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The article presents the paper "China's Political Party System," published by China's State Council Information Office in 2007. The document examines the political party system adopted by China, focusing on the role that multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party plays in China's social and political life. The author looks at China's basic political system as well as manifestations of socialist democracy. A brief introduction to the democratic parties of China is also presented.

The difficulty with resolving the classic problem of whether newspapers influence voting patterns is self-selection: readers select a paper to fit their politics, and newspapers select particular types of readers. One way round this chicken-and-egg problem is to compare the voting behaviour of individuals whose politics are reinforced by their paper, with those who are cross-pressured by their paper, and to compare both with those who do not regularly read a paper. Using the British Household Panel study to analyse voting patterns in 1992 and 1997, this study suggest that newspapers have a statistically significant effect on voting, larger for Labour than Conservative sympathizers, and larger for the 1992 than the 1997 election. The broader implications of these findings for British politics and democracy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the marketing research in emerging markets conference organized by the Indian Institute of Management in Noida, India on January 10-11, 2014. The event features various papers on topics including emerging economies, innovative research methods and marketing strategy innovations. It provides a preview of various awards from the journal "International Journal of Market Research" including the Young Research Writer, MRS Silver Medal & Innovation in Research Methods and the Collaborative awards. It also offers an overview of the papers within the issue on topics including behavioural economics, positioning strategies for political parties in Great Britain and the relationship between market research and social media.

This paper explores politics and political participation from the voices and perspectives of migrant slum dwellers in Agbogbloshie, the most populous migrant slum in Accra. Using in-depth interviews, the paper found that residents' conception of politics is couched in a pejorative sense as they view politics as a "dirty and deceitful game." While most migrants see politics as contested elections in which political elites struggle for power, they participate in politics mainly by voting in periodic elections. The main driver of migrants' political participation is the need to vote for political parties and governments that protect them against forced eviction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political leaders around the world increasingly rely on personalist parties to win elections and govern. While existing scholarship assumes that personalist parties do not build territorial organization, in fact they vary substantially in terms of organizational strength. In this paper, we move beyond existing structural explanations of party-building and focus on the role of party elites' preferences to explain the source of this variation. Through a mixed-method approach combining process-tracing of the case studies of Venezuela's MVR/PSUV and Ecuador's Alianza PAIS and statistical analysis of Latin American parties, we find that party elites' past political experiences shape whether personalist parties successfully invest in party organization. Party officials who were socialized in radical-left parties are more likely to advocate for party-building and their presence within party cadres is associated with stronger party organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Politics in Latin America is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The question of who is appointed to key administrative posts at the expense of whom lies at the heart of public administration research. In this paper, I study what career experiences have increased senior civil servants' chances of being appointed to a secretary general position. The civil service politicization and core executive literatures suggest such appointments are impacted by loyalty, ability, and proximity to power. These hypotheses are investigated using a mixed methods research design combining quantitative analysis of the career paths of all active senior civil servants in the years 2000–2020 (n = 247) with 22 elite interviews with cabinet ministers and bureaucrats in the Netherlands. The main findings of this paper are that active affiliation with minister-delivering political parties and having worked in the prime minister's office significantly increased the odds of a candidate's appointment to an SG position, whereas managerial experience did not. These findings challenge the conventional theory of nonpoliticized appointments and unlock possibilities for comparative research on bureaucrats' biographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Converse's paper, opinion constraint has been defined as the degree to which voters hold ideologically consistent opinions across different issues. Yet, scholars have found that opinions departing from the liberal/conservative categories constitute alternative ways of organizing political preferences. This suggests a methodological dilemma: how can we assess the consistency of opinions based on empirical, rather than theoretically predefined, criteria? This article proposes measuring constraint as the extent to which citizens' policy preferences resemble those of their most preferred political parties (a top-down approach). To do so, it relies on data from the 2019 European Election Studies and the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Analyses show that a top-down measure of opinion constraint correlates weakly with pre-existing measures of this concept (discriminant validation). Findings also suggest that well-established