Party Talks Research Articles

How much and why do political parties talk about terrorism?: evidence from the Basque Parliament (1980–2011)

ABSTRACT This article is focused on the weight that the issue of terrorism had among the discourse of the political parties sitting in the Basque Parliament between 1980 and 2011. In order to explore this question, transcripts of the most generalistic parliamentary debates were hand-coded and transformed into a quantitative variable. Results show that, from 1995 onward, when ETA began to attack politicians and other representatives of civil society, the Basque political elite started to pay more attention to the problem of terrorism in its discourse. Beyond this descriptive result, this study explores which other independent variables have mediated in the time that Basque MPs spent talking about terrorism. Thus, this article contributes to the study of how terrorist tactics influence the performance of the political elite.

Exploring the Zone of Possible Agreement on the Nuclear Issue of the Korean Peninsula

From 2003 to 2009, China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and the United States engaged in a series of multilateral negotiations to address North Korea’s nuclear program. On September 19, 2005, the six participants achieved a “gold standard” agreement on denuclearization. North Korea agreed to relinquish all nuclear weapons, abstain from deploying nuclear weapons, and rejoin the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), as well as adhere to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. The United States affirmed its lack of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and expressed no intention of attacking or invading the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) with nuclear or conventional weapons. China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States concurred to provide energy assistance to the DPRK. Furthermore, the agreement established the principle of “commitment for commitment, action for action,” which holds significance for the spirit of future engagement. The prevailing impasse in resolving the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula prompts the inquiry of a possible negotiation model. This paper uses the Harvard negotiation method to examine a zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) between China, North Korea, Russia, and the United States, which culminated in the September 19, 2005 Six Party Talks agreement addressing the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. The first section of the article is devoted to scrutinizing the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA), which facilitated the 2005 agreement. Based on the acquired insights, the second section assesses the prospects for implementing the 2005 Joint Statement in the current context. This section also concentrates on identifying a ZOPA under current conditions, taking into account past experiences and lessons learned from past negotiations.

Where do parties talk about what? Party issue salience across communication channels

Political parties address the public through multiple communication channels simultaneously, but this is not reflected in contemporary research. It is largely unclear how party competition plays out across different communication channels and whether issue salience strategies depend on the channel used. In order to answer this question, this article trains a state-of-the-art language model (BERT) on labelled manifestos and applies it for cross-domain topic classification of press releases, parliamentary speeches and tweets from parties and individual party members in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The results show that certain channel characteristics influence parties’ issue salience. The extent to which a party addresses its issue preferences (ideal agenda) is moderated by the degree of centralised communication (party vs. individuals) and the presence or absence of a pre-given agenda, whereas a channel’s primary audience (direct vs. mediated channel) plays a much smaller role than expected. These findings illustrate the complexity of party competition in contemporary multi-channel and hybrid media environments.

FACTORS AFFECTING THE FLOW OF CONVERSATION

Conversation is the way in which people socialize, develop and maintain their relationships with each other. When people converse they engage in a form of linguistic communication, but there is much more going on in a conversation than just the use of a linguistic code. Much that is important in conversation is carried out by things other than language, including eye gaze and body postures, silences and the real world context in which the talk is produced. Conversation has received a great deal of attention from writers over a very long period of time; much of that attention has been paid to the idea of what makes a good conversationalist (Burke,1993). Conversation is not solely an elite activity, but rather an everyday one, and it is important to understand how is it that people engage in everyday activity as a structured social event. Conversation can be held if “there is at least, and not more than one party talks at a time” (Sacks, 1974). In other words, conversation can occur if it fulfills the aspects that are needed in conversation such as: participants, topics, and setting. Participants are commonly divided into speaker and listener or first speaker and second speaker. They usually share information or exchange ideas and these activities cause conversation. Participants take turn at the floor and, while small gaps and overlaps between participants’ speech are frequent they rarely last more than a few hundred milliseconds.

What Do Far-Right Parties Talk About When They Talk About Green Issues? ĽSNS in 2016–2020 Parliamentary Debates

What Do Far-Right Parties Talk About When They Talk About Green Issues? ĽSNS in 2016–2020 Parliamentary Debates

Korean Peninsula: is a turn from armistice to peace possible?

