Conservative Members Research Articles

The relationships between law enforcement authorities and underground raves: a case study of OTUM rave festival in the Maldives

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the relationship between underground raves and law enforcement authorities. It is centred on the police raid of the OTUM rave festival held on the uninhabited island of Anbaraa in the Maldives, specifically focusing on the perceptions of ravers present during the raid of the OTUM rave festival. The data on which this paper is based stems from open-ended interviews with ravers who were present during the raid. Ravers felt that police used excessive force at the rave festival. They arrested 79 ravers for possessing recreational substances, including LSD, cannabis, and ecstasy. The police raided the rave festival due to pressure from religious clerics and to appease the more conservative members of the mainstream society. The results from this study suggest that treating ravers as criminals and threatening them with imprisonment creates a disconnection between the underground rave community and the mainstream society, widening rather than healing divides and reinforcing ideas of deviance and resistance.

Civic Organizations and the Political Participation of Cross-Pressured Americans: The Case of the Labor Movement

Civic associations underpin American democracy. How can politically cross-cutting associations engage members who hold divergent viewpoints amidst increasing partisan polarization and nationalization of politics? I examine this question in the context of labor unions, studying how unions engage members who hold conservative views at odds with some of the union’s political actions. Using original surveys of local union presidents, members, and non-members along with in-depth interviews in selected local unions, I show how local union leaders can foster norms of participation among politically cross-pressured members. Norms of participation increase conservative members’ perceptions of political representation and engagement in politics, including participation in the union’s political action committee and support for union political mobilization. These findings have implications for understanding civic associations and participation in an era of political division, as well as the role unions continue to play in politics.

Why leaders can be bad: Linking rigor with relevance using machine learning analysis to test the transgression credit theory of leadership

Transgression credit is a form of deviance credit that occurs when people are more permissive towards transgressions by in-group leaders than by in-group nonleaders and out-group members and leaders. Despite rigorous experimental and simulation evidence for transgression credit, the ability to make such group processes research relevant to organizations and wider policy requires evidence with greater ecological validity. We examine transgression credit using spontaneously arising data from Twitter (now X) to test theoretically specified reactions to instances of transgressive leadership by the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Studies 1a and 1b compared Conservative and Labour Members of Parliament’s (MPs’) tweets in response to Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of Parliament (Study 1a) and his publication of an Internal Market Bill that would break international law (Study 1b) with tweets responding to a nonleader, Dominic Cummings, breaking coronavirus lockdown rules. Conservative, but not Labour, MPs were more permissive of Johnson’s, but not Cummings’, transgression. Study 2 examined the semantic themes occurring among supportive and unsupportive tweets posted by the UK general public in response to Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of Parliament. Across studies, the evidence is consistent with propositions from deviance credit and social identity theories.

Feminism within parties: Implications for political elite evaluations and policy attitudes

Although gender-related attitudes have played an increasingly larger role in recent U.S. elections, the implications of feminist identity beyond electoral politics remain largely understudied. This paper examines how the interaction of feminist and party ID impacts political elite evaluations and policy attitudes that are not gender-based by relying on an original survey fielded as part of the 2020 CES and the 2016 ANES. Our analyses show that feminists of both parties give the highest feminist ratings to co-partisan elites. However, while Democratic feminists rate Democratic elites as more feminist than Republican elites, Republican feminists rate the two similarly. Furthermore, within both parties, feminist self-labeling is associated with increased support for policies that advance social equity and inclusion. This gap in policy preferences between feminists and non-feminists largely persists across ideologies—among liberal, moderate, and conservative members of both parties. These findings suggest that feminist identifiers constitute a distinct group within each party, and fostering feminism across political leanings may strengthen public support for more equitable and inclusive policy goals and outcomes.

Experimentation in Endogenous Organizations

Abstract We study policy experimentation in organizations with endogenous membership. An organization decides when to stop a policy experiment based on its results. As information arrives, agents update their beliefs, and enter or leave the organization based on their expected flow payoffs. Unsuccessful experiments make all agents more pessimistic, but also drive out conservative members. We identify sufficient conditions under which the latter effect dominates, leading to excessive experimentation. In fact, the organization may experiment forever in the face of mounting negative evidence. Ex post heterogeneous payoffs exacerbate the problem, as optimists can join forces with guaranteed winners. Control by shareholders who own all future payoffs, however, can have a corrective effect. Our results contrast with models of collective experimentation with fixed membership, in which under-experimentation is the typical outcome.

