Ideological Partisanship Research Articles

Party-Political and Ideological Partisanship in Danish Alternative Media: How Distinguishing between Types of Partisanship Can Advance Our Understanding of the Political Roles of Alternative Media

ABSTRACT The spread of (hyper)partisan alternative media has sparked renewed scholarly interest in their political role, but the relation between these outlets and political parties has only recently received scholarly attention. This study explores this relationship using a novel design that directly compares the news agendas and source balances of two Danish alternative media to those of two national dailies, and to the political agendas of two political parties the alternative media have ties to. In total, 576 news articles and 1012 social media posts were analyzed. The study identifies four ways in which the alternative media favor the political parties but finds that the favoritism is markedly more pronounced in one of them. The case study contributes with the general theoretical insight that within the group of partisan alternative media it might be fruitful to distinguish between party-political and ideological partisanship and that alternative media can be more or less party-politically or ideologically partisan. The study concludes with a recommendation that future studies empirically investigate whether such distinctions are also relevant in other media systems as this is important for understanding the political roles different alternative media can play in the media and political systems they enter.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in a polarized political system: Lessons from the 2020 election

Given the deep polarization of the American political system in recent decades, was the 2020 presidential election an extension of the pre-existing partisan coalitions or did the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have a significant impact on the outcome? Using a national probability sample provided by AmeriSpeak and voter verification provided by Catalist, we construct a structural equation model to examine the relative influence of age, race, gender, education, religious fundamentalism, ideological partisanship, affective partisanship, and measures of Covid-19 experiences and understanding to predict the 2020 vote. We re-construct the partisan polarization landscape to examine the role of politically interested non-partisans in the center of the ideological spectrum and examine their ability to select candidates in response of specific issues. The Covid-19 pandemic had a significant marginal impact on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Political ideology and information technology in government online communication

Government agencies are directed to communicate objective and scientific information to the public, but studies show that political ideology may play a role in how much information governments provide. In this paper I argue that the ideology of a head administrator, and its alignment with agency mission, can restrict the kinds of information that government agencies provide, which may or may not amount to a type of regulatory capture. This impact may also be moderated by the specific media in which the communication takes place. I explore this theory via a case study of the United States Environmental Protection Agency online communication over a period of 32 months, during the years of 2013–2014, under the Democratic Administrator Gina McCarthy, and 2017–2018, under the Republican Administrator Scott Pruitt, via topical terms and document analyses of Twitter posts and web news releases. The information—topics, policies and issues—remain largely consistent across administrations and media channels, but notable distinctions are observed that point to the political ideologies of administrators in office, including a restriction of relevant scientific information on climate change during the misaligned administrator. Moreover, results show differences across media types which may reflect speed and popularity affordances of Twitter compared to website communication. I conclude by discussing the importance of policies to protect against ideological partisanship, and how social media may be better used as tools in government information policy and online communication.

С чего начинается русская музыка? Casus Глинки в биографической серии «Жизнь замечательных людей»

Since the second half of the 19th century, the figure of Mikhail Glinka has become the dominant one for constructing the total history of Russian music and understanding the significance of other Russian composers. Among the multitude of historical and theoretic research works pertaining to Russian musicology, especially noteworthy is the publication of the musician’s biography in the popular scholarly series “The Lives of Wonderful People” for the period of 1892– 2019. A long-term analysis of the author’s narratives in the historical and cultural context revealed the mechanisms of cultural recycling in the interpretation of Glinka’s personality and work: the phenomenon of “forgetting” and the effects of “double recycling” and the “personal approach.” Several models of biography are traced, the features of which resonate with the historical, cultural, and political guidelines of the era as well as with the professional preferences of the authors of these books. The book about Glinka written during the Silver Age of Russian culture presents a kind of a “life guide,” which peculiarly conflates the Victorian biographical canon and the psychological essay bearing a positivist accent. The Soviet image of the composer was being formed gradually, becoming fixed in the 1940s and 1950s. In its case, both the tendency to visualize narratives associated with the influence of the cinematograph (from the “novel about the composer” to the “movie plot for the young generation”) and the ideological partisanship in Glinka’s biography (the maximal approach to the canons of socialist realism) become characteristic feature. In the 21st century the leading principle in designing the image of the composer is the demythologization of the Soviet canon and the fundamental orientation towards the Internet public consisting primarily of the generation of millennials.

