IV Political process : public opinion, attitudes, parties, forces, groups and elections / Vie politique : opinion publique, attitudes, partis, forces, groupes et élections
| DOI | 10.1177/0020834520906573 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Abstracts |
46
IV
POLITICAL PROCESS : PUBLIC OPINION,
ATTITUDES, PARTIES, FORCES, GROUPS AND ELECTIONS
VIE POLITIQUE : OPINION PUBLIQUE,
ATTITUDES, PARTIS, FORCES, GROUPES ET ÉLECTIONS
70.439 AHMAD, Aisha — “We have captured your women”:
explaining jihadist norm change? International Security
44(1), Summer 2019 : 80-116.
In recent years, jihadists across the world have transformed their gen-
dered violence, shocking the world by breaking from prior taboos and
even celebrating abuses that they had previously prohibited. This behav-
ior is surprising because jihadists represent a class of insurgents that are
deeply bound by rules and norms. For jihadists, deviating from estab-
lished Islamist doctrines is no easy feat. What then explains these
sudden transformations in the rules and norms governing jihadist vio-
lence? An inductive investigation of contemporary jihadist violence in
Pakistan and Nigeria reveals a new theory of jihadist normative evolu-
tion. Data from these cases show that dramatic changes in jihadist
violence occur when an external trigger creates an expanded political
space for jihadist entrepreneurs to do away with normative constraints on
socially prohibited types of violence. [R, abr.]
70.440 AHMED, Saifuddin ; CHO, Jaeho — The internet and politi-
cal (in)equality in the Arab world: a multi-country study
of the relationship between Internet news use, press
freedom, and protest participation. New Media and Society
21(5), May 2019 : 1065-1084.
This study investigates the role of the internet in protest participation in
the Arab world. More specifically, we aim to address three important
questions: (1) Does internet news use increase the chances of protest
participation? (2) Does internet news use amplify or reduce participation
gaps that exist among individuals at various socioeconomic strata? (3)
How does a country’s press freedom act as a contextual factor to shape
the role of the Internet in affecting protest participation gaps? The results
based on an analysis of the third wave of Arab Democracy Barometer
survey suggest that internet news use for political purposes increases
the likelihood of protest participation in the Arab world while it also
deepens socioeconomic stratification in participation. Furthermore,
national press freedom shapes the intervening role of the internet. [R,
abr.] [Part of a special issue on “ArabInternet” edited and introduced by
Eid MOHAMED, Aziz DOUAI and Adel ISKANDA, “Media, identity, and
online communities in a changing Arab world”, pp. 1035-1042. See also
Abstr. 70.753]
70.441 AHMED, Saifuddin ; CHO, Jaeho ; JAIDKA, Kokil — Framing
social conflicts in news coverage and social media: a
multicountry comparative study. International Communica-
tion Gazette 81(4), June 2019 : 346-371.
This study attempts to understand how geopolitical proximity influences
framing of social conflicts in news coverage and social media discus-
sions. Within the context of 2013 Little India riot in Singapore, a manual
content and automated linguistic analyses are conducted on 227 news
articles and 4,495 tweets. A multinational comparison suggests that
news media follow the traditional hypothesis of geopolitical proximity and
international news coverage. However, Twitter seems less constrained
by geopolitical boundaries of news making allowing citizens to bypass
press censorship in an alternate information system. The reasons for
framing differences across mediums and between countries are ex-
plored. Implications of these findings and limitations of the study are
discussed. [R]
70.442 AHMED, Zahir — From shape shifting to collusion in
violence: an ethnography of informal relationships be-
tween members of Par liament and their constituents. Po-
LAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 42(1), May
2019 : 5-20.
Based on an ethnography of relationships between MPs and their con-
stituents in Bangladesh, this article shows how social and political rela-
tionships are entangled and performed, and how MPs are viewed by
others and how they see themselves. Despite the diversity of politicians
and constituents, some aspects of these relationships cut across MPs’
age, gender, and political background. I argue that these messy and
contradictory relationships require MPs to be shape-shifters. When MPs
transgress to collude with one group of constituents to marginalize others
— or even to commit violence — the representative role breaks down.
