Established Political Parties Research Articles

Political identities: The missing link in the study of populism

Political identities are crucial for understanding electoral behavior: individuals who identify with a political party behave as loyal supporters who would hardly vote for competitors old or new. Although this is an obvious observation, it has received little attention in the study of populism—a set of ideas that not only portrays established political parties as corrupt and self-serving entities but also depicts “the people” as a homogenous and virtuous community that should run the government. In this contribution, we develop a novel theory that claims that populism can thrive only when an antiestablishment political identity exists. This identity denotes an emotional and rational repulsion toward all established political parties in a given country. We test our theory by analyzing original survey data from contemporary Chile. The empirical analysis reveals not only that a limited segment of the electorate holds an antiestablishment political identity coalesced by populism but also that there is a large segment of apartisans adverse to populism. These empirical findings have important consequences for the study of populism, particularly when it comes to analyzing its emergence and electoral potential.

Backlash Against “Others”

Right wing populist movements are challenging established political parties and institutions, including higher education. The discourse and platforms of these movements are a nationalistic backlash against elites and “others” that are antithetical to all that universities at their best stand for. But universities would do well to refocus on class-based inequities that also underlie this shift, in ways that rebalance the global and local.

Backlash Against “Others”

Right wing populist movements are challenging established political parties and institutions, including higher education. The discourse and platforms of these movements are a nationalistic backlash against elites and “others” that are antithetical to all that universities at their best stand for. But universities would do well to refocus on class-based inequities that also underlie this shift, in ways that rebalance the global and local.

The Cost of Political Representation

We estimate the causal effect of independent candidates on voter turnout and election outcomes in India. To do this, we exploit exogenous changes in the entry deposit candidates pay for their participation in the political process, changes that disproportionately excluded candidates with no affiliation to established political parties. A one standard deviation increase in the number of independent candidates increases voter turnout by 5-6 percentage points, as some voters choose to vote rather than stay home. The vote share of independent candidates increases by 9-10 percentage points, as some existing voters switch who they vote for. Thus, independents allow winning candidates to win with less vote share, decrease the probability of electing a candidate from the governing coalition by about 27-30 percentage points, and ultimately increase the probability of electing an ethnic-party candidate. Altogether the results imply that the price of participation by independents is constituency representation in government.

The Real Estate Transfer Tax and Government Ideology: Evidence from the German States

In 2006, the reform of the German fiscal constitution realigned legislative powers between the federal and the state governments. Since 2007, the German state governments have been allowed to design real estate transfer tax rates. We investigate whether government ideology predicts the levels and increases in the real estate transfer tax rates; and show that leftwing and center governments were more active in increasing the real estate transfer tax rates than rightwing governments. The result is important because many voters were disenchanted with the policies and platforms of the established German parties in the course of the euro and refugee crisis. Disenchantment notwithstanding, the established political parties are still prepared to offer polarized policies.

The Hobbyhorse of the Party for the Animals

Can a small, new political party increase the attention to nonhuman animal welfare? This paper traces the effect of the Party for the Animals on the Dutch parliament. This was the first animal advocacy party to enter parliament. After this relatively small, new political party entered the Dutch parliament, attention to agriculture and animal welfare increased markedly. Because of timing of the change and the absence of alternative explanations, it is very likely that the Party for the Animals caused the change. The paper also identifies the underlying mechanism of the change in attention: a conflict between established political parties and the new political party about the framing of the debate on agriculture.