hypotheses about the predictors and effects of constraint are confirmed when using the top-down measure (nomological validation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the conditional effects of legislator gender, party, and key district-level characteristics on patterns of roll-call votes. I propose and test a theory of legislative freedom conceptualized as a member of Congress's ability to defect from their party in roll-call votes. I argue that women members of Congress (MCs) will be more able to exercise legislative freedom in women-friendly districts. I expect both Democratic and Republican women MCs representing women-friendly districts will be more likely than those representing districts that are less women-friendly to defect from party and that the women-friendly district effect will be stronger for Republican women MCs. To test these hypotheses, I use roll-call voting data, women-friendly district data (Palmer and Simon 2006), and original data collected on members of the U.S. House beginning with the 103rd Congress. In this paper, I further explore the proposed theory of legislative freedom to examine recent high-profile cases of women MCs defecting from the Republican party and the conditions in which they exercise this freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a Zambian case study of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), this paper applies the behavioural theory of party competition to explain how, through vote-seeking and office-seeking strategies, political parties may employ rapacious predatory co-optation of members from competing political parties as a mobilisation strategy. The paper concludes that in the absence of a dominant political party, parties and political elites may resort to predation to bolster their electoral fortunes. While predatory co-optation may strengthen some parties, it also weakens others and undermines or reverses party system institutionalisation and vertical accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether the rules governing state political parties help to explain primary election outcomes. I theorize political parties will see lower levels of competition during primary elections when they have bylaws that centralize power within the state central committee. To test this expectation, I created a dataset of state-level party rules by collecting and coding provisions within the bylaws of all 100 state-level Republican and Democratic parties. I operationalize party centralization of power as whether or not elected officials are represented within each party's formal membership, their state central committee, and whether or not each party has an endorsement or neutrality policy when it comes to contested primaries. I find the centralization of party power does correlate with lower levels of competition in primary elections for the House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020. Specifically, parties are more likely to see uncontested primaries when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and are more likely to see fewer candidates in general when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and when they do not have rules that require the state central committee to remain neutral during contested primary elections. While evaluating the causes of this trend is beyond the scope of this paper, these findings appear to be driven by Republican primaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Politics in Latin America is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines how the concept of participation in planning has been constructed by state and nonstate actors in the politico-institutional context of Singapore. Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the political dynamics shaping ideas about participation, and the impact of these contested constructions on the perpetuation of the ruling party's political control. Drawing on strategic-relational institutionalist planning and cultural political economy theories, we analyze 312 documents including government and civil society periodicals, parliamentary debates, and academic publications, focusing on the planning and participatory practices of Singapore's national planning agency from the mid-1980s to 2020. The findings reveal that state-led coalitions continuously reframed participation as an instrument of economic growth, nation-building, and activism-management, while nonstate-led coalitions emerged to transform state-civil society relations through promoting and materializing alternative meanings of participation. These dynamics demonstrate the potentialities and limitations of democratizing urban planning and governance in Singapore's hybrid regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional nationalism in Spain – particularly those movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country – have been characterized at the parliamentary level by political parties from both the traditional left and right of the political spectrum. While calls for greater autonomy and even secession are made from both ends of that spectrum, the framings of their calls for self-government vary in content and scope. Since the turn into the 21st century, sub-state nationalist parties of the left - those more typically associated with a prioritization of environmental concerns - in both regions have taken an increased share of the seats in their respective parliaments. Over the same period, climate change has increasingly moved to the front of the list of the concerns of European citizens. This paper investigates the degree to which key regional nationalists of the left have moved to incorporate environmental and climate change concerns into their claim making, narrative, and framings, highlighting both regional, and governance level comparative dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of women parliamentarians in Myanmar increased during the last decade of democratization before the February 2021 coup d'état yet remained extremely low at about 15% of parliament