Ideological Camps Research Articles

The effects of political involvement and cross-pressures on multiple party identifications in multi-party systems – evidence from Germany

ABSTRACTDespite being part of the original concept in “The American Voter”, multiple party identifications (MPID) have rarely been analyzed. Based on a 2016 survey that is representative of the German electorate, we investigate the determinants of multiple party attachments in Germany. With the help of a new measurement instrument for MPID, we can show that multiple attachments are a common phenomenon in Germany: Nearly 30% of the respondents and more than half of all party adherents identify themselves with more than one party. Political interest and education as facets of political involvement have a significant effect on the likelihood of holding multiple attachments within ideological camps. Cross-pressures lead to a higher probability of having multiple identifications between political camps.

Participant commentary from Alice Maher

One of the most oppressive problems in politics today is the polarization that divides people into ideological camps. Liberals exacerbate this problem of polarization when they fail to listen to conservative voices. As such, I argue that censoring conservative speech is generally not a useful response to this problem.

PUBLISHING STRATEGIES OF MYKHAILO RUDNYTSKYI IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD: IDEAS, PROJECTS, PROSPECTS

The article deals with the insufficiently known aspect of Mykhailo М. Rudnytskyi's activity: his publishing projects. History of his becoming as a publisher is considered, especially his collaboration with the Polish bookstore of Bernard Polonetski and the Kyiv publishers. The study analyses М. Rudnytskyi's views on the interwar Ukrainian publishing process, its state, tasks, and prospects, in particular, the commercial orientation of publishing projects. М. Rudnytskyi was convinced that a commercial aspect is one of a key in the publishing business. However, this interpretation of publishing and book business has not always been understood by contemporaries, especially from the nationalist (Yuri Lypa) and сatholic (Mykola Hnatyshak, Alexander Mokh) ideological camps. Attention is concentrated on a collaboration with a publishing house «Izmarahd», in particular with its owner Mykhailo Matchak, and also on the realization scale publishing project «Biblioteka “Dila”». As publishing projects were focused on the translated fiction, Rudnitsky's approaches to translations were examined, for example, the questionable practice of shortening text. The opinion on publishing projects of М. Rudnytskyj in the printing of that period is also reflected. The author attracts correspondence of М. Rudnytskyj with contemporaries, such as M. Mochulskyj, M. Zerov, M. Yatskiv. Also the repertory of publishing projects of М. Rudnytskyj is analyzed. Keywords Mykhailo Rudnytskyi, publishing house, «Biblioteka “Dila”», publishing house «Izmarahd», Mykhailo Matchak.

Freedom from Social Echo Chambers: Policy Implications of an Algorithmic Bias

Search engines and social networking sites use a number of signals to track interests and preferences online in order to continually display content that retains readership and activity. Building on work done around Filter Bubbles, this paper investigates the cognitive workings of a typical user in sub-consciously constructing “echo chambers” by making use of Facebook’s News Feed. Their interaction with like-minded content and the unintentional consequence of losing access to opposing or challenging information reinforces the confirmation bias that stunts social synthesis and political progression. This largely involuntary binding of users in ideological camps damages the Hegelian social dialectic and demands regulation, especially in states devoid of strong institutional frameworks capable of withstanding polarised polities.

Competing Political Ideologies on the Implementation of Islamic Law in Indonesia: Historical and Legal Pluralist Perspectives

A contest between different political ideologies took place in the early years after the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. The debate centered on whether the new state would officially apply Islamic law. This article looks at the past events that demonstrated the recurring contest between various ideological camps at different levels and forms. Employing both historical and legal pluralist perspectives, this article ponders several themes at different time and places to show typologies of political ideologies throughout Indonesian modern history. DOI: 10.15408/ajis.v17i2.6233

Activating analytic thinking enhances the value given to individualizing moral foundations

Two central debates within Moral Foundations Theory concern (1) which moral foundations are core and (2) how conflict between ideological camps stemming from valuing different moral foundations can be resolved. Previous studies have attempted to answer the first question by imposing cognitive load on participants to direct them toward intuitive and automatic thought. However, this method has limitations and has produced mixed findings. In the present research, in two experiments, instead of directing participants toward intuitive thought, we tested the effects of activating high-effort, analytic thought on participants’ moral foundations. In both experiments, analytic thought activation caused participants to value individualizing foundations greater than the control condition. This effect was not qualified by participants’ political orientation. No effect was observed on binding foundations. The results are consistent with the idea that upholding individualizing foundations requires mental effort and may provide the basis for reconciliation between different ideological camps.

