Experienced Politicians Research Articles

Online image content analysis of political figures: an exploratory study

This study investigates the emotional content of facial images of South Korean politicians. The data were drawn from official websites of 18th National Assembly members. We categorized facial expressions (smiling, frowning, and no expression) by using photos on the websites. The smiling image was the most prevalent facial expression regardless of the socio-political-demographic attributes of the politicians. The existence and strength of the smiling image had significant positive correlations with the politicians’ web visibility. Opposition parties were significantly more likely to show frowning or expressionless images than the ruling party. The more experienced politicians were more likely to continue their use smiling images than similarly aged politicians with less experience.

Ronald Reagan: Conviction politics and the transatlantic relationship

‘Personal relations matter more in international politics than the historians would have us believe’1 Ronald Reagan, writing about Margaret Thatcher in 1989 This article argues that any ‘nomination’ of a president for Transatlantica, interpreted here as being a ‘territory’ primarily occupied by the United States and the United Kingdom, should have three elements. The first is an acceptance by the ‘governed’ of the said ‘president’, with the former in this case being the leadership of the UK. The second is a unity of purpose founded on a common world view and evidenced at all levels, from the identification of enemies abroad to the proffered solutions to practical issues at home. The third is a consistency of action and a resiliency of trust in the face of differences in opinion or policy. Margaret Thatcher, while prime minister, accepted Ronald Reagan's leadership, despite the fact she was arguably the more experienced international politician. The two shared a form of ‘conviction politics’ that drove not...

'Madame Royal'. Eine kritisch-diskursanalytische Untersuchung zur printmedialen Repräsentation von Polit-Figuren im medialen Diskurs am Beispiel des französischen Präsidentschaftswahlkampfes

The article illustrates 'nomination” as a special form of reference, containing an evaluative perspective of the language user on extra-linguistic entities (cf. REISIGL 2003. In the media discourse nomination referring to people appears as classification or as anthroponyms and can be instrumentalized. The corpus consists of the nominations of the candidates to the presidential election in France 2007, the nominations contained in the daily press of the 3 months preceding the election. In the field of nomination as anthroponyms it could be shown that in the media discourse the use of the family name alone and the use of both first name and family name can be considered as neutral, while the use of a nickname or the first name alone establishes a relation of inferiority, a phenomenon that could be observed only in the case of the female candidate Ségolène Royal. Nomination as classification of the other hand established the following representations: The hyper real figure of Nicolas Sarkozy was represented as an authoritarian, strong, experienced politician with a problematic character and a migration-background. Ségolène Royal was constructed as an emotional woman who is hardly known in the political landscape and has little political experience. François Bayrou was represented as a solid, Christian down-to-earth personality, at the third place behind the other two and Jean Marie Le Pen as extreme right wing and the oldest candidate behind the other three. It could be shown that nominations (as classifications or anthroponyms) construct representations of the candidates which correspond even before the elections to their result.

Inside the campaign finance battle: court testimony on the new reforms

In 2002 Congress enacted the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), the first major revision of federal campaign finance law in a generation. In March 2001, after a fiercely contested and highly divisive seven-year partisan legislative battle, the Senate passed S. 27, known as the McCain-Feingold legislation. The House responded by passing H.R. 2356, companion legislation known as Shays-Meehan, in February 2002. The Senate then approved the House-passed version, and President George W. Bush signed BCRA into law on March 27, 2002, stating that the bill had flaws but overall improves the current system of financing for federal campaigns. The Reform Act was taken to court within hours of the President's signature. Dozens of interest groups and lawmakers who had opposed passage of the Act in Congress lodged complaints that challenged the constitutionality of virtually every aspect of the new law. Following review by a special three-judge panel, the case is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. This litigation constitutes the most important campaign finance case since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Buckley v. Valeo more than twenty-five years ago. The testimony, submitted by some of the country's most knowledgeable political scientists and most experienced politicians, constitutes an invaluable body of knowledge about the complexities of campaign finance and the role of money in our political system. Unfortunately, only the lawyers, political scientists, and practitioners actually involved in the litigation have seen most of this writing --until now. Inside the Campaign Finance Battle makes key testimony in this historic case available to a general readership, in the process shedding new light on campaign finance practices central to the congressional debate on the reform act and to the landmark litigation challenging its constitutionality.

“Biggest Scandal in Canadian History": HRDC Audit Starts Probity War

The article describes the nearly year-long political and media uproar that followed on the release in January, 2000 of a qualitative or soft “audit" of management control in the federal government department, Human Resources Development Canada, and analyses the contributing factors. The article argues that the auditors’ examination of project files for programs delivered by grants and contributions was so abstract and poorly executed that nothing whatever can be concluded from the work. Factors that favoured the “scandal" interpretation include across-government new public management reforms where accountability has not been re-theorized for Canada’s Westminster system of government; Canada’s electoral volatility that starves the country of experienced politicians and spurs the tradition of political compensation for electoral support; and the political role of the office of the Auditor General.