The emergence and perils of polarization

We provide commentaries on the papers included in the Dynamics of Political Polarization Special Feature. Baldassarri reads the contribution of the papers in light of the theoretical distinction between ideological partisanship, which is generally rooted in sociodemographic and political cleavages, and affective partisanship, which is, instead, mostly fueled by emotional attachment and repulsion, rather than ideology and material interests. The latter, she argues, is likely to lead to a runaway process and threaten the pluralistic bases of contemporary democracy. Page sees the contribution of the many distinct models in the ensemble as potentially contributing more than the parts. Individual papers identify distinct causes of polarization as well as potential solutions. Viewed collectively, the papers suggest that the multiple causes of polarization may self-reinforce, which suggests that successful interventions would require a variety of efforts. Understanding how to construct such interventions may require larger models with greater realism.

Ideology vs. Interest Group Politics in U.S. Energy Policy

The political economy of energy policy in the United States is dominated by a combination of ideological partisanship and interest group lobbying. Both are reflected in the widespread belief that, under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) was engaged in a misguided “war on coal,” despite the coal industry’s status as the leading industrial source of air pollution and compelling evidence that the benefits of EPA’s regulations vastly exceed their costs. This conflict is persistent and unresolved, notwithstanding repeated involvement of the Supreme Court over the last few years. The politics of this conflict are compounded by tensions between electricity managers and environmental regulators. Much of this tension is driven by competing perspectives: EPA’s focus has been on the national costs and benefits of its rules, whereas grid managers operate regionally. This Article resolves the apparent conflicts by downscaling the regulatory analyses of three highprofile (and highly litigated) EPA rules addressing emissions of conventional pollutants, air toxics, and greenhouse gases associated with climate change from coal-fired power plants. This Article utilizes complementary EPA databases and draws on several model estimates to examine the regional impacts— both costs and benefits—of regulations targeting coal-fired power plants. Overall, this Article finds that the distribution of both the compliance costs and environmental benefits of the rules are roughly commensurate with each region’s reliance on coal-fired power plants, particularly older facilities. That is, the benefits of reducing emissions under these rules are predominantly local. As a consequence, regulatory benefits exceed costs not only at the national level but at the regional level as well, and typically by large margins. Further, with a few important caveats, we find that while the EPA rules will hasten power plant closures, most will occur in electricity markets that have sufficient excess capacity to mitigate potential threats to electricity supplies and reliability. Nevertheless, opposition to the rules persists, which we explain as the product of a combination of both interest group and ideological/partisan opposition. Interestingly, ideological/ partisan opposition appears to hold greater sway based on varying levels of political opposition regionally and may— incrementally—be shifting in EPA’s favor.

The Psychology of International Relations Theory: Finding an Appropriate Methodology for Research

This paper will discuss the bonds and boundaries a researcher must take into consideration when attempting to show links between intellectual history (or history of theory) and real historical events. Specifically, it will focus on the methodological considerations of a research project that is attempting to establish connections between academic International Relations theory, political ideology, and world history in the 20th century. The two main difficulties obvious from the outset in attempting to create such links are that the subject area is a) almost impossibly vast and b) deals largely in the abstract realm of contending ideological worldviews. As such, a rigorous, astute and highly selective methodological approach must be carefully applied if the resulting argument is to be of real academic value. This paper, therefore, explores how to navigate specific boundaries and limitations such as a) the limited ability to make direct assessments of causality, b) the boundaries between different epistemological or ontological worldviews in their interpretations of the ‘same’ historical events, and c) the difficulties of situating a given worldview within its own historical context. Without a disciplined focus on the issues above it would be easy, given the ethereal nature of the subject area, to falter into generalisations or ideological partisanship that would render the argument practically meaningless. It concludes by discussing why an explicitly historical approach is the most suited to dealing with the project at hand. To read or download this article, please follow this link: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1503803 DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.064

