Ideological Heterogeneity Research Articles

THE BALANCED US PRESS

We measure the relative ideological positions of newspapers, voters, interest groups, and political parties, using data on ballot propositions. We exploit the fact that newspapers, parties, and interest groups take positions on these propositions, and the fact that citizens ultimately vote on them. We find that, on average, newspapers in the United States are located almost exactly at the median voter in their states—that is, they are balanced around the median voter. Still, there is a significant amount of ideological heterogeneity across newspapers, which is smaller than the one found for interest groups. However, when we group propositions by issue area, we find a sizable amount of ideological imbalance: broadly speaking, newspapers are to the left of the state-level median voter on many social issues, and to the right on many economic issues. To complete the picture, we use two existing methods of measuring bias and show that the news and editorial sections of newspapers have almost identical partisan positions.

Issue Ownership vs. Conflict Extension: Understanding State Party Polarization

Based on analysis of party platforms written in 2012, I find that state political parties are highly polarized. Two leading theories about party issue positions, “issue ownership” and “conflict extension” lead to different predictions about the nature and degree of issue conflict. I find that across states, the two parties have different issue priorities, as predicted by issue ownership. At the same time, there is considerable heterogeneity within each party. There is a smaller degree of within-state variance in conflict; parties within the same states tend to emphasize the same issues. Conflict extension seems to best characterize differences at the state level, as party platforms articulate clearly different views on a wide range of issues. Once again, however, there is within-party ideological heterogeneity. Moreover, not every issue is similarly polarized; on gun control state Democratic parties are relatively moderate across states, while Republicans have moderated over time on drug policy

Ideological Heterogeneity and Legislative Polarization in the United States

The responsiveness of individual legislators to their constituents creates an indirect electoral connection between the aggregate preferences of citizens and the behavior of legislative parties. In this research, I argue that legislators from moderate districts are the least likely to support their parties and most likely to vote moderately during roll call votes. I also argue that states with low ideological variance among citizens are the most likely to have moderate districts. Thus, states with ideologically heterogeneous populations are more likely to have homogeneous, extreme legislative parties. Using ideal point estimates and measures of party cohesion from state legislative parties, empirical evidence largely supports my expectations.

Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape. In our framework, party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates, linked to the national party organization and its contributors, interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive Senate contests. Three hypotheses emerge from this model: (1) the greater the diversity of a party’s national legislative delegation, the more highly competitive Senate elections we will observe; (2) states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections; and (3) highly competitive Senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries. We provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third.

Rational Criticism, Ideological Sustainability and Intellectual Leadership in the Digital Public Sphere

This review postulates that today's digital environments unveil an era of connectivity, in which digital communication devices exercise a general influence on social interactions and public deliberation. From this perspective, it argues that connective practices are likely to affect two main components of the normative public sphere, namely rational criticism and ideological sustainability. Drawing on the case of the 2011 Arab revolutions, in which social media proved to have a strategic function, this paper illustrates the ideological heterogeneity of social networks. Additionally, this article considers how issues of rational criticism and ideological sustainability could be improved by regulating online interactions and proposes that the digital divide could act as a natural process of regulation for today's connective and transnational public sphere.

German Women's Poetry Circa 1900: A Forgotten Anthology

The anthology Frauenlyrik unserer Zeit (1907), edited by the artist‐writer Julia Virginia Scheuermann, appeared at a pivotal moment in literary history when the economic conditions for poetry, aesthetic tastes, and women's roles in society were in dramatic flux. In this article, I examine those dynamic conditions and the influence such anthologies once attained as quintessential social and cultural projects. I propose that the intermediality of this unique collection marks it as a transitional project that bridged the private and public spheres and illustrated the expansion of women's writing. I argue that the author's rights movement, advanced by the Kartell lyrischer Autoren, influenced the stylistic and ideological heterogeneity of the collection. By boldly defining the emergence of women's writing in the early twentieth century in terms of universal human history (Menschheitsgeschichte), Scheuermann proposes a narrative rationale for the lyric genre that endures in later modernist projects.

The souls of white folk beyond formation and structure: bound to identity

Omi and Winant's Racial Formations (1994) and Feagin's Systemic Racism (2006) and White Racial Frame (2010) provide robust analyses of race, racism and racial inequality. Yet, both models hold distinctive, even antagonistic, assumptions on how white racial identities are formed and their relationship to (anti-)racism. We point to a theoretical synthesis of the strengths of both paradigms that centres on ‘hegemonic whiteness’ (Hughey 2010, 2012a) – namely the role that interactional accountabilities and expectations of racial identity performance have to play as both product and cause of the racialized social order. The ongoing pursuit of an idealized white racial self is thus illuminated as the point of suture between Feagin's focus on the relative uniformity of white privilege and Omi and Winant's attention to the political and ideological heterogeneity of whiteness.