Prospects for US-China Union Relations in the Era of Xi and Trump

In October 2013, Richard Trumka, President of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL- CIO), visited the AllChina Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to establish formal bilateral relations between unions in China and the United States. This visit signalled an historic shift in labour policy, from Cold War- style hostility to normalisation of relations. Some American labour activists hoped that it might further lead to collaboration on joint activities, such as collective bargaining. That collaboration would be a significant step forward in labour solidarity and building a global labour movement. However since then progress towards building relations has been decidedly slow. There have been only a couple of official exchanges with the AFLCIO , and activities sponsored by Change To Win (CTW), the splinter group of the AFL-CIO that first began relations with the ACFTU a decade ago, have decreased. Some American labour leaders have noted that the ACFTU has become less interested in collective bargaining since Xi Jinping’s campaign against corruption began. Now, given Donald Trump’s election as US President with his agenda to weaken the American labour movement and start a trade war with China, it is fair to ask whether there are any prospects for progress in relations between unions in China and the US, and if so where. A Troubled History The root of American attitudes towards Chinese labour have been shaped by race, class, and ideology. Since the nineteenth century there have been xenophobic fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’ represented by Chinese workers, as well as arguments that workers of European ancestry should cast their lot with American business and shut out Chinese workers. These fears were compounded in 1949, when China became a communist state and an ideological enemy, resulting in antipathies that linger to this day. After World War II, the Cold War set in, and the world was divided into two main ideological camps: the communist and the ‘free world’. In 1949, American unions led a split in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) - a global union that aspired to bring together unions from all over the world into a single organisation—to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), an alliance of free world unions. Meanwhile, the WFTU came to be known as the federation of communist unions. The ICFTU consistently criticised the ACFTU for not being a free and independent trade union, and therefore declared that it was not an ‘authentic’ voice of Chinese workers. However, in 1979, when China opened its doors to foreign investment and diplomatic relations with the US were established, the material basis for this divide changed. Multinational corporations raced to China to take advantage of the low-cost labour. Factory conditions were appalling and workers were exploited, causing outcry among international consumer and human rights activists, and drawing criticism of the Chinese government and its unions for not protecting workers. At a time when international labour solidarity might have meant American workers reaching out to workers in China, American unions continued to refuse to have anything to do with Chinese unions, repeating the Cold War rhetoric that they were neither independent nor authentic. Meanwhile, some left-leaning labour organisers worked quietly in the background to coordinate worker-to-worker exchanges between US and Chinese workers, hoping to build solidarity. The Tiananmen Incident in 1989 proved to be a setback for these budding relations. The crackdown on the protests was viewed worldwide on cable news in real time, and its brutality reinforced what many American labour unionists had believed all along— that despite capitalist markets and openness to meeting foreigners, China was still an authoritarian state that did not respect human rights. The AFLCIO response was to support a few Chinese labour activists in exile, and to continue to boycott relations with Chinese unions. At that time, American unions supported campaigns targeting international brands, pressuring these companies to accept corporate social responsibility in their supply chains. The theory was that the brands had power to control labour conditions in factories that manufactured their products. In Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, these cross-border campaigns, mostly led not by unions but by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), had...

Two Major Challenges to Muslims and the World in the Age of Post-Truth: Islamist Extremism and Islamophobia

A brief perusal of Islamic studies, Muslim history and sociology of Islam refutes both radical Islamists and Islamophobes who want to portray a twisted, ahistorical and fabricated version of Islam and Muslim culture. But these two ostensibly opposite ideological camps consistently, mutually and symbiotically reinforce each other at expense of Islam, Muslims, intercultural understanding and the peaceful co-existence in the World. This is a fatalistic and even dystopian vicious cycle that has threatened not only the Muslims and the Muslim World but also the entire humanity. It will go on and on unless it begins to be creatively and pro-actively challenged and broken down. Two of the main reasons of this notorious vicious cycle are a lack of knowledge in Islamic studies and a lack of intercultural understanding. This vicious cycle could only be broken by production and dissemination of knowledge that does not only inform minds but also facilitates critical thinking, self-reflexivity, empathy, openness to others and intercultural exchange.

