Party Ideology Research Articles

La prohibición de partidos políticos en Alemania. Del nuevo criterio de la potencialidad y la reciente reforma constitucional para la no financiación de formaciones antidemocráticas pero constitucionales

Resumen:El año 2017 fue testigo de importantes acontecimientos en relación con el fenómeno de la ideología de ultra derecha en Alemania. Si en enero, el Tribunal Constitucional Federal fallaba en contra de la prohibición del NPD pese a reconocer el carácter antidemocrático de sus objetivos, en julio entraba en vigor una reforma constitucional para excluir de la financiación estatal a formaciones políticas que, siendo contrarias al orden democrático, no sean objeto de prohibición al carecer del potencial necesario para alcanzar sus objetivos. A modo de colofón, septiembre finalizaba con la celebración de elecciones federales y la entrada de la AfD en el Bundestag como tercera fuerza política. A la luz de todo ello, en el presente trabajo se apuesta por el análisis de las principales implicaciones jurídicas derivadas de dichos hechos, ello con el ánimo de ofrecer al lector una visión actualizada sobre el control jurídico aplicable a la ideología de los partidos políticos en Alemania.Summary1. Introduction. 2. The right of every democratic system to its self-defence. 2.1. Theoretical approach. 2.2. Express intangibility clauses and ideological control. 3. The defense of democracy and political parties in the German legal system. 3.1. The German concept of militant democracy. 3.2. Legal regime applicable to anti-democratic political parties. 3.2.1. Constitutional framework. 3.2.2. Basic legislative framework. 4. The German jurisprudential adaptation to the ECHR conventionality control: the NPD case. 4.1. The necessity test according to the ECHR jurisprudence. 4.2. Potentiality as a substitute for the principle of proportionality. 4.3. Anti-democratic but constitutional. 5. Main observations after the recent constitutional reform. 6. Conclusions. Bibliography.Abstract:2017 witnessed important events in relation to the phenomenon of the right-wing ideology in Germany. First, in January, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled against the prohibition of the NPD, despite recognizing the anti-democratic nature of its objectives; then, in July, a constitutional reform came into effect to exclude from the state funding those political formations that, contravening the democratic order, are not prohibited as they lack the necessary potential to achieve their objectives. To conclude, September ended with the holding of federal elections and the entry of the AfD into the Bundestag, as the country’s third largest force. In light of all this, the present work is committed to the analysis of the main legal implications derived from these events, this with the aim to offer the reader an updated view on the legal control applicable to theideology of political parties in Germany.

Party Ideology and Chinese Law

This chapter elaborates on the claim that ideology provides a useful lens to understand the development of the Chinese legal system. In spite of expectations both inside and outside of China, this system does not seem to be evolving towards a "rule of law" in the Western sense of the term. This chapter claims such expectations were based on an approach paying short shrift to the role of the Party in developing the legal system, and its ideology in particular. It further analyses CCP ideology in the light of three political questions: what is the purpose of politics, who should be in charge and what methods should they use. Lastly, it explores the impact of the answers to these questions on the trajectory of law in China. It suggests there many of the perceived flaws in the legal systems are logical consequences of its ideological structuring, or even fundamental features. Specifically, it finds that legal rationality in China remains tightly circumscribed in its scope of application, ideology is a potent tool to provide meaning to political terminology, and discipline the CCP's organisation.

Parliamentary involvement, party ideology and majority-opposition bargaining: Belgian participation in multinational military operations

ABSTRACTThis article examines the impact of parliamentary involvement in troop deployment decisions on restrictions on military mandates by examining the Belgian contribution to the 2011 Libya intervention and the coalition against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. More specifically, we analyse (1) the effect of party ideology on mandate preferences, and (2) the impact of bargaining between majority and opposition parties on the outcome of mandate negotiations. Our case study demonstrates that left-wing parties show a strong inclination toward imposing restrictions on the use of military force beyond humanitarian goals, while right-wing preferences tend to depend on the national interests at stake in the operation. With regard to majority-opposition bargaining, our study shows that the impact of opposition parties is dependent on the degree of contention between government and opposition parties, as well as on the extent to which the executive needs to seek support across its own majority.

The Usage of Excommunication (Takfir) in the Ideology of Justice and Development Party (the AKP), Political Islamists of Turkey

The usage of excommunication goes back to the early history of Islam for the extreme Kharijite sect declared for the first time all other Muslims who did not agree with them as apostates and killed them brutally in the 7th century. The extreme mentality of the Kharijites has been witnessed in various extreme sects throughout Islamic history. More recently, Justice and Development Party (the AKP), the political Islamists of Turkey, has been using the concept of takfir (excommunication) against its opponents. In this essay, we will examine the concepts of faith (iman) and disbelief (kufr) and then attempt to analyze the ruling AKP’s usage of excommunication (takfir) on the basis of primary Islamic sources. The essay will seek the relation between the takfir and extremism as well as its connection with violence and terrorism by examining the ideology of the ruling AKP in Turkey.

