Abstract
72.6098 ADOLPH, Christopher, et al. —
We explore the US states' evolving policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining governors' decisions to begin easing five types of social distancing policies after the initial case surge in March-April 2020. Applying event-history models to original data on state COVID-19 policies, we test the relative influence of health, economic, and political considerations on their decisions. We find no evidence that differences in state economic conditions influenced when governors began easing. Governors of states with larger recent declines in COVID-19 deaths per capita and improving trends in new confirmed cases and test positivity were quicker to ease. However, politics played as powerful a role as epidemiological conditions, driven primarily by governors' party affiliation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6099 AGERBERG, Mattias —
An important and commonly used data source are several large-scale multi-country projects that survey citizens directly about their perceptions and experiences of corruption. This paper deploys a large survey with two embedded experiments to investigate two potential sources of bias in indicators based on citizens' perceptions and experiences of corruption, stemming from political bias and sensitivity bias. First, I draw upon research on economic perceptions and argue that respondents are likely to respond in a political manner when asked how they perceive the level of corruption in their country. I test this argument by experimentally priming respondents' political affiliations before asking for their perception of corruption. Second, I argue that standard questions probing peoples' corruption experiences are likely to be subject to sensitivity bias. I test this second argument by constructing a list experiment. [R, abr.]
72.6100 AKSIUMOV, Boris ; AVKSENTEV, Viktor —
This article contributes to the research of nation-building in modern Russia. It proposes a discursive model of nation-building in Russia, based on the interaction of four types of nationalism: civic, multicultural, imperial and civilizational. The results of content-analysis of key political documents on nation-building in modern Russia (Strategies of the state national policy, presidential addresses, Vladimir Putin's articles) are presented and discussed. It is shown that civic nationalism with rhetorical references to civil society and its ability to build a nation from below is the most supported by the elite type of discourse on nation-building. However, in practice policy preference is given to the hegemonic state model of nation-building from “top to bottom,” dominated by a carefully veiled imperial discourse. [R, abr.]
72.6101 ALAGHA, Joseph —
What is the role of various Lebanese political, civil society, and Islamist organizations in this ongoing process? How could the strong states known as the ‘Switzerland of the Middle-East’ degenerate into a weak state — a ‘deep state’ and a ‘Banana republic’ governed by the omerta of ‘vetocracy’ (consensual democracy) and ‘mafiocracy’ (crony capitalism?). This meltdown let the French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian to appeal to the Lebanese to ‘help us to help you’, warning of the disappearance of the Lebanese Republic if swift and drastic measures were not taken to stamp out the rampant culture of corruption and clientelism (patron-client relationship). Seen through that lens, Lebanon's 17 October WhatsApp Revolution and mass mobilisation was a reaction against faulty governance and elitist political participation. [R. abr.]
72.6102 ALBRECHT, Holger ; BUFANO, Michael ; KOEHLER, Kevin —
This article introduces a theory on military role expansion in emerging democracies and poses a broad question: who wants the military to adopt which role in society and politics? Drawing on an original, nationally representative survey conducted in Tunisia, the article explores people's preferences for the military to remain a security provider or serve in government and contribute to policing protests. Findings reveal that public support for military role expansion is substantial and varies across political cleavages. We test hypotheses to account for cleavages driven by the country's authoritarian past versus partisan divides during Tunisia's transition to democracy. Findings indicate that popular support for military role expansion is driven by anti-system sentiments prevalent in contemporary Tunisian politics: while voters prefer the military as a role model for security provision, non-voters support its enhanced role in politics. [R, abr.]
72.6103 ALLEN, Chris —
This article argues that new governance spaces evidence a paradigm shift that has irretrievably changed how formal governmental relations with Britain's Muslim communities are established, facilitated and maintained. It is a paradigm shift that is driven by the ideology of neoliberalism and the efficacy of the market. Having begun under New Labour, this shift was further catalysed by the election of the Conservative-led Coalition government in 2010 and successive Conservative-majority governments since premised on the basis of the ‘problematisation’ of Muslims and the religion of Islam. Drawing on participatory approaches that afford unprecedented access to the political spaces and mechanisms within which formal governmental relations with Britain's Muslims were facilitated, this article uses critical analyses of three social issues — counter extremism, Islamophobia and child sexual exploitation — to illustrate the article's overarching narrative. [R, abr.]
72.6104 AMLANI, Sharif ; COLLITT, Samuel —
The COVID-19 pandemic spurred many states and counties to reduce public health risks by adopting policies that made voting by mail easier in the 2020 general election. Employing a two-period difference-in-difference research design, this article investigates how these policy changes affected turnout and presidential vote share. We find that counties that moved to send registered voters mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day experienced 2.6 percent higher turnout compared to counties that made no change, although lesser reforms may have hindered turnout. We also find no evidence that making voting by mail easier conferred a partisan advantage. [R]
72.6105 ARES, Macarena —
Against premature claims about the declining political relevance of social class in post-industrial democracies, recent research indicates that class continues to be a relevant determinant of political preferences. In postindustrial societies ‘old’ class divides on economic issues coexist with ‘new’ class alignments on cultural topics. While there is cumulated evidence of social classes' distinct placement on these issues, this paper argues that the strength of class divides depends on the extent to which these issues are politicized by political parties. Studying preferences on economic and cultural issues (attitudes towards redistribution, immigration, gay rights and European integration), this study shows that class divides in preferences are context dependent. Adding to recent literature on parties and class conflict, this study identifies another stage at which parties can affect the strength of class voting. [R, abr.]
72.6106 ARMALY, Miles T. ; BUCKLEY, David T. ; ENDERS, Adam M. —
What explains popular support for political violence in the contemporary US, particularly the anti-institutional mob that attacked the US Capitol in January 2021? Recent scholarship gives reason to suspect that a constellation of beliefs known as “Christian nationalism” may be associated with support for such violence. We build on this work, arguing that religious ideologies like Christian nationalism should be associated with support for violence, conditional on several individual characteristics that can be inflamed by elite cues. We turn to three such factors long-studied by scholars of political violence: perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities, and support for conspiratorial information sources. Each can be exacerbated by elite cues, thus translating individual beliefs in Christian nationalism into support for political violence. We test this approach with original survey data collected in the wake of the Capitol attacks. [R, abr.]
72.6107 ARMSTRONG, Brenna, et al. —
Corruption is sustained by powerful male networks, reinforcing women's exclusion from politics. Yet, contrary to this conventional wisdom, we theorize that corruption can sometimes increase women's access to power. Since women are often perceived as “cleaner” than men, where institutions allow heads of government to be held accountable on economic issues, chief executives may use women's inclusion in high-profile posts to signal that they are curbing the abuse of public office for private gain. Examining upward of 150 countries over 16 years, we investigate whether and where corruption is linked to the presence of women finance ministers — a high-profile post capable of quelling economic malfeasance. We show that increases in corruption bolster women's presence, particularly in countries with free and fair elections and presidential systems. [R, abr.]
72.6108 ARRIOLA, Leonardo R., et al. —
Party switching among legislative candidates has important implications for accountability and representation in democratizing countries. We argue that party switching is influenced by campaign costs tied to the clientelistic politics that persist in many such countries. Candidates who are expected to personally pay for their campaigns, including handouts for voters, will seek to affiliate with parties that can lower those costs through personal inducements and organizational support. Campaign costs also drive candidate selection among party leaders, as they seek to recruit candidates who can finance their own campaigns. We corroborate these expectations with an original survey and embedded choice experiment conducted among parliamentary candidates in Zambia. The conjoint analysis shows that candidates prefer larger parties that offer particularistic benefits. [R, abr.]
72.6109 ASANO, Masahiko ; PATTERSON, Dennis —
Research has shown that Japan's parallel electoral system altered the incentives that parties and their members face when competing for lowerhouse seats, leading to, among other things, more policy-oriented and less personalistic elections. What is less well known is how these altered incentives affect the decisions of incumbents to stay with their current party organizations or exit and join another political party. We address this question by using data from the 2017 snap election in Japan, specifically, the exit decisions of Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) incumbents. Typically exit decisions involve considerations of electoral support, policy, or increased office benefits. [R, abr.]
72.6110 ÅSARD, Erik —
The Republican Party is the most successful conservative party in the Western world. Eight of the thirteen presidential elections between 1952 and 2000 were won by Republicans. Even after the turbulent years of Donald Trump, they still control a majority of the statehouses and have a clear majority (6-3) on the US Supreme Court. In recent times, however, the party has gone through dramatic changes, both in terms of ideology and political orientation. The arrival of ”Trumpism” has transformed it into a nativist party fearful of foreigners, distrustful of reason and science, scornful of its adversaries and beholden to the whims and wishes of one man. Worse, it has lost faith in democracy and most of its elected officials and supporters have accepted, or at least tolerated, Trump's ”Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. [R, abr.]
72.6111 ASTUDILLO, Javier ; PANEQUE, Andreu —
This paper examines the effect of party primaries on women's chances of winning a leadership contest in eight Western parliamentary countries since 1985. By doing so, we revisit an ongoing debate about a possible trade-off between the democratic values of ‘inclusion’ of party members and ‘representation’ of excluded groups that this type of selection method may involve. Using an original data set consisting of 608 candidates who participated in 168 leadership mixed-gender contests at the national or regional level, we show that female candidates perform worse under party primaries. This finding holds even after controlling for the type of candidate competing. We therefore sustain the argument that this leadership selection mechanism, in its current format, involves a trade-off between ‘inclusion’ and ‘representation’. [R]
72.6112 ATKINS, Judi —
This article demonstrates the value of rhetorical audience studies for analysing constructions of ‘the nation’ and national identity. A key strength of this approach is its recognition of the interplay between the rhetorical situation, the text of the speech, and the audience's responses to that rhetoric. Using the historical method for investigating rhetoric and its reception, the article examines Theresa May's efforts to bring the nation together after the 2016 referendum and to offer an inspiring vision of post-Brexit Britain. A textual analysis shows that her rhetoric of Britishness was constructed around an imagined audience of Leave voters, and thus excluded Remainers from her conceptions of Britain and ‘the British people’. The audience reception study supports this finding, as it reveals two competing myths of ‘the nation’ which in turn constituted rival subject positions. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6113 AUERBACH, Adam Michael, et al. —
In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. We consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries. [R, abr.]
72.6114 AVDEYEVA, Olga A. ; MATLAND, Richard E. —
Under what conditions are voters likely to invoke gender-trait stereotypes and ethnic biases when they evaluate the performance of local political leaders? We test arguments from role congruity and social identity theories and employ intersectional analysis to explore voter reliance on gender-trait stereotypes and ethnic biases across four diverse Russian regions. We find that the structure of the regional economy matters for the reduction of gender-trait stereotypes, while spatial and labor market integration matters for the dissipation of ethnic favoritism in leader evaluation. Our findings have important implications for policy makers aiming to reduce political biases in diverse contexts. On the one hand, we encourage scholars to pay careful attention to stereotypes of underrepresented social groups and evaluate how they can translate into understanding the traits associated with good leadership. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the roots of social biases stem from complex structural phenomena, such as limited labor opportunities for women and minorities, and thus require transformative political and economic changes. [R]
72.6115 BÄCK, Hanna ; FREDÉN, Annika ; RENSTRÖM, Emma A. —
This article focuses on how party identity can shape policy support or opposition to the controversial issue of legalizing cannabis in Sweden, which is strongly opposed by the public. In a survey experiment (N = 3612), we manipulated if a message that supported or opposed a policy proposal to legalize cannabis was presented by a representative of the own party or an out-group party. Results showed increased opposition to the proposal when the in-group party opposed the policy and when the out-group party endorsed the policy. When the in-group party endorsed the policy and when the out-group party opposed the policy, attitudes to the policy were not influenced. We argue that prior attitudes moderate how in-group- and out-group party messages are processed and that voters do not blindly follow the party line. [R, abr.]
72.6116 BAILEY, Jack —
If voters are to hold governments to account for the state of the economy, they must know how it has changed. Indeed, this is a prerequisite for democratic accountability. Yet the perceptions that voters report often show signs of clear partisan bias. At present, we do not know if this bias is real or instead due to priming in political surveys. To test this, I assign subjects at random to either a political or nonpolitical survey. I then record their economic perceptions and compare the results for each group. I show that political surveys do worsen partisan bias, though only among supporters of the incumbent party. Still, much partisan bias remains unexplained, even in the nonpolitical condition. So, while economic perception items remain biased, we can at least be sure that most people respond to them in a similar way no matter the survey context. [R]
72.6117 BAKKER, Ryan ; JOLLY, Seth ; POLK, Jonathan —
Using survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that party placements on the economic left-right dimension are cross-nationally comparable across the EU; however, the socio-cultural dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey included anchoring vignettes which we use as “bridge votes” to place parties from different countries on a common liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey technique. [R, abr.]
72.6118 BARNES, Lucy —
Who supports high taxes on the rich? Existing accounts of public attitudes focus on egalitarian values and material interests, but make little mention of the ideas people hold about how the economy works descriptively. Drawing on the distinction between positive- and zero-sum beliefs about the economy, and original survey data from five countries, I show that there are systematic differences in tax progressivity preferences across groups within the public who think differently about the economy. Positivesum thinking is associated with less progressive preferences. However, despite theoretical attention, there is no evidence of systematic zero-sum thinking among the public. On the other hand, some descriptions focus on conflict between rich and poor, and these do predict support for greater progressivity. Further analysis is required to differentiate alternative causal explanations of the patterns observed, but different modes of descriptive economic thinking are an important feature of the mass politics of progressivity. [R] [See Abstr. 72.5967]
72.6119 BEAULIEU BACCHUS, Emily ; BOULDING, Carew —
How does the fairness of the democratic process influence public perceptions of corruption? This article demonstrates the ways that elections can influence broader confidence in democracy. Corruption is often described as one of the most serious problems facing democracy today, and citizen confidence in democracy has implications for system support and legitimacy. What constitutes corruption, however, is not always obvious. We focus on the importance of citizens' feelings about electoral integrity for shaping their attitudes about corruption more broadly. Using survey data from Latin America and an experimental survey in the US, we show that when asked to evaluate political practices as corrupt or not, people who are more confident in the fairness of their electoral process are generally less concerned about corruption, compared with people who are less confident in elections. [R, abr.]
72.6120 BECHTEL, Michael M. ; MANNINO, Massimo —
Which factors explain voters' evaluations of policy responses to economic shocks? We explore this question in the context of mass preferences over the distribution of disaster relief and evaluate three fairness-based explanations related to affectedness, need, and political ties. We analyze experimental data from an original survey conducted among American citizens and find that affectedness and need are key drivers of voters' preferred disaster responses. We then compare these patterns with observed disaster relief distributions (1993–2008). The results suggest that observed relief allocations largely mirror the structure of voter preferences with respect to affectedness and need, but not to political ties. These findings have implications for an ongoing debate over the electoral effects of natural disasters, voters' retrospective evaluations of incumbent performance, and the extent to which divide-the-dollar politics decisions align with mass preferences. [R]
72.6121 BERRY, Marie E. ; BOUKA, Yolande ; MUTHONI KAMURU, Marilyn —
Extensive research has affirmed the potential of gender quotas to advance women's political inclusion. When Kenya's gender quota took effect after a new constitution was promulgated in 2010, women were elected to the highest number of seats in the country's history. In this article, we investigate how the process of implementing the quota has shaped Kenyan women's power more broadly. Drawing on more than 80 interviews and 24 focus groups with 140 participants, we affirm and refine the literature on quotas by making two conceptual contributions: (1) quota design can inadvertently create new inequalities among women in government, and (2) women's entry into previously male-dominated spaces can be met with patriarchal backlash, amplifying gender oppression. [R, abr.]
72.6122 BETHKE, Felix S. ; PINCKNEY, Jonathan —
Previous research has shown that successful non-violent resistance (NVR) campaigns promote democracy compared with violent revolutions and top-down liberalization. However, research to date has not examined the character and quality of the democratic regimes following NVR campaigns, or evaluated the mechanisms that produce this effect. In this paper, we address this gap by analyzing the effect of NVR on the quality of democracy, using the Polyarchy index from the Varieties of Democracies project and its sub-components: (1) elected executive; (2) free and fair elections; (3) freedom of expression; (4) associational autonomy; and (5) inclusive citizenship. Using kernel matching and differences-in-differences estimation we find that initiating a democratic transition through NVR improves democratic quality after transition significantly and substantially relative to cases without this characteristic. [R, abr.]
72.6123 BEZZINA, Frank ; BROWN, Maria ; MARMARÀ, Vincent-Anthony —
This quantitative study queried perceptions of the gender corrective mechanism as part of a broader parliamentary gender balance reform programme in Southern European, EU island state Malta. A representative sample (n = 435) of the Maltese electorate showed support for increased representation of women (88.5%) and the integration of the gender corrective mechanism (66.5%); but manifested a preference for other measures, namely childcare facilities, full-time backbenchers and more females in the electoral commission. Consequently, should the preferred measures not be sufficiently addressed, the reform risks falling short of sustainable development. The study adds to literature about how the electorate engages with more representative parliaments when this is targeted using constitutional amendments. [R, abr.]
72.6124 BHATIA, Aditi ; ROSS, Andrew S. —
Focusing on the anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong, this article presents an analysis of Twitter posts adopting the hashtags #antiELAB, #NoChinaExtradition and #HongKongProtests. The analysis explores the public narrative among the collective identity of Hongkongers opposing the extradition bill as events unfolded during mid-2019 in Hong Kong. To do so, we adopt Bhatia's (2015) multi-perspective framework for the Discourse of Illusion, which takes a three-prong approach to the study of argument construction and establishing legitimacy. Specifically, through the interrelated components of (1) historicity, (2) linguistic and semiotic action, and (3) social impact, the dimensions of the hashtag narrative that emerged on Twitter were explored. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6448]
72.6125 BIJL, Erin ; VAN DER BORGH, Chris —
Between 2010 and 2015, as Myanmar transitioned from authoritarian rule to a more liberal and democratic state, its Muslim population increasingly faced hate speech and violence. This article goes beyond analyses that regard the growing anti-Muslim sentiment as a consequence of a liberalized media environment, enabling people to voice long-standing grievances and prejudice. Rather, the notion of a “Muslim threat” to Myanmar's Buddhist population is approached as the outcome of a dynamic process of securitization in which an alliance of political and religious elites was forged whose discourse changed the rules of the political field, forcing the reform-oriented opposition into strategic silence. [R, abr.]
72.6126 BLAIR, Christopher W. ; HOROWITZ, Michael C. ; POTTER, Philip B. K. —
Existing research finds that cooperation among militant groups is common and contributes to both capabilities and lethality. Comparatively little is known, however, about how militant alliances are maintained and how they break apart. We argue that leaders are critical to sustaining alliances among militant groups. As a consequence, organizational disruption in the form of leadership targeting can lead to the breakdown of militant alliances. To test this argument, we pair original data on militant alliances with data on leadership targeting to reveal that decapitating an organization's leader, and particularly its founder, increases the probability that an organization's alliances terminate. We find that leadership decapitation spurs alliance termination by incapacitating targeted groups, stoking fear among allies, and inducing preference divergence between targeted groups and allies over strategy. [R]
72.6127 BOLLEYER, Nicole —
This paper is concerned with one important dimension of intra-organizational hierarchy that has to date received only little attention in cross-national party research, although its relevance has grown in light of both the increasing empowerment of rank-and-file members and the growing inclusiveness of contemporary party organizations: the range of monitoring and disciplinary mechanisms available to parties to manage internal differences and dissent essential to assure the day-to-day functioning of complex organizations. Based on the distinction between ‘organizational control’ and ‘leadership power’ that can be exercised through these mechanisms, this paper explores how the availability and nature of such mechanisms in party statutes is shaped by differences in ideology on the party level and the legal regulation of intra-party conflict regulation on the system level. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5983]
72.6128 BOLLEYER, Nicole ; CORREA, Patricia —
Which membership-based voluntary organizations constitutive of civil society such as parties, interest groups or service-oriented organizations keep their members active and which forms of activism do they cultivate? This article addresses this important question distinguishing two forms of ‘member activism’: ‘member involvement’, defined as members working for an organization, and ‘member influence’, defined as members' participation in intra-organizational decision-making. Building on incentive-theoretical approaches to leader–member relations and resource dependency theory, we present a theoretical framework specifying distinct drivers of each form of member activism, which is tested using new data from four organization surveys conducted in four most different European democracies. None of the theorized factors has the same robust effect on both involvement and influence. [R, abr.]
72.6129 BORGES MARTINS DA SILVA, Mariana ; GATTO, Malu A. C. —
What happens when a traditional source of political capital becomes a health hazard? Stigmatized electoral practices, such as vote buying, are a double-edged sword: While these strategies may signal candidates' electoral strength, they may also entail reputational costs. In normal times, street campaigns are a non-stigmatized electoral practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, they imposed health risks. Employing data from a national survey experiment conducted in Brazil prior to the 2020 municipal elections (N= 2025), we extend research on the employment of stigmatized campaigns and the gendered dynamics of electoral viability. We find that voters evaluate candidates who engage in face-to-face activities as less electorally viable and report lower intent to support them. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6676]
72.6130 BORN, Andreas ; JANSSEN, Aljoscha —
In most democracies, members of parliament (MPs) are elected either through a party list or by a district. We use a discontinuity in the German electoral system to investigate the causal effect of a district election on an MP's conformity with the party line. A district election does not affect rollcall voting behavior causally, possibly due to overall high adherence to party-line voting. Analyzing the parliamentary speeches of each MP allows us to overcome the high party-line discipline with regard to parliamentary voting. Using textual analysis and machine learning techniques, we create two measures of closeness of an MP's speeches to the party line. We find that district-elected members of parliament do not differ, in terms of speeches, from those of their party peers who have been elected through closed party lists. [R, abr.]
72.6131 BOSWELL, John, et al. —
‘Place-based explanations' of politics in the UK tell sweeping narratives about ‘Two Englands', or of sizeable regions of the country that have been ‘Left Behind’, reinforcing popular accounts of a North-South or city-town divide. We introduce the concept of nested deprivation – deprivation that may occur in just one housing estate or even one row of flats within neighbourhoods that are otherwise affluent. We report on intensive fieldwork in 8 neighbourhoods varying in relative affluence and density of population (including urban, suburban/satellite, market town or rural village). Three key themes and consequences emerge for those living in nested deprivation in relatively affluent and geographically dispersed contexts: (1) either disconnection from or entrapment within the local economy; (2) social isolation and atomisation; and (3) powerlessness to affect politics. ‘Placebased’ explanations of rapid and radical changes to political participation in Britain need to take fine-grained geographical distinctions much more seriously. [R, abr.]
72.6132 BOUDREAU, Cheryl ; MacKENZIE, Scott A. ; SIMMONS, Daniel J. —
What factors shape public opinion about government solutions to address police violence? We address this question by conducting a survey in which respondents express their opinions about actual proposals to reform police practices. Within the survey, we randomly assign respondents to receive the positions of traditional advocates (Black lawmakers) and/or opponents (law enforcement) of police reform efforts. Our results reveal broad bipartisan support for the proposals, but that information about groups that support or oppose these proposals polarizes partisans' opinions. However, Democrats and even Republicans who support Black Lives Matter (BLM) express high levels of support for the proposals regardless of the information they receive. These results suggest that partisanship in the mass public is not necessarily a barrier to police reform efforts. A bipartisan majority of the public supports meaningful reforms, and any polarizing effects of elite signals are muted by Democrats' and Republicans' support for BLM. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6138]
72.6133 BOURNE, Angela ; VEUGELERS, John —
This article contributes to the empirical literature on militant democracy and successor party bans by comparing post-1945 West Germany and Italy. These countries shared a right-authoritarian past but their tolerance of right-authoritarian parties differed. Looking for reasons behind the ban of the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands and the survival of the Movimento sociale italiano, this study tests five conditions: (1) ambiguity towards — if not open approval of — violence; (2) absence of effective alternatives to proscription; (3) securitization; (4) veto player agreement; (5) veto player incentives. We find that securitization is a necessary condition for proscription, whereas approval of violence is not. While neither the presence of effective alternatives nor veto player incentives relate to ban outcomes in a consistent pattern, veto player support remains crucial. [R, abr.]
72.6134 BOZKURT, Umut —
This article aims to analyse state-bourgeoisie relations in the era of AKP-rule in Turkey, with a specific focus on the 2018 economic crisis. It will discuss the following question: how did the AKP regime position itself with respect to the interests of the first- and second-generation bourgeoisie? Especially after 2010, the AKP was criticised for carrying out an extra-economic intervention in the sphere of accumulation as well as providing benefits to the Islamic second-generation bourgeoisie. This article draws on a Marxist conceptualisation of the state which underlines that the state's autonomy from the economy is limited because its continued existence depends on the reproduction of accumulation, hence its need to intervene. However, the state cannot implement a unified interventionist strategy because it needs to maintain links with different groups of bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat. [R, abr.]
72.6135 BRACALENTE, Bruno ; FORCINA, Antonio ; FALOCCI, Nicola —
Using an innovative methodology, we investigate the relationship between local context and voter transitions in Umbria, the first Italian ‘red region’ recently conquered by the Lega. We estimate voter transitions from the general elections of 2018 to the European elections of 2019 and from the latter to the regional elections within twenty small areas that cover the entire region and apply multinomial models to investigate how these estimates of voter transitions are related to a set of variables that describe the local context. The set included both variables measuring the composition of the population by age, educational qualification, profession, etc., as well as other specific characteristics of the places. To reduce the number of the original explanatory variables which are, often, strongly correlated, three composite variables were detected by factor analysis, which are interpretable as urban factor, dynamism factor and unemployment factor; a dummy variable taking value 1 in areas with a strong left-wing tradition was added. In explaining the voter transitions, socio-economic factors were more important than the political tradition. [R, abr.]
72.6136 BRAITHWAITE, Alex, et al. —
We investigate how the outbreak of epidemics can affect host governments' targeting of refugees and violation of their physical integrity rights. We argue that governments target repression against refugees for two reasons. First, refugees are easily scapegoated for the arrival of epidemics at a time when governments are looking to shift the blame for their own poor performance. Second, crises provide circumstances for governments to engage in opportunistic repression to further their goal of coercing existing refugees to depart and deterring new refugees from arriving. Drawing upon a global dataset of countries for the years 1996 to 2015, we demonstrate that epidemic outbreaks do indeed increase the likelihood and scale of government repression targeting refugee populations. These effects are especially pronounced in countries with higher proportions of refugees hosted and in less democratic countries. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6137 BRENNER, David ; TAZZIOLI, Martina —
We propose a novel conceptualization of rebel governance as competing biopolitics. Tracing biopolitical technologies of rebel rule reveals the productive functions of war-time social orders for molding populations into imagined communities in direct opposition to the existing nation state. We develop this perspective by mobilizing Foucault's work in conjunction with Chatterjee's postcolonial understanding of governmentality in contexts of postcolonial state- and nation-formation, and empirical research on the Pat Jasan in northern Myanmar. Linked to the Kachin rebellion, this movement has fought against a devastating narcotics crisis with biopolitical interventions that form the Kachin nation body amidst protracted ethnonational conflict. This offers three distinct contributions to international studies: exploring non-state armed groups as actors of public health, theorizing the sociological underpinnings of rebel governance, and developing the concept of biopolitics beyond the nation-state. [R, abr.]
72.6138 BRODNAX, NaLette M. ; SAPIEZYNSKI, Piotr —
Political advertising on digital platforms has grown dramatically in recent years as campaigns embrace new ways of targeting supporters and potential voters. We examine how political campaign dynamics have evolved in response to the growth of digital media by analyzing the advertising strategies of US presidential election campaigns during the 2020 primary cycle. To identify geographic and temporal trends, we employ regression analyses of campaign spending across nearly 600,000 advertisements published on Facebook. We show that campaigns employed a new strategy of targeting voters in candidates' home states during the “invisible primary.” In contrast to earlier studies, we find that home state targeting is a key strategy for all campaigns, rather than just for politicians with existing political and financial networks. While all candidates advertised to their home state, those who dropped out during the invisible primary tended to spend disproportionately more than the candidates who outlasted them. [R, abr.] [First article of a symposium on “America in the 2020 Elections”, introducted by Seth C. McKEE. See also Abstr. 72.6132, 6252, 6441]
72.6139 BROWN, Jacob R. ; ZOOROB, Michael —
We examine a change in social context following the relocation of homelessness and drug treatment services in Boston (US). In 2014, an unexpected bridge closing forced nearly 1000 people receiving emergency shelter or addiction treatment to relocate from an island in the Boston Harbor to mainland Boston, causing sustained increases in drug-use, loitering, and other features of neighborhood disorder. Residents near the relocation facilities mobilized to maintain order in their community. In the subsequent Mayoral election, their turnout grew 9% points while participation in state and national elections was unchanged. However, increased turnout favored the incumbent Mayor, consistent with voter learning about candidate quality following local shocks. Voters responded to neighborhood changes at the relevant electoral scale and rewarded responsive politicians. [R, abr.]
72.6140 BRYANT, Lisa A., et al. —
Unlike citizens in nearly all other democracies, most US citizens bear the responsibility for registering to vote. We test whether states can help citizens overcome the barriers to registration and turnout using a simple postcard. To do this, we leverage a new program that brings states together to improve the quality of their voter registration rolls and generate lists of eligible but unregistered citizens. Using a unique list of eligible but unregistered citizens from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, we partnered with the Pennsylvania Department of State's Office to conduct a large-scale voter registration field experiment prior to the 2016 election. We provide new tests of traditional theories related to lowering the costs of registration as well as new theories related to promoting government responsiveness. [R, abr.]
72.6141 BU Zhong, et al. —
Considerable work has been devoted to studying voter behavior in US presidential elections by analyzing their political participation and attitude toward political advertising. Less is known about how other factors may alter voter behavior like personality traits and use of information and communication technology (ICT). This study analyzes vote likelihood among American young voters and their parents (N= 674) after they watched four presidential campaign commercials. It proposes a hierarchical mediation model highlighting the need for cognition (NFC) impact on vote likelihood through the mediation of power use of ICT applications, political participation and trust in negative advertising. This study has revealed both the direct effect of NFC on vote likelihood, and the indirect relationship between NFC and vote likelihood that is mediated by power use of ICT applications. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6347]
72.6142 BURNETT, Craig M. ; KOGAN, Vladimir —
At last count, US voters were responsible for directly electing more than 510,000 public officials. Few of these contests feature lively campaigns or attract substantial media attention, often leaving the average voter to make decisions with limited information. We argue that the cognitive strategies voters use to make decisions in these low-information contests depend in part on the informational cues printed on their ballot — in particular, the presence or absence of partisan labels. Using two “Who Said What?” experiments, we show that voters engage in social categorization — and do so on the basis of race and ethnicity when candidates differ in their demographic background. We also find, however, that the availability of party labels shapes the degree to which voters categorize candidates based on their race and ethnicity. [R, abr.]