This article explores the current prospects for peace on the Korean Peninsula. It argues that denuclearisation will be the final step in any peace process and cannot be seen as a precondition. There needs to be an understanding that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) sees nuclear deterrence as guaranteeing its survival as a country, which means that surrendering it will only be possible at the end of multilateral peace process with strong security guarantees. The rigour, robustness and resilience of the Iran Deal and its Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is seen as a model. The start of talks is likely to be bilateral, but security and economics will make the later stages collective. Obstacles along the way include a lack of understanding on both sides; President Biden's reversion to Obama's playbook and the potential difficulties of getting any agreement through Congress; and recent elections in South Korea, which have seen the election of a hawkish President. The only good news is that, since Fumio Kishida became president any initiative by China to return to Six Party Talks is no longer stymied by Japanese intransigence. As with any peace process, there is a need for recognition by both sides that the journey is as important as the destination; an 'End of War Declaration', to replace the armistice, would be a good starting point.

Creating communities: A way of entering foreign markets in 2022

For companies, the top priority always lies in selling their products and keeping expanding the market to make them competitive. There are many ways to expand and discover new markets, which companies would be able to sustain long-term. Marketing communication within and outside the company is an important way to achieve this. Communities are the key factor for successful companies because they are the communicative bridge to their (potential) customers and employees. Community building can be one of the approaches of discovering and entering new markets. Until now, most companies have communicated in the direction of the customer, like a monologue. In such an approach to marketing communication, the company talks about its product and advertises it to the customer. In order to not lag behind and remain competitive, companies should change marketing communication to a so-called multilogue. This means that customers and interested parties talk to each other about the product and the company. The company only serves as an initiator of new topics and as a moderator. In this way, a community can be established that builds sustainable relationships between the target group and the company. In contrast to mass media, the internet is particularly well suited for dialogue, but also for multilogue. Communication can take place in all directions: between the provider and the consumer, between the consumer and the provider or directly from one consumer to another. The main aim of this paper is to identify the different approaches and platforms that can lead to success and the obstacles that can arise. In the end, we will present a case study of a young company that implements a similar approach and has been very successful so far, measured in terms of turnover and the number of customers.

Negative Interplay between Cabinet and Opposition Agendas: Evidence from Croatia

Abstract Despite the contemporary notion that government and opposition parties’ agendas in the long run positively influence each other, there are reasons to argue that different dynamics are at play as well. More specifically, previous studies neglected to address the short-term, transient interplay between parties’ agendas (within a year) while dominantly focussing on what governing parties talk about (and not on what they actually decide). Therefore, this article focuses on this short-term dynamic by hypothesising that governing parties (in cabinet meetings) and opposing parties (in parliamentary questions) feature issues that are undisclosed by the other side in the recent past, and as such create a negative issue attention influence. In other words, if the government places a certain issue high on its cabinet agenda, it will cause the opposition to avoid that issue in their parliamentary questions in the following months and vice versa. By analysing issue-coded data from the government’s cabinet meetings and opposition questions in Croatia (1992–2017) across multiple issues, I can provide evidence that supports these hypotheses. As such, this study contributes to the current knowledge on the relationship between government and opposition issue attention by offering another take on their interaction from a negative influence perspective.

Avoidance and engagement: Do societal problems fuel political parties’ issue attention?

An important part of political parties’ competition for votes is the extent to which parties avoid or engage the issues that rival parties talk about. Despite a large literature on this topic, it remains largely unknown when parties engage. Drawing on research on political attention allocation and party behaviour, this study argues that societal problems are a central source of issue engagement: The engagement is due to a pressure to not ignore electorally important problems. The analysis shows that issue engagement emerges because parties address the same issues in a negative development. Moreover, and particularly important for issue engagement, parties attend more to a negative development if other parties already attend to the development, particularly at elections. The argument is tested across 16 issue areas through the collection and coding of 5523 press releases from seven parties in Denmark at a quarterly level from 2004 to 2017.