Comparing Party-Voter Linkages Across Parties and Party Systems: Ideological Partisanship in Voterss Minds

This study answers the question of why an ideological party system emerges in some democracies but not in others. Despite the importance of ideology in party competition, the relationships between parties and voters in developing democracies and how these are different from, or similar to, that of established democracies with respect to ideology have received relatively less attention. Scholars have long agreed that parties of late democratizers have failed to develop ideological linkages to the same extent as their well-established Western counterparts, with the comparability between the two worlds often questioned. Even recent efforts to account for the party-voter relationships in developing democracies fall short of providing valid measures for cross-national comparison. To address these theoretical and empirical gaps, I investigate the cross-national variations in the nature of party-voter linkages and the underlying conditions for the development of ideological linkages. First, I provide novel measures of ideological linkages at the party and the party system level in 46 established and developing democracies, by using the public opinion survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1996-2011). Next, I evaluate competing theories of party-voter relationships: institutional, socioeconomic and democratic. I find that neither being a third wave democracy nor being a less matured democracy is as critical for the development of ideological linkages as institutional and socioeconomic factors. By providing a basis for both cross-party and cross-national comparisons for future research in party-voter relationships, this study challenges the 'incomparability thesis' in the study of party politics.

Voorbeeld en voorganger. Robert Fruin en Godefroid Kurth als vaders van de geschiedwetenschap

Model and Predecessor: Robert Fruin and Godefroid Kurth as Fathers of Historical ScholarshipThis article explores not how historians study collective memories, but how they create and nourish (professional) memory cultures of their own. It examines how historians commemorate their predecessors and celebrate their historiographical achievements. The case studies chosen are Robert Fruin (1823-1899) and Godefroid Kurth (1847-1916), both of whom were hailed as ‘father of history’ by Dutch and Belgian admirers, respectively, in the late nineteenth century. Tracing the fortunes of Fruin’s and Kurth’s reputations throughout the twentieth century, the article shows that this ‘father of history’ metaphor acquired rather diverse meanings. These shifting meanings not only mirrored changing ideals of scholarly practice, but also reflected institutional concerns, religious or ideological partisanship, and growing concerns over the habit of conceiving of historical scholarship in national terms. Finally, the article recommends further research on the affective and emotional dimensions of fatherhood in nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography.

The Role of Congressional Polarization and Divided Government in the New Ideological Partisanship

The level of mass partisanship has gone through three distinct phases since WWII. The period directly after WWII was a period of high mass partisanship and low elite polarization. The 1970’s was a period of low mass partisanship with many predicting the end of political parties. Since the 1970’s the level of partisanship has increased. The two periods of high mass partisanship are much different from each other with the first being an era of government performance based partisanship and the more recent an era of ideological issue based partisanship. This shift between a government performance based to an ideological issue based partisanship is driven by increasing polarization at the elite level and the increasing prevalence of divided government. Contrary to previous findings (Hetherington 2001), it is argued that elite polarization does not increase the amount of mass partisanship, but instead only changes the basis of partisanship from government performance to ideological issues.