in the 2020 election. This paper uses the concept of political pathway to explore barriers and opportunities that women parliamentarians experienced along their life course. It does so through in-depth interviews conducted in early 2020 with 20 women and 10 men parliamentarians elected in the 2015 general election. Results suggest that women tend to take distinct pathways from men and face specific opportunities and barriers through supply-driven factors such as parental socialization, experience of national crises, available peer networks, acquired professional experiences, and available family support, and through a main demand-driven factor in party recruitment and politics. This informs recommendations in the conclusion in terms of increasing resources and support available to women and addressing discrimination by political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Action research has approached conflict mainly through the concept of conflict resolution, where action researchers play a role as third parties acting as organizers, conveners, and facilitators. This paper proposes a complementary role as stakeholders in the conflicts of territorial development and thus, as one more part in conflict. This is done in the context of one specific approach to action research, namely, action research for territorial development and one specific project, the Territorial Development Laboratory initiated in 2009 in Gipuzkoa, Basque Country, Spain. The paper argues that the ideological and political positions of action researchers, legitimated by the other stakeholders through the action research process, give them a stake in territorial development conflicts. It also revisits the interpretation of participation in action research in order to conceptualize action researchers' role as stakeholders in the conflicts of territorial development. These discussions are of interest for any action researcher wanting to explore her or his role as a part in conflict in action research processes and not exclusively as a third party facilitating the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on distributive politics reveals that presidents regularly influence federal spending and disproportionately direct federal grants toward their core supporters. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the interpretation of core-supporter targeting. Empirical evidence shows that the underlying patterns of partisan targeting do not accord with standard accounts of party-building activities nor electoral considerations that are evidence of presidential particularism. Instead, this paper argues that presidential policy priority better explains core-state targeting. Presidents use agencies that are ideologically aligned with them or associated with their policy priorities to enhance the largesse they bestow on core constituencies, and this is the consequence of presidents pursuing ideological and policy goals. Collectively, it indicates a less cynical point of view on the orientation of the American presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite waves of democratic backsliding over the last decade, most global citizens still claim to support democracy. On the other hand, many citizens become more supportive of specific anti-democratic actions when their preferred political side can benefit. How, then, do citizens justify their consistent "explicit support for democracy" with their more malleable support for the implementation of liberal democracy? This paper uses cross-national survey data from 74 countries and two methods—a standard cross-sectional analysis and a within-country variation design—to show that a citizen's conceptualization of democracy, or what democracy means to them, is subject to partisan-motivated reasoning. In other words, citizens are more likely to conceptualize democracy in illiberal terms, like emphasizing the need for obeying authority, when their preferred political party is in power. The findings suggest one's conception of democracy can be a fluid attitude that citizens mold to match their partisan self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of elections held by autocrats often assume that institutions are strengthened in order to increase the leverage of the dictator. Yet, it can also be the case that institutions are purposely weakened when autocrats allow for elections. This is what happened in the 2019 Thai elections. These elections were notable not for advancing "national reform" or democratisation, but for the deinstitutionalisation of the party system. Through three mechanisms – constitutional engineering, electoral manipulation, and legal rulings – Thailand's royalist elites were able to deinstitutionalise the opposition and undermine a fair, democratic process. This paper outlines these mechanisms of deinstitutionalisation that distorted the outcome of the 2019 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1990 and 2018 Chile experienced one of Latin America's most dramatic declines in party identification, from 80% in the early 1990s to under 20% in 2016. This decline seems puzzling given a highly institutionalized and programmatic party system, and low levels of ideological convergence. This paper argues that, to a large extent, the decrease in partisanship can be understood as a consequence of the erosion of the main political cleavage that articulated the political landscape throughout this period: the dissolution of the conflict between the supporters of the previous military regime (1973–1990) and the advocates of democracy. Because this conflict was the key driver of political identities following the dictatorship, as it faded overtime, particularly after conservative parties distanced themselves from the military regime for electoral reasons, partisans lost an important reason to feel attached to political parties. More broadly, the paper argues that unless political identities are continually reinforced by political actors, they are unlikely to remain stable sources