72.6143 BUSBY, Ethan C. —
Democracies face rising concerns about extremism. At the same time, citizens and political actors define extremism in different ways with different consequences. In light of this, what do American citizens and elected officials consider to be extreme, and what political penalties are associated with extreme behavior and beliefs? To answer these questions, we rely on three surveys, two of the American public and one with American elected officials. Respondents' open-ended definitions of extremism and two conjoint experiments suggest that Americans do have ideas about extremism that correspond to research and theorizing about democracy — focusing, for example, on spatial extremity and an unwillingness to listen to others. However, the use of these standards is slanted in favor of one's own political position and does not indicate a robust recognition or rejection of many normatively troubling forms of extremism. [R]
72.6144 CALNITSKY, David —
In the standard formulation, the Marxist theory of the state implies that socialism requires revolution: Reformist social policy generates capital flight and capital flight undermines reform. I show that this mechanism, while plausible, turns out to have little empirical merit. State theory correctly points to an “accumulation” function whereby capitalist states depend on revenue and must therefore worry about the reforms that undermine profitability. But this accumulation function has been overwhelmed, historically, by a more powerful “legitimation” function: Popular social expenditures in rich capitalist democracies tend to grow and only rarely decline, even during the so-called neoliberal period. This article considers both sides of this debate. First, I propose (and predict) a path to socialism by way of mushrooming social policy. [R, abr.]
72.6145 CAMMETT, Melani, et al. —
A large literature finds that co-ethnicity primarily shapes voter behavior through material exchanges, particularly clientelism. Yet identity groups provide distinct psychological and social benefits that also compel people to vote based on co-ethnicity. Does co-ethnicity matter for vote-choice, net of instrumental considerations? We address this question using a conjoint experiment in Lebanon, which asked a nationally representative sample of citizens to choose between potential candidates in national elections. We find that co-ethnicity is the single strongest predictor of electoral support, more important than party affiliation, provision of clientelism, or programmatic platform. Co-ethnicity does not significantly alter perceptions of candidates who pro-vide clientelism, including high-value goods like patronage employment. [R, abr.]
72.6146 CAMPBELL, Rosie ; BOLET, Diane —
This article reviews the issues raised by the reaction to an audit experiment, studying the responsiveness of British MPs to their constituents, in November and December 2020. The experiment was part of a wider comparative project investigating the linkage between legislators and their constituents. We sent two short emails to all MPs asking how they and their party were going to respond to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were required by our ethics committee to debrief the subjects, providing the opportunity to withdraw from the analysis. The scale of the reaction to the debriefing email was neither desired nor anticipated (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56196967). We explain how we got ourselves into such difficulty, how we might have stayed out of it and the wider implications of our experience for experimental research on politicians. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5885]
72.6147 CANSUNAR, Asli —
While philanthropy is seen as a critical instrument for wealth redistribution in countries with low state capacity or weak welfare institutions, there is little empirical evidence of its distributional consequences. What are the incentives of the rich to philanthropically invest in local public goods? How do these incentives shape inequalities in access to services across ethnic and social groups? I answer these questions by exploiting the fact that fountains in Ottoman Istanbul, a city with rigid religious and social cleavages, were built by the Muslim elite's private initiatives through the waqf system. Using data on water provision from 1868, I find that elites used philanthropy to benefit themselves disproportionately. Elite neighborhoods were more likely to have water access and had more fountains. Also, Muslim communities were better endowed than non-Muslim communities. [R, abr.]
72.6148 CAO Xiuling ; ZHANG Danqi ; LUO Qianjun —
Based on Appraisal Theory and critical discourse analysis, this corpusassisted study examines how China Daily (CD) and South China Morning Post (SCMP) used appraisal resources to express their respective stances towards the anti-extradition bill movement. The results show that both newspapers employed negative resources of Judgement and the predication strategy to convey their stance, but SCMP seemed more refrained in the use of appraisal resources. CD openly stated that any illegal actions should be punished, and SCMP also criticised these actions. Besides, CD emphasized the consequences brought by violence and attributed the breakout of the protests to the opposition camp's political intention for their own benefit, whereas SCMP highlighted Hong Kongers' widespread opposition to the bill. These differences in language use and stance might be explained by the different press systems they respectively belong to and related to their respective historical and socio-political contexts. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6448]
72.6149 CARLIN, Ryan E., et al. —
A robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders' standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending the partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries support our pro-constituency model of accountability. When economic inequality is high, growth concentrates among the rich, and approval of right-of-center presidents is higher. Leftist presidents benefit from growth when gains are more equally distributed. Further analyses show growth and inequality inform perceptions of personal finances differently based on wealth, providing a micro-mechanism behind the aggregate findings. Study results imply that the economy is not purely a valence issue, but also a position issue. [R]
72.6150 CARNEGIE, Allison ; GAIKWAD, Nikhar —
This article provides a systematic examination of the role of security considerations in shaping mass preferences over international economic exchange. The authors employ multiple survey experiments conducted in the United States and India, along with observational and case study evidence, to investigate how geopolitics affects voters' views of international trade. Their research shows that respondents consistently — and by large margins — prefer trading with allies over adversaries. Negative prior beliefs about adversaries, amplified by concerns that trade will bolster the partner's military, account for this preference. Yet the authors also find that a significant proportion of the public believes that trade can lead to peace and that the peace-inducing aspects of trade can cause voters to overcome their aversion to trade with adversaries. This article helps explain when and why governments constrained by public opinion pursue economic cooperation in the shadow of conflict. [R]
72.6151 CARPENTER, Stephanie M. ; BRAUER, Markus ; NIEDENTHAL, Paula M. —
We tested a national rural resentment hypothesis using survey methodology. 3820 respondents representing all 50 US states reported the extent to which they felt resentment- and admiration-related emotions toward public school teachers, state university professors, and agents of departments of natural resources, and reported the presidential candidate they voted for in the 2016 general election. Rural and urban Americans' resentment of government employees was significantly lower than their admiration for members of those groups. Political party affiliation and education predicted resentment of government employees more than did rural-urban residence. Although Americans residing in rural areas were more likely to have voted for Donald Trump than Americans residing in urban areas, resentment of government employees accounted for a relatively small proportion of this effect. [R, abr.]
72.6152 CARRERAS, Miguel ; VISCONTI, Giancarlo ; ACÁCIO, Igor —
Did the election of Donald Trump have an immediate effect on trust in the US government in Latin America? While on the campaign trail, the Republican candidate used strong and derogatory language to describe Latin American countries and people and made policy proposals that could deteriorate US-Latin American relations. However, it is not clear whether the 2016 election led to a rapid decline in trust in the US government in Latin America. Leveraging the timing of the field implementation of the 2016 wave of the Americas Barometer in five Latin American countries, we estimate the effect of the 2016 presidential election on respondents' attitudes using a regression discontinuity design in time. [R, abr.]
72.6153 CARTY, R. Kenneth —
For most of the twentieth century the Irish party system was stable and unchanging, centred on Fianna Fáil, Europe's most electorally successful political party. That system suddenly collapsed in 2011 when Irish electoral politics became unusually volatile, ending decades of one-party dominance and leaving democratic elections unable to provide for government choice and accountability. This paper traces this transformation of the party system, unmasking the altered dynamics of the country's electoral competition, through a focus on its long-dominant natural party of government. It concludes by considering the challenges and prospects for Ireland's party democracy. [R] [See Abstr. 72.5983]
72.6154 CASERO-RIPOLLÉS, Andreu ; ALONSO-MUÑOZ, Laura ; MARCOS-GARCÍA, Silvia —
Social media has introduced new parameters that can potentially transform the digital political conversation. Traditionally, in the age of mass communication, public debate was dominated by politicians and journalists. However, digital platforms, primarily Twitter, have allowed other social actors to join the political discussion, trying to influence it. The objective of this research is to establish what factors enable the authority and digital influence of political actors in the public debate on Twitter. We use a big data sample of 127.3 million tweets from the negotiation process around the formation of the Government in Spain. The applied methodology is based on social network analysis and machine learning. The results show that ideology, political initiative, and political career are configured as factors capable of conditioning the authority and influence of political actors in the political conversation on Twitter. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6347]
72.6155 CASEY, Katherine —
Seminal studies show that naive lab participants accurately predict who wins real-world elections based solely on candidate photos. It is unclear what this implies for the health of democracy without knowing whether candidates who look more electable or competent in photos behave more competently in office. This study brings novel performance data to this question and shows that voters can identify which politicians divert less public money and communicate more persuasively based solely on headshots. Such inferences do not predict politicians' effort visiting their constituencies, but neither do other available metrics like professional qualifications. I implement these studies in a low-income country where ballots include candidate photos and where weak institutional checks raise the stakes for selecting innately competent leaders. [R, abr.]
72.6156 ÇAVDAR, Gamze —
The author analyzes women's support for conservative parties in Turkey between 2003 and 2020. She highlights the role of clientelist networks that strategically target women and provide them with both material benefits (such as cash and in-kind transfers) and non-material aid (such as social support and solidarity). [R]
72.6157 CEPURAN, Colin J. G. ; BERRY, Justin —
Scholarship in American politics finds whites' racial resentment and status threat predict their vote-choice. However, research in social identity indicates that such variables should negatively correlate with participation, attenuating resentful whites' political power. We resolve this contradiction by studying these variables interactively, using data from the 2012, 2016, and 2020 American National Election Studies. Our primary independent variables are racial resentment and a measure of relative discrimination that captures whites' perceptions of inequality relative to other racial/ethnic groups. Both constituent variables are negatively associated with participation. Interactively, they are positively associated with political participation. These relationships persist when we predict voter turnout, an index measuring non-electoral participation, and an index measuring civic engagement. In 2012, our interaction term moderates the negative impact of racial resentment in relative discrimination. [R, abr.]
72.6158 CHAHONGNAO, Shimreisa —
This study analyses the issue of legitimacy that unfolds to understand the authority claims of traditional leaders underpinned by customary law in contrast to modern law and legislations in the democracies of two erstwhile British colonies: South Africa and the Tangkhul Nagas of India and Myanmar. [R, abr.]
72.6159 CHAN, Nathan Kar Ming ; KIM Jae Yeon ; LEUNG, Vivien —
Extending theories of social exclusion and elite messaging, we argue that Trump's targeted rhetoric toward Asian-Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic pushes the racial group, largely “Independent” or nonpartisan affiliated, to lean more towards the Democratic Party. We support this claim by combining social media (Study 1) and survey data (Study 2) analysis. Tracing 1.4 million tweets, we find that Trump's rhetoric has popularized racially charged coronavirus-related terms and that exclusionary, anti-Asian attitudes have increased in the US since the pandemic began. Next, by analyzing repeated cross-sectional weekly surveys of Asian- Americans from July 2019 to May 2020 (n=12,907), we find that the group has leaned more towards the Democratic Party since Trump first made inflammatory remarks towards Asian Americans. Whites, Blacks, and Latina/os, on the other hand, exhibited fewer and less consistent changes in Democratic Party-related attitudes. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6160 CHANG, Vincent K. L. —
There is a common perception that the Chinese state promotes fabricated accounts of the Second World War and the Communist Party's role in that conflict. Despite a growing scholarly interest in the history and collective memory of China's war experience, this perception has rarely been scrutinized, and the field has been slow to recognize recent shifts in China's memoryscape. This study draws on the concept of historical statecraft to compare official accounts with the historical record and explore how the Chinese party-state uses war memory for political purposes. It finds that its desire for national unity and international recognition have led Beijing to espouse a narrative of the Second World War that, despite significant gaps, is more representative and historically accurate than ever before. [R, abr.]
72.6161 CHARNYSH, Volha —
Two dominant explanations for ethnic bias in distributional outcomes are electoral incentives and out-group prejudice. This article proposes a novel and complementary explanation for the phenomenon: variation in legibility across ethnic groups. The author argues that states will allocate fewer resources to groups from which they cannot gather accurate information or collect taxes. The argument is supported by original data on state aid from the 1891/1892 famine in the Russian Empire. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that districts with a larger Muslim population experienced higher famine mortality and received less generous public assistance. The Muslims, historically ruled via religious intermediaries, were less legible to state officials and generated lower fiscal revenues. State officials could not count on the repayment of food loans or collect tax arrears from Muslim communes, so they were more likely to withhold aid. State relief did not vary with the presence of other minorities that were more legible and generated more revenue. [R]
72.6162 CHAUVANCY, Raphaël —
L’information est une arme essentielle dans les crises avec des approches très différentes entre les démocraties et les régimes autoritaires. Ceux-ci instrumentalisent l’information à des fins de désinformation. A l’inverse, les démocraties peuvent se renforcer et contrer la menace en demeurant ouvertes. [R]
72.6163 CHENG, Julia Y. —
Although researchers have identified conditions for marital formation across and along ethnic lines, few efforts have been made to clarify factors behind in-group rejection. This article looks at one specific aspect of rejection within ‘us' through the lens of long-distance nationalism. The data were collected from islander-origin first-generation Taiwanese Americans in a transnational community organization in the San Diego area, whose ancestors can be traced to provinces in southeast China. The long-term development of the islanders-led nationalist movement in Taiwan has made these immigrants long-distance nationalists by default. The article finds that although all immigrants identify ‘us' with Taiwanese American, they have developed two types of transnational attachment (homeland and home) affecting their different ways of transforming ‘us' into ‘marriageable us.’ While immigrants with homeland attachment have developed a Taiwan-first hyphenated identity that excludes Chinese people from the group of ‘us' and ‘marriageable us,’ those who have a home attachment apply a symbolic approach to Taiwanese ethnicity resulting in the decoupling of ‘us' and ‘marriageable us.’ By showing in-group heterogeneity in the transformation of ‘us' into ‘marriageable us' in the context of Taiwanese immigration to the United States, this article identifies community organizations as a mechanism for supporting the variance of transnational attachment. [R]
72.6164 CHERNOBROV, Dmitry —
How do diasporas fight online information wars during armed conflicts in their homelands? I explore this question through interviews with 30 young diaspora Armenians in seven nations about their practical experiences of online activism during the 2020 Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I examine their motivations for engaging in social media activism; strategies and methods of promoting the Armenian narrative; vision of the online opponent; and perceived outcomes of their efforts. Besides investigating this recent case of diaspora mobilization during armed conflict, the study offers broader conclusions about social media and participatory warfare, and about the changing roles of diasporas in international relations. I demonstrate how social media enable participatory war that is transnational, monologic, empowering and retaliatory, involving individual and networked tactics, and culturally and politically transformative. [R, abr.]
72.6165 CIORNEI, Irina ; EUCHNER, Eva-Maria ; YESIL, Ilay —
Despite growing anti-immigrant discourse and radical-right party electoral support, most Western European states include Islam in religious education classes in public schools. What are the conditions that explain these policy changes? Who are the main political allies of Muslims' demands for inclusion in religious education? Based on an original dataset that gathered data on religious education policies in 13 European countries between 1970 and 2010, this article inquires how party ideology and secularisation explain the timing and equal inclusion of Islam. The article shows that, while Left-dominated governments are the main drivers for introducing Islam within curricula, Christian-Democratic parties in power promote equal terms of inclusion, especially in contexts with a secular approach to religious education. [R, abr.]
72.6166 CLEARY, Matthew R. ; ÖZTÜRK, Aykut —
In recent decades, prominent national leaders like Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez gained power through democratic institutions, only to undermine those institutions once in office as part of a broader effort to consolidate authoritarian power. Yet attempts at “executive aggrandizement” have failed in other countries, with varying consequences for democratic institutions. We develop an agency-based perspective to enhance the understanding of aggrandizement and to explain when it results in democratic breakdown. Relying on comparative case studies of five countries — Bolivia, Ecuador, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela — our analysis suggests that the contingent decisions of opposition actors during the process of aggrandizement have a significant effect on regime outcomes. Irregular opposition attempts to remove incumbents from office, which are especially likely after electoral defeats, contribute to democratic breakdown. [R, abr.]
72.6167 CLIFFORD, Scott —
Citizens hold robust stereotypes about the parties and their leaders, including the issues they are most competent at handling and the character traits they exemplify. Yet, we know less about whether and how party stereotypes are linked in the minds of voters. I argue that there are strong links between issues and traits, and that these links are not merely the byproduct of elite ideology. Rather, issue-ownership is structured, in part, by the moral problems those issues represent (e.g., suffering) and the character traits (e.g., compassion) that are relevant to solving those problems. As a result, there should be strong and widespread links between the issues and character traits that parties own. Alternatively, any issuetrait linkages might be wholly a product of elite behavior, in which case these links should be limited to the politically engaged. [R, abr.]
72.6168 COCCO, Jessica Di ; MONECHI, Bernardo —
One of the main challenges in comparative studies on populism concerns its temporal and spatial measurements within and between a large number of parties and countries. Textual analysis has proved useful for these purposes, and automated methods can further improve research in this direction. Here, we propose a method to derive a score of parties' levels of populism using supervised machine learning to perform textual analysis on national manifestos. We illustrate the advantages of our approach, which allows for measuring populism for a vast number of parties and countries without resource-intensive human-coding processes and provides accurate, updated information for temporal and spatial comparisons of populism. Furthermore, our method allows for obtaining a continuous score of populism, which ensures more fine-grained analyses of the party landscape while reducing the risk of arbitrary classifications. [R, abr.]
72.6169 COHEN, Dara Kay ; KARIM, Sabrina M. —
Recent world events, such as the rise of hypermasculine authoritarian leaders, have shown the importance of both sex and gender for understanding international politics. However, quantitative researchers of conflict have long relegated the study of sex and gender inequality as a cause of war to a specialized group of scholars, despite overwhelming evidence that the connections are profound and consequential. In this review essay, we demonstrate the tremendous progress made in this field by analyzing a wave of research that examines the relationships between sex and gender inequality and war. We divide this work into theories that emphasize strategy versus those that analyze structures. In addition, we focus on two aspects of this research agenda — specifying mechanisms that link sex and gender inequality to war, and leveraging data at multiple levels of analysis — to outline fruitful pathways forward for the broader international security research agenda. [R, abr.]
72.6170 CONSTERDINE, Erica —
The Conservatives have long been ideologically split on immigration between the business right and identity right of the party. Appealing to the social right of its voter base, since 2010 immigration policy has been doggedly restrictive. Yet, lobbying channelled through bureaucratic politics has led to subtle, but important, concessions to appease business interests. The Conservative administrations have legitimised these concessions by making distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants. In the 2010s, lobbying strategies, while shifting according to the political climate, predominantly consisted of insider lobbying. Yet, with significant labour market shortages induced by the new immigration system and heightened by the pandemic, employers are ‘going public’ with their opposition, placing significant pressure on the Conservatives to perform a policy reversal. Meanwhile, public opinion on immigration has softened and its saliency has dwindled. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6171 COOPERMAN, Rosalyn ; SHUFELDT, Gregory ; CONGER, Kimberly —
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump secured their respective party's 2016 nominations only after raucous, spirited debates among delegates at the start of each party convention. Groups and their preferred candidates behaved consistently with the policy demanders view of parties, which identifies parties as comprised of coalitions of groups with strong policy preferences that negotiate with one another for influence in the party decisionmaking and policy process. Using the 2016 Convention Delegate Study, the longest standing survey of Democratic and Republican Party activists, we examine intra-party groups as new delegates are folded into the framework along with returning delegates. We assess how the theory of parties as comprised of policy-demander groups works in a context of high external party polarization. [R, abr.]
72.6172 CORNELISSEN, Lars —
This article examines the complex relationship between neoliberalism and the Brexit campaign. It proposes to move beyond simplified explanations that see in Brexit a ‘populist’ revolt against the neoliberal status quo by drawing attention to neoliberal ideas surrounding Europe and the free market. The article contends that from the 1990s onwards, many prominent neoliberal thinkers came to see the European Union as a threat to free trade and individual liberty, prompting them to support Brexit as a means of subverting the growing influence of European federalism. In building this argument, the article maps and analyses the key theoretical elements of neoliberal Euroscepticism, focusing in turn on the neoliberals' interpretation of the European project, their critique of European Monetary Union, and their approach to the question of national sovereignty. [R, abr.]
72.6173 COS, Grant ; ELAHI, Babak —
Ronald Reagan's iconic, 1984 advertisement, “Morning in America,” has served as an ideological pole star for Republican identity for the past four decades. More recently, the political action committee, The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republicans, produced a number of ads highly critical of President Donald Trump's administration. One specific ad, “Mourning in America,” uses the form of the original 1984 ad to communicate a set of radically different ideas from the original. This article fuses Black's second persona and Wander's third persona to Charland's idea of constitutive rhetoric to explore how “Morning in America” constitutes a Republican identity via a matrimonial symbolism that connects candidate to a gauzy, constructed community and imagined culture. We argue that the Lincoln Project's “Mourning in America” deconstitutes the very ideals promulgated in the original ad through a stark funereal symbolism. The implications of this symbolism on the Republican identity are discussed in the conclusion. [See Abstr. 72.6347]
72.6174 COSTA, Mia —
Citizens hold gender-specific stereotypes about women in political office, yet scholars disagree on whether these stereotypes lead to a “double bind” in which female legislators are held to higher standards than male legislators. Two survey experiments reveal how citizen evaluations of elite responsiveness to constituent mail are conditioned by gender and sexist attitudes. The findings suggest that a double bind does exist in legislator– constituent communication, even among people who have positive views of women. For instance, although the least sexist respondents favor communication from female legislators regardless of the quality of communication, they also punish women, but not men, for taking longer to respond to constituent mail. Male legislators are also more likely to be rewarded for being friendly as respondents' sexism increases, but female legislators do not enjoy the same advantage, likely due to gender stereotypes and expectations regarding women's behavior. [R]
72.6175 COX, Michael —
The Royal Institute of International Affairs has for a century been at the forefront of an ongoing ‘Anglo-American’ conversation about world politics. Yet it did very little independent research of its own on US foreign policy. However, it took on a more organized form following the attack of 9/11 [2001]. Chatham House decided to establish a new Study Group — the ‘United States Discussion Group’ (USDG) — which went on to discuss US foreign policy in depth. This article outlines the origins of the USDG, the main contours of what was discussed within the Group, the degree to which these discussions were different to those then underway within the US itself, and finally assesses the contribution it made in helping encourage further debate on the US within Britain's foremost foreign policy Think Tank. [R, abr.]
72.6176 COX, Paulo ; MORALES QUIROGA, Mauricio —
Gender gaps in voter turnout are usually studied using opinion surveys rather than official census data. This is because administrative censuses usually do not disaggregate turnout according to voters' sex. Without this official information, much of the research on gender gaps in electoral turnout relies on survey respondents' self-reported behavior, either before or after an election. The decision to use survey data implies facing several potential drawbacks. Among them are the turnout overstatement bias and the attrition or nonresponse bias, both affecting the estimation of factors explaining turnout and any related statistical analysis. Furthermore, these biases may be correlated with covariates such as gender: men, more than women, may systematically overstate their electoral participation. We analyze turnout gender gaps in Chile, comparing national surveys with official administrative data, which in Chile are publicly available. Crucially, the latter includes the official record of sex, age, and the electoral behavior — whether the individual voted or not — for about 14 million registered individuals. Based on a series of statistical models, we find that analysis based on survey data is likely to rule out gender gaps in electoral participation. Carrying out the same exercises, but with official data, leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that there is a sizable gender gap favoring women. [R]
72.6177 CRAIG, Stephen C. ; COSSETTE, Paulina S. —
Two current members of the US Supreme Court took their seats despite allegations of sexual harassment (Clarence Thomas) and sexual assault (Brett Kavanaugh) leveled against them during their confirmation hearings. In each instance, the Senate vote was close and split mainly along party lines: Republicans for and Democrats against. Polls showed that a similar division existed among party supporters in the electorate. Using data from a national survey of registered voters, we examine the factors associated with citizens' attitudes about the role of women in politics, the extent to which sexism is a problem in society, the recent avalanche of sexual harassment charges made against elected officials and other political (as well as entertainment, business, and academic) figures, and the #MeToo movement. [R, abr.]
72.6178 CROSSON, Jesse M. ; TSEBELIS, George —
We examine the mechanical effect of a multiple vote, proportional representation electoral system on party vote share in n dimensions. In one dimension, Cox (1990) has proven that such a system is centripetal: it drives parties to the center of the political spectrum. However, as populism has swept across Western Europe and the United States, the importance of multiple policy dimensions has grown considerably. We use simulations to examine how a multiple vote system could alter electoral outcomes in all possible parliamentary systems. We find that multiple vote systems act centripetally in multiple dimensions too, though weakly in extreme cases where parties are sorted into ideological clusters at opposite corners of the ideological space. Even in these cases, though, we find that a slight disturbance of the conditions (by introducing an additional party- even if it is very small) strengthens the centripetal properties of the multiple vote system. [R]
72.6179 CUNHA SILVA, Patrick ; CRISP, Brian F. —
Electoral systems vary in terms of the choice and influence they offer voters. Beyond selecting between parties, preferential systems allow for choices within parties. More proportional systems make it likely that influence over who determines the assembly's majority will be distributed across relatively more voters. In response to systems that limit choice and influence, we hypothesize that voters will cast more blank, null, or spoiled ballots on purpose. We use a regression discontinuity opportunity in French municipal elections to test this hypothesis. An exogenously chosen and arbitrary cutpoint is used to determine the electoral rules municipalities use to select their assemblies. We find support for our reasoning — systems that do not allow intraparty preference votes and that lead to disproportional outcomes provoke vote spoilage. [R, abr.]
72.6180 CURRAN, Declan ; GILLANDERS, Robert ; MAHMALAT, Mounir —
The ideational power framework developed by Carstensen and Schmidt has sought to make explicit the manner in which ideas can exert an influence over policy outcomes. However, one key feature of this theoretical framework has not yet been adequately conceptualised: the communicative process through which policy entrepreneurs convey their ideas to the general public. This article focuses on one specific form of communicative discourse as a means of generating widespread public support for a given policy proposal: public discourse via the media — be it print, broadcast or social media. We argue that the ideational power literature should recognise the media as a powerful entity in its own right rather than merely depicting the media as an implement for political communication. We contend that the ideational power framework could usefully incorporate a characterisation of the media that has recently emerged from political communications research: the hybrid media system. [R, abr.]
72.6181 DAFOE, Allan, et al. —
What public pressures do leaders face in international disputes? Leaders often denounce foreign actions as provocations, triggering public anger and demands for restitution. Rather than generating a reflexive rally around the flag, we argue that leaders who invoke foreign provocations — whether hypothetical, remembered, exaggerated, or real — face heightened public disapproval if they fail to take tough action in the present. Across two survey experiments and a quasi-experiment involving US naval patrols in the South China Sea, we find that incidents construed as provocative increase public pressure on the Chinese government to respond or incur public disapproval. We discuss possible explanations, how government elites seek to mitigate public disapproval, and how such events can change the logic of coercion and deterrence. [R]]
72.6182 DAMBO, Tamar Haruna, et al. —
The auhtors discuss how new media technologies are leading the way for new forms of political inclusion campaigns and political activity among youths in Nigeria. They examine the impact of the #NotTooYoungToRun (NTYTR) campaign in Nigeria. [R]
72.6183 DEBUS, Marc —
This contribution presents the policy profiles of the parties represented in the Bundestag on the basis of their 2021 election manifestos. Furthermore, we present — on the basis of the determinants of government-formation in Germany at the state and federal level since 1990 — the most likely coalition using different scenarios of the distribution of seats in the 20th German Bundestag, including the election outcome. The findings show that government formation in Germany is determined by office- and policy-seeking coalition theories and by institutional-contextual factors. A coalition between the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Free Democrats (FDP) is the most likely outcome of the 2021 government formation process if another “grand coalition” between the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is considered as rejected. [R, abr.]
72.6184 DeFORD, Daryl R. ; EUBANK, Nicholas ; RODDEN, Jonathan —
We introduce a fine-grained measure of the extent to which electoral districts combine and split local communities of co-partisans in unnatural ways. Our indicator — which we term Partisan Dislocation — is a measure of the difference between the partisan composition of a voter's geographic nearest neighbors and that of her assigned district. We show that our measure is a good local and global indicator of district manipulation, easily identifying instances in which districts carve up clusters of co-partisans (cracking) or combine them in unnatural ways (packing). We demonstrate that our measure is related to but distinct from other approaches to the measurement of gerrymandering, and has some clear advantages, above all as a complement to simulation-based approaches, and as a way to identify the specific neighborhoods most affected by gerrymandering. [R, abr.]
72.6185 DENNY, Elaine K. —
How do economic shocks and financial resilience shape civic engagement, especially for the economically insecure? I turn to the early months of the coronavirus pandemic for insights. In April 2020, with more than 23 million adults unemployed, the US government asked residents to participate in the constitutionally mandated decennial census. I test how variations in income shocks from the shutdown and sources of financial resilience predict disparities in census completion, a civic act designed to minimize participation barriers. First, I use nationally representative survey data to demonstrate that policies that protect the economically vulnerable from the full impacts of economic shocks also predict higher census completion rates. Then, I use Google Trends data to show that high unemployment search volume interacted with low resilience to predict depressed census completion. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6186 DILLET, Benoit —
In the last few years, research studies and opinion pieces have tried to account for the new polarisation and dealignment of US politics after Trump and the post-Brexit UK politics. It is now well-established both by academic research and by Facebook's own research that Facebook leads to more polarisation in its users' political views, but rhetorical analysis has not yet accounted for the role played by algorithms in political communication and persuasion. What does social media do to rhetoric? The situation of speech in social media is often treated like in a public sphere when it should not be. This misconception prevents rhetorical studies to take into consideration the question of technology. By using the recent literature in critical algorithm studies, I develop a new approach in rhetorical criticism. I argue here that the increasing agency that algorithms have acquired in delivering and mediating rhetoric means that we must consider the role played by intermediaries when examining rhetorical situations. This paper sheds light on what I call the four conditionalities of algorithms on rhetoric: (1) programmed speech content, (2) the verticalisation of political communication, (3) the new biases produced by digital media, and (4) the rhetorical machine learning. [R] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6187 DOLLBAUM, Jan Matti —
I compare the organization-building process in the “For Fair Elections” (FFE) protests of 2011–2012 across four Russian regions. I argue that mass protests are more likely to leave behind new social movement organizations (SMOs) when the local and the national interact, i.e., when long-standing activists on the ground perceive an opportunity to use the protests for their ongoing local struggles. Where new SMOs are established, their composition, activity pattern, and inner structure follow the tactical and organizational repertoires of veteran activists that were shaped by their local political environments. This argument illuminates the functioning of electoral authoritarian regimes from a subnational perspective and identifies conditions under which a bottom-up challenge to an authoritarian political system can drive local civil society development. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6652]
72.6188 DOWNING, Joseph ; BRUN, Estelle E. —
Advanced democracies increasingly face three interrelated challenges: new media technologies, increased political distrust and decreasing voter participation. During the 2017 French presidential election, all three were enmeshment while France witnessed its highest voter abstention rate since 1969. The Twitter hashtag #SansMoile7Mai (#WithoutMeMay7) emerged in the social media debate about abstention between the two rounds of the election, offering new insights into self-expression of abstention. Posing the research question “What discourses about voter abstention coalesce around the hashtag #SansMoile7Mai on social media during the 2017 French presidential election?”, this paper seeks to use the aforementioned case study to understand public discourse about voter abstention in the new digital era. By applying a multi-methods approach (social network analysis, thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis) to texts from #SansMoile7May, the results demonstrate that discourses around abstention conveyed significant distrust in contemporary French democracy and raised allegations of voter manipulation, expressing opposition to incoming president Emmanuel Macron as a product of an oligarchical system while — surprisingly — showing little opposition to the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6290]
72.6189 DRUCKMAN, James N., et al. —
Affective polarization — the tendency of ordinary partisans to dislike and distrust those from the other party — is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. High levels of out-party animus stem, in part, from misperceptions of the other party's voters. Specifically, individuals misestimate the ideological extremity and political engagement of typical out-partisans. When partisans are asked about “Democrats” or the “Republican Party,” they bring to mind stereotypes of engaged ideologues and, hence, express contempt for the other party. The reality, however, is that such individuals are the exception rather than the norm. We show that when partisans learn that reality, partisan animus falls sharply; partisans do not have much animus toward the typical member of the other party. Our results suggest antidotes for vitiating affective polarization but also complicate understandings of good citizenship. [R]
72.6190 DUFRESNE, Yannick, et al. —
This research note has two objectives. First, we present the Relative Confidence Index (RCI), a new measure of potential for growth and of solidity of the vote based on voters' expressed likelihood to vote for the parties in their constituency. We look in detail at the benefits of the RCI and show that it can be used to assess the potential for growth and the solidity of the vote for political parties at the constituency and provincial levels. Second, we apply this index to the case of the Parti Québécois, using large samples collected during the 2012, 2014, and 2018 Quebec election campaigns. This allows us to illustrate and draw conclusions about the potential for growth of the Parti Québécois. [R]
72.6191 DYRNES NORDØ, Åsta ; IVARSFLATEN, Elisabeth —
This article makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to the analysis of the scope of exclusionary reactions following a refugee crisis. Conceptually, we distinguish between three scope dimensions: substantive reach, duration and politicization. Empirically, we evaluate each of the scope dimensions using seven-wave panel-data collected before, during and after the large-scale influx of refugees to Norway. We find that the expected exclusionary reaction (1) spilled over to opinion about immigration broadly speaking; (2) endured in that it lasted long after the situation in Norway had been brought under control; (3) encompassed voters of all political stripes. Nevertheless, we also document an important limitation to the scope of the reaction: The sudden influx of refugees to Norway did not cause a permanent shift in public opinion. [R, abr.]
