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The rapid decline of global biodiversity has engendered renewed debate about the social, economic, and political factors contributing to it. Specifically, there is little understanding of the role that political ideology within a country (e.g., nationalism, conservatism, socialism) plays in determining biodiversity outcomes. We used negative binomial generalized linear models to investigate the importance of national regime ideology in predicting threatened animal species and protected area establishment compared with other factors that affect biodiversity outcomes, such as gross domestic product, inequality, and democracy. For threatened animals, the model with the highest Akaike weight suggested adverse biodiversity outcomes arose from larger gross domestic product (β = 0.120, p < 0.001). However, nationalism (β = 0.371, p < 0.01) and socialism (β = 0.293, p < 0.05) were also significantly associated with increased proportions of threatened species. For protected areas, the model with the highest Akaike weight suggested increases in democracy (β = 0.880, p < 0.001) led to a rise in relative protected area estate. Conservative regime ideology was also associated with greater protected area estate, although this did not increase the weight of evidence in support of the best models. These findings highlight the relevance of political ideology for predicting biodiversity outcomes at a national scale and illustrate opportunities to tailor policies and advocacy to promote biodiversity conservation more effectively. By targeting appropriate messaging and political advocacy, conservationists can improve the likelihood that politicians and their nations will participate in positive biodiversity actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As factionalism becomes increasingly prominent within the Conservative Party, understanding the worldviews of the respective groupings has become key to understanding the party itself. This is especially true regarding the one nation group which is the most numerous in Parliament. From the Cameron era, the term 'one nation' expressed leaders' attempts to modernise the party, reckon with the Thatcherite social legacy, and carve out a distinct centre‐right identity which contained both socially liberal and distinctly conservative elements. However, reconciling 'modern' and 'conservative' views has been singularly difficult. Whilst bridging the two rhetorically and intellectually has been possible, leaders have struggled to translate such a synthesis into a viable governmental agenda that unites the party. Underlying this difficulty is fierce disagreement on immigration, sovereignty, nationhood and cosmopolitanism, resulting in one nation conservatism becoming a signal of intra‐party disagreement rather than unifying leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is an edited transcript of a panel held on February 21 at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House on the forthcoming book World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press). The discussion, moderated by Sam Adler-Bell, features three of the book's co-authors—Rita Abrahamsen, Srdjan Vucetic, and Michael C. Williams—and concludes with questions from the audience at the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews myths about English identity, using 'myth' in a social scientific way, a truth held to be self‐evident; not something which is patently untrue. It argues that there must be three defining dimensions of English 'nationalism' if it is to be treated as such: first, whether there has been a significant increase in the proportion of people claiming 'English' as their national identity; second, how 'England' is treated as an 'imagined community'; and third, the degree to which the Conservative Party is the political vehicle for English nationalism. These dimensions are labelled the social, the cultural and the political. Only if there is sustained evidence for all three aspects might we consider English nationalism to be a significant phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a label that used to mean an ideological family in favor of customs and tradition, the meaning of "conservatism" has been recently changing to encompass more nationalistic and populistic connotations. Given this shift, I use two works to discuss what it means to label something as "conservative" and to talk about the nature and function of political labels in general. On the one hand, I use David McIlwain's recent work on Strauss and Oakeshott as a gateway to discuss the meaning of this label and of political labels in general. McIlwain's is critical of the idea that Strauss and Oakeshott are conservatives and he separates them as much as possible from conservatism's "conventional" senses: reactionism, traditionalism, and free-market liberalism. In this essay, I argue that the significance of Strauss' and Oakeshott's conservatism is not found in any straightforward defense of reactionist, traditionalist, or free-market policies. Rather, Strauss and Oakeshott were ideological innovators who offered new concepts that enabled conservatives to redraw the limits of the conservative family – to conflate several disparate opponents as enemies of conservatism, and to exclude other conservatives as not being part of the conservative family. Then, and on the one hand, I look at how Oakeshott's notion of "rationalism" entails a critique of religious defenses of conservatism. On the other hand, I describe how Strauss' notion of "historicism" entails a criticism of Oakeshott's style of contextualist conservatism. Finally, I use the ideas of this essay to look at a recent attempt at ideological innovation, i.e. Yoram Hazony's Conservatism that tries to take conservatism in a nationalist direction. I show that Hazony's conservative nationalism does not succeed. Contrarily to Strauss and Oakeshott, Hazony creates concepts that do not innovate conservatism, and that are absent in his critiques of other conservatives and of the opponents of conservatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"From Culturalist Nationalism to Conservatism: Origins and Diversification of Conservative Ideas in Republican China" by Aymeric Xu is an intellectual-political study that explores Chinese conservative thought from the late Qing dynasty to the Republican period. The author challenges the notion that conservatism did not exist in China, arguing that Chinese conservatism is a polysemic term that attributes different values and judgments to liberalism, capitalism, industrialization, statism, social hierarchy, democracy, and Westernization. Xu identifies four typologies of Chinese conservatism: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarianism. The book highlights the importance of the culture-politics nexus in modern China and examines the diverse perspectives within the conservative movement. While conservatism ultimately failed in Republican China, there has been a revival of New Confucianism in recent years. However, the book suggests that conservatism is unlikely to become an adequate political strategy in China. Overall, this well-researched book contributes to the understanding of modern Chinese thought and intellectual history. [Extracted from the article]