of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As European radical right parties grow in influence, and as foreign and security policy becomes more politicised, these parties have increasing potential to shape national debates on international affairs. This paper shows how radical right opposition parties seek to exploit policy dilemmas surrounding military intervention according to the nature of the political opportunity these dilemmas present in specific national settings. Its findings are based on qualitative comparative case studies of Front National, AfD and UKIP responses to intervention debates surrounding the Syrian civil war in France, Germany and the UK. I find that non-intervention is not an absolute value for radical right parties. Whilst liberal-humanitarian interventions are uniformly rejected, interventions on national security grounds, whether to combat Jihadist threats or prevent uncontrolled migration, prompt a range of responses shaped by the domestic political context. Yet even where these parties back intervention in votes, their discourse focuses on fitting the issue to the populist dimensions of their political agenda, especially attacking mainstream rivals for incompetence, duplicity or incoherence, and failing to protect the sovereignty and ethnic integrity of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clientelism, the exchange of selective rewards for votes, is fraught with commitment problems and questions remain regarding how it occurs in settings lacking strong parties. In such settings, we argue, bureaucrats can act as brokers using their own networks. Bureaucrats can use their discretionary power to cultivate reciprocal relations with voters and leverage this political capital in negotiations with politicians to secure career advancements. As brokering requires networks, we hypothesize that bureaucrats with connections to civil society are more likely to exhibit brokering behavior, and especially in localities with stronger civil society. Original survey data of bureaucrats (N =1300) in a context of weak parties, Peru's 25 regions plus the city of Lima, show that bureaucrats with connections to civil society are more likely to exhibit brokering behavior. Political and party connections are weaker predictors of brokering. The paper thus shows how locally connected bureaucrats may aid in coordinating clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has noted the transformation of the American parties since the 1970s, as exhibited in their increased ideological polarization and transformation on social issues like civil rights, abortion, and the environment. We contribute to the literature on party change by theoretically stressing the decentralized and individualistic nature of American parties, while using a measure of party change that is based on legislative behavior beyond roll call voting. Our paper uses social network analysis to analyze the parties from the 93rd to 110th Congresses, utilizing bill cosponsorship to define connections between members. Our analysis illustrates how the core of the party, that is, who are most central in the cosponsorship network, has changed over time. We find evidence that party centrality influenced retirement decisions, thereby reinforcing and contributing to party change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties in many ethnically polarized contexts around the world engage in electoral violence. Why do some parties engage in violence directly while others do so through intermediaries? Existing literature has produced contradictory results about when democracy turns violent and paid insufficient attention to the form that party violence takes. Using qualitative and survey data of both party elites and voters, this paper focuses on two parties in the violent megacity of Karachi, Pakistan: the Muttahida Qaumi Movement—whose cadres directly orchestrated violence—and the Pakistan People's Party—which outsourced violence to distinct specialists. It argues that where state capacity is contested by multiple competing sovereigns, the economic and coercive benefits to be gained from violence are high. However, even where parties share similar incentives for violence within a particular electoral arena, whether a party engages in violence directly or not depends on its organizational structure and strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq has a multi-party system which has been held up as a model for democratic pluralism in the whole region. The nature of Kurdistan's political parties is strongly related to the position of Kurds in Iraq. From the mid-twentieth century, the dominant Kurdish political party in Iraq was the Kurdistan Democratic Party; in a later partisan split the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was born. Moreover, in the last three decades other political parties have come into being, which have all influenced the characteristics of Iraqi Kurdistan's political system. This paper's main argument is that Iraqi Kurdistan shares many of the characteristics of its main political parties, including reliance on charismatic leadership, a focus on nationalism, and the lack of transparency. This paper analyzes the primary characteristics of the Kurdish political parties and their influence on the institutional functions of the political system in the Kurdistan Region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model in which people sort between two districts based on economic and ideological preferences. People are either ideologues who prefer redistribution over a public good or non-ideologues who prefer a public good that benefits everyone equally. Individuals differ in their productivity with the distribution of productivities the same for both ideologues and non-ideologues. Ideologues back their ideology by working harder when there is redistribution even when not recipients, and non-ideologues work harder when the public good is provided. The tax rate in each district is chosen by majority rule with the median voter theorem identifying the winner. In