Dimensions Of Political Conflict Research Articles

Dimensions of class identification? On the roots and effects of class identity.

Throughout the 20th century, objective class position was a strong predictor of both class identity, political preferences and party choice, but since the 1980s, the relationship between objective and subjective dimensions of class has supposedly vanished-according to some as the result of a fundamental blurring of class relations. However, others suggest that this result may be partly due to the use of outdated class schemes. Although still basically focused on inequality of life chances, class relations today are complex and include more than labor market position, such as different forms of cultural resources (e.g., education). As a result, class identity may also have become more complex, and possibly dependent upon the salience of different resources and types of group relations-both in itself and in its relationship with political preferences. Very few contributions, though, test such claims. Using two independent Danish surveys, this paper investigates to what extent class identification is multidimensional and how any such dimensionality is related to, on the one hand, different dimensions of objective class relations and, on the other hand, different dimensions of political conflict. The analyses show that despite changes at the overall, societal level, class identity remains a primarily unidimensional concept both in its structural origins and its relationship with politics.

The Lety camp as a “nonexistent pseudo concentration camp”: An analysis of the changing Lety narratives

Interpreting and staging the past is an integral part of politics in its different forms. Selected historical events that are attached greater importance have often been contested politically. In the last two decades or so, clashes over the past have escalated in most consolidated democracies and have become more closely linked with other dimensions of political conflict. In the already consolidated Czech democracy, disputes have reopened over both the Communist regime and a much older past, with history fully entering the political agenda. These conflicts have been centred on both the historical subjects and fundamental points of collective memory, and on locations related to that memory and history. In a specific time and space, those places represent a certain tale, a certain interpretation of historical events, and at the same time allow for the development of other tales, often updated and in some cases politically contested. The forms and nature of the physical places of collective memory may vary. Firstly, these may be places “where bodies lie or have lain” – mass graves, destroyed communities or other places of collective suffering. This paper tackles this issue and analyses the narratives constructed by leading Czech politicians of the WWII Roma concentration camp in Lety. It presents the main arguments of the competing narratives and their changes throughout the post-Communist period.

Populist Radical Right Party-Voter Policy Representation in Western Europe

ABSTRACTIn this study we assess policy representation by populist radical right (PRR) parties in ten West European countries. Going beyond aggregate left-right or socio-cultural (GAL-TAN) dimensions of political conflict, we study representation on policy issues related to the PRR parties’ core ideological features nativism, populism, and authoritarianism. Analysing data from party expert and voter surveys, we find that the PRR parties provide largely unique policy positions that are congruent with their voters’ preferences in terms of their opposition to immigration and the European Union. By contrast, the parties are less representative in terms of their value conservative and authoritarian positions on gay rights and civil liberties. The findings have relevance for our understanding of party strategy, voter behaviour, and the dimensionality of political competition.

Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project

Partisan conflicts have been frequently analysed in comparative political science research. Yet little is known about the dimensions of political conflict at the local level in multi-level democracies. This article contributes to the literature on the estimation and analysis of party positions by first presenting a new dataset of more than 800 local party manifestos in Germany that allows for a systematic analysis of the dimensions of political conflict at the German local level. Secondly, it is demonstrated that (semi-)automatic content analysis of these texts offers a promising approach for gaining new insights into local party positions. Thirdly, the empirical analysis of German local party manifestos shows that partisan conflicts are not only structured along the left–right dimension but also along a dimension which distinguishes between parties addressing ‘local’ and ‘national’ issues to a varying degree in their manifestos, due to the different behaviour of established and populist parties.

Validating Wordscores: The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Text Scaling

ABSTRACTWordscores is a popular computational text analysis method with numerous applications in communication research. Wordscores claims to scale documents on specified dimensions without requiring researchers to read or even understand the language of the input text. We investigate whether Wordscores delivers this claim by scaling the Euromanifestos of 117 political parties across 23 countries on 4 salient dimensions of political conflict. We assess validity by comparing the Wordscores estimates to expert surveys and other judgmental measures, and by examining the Wordscores’s estimates ability to predict party membership in the European Parliament groups. We find that the Wordscores estimates correlate poorly with expert and judgmental measures of party positions, while the latter outperform Wordscores in the predictive validity test. We conclude that Wordscores does not live up to its original claim of a “quick and easy” language blind method, and urge researchers to demonstrate the validity of the method in their domain of interest before any empirical analysis.

“It’s the politics, stupid!”. The politicization of anti-corruption in Italy

This article aims to analyze the relationship between judicial activism against political corruption and electoral accountability. The judiciary plays a pivotal role in enforcing anti-corruption legislation, and, in many countries, courts have moved closer and closer towards that kind of working. In the article, we analyze the conditions under which a judicial prosecution of corrupt practices can also lead to electoral punishment of political misconducts by voters, or to a failure of accountability mechanisms. The latter outcome is more likely to occur if judicial activism is politicized. The ‘politicization’ of anti-corruption initiatives is here defined as an increase in the polarization of opinions, interests, or values about judicial investigations and the extent to which this polarization is strategically advanced towards the political debate by parties, political leaders, and media. By crystallizing a new dimension of political conflict, political actors can negatively affect electoral accountability, diminishing the risk of electoral punishment. We study this phenomenon by analyzing the case of Italy, a country which has experienced high levels of politicization of anti-corruption. However, whether and to what extent anti-corruption policies can be politicized is a question open for many other countries that can take a similar path.