The Difficult Relationship between the Kosovo Political Parties and Conservatism

The presentation of various party / program stances in the Kosovo political scene, tells us about the parties’ level of orientation in favour or against conservatism. Therefore, the aim of this article is to analyze and discuss the empirical validity, respectively the relations of Kosovo political parties with the pragmatic conservatism. In what areas, Kosovo parties have similarities or differences with pragmatic conservatism, such as Religion, patriotism and property.In order to find an answer for this research article, different qualitative methods will be used, such as comparative, content and document analysis, as well as interviews. All this with the sole of collecting and analyzing the data found.The findings of this article are very significant because, based on substantive analysis and party documents, we can conclude that the attitudes or approaches of Kosovo political parties regarding pragmatic conservatism are only "Partially pragmatic conservative” or "Beyond - Pragmatic Conservator". This means that the parties take the ideology of conservatism into account only partially or only within the program points that suits them.In this regard, the importance of this research has to do with the facts and with a realistic situation to understand the complexity, the issue and the importance of pragmatic conservatism as well as the idea of social transformation by curbing destructive tendencies. In this context, the stances of Kosovo political parties go beyond party ideology, because they include social transformations, religion, tradition and nation / patriotism. So in this way, through such attitudes, political parties convey / transmit into the society of Kosovo a social awareness and inter-religious tolerance.

Осознание прав и правил сельскими протестующими в Китае (на примере протестов в селе Укань)

Янь Лю – соискатель, научный сотрудник, Центр китайского сельского исследования, Центральный китайский педагогический университет, Ухань, Китай. Электронная почта: karenly_62@mail.ru
 Осознание прав китайскими сельскими протестующими в основном изучается в контексте демократических правовых отношений между государством и гражданами. При этом недостаточно внимания уделяется связи с использованием протестующими социалистического учения, сельской культуры и других идеологем. В немногих исследованиях, посвященных этой проблематике, обсуждается главным образом только осознание прав выживания. Между тем актуализируется задача понимания того, каким образом характеризуется осознание прав и правил протестующими в современном сельском обществе Китая, где выживанию жителей села уже ничего не угрожает. В качестве объекта исследования используются протесты в селе Укань провинции Гуандун Китая. Влияние идеологем на осознание прав и правил изучается методом фрейм-анализа. Эмпирическую базу исследования составили материалы (тексты, фото- и видеозаписи), отражающие ход протестов и заявления сторон конфликтов. Показано, что жители Уканя протестовали, поскольку считали распределение доходов от сделок с коллективной землей несправедливым. Требования протестующих касаются не выживания, а главным образом защиты экономических интересов. Осознание прав жителями Уканя формируется на базе сельской культуры и партийной идеологии и отличается от осознания гражданских прав, потому что, хотя требования протестующих не защищаются законом, сельчане не ставили под сомнение правомерность существующих законов и политики. Осознание прав на основе сельской культуры усиливает интенсивность протестов, а осознание прав на базе партийной идеологии предполагает укрепление авторитета центральных органов государства и компартии. Заимствование дискурса о социалистической революции придает протестам оттенок классовой борьбы. Так как в Китае коллективные действия с самого начала сталкиваются с кризисом законности, осознание правил касается необходимости легитимации протестных действий. В этом и отражается роль официальной идеологии Китая (принципа верховенства права и партийной идеологии) в «деполитизации» сельских протестов.

The Rise of Feminism in the PKK: Ideology or Strategy?

Studies on women in nationalist guerrilla movements, such as in Sri Lanka and Angola, find that women's militancy has not lead to changes in traditional patriarchal structures. Contradicting much of the current literature, today Kurdish women have gained substantial equality in the PKK, and the Party's ideology actively promotes a subversion of traditional gender structures. Using existing interviews with militants and academic literature, I will give a nuanced view of the progressive transition of the PKK's political ideology on women. During the early 1990s, the PKK's emancipatory stance and reinterpretation of Kurdish myths were employed pragmatically to increase women's participation. However, patriarchal structures remained unchanged and female militants were merely handed over from a patriarchal family to a patriarchal party. Despite this, the autonomous Women's Army (YJAK) became a “safe space” from which self-organized and armed women actively influenced the PKK's ideology and practice. Legitimized by the PKK's own emancipatory propaganda, the YJAK pushed the party towards a more radical feminist agenda by loyally aligning themselves to the “father figure” Öcalan during setbacks in the late 1990s. The current prominence of the PKK's feminist agenda suggests female militants can undermine and challenge patriarchal structures from within the structure of a nationalist movement.