The Problem of Evil in Sand's La Mare au diable and Carl Jung, The Ideology of Sentiment

My thesis insists on the theme of evil implicit in Sand's title to her pastoral novel, La Mare au diable (1846). The question of evil as death (le mal métaphysique) stands out in her preface, opens her novel, and defines the challenge faced by the hero in social prejudice (le mal social) and in the heroic journey to overcome internalized obstacles such as fear (le mal psychologique) in order to transform his values. The interplay between good and evil culminating in “the devil's pond” intuits Jung's theory of the convergence of good and evil and the necessity of the latter in the maturation process. The victory of the hero, Germain, is also that of Sand who rises above the ideological partisanship of her opening chapters to bring to life inspirational values open to all.

:Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter

While most of today's history graduate students would recognize Herbert Butterfield as the author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), few would have read it, and likely none could name the title of any other work by the same man. C.T. McIntire sets out to establish that Butterfield's influence extends far beyond his famous warning against “presentmindedness.” In the process, he provides the first full-bodied evaluation of Butterfield and his work based on unrestricted access to his private papers. The author warns at the outset that this is an “intellectual biography,” conspicuously disregarding his subject's personal life except as it affected the trajectory of Butterfield's work. True to his word, Mclntire devotes only two paragraphs to the 1954 suicide of Butterfield's son. Early exposure to Harold Temperley led to Butterfield's first academic publication on the minutiae of Napoleonic diplomacy. This research experience ensured that Butterfield would henceforth champion “technical” or “scientific history” as the benchmark for investigations of the past. Here was a technique he maintained was free of religious, ethnic, and ideological partisanship. The great irony was that, from 1929 until his retirement in 1968, Butterfield never authored another book that fit his description of scientific history. He spent the last fifty years of his life assuring colleagues that he was working on the definitive life of Charles James Fox, a volume that never quite materialized. Butterfield's sense of guilt at this professional lapse is a recurrent theme of McIntire's study.

Income maintenance policies in post-materialist Europe: Implications for pre-capitalist societies

Ronald Ingelhart's contention that post-materialist values arising from increases in GDP per capita ensue from greater affluence and economic security in industrialized countries is examined here. Using the Euro-Barometer dataset, this paper tests variations across eight European countries to determine if post-materialist values: (a) actually shaped citizens' attitudes toward social welfare policies hence its increases; (b) influenced ideological partisanship preferences and dominance of leftist parties; and (c) led to increases in transfer payments when left-of-centre parties are in control. The results of a pooled cross-sectional time series analysis indicate that economic development is negatively associated with social security expansion, but bears a positive relationship to post-materialist values. It also shows that post-materialist values exert only moderate, rather than ‘strong’ influences on ideological political preferences.

Workers or Citizens: Democracy and Identity in Rosario, Argentina(1912–1930)