the focal equilibrium, high productivity ideologues and non-ideologues locate together in a low tax district, and low productivity non-ideologues and ideologues locate together in a high tax district to benefit from redistribution. Middle-income individuals separate with non-ideologues locating in the low tax district and ideologues locating in the high tax district. Ideology thus results in a polarization interval in the middle of the income distribution. If ideology leads to partisanship and a strong party government that chooses the tax rate based on the party median, partisanship widens the polarization interval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contesting elections is extremely expensive. The need for money excludes many prospective candidates, resulting in the over-representation of wealth within politics. The cost of contesting elections has been underestimated as a cause of women's under-representation. Covering seven case studies in six papers, this special issue makes theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding how political financing is gendered. We look at the impact on candidates, arguing that the personal costs of running for office can be prohibitive, and that fundraising is harder for female challengers. We also explore the role of political parties, looking at when and how parties might introduce mitigating measures to support female candidates with the costs of running. We demonstrate how political institutions shape the cost of running for office, illustrate how this is gendered and consider the potential consequences of institutional reform. We also note how societal gender norms can have financial repercussions for women candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the contemporary growth of 'populist' political parties and movements in a number of highly developed democratic states in Europe and North America, there has been a resurgence in academic interest around the various causes for the groundswell of support for political populism. Given this broader political context, this paper explores the interconnection between sport and populist politics in Hungary, with a particular emphasis on the appropriation of sport by 'right-wing' populist political actors. In particular, this paper will examine the politics–sport interconnection by discussing how the Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orbán, uses football, and sport more broadly, and the ways in which the Hungarian government have attempted to reinvent a strong nation and national identity through sport and related political populism. These attempts have been influenced by the interaction between forces of Westernisation and the country's continuing post-communist transition, with the view to (re)inventing the Hungarian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period from 1992 saw Ghana, under pressure from both internal and external sources, embark on the transition to democratic rule. Despite the strides, an issue that has the potential to undermine Ghana’s liberal democratic credentials has centred on the process of political party financing. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the existing political party financing system in Ghana is negatively impacting on electoral competition and the country’s democratic process. Drawing on secondary sources, this paper shows that, given that it is political resources that drive party vibrancy and competitiveness, a level playing field in terms of public financing of political parties can help in electoral competition and the promotion of the democratic process in Ghana. However, the importance of transparency and accountability, as well as a legal framework that monitors, denounces, sanctions and punishes abuse in the use of public funds, would be crucial if success is to be attained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most opinion polls conducted during British general election campaigns report on each party's estimated national vote share. Although of considerable interest, these data do not put the spotlight on the marginal seats, the constituencies targeted by the parties for intensive canvassing; these are where the contest for a majority in the House of Commons is won and lost. There have been some polls covering those constituencies as a whole, but very few of individual constituencies so there was very little reporting of the outcome for each party in those individual constituencies. That changed with the 2017 general election, when three analysts published estimates on the Internet of each party's vote share separately for each constituency and with those data predicted which party would win each seat. This paper explores the veracity of those estimates, finding that although in general terms they accurately represented the relative position of each constituency in the share of each party's votes, nevertheless their estimates of which marginal seats would be won by each were not as accurate. The implications of such polls, especially as their predictive ability is improved, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic politics builds on both clear differences and shared common ground. While the rise of digital media may have enabled more differences to be articulated, common ground is often seen as threatened by fragmentation of political debate, which some see as driven by news media. The relative importance of political actors (parties and politicians) in driving fragmentation has received less attention. In this paper, we compare how news media and political actors contribute to the fragmentation of online political debate on the basis of analysis of almost half a million election-related tweets collected during the 2017 French, German, and U.K. national elections. We employ a structural topic model to reduce online political debate to networks of topic overlap. Across the three countries with different political and media systems, we find news media are by far the most important actors in terms of creating and maintaining a