood of electoral reforms than (most of) the catalysts. Additionally, there are indications that courts may play a more active role in triggering reform than previously thought. [R, abr.]
66.7039 OBHOLZER, Lukas; DANIEL, William T. —
This article analyzes the impact of electoral institutions on the re-election campaigning and outreach strategies of MEPs on the Twitter social media platform. Social media offer politicians a means to contact voters remotely and at low cost. We test the effect of diverse national proportional representation electoral institutions in European elections on a possible online electoral connection. We draw upon an original dataset of MEPs' Twitter activity before, during, and after the 2014 European elections. Our results confirm that variation in electoral institutions leads to meaningful differentiation in representatives' social media campaigning, which is further affected by national party, voter and legislator characteristics. Representatives make constructive use of Twitter, but there is no sustained online electoral connection. [R]
66.7040 ONUCH, Olga; SASSE, Gwendolyn —
The Maidan protests provide us with insights into Ukrainian society and the dynamics of mobilization more generally. Based on the “EuroMaidan Protest Participant Survey”, on-site rapid interviews with protesters, interviews with politicians, activists and journalists, and focus groups with ordinary citizens and activists, this essay maps the actors, claims and frames of each phase in the protest cycle. It highlights the diversity of actors and the inability of activists and party leaders to coordinate as the central features of the protests. Our analysis reveals the fluid and contingent nature of cleavages commonly portrayed as fixed and politically salient. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “The Ukrainian crisis and the post-post-Cold War Europe”, edited and introduced, pp. 551–555, by Derek AVERRE and Kataryna WOLCZUK. See also Abstr. 66.6911, 6988, 7164, 7212, 7252, 7285, 7293, 7295, 7405, 7558]
66.7041 ONUKI, Janina; MOURON, Fernando; URDINEZ, Francisco —
We use survey data from The Americas and the World project to establish whether Latin Americans share a common regional identity, and regard Brazil as a regional leader. Our results indicate that the majority of Brazilians do not identify themselves as Latin Americans. Moreover, while they believe their country is the most suitable candidate for regional leadership, they are unwilling to bear the costs of assuming such a role. Our study also explores perceptions of regional identity and Brazilian leadership in other Latin American countries, based on their own respective power aspirations. It shows that less powerful Latin American nations recognize Brazil as a regional leader, but citizens in middle powers, like Argentina and Mexico, still believe their countries should play a prominent regional role. [R] [See Abstr. 66.7259]
66.7042 ORRIOLS, Lluis; RODON, Toni —
This paper examines the context, campaign and main determinants of how Catalans voted in the 2015 regional election. The elections were exceptional because the incumbent and the remaining Catalan nationalist parties framed the contest as a de facto referendum on secession. In this paper we scrutinize whether attitudes towards independence affected vote choice and whether they eclipsed other traditional significant vote-driving factors such as the state of the economy or government performance. Results show that, although the independence issue became a major determinant of vote-choice, the elections did not become a pure plebiscite on secession, since voters also used their vote to hold the regional government accountable for its past performance. [R]
66.7043 OSKARSON, Maria; OSCARSSON, Henrik; BOIJE, Edvin —
By combining insights from individual-level models of party choice in second-order elections with theories of sequential decision-making, this article investigates if, how and at what stages in the decision process attitudes to European integration matters for party choice. It develops and tests hypotheses about how voters' orientations work at different stages of the voter decision process. The findings, based on Swedish data from a probability-based three-wave internet campaign panel, indicate that many voters are in fact considering more than one party to vote for in the beginning of the election campaign. As expected, left-right orientations function as a main decision rule with respect to which parties voters even consider voting for, while proximity on the European integration dimension mainly matters as a second decision rule in the final stage of the decision process. [R, abr.]
66.7044 OZZANO, Luca —
This article analyzes the positions taken and the frames proposed by Italy's Catholic political actors in relation to two particularly telling issues, that of same-sex marriage and that of the Muslim dress codes. Its most striking finding is the presence in the Italian political system of two distinct forms of Catholicism in politics. One, promoted by the Catholic Church and followed by most centrist Catholics, is quite tolerant in terms of social and religious pluralism and supportive of human rights and social justice, but it emphasizes the “traditional” heterosexual family as the cornerstone of society. The other, “civilizational” form, promoted by the Lega Nord and some other center-right representatives and intellectuals, is based on an idea of Italian citizenship articulated in religious, cultural, and ethnic terms, excluding those who are not members of this community. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6846]
66.7045 PAGE, Douglas —
The established consensus is that voters do not hold EU leaders accountable for their management of the economy in EP elections, which contributes to the EU's democratic deficit. However, the existing research misses a comparison between those who feel that the national government is responsible for their economic situation and those who feel the EU is responsible. The analysis is based on surveys of the 28 EU members. I find that when one assigns more responsibility to the EU than the national government for national economic conditions, satisfaction with the economy increases the likelihood of voting for the European People's Party, the dominant party group in the EU. This study presents the first evidence of individuals' accountability-holding behavior towards the EPP. [R]
66.7046 PANOV, Petr —
One of the most influential approaches to the management of ethnopolitical conflicts — power-sharing — assumes that politically salient ethnic groups should be included in the policy-making process through special arrangements concerning the allocation of political offices between ethnic segments. This article compares the practices of the allocation of political offices in Russian national republics and examines to what extent they depend on the ethnic composition of the population. Comparative analysis demonstrates that although ethnic lines are a significant factor in regional politics in almost all the cases, stable practices of power-sharing have emerged in approximately half of Russian national republics. Since Russian legislation does not allow ethnic parties, ethnic quotas or similar arrangements, informal power-sharing conventions are used so that specific political positions are attached to specific ethnic groups. [R, abr.]