This well-documented study supports a nuanced set of arguments that helps us understand the conflictive nature of party politics in Argentina in the early twentieth century, especially the failure of the democratic project that began promisingly in 1912 and ended in the 1930 military coup. Karush argues that Juan Perón’s 1945 electoral success finds its roots in the nature and discourse of electoral politics up to 1930.Elite concern over the growing dangers of Argentina’s scandalously corrupt electoral system resulted in top-down legislative reform. While the Sáenz Peña law, enacted in 1912, did not lessen the contentiousness of party politics, the Radical Party did stop threatening revolutionary challenges. However, in September 1930 right-wing elements of the military put an end to Argentine liberal democracy. Focusing on the urban laboratory of Rosario, the largest city in the province of Santa Fe, Karush addresses the nature of citizenship, conflicting perceptions of class, and the variable tolerance for pluralist democracy.The Radical Party won the 1912 election in Rosario. The rhetoric of Ricardo Caballero, the party’s most aggressive leader, appealed to the historical vitality of Argentina’s laborers, infusing working-class aspirations into the idea of an Argentine democracy. By invoking the needs of the disaffected within a nativist discourse, Caballero politicized class positions and questioned the legitimacy of the elite republic. This discourse fused class identity with citizenship identity. Democracy was not simply about pristine, affective patriotism and single-minded affinity to the nation; it was something more complex—a political system conscious of social needs. However, Caballero’s connection of patriotism and partisan need were an anathema to other established political actors in Rosario, including the traditional elite and the bourgeois core of the Radical Party, whose definition of citizenship did not easily admit class considerations. Indeed, the prevailing view was that citizenship should not be conditioned by partisan identities: the nation demanded of its people an undifferentiated, indivisible affinity to the patria, devoid of sectoral appeals.Karush explores an oddly irreconcilable pair of worldviews. Workers, on the one hand, saw the state as the principal agent responsible for social conditions. That politicians should respond to sectoral demands was made clear through strikes and the rhetoric of class grievances. In contrast, the majority of intellectuals, professionals, merchants, landowners, and petty entrepreneurs saw political participation as an honorable and patriotic activity that expressed, above all, an essential Argentinidad devoid of ideological partisanship. This view held that issues of social justice eroded democracy. Insofar as the principal political organizations considered partisanship politics to be unpatriotic, Argentine electoral campaigns were largely devoid of specific social or economic content but rich in patriotic and hagiographic discourse. For the most part, politicians and their supporters defined electoral politics and democracy as nation-building tools and not as avenues for representing diverse needs.Most political leaders’ insistence on what Karush calls a “nonpluralist democracy,” in contrast to workers’ commitment to class-based identities and continued use of labor unrest to redress grievances, had two results. In the short term, elites felt increasingly frustrated that class-based political appeals represented a failure of Argentina’s experiment in liberal democracy and nation building. Liberal democracy was defined by a politically mature citizenry and not the relentless dissension unleashed by the class-based appeals of laborers and political firebrands. Thus, the military coup of September 1930 was welcomed as an immediate relief from violence and as an acknowledgment that liberal democracy had failed to build the consensual nation. In the longer term, the failure of parties to address social and economic grievances during this experiment in electoral democracy paved the way for the Peronist movement, which would galvanize neglected sectors and, in the process, redefine the purpose of politics, the nature of the state, and the constituency of the body politic.

Constitutional Treatment of Religion and the Politics of Human Rights in Nigeria

The debate about the proper relationship between religion and politics in Nigeria has been clouded historically by ideological partisanship and conceptual confusion. This article examines the topic against the backdrop of an emergent constitutional culture in the country and the paradox that this creates in a religiously pluralistic context. It argues that it would be foolhardy to repress pluralism in the attempt to resolve this paradox and instead defends a kind of pluralist orientation that is compatible with the desire to build and nurture a stable constitutional culture. (authors)

