Search

This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the idea of centripetal and centrifugal forces in struggle to critical discourse studies to analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought into competition in political language to justify paradigm changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz's Zeitenwende ('watershed') speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme and change in foreign policy, paradigm shifts that had previously been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a qualitative analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular powerful discourses, centring some and marginalising others, to construct an existential threat for Germany and a 'watershed' moment, a new situation which casts his policies of armament as without alternative. I use a dialogic approach to analyse how the speech responds to and anticipates past (already-spoken) and future (not-yet-spoken) discourses, to position itself both in terms of the immediate and the historical function of a policy statement. The paper demonstrates the strength of Bakhtinian analysis of how utterances are shaped by past and envisaged future uses of particular discourses and of dialogically contractive and expansive strategies in critical discourse studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extension of voting rights is basic to political representation, but getting the newly eligible to the polls is also essential to representative politics. What are the factors that contribute to the mobilization of new voters? Study of the entry of women in electoral politics remains limited due to lack of appropriate data. However, in the case of Norway, as in several other countries, separate records were kept on women's eligibility and voting turnout. This paper examines how social factors may condition the influence of a major determinant of women's turnout, political party competition, in parliamentary elections immediately following their enfranchisement in the case of Norway. The study is conducted at the commune level and uses spatial tools of analysis. It takes place across (a) regions with different socio‐cultural and political attributes, (b) different franchise extensions to women by socioeconomic status, and (c) genders. Findings suggest that social context, that is, women's location in different socio‐cultural/political settings and socio‐economic status may condition the effects of political party competition on women's turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalization is a growing trend in politics that has been well studied, yet the current literature has no causal explanations for the relationship between personalized media activities and personal votes or an understanding the contextual factors that shape it. This study examines how candidates have used Facebook as means of personalization and its impact on voting during Taiwan’s 2020 legislative campaign. It assumes that personalized campaigns originate from a need among candidates to gain personal votes and that this need is determined by the intensity of a given competition. Intensified competition between parties increases a candidate’s need for personalized activities on social media, which in turn bring in more personal votes. Through a content analysis of 27,977 Facebook posts and the compiling of data on personal votes, the models confirm two hypotheses: those in party strongholds (safe districts) are less likely to make personalized posts, and those who post more personalized messages are more likely to gain personal votes. This paper enhances our understanding of how different facets of personalization within social media are intricately linked and mutually reinforce one another in shaping voter behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent political parties engage in debates about the same issues and how they respond to each other is highly relevant to democratic processes. Existing research on issue engagement has uncovered several interesting patterns and factors, but has neglected one important feature of contemporary democracies: nowadays, political actors have a wide range of communication channels at their disposal with the use of ‘newer’ forms of political communication (e.g., social media) potentially transforming discursive power relations between political actors. However, it remains largely unclear whether the extent and nature of issue engagement varies between more ‘traditional’ and ‘newer’ forms of political communication. To fill this gap, I apply unsupervised topic modelling to press releases and tweets from political parties in Austria, Germany and Switzerland (January 2019–September 2021). The statistical analysis shows substantial differences in issue engagement between political parties in press releases and on Twitter, now X. First, I find a higher likelihood of issue engagement between parties in tweets. Second, Twitter appears to moderate the influence of party‐level factors on issue engagement compared to press releases. The results show that for issue engagement in tweets, the importance of party size is smaller and the role of government parties is larger than in press releases, while the role of ideological distance does not seem to change. These findings add important insights to our understanding of the potential transformative effect of new communication technologies on party competition and political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of othering through race, ethnicity, or other forms of belonging follow context-specific trajectories. Building on nine months' fieldwork in Chad, this article engages with discussions about othering in postcolonial Africa. The article moves from the description of micro-divisions in the Guéra province, in the Chadian Sahel, to discuss theoretical paradigms connecting African discourses on race and ethnicity to precolonial cleavages or colonial divisions, and theories that connect emerging ideas of autochthony with neoliberal reforms of governance. It shows that both precolonial cleavages and colonial shaping of identities were contradictory and remain important because of their use by French colonial and Chad postcolonial governments to divide and rule local people. This has fostered forms of political competition based on othering further reinforced by neoliberal reforms of local governance. The increasing dynamics of othering are not therefore specific to Guéra's cleavages but connected to divisive forms of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political competition in Africa is often characterized as suffering from a number of deficiencies at the level of political discourse and electoral campaigns, which together paint a picture of an essentially vacuous political life. This article contends that these absences are to some degree methodologically generated. If African political actors appear to have little substance to say about the most pressing social and economic issue of the day, then perhaps as scholars of politics we are looking at what they say in the wrong way? This article points to the limitations of an increasingly popular method of discourse analysis in African politics based on coding political statements within a framework that contrasts valence politics with a position-based appeals framework. It argues for an alternative more contextualized, inductive method of analysing political discourse as the struggle to control the meaning of key terms, using the example highly contested gubernatorial election in Nigeria's southwest. Debates over "stomach infrastructure" and a "hierarchy of needs" reveal the possibility that political discourse and electoral campaigning that on more mechanistic methodologies look devoid of