Participation In Political Campaigns Research Articles

Institutional Constraints of Church Lobbying In the USA

The article presents an analysis of the restrictions on legislative lobbying and the ban on participation in political campaigns for religious organizations covered by section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). The existing institutional framework for lobbying activities of such organizations is considered in the context of the recommendations of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for churches and religious organizations and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops guidelines for catholic organizations on acceptable forms of political and lobbying activity.

Voter Behaviour and The Campaign Pattern of Candidates during Pandemics in Regional Head Election in Medan City, North Sumatra

Covid-19 has influenced the process of democracy in many countries, including Indonesia, especially in the local election. The political campaign involving mass mobilisation was restricted, so the candidates were encouraged to use online media to reduce the Covid-19 spread. Based on this problem, this study aims to analyse the campaign patterns between candidates in a regional head election in Medan during a pandemic and how the candidates increase voter turnout. This study used both the qualitative method by interviewing the campaign team of the candidates in charge of online and offline media and the quantitative method by distributing the questionnaires to measure the behaviour of the voters. This study showed that the perception of popularity and electability influenced the pattern of candidate campaigns, and the low political awareness of the community influenced low participation in political campaigns and voter turnout, besides unhealthy campaigns and negative perception of local government. Therefore, although face-to-face was restricted, the candidates believed that direct meetings with the voters were only the way to influence the voter and increase political participation.

Charity in the 21st Century: Trending Toward Decay

The turn of the century seemed to bring with it a sharply critical focus on charity.(FN1) Under federal tax law, a charity includes organizations that are "organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes." This single phrase provides a standard not just for tax exemption for over 1.2 million organizations (which are diverse in purpose, size, function, complexity, and effectiveness) but also access to several tax and nontax preferences, including eligibility to receive tax deductible contributions (for income, estate, and gift tax purposes),(FN2) access to tax-exempt financing,(FN3) State property tax exemptions,(FN4) and regulatory relief, among other benefits.(FN5) The concerns about charities surfaced largely through press reports and are legion: spending of earmarked contributions for non-earmarked purposes; excess compensation to organization insiders; mission drift -- deliberate, or aided by faulty corporate governance; acceptance of property contributions when donors or others are the principal beneficiaries; participation in illicit tax shelter transactions; spending for non-charitable purposes; accumulations of income; failure to provide charitable services; use of the charitable form for non-charitable purposes; questionable investment practices; participation in political campaigns; and self-dealing transactions, to name a few.(FN6) The response to ongoing scandals by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Congress was mixed. As the scandals unfolded, the IRS continually pointed to abuses and the need to address them,(FN7) but also asserted that the charitable sector is "compliant," notwithstanding a minimal examination rate.(FN8) As part of its enforcement efforts, the IRS completed an ambitious overhaul of the annual information return charitable (and other tax-exempt) organizations file each year (the Form 990);(FN9) undertook intensive studies on the two largest segments of the charitable sector: hospitals,(FN10) and colleges and universities;(FN11) made an inquiry into executive compensation practices;(FN12) and raised new questions about governance.(FN13) The IRS's continuing actions indicate, at a minimum, suspicion that the charitable sector indeed has large pockets of noncompliance and that oversight, or the perception of it, is necessary. But the IRS can only do so much. Meaningful change of any underlying weaknesses in the tax law of charities ultimately must come from Congress.

Minority Stress, Campaign Messages and Political Participation during the Australian Marriage Plebiscite

BackgroundThe health and wellbeing of sexual minorities is adversely impacted by a set of factors collectively known as minority stress. Recently, negative campaigns preceding gay-rights referenda have put further pressure on sexual minorities. However, active participation in political campaigns is expected to foster wellbeing. This study explores the mechanisms through which political campaigns affect psychological distress in sexual minorities.MethodWe conducted a survey with 318 Australian sexual minority individuals during the campaign for the same-sex marriage postal vote in 2017.ResultsAs expected, exposure to negative campaign messages was associated with psychological distress. This association persisted controlling for the effects of everyday stress. The effect of exposure to negative campaign messages was no longer significant when controlling for minority stressors like internalized homophobia, expectations of rejection, and everyday discrimination. Political participation was also associated with psychological distress. Post hoc analyses supported a model whereby minority stressors mediated the associations of campaign messages and political participation with distress.ConclusionMinority stress provides a flexible theoretical framework that can incorporate novel challenges to the wellbeing of sexual minorities.Policy ImplicationAs public votes on the rights of sexual minorities become more common, it is important to develop models that can inform policy in protecting such minorities.