North Korean nuclear program and Six Party Talks: A critical analysis

North Korea is an important figure in Northeast Asian politics due to its growing nuclear program which she claims to have initiated for defence. However, it has disturbed the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula at large. The tense relations over the years between U.S., its regional allies particularly South Korea and North Korea have affected world politics. Breakdown of the Agreed Framework Agreement of 1994, signed between U.S. and North Korea in 2002, caused a damage to their relationship. Six Party Talks were started to bring stability to region and political certainty among the relations of the stakeholders. However, SPT failed to achieve the desired objectives due to the ambitious interests of the member states. This research paper focuses those obstacles that led to breakdown of the six-party talks. Furthermore, the study addresses the question that how U.S., China and other regional states are handling and exploiting the North Korean nuclear issue for the vested interests. This qualitative study has used secondary sources for data collection and for the analysis it used descriptive-analytical and narrative analysis technique. The study shows that failure and suspension of the SPT have some serious implications on the security of Northeast Asia.

Bringing Pyongyang Back: the Prospects for Establishing Multilateral Cooperation Mechanism in East Asia

In this interconnected world, the multilateral mechanisms become more and more present and relevant. However, East Asia is a notable exception with no such institutionalised tool. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains the most troubling state and the main reason why collaboration has not resulted in strengthening the stability in East Asia. Although a formal dialogue called the Six Party Talks exists, it currently remains in deadlock after two nuclear tests conducted by Pyongyang in 2009. The actions that took place throughout last year have once again drawn greater attention to the Korean Peninsula, raising the possibility of resuming the negotiations. Nevertheless, the question about what this new agenda should include remain relevant. The purpose of this paper is to outline international relations in Northeast Asia from both theoretical and practical perspective and provide ideas on what can be done to facilitate the cooperation between the states.

Commercial expectations and cooperation in symbiotic contracts: An empirical and legal analysis

Modern complex contracts require cooperation, solid effective governance and a hard core of clear and workable terms and conditions to make them work. In this essay I explore exactly what cooperation and governance mean through the lens of a major global survey of contract practitioners. I discuss formal and informal elements of contract management because both matter. I find that contract managers show a marked reluctance to use punitive measures, but that value is seen in escalation, negotiation, communication, and professional governance. These require constructive engagement, that the parties talk, communicate, and work together to find the cause of the problem and agree solutions. I conclude that respondents are more interested in performance than in revenge, and that the key task is about making the contract work.

Russia and the Korean Peninsula: Central Rather Than Peripheral?

The potential role of Russia as an intermediary in inter-Korean relations has been under-studied inasmuch as regional attempts to bring about the denuclearisation of North Korea are concerned. Although Russia had previously taken a less active role during the Six Party Talks, it is apparent President Putin has sought a Russian Pivot to Northeast Asia, with a particular interest in consolidating Russian interests on the Korean Peninsula. Russian involvement as an intermediary acceptable to both Seoul and Pyongyang may mark a possible opportunity to break the current impasse over the denuclearisation of North Korea.

Interactional integration of talk and note-taking

Abstract This paper contributes to the current line of research that examines how participants interactionally engage in simultaneous multiple courses of actions. It looks into how institutional interactants jointly integrate two concurrent engagements: talk and note-taking. It builds upon video recordings of naturally occurring monitoring visits in Denmark, where social supervision representatives interview foster parents and facility leaders and simultaneously take notes on their laptop computers. Data suggest that talk and note-taking concur very commonly, that is, representatives take notes extensively while the other party talks. The paper investigates three factors that advance our knowledge about interactional reasons why this dual engagement can take place so commonly. First, when initiating concurring writing or talk, both parties orient towards simultaneous engagement in the two activities as appropriate. Second, whilst writing, representatives verbally display recipiency to talk, which prompt speakers to continue. Third, representatives frequently suspend the act of writing in order to briefly face the speakers, which they similarly treat as an encouragement to continue.

Gift Baskets for South Asia: Nuclear Risk Reduction and Crisis Management

Gift Basket diplomacy is an interest-based approach to negotiation that encourages voluntary commitments as incentives for cooperation. International diplomats used this approach during the Nuclear Security Summits (NSS), and it is the new standard for international cooperation. This model was successfully replicated in climate talks and led to a global effort to combat climate change. The use of house presents, and gift baskets encourages leadership and team building, to excel beyond intractable consensus-based stalemates. The Gift Basket Diplomacy model may reduce South Asia’s nuclear risk and enhance crisis management by increasing diplomatic efforts during regional party talks and cooperative engagements, by keeping negotiators on a focused path to substantive counterterrorism and border security cooperation.

