Partisan Discourse Research Articles

Where is Serbia's stabilitocracy heading to? A Break from the past but without a future

Since 2012, the gradual establishment of a new type of political regime, stabilitocracy in the Balkan region and Serbia in particular has raised many questions. From Europeanization (failed attempts), active and instrumentalized memory activism, and progressivism, to the foreign policy shift compared to Yugoslavia and, broadly speaking, the contestability of the liberal peacebuilding processes at work in Serbia, this paper engages in a critical discussion about its constituents and emphasizes the limits of the current Serbian political pattern beyond dogmatism and partisan discourses, and by showing greater openness to non-Western ways of thinking.

Partisans process policy-based and identity-based messages using dissociable neural systems.

Political partisanship is often conceived as a lens through which people view politics. Behavioral research has distinguished two types of "partisan lenses"-policy-based and identity-based-that may influence peoples' perception of political events. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms through which partisan discourse appealing to policy beliefs or targeting partisan identities operate within individuals. We addressed this question by collecting neuroimaging data while participants watched videos of speakers expressing partisan views. A "partisan lens effect" was identified as the difference in neural synchrony between each participant's brain response and that of their partisan ingroup vs. outgroup. When processing policy-based messaging, a partisan lens effect was observed in socio-political reasoning and affective responding brain regions. When processing negative identity-based attacks, a partisan lens effect was observed in mentalizing and affective responding brain regions. These data suggest that the processing of political discourse that appeals to different forms of partisanship is supported by related but distinguishable neural-and therefore psychological-mechanisms, which may have implications for how we characterize partisanship and ameliorate its deleterious impacts.

What's your problem? How issue ownership and partisan discourse influence personal concerns

AbstractObjectivePolitics around the world has become more divisive. We ask if the influence of far‐right parties extends to personal concerns and argue that a theory combining issue ownership with partisan discourse can explain personal policy salience.MethodUsing aggregate Eurobarometer data, we create compositional models to estimate the effect of partisan discourse on pocketbook policy concerns. We focus on whether these elite messages influence concerns differently depending on the presence of a far‐right party.ResultsWe find that more partisan discussion about law‐and‐order issues influences relative personal concerns on security and immigration issues across ideological groups when a far‐right party is present.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that an “issue‐owning” party can alter how people interpret politics and view their own concerns. Far‐right parties influence the perceptions of people across ideologies. Research showed that these parties can influence parties and voters; we show that they can shape personal perceptions.

The Distribution Front: Spain in Flames, Partisan Protest, and the Limits of Radical Documentary

This article examines the distribution and partisan discourse around the pro-Republican Spain in Flames (1937), the first feature-length nonfiction film about the Spanish Civil War to reach American screens. The essay discusses the collaborative efforts between the film’s distributors Amkino and Garrison Films, independent exhibitors, and activists to circulate the documentary among progressive audiences and fundraising groups, and how conservative forces lobbied to restrict the film’s release in several American states and cities. Right-wing backlash against Spain in Flames ultimately expanded from this single text to the organizations that dared to deploy any ‘red’ film. This case study demonstrates how media distribution engenders discourse, constructing a contested terrain where partisan forces collide. It offers the metaphor of the ‘distribution front’ to foreground the political labour of distribution that has long been understudied within the history of radical documentaries.

Framing inclusive journalism: Between necessary idealism and essential realism

Abstract This article addresses the challenge of becoming an inclusive journalist. Starting from the structural location of journalism the argument seeks to outline a viable basis for inclusive journalism; which starts with two generic aspirations that inclusive journalists might seek to address. These are that: inclusive journalists must be reflexively aware of their own political framing of diversity, and the limitations of their imagination; and that they must have the critical tools to be able to identify, and critically expose, the partisan discourses used by politicians and others to frame any understanding of coexistence and inter-group competition. In the pursuit of this ambition three competencies are outlined: An appropriate affective moral stance; A critical and self-conscious personal conceptualization of the political basis of an equitable good life; A social science based capacity to interrogate the hegemonic reproduction of violence, brute nastiness and collusion with inequity.