Such disruptions mean understandings of representation have to be
reconceptualized. Knowing how MPs make choices between competing
and conflicting interests among their constituencies could enrich debates
about their role specifically and about democracy more generally. [R]
70.443 ALBRECHT, Holger — Military insubordination in popular
mass uprisings. Political Science Quarterly 134(2), Summer
2019 : 303-328.
The author explores the effects of popular mass uprisings on civil-military
relations in authoritarian regimes. Drawing on cases from the Arab
Spring, he examines different types of military insubordination and the
conditions catalyzing military coups, mutinies, officer defections, and
mass desertions. [R]
70.444 ALBUQUERQUE, Afonso de — Protecting democracy or
conspiring against it? Media and politics in Latin Ameri-
ca: a glimpse from Brazil. Journalism 20(7), July 2019 :
906-923.
Studies about the relationship between m edia and politics in Latin Amer-
ica usually adopt a “transition to democracy” approach, by evaluating
them more or less positively in reference to their degree of conformity to
western examples. Typically, these studies describe advances of Latin
American media toward a more democratic model or point to the obsta-
cles preventing this from happening. However, these studies rarely
explore a third possibility: What about cases in which the free press
seemingly conspire against the democratic order? The 2016 parliamen-
tary coup that overthrew President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil p rovides a
vivid example of such a possibility. Based on this case, this article con-
tends that analyses about the press/politics relations in Latin American
societies must consider other factors, such as those related to their
postcolonial nature. [R, abr.]
70.445 ALDIKAÇTI MARSHALL, Gül — Grass-roots feminist
activism, the state and gender equality policies: current
lessons from Turkey. International Journal of Contemporary
Sociology 56(1), Apr. 2019 : 9-24.
This article draws attention to the relationship between feminist move-
ment and the state in Turkey. It discusses feminist activism, which
followed the launch of the second-wave feminist movement, advocating
for policies that guarantee gender equality and the ways in which the
current government of Justice and Development Party (JDP) has en-
gaged in reshaping gender equality policies within the framework of its
conservative worldview. The paper has two parts: in the first part, it gives
an account of the relationship between feminist movement and the state
before 2000; the second part looks into the JDP era. [R] [First article of a
special issue on “he feminist movement and the Turkish state”, intro-
duced, pp. 7, by L. Allen FURR. See also Abstr. 70.456, 731]
70.446 ALEXIADOU, Despina ; HOEPFNER, Danial — Platforms,
portfolios, policy: how audience costs affect social wel-
fare policy in multiparty cabinets. Political Science Re-
search and Methods 7(3), July 2019 : 393-409.
When and why do electoral commitments enhance parties’ ability to
implement their preferred policy in multiparty governments? We propose
an audience costs theory whereby strong platform commitments en-
hance parties’ negotiating positions in multiparty cabinets but only when
they are on a salient policy issue for core voters and the party controls
the policy-relevant portfolio. Utilizing new data on portfolio allocations in
eight parliamentary democracies over 40 years, we show that absent a
strong platform commitment, control of the portfolio of social affairs by
social democrats, alone, is not associated with changes in welfare
generosity. Notably, our findings are independent of party size and hold
in most multiparty legislative systems not dominated by three parties. [R]
Vie politique : opinion publique, attitudes, partis, forces, groupes et élections
47
70.447 ALLEN, Peter ; CHILDS, Sarah — The grit in the oyster?
Women’s parliamentary organizations and the substan-
tive representation of women. Political Studies 67(3), Aug.
2019 : 618-638.