Political Determinants of Voting Behaviour in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

The aim of this study is to find the political determinants of voting behaviour in the selected districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. It is a quantitative study and aims at knowing the political factors of voting behaviour in the earlier three general elections i.e., 2002, 2008 and 2013. Its major purpose is to see the changing trend of the voters in the above-mentioned elections. It has investigated 292 respondents who had cast vote in any of the target elections. The researchers asked questions through Likert scale designed questionnaire under the purposive sampling technique. The study finds a significant association of political factors such as candidate’s affiliation, political party affiliation, party leadership affiliation and party ideology with the voting behaviour. The results of the data show changing scenario as the importance of numerous factors is replaced by others. The study recommends that local political leadership as well as the Election Commission of Pakistan should come forward to actively launch an awareness movement for women participation in elections. It should focus on the importance of vote towards increasing the ratio of participation in voting process, especially women’s voting.

Gender, Incumbency and Party List Nominations

This study assesses how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, it explores what determines whether parties place women in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, it directly examines a mechanism – party nomination – central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover, it jointly evaluates how incumbency and gender affect nomination. This study uses European Parliament elections to compare a plethora of parties, operating under numerous institutions, in the context of a single legislature. It finds that gender differences in candidate selection are largely explained by incumbency bias, although party ideology and female labor force participation help explain which parties prioritize the placement of novice women.

Polarization and ideological congruence between parties and supporters in Europe

The relationship between parties and their supporters is central to democracy and ideological representation is among the most important of these linkages. We conduct an investigation of party-supporter congruence in Europe with emphasis on the measurement of ideology and focusing on the role of party system polarization, both as a direct factor in explaining congruence and in modifying the effects of voter sophistication. Understanding this relationship depends in part on how the ideology of parties and supporters is measured. We use Poole’s Blackbox scaling to derive a measure of latent ideology from voter and expert responses to issue scale questions and compare this to a measure based on left–right perceptions. We then examine how variation in the proximity between parties ideological positions and those of their supporters is affected by the polarization of the party system and how this relationship interacts with political sophistication. With the latent ideology measure, we find that polarization decreases party-supporter congruence but increases the effects of respondent education level on congruence. However, we do not find these relationships using the left–right perceptual measure. Our findings underscore important differences between perceptions of left–right labels and the ideological constraint underlying issue positions.

Expressive attitudes to compensation: The case of globalization

Using survey data from the World Values Survey and the Comparative Manifesto Project, we empirically study attitudes towards the proposal that government compensation should be provided for individuals adversely affected by globalization. We include roles for personal experience with globalization and ideology of individuals and political parties, noting also the general problem of expressiveness in survey data, where responders who favored compensation did not actually have to pay to help. Findings indicate that attitudes to actual compensation depend on exposure to globalization but are substantially qualified by ideology.

Federal Complexity and Perception of State Party Ideology in the United States

Scholarship has established that ideological positions offered by state parties differ substantially from the national parties, and from one another. However, less attention has been devoted to investigating whether ordinary people are aware of the ideological distinctiveness of state parties. In particular, do people notice that their state party is ideologically different than the national party? In this article, I draw upon theories of low information rationality to develop an account of public reasoning about state parties. I analyze public opinion about state parties using an original survey fielded as part of the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. I find limited evidence that ordinary people are responsive to the actual legislative behavior of state parties. Instead, individuals’ judgments about state party ideology may be rooted in inferences drawn from national-level politics. The findings support arguments that a complicated federal structure obscures the role of state-level actors in the policymaking process.

Radical right and radical left party ideologies: a pan-European mapping of necessary attributes, differences and similarities

ABSTRACTRadical parties, both to the right and to the left, have recently earned victories in a range of European countries. Previous efforts seeking to understand radical parties in general are, however, relatively rare. The present paper offers an examination of the possible necessary attributes of, as well as the differences and similarities between, radical right and radical left party ideologies in contemporary (Western, Central and Eastern) Europe. The expectation that nativism is a necessary attribute of radical right ideology while anti-capitalist socialism is a necessary attribute of radical left ideology receives partial support; although not present in all of the manifestos produced by these parties, these attributes are, from a broader perspective, necessary ingredients of the radical right and the radical left party ideology, respectively. The empirical examination also confirms that the two families clearly differ in their sociocultural and, to a lesser extent, socioeconomic views. Finally, it demonstrates that they take matching standpoints towards European integration and, more ambiguously, towards the political system.