This article examined the relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking and the related mediating effect of ingroup favoritism in a non-Western society. We investigated patriotism and nationalism as two favorable orientations toward national ingroups. We also examined their relationship with the general conspiracy mentality and the specific conspiracy beliefs that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed that conservative ideology was associated with conspiratorial beliefs in China regardless of the specific conspiracy theories related to ingroups or outgroups, which indicates such tendencies may exist universally across cultures. Patriotism was not associated with conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19, whereas nationalism was negatively associated with the conspiracy theories about China (an ingroup) and positively associated with conspiracy theories about the US (an outgroup). Moreover, nationalism mediated the relationship between ideology and specific conspiracy beliefs during the pandemic. The general conspiracy mentality did not predict conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19. The results indicate that believing conspiracy theories is not only the result of a stable conspiracy mentality but is also influenced by ideology and intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The liberal-dominated civil society theory tends to obscure the dynamics and intricacy of state-society relations in authoritarian contexts. Existing accounts on Vietnam have not cast adequate light onto the struggles of ideology and positions between the state and civil society. Drawing on the most recent data from social media in Vietnam, the article contributes a new analytical approach to understanding state-society relations by offering granular insights into the contrasting but mutually reinforcing narratives adopted by the state and civil society actors. In particular, the article steers attention towards the opportunities that crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have provided for ideological struggles and legitimacy building between these actors. The paper argues that rather than continuously pushing forward the rhetoric 'civic space is shrinking', these alternatives must be steeped within wider historical understanding, attuned to particularities of the social-political context, and ultimately reflective of the evolving intricate state-society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that scale. Finally, I demonstrate that this index performs poorly at the interval level, a combination of measurement error and the sorting out of religious and political preferences. These attitudes have become so bound up in conventional politics that they often exhibit a threshold rather than a linear relationship to political preferences. I conclude with an appeal for care in matching theory to empirics: Christian nationalism is a prominent political theology, but research must grapple with the limitations of prevailing measurement tools when operationalizing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years Georgia saw the rise of anti-liberal, far-right powers, comprised of political parties, societal groups, and media outlets, that found solid ground in exploiting the conflict over values in a predominantly conservative and religious society. While the literature focuses on how different 'non-democratic regional powers' are countering against efforts of Western democracy promotion, including by empowering anti-liberal actors in neighbouring countries, less attention has been paid to the importance of transnational diffusion of ideas from Europe's promoters of 'illiberal democracies' beyond the European Union. This article shows how Georgia's anti-liberal domestic actors have found the 'anti-liberal Europe' as a powerful narrative to pit against 'normative power Europe.' Drawing on frame analysis and analysing how two online outlets have reported about Europe/the European Union from January 2018 to August 2020, this article sheds light on how ultranationalist online media outlets in Georgia are diffusing anti-liberal narratives about Europe, aimed at building a counter-model, an anti-liberal vision pitted against normative power Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservatism has been a characteristic of the political culture of Santa Catarina since the Vargas Era. This paper aims to analyze the complexity of political disputes in the state during the thirties, recognizing social, political and economic factors that contributed to the consolidation of conservatism as an integral part of the "barriga-verde" political culture. Drawing on the studies of historian João Henrique Zanelatto, the research seeks to overcome the traditional ethnic issue to explain the social and political factors that still integrate the state scenario, problematizing other issues that have fostered and still foster conservative positions in Santa Catarina's politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this critical note, Antonio Fernández Díez analyzes the book "La imaginación conservadora" by Gregorio Luri. Fernández Díez argues that Luri's conservative perspective is too ambitious and does not question the compatibility between politics, society, and the individual. Additionally, he points out that Luri's imaginative conservatism does not solve the problem of the incompatibility between ethics and politics. Fernández Díez criticizes the paradoxical writing of the book and questions Luri's extreme and definitive position on conservatism. He also mentions that Luri's imaginative conservatism is linked to nationalism and the exaltation of narcissism. [Extracted from the article]