66.7047 PÉREZ, Efrén O. —
making some political concepts more mentally accessible. I claim that concepts vary by how associated they are with certain languages, which means people are more likely to acquire a construct when it is tied to the tongue one speaks. Hence, recalling concepts from memory should be easier when the language a construct is linked to matches the tongue one interviews in, thereby intensifying people's opinions. I test my theory by manipulating the interview language in two US surveys of English/Spanish bilingual Latino adults. I generally find that language influences the accessibility of concepts. [R, abr.]
66.7048 PERRY, Barbara; SCRIVENS, Ryan —
Despite the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's recent concern with the growing threat from right-wing extremists nationwide, we have little contemporary scholarship on the far-right movement in Canada and fewer attempts to systematically analyze their ideologies and activities. Drawing on a three-year study involving interviews with Canadian law enforcement officials, community organizations, and right-wing activists, as well as analyses of open source intelligence, this article examines the endogenous factors that facilitate and inhibit the right-wing extremist movement in Canada. Findings suggest that strengths and weaknesses of the groups themselves can be exploited as a means of debilitating them. [R]
66.7049 PILLAR, Paul R. —
An entire generation of Americans has come of age with its country perpetually at war. The US appears destined, for reasons related to what makes it exceptional, to continue using military force beyond what serves its interests. [R]
66.7050 PLIBERSEK, Tanya —
Mainstream thinking accepts that the main tenets of Australian foreign policy are the US alliance, engagement with the Indo-Pacific and our global interests. We differ over emphasis and approach, but we are fortunate to have broad agreement on the component parts. This is one reason why foreign policy often plays a marginal role in Australian election campaigns — elections are designed to amplify difference. Foreign policy is most often about continuity and seeking common ground. Election campaigns are built on concentrated points of contrast. Yet even if foreign policy does not shift a single vote in a single seat, Australia's place in the world deserves to be part of the national conversation. [R] [See Abstr. 66.7263]
66.7051 PREECE, Jessica Robinson; STODDARD, Olga Bogach; FISHER, Rachel —
There has been little systematic research about how men and women respond to party recruitment, so we do not know whether gender-balanced recruitment would actually lead to gender-balanced outcomes. We conduct two studies to address this question. First, we identically recruited 5510 male and 5506 female highly active party members to attend a free candidate training seminar. Republican women were half as likely to respond to the invitation as men. Second, we conducted a survey experiment of 3,960 voters on the Utah Colleges Exit Poll. Republican men's level of self-reported political ambition was increased by the prospect of elite recruitment significantly more than Republican women's. Together, these findings suggest that to fully understand the role recruitment plays in women's underrepresentation, researchers must understand the ways in which men and women respond to recruitment. [R, abr.]
66.7052 PRITONI, Andrea —
A widespread belief is that financial regulations are actively designed by, and intended to serve the interests of, the regulated actors themselves. In other words, banks (and their associations) are generally considered to be very powerful, either in shaping policy reforms, or in successfully vetoing unwelcome reform proposals. Italian journalists and political analysts usually consider the Italian Bankers' Association (ABI) to be a potere forte (“strong power”) par excellence. However, is this common view empirically demonstrable? In order to answer this question, the present work builds upon the interest-group literature to explain the degree of success of the ABI with respect to three very important policy initiatives that have shaped the regulation of the Italian banking sector since the period between 2006 and 2012. [R, abr.]
66.7053 PROSSER, Christopher —
The effects of electoral rules on party systems have been well known since M. Duverger first proposed his famous law. Often considered “second-order” in terms of issues and voting behavior, many EP elections are held under different electoral rules to national elections. This article examines the consequences of these differences and hypothesizes that where a more permissive electoral system is used for EP elections, the size of the party system at EP elections will grow towards what we would expect from the EP electoral rules in isolation, and that this will lead to a subsequent growth in the size of the national party system. Using multi-level mixed-effect growth curve modeling support is found for both these hypotheses. [R]
66.7054 PRUYSERS, Scott —
Examining multi-level vertical party linkages in Canada's largest province this paper makes two primary contributions to the literature. First, drawing on data from a unique survey of constituency associations, the paper focuses on an often unexplored aspect of parties: their local organizations. Second, the paper offers an exploratory analysis of constituency level factors in order to determine which types of constituency associations are the most likely to be integrated. The results of the logistic regression demonstrate the possibility of non-party-based factors such as electoral strength that may contribute to vertical party integration. [R]
66.7055 QUARANTA, Mario —
This article analyzes how the political participation of men and women varies across the life course in Italy. Various studies on the topic have looked at the effects of the life cycle on political participation by using age as a proxy. Participation, however, may not be simply dependent on age. Instead, it may be related to the roles individuals assume during the life course. For this reason, the article looks at how participation changes during specific life transitions, such as leaving the parental home, forming a union and becoming a parent. Furthermore, the article puts special emphasis on how “private inequalities” in the household may become “political inequalities”. In fact, family roles and responsibilities can be constraints to participation, especially for women. [R, abr.]
66.7056 RAFTER, Kevin —
This research report considers the contest for leader of the Irish Labour Party in 2014. It discusses how the selection of leaders in Irish political parties has evolved in a manner similar to the experience internationally. The contest in 2014 is examined with specific attention given to the organization of the election, the campaign and its outcome. The concluding section highlights a number of issues arising from this contest that have implications wider than Irish politics. [R]
66.7057 RANDALL, Vicky —
This article discusses older women's participation in local political parties in the London area. Its analytical framework draws on intersectionality as a perspective together with feminist political science and political gerontology. Empirically, it refers to research in seven parliamentary constituencies, based primarily on semi-structured interviews, focusing on roles, activities and contribution; underlying motivation; and experiences of marginalization or exclusion. A complex picture emerges with effects of gender and age-mediated, especially by political party and location. Experiences are found to differ in different stages of old age, but there is no simple pattern of cumulative disadvantage for older women. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6428]
66.7058 RAYMOND, Christopher D.; TROMBORG, Mathias Wessel —
Although strategic voting theory predicts that the number of parties will not exceed two in single-member district plurality systems, the observed number of parties often does. Previous research suggests that the reason why people vote for third parties is that they possess inaccurate information about the parties' relative chances of winning. However, research has yet to determine whether third-party voting persists under conditions of accurate information. We examine whether possessing accurate information prevents individuals from voting for third-placed parties in the 2005 and 2010 British elections. We find that possessing accurate information does not prevent most individuals from voting for third-placed parties and that many voters possess reasonably accurate information regarding the viability of the parties in their constituencies. [R, abr.]