substantive political contestation in fact contain competing conceptions of development and what the state should do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary critics of American antitrust law lament a supposed misinterpretation by modern, welfare-driven enforcers of the true meaning of the competition principle. This essay contributes to the debate by reconstructing the principle's historical origin. While it did not feature in the Sherman Act, the competition principle was introduced by the Supreme Court during the early years of antitrust law. The court formulated alternative versions of the principle; the one that eventually prevailed was neither populist nor neoclassical, as it was based on classical political economy and, in particular, on freedom of contract and "natural" values. This historical circumstance may pave the way for a new approach to antitrust law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis study investigates the political economy of slums to understand the role of political competition, electoral power, and political alignment in service delivery. The paper examines whether political competition is likely to improve housing and basic services in slums. It is based on surveys of slum dwellers in 2012 and 2021–22 in Kolkata, India. The results suggest that slum improvement may lead to slum eviction in the future. The political alignment and their electoral power of elected members influence housing and basic services. Ward level high political competition and fragmentation will degrade service in a slum if the incumbent administration and politician fail to showcase their credibility through overall long-term improvement of the service across all the slums. Housing and some services were found to better in slums facing high political competition and fragmentation. For an inclusive slum improvement, government should plan with the community and engage the market rather than depend on market-led or unplanned government initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has found that citizens’ perceptions of elites’ left-right polarization are one of the causes behind affective polarization (AP). However, in many countries, political conflict and competition extend beyond the left-right axis. Using a 12-wave panel dataset, this paper examines the relationship between perceived polarization along the two main axes of political competition in Spain (the left-right axis and the territorial one) and AP. The findings reveal that perceived territorial polarization can independently contribute to AP, and provide preliminary evidence on how the salience of the territorial conflict affects this relationship. Furthermore, the impact on AP of the perceived elite conflict on each of the axes differs depending on individuals’ self-reported ideology: individuals’ perceptions of elite disagreements on the territorial dimension are strongly related to AP mainly among right-wing individuals, while perceptions of elite disagreements on the left-right dimension are somewhat more strongly related to AP among left-wing individuals. These relationships, however, are not perfectly linear, and this article also shows interesting differences between the different ideological groups. These results deepen our understanding of the causes of AP in multinational democracies and might inform future de-polarization interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberalism advances democratic rights and representation through three principles. First, it seeks to protect individuals from abusive state power. Second, it shares an affinity with the epistemology of the Enlightenment, where an objective world can be discovered and observed. Third, it limits "tyranny of the majority" through civil liberties that counter the weight of public opinion and political rights that enable political competition of ideas. Rapidly evolving demands for recognition in the United States have advanced a broad critique of liberalism, highlighting the boundaries it imposes on representation as well as its limited success protecting rights. This essay traces disenchantment with liberalism to two very different sources: first, many progressives who resent how the jurisprudence of equal opportunity obscures efforts to achieve actual equality reject "anonymity" under the law-removing a core civil rights principle for promoting fairness. Such demands for more explicit rights and representation conflict with the majoritarian model's application of liberalism, which biases cultural assimilation over multicultural integration. Movements for recognition increasingly challenge both assimilation and the institutional devices of multicultural integration. The other source of tension around recognition comes from the right, where populists have set out to revive nativist ideas of coerced assimilation or outright homogenization through exclusion (ie, nonrecognition). Such failures of representation have promoted subjectivist views as a credential for contesting facts. The paper argues for "pluralist solidarity" as a tool for reconciling multiculturalism with new rights and demands for recognition emanating from liberalism's traditions of individual liberty. This device aims to help separate the quest for recognition and dignity from the subjectivity that contributes to post-truth politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This article presents a model of political competition in which political parties, through clientelism strategies, vie for control of legislative seats. Parties exercise political violence to prevent potential rivals from gaining power and threatening their position within the hybrid political regime. The theory suggests that the degree of political violence exerted by parties in hybrid regimes will increase (decrease) as they concentrate more (less) power in the legislature. Methods: Using the methodology of analytical narratives, we examine the narrative on political violence in the Colombian political regime to identify key actors, strategies, information sets, and institutional changes. From these identified elements, we construct a theoretical model of political competition within the mathematical theory of games to explain the institutional changes highlighted in the narrative. Finally, we develop an econometric model to find statistical evidence supporting the predictions of the theoretical model derived from the narrative. Results: The narrative and the analytical narrative indicate that, in a hybrid regime, a higher degree of political power concentration causes a higher rate of political violence. The estimation of the Vector Auto-regression model allows us to analyze the response of the violence rate to a shock in the concentration index. Following an unexpected increase in the concentration of political power, the violence rate shows an initial increase of approximately 0.3 percentage points above its initial value. Subsequently, the effect attenuates slightly and stabilizes at around 0.2 percentage points above the baseline, maintaining this level throughout the period. Discussion/Conclusion: The theoretical model proposed in this paper suggests an explanation of political violence that diverges from the explanations offered by traditional theories. We suggest that the theoretical model proposed here captures the historical logic of the relationship between violence, political clientelism, and exclusion in Colombia, a country with a relatively long tradition as a formal democracy (since 1958), leading us to interesting conclusions that have not been proposed so far in the literature on violence in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars commonly argue that international law and organizations promote democracy by helping