Les Irréguliers, un autre après-guerre: Gary, Guilloux, Malaquais …

The virtue of this volume is to go beyond merely doubting whether the Standard Version of French literary history in the post-war period is true (from engagement to the nouveau roman and the defeat of the Hussards) by showing just how much it leaves out. Admirable figures with little in common save their determination to be themselves and not part of anything else — Marc Bernard, Jean Malaquais, Jean Meckert, Louis Guilloux, and, centrally, Roman Gary (to which set I would add Elie Wiesel and André Schwartz-Bart, not discussed in this volume) — produced a whole library of serious literary fiction that, despite winning a dozen Goncourt, Renaudot, and other prizes, was consistently marginalized by the rigidly politicized literary institutions of Paris and continues even now to be held at arm's length by the academy. Roumette introduces these still largely hidden treasures with a thoughtful and sensitive essay on the damage wrought by an over-ideological era. Roger Grenier, Jacques Cantier, Geneviève Nakach, and Pierre Masson make the personalities and novels of Bernard, Guilloux, and especially Malaquais seem irresistibly interesting. Kerwin Spire provides an extremely well documented and persuasive account of Romain Gary's relations with Gaullism, Maxime Decout unravels the battle he fought with ‘ideology’, and Hélène Baty-Delalande offers a welcome salvage-and-rescue service for the literary project of Frère Océan, centred on a generous reading of Gary's long essay on the picaresque, Pour Sganarelle. Roumette also contributes a fine essay setting Gary's White Dog in parallel to Guilloux's OK, Joe! — the only two of the novels under consideration to exist in English translation — and Cyril Piroux explores the double career of Jean Meckert who was also the Série noire author Jean Amila. The term ‘irrégulier’, chosen to characterize these highly individual writers who share a common resistance to labels and brigades, is borrowed from Gary, who used it to identify himself in a newspaper column he published as the Journal d'un irrégulier, and is entirely apt, for the moral thrust of all these novelists is not ‘disengagement’, but engagement in the great issues of the day from a position not compatible with that of any established political party or group — like ‘irregular soldiers’ fighting when it suits, and not when it doesn't. A volume of essays of such high quality ought to prompt more widespread interest in the some of the best writing that France produced in the 1940s and 1950s. (A planned screen version of OK Joe!, if it materializes, may do even more.) At the least, it pulls another plank from under the rickety political structure still maintained in much academic discourse about the shape and meaning of the post-war French novel.

The Life and Death of New Political Parties in the Low Countries

Numerous new parties have emerged since voters became less loyal to established political parties. A number of these survived and have been analysed intensely, especially green and radical right parties; many other new parties disappeared and have been neglected by party research. This article analyses the fate of all 30 political parties that entered parliament in the Netherlands or Belgium between 1950 and 2003. Qualitative comparative analysis is used to identify characteristics of both surviving and disappeared new parties. Conditions related to party origin (roots in civil society, organisational newness, initial programmatic profile) are scrutinised, as are conditions pertaining to the party’s developmental process (party organisational strength and the occurrence of defections or party splits). Surviving parties are characterised by strong, rooted organisations that have not suffered defections. Most disappeared parties lacked a strong organisation and roots and have experienced shocks that they could not absorb. Organisational newness makes new parties vulnerable.

Contentious precarious generation in anti-austerity movements in Spain and Italy

This article focuses on the precarious generation protesting in Spain and Italy in times of crisis and austerity (2010-2012). Their many similarities notwithstanding, the two countries have experienced different types of mobilization against austerity measures. In Spain, a relatively autonomous mobilization –characterized by new collective actors and new forms of action– has made possible the building of a political actor, Podemos, able to seriously challenge the established political parties. In Italy, instead, the mobilization was dominated by established political actors, especially trade unions, did not produce innovative forms of action and has not been able to overcome (so far) the fragmentation of the social movement sector. In both countries, however, the anti-austerity protests have been characterized by a strong presence of what we call hear the “precarious generation”, particularly exposed to the economic crisis and the austerity measures. By relying on data from several surveys conducted in demonstrations on social, economic and labor issues in the two countries from 2010 to 2011, in this article we single out differences and the similarities in terms of presence, social composition, grievances and emotion, collective identity and network embeddedness of the precarious generation. Our findings show that the precarious generation was almost equally present in the selected demonstrations in the two countries, share similar socio-graphic features and similar types of grievance and emotions. Nonetheless, in Spain it seems to have built a more cohesive and radical collective identity based upon a more informal and internet based network integration while in Italy it seems embedded in a more traditional and formal network, which prevented the formation of a strong collective identity. Moreover, while in Spain the differences between the older and the precarious generation reveal that, both have a strong identity based on different networks; more formal the older and more related to informal and online instruments the latter; in Italy, the older generation has a much stronger collective identity based on a organizational network, while the precarious one is less but still integrated in organizational network. We conclude that the more autonomous civil society tradition in Spain, together with the particular political opportunities, under the pressure of a harsher economic crisis, may account for the differences we found.

The Impact of Party Identification and Socially Supplied Disagreement on Electoral Choices in Turkey

The relative impacts of social influence and political party affiliation on electoral choices depend on the maturity of the political party system. In established democracies political party affiliation has a decisive impact on electoral choices whereas in democratizing countries political discussion influences over-time volatility in electoral outcomes. This paper investigates the significance of both factors on individual attitudes toward political candidates in Turkey. Findings from an experiment where social disagreement and candidate political party affiliation are manipulated indicate that young voters are sensitive to both partisan cues and socially supplied disagreement in forming and changing their attitudes toward political candidates. The results also show that, unlike most developing countries with weak parties, party label in Turkey is an important heuristic for making electoral choices. However, social disagreement can make political attitudes unstable. The findings suggest that Turkey presents us with a case in between the developed country voters' iron clad partisan attachment and the developing country voters' high susceptibility to socially communicated persuasive messages.