This article addresses a foundational question of political representation:
how do representatives act for those they represent? In a shift away from
analyses of individual representatives’ attitudes and behavior, we identify
Women’s Parliamentary Organizations as potential critical sites and
critical actors for women’s substantive representation. Offering one of the
most in-depth studies to date, our illustrative case is the long-standing
UK Parliamentary Labour Party’s Women’s Committee. With a unique
data set, and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we sys-
tematically examine the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Women’s Commit-
tee efforts to substantively represent women over more than a decade.
We find that the Committee sustains its focus on a small number of
women’s issues and interacts with party leadership to advance women’s
interests in a feminist direction. [R, abr.]
70.448 AMIRA, Karyn, et al. — Adversaries or allies? Donald
Trump’s Republican support in Congress. Perspectives
on Politics 17(3), Sept. 2019 : 756-771.
D. Trump’s first year in office received unprecedented media coverage,
with many wondering whether congressional Republicans were “adver-
saries” or “allies” of the president’s legislative positions. We explore this
issue from two vantage points. First, we place Trump’s presidency in
historical context by forecasting his Republican support with data from
1969 to 2016. We find that Republicans supported Trump’s legislative
positions in 2017 at levels consistent with expectations, contrary to the
views of some. Second, we explore the factors that explain why Republi-
can lawmakers supported or opposed their party’s president. We find
that conservative and establishment Republicans were more likely to
support Trump, contrary to some claims, while female Republicans and
those representing affluent, non-white districts were more likely to op-
pose Trump. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 70.622]
70.449 AMSALEM, Eran — How informative and persuasive is
simple elite communication? Effects on like-minded and
polarized audiences. Public Opinion Quarterly 83(1), Spring
2019 : 1-25.
In the past two decades, increasing levels of simplicity in political elite
rhetoric have drawn both empirical interest and normative concern from
political scientists. While conventional wisdom holds that politicians
simplify their public communications because “simplicity works,” the way
citizens respond to such messages has hardly been investigated. This
study presents the results of two experiments testing the effects of
simplicity on two major goals of elite communication: informing citizens
and persuading them. Results show that simple rhetoric has lower
informative value for citizens than complex rhetoric, regardless of the
issue being addressed and the partisan identity of the speaker. In terms
of persuasion, results point to a conditional effect. When a politician
addresses a like-minded audience, simplicity sways public opinion.
However, when addressing a polarized audience, simple rhetoric is
ineffective. [R]
70.450 ANDREEVA, Tatyana N. — The UK right-wing populist
parties and the success of Brexit referendum campaign.
Mirovaja Ekonomika i meždunarodnye Otnošenija 63(3),
March 2019 : 21-29.
The article is about growth of unexpected popularity of the British popu-
list right-wing party — the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and its role in
the success of the idea of a UK exit from the EU (Brexit) at the British
2016 referendum. The author [examines] why in comparison with the rest
of European countries the right-wing parties were not popular and suc-
cessful in Great Britain in the 20th c. but at the beginning of the 21st c.
one of these British parties has suddenly gained broad popularity and
played an important pole in the outcomes of the referendum. There is a
definition what parties can be called populist. There is also information
about what a phenomenon of “insular psychology” is and how it prevents
the British from supporting populist right- and left-wing parties. [R, abr.]
[See Abstr. 70.946]
70.451 ARIAS, Eric — How does media influence social norms?
Experimental evidence on the role of common
knowledge. Political Science Research and Methods 7(3),
July 2019 : 561-579.
How does media influence beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? While many
scholars have studied the effect of media on social and political out-
comes, we know surprisingly little about the channels through which this
effect operates. I argue that two mechanisms can account for its impact.
Media provides new information that persuades individuals to accept it
(individual channel), but also, media informs listeners about what others
learn, thus facilitating coordination (social channel). Combining a field
experiment with a plausibly natural experiment in Mexico, I disentangle
these effects analyzing norms surrounding violence against women. I
examine the effect of a radio program when it is transmitted privately
versus when it is transmitted publicly. I find no evidence supporting the
individual mechanism. [R, abr.]
