Legislative Campaigns Research Articles

Personalized Facebook campaigning and the quest for personal votes in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Personalization is a growing trend in politics that has been well studied, yet the current literature has no causal explanations for the relationship between personalized media activities and personal votes or an understanding the contextual factors that shape it. This study examines how candidates have used Facebook as means of personalization and its impact on voting during Taiwan’s 2020 legislative campaign. It assumes that personalized campaigns originate from a need among candidates to gain personal votes and that this need is determined by the intensity of a given competition. Intensified competition between parties increases a candidate’s need for personalized activities on social media, which in turn bring in more personal votes. Through a content analysis of 27,977 Facebook posts and the compiling of data on personal votes, the models confirm two hypotheses: those in party strongholds (safe districts) are less likely to make personalized posts, and those who post more personalized messages are more likely to gain personal votes. This paper enhances our understanding of how different facets of personalization within social media are intricately linked and mutually reinforce one another in shaping voter behavior.

Effective Movement Framing Strategies for Gender Policy Changes in South Korea

Abstract This article examines the impact of framing strategies on the political outcomes of feminist legislative campaigns in South Korea. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), I analyze the interactive effects of frame qualities and nonverbal framing activities. The research fills a gap in the literature by emphasizing the combined influence of frame articulateness and empirically credible frames on political success. It also highlights the significance of nonverbal strategies such as strategic silence and the use of a broader identity in framing. By considering both verbal and nonverbal framing elements, this article provides a comprehensive understanding of how framing contributes to the achievements of social movements.

An analysis of the trends and distribution of political contributions from hematologists and oncologists in the United States.

e23041 Background: In today's increasingly tumultuous political landscape, understanding how healthcare providers are engaging the system to contribute to shaping the future of healthcare policy has become increasingly important. Policy can directly influence funding priorities, research agendas, and regulations for providers. This cross-sectional study aims to assess political contributions made by hematologists and oncologists across the United States from 2009-2022. Methods: Political donations to the U.S. Presidential, Senate, and House of Representatives campaigns made by hematologists and oncologists between 2009-2022 were collected from the Federal Election Commission database. Keywords used in the occupation search query were “oncologist”, “hematologist”, “oncology”, and “hematology”; the raw data was filtered to remove non-physicians. Each individual contribution was addressed to a recipient committee, which were characterized as “Democratic”, “Republican”, or “Independent”. Results: From 2009 to 2022, a total of 2889 contributions were made by hematologists and oncologists to campaigns for presidential and national legislative campaigns grossing a total of 1,324,397 with a mean donation value of $458 per contribution. Of campaign contributions, 68% ( $905,388), 31% ($405,257), and 1% ($13,751) went to democratic, republican, and independent campaigns respectively. The total number of contributions increased from 77 totaling a sum of $48,902 in 2009 to 203 totaling a sum of $107,281 in 2022. Republicans experienced an increase in total dollar amount of contributions of 9.42% from 2009 to 2022. The top five states with the highest contributions in dollar amount were California, Texas, Maryland, Florida, and Georgia, in descending order. Conclusions: The total political contribution amount made by hematologists and oncologists in the United States has increased from 2009 to 2022. Further investigation of how physician contributions influence the development and implementation of healthcare policies is imperative.

Individual drivers of toxicity in radical right-wing populist legislative campaigns

Most studies of political rhetoric examine only political leadership or treat parties as unified actors. However, what happens where electoral systems incentivise candidates to diverge from stated party messaging during campaigns? This article uses novel data on political experience and candidate backgrounds from the 2022 French parliamentary elections to explore the individual drivers of campaigning behaviour. The choice of France, with its multiple and prominent radical right-wing parties, allows for the consideration of both within- and between-party differences in individual campaigning. Using the salient example of toxic rhetoric, findings demonstrate that even when party leaders publicly urge moderation, individual candidates do not necessarily follow along. This implies the need for additional focus on the individual-level drivers of political semantics, especially where candidates are apt to campaign independently, using social media platforms to communicate directly with citizens.