common space of online political debate on Twitter. Our results also show that political actors, with some variation from country to country, contribute more to fragmentation as they focus on different topics while articulating clear differences. These findings underline the importance of complementing structural analysis of the rise of digital and social media with analysis of how important elite actors like news media and political parties/candidates use these media in different ways. Overall, we show how at least on Twitter, across three different countries with different media systems and political systems, news media create connection that contributes to commonality while political actors lay out clear differences that drive fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision-makers. This view contrasts with List and Pettit's view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how we fail to appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I, therefore, conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is criminal law enforcement increasingly punitive, despite that the situation has improved for decades? This paper investigates this question from the perspective of political misinformation. To this end, we develop a law enforcement model with political competition and examine how political parties' campaigns affect voters' perceptions of crime and equilibrium law enforcement policy. In a political campaign stage, we show that one political party has an incentive to overstate the severity of crime, while the other party has an incentive to correct voters' beliefs. However, although the two parties attempt to change voters' beliefs in opposite directions, we find that the total effect of a political campaign is more likely to drive both parties' policies in a harsh direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aftermath of the 2016 election cycle ignited significant interest in populism among scholars of American politics, yet relatively little engagement has gone toward how American political elites and institutions respond to populist insurgencies. This is problematic as the response a populist insurgency receives likely affects its degree of success, thereby conditioning the substantive importance of rising populism. This paper addresses this shortcoming by articulating an audition and assimilation theory of party response to populist insurgencies. This theory predicts that parties, presented with an electorally viable populist insurgency in a presidential primary contest, can choose to assimilate the message while removing the populist content to diffuse the insurgent nature. In contrast, an electorally unviable populist insurgency is treated as a failed audition, warranting no response. Using a corpus of presidential primary candidate speeches, I show that party nominees assimilate the topics used by populists who demonstrate electoral viability but do not become more populist themselves. This assimilation is also found among party platforms. Furthermore, assimilation is only performed by the Democratic party and exceeds assimilation of topics used by electorally viable, non-populist rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives vary in their earmarking behavior. After a 10-year moratorium, Congress enabling members to request small grants for community programs in their districts in the 2021 appropriations process. As part of a reform designed to limit corruption and wasteful spending, members had to submit written justifications for the grants, which provides insight into how members of Congress view their role as representatives. In performing a content analysis on 3007 earmark justifications, we find that Democrats are more likely to name the specific social groups comprising their party coalition in their justifications; Republicans rarely do so. Democrats are also more likely to request grants on their core partisan priorities, while Republicans tend to focus on large local infrastructure projects that are seemingly unrelated to their national priorities. Finally, we find some, but limited, evidence that earmark requests are a result of the different kinds of districts that members represent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research has examined the influence of the Tea Party as a social movement or loose organization, but less is known about its influence within legislative party politics, especially at the state level. In this paper, we argue that in this context the Tea Party is primarily an intraparty faction that has caused significant divisions inside the Republican Party. Using an original dataset of legislators across 13 states for the years 2010 to 2013, we examine legislator and district-level characteristics that predict state legislators' affiliation with the Tea Party. Our results reveal that in some respects legislators affiliated with the Tea Party are a far-right wing of the Republican Party. However, by other measures that capture anti-establishment political sentiment, Tea Party affiliated legislators comprise a factional group attempting to transform the Party in ways that go beyond ideology. These findings have important implications for the future prospects of the GOP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the membership of the most important Czech political party, ANO (meaning "yes" in Czech), led by Andrej Babiš, in the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). Our goals are to reconstruct how Babiš's party joined ALDE and to discuss the ideological differences between ANO and ALDE. The paper shows that ALDE's offer of membership in 2014 was motivated by a pragmatic need to bolster its own position in the European Parliament; ANO, meanwhile, needed to anchor itself in European politics. Andrej Babiš's technocratic and illiberal view was not apparent at the beginning, but more importantly, this did not matter to ALDE. ALDE's Czech "point of contact," ANO's foreign policy expert and the leader of its party group in the European Parliament, Pavel