The democratisation of party leadership selection: The Portuguese experience

In recent years, members of established political parties have received increased powers to select candidates and leaders. Several explanations have been advanced to account for this trend, focusing on the evolution of the political system, the characteristics of party systems or intra-party dynamics. The aim of this article is to examine the introduction of democratising reforms for leadership selection in Portuguese parties. Despite the high degree of centralisation and the low levels of internal participation, all governing parties have expanded members' rights during the last decade. The main findings suggest that party leaders have decided to change methods for leadership selection mainly for instrumental purposes in order to consolidate their internal power or gain electoral benefits. Moreover, this organisational transformation has had reduced effects on the internal party functioning. Regardless of these similarities, the data show that there are important differences between parties with regard to levels of participation and internal competition.

Declining memberships, changing members? European political party members in a new era

In recent years, membership in established political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time members of some parties have received increased powers to help select candidates, leaders and party policies. These twin trends make it important to re-examine who is joining today’s smaller parties. As parties shrink, do they attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different political priorities? Using data from two sets of European surveys, our study investigates this question to study longitudinal change in party membership. The data show a growing gap between the age of party members and the general population. In most other respects, however, party members seem to be becoming more, not less, like their fellow citizens. This suggests that today’s smaller but more powerful memberships still have the potential to help link their parties to a wider electoral base.

Young Protest: The Idea of Merit in Commercial Hindi Cinema

This article depicts the closing of the distance between a rational public sphere and popular Hindi cinema in view of a spurt of youth-related Hindi films in the 2000s, especially Rang de basanti (2006). Rang de basanti is taken as the starting point for a discussion of the idea of politics deployed in and through Hindi cinema. The film provides an eclectic mishmash of Gandhian satyagraha and revolutionary rhetoric, a combination that resonates ironically within a neoliberal educational imagination. The media-orchestrated response of the avowedly apolitical, but staunchly antireservationist, upper-caste students' group Youth for Equality (YFE), which emerged as a direct offshoot of the film, definitely echoes this. However, the YFE's investment in academic capital and merit has deep roots in the discredited popular Hindi cinema of yore. This essay argues that the YFE's overture to politics flows from a dawning realization that the mainstream political sphere no longer shares its concept of merit, since a new political consensus about reservations is now apparent even in the most Brahmanic and right-wing of established political parties. The essay then attempts to come to terms with how the YFE class goes about adjusting to the new playing field of cultural politics. Finally, it tries to place the role of education and student politics in a broad historical perspective, exposing the links of the contemporary public sphere to a more privatized and subterranean location in Bombay films.

The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?

The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?

The Heterogenous Citizen

The Heterogenous Citizen

THE PRACTISES OF INTERNET NETWORKING – A RESOURCE FOR ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

Over the past ten years, the political significance of the Internet has become a recurrent theme within the social science literature, with questions centring on the Internet's part in the emergence of political movements and in the reshaping of people's roles as citizens. These discussions have been predominantly theoretical and deterministic in nature, with the political significance of the Internet being viewed as a consequence of its features; for example, the Internet's network structure is addressed within this literature as a forerunner to a politics following network logic. For the most part, extant research has not told us much about the Internet's significance in individuals' everyday political engagement. This article aims to modestly compensate for this shortcoming by presenting empirical results from a study on the perception and use of the Internet among young people in four alternative political movements. Specifically, by drawing on semi-structured interviews with twenty-one activists and viewing the interview data through the lens of the ‘network metaphor’, the article illustrates and discusses three different networking practises in which the Internet is an important resource: (1) the activists' use of the Internet to maintain their organizations' network-like character, (2) their use of the Internet for networking within their organizations, and (3) their use of the Internet for networking in between different, alternative political organizations. The article concludes by discussing the potential significance of these networking practises for politics, and presenting a comparative outlook towards a similar, previous study of young members within established political parties' youth organizations.

National conferences in transitional periods: The case of Iraq

This article places the Iraqi National Conference of August 2004 in a comparative context by examining the role of national conferences in transitional and post-conflict countries. It argues that national conferences do not contribute significantly to a transitional process, if a prior political agreement on the process and on the role of the Conference among key stakeholders is absent. In Iraq, the disagreement over the transitional framework created by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council impeded a truly inclusive Conference from taking place. A core of established political parties, distrusted by the opposition, controlled the Conference preparations. A transparent preparatory process did not take place; the Conference did not serve as a forum for genuine dialogue. Finally, the National Council elected by the Conference did not expand political participation to credible opposition figures.