72.6192 ECKER, Alejandro, et al. —
This paper examines the validity of three approaches to estimate party positions on the general left-right and EU dimensions. We newly introduce party elite data from the comprehensive IntUne survey and cross-validate it with existing expert survey and manifesto data. The general left-right estimates generated by elites and experts show a higher congruence than those derived from party manifestos; neither measure clearly materializes as more valid regarding EU positions. We identify which factors explain diverging estimates. For instance, disagreement among experts has greater impact than their mere number. The substantial centrist bias of the manifesto estimates persists even when alternative documents are used to substitute manifestos. Low response rates among elites have no systematic detrimental effect on the validity of party position estimates. [R]
72.6193 EGGERS, Andrew C. ; HARDING, Robin —
We use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID-19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes towards the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. [R, abr.]
72.6194 EICHENBERGER, Steven ; VARONE, Frédéric ; HELFER, Luzia —
This study analyses how information provided by different types of interest groups influences the ability of members of parliament (MPs) to accurately perceive the preferences of those citizens who voted them into office. To study how information provision by interest groups affects MPs' perceptions, we combine unique data from a citizen survey and face-to-face meetings with 151 federal MPs in Switzerland, thus enabling a comparison of actual voter preferences with MPs' estimations of these preferences. Ties to citizen groups, as self-reported by MPs in our survey, relate to more accurate perceptions by MPs, even when controlling for MPs' partisan affiliation. Ties to business groups, as declared in the official registry, relate to less accurate perceptions. These findings suggest that interest groups can both tighten and weaken MPs' link to their party voters, which might have repercussions on substantive representation and democratic accountability. [R]
72.6195 ELSÄSSER, Lea ; SCHÄFER, Armin —
This article departs from the normative-theoretical literature on descriptive representation, which argues that some disadvantaged groups need a special form of representation. Most proponents of a guaranteed presence of women or ethnic minorities, however, do not believe that their arguments equally apply to social classes. The main reason is that the class cleavage historically structured many party systems, making ‘class issues' extraordinarily present. However, party systems and industrial relations have vastly changed since then, altering the circumstances under which representation takes place. Evaluating the theoretical arguments for descriptive representation with the help of empirical insights on growing political marginalisation of lower-status classes, this article argues that the societal and political changes of the last decades justify descriptive representation of the contemporary working class. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6203]
72.6196 EMMENEGGER, Patrick ; LEEMANN, Lucas ; WALTER, André —
This article contributes to the literature on direct democracy and public spending in two ways. First, we explore how direct democratic institutions interact with a specific aspect of the representative system, the size of the governing coalition, to influence public spending. Second, based on newly collected data, we examine the relationship between three different direct democratic institutions, coalition size and public spending over the period from 1860 to 2015. Empirically, we find that initiatives increase the size of the public sector under single-party governments, but this positive relationship disappears as coalition size increases. In contrast, we find that financial referendums slow down the growth of public spending, while law referendums are not systematically associated with public spending. [R, abr.]
72.6197 ENNSER-JEDENASTIK, Laurenz —
Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters' issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaigns make use of these new possibilities. To narrow this gap, we use a unique data set covering every Facebook post by party leaders and party organizations in the run-up to the 2017 Austrian parliamentary election. We test the hypothesis that party actors are more likely to double down on issues that have previously generated higher levels of user engagement. We also theorize that responsiveness is conditional on major/minor party status and pre-campaign issue salience. [R, abr.]
72.6198 ENYEDI, Zsolt ; CASAL BÉRTOA, Fernando —
Arguably, the most fundamental question one can ask about a party system is whether it is bipolar or not. Based on theoretical conjectures and on tendencies one observed during the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as reflecting the position of the academic community at the time (e.g. [Bale, T. (2003). Cinderella and Her ugly sisters: The mainstream and extreme right in Europe's bipolarising party systems. West European Politics, 26(3), 67-90; Müller, W., & Fallend, F. (2004). Changing patterns of party competition in Austria: From multipolar to bipolar system. West European Politics, 27(5), 801-835]), Peter Mair had a clear prediction: the future of party politics would be bipolar. Using the Who Governs Europe dataset [Casal Bértoa, F., & Enyedi, Z. (2021a). Party system closure: Party alliances, government alternatives, and democracy in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press], the article examines the validity of Mair's predictions. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5983]
72.6199 ERLANDSEN, Matthias ; HERNÁNDEZ-GARZA, María Fernanda ; SCHULZ, Carsten-Andreas —
This study focuses on the gendered nature of ambassadorial appointments. Analyzing the diplomatic services of ten Latin American countries between 2000 and 2018, we examine the factors that explain the designation of women to ambassadorships. More especially, we are interested in whether the election of women to the presidency in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Costa Rica had an impact on the gender gap at the top of those countries' foreign services. Drawing on an original dataset on diplomatic appointments, we show that the presence of women ambassadors has increased only marginally over the past two decades. Furthermore, multivariate regression analysis demonstrates that women presidents on the left have (partially and temporarily) corrected the gender gap in their foreign services through political appointments, provided they had the discretionary powers to do so. [R, abr.]
72.6200 ERLENBUSCH-ANDERSON, Verena —
In light of increasing white supremacist violence in the United States, calls to identify such violence as terrorism have surged in public discourse. Federal and state agencies have taken up these demands and included white supremacy in counterterrorism and national security policy. While this classification appears to remove the racist double standard in applications of the terrorism label, it has come under criticism for obscuring the history and distinctly US American roots of white supremacy, on the one hand, and expanding the harmful and typically racially coercive consequences of US counterterrorism, on the other hand. There is, however, a robust yet neglected tradition in US racial justice activism that uses the language of terrorism to make sense of white supremacy. By examining this tradition, this essay offers a more nuanced assessment of the dangers and possibilities of classifying white supremacy as terrorism. Specifically, I look at Ida B. Wells's analysis of lynching as racial terrorism to recover an alternative narrative of white supremacist terrorism. [R, abr.]
72.6201 ERTAN, Senem —
Countries around the world adopt different types of gender equality principles in government action plans, and these principles play a critical role in determining public policies regarding gender issues. International actors may prod countries in this direction; these actors include regional international parliaments. However, the power of regional international parliaments varies, allowing us to investigate the extent to which they have an impact on national governments' adoption of policy frameworks for gender equality. This study analyzes the impact of regional international parliaments on governments' gender equality policy frameworks. A three-dimension scale was developed to measure the degree to which governments have developed policy frameworks for gender equality. [R, abr.]
72.6202 ESSLETZBICHLER, Juergen ; FORCHER, Johannes —
While research on the spatial variation in populist right voting focuses on the role of “places left behind”, this paper examines the spatial distribution of populist right voting in one of the fastest growing capital cities of Europe, Vienna. Combining detailed electoral data of the 2017 national elections at the statistical ward level and the location of municipal housing units, the paper examines why the populist right “Austrian Freedom Party” (FPOE) performs better in the former bulwarks of socialism, in the municipal housing areas of “Red Vienna”. The paper links the socio-demographic development of Vienna and its municipal housing policy with election results and explores three possible reasons for elevated FPOE shares in municipal housing areas: rising housing costs pushed an increasing number of socially and economically vulnerable into the municipal housing sector and so increased the FPOE voter pool in those areas; European Union accession and changes in regulation allowed foreign citizens to apply to and obtain municipal housing flats triggering a backlash from Austrian municipal housing residents; and municipal housing is located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods further enhancing the FPOE voter pool. [R, abr.]
72.6203 EVANS, Geoffrey ; STUBAGER, Rune ; LANGSAETHER, Peter Egge —
The sources, meaning and political implications of class identity are conditional on national context, reflecting the relative importance of cultural (status-related) versus economic (resource-related) influences on class identification. Unlike Danes, the majority of Britons continue to identify as working class. This difference between the two societies is robust across the span of 50 years of survey data analysed. It is unrelated to national variations in inequality, reflecting instead the far larger influence of an ascriptive source of identity, class origins, in Britain compared with Denmark, where current class remains the primary influence. The two societies in turn differ in the extent to which class identity is associated with economic or cultural politics. In Denmark, working class identification is associated with endorsement of redistribution, in Britain it is associated with opposition to immigration. High levels of working class identification in Britain therefore provide an augmented constituency for the radical right rather than the left. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on "Working-class politics", edited and introduced by Nadja MOSIMANN, Line RENNWALD and Jonas PONTUSSON. See also Astr. 72.5814, 5923, 6195, 6271, 6356, 6374, 6387]
72.6204 FAHEY, James J. ; ALLEN, Trevor J. ; ALARIAN, Hannah M. —
Right-wing populists have emerged and endured in democracies globally, threatening democracy through their attacks on liberal institutions. Beyond these proximate threats, relatively little is known about how right-wing populists impact public opinion. This article addresses this gap, exploring change in democratic satisfaction among non-populist voters in two recent elections with right-wing populist success: the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2017 election of the far-right, populist Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. Leveraging high quality panel data, we reveal democratic satisfaction among the mainstream electorate declines after right-wing populists win. Conversely right-wing populist voters appear to be no more or less satisfied in democracy regardless of the election outcome. [R, abr.]
72.6205 FARRIS, Emily M. ; HOLMAN, Mirya R. ; SULLIVAN, Miranda E. —
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare deep-rooted racial and gender disparities in the United States. The lack of national policy produced an uneven patchwork of local policies. We quantitatively evaluate how descriptive representation translated to substantive representation in 500 cities' efforts to declare racism as a public health crisis and enact eviction moratoria. We find that representation shapes explicitly anti-racist resolutions on racism, not implicitly anti-racist eviction moratoria, suggesting the descriptive-substantive representation connection is more powerful for explicitly anti-racist policies. [R]
72.6206 FASTENRATH, Florian, et al. —
Why are rich citizens not taxed more heavily — despite growing inequality (aversion)? The literature offers several explanations, all of which ultimately work through the minds and actions of politicians. Taking Germany as a case, we therefore ask in 25 semi-structured interviews which obstacles left-wing politicians perceive in taxing the rich. Overall, tax increases are perceived as difficult projects. Organized business is described as a major barrier, but in a way that goes beyond existing accounts: besides classical lobbying, business interests are seen to influence electoral politics through long-term communication strategies shaping tax preferences. Moreover, the interviews point to a previously unrecognized organizational barrier that we coin the ‘vicious competence cycle’: left-wing politicians are often overwhelmed by tax issues which results in consequential disadvantages when confronted with resourceful anti-tax actors. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5967]
72.6207 FEITOSA, Fernando ; STIERS, Dieter ; DASSONNEVILLE, Ruth —
Civic duty has been perceived as a key determinant of turnout. That is, while dutiful citizens turn out in large numbers, those who conceive of voting as a choice do less so. The strong correlation between civic duty and turnout might be due to reverse causation, however. Specifically, individuals might adapt their sense of duty according to previous voting behavior. In this article, we leverage Belgium's compulsory voting system and the age-based discontinuity for the right to vote, and estimate the effects of being treated with participation on civic duty. We do not find “treated” citizens to be more likely to report civic duty than their “non-treated” counterparts. This finding holds across a series of robustness tests, and suggests that civic duty is exogenous to the vote. [R]
72.6208 FILINDRA, Alexandra ; KAPLAN, Noah J. ; BUYUKER, Beyza E. —
Scholars have argued that racial policy beliefs contributed to a decline in public trust among white-Americans, but this effect waned over time as racial policies left the agenda. We theorize that beliefs about racial policies may have been integrated into whites' racial attitudes, resulting in a durable association between racial prejudice and public trust. Our analysis of eight ANES surveys (1992-2020) shows that racial prejudice, measured in terms of anti-Black stereotypes, informs white Americans' beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government. LDV models strengthen our contention by showing that the relationship persists after an LDV is included and it is not reciprocal. [R]
72.6209 FINSERAAS, Henning ; STRØM, Marte —
We leverage a sudden shift in refugee settlement policy to study the electoral consequences of refugee settlements. After the 2013 Norwegian parliamentary election, the newly elected right-wing government made a concerted effort to spread newly arrived immigrants across the country, with the consequence that some municipalities with limited experience in settling refugees accepted to do so. We propose that such policy changes have political consequences, increasing the salience of immigration issues and shifting voters' preferences to the right. We further propose that successful refugee integration can move (parts of) the electorate to the left, with stronger political polarization as a possible effect of the policy change. Applying difference-in-differences techniques, we find no evidence of unidirectional shifts in voter sentiments, but support for the hypothesis of stronger political polarization. [R]
72.6210 FLIS, Jarosław ; KAMINSKI, Marek M. —
We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in singlemember district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties' positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party's normal electoral performance. [R, abr.]
72.6211 FÖLSCHER, Marine ; JAGER, Nicola de ; NYENHUIS, Robert —
This article examines the use of populist discourse in South African politics. We investigate speeches of leaders from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and opposition parties, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). We find that the EFF consistently employs populist appeals, while both the incumbent ANC and official opposition DA largely refrain. Our longitudinal analysis allows an examination of fluctuation across party leaders and electoral cycles, and illustrates that neither the ANC nor the DA have modified their political discourses in light of a rising populist challenger. However, there is some evidence that the two most dominant parties have reformed their programmatic offerings and behaviour in an attempt to compete with the EFF's popular appeal. The South African case offers important insights into the study of oppositional populism on the African continent, and a window into how major political parties may respond to emerging populist contenders. [R]
72.6212 FOSSATI, Diego ; MUHTADI, Burhanuddin ; WARBURTON, Eve —
In several world regions, democracy is in retreat. This retreat is taking place amid growing polarization in many countries, and analysts are increasingly concerned with the role that deepening political divisions play in processes of democratic decline. This article investigates the relationship between partisan polarization and deteriorating public support for democratic institutions. It leverages the case of Indonesia, a major thirdwave democracy now in the midst of a democratic regression. Indonesia's political landscape has become more ideologically polarized in recent years, despite the strength of clientelist networks and low levels of party identification. Using four survey experiments, we find that Indonesians embrace illiberal interventions and abandon democratic institutions when exposed to party and leadership cues. These results suggest that political polarization may prompt citizens to abandon democratic norms even in democracies without strong partisan identities. [R]
72.6213 FOSSHEIM, Karin —
Non-elected actors in governance networks are legitimate representatives when the constituency accepts their claims of representation. However, not all constituents have the resources to approve or oppose this representation. Consequently, I argue that the audience, often the decisionmaking authority, which enables non-elected actors to act as representatives has a responsibility to consider their legitimacy. Drawing on seven business and urban development networks in Norway, this article explores how the decision-making authority considers credibility, qualifications and connectedness to legitimise non-elected representatives in governance networks. Through interviews with civil servants and politicians organising and participating in the network, relevant documents and observations, this article demonstrates that the decision-making authority legitimises non-elected representatives based on credibility and qualifications rather than connectedness with the constituency. The decision-making authority believes that claims grounded in specialist expertise, self-representation and shared experiences with the constituency legitimise non-elected representatives. [R, abr.]
72.6214 FRAGA, Bernard L. ; MILLER, Michael G. —
Voter identification (ID) laws have sparked concerns of vote suppression, but existing evidence relies on aggregate analyses or survey self-reports. We leverage unique information from Texas, where registrants without ID filed “reasonable impediment declarations” (RIDs) before voting. Linking 16,000 RID forms to the Texas voter file, we provide the first direct documentation of the traits of voters who would be stopped from voting under strict identification laws. Our preregistered analysis finds registrants voting without ID in 2016 were disproportionately Black and Latinx when compared to voters voting with ID. Examining voters' stated reasons for not providing ID, we find socio-economic hardships are not the most commonly cited impediment, but voters with hardships were less likely to vote in a strict-ID election than those who previously had identification. [R]
72.6215 FRIDLUND, Patrick —
It can be argued that there are many figures of thought within Christian theology that easily go together with populist discourses. This has three consequences. First, populists cannot be said to simply misuse the Christian tradition. Second, if so, Christian theologians will have to be aware of the potential populist slant when developing their understanding of Christian belief and praxis. Third, if Christian theology cannot be seen as an innocent activity, it may also constitute a constructive resource in critical analyses of populist discourses. The conclusion is that theology and political science may take advantage of each other to a larger extent than so far has been the case. [R, abr.]
72.6216 FRIEDLINE, Terri, et al. —
The COVID-19 pandemic recession has revealed examples of systematic discrimination within a wide range of industries, including banking. Using data from interviews conducted with bank employees in March and April 2020, we explore how private banks exemplify racialized organizations and operate within the broader economic system of racial capitalism that prioritizes pursuit of profits over the interests of their customers. We explain how the banking industry's responses to the pandemic reflect the logic of racial capitalism, and we develop the theme of doubling down to illustrate this logic and to explain the patterns revealed in employees' narratives. Subthemes included pursuit of profits, bureaucratic mundane, forced choices, history limits imagination, and dissonance. We conclude with implications for the banking industry. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6395]
72.6217 FRIESEN, Amanda ; HOLMAN, Mirya R. —
Risk-aversion dampens political participation and heightens religiosity, with concentrated effects among women. Yet, little is known about how intersecting identities moderate these psychological correlates of religiosity and political engagement. We theorize that the risk-religion-politics relationship is gendered and racialized. Using a nationally representative survey, we show that political participation is more strongly correlated with risk for Black women than for any other race-gender group. For religiosity, however, we find little evidence that risk is related to religiosity among Black women, while highly correlated with white women's religious engagement. For men — whether Black or white — risk exhibits a modest, positive relationship with their religiosity. Our results speak to the importance of considering intersectionality and race-gender identities in evaluations of religious and political activities in the US. [R]
72.6218 FRIMPONG, Adasa Nkrumah Kofi, et al. —
This paper investigates how social media affects general voting patterns. Unlike previous studies investigating whether citizens' use of social media affects political participation, this paper considers the connections that social media users have with political activists on social media, and how this connectedness influences general voting patterns, using data from Ghana. With contemporary theoretical perspectives and exploratory techniques, trends from past literature are presented, from a social mediabased propagated survey with 420 valid responses. Structural equation modeling was used to test the conceptual model, which demonstrates that the connectedness with political and social media activists is significant and positively influences modifications in voting patterns. Online political participation and political affect also present an effect on voting patterns. The relationship between connections with social media political activists and online political participation is significant. [R, abr.]
72.6219 FUNK, Kendall D. ; PAUL, Hannah L. ; PHILIPS, Andrew Q. —
Decades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allocation of government expenditures in three policy areas: education, healthcare, and defense. We find that women's representation predicts spending in all three areas. We also find evidence of critical mass effects as the relationships between women's representation and government spending are nonlinear. However, beyond critical mass, our research points to a potential critical mass interval or critical limit point in women's representation. We offer guidance on how these results can inform future research using standard parametric models. [R]
72.6220 GALANOPOULOS, Antonis ; VENIZELOS, Giorgos —
This article investigates how ‘populism’ was used in public discussions during the COVID-19 outbreak. It argues that the indiscriminate use of ‘populism’ and its association with the pandemic is rooted in the negative way it is talked about in public debates. Critically evaluating pundit claims framing populism as an ‘anti-scientific’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘authoritarian’ response to the health crisis, this article shows that ‘populism’ does not suffice to explain actors' responses to COVID-19. Rather, populists' ideological positions played a crucial role in their pandemic politics. [R]
72.6221 GANDERSON, Joseph —
This article charts surprising departures in how the two major British parties have cultivated and regulated financial services since the 1990s. During this time, Labour leaderships have consistently sought to accommodate the City, while the Conservatives have defied it at important junctures. This pattern of behaviour challenges the assumption in classical business power theory that Conservatives should be more attuned to finance's preferences than Labour. The article attributes this to the parties' distinct understandings of the interplay between the sector's business power and their own statecraft, which derive from substantially varying political links with the City. Labour's repeated charm offensives are prompted by a sensitivity to disinvestment and perpetually weak political ties. The Conservatives' approach is less sensitive to the sector's economic weight and is underwritten by enduring political ties. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5871]
72.6222 GARAND, James C. ; QI Dan ; MAGAÑA, Max —
We explore how American identity and Americans' perceptions of immigrant threat work together to shape their vote-choices in the 2016 presidential election. With the presidential campaign of Donald Trump characterized by strong rhetoric that emphasized immigrant threat and American identity themes, we suggest that the effects of immigrant threat perceptions are amplified by individuals' American identity, with those who have a strong American identity more likely to translate immigrant threat perceptions into support for Trump than those with weaker levels of American identity. Moreover, we consider whether the effects of American identity on vote-choice are activated and moderated by individuals' perceptions of immigrant threat. [R, abr.]
72.6223 GARCIA-RIVERO, Carlos ; CLARI, Enrique ; CUBAS, Joaquín Martín —
Over the past century, political Islam has taken the form of political parties and entered the electoral realm to gain institutional power. The Arab Spring sparked an unprecedented electoral advance of Islamists. New elections gave rise to new governments under the control of Islamist in several countries in the region which created a new political scenario unthinkable only a few years earlier. In comparison with the traditional political parties, little is known about Islamist parties as recently empowered political actors. Against this background, this article explores the origin of Islamist political parties in the MENA region, the evolution of their parliamentary representation and the causes that fuel the latter. The first section of the article describes the appearance and evolution of Islamist political parties and the context in which the latter took place. The second part analyses the economic and political factors that explain the evolution presented in part one. [R]
72.6224 GARRIDO, Marco —
We know a lot about the new wave of autocrats and how they operate but much less about why so many people, particularly in the developing world, are cheering them on. Case-in-point: How do we make sense of widespread popular support for Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's strongman rule? Scholars generally cite frustration with a democracy widely regarded as elite-dominated and endemically corrupt, but this account is underspecified. Filipinos have been frustrated with liberal democracy for a long time and Duterte is not the first law-and-order candidate to seek the presidency. I will argue that we need to situate Duterte's election and enduring appeal in the conversation about democracy as it has unfolded on the ground. Specifically, (1) repeated failures to reform democracy have resulted in (2) conditional support for democracy and increasing openness to certain authoritarian forms of government. (3) These attitudes manifest on the ground as calls for “disciplining” democracy. (4) Rodrigo Duterte is seen as a “strong leader” and the answer to such calls, hence his enormous popularity.. [R, abr.]
72.6225 GARZIA, Diego ; FERREIRA DA SILVA, Frederico —
Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental-rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. [R, abr.]
72.6226 GEURKINK, Bram ; AKKERMAN, Agnes ; SLUITER, Roderick —
This article aims to establish the connection between people's voice at work and their political voice. We theorize and model a spillover mechanism from supervisors' responses to workplace voice to political participation. Applying structural equation modeling on a unique dataset (N = 3129), we find that while support and suppression of workplace voice both affect political participation, they do so through different mechanisms. In addition, we find that supervisors' suppressive responses to employees' voice can trigger both positive and negative effects on different forms of political participation. Thereby, we contribute to the understanding of the link between participation at work and participation in politics. [R]
72.6227 GILBERT, Victoria —
In the rich literature on women and conflict, many scholars have assumed that the outbreak of civil war suppresses women's political involvement. However, during Syria's civil war, there was significant subnational and temporal variation in the involvement of women in the institutions established by armed groups and civilians in rebel-held areas. Why were some Syrian women able to secure a place for themselves in insurgent governance? How were they able to influence the form of local institutions to secure a role for women? Bringing together the scholarship on social movements and rebel governance, this article argues that two factors determine whether women were able to mobilize politically during conflict: the organizational capacity of women and the strength and ideology of locally active armed groups. [R, abr.]
72.6228 GILL, Denise —
This article provides an account of how sense experiences are drawn into processes of contest over the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. Based on ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara, it examines the ruptures of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey. Particular forms of listening emerged in Western urban centers, newly attuned to sounds of warfare commingled with Islamic melodic devotionals ordered by state officials. Unique and pronounced engagements with bodily liquids accompanied the handling and placement of the dead. The multi-sensory experiences of Muslim women municipal employees who wash and shroud the deceased elucidated the foundational roles of scent and body weight in constituting martyrdom. This article demonstrates how the body politic operates — with various forms of acquiescence and repudiation — through sound, smell, and touch. [R]
72.6229 GINGERICH, Daniel W. ; SCARTASCINI, Carlos —
Anti-crime policy is often unresponsive to reductions in crime. To address why, we provide a model and empirical test of how citizens' anti-crime policy preferences respond to information. Our model shows that preferences for anti-crime policy hinge on expectations about the crime rate: punitive policies are preferred in high crime contexts, whereas social policies are preferred in low crime contexts. We evaluate these expectations through an information experiment embedded in the 2017 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey conducted in Panama. As expected by our theory, a high crime message induced stronger preferences in favour of punitive policies. Unanticipated by our theory, but in line with cursory evidence and survey results, we find that a low crime message did not induce stronger preferences in favour of social policies. [R, abr.]
72.6230 GOLDSTEIN, Daniel A. N. ; WIEDEMANN, Johannes —
Mitigation policies intended to combat the novel coronavirus offer a realworld measure of citizen compliance, allowing us to examine the determinants of asymmetrical responsiveness. Analyzing county-level cellphone data, we leverage staggered roll-out to estimate the causal effect of stayat-home orders on mobility using a difference-in-differences strategy. We find movement is significantly curtailed, and examination of descriptive heterogeneous effects suggests the key roles that partisanship and trust play in producing irregular compliance. We find that Republican-leaning counties comply less than Democratic-leaning ones, which we argue underlines the importance of trust in science and acceptance of large-scale government policies for compliance. However, this partisan compliance gap shrinks when directives are given by Republican leaders, suggesting citizens are more trusting of co-partisan leaders. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6231 GOLOVCHENKO, Yevgeniy —
Many states have become concerned with Russian cyberattacks and online propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded to the information threat in 2017 by blocking access to several Russian websites, including VKontakte, one of the most popular social media websites in Ukraine. By exploiting a natural experiment in Ukraine, I find that the sudden censorship policy reduced activity on VKontakte, despite the fact that a vast majority of the users were legally and technically able to bypass the ban. Users with strong political and social affiliations to Russia were at least as likely to be affected by the ban as those with weak affiliations. I argue that the ease of access to online media — not political attitudes toward the state — was the main mechanism behind the users' response to the ban. [R, abr.]
72.6232 GOMEZ, Raul —
Despite the widespread secularization of West European societies, research has only found mixed evidence of a decline in the influence of religion on people's electoral preferences. A relatively recent line of inquiry has adopted a ‘top-down’ approach to this problem, arguing that the impact of religion not only depends on structural social changes, but also on parties' convergence on moral issues. Drawing upon this ‘top-down’ approach and the ‘impressionable years' model, this article argues that parties' political strategies aimed at (de-)mobilizing social cleavages have a lasting effect on voters' party preferences. [R, abr.]
72.6233 GOODWIN, Mark ; HOLDEN BATES, Stephen ; McKAY, Stephen —
Where female representatives are located within legislatures and what they do matters for the substantive representation of women. Previous scholarship has found that female parliamentary committee members participate differently than their male counterparts in relation to both policy area and status of positions held. Here, we draw on an original time-series data set (n = 9,767) to analyze the U.K. select committee system. We test for the impact of four variables previously found to be important in explaining changes in gendered divisions of labor: the system of appointment/election, the proportion of female representatives in the legislature, sharp increases in the number of female representatives, and changes in government from right-wing parties to left-wing parties. We find that horizontal and vertical divisions of labor persist over time and that membership patterns in the United Kingdom mainly correspond to those found elsewhere. Moreover, there is little evidence that any of the four variables have systematically affected membership patterns. [R]
72.6234 GREENE, Samuel A. ; ROBERTSON, Graeme —
While most of the literature on authoritarianism focuses on coercion, institutional manipulation, or clientelism, many contemporary autocrats clearly enjoy enthusiastic support even in times of economic stagnation or decline. We argue that part of the solution lies in unpacking the role of emotions in building support for rulers. Drawing on a unique panel survey conducted shortly before and after Russia's annexation of Crimea, we discover that the resulting “rally” around the authoritarian flag involves much more than simply support for the leader or a simple increase in nationalism. Rather, we witness a broad shift in respondents' emotional orientation. Driven by the shared experience of the Crimean “moment,” this shift improves people's evaluation of their social, political, and economic surroundings in the present, the future — and even the past. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6652]
72.6235 GREGORY, Sam —
Frontline witnessing and civic journalism are impacted by the rhetoric and the reality of misinformation and disinformation. This essay highlights key insights from activities of the human rights and civic journalism network WITNESS, as they seek to prepare for new forms of media manipulation, such as deepfakes, and to ensure that an emergent “authenticity infrastructure” is in place to respond to global needs for reliable information without creating additional harms. Based on global consultations on perceived threats and prioritized solutions, their efforts are primarily targeted towards synthetic media and deepfakes, which not only facilitate audiovisual falsification (including non-consensual sexual images) but also, by being embedded in societal dynamics of surveillance and civil society suppression, they challenge real footage and so undermine the credibility of civic media and frontline witnessing (also known as “liar's dividend”). They do this within a global context where journalists and some distant witness investigators self-identify as lacking relevant skills and capacity, and face inequity in access to detection technologies. [R, abr.]
