Party Agenda Research Articles

The effect of majority party agenda setting on roll calls

How well can roll calls detect the causal impact of majority party agenda setting in Congress? Estimating the counterfactual required to assess the effects of majority party agenda setting is complicated by time-varying differences in the political environment and the fact that measures commonly used to control for compositional changes may themselves depend on the extent of agenda control being exercised. Using techniques popularized by recent work focused on causal inference, I characterize whether agenda changes occuring during changes in majority party control in the US House of Representatives are consistent with predictions from models of majority party agenda control. Comparing how the same members in consecutive Congresses are affected by changes in party control and using fixed effects to account for time-varying differences between consecutive Congresses helps isolate the changes in the agenda attributable to agenda setting. The analyses highlight the challenge in consistently estimating the effects of agenda control and suggest that although recent transitions produce patterns consistent with the predictions of agenda setting theories, the average effect over the post-Reconstruction period is harder to interpret as being produced by agenda control.

ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE STRATEGIES AND IDEOLOGIES IN THE INAUGURAL SPEECHES OF BARRISTER IBRAHIM SHEHU SHEMA

Inaugural speeches are crucial to political processes because they are avenues to mobilize, seek for support, persuade the people and consolidate their loyalty throughout the administration. Political actors,therefore, use the medium to persuade, manipulate, or simply inform their audience about their administration's policies. Their speeches are carefully crafted to convey their messages which definitely have ideological intents because political speeches are not value-free or neutral in terms of ideological leanings. In this study, the authors investigate the discourse strategiesin the inaugural speeches of Barrister ShehuShema. This is done by operationalizing some tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis with the aim of uncovering covert ideologies enshrined in the inaugural speeches. Several linguistic facilities such as allusions, conversational tone, pronominal references, positive face-strategies, etc are used by the speaker to change the orientation of the people and sold his party agenda to them.All these linguistic tools, as wielded by BarristerShema, help to underscore the fact that 'ideologiestruly reside in texts' and cannot be read off. The findings revealed that the languageused in the speeches are consciously and skillfully deployed to champion his party ideologies of inclusiveness, fairness and justice, continuity, acceptance of religious diversity, and unity

Setting the Party Agenda: Interest Groups, Voters and Issue Attention

Do political parties respond to interest group mobilization? While party responsiveness to voters has received widespread attention, little is known about how interest groups affect parties’ policy agendas. I argue that political parties respond to interest groups as lobbyists offer valuable information, campaign contributions, electoral support and personal rewards, but that party responsiveness is conditioned by voter preferences. Based on a novel longitudinal analysis studying the responsiveness of German parties to interest groups across eleven issue areas and seven elections from 1987 until 2009, it is shown that parties adjust their policy agendas in response to interest group mobilization and that interest groups are more successful in shaping party policy when their priorities coincide with those of the electorate.

Hoe structureren burgers hun opvattingen over culturele vraagstukken? : Stelsels van culturele opvattingen onder aanhangers van populistisch radicaal-rechtse partijen1

Abstract Social scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to representative survey data, we uncover three cultural belief systems. For individuals adhering to an integrated one, all cultural attitudes are interdependent, as typically assumed. However, we also uncover two alternative belief systems: intermediate and partitioned. In the latter, positions on one cultural attitude (e.g., ethnocentrism) are barely related to positions on others (e.g., rejecting Islam or opposing homosexuality). The existence of multiple cultural belief systems challenges the widely-held assumption that all people organize their cultural attitudes similarly. Both political party agenda’s and individuals’ education level and religion appear key to understanding variation in belief systems.

The representation of canada in political discourse

The primary purpose of this article is to examine the Canadian image in political discourse, to identify the factors creating this image. Due to the most relevant political speeches, messages, government reports, analysis of statistical data there are being worked out some tools for building the image of Canada on the world stage. Lately, political discourse is becoming a subject of study for linguistics. The interest in the phenomenon is motivated by a wide range of linguistic instruments used as an effective tool to manage the public perceptions. Study and analysis of the mechanisms of political communication allow to decode pragmatic information hidden in the political texts. The subject of the work consists in highlighting the linguistic approaches to the representation of Canada in the international diplomacy. The object of the work is an examination of political discourse in the public statements made by political figures, government documents, which reflect social and political realities. The methodology has developed under the influence of cognitive linguistics of domestic and foreign scientists. Research study includes cognitive and conceptual analysis to reveal distinctive features of the social and political realities; interpretive and context analysis to select political texts. It exposes the ways of representation of Canadian image, demonstrates its weak and strong sides. A vast factual material reveals multi-faced nature of Canada and provides an identity set of lexical units which are reflected in political discourse. The material illustrates today’s image of the country and the perceptions of Canada throughout the world. The idea of multiculturalism is justified by the guiding ideology of ethno-cultural plurality. The main sources of information are official government documents (laws, acts, reports), statistical data, parliamentary debates, party agenda, political speeches. All the provided material combined mass-media information, the Internet.