The rise of local labour legislation campaigns in post-war Hong Kong, 1969–1981

ABSTRACT This article tells the story of the rise of local labour legislation agenda in post-war Hong Kong in the period between 1969 and 1981. For over a hundred years, the legislation on labour issues has been mainly led by the Colonial Office, which was driven by the changing politics in Britain. Given the lack of channels for workers to participate in the government, the weak and divided union movement, and the unions’ prioritization of external political agenda over local workers’ welfare, workers’ voices had no influence at all on labour legislation. Looking into three legislative campaigns between 1969 and 1981, this article reveals how non-governmental organizations, rather than labour unions, mobilized workers to develop the local labour agenda serving workers in Hong Kong. This is a missing chapter in the study of Hong Kong’s labour legislation history and contributes to the understanding of the rise of the autonomous labour movement in post-war Hong Kong.

Supporting health professionals who serve gender-diverse youth.

Health care providers have recently experienced a significant increase in gender-diverse youth seeking gender-affirming care. Politicians have responded by introducing legislation in dozens of states banning or limiting access to gender-affirming care, especially for youth. This coordinated legislative campaign has been accompanied by a multitude of threats against both hospitals and health care providers who offer gender-affirming care to youth. This commentary provides an overview of these recent developments, highlighting the role that affirmation of gender identity plays in reducing suicide risk among trans youth. The commentary recommends five concrete steps that health care providers and systems can take to support their colleagues who provide gender-affirming care and their patients. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Preaching to the Choir or Proselytizing to the Opposition: Examining the Use of Campaign Websites in State Legislative Elections

AbstractThe Internet has spawned a renewed hope for facilitating increased access to candidate information for voters. However, the nationalization and polarization of constituents have left many candidates averse to the risks of personalized campaigns, especially in subnational elections. Under what conditions are state candidates willing to establish a personalized web presence as opposed to relying on partisanship? This study introduces a novel dataset of campaign website presence for the 2018 and 2020 state legislative elections. During this time, approximately one-third of state legislative candidates opted to forgo a personalized campaign website. District-level constituent ideology was significantly correlated with the website use, even when controlling for district education, income, age, and race, and the candidate’s competitive position. District ideological homogeneity encouraged website use across both parties, while adversarial district ideology corresponded to low website use among Republicans. The results indicate that state legislative candidates, especially Republican candidates, are far more likely to preach to their partisan choir rather than incur the risks of proselytizing among their partisan opposition. The results reiterate the divergent responses of the political parties regarding partisan polarization and shed light on the impact of nationalization within state legislative campaigns.

The Middle-Out Perspective: an approach to formalise 'normal practice' in public health advocacy.

The middle-out perspective (MOP) provides a lens to examine how actors positioned between government (top) and individuals (bottom) act to promote broader societal changes from the middle-out (rather than the top-down or bottom-up). The MOP has been used in recent years in the fields of energy, climate change, and development studies. We argue that public health practitioners involved with advocacy activities and creating alliances to amplify health promotion actions will be familiar with the general MOP concept if not the formal name. The article aims to demonstrate this argument. This article introduces the MOP conceptual framework and customises it for a public health audience by positioning it among existing concepts and theories for actions within public health. Using two UK case studies (increasing signalised crossing times for pedestrians and the campaign for smoke-free legislation), we illustrate who middle actors are and what they can do to result in better public health outcomes. These case studies show that involving a wider range of middle actors, including those not traditionally involved in improving the public's health, can broaden the range and reach of organisations and individuals involving in advocating for public health measures. They also demonstrate that middle actors are not neutral. They can be recruited to improve public health outcomes, but they may also be exploited by commercial interests to block healthy policies or even promote a health-diminishing agenda. Using the MOP as a formal approach can help public health organisations and practitioners consider potential 'allies' from outside traditional health-related bodies or professions. Formal mapping can expand the range of who are considered potential middle actors for a particular public health issue. By applying the MOP, public health organisations and staff can enlist the additional leverage that is brought to bear by involving additional middle actors in improving the public's health.