72.6236 GRINSTEIN-WEISS, Michal, et al. —
Despite the array of public programs offered to help households mitigate the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, many still needed to rely on savings, credit, or other assets to make ends meet. This reality may exacerbate existing social and economic inequities because racial and ethnic minorities often have lower access to assets and credit than white households. We use longitudinal national survey data to explore the extent to which different racial and ethnic groups experienced housing hardships during the pandemic, the role of liquid assets in mediating housing hardship, and whether job/income loss moderated the relationship among race/ethnicity, liquid assets, and housing hardship. We find that liquid assets significantly mediated the relationship between race/ethnicity and housing hardships and that the effect was stronger for those who lost jobs or incomes as a result of COVID-19. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6395]
72.6237 GULZAR, Saad ; ROBINSON, Thomas S. ; RUIZ, Nelson A. —
An established finding on ballot design is that top positions on the ballot improve the electoral performance of parties or candidates because voters respond behaviorally to salient information. This article presents evidence on an additional unexplored mechanism: campaigns, that can act before voters, can also adjust their behavior when allocated a top position on the ballot. We use a constituency-level lottery of ballot positions in Colombia to establish, first, that a ballot-order effect exists: campaigns randomly placed at the top earn more votes and seat shares. Second, we show that campaigns react to being placed on top of the ballot: they raise and spend more money on their campaign, and spending itself is correlated with higher vote shares. Our results provide the first evidence for a new mechanism of ballot-order effects examined in many previous studies. [R]
72.6238 GUNTERMANN, Eric ; BEAUVAIS, Edana —
Research on the political preferences of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) voters shows that they are more progressive than heterosexuals. However, few studies consider differences between heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual men and women. Furthermore, little is known about how these preferences have changed as society has become more accepting of diverse sexualities. We offer an analysis of Canadian LGB voters' political preferences a decade and a half after same-sex marriage was legalized. Consistent with prior research, we find that gay men, and, to a lesser extent, bisexual men, are more left-wing than heterosexual men. A more novel finding is that bisexual women are the most left-wing group. Lesbian women are only slightly to the left of heterosexual women. While left-wing bisexual women are growing in number, the overall gap between LGB and heterosexual voters has remained stable across generations, because marriage narrows some of the preference gaps. [R]
72.6239 GUNTERMANN, Eric ; LENZ, Gabriel —
Some scholars have suggested that voter attention may increase when policy issues become important to them, such as when a crisis disrupts their lives. The coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to test this proposition. It is one of the most severe crises the US has faced. It has disrupted almost everyone's lives, and many people know someone who has tested positive or died from the virus. It is thus salient and important to many — if not most — voters. Despite this context, we find that many voters remain unaware of the 2020 US Presidential candidates' stances on coronavirus policies. Their levels of knowledge are about typical for other policies, which is middling. In the absence of knowledge, voters cannot connect their policy views on the virus with their presidential voting decisions. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6240 GUSTAFSSON, Maria-Therese ; SCHILLING-VACAFLOR, Almut —
There has been an unprecedented inclusion of Indigenous peoples in environmental governance instruments like free, prior, and informed consent; reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) projects; climate adaptation initiatives; and environmental impact assessment. We draw on theories of participatory governance to show how locally implemented processes have been shaped by their interactions with invited, closed, and indigenous-led spaces at multiple scales. Empirically, our article is based on field research in Latin America, semistructured interviews, and a systematic literature review. We find four main barriers that have (re-)produced environmental injustices in environmental governance: first, a lack of influence over the institutional design of governance instruments; second, the exclusion of Indigenous peoples in the domestication of global instruments; third, policy incoherencies constraining the scope for decision-making; and fourth, weak cross-scale linkages between Indigenous-led spaces. [R, abr.]
72.6241 GUTH, James L. ; SMIDT, Corwin E. —
This article examines the partisan identifications and electoral behavior of American Protestant clergy in the 2016 presidential election. Although clergy partisanship may be of interest in any election, the 2016 contest, given the milieu of political polarization and the presence of the Trump candidacy, provides an intriguing context for assessing the profession's electoral behavior, particularly among Republican clergy. Based on survey results from over 2,500 clergy drawn from ten Protestant (five mainline and five evangelical) denominations, the study finds that, during the early stages of the 2016 nomination process, only a small percentage of Republican clergy supported Trump and that, despite the high level of political polarization, a sizable segment of Republican clergy resisted partisan pressures and refused to vote for Trump in the general election. [R, abr.]
72.6242 HALLDORF, Joel —
At the inauguration day of President Joe Biden, the US re-entered the Paris Agreement and soon thereafter a pledge was made to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half to 2030 and reach climate neutrality to 2050. The radical shift from the policy of the previous president is an illustration of how deeply polarized the climate issue is the US. This article discusses the background of this polarization, identifying its roots in the 1970s energy crisis. From this time on, the Republican party has been deeply entwined with fossil fuel interests, and these connections were further entrenched during the fracking boom. The prospect of overcoming the polarization on climate is to a great extent dependent on a potential shift in attitudes to climate change among young Republican voters and the growth of renewable energy. [R, abr.]
72.6243 HARDY, Bradley ; HOKAYEM, Charles ; ROLL, Stephen —
The burden of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been shouldered equally by American families. Black and Hispanic communities have been hit the hardest, with the pandemic often exacerbating existing disparities. Using nationally representative data, we assess the economic and public health effects of the pandemic among different socioeconomic groups and whether typical sources of protection from economic insecurity are uniformly protective across the US population. Within these sociodemographic groups, we also explore differences by education and industry. We find higher levels of employment loss among Blacks and Hispanics, those without college degrees, and frontline workers. We also find evidence that individuals and families are facing mental health episodes and are turning to costly alternative financial strategies to cope throughout the pandemic. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6395]
72.6244 HARGRAVE, Lotte ; LANGENGEN, Tone —
It has long been claimed in the gender and politics literature that male and female legislators have different communication styles. The evidence for this claim has come mostly from interviews with legislators as the key informants on gendered differences. We contribute to this literature in two ways: First, we empirically examine speeches by Members of Parliament to establish whether gendered differences are observable in parliamentary debates. Second, we advance existing measurement approaches by testing for multiple dimensions of communication style, providing a more systematic approach to studying gendered speech behavior. Communication style is examined through a content analysis of almost 200 speeches in three parliamentary sessions of the British House of Commons. We find compelling evidence for differences in communication style: women evidence arguments with personal experience, discuss policies in a concrete way, and are less adversarial than men. [R, abr.]
72.6245 HARLOW, Summer ; KILGO, Danielle K. —
Protest paradigm researchers theorize that protests are delegitimized in news coverage because of journalistic culture and practices. This study explores the degree to which norms, routines, values and perceptions explain coverage patterns of protest. This mixed-methods study utilizes selfreflections from a survey of US journalists in four regions, alongside a content analysis of their coverage. Our study highlights how objective-observer role conceptions, routines driven by newsworthiness, and a perception-performance gap help explain protest coverage patterns. Importantly, journalists believed they did a better job covering protests than the content analysis showed, raising questions about what protest coverage should look like. [R]
72.6246 HARTEVELD, Eelco, et al. —
Populist radical-right parties are considerably more popular in some areas (neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions) than others. They thrive in some cities, in some smaller towns, and in some rural areas, but they are unsuccessful in other cities, small towns, and rural areas. We seek to explain this regional variation by modelling at the individual level how citizens respond to local conditions. We argue that patterns of populist radical-right support can be explained by anxiety in the face of social change. However, how social change manifests itself is different in rural and urban areas, so that variations in populist radical right support are rooted in different kinds of conditions. To analyse the effects of these conditions we use unique geo-referenced survey data from the Netherlands collected among a nationwide sample of 8,000 Dutch respondents. [R, abr.]
72.6247 HASEN, Richard L. —
Election litigation rates in the US have been soaring, with rates nearly tripling from the period before the 2000 election compared to the post-2000 period. In 2020, election litigation rates increased almost 26 percent over rates in 2016, the year of the immediately prior United States presidential election. But future trends are uncertain. This short Research Note describes and analyzes new data through 2020 on trends in US election litigation, explains whether litigation rates are likely to continue to rise in the future, and briefly discusses whether this trend is normatively good or bad. [R]
72.6248 HATZISAVVIDOU, Sophia —
This article argues that rhetorical analysis is a method particularly well-suited for the study of political disputes and introduces commonplaces as a tool to conduct such analysis. Commonplaces function as key reference points that produce and organise social meaning; they can thus help to clarify the terms of the dispute and illuminate how these are linked to broader debates within the political community. Commonplaces call into attention sedimented views and point to alternative norms of action pursued by agents of change and therefore to entry points for recontestation. The article substantiates this claim through a case study that maps arguments for climate action in party manifestos in the 2019 General Election in the United Kingdom. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6249 HÄUSERMANN, Silja, et al. —
Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis-conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and — more specifically — over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the 21st c., but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working- and middle-class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle- and working-class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. [R, abr.]
72.6250 HAYTON, Richard —
This article analyses the extent of party change in response to the vote for Brexit in the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. It focuses particularly on how both parties struggled to manage internal divisions and ideological conflict, and how each sought to manage the issue in terms of party competition. It argues that the Conservative Party victory at the 2019 UK general election was the result of an ultimately more effective response to the electoral dynamics unleashed by Brexit, as the party adjusted its position to successfully mobilise the coalition of Leave voters into party competition, while Labour struggled to do the same with Remain voters. In short, it suggests that substantial party change, particularly by the Conservatives, effectively averted major party system change and the realignment of British politics many analysts predicted. This case study analysis consequently contributes to the wider theoretical literature on external system shocks and party change. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6537]
72.6251 HEINRICH, Roberto ; MERZ, Stefan ; SIMON, Anja Miriam —
The state election in Rhineland-Palatinate, which took place on the same day as the election in Baden-Württemberg, was safe to gain nationwide attention. It was perceived as a first test of the political mood for the federal election in the fall and, in addition, the first election held under Covid-19 pandemic conditions. Not surprisingly, the proportion of absentee voters increased significantly and reached a new nationwide high. The social democrats emerged as the strongest political force for the seventh time in a row with a share of 35.7 percent of the vote. The election winners were the Greens, who achieved their second-best state election result of 9.3 percent. For the first time, six parties are represented in the state parliament. [R, abr.]
72.6252 HESELTINE, Michael ; DORSEY, Spencer —
This paper explores the prevalence and correlates of political incivility among Congressional candidates in the 2020 election cycle, focusing specifically on which types of candidates were most likely to use uncivil language in their online communications and the self-reinforcing nature of incivility between candidates. Based on a comprehensive analysis of more than two million tweets sent by major party candidates in the 2020 House and Senate races, we conclude that several individual and electoral factors were influential in driving candidate incivility. Specifically, Republicans, challengers, and candidates in less competitive races were more likely to use uncivil rhetoric. Women, racial minorities, and candidates running in open seat races were less prone to incivility. We also find that incivility begets incivility, with candidates whose opponents used higher rates of incivility also being more likely to use incivility themselves. Uncivil tweets were also found to generate significantly more likes and retweets, suggesting that incivility is a viable means of driving engagement for candidates. These results shed light on the factors behind incivility among political elites, as well as highlight the feedback effects which contribute to a self-reinforcing rise in political incivility. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6138]
72.6253 HICKEL, Flavio R., Jr. ; MURPHY, Andrew R. —
Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, racial equality). His rhetoric legitimized the defense of white male privilege as a vital component of this restoration. While this use of civil religious themes emboldened those who harbor prejudicial views, it alienated others. Relying on a unique module within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that adherence to the tenets of American civil religion significantly exacerbated the effects of symbolic racism and modern sexism on support for Trump. [R, abr.]
72.6254 HILL, Seth J. —
Many believe primary elections distort representation in American legislatures because unrepresentative actors nominate extremist candidates. Advocates have reformed primaries to broaden voter participation and increase representation. Empirical evidence, however, is quite variable on the effects of reform. I argue that when institutional reform narrows one pathway of political influence, aggrieved actors take political action elsewhere to circumvent reform. I use a difference-in-differences design in the American states and find that although changing primary rules increases primary turnout, campaign contributions also increase with reform. Implementing nonpartisan primaries and reforming partisan primaries lead to estimated 9 and 21 percent increases in individual campaign contributions per cycle. This suggests actors substitute action across avenues of political influence to limit effects of institutional reform. [R]
72.6255 HO Janet ; MING Chiu —
We investigated how two English-language newspapers – Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP) and the mainland China Daily (CD) – portrayed key social actors (police, students, protesters, and governments) during the Occupy Central/Yellow Umbrella movement. We examined emotional valence, arousal, and dominance characterizations in 1,180 news articles via a multilevel, multivariate outcome regression and critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that emotional sentiments associated with students and protesters in SCMP were generally more positive than in CD but that this was reversed for the police and the government. Whereas SCMP deployed personal stories to construct a humanized image of protesters and students, CD relied on expert authority, rhetorical questions, and imagined scenarios to convey empathy towards Hong Kong residents, creating a villainized image of protesters. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6448]
72.6256 HOLTHAUS, Leonie ; KNAPPE, Henrike ; MARTINEZ MATEO, Marina —
Who is allowed to speak for whom beyond the state, and which identities are offered and created by this act of speaking? The theoretical and practical relevance of these questions is clear, but the questions imply a number of challenges. In a response to a debate published in 2020, we zoom in on questions of transnational representation before we argue that feminist studies of transnational representation provide critical examples for how to address transnational representation through approaches that combine normative and empirical research. Feminist representation theory and the inspiration that can be derived from it have been left out of the debate. Hence, and through a focused discussion of the contributions of international relations and political theory, we show that feminist interventions bridge theory and practice and provide constant critiques of emerging inequalities and constructions of identity. [R, abr.]
72.6257 HOMOLA, Jonathan —
Does the representation of women in cabinet and party leadership positions affect whether governments are more or less likely to fulfill the policy promises they make during election campaigns? This research note studies the effects of women's descriptive representation in cabinet and party leadership on policymaking by analyzing the pledge fulfillment of parties in 10 European countries, the US, and Canada. The empirical analysis suggests that governing parties are more likely to fulfill their election promises when levels of women's representation are higher. The results have implications for our understanding of the descriptive and substantive representation of women, as well as for party competition and policymaking more broadly. [R]
72.6258 HOOD, M. V., III ; McKEE, Seth C. —
This article demonstrates with survey data a pronounced shift in opinion movement on a restrictive voting provision: requiring a driver's license number to vote absentee by mail as per Georgia Republican legislators' passage of Senate Bill (SB) 202 in March 2021. The dynamic we uncover is asymmetric, with no significant movement in the opinions of Republican voters. The substantial shift in views is confined to Democratic and Independent voters, who strongly turned against this restrictive requirement in the second survey conducted after enactment of SB 202. The rapid and pronounced movement of certain opinions on a restrictive voting measure shows how easily the mass electorate can alter their views to reflect polarization in a policy domain during a time of historic partisan divisions. [R]
72.6259 HOOIJER, Gerda ; KING, Desmond —
We document the broad patterns of COVID-19 as it affects minority communities. We present a theoretical framework rooted in Global North democracies' racial and ethnic legacies to analyze the health and economic disparities between these communities and the white majority population. Marshalling first-cut empirical evidence from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden, we find patterns of the pandemic's distribution consistent with how the burden of racial and ethnic legacies endures: people from minority communities have worse health and economic outcomes under normal circumstances, inequalities the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated. The comparison shows that the impact of racial and ethnic discrimination on pandemic policy outcomes is not unique to the US. Health inequalities stemming in part from patterns of institutional racism and discrimination perversely help reproduce these societal inequities. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6260 HTUN, Mala —
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, but did not create, the caregiving crisis in the US: for most people, it was already a major ordeal to provide reproductive labor. The caregiving crisis was less visible before the pandemic because it was suffered unequally, in part due to the different positions of American women. Some women paid other women to do care work, women received differing sets of benefits from federal and state governments, and some women got far more support from their employers than did others. Pandemic-induced shocks, including the closure of K–12 schools and childcare centers, and reduced access to domestic workers and elder care workers, seemed to have triggered a closer alignment of perspectives and interests among diverse women. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6263]
72.6261 HUAN Changpeng ; DENG Menghan ; SRITRAKARN, Napakon —
This article sets out to explore the potential of journalistic attitudinal positioning in dis/aligning readers into different feeling and moral communities in traumatic news event. To do so, it utilises the appraisal framework to examine how the Bangkok Post and the New York Times present and represent ‘attitude’ of different news actors in the coverage of the Bangkok Blast. Analytical findings show that while journalistic attitudinal positioning constitutes a means of political empowerment through bringing in otherwise marginal and silenced voices, it also opens up a space for journalists to evaluate risks and negotiate responsibilities. News reports of the Bangkok Blast eventually construe the Thai society as divided by representing the event as a blame game. The findings also extend the conceptual scope of symbolic codes of victims, villain and hero by resorting to attitudinal resources. [R]
72.6262 HUGHES, Ceri —
The Wisconsin Green Party, a state affiliate of the US Green Party, is a third party in a two-party system. The US electoral system is not kind to third parties; 1949 was the last time a third party was represented in the US Congress, in the 2016 presidential election, just 1% of voters in Wisconsin voted for the Green Party candidate. Ethnographic fieldwork combined with in-depth interviews for this study finds that the policies and practices of the party may be inhibiting its efforts to grow support and improve its electoral standing. This paper details how the party operates in a narrow window of antiparty sentiment, with the emphasis on the intersection of their four core policy pillars, and party practices of ‘being the message’ serving to deter their two likeliest sources of new support; the logic of constituency representation given primacy over electoral competition. [R, abr.]
72.6263 HUNT, Kate —
In recent months there has been media coverage of how anti-abortion actors in the US attempted to use the COVID-19 pandemic to restrict access to abortion by classifying abortion as a non-essential medical procedure. Was the crisis “exploited” by social movement organizations (SMOs) in other countries? I bring together Crisis Exploitation Theory and the concept of discursive opportunity structures to test whether social movement organizations exploit crisis in ways similar to elites, with those seeking change being more likely to capitalize on the opportunities provided by the crisis. Because Twitter tends to be on the frontlines of political debate — especially during a pandemic — a dataset is compiled of over 12,000 Tweets from the accounts of SMOs involved in abortion debates across four countries to analyze the patterns in how they responded to the pandemic. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on "Pandemic politics". See also Abstr. 72.5876, 5932, 6085, 6098, 6136, 6159, 6185, 6230, 6239, 6259, 6260, 6691, 6761]
72.6264 HYTTEN, Karen F. —
It is clear that transitioning towards environmental sustainability requires a strong and sustained effort to address climate change. However, despite high levels of public concern about climate change, it has remained a highly politicised and hotly contested issue in Australia, and Australia's climate change policy remains inadequate and ineffective. Climate change first emerged as a key election issue in Australia's 2007 federal election and remained a highly contentious issue in the 2010 election. Although climate change was much less prominent during the 2013 and 2016 election campaigns, it re-emerged as a major election issue in 2019. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to identify and trace climate change discourses in the media through these five federal election campaigns. It explores the main arguments, actors, and discursive strategies associated with two key discourses, how climate change was constructed during each campaign, and the implications of these constructions for the development of Australia's climate change policy. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5844]
72.6265 IGERSHEIM, Herrade, et al. —
This paper presents data from a survey leading up to the 2016 US presidential elections. Participants were asked their opinions about the candidates and were also asked to vote according to three alternative voting rules, in addition to plurality: approval voting, range voting, and instant runoff voting. The participants were split into two groups, one facing a set of four candidates (Clinton, Trump, Johnson, and Stein) and the other a set of nine candidates (the previous four plus Sanders, Cruz, McMullin, Bloomberg, and Castle). The paper studies three issues: (1) How do US voters use these alternative rules? (2) What kinds of candidates, in terms of individual preferences, are favored by which rule? (3) Which rules empirically satisfy the independence of eliminated alternatives? Our results provide evidence that, according to all standard criteria computed on individual preferences, be there utilitarian or of the Condorcet type, the same candidate (Sanders) wins. [R, abr.]
72.6266 IGNAZI, Piero ; FIORELLI, Chiara —
This article investigates the dimension and evolution of the financing of political parties. It focuses on 28 parties in the five major European countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain), analysing the parties' budgets from 2002 to 2016. The article's assessment shows that the availability of funds increased until the beginning of the Great Recession (2008), and then decreased, mainly due to a decline in public support for parties. Diminished state generosity has led parties to look for different sources of financing: the article shows the proportion of self-funding resources in terms of membership fees and private donations that has sustained the parties' finances. [R, abr.]
72.6267 INVERNIZZI ACCETTI, Carlo ; OSKIAN, Giulia —
We examine the democratic legitimacy of popular referendums asking whether they should be understood as bypassing or complementing representative institutions. To answer this question, we focus on the distinction between legislative referendums and consultative ones, noting that even though referendums of the latter kind are by far more prevalent from an empirical point of view, their specific role in democratic decision-making remains under-theorized in the existing literature. We therefore focus on consultative referendums as a possible way of reconciling the referendum procedure with representative democracy. First, we clarify the specific conception of representative democracy that underscores our study; second, we develop the idea that consultative referendums are to be understood to specify the political mandate of elected representatives; finally, we apply the results of this conceptual work to the case of the Greek bailout and the Brexit referendums. [R, abr.]
72.6268 JACQUES, Olivier ; BÉLANGER, Éric —
Public choice theory suggests that citizens have a deficit bias: they approve governments for running large deficits that increase spending or reduce taxes. In contrast, others contend that citizens reward governments for balanced budgets. We contribute to this debate by modelling a popularity function for the Canadian federal government and show that the impact of fiscal policies on the executive's popularity changes over time. Until the early 1990s, Canadians preferred budget deficits. As deficits became unsustainable during the economic crisis of the early 1990s, the government shifted its fiscal policy paradigm, as balancing the budget became its primary fiscal objective and citizens were actively concerned about the deficits. Since 1993, citizens' deficit bias morphed into an austerity bias: executive approval increases when deficits are reduced. These findings contribute to comparative political economy research by assessing how policy regimes and public preferences reinforce each other. [R]
72.6269 JANKOWSKI, Michael, et al. —
In this research note, we present the main findings from the Open Expert Survey 2021 (OES2021). We conducted this expert survey prior to the German General Election of 2021. More than 300 political scientists participated. The experts provided estimates for the relevant German parties on various dimensions and policy issues. They also assessed the salience of specific topics for the parties. Two aspects make the OES21 stand out against other expert surveys. First, it provides party placements on multiple issues, many of which are not asked in existing expert surveys. Second, the number of experts is comparatively large, allowing to analyze in greater detail how expert characteristics affect party placement. [R]
72.6270 JARVIS, Lee —
This article explores the importance of constructions of temporality within the UK government's discourse on the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis across the first six months of 2020. Drawing on over 120 official texts, it traces the emergence of discontinuous, linear, and cyclical conceptions of time in representations of the virus' pasts, presents, and futures. Three arguments are made. First, constructions of temporality were fundamental to the social, political, and historical positioning of the virus. Second, these constructions were constitutively important in producing, explaining, justifying and celebrating the UK government's response to the virus. And, third, tensions and inconsistencies between these constructions of temporality highlight the contingent, and constructed, character of official discourse, pulling into question the inevitability of the UK's response and opening opportunity for critical intervention. [R]
72.6271 JEANNET, Anne-Marie —
Has social reproduction through families preserved unequal political participation amongst the working class in post-industrial society? This article builds on both political and sociological traditions to consider the family as a tenacious social structure that reproduces political participation from one generation to the next. In order to answer this empirically, the study uses a longitudinal panel data of political behaviour across three biological generations in the United States (1965-1997). The findings show that respondents who grew up in working-class families are less likely to vote as adults regardless of whether they have working-class occupations or not. The transmission of un-equal participation is partially mediated by the voting behaviour of the parent who models this behaviour to their children. The study also shows that the second generation of respondents transmits low political participation to their offspring in the third generation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6203]
72.6272 JENNINGS, Freddie J., et al. —
One mechanism by which citizens learn about candidates and issues is through watching presidential debates. Some scholars have raised concerns that these events, however, disproportionately benefit those already high in political knowledge more so than others with lesser knowledge levels. We hypothesize that knowledge begets knowledge because it prompts a constructive cognitive process that results from elaboration and reflection. We test this hypothesis in an experiment that also considers whether issue priming could help mitigate the deficit that those lower in political sophistication have when viewing campaign events. Participants (N= 543) watched a 9-minute segment focusing on economic issues drawn from the first 2020 presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to an issue priming condition and viewed the debate segment after reading a narrative text on economic policy, and the other half read an unrelated text. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6347]
72.6273 JENSENIUS, Francesca R. ; SURYANARAYAN, Pavithra —
It is well established that a country's institutional features can weaken economic voting because voters find it hard to attribute performance to specific parties. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization similarly moderates the link between the economy and vote-choice. We focus on one manifestation of party system institutionalization: the strength of party-candidate linkages in elections, operationalized by manually tracing the rerunning patterns of some 80,000 candidates in Indian state elections between 1986 and 2007. Using rerunning patterns to measure party-candidate linkages and rainfall data to measure the state of the economy, we show that voters were more likely to reward incumbent parties for economic performance when parties and candidates were aligned in consecutive elections. [R, abr.]
72.6274 JEROENSE, Thijmen —
This study focuses on social media use of citizens from two groups that are often associated with the rise of social media: populist and postmaterialist citizens. Considering their ideological underpinnings, we theorize that they will make more political use of social media and that this further reifies their political attitudes into voting for populist and postmaterialist parties, respectively. Using unique survey data including the relatively new populist attitudes and political use of social media, we test this theory on the Dutch case. We find that both groups do not read political news or connect to politicians more, but both are more likely to react to political content. Moreover, social media use does not seem to lead to a retention in one's own ideological funnel signified by populist or postmaterialist voting. [R, abr.]
72.6275 JOHNSON, Brandon M. ; STUCKEY, Mary E. —
This essay offers a metaphoric analysis of Donald J. Trump's announcement speech. We argue that by focusing on two of his metaphors, the presidency as a business and his promise to build a wall, we are provided a better understanding of the symbolic structures that underlie his presidency, explaining both the nature of his support and the way he approaches his job as president. [R] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6276 JONES, Rodney H. ; CHAU, Dennis —
This paper explores the metalinguistic tactics used by Hong Kong protesters in 2014 and 2019 and how they reflected and exploited a range of dominant ideologies about language in the city. These tactics are considered both in terms of their rhetorical utility in the “message war” between protesters and authorities, and their significance in the broader sociolinguistic context of Hong Kong. The analysis reveals how such tactics entailed both opportunities and risks, allowing protesters to create shareable discursive artifacts that spread quickly over social media and to promote in-group solidarity and distrust of their political opponents, but also limiting their ability to broaden the appeal of their messages to certain segments of the population and implicating them in upholding language ideologies that promote exclusion and marginalization. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6448]
72.6277 JUNG Hoyong —
Politicians' individual traits can influence policy outcomes. A local mayor has authority over the budget process and can affect the municipal budget allocation. This study empirically examined whether the mayor's gender affected the gendered budget in Korean cities between 2016 and 2020. Across various econometric designs, our results revealed little evidence that mayoral gender (women, in this case) affects the formulation and execution of the gendered budget. The results imply that the effects of female representation through a female leader are dependent on various socioeconomic contexts. [R]
72.6278 KALIN, Ilker ; LOUNSBERY, Marie Olson ; PEARSON, Frederic —
Non-violent movements are rarely confined to the borders of the societies in which they take place. International actors are prone to take a side in the face of such resistance. Yet knowledge is limited on external actors' effects on outcomes of non-violent protests abroad. Thus, we zero in on the strategic logic behind major powers' involvement decisions regarding such movements, and the impact those decisions have on campaign outcomes. We find that major powers tend to undermine non-violent movements when target states are strategically important; we find also an indirect link between major power support for movements and security force defections in target states, thus improving success prospects for the protestors. [R, abr.]
72.6279 KANAS, Agnieszka ; SCHEEPERS, Peer ; STERKENS, Carl —
This study examines mechanisms and conditions under which ethnoreligious identification is related to support for out-group violence. It uses unique survey data collected among religious minorities and majorities in conflict and non-conflict regions in Indonesia and the Philippines. We find that strong ethno-religious identification is positively related to support for out-group violence. This relationship is fully mediated by the perception of out-group threat, suggesting that ethno-religious identification facilitates the perception of out-group threat, which, in turn, is positively related to support of violence. While the experience of communal violence increases support for interreligious violence, it does not influence the relationship between perceived group threat and support for violence. [R, abr.]
72.6280 KARWACKA, Anna ; GAWROŃSKI, Sławomir ; TWORZYDŁO, Dariusz —
This article is the result of a research study aimed at comparing the degree of maturity of political communication in local government elections between France and Poland. The authors' objective is to reveal the specificity of the subsystems of electoral communication between these countries mainly by presenting the diversity of the communication tools used and the degree of professionalisation of communication management by local government politicians. The undertaking of a comparative analysis of these two countries was dictated by the countries' similarities in terms of the three-tier division of local government. In addition, it compares the experience of France's mature democracy and Poland's democracy, which is in its early stages. A survey conducted on a representative sample could be extrapolated from the entire population studied in France and Poland. The scope of the study concerned local government elections from 2015 in France, and 2014 and 2018 in Poland. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6290]
72.6281 KATZ, Richard S. —
Contrary to some interpretations, the cartel party model was never assumed to be an equilibrium end-state. Rather, it was postulated, on the one hand, that cartelization would lead to its own opposition in the form now identified as anti-party-system parties, and on the other hand, that this development would lead to further adaptation on the part of the cartel parties themselves. But is this continuing evolution leading to parties that are more democratic, either in their internal operation or in their contribution to the wider political system? While a number of empirical trends are evident, whether they represent ‘democratic evolution’ depends in large measure upon how one understands democracy itself. [R] [See Abstr. 72.5983]
72.6282 KAVASOGLU, Berker —
Autocrats often attempt to co-opt select opposition party leaders to remain in power. While the literature identifies co-optation of opposition party leaders as an important survival strategy of autocrats, we lack a systematic examination of why some opposition party leaders are co-opted but not others. This article argues that opposition party co-optation is shaped by both inter- and intra-party dynamics. Using a novel data set on opposition party organizations in electoral autocracies between 1970 and 2019, I show that opposition parties with high mobilizational capacity and those that devolve internal decision-making authority from the party leadership to lower cadres are less likely to be co-opted, especially when they are ideological distant from autocratic incumbents. I contend that opposition parties' organizational characteristics and their ideological positioning in an autocratic party system significantly alter the strategic calculus of the incumbent regime and opposition party elites in deciding whether or not to cooperate with one another. [R, abr.]
72.6283 KENNEDY, Courtney, et al. —
While the migration of public opinion surveys to online platforms has often lowered costs and enhanced timeliness, it has also created new vulnerabilities. Respondents completing the same survey multiple times from different IP addresses, overseas workers posing as Americans, and algorithms designed to complete surveys are among the threats that have emerged in this new era. This paper measures the prevalence of such respondents and their impact on survey data quality, while demonstrating methodological approaches for doing so. We carried out a large-scale study with an eye toward overcoming these limitations. This study examines the threat of insincere respondents using large samples from six online platforms: three opt-in survey panels, two address-recruited survey panels, and a crowdsourced sample. [R, abr.]
72.6284 KENNEDY, Ryan P. ; WAGGONER, Philip D. ; WARD, Matthew M. —
Algorithms are playing an increasingly important role in many areas of public policy. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the degree of trust individuals are willing to place in these algorithms. This article reports on a series of experiments on trust in algorithms for forecasting political events and criminal recidivism. Contrary to previous literature on algorithm aversion, we find that people show high levels of trust in algorithms relative to other sources of advice, even with minimal information about the algorithm. We also explore evaluation of combined human and algorithm advice. We find that, when experts make decisions in light of algorithm advice, the relative weight given to their judgments increases, but the algorithm's guidance is not disregarded. Finally, using a conjoint experiment, we evaluate the factors that influence people's preferences for algorithms. [R, abr.]