Direct Parliamentarianism: An Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement

This article focuses on the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with data regarding its use and qualitative data collected during the 2016 and 2017 national meetings of the Five Star Movement, the essay argues that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain an ostensibly direct relationship with the party in public office, at the expense, however, of deliberative processes that may allow them to influence the party agenda. Thus Rousseau leaves the deliberative, and strictly parliamentary moment in the hands of elected representatives and party leaders, leaving to the party base the task of choosing between options that have been defined elsewhere.

From the journalistic agenda to the party agenda

No abstracts availableRealidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No. 117, 2008: 357-363

Implementing the Reform Party agenda: the roots of Stephen Harper’s foreign policy

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the role of the Reform Party in the foreign policy of the Stephen Harper government. Through a comprehensive analysis of various Reform Party documents, called “Blue Books,” from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper assesses the degree to which the Harper government implemented these policy proposals in its foreign policy (foreign affairs, international trade, defense, foreign aid and immigration). It shows that, to a surprising degree, many of these Reform Party foreign policy proposals were implemented. An evaluation of the 10-year record of the Harper government shows that of the 31 priorities identified in the Blue Books, 15 were achieved, three were attempted, 11 were avoided, and two were not applicable.

Intra-Party Democracy in Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf

With the idea of ‘change’ in exiting social system of Pakistan mainly by eradicating corruption, Pakistani Tehrik-e-Insaf emerged in 1996, under the leadership of renowned cricket player Imran Khan. He pledged to promote justice and the establishment of a welfare state. However, the party could hardly attain electoral success until 2012 when it reached on national political peaks. Majority of the Pakistani youth from urban areas follow the party agenda with a new zenith. Unlike other political parties, PTI pledged to challenge the existing transmissible-monarchy and decided to holds the intra party election. By using different primary and secondary sources, this article tries to focus on PTI’s intra party elections in order to denounce the existing socio-political culture of Pakistan, yet it could hardly achieve the said goals in the presence of “old-guard” in the front lines of party leadership.

The Electoral Costs of Party Agenda Setting: Why the Hastert Rule Leads to Defeat

This study demonstrates that unconditional blocking of bills opposed by a majority of the majority party—as implied by the party cartel model and advocated by former Speaker Dennis Hastert—can produce conditions in which the majority party loses popular support and loses elections. The theoretical analysis and empirical results imply that the use of negative agenda power to block bills is circumscribed by this risk of electoral defeat. As a result, the opportunity for effective negative agenda control is conditional on majority party issue advantage, party polarization, and the distribution of status quo locations. In particular, majority party roll rates should sometimes be nonzero, blocking increases the odds of majority party defeat in House of Representatives elections, and policy change is most likely on issues with status quo that the model suggests are the riskiest to block.

Dynamic Agenda Setting

A party in power can address a limited number of issues. What issues to address—the party's agenda—has dynamic implications because it affects what issues will be addressed in the future. We analyze a model in which the incumbent addresses one issue among many and the remaining issues roll over to the next period. We show that no strategic manipulation arises without checks and balances and identify strategic manipulations in the forms of waiting for the moment, seizing the moment, steering, and preemption with checks and balances depending on how power fluctuates. We also discuss efficiency implications. (JEL C78, D72, D78)

Dynamic Agenda Setting

A party in power can address only a limited number of issues in an election cycle. What issues to address - the party's agenda - has dynamic implications because it affects what issues will be addressed in the future. What is the optimal agenda in the presence of dynamic concerns? How does a party's political strength affect its agenda? What are the efficiency implications? We address these questions in a stylized model in which the incumbent in each period addresses one issue among several issues and the remaining issues roll over to the next period. When the incumbent expects its power to strengthen or weaken, strategic manipulations can happen in the form of waiting for the moment and seizing the moment respectively. When the incumbent expects the opposition to come in power next period, strategic manipulations can happen in the form of steering and preemption. In steering, the incumbent gives priority to a less pressing issue to direct the opposition party towards addressing the most pressing issue for the incumbent. In preemption, the incumbent gives priority to the issue most pressing for the opposition to prevent the opposition from addressing it. Although preemption can still be efficient, steering is necessarily inefficient.

Congressional Cohorts: The House Republican Class of 2010

AbstractAs a result of its size and close ties to the Tea Party movement, the freshman cohort of House Republicans elected in 2010 had a significant impact on the chamber. Compared to other Republicans, the districts the freshmen represented did not tilt more toward the GOP or the Tea Party, nor was their roll call ideology during 2011–2012 statistically distinguishable from that of their more senior colleagues. For votes that were Tea Party priorities, however, the effects of freshman status were often large. And the most consequential impact of the class was over party strategy and agenda. The role played by the 2010 House freshmen has implications for how we should think about party influence in Congress.