Health Professionals Should be Involved in Shaping Substance Use Disorder Policy.

: Health professionals should become actively involved in creating evidence based SUD policies as individuals; as members of advisory commissions; as advocates within professional associations and through participation in political campaigns as candidates, donors or activists.

Economic Inequality and Campaign Participation*

ObjectiveHow does economic inequality shape participation in political campaigns? Previous research has found that higher inequality makes people of all incomes less likely to participate in politics, consistent with relative power theory, which holds that greater inequality enables wealthier citizens to more fully reshape the political landscape to their own advantage. Campaign activities, however, demand more time and money than previously examined forms of participation and so might better conform to the predictions of resource theory, which focuses narrowly on the ramifications of inequality for individuals’ resources.MethodsWe combine individual‐level data on donations, meeting attendance, and volunteer work for political campaigns with measures of state‐level income inequality to construct a series of multilevel models.ResultsThe analyses reveal that, where inequality is higher, campaign participation is lower among individuals of all incomes.ConclusionsPatterns of participation in even resource‐intensive campaign activities provide support for the relative power theory.

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne ed. by Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd, Judith Hawley

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne ed. by Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd, Judith Hawley W. B. Gerard Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd, and Judith Hawley, eds., Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016). Pp. xvi + 268. $85.00. This collection of thirteen essays emerging from the 2013 Sterne Tercente-nary Conference gathers an international medley of Sterneans both seasoned and new to the field. It stands as evidence of the variety of approaches that Sterne’s writings invite and affirms their depth and continuing interest. An anthology cleverly divided into three subsections entitled “Sterne,” “Tristram,” and “Yorick,” the volume operates more powerfully as a collection of intriguing insights than as a cohesive whole. The introduction, by Pat Rogers, contextualizes these essays with a history of Sterne’s critical reception, reduced to a [End Page 129] token summary; to this is added a few reflections on the 1968 conference marking the bicentenary of the author’s death that resulted in the collection The Winged Skull, as well as a useful overview of the present volume’s contents. Rogers touches on the absence of editor Melvyn New’s confrontational conference plenary (vii), which, we discover in the latter’s contributor’s note, “was censored out of this collection by readers for the University of Delaware Press” (267). (The text appears in The Shandean 26 [2015].) Perhaps, in an aptly Sternean twist, meaning can be derived from absence. In the opening chapter of part 1, “Sterne,” Tom Keymer speculates about the “so-called subjective turn of eighteenth-century culture” (6) and issues of self-definition in Sterne’s texts before merging these notions with the author’s creation of self within an emergent celebrity-oriented society. Moving astutely through the texts, Keymer weaves an allusive and revealing argument connecting the public Sterne and Rousseau’s “social performances of self” (19), alongside Sterne’s two fictions and the autobiographical Confessions. Pairing the role of Bohemia in Sterne’s life with his wife Elizabeth’s response to his seven years of literary celebrity, Elizabeth Kraft also bridges the textual with the autobiographical. The disrupted tale of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles is tied to Mrs. Sterne’s supposed fantasy that she was “Queen of Bohemia,” a tale propagated by her dubious contemporary, John Croft. This unexpected pairing evolves suggestively into a discussion of the notion of being “bohemian.” Continuing this biographical thread, John Owen Havard uses Sterne’s vague participation in political campaigns with his uncle Jaques in the early 1740s to create a political lens for viewing his major works; for instance, Tristram Shandy can be seen “as a satire on the very premise of taking sides” (43). This leads Havard to several inventive pairings between history and fiction, some dependent on murky claims; for example, his statement that Sterne was “quite concerned with the wider restructuring of political commitments and expectations” (47) is bereft of adequate documentary support. In this section’s final chapter, Christoph Henke employs the eighteenth-century idea of “common sense” to assess Tristram Shandy, capably investigating its literary, religious, political, and intellectual foundations before thoughtfully mining Sterne’s work for evidence. Henke’s assertion of the essential commonsensical qualities of and between the characters leads to the broader point of the centrality of subjectivity, nicely (if incidentally) linking his readings to Keymer’s opening essay. Donald R. Wehrs begins part 2, “Tristram,” by summoning Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Emmanuel Levinas (among others) to assess the somewhat contradictory elements of satire and grace in Sterne’s work, skillfully applying a blend of Western humanistic philosophies with an enlightening use of affective considerations to help unravel the author’s ethics. Wehrs notes, for instance, the readerly act of “experiencing imaginatively an affective registering . . . impressing somatic empathy on ethical consciousness in ways that Sterne links with grace speaking within and through nature” (92). Examining the theme of birth in Tristram Shandy, Ashleigh Blackwood sees projections of uncertainty in the attitudes of Walter, Toby, and Dr. Slop, as well as links to contemporaneous obstetrical texts that combine to offer “an array of cultural inconsistencies that reveal the halting process of acclimatizing...