72.6285 KENNY, Meryl, et al. —
In 2021, Anika Gauja and Karina Kosiara-Pedersen [ibid 20(1), March 2021; Abstr. 71.5079] review the sub-field of party politics research. In doing so, they argue party politics scholarship reflects the broader development of the political science discipline, illustrating the evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organisations they study. We argue that the party politics sub-field reflects the wider discipline in another crucial respect — it continues to marginalize gender politics scholarship. We demonstrate that a gendered lens fundamentally transforms key questions in the field around what party politics scholars study, and how and why they conduct their research, with relevant consequences for whose work is included. In failing to engage with this scholarship, “mainstream” party politics scholars are (re)producing unequal power relations and hierarchies within the discipline. [R, abr.]
72.6286 KERSTING, Norbert ; GRÖMPING, Max —
In some countries, direct democracy is used successfully to increase legitimacy of decisions or mitigate conflict, and in other countries, authoritarian leaders seem to instrumentalize and manipulate referendums. How can referendum integrity be analyzed? This article presents an empirical instrument to evaluate the variety and integrity of referendums. This encompasses criteria for the analysis of direct democracy. First, we develop a referendum cycle model based on the electoral cycle framework, assessing referendum quality in a number of dimensions from electoral laws and electoral procedures, thematic limitations of referendums, to voter registration, the initiation of referendums, campaign and media coverage as well as campaign financing. The empirical instrument is designed to be used in expert surveys, and piloted in the Turkish constitutional referendum of 2017. [R, abr.]
72.6287 KETCHLEY, Neil ; BROOKE, Steven ; LIA, Brynjar —
Scholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in commerce, public administration, and the professions were more likely to sign the movement's petitions. The movement's supporters were also overwhelmingly literate. A case study tracing Muslim Brotherhood branch formation and petition activism in a Nile Delta village illustrates how literate, socially mobile agrarian families were key to the propagation of the movement in rural areas. [R, abr.]
72.6288 KEUTCHEU, Joseph —
La crise anglophone, en fait le mouvement social actuel dans les régions anglophones du Nord-Ouest et du Sud-Ouest du Cameroun, est loin d’être une génération spontanée. Elle est le produit d’une histoire singulière de la rencontre entre deux parties d’un même pays ayant subi une double colonisation (anglaise et française) et d’une conjoncture tout aussi particulière qui amène les acteurs à réinventer une cause anglophone ancienne. La présente étude montre qu’elle plonge ses racines dans le malaise identitaire non soldé du lendemain des indépendances, malaise qui a produit la longue lutte de reconnaissance des Anglophones. Les interactions entre les acteurs de la mobilisation anglophone actuelle permettent de mettre en évidence les signes de la renégociation d’un nouveau rapport à l’ordre politique au Cameroun. Il s'agit d’une négociation désormais expurgée de sérénité qui donne à voir un épuisement au moins provisoire du référentiel monopoliste de l’État camerounais. [R]
72.6289 KEVINS, Anthony —
Most legislation neither affects nor interests citizens equally. But should this variation in interest and affectedness impact who gets to influence policy reforms? This article examines US public opinion on this issue using a national survey experiment varying both the policy outcome (a bill's passage/failure) and the type of constituency input granted by elected representatives (none/constituency surveys/targeting interested constituents/targeting affected constituents). It then compares reactions across treatment groups, examining the impact of outcome favourability as well as external and internal political efficacy. Results suggest that granting constituents explicit policy influence consistently affected perceived responsiveness in the expected manner, but that the different consultation procedures had more varied effects on decision acceptance. [R, abr.]
72.6290 KIM Do Won —
Do voters vote for the candidate they like or vote against their dislike? This paper aims to broaden the understanding of voting behavior and expand the scope of voting models by incorporating loss aversion, the central concept of the prospect theory, into the traditional proximity model. By testing the ‘vote-against model’ on the 2017 French presidential election data, this paper shows that the French electorate weighed the psychological losses more than gains in their final vote decision. Furthermore, this paper finds that the vote-against model explains and predicts the French electorate's voting behavior better than the proximity model. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on ""Election". See also Abstr. 72.5937, 6188, 6280, 6342, 6351]
72.6291 KIRDIS, Esen —
The author explores why Turkish youth became less religious under the two-decade incumbency of the Justice and Development Party (JDP), a religio-conservative party. She argues that the Turkish youth's religious disengagement can be explained by the rising religious monopoly of the JDP that neither supplied services to address the youth's socioeconomic grievances nor allowed for the formation of a diverse and competitive religious market that could capture the changes among Turkish youth. [R]
72.6292 KLAŠNJA, Marko ; POP-ELECHES, Grigore —
Many developing democracies suffer from persistent corruption and ruleof-law violations. Growing efforts have focused on establishing anticorruption institutions to combat this culture of impunity, but success has been modest. We tackle this puzzle by focusing on the calculus of the threatened corrupt elites in undermining serious anticorruption efforts. We examine electoral manipulation, as credible anticorruption reforms may increase pressure on corrupt elites to fraudulently maintain power in order to control anticorruption efforts. At the same time, anticorruption reforms can deter electoral manipulation if they sufficiently raise the costs of lawbreaking. Focusing on the representative case of Romania and using a variety of data sources, diagnostics and research designs, we show how credible anticorruption efforts systematically induce electoral manipulation by the backlash coalition of corrupt politicians. [R, abr.]
72.6293 KOEDAM, Jelle —
Why do parties change their policy positions? A growing literature suggests that the internal balance of power between leaders and activists affects how a party responds to changing environmental incentives. This paper explores when and how party organization matters for party strategy. It argues that a key prediction — that leadership-dominated and activistdominated parties are responsive to the positional shifts of the mean voter and the party voter, respectively — is conditional on two factors, namely a party's electoral performance and party system polarization. Cross-sectional time series analyses of fifty-five parties in 10 European democracies between 1977 and 2003 confirm that (1) leadership-dominated parties' responsiveness to the mean voter decreases as their electoral fortunes improve, (2) increases as a party system becomes more polarized, while (3) activist-dominated parties more reliably follow the positional shifts of the party voter. [R, abr.]
72.6294 KÖKER, Philipp ; HARMENING, Morten —
Since German reunification, the average proportion of women in the Federal Convention, which elects the Federal President, has been just 32 percent. To present a nuanced assessment of the lack of gender parity among electors, a new data-set is used that includes all members of German D-Federal Conventions from 1994 to 2017. The low proportion of women can only partly be attributed to the existence and implementation of gender quotas within parties. Differences in intra-party pressure and further restrictions in form of ties to external organizations mean that parties do not use the potential to increase the proportion of women by nomination nonparliamentarians for that purpose. [R, abr.]
72.6295 KOPECKÝ, Petr ; MEYER-SAHLING, Jan-Hinrik ; SPIROVA, Maria —
The contemporary literature on political parties has identified their gradual but consistent shift away from civil society and towards the state. As parties are becoming ever increasingly dependent on state resources and exclusively interested in governing, as Mair (Ruling the void: The hollowing of western democracy, Verso Books, 2013) suggested, and patronage is a fundamental to that relationship, the degree and modes of party patronage becomes pivotal to understanding their performance, and the ways they organize and govern. In this paper we argue that party patronage is likely to be structured by the nature of political competition and explore the effects of political polarization, which is a feature of political competition relatively independent from the precise format of a party system, on patronage practices. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5983]
72.6296 KREFT, Anne-Kathrin ; SCHULZ, Philipp —
Recent scholarship challenges the dichotomized way of thinking, showing how victimhood and agency sit alongside each other. We extend this growing body of scholarship by proposing a relational conception of agency that helps us better understand exactly how victimhood and agency intersect and can even be co-constitutive. Specifically, we propose that conceptualizing agency as relational — to others, to contextual structures, to own vulnerabilities and prior victimization — is particularly well suited to overcome inadequate dichotomizations, and to illuminate the spectrum of political agency, ranging from formalized politicized spaces to more mundane forms of agency within the quotidian. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Colombia and Uganda, we empirically tease out these complex intersections in a context of (gendered) vulnerability. [R, abr.]
72.6297 KUMAR, Tanu —
Home price subsidies are common in low- and middle-income countries. How do they affect an important input into local governance — namely, citizens' propensity to make everyday demands or claims? I study the effects of a program in Mumbai, India, through an original survey of winners and nonwinners of program lotteries. Winning increases participants' reported claims to improved services and knowledge of municipal government. It also changes policy preferences, even among those who rent out the homes. Transfers can thus generate active citizenship through many channels, including increased political capacity, improved perceptions of self-efficacy, expanded expectations of government, and changed motivations of recipients. They also create interest groups at the local level, where their actions can have both positive and negative externalities. [R, abr.]
72.6298 KWEON, Yesola ; SUZUKI, Kohei —
Since old-age programs mitigate life-course risks that are relevant to individuals across socio-economic groups in ageing societies, all parties have a political incentive to support these initiatives. Nevertheless, pre-existing partisan commitments bind the policy instruments that parties use. Cabinet-level analyses of OECD economies demonstrate that left incumbency relies more on public expenditure than right-wing governments. What is more important is that, in the context of large elderly populations, pension coverage is greater under right-leaning governments, while pension replacement rates are higher in left-leaning governments. This shows that party behaviour related to life course-related policies cannot be explained by the conventional pro-expansion versus the pro-retrenchment partisan politics. Rather, a focus on partisan variation in the use of policy instruments is required. [R]
72.6299 KWON Soonhwan —
Does a populist party increase civic political participation? This paper aims to contribute to the debate among scholars on whether populism serves to correct the limits of representative democracy by increasing civic political participation. Prior studies dealing with this question have conducted empirical studies by using voter turnout as a dependent variable. However, the prior studies overlook the fact that there are many other ways of political participation by citizens besides voting. To fill the gap, this paper empirically tested the relationship between populist parties and six different ways of political participation as dependent variables (participating in party or action group, participating in organization or association. wearing some political symbols (badge, sticker), public demonstration, petition signing and boycotting). The results are ambivalent. Generally, there is no evidence that the increase of civic political participation by populist parties is a universal phenomenon. However, when analyzed on more micro-level, there are results that can derive several implications. First, when left populist parties are represented in a parliament, the participation in boycotting increases. It might be related to the fact that boycotting movements are mostly associated with progressive agendas. Second, in the Central-Eastern Europe (CEE), when populist parties are represented in a parliament and their vote share in last election is higher, there is a significant impact on the participation in association or organization. Third, in Western Europe, populist parties increase the participation in party or action group when they are represented in a parliament. [R, abr.]
72.6300 LAMOUR, Christian —
There is one European state leader from the moderate Christian-democrat center right who has developed a discourse and policies showing his progressive move toward the radical right: Viktor Orbán. Based on an analysis of segments of Orbán's speeches between 2014 and 2019 that mention Christianity, the research reveals that this religion is a nodal point for three main reasons: (1) the density of Christian references used to shape a negative and antagonistic discourse, strategically adjusted to his audience; (2) the use of Christianity to ground the three ideological pillars of the radical right (populism, nativism, and authoritarianism); and (3) the mobilization of Christianity to organize a hegemonic struggle against the dominant political force that has defined the meaning of this religion in the European public sphere — the moderate center right. [R, abr.]
72.6301 LAWLOR, Andrea ; CRANDALL, Erin —
While the majority [of research] has focused squarely on the fundraising activities and spending preferences of parties and candidates, far less has paid attention to the spending habits of corporations, unions and interests that often register as non-parties. Yet these actors have gained prominence across general elections and referendum campaigns in the past decade owing to the increase in funds spent to influence election outcomes. Little is known about what the public thinks about the participation of these actors in campaigns. Yet public opinion toward non-party campaign spending is important to the degree that it effects perceptions of electoral integrity and might compel policy change. This paper uses new survey data collected from Canada and the UK to answer questions about how citizens perceive non-party campaign spending and what informs attitudes toward non-parties. [R, abr.]
72.6302 LE GALL, Cal ; DEVINE, Daniel —
One of the purported effects of international integration is that voters are less able, or less willing, to punish or reward incumbents for economic performance: since governments are less able to influence economic outcomes, economic considerations weigh less for voters at the ballot box. This would have serious implications for democratic legitimacy. Yet the balancing demands hypothesis predicts that voters compensate for this by judging incumbents on non-economic performance instead. In this article, this theory is critiqued theoretically and empirically, putting it to the test for one of the first times at the individual level using the 2019 Belgian Election Study. Combining perceptions of policy performance across six issue areas with novel survey items which measure perceptions of economic constraints, it is shown that whilst performance voting does occur, there is no support for the balancing demands hypothesis. [R, abr.]
72.6303 LEE Myunghee ; MURDIE, Amanda —
Why is the #MeToo movement very active in some countries but not in others? What factors encourage the transnational diffusion of digital feminist activism? Although transnational forces are important, we argue that domestic political opportunity structures play a more significant role than transnational influences in the country-level diffusion of #MeToo. We collected 35,211 global tweets and used Bayesian statistical modeling to test the implications of our theory. Our findings support the idea that as a country better protects its citizens' political and civil rights and civil liberties, individuals in that country are more likely to engage in the #MeToo movement. [R]
72.6304 LEE Yunsoo —
In spite of voluminous literature on citizen trust in government and job insecurity, the relationship between job insecurity and trust in government has been overlooked. Drawing on performance theory and psychological democratic contract model, this study assesses the effects of job insecurity on trust in government. Using the Latinobarometer 2017, the findings suggest that job insecurity has a substantial negative impact on trust in government. A closer look at the impacts of job insecurity on various parts of government reveals a slightly differentiated picture. While job insecurity reduces trust in a national government, Congress, and the Court, it does not have a damaging impact on trust in police. [R]
72.6305 LESSCHAEVE, Christophe —
Research on opinion congruence has often found that political parties' views are more likely to align with those of higher-income and higher educated citizens. We argue that this conclusion does not account for heterogeneity among parties. Based on an integrated dataset containing the positions of over 1,700 Belgian citizens and 11 Belgian parties on over 120 policy statements, we examine how opinion congruence inequality between privileged and underprivileged people varies between parties. We find that left-wing parties align more with underprivileged citizens than they do with privileged citizens on economic issues, while the opposite holds for right-wing parties. On cultural issues, however, both left- and right-wing parties better represent the preferences of privileged people. The exception is the radical-right party Vlaams Belang, which on the cultural dimensions better represents the views of underprivileged voters. [R, abr.]
72.6306 LEVIEN, Michael ; UPADHYAY, Smriti —
Land dispossession is a major source of protest in many countries. This article asks, How common are cases of mobilization against land dispossession relative to cases of nonmobilization? Why do we see protests against land dispossession for some projects and not others? These questions are taken up in the context of India, a major global hotspot for land dispossession protest. Using a database of all major capital projects in the country, the article looks at the effects of project characteristics and context on incidence of delays or cancellations due to land acquisition problems. The findings demonstrate that a project's sector and subnational location affect the emergence of opposition to land dispossession. Further, differences in political competitiveness and agrarian social structure are significant factors driving subnational variation. By identifying important factors shaping opposition to land dispossession, the article aims to stimulate comparative research that can advance a political sociology of dispossession. [R]
72.6307 LEVINE, Kenneth J. —
Voters make their decisions based on several factors; however, cognitive dissonance and ego-involvement are two forces that work to keep voters' choices consistent over time. Despite these internal pressures, there are times when a particular candidate has disappointed a voter to such an extent that the voter considers voting for a different candidate in the next election. 170 young voters were asked about their feelings of regret and their need for permission to change their minds and vote differently in a future election. Findings suggest that women and Democrats are more likely to need permission to change their votes than men and Republicans. Furthermore, there is a significant relationship between regret and desire to change one's vote with the need for permission to do so on election day. Lastly, the importance of having that permission will affect a voter's feelings of obligation to cast a ballot for the same party. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6347]
72.6308 LEVY, Gabriella —
Following armed conflict, voters must often evaluate candidates who have allegedly committed violence against civilians. What kinds of alleged perpetrators are voters more willing to support and why? I argue that people appraise candidates' alleged involvement in violence by considering how their participation reflects competence and integrity. This article relies on the theory of dyadic morality to build a framework for civilian judgements about perpetrator integrity. It also argues that the most salient form of competence in the context of civilian targeting is security competence. A conjoint survey in Colombia featuring hypothetical former combatants running for office indicates, in line with my argument, that attributes associated with integrity affect respondent preferences. Respondents are more supportive of candidates who violate less strict norms, have less agency, and have less clear causal links to the victims. [R, abr.]
72.6309 LI Anqi ; RAIHA, Davin ; SHOTTS, Kenneth W. —
We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert democracy if retained in office. A truthful alternative media can help voters identify and remove these subversive types while reelecting competent leaders. A malicious alternative media, in contrast, spreads false accusations about the incumbent and demotivates policy effort. If the alternative media is very likely to be malicious and hence is unreliable, voters ignore it and use only the mainstream media to hold regular incumbents accountable, leaving aspiring autocrats to win reelection via propaganda that portrays them as effective policy makers. When the alternative media's reliability is intermediate, voters heed its warnings about subversive incumbents. [R, abr.]
72.6310 LI Xiaojun ; CHEN Dingding —
Does the public in authoritarian regimes disapprove of their leaders' backing down from public threats and commitments? Answers to this question provide a critical micro-foundation for the emerging scholarship on authoritarian audience costs. We investigate this question by implementing a series of survey experiments in China, a single-party authoritarian state. Findings based on responses from 5375 Chinese adults show that empty threats and commitments expose the Chinese government to substantial disapproval from citizens concerned about potential damage to China's international reputation. Additional qualitative evidence reveals that Chinese citizens are willing to express their discontent of leaders' foreign policy blunders through various channels. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate over whether and how domestic audiences can make commitments credible in authoritarian states. [R]
72.6311 LIDAUER, Michael —
The 2015 general elections were considered a hallmark of Myanmar's transition from an authoritarian regime towards a new form of government. However, the elections did not take place in all parts of the country, and significant portions of the population were excluded from the vote, including voters in areas of contested sovereignty, those who experienced displacement by conflict, and the Rohingya. Against the background of the regulatory framework for elections in Myanmar and its electoral system, this article looks first into a particular understudied element of the electoral process—the cancellation or postponement of elections in areas affected by conflict, which is little understood by voters, election administrators, and outside observers. Second, it examines the conditions necessary for internally displaced persons (IDPs) to participate in elections. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6729]
72.6312 LIND, Michael —
For generations, Americans opposed to foreign wars have warned that they might result in the conversion of American society into a garrison state. But there are other ways in which foreign policy can undermine the economic, political, and social foundations of a democratic republic like the USA, to the point at which it becomes a different kind of regime. [R]
72.6313 LOEPP, Eric ; MELUSKY, Benjamin —
Ballot fusion is an electoral device used in some states that permits multiple parties to endorse the same candidate for public office. The practice is at the center of a fierce policy debate concerning the legality and efficacy of ballot design: critics say fusion allows minor parties to hijack mainstream parties and complicates the voting process; advocates say fusion reduces the potential for wasted votes and increases democratic efficacy in the electorate. We explore whether, and to what extent, fusion voting impacts voters' perceptions, decisions, and overall voting experience. We develop a survey experiment in which individuals make electoral choices under a series of ballot designs, enabling us to evaluate counterfactuals concerning ballot fusion for the first time: how do individuals evaluating a ballot with fusion behave relative to voters who evaluate the same ballot without it? [R, abr.]
72.6314 LOEPP, Eric ; REDMAN, Shane M. —
Cultural debates over gay rights have prompted a great deal of scholarship assessing the nature and resiliency of citizen attitudes toward homosexuality in American political life. We posit, however, that more attention should be devoted to LGBT individuals themselves as potential office holders. Specifically, we argue that in an era of increased affective polarization and partisan sorting, party identification of candidates, as well as affectual and ideological attitudes of voters, must be integrated into analyses of the effects of sexuality as a voting heuristic. Drawing on social identity and subtyping theories, we contend that candidate sexuality will influence attitudes about some candidates, but not others. We then present the results of an original survey experiment in which candidate partisanship and sexuality are both manipulated. [R, abr.]
72.6315 LORENTZEN, Jenny —
More than 20 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the international community is concerned with taking stock of its implementation in countries undergoing transitions from war to peace. This article contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics involved in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda through a focus on the frictional interactions that take place between different actors promoting women's participation in the peace process in Mali. Based on extensive fieldwork in Bamako between 2017 and 2019, it analyses interactions between different international and local actors in the Malian peace process through a discussion of vertical (between international and local actors) and horizontal (between local actors) friction. It finds that the way different actors respond to friction shapes relationships and impacts norm trajectories by triggering feedback loops, which in turn trigger new responses and outcomes. [R]
72.6316 LUI, Elizabeth —
This paper aims to address an important yet under-studied issue — how does violence from the side of the protestors affect overseas support for a democratic movement? The importance of this question is twofold. First, while violence and radicalization are not exactly unfamiliar territories for scholars of contentious politics, they do not receive as much attention when their effects spill beyond the domestic arenas. Second, this study seeks to examine international solidarity with democratic movements at the civil society level, which differs substantially from the conventional elite-centric approach when it comes to the intersection between democratization and international relations. Against this backdrop, this paper considers the relationship between violent tactics employed by the protestors during the anti-extradition movement and the sentiment expressed by people elsewhere towards the protests. To this end, a total of 9,659,770 tweets were extracted using Twitter Application Programming Interface during the period of 1 June 2019-31 January 2020. [R, abr.]
72.6317 LUPTON, Robert N. ; MYERS, William M. ; THORNTON, Judd R. —
The Democratic Party is a coalition of interests sharing a common desire to use government to ameliorate societal inequities. Research shows that the party's programmatic policy appeals engender attitudinal consistency among Democratic identifiers, although less work explores the connection between these partisans' core values and specific policy positions. In this article, we propose and test a theory linking self-identified Democrats' political sophistication to their commitment to a central core value — equality — and attitudes toward group-specific policies designed to benefit Blacks, gays and lesbians and the poor, respectively. We expect that beneficiaries will support their group-specific policy uniformly, but that political sophistication moderates non-target group Democrats' support, as greater awareness should increase non-group members' willingness to further the party's cardinal core value. [R, abr.]
72.6318 MA Jingxue ; MING Liu —
This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of 2019 Hong Kong protests in the New York Times. With the corpus-analytic tools Wmatrix and Wordsmith, it examines both the dominant patterns in its representations and the specific strategies used. The findings suggest that while NYT still draws on the traditional patterns in its representations of Hong Kong protests, it deviates from the protest paradigm in its representations of concerned parties. Meanwhile, emotion discourse has emerged as a distinct strategy in its representations. This is most revealing in the emotion of fear, and a close analysis of its use in its context has revealed its role in the construction of concerned parties and the distrust of Hong Kong people towards the Chinese government. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6448]
72.6319 MABOUDI, Tofigh ; NADI, Ghazal P. —
Does public participation in constitution-making processes enhance constitutional legitimacy? Using an original public opinion survey conducted in Tunisia shortly after the adoption of the 2014 Constitution, this article examines whether public participation in constitution-making activities enhances perceived constitutional legitimacy. The results show that participants are more likely to support the constitution and its institutions than non-participants. We argue that participation increases constitutional literacy among the general public and this increased knowledge impacts the respondents' perception of the constitution. The empirical findings confirm normative assumptions of participatory model of the democratic theory and suggest that inclusive and participatory constitutional reform processes, in contrast to an elitist approach, are more likely to yield democratic constitutional outcomes which are supported by larger segments of the society. [R]
72.6320 MADRID, Raul, Jr., et al. —
Over the last several decades, Gallup data shows an increased willingness among members of the public to support presidential candidates from a wide range of religious backgrounds, though a nontrivial proportion of the public is still unwilling to vote for an Atheist, Mormon, or Muslim. What underlies this opposition? We argue that voters evaluate candidates from religious out-groups more negatively on a wide range of dimensions considered desirable for political office, and that this bias should be more pronounced among the highly religious. We show support for these arguments using a survey experiment fielded with YouGov. Atheists and Muslim candidates were perceived more negatively on a large set of traits considered desirable for political office compared to candidates from religious in-groups, and Mormon candidates fall somewhere in between. [R, abr.]
72.6321 MARCINKIEWICZ, Kamil ; DASSONNEVILLE, Ruth —
The rise of populist radical right parties fuels a discussion about the roots of their success. Existing research has demonstrated the relevance of gender, education and income for explaining the far-right vote. The present study contributes to the aforementioned debate by focusing on the role of religiosity. The data collected in the eighth round of the European Social Survey (2016) allow examining in more detail the political relevance of attendance at religious services and other measures of religious devotion. This study focuses in particular on 15 countries, 11 from Western Europe and 4 from East-Central Europe. In none of the Western European countries is there evidence of a positive relationship between religiosity and vote for a populist radical right party. In fact, in many countries of this region more religious voters are substantively less inclined to support farright movements. The situation is different in parts of East-Central Europe. In Poland, and to a weaker extent also in Hungary, the probability of a vote for right-wing populists increases with religiosity. [R]
72.6322 MARINOV, Nikolay ; POPOVA, Maria —
We argue that Eastern European democracies' original sin of state capture has been exacerbated by the rise of conspiracy theories, whose stock has only increased with the addition of COVID misinformation. Eastern European voters struggle to differentiate between the true political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as COVID denialism, world government, or political correctness as a tyrannical plot. As a result, conspiracy theories enable the state capture camp to divide the reformist opposition and maintain their grip, while simultaneously claiming that they are governing competently and in line with European values. We use an original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications from the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. [R, abr.]
72.6323 MARTIN, James —
What insights and advantages do rhetorical approaches offer over other methods of exploring social and political discourse? This article aims to clarify the contribution of rhetorical analysis by exploring its distinctive, hermeneutic attention to public speech. Public speaking is, accordingly, viewed as a practice of assembling meaningful interpretations in specific situations. Central here is a temporal dimension. Analysing rhetoric involves grasping discourse, on the one hand, as concretely situated in response to proximate constraints and, on the other hand, as a medium to move beyond the situation towards a future. Following John Caputo's reading of Derrida, I argue that, examined rhetorically, public speech enacts a ‘negotiation’ of past and future, intertwining conditional – and hence partially calculable – positions with an ‘unconditional promise’ to prepare for what comes. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6324 MARTIN, Steven Andrew ; BLUNDELL, David —
Through ethnohistorical studies, this paper explores social and political perspectives during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan which led to the forced resettlement of an entire indigenous society. Ethnographic life histories and translations of official Japanese police announcements are used to explore the 1941 Neibenlu (Laipunuk) Incident, a critical event in the oral history of the Bunun, a Taiwanese (Formosan) indigenous people of the southern mountains of Taiwan. We examine the reopening of Neibenlu's Japanese mountain trail and its police stations offering new access to Bunun heritage to inform present and future generations. The study offers an innovative account of a neglected topic of indigenous resistance to imperialism, combining oral ethnography and historical textual analysis. [R]
72.6325 MASON, Andrew ; MINERVA, Francesca —
The UK Equality Act 2010 prohibits direct and indirect discrimination with respect to nine characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. We argue that the best way of understanding the Act is to see it as protecting those who are vulnerable to systematic disadvantage, partly in virtue of being at risk of experiencing discrimination that violates what we call the meritocratic principle. If this is a key principle underpinning the Act, then there is a compelling case for extending the legislation to include the protection of at least one further characteristic, namely, appearance. We consider but reject various difficulties that might be raised with extending the Act in this way, including the objection that those vulnerable to forms of appearance discrimination that violate the meritocratic principle could be adequately protected by treating them as disabled. [R]
72.6326 MATTHEIS, Nikolas —
Taking the ‘Fridays for Future’ movement as its starting point, this article conceptualizes and defends youth disobedience, understood as principled disobedience by legal minors. The article first argues that the school strike for climate can be viewed as civil disobedience. Then, the article distinguishes between various forms of youth disobedience (according to whether they involve child-specific issues or actions). Building on the democratic rationale for civil disobedience, the remainder of the article argues that there is a special justification for youth disobedience. To show this, it argues that children are wrongfully excluded from political participation and that principled law-breaking can be an important remedy to this exclusion. The upshot is that adults should engage seriously and leniently with youth disobedience. [R]
72.6327 MAYNE, Quinton ; SINGH, Shane P. —
We examine the individual-level characteristics and political and economic conditions associated with political discussion. To build our model of discursive engagement, we draw on existing research on political participation as well as our own theoretical reasoning. Our data cover two million individuals in twenty-eight European countries over forty-five years, and we employ a little-used approach to multilevel analysis that distinguishes variations in engagement attributable to cross-country differences from those stemming from within-country changes. Our primary findings reveal that, within countries, citizens are more likely to talk about politics at election time, when there are more electorally competitive political parties, during periods of recession, when unionization levels are higher, and when racial and ethnic diversity is greater. Across countries, political discussion is more likely where elections are ongoing and in countries with lower levels of income inequality and corruption. We also find that men and the higher-educated are more likely to discuss politics, as are those who are middle aged or employed. [R, abr.]
72.6328 MAZZOLENI, Oscar ; IVALDI, Gilles —
Sovereignism is at the crux of the current wave of radical right-wing populism. Populist parties advocate ‘taking back control’ and generally do so in the name of the ‘people’, pledging to restore economic well-being. This article argues that populism and sovereignism are inherently connected in radical right-wing populism politics through a set of values that emphasize popular and national sovereignty. To test the empirical validity of our proposition, we focus on two established European radical right-wing populist parties, namely the Rassemblement National in France and the Swiss People's Party and use data from an original survey. We find that while Rassemblement National and Swiss People's Party voters diverge in general economic orientations, they share similar economic populist sovereignist values that significantly shape electoral support for those parties. These findings suggest that economic populist sovereignism may represent an important driver of support for the radical right-wing populism, alongside other correlates of radical right-wing populism voting, such as perceived immigration threat. [R]
72.6329 McCARTHY, Devin —
A commonly accepted model of public attitudes toward election rules assumes that citizens follow the cues of their preferred party's elites and support rules that would benefit that party in elections. This article proposes an alternative theory in which most citizens prefer fair electoral institutions at the expense of partisan interest when that choice is made explicit, while a minority of committed partisans are driven by partisanship. I test this theory on the case of redistricting using two survey experiments that ask respondents to choose between a partisan gerrymander and a nonpartisan district map. While introducing party labels to a redistricting scenario makes partisans somewhat more likely to choose a gerrymandered map, a clear majority of partisans choose a nonpartisan map across all experimental conditions. [R, abr.]
72.6330 McGREGOR, Michael, et al. —
Voter turnout rates among survey respondents tend to exceed actual turnout by a significant margin. This note reports the results of an experiment whereby the indicated topic of a political survey was varied at the recruitment stage, with the goal of producing a sample with reported turnout rates that more closely mirror reality. Three experimental groups were informed that the survey was about politics, while a fourth received no indication of the nature of the study. Data from nearly 5000 respondents in Ontario, Canada suggest that this manipulation had no appreciable effect upon survey completion rates, but the level of reported turnout is lower when no topic is indicated. We theorize that this manipulation affects self-selection into (out of) surveys by voters (non-voters). [R, abr.]