66.7059 RAYNER, Hervé —
The rhetoric of participation constitutes one of the topics of institutional discourse in Switzerland. Votes by citizen on policy questions are the base of a unique political system, a semi-direct democracy mixing political stability and citizens' regular participation in the decision-making process. In this participationist context where it seems difficult to question the centrality of the sovereign people, public supervision of direct democracy campaigns (referenda and popular initiatives) by means of the rise of “state public relations” is in potential conflict with one of the components of the governmental coalition, the Swiss People's Party (SVP). By means of their popular initiative “Sovereignty of the people without governmental propaganda”, the leaders of that powerful political party, stemming from Zurich's economic elites, try to preserve their dominant position in the field of public opinion management. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6255]
66.7060 RESODIHARDJO, Sandra L., et al. —
Following crises and fiascos, a framing contest takes place in which actors have to account for their actions and might get blamed for what went wrong. An inadequate response to blame can lead to resignation or losing a re-election. Currently, the literature on blame games focuses mainly on the policy, agency, and — especially — presentational strategies one can use to respond to blame. Based on our analysis of the blame games following two festival disasters in Germany and the Netherlands, we show that our current understanding of blame games and blame responses needs to be broadened to include context, rituals, and sub-blame games. [R]
66.7061 RICH, Timothy S.; HOLMES, Carolyn E. —
Which factor — being an electoral loser or being a non-voter — has a greater negative influence on perceptions of democratic institutions in South Africa? Employing four waves of Afrobarometer data, this analysis finds that both negatively correlate with evaluations of democracy and parliament in particular, with weaker results after controlling for demographic and geographic factors. However, little consistency emerges as to which has the greater negative influence on perceptions. Furthermore, disaggregating non-voters finds that those preferring parties that lost have the lowest evaluations overall. [R]
66.7062 RIERA, Pedro, et al. —
Since the establishment of the first democratic local councils in 1979, ten municipal elections have taken place in Spain. In the few studies devoted to them, voting has habitually been explained by using national variables and following the well-known model of second-order elections. In this paper we examine the validity of these conclusions by also considering local factors. We have estimated several hierarchical models using an ambitious dataset which includes both individual and contextual variables for a representative sample of Spanish municipalities between 1991 and 2011. Our empirical results are particularly interesting, with individual factors such as voters' ideology and contextual indicators such as the unemployment rate at the municipal level having a significant impact on the probability of voting for the incumbent mayor's party. [R]
66.7063 RITZI, Claudia; WAGNER, Aiko —
Although electoral participation has decreased especially in the group of young adults in recent years, online participation may lead to more political engagement of young people. By asking for their activities in conventional and unconventional forms of political participation and the reasons for their engagement, their online participation can be identified as primarily either a diversion, symbolic behavior or “genuine” participation. Furthermore, influence is a major motivation to participate online. Internet participation options are highly frequented, mostly by people who also participate conventionally. In addition, mainly “young critical citizens” can be encouraged to participate via the internet. [R]
66.7064 ROBINSON, Emily —
This article suggests that the politics of Englishness presents a number of specific dilemmas for Labour. First, the historical narrative of a radical tradition in British history cannot easily be used to support a competitive politics of nationhood, in the way that disaffected English identifiers might desire. Second, the deliberately alternative nature of this “radical nostalgic” narrative makes it an unlikely basis for a unifying national story. It is also at odds with Labour's status as a successful party of government, committed to using the power of the British state, rather than opposing it. Finally, while “everyday Englishness” may well align with core Labour values and be less socially conservative, intolerant or racially exclusive, its very nature as an everyday practice rather than a political identity makes it difficult for Labour to co-opt. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.7501]
66.7065 RODON, Toni; HIERRO, María José —
With a very high unemployment rate but at the first stage of a timid economic recovery, Spain held regional and local elections in May 2015. The election results showed the fall of traditional parties and the emergence of new forces and citizens' platforms, which increased the fragmentation of the party system. The PP (Partido Popular — Popular Party) continued to be the most voted-for party but post-election agreements brought the left to power in eight of the 14 regions that held elections, ending four years of conservative general dominance. After commenting on the context, the campaign and the results of the elections, this article explores the main characteristics of the new party competition and examines the profile of those voting for new political alternatives. [R]
66.7066 ROGSTAD, Ingrid —
This paper investigates intermedia agenda-setting between old and new media platforms through a study of the Norwegian Twitter and mainstream media agendas. The study tracks top tweets and headline news, asking whether Twitter mainly rehashes mainstream media content or actually produces original content. The study finds that Twitter and mainstream media are consistent on the salience of many issues, but also that Twitter gives attention to issues that are overlooked by mainstream media, such as news about environmental challenges and gender equality. The paper also suggests that Twitter contributes to an expansion of the elite, meaning that it has become an important platform for eloquent and media-savvy people outside the traditional political, economic, or academic elites. [R]
66.7067 ROODUIJN, Matthijs; VAN DER BRUG, Wouter; LANGE, Sarah L. de —
Many studies have found that political discontent and populist voting are positively related. Yet, an important shortcoming of these studies is that they interpret the correlation between these two phenomena as evidence that existing feelings of political discontent contribute to the support for populist parties. We argue that there is also a causal effect in the opposite direction: Populist parties fuel political discontent by exposing their supporters to a populist message in which they criticize the elite. Our study links individual level data on political discontent of voters to the populist message of the party they intend to vote for, employing various operationalizations of populism. Based on a 6-wave panel study from the Netherlands (2008–2013), we conclude that political discontent is both cause and consequence of the rise of populist parties. [R, abr.]