Brave rebels stay home

Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been fully tested. Looking at the internal debates held during party congresses and analysing motions presented by party factions through quantitative text analysis, the present article provides a new measure of intra-party polarization that is exogenous to the parliamentary arena. This measure is used to disentangle the effect of ideological heterogeneity on MPs voting behaviour, net of the party whip. Our results show that factional heterogeneity negatively affects party unity. This effect, however, is conditional on the strength of whipping resources available to the party leader. When the electoral system or the intra-party candidate selection process allows strong discipline to be enforced, the negative effect of heterogeneous preferences on party unity is lower or no longer significant. However, since absences can be a strategy by which to express dissent while avoiding sanctions, they should be considered as an additional voting option and this is crucial to understanding the impact of intra-party heterogeneity on party unity.

Du nomadisme idéologique à l'allégeance partisane : les mondes franco-vénézuéliens de la réélection de Hugo Chávez (2012)

Globalization via foreign media and hyper-polarization are two particularities of ongoing partisan struggles in Venezuela. By examining the various trajectories of the French-based journalists, intellectuals and experts involved in the 2012 presidential campaign, one may describe the socio-historical conditions of the emergence and structuration of (anti)Chavist involvement in the “North” since the failed coup d’état of 2002 and their uses in the Bolivarian configuration. By projecting past violence into a future that “engages” the rest of the world, these discursive circulations exacerbate a bipolarity that has gradually become disconnected from the everyday material conditions of the petro-state. This is maintained at the local level as a vector of disciplinarization within the two poles that benefits Chavist elites and their foreign partners, their ideological heterogeneity notwithstanding. ?

Euroscepticism at the Supranational Level: The Case of the ‘Untidy Right’ in the European Parliament*

AbstractFor the last 20 years, Euroscepticism has become a stable component of European politics and has attracted much attention. European elections have provided Eurosceptic parties with an opportunity to get parliamentary representation. While there is a burgeoning literature on the Eurosceptic stances of these parties, there remains relatively little research on their strategies once inside the European Parliament. This article analyzes how Eurosceptic MEPs from the ‘untidy right’ conceive and carry out their representative mandate in an institution they despise. First, it takes an historical perspective to show that despite the persistence of Euroscepticism in the European Union's elected chamber, the body of research remains comparatively limited. Second, it examines the institutional constraints faced by Eurosceptic representatives resulting from the institutional environment and the ideological heterogeneity of these actors. The final part proposes a typology of parliamentary roles to account for their attitudes and behaviours inside the chamber.

Explaining Policy Position Choice of Europarties: The Effect of Legislative Resources

While Europarties have received increasing attention in recent years, little is known about how they arrive at common policy positions, given their strong internal ideological heterogeneity. In order to explain position formation within Europarties, this article argues that national parties compete with each other in an attempt to upload their own policy positions to their Europarty. The article hypothesizes that their ability to succeed in these attempts depends on their legislative resources. The argument is tested by analysing position formation within the four major Europarties for all European Parliament elections between 1979 and 2004. The empirical results confirm that position choice is skewed towards parties with a large seat share, which has important implications for political representation in Europe.

Tackling ideological clashes

This investigation is about how Chinese overseas online commentators (COOCs) respond to political discourses on China. COOCs present the ideological heterogeneity of Chinese overseas. Their diverse responses to different ideological debates show patterns that manifest how the Chinese diaspora enact their positional cultural identification. The analysis of the data showed that on both sides of the divide, the debate leads commentators to assume positions of attachment to, or detachment from, their Chinese cultural affiliations not in a set of binary oppositions but as a continuum with varying degrees. Along this division line, internal fragmentation can be further identified by different views of China’s external tension with other world powers. The notable internal complexity can arguably represent the nation’s maturation.

Charlotte Wilson, the “Woman Question”, and the Meanings of Anarchist Socialism in Late Victorian Radicalism

SummaryRecent literature on radical movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has re-cast this period as a key stage of contemporary globalization, one in which ideological formulations and radical alliances were fluid and did not fall neatly into the categories traditionally assigned by political history. The following analysis of Charlotte Wilson's anarchist political ideas and activism in late Victorian Britain is an intervention in this new historiography that both supports the thesis of global ideological heterogeneity and supplements it by revealing the challenge to sexual hierarchy that coursed through many of these radical cross-currents. The unexpected alliances Wilson formed in pursuit of her understanding of anarchist socialism underscore the protean nature of radical politics but also show an over-arching consensus that united these disparate groups, a common vision of the socialist future in which the fundamental but oppositional values of self and society would merge. This consensus arguably allowed Wilson's gendered definition of anarchism to adapt to new terms as she and other socialist women pursued their radical vision as activists in the pre-war women's movement.