A literary debate occurred during 1969 and 1970 as Soviet society stepped into the holistic transition to conservatism. In the debate process, liberals in the journal Novyi Mir interpreted Soviet patriotism based on cultural pluralism and censured Russian nationalists of the journal Molodaia Gvardiia for deviating from Lenin's ideas on the nationality question and obscuring the demarcation between patriotism and Russian chauvinism. Conversely, nationalists in Molodaia Gvardiia emphasized their validity in reviving the Russian tradition to defend the national culture from Western cultural penetration and responded that Western cosmopolitanism was the innate character behind the words of Novyi Mir. The contention gradually stirred up so much public attention that Soviet authorities decided to quiet down the contestation. Eventually, the editorial boards of Novyi Mir and Molodaia Gvardiia were reshuffled, although the Soviet authorities sheltered Molodaia Gvardiia to some degree. The result of the debate was affected by a combination of synthesized factors: the background of rising Russian nationalism, the ideological rhetoric of the debate, and the influences of the opinions of international media and officials toward either side. Whatever individual preferences the authorities had, the principles of the Era of Stagnation (Zastoi) were the guidelines in dealing with the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore the political aspects of contemporary Paganism. Based on my own fieldwork, I analyze the changes in views and attitudes in relation to nationalism among Polish followers of Rodzimowierstwo , which is a modern religious movement referring to the pre-Christian beliefs of the Slavs. I put forward the thesis that the attitude toward nationalism is an important element in shaping the dynamics of divisions within believers and at the same time radical nationalist views and attitudes present among them are marginalized. The gradual weakening of nationalist tendencies does not mean, however, the dissemination of liberal and universalist attitudes and views. Nationalism is being replaced by a specific type of conservatism, which consists in creating a clear opposition between "foreign" and "native" cultural patterns, and the postulate of preserving and defending the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the ideological debate that interculturalism has aroused in Quebec's intellectual field since the 2000s. While it has long served as a point of convergence between neonationalist intellectuals seeking to combine pluralism and nationalism, the interculturalist model has not, however, prevented the resurgence of calls for tighter control over migrants and minority cultural practices. The thesis advanced is that this trend confirms the eclipse of the attempt to reconcile nationalism and pluralism within interculturalism. To support this thesis, our article documents the weakness of Quebec interculturalism in the face of the ideological blocs formed by federal multiculturalism, conservative nationalism, and the rise of anti-racist and decolonial criticisms in Quebec. Vis-à-vis these competing positions, the contradictions of interculturalism regarding the alleged privilege of the majority over minorities have come to light in the course of the controversies that the article examines over a period of twenty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we are paying a lot of attention to U.S. conservatives this election year, it is also an auspicious time to publish a special section on the global right. Just under a decade ago, we passed through a "populist moment," so-called because of Brexit, Trump's election, and the rise of Marine Le Pen as a serious contender for the French presidency, all in rapid succession. It seemed like the beginning of a new era of politics, one emerging from the dashed hopes and profound failings of the neoliberal order—and in many ways it has been. T he terrain on which political struggle now takes place has been deeply altered by the right, with less educated voters, many of them from the working class, leaving their ancestral political parties and supporting the forces of reaction over issues like immigration, national identity, and "law and order." But in electoral terms, the right's record has been hit or miss, and it's worth learning from their failures as well as their successes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ne consequence of Chile's socalled "estallido social" (social outburst) of October 2019 was the erosion of the hegemonic ideological canon, in other words, of neoliberalism as a paradigm of modernity. That several currents of opinion have since (re)emerged within conservative Chilean intellectual thought reflects not only this loss of ideological hegemony, but also shows an ability to react and adapt to a setting in which this belief system is under threat. This paper analyses some of these currents, taking four authors as paradigmatic examples: Axel Kaiser (liberalism), Pablo Ortúzar (corporatism), Hugo Herrera (social Christianity) and Alexis López Tapia (nationalism). Of particular interest are their readings of the nature of the outburst, the political displacements provoked, the ideological and conceptual tensions that emerged, as well as the continuities and departures in terms of social imaginaries, traditions, practices and ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an 'ethno-pluralist' European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a 'Great Replacement' through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as 'national-conservative', is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism's relativism. These two intellectual lineages, and corresponding political alignments, engender different political projects of the Global Right, which is not that coherent as it seems. Taking a long-term historical-ideational perspective that underlines the power of ideologies as templates, we argue that a closer look at the different intellectual traditions of the Global Right can help explain the contrasting political preferences for socio-economic action, institution-building and transnational cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal nationalism has been the subject of