66.7068 ROY, Oindrila —
Existing scholarship regarding the impact of faith on foreign policy public opinion is divided on whether religious factors have any direct influence that is independent of political predispositions. I address this debate by analyzing the effect of religious background on attitudes toward the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf. Using American National Election Study data-sets and a series of regression estimates, I find that the impact of religious factors — in terms of affiliation, attitudes on the Bible, and religious behavior — on perceptions toward each of the wars is rather indirect via political predispositions. The contribution of the piece lies in utilizing the Karlson, Holm, and Breen method to capture for the first time the exact scope of mediated effects for religious variables. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6888]
66.7069 RYAN, Phil —
E. Ambrose and C. Mudde [“Canadian multiculturalism and the absence of the far right,” ibid. 21(2), 2015: 213–236; Abstr. 65.5518] argued in this journal that the absence of far-right parties in Canada can be attributed, among other factors, to “strong state repression of dissent” on multiculturalism policy. This article provides numerous examples of such dissent, to show that the state repression invoked by Ambrose and Mudde does not exist. The article also argues that certain “supply-side” explanations for the absence of a strong far-right apply to the Canadian case. It notes, in particular, how S Harper's Conservative government occupied much of the political space that might otherwise have been available for far-right challengers. [R] [See Abstr. 66.7031]
66.7070 SAAD-FILHO, Alfredo; BOITO, Armando —
The economic and political crises in Brazil are due to the achievements and limitations of the administrations led by [Presidents] Lula da Silva and D. Rousseff. In the political domain, the PT transformed the social policies of the Brazilian state, while simultaneously accepting a fragile hold on power as a condition of power itself. As a result, the “new right” describes a large and heterogeneous field of social groups, interests and values that have converged around an unremitting rejection of the PT and selected aspects of its rule. Despite their significant differences, these groups converge around the fight against corruption, which they associate with the PT as if it were previously absent. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.7071 SAAS, William O.; HALL, Rachel —
The US news media's heavy circulation of images of dead soldiers returning home from Vietnam in “body bags” is frequently offered as an explanation for the state of popular political disaffection with war commonly called “Vietnam Syndrome”. We argue that the rhetoric of Vietnam Syndrome misdiagnoses dissent against war as a photo-pathogenic affective disorder, a visually transmitted disease of the popular political mind. In their respective attempts to stave off the syndrome, Presidents G.W.H. Bush and G.W. Bush enacted visual quarantines of deceased US soldiers — first in 1991 and again in 2003. Our analysis suggests that President B. Obama's lifting of the ban in 2009 represented not only a more precise grasp of US war history but also a cynical recognition of the limited need for popular assent in executing the war on terror. [R]
66.7072 SAULL, Richard —
Since the end of the Cold War much of the political landscape — especially across European liberal democracies — has become increasingly influenced by far-right political and ideological sentiments and perspectives. A longer-term and more contextual perspective sheds light on the way in which the far right has been defined by and responded to the politics of liberal democracy and social regime of capital and suggests that the international — in its institutional, geopolitical, and material forms — plays a crucial role as key mediating factor in accounting for the historically distinct possibilities and opportunities for far-right forms of politics. Offering a sober assessment of the political challenge and threat that the far right poses can serve as a basis for thinking about effective political responses to it. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.7073 SCHULTZ, David —
Conventional wisdom pervades presidential politics, and there is no doubt that this will again be true in 2016. First among “old politicians' tales” is that a political party's placement of a national convention in a specific state can affect presidential voting there, swinging or flipping it to its presidential candidate. Second, the selection of a vice-presidential candidate as a favorite son (or daughter) will deliver a state's electoral votes to a presidential ticket. Is either of these pearls of wisdom true? This article tests the truth of both the convention location and favorite-son claims and finds little evidence of their efficacy. [R]
66.7074 SCHWAM-BAIRD, Michael, et al. —
We report the results of three field experiments that provided nonpartisan information about municipal- and state-level incentives for making political contributions to potential donors. Our experiments examine two types of contribution incentive programs, public matching funds and tax credits, in three different jurisdictions: New York City, Virginia, and Ohio [US]. We find that providing information about matching funds and tax credits has negligible effects on both the probability that an individual will make a contribution and the amount that an individual donates. Our findings suggest that publicizing contribution incentive programs using nonpartisan messages does little to enhance the pool of new donors. [R, abr.]
66.7075 SEABROOKE, Leonard; THOMSEN, Rune Riisbjerg —
Everyday narratives are grounded in how people make sense of their world. This article suggests that everyday narratives are made up of story-sets with categories of meaning, story-lines that provide a temporal understanding, and plots that establish the common characters and scenes. These narrative elements are part of a sense-making process where people are trying to understand their personal situation, changes to their households, and the national economy. We apply this logic to a study of online comments' sections for 240 newspaper articles on austerity in Denmark and the UK. Characters such as “scroungers” and “corporate criminals” are identified, as are scenes such as the decline of the welfare state and the rise of technocracy. We link the story-sets, story-lines, and plots together to understand how Brits and Danes are making sense of austerity. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6472]
66.7076 SEIB, J. Drew —
Given voters' limited cognitive abilities, the learning environments voters face may have implications for how voters learn and make decisions. One prominent feature of American elections is the variation in the length of the ballot across jurisdictions and elections. This paper explores the consequences of lengthy ballots on the ability of voters to learn about candidates. Using an experimental design and a dynamic information board, subjects participate in a mock election where they are asked to gather information about a single election or multiple elections. The results indicate that while voters compare more information as ballot length increases, they spend significantly less time learning about individual pieces of candidate information. [R]
66.7077 SEYMOUR, Richard —
UKIP represents a profound realignment in modern Conservatism. Originating as a split in the Conservative base, its metastasis has been fueled by a long-term and continuing crisis in the Conservative Party. The old, distinctive blend of British nationalism, racism, social authoritarianism, and economic liberalism that worked wonders for M. Thatcher, no longer avails the Conservatives. But those voters still exist, and UKIP has emerged to organize them. With the petty bourgeoisie at its bedrock, UKIP has assembled an impressive, cross-class coalition, with moderate advances into the Liberal and Labor vote. Only in Scotland, where Labor is the main party of British nationalism, and Northern Ireland, where British nationalism has more locally rooted variants, are UKIP absent. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.7078 SHIN Jungsub —
Although [much] scholarship assumes that benefiting from welfare spending increases the likelihood of voting for the incumbent parties, the impact of general welfare spending on incumbent parties' electoral success has received scant attention. This article expects that an increase in welfare spending has a positive effect on incumbent vote, but this effect is conditional on the ideology of government and levels of taxation. By examining 197 lower-chamber elections in thirty-one OECD countries from approximately 1980 to 2013, this article finds that incumbent parties gain benefits for expansionary welfare spending. However, as the ideology of government moves closer to the right and as levels of taxation increase, the effects of welfare spending on incumbent parties' vote share become weaker. [R, abr.]