72.6331 McKINNEY, Jared Morgan —
Building on Ernest Gellner's theory of the nation-state and drawing on insights from John Lukacs and George Kennan, this article contends that the major powers of the contemporary Indo-Pacific are characterized by conflicting nationalisms. Homogenizing nationalism seeks to form China — a former multiethnic empire — into a unitary nation-state. Budding fascism endeavors to transform India — founded as a secular state — into a Hindu nation in which there is little place for the ‘other.’ And in the USA, truculent exceptionalism readily acknowledges that coexistence with China is no longer possible in the long run. All three powers have an alternative that they might embrace: toleration. But civility, in both domestic and international politics, is increasingly rare. The future of world order in the Indo-Pacific does not look bright. [R]
72.6332 MELO, Daniel —
We propose a problematizing overview of daily life under the Salazarist dictatorship (1926-1974), linking the corporative, educational and propagandistic contexts. We examine how institutionalized, controlled, negotiated and/or repressed leisure was spread throughout the smallest interstices of daily life in Portugal. We also analyse the dichotomous realities and policies for the people and elites (in education and reading, cultural production, circulation and consumption), for women and men (social and cultural roles), etc., and compromises with an expanded mass culture. The article directs attention to specific examples of sociocultural negotiations between civil society and the state, as happened in sports (para-)folkloristic festivities and parades (e.g. the ‘popular marches') and in certain mass culture productions (e.g. revue theatre, cinema, broadcasting and television). [R, abr.]
72.6333 MENG Xiaoxiao ; ZHOU Shuhua —
This article explores the correlation between media effects and political trust, as well as the moderating factor in the equation. Specifically, the authors measured political trust within two categories: institutional trust and system trust. Analyses were based on two waves of surveys conducted among Internet users (2014: N = 2,970; 2017: N = 2,379) in China. Results indicated that (1) exposure to official media was positively correlated with political trust, whereas exposure to individual media and overseas media were negatively correlated with political trust, and exposure to commercial media was a nonsignificant factor; (2) correlation was higher for institutional trust than system trust; and (3) political values were a significant moderating factor. Implications are discussed. [R]
72.6334 MÉRAND, Frédéric —
While most scholars analyze EU politicization as a process that shapes public opinion, little attention has been paid to political strategies. In this article, I focus on politicization as an outcome of political work, the practice of carving out a space for agency in an environment that is constrained by institutional rules and intergovernmental power structures. Through an ethnographic analysis of the Juncker Commission's implementation of the Stability and Growth Pact in Italy, Spain, and Portugal in 2015-2017, I make three arguments. First, the Commission succeeded in redefining the rules of the Pact, without however challenging them. Second, this political work was enabled by conservative and social-democrat actors who neutralized each other. Third, political work contributed to a politicization of the Pact. The ethnographic narrative reveals two practices of politicization at play: (1) the purposeful exercise of political discretion vis-à-vis institutional rules; (2) the embrace of ideological and partisan conflict. [R]
72.6335 MERINO, Roger —
Indigenous organizations, international actors, and national authorities portray different images of Indigenous Peoples' relationship with the natural environment. Based on these images, these actors deploy ecological, economic, and security arguments to create or transform protected areas. By exploring three cases of conflicts over creation and management of protected areas in the Peruvian Amazon, this article maps the tensions around the different images and explores how Indigenous organizations and state authorities — backed by international actors — engage with security, economic, and ecological rationales from their own sovereignty standpoint. I argue that the state weakens Indigenous political aspiration of sovereign territorial control by translating this agenda into depoliticized mechanisms and assumptions of modern international environmentalism, which ultimately limits their capacity to truly contribute to conservation goals. [R, abr.]
72.6336 MICHEL, Cynthia L. ; MEZA, Oliver D. ; CEJUDO, Guillermo M. —
When more actors — politicians, bureaucrats, or citizens — get involved in the process of policy implementation, they bring different understanding of their roles and objectives as participants in the policy. These understandings are the means-ends relationships shaping actors' behavior during the implementation process, analyzed in the literature as institutional logics. How do these institutional logics interact during the process of implementation? We argue that institutional logics do not only seamlessly coexist, but they interact in diverse ways: they may coincide, complement, clash or be unrelated. To make these interactions empirically observable, we put forward a working definition for each of them. Using an in-depth case study of a participatory budget in Cananea, a municipality in northern Mexico, we show how the way these logics interact affects implementation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5946]
72.6337 MINARIK, Pavol —
The article examines the development of state-paid salaries for the clergy introduced by the Communists in Czechoslovakia from their institution in 1949 until they were removed in a major change of church-state relations in 2012. In the initial years of Communist rule, it appears that the salaries were part of a “carrot and stick” strategy aiming to subject churches to the state. Later, the real value of salaries steadily decreased, leaving priests marginalized in the economic structure. Following the collapse of the Communist regime, the salaries of the clergy were significantly increased; although, in subsequent years, they followed a trend similar to the pre-1989 period. The similarity in the development of salaries in the Communist and post-Communist period and the reluctance to restitute the church property after 1989 reflects the attitudes of the Czech population and the political representation toward organized religion and the transition from assertive to passive secularism. [R, abr.]
72.6338 MITTS, Tamar ; PHILLIPS, Gregoire ; WALTER, Barbara F. —
Over the past decade, a large number of extremist and hate groups have turned to internet platforms to inspire mass violence. Currently, there is little reliable evidence on how such campaigns radicalize targeted audiences. We provide systematic, large-scale, microevidence on the effect of Islamic State propaganda on social media. We use several machine learning algorithms to detect recruitment messages in online propaganda, identify their dissemination on Twitter, and quantify the reactions of exposed users. Analyzing content produced by the Islamic State between 2015 and 2016 shows that propaganda conveying the material, spiritual, and social benefits of joining ISIS increased online support for the group, while content displaying brutal violence decreased endorsement of ISIS across a wide range of videos. [R, abr.]
72.6339 MIURA, Mari —
The #MeToo movement in Japan is usually considered to have started slowly, and it remains far smaller and quieter compared with those found in the United States or South Korea. Few celebrities or high-profile figures have come forward to support the movement, and even fewer powerful men have been brought down as a result of allegations of sexual assault. The strategy of naming and shaming has rarely been used, but there is collective empowerment through empathy resulting from a nationwide grassroots movement known as “Flower Demo.” This movement has provided victims with a safe space to share their experiences. Those breaking their silence have appeared in various sectors of society, and this has raised the social consciousness of deep-rooted sexism inherent in Japanese society. [R]
72.6340 MIWA, Hirofumi ; HAPPO, Musashi ; ODAKA, Kaho —
We contribute to the demand-side theory of women's underrepresentation in democracy, by which we mean that women are underrepresented in politics because voters prefer male politicians, by focusing on gender's effect on the persuasive power of politicians' policy statements. We conducted a survey experiment in Japan, where women are seriously underrepresented in politics and voter preferences for individual candidates matter with respect to women being elected. We showed participants fictitious local legislators' policy statements and asked to what extent they supported those statements. We selected foreign and welfare issues on which voters have shared gendered stereotypes and randomly manipulated the legislators' gender, ideological positions, and tone of their statements. We found no significant differences in approval for policy statements between female and male legislators. [R, abr.]
72.6341 MONAHAN, Martin —
Now that Corbynism has passed, an institutional explanation for his sudden control of the British Labour Party allows for a richer understanding of the process by which his leadership came about. In particular, this analysis develops on the established institutional theory ideas of reactivation, invasion and veto-players and adds to these the role of “veto complacency”. These theoretical mechanisms are key to understanding why the British Labour party changed so radically after its 2015 electoral defeat. This case study highlights the usefulness of applying institutional theory mechanisms to explanations of party change and seeks to expand on current dominant theories of institutional change that appear less capable of explaining sudden radical endogenous change — as exhibited here by the British Labour party. [R, abr.]
72.6342 MONGRAIN, Philippe —
In the last 40 years or so, scholars have proposed a vast array of models and approaches to predict election outcomes in a variety of democracies. Election forecasting has garnered increasing attention and has been the subject of multiple symposia and special issues in political science journals. This article reviews the forecasting efforts that have been deployed in the case of France since pioneering work in the late 1970s and early 1980s and discusses the peculiarities of the French political system and their consequences as well as the challenges they create for election forecasting. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6290]
72.6343 MONNAT, Shannon M. —
This study investigates rural-urban differences in COVID-19 in terms of its impacts on the physical and mental health, social relationships, employment, and financial hardship of US working-age adults (18-64). I use data from the National Wellbeing Survey collected in February and March 2021 (N = 3,933). Most respondents (58 percent) reported that COVID-19 has had a negative impact on their lives. Residents of rural counties adjacent to metro areas reported the worst outcomes: they were more likely than residents of large urban counties to report positive tests for coronavirus; to live with someone who tested positive or have a close friend or family member outside of the household test positive; to have a close friend or family member hospitalized; to seek treatment for anxiety or depression; to be late paying rent, mortgage, and other bills; to not be able to afford groceries or other necessities; and to get a loan from family or friends. Recovery policies must consider geographic variation in COVID-19 vulnerability and impacts. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6395]
72.6344 MONTGOMERY, Jacob M. ; SEO Min Hee —
Existing research shows that participation rates are higher in competitive electoral contexts. However, it is difficult to disentangle whether this contextual effect is a function of geographic heterogeneity or the strategic incentives for participation that individuals face in close elections. We partially circumvent this dilemma by focusing on out-of-state college students facing the choice of where to cast their vote. Using a novel survey and administrative records for over 1 million out-of-state students, we show that individuals attending college in a state where the election is more competitive than in their home state are more likely to register in their campus state, consistent with theories of strategic behavior. We argue that by focusing on this population and this question we are better able to assess the relationship between strategic incentives and political behavior while holding constant state-specific context. [R]
72.6345 MORENO, Guillermo Romero ; PADILLA, Javier ; CHUECA, Enrique —
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) aim to increase voters' political competence by providing them with the closest political party according to their preferences. To do this, VAAs usually compare and aggregate the positions of users and political parties on a set of policy issues by defining a conceptual space and some distance metric on it. We argue that the main method for performing the comparison adapts to users' preferences unsatisfactorily because 1) they use unjustified a priori decisions for weighting policy issues and 2) they employ the same issue-voting space on all policy issues. Some exceptional cases address these issues by providing a community-based recommendation, but often come with lack of interpretability. To fill these gaps, we propose an adaptive algorithm that learns the configuration of the conceptual space from users' answers. [R, abr.]
72.6346 MORTENSEN, Mette —
This article studies perpetrator livestreams as an emerging witnessing genre in today's digital media circuit. Perpetrator livestreams challenge the norms of witnessing by undermining the ethos traditionally associated with testimonies. They also challenge the forms of witnessing by being integral to the attacks and disseminated across media. Combining scholarship on witnessing and liveness, this article proposes a conceptual framework for understanding perpetrator livestreaming as a witnessing genre, which falls into the three phases pre-mediation, mediation, and re-mediation. Moreover, a prominent example of perpetrator witnessing is analyzed: the livestreaming of the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. [R]
72.6347 MUDDIMAN, Ashley ; FLORES, Lynzee ; BOYCE, Brandon —
Despite evidence that a majority of people in the United States say that they want more civil politics, candidates still use incivility strategically during campaigns. Distinguishing between descriptive and injunctive norms may help explain this apparent contradiction. This study presents an experiment conducted with participants recruited at 2020 Democratic Iowa Caucus rallies that tested whether (1) individuals differ in their descriptive and injunctive normative beliefs about a variety of uncivil behaviors and (2) candidate characteristics such as gender and insider/outsider status in a party influence respondents' normative beliefs. Findings suggest that, while descriptive and injunctive norms align for some campaign behaviors, they do not for all behaviors, such as sharing false information and using insults. Additionally, men and women candidates, as well as political insider and outsider candidates, are expected to behave differently but are held to the same injunctively normative standard when uncivil behaviors are attributed to them. Future incivility researchers should continue investigating descriptive and injunctive norms to investigate whether voters dismiss descriptively common behaviors during campaigns, even if they perceive those behaviors as inappropriate and uncivil. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “Strategic messaging in election 2020”, edited by the author. See also Abstr. 72.6141, 6154, 6173, 6272, 6307, 6459]
72.6348 MURTINU, Samuele ; PICCIRILLI, Giulio ; SACCHI, Agnese —
We model a two-party electoral game with rationally inattentive voters. Parties are endowed with different administrative competencies and announce a fiscal platform to be credibly implemented in case of electoral success. The budgetary impact of each platform depends on the party's competence and on a stochastic implementation shock. Voters rely on the announced platform to infer a party's unobserved competence. In addition, voters receive noisy signals on the impact of each fiscal platform with noise depending ultimately on a voter's cognitive skills. We predict that the interplay between the desire of parties to win the election (the incentive to manipulate voters' beliefs) and voters' (lack of) cognitive skills (the scope for manipulation) distorts fiscal policies towards excessive budget deficits. The mechanism is that parties attempt to manipulate inferences on their competencies by implementing a loose fiscal policy. The predictions are tested empirically on a sample of advanced economies over years 1999–2008. [R, abr.]
72.6349 MYERS, Joshua ; COFFÉ, Hilde —
The study investigates the effect of having a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) educational and/or occupational background on both the likelihood of MPs proposing a STEM Private Member's Bill (PMB) and the proportion of PMB proposals an MP dedicates to STEM bills. Focusing on the 2015-2017 UK Parliament, we find that having a STEM background does not affect the likelihood of proposing a STEM PMB (or not) but combining an educational and occupational STEM background significantly increases the proportion of an MP's PMB proposals dedicated to STEM bills. This effect is stronger for the co-sponsors of PMBs than for the primary presenters. We also find that having a STEM educational background matters more strongly for women than for men. [R, abr.]
72.6350 NALEPA, Monika ; POP-ELECHES, Grigore —
Covert forms of authoritarian control remain an understudied strategy of authoritarian survival. This article uses the infiltration of the Catholic Church with secret collaborators in communist Poland to study the drivers and consequences of such covert forms of control. We theorize that subnational variation in communist infiltration is driven by differences in organizational vulnerability following World War II. In turn, we argue that the uneven degree of infiltration with pro-regime agents shaped the subsequent effectiveness of the Church to foster anticommunist attitudes. We test these predictions against competing explanations (including imperial legacies and modernization) by analyzing seven Polish surveys from the late communist period (1985-1989). Our results confirm the importance of organizational vulnerability in driving the success of communist infiltration efforts. [R, abr.]
72.6351 NEIHOUSER, Marie, et al. —
The effects on political participation of the consumption of political information from traditional and digital media are widely addressed in the literature. However, what happens in times of pandemic when people have other pressing concerns that are likely to receive significant media coverage? Does the consumption of political information — which increases in times of pandemic — mobilize or rather demobilize voters in local elections? By focusing on the two rounds of the French municipal elections in March and June 2020, we explore how the pandemic affected turnout through the consumption of political information distributed by official news media and users on social media during the first peak of the crisis (March 2020) and during the first period of decline in contagion rates (June 2020). Our results show that the association between consumption of political information and participation is detectable but remains less relevant than traditional predictors of turnout such as socio-demographic variables or an interest in politics. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6290]
72.6352 NEMETH, Stephen C. ; HANSEN, Holley E. —
While many previous studies on US right-wing violence center on factors such as racial threat and economic anxiety, we draw from comparative politics research linking electoral dynamics to anti-minority violence. Furthermore, we argue that the causes of right-wing terrorism do not solely rest on political, economic, or social changes individually, but on their interaction. Using a geocoded, US county-level analysis of right-wing terrorist incidents from 1970 to 2016, we find no evidence that poorer or more diverse counties are targets of right-wing terrorism. Rather, right-wing violence is more common in areas where “playing the ethnic card” makes strategic sense for elites looking to shift electoral outcomes: counties that are in electorally competitive areas and that are predominantly white. [R]
72.6353 NEUNDORF, Anja ; PARDOS-PRADO, Sergi —
Did the COVID-19 crisis have a significant effect on Trump's electoral demise? We present survey experimental evidence on two substantial effects of the pandemic. First, information on the unprecedented economic downturn significantly depressed Trump's popular support across all partisan groups, and especially among middle-low and low-income respondents. Second, being primed on the poor public health record of the Trump administration reduced its electoral prospects among citizens between 55 and 70 years old. We conclude that the 2020 election was a normal contest compatible with theories of economic voting and political competence. Our results suggest that democratic accountability can be a powerful determinant of the fate of populist leaders once in power. [R]
72.6354 NEUNER, Fabian G. ; WRATIL, Christopher —
A growing body of work adopts a “thin” ideology conception of populism, which attributes populist parties' electoral success to anti-elite and peoplecentric appeals that resonate with voters holding populist attitudes. A second tradition, however, has attributed the success of populist parties to particular “thick” or “host” ideologies, such as anti-immigration, anti-globalization, or pro-redistribution positions. We leverage conjoint survey experiments that allow us to causally identify the effects of several thin and thick populist attributes on vote-choice. Examining the case of Germany, results from experiments embedded in two high-quality panel surveys demonstrate that populist anti-immigration and pro-redistribution positions as well as people-centric political priorities are the most vote-maximizing components of populist ideology. In contrast, anti-elite priorities as well as Eurosceptic and anti-globalization positions do not boost support, not even among voters with strong populist attitudes. [R, abr.]
72.6355 NIVEN, David ; SOLIMINE, Michael E. —
In the congressional district maps in effect from 2012 to 2021, millions of Americans were “castaway” from the largest congressional district in their home county. We show that castaway status was disparately imposed, such that majority-minority census tracts were roughly twice as likely to be castaway relative to majority-white areas. The implications of this disparity are significant given that previous research suggests castaway status has a deleterious effect on basic pillars of representation. This effort to demonstrate who is castaway in the redistricting process augments both scholarly and legal understanding, enhancing our ability to identify individuals whose access to representation may be compromised by gerrymandering, offering a new indicator of gerrymandering, and moving debate beyond the limitations of the ubiquitous collective focus on such matters as how many votes produce how many legislative seats. [R]
72.6356 NOLAN, Brian ; WEISSTANNER, David —
The declining ‘subjective social status' of the low-educated working class has been advanced as a prominent explanation for right-wing populism. The working class has certainly been adversely affected by rising income inequality over the past decades, but we do not actually know if their perceived standing in the social hierarchy has declined correspondingly over time. This article examines trends in subjective social status in two ‘most likely cases' — Germany and the US — between 1980 and 2018. We find that the subjective social status of the working class has not declined in absolute terms. However, there is evidence for relative status declines for the working class in Germany and substantial within-class heterogeneity in both countries. These findings imply that rising income inequality has a nuanced impact on status perceptions. When assessing the role of subjective social status for political outcomes, longitudinal perspectives that consider both absolute and relative changes seem promising. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6203]
72.6357 OLZAK, Susan —
An underlying premise of democratic politics is that protest can be an effective form of civic engagement that shapes policy changes desired by marginalized groups. But it is not certain that this premise holds up under scrutiny. This article presents a three-part argument that protest (1) signals the salience of a movement's focal issue and expands awareness that an issue is a social problem requiring a solution, (2) empowers residents in disadvantaged communities and raises a sense of community cohesion, which together (3) raise costs and exert pressure on elites to make concessions. The empirical analysis examines the likelihood that a city will establish a civilian review board (CRB). It then compares the effects of protest and CRB presence on counts of officer-involved fatalities by race and ethnicity. Two main hypotheses about the effect of protest are supported: cities with more protest against police brutality are significantly more likely to establish a CRB, and protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African American and Latino (but not for White) individuals. [R, abr.]
72.6358 ORHAN, Yunus Emre —
Why do voters vote for undemocratic politicians in a democracy? My chief contention is that affective polarization has become a primary factor driving support for undemocratic politicians. Once partisan identification turns into a salient identity in the hierarchy of group affiliations, it has the potential to widen inter-party distances. Such a political environment fosters positive beliefs of their preferred party and negative beliefs of the other party, which promote political cynicism, intolerance and increase partisan loyalty. As a result, crossing party lines becomes costly, even when incumbents violate democratic principles or incumbents' economic policies do not appeal to supporters' interests. This tradeoff enables undemocratic politicians to evade electoral sanctions for undemocratic behaviour. I created an extended version of Reiljan's affective polarization application. The new dataset covers affective polarization scores of 53 countries calculated over 170 national election surveys. [R, abr.]
72.6359 ORR, Lilla V. ; HUBER, Gregory A. —
Prior research has reported that Americans hold biased perceptions about the composition of US parties. Survey respondents vastly overestimate the frequency with which partisans belong to other social groups stereotypically associated with their party. We argue that when perceptions of Democrats, Republicans, and members of the American public are directly compared, evidence of relative misperceptions is limited. Drawing on novel survey experimental measures, we find that respondents underestimate many differences in the demographic composition of the Democratic and Republican parties. A few stereotypes thought to be associated with one party or the other may apply to partisans in general. Similar trends appear across parties and among strong partisans.[R, abr.]
72.6360 OSANAMI TÖRNGREN, Sayaka —
Increasing immigration and intermarriage in Sweden and Japan have led to a growing multiracial and multiethnic population. Approximately 7% of the Swedish population and 2% of the Japanese population are multiracial and multiethnic today. Based on a total of 39 interviews with mixed persons in Sweden and Japan, I examine the self-claimed and ascribed identification among mixed Japanese and mixed Swedes. I argue that, despite the contextual differences, there are commonalities of experiences and identification. These commonalities of experiences shed light on the conditions the mixed individuals feel that they must fulfill in order to have their different claims to identities validated. The study gives a unique insight into how racial appraisal constrains individual choices of identity in a context where there is no official classification of racial and ethnic groups. [R]
72.6361 OTJES, Simon ; STIERS, Dieter —
Holding the government accountable is a crucial function of elections. The extent to which voters can actually do so depends on the political system. One element that may influence the likelihood that voters hold the government accountable is the difference between wholesale and partial alternation. Prominent political scientists like Mair, Bergman and Strøm and Pellegata and Quaranta propose that in countries with wholesale alternation voters are better able to hold governments accountable because in essence voters have the choice to keep their current government or ‘throw the rascals out’. However, this relationship has not been tested. We examine the relationship between partial and wholesale alternation and retrospective voting in a large-N cross-country study. We show that the association between government satisfaction and vote choice is stronger in countries with wholesale alternation than in systems with partial alternation. [R]
72.6362 ÖVER, Defne —
Focusing on journalists' professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. [R, abr.]
72.6363 PAN, Jennifer ; SHAO Zijie ; XU Yiqing —
Research shows that government-controlled media is an effective tool for authoritarian regimes to shape public opinion. Does government-controlled media remain effective when it is required to support changes in positions that autocrats take on issues? Existing theories do not provide a clear answer to this question, but we often observe authoritarian governments using government media to frame policies in new ways when significant changes in policy positions are required. By conducting an experiment that exposes respondents to government-controlled media—in the form of TV news segments—on issues where the regime substantially changed its policy positions, we find that by framing the same issue differently, government-controlled media moves respondents to adopt policy positions closer to the ones espoused by the regime regardless of individual predisposition. [R, abr.]
72.6364 PARDELLI, Giuliana ; KUSTOV, Alexander —
Why do communities with larger shares of ethnic and racial minorities have worse public goods provision? Many studies have emphasized the role of diversity in hindering public outcomes, but the question of causality remains elusive. The authors contribute to this debate by tracing the roots of both contemporary racial demography and public goods provision to the uneven historical expansion of the state. Focusing on new historical data from Brazil, the authors show that more remote municipalities with lower levels of state capacity in the past were more frequently selected by escaped slaves to serve as permanent settlements. Consequently, such municipalities have worse public services and larger shares of Afro-descendants today. These results highlight the pervasive endogeneity of the relationship between ethnic demography and public outcomes. [R, abr.]
72.6365 PARIS, Roland —
European populist leaders and movements often extol the virtues of sovereignty, but how exactly are they using this term? Scholars have typically relied on conventional understandings of the concept — Westphalian, popular and national sovereignty — to interpret populist discourses, but some have noted that these categories seem inadequate. This article asks whether much older, long overlooked, versions of sovereignty might help to explain the sovereignty discourse of European populists. These older variants include extralegal sovereignty (a leader's power to act outside the constraints of formal rules) and organic sovereignty (the power of a political community understood as a single ‘organism’). Both are inherently illiberal: extralegalism rejects constitutionalism, while organicism is inimical to political pluralism. [R, abr.]
72.6366 PARTHEYMÜLLER, Julia, et al. —
In recent years, election administration has become a subject of intensified debates, raising questions of how to organize elections to ensure electoral integrity. One question concerns who should serve as members of polling station boards, administer election day proceedings, and participate in the vote count. Different models co-exist in modern democracies, with some countries – among them Austria – actively involving the political parties in the election administration. Against this background, this paper examines perceptions of electoral integrity among Austrian poll workers and citizens using data from an original survey of poll workers and survey data of the voting population. The results show that poll workers have greater confidence in the election administration than regular voters but are equally or more skeptical regarding other aspects of electoral integrity. [R, abr.]
72.6367 PATTERSON, James —
Recently, so-called Catholic “postliberal” conservatives have condemned the American regime as fundamentally liberal and, hence, parasitic on preliberal institutions. I argue that this view unduly conflates liberalism and republicanism and thereby confuses an ideology with the principles of the regime. American Catholic clergy have historically condemned liberalism in favor of a Catholic republicanism. These clergy opposed liberalism, but they couched their opposition in terms of support of the American Republic, often arguing that the Catholic Church, especially in parochial schooling, provided the best foundation for good government. However, the recent decline of hierarchical support of Catholic republicanism has led to the present disillusionment of American Catholics, who are at risk of turning to reactionary politics to their own peril. [R, abr.]
72.6368 PERRETTA, Heather —
Research on state-level suffrage associations points to women's greater participation in the public sphere — higher education, the professions, and civic organizations — as a significant predictor of a state's suffrage association succeeding in securing woman suffrage prior to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. This finding raises the question of how women gained access to those areas of public life that had formal barriers to entry — higher education and the professions. Specifically, did women's participation in civic organizations play a role in helping women gain access to these areas of the public realm? Using event history analysis, this study explores the role of the Literary Club movement and the Suffrage movement in influencing a state's policy regarding women's right to practice law. I employ the concept of institutional logics to argue that Clubwomen and Suffragists exploited contradictions in the logics of traditional gender roles and of the American political system to press for expanded opportunities for women in the public realm. [R, abr.]
72.6369 PERRY, Kate —
How does sanction type negatively impact women in gendered ways in the target state? I argue that economic sanctions place a financial burden on the target state which leads to government cuts to social spending, specifically in public education. Women rely disproportionately upon spending on public education, and thus, are impacted more harshly than men when these programs are underfunded by the government. I find that contrary to policy expectations, targeted sanctions do not have a reduced impact on women's human rights in the target state compared to comprehensive sanctions once this impact is disaggregated from standard human rights indices and specific mechanisms in the state are examined. In fact, compared to comprehensive sanctions, I find that targeted and human rights sanction types are worse for women's gender equality metrics via this influence on government social spending. Using a panel analysis, I show that targeted and human rights sanctions lead to a decrease in government spending on public education and that these cuts negatively impact women in the post-sanctions period. [R, abr.]
72.6370 PERRY, Samuel L. ; WHITEHEAD, Andrew L. ; GRUBBS, Joshua B. —
Christian nationalist ideology was among the strongest predictors of Americans voting for Trump in 2016 and remained a strong predictor of intent to vote for him prior to the 2020 election. This study uses national data to examine whether Christian nationalism could potentially convert the previously-unconverted to supporting Trump or, conversely, prevent apostatizing from Trump. Among Americans who did not vote for Trump in 2016, Christian nationalism increased the likelihood that they intended to vote for Trump in 2020, but only those who earlier did not vote at all or voted third party. Conversely, among Americans who did vote for Trump in 2016, Christian nationalism reduced the likelihood that they planned on voting for a Democratic or third party candidate. [R, abr.]
72.6371 PETERSON, Rolfe Daus ; PALMER, Carl L. —
This research considers the effects of the personality characteristics of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (labeled the Dark Triad) on political ambition. Research on nascent ambition has shown that individuals who express political ambition differ by social background, gender, and personality. Using original survey research, our analyses find that Dark Triad traits are significantly related to ambition. Respondents who score higher in Machiavellianism are more likely to have higher political ambition, more likely to enjoy the specific aspects of campaigning, and more likely to predict they will be successful candidates. While narcissism is related to feeling qualified and thinking about running for political office, individuals scoring higher in narcissism are less likely to express interest in the specific work of political campaigning. [R, abr.]
72.6372 PIETRYKA, Matthew T. ; MacINTOSH, Randall C. —
Political surveys often include multi-item scales to measure individual predispositions such as authoritarianism, egalitarianism, or racial resentment. Scholars use these scales to examine group differences in these predispositions, comparing women to men, rich to poor, or Republicans to Democrats. Such research implicitly assumes that, say, Republicans' and Democrats' responses to the egalitarianism scale measure the same construct in the same metric. This research rarely evaluates whether the data possess the characteristics necessary to justify this equivalence assumption. We present a framework to test this assumption and correct scales when it fails to hold. Examining 13 commonly used scales on the 2012 and 2016 American National Elections Studies, we find widespread violations of the equivalence assumption. These violations often bias the estimated magnitude or direction of theoretically important group differences. [R, abr.]