Harvesting Influence: Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Brazil

With size, voting discipline, and technical resources superior to those of most Brazilian parties, in the last two decades, the support of the Agrarian Caucus has become crucial for the realization of presidents’ legislative agenda. In a country where 87 percent of the population is urban, how have representatives of the agrarian elites become key players in bargaining on nonagrarian issues? This article argues that Brazilian agrarian elites have been so successful because they have devised an electoral strategy that maximizes their leverage in a fragmented party system with ideologically weak right-wing parties. Empirically, I show how agrarian elites in Brazil finance legislative campaigns, mobilize voters, and subsidize the legislative work of politicians from their ranks, independently of their partisan affiliation. Theoretically, I discuss the advantages of a candidate-centered electoral strategy: self-representation and multipartisanship. While self-representation has granted agrarian elites direct access to agenda-setting positions within Congress, having members in many parties has increased the number of agenda-setting positions they can control and guaranteed their presence in the legislative coalition of right- and left-wing presidents alike.

The Many Faces of Care: A Comparative Analysis of Anti-trafficking Approaches to Domestic Work and Sex Work in the Philippines

ABSTRACT Human rights groups in the Philippines built on the momentum of the United Nations Anti-Trafficking Protocol to address precarious and feminized labor. This paper examines how care has been conceptualized and practiced by Philippine anti-trafficking and women’s rights groups in relation to domestic workers and sex workers. Based on ethnographic research with Filipino sex workers, and a critical historiography of the campaigns for legislation on domestic work, trafficking, and sex work, this paper demonstrates that the contrasting approaches to domestic work and sex work construct certain types of income-generating activities as ‘labor’ and others as ‘abuse’, and reify a hierarchy of work, with domestic work seen as virtuous and sex work as stigmatizing. This increases the precarity of sex workers and inadvertently normalizes exploitation in other feminized work by positioning prostitution as their ‘always worse Other’. It also shows that by seeking to induce a ‘sympathetic shift’ through redefining sex work as victimhood, women’s rights groups have re-inscribed the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, and entrenched sex workers’ exclusion from political life. Secondly, this paper proposes that anti-trafficking groups consider sex work alongside other forms of intimate labor and support interventions focused on workers’ rights.

The California battle for health and safety for domestic workers

This article reflects on the legislative campaign of the California Domestic Worker Coalition, including Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network, to end the exclusion of household workers (nannies, personal attendants and cleaners) from occupational health-and-safety requirements. It discusses the strategies and arguments deployed, and analyses the rationale of the governor, who vetoed the bill in 2020 in the name of the home as a private space impossible to regulate. Foregrounding the voices of domestic workers, it highlights their understanding of caring labour and determination to organise for change, seen in the winning of an amended bill in 2021.

The origins of the Polizia Femminile, 1948–1961

ABSTRACT Women entered police forces through women-only special corps in many democratic states in the early twentieth century. In Italy this reform occurred after World War II, first under the occupying Allied military government in Trieste and, after 1959, on a national basis. Women served separately from men from 1961 until 1983. This article examines the debate triggered by the campaign of the so-called Merlin Law from 1948–1958, a law which deregulated prostitution, closed state-run brothels, and abolished the vice squad in favour of a women’s squad dedicated particularly to working with prostitutes and juveniles. This complex and shifting debate regarding the constitution of what would become the Polizia femminile (P.F.) is reconstructed through sources documenting the legislative campaigns by Italy’s first generation of women members of parliament, the scramble in the Ministry of the Interior and the upper administration of the police to control and define the terms of women’s entry, and media reactions. Ultimately P.F. officers did secure professional status with uniforms, service weapons, and power to arrest; yet they were enjoined to use these powers to surveille and discipline the sexuality of other women. Women police are thus a historical window into understanding the complicated bargain women made to achieve new professional opportunities while enforcing normative gender roles. Yet the very work of policing often subverted those same roles of gender and sexual respectability, making women police officers a crucial site for conflict over who could enforce, challenge, or subvert the claim to social control in post-war Italian society.