66.7079 SINDRE, Gyda Marås —
Intraparty democracy is considered an important feature of former rebel movements' adaptation to democracy more generally. What conditions intraparty democracy in former rebel parties? This article traces internal debates about and organizational adaptation to intraparty democracy in Partai Aceh (Indonesia) and Fretilin (East Timor), paying specific attention to the interaction between party leaderships and the wider rebel organization. Leaning on theories of party change and organization, the article finds that even in the presence of formal procedures that prescribe inclusive decision-making, the nature and persistence of decentralized wartime command structures and relative strength and dependence on these networks limits intraparty democracy. [R]
66.7080 SINGER, Matthew —
While political polarization may lead to gridlock and other negative policy outcomes, representation is likely to be enhanced when parties differentiate themselves from each other and make it easier for voters to see the connection between their personal ideologies and the electoral offerings. These differences between parties may be especially important in developing democracies, where voters are still learning parties' priorities and where parties do not always emphasize issues when campaigning. I develop a measure of elite polarization in Latin America since the early 1990s based on legislative surveys. Individual-level voting patterns from mass survey data confirm that the connection between voters' self-placement on the left-right scale and their electoral choice is stronger in polarized party systems, even when controlling for other party system factors. [R, abr.]
66.7081 SINGH, Sourabh —
I argue that democracy scholars cannot explain the political elite's interest in democracy-consolidation processes because they have yet to conceptualize the relation between the political elite and structure. This shortcoming can be rectified by using P. Bourdieu's field theory insight that subjectivity and structure are constructed, reproduced, or altered due to contests among field actors over the symbolic capital of their field. I illustrate the significance of this solution by using it to explain the stability of Indian democracy during the early postcolonial period. Using data on the Indian political elite's trajectories in institutional politics and observations on their everyday politics, I show that their differing interest in democracy during the early transition period was shaped by their unique political habitus. [R, abr.]
66.7082 SKOCPOL, Theda; HERTEL-FERNANDEZ, Alexander —
Presidential election years attract attention to the rhetoric, personalities, and agendas of contending White House aspirants, but these headlines do not reflect the ongoing political shifts that will confront whoever moves into the White House in 2017. We draw from research on changes since 2000 in the organizational universes surrounding the Republican and Democratic parties to highlight a major emergent force in US politics: the recently expanded “Koch network” that coordinates big money funders, idea producers, issue advocates, and innovative constituency-building efforts in an ongoing effort to pull the Republican Party and agendas of US politics sharply to the right. We review the major components and evolution of the Koch network and explore how it has reshaped American politics and policy agendas, focusing especially on implications for right-tilted partisan polarization and rising economic inequality. [R, abr.]
66.7083 SLOAM, James —
Europeans are turning away from mainstream electoral politics towards new forms of political engagement. This is particularly the case for younger citizens. If young people are reinventing political activism, in which forms of participation and in which countries is it most true? Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, the article compares and contrasts young people's politics in the 15 old member states of the EU. Youth engagement generally reflects a country's civic-political culture. However, there are significant differences in levels of youth participation, in ratios of youth participation (compared to the adult population as a whole) and in the relative popularity of different forms of political action. The UK stands out, however, with a disturbingly large gap between the political engagement of young people and older adults. [R, abr.]
66.7084 SLOBOZHNIKOVA, Valentina —
The problem of religiosity influence on party construction in modern Russia is analyzed within three periods: (1) the 1990s — the period without restrictions on the use of religion; (2) the first decade of the 21st c. — the period of sufficiently strong principles of state secularism; (3) 2012-present — the period of “primitive secularism” overcoming. Conclusions and generalizations are made within a broad empirical material, including the study of party's public declaration. The basic trends and features of the religiosity influence on party construction have been determined. It has been analyzed in relation to religion and believers of the leading political parties. Particular attention is paid to political parties that have been using religious ideas in their programs and within party's ideology construction. [R]
66.7085 SMULDERS, Jef; MADDENS, Bart —
This article investigates the impact of the Third Evaluation Round of the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) on party finance laws in 18 Northern, Western, and Southern European states. It particularly focuses on the transparency stipulations regarding political parties' annual accounts. Five indicators are analyzed: (1) the obligation of parties to submit their accounts, (2) the availability of a standardized form, (3) the obligation to make the accounts public, (4) the independence of the auditor, and (5) the independence of the monitoring body. A global transparency score allows us to assess the impact of GRECO. Our study shows that GRECO had a significant impact: the legal frameworks of a large number of countries have been amended, in the sense that the level of transparency regarding the parties' accounts has considerably improved. [R]
66.7086 SPÁČ, Peter —
This article deals with ballot-order effect in preferential voting in general elections in Slovakia. Previous research in this field has primarily focused on countries whose elections are based either on single-member districts or on lists with fewer candidates. This article analyzes a case of a different nature. Slovakia uses a proportional representation list system with a single nationwide constituency where all 150 members of parliament are elected. Hence, most of the political parties create lists with a high number of candidates, which according to theory should enhance the influence of ballot ranking. Using data from Slovak general elections between 2006 and 2012 with a sample of 7,587 candidates, this study provides strong evidence of the impact of ballot order on the results of preferential voting. [R, abr.]