The Politics of Emotion: News Media Attention, Emotional Responses, and Participation During the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election

This study examines the mediating role of emotions toward presidential candidates in the relationship between news media attention and political campaign participation. Numerous studies have investigated the effect of news media attention on political participatory behavior. Research in this area, however, focused mostly on cognitive variables as influences on people's behavior. We hypothesize that emotional reactions to candidates can mediate the effect of news media attention on political campaign participation. Using the 2004 American National Election Studies, we test this hypothesis employing structural equation modeling. Results show that both news media attention and the amount of emotions toward candidates are positively associated with political campaign participation. The relationship between TV news attention and political participation is fully mediated by the emotions toward both candidates, whereas the relationship between newspaper attention and political participation is partially mediated. In other words, TV news only has an indirect effect on political participation through emotional reactions toward candidates.

Tax Consequences when Churches Participate in Political Campaigns

The Internal Revenue Code conditions important tax benefits for churches on their not intervening in political campaigns on behalf of particular candidates. Churches that violate this condition are not eligible to receive deductible contributions and may not be tax-exempt. The Internal Revenue Service and many commentators take the position that the ban on partisan political activity should be vigorously enforced against churches and should apply to core religious activities such as sermons. The article demonstrates that this approach needlessly threatens religious liberties, causes undue entanglement of government with religion, and adversely affects political campaigns. There are convincing arguments for treating churches differently from other section 501(c)(3) organizations when interpreting and applying the prohibition against intervening in political campaigns. The article recommends that pastors and other church leaders be able to communicate with members about the merits of political candidates without risking loss of favorable tax status. Such leniency for churches is consistent with the legislative history of the prohibition and would not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Furthermore, strict enforcement of the ban against participation in political campaigns by churches risks violating the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

O índice de participação e a importância da educação

O artigo analisa a participação e envolvimento do eleitorado brasileiro com relação a aspectos da dinâmica e política. Com base em três grupos de variáveis relacionados à participação em grupos e movimentos associativos; à participação em campanhas políticas e acesso à informação política, os autores elaboram um índice de Participação. O artigo utiliza os dados do ESEB 2002.

Activism Against Nuclear Weapons Build‐up—Student Participation in the 1984 Primary Campaigns1

This study presents longitudinal data concerning factors that influence student participation in political campaigns for candidates opposed to nuclear weapons build‐up. Participation in campaigns was stimulated by nervousness about the nuclear arms race and the possibility of nuclear war, a feeling of moral obligation to act to try to prevent nuclear war, and several additional factors. The factors that contributed to participation in political campaigns are quite different from the factors found previously to be associated with other types of activism against nuclear weapons build‐up. These findings suggest varied strategies for recruiting people to participate in different types of activism.

Dimensions of Political Participation in a Canadian Sample

Recent works have compared political participation in a variety of democratic polities. One major finding of some of this research is that to classify individuals as highly active or inactive politically is to oversimplify the notion of participation. Political participation is multidimensional: active participants in one kind of political behaviour may be inactive in another. Preoccupation with one form of participation, such as voting, may obscure the extent and nature of participation taking place. This finding was summarized neatly in a recent work: “Citizens differ not only in the overall amounts of participation they perform but also as to the types of acts in which they choose to engage. Furthermore, these different types of acts are quite distinctive in form and function and can almost be thought of as alternative participatory systems: – systems that are used for different purposes, that are able to provide types of benefits, and that relate the participant to his government and to his fellow citizens in fundamentally different ways.” Surprisingly, perhaps, these types of participation have been found to be similar across several democratic polities. Four distinct activities have been located in the several nations: (1) voting; (2) active participation in political campaigns; (3) cooperative activity such as joining with others formally or informally to pursue political goals; and (4) contacting government officials about some public problem. There has been little analysis of the forms of participation of Canadians.