dictators to credibly commit to accountability, individual rights, and transparency. Yet dictators routinely join treaties and international organizations without transitioning to democracy. International law and organizations can generate asymmetric costs for domestic actors because international rules often apply to both governments and non-state actors, yet dictators can limit how these rules are upheld at the domestic and international level. We argue that dictators are most likely to join such treaties and international organizations when they face strong domestic political competition. We illustrate our argument using the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has extensive powers to prosecute individuals for international crimes, including crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. We show that ICC investigations and prosecutions have become a tool for incumbent dictators to target their domestic opponents. We examine the implications of our theory for multiple outcome variables, including the decision to join the ICC, violence, and the survival of dictators in power. Our evidence suggests that dictators are most likely to join the ICC when they face strong political opponents and are subsequently less likely to commit violence and more likely to survive in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asian countries have recently upgraded their regional cooperation for clean air through the Acid Deposition Monitoring Network in East Asia, with elaborate arrangements for monitoring and capacity-building assistance for multiple pollutants. This represents a departure from the earlier informal regimes with vague arrangements on acid deposition. However, despite this notable shift, this formalization in the regional governance for clean air remains largely unexplored in the existing literature. This study fills this gap by analysing the dynamics of formalization through aid from theories of regime complexity and legalization. It focuses on the decade from 2012 to 2021, employing documentary analysis and interviews. The results reveal that governments actively pursue their state interests by adjusting institutional arrangements through regime competition and selection that drive formalization. Sharing cognition of the hazardousness of multiple pollutants achieved through interactions between regional and global institutions serves as a catalyst for reaching an agreement on the arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Euroscepticism has shifted the structure of political conflict in the European Parliament (EP) towards an increasingly dominant pro-/anti-EU divide. Focusing on the hard case of EU enlargement, this article examines changes in MEPs' discursive and voting patterns over the past two EP mandates. It combines two original datasets containing MEP statements during plenary debates and subsequent roll-call votes to examine the polarisation, cohesion, and consistency of legislative behaviour across different European Political Groups. The findings show that soft Eurosceptics drive a deepening of the pro-/anti-EU divide by radicalising in both discourse and vote to join hard Eurosceptics in their firm rejection of further enlargement. Pro-European MEPs, in contrast, show discursive accommodation of Eurosceptic concerns, with a growing inconsistency between sceptical discourse and continued vote-based support for enlargement-related initiatives. A case study of Turkey illustrates these two mechanisms. The findings shed light on the changing dynamics of political competition in the EP and the impact of rising Euroscepticism upon MEPs' legislative behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firm pollution is a top concern for both the public and the government. Previous studies on firm pollution mainly focus on formal environmental regulations, but rarely explore informal mechanisms such as political connections, a significant informal means for government intervention. The research explores how political connections affect firm pollution, and tests the moderating effects of market competition, state ownership and environmental regulation on this relationship from the perspective of institutional logics. Using empirical data of the most polluting publicly listed enterprises in China, the research demonstrated that politically connected firms participate in pollution remarkably less probably compared to non-connected firms. Moreover, market competition and state ownership significantly strengthen the focal relationship, while the moderating effect of environmental regulation is insignificant. The study provides novel insights into political connections research, institutional logics perspective and corporate unethical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What affects police killings of denizens in the cities of developing democracies? Brazil is one of the countries with the most casualties from police lethality, yet deaths from police interventions vary greatly across its cities, as well as over time. Since most of its police forces are formally responsive to state-level governments, the political dynamics at this government tier are essential to comprehend urban policing—and its resort to deadly violence. I argue that subnational political competition explains whether state-level governments can implement reforms to reduce police lethality. I illustrate this argument through a within-case, cross-case comparison of the city-states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro since re-democratization in the 1980s. While lower fragmentation and partisan continuity at the state-level government enabled and consolidated reforms that mitigated police violence in São Paulo, higher fragmentation and turnover inhibited reforms and increased police lethality in Rio. Building on interviews with subnational politicians and police officers as well as statistics on police killings, this paper helps spark an urgent conversation in urban studies on police violence in the urban Global South and expands the police reform literature by developing a theory of how politics influences police violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how financial analyst forecasts could be influenced by local political forces. Using Chinese data, we find that financial analysts from brokerage houses controlled by provincial governments issue more optimistic forecasts for state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) headquartered in the home province (i.e., home SOEs) than for nonhome SOEs, and this effect is more pronounced for nonhome SOEs located in competing provinces. Our results remain unchanged in a battery of robustness checks. Further, local officials are more likely to enjoy political career advancement when they pressure analysts to issue optimistic forecasts for home SOEs relative to nonhome SOEs from competing provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While colonial history has been largely illuminated by the work of historians since decolonization, the socialization of its memory has been the subject of competitive investments since the 1980s. This contribution firstly proposes to understand the change of the regime of the commemorations and its effects on collective memory relating to the Second World War, since the recognition of France’s responsibility in the deportation of the Jews. Then, we explore the projects of patrimonialization of the colonial history—all oriented towards a “valorization” of colonial history—from a first project initiated by François Mitterrand in the early 1980s to the memorial project supported by the right and included in the 2005 law. We also analyze the various museographic projects on this subject in several cities in France.