Expression of the <i>engrailed</i> Homologue in Larvae and Juveniles of the Annelid <i>Alitta virens</i> Characterizes the Formation of Segments from the Growth Zone

The evolutionary origin of segmentation remains to be a mystery. In arthropods, the engrailed gene is recognized as one of the most important and conservative members of the segmentation developmental program. Orthologues of this gene have been identified in annelids, but their role is interpreted ambiguously, because in some species their expression precedes subdivision of the body into segments, but in others it does not. Here we studied the expression of engrailed in the nereid polychaete Alitta virens during metamorphosis and development of the first postlarval segments. Our data support the possible involvement of this gene in the process of segment formation from the growth zone in A. virens. At the larval stages, engrailed is expressed in neuroectodermal cells, in the growth zone, as well as in metameric epidermal cell rows at the anterior boundary of each segment. Upon transition from the metatrochophore to the nectochaete stage, the circular expression domain in the growth zone expands and then resolves into two serial domains. Over time, the distance between these circular domains increases indicating the growth of the first postlarval segment anlage. Formation of subsequent postlarval segments occurs in a similar way. Analyzing our results and literature data, we compared engrailed expression patterns in annelids and arthropods. Our work indicates an absence of conservation in patterning of sequentially developing segments from the growth zone in protostomes. We suggest that in A. virens the anteroposterior axis elongation occurs simultaneously with the specification of a new segment. These features differ from the known models of the growth zone and indicate the possibility that nereids have a specific mechanism of segmentation.

One Man's Damage: The Consequences of Boris Johnson's Assault on the British Political System

AbstractThe disgraced British prime minister, Boris Johnson, was forced to resign by his own backbench MPs on 7 July 2022 (effective from 6 September) in complete denial that he had done anything wrong. Optimists might argue that this shows the strength of the British political system; that a way was found to throw out a proven rascal, thus providing the opportunity for a restoration of ‘normal politics’. In my view, this optimism is misplaced. Boris Johnson's behaviour, mirroring that of his populist role model, Donald Trump, has raised a number of serious questions about the continued successful functioning of the UK's unwritten constitution.The article reviews the character of Johnson's constitutional violations during his period as prime minister. Using data from a recent survey of UK voters, it then explores the damaging effect that his period in office has had on UK public opinion. Despite his removal from office, Johnson retains a hard core of support across the wider electorate and, in particular, among grassroots Conservative supporters and party members. These supporters remain largely unaware of Johnson's constitutional crimes, and where they do know about them, they forgive them. This creates the real danger either that Johnson may at some future date return to office to repeat his offences, or that a similarly populist successor might deploy the same anti‐democratic devices that Johnson himself used in his desperate attempts to cling to power.

Activists of Faith, Betwixt and Between:

Recognizing the entangled nature of religion and public activism, this article proposes a new category for individuals operating at the intersections of activism and faith communities: activists of faith, an umbrella term for activists who work in secular activist spaces while also ascribing to particular religious traditions. I propose three categories for understanding these individuals: religious outliers, organizers of faith, and evangelical activists. Drawing from eight years of ethnographic fieldwork, I offer detailed examples of each type within Florida’s environmental movement in order to provide a robust understanding of faith-based ecological resistance in a religiously conservative region of the United States. Such activists go unnoticed as they belong to secular environmental groups, often without overt connections to their religious traditions. While their personal activism may set them at odds with conservative members of their religious communities, faith is a vital part of their work and quest for justice.