Telička, made ANO's membership credible. However, as a Euro-optimist, Telička was not compatible with ANO's flexible ideological character in the long term and the party group split up. A comparison of the parties' European Parliament election manifestos and positions on crucial controversial European issues clearly reveals a deep division between ALDE and ANO—and their fundamentally opposed ideological positions. We describe the findings as a new hyper-pragmatic trend in the creation of Europarties, which weakens their ideological cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are decentralization reforms in dictatorial regimes mere window dressing or can they deliver longevity for dictators? Many scholars in political science have argued that seemingly democratic institutions established in dictatorships play a crucial role in increasing the survival potential of the authoritarian regime by providing a channel to the dictator to co-opt members of the opposition, identify their bases of support and recruit effective coalition members. While most of the existing analysis has focused on national elections and political parties, we use primary data and social network methodology to analyze the 2001 decentralization reforms established during General Musharraf's military regime in Pakistan. We show that seemingly democratically empowering decentralized governance structures can also be used to distribute rents to political supporters through ostensibly legitimate channels. Therefore, this paper adds to the literature on institutions in dictatorships on two fronts in addition to providing crucial information about the political landscape in a strategically important country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interconnections between crime prevention and local governance practices are increasingly evident through the involvement of local partnerships and local government in crime prevention. The microlocal workings and the political implications of these interconnections have, however, received far less attention. This paper uses a case study from South Africa to understand the microlocal experiences of the interconnections between what is described here as 'crime management' and local governance. It is argued that the extent of interconnection is beyond that captured by the concept of 'partnership', as multiple governance structures, including local political parties, engage in crime management. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how local governance is dominated by crime management and that this domination is explicitly tied to the party political 'ambitions' of the dominant ANC party. The interconnection is theorised as the criminalisation of governance within a context of state-building [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives' voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives' votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Baldwin's concept of racial innocence is, at its core, a tool for examining the process whereby a dominant group subjugates another while prominently, proudly maintaining an egalitarian self-image. Rather than merely point to the existence of such a seemingly untenable paradox, Baldwin uses his concept of racial innocence to interrogate how that paradox persists; how it is consciously and unconsciously maintained. In this paper, racial innocence is used to explain the process whereby Muslim political critique based on lived experiences of discrimination and marginalisation in France is rejected – and, specifically, rejected in a way that supposedly reinforces French norms of liberty, equality, and fraternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a paucity of research that outlines how to understand the image of political brands. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this research seeks to demonstrate the elicitation capabilities of qualitative projective techniques to explore the political brand image of the UK Conservative Party. This paper highlights that projective techniques can provide a greater understanding of underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates, and the positive and negative aspects of brand image. Many of the associations and perceptions may have been overlooked if other research methods had been adopted. Projective techniques may be adopted by political actors to assess how their brands are understood and, if required, make adaptations to their communicated brand identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the Facebook activities of eighty-three political leaders from twenty-six Western and Latin American countries, we analyze their reliance on elements of populist communication for their competitive strategies. By integrating both a communication-centered and an actor-centered approach to the study of populism, we tackle four major research questions: Do populist and non-populist leaders adopt similar communication strategies on Facebook? Is there any evidence of the so-called populist zeitgeist in such arena? What different combinations between the so-called three “elements of populist communication” characterize the communication strategies of political leaders on Facebook? Are there major differences between Western and Latin American leaders? The results of our analysis provide an important contribution to the existing literature on populism and political communication in different respects. First, the populist zeitgeist “thesis” does not apply to the communication strategies of political leaders on Facebook. Second, the spread of elements of populist communication in Latin America is considerably lower in comparison with Western countries, irrespective of party ideological background. Finally, this paper identifies all the logical combinations that can occur between the interplay of the different elements of populist communication, thus enabling the classification of the communication strategies employed by political leaders on Facebook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Xi