Research Purposes. This study aimed to determine the influence of audit findings on audit opinion involving the moderating variable of political competition among regencies/city governments in Indonesia. Research Methods. The secondary data are analyzed quantitatively utilizing binary logistic regression and MRA (Moderated Regression Analysis), processed by SPSS version 25 software. The population involves the entire 508 local governments of city-regencies in Indonesia, from which 395 sample cities/regencies in Indonesia in fiscal year 2016 were selected using purposive sampling. Research Results and Findings. The results showed that audit findings on internal control system weaknesses and non-compliance with legislation have a negative and significant effect on audit opinion, which means that more audit findings lessen the chance for the government to obtain an unqualified opinion. In addition, political competition strengthens the effect of audit findings of non-compliance with legislation and weaknesses in the internal control system on audit opinion. It implied that local governments in Indonesia should enhance internal controls and compliance and account for political factors to improve audit opinions.

All UN member States committed to realizing universal health coverage (UHC) when they included UHC as Target 3.8 in the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. However, the global commitment to UHC has not been matched with action on the ground. According to the World Health Organization, about half of the world population lacks full coverage for essential health services. To accelerate progress toward UHC, a close understanding of factors that drive adoption of UHC policies at the national and local levels is essential. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impetus for establishing a sub-national health insurance program in Kenya—the Makueni county government health insurance program (MakueniCare)—which led to increasing the percentage of the county population with health insurance, the majority of whom live in poverty, from 8.8% in 2013 to 91% in 2018. This qualitative case study drew on Kenyan law and policy documents as well as semi-structured interviews with 30 key informants in government and NGOs to understand the drivers that led to the establishment of MakueniCare. Findings revealed that several drivers—namely, global norms, decentralization, democratic competition, and the strategic action of social change-minded leaders—coalesced to influence the adoption of MakueniCare. The study offers timely insights into the factors driving UHC in Makueni, Kenya and lessons for other low- and middle-income countries working toward UHC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defending democracy requires undemocratic steps; one of the most radical is the prohibition of political parties. The functioning of political parties is fundamental to healthy and pluralistic democracies. Thus, their exclusion from the political process raises a severe dilemma for a democratic society, which has to address sufficiently why and when a political competitor can legitimately be kicked out of the political arena. The latter is crucially important because of the rise of far-right parties and attempts by authoritarians to infiltrate the domestic political competition of democratic countries. The approaches of various national courts in cases concerning the prohibition of political parties are far from uniform. Experiences in Spain, Ukraine, the UK and, eventually, Germany demonstrate significant contrasts regarding the political theory and legal rationale for prohibition. While democracy is a universal value for a pan-European context, the courts set different limits of democratic tolerance for guarding it. The paper offers a new paradigm that explains why and when democracies ban political parties. The classification of democratic state orientation to party bans consists of liberal, institutional and militant models, which illustrate different concepts around finding the balance between personal rights on the one hand and the interests of a democratic society on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Democratic parties have been in crisis across Europe in recent decades. The once dominant party family has struggled to adapt to the structural challenges of post-industrialization, changes in its core constituency, and increased political competition from alternative parties. This article analyzes the welfare chauvinist shift embraced by some Social Democratic parties to assess its viability as an electoral strategy in response to this changing political landscape and far-right party challenges. The article analyzes individual-level data from 26 European countries from successive European Voter Survey rounds for 2014 and 2019. This article tests the relationship between voter positions on government intervention, redistribution, and immigration and support for Social Democratic parties. Issue salience data is also examined to identify the importance granted by the public to different concerns over time. Despite claims that welfare chauvinist approaches represent a path forward for Social Democrats, this research finds that this strategy is not a broad winning formula. Rather there are incentives for Social Democrats to return to their egalitarian and progressive roots on key socioeconomic and sociocultural issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the evolving impact of linguistic voting and its relationship with values and preferences in Catalonia. Our central argument posits that both bottom‐up and top‐down dynamics serve as complementary and interactive explanations for ethnolinguistic voting. On the one hand, it could be expected that, over time, the influence of language on party choice would diminish as Catalan became more widespread among the population. On the other, we expect polarisation to push in the opposite direction, increasing the significance of language in party voting through national identity, strategically activated by political elites. We empirically demonstrate that language has remained a strong predictor of the nationalist vote using