ARGUING ABOUT FAMILY LAW IN JORDAN: DISCONNECTED SPHERES?

AbstractDo public policy debates between activists from different ideological camps in a nondemocratic and illiberal system bridge social divisions or deepen them? Focusing on three controversies regarding family law in Jordan, we argue that activist groups rarely talk to each other in public, and when they do, their discourses aim primarily at mobilizing support within their own camps rather than addressing each other's concerns. Through media analysis, discourse analysis, and in-depth field interviews, we find much polarization and few attempts to build bridges, but also limited though very suggestive exceptions. Those exceptions rely less on public and democratic mechanisms and more on entrepreneurial state actors working quietly, talking opportunistically to each side, and emerging as powerful institutional actors. Authoritarian states can provide sites of deliberation, but deliberation seems to lead to principled agreement beyond the platitudinous only when an institutional actor within the state takes the initiative to get involved.

A Decade of Regional Confrontation over the Nile Waters

This article examines how unilateral actions hindered the imperative for cooperation between Ethiopia, Egypt and the Sudan over the use of the waters of the Nile River. It focuses on the remarkable strategic shift away from the idea of comprehensive Basinwide hydraulic projects – that would have benefited all the states and hence would have brought about cooperation in the Nile Valley – to Egypt’s unilateral decision to erect the High Dam at Aswan in the early 1950s. It examines in detail Ethiopia’s counter response to the Aswan High Dam Project and the subsequent Egypt-Sudanese bilateral negotiations on the division of Nile Waters through the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, and how the discrimination inherent in the Agreement vis-à-vis the upstream countries, particularly Ethiopia, triggered long years of legal wrangling and stalemate among the Nile Basin states. It also argues that the involvement of Cold War crusaders and the Basin states’ alignment to opposing ideological camps further complicated the hydropolitics of the Nile and deepened the differences between the Basin states. Finally, the article suggests what a lasting solution to the hydropolitics of the Nile should consist of.

“Voluntary PR Voting” in the Election of Swiss Regional Governments

AbstractThis paper analyses citizens' voting behaviour in the April 2011 elections of the regional governments in the cantons of Zurich and Lucerne. These elections were conducted with a majoritarian electoral system in a multi‐member district. In both cantons, the number of candidates in competition is relatively limited due to “voluntary PR”, that is, a coordination effort among parties that aims to achieve a proportional distribution of government seats. If citizens cast all of their votes, they must support candidates from various ideological camps. Alternatively, they can limit the number of votes used to cast a more concentrated vote. This paper examines what factors lead citizens to cast an ideologically concentrated or dispersed vote. The results show that the degree of ideological concentration of citizens' votes is related to partisan preferences, strategic considerations, political knowledge, and the level of satisfaction with the government performance.

Negative Party Identifications as Out-Group Perceptions in Multi-Party Systems How Do They Affect Vote Choice?

Although negative party identification is part of the original party identification concept by Campbell et al., it has been rarely analyzed in empirical studies. Further, the few existing studies lack a coherent conceptualization of negative partisanship, and focus in their analyses almost exclusively on negative party evaluations. This paper clearly distinguishes between negative party identification and evaluation, conceptualizing both concepts coherently within the social identity framework. In addition, new insights are presented by conceptualizing and operationalizing negative party identifications as out-group perceptions of political parties (based on new German data from 2013). The results indicate that negative party identifications affect votes significantly, but only in West Germany, between parties of different ideological camps.

Nationalist Action Party and the Politics of Dissent

All political parties tend to use different types of discourses to legitimize themselves and to mobilize their supporters. These discourses may not properly fit to their ideologies, but as they seek the support of the vast majority of society, they may refer to the policies and values of other ideological camps. In Turkey, the MHP is the most influential actor of extreme right politics. Its ideology depends on nationalism and Turkishness and the party mobilizes a considerable population by appealing to nationalist feelings. On the other hand, the MHP tries to transform itself into a vote-seeking catch-all party and aims to broaden its social base. For this reason, MHP’s political strategy combines nationalist and conservative values with rather moderate ones and even ‘leftist’ ones. Our study which focuses on the political discourse that the MHP has adopted in the last four general elections demonstrates that elements that can be considered as “leftist” are also a part of the MHP discourse. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n8p552

‘History Has Begun a New Chapter’: US Political-Opinion Journals and the Outbreak of the Korean War