Developments in Danish Parliamentary Democracy: Accountability, Parties and External Constraints

Danish parliamentary developments since the Second World War include the consolidation of minority rule, a reduction in the power of established political parties, and more external constraints on parliamentary actors. They also involve a number of more specific changes to the various steps of delegation and accountability. The evidence tends to support the thesis of a paradox in the development of parliamentary democracy. On the one hand, changes in the constitutional chain of delegation and accountability have, on the whole, favoured the principals (voters, parliament, ministers) compared with their agents (parliament, ministers, civil servants). On the other hand, the established parties have declined somewhat and there are more external constraints than there used to be. This implies that the power of democratic principals has increased within narrower limits of action. In such a situation, the principals can be said to ‘decide more about less’ because of the stronger national and (not least) international constraints. However, the emergence of a partially new system of governance cannot unequivocally be called better or worse than the traditional Danish system of democratic governance.

Aesthetic Political Thought: Benjamin and Marker Revisited

The complexity of contemporary political life has challenged traditional political theory in several Western democracies. With emergence of new approaches to interpretation of political praxis, we are forced to confront issues such as New Right, Christian Right, communitarianism, post-liberalism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, feminism, globalization, and green thought. Many of these approaches continue to both reflect and critically challenge major ideological movements dating back to beginning of twentieth century. Since alterations to earlier theories are commonly result of changes in political, cultural, and social conditions, new approaches to understanding political reality are also signs of transformations in terms in which political is now understood. Where traditional or classic political theory has tended to express claims of established political institutions, parties, and ideologies, alternative ways of understanding political have increasingly exceeded these boundaries. Chantal Mouffe, for example, notes that the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to human and that determines our very ontological condition.' Although Mouffe's critique is focused specifically on political liberalism, she refers to a broad understanding of political. The political, understood as being inherent to every human society and thus extending from institution to human condition, signifies a move toward new spheres of conceptualization of political thought and praxis. In his book Aesthetic Politics, Frank Ankersmit claims that contemporary brokenness of political reality refers, in fact, to actualization of politics. Through this claim, Ankersmit attempts to redefine in terms that refrain from reducing it to ethics, economics, public interest or technological determinism. In this respect, Ankersmit follows a perspectivist idea of political reality in terms already sketched by Machiavelli, in which there is no perspective that is uniquely privileged above all others in discovering and defining political truth. (2) In other words, chosen perspective on political truth or its ethical background is, in itself, a political matter. One result of this specification of complexity of political reality led Ankersmit to rethink in aesthetic terms. In this article, terms aesthetic and difference are characteristic of my ways of understanding some of core elements of political. Consequently, diversity of contemporary aesthetic, political, and historical representation, and even diversity of existing ideas and theories, is understood here not as a confusing but as a creative force within contemporary understanding of politics. As part of this creativity, I seek to inspire new ways of discussing aesthetic forms of politicization, political representation, and action. Through my examples, I will focus on questions about representation of history, politics, and memory. First, I will discuss Walter Benjamin's idea of representing history as a montage. (3) This is equally an historical, political, and aesthetic montage, portrayed both through textual and visual representation. Instead of offering an homogeneous image of reality, Benjamin's notion of an historical montage combines individual with collective, conciliatory with contradictory elements of history. The idea of montage also plays a significant role in examination of how heterogeneity of historical knowledge forms an active background for constituting political knowledge. Hence, idea of montage brings forth uniqueness of different moments that each in their own way participates in constituting images of history and politics. Second, I will discuss cinematic politics (4) in relation to various aesthetic works of Chris Marker. …

Recent developments in Pakistan

Pakistan, today, is struggling both politically and economically. The military regime which seized power in October 1999, promised to introduce “real” democracy in the country. However, it was left grappling with the problem of dealing with Nawaz Sharif, culminating in his controversial exile to Saudi Arabia. And when the government did initiate local elections, it showed signs of lack of electoral enthusiasm and discriminated against religious minorities. Also, it did not succeed in its purported goal of keeping established political parties out and building a new, ‘clean’ breed of politicians. On the economic front, Pakistan was on the verge of defaulting on its external loan obligations when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to its rescue with a 10‐month stand‐by credit of US$ 596 million. However, the IMF imposed stiff conditions for the country to be able to lay its hands on a large part of the loan. Pakistan, with its record of hardly ever progressing beyond the first tranche of loan grants, is struggling to meet these conditions. The country will have to start thinking beyond a loan‐sustained economy and begin building internal economic strength.