data on regional elections in Catalonia from the Center for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, CIS). We show that a key mechanism accounting for this relates to parties' strategies to shape the linkage between language and identity, thereby polarising the political competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do political and economic rivalries promote interracial killings in 21st-century America? This article examines the determinants of disaggregated interracial killings in 1,381 U.S. counties by testing conflict-based accounts in an era of economic recession and unprecedented Black political mobilization. Results show that one dimension of racial conflict—political competition—is linked to interracial killings. Counties with mounting interracial rivalry in the political domain are significantly more likely to experience White perpetrated killings of Black residents and less likely to experience Black-on-White homicide offending. These results suggest that contests for political influence lead to greater interracial violence involving White perpetrators and Black victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the deepening of affective polarization in rural Indonesia after the Village Law. The 2014 Village Law was envisioned as an essential way for promoting rural decentralization to fostering collaborative governance. Nevertheless, this article finds that there has been a deepening of polarization in rural communities after Village Law. Through an everyday political approach, the study employs qualitative research to provide a more tangible picture of the depth of polarization. This article examines three ways of affective polarization in rural communities: intense political competition, disaggregated voting patterns, and selective handing out of government benefits. We conclude that the dynamics of the village head election, built on ethnic and religious lines, generate an intense political competition and segregated voting patterns. Furthermore, affective polarization ultimately affects the selective distribution of government benefits. This article offers new insights into the aftermath of the Village Law dynamics from village head elections to village governance, focusing on how polarization in rural Indonesia is deepening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of political elections on public policies during the Covid pandemic, distinguishing between economic (supportive) and noneconomic (restrictive) policies in a panel of countries that held political elections during 3 years of pandemic, 2020–2022. An event study, controlling for the evolution of the pandemic in terms of Covid cases and deaths, as well as country and time fixed effects, reveals significant adjustments in the Covid‐related restrictive, lockdown‐type, policies but not in the Covid‐related economic support policies before political elections during the first half of the pandemic. The pre‐election policy adjustments included a gradual easing of the restrictions before elections and were driven by the changes in the restrictions that were more likely to directly affect the electorate, such as the restrictions on workplace closing, gatherings, and public events. The presence of the pre‐election restrictions adjustment is conditional on the economic and political characteristics of the country, such as the state of democracy, the degree of political competition, the overall restrictions stringency, and the income level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political competition accelerates the enactment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersexual rights (LGBTI+) due to the dynamic, rational behavior of mainstream parties across the political aisle to adapt to the sociopolitical environment. We argue that LGBTI+ social movements capitalize on median voter shifts combined with the rising pressure of ideologically close challenger parties to enact legislation. To examine this argument, we employ quantitative event history analysis with a unique dataset with measures for social movement, institutional, political, and sociocultural dimensions across 33 years in Spanish subnational arenas. We find that rising leftist and liberal contenders challenging dominant center‐left and center‐right parties, respectively, widen the opportunity political structure of LGBTI+ organizations. Ultimately, rising political fragmentation in a multiparty, multidimensional party system turns both left and right mainstream parties into allies of LGBTI+ organizations, which propose new legislation, due to political platforms seeking to preserve and enhance their electoral base. Related Articles: Burnett, Craig M., and Aaron S. King. 2015. "The Personal Politics of Same‐Sex Marriage." Politics & Policy 43(4): 586–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12126. Lewis, Gregory B., Marc A. Rogers, and Kenneth Sherrill. 2011. "Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Voters in the 2000 US Presidential Election." Politics & Policy 39(5): 655–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00315.x. Skipworth, Sue Ann, Andrew Garner, and Bryan J. Dettrey. 2010. "Limitations of the Contact Hypothesis: Heterogeneity in the Contact Effect on Attitudes toward Gay Rights." Politics & Policy 38(5): 887–906. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00262.x. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a newly assembled dataset on various types of social protection spending in 154 countries during the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 to analyze the effect of the electoral cycle on the size and composition of the social protection stimulus budget. The analysis shows that the longer the time since the last election in a country—and thus the sooner the next election date—the larger the share of the social protection pandemic budget allocated to social assistance and income protection, and the lower the share allocated to job retention schemes. The electoral cycle appears to have impacted the size of social assistance spending only in countries with high political competition. [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.)

