Party Line Research Articles

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Toeing the party line: Politically driven responses to the coronavirus pandemic in the USA

Polling data indicate that in the USA, Republicans, compared to Democrats, have been less inclined to take preventive measures against coronavirus. In three studies (Ns = 380, 430, and 393), we sought to find evidence for partisan motivations and to illuminate how they translate into attitudes, behavioral intentions and actual behaviors. Results revealed a consensus that the Democratic party wants people take coronavirus seriously. Thus, while Democrats thought it was aligned with their political interests, Republicans thought it was in their opponents’ interests. Further analyses suggest that perceived party interests mediated the effect of party allegiance on attitudes about the seriousness of coronavirus, and both attitudes and intentions to preventive behaviors (Studies 1 and 2) and specifically attitudes and intentions to wear masks (Study 3). This relationship also held for mask-wearing behavior. Results suggest that people’s responses to coronavirus may reflect a conformity to the perceived wishes and interests of their political party.

When Policymakers are Asked: Why and How Polarization Varies Across States

This study brings a fresh perspective to elite polarization by examining how policymakers and party leaders interpret and respond to it. Polarization is examined through the language and lived experience of those most familiar with it—policymakers themselves. Face-to-face interviews posed qualitative and quantitative questions to 212 legislators and 13 key informants from two states that varied in polarization. Most legislators describe polarization in negative terms. Consistent with “Community Dissonance Theory,” analyses reveal differences in a legislature’s institutional culture with policymakers in the more polarized state reporting more fraying of the social fabric and fracturing of decision-making processes. Specifically, legislators report more limited opportunities to build relationships with colleagues across party lines and for the minority party to make meaningful contributions. Corroborating the “Theory of Pernicious Polarization,” polarization appears to function as a relationship-based process that leaders can use for instrumental political ends. Polarization depends on whether party leaders react to rifts in tribal, non-compromising ways and how the minority responds. Consistent with “Conditional Party Governance” theory, party leaders can contribute to dysfunctional polarization by encouraging homogeneity in their own party and polarity from the opposing party. Drawing on policymakers’ own words, states vary in whether elite polarization is dysfunctional.

Opposition space in Indian democracy: S.A.Dange and ‘Other’ voice of the Indian Left

With back to back electoral mandates to govern the country in national election to elect 16th and 17th Lok Sabha(lower house of Indian Parliament), in 2014 and 2019, Bharatiya Janata Party(B.J.P) bagging 282 seats and 303 seats out of total 545 seats respectively, seems unstoppable with main opposition political party Indian National Congress in doldrums due to organizational leadership issues. As such contemporary Indian politics presents a uni-multiparty period with narrative of B.J.P domination (from electoral to social space having a tinge of Hindutva[monolithic narrative on path of religion and community) and singularities of resistances to it. In this time of structural domination, political parties in India are grappling to find a balanced practical political position to correct this skewed power distribution scenario. In this context ‘Dange-line' of united front tactics against right reactionary fascist political force propagated by Sripad Amrit Dange, yesteryear stalwart of Communist Party of India, in early 1970s, can be reinterpreted to nurture liberal-left-secular space which is under considerable strain in contemporary Indian democracy. Going beyond mainstream analysis of Dange-line within leftist framework of revisionism, this paper argues that it offers an indigenous eclectic political line of practical politics, soaked in ideas of nationalism, socialism and secularism. This paper tries to question the marginalistion of discussion on Dange-line in Indian left and non-left political historiography discourse and views it as a ‘other’ voice (disensus) of Indian left which is more open-ended, context specific and based on nationalism-socialism-secularism triad. The paper concludes by arguing that in contemporary opposition space of Indian democracy, Dange-line is an open choice for any political party (left or non-left) committed to ideals of justice, plurality, dialogue, rights, socialism, nationalism and secularism and before 2024 national election commitment to Dange-line (universal / mass) or to Party line (specific identity-oriented) will direct the tone and texture of Indian politics.

Beyond homonationalism: queer temporality in contemporary Israeli gay and lesbian cinema

ABSTRACT The article explores the homonormative and homonational politics and the discourse of LGBT rights in contemporary Israeli cinema. Some Israeli films such as Yossi and Jagger, The Bubble