The Senate Budget Committee: The Impact of Polarization on Institutional Design

AbstractThe Senate Budget Committee is a unique and potentially powerful institution in the US legislature. It was begun to help coordinate the federal budget making process in the US Senate. Long-term trends and short-term institutional dynamics have weakened the coordinating capacity of the committee to the point that the budget process was entirely ignored in 2011. This article explores these changes. It shows evidence for Democrats and Republicans on the committee moving further apart ideologically since the 1970s resulting in more partisanship and less deliberation on the committee. It also shows how a combination of a narrow Democratic majority on the committee along with a recent uptick in ideological heterogeneity among Democrats but without prospects for bipartisanship, resulted in no budget process in 2011.

Global Economic Crisis and China's Challenge to Global Hegemony: A Neo-Gramscian Approach

This paper considers the question of whether the collapse of the global economy in 2008 and subsequent uneven national recoveries constitute an existential challenge to the legitimacy of hegemonic neoliberal globalization. Neo-Gramscian international political theory is reviewed, and its application to globalization and then the critical insights provided are used to describe China's embrace and subsequent rejection of neoliberalism to conclude that the near future of the global economy is likely to be one of ideological heterogeneity and thus unlikely to spawn a new hegemonic system of globalization.

Coalition formation and polarisation

Party ideology plays an important role in determining which government coalitions form. Research on coalition formation tends to focus on the ideological distance between coalition parties. However, the distribution of preferences within the coalition, and the legislature, also has implications for which government coalition forms – that is, a party's willingness to join a coalition depends not only on its prospective coalition partners, but also on the alternative coalitions it could form. Several hypotheses about the effects of legislative polarisation are offered and tested using data on coalition formation in 17 parliamentary democracies in the postwar period. This article also demonstrates how the traditional measure of ideological divisions within coalitions fails to capture certain aspects of ideological heterogeneity within the cabinet (and the opposition) and how Esteban and Ray's polarisation index helps in addressing these deficiencies.

Incumbent positioning, ideological heterogeneity and mobilization in U.S. House elections

This article examines whether the need to mobilize citizens pushes incumbents to the ideological extremes in U.S. House elections. We test whether incumbents are more ideologically extreme as the ideological heterogeneity of the district increases and if turnout increases as incumbents become more extreme. These tests combined with the observation that divergence decreases with competitiveness suggest that candidates balance the need to attract swing voters with the need to mobilize supporters. The results also suggest that the growth in elite polarization is linked to the growing ideological heterogeneity in the electorate.

Balancing constituency representation and party responsiveness in the US Senate: the conditioning effect of state ideological heterogeneity

Spatial proximity theories of representation focus on the importance of the average views of constituencies in guiding legislators’ decisions. However, legislative scholars also identify political parties as central in structuring behavior. We present and test a theory of how legislators might resolve this tension. We propose that heterogeneity in constituent preferences conditions how legislators balance the (sometimes) rival pressures of constituency and party. Specifically, greater preference heterogeneity weakens the impact of the average constituency views on roll-call behavior while strengthening the impact of party. We show support with data from the US Senate and discuss the implications for democratic representation.

Measuring Aggregate‐Level Ideological Heterogeneity

Ideological heterogeneity is a key variable for the study of legislative and electoral politics. Scholars have long recognized that members with more ideologically heterogeneous constituencies behave differently than members with more homogeneous ones. Empirical tests of these theories, however, have typically been stymied by a lack of appropriate measures. We corrected this shortcoming by developing a measurement model for ideological heterogeneity, and we used our method to generate estimates for the 50 U.S. states and 435 congressional districts. Beyond the specific results presented here, a key contribution of our model is its flexibility: our technique can be used to produce similar estimates in a variety of contexts.

‘Bringing coals to Newcastle’? Human rights, civil rights and social movements in New York City

AbstractIn this article we examine the encounter between global human rights ideas and domestic discourses of civil rights and social justice, focusing on processes of translation and adaptation of women's human rights in two ethnographic sites in New York City. The first site is a citywide coalition working for the adoption of a New York City human rights ordinance. The second site is an advocacy organization working on domestic violence issues. We find that the local adoption of human rights in New York City – the ‘domestication’ of human rights – takes place in two central sites: law and social movement. We further find that the process of translation takes place unevenly in the two sites, and it is driven primarily by the actors, mechanisms and technologies in the social movement arena. Overall, we witness the emergence of a domestic human rights movement as a new counter‐hegemonic space, characterized by multiplicity in meanings, ideological heterogeneity and ambivalence from those engaged in its construction.