Extensive media coverage of immigration, that is, media salience, has been thought to heighten anti‐immigrant attitudes among native‐born citizens by creating an information environment that portrays immigration as society's greatest problem. However, past empirical findings on the relationship between media salience and anti‐immigrant attitudes have been mixed. Some studies have observed that media salience increases hostility towards immigrants, while others have found it has no significant influence. This study investigates the underlying reasons for these inconsistent findings and demonstrates the need to revisit the meaning of issue importance. It employs the concept of public issue salience, the perception that immigration is the most important problem or concern about immigration, to find evidence. It argues that when the immigrant issue is a pivotal point of political competition, the immigration issue signals conflicts, connoting negativity so public issue salience and anti‐immigrant attitudes are closely related. On the other hand, in an environment where political elites reach a consensus, the immigration issue remains neutral so that they can be disentangled. The scope of media salience changes accordingly as well. This study chooses the United Kingdom and Germany for comparative research due to their similarities in immigration histories and the success of far‐right parties as well as differences in their major political parties' reactions to the issue. I match individual‐level longitudinal survey data to media article data and find clear country differences. In the United Kingdom, where political parties are polarized over the issue, public issue salience and anti‐immigrant attitudes are closely related so that media salience heightens them. In Germany, where political elites across different ideologies hold welcoming stances, their relationship is moderate. Media salience merely increases the perceived importance and does not increase anti‐immigrant attitudes. Contributions and implications are discussed with respect to political elites' role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Murle age system is often presented in a negative light in the South Sudan conflict reporting, which links age-set activities to communal violence, cattle rustling, and the abduction of women and children. Such assessments by outsiders overlook the positive effects of age-sets on interethnic relations in rural areas, where young people follow the Murle tradition and navigate the complex influence networks of Murle society. We focus on pastoral Murle youth in Pibor born in the 1980s and 1990s--that is, the laŋo age-set. By drawing on in-depth lifestory interviews, this article studies how Murle laŋo masculinity is constructed, embodied, and negotiated. The analysis of our ethnographic data exemplifies how early childhood emotional bonds with caregivers, conflicts, and marginalisation impact the life trajectory of one Murle man. Our results show the connectedness of political orientation, tradition, and masculinity to intergenerational conflict and competition for political and societal power in Murle society. The study increases our understanding of Murle laŋo men's survival strategies. Specifically, it shows that these rural marginalised Murle youth build alliances beyond kinship and ethnic ties, defend land, advance the goal of peace with neighbours, volunteer for unpaid community work to fight idleness, and act as a counter force to prevent manipulation by political and military leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that what was understood as democracy in the eighteenth century differs fundamentally from modern democracy. While modern democratic states take locally born or naturalized personhood as the criterion of citizenship, eighteenth-century advocates of democracy demanded proof of political competence to allow participation in politics. While the requirement of competence to engage in any activity is not unreasonable, if defined, as it was by most Enlightenment thinkers, as a combination of independence, cultural standing and wealth, it is clearly elitist. Enlightenment criticisms of birth and status as criteria of political standing should not be mistaken for demands for broadly inclusive, modern conceptions of equality and democracy. Rather, most Enlightenment thinkers and publicists, fully aware of the implications of widespread and debilitating poverty, expressed reservations about granting the 'people' an effective role in politics. Far from being 'radical', Enlightenment political theory called for the replacement of an elitism based on status and privilege with an elitism of ability and wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies KMV modified model to construct a local governments' debt risk index by using the local governments' financial revenue and expenditure data and the data of Chinese A-share listed companies, and studies the relationship between local government debt risk and enterprise innovation. The results show that the increased risk of local government debt can encourage enterprises to increase R&D investment, which is more significant when the enterprises are politically connected, the provincial officers have a longer tenure, the provinces are more market-oriented, and the enterprises get more refunds of taxes. This paper provides empirical evidence for the state theory, which suggests that competition for political promotion among local officials can make the goal of personal political promotion of officials agree to intend to maximize social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on what is the relationship between religiously motivated violence and political competition? We are interested in understanding how increased levels of political competition can lead to outbreaks of different types of religious violence. We analyze national elections in India, France, and Germany from 2000 to 2015 and utilize a research design that uses natural language processing to examine text sources from English and foreign language media reports to create event-data to test our claims regarding the relationship between political competition and religious violence. Our findings indicate that political competition influences the propensity for religious violence in some of these states but not all and that incorporating foreign language media sources provides significant benefits, especially regarding the occurrence of religious violence that is non-lethal in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing availability of extensive governmental data, technological advancements, and a rising standard for government openness are encouraging global governments to implement open data initiatives. While some governments are actively adapting to these trends, others remain behind, despite the pressure. This research explores the political and administrative reasons behind these differences. By analyzing how local governments in South Korea handled requests for open data from citizens between 2007 and 2016, the study highlights the importance of political competition and administrative strength in fostering government transparency and effectively addressing citizen data requests. The study assesses open government data based on its scope, time, and quality, finding that higher levels of electoral competition and better administrative capabilities contribute to increased transparency and responsiveness. However, the study's use of a regression discontinuity design reveals that the political party controlling local governments had minimal influence on these factors. Related Articles: Heo, Inhye. 