The Tea Party and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Mainstreaming New Right Populism in the Corporate News Media

Within months of Barack Obama's election, a putatively grass-roots conservative uprising emerged to challenge the Democratic Party's agenda. In this article, we analyze the role of cable news in the rise of the Tea Party during the current “crisis of neoliberalism”—a moment of political-economic volatility brought about by the Great Recession. We argue that the Tea Party's political purpose is to hold together the New Right coalition of business elites and white working- and middle-class Americans that undergirds the neoliberal political project. In the context of a deregulated corporate mass media, we show that both “right-wing” and “moderate” cable networks mainstreamed the Tea Party by framing it as a legitimate social movement, enabling the widespread projection of right-wing populist discourse in support of neoliberalism. In light of our study, we suggest that democratizing the mass media is crucial for a sustained progressive political response in the United States.

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement Kate Sampsell-Willmann (bio) Cornelius L. Bynum. A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. x + 244 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Leigh Raiford. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pp. Photos, bibliography, notes, and index. $45.00. In the last decade, scholars have reconsidered the temporal span of the African American Civil Rights Movement (CRM): taken together, which moments of heroism and conscience are to be included in the “modern” CRM? Once considered to be tightly bracketed by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., historians have erased that arbitrary end point, correctly extending the ongoing struggle for full political citizenship into the present. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s 2004 American Historical Association presidential address, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” is the landmark publication marking the shift.1 And although her essay and the efforts of other historians since have nominally encouraged lengthening the study of the organized movement to a place earlier in time than the 1950s, few have written in that temporal direction until recently. Fewer still have considered integrating unfettered economic participation as an essential element of full citizenship into the primary civil rights thesis. By including equal opportunity to economic justice in the panoply of civil rights and citizenship privileges, the date of the movement’s birth is easily stepped backwards in time. The books discussed here give an opportunity to extend formally, by a generation, the scope of the fully modern CRM, thus including economic opportunity as essential to civic engagement. In doing so, they also examine the classification used by authors to delineate where the timeline should begin. Cornelius Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights seeks (beginning in its colorblind title) to reverse Randolph’s exclusion from the A-list of civil rights heroes. A. Philip Randolph is perhaps the least explored of [End Page 492] the civil rights titans and is usually dismissed as the “vanguard” or “father” of the modern CRM, someone standing outside and prior, representing more “freedom struggle” than “civil rights.” Yet, as Bynum successfully establishes, Randolph was much more than the figurehead named honorary chair of the 1963 March, the vocal Messenger editor, or the footnoted organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a political ideologue whose leadership is especially relevant in the present atmosphere of race, labor, and Republican Party agenda. (This is relevant especially in that Party’s attempt to redefine the notion of “civil rights” from one of King’s pursuit of access to society’s segregated spaces to one more about Glenn Beck’s individualistic rationale for avarice2). The freedom to organize peacefully, engage in collective action, and demand economic fairness is also a civil right. Why are Randolph’s contributions relegated to the prehistory of civil rights, even though one of his major triumphs preceded by only seven years Rosa Parks’ brave refusal to vacate her seat? Randolph’s invisibility might be explained by his 100 percent, unapologetic, no-holds-barred embrace of socialism; yet, he was also, to the same degree (after early flirtation with the doctrine), an anticommunist. “Socialist” is today’s easy epithet used to smear others with a stench of un-American behavior, not unlike McCarthy-era accusations of communism. Randolph remained committed to socialism as the path to economic justice for all workers throughout his life, but he saw no value in communism to help American workers. Perhaps because of his inconvenient ideological commitment, or perhaps because he initially pursued a colorblind approach to economic justice, Randolph is conspicuously absent from the modern civil rights pantheon (as is Bayard Rustin, who, despite convincing King to employ active nonviolence, was inconveniently homosexual). Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph is divided into four sections based on Randolph’s intellectual progression from his childhood, riding the circuit with his minister father; to his move to Harlem in 1911; to the era...

The Progressive Dilemmas of British Social Democracy: Political Economy after New Labour

This article traces the roots of ideas currently influencing the Labour party relating to the role of the state in Britain's political economy, exploring the trajectory by which such ideas have entered contemporary debate and how they continue to shape the party's agenda. Subsequent sections explore diverse interpretations of New Labour, the economic legacy of the Blair and Brown governments, the re-imagining of British political economy undertaken by Labour under Miliband's leadership, and the interlinking ‘progressive dilemmas’ that have so far emerged. The article concludes by suggesting that the ambitious rediscovery of interventionism will only be realisable if Labour confronts historical dilemmas relating to the structure and efficacy of the British state. Such a confrontation requires serious engagement between the doctrines of British social democracy and the overlapping and interlinking narratives of liberal political thought.