Demonisation of political discourses? How mainstream parties talk about the populist radical right

Academic research focuses on political communication of populist radical right parties and on their discourses about the political mainstream. Yet, we know less about how the political mainstream talks about radical right populists. Scholars assume a demonisation of populist radical right parties by the mainstream, which portrays the far-right outsiders as Nazis or fascists. This study assesses whether demonising discourses are indeed a common communicative element of Western European mainstream parties by analysing parties’ messages on Twitter in ten Western European countries during election campaigns. The findings indicate that demonising discourses are not as widespread as assumed in the literature but occur exclusively among some centre-left parties. In the article it is argued that historical contexts (experiences with fascist rule) and electoral breakthrough of radical right parties might explain why certain centre-lefts demonise their far-right competitors while others do not.

Application of natural language processing to the electoral manifestos of social democratic parties in Central Eastern European countries

Abstract The paper examines electoral manifestos of social democratic parties in Visegrad countries through a computer-driven method of content analysis. The analysis focuses on a sentence sentiment (how parties talk about their priorities) and a keyword examination (what parties mostly talk about). Such analysis is not widespread in the academic literature related to Visegrad countries, where a human-based approach to content analysis of electoral manifestos prevails. The paper, however, does not aim to nullify the findings of the previous research, but aims to improve the understanding of the content of manifestos through a different research method. The paper’s findings have confirmed the pro-European support of social democratic parties as well as the focus on predominantly socio-economic issues in manifestos. Additionally, the paper explores the effect of incumbency on the manifesto’s content. The incumbency seems to have an impact on the manifesto sentiment, but not on keywords.

I've Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song, and: And We Arose, and Were Renewed, and: For What It's Worth, and: I Still Make Believe an Imperfect Sonnet Can Save the World or, How Many Bad Sonnets Does It Take to Fix the Future, and: Party Talk, with Sylvia

I've Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song, and: And We Arose, and Were Renewed, and: For What It's Worth, and: I Still Make Believe an Imperfect Sonnet Can Save the World or, How Many Bad Sonnets Does It Take to Fix the Future, and: Party Talk, with Sylvia Ronda Piszk Broatch (bio) I've Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song The bees of the heart weave stillness into a conversation.String theory is smaller than the bees in the honey tin,larger than the bats hanging from the do not disturb sign. If I wasn't so tired, I'd rearrange my family's livesabove the upright piano, would spring a new theory in a blue-me world, where wandering beyond the yard sets my laughing gear in motion. If only my iPhone had a zapper appI'd deploy it at the movies, but for now I just use my keys.Tell me about your everyday love, and I'll tell you how the worm bin is haunted, and the fact that I hid the rulesin back of the cider house, in a can of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Stickysunrise, and UPS brings a broken administration all the way from America, the box intact. I miss my life, I really do.The bees of my heart sing the Mad Girl's Love Songso often my quarantine has an earworm, and the rat in my compost pile steals the worms. If I wasn't so tiredI'd be detachable, capable of reliability, but that's debatable.In an old insane world, the able are constantly bewitched, which is good, in my book. Close your eyes, pots and pans, runningwater. Can't you hear the phone ringing? The Mad Girl'sin the Bee Box, and I've got a sloe-gin theory about that. [End Page 87] And We Arose, and Were Renewed What should I believe in next, now we've deducedours is a passive God, who spit the seed and watched it explode like morning glory? I know we can't feel it,but we are coming apart, the universe of our bodies expanding like prizewinning pumpkinswe carve for months of soup, leaving the crows to fight for what's left. I believe in soup, and onions,poems, orcas, life on other planets. Let's put faith in emerging unscathed from a black hole, the ghostsof our mothers having gentled from their journey, their eyes cut out for science. I believe in eyes, too,wondering if a pair can be passed from mother to daughter ad infinitum, something like scalesfalling away, the dying stars closer than ever. [End Page 88] For What It's Worth I'm wild about fingers and forks and the mouths of moths, those bendy straw antennae that twitchand rotate like my cat's tail when she wants down. I want to buy up all the onions in all the fields where all the workers are home on COVID quarantine,and I'm sad for the pigs being slaughtered, and the farmers whose hearts and minds never knew so much death all at once. My favorite saint is Theodoraas is my grandmother Theodora whose name means gift of God. Keith Richards named his daughter Theodora, and maybe love walks through a pandemic in PPE, picks upall the babies, and wraps the elderly in all the care homes in caution tape. I take Mary Oliver with me to my yoga class, show her my seniors, who sometimes fallasleep when I read to them. For what it's worth, I like to bestow a blessing on all speckled trout, orcas, and the nurses who mask up [End Page 89] for us. In the last twenty-four hoursI received a stimulus check, a book, an offer for life insurance. I stalk comets with my longest lens, blotting out deniers, naysayers, and haters. I finally understand that hungeris a state of becoming, that fire starts the seed that might otherwise lie dormant, that without fingers nothing would burn as bright. [End Page 90] I...