70.452 ARNDT, Christoph ; THOMSEN, Jens Peter Frølund —
Ethnicity coding revisited: right-wing parties as catalysts
for mobilization against immig rant welfare rights. Scandi-
navian Political Studies 42(2), June 2019 : 93-117.
Ethnicity coding m eans that threat-based views of ethnic minority mem-
bers spur opposition to specific welfare programs. To advance
knowledge of the influence of political parties on ethnicity coding, we
apply a dynamic approach. Longitudinal analyses show that: (1) because
right-wing political parties persistently frame state pensions as benefitting
native majority members, a perceived ethnic threat increases support for
this welfare scheme, and (2) a perceived ethnic threat reduces support
for social assistance when right-wing political parties frame it as favoring
immigrants. Extending these findings, we show that opposition to immi-
grant welfare rights prompts electoral realignment, as left-wing voters
increasingly switch to right-wing parties. More generally, political parties
are capable of stimulating opposition to parts of the welfare state, includ-
ing electoral mobilization against immigrant welfare rights. We utilize
unusually rich mass-level survey data from Denmark, covering a 25-year
period (1990-2015). [R, abr.]
70.453 ARZHEIMER, Kai ; BERNING, Carl C. — How the Alterna-
tive for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the rad-
ical right, 2013-2017. Electoral Studies 60, Aug. 2019 :
online.
Until 2017, Germany was an exception to the success of radical-right
parties in postwar Europe. We provide new evidence for the transfor-
mation of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to a radical-right party
drawing upon social media data. Further, we demonstrate that the AfD's
electorate now matches the radical-right template of other countries and
that its trajectory mirrors the ideological sh ift of the party. Using data
from the 2013 to 2017 series of German Longitudinal Elections Study
(GLES) tracking polls, we employ multilevel modeling to test our a rgu-
ment on support for the AfD. We find the AfD's support now resembles
the image of European radical-right voters. Specifically, general right-
wing views and negative attitudes towards immigration have become the
main motivation to vote for the AfD. [R, abr.]
70.454 ASCENCIO, Sergio J. ; RUEDA, Miguel R. — Partisan poll
watchers and electoral manipulation [in Mexico]. Ameri-
can Political Science Review 113(3), Aug. 2019 : 727-742.
How do parties protect themselves from electoral manipulation? We
study the drivers of polling station party representatives’ presence and
their impact on electoral outcomes in an environment where electoral
irregularities are common. Using election data from the Mexican Cham-
ber of Deputies, we find a robust positive correlation between the pres-
ence of party representatives and that party’s vote-share. The evidence
suggests that this correlation can be attributed to party representatives
influencing the electoral results. We also formulate a game-theoretic
model of the levels of representation chosen by parties in a given pre-
cinct and structurally estimate its parameters. We find that parties send
their representatives where they expect their opponents to send their
own. [R, abr.]
70.455 AŞIK, Ozan — Politics, power, and performativity in the
newsroom: an ethnography of television journalism in
Turkey. Media, Culture and Society 41(5), July 2019 : 587-
603.
How do political divisions within the newsroom shape negotiations
around news production? This article addresses this question by examin-
ing how Turkish journalists, in their discourse and practices, represent
Kurds and Arabs when interpreting and discussing current events related
to the Kurdish question and the Arab Spring. The study draws upon a
year of ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews conducted in 2011 and
2012, in the newsrooms of two mainstream national television channels
in Turkey. It reveals how journalists with opposing political beliefs per-
form their representational practices by continuously modifying them
according to the opinions of managerial boards. In negotiations on the
portrayal of Kurds and Arabs in news reports, journalists mask or modify
“undesired” aspects of their individual interpretations to fit them into a
dominant news frame. However, they can also challenge that frame. [R,
abr.]
70.456 AYBARS, Ayşe Idil ; AYATA, Ayşe Güneş — The state and
women’s organizations in Turkey: an irreversible dis-
tance or total embeded edness? International Journal of
Contemporary Sociology 56(1), Apr. 2019 : 57-87.