72.6373 PIGNATARO, Adrián —
Rally-round-the-flag events are short-term boosts of government approval during crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic produced such an effect in many countries. But why did some people join the rally while others didn’t? Using public opinion data from Costa Rica, this paper tests two hypotheses: first, that threat increases government approval at the outbreak of the pandemic; second, that electoral predispositions shape approval. Results indicate that COVID-19 contagions, as a measure of the threat, are not associated with approval, while past voting patterns are. Positive assessments of the economy and the relief measures also predict higher support for the government. In brief, Costa Rica's rally-round-the-flag event did not overcome the partisan divisions or the ordinary drivers of approval. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6676]
72.6374 PILATI, Katia ; PERRA, Sabrina —
This article examines the consequences of the insider–outsider divide on contentious labour politics. Focussing on work-related collective actions occurring in Italy between 2008 and 2018 (N = 9,935), it is investigated how trade unions and new groups supporting insiders and outsiders are involved in actions that differ in repertoire, scale, issues claimed and by duration. Results show a tripartite field of actors who are engaged in contentious labour politics: trade union federations and professional associations — mostly representing insiders — support institutional, large-scale actions and economic claims. Unorganised and self-organised workers — mostly mobilising outsiders — are active in traditional, disruptive and small-scale actions related to economic issues. Non-working categories — students, political parties, loosely-organised groups — are engaged in traditional, large-scale actions motivated by political and social rights issues. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6203]
72.6375 PIRRO, Andrea L. P. ; STANLEY, Ben —
In recent years, Central and Eastern Europe have furnished several examples of illiberalism in power. The most prominent and consequential cases are Fidesz, which has ruled in Hungary since 2010, and Law and Justice (PiS), which has ruled in Poland since 2015. In both cases, illiberal governments have embarked upon an extensive project of political reform aimed at dismantling the liberal-democratic order. We examine the nature, scope, and consequences of these processes of autocratisation. We first argue that illiberal changes are ideologically founded and identify how both populism and nativism figure in the policymaking of illiberals in power. We then show how these practices emerge from a common “illiberal playbook” — a paradigm of policy change comprising forms of forging, bending, and breaking — and elaborate on the notion that illiberal governments are using legalism to kill liberalism. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6652]
72.6376 PONCE, Aldo F. ; WANG Ching-Hsing —
This study examines the role played by the Hong Kong crisis in the outcome of the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election. Using the original data from a two-wave panel survey, we present solid evidence showing that the effect of cross-strait relations on voting behaviour in Taiwan is certainly complex and intricate. This study finds that greater optimism about Taiwan's future is conducive to the Democratic Progressive Party's chance of winning the election. However, when Taiwanese voters takes into consideration the Hong Kong crisis, it is found that greater optimism about Taiwan's future helps relatively more the Kuomintang. Thus, this study deepens our understanding of the role of the cross-strait relations in shaping electoral behaviour in Taiwan for presidential elections. [R]
72.6377 PONGE, Rémy —
De nombreuses explications ont été avancées pour rendre compte de la visibilité croissante des souffrances psychiques du travail (stress, burnout, risques psychosociaux, etc.) dans l’espace public: "psychologisation" du social, recomposition des maux du travail, construction d’un problème public par des acteurs mobilisés, etc. Cet article s'intéresse au rôle des organisations syndicales et explore la piste d’une "sanitarisation" de l’action syndicale. Il interroge ainsi ce que la place croissante du thème des souffrances du travail dans le discours et les pratiques des organisations syndicales nous dit des transformations contemporaines du syndicalisme et de son rôle dans la politisation des enjeux du monde du travail. Articulant matériaux d’archives et entretiens, nous analysons les pratiques des acteurs en charge des questions de santé au travail au sein des directions des deux principales centrales syndicales françaises, la CFDT et la CGT, des années 1990 à aujourd’hui. Nous montrons que s'il s'est d’abord agi pour les directions syndicales, particulièrement la CGT, d’apporter une réponse à un problème social fortement publicisé, la mise à l’agenda des souffrances au travail est étroitement liée aux rapprochements entre des acteurs des champs syndical et scientifique d’une part et, d’autre part, aux difficultés croissantes des syndicalistes face aux directions d’entreprise. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6084]
72.6378 POP-ELECHES, Grigore ; ROBERTSON, Graeme ; ROSENFELD, Bryn —
How and why does protest shape participants' attitudes? We study this issue using panel data gathered both before and after Ukraine's Euromaidan protests. We argue that frames play a key role in this process. We find that protest participation increased alignment of protesters' policy preferences with the main protest frames by stabilizing existing attitudes that were in alignment and changing attitudes that conflicted with the dominant frame. Attitudes on core protest issues also became more coherent. We find no comparable effects for issues less central to the protests, and all effects vary as the framing and protest environment changed. In addition, we examine the mechanisms of attitude change, showing that while protesters also experience significant increases in efficacy, interest, and participation, these changes only partly explain attitudinal changes. [R, abr.]
72.6379 POPÁLENÝ, Peter ; CABADA, Ladislav —
During inter-war Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) profiled itself as an anti-system revolutionary political party, which after 1935 managed to strengthen its relatively stable position in society via antifascist rhetoric. With the support of the Soviet leadership, it unconstitutionally seized power and established a totalitarian regime after 1948. The events of 1989 meant a fall of the undemocratic regime, though surprisingly they did not mark the end of the Communist Party. This status did not change even after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) still figures in the Czech political scene as a relevant actor. A hundred years of existence brings the opportunity to look back at the party development. The logical question presents itself about whether, and how, KSČM is comparable to KSČ and what differentiates them. [R, abr.]
72.6380 PRIDDY, Grace, et al. —
Rohingya is one of the ethnic minority groups that has faced profound ethnic violence against them in their home country, Myanmar. Almost a million Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh and are currently living in extremely precarious conditions near the Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Despite the sufferings and oppressions of all Rohingya, women, in particular, have been victims of sexual violence. Using various information sources, this paper analyzes different dimensions of the gender-based violence that has endured in Myanmar for decades. This paper also highlights the health and wellness of Rohingya women, including impacts made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, it provides a framework for reducing gender-based violence in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. Even though this paper focuses on the Rohingya crisis, insights are relevant to other contexts facing similar social, political, and humanitarian crises, particularly in the Global South. [R]
72.6381 RABINOWITZ, Beth —
With the 21st-century surge of populism, a debate has emerged over the relationship between nationalism and populism. Some scholars maintain these two phenomena are distinct and should be analytically differentiated; others hold the difference between the two is primarily an artifact of how the scholarship has evolved around each. To bridge these positions, this paper argues that by reorganizing our typologies of nationalism, we can better account for why populism seems to have become fused with nationalism. To do so, it introduces a new typology that distinguishes among state-creating, state-consolidating and state-defensive nationalisms. Applying this new typology, the case made is that we are experiencing a convergence of populism and nationalism today because we are currently in an era of defensive nationalism. [R]
72.6382 RADNITZ, Scott —
Despite recent attention to the spread of propaganda abroad, scholars have not addressed whether and how conspiracy theories spread across borders. This study assesses this question in the post-Soviet region, by examining the relationship between exposure to Russian state propaganda and belief in conspiracy theories in two countries that border the Russian Federation. Analyzing data from an original survey of Georgia and Kazakhstan indicates that exposure to Russian propaganda through television, social media, or websites has minimal effects on respondents' endorsement of conspiracy theories. Respondents in Kazakhstan, and especially ethnic Russians, are likely to endorse pro-Russian conspiracy claims that are frequently propagated, owing to preexisting affinities. Yet the most consistent predictor of conspiracy beliefs is alienation from the political system, which occurs independent of foreign media consumption. [R, abr.]
72.6383 RAJAN, Akhil ; PAO, Christina —
It is well established that voters often hold politicians accountable for misbehavior. But are minority (Black, gay, and/or female) candidates sanctioned more severely for their transgressions? Using a vignette experiment (N = 4129) in the United States, we find that gay candidates (regardless of gender and race) are indeed less likely to win elected office than their more “traditional” counterparts in the aftermath of scandal. However, contrary to the existing literature, the mechanism for this lessened electability does not lie in greater penalties. Instead, we find evidence that it originates in lower pre-scandal vote shares, an effect driven by Republican voters. Sharply lower starting points mean that gay candidates are less able to prevail in an election, even in the face of potentially diminished penalties. In what we term the “Room for Error” hypothesis, we document how even facially neutral accountability structures can have discriminatory effects. [R]
72.6384 RAKOWSKA-TRELA, Anna —
On 6 August 2020, the 5-year term of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, expired, and therefore it was necessary to hold a presidential election. On 5 February 2020, the Marshal of the Sejm set the presidential election date for 10 May 2020, however, on 4 March 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Poland. In mid-March 2020, a number of very serious restrictions related to the pandemic situation were introduced, limiting e.g. citizens' ability to travel as well as freedom of assembly. The organization of the election in May became legally and practically impossible. On 2 June 2020, the Act on Special Rules for the Organization of General Election of the President of the Republic of Poland in 2020 with the Possibility of Postal Voting was passed, on the basis of which act the election was finally held on 28 June and 11 July. Both the legal regulation of the presidential election which took place in 2020 and the electoral procedure had many drawbacks. The one-off electoral statute, which was the legal basis for the election, was adopted in a hastily conducted procedure, inconsistent with the standards of electoral lawmaking. [R, abr.]
72.6385 RATHGEB, Philip ; WOLKENSTEIN, Fabio —
Attempting to reconcile the diverse immigration policy demands of the ‘old’ working class and the ‘new’ middle class, social democratic parties struggle to take a clear position on immigration policy. Adopting more restrictive policies is a possible way forward, but this is likely to lead to electorally costly intra-party conflict. This article illuminates the conditions under which social democratic parties can unite behind more restrictive immigration policies and promote them consistently. Employing a most-similar systems design, it presents a comparative case study of the Austrian and Danish social democrats, from the 2015 ‘refugee crisis' to 2020. The article argues that low levels of territorial decentralisation enabled the Danish social democrats to promote a restrictive stance on immigration top-down, while the Austrian social democrats' federal party structure exacerbated internal disagreements between urban and rural leaders. [R, abr.]
72.6386 REHMERT, Jochen —
How do parties and candidates react to electoral system reform? While the literature on causes and consequences of electoral reforms is receiving increasing attention, we lack a systematic micro-level account on how parties and candidates adopt to changes in electoral rules and district boundaries. This paper examines the case of the Japanese Liberal Democrats to explore how the party has managed to accommodate a surplus of incumbents to a reduced number of nominal tier seats following the 1994 electoral reform. By using micro-level data, I examine how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has matched candidates based on their expected electoral strength and ideological positioning to new districts. Moreover, I investigate how the newly instituted party-list allowed the LDP to avoid its disintegration at the local level by systematically defusing local stand-offs through the handing out of promising list positions. [R, abr.]
72.6387 RENNWALD, Line ; PONTUSSON, Jonas —
This article explores the role of occupation, education and income on individuals' perceptions of being politically represented. Based on ISSP surveys in 19 liberal democracies between 1996 and 2016 and a cross-national survey carried out in the mid-1970s, we analyse responses to the statement that ‘people like me do not have any say about what the government does'. We show a clear occupational and educational hierarchy in perceptions of being politically represented (or having a political voice), with routine workers and skilled production workers perceiving themselves as much less well represented than upper middle-class professionals. Analysing changes over time, we show that class gaps were already large in the mid-1970s and increased further over the following decades. By contrast, class gaps were stable over the period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6203]
72.6388 RENWICK, Alan ; VOWLES, Jack —
Two voting system referendums in the same year in two countries with institutional and cultural similarities provide an excellent opportunity for comparison, particularly given the significant differences in how those referendums were regulated and conducted. In New Zealand, a well-funded and balanced official information campaign led the debate; in Britain, the debate was dominated by campaign organisations. Based on content analysis of newspaper coverage of the campaigns, this paper explores how regulatory differences between these two cases shaped the quality of debate as reflected in media discourse. It finds that they made a difference, suggesting that positive interventions to promote better debate can work. It also concludes, however, that contextual factors are crucial too: interventions that work in one context will not necessarily work in another. [R]
72.6389 RICE, Douglas ; RHODES, Jesse ; NTETA, Tatishe —
While a rich literature has developed around race and juror decision-making, little is known about the underlying reasoning and psychology informing these decisions. We argue juror decision-making and reasoning in cases featuring an African-American defendant are moderated by a juror's level of racial resentment. We present a survey experiment that subtly manipulates the race of the defendant and ask respondents to assess the guilt of the defendant and explain the reasoning for their decision. We find that racially resentful jurors exposed to a vignette featuring an African- American defendant are more likely to see the defendant as guilty and to employ distinctive explanations for assessing their guilt. Additionally, we find whites with low levels of racial resentment exposed to an African- American defendant are significantly less likely to view the defendant as guilty. [R, abr.]
72.6390 RICHARDS-GRAY, Laura —
In the UK, as in many other countries, welfare reform in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has had a detrimental effect on gender equality. Between 2010 and 2015 the UK Coalition government initiated far-reaching cuts to public spending, as well as an increase in welfare conditionality. These reforms have hit women harder than men as women are more likely to rely on welfare benefits and services due to unpaid care responsibilities. Many have suggested that the way in which issues are represented by policymakers can limit what can be conceived as appropriate policy solutions. In line with this, Bacchi's What's the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach is used in this article to interrogate the way in which welfare was problematized by the UK Coalition government. [R, abr.]
72.6391 RIDGE, Hannah M. —
A robust literature on citizens' satisfaction with democracy argues that system satisfaction is based on the policy outcomes that citizens anticipate from electoral results. A tacit assumption in this research is that there are differences between the parties and that citizens are aware of the ideological and preference diversity in their political environment. Some citizens, however, fail to perceive these differences. Using a multi-national set of post-election surveys, regression analysis, and propensity score matching, perceived party difference is shown to substantially impact citizens' systemic satisfaction. Those who believe all parties are the same are substantially less satisfied with the functioning of their democracy. The negative effect of perceived party homogeneity is mitigated by closeness to a political party and sense of representation. By manipulating the public's reserve of democratic satisfaction, this perception of party homogeneity threatens democratic stability. [R]
72.6392 ROBBINS-KANTER, Jacob —
Scholarly research suggests that Canadian election campaigns are centralized affairs, with party headquarters managing a disciplined campaign organization across 338 federal constituencies. At the same time, local realities can incentivize constituency campaigns to deviate from their parties. This article examines the extent of local campaign discipline, given these tensions between parties' centralizing compulsions and countervailing forces that militate against party cohesion. The article relies on original data to identify and explain the extent of local campaign behaviour that defies central party preferences and directives. It draws from interviews with 87 former candidates and eight party strategists, as well as observational data gathered from 10 constituency campaigns during the 2019 federal election. The findings indicate a relatively high level of undisciplined constituency campaign behaviour during the 2015 and 2019 elections. [R, abr.]
72.6393 RØED, Maiken —
Although research on interest group influence has had a revival in recent decades, little is known about interest group influence on political parties. This study considers how parties' goals can affect interest groups' ability to influence these actors. Interest groups are expected to be more likely to influence parties that are ideologically approximate to the interest groups as well as parties that are more willing to make policy compromises; the access that interest groups have to parties mediates these effects. Results from the empirical analysis of 5000 party-interest group observations from Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom support these expectations. In addition to contributing to the literature on parties and interest groups, the findings shed light on party position taking and when the link between citizens and parties is likely to be affected by interest groups. [R]
72.6394 ROSENBERG, Jonas Hultin ; WEJRYD, Johan —
The prevailing trend of treating voting-rights as a privilege for citizens has been challenged by a lively debate among democratic theorists. Growing numbers of resident non-citizens and non-resident citizens are likely to make voting-rights regulations more politically salient. Yet, these issues are largely missing in studies of public opinion and little is known about the support for the citizenship-requirement and its more or less democratic alternatives. Informed by normative democratic theory, this article opens the research field by conducting the first comprehensive study of attitudes toward competing requirements for voting-rights, using a conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of US citizens. The results indicate that considerable proportions of respondents support a residencyrequirement and a democratically dubious economic contribution-requirement, restricting voting-rights to taxpayers only. [R, abr.]
72.6395 ROTHWELL, Jonathan ; SMITH, Ember —
We provide an empirical summary of the relationship between socioeconomic status and the economic and disease burden of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic in the United States. We rely on large-scale public data, including a zip code database we constructed from public records, to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic status and the risk of economic harm, COVID-19 infection, or COVID-19-related death. We find that low levels of education and income are associated with 1.3 to 2 times higher risk of economic harm and 2 to 3 times greater physical harm. Education and income have a similar effect size to racial and ethnic disparities, with many Americans of color facing worse outcomes. Using Gallup data to investigate potential mechanisms, we find that socioeconomic status is not related to preventative behavior like mask use but is related to occupationrelated exposure, which puts lower-socioeconomic-status households at risk. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “The COVID-19 shock to our deep inequities: how to mitigate the impact”. See also Abstr. 72.5904, 6216, 6236, 6243, 6343, 6684, 6731]
72.6396 RUIJGROK, Kris —
This article examines India's troubling rise in internet shutdowns. Focusing on internet shutdowns issued outside of the conflict-prone region of Jammu and Kashmir, the article asks two essential questions: One, who issues the shutdowns in India? And two, why are they issued? Using qualitative fieldwork conducted in two Indian states, and quantitative data analysis of recorded internet shutdowns across the country, the article argues that (1) rather than a centrally coordinated, top-down campaign from the central government, India's 28 state governments are largely responsible for the issuing of shutdowns, and (2) the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is both directly and indirectly responsible for many of India's shutdowns. BJP-run state governments issue more shutdowns than non-BJP states, primarily to suppress protest (the direct responsibility), while the party's polarizing rhetoric and policies, coupled with the BJP-built limited regulatory framework governing the issuance of shutdowns, contribute to an environment in which the shutdowns can thrive (the indirect responsibility). [R, abr.]
72.6397 RUIZ COLLANTES, F. Xavier —
This article argues that the political category of populism has been constituted, historically, on the basis of political parties and leaders who, in complex performative processes, have been defined as populists. Those performative processes have been implemented in hegemonic academic, media and political discourses that are underpinned by ideological biases and political stratagems. As a consequence, the political category of populism is incoherent and diffuse; definitions are inconsistent, given that they not only can be applied to political leaders and parties designated as populist, but also to almost any other political party or leader who questions the democratic credentials of an existing political system. Proposed in this article, therefore, is the creation of a new political category called ‘democratic legitimism’ or ‘demo-legitimism’, which would include populist discourse as just one of many types of demo-legitimist discourses. [R, abr.]
72.6398 SAHA, Sparsha ; WEEKS, Ana Catalano —
Are ambitious women punished in politics? Building on literature from negotiation, we argue that women candidates who are perceived to be ambitious are more likely to face social backlash. We first explore what the term ‘ambitious' means to voters, developing and testing a new multidimensional concept of perceived ambition, from desire to run for higher office to scope of agenda. We then test the link between these ‘ambitious' traits and voter support for candidates using five conjoint experiments in two countries, the US and the UK Our results show that while ambitious women are not penalized overall, the aggregate results hide differences in taste for ambitious women across parties. [R, abr.]
72.6399 SAUNDERS, Ben —
Compulsory voting involves a legal obligation to vote (or attend the polls), but we might instead require those who do not to pay a charge, without any legal obligation for them to do so. This nonpunitive price creates an incentive for all citizens to participate and prevents free-riding, but permits nonvoting and avoids condemning nonvoters. Thus, this proposal delivers what at least some advocates and opponents of compulsory voting want. Moreover, considering this possibility helps to clarify the disagreement over compulsory voting. Those who wish to reject this proposal need further arguments for their respective positions. [R]
72.6400 SAXTON, Gregory W. ; BARNES, Tiffany D. —
Research finds citizens are less likely to penalize politicians implicated in sex scandals compared to corruption. Still, observational data reveals that some politicians have better luck surviving sex scandals than others. Do voters punish politicians for sex scandals? We argue yes — some do. Whereas liberals are inclined to view sex scandals as personal matters — unrelated to a politician's job performance — conservatives are more likely to view sex scandals as moral outrages that disregard traditional values and threaten the social order. Conservatives are thus less forgiving of sex scandals than liberals, especially when women politicians are implicated. Using evidence from a survey experiment in the US designed to isolate the effect of scandal type (corruption vs. sex) and candidate sex, we investigate heterogeneous effects by political ideology. [R, abr.]
72.6401 SCARROW, Susan E. ; WEBB, Paul D. ; PoGUNTKE, Thomas —
Political observers agree that parties in European parliamentary democracies are more likely than previously to give party members opportunities to vote in decisions about party policies or personnel. Observers are less agreed about the implications of these apparent procedural trends. Some, including Peter Mair, saw them as evidence of the hollowing-out of party democracies; others have seen them as enhancing citizens' opportunities for meaningful political participation. Because this is ultimately an empirical question as well as a normative one, these radically conflicting interpretations make it crucial to examine which interpretation is best supported by usage to date This is the task we undertake in this article. We use data from the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) to investigate the extent to which parties in 26 European countries have adopted and employed intra-party ballots. We also ask whether there is evidence that such procedures are changing intra-party relationships. We find that balloting of party members is indeed widely used, but it is by no means universal. We find much less support for the implication that such ballots are associated with less competitive contests, or that the new devices are generally used in ways that devalue party-member bonds. [R] [See Abstr. 72.5983]
72.6402 SCHAKEL, Wouter ; BURGOON, Brian —
This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation — broadening the countries, issue-areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesizes that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesizes that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on "Understanding unequal representation", introduced by the authors, Noam LUPU and Jonas PONTUSSON. See also Abstr. 72.6022, 6431, 6458, 6688]
72.6403 SCHERPEREEL, John A. ; ADAMS, Melinda ; HAYES, Katherine —
Which factors explain variation in the gendered composition of governing cabinets? To address this question, we transpose the idea of proportionality between legislative seat shares and cabinet seats shares from studies of the partisan composition of cabinets to studies of the gender composition of cabinets. Gamson's law identifies a strong association between the proportion of legislative seats a party contributes to a governing coalition and the proportion of seats the party receives in the cabinet. We attempt to gender Gamson's law. We develop a theory of why a gendered Gamson's logic should apply to cabinets in parliamentary systems. We test our intuition via analysis of a new dataset covering 18 OECD parliamentary systems from 1990 through early 2019. [R, abr.]
72.6404 SCHROEDER, Ralph —
The question this article tries to answer is: to what extent can the recent rise of populism outside of the West be attributed to anti-Western sentiment? Interest in populism has focused on Western democracies, with far less attention devoted to regimes in non-Western parts of the world. This article takes three major cases — India, China, and Turkey. The article examines the recent intensification of populism in the three cases, but also shows how populism fits into the longer comparative-historical trajectories of a revolt against Western domination. The conclusion puts populism in a wider perspective: how do these non-Western assertions of populism shed light on debates about alternative paths within modernity and on the nature of populism in Western democracies? [R]
72.6405 SCHULTE-CLOOS, Julia ; LEININGER, Arndt —
Does the populist radical right benefit from increased electoral mobilization? Integrating theories of political grievances with accounts of party competition in Western Europe, we contend that the populist right gains advantage from increased electoral mobilization, but that this effect is conditional on political disaffection. We draw on a novel panel dataset (2009- 2019) of more than 10,000 German municipalities and city districts to study the implications of turnout surges as a function of pre-existing levels of political disaffection in a difference-in-differences design. The results demonstrate that turnout surges benefit the populist right “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) in contexts of widespread political distrust. In contrast, increased mobilization acts to depress its electoral fortunes in communities marked by low baseline levels of political disaffection. In shedding light on the interplay between political disaffection and electoral mobilization, this study has important implications for understanding the surge of the populist right in established democracies. [R]
72.6406 SCHWARZ, Susanne ; COPPOCK, Alexander —
Candidate choice survey experiments in the form of conjoint or vignette experiments have become a standard part of the political science toolkit for understanding the effects of candidate characteristics on vote-choice. We collect 67 such studies from all over the world and reanalyze them using a standardized approach. We find that the average effect of being a woman (relative to a man) is a gain of approximately 2 percentage points. We find some evidence of heterogeneity across contexts, candidates, and respondents. The difference is somewhat larger for white (vs. black) candidates and among survey respondents who are women (vs. men) or, in the US context, identify as Democrats or Independents (vs. Republicans). [R, abr.]
72.6407 SCOTT, Ralph —
An individual's level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour, with higher education proposed as a new political cleavage. However, there is limited evidence on the causal effect of university on political attitudes, due to self-selection into educational pathways. Addressing this gap, this article estimates the change in political values that occurs within individuals who graduate from university by applying longitudinal modelling techniques to data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, overcoming the selection problem by accounting for time-invariant confounding. It provides the first causal estimate of higher education specifically, finding that achieving a degree reduces authoritarianism and racial prejudice and increases economic right-wing attitudes. [R, abr.]
72.6408 SEVENANS, Julie ; SOONTJENS, Karolin ; WALGRAVE, Stefaan —
Democratic representation presumes that politicians know what the public wants. Ideally, politicians have accurate perceptions not only of which policies citizens prefer (positions), but also of which issues citizens prefer to be dealt with first (priorities). How accurate are elites' perceptions of the public's priorities? And, if elite estimations are incorrect, is there inequality in these perceptions? Using data from two surveys — one measuring citizens' priorities and one gauging representatives' perceptions thereof — in Belgium, Canada and Israel, this article shows that politicians' perceptions of the extent to which citizens want them to undertake action on various issues are not entirely accurate. Importantly, politicians' perceptions appear to be biased towards the preferences of the male, highly educated, and politically interested citizens. [R, abr.]
72.6409 SEVI, Semra ; BLAIS, André —
The decision to vote is partly based on the expected cost of voting. We test the hypothesis that voting in one election reduces the expected cost of voting in the following election, as voters learn that the cost of voting is low. Using three different datasets — the National Electors Study conducted during the 2019 Canadian federal election; a two-wave YouGov survey in British Columbia and Quebec in 2008 and 2009, at the time of the federal and subsequent provincial elections; and a five-wave survey conducted for the Making Electoral Democracy Work project in Bavaria in 2013 and 2014, before and after the Land, federal and European elections — we find that voters who voted in a previous election perceive it will be easier to vote in a subsequent election. We also find evidence that voting leads to more accurate estimates of how little time it takes to vote. [R]
72.6410 SEVI, Semra ; MENDOZA AVIÑA, Marco ; BLAIS, André —
In a seminal article published in 2003, Blais, et al. demonstrated that local candidates mattered for about 5 per cent of voters in the 2000 Canadian federal election. This study's reliance on a single election raises external validity concerns. We replicate Blais, et al. ‘s original analyses on four elections from 2000 to 2008 using a decade's worth of data from the Canadian Election Study. The local candidate effect first uncovered by Blais, et al. is not specific to a single election. Local candidates are a decisive consideration for about 5 to 8 per cent of voters outside Quebec and for about 2 to 5 per cent of voters in Quebec. [R]
72.6411 SHINO, Enrijeta ; SMITH, Daniel —
Are more politically knowledgeable registered voters more likely to cast their ballots prior to Election Day when given an option to do so? We argue that individuals with high political knowledge are more likely to take advantage of convenience voting opportunities because they have command over static-general facts, enabling them to make informed choices when voting. Drawing on five Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) pre- and post-election national surveys and an original survey of registered voters in Florida conducted in 2017, we test if political knowledge affects the method of voting. We estimate a series of multinomial logistic regression models with fixed-effects for voters registered in American states that permit convenience voting, and controlling for socio-economic, political, and campaign effects. [R, abr.]
72.6412 SKORGE, Øyvind Søraas ; RASMUSSEN, Magnus Bergli —
To what extent organized employers and trade unions support social policies is contested. This article examines the case of work-family policies (WFPs), which have surged to become a central part of the welfare state. In that expansion, the joint role of employers and unions has largely been disregarded in the comparative political economy literature. The article posits that the shift from Fordist to knowledge economies is the impetus for the social partners' support for WFPs. If women make up an increasing share of high-skilled employees, employers start favoring WFPs to increase their labor supply. Similarly, unions favor WFPs if women constitute a significant part of their membership base. Yet the extent to which changes in preferences translate into policy depends on the presence of corporatist institutions. [R, abr.]
72.6413 SKRZYDŁO, Jacek —
Rules governing liability of public authority for damages in the Polish legal system are substantially different than their equivalents in the US law. Sovereign immunity is a distinctive feature of American law. It has its roots in the XVIIth century (or even older) English concept: The King can do no wrong. It means that the public authority can be sued only if it waives this privilege. In the US, the federal Congress adopted in 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, excluding sovereign immunity is some (but not all) cases; for example, it is still not possible to sue military authorities for damages resulting from military service (so called Feres doctrine). Another distinctive feature of the American legal system is legal fiction: it is allowed to sue directly public officials whose acts were the source of harm (Bivens suit in case of the federal officials, § 1383 of the US Code in case of the state officials). In both cases, the defendant may, however claim qualified immunity. [R, abr.]
72.6414 SKRZYPEK, Maciej —
This comparative study draws on empirical analysis of restrictions on freedom of assembly implemented in national legislation and used in practice. The study aims to identify and account for how in consolidated democracies, authority states implement a hybrid strategy of restricting freedom of assembly since the economic crisis of 2008 triggered a wave of social mobilization across Europe. The final turning point is 2019, the moment before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparative studies draw on qualitative analysis of sources: national legislation and NGOs' reports. This research uncovers restrictions on public assemblies implemented in consolidated democracy and evaluates their scope and effectiveness in combating social groups recognized as enemies of democracy. [R, abr.]
72.6415 SMETANA, Michal ; ONDERCO, Michal —
A recent surge in survey-based scholarship has shed new light on public attitudes toward nuclear weapons. Yet, we still know little about how these public attitudes differ from those of political elites. To address this gap, we conducted an original survey on a large representative sample of German citizens and on a unique elite sample of German parliamentarians. In the survey, we asked the respondents about their views on different aspects of NATO's nuclear sharing practice. We found support for several hypotheses concerning nuclear use, extended deterrence, withdrawal of forward-deployed weapons, and the feasibility of global nuclear disarmament. As such, we provide systematic empirical evidence that there are, indeed, important gaps in public and elite attitudes toward nuclear weapons. [R, abr.]
72.6416 SMIDT, Hannah —
In war-torn countries, elections are held to support peacebuilding, but they sometimes trigger new violence. While peacekeeping operations (PKOs) regularly accompany electoral periods, we lack systematic knowledge on how they influence election-related violence. I argue that variation in peacekeepers' activities is fundamentally important: only if PKOs assist with securing and organizing elections can they reduce election-related violence. Using novel data on PKOs' election-related activities and accounting for endogeneity in both peacekeeping deployment and activities, the analyses of all 630 elections in conflict-affected countries support this expectation. The result implies that the design of PKOs is crucial for effectively managing post-war political transitions. [R]
72.6417 SNEGOVAYA, Maria —
Scholarship analyzing Russia's influence in Europe has focused primarily on the supply-side of this relationship, especially on the links between the Kremlin and specific parties. Surprisingly few studies have focused on the demand-side. My paper fills in this gap. First, I compile a dataset of pro- Russian parties in the European Union and show that Russia-sympathizers are found across different (left and right) party families. Second, I demonstrate that supporters of these parties across different party families show stronger Eurosceptic attitudes than the electorates of mainstream parties. This finding explains the endorsement of narratives and policies indirectly favorable to the Kremlin by political actors whose electorates harbor Eurosceptic sympathies. [R, abr.]
72.6418 SOLAR, Carlos —
Why does the military remain one of the most trusted institutions despite, in some cases, their history of violence, corporate abuses and bloody interventions to overthrow the state and punish parts of society? This article analyses the interaction between individual factors and support for the armed forces in Argentina, Brazil and Chile to understand current forms of opinion and trust-shifts in post-authoritarian societies. It explores whether in these three democracies, support for the military is explained by the extent to which citizens support other political institutions, democracy, partisan ideologies, and novel military missions, such as the armed forces combating crime. The empirical results suggest that trust in congress and the police are statistically significant factors explaining variance in the outcome in the three case studies. [R, abr.]
72.6419 SORELL, Tom ; BUTLER, Jethro —
Opposition to vaccines is not a new phenomenon, but positions once associated with traditional religious or conservative stances have given way to some highly disparate views that transcend traditional left/right/religious divisions. This article reviews recent literature showing how social media has contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories around Covid-19 and mass vaccination programmes. The narratives discussed are principally those of the right and the religious right. [R]
72.6420 STEIN, Arthur —
Does the overtness of external support to rebels affect civilian targeting in civil wars? Conflict studies increasingly scrutinize how insurgent sponsorships shape rebels' behavior. However, the influence of external sponsors' decisions to publicly acknowledge or deny their support on rebel conduct is largely neglected. This article introduces a new dataset on the overtness of external support to rebels in civil wars between 1989 and 2018. It then assesses whether the overtness of support is correlated with insurgents' propensity to target civilians. I hypothesize that overtly supported rebels are less likely to target civilians than covertly supported rebels. This hypothesis stems from how supply-side factors — the way state sponsors expectedly act after having allocated their support — impact insurgents' structure of incentives around relations with non-combatants. Statistical analyses yield strong support for my hypothesis. [R, abr.]