increased attention in the wake of the 2010s rise in national populism. It has been seen to offer a concessionary form of national identity which is compatible with the liberal values of inclusivity and egalitarianism. This paper argues that recent attempts to delineate the contours of a specifically liberal national identity fail to highlight much that is distinctively liberal, as opposed to conservative, about its content. The criteria that such attempts propose typically apply almost equally to conservative accounts, thereby overshooting the target. However, further ideological excavation reveals that there is an alternative axis for distinguishing between liberal and conservative conceptions of national identity: democratic inclusivity. The paper further proposes that shifting the emphasis to this dimension, and to liberal and conservative accounts differing aims and formation processes, is conducive to both greater ideological transparency and bridging the gap between theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging in Toronto in the late 1960s, the Edmund Burke Society (ebs) became a leading far-right outlet. From picketing Model United Nations meetings and gatherings of left-wing groups to staging pro-Vietnam War protests and engaging in racially motivated vandalism, the ebs became a bellweather of what journalists and social scientists identified as a "virtual explosion" of Canadian right-wing extremism. The far right has a long history in Canada, and, in this regard, ebs members' views reflected long-standing strains of extreme nationalism, racism, anti-statism, and anti-communism. However, the ebs and its successor organizations were very much concerned with issues that were current in late twentieth-century Canada: the expanding welfare state; changes in Canadian immigration policy; multiculturalism and a more civic-based nationalism; and the entrenchment of the rights revolution. Furthermore, the group was also a response to 1960s counterculture, a counter-counterculture in that it offered a radical challenge from the right, not only to the status quo but also to the New Left. While much of the history of Canada in the 1960s is focused on the left, the emergence of the ebs highlights the growth of activism at the other end of the political spectrum. Providing an important look at Canadian far-right extremism, this examination of the ebs serves as a reminder that the 1960s were not all Trudeaumania and flower power and that societal changes in the later decades of the century did not go uncontested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the crises of neoliberal globalisation since the 2000s have given rise to a new transnational political family that we call ‘national-conservatism’. Through a critical examination of the literature on the Global Right and the role of the state under globalisation, we contend that national-conservatism acts as an innovative model for acquiring and exerting power from the right today, characterised by an endorsement of the state’s economic role, an emphasis on traditional values and hierarchies such as religion, and a proactive, occasionally confrontational stance in foreign policy. Consequently, the paradigm of national-conservatism prompts the division of transnational neoliberalism into discrete national domains. These domains function as havens where the neoliberal elite is shielded both from foreign competitive pressures and radical demands of respective national societies. Crucially, national-conservatism garners legitimacy for this new order through its commitment to revitalising traditional, hierarchical models of national sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role played by the concept of nation in the interwar writings of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and Eric Voegelin (1901–1985). It contends that, although these conservative thinkers were drawn in different ways to the anti-progressive potential of nationalist ideas, the centre of their political and theoretical horizons in that period is occupied by the problems of political unity and authority. Therefore, their nationalism is fundamentally determined by, and instrumental to, their adherence to a monistic and authoritarian conception of the state. This, in turn, leads them to embrace, though not without some reservations, the solutions put forward by the emergent far-right 'strongmen' to the interwar crisis of liberal democracy. Each author tested in his own way the porous borders between conservatism, nationalism, and fascism – a topic whose scholarly and political relevance is far from being exhausted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the symbolism of the Hagia Sophia for the conservative nationalist movement, this article examines the emergence of Ottomanism as an attempted challenge to the Kemalist reading of Ottoman history. The Hagia Sophia, the former imperial church that was converted into a mosque by Sultan Mehmed II and served as the imperial mosque of the Ottomans, lost its religious function and was opened as a museum in 1934 by governmental decision. This 'secularization' of the building could be openly criticized especially after the transition to multiparty democracy in the late 1940s. Demands for reconverting the museum into a mosque were gradually transformed into public campaigns led by the protagonists of the conservative nationalist movement. This article analyses these campaigns as reflected in the printed press from the 1950s onwards and explores how the Hagia Sophia has since been instrumentalized for the reproduction of a xenophobic, anti-Western, Islamic and Ottomanist nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To consolidate a predominant party system, an incumbent party will attempt to anchor voting behavior to social cleavages, a strategy called cleavage enclosure. However, does this strategy actually work? In Turkey, the incumbent AKP government has focused its campaigning on conservatives and nationalists. The analysis of the 2018 post-election survey reveals that the cleavage enclosure worked for conservatives but not for nationalists. Of the incumbent supporters in the previous election, conservatives replicated their support, whereas nationalists were less likely to support the incumbent than other identity holders. Nationalists tend to punish but not reward the incumbent party for its economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]