Democratic Partisanship: From Theoretical Ideal to Empirical Standard

In recent years, a number of scholars have taken parties and partisanship as objects of normative theorizing. They posit partisanship as a fundamentally democratic practice and develop a model of what partisans can do at their best to contribute to liberal democracy. However, the standards the literature puts forth remain insufficiently specified to serve as empirical benchmarks. This article further conceptualizes this model of democratic partisanship and offers a theoretical framework within which to empirically evaluate the democratic merits of partisan discourses. It establishes a series of indicators for assessing the extent to which partisan discourse displays two main qualities: cohesiveness and respect for political pluralism. The article then discusses the implications of using this theoretical framework as a basis for empirical studies and shows how the model can thereby benefit both political scientists and theorists.

Partisan Discourse, Polarization, and the Politics of Military Fatalities in Iraq

Public deliberation on the costs of war is important to democratic decision-making. This article explores congressional rhetoric about military fatalities within the U.S. House of Representatives and in television news media interviews from 2004 to 2006. In the House, the results are consistent with the “ideological opportunism” model of congressional rhetoric, which suggests that politicians–particularly the president’s partisan opponents–will be highly communicative about combat deaths in an effort to express ideological perspectives on war and criticize opponents’ positions. The results also show that as local combat fatalities accumulate, the president’s partisan opponents tend to become increasingly vocal about these deaths. The results do not support the “newsworthiness” model of congressional rhetoric in TV media interviews, which expects opposition party support and presidential party criticism of the president. Politicians on the far ends of the ideological spectrum dominate discussions about the loss of troops in the House, and politicians in both the House and TV news interviews advance largely unwavering partisan positions on the conduct of war. The findings suggest members of Congress reinforce political polarization in debates over the use of force.

From Need to Hope: The American Family and Poverty in Partisan Discourse, 1900–2012

From Need to Hope: The American Family and Poverty in Partisan Discourse, 1900–2012

Un supplément d’âme

These last few years I have regularly been asked, during press or radio interviews, what I thought about the new wave or waves of anti-Semitism or judeophobia, as it is called. Statistical studies, rigorous scholarly research and journalistic inquiry demonstrate, through sad findings indeed, that an anti-jewish sentiment has become more present in the last few years. Intentional acts against Jews are on the rise, no longer restrained to profanation and insults. More partisan discourses also a...

Responsive partisanship: public support for the clinton and obama health care plans.

We examine the contours of support for the Clinton and Obama health care plans during the 1990s and 2000s based on our own compilation of 120,000 individual-level survey responses from throughout the debates. Despite the rise of the Tea Party, and the racialization of health care politics, opinion dynamics are remarkably similar in both periods. Party ID is the single most powerful predictor of support for reform and the president's handling of it. Contrary to prominent claims, after controlling for partisanship, demographic characteristics are at best weak predictors of support for reform. We also show that Clinton and Obama did not "lose" blacks, seniors, or wealthy voters over the course of the debate. The small and often nonexistent relationship between these characteristics and support for the plan are constant over time. Instead, the modest fluctuations in support for reform appear to follow the ebb and flow of elite rhetoric. Both mean levels of support and its volatility over time covary with elite partisan discourse. These findings suggest that presidents courting public opinion should seek consensus among their own party's elites before appealing to other narrower interests.

Politics of Memory, Decentralisation and Recentralisation in Mozambique

This article explores the contradictory processes that arise from projects of democratic decentralisation in the contexts of those post-civil war, emergent pluralistic democracies and ruling elites that typically strive to officially maintain essentialist forms of national unity, identity and commemorations. These contradictions significantly shape projects of democratisation and decentralisation in post-conflict countries, even though they have not been thoroughly accounted for in the expert literature. In Mozambique, these contradictions were analysed through the unrelenting attempts by the main Mozambican opposition party, Renamo, to inscribe officially in the country's landscape their own version of the post-independence civil war (1976–1992). Taking advantage of the Law 2/97, known as the Juridical Framework for the Implantation of Local Autarchies, Renamo built a square with a sculpture to honour André Matsangaíssa, Renamo's first commander killed in combat during the war. The inauguration of Matsangaíssa Square was the focal point of serious elite factional contestation and debates in the media and in the streets about the appropriate memories to give a new sense to national unity, identity and decentralisation. The Frelimo government both appealed to the Administrative Court and recentralised some aspects of the decentralisation law. Although the elites' representations of the meaning of decentralisation and recentralisation shape the public's views, the positions of the ordinary people signal that the dynamics of decentralisation and national identity are far more complex than the elite partisan discourses which are also at times incoherent. The overall analyses demonstrate how conflicts over memories of violence paradoxically hamper and constitute political pluralism, democratisation and decentralisation in post-civil war Mozambique.