A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown

Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown. Ed. Mark A. Sanders. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. xxii + 314 pp. $15.95 paper. the Foreword to this collection of essays, Mark Sanders offers basic introduction to the life and work of Sterling Brown, from his insistence on claiming part in rather than Harlem Renaissance to his part in the 1938-40 Gunnar Myrdal study of the in America. Brown's consuming interest in music and dialect, Sanders writes, was directed toward correcting the middle-class exclusivity of the Movement and introducing a new and vital self-awareness into the study of life and literature. Sanders ends his Foreword to this collection by naming Sterling Brown raconteur taken with the near-limitless possibilities language offers, an apt appraisal of the man who is now being called the Dean of Poets. title essay, A Son's Return, proves Sanders's point well. It is the text of speech delivered at Williams College in 1973 when Brown was teaching at Howard. his rambling to the audience at Williams, he likens himself to both Euro- and African-American writers and offer no quarter even to scholars whom he respects or to Williams, the college where he earned his undergraduate degree: I am the best liar at Howard University, in the Mark Twain tradition. I can outlie Ralph Bunche, who was great liar ... J. Saunders Redding stated that one quality of folklore was that they had no dirty stories except in the dirty dozens. And I want to know what fraternity houses J. Saunders Redding did not go into. the same speech, Brown speaks of the racial segregation during his time at Williams, but he laughs--in the best of the Mark Twain tradition. Although he credits the college with teaching him how to read and to write, at least someone in the audience must have wondered whether this controversial critic and poet was praising or blaming his school. Later in the same speech, he contends: standards are not white. My standards are not black. My standards are human. Throughout these essays, Brown insists that art should be judged on its quality, not its genesis in one or another race or culture, but that the culture from which each artist springs must be acknowledged as the wellhead of creativity. Brown lived--and wrote--by what he believed. essays following A Son's Return are grouped by general topic: African Americans and Politics; American Literature; African Music and Folk Culture; and Reviews. Many of the major essays are included: Negro Character as Seen by White Authors (1933); The Race Problem as Reflected in (1939); Count Us In (1945); The New in Literature (1925-1955) (1955). four essays on music and folk culture are knowledgeable, balanced, seminal works on the value of folk art and the dangers of ideological partisanship. his discussion of the origin of spirituals, Brown warns again that we must consider any cultural product as it stands and not as we would have it for political purposes: Extremists have set up the controversy as between Africanism, or complete originality, and white camp-meeting derivation, or complete unoriginality. This oversimplication does injustice to the careful scholarship of some of the men on both sides. Throughout the essays, he returns to the same theme: We all take from and give to culture; we are all, then, equal in fact if not yet in public recognition or political power. This collection of essays would make an excellent companion volume for an undergraduate course in twentieth-century literature. Brown read widely; he spoke plainly; and he knew great literature, whatever its source. Many of the works he thought excellent have been nearly forgotten; but he valued them only if they combined integrity and artistry, as he wrote of Evelyn Scott's Wave. …

Economic Growth Strategies: The Effects of Ideological Partisanship on Interest Rates and Business Taxation in the United States

We reformulate the partisanship thesis in light of four claims leveled against it. The reformulated version, ideological partisanship, is based upon the theory that similar rates of economic growth may follow from the different use of policy instruments. Owing to their role as determinants of investment and growth, interest rates, business taxation rates, and the redistribution of the tax burden between capital gains and earned income are examined. We advance models that take into account other views of politics beside the partisan one, and test for political influences. The United States is characterized by very pronounced partisan differences in national economic policy with Democratic administrations seeking to promote growth through a consumption driven, while Republican administrations promote an investment-driven strategy. Democratic administrations also seek to shift the tax burden toward corporations and owners of capital. These findings are examined in light of the comparative political economy literature. We conclude that the forms and institutional foundations of left partisan policies differ among democratic capitalist countries.

Rethinking the Political: Some Heideggerian Contributions

Recent literature on Heidegger concentrates heavily on his (temporary) involvement in or collusion with Nazi ideology and policies. Without belittling the gravity of the issue, this article shifts the focus somewhat by invoking a distinction which recently has emerged (or reemerged) in political thought: namely, the distinction between “politics” and “the political” or between politics viewed as partisan ideology or policy making, on the one hand, and politics seen as regime or paradigmatic framework, on the other. The main thesis of the article is that Heidegger's promising contributions to political theory are located on the level of ontology or paradigmatic framework rather than that of ideological partisanship. While not neglecting the dismal intrusions of the latter plane, the article probes Heideggerian cues for a “rethinking of the political” by placing the accent on four topical areas: first, the status of the subject or individual as political agent; second, the character of the political community, that is, of the polity or (in modern terms) the “state”; thirdly, the issue of cultural and political development or modernization; and finally, the problem of an emerging cosmopolis or world order beyond the confines of Western culture. In discussing these topics, an effort is made to disentangle Heidegger from possible misinterpretations and to indicate how, in each area, his thought pointed in the direction of an “overcoming” of Western political metaphysics.

New York's Non-English Dailies and the Deliverymen's Strike

Analysis of the performance of the foreign-language press disclosed four patterns of response to the situation in which English-language papers were no longer available. In general, the more “adaptive” dailies were low in ideological partisanship, privately controlled, and directed to larger and younger minority groups.