The evangelical foreign policy model: Jair Bolsonaro and evangelicals in Brazil

The article proposes an evangelical foreign policy model to analyse the relationship between evangelical groups and conservative governments in foreign policymaking. Using Brazil as a case study, we argue that the model is defined by the convergence of views and interests between conservative cabinet members and domestic evangelical groups on four foreign policy issues that are critical to evangelicals worldwide – the relationship with Israel, persecution of Christian minorities, abortion rights, and evangelical missions in Africa. To analyse the convergence, we use an original database of 207 speeches from Brazilian evangelical parliamentarians (Evangelical Parliamentary Front) and 1992 discourses from Jair Bolsonaro’s cabinet members from January 2019 to July 2022, as well as multiple documents from the main evangelical groups in Brazil. In the case of Brazil, this is the first time that typical religious considerations have been officially adopted by the country’s foreign policy, indicating the growing importance of evangelical thinking in Brazilian politics. This is also one of the first analyses, not centred in the United States, that shows how views and interests of evangelical groups and conservative governments converge in international affairs, broadening perspectives on the political participation of the ever-growing evangelical movement in the Global South.

Review: Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy, by Christy Thornton

Review: <i>Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy</i>, by Christy Thornton

The Roots of Populism: Neoliberalism and Working-Class Lives

The Roots of Populism: Neoliberalism and Working-Class Lives

“If big brother England votes to leave the EU … we will be treated like upstart children”: Irony and a United Kingdom family of nations metaphor in Scottish nationalist discourse

This study explores the inter-play between metaphor and irony in the communication of contrasting UK “family of nations” (UK-FON) metaphor variants by Conservative and Scottish National Party members of the UK Parliament. The study proposes: first, that debates surrounding the intertwined issues of Scottish independence and Brexit triggered an increase in the deployment of the UK-FON metaphor, particularly by Scottish nationalist speakers; second, that competition for control over the metaphor’s meaning has produced two competing variants (i.e. an initial Conservative aspirational/positive one framing the UK-FON as unified, equal, beneficent, expansive, and historically-rooted, followed by an ironic SNP hypocritical/abusive variant framing it as unequal, coercive, and disrespectful); and; lastly, that the SNP communication of the ironically reinterpreted hypocritical/abusive variant contributes rhetorical weight to the expression of Scottish nationalist grievances, objectives, and perspectives on belonging in the UK and Europe.

Conservative conservationists: reconciling conflicting identities on climate change

ABSTRACT Identities – how individuals think about themselves in the social world – are powerful drivers of political attitudes and behaviors. On highly polarizing issues such as climate change, political identities are powerful predictors of attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences. However, other, non-partisan identities are also relevant to climate change attitudes, particularly when the identity is threatened by climate change. What happens when an individual has two salient identities informing opposing attitudes on a political issue? This study leverages a unique sample of politically conservative members of an environmental conservation organization – “conservative conservationists” – to understand how people reconcile conflicting identities to form their environmental attitudes and behaviors. Using qualitative data from interviews (n = 25) and participant observation, I document four strategies that participants use to reconcile identity conflicts and form environmental attitudes: distancing oneself from one of the conflicting identities; increasing deliberate political information seeking; redefining conceptions of an issue to fit with both identities; and creating a new identity that merges the non-conflicting aspects of the two identities. This research has implications for both the theoretical study of how identities influence political behavior and practical efforts to build bipartisan agreement on climate change.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Persistence of Republican Opposition to Multilateralism in American Foreign Policy

AbstractThe last two Republican presidents’ hostility to multilateralism has produced striking departures from postwar American foreign policy, but this position is not as new as it sometimes appears. It has deep historical roots in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Using data on congressional voting and bill sponsorship, we show that Republicans, especially those from the party's conservative wing, have tended to oppose multilateral rules for more than a century. This position fit logically into the broader foreign policy that Republican presidents developed before World War I but posed problems in light of the changing conditions during the mid-twentieth century. The importance of multilateral cooperation for U.S. national security during the Cold War and the growing international competitiveness of American manufacturing split the party on multilateral rules, but it did not reverse the conservative wing's longstanding skepticism of them. Congressional leaders’ efforts to keep consequential choices about multilateral rules off the legislative agenda for most of the postwar era contributed to the persistence of this position. This move spared conservative members of Congress from confronting the costs of opposing multilateral institutions, giving them little incentive to challenge ideological orthodoxy.