Re-Reading Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Against the Grain: Toward a Dialectical Theory of Responsible Party Discourse

This essay represents the author's attempt to grapple with number of tensions inspired and enriched by Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This author's interest in history and historical context first engendered skepticism regarding Habermas's surprising discovery of the of the bourgeois public sphere (hereafter BPS) within the far less than context of eighteenth-century English politics and political discourse. Habermas critics have long noted that Structural Transformation often ignored many of the dreadful realties of the context of eighteenth-century political discourse (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 33, 239). There can be little doubt that the reality of politics and political discourse, at least in the English BPS, was antithetical to Habermas's ideal. According to Craig Calhoun (1992), for Habermas: The importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as mode of societal integration. Public discourse ... is possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. But money and power are non-discursive modes of coordination ... they offer no intrinsic openings to the identification of reason and will, and they suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification. (p. 6) In fact, public discourse of the period associated with the English BPS was thoroughly inundated with the influences of money and power. This period saw the rise and consolidation of modern financial institutions like the Bank of England and stock markets. And this timeframe also saw important developments in the growth of English political institutions--particularly political parties--that also exercised influence over policy outcomes and social coordination. In sum, the Structural Transformation may be said excessively to downplay the extent to which the power of emerging financial and political institutions, rather than the power of the better argument, shaped and guided English political discourse and policy--even during the time at which the BPS was allegedly in its prime. But alongside this longstanding unease with the manner in which Habermas may be said to have neglected historical accuracy in the service of his efforts to recover a valuable critical ideal (Calhoun, 1992, p. 29) from the BPS, my current ruminations on Habermas's Structural Transformation are informed not just by history, but by concerns about the hyperpartisan context of early twenty-first century political discourse in the United States. As corrective both to Habermas's downplaying of party and partisanship in the English BPS, as well as the seemingly unchecked partisanship of current political discourse, this essay uses Habermas's Structural Transformation as springboard for developing contextually based strategies for argument evaluation that view political parties and partisan discourse, not exclusively as distortions of rationality or culprits in the decay of an idealized BPS, but rather as potential agents of rational deliberation and discourse. Although Habermas (1989) maintained that the rise of modern interest-based political parties was contributing factor in the decline of the BPS (pp. 203-5), he recognized nevertheless that the rational critical debate of the English BPS was itself somehow structured by discursive tension between Robert Walpole's government and Bolingbroke's opposition. The English BPS, Habermas contends, resulted largely from the parliamentary opposition's attempt to influence the state by recourse to the umpire of public opinion. Opposition papers achieved the status of fourth estate; and the public sphere developed in confrontation between the press and the state: From 1727 on, under the impact of the Craftsman, systematic opposition arose which ... until 1742, via literature and press, informed the public at large about the political controversies in Parliament (Habermas, 1989, pp. 63-64). Habermas (1989) continues, through the critical debate of the public, it [political opposition] took the form of permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition . …

‘Let your indulgence set me free’: reflections on an ‘Africanised’ Tempest and its implications for critical practice