66.7087 STEPAN, Alfred —
Many classic studies of leadership focus on strong leadership in the singular. This essay focuses on effective leaderships in the plural. Some of the greatest failures of democratic transitions (Egypt, Syria, Libya) have multiple but highly conflictual leaderships. However, a key lesson in democratization theory is that successful democratic transitions often involve the formation of a powerful coalition, within the opposition, of one-time enemies. This was accomplished in Chile, Spain, and Indonesia. In greater detail, this essay examines Tunisia, the sole reasonably successful democratic transition of the Arab Spring. In all four cases, religious tensions had once figured prominently, yet were safely transcended by the actions of multiple leaders via mutual ideological and religious accommodations, negotiated socioeconomic pacts, and unprecedented political cooperation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6974]
66.7088 STEPHAN, Laure —
of State is supposed to be elected by parliament but all the sessions earmarked for the vote have been consistently adjourned for lack of an agreement between the main political parties. So would it be true to say that these parties run the country? Again, no. Both the Sunni March 14 Alliance, driven mainly by Saad Hariri's Movement of the Future, and the Shiite March 8 Alliance, led by Hezbollah, are racked by internal strife. Their perpetual antagonism tends to neutralize them both. The government, too, is paralyzed by dissent and bad blood and unable to do more than dispatch routine business as best it can. [R, abr.]
66.7089 STOEGNER, Karin —
This article analyzes the role of anti-Semitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in-group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). It shows that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right-wing parties in Europe, utilizes various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim-perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimize political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimizing strategies used by the FPÖ when criticized involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent anti-Semitism and forms of post-Nazi anti-Semitism. I focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalization of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry. [R, abr.]
66.7090 TAMÁS, G. M. —
always had the enormous task to explain why equal rights do not result in equal power and equal wealth for all. Then as now, the main explanation was nationalism and there had been three main competitors to the idea of the nation — class, race, and gender. The idea of the nation is, or rather was, paradoxically, a universalist notion. First outlined by the Enlightenment, the problem why and how common good and public interest should be limited geographically has remained. Nowadays, culture is the factor that could trace convincingly the boundaries of a polity so that public interest would not reach beyond them, so that common good would stop at the frontier. [See Abstr. 66.6912]
66.7091 TAYLOR, Andrew —
Scholars portray a [US] Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s dominated by a north-east liberal establishment confronting an emerging opposition based on anti-communism, economic liberalism and limited government. B. Goldwater, deploying ideas developed as a long-standing opponent of the New Deal, from his experiences as a businessman, and his philosophic commitment to individualism, engaged extensively with conservatives from the mid- to late 1950s, becoming the spokesman for the developing conservative movement. Goldwater articulated an alternative, radical interpretation of conservatism. Using constitutive rhetoric, an under-used tool in the study of conservatism, this paper explores the content and message of Goldwater's insurgent conservatism. [R, abr.]
66.7092 THÖRN, Håkan —
This article presents and analyzes the findings of a research project on power relations in the context of development partnerships with civil society on HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa, and engages in a critical dialogue with governmentality analysis. It argues that contemporary neoliberal government needs to be understood as context-specific articulations of three forms of power discussed by M. Foucault — sovereignty, discipline and biopower — and, in the global domain, a fourth form of power — (new) imperialism. Further, the analysis demonstrates how the introduction of a “package of (de-)responsibilization” shapes CSOs' activities so that they become competitive service providers, use evidence-based methods and produce measurable results. Addressing the issue of resistance, it shows how the transfer of responsibilities may involve tension and struggle — a politics of responsibility. [R]
66.7093 TOULOUSE, Anne —
There is an unusual slant to this US presidential election. The sudden death in February [2016] of Associate Justice A. Scalia, the most conservative member of the Supreme Court, raises the prospect of a shift in the balance of the court, concomitantly with a change of President and an altered majority in Congress. Each of these contests could go either way, but in fact they are connected. Although media attention is focused primarily on the presidential race, the impact of the makeup of the Supreme Court is at least as important. Given the political leanings and ages of the incumbent judges, a victory by H. Clinton would secure a lasting Democratic supremacy in the Court, whose role in the US power structure is more central than ever before. [R, abr.]
66.7094 UL'ČENKO, Natal'ja J. —
The Justice and Development Party's main achievements since 2002 are related to achievements in the democratization process as well as the attainment of financial and economic stability, which has created a basis for sustainable growth with an increasing inflow of foreign direct investments. Such an economic situation, however, is hardly stable enough since economic prosperity relies heavily on active use of external financing. Although JDP has managed to re-obtain the status of a ruling party, the price of victory has been high: the country and its government will have to face a number of challenges and serious problems in the fields of economy, domestic and foreign policy. The inability to find a constructive response can lead to an eventual radicalization of political power in Turkey. [R, abr.]
66.7095 VAN BRUSSEL, Suzanne; BOELENS, Luuk; LAUWERS, Dirk —
Large mobility projects in Flanders end up in wicked problems. In the quest for efficient and sustainable mobility, the Flemish government becomes entangled in endless struggles between ever-more involved and changing stake- and shareholders. The role and effectiveness of the government is exposed to rising challenges from inside and outside. Since most new projects focus on infrastructural (hardware) or (socio-)technical innovations in the use of mobile means (software), innovations within the organizational structure of mobility (“orgware”) have mostly remained untouched. We address this hiatus by approaching mobility projects as complex adaptive systems, comprising various, dynamic actor-networks. We draw upon a combination of actor-network theory and institutional theory insights applied to conceptual mobility frameworks. [R, abr.]