Jinping took office as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, he has been tightening ideological control across many fronts. This article investigates how the framing of televised confessions facilitates Xi's rule. Originating from the intra-Party disciplinary technique of self-criticism, the recent resurgence of mediated confessions reflects Xi's pursued strategy in tackling social and political challenges. Applying critical discourse analysis to the case of the disappeared Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai, this paper shows the way in which the framing of Gui's televised confession follows Xi's so-called rule of law agenda and selectively appeals to traditional Chinese family values. The paper argues that the propaganda value of the televised confession from a little-known, non-Party confessant lies in its banality, which blends into the Party's everyday narration. The resurgence of confessions might suggest a regression towards Maoist-style campaigns, but more audience-oriented research is needed to address this issue fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the experiential legacy of participating in autocratic legislatures influence how autocratic-era opposition parties and politicians want to use legislatures in a subsequent democracy? Do they learn to use legislatures to strengthen or undermine democracy? Given the frequency of institutionalized autocracies, of opposition party led post-transition governments, and importance of legislatures in democracies these are important questions. This paper addresses them by first drawing on research on authoritarian legacies, and on organizational and individual learning to identify three potential institutional lessons opposition parties and politicians could learn from their autocratic legislative experience about how to use legislatures in a subsequent democracy. It then uses data from a survey of almost 200 Egyptian politicians conducted during the 2011 elections to test which lessons parties and politicians learned by focusing on their support for protecting judicial independence from legislative interference in the future democratic regime. We find that (i) experienced opposition parties learn a democracy-strengthening institutional lesson, (ii) experienced opposition politicians learn a democracy-weakening institutional lesson, and (iii) membership in an experienced opposition party curbed the undemocratic institutional preferences of experienced politicians. Thus, authoritarian institutions leave diverse legacies among ruling and opposition parties and politicians with very different consequences for subsequent democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper puts forward, and empirically explores, claims on how the literature on political agenda setting could inform the concept of mediatized politics. It uses as a starting point the lack of empirical research within mediatization studies, arguing that the field of political agenda setting offers important supplements through systematic investigations of the media’s role in promoting social problems on the political agenda. However, this does not imply a straightforward merging of the two traditions. Instead, I discuss how agenda-setting perspectives offer a more active and visible role for political actors and political logics in the media–politics relationship, presenting analyses that find media influence on political issue attention to be conditioned by policy responsibility and the competition between opposition and government. Furthermore, the paper takes issue with the zero-sum game interpretation of the media–politics relationship, where mediatization necessarily implies decreasing political influence. Future research, on both mediatization and agenda setting, need to address how the media (re)distributes power between different actors or institutions in politics. As a first step toward this goal, I show that opposition parties (in some respects) are more mediatized than government but that this constitutes an opposition strength in party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite decades of efforts to harmonize asylum procedures, large unexplained differences in asylum outcomes persist across European Union member states. Unfortunately, relatively little empirical literature has examined the causes of disparities in asylum recognition rates. In this paper, I suggest that domestic politics impact how asylum claims are adjudicated. I analyze origin-specific asylum recognition rates in 27 European Union member states from 2000-2018. The findings show that right-wing parties in government are associated with lower asylum recognition rates. This effect is strongest for far-right parties. When far-right parties gain legislative seats and cabinet positions, there is a substantive reduction in recognized asylum claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pluralist norms, which prescribe certain attitudes of openness and mutual respect for diverging views, have long been considered a central pillar of liberal democracy. While democratic theorists have championed these values, they have been conflicted as to the capacity of political parties to carry them. Partisanship is widely recognized as an essential institution of democratic regimes but it has also been traditionally associated with intransigence rather than tolerance. This paper investigates this theoretical debate from an empirical standpoint, asking whether partisans can be carriers of pluralist values. It relies on focus-group methodology and software-assisted textual analysis to evaluate the extent to which the discourse of 117 party members in two different national contexts, France and Hungary, resonates with the pluralist worldview. The results of this study provide key empirical insights into the nature of partisanship, demonstrating wide variations in the extent to which partisans uphold pluralist principles, but also their capacity to do so at a stringent level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]