Campaign Finance Transparency Affects Legislators’ Election Outcomes and Behavior

AbstractDo audits by executive agencies impact the behavior of those audited? Does revealing negative information about legislators affect electoral results and behavior? Institutions that encourage transparency, such as campaign finance disclosure, influence mass and elite behavior. Campaign finance transparency provides information to voters during legislative campaigns about the character of candidates, and this information affects voter and legislator behavior. The US Federal Election Commission conducted random audits of 10% of US House members in the 1970s. This FEC program is the only randomized experiment a US agency has conducted on federal legislators and their electorates. We find that audited legislators were more likely to retire and faced more competitive reelections relative to the control group, an effect that is amplified among incumbents whose audits revealed campaign finance violations. Further, campaign finance scandals are associated with lower incumbent vote shares and approval and more negative advertisements in the 2000s.

Rights, Redistribution, and the Rise of the “Litigation State”: The Case of Disability Discrimination Laws

Critics have long maintained that the rights revolution and, by extension, the postwar turn to litigation as a regulatory tool, are the product of a cynical legislative choice. On this view, legislators choose rights and litigation over alternative regulatory approaches to shift costs from on-budget forms (for example, publicly funded social provisions, public enforcement actions by prosecutors or agencies) to off-budget forms (for example, rights-based statutory duties, enforced via private lawsuits). This “cost-shift” theory has never been subjected to sustained theoretical scrutiny or comprehensive empirical test. This article offers the first such analysis, examining a context where the cost-shift hypothesis is at its most plausible: disability discrimination laws, which shift costs away from social welfare programs by requiring that employers hire and “accommodate” workers with disabilities. Using a novel dataset of state-level disability discrimination laws enacted prior to the federal-level Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and a range of archival and other materials drawn from state-level legislative campaigns, we find only limited support for the view that cost shifting offered at least part of the motivation for these laws. Our findings offer a fresh perspective on long-standing debates about American disability law and politics, including judicial interpretation of the ADA and its state-level analogues and the relationship of disability rights activism to other rights-based political movements.

Prostitution Decriminalization Campaigns in the United States: Libertarianism or a "Decent Society"?

Recently, legislative campaigns to totally decriminalize the sex trade industry in a handful of U.S. states and the District of Columbia failed, but a look at campaign supporters and their arguments demonstrates that libertarian principles are mainly guiding their efforts. This article explores how libertarianism principles, when applied to the sex trade, could bring about severe and lasting harm to others, including sellers of sex, potential victims of sex trafficking to meet the new demand, and the general community. Philosophic principles of liberty have been incorporated by courts, which find that liberty is never absolute and requires a balancing test in order to create a "decent society."

Prostitution Decriminalization Campaigns in the United States: Libertarianism or a "Decent Society"?

Recently, legislative campaigns to totally decriminalize the sex trade industry in a handful of U.S. states and the District of Columbia failed, but a look at campaign supporters and their arguments demonstrates that libertarian principles are mainly guiding their efforts. This article explores how libertarianism principles, when applied to the sex trade, could bring about severe and lasting harm to others, including sellers of sex, potential victims of sex trafficking to meet the new demand, and the general community. Philosophic principles of liberty have been incorporated by courts, which find that liberty is never absolute and requires a balancing test in order to create a "decent society."