66.7096 VAN ELSAS, Erika J.; HAKHVERDIAN, Armen; VAN DER BRUG, Wouter —
The Euroskepticism of radical left-wing and radical right-wing parties has been shown to have distinct roots and manifestations. The article investigates whether these differences are mirrored at the citizen level. Using data from the European Election Study (2009/2014) and the European Social Survey (2008/2012) in 15 West European countries, it is found that left-wing and right-wing citizens not only differ in the object of their Euroskepticism, but also in their motivations for being skeptical of the EU. Left-wing Euroskeptics are dissatisfied with the current functioning of the EU, but do not oppose further European integration per se, while right-wing Euroskeptics categorically reject European integration. Euroskepticism among left-wing citizens is motivated by economic and cultural concerns, whereas for right-wing citizens Euroskepticism is solely anchored in cultural attitudes. [R, abr.]
66.7097 VAN ELSAS, Erika J.; MILTENBURG, Emily M.; VAN DER MEER, Tom W.G. —
The mechanisms behind vote-recall inaccuracy are not well understood. The literature has been unable to separate inaccuracy due to the nature of the voter (such as non-attitudes) from inaccuracy due to interfering events after casting the vote (such as a change in vote intention). This paper employs event-history analysis to disentangle time-invariant and time-variant explanations of recall inaccuracy. Using Dutch panel data on 20,936 respondents in 42 waves between 2010 and 2012 (and additional data collected between 2006 and 2010), we explain the likelihood of misreporting the 2010 vote during the subsequent electoral cycle. The analyses show that although both explanations play a role, voters' general level of volatility before casting the recalled vote matters less than changes in vote intention after the vote. [R, abr.]
66.7098 VAN HOUWELINGEN, Pepijn —
This paper starts out with a theoretical argument, based on panel data, that public mood in general and societal pessimism in particular should be measured from an explicitly temporal perspective. Next, based on a survey among more than 200 Japanese students and a wide array of existing (longitudinal) data sources in three different languages and covering several decades it is shown that public mood in three quite different countries — first and foremost Japan, but also the US and The Netherlands — is quite apprehensive. In all these three countries societal pessimism can be observed during the past quarter century. Finally, utilizing a MDSD approach a few possible tentative explanations for this observed pessimism are sought. [R]
66.7099 VIGNON, Sébastien —
If the methods used during election campaigns of rural mayors in France differ from those of big cities, peri-urbanization has modified their way of running for mayoralties. A survey conducted in Picardy during the 2014 mayoralties showed that candidates have been led to progressively adopt new modes of action in their strategies. Indeed, in rural areas, the gradual depreciation of candidates' door-to-door visits goes along with a shift in the types of mayoral legitimacy. Today, candidates must combine proximity to their potential constituents with managerial fairness, while avoiding any biased attitude. These moves which are taking place at various rhythms and intensity are the results of a change in the social profile of the different populations and that of contenders running for mayoralty/local government. [R] [See Abstr. 66.6320]
66.7100 WALSH, Sinead —
While NGO accountability is widely discussed in the literature, there has been little work done on how accountability systems operate in practice. This article addresses this gap by using qualitative empirical data to provide a case study of one NGO's initiative in this area. ActionAid has made substantial, high-profile efforts to improve its downward accountability since 2000. Using data from fieldwork conducted in Uganda and internationally, the article reveals the operational obstacles which have hindered ActionAid in its attempts to strengthen its accountability to intended beneficiaries at the community level, and reviews ActionAid's ongoing commitment to this goal. [R]
66.7101 WALTERS, Rosie —
This article analyzes the extensive coverage in UK newspapers of the shooting, recovery and activism of Malala Yousafzai, the prominent campaigner for girls' rights from the Swat Valley in Pakistan. The study uses discourse-analysis and a post-structuralist, feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze 223 newspaper articles, identifying the dominant discourses about Yousafzai in the context of the UK's colonial history and perceptions of its current role in global politics. The article demonstrates that the UK media's representation of Yousafzai's story embraces and reproduces seemingly emancipatory discourses around girls' education, yet is ultimately limited by enduring gendered and orientalist discourses that underlie these new initiatives, which are simultaneously produced by, and productive of, unequal power relations. [R, abr.]
66.7102 WANG Zhengxu; VANGELI, Anastas —
Under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party started to institutionalize leadership succession in the 1980s. Peaceful and orderly succession of the top political offices, however, started to take shape only in the early 1990s. We identify three sets of rules and norms formed since then to govern elite replacement and power succession. These concern top leaders' exit from power, selection of successors, and the transition of power between outgoing and incoming leaders. We trace the evolving process in which these rules were made and accepted by the Party elite between 1992 and 2012. Incidents, however, also showed the malleability of some of these rules and the potential rise of ambitious rule challengers. Into Xi Jinping's era, uncertainty still threatens the revision or abandonment of some of these rules. [R, abr.]
66.7103 WARE, Alan —
Four aspects of Trump's hijack of the Republican party are examined. First, how he used unconventional techniques, usually associated with some “reality” television programs, to become the leading candidate in the pre-primary debates. Second, how his insurgency differed from the party's takeover in 1964 by supporters of B. Goldwater. Third, how the Republicans have replaced the Democrats since the early 1980s as the party with a less cohesive potential coalition among voters, with the result that internal party relations became more conflictual throughout the period. Finally, that internal conflict has been intensified by the prevalence of divided government, which has made it virtually impossible to impose a truly conservative agenda on federal government policy, and the impact of forty years of stagnating real incomes for many middle-income Americans. [R, abr.]