2013. "The Political Economy of Policy Gridlock in South Korea: The Case of the Lee Myung‐bak Government's Green Growth Policy." Politics & Policy 41(4): 509–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12029. Heo, Inhye. 2022. "Energy Democratization Policy without Democratization of Policy Governance in South Korea: A Participatory Democracy Perspective." Politics & Policy 50(4): 834–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12480. Nam, Aerang, and Christopher M. Weible. 2023. "Examining Experts' Discourse in South Korea's Nuclear Power Policy Making: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Approach to Policy Knowledge." Politics & Policy 51(2): 201–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12522. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most agree that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is an ambitious strategy to maximise its geopolitical position worldwide, policymakers and scholars have questioned whether the BRI implies an attempt to promote Beijing’s governance model. This article takes a political economy approach to analyse the domestic political dynamics of the recipient countries. Political elites tend to employ available incentives to consolidate their winning coalitions if their political survival is threatened. A regime under transition is vulnerable to external influence during political competition, and the “convenient” money from Beijing becomes an offer that the ruling elites of recipient states cannot decline. Consequently, such external influence indirectly undermines the regime dynamics of recipient states. The case studies of four Southeast Asian states — Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand — offer supportive evidence for this explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Amazonia Investiga is the property of PRIMMATE 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.)

In the USA, for the first time in the 1960s, and in a very systematic manner from 1976 onwards, pre-election debates (televised presidential debates) have become a fundamental and integral method of communication for political parties, as well as an institution of American democracy that contributes significantly to shaping a culture of public political dialogue at a relatively high level, through which citizens accumulate knowledge about political figures and their parties' positions within a very short period of time before the elections. In Greece, on the contrary, these television programs have not sparked significant interest to date. The subject of this study is the television debates in Greece, evaluated through a brief historical overview and commentary on their structure, culminating in the two televised confrontations that took place within a five-month period during two electoral contests in 2023. Firstly, the reactions to and reception of the two televised debates by citizens on platform X and, secondly, the commentary on the two debates by journalists, columnists, and renowned analysts, reveal the differing interests of both sides. The research results confirm that, in addition to the performance of politicians, citizens are also interested in the conditions and form in which these pre-election televised debates are staged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impacts of political competition on eco-efficiency. We first develop a theoretical model in which local government officials compete against each other to maximise their own political score. We find that after an initial stage of decline, eco-efficiency eventually turns upwards, once environmental performance becomes a meaningful component of local government officials' annual assessment. Eco-efficiency also exhibits a pattern of convergence. Lastly, the level of political competition is found to be negatively correlated with eco-efficiency. For the empirical analysis, we use a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to compute the eco-efficiency level for 191 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2015. Our empirical evidence presents a 'U'-shape pattern in the trend of eco-efficiency and identifies two peer effects that work in opposite directions: the incentivising effect arising from higher performing neighbours, and the disincentivising effect when a city outperforms its competitors. Both peer effects lead to convergence in eco-efficiency, and our spatial econometric modeling analysis suggests that the net peer effect is significantly positive. We also find evidence of political competition reducing eco-efficiency, as predicted in the theoretical model. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of eco-efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hacettepe University Journal of Economics & Administrative Sciences / Hacettepe Üniversitesi Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Hacettepe University, Faculty of Economic & Administrative Sciences 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 present study has been conducted in a concise and realistic manner around the factors of the Cold War. The Cold War has distant and close factors that originate from the early twentieth century (Bolshevik Revolution) and during World War II due to the continuation of distrust between East and West blocs, the issues of disagreement remained in ambiguity immediately after the end of the war, the wartime alliance was lifted, and relations between Western powers and the communist bloc of Eastern Europe became tense and hostile, and the atmosphere of the Cold War emerged. The importance of this research is that in this period, the blocs had intense propaganda but avoided face-to-face wars. This research aims to investigate the emergence of factors of the Cold War that emerged from within the Allied Union of World War II, based on an ideological and superior approach of new powers. The reasons for the emergence of the Cold War were a complex and less researched issue. This is library-based research (analytical, descriptive, and historical explanation). The findings of this research show that the Cold War was an inevitable phenomenon in a turbulent and complex period after World War II, which resulted from grounds such as the