Exploring the political culture of Fratelli d’Italia with a novel middle-level elite survey

Candidate selection is one of the most relevant tasks of parties and has important consequences for various aspects of political representation. While previous research has addressed many important aspects of the candidate selection process, we know little about the question of which candidate characteristics are preferred by party members. We address this research gap by conducting a conjoint experiment among more than 300 local party leaders in Germany. In the experiment, potential candidates differed on various important dimensions regarding their socio-demographic background, prior political experience, local roots, and work within the political party. We find that prior political experience and engagement within the party are the most important features. However, socio-demographic characteristics and deviation from the party line also matter. These findings have implications for theories of descriptive representation as well as the impact of decentralization on party cohesiveness.

This article argues that the development of the European Parliament (EP) is largely in the hands of the Members of this Parliament (MEPs).Empirical questions are posed whether a) age and prior political experience (parliamentary and ministerial) are determinants of MEPs' levels of activities (number and length of interventions in debates and written questions) ; and b) MEPs concentrate their activities on those issues where the Parliament has the potential to gain powers. The empirical examination deals with the first three years of the directly elected EP and centres on the British, Benelux and Irish MEPs. Whilst age and prior political experience were found to be important determinants for levels of activities, the activities themselves do not appear to be focusing attention on those issues where the EP has in the past gained powers in line with institutional changes.

ABSTRACTThis article examines Tea Party candidates for the US House of Representative in 2012. Tea Party and Tea Party–endorsed candidates are similar to other Republican candidates. Although they have served in the House for a shorter period, they have approximately the same financial resources, prior political experience, and reelection rate as other Republicans. Multivariate analysis finds that Tea Party membership and endorsement have no impact on electoral outcome when other political factors are controlled for (e.g., incumbency, running for an open seat, quality of opposing candidate, prior political experience, financial resources, and Obama’s vote). Consequently, the success of Tea Party candidates depends on acquiring the traditional political resources, having weak opponents, and running in favorably disposed constituencies rather than identification with this highly visible political movement.

Populist orientations refer to a set of political beliefs and values that emphasize the interests of «ordinary people» with a corresponding need to challenge the political establishment. In Ukraine, long social transformations in the post-communist period led to total mistrust and a negative attitude toward state institutions. The post-communist irremovability of the political establishment led to persistent anti-elitist attitudes. As a result of the inconsistency and contradictions of Ukraine's path to democracy, a basic «transitional type» of personality has emerged. It is characterized by psychological ambivalence, that is a double contradictory attitude to the prospects of society's development. The connection of ambivalent consciousness with populist orientations often arises because both phenomena are based on the absence of a stable ideological orientation or a clear political identity. The ambivalent consciousness and unbelief in the pluralist mechanisms of an imperfect democracy have fuelled the population's attachment authoritarian methods in politics, which is a reflection of the hopes for effective governance. However, the existence of polarization in Ukrainian society based on geopolitical orientations and social identities for a long time conditioned citizens to rely on traditional political forces in their electoral behavior. Only after the disappearance of this polarization did populist orientations materialize into the electoral phenomenon of 2019. In the course of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, a radical reassessment of the state and state institutions by the population took place, and therefore the antagonism between the population and the elite became temporarily irrelevant. However, post-war reconstruction carries with it the risks of a revival and growth of populist orientations, as economic difficulties will exacerbate intolerant of social injustice.

A large literature documents the effects of gendered stereotyping on the outcomes of legislative and executive elections. Less attention has been paid to the effects of these stereotypes on judicial elections, a venue where candidates might encounter unique stereotypes. Further, existing research on judicial elections prioritizes one form of qualification—prior judicial experience—leaving unaddressed the effects of other professional experiences on voters’ choices in these contests. In this paper, we rely on a conjoint experiment to test the effects of candidate qualifications and gender stereotypes in U.S. state judicial elections. We find that, on average, women candidates are advantaged in judicial elections, though we find no evidence that citizens view women candidates as more qualified. Further, while voters do prefer candidates with prior judicial experience they also—contrary to the conventional wisdom—favor judges with prior political experience. Importantly, however, we observe minimal instances of gendered stereotyping in these elections. Our findings call for further research on the effects of gender in judicial elections.

<i>Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics</i>. Edited by Nadia E. Brown and Sarah Allen Gershon. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Cabinet officers and other political executives in the United States are chosen from a pool of potential candidates from various sectors of society: business, the professions, and government, as well as others. At the cabinet level those selected are clearly the president's choice but other political executives may be the product of cabinet officer and White House recruitment efforts. There are distinct patterns of recruitment from department to department with differing emphases on economic sectors, geography, and prior political experience. The process and the pool of candidates are distinctive during the middle of an administration, with greater emphasis on persons already in government. This selection system reflects basic American values, political experience, and institutional capabilities. The system has significant implications, both for governance and for the legitimacy of government.

Business leaders emerge as key players in canonical accounts of urban politics, but data limitations have hampered efforts to quantify their role in city politics. Drawing on an original dataset that includes gender, race, occupational, and political experience for over 3,500 mayoral candidates from 259 cities over fifty years, I document who runs for office and who serves as mayor, with a focus on candidates who are business owners and executives. Overall, the data indicate that mayors tend to be White and male with prior political experience and white-collar careers. Business owners and executives account for nearly one-third of the candidates in the sample, but I find no indication that they win elections at higher rates than other candidates overall. However, my results do suggest that business owners and executives have better electoral prospects in more conservative cities, especially those that hold nonpartisan elections.