Political process : public opinion, attitudes, parties, forces, groups and elections
48
This study examines the development of the relations between the state
and the women’s movement in Turkey in the period of Justice and
Development Party (JDP) governments through the experiences and
accounts of the major women’s organizations themselves. It puts the
period since 2000 onwards, which is marked by subsequent JDP gov-
ernments, under scrutiny, and points to an increasingly “irreversible
distance” among independent organizations and the government, in line
with a gradual transformation of the latter’s approach to women’s rights
and gender equality. The fact that government has actively been creating
its own “embedded” institution s, in this process, together with the in-
creasing distance it puts to independent women’s movements, has
crucial repercussions for women’s rights and gender equality in Turkey.
[R, abr.] [See Abstr. 70.445]
70.457 AYLOTT, Nicholas ; BOLIN, Niklas — A party system in
flux: the Swedish parliamentary election of September
2018. West European Politics 42(7), Nov. 2019 : 1504-1515.
In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest
parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes com-
pared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they
had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the
Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from
Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well,
but not as well as it had hoped. The result left the array of parliamentary
forces fragmented and finely balanced. Only after months of negotiations
could a government be formed. Eventually, the incumbent coalition
received a renewed parliamentary mandate. At the same time, the party
system was transformed. [R]
70.458 BÄCK, Hanna ; DEBUS, Marc — When do women speak?
A comparative analysis of the role of gender in legisla-
tive debates. Political Studies 67(3), Aug. 2019 : 576-596.
Do female representatives participate less often in legislative debates,
and does it matter which topic is debated? Drawing on the role incongrui-
ty theory, we hypothesize that women take the parliamentary floor less
often because of the gender stereotypes that are likely to guide the
behavior of party representatives. Such underrepresentation is less likely
to be present when debates are dealing with policy areas that can be
characterized as feminine. By referring to critical mass theory, we expect
women to participate less in debates if they are members of parties with
fewer female representatives. The results of an analysis of speechmak-
ing among members of parliament in seven European countries show
that female members of parliament are less represented in legislative
debates, especially when debates deal with topics that can be character-
ized as masculine. [R, abr.]
70.459 BAETHGE, Christopher ; DALLENDÖRFER, Mirko ; KAISER,
André — Federal-level government participation and
state-level electoral perform ance: a party-based analysis
of land elections in Germany, 1949-2017. German Politics
28(4), Dec. 2019 : 583-601.
To what extent does the federal political arena contaminate the regional
one in Germany? Does a party’s position as government or opposition on
the federal level have a systematic impact on its performance in Land
elections? Land elections are often characterised as second order
elections, but existing empirical studies that use real election data suffer
from important methodological problems. Unlike previous approaches
using survey data or comparing vote shares in regional and federal
elections, we analyse contamination in two ways. First, we test whether a
party’s role at the federal level has a systematic impact on gaining or
losing office at the Land level. Second, we examine the vote difference of
parties relative to their result in the previous election in the Land. [R,
abr.]
70.460 BAGOZZI, Benjamin E., et al. — The prevalence and sever-
ity of underreporting bias in machine- and human-coded
data. Political Science Research and Methods 7(3), July
2019 : 641-649.
Textual data are plagued by underreporting bias. For example, news
sources often fail to report human rights violations. S. J. Cook, et al.
[“Two wrongs don’t make a right: addressing underreporting in binary
data from multiple sources”, Political Analysis 25(2), Apr. 2017: 223-240;
Abstr. 67.6417] propose a multi-source estimator to gauge, and to
account for, the underreporting of state repression events within human
codings of news texts produced by the Agence France-Presse and
Associated Press. We evaluate this estimator with Monte Carlo experi-
ments, and then use it to compare the prevalence and seriousness of
underreporting when comparable texts are machine coded and recorded
in the World-Integrated Crisis Early Warning System dataset. We repli-
cate Cook, et al. ’s investigation of human-coded state repression events
with our machine-coded events. [R, abr.]