66.7104 WERNER, Ana Lena —
German media on the left and the right of the political spectrum consider the US chiefly responsible for the war in Ukraine. Junge Welt, Junge Freiheit, and the “third position”-publication Compact hardly see any difference between political and financial support for the new government and military intervention against it. They employ classic anti-American clichés. While Junge Welt argues in terms of anti-imperialism and Junge Freiheit in terms of geopolitics, Compact adheres to conspiracy theories widespread in Russia. [R]
66.7105 WEYLAND, Kurt —
Counterrevolution unfolds in a more deliberate and systematic fashion than revolution, which is fueled by the rash, ill-considered belief that the tsunami's trigger — the striking overthrow of a longstanding ruler by mass protest — is widely replicable. While reactionaries share this facile inference during the revolutionary upsurge, they engage in learning thereafter, rely less on problematic inferences, and resume more rational decision-making. Longstanding experience and practices of open debate and collective deliberation enable them to process information more thoroughly and calibrate their counterrevolutionary plans to domestic opportunities. Consequently, they succeed in reestablishing autocratic control step by step. By demonstrating how reactionaries recuperated their grasp of political reality during the upheavals of 1848, the article elucidates the differential patterns of rationality in politics. [R, abr.]
66.7106 WILFORD, Allan M.; KRIVACSY, Kevin —
This paper examines how increases in voter turnout might allow Labour to remain competitive in future general elections if Scottish representation is removed from Parliament or Labour continues to remain uncompetitive in Scotland. The loss of Scottish representation would be deleterious to Labour's prospects of gaining sizeable majorities again in Parliament. However, this prospect may be mitigated by an increase in voter turnout, as much has been made of the benefits that left parties can accrue with across-the-board increases in voter turnout. Using methods of multiple imputation, our analysis shows that Labour can modestly increase their vote-share at full voter turnout, while the Conservatives consistently experience declining share. Results from this study also demonstrate that Labour losses could be mitigated by increasing voter turnout in the remainder of the UK. [R, abr.]
66.7107 WOOD, Matthew; CORBETT, Jack; FLINDERS, Matthew —
This article offers the findings of a research project that has detected a marked shift in the interplay between celebrity culture and the presentational strategies adopted by politicians. At the heart of this shift is an increased focus on the concept of “normality” as politicians increasingly attempt to shake-off the negative connotations associated with “professional politicians” and instead attempt to appear “just like us”. As such, this article offers an original approach by distinguishing between “superstar” celebrity politicians and “everyday” celebrity politicians before identifying three aspects of each strategy (i.e. media platform, marketing technique and performative role). It offers numerous empirical examples that serve to underpin this distinction before using the example of B. Johnson as a case-study in the attempted shift from “superstar” to “everyday” celebrity. [R, abr.]
66.7108 WÜST, Andreas M. —
This article [examines] the relationship between parties and immigrants. The focus of the empirical analyses is on candidates and issues as linkage mechanisms between parties and voter groups. The results point not only to some changes in this relationship, but also to a few elements that indicate a specific representational bond between the immigrant-origin electorate and immigrant-origin politicians. There are significant differences in some migration-related policy positions of native politicians and of those of immigrant origin — in all parties. Irrespective of the specific voter-candidate relationship among the immigrant-origin population, the analyses strongly support the traditional, party-centered “politics of ideas” approach. Consequently, the political integration of immigrants and their descendants can be characterized as a more general process across parties, and this process is expected to linger on. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 66.6644]
66.7109 ZAPF, Holger —
More often than not, protests and other aspirations to participation in authoritarian regimes are confronted with delegitimizing discourses that flank physical repression. These attempts to discoursive demobilization can take place either in unchallenged or in revolutionary situations. Discourses contain hegemonial claims, narratives, frames and arguments. The paper develops analytical perspectives relating to these elements and applies them to speeches of heads of state before and during the Arab spring. It is shown that “securitization” is not the dominant mode of this discourse. Rather, a kind of unsettling encouragement is to be found that subtly delegitimates participation. [R]
66.7110 ZENG Jinghan —
Ideological campaigns in post-Deng China have a strategic function of discerning loyalties of local leaders. Previous empirical studies have found that Jiang Zemin's followers are more likely to echo Jiang's ideological campaigns. Through a content-analysis of provincial newspapers between 2005 and 2012, this study suggests that the manner of displaying loyalties has completely changed. By employing a panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) estimation, this study finds that protégés of both Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin are less likely to echo their patron's ideological campaigns, suggesting the shifting function of ideological campaigns from monitoring identified followers' loyalties to recruiting new followers. This article argues that this is a result of changing elite politics and — more importantly — the different strategic use of ideological campaigns. [R]
66.7111 ZHAI Yida —
By displaying its economic and military might, China's recent assertive actions in the East China Sea and South China Sea seem to “prove” longstanding worries regarding China's threats. This article reviews the traditional Chinese philosophy of the great state and argues that China unfortunately deviates from it. Cross-national survey data show that Asian citizens widely acknowledge the rising power of China. Nevertheless, an expansion of economic and military power fails to yield more positive evaluations. The country's pursuit of power and blunt foreign policy push neighboring states to welcome an expansion of Japan's military role and to intensify their security ties with the US to achieve a balance of power. [R, abr.]
66.7112 ZINK, James R.; DAWES, Christopher T. —
Some observers argue that excessive veneration of the US Constitution has blinded Americans to its flaws and made them reluctant to consider necessary reforms. We test the assumptions that underlie these claims. We report the results of two survey experiments that examine the existence and effects of constitutional status quo bias at both the state and federal levels. Our findings support the notion that a proposed policy involving constitutional change imbues the constitutional status quo with normative value and, in turn, disposes individuals to resist the proposal. These results hold even at the state level. In addition to the institutional obstacles to constitutional amendment, therefore, we find evidence of another, psychological barrier to constitutional change that is based specifically in a sense of constitutional attachment. [R]
66.7113 ZUCCO, Cesar, Jr.; NICOLAU, Jairo M. —
In the mid-1990s, Brazil introduced electronic voting technology that reduced residual ballots and consequently expanded de facto enfranchisement. We employ a regression discontinuity design similar to that of previous studies of the Brazilian electronic voting technology to show that electronic technology also caused a sharp rise in party label votes (votos de legenda) that can only be explained by voting error. We show that this error offsets a large portion of the gains in enfranchisement, highlighting the fact that even generally positive changes in voting procedures can have negative effects. Our results also suggest that party label votes should not be considered a measure of party strength in the Brazilian context. [R]