In the pages of the United States’ leading political-opinion journals, different ideological camps had very different answers to the issues raised by the outbreak of war in Korea in the summer of 1950. Left liberals placed a great deal of blame for the outbreak of war on South Korean President Syngman Rhee, while conservatives and hawkish liberals used the occasion to lambast President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson. Hawkish liberals welcomed the possibility of a global showdown with Communism, while conservatives disapproved of US intervention in Korea for reasons both political and constitutional. In sum, the debate that dominated the pages of US opinion journals in the first weeks and months of the Korean War was both heated and robust, and exposes the ideological fault lines of the early cold war. To wit, hawkish liberals held positions that anticipated the birth of neoconservatism some two decades later. And conservative voices utilised their newfound platforms in The Freeman and The American Mercury to attack the Truman administration on a whole host of foreign-policy issues, revealing in greater detail than has previously been shown the role that international affairs played in the birth of the New American Right.

The Rhetoric of Enhancing the Human:

ABSTRACT The task of this article is to explore the current state of bioethical debates over enhancement technologies as articulated through its two dichotomous ideological camps. It aims to explain why the conservative and posthumanist movements have reached a point where they fail to engage with each other and how we can reconceptualize the bioethical endeavor in a way that does not force the public to adhere to a framing of enhancement technologies as either universally desirable or abhorrent. In order to do so, I turn to the work of Lacan and Deleuze to explain why attempts to define what is essentially human always enter what I call “tropological regress,” or the endless procession of linguistic tropes that are artificially linked to transcendental conceptions of “the good.” I aim to diagnose why conservative and posthumanist discourses on enhancement technologies find themselves irreconcilably opposed.

Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (review)

Reviewed by: Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania Robert Murray (bio) Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania. By Beverly C. Tomek. (New York: New York University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 296. $39.00 cloth) Beverly C. Tomek’s study of antislavery thought in Pennsylvania from the formation of the American republic to the Civil War draws attention to the wide variety of ideologies and activists—immediatists, gradualists, and colonizationists—who collectively challenged slavery [End Page 201] from the Keystone State. Tomek sees Pennsylvania as an important “lens” to view the evolution of the national antislavery community. As a northern border state neighboring three slave states, Pennsylvania contained elements of all three ideologies, represented by the immediatist Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), the gradualist Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), and the Pennsylvania Colonization Society (PCS). Few abolitionists of the nineteenth century considered colonization an antislavery movement and their antislavery credentials have been only unevenly restored by historians. But Tomek is aware of these challenges, and she focuses her narrative on colonization in order to demonstrate that the movement—and she hedges her bets with the all-important qualifier “at least in Pennsylvania”—was an antislavery movement (p. 1). Although nominally an account of how these three antislavery ideologies overlapped, colonization is really the engine that drives Tomek’s story. While she eschews focusing on abolitionism, Tomek does advance several critical arguments for our understanding of the colonization movement. Significantly, she classifies colonizationists into two camps situated under the same broad umbrella. One group based its support for colonization on the belief that slavery was a backward economic model. Uninterested in concerns for morality or black uplift, these colonizationists saw slavery as a national threat to industrialization, modernization, and progress. “Humanitarian” reformers constituted the other camp. Often ideological drifters from the gradualist PAS, these people grew increasingly disenchanted with the possibility of black uplift in the United States as the nineteenth century progressed. Equally significant, Tomek does not ignore the contributions of African Americans to these antislavery causes. While African American opposition to the ACS has been well documented, Tomek adds an important addendum to this established narrative by noting that many African Americans were not intrinsically opposed to colonization schemes, especially if those plans were tied to black uplift, but rather were wary of the white-led American Colonization Society (ACS). The book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter one focuses [End Page 202] on the foundation of organized antislavery activity in Pennsylvania with the establishment of the PAS. Tomek astutely notes that these reformers often merged their opposition to slavery with a desire to control the Pennsylvania black population through education and demands for moral uplift. The second chapter centers on the rise of the PCS as it established a broad coalition of politically minded and frustrated humanitarian reformers. The heart of the book, however, is a series of five chapter-length case studies that spotlight persons who embody the disparate elements of the colonization movement and demonstrate the breadth of antislavery thinking. Matthew Carey represents the politically and economically minded side of colonization. For humanitarian reformers of the gradualist stripe, Tomek focuses on Elliott Cresson. Black businessman James Forten is Tomek’s example of upper-class African Americans who flirted with the idea of colonization. While the idea of a black republic appealed to Forten as a demonstration of black equality with whites, he ultimately decided that the white-led ACS did not fulfill this ambition. Benjamin Coates, also a Philadelphia Quaker like Cresson, followed in his predecessor’s footsteps by emphasizing colonization as a vehicle for black uplift. The final case study centers on Martin Delany and his arguments for self-help and emigration as the ideological descendants of Forten. Tomek concludes her narrative with a final chapter “assessing the success and failures of Pennsylvania’s competing antislavery agendas” (p. 219). The approach is not without its problems. For those who are supposed to stand in for entire ideological camps, the reader is often presented with such exceptional characters that one wonders at the extent of their representativeness. After uncritically quoting another historian who described Cresson as a “one...