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent - By Robert W. Merry

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent. By Robert W. Merry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. 376 pp. This is a book for aficionados of dramatically focused popular history. Merry, a former newspaperman and a nonfiction author of note, retells the story of the extraordinary accomplishments of the hardly dramatic President Polk, who did dramatic things during his busy single term in office in the 1840s, concentrating on the war with Mexico that followed the annexation of Texas. Rooted in the exuberant populism of the trans-Alleghany west, mentored by his fellow Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, Polk, an ambitious, seasoned and shrewd Democratic leader, was the youngest man to hold the presidency when he entered office. He was determined to carry out his party's agenda, in particular, extending America's boundaries across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Merry tells a straightforward, sprawling, occasionally overdetailed, story. In covering familiar ground he takes his material largely one or another scholarly account (p. 154), relying on the standard historiography from Eugene McCormac's biography (James K. Polk: A Political Biography [University of California Press, 1922]) and Claude Bowers' populist interpretation of the era, published in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., The Party Battles of the Jackson Period [Houghton Mifflin, 1922]), to many of the more sophisticated monographs and biographies appearing over the last generation. He also makes use of a limited number of the available printed primary source collections relying primarily on Polk's diaries and several newspapers, especially the administration's flagship organ, the Washington Union, as well as a short list of the correspondence of other leaders and some relevant web sites. In addition to his description of events, Merry offers succinct and tart judgments about Polk's demeanor, attitudes, and behavior toward others, as well as how he sought to accomplish his aims. He pays a great deal of attention to the jealousies, fears, petty intrigues, and personal loathing endemic among those at the top in Washington, fueled by the demanding president's impatience ... penchant for intrigue ... willingness to stir political animosity, as well as his self-righteousness and bold--or reckless--political calculus, in carrying through his initiatives (p. 159). Determined to be the leader of his administration, he worked closely with his cabinet in formulating policy and with members of Congress to get his way, overworking himself with every aspect of affairs, often revealing unnecessary involvement and meddlesome ways (p. 269). What did this add up to? Merry's position, other than his comments about Polk's personality and approach to people and events, goes back and forth. …

The politics of mobilization for security in South African townships

The politics of mobilization for security in South African townships

Guest editorial: What democracy looks like

Greetings from Wisconsin, 3 months into what some have tagged our ‘‘Main Street Rebellion.’’ A couple of weeks ago, I found myself sitting in a messy, airless room above a coffee shop, poring over Republican-filed petitions to recall Democratic senators. We were perusing the handiwork of out-of-state canvassers who had entered long lists of names from the phone book, including an entry for State Assembly Representative Mark Pocan’s father, who has been dead for 20 years. Other volunteers were out in the streets collecting affidavits from people who had signed the petitions because they were told they demanded the recall of Governor Scott Walker. Republicans were contesting the validity of six recall petitions filed by Democrats against Republican senators—on the grounds that the petitioners’ names were not included on all pages of the document. Three blocks away from the coffee shop office, teams of citizen observers watched the recount of ballots from the recent State Supreme Court election. Looking up from a pile of petitions, a fellow volunteer plaintively turned the movement’s pervasive tag-line into a question: ‘‘This is what democracy looks like?’’ How did we get to this point? And what does it say about the prospects for grassroots movements targeting corporate power and defending labor rights and social spending? These are questions I have been asking myself incessantly since February. Here is an attempt to recap the, ‘‘How did we get here’’ question. In February and March of this year, public sector workers and their friends and neighbors took to the streets in Wisconsin. A few months earlier, perhaps in a fit of pique at the bad news of the recession, our state had elected a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both legislative houses. The governor, Scott Walker, had campaigned as a moderate but soon revealed himself to be at the cutting edge of the Tea Party agenda. The massive demonstrations that began February 14th were

Serving Two Masters

Studies comparing the ideological leanings of voters and elected officials are often hampered by the lack of a common measure. The authors use legislative referenda—on which state legislators and voters both vote on the same issue—as bridging observations to develop a common measure for both. They use this measure to help assess two theories of legislative representation, the well-known dyadic model and a partisan model that assumes legislators are also accountable to a collective party agenda. Examining referenda votes during several sessions of the California Assembly, the authors report several findings that are consistent with the partisan model. They find that legislators are significantly more ideologically extreme than the median voter in their districts. They also find that members of the majority party are considerably more extreme relative to their districts than members of the minority party are and that the majority party becomes even more extreme the longer it maintains control of the chamber.