72.6421 STEINERT-THRELKELD, Zachary C. ; CHAN, Alexander M. ; JOO Jungseock —
How do state and protester violence affect whether protests grow or shrink? Previous research finds conflicting results for how violence affects protest dynamics. This article argues that expectations and emotions should generate an n-shaped relationship between the severity of state repression and changes in protest size the next day. Protester violence should reduce the appeal of protesting and increase the expected cost of protesting, decreasing subsequent protest size. Since testing this argument requires precise measurements, a pipeline is built that applies convolutional neural networks to images shared in geolocated tweets. Continuously valued estimates of state and protester violence are generated per city-day for 24 cities across five countries, as are estimates of protest size and the age and gender of protesters. [R, abr.]
72.6422 STOCKEMER, Daniel ; WIGGINTON, Michael J. —
In this article, we first formulate some theoretical expectations about the development of the gender gap in voting in post-conflict situations. Second, we test these expectations on five cases, including two civil wars, the Ivorian Civil War (2011) and the Malian Civil War (2013-2015), and three major international Israeli conflicts, the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the First and Second Lebanon Wars (1982-1985 and 2006). We do so by comparing women's and men's turnout before and after a conflict using individual voting data and find that the sum of the nine factors we identify (i.e. duration of war, type of warfare, end of fighting after ceasefire/peace settlement, change in workforce participation, international involvement in the peace process, international development aid, the militarization of politics and female social movement activism) explain changes in the gender gap in voting after the conflict in three of the five cases we study. [R]
72.6423 STREBEL, Michael Andrea —
The appropriate scale of metropolitan governance has been the subject of long-running debates. These debates between institutional fragmentation and integration proponents have revolved around the efficiency and effectiveness of metropolitan governance structures. However, the democratic acceptability of such reforms — whether and which citizens support or oppose metropolitan integration — has been largely ignored. This article makes two contributions. First, it develops a socio-psychological explanation of citizens' support for metropolitan integration. Second, it uses unique survey data of 5000 respondents from eight West European metropolitan areas to demonstrate that group-based (local attachment and nationalist party support) and cognitive factors (exposure to metropolitan issues and heuristics) are linked to metropolitan integration support, while material interests are less relevant. [R, abr.]
72.6424 STUCKELBERGER, Simon ; KOEDAM, Jelle —
Digital political advertising on social media is an integral part of modern election campaigns. It gives political parties a powerful new tool to target voters, but which voters do they pursue? Tapping into an ongoing debate about party strategy, we examine whether parties seek to maintain their existing demographic and regional strongholds, or whether they aim to expand their voter coalitions. While the (intended) audience of other campaign activities is often unknown, data from the Facebook ads archive provide information on their recipients' gender, age, and subnational region. Our analysis across five countries, which further brings in recent survey and electoral data, suggests that coalition maintenance is the dominant party strategy for demographic groups. Parties that receive more support from a given gender or age group run ads that reach more members of that demographic group. Consistent with the literature that shows a gender and age gap in voting, left-wing parties are more likely to advertise to women than right-wing parties, and green parties disproportionately reach younger voters. [R, abr.]
72.6425 SYLVESTER, Steven M. ; HAEDER, Simon F. ; CALLAGHAN, Timothy —
Using an original demographically representative survey, we estimate the determinants of public support for a set of supportive and punitive policies to combat the opioid epidemic among a sample of 2,131 Americans. Our findings indicate that individuals who attribute blame for the epidemic to the personal choices of individuals, conservatives and those high in racial resentment are consistently more likely to support punitive policies to combat the opioid epidemic and less likely to favour policies to support individuals with substance use disorders. Individuals who have a personal connection to someone struggling with opioid use disorder favour policies to support such individuals but have nuanced attitudes towards punitive policies. Importantly, we find overwhelming support for all supportive policies except supervised injection sites, while roughly 50% of our sample supported the set of punitive policy choices. [R, abr.]
72.6426 SZEWCZYK, James ; CROWDER-MEYER, Melody —
This paper reveals how community-level income inequality affects political participation. We theorize that local experiences of inequality increase awareness of the unequal distribution of income in the US, provoking political activity, particularly among those with more resources enabling them to act. Using restricted geographic data from the 2012 and 2016 ANES, we show local income inequality increases political participation, especially among the affluent. Using an instrumental variables design, we demonstrate these findings are not the result of reverse causality. Our results reveal the importance of considering both individual- and community-level factors when evaluating political behavior. They also suggest that as income inequality in the US continues to rise, so too will the gap in political participation between the rich and the poor. [R, abr.]
72.6427 TAKEYH, Ray —
The Islamic Republic of Iran finds itself in an unusual paradox. It is a regime that is growing stronger in the region while weaker at home. The mullahs will stand as Persia's most dedicated and ardent imperialists, who have implanted their influence throughout the Middle East. Iran has prolonged regional civil wars, harassed Arab potentates, and reduced the once proud Arab nation of Iraq into a vassal state. Yet, it is at home that the regime faces its most significant challenges. Ebrahim Raisi, Iran's new dogmatic and unimaginative president, is facing a depleted economy, popular protests, and massive corruption. The clerical oligarchs have no answer to Iran's mounting problems. It remains unclear whether the regime can survive the many predicaments of its own making. [R]
72.6428 TARRANT, Andy ; COWEN, Tim —
This article investigates lobbying by US digital platforms, the so-called Big Tech, with regard to the Digital Markets Act (currently under consideration by the European Commission in Brussels) and analyses whether lobbying on the Digital Markets Act fits with academic analysis of the general properties of corporate lobbying in the EU. The article suggests that the case illustrates the importance of domestic European political economies in driving approaches in the Council and Parliament and thus collective legislative outcomes. Contrary to some commentary, the article argues that despite significant expenditure on lobbying in Brussels, Big Tech has been unsuccessful in its efforts and that a significant impediment has been because Big Tech companies only have status as major employers and investors in a handful of small EU Member States. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.5871]
72.6429 TAYLOR, Abigail ; LEFEBVRE, Alexandre —
Why do private citizens in liberal democracies offer hospitality to undocumented migrants? Through qualitative interviews with French citizens, we propose three reasons. The first is widely recognized in the scholarly literature: hospitality is offered out of a care and concern for vulnerable and precarious migrants. However, we uncover two additional reasons that are not acknowledged in studies on hospitality. One is the desire by citizens to uphold the basic principles and ideals of their own society (what we call “care for the world”). Another is the desire on the part of citizens themselves to become a different and better kind of person by practicing hospitality (what we call “care of the self”). We provide a multifaceted account of what motivates citizens to offer hospitality even in situations where it is outlawed by their own governments. [R, abr.]
72.6430 TESLER, Michael —
This article argues that the unusually large and persistent association between Islamophobia and opposition to President Obama helped make attitudes about Muslims a significant, independent predictor of Americans' broader partisan preferences. After detailing the theoretical basis for this argument, the article marshals repeated cross-sectional data, two panel surveys, and a nationally representative survey experiment, to test its hypotheses. The results from those analyses show the following: (1) attitudes about Muslims were a significantly stronger independent predictor of voter preferences for congress in 2010-2014 elections than they were in 2004- 2008; (2) attitudes about Muslims were a significantly stronger independent predictor of mass partisanship during Obama's presidency than they were beforehand; and (3) experimentally connecting Obama to Democratic congressional candidates significantly increased the relationship between anti-Muslim sentiments and Americans' preferences for Republican congressional candidates. [R, abr.]
72.6431 TRABER, Denise, et al. —
Researchers on inequalities in representation debate about whether governments represent the preferences of the rich better than those of less affluent citizens. Due to different levels of visibility, resources and social ties, governments pay more attention to what high-status citizens consider important in their legislative agenda and pay less attention to the issues of low-status citizens. We combined three types of data for our research design. First, we extracted the policy priorities (most important issues) for all status groups from Eurobarometer data between 2002 and 2016 for 10 European countries and matched this information with data on policy outcomes from the Comparative Agendas Project. We then strengthen our results using a focused comparison of three single-country studies over longer time-series. We show that a priority gap exists and has representational consequences. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6402]
72.6432 TRANCHANT, Thibault —
La présente étude aborde l’humour comme un véritable outil de reconnaissance identitaire, lequel, bien qu’ayant des effets ambivalents, contribue à déterminer la perception et la compréhension des différents particularismes sociétaux. Par ailleurs, la relation entre l’humour et les enjeux entourant le vivre ensemble a été peu abordée en science politique. En ce sens, le principal objectif de la présente recherche vise à observer comment les humoristes québécois traitent des questions entourant la diversité ethnique, culturelle et religieuse. À travers une analyse de contenu qualitative et quantitative, la recherche compte répondre à trois questions spécifiques. La première vise à identifier les différentes communautés dont il est question au sein des numéros analysés. La seconde a pour but de souligner les principaux stéréotypes entretenus par les humoristes à l’égard des différentes communautés ciblées. Enfin, la troisième question vient mettre en lumière comment, entre groupe majoritaire et groupe minoritaire, on parle de ces communautés. [R, abr.]
72.6433 TRAUNMÜLLER, Richard ; HELBLING, Marc —
Focusing on one specific aspect of immigrant political integration — how authorities deal with their political right to demonstrate — we show in a large-scale survey experiment that liberal policy decisions permitting demonstrations lead to a polarization in attitudes: citizens who agree with a permission become more sympathetic, while those in favor of banning become more critical of immigrants. This notion of opinion backlash to policy decisions adds a new perspective to the literature on immigration attitudes which has either assumed a congruence between public opinion and policy or ignored political sources of anti-immigrant sentiment altogether. By exploring the unintended consequences of policy decisions, we provide an alternative view and demonstrate the inherent dilemma of balancing citizen opinion and minority rights. [R]
72.6434 TRIPLETT, Jen —
How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation — understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs — contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women's magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. [R, abr.]
72.6435 TRUAN, Naomi —
This paper puts forward an argument about the relation between narratives and constructed dialogue in political discourse. Narratives of dialogue are special cases of constructed dialogue that emphasize the embeddedness of the speaker, displayed as a discourse participant engaging in a conversation with an ordinary citizen or a public figure. Close analysis of British, German, and French parliamentary debates reveals how narratives of dialogue shape an image of the speaker involved in a dialogue. While being engaged in the activity of debating, parliamentarians simultaneously perform the act of debating. I argue that the main point of narratives of dialogue is not so much to report on a prior or hypothetical situation, but to create the ethos of a Member of Parliament receptive to their interlocutors. [R]
72.6436 TRUMM, Siim —
The internet is playing an increasingly important role in shaping citizens' political experience. We turn to it to consume political news and, in some countries, to even cast our ballots at parliamentary elections. Leading the way in embracing internet voting (i-voting) is Estonia where nearly half of the ballots cast during the 2019 parliamentary election were submitted online. Using original data from the 2019 Estonian Candidate Study, this paper explores the relationship between how candidates campaign and their electoral performance. It finds greater use of both offline and online campaign tools to contribute to higher vote-shares as candidates win more traditional and i-votes. These positive effects are similar in size, in terms of candidates' overall electoral performance as well as their ability to attract different types of votes. [R, abr.]
72.6437 TURNBULL, Nick ; BROAD, Rose —
Rhetoric is a way to explain policy problem framing by recognising the practical necessity to persuade audiences in contextual situations. Modern slavery and human trafficking is a complex and emotive problem, simplified through rhetorical demands to motivate an audience of supporters. This article analyses rhetoric by 212 UK anti-trafficking and anti-slavery non-government organisations (NGOs) to uncover rhetorical practices and their effects on policy framing, supplemented by archival research to compare past and present anti-slavery oratory. Our data show NGOs use rhetoric to motivate supporters and promote a humanitarian problem frame, in opposition to a state-driven security frame. Findings confirm other research in identifying an emphasis on female victims and on sexual over labour exploitation. Past and present rhetoric are equivalent in terms of liberal, Christian values (ethos) and appeals to pathos through sympathy for victims. Historical rhetoric is distinctive in arguing for the equal human status of slaves, whereas contemporary activists argue victims are denied agency. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.]
72.6438 TURNBULL-DUGARTE, Stuart J., et al. —
Mass emails are frequently used by advocacy groups to mobilize supporters to lobby legislators. But how effective are they at inducing constituentto-legislator lobbying when the stakes are high? We test the efficacy of a large-scale email campaign conducted by the UK's main anti-Brexit organization. In 2019, the group prominently displayed a ‘Write to your MP’ tool on their website and assigned 119,362 supporters represented by legislators with incongruent views to one of four email messages encouraging them to write to their MP or a control condition (no email). Messages varied across two factors: whether the MP's incongruent position was highlighted, and if urgency was emphasized. We find that 3.4 per cent of treatment subjects contacted their representative, compared to 0.1 per cent of those in the control, representing an additional 3,344 emails sent to MPs. [R, abr.]
72.6439 TYLER, Matthew ; GRIMMER, Justin ; IYENGAR, Shanto —
Many now believe a segregated online news market has led to increased polarization in the US. Indeed, experimental studies in political science and psychology show that partisans are more interested in reading attitude-reinforcing information. Yet, observational studies of web-browsing behavior have thus far found limited differences between Democratic and Republican online news consumption. We present two new pieces of evidence showing how partisans selectively approach congenial news online. First, using a data-set of web-browsing histories from the 2016 US general election, we show that Democrats (Republicans) split their news consumption between left-leaning (right-leaning) sources and moderate/mainstream sources. Second, using high-profile scandals from the 2016 election (Access Hollywood and the Comey letter), we show that partisans consume more news when an event benefits their preferred candidate. [R, abr.]
72.6440 UTYCH, Stephen M. ; NAVARRE, Rachel ; RHODES-PURDY, Matthew —
As groups began to gather to protest COVID-19 restrictions, it became readily apparent that these groups were filled with overwhelmingly white protesters, and were led by organisations that often espoused a white nationalist message. We examine the effects of white identity on opposition to COVID-19 restrictions using original survey data. We find that white identity predicts opposition to COVID-19 mitigation measures, and that this effect persists only when individuals hold anti-elite attitudes. These effects operate above and beyond traditional predictors, such as partisanship and ideology. [R]
72.6441 VanDUSKY-ALLEN, Julie A. ; UTYCH, Stephen M. ; CATALANO, Michael —
The COVID-19 pandemic was a key policy issue during the 2020 election in the United States. As such, it is important to analyze how voters evaluated government responses to the pandemic. To this end, in this article, we examine factors that influenced Americans' evaluations of state-level COVID-19 policy responses. We find that during the pandemic onset period, Americans typically rated their state governments' responses more favorably if their governor was a co-partisan. In contrast, during the reopening period, we find that Democrats relied on both partisanship and policy to evaluate their state-level responses, while Republicans continued to rely solely on partisanship. We contend that given the complex policy environment surrounding COVID-19, Americans may have not been fully aware of the policies their state governments adopted, so they relied on partisan cues to help them evaluate their state-level policy responses. But by the re-opening period, Americans likely had enough time to better understand state-level policy responses; this allowed Democrats to also evaluate their state-level responses based on policy. These findings shed light on how Americans evaluated COVID-19 responses just prior to the 2020 election. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6138]
72.6442 VANTHUYNE, Karine ; GAUTHIER, Mathieu —
In Canada, the relationship between Indigenous Nations and mining corporations is characterized by asymmetrical power dynamics. To address this situation, several Indigenous Nations who see mining as an opportunity to realize their financial autonomy have developed mechanisms to enhance their capacity to regulate how their traditional territories are exploited. Drawing on collaborative research conducted with the Cree of Eeyou Istchee, we show how these initiatives can allow Indigenous peoples to reconcile mining with ways of life seemingly at odds with extractive development. From local perspectives, the Eeyouch have managed to persuade the developers of the mine operating on their territory to meaningfully engage with Iiyiyiuituwin — the “Eeyou way of life,” fundamentally anchored in respect for and reciprocity with the land. While numerous Indigenous Nations exercise their sovereignty by opposing extractive development, others realize it through building relationship with corporations in ways that sustain their enduring political philosophy. [R]
72.6443 VARONE, Frédéric ; HELFER, Luzia —
The ability of Members of Parliament (MPs) to know the policy preferences of their party voters is a precondition for substantive representation. This study investigates whether MPs' perceptions of their party voters' opinions are more accurate with policy statements on which they are competent — namely, those that are owned by their party and in which the MPs have specialised. It combines unique data from citizen surveys and face-to-face meetings with 367 MPs in Belgium, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. Both citizens and MPs evaluated the same statements, and MPs also estimated the support for each statement among their party voters. The comparison of party voters' preferences and MPs' estimations shows that MPs are more accurate on statements owned by their party, but not on issues they themselves specialise in through committee membership. [R, abr.]
72.6444 VENTURINO, Fulvio ; SEDDONE, Antonella —
What happens after primary elections? Strategies of loyalty or defection in general elections have been addressed by US literature mainly by means of aggregate data. However, we lack similar studies in non-US contexts. This article investigates the strategies followed after primary elections by taking the case of the Italian Partito Democratico as an illustration. We addressed the individual drivers of loyalty or defection strategies by considering three different dimensions: (1) the outcome of the primary election, having backed a winning or losing candidate; (2) the strength of partisanship, meant as ideological congruence with the party and partisan involvement; and (3) the leader effect. We relied on four surveys (exit polls) administered during party leadership selections held in 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2019. The results suggest that all three dimensions have an influence on post-primary strategies, but what counts the most is partisan involvement. [R]
72.6445 VERA, Sofia B. —
This article lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of the clarity of alternatives on corruption voting. Traditional approximations to the question of why corrupt politicians win elections focus on the limited availability of information and voter biases toward in-group candidates. I argue that while citizens are ready to punish corruption, the electoral toll for a corrupt candidate is reduced in settings of unclear electoral choices. I find support for this theoretical framework by examining the accountability enhancing consequences of the clarity of alternatives in Latin America. The results indicate that politicians running for office in settings of weak clarity of alternatives sustain less electoral damage than those running in settings of strong clarity of alternatives. The implication is that party decisions that increase voter uncertainty about the menu of choices contribute to the electoral fortune of corrupt politicians. [R]
72.6446 VOLLER, Yaniv —
Rebels, warlords and other actors have not only undermined the authorities' grip on power, but gradually come to shape the nature of governance and political system in their countries. Warlordism, rebelocracies and aliocracies are just a few of the political systems identified by students of conflict and armed groups. However, the literature has generally overlooked one category of armed groups and their implications on political order: pro-government militias (PGMs). As PGMs have become ubiquitous in civil wars, this article identifies a new political order emerging in countries where central governments have become reliant on PGMs in counterinsurgency operations. The article defines this order as a militiatocracy. The article illustrates the emergence and nature of militiatocracies by employing the case of Syria during the civil war. [R, abr.]
72.6447 WAMBLE, Julian J. —
Despite growing ideological diversity within the group, black Americans have maintained their overwhelmingly unified support for the Democratic Party. We argue that black Democratic partisanship is upheld, in part, through black Americans' use of social sanctions (both positive and negative) to encourage compliance with a group norm of Democratic Party support. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of racial social context provided by the race of an interviewer in face-to-face American National Election Study survey interviews of black respondents, we demonstrate the racialized social imperative of black Democratic Party identification. We show that black respondents are more likely to identify as Democrats in the presence of other blacks, particularly those respondents whose conservative ideological placement provides a cross-pressuring incentive to otherwise make an alternative partisan choice. [R, abr.]
72.6448 WANG Guofeng —
Since Hong Kong's handover to China, British newspapers still play an active role in constructing Britain's connections with its former colony. This study elaborates a schema for protests to help better understand protests in general. Based on this schema, the study examined representations of the 2019-20 protests in British newspapers using the approach of corpusassisted critical discourse studies. The analysis shows that they mainly used the predicational strategy, and emphasized the Chinese government's control of Hong Kong — including the inabilities of the Hong Kong government and police violence — in contrast with the protestors' demands for universal suffrage. They suggested that Britain act as a mediator to shoulder a moral responsibility over Hong Kong. Their attitudes are interpreted with regard to Britain's foreign policies and the dominant ideology cultivated in its historical, socio-political contexts and suggest that the UK journalistic practice regarding Hong Kong issues is political-driven to a great extent. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “Language, Politics and Media: The Hong Kong protests”. See also Abstr. 72.6124, 6148, 6255, 6276, 6448]
72.6449 WEINBERG, James —
Entrenched inequalities in political participation have made the questions of who participates and when, why, or how some of the most frequently asked and researched in political science. Building on existing comparative research, this article focuses on civic education in English secondary schools and, in particular, the ability of related interventions to close participation gaps normally seen by sex, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Analysing original survey data collected from more than 350 students in 17 maintained secondary schools located in six regions of England, this article evaluates the impact of four types of civic education (curricula lessons; open classroom climate; participatory activities; and political contact) on three participatory outcomes (expressive political behaviours; voting intentions; and anticipated high-intensity participation). [R, abr.]
72.6450 WEST, Emily A. ; IYENGAR, Shanto —
The claim that partisanship has developed into a social identity is one of the dominant explanations for the current rising levels of affective polarization among the US electorate. We provide evidence that partisanship functions as a social identity, but that the salience of partisan identity — in and of itself — does not account for increased affective polarization. Using a two-wave panel survey capturing natural variation in the salience of politics, we find that partisanship contributes more to individuals' self-concept in times of heightened political salience. We also show that partisans can be detached from their Democratic or Republican identity by having them focus on individuating characteristics (by way of a self-affirmation treatment). However, we find only limited evidence that when partisan social identity is made less salient, partisans are any less inclined to express in-party favoritism and out-party hostility. [R, abr.]
72.6451 WESTLAKE, Daniel —
The Canadian party system experienced a period of remarkable transition between 2006 and 2015, with the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Liberals trading places as the main competitor to the Conservatives. While national-level explanations are often used to explain this volatility, William Cross's research has shown that local association revitalization played a central role in the Liberals' 2015 resurgence. This article examines the relationship between NDP local spending and success between 2006 and 2015. It shows that the NDP was consistently outspent by its opponents overall but that it often had a spending advantage in marginal ridings. As a result, this article finds little evidence that the NDP's local spending disadvantage cost the NDP seats, even though it finds a positive correlation between NDP local spending and NDP vote share. [R]
72.6452 WEYLAND, Kurt —
The author examines the weaknesses of populist leadership. He argues that populist leaders are prone to errors and misdeeds, have difficulty dealing with other political forces, and face institutional and external constraints. Consequently, he concludes, they damage and suffocate democracy not as easily and frequently as recent observers have feared. [R]
72.6453 WHEELER, Duncan —
Four bullfighters stood as MPs in the April 2019 Spanish general elections: Miguel Abellán and Salvador Vega for the PP; and Serafín Martín and Pablo Ciprés for Vox. None was elected, although Abellán and Martín came close. The former's allegiance was rewarded with his political appointment by the PP's Isabel Díaz Ayuso as Director-General of Madrid's Centre for Taurine Activities. Bullfighters throwing their hats into the political arena is inextricably linked to the escalation of Spain's cultural wars and critically interrogating the ongoing controversies surrounding the future of bullfighting constitutes a privileged lens through which to view increasingly visible fissures in the post-Franco constitutional order. This article explores the interrelationship of bullfighting with the Catalan secessionist vote as well as its currency in the struggle between Vox and the PP for the conservative vote. [R, abr.]
72.6454 WHITE, Stuart —
Many supporters of democratic reform in the UK propose both a change in the electoral system to proportional representation (PR) and a shift to a formal (codified and entrenched) constitution. In principle, these two proposals are deeply complementary. There is, however, also a potential tension between them. Specifically, if a future UK government were to treat PR as a matter of ordinary legislation, this would conflict with the democratic constitutionalist principle that major constitutional changes require a more direct and/or robust test of public support, in addition to parliamentary approval — such as in a confirmatory referendum. The article discusses seven possible approaches by which a future progressive Parliament might advance PR. It assesses their strengths and weaknesses with an eye on this tension and other factors. [R, abr.]
72.6455 WILLIAMS, Lucy —
How can grieving communities respond to public loss while also seizing the reflective and transformative potential inherent in moments of collective mourning? In this article, I explore this question by analyzing and critiquing fifty-seven of the official funeral speeches Barack Obama delivered during his presidency. I compare Obama's national eulogies to two ancient mourning traditions: the Homeric mode and the Athenian mode. I further argue that, like these ancient modes, Obama's eulogies may suppress critical thought, perpetuate us/them thinking, and prioritize individual interests above communal ties. I therefore propose and theorize the countereulogy, a thoughtful, critical, and self-reflective mode of official funeral rhetoric inspired by the counter-monument artistic movement and other alternative mourning practices. [R, abr.]
72.6456 WOJCZEWSKI, Thorsten —
This article analyses the relationship between conspiracy theories, populism and foreign policy by shedding light on the affective force of conspiracy theories in mobilising ‘the people’. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, it conceptualises conspiracy theories as fantasies that promise to satisfy subjects' desire for a complete identity by accusing ‘hidden’ forces of blocking this perceived-to-be-lost but ultimately unattainable sense of ontological wholeness. The article argues that conspiracy theories allow populists to appeal to voters through emotive narratives which offer a dualistic outlook on global politics and (1) blame the conspirators for such feelings of lack, (2) transgress the conventions of the mainstream discourse by appealing to the obscene, and (3) valorise the populist actor for uncovering the plot against popular sovereignty and thereby promising to make ‘the people’ whole again. [R, abr.]
72.6457 WOOLLEN, Constance —
Brexit has caused a chasmic divide in the UK. Voters and Parliament are divided, as are the UK's major political parties. Such divisions may not be so surprising, however, given that Brexit crosses traditional party lines. Preferences to leave or remain do not fit neatly onto the traditional Left/Right dimension. Instead, the idea that European integration constitutes a new dimension in party competition has been gaining ground. This article creates a typology of Brexit ‘clusters' through a discourse analysis of Conservative and Labour MPs, building an intricate picture of the archetypal positions of parliamentarians during the cacophonous Brexit period. Six clusters of MPs are found, crossing party lines and indicating that a Europe-related dimension is taking hold in British politics. Proposals for future research using the typology are also put forward. [R]
72.6458 WÜEST, Reto ; PONTUSSON, Jonas —
This paper presents the results of a conjoint survey experiment in which Swiss citizens were asked to choose among parliamentary candidates with different class profiles determined by occupation, education and income. Existing survey-experimental literature on this topic suggests that respondents are indifferent to the class profiles of candidates or biased against candidates with high-status occupations and high incomes. We find that respondents are biased against upper middle-class candidates as well as routine working-class candidates. While the bias against upper middle-class candidates is primarily a bias among working-class individuals, the bias against routine working-class candidates is most pronounced among middle-class individuals. Our supplementary analysis of observational data confirms the bias against routine working-class candidates, but not the bias against upper middle-class candidates. [R] [See Abstr. 72.6402]
72.6459 XUCLÀ, Jordi —
The purpose of this article is to detect the lack of coincidence regarding foreign affairs in the electoral programs of the two members of the Spanish center-left coalition. The main assumption of this article is that the Socialist Party maintains its foreign affairs program, while Unidas Podemos, the coalition partner, does not because it focuses its priorities on other areas of its political agenda at the sacrifice of foreign policy. This article explores the tensions and resignations experienced in the field of foreign policy by the two government partners. It also explains how both political forces had to revise their proposals in order to allow the formation of a new government. This article hypothesizes that the resignations have been greater by Unidas Podemos, and that the Socialist Party has been able to maintain the core of its doctrine on foreign policy, security, and defense. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6347]
72.6460 YADAV, Vineeta ; FIDALGO, Amanda —
Political parties in developing country democracies are often characterized by undemocratic internal party practices, including for selecting party organizational leaders. Scholars identify institutional, party-level, and demographic factors as driving such practices. In this paper, we contribute to this research by considering the effect of two personal factors — personal religiosity and membership in a political family. Politicians act in accordance with personal values and strategic incentives. We argue religiosity influences both in ways that undermine support for democratic intra-party selection practices. We hypothesize that membership in a political family increases the undemocratic effects of high religiosity because it strengthens the capacity of highly religious dynasts to access and mobilize politically through religious and family networks. This strengthens their strategic independence from their party, leading them to support undemocratic leadership selection practices. We test this prediction for the case of Turkey using original data from a 2017 survey of 200 Turkish politicians. We find that religiosity is only associated with reduced support for democratic leadership selection practices among politicians who are members of political families. [R, abr.]
72.6461 YONI, Nyana —
While international focus has been on armed violence and Rohingya refugee flows from Rakhine state, this article pays attention to the myriad forms of ‘everyday discrimination’ that Muslim Rohingya people have experienced over a prolonged time. These forms of discrimination were observed by the author and reported by Rohingya informants in three areas of Rakhine state during research conducted in 2015. The article argues that systemic discrimination against Rohingya people can be understood as the violent enactment of bordering processes by both state and nonstate actors at multiple scales, thus contributing to border governance. Bordering processes can be observed at the national level through the construction of citizenship in law and documentation; at the sub-national level through the restriction of travel and mobility at the township and village levels in Rakhine state. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.6729]
72.6462 YU Sun ; GRAHAM, Todd ; BROERSMA, Marcel —
This article focuses on a popular form of civic practice in China: casual political talk that occurs in online spaces that are not ostensibly political. We investigate how Chinese citizens engage in politics through a comparative analysis of everyday talk on health issues across three popular online discussion forums: a government-orientated forum Qiangguo Luntan), a commercial-lifestyle forum (Tieba), and a commercial-topical forum focused on parental advice (Yaolan). Our findings show that conventional deliberation directly involving conflictual and resistant attitude against state authorities is not prominently embraced by Chinese citizens in everyday online settings. However, communal and less confrontational forms of discourse are important for the proto-political talk to turn political, thus serving as prerequisite conditions for the emergence of an online public sphere. [R, abr.]
72.6463 ZINGHER, Joshua N. —
The divide between college graduates and non-college graduates is an increasingly important political cleavage. In this paper, I document the rise of the diploma divide on the micro and macro levels. First, I use ANES and CES data to assess the relationships between educational attainment, partisanship, and vote choice. I find that post-2000, educational attainment is an increasingly strong predictor of partisanship and, in turn, vote choice. I demonstrate that differences in racial and culture war attitudes between college graduates and non-graduates drive the diploma divide. I then show that the increasing salience of education at the individual level has reshaped the macro-level political alignment. Between 2000 and 2020, the percentage of a county's population with a BA is one of the strongest predictors of changes in vote share, with highly educated counties becoming more Democratic and less educated counties becoming more Republican. Finally, I demonstrate that county-level educational context conditions the effect of degree-holding on individual-level behavior. [R, abr.]
72.6464 ZUBRZYCKA-CZARNECKA, Aleksandra —
The article examines how the perception of gender identities of tenants and owners was constructed in normalizing discourses regarding re-privatization/property restitution in Warsaw in 2004-2016. As a theoretical approach, it applies the feminist post-structuralist perspective developed by Sophie Watson (2000a). The data were collected with discourse analysis. The article identifies two discourses pertaining to re-privatization/property restitution in Warsaw: 1) property restitution discourse, under which returning property to former owners (or their heirs) is presented as a moral imperative; and 2) expropriation of tenants discourse, focusing on abuse, fraud and human misfortune stemming from the passage of municipal housing stock to the descendants of former owners. In both discourses, tenants were ascribed a feminine identity, and owners a masculine one. That affected the tenants' and owners' positions in the housing policy process. [R, abr.]