A Legal and Political Assessment of Challenges to Abortion Laws by Anti-choice Activists in Australia and the Progression of Abortion Law in Australia and the United States

Abstract Historically, in Australia the issue of abortion had not attracted the violent protests that are frequently part of the American political landscape. Nor had it featured prominently in parliamentary debates. This began to change in 2004 when the issue was put on the political agenda by a small but vocal group of conservative members of the Federal Parliament. It also emerged as an issue at the state government level between 2008 and 2019 with the decriminalization of abortion in four Australian states and one territory. These changes in turn, led to a response by opponents along three lines as follows: first, legal challenges to safe access zones around fertility clinics; second, the pursuit of legal recognition of fetal personhood in state parliaments; and third, ongoing attempts to prevent Medicare (public) funding of abortions in relation to the occurrence of sex-selection abortion. All three strategies have been influenced by, or are copies of, the actions of antiabortion activists in the United States. To date, none of these strategies have proven successful in Australia. Nonetheless, anti-abortion activists are resolute in their desire to overturn recent gains in decriminalising abortion law in Australia. While Australian developments are in conformity with global trends towards liberalization of abortion law, the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States and the restrictions introduced across various states in America, has emboldened opponents of abortion who hope to replicate similar bans and restrictions in Australia.

REPUBLICAN JESUS: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels by Tony Keddie

Reviewed by: REPUBLICAN JESUS: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels by Tony Keddie David B. Parker REPUBLICAN JESUS: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels. By Tony Keddie. Oakland: University of California Press. 2020. According to Genesis, God created us in His image; according to Tony Keddie, Republican politicians and preachers have created Jesus in theirs. Keddie’s basic premise in Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels is nothing new. Other scholars have shown how different versions of Jesus reflect their cultural milieu: Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment Jesus, the nineteenth century maternal Jesus, the manly Jesus from the early 20th century, the hippie Jesus of the 1960s (Godspell!), and so on. Keddie updates that list with a contemporary Republican Jesus who “loves borders, guns, unborn babies, and economic prosperity and hates homosexuality, taxes, welfare, and universal healthcare,” in the words of the publisher’s blurb. The book begins with “A Portrait of Republican Jesus” as shown in Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s Killing Jesus (2013). Keddie describes the book as “a political allegory in which ancient characters and events are used to express the authors’ modern political views on class, race, and religion.” The result is “a gospel of limited government marked by anti-Semitism, white nationalism, and Christian supremacism” (33). Describing the origins of today’s Republican Jesus, Keddie notes that the Protestant Reformation and classical liberalism provided important antecedents, but he follows Kevin Kruse (in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, 2015) in emphasizing the role of businessmen who enlisted religious leaders in their opposition to the New Deal. The resentment politics of the Tea Party built on that 1930s foundation and lead directly to Donald Trump and what is effectively a new version of Christianity. The meat of the book is Part Three, in which Keddie describes the Republican Jesus’s views on family values (especially abortion and LGBTQ+ issues), welfare, the separation of church and state, immigration, and the end times. Republicans use what Keddie calls the “GOP method” of biblical interpretation: they garble the text by mistranslating or misstating the words of the Bible; they omit context and cherry-pick phrases; and they patch this “cut-up text together with other cut-up texts into the framework of a carefully designed quilt that’s backed by ignorance, stuffed with hatred, and sewn with self-interest” (10). So, what would Jesus do? Keddie, a respected historian of early Christian history at the University of British Columbia, knows his stuff and can explain what the [End Page 77] scriptures really say about these issues. Republicans, he says, are engaging in “biblical gaslighting” (267). Some readers will find this book useful as a way to refute conservative friends and family members (although the book comes with no guarantees that anyone will actually listen). Probably more will appreciate it as a way to understand something of our contemporary scene—like the conservative candidate for governor in Georgia who is currently campaigning with a simple slogan: “Jesus, Guns, Babies.” Suddenly, it almost makes sense. [End Page 78] David B. Parker Kennesaw State University Copyright © 2022 Mid-America American Studies Association

Too close, too intimate, and too vulnerable: close reading methodology and the future of feminist game studies

ABSTRACT In this article I discuss close reading as a methodology for feminist game studies. Due to its centralization of the researcher’s own interpretations, close reading can be a particularly fruitful methodology for marginalized scholars discussing the ways games construct, position, and portray their own identities. However, this intimacy can also result in vulnerability, in part because reactionary and conservative members of the gaming community continue to insist that video games should be “just for fun” and push back against reading “too much” into them. This pushback has been directed in particularly hostile ways towards feminist critics and scholars who interpret game narratives or characters as misogynistic, homophobic, or racist. Yet, in order to make positive change happen, more feminist research on games needs to reach the broader public and intimate social justice-oriented close reading must become normalized rather than niche. In this sense, close reading can be both a methodology and a political stance.