70.461 BALE, Tim ; WEBB, Paul ; POLETTI, Monica — Participa-
tory locally and nationally: explaining the offline and
online activism of [UK] British party members. Political
Studies 67(3), Aug. 2019 : 658-675.
Drawing on survey data on the members of six British parties gathered in
the immediate aftermath of the general election of 2015, this article
addresses the question of what members do for their parties during
campaigns. It identifies a key distinction between traditional forms of
activity and more recent forms of online campaign participation. While
the well-established general incentives theory of participation continues
to offer a useful basis for explaining both types of campaign activism, we
find that our understanding is significantly enhanced by considering the
impact of national and local political contexts. Whereas the former chiefly
adds explanatory value to the model of online participation by party
members, the latter considerably improves the model of offline participa-
tion. [R]
70.462 BAN, Pamela, et al. — How newspapers reveal political
power. Political Science Research and Methods 7(4), Oct.
2019 : 661-678.
Political science is in large part the study of power, but power itself is
difficult to measure. We argue that we can use newspaper coverage —
in particular, the relative amount of space devoted to particular subjects
in newspapers — to measure the relative power of an important set of
political actors and offices. We use a new dataset containing nearly 50
million historical newspaper pages from 2,700 local US newspapers over
the years 1877–1977. We define and discuss a measure of power we
develop based on observed word frequencies, and we validate it through
a series of analyses. Overall, we find that the relative coverage of politi-
cal actors and of political offices is a strong indicator of political power for
the cases we study. To illustrate its usefulness, we then apply the meas-
ure to understand when (and where) state party committees lost their
power. [R, abr.]
70.463 BARBER, Michael ; POPE, Jeremy C. — Conservatism in
the era of Trump. Perspectives on Politics 17(3), Sept.
2019 : 719-736.
What does the rise and election of D. J. Trump as president mean for the
future of conservatism? Republican elites continue to argue about
whether Trump is changing the definition of conservatism for better or
worse, although many Republicans seem content to let him shape the
issues, direction, and brand of the traditional party of conservatism. We
examine the ideological characteristics of different groups of Republican
voters across three types of ideology: symbolic, operational, and concep-
tual. We find distinct differences between Republicans who consistently
supported Trump and other groups that either supported him in the
general election only and those who never supported him. [R, abr.] [See
Abstr. 70.622]
70.464 BENNETT, Daniel L. ; LONG, Jason T. — Is it the economic
policy, stupid? Economic policy, political parties and the
gubernatorial incumbent advantage. European Journal of
Political Economy 58, June 2019 : 118-137.
Incumbent politicians have a well-known advantage in seeking re-
election. Using the Economic Freedom of North America dataset, we
examine how changes in economic policy during an incumbent gover-
nor's tenure influence the probability of losing their re-election bid. Put
simply, does econom ic policy matter for the incumbent advantage? The
results suggest that a decrease in economic freedom increases the
probability of an incumbent loss, regardless of the governor's party. A
decomposition analysis indicates that these results are primarily driven
by the government spending sub-index. [R, abr.]
70.465 BERNHARD, Laurent ; KRIESI, Hanspeter — Populism in
election times: a comparative analysis of 11 countries in
Western Europe. West European Politics 42(6), 2019 :
1188-1208.
The article comparatively examines the levels of populism exhibited by
parties in Western Europe. It relies on a quantitative content analysis of
press releases collected in the context of 11 national elections between
2012 and 2015. In line with the first hypothesis, the results show that
parties from both the radical right and the radical left make use of popu-
list appeals more frequently than mainstream parties. With regard to
populism on cultural issues, the article establishes that the radical right
outclasses the remaining parties, thereby supporting the second hypoth-
esis. On economic issues, both types of radical parties are shown to be
particularly populist. This pattern counters the third hypothesis, which
suggests that economic populism is most prevalent among the radical
left. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 70.484]
70.466 BERTSOU, Eri — Rethinking political distrust. European
Political Science Review 11(2), May 2019 : 213-230.
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