Pension Funds and the Politics of Ownership in Britain, c. 1970–86

The growth of occupational pensions in the post-war era transformed the pattern of capital ownership in Britain, as workers' collective retirement savings purchased a substantial share of the national economy. This article examines the response of the Labour and Conservative parties to this significant material change, and considers how it shaped their respective politics of ownership at the end of the post-war settlement. It demonstrates that Labour and the trade union movement recognized occupational pension funds as a new form of social ownership but had to reconcile their desire to give pension scheme-members direct control over their investments with a broader belief that the funds needed be used for a state-coordinated revitalization of the industrial economy. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party's initial enthusiasm for occupational pensions, which it championed for helping to create a 'property-owning democracy', was challenged by a radical neoliberal critique in the early 1980s that sought to dismantle pension funds and to individualize investment. The findings in the article assert the need for historians to situate the politics of the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s in the context of the substantial economic and social changes that had taken place during the post-war decades. These changes often created opportunities to formulate new policies and political agendas, but they also served to highlight deeper tensions within the ideologies of the main political parties.

The Trade Origins of Economic Nationalism: Import Competition and Voting Behavior in Western Europe

AbstractWe investigate the impact of globalization on electoral outcomes in 15 Western European countries over 1988–2007. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual‐level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Comparative Manifesto Project. We compute a region‐specific measure of exposure to Chinese imports, based on the historical industry specialization of each region. To identify the causal impact of the import shock, we instrument imports to Europe using Chinese imports to the United States. At the district level, a stronger import shock leads to (1) an increase in support for nationalist and isolationist parties, (2) an increase in support for radical‐right parties, and (3) a general shift to the right in the electorate. These results are confirmed by the analysis of individual‐level vote choices. In addition, we find evidence that voters respond to the shock in a sociotropic way.

Personality and Party Ideology Among Politicians. A Closer Look at Political Elites From Canada and Belgium.

We examined the relationship between Big Five personality and the political ideology of elected politicians. To this end, we studied 303 politicians from Flanders, Wallonia, and Canada, relating their self-reported Big Five scores to a partisanship-based measure of political ideology. Our findings show that, in line with the congruency model of personality, Openness to Experience is the best and most consistent correlate of political ideology, with politicians high on Openness to Experience being more likely to be found among the more progressive left-wing political parties.

Military Service of Politicians, Public Policy, and Parliamentary Decisions

How do politicians with past military service decide on societal issues? We explore the voting behavior of parliamentarians in the informative institutional setting of Switzerland with a conscription army. Our setting allows controlling for voter preferences and party ideology. Results show that politicians who have served in the military do not differ from those who have not served when comparing their voting behavior on issues related to female welfare and welfare of the weak and disabled. However, politicians who have served in the military tend to have a higher probability to accept proposals on neutrality and a lower probability to accept proposals linked to international human rights and the environment. We explore differences with respect to military ranks and ideological positions within parties and find that having chosen to serve in higher military ranks is associated with a differential voting pattern. This suggests that motivation for the military affects voting in parliament.

Conservative Feminists? An Exploration of Feminist Arguments in Parliamentary Debates of the Bundestag1

Past studies have shown that conservative governments and parties are unlikely places for women’s representation, especially for feminist policy adoption. Contrary to existing studies, this article argues that conservative governments can be places for feminist interests’ representation. To demonstrate this, I analyse the parliamentary discourse surrounding two instances of feminist policy adoption under Germany’s conservative government in 2006 and 2015, respectively. I find that in both instances, feminist arguments dominated the debates and, most importantly, that these findings still hold when controlling for party ideology.

LOBBYING AND ELECTIONS

ABSTRACTI analyse the interaction between post‐election lobbying and the voting decisions of forward‐looking voters. The existing literature has shown that in models with citizen candidates from a dispersed distribution of preferences, lobbying has no influence on implemented policy. In my model with ideological parties, lobbying is shown to have an effect on policy. In terms of welfare, I show that the median voter and the majority of voters can be better off with lobbying.

Interdisciplinarity, History and Cultural Encounters

Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define their own niches in terms of topics or practices for their candidates; and decision makers are confronted with challenges that do not respect ideologies of political parties and reports based on mainstream knowledge. In this context, interdisciplinarity is an ongoing re-consideration of the creation, the communication and the application of knowledge uniting the perspectives of research, teaching and decision making. While most discussions on interdisciplinarity focus on its theoretical and methodological complexity in an exclusively contemporary perspective, this article will discuss interdisciplinarity in a historical perspective as central to European history of knowledge as well as in an intercultural perspective.*