collapse and disintegration of countries, power vacuums, ideological competition, extensive reconstruction programs, proxy wars, and political competition. Unless based on the existence of various weapons of mass destruction, they never did anything that would lead to an actual war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals are increasingly exposed to news and opinion from beyond national borders. This news and opinion are often concentrated in clusters of ideological homophily, such as political parties, factions, or interest groups. But how does exposure to cross-border information affect the diffusion of ideas across national and ideological borders? Here, we develop a non-linear mathematical model for the cross-border spread of two ideologies. First, we describe the standard deterministic model where the populations of each country are assumed to be constant and homogeneously mixed. We solve the system of differential equations numerically by the Runge-Kutta method and show how small changes in the influence of a minority ideology can trigger shifts in the global political equilibrium. Second, we simulate recruitment as a stochastic differential process for each political affiliation and fit model solutions to population growth rates and voting populations in US presidential elections from 1932 to 2020. We also project the dynamics of several possible scenarios from 2020 to the end of the century. We show that cross-border influence plays a fundamental role in determining election outcomes. An increase in foreign support for a national party's ideas could change the election outcome, independent of domestic recruitment capacity. One key finding of our study suggests that voter turnout in the US will grow at a faster rate than non-voters in the coming decades. This trend is attributed to the enhanced recruitment capabilities of both major parties among non-partisans over time, making political disaffection less prominent. This phenomenon holds true across all simulated scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most significant changes in West European politics in the past 40 years is the emergence of the new cultural divide. However, there is substantial variation in how the issues comprising this new divide have manifested themselves in party systems. This raises the question of what mechanisms bring these issues into established party systems. The literature has so far focused on new political parties and critical junctures. This article argues that the left-right structure is a key condition for the integration of new political issues into party competition. Rather than seeing their integration as a matter of the emergence of a new, second conflict, it argues that new issues become central to party competition if the existing conflict structure presents established mainstream parties with vote-seeking or coalition-building incentives to focus on them. The article uses Ireland as a 'negative case study' to develop the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Controlling the Capital: Political Dominance in the Urbanizing World" by Tom Goodfellow and David Jackman explores the rise of authoritarianism globally and its impact on capital cities. The book focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia case studies, examining how authoritarian regimes establish and sustain dominance in capital cities. It discusses the relationship between cities and political dominance, contributing to debates on authoritarianism, urbanization, political contestation, resistance, development, and the prospects for democracy. The book provides historical and contemporary analysis, covering various political matters and highlighting the challenges faced by urban populations. However, it lacks a serious projection of the future of cities and their potential for democracy, and future research should address this issue. [Extracted from the article]

This paper provides a political-economic analysis of policy evaluation. We focus on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) as a subset of policy evaluations and argue that they are used instrumentally by decision-makers in order to improve perceptions of reforms and help secure policy legacy. We theorize that this 'credibility premium' is more valuable for incumbents in politically polarized societies, which we empirically examine using two methods. First, we provide a series of vignettes of prominent randomized evaluations embedded by governments in policy roll-outs and a detailed case study of the Liberian government's decision to commission a third-party RCT evaluation of a proposed primary school privatization reform. Second, we have compiled a unique cross-country panel data set on RCTs in development policy since 1996, with which we demonstrate that RCTs are more likely to occur in polarized societies, and that the effect is amplified by the degree of political competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two dimensions of the intensity of interparty rivalry are used to test the hypothesis that greater interparty competition enhances government efficiency. Using data from a set of 14 large Indian state governments between 1957 and 2018, we find confirmation for two political rivalry hypotheses. The first is that the ex-post size of the first versus second place seat share winning margin is a useful metric of the (in)effectiveness of rival party policing of incumbent spending behavior. The second is the hypothesis that excessive spending by the incumbent governing party is decreased by the expectation of greater election contestability and that contestability is related to the expected effective number of competing parties (ENPSeats) nonmonotonically. Our analysis suggests that contestability across Indian States reaches a maximum when the incumbent faces an expectation of ENPSeats that is closer to 5 than to Duverger's 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do women's motives for joining a political party depend on the implementation of a gender quota for party offices and electoral lists? Based on multiple waves of the German Party Membership Studies, we address this issue using survey data for about 5,000 female party members. We find that women's probability of joining a party because of their political ambition, i.e. attaining a public or party office, slightly improves with the quota size. But more importantly, there is a robust, statistically significant interaction between the quota targets and the percentage of female party members. Women are most likely to report instrumental reasons for joining when there is a large gender gap for the party members and a quota requiring a high percentage of female office holders. These results strongly imply that women, at least roughly, calculate the intensity of the intra-party competition for political offices when deciding to join a party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]