‘D — politics: cultivons notre jardin’: Into the Wilderness, November 1922–December 1923

The significance of the Carlton Club revolt was that it formally destroyed the Coalition without exorcising the menacing spectre of coalitionism. When Lloyd George resigned on the afternoon of 19 October 1922 he was followed into the wilderness by some of the most experienced and talented Conservative politicians of the age. This group subsequently established their collective position in the form of a manifesto to the press reaffirming their loyalty to Lloyd George, with whom ‘there had been no difference be it … on matters of principle or policy’, and portentously warning that ‘other men who had given other counsels must inherit our burden and discharge its consequent responsibilities’. Thereafter, when initial hopes that Law would not obtain an absolutely majority were extinguished, the Chamberlainites took refuge in pique that appeared almost inexhaustible. Under Birkenhead's effective strategic direction, the objective was to present the Chamberlainites as a coherent alternative leadership for the Conservative Party: a strategy founded upon the firm and constant conviction that incompetents and ‘second class brains’ could not rule empires. Given time, Birkenhead believed, the Law government would engineer its own humiliation and downfall. Abstinence from office in the short-term was thus merely a prelude to permanent anti-socialist coalition. In the interim they considered it sufficient to stand aloof to avoid being tainted with the opprobrium of their successors and to pour derision upon the ‘second class brains’ who had succeeded them.

State Legislators in Congress: Strategic Politicians, Professional Legislatures, and the Party Nexus

This research explores the reasons for the increased number of former state legislators in the House of Representatives. Like other experienced politicians, former state legislators strategically assess the opportunities presented by an election and run for Congress when their prospects look most favorable. But these election-specific factors cannot explain either state differences in career paths or the greater numbers of former state legislators, rather than other experienced politicians, in the House. Using pooled cross-sectional data from 1940 to 1992, I test the importance of the state legislative context within which strategic politicians make their decision to run. Democrats' decision are shaped by the funding opportunities offered to them in professionalized state legislatures; Republican decisions are shaped by the opportunities presented by the state legislature for power and influence relative to those offered by minority status in the House. Professionalized state legislatures have also had more of an impact on the quality of the Democratic party's candidate pool for Congress than they have for the Republican's.

Reflections of a "Pracademic" on the Logic of Politics and Administration

Concerned about the future of professionalism in local government, the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) recently commissioned a future horizons task force, a task force on the future of council-manager government, and initiated a dialogue on the profession. These discussions reveal uncertainty and doubt about the roles and responsibilities of professionals in environments of political diversity and value conflict. Increasingly, professionals realize that success depends less upon staking out distinct and exclusive realms of administrative competence and more on forging relationships both individually and as a profession, with governing bodies and associations of elected officials. I am concerned that their lack of a sophisticated understanding of how elected officials approach and think about their own work hinders the professional's preparation for this partnership. After my own research efforts, and literally hundreds of conversations with professional administrators about this issue, and now with my own experience as an elected official, I would suggest that forging these relationships requires far greater insight by the administrator into the world of the politician as the elected official experiences it - as it makes sense to the politician. How, then, do local politicians think and how do they approach their work? And what challenge does the elected official's logic pose for the future of professionalism ln local government? To address these questions I begin by contrasting the logic of politics and administration. Politics and Administration: Constellations of Logic Although the distinctions between politics and administration rarely are seen as usefull guides to action, they can help distinguish the ways that politicians and administrators think about and approach their work. Often apparent common ground is viewed and experienced very differently by the parties involved, especially when one contrasts the world of experienced politicians with that of technically trained professionals like engineers or planners (Aberbach and Rockman, 1988; Heclo, 1977). Table 1 describes the way I see these differences in the prototypical politician and technically trained administrator with the city manager or other generalist chief administrative officer or political executive in the middle. For illustrative purposes, I draw the contrasts starkly. My aim is to convey two constellations of logic not to pinpoint on the chart every politician and every technically trained member of a professional staff. [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] Even though they speak the same words, politicians and professional staff often talk a different language because their perspectives are different. The worst politicians have no idea what an administrative perspective is like; they simply do not appreciate the erosion of staff respect that results from making political exceptions to polices, resolutions, or even ordinances when the reasons cannot be convincingly articulated. They do not understand that staff has goals and objectives, and the city could run for a long time without the governing body ever meeting, and that every time an elected official asks for something from staff, some administrative routine is probably upset. And they do not understand that changes in policy mean changes in enforcement criteria and emphases, and if staff do not understand why a policy has changed, they are left telling citizens, It's changed because the politicians changed it! On the other hand, I think that the more technically trained local government professionals expece the governing body to deal with public policy as if the governing body was just another administrative committee. Gruber's (1978; 100) research showed that local government employees were able to talk about democratic principles with respect, but they had a lot of trouble incorporating them into their work and into their expectations of elected officials. …

Risks in answering hypothetical questions

The way in which experienced politicians deal with hypothetical questions is examined. Some guidelines are extracted for handling such questions during an interview.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>