Conditions for Dyadic Partisan Agreement and Disagreement: An Analysis of Voters' Social Networks at the 2009 German Federal Election

Using a unique dataset (a nationally representative pre-election Rolling Cross-Section survey with post-election panel wave) the paper tests a series of hypotheses about conditions that increase or decrease the amount of agreement resp. disagreement in dyads of voters and discussants at the 2009 German Federal Election: that interpersonal influence is stronger within primary relationships (strong ties) than within functionally defined secondary relationships (weak ties); that political conversion is the medium through which agreement is generated; that perceived political expertise and trustworthiness as well as effective communication are important preconditions of agreement; and that dyadic partisan correspondence is a function of the party preferences prevalent in the overall network (autoregressive effect). While most studies of this kind have so far strictly focused on party correspondence, this study of a West European multi-party system additionally explores agreement and disagreement across parties belonging to the same ideological camps. To varying degrees, when simultaneously tested all hypotheses are supported by our findings.

Politische "Grenzgänger" in der Viersektorenstadt Berlin (1945 - 1948) Überlegungen zu einer historischen Quellenkritik der Autobiografie

The article aims to develop criteria that can be helpful for the historical contextualization of sources which are helpful for autobiographical research. It focuses on border-crossers in Berlin. These people resufsed to accept the separation of East and West and the consequences of the Cold War. They looked - unsuccessfully in the end - for political alternatives to the formation of ideological camps and the separation of states and cities.

Throwing out the Bums: Protest Voting and Unorthodox Parties after Communism

The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals? Why did this reversal in Eastern Europe happen during a period of economic recovery, remarkable Western integration progress, and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town? This article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence. While protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism, the beneficiaries of these protest votes have changed in recent elections. Whereas in the first two generations of postcommunist elections, disgruntled voters could opt for untried mainstream alternatives, in third-generation elections (defined as elections taking place after at least two different ideological camps have governed in the postcommunist period) voters had fewer untried mainstream alternatives, and therefore opted in greater number for unorthodox parties. This explanation receives strong empirical support from statistical tests using aggregate data from seventy-six parliamentary elections in fourteen East European countries from 1990 to 2006, survey evidence from twelve postcommunist elections from 1996 to 2004, and a survey experiment in Bulgaria in 2008.

Beyond red and blue: how twelve political philosophies shape American debates

Why Americans do not divide neatly into red and blue or right and left but form coalitions across party lines on hot-button issues ranging from immigration to same-sex marriage. On any given night cable TV news will tell us how polarized American politics is: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Canada. But in fact, writes Peter Wenz in Beyond Red and Blue, Americans do not divide neatly into two ideological camps of red/blue, Republican/Democrat, right/left. In real life, as Wenz shows, different ideologies can converge on certain issues; people from the right and left can support the same policy for different reasons. Thus, for example, libertarian-leaning Republicans can oppose the Patriot Act's encroachment on personal freedom and social conservatives can support gay marriage on the grounds that it strengthens the institution of marriage. Wenz maps out twelve political philosophies-ranging from theocracy and free-market conservatism to feminism and cosmopolitanism-on which Americans draw when taking political positions. He then turns his focus to some of America's most controversial issues and shows how ideologically diverse coalitions can emerge on such hot-button topics as extending life by artificial means, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage, health care, immigration, and globalization. Awareness of these twelve political philosophies, Wenz argues, can help activists enlist allies, citizens better understand politics and elections, and all of us define our own political identities.