Workshop: Political parties, health and influence in the EU

Abstract In light of the 2019 European Parliament elections, signs of a deteriorating public health and the rise of populist radical parties elected in office in some Western countries, this urgent workshop focuses on making sense of the impact of politics on public health. There is a clear need for in-depth understanding and more effectively engaging with political processes that affect health. Political science articulates the understanding and improvement of the conditions under which politics is able to produce effective and legitimate solutions to policy problems. It involves a systematic inquiry into basic features of the political economy such as institutions, partisanship and the organization of labour markets. Understanding this political landscape of public health helps to define the political options for organizing effective influence on healthy policies and outcomes. One component in this health political landscape is that of political parties and partisanship. Political parties structure modern politics because they are the teams on which politicians compete for power. They mattered enormously in the post-war years of stable party systems, and their more recent crises and reconstitutions also matter enormously (as a quick look around Western Europe should show). Politicians, and parties, are motivated by the electoral imperative to seek and stay in office. Once elected, politicians on any issue will be looking to claim credit for good outcomes and avoid blame for bad outcomes. If the issue is one that lacks ‘traceability’ such that it produces no obvious credit or blame, politicians will take positions that please their followers and target voters. This workshop presents five studies on political parties and health, asking the questions ‘Do political parties matter to health? What do political parties talk about when they talk about health? And what do they actually do to health?’ In three studies a health screening was performed on political party manifestos and electoral programmes with additional explorative interviews. Two other studies dive into the academic literature on political parties and partisanship and their presumed effect on health and welfare policies. After these five presentations the panel, consisting of dr. Natasha Azzopardi Muscat, dr. Holly Jarman and prof Scott Greer, will briefly reflect upon the findings and implications for public health policy and politics. The participants of the workshop will be engaged in an interactive discussion with the panel and presenters focusing on the questions of (a) whether and how, in participants’ home countries, (radical and other) political parties address and affect health and welfare policies; (b) how participants can analyse this themselves; and (c) how they can act upon this evidence. We end the workshop with five key messages for follow up research and strategy. Key messages The 2019 European Parliament elections, signs of a deteriorating public health and the rise of populist radical parties provide opportunity and necessity to understand and influence health politics. Political party manifesto screening detects possible public health opportunities and threats, but party influence on policies is mediated by party system requirements varying across countries.

Political migration discourses on social media: a comparative perspective on visibility and sentiment across political Facebook accounts in Europe

ABSTRACTMigration has been dominating media and political discourses in Europe in recent years. Previous studies have mainly mapped migration discourses in traditional media or conventional channels of party communication, often in a single country. Migration-related party communication on social network sites has been largely neglected. This study analyses migration discourses in the Facebook accounts of political actors (n = 1702) across six European countries (Spain, UK, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Poland). On the basis of automated content analyses, we present new insights into the visibility of migration as a topic and sentiment about migration, revealing country- and party-specific patterns. Migration is a more prominent topic in countries with positive net migration (‘receiving countries’) than in countries where net migration is neutral or negative. Although we did not find support for the assumption that right-leaning parties talk more, and more negatively, about migration, our results do suggest a distinct pattern that applies to parties of both the extreme left and the extreme right. Political actors from parties of the extreme left and the extreme right of the political spectrum address migration more frequently and more negatively than more moderate political players.