ABSTRACTRecent decades have seen the growth of various strands of right-wing populist political orientations, where populism and critique of immigration policies have been central. These ideological developments have caused concern for the legitimacy of social and political institutions. The question explored in this paper, based on Norwegian survey data, is ‘Which types of right political orientations exist among young people, and how do these political attitudes affect trust in social and political institutions?’ The results reveal the existence of both a populist ‘new right’ political orientation similar to the ideology of the Progress Party and a nativist ideology. The new right orientation contains two sets of variables: (i) economic liberalism/state scepticism and (ii) nationalist values. For trust in political institutions, the emerging picture is complex because the nationalist dimension of both the populist orientation and the nativist ideological orientation implies a high level of trust in political institutions. To the extent the new right political orientations causes mistrust, it seems to come from the liberal economic, anti-statist values included in this ideology. Based on these findings, future researchers should distinguish more clearly between the ideological dimensions going into populist political right orientations and the relationship between attitudes and more practical implications of such ideologies.

Domestic and international politics are linked so that domestic structure and domestic political preferences affect international conflict behavior. In particular, states' policy preferences can be characterized by the congruence of policy preferences between political institutions. As a state's policy preferences become more congruent, as policy preferences between political institutions are more similar, the state's conflict behavior changes. I hypothesize that as the domestic political institutions in a state share similar policy preferences or policy goals, disputes become more likely and tend to last longer. I employ event count and continuous-time hazard models to analyze U.S. conflict propensity and conflict duration during the period 1945-1992. Using the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set (version 2.1), I model U.S. militarized dispute behavior as a function of congruence between the policy preferences of the U.S. President and the Congress. The models reveal a strong relationship between preference congruence and both the amount of conflict and the duration of the disputes in which the U.S. engages. The congruence hypotheses are robust across a variety of measures. The results add substantial strength and substance to claims that domestic political characteristics affect international conflict. The theory and empirical analyses also refine the domestic-international linkage by allowing scholars to consider the effect of normal political change in a single state on that state's foreign policy decisions.

The record high number of women who ran for the U.S. Congress during the midterm elections led many journalists to proclaim 2018 as another “Year of the Woman.” Although not every female candidate was successful, this large number of women running for office provides the opportunity to advance our understanding of the ways in which women present themselves to their voters. Using the “Biography” pages of more than 1,500 2018 congressional campaign websites, we use a structural topic model to examine how these candidates present themselves to their constituencies. In doing this, we find great variance in the presentation styles of women running for Congress in 2018. We also find that prior political experience, more so than gender, is the primary driver in influencing how candidates (both men and women) present themselves. Experienced candidates use similar styles that highlight their past political work while amateur candidates are more likely to use “values-driven” language.

This article examines the activism of a specific subset of Chilean communist women – those whose loved ones were abducted and who mobilised to demand justice – against the Pinochet dictatorship. It focuses on a well-organised and well-publicised hunger strike inside the United Nations headquarters in Santiago, Chile, which denounced the dictatorship’s use of forced disappearance. It argues that these women’s prior political experience and contacts enabled them to organise demonstrations and make successful human rights claims in a changing global environment. In so doing, this article expands and re-politicises the cast of protagonists of the human rights revolution of the 1970s.

Prime ministers (PMs) in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are regarded as lacking the experience to perform successfully in office. The chapter examines this conventional assumption by exploring the individual characteristics of Central and Eastern European PMs from a comparative perspective. The results show that the PMs studied here have similar social backgrounds, making them a relatively homogeneous ‘ruling class’. Most of them have prior political experience, albeit to varying degrees, gained from previous positions as members of the national parliament, as cabinet ministers, or as party leaders after democratization. A few PMs also held political positions during the communist era or belonged to the leadership of anti-communist movements before 1990. PMs in CEE are therefore not politically inexperienced per se but have had different career paths that may influence their performance in office.

The 2016 election saw the rise of Donald Trump, a businessman with no prior political experience, to the presidency in a wave of populism. Yet, was it really populism in the traditional sense? While he lost in 2020 there was an insurrection attempting to overturn the results, despite policies from his administration that supported the wealthy and elites. This paper examines how populism in the 21st century has been perverted to support the elites, the methods that have been used to spread elite ideologies, and finally recommends some actions to address democracy in the future. KEYWORDS: Populism, Ideology, Conflict Theory, Politics

Just what do you have to do to successfully run for public office in the United States? • In her first try at public office, a North Carolina musician and television personality with no prior political experience is steeling herself for the morning's round of “money calls” to potential contributors to her congressional congressional campaign, none of whom she's ever met. • On the streets of Honolulu, savvy candidates for governor on down, know that the best way to reach their voters is to put on a colorful lei, grab as big a sign as they can carry, and stake out the corner with the busiest rush hour traffic passing by, to “sign wave.” If they don't do it, they'll never get elected. • On the Crow Indian reservation in Montana—where one candidate for tribal leader describes local politics as cutthroat, “just like Mayor Daley's Chicago”—winning may be determined by which candidate throws the best venison feast or has the largest extended family of voters. And 80% of eligible voters will turn out on election day at the one polling place for 1700 square miles.