A joint production of The Tempest by Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Company and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre raises questions about the possibilities, and difficulties, of the deliberate ‘Africanisation’ of Shakespeare. I argue that the discursive fields within which ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ are read carry significations that preclude easy acknowledgement. I consider the interpretative function an unapologetic, celebratory ‘Africa’ performs when it is put in conversation with canonical Shakespeare. Drawing on Terence Hawkes’s notion of ‘presentism’, I argue that in its effects this particular staging gives life both to the partisan discourse of public forgiveness in South Africa and to the powerful figure of ‘Shakespeare’. An African Tempest that engages the discourse of forgiveness allows ‘Shakespeare’ to share in the sociality invoked by ubuntu. Post‐apartheid theatre would do better to resist a post‐Truth and Reconciliation Commission hope of transcendence and an iconic ‘Shakespeare’. However, it may take great boldness to claim the latitude with which to trespass beyond an apparently familiar ‘Africa’ and an uninterrogated ‘Shakespeare’. The cultural legacies of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Africa’ need to be treated with the kind of unflinching critique of self and society that Edward Said deems central to the work of the humanities.

Who's the Fairest of them All? An Empirical Test for Partisan Bias on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News

While accusations of media bias have long been a staple of partisan discourse, a number of issues have generally undermined their scholarly validity. While some have unearthed specific instances of biased story construction or patterns of bias in news content, these examples tend to be undermined by the inherent subjectivity of defining “bad” news. Moreover, these studies are generally unable to test for selection bias because they cannot observe the characteristics of stories that were not selected for broadcast. This study is designed to overcome these problems and allow for a more comprehensive test for detecting bias in television news. In particular, this study examines coverage of presidential approval polls on Fox News's flagship news program, Special Report, as well as on ABC's, CBS's, and NBC's evening newscasts over the last decade. The results provide substantial evidence for bias in the news choices across the four news outlets, although somewhat surprisingly, the results are stronger for some of the networks than for Fox.

National Political Parties and European Governance: The Consequences of ‘Missing in Action’

This article first summarises the findings of a three-year research project on the Europeanisation of national party organisation, then proceeds to a critical analysis of the consequences for national as well as EU governance. The account begins with the general finding that mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties have not created new procedures to make their leaders more accountable for their actions in EU decision-making, nor expanded to any appreciable degree the number and/or influence of party personnel responsible in the area of EU matters. It then identifies three clusters of impact: a) public opinion and partisan discourse; b) the legitimacy of both MEPs and transnational party federations; and c) the dynamics of party government at the national level. The article concludes with discussion of the ‘democratic deficit’ inside parties and the merits of politicising the EU without taking into consideration the role of national parties.

The Internet, alternative public sphere and political dynamism: Korea's non-gaek* (polemist ) websites

This paper explores the development of Korea's online alternative public sphere and illuminates the characteristics of this space, ‘activated’ by non-gaek websites. These websites host highly partisan discourses which are produced and disseminated by a focused political agenda that aims at political reform. Such a method of conducting discourse has led to the dissimilitude of the alternative public sphere, resulting in the birth of a multiplicity of spheres that represent divergent political views. This paper argues that although the overall extent of the alternative public sphere is expanded by non-gaek websites, it is becoming at the same time an exclusive and intolerant space. Furthermore, it is argued that to facilitate functional operation of the alternative public sphere, an institutionalization of rules and norms that can solve such problems is necessary. *The non-gaek are reformist online journalists involved in forming and leading public opinion. They play the central role of setting agenda, writing colomns, and interacting with the ‘netizens’.

How to define a Foreigner? The symbolic politics of immigration in German partisan discourse, 1978–1992

This article tries to answer two questions. First, how did Germany, a de facto country of immigration, manage to espouse a counter‐factual ideology in the 1980s and early 1990s? Second, what have been the political consequences of upholding a political discourse that denied the reality of immigration? In a polity that officially denies migration and the development of a multiethnic society, issues such as immigration regulation and the settlement of the regulation of labour migrants’ immigration have not been directly addressed in partisan discourse. An ethno‐cultural conception of citizenship has facilitated a politics of exclusion of ‘guestworkers’ from voting rights, but inclusion of ethnic Germans, and a redefinition of asylum as labour migration. This has reinforced the symbolic uses of politics by Christian Democratic and populist parties and politicians: immigration, asylum and the multiethnic polity have come to be meta‐issues that can be referred to as causes of manifold problems in a context of ...