The Issue Voting Triangle: How Issue Linkage, Issue Competition and Issue Mobilization Facilitate Issue Voting

Why do some new policy issues influence voters’ decisions at the ballot box while others do not? This study develops and tests arguments about the way in which supply-side factors, i.e. the behavioral characteristics of political parties, mediate the extent to which new and complex policy issues affect voting behavior. Specifically, it proposes a model, i.e. the issue voting triangle, that draws attention to three supply-side factors that explain variation in issue voting: (1) issue linkage, (2) issue mobilization and (3) issue competition. The degree of issue voting is expected to vary as a result of the linkage between parties’ positions on the new policy issue and the main dimension of political conflict (issue linkage), the extent to which parties take diverging stances on the new issue (issue competition) and the degree to which parties view the new issue as important (issue mobilization). These general propositions are tested by examining the impact of the European integration issue on vote choice in British, Danish, Dutch and German elections between 1992 and 2002. The empirical analysis demonstrates that issue voting on the basis of a new and complex policy issue is indeed more prominent when the three issue voting triangle conditions are present. Consequently, this study has crucial implications for the study of elections and voting behavior and enriches our understanding of the issue voting process.

Dutch Voters and the Changing Party Space 1989–2006

Elections in the Netherlands in the period 1989-2006 have shown major changes in the supply of political parties and at some points a very large volatility of results. We describe these developments against the background of theories of dealignment and realignment. Specifically, we focus on the alleged rise of a new 'cultural' dimension of political conflict in Dutch politics at the level of the electorate. We show that the electorate's position on political issues representing the traditional conflict dimensions (left-right, religion) has been relatively stable. Since the early 1990s, new political problems have become salient for the voters. Sympathy for political parties can be modelled by three dimensions (authoritarian-libertarian, left-right, religious) which are related to the voters' positions on political issues. These positions on issues representing traditional and new political conflict dimensions also affect voting behaviour for traditional and for new political parties.

Four Types of Symbolic Conflict

The aim of this article is to derive a theory of political symbolism from an analysis of symbolic conflict. By symbolic conflict I mean that dimension of political conflict which focuses on the manipulation of symbols. Drawing on a range of ethnographic examples, I argue that symbolic conflict is a type of competition for what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, and that it can tab four prototypical forms: it can concern either the valuation of political symbols, their production, their proprietorship, or their survival as emblems of political affiliations. These correspond to the four central properties of a political symbol, which are the four ways in which such a symbol can be manipulated so as to appropriate symbolic capital.

Social Irrelevance of Politics: Hong Kong Chinese Attitudes Toward Political Leadership

N THE EVE of 1997, when China will resume sovereignty over the territory, Hong Kong still suffers from the lack of trusted political leaders. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs are legion. Elsewhere I have analyzed Hong Kong Chinese views of political leadership' and the structuralhistorical factors which impede the rise of strong political leaders.2 In this paper, the ways social irrelevance of politics hamper the emergence of trusted political leaders and the formation of political groups with strong social support bases will be explored. The focus of the study is the Hong Kong Chinese's perception of the relevance of the major institutions, individuals and groups, which constitute the political leadership of the territory, to the major issues that concern them. It was found that while the Hong Kong Chinese were able to vaguely detect the major dimensions of political conflict among the leadership components, they failed to see the relevance of political conflict to the major social and economic issues of Hong Kong, which were given a higher order of importance by the public than by the leadership. Furthermore, they had some difficulty differentiating between the leadership in political terms and an almost total inability to distinguish between leaders in social and economic terms. Such a state of affairs is obviously not conducive to the development of public trust in the emergent political leaders and political groups. Most of the statistical findings reported in this study come from a questionnaire survey of a Hong Kong-wide sample

Political unrest in Western Europe: Trends and prospects

Empirical evidence is presented on the development of (violent) political conflict in 19 West European countries during the 1970s, the early 1980s and the entire post‐Second World War period. It is possible to identify three types of nation‐groups: ‘noisy‐participatory’ states such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and more recently Spain and Portugal ‐ and Greece if taken on a per capita base. The group of rather ‘quiet’ democracies consists of the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and Luxembourg, with the remaining countries forming the middle, less clearly delineated group. There are two dimensions of political conflict: collective protest, made up of variables such as protest demonstrations, political strikes and riots, and internal war, characterised by the breakdown of the slate monopoly of violence and the organised use of violence by anti‐system groups. A causal model of political protest is presented and confronted with rival explanations. Empirical evidence and theoretical arguments lead to scepticism about accurate predictions of political violence and political instability.