Informar através do som O Podcast no ciberjornalismo português – Análise do P24

This article addresses the effectiveness of the political communication strategies used in the Instagram of national political parties in the 2019 Portuguese legislative campaign. To accomplish this goal, a content analysis of 164 Instagram posts of four political parties (PS, PSD, Iniciativa Liberal and Livre), published between 22 September and 4 October 2019, was carried out. The broadcasting, mobilization and personalization strategies, in which the engagement rate was measured,were assessed. The analysis showed that PS and PSD were less successful in broadcasting and personalisation. Only personalisation was the most effective, while in Iniciativa Liberal and Livre there was no greater effectiveness in mobilization, but in broadcasting.

Recent Legislation that Secured a 'Right to Try' Unapproved Drugs: Why the 'Fuss' Over a 'Fix' of What 'Ain’t Broke'?

The significance of the federal Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act of 2017 and its state counterparts is widely misunderstood. The legislation is both more and less than it may seem at first blush. This much is clear: at the federal level, it opens a new pathway, alongside the existing FDA-regulated pathway, for making promising investigational drugs available to seriously ill patients who lack meaningful alternative treatment options (“treatment use”). This Article aims to elucidate the real import of these laws by examining them in the detailed historical context of how treatment use has been regulated before the laws’ advent, and how that regulation had repeatedly been challenged, unsuccessfully, in all three branches of government. The decades-long history of those prior challenges, all of which fundamentally targeted the FDA’s broad gatekeeping role in the modern drug regulatory paradigm, is excavated in considerable depth. Straddling this more-less dichotomy, this Article demonstrates on the one hand why the promise of the new legislation is less than proponents’ bold claims of being life-saving and transformative. To this end, this Article contrasts the new and extant pathways in light of decision factors that matter to mainstream drug developers. Their willingness to participate along any pathway is rate-limiting. Building on this view, this Article canvasses public reports through mid-2020 of actual “right to try” patient experience in order to substantiate the expectation that it would be scant, and unconvincing of broader uptake to come. On the more side of the dichotomy, this Article analyzes the broader ramifications of these bills, even beyond the potential to incentivize questionable fringe business models. In historical context, passage of the legislation is a celebrated “first” success in a long-running series of challenges to the FDA’s broad gatekeeping authority, in this specific context of treatment use. An undercurrent of aversion toward that authority has been persistent, and naturally flows to the sympathetic context of seriously ill patients. As a number of scholars and reporters have observed, proponents of “right to try” have a broader deregulatory agenda, and their ability to have achieved a first breakthrough in the treatment use context is the greater significance of the recent legislative campaign.

Labor’s Legacy: The Construction of Subnational Work Regulation

In recent decades, much of the authority to regulate the workplace has shifted from national-level labor law to state-level employment law. What contributions, if any, did labor unions make to this historic shift in workplace governance? The author uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to test hypotheses and move incrementally closer toward drawing causal inferences. In the first part, he finds a strong statistical relationship between union density and state employment law enactments. Next, analyzing the cases the model identifies as “deviant” (Pennsylvania and Maine), he uses systematic process tracing to test the hypothesis that labor unions were integral players in legislative campaigns for stronger employment laws. Strong evidence supports the hypothesis that labor unions, even as they declined, contributed to the construction of this new system of subnational work regulation—arguably one of their most significant and durable legacies.

PERAN FUKUN DALAM KAMPANYE PEMILU: ALTERNATIF TERHADAP MEDIA MASSA DAN MEDIA BARU

This study aims to reveal the communication media used in conducting legislative elections in 2019, especially in rural areas. Several studies have shown that the presence of mass media such as television and radio, as well as the presence of new media (new media) through social media platforms and other online media have contributed to support the activities of the election campaign. However, in the technological development of communication media, in a rural area there is a channel / other communication media were also very successful as a campaign activity. This study specifically examines the communication media used by legislative candidates in campaign activities in rural areas. In the legislative election campaign in 2019 in rural areas Beskem (pseudonym), fukun be an alternative to the media in the campaign due to limited public access to the mass media and new media. Fukun became a communicator as well as a medium for legislative candidates to meet with village communities. In addition, fukun can mobilize the masses in election campaign activities.