Tripartite motif family proteins in inflammatory bowel disease: Mechanisms and potential for interventions.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic recurrent gastrointestinal inflammatory disease that poses a heavy burden to the global healthcare system. However, the current paucity of mechanistic understanding of IBD pathogenesis hampers the development of aetiology‐directed therapies. Novel therapeutic options based on IBD pathogenesis are urgently needed for attaining better long‐term prognosis for IBD patients. The tripartite motif (TRIM) family is a large protein family including more than 70 structurally conservative members, typically characterized by their RBCC structure, which primarily function as E3 ubiquitin ligases in post‐translational modification. They have emerged as regulators of a broad range of cellular mechanisms, including proliferation, differentiation, transcription and immune regulation. TRIM family proteins are involved in multiple diseases, such as viral infection, cancer and autoimmune disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease. This review provides a comprehensive perspective on TRIM proteins' involvement in the pathophysiology and progression of IBD, in particular, on intestinal mucosal barriers, gene susceptibility and opportunistic infections, thus providing novel therapeutic targets for this complicated disease. However, the exact mechanisms of TRIM proteins in IBD pathogenesis and IBD‐related carcinogenesis are still unknown, and more studies are warranted to explore potential therapeutic targets of TRIM proteins in IBD.

‘The Azure Generation’: Liberal Youth Politics in Greece and the Politicization of Music, 1982–1984

This article focuses on the years 1982–1984, which witnessed the first systematic effort to establish a moderate right-wing youth organization in Greece during the Cold War. It shows that the invention of the political songs of the Liberal youth ONNED underpinned its mass mobilization in 1982–1984. In this vein, our analysis enriches recent historiographical approaches that focus on cultures of Conservatism and on political and cultural changes in post-authoritarian Southern Europe in the 1970s to 1980s. Those political songs were linked to both the rhetoric and the practices of ONNED cadres and members. Their lyrics conveyed anti-Communist post-memories of the Civil War in Greece (1943/1946–1949), as reconfigured and filtered through the experiences of ONNED cadres and members in the aftermath of the 1967–1974 dictatorship and the electoral victory of the Socialists in 1981. Thus, the study of the Liberal youth complements the analysis of moderate right-wing subjects in Spain, for whom the Civil War was no reference point after democracy was restored in 1975. Simultaneously, the article enriches research on the Greek Liberal youth so far, which has neglected how this subject reconfigured its approach to the Greek Civil War in comparison to the Right in the preceding decades. Our article also shows that the songs under study accompanied a wide range of ritualistic and prosaic practices of ONNED cadres and members. Listening to and singing those songs was part of a double demarcation process between ONNED cadres and members and their left-wing opponents, as well as within ONNED. For instance, in Thessaloniki, the more Conservative members embraced those songs in their leisure activities and their everyday spaces. By contrast, the more centre-right members were more critical, but still tolerated such music. The everyday life and spatial history approach is crucial to illuminating the varying reception of the political songs of ONNED within this organization.

The Voter ID Debate: An Analysis of Political Elite Framing in the UK Parliament

Abstract In 2021, the Conservative UK government announced a proposal to introduce mandatory voter identification (ID) in elections, raising concerns around how these measures might disenfranchise already marginalised groups. Using computational content analysis techniques, this study analyses all parliamentary debates to date on voter ID to understand how political elites frame these requirements. Despite voter ID being justified as necessary to tackle voter fraud when the new Elections Bill was first announced, this study instead finds both Conservative and Labour Members of Parliament agree voter fraud numbers are small. Conservatives nevertheless significantly frame voter ID as necessary to strengthen public confidence in the electoral system, which contrasts Electoral Commission’s 2021 data instead finding 90% of the public consider voting to be safe from fraud at the polling station. Overall, this study sheds light to the ‘framing contest’ and polarisation present in parliamentary debates about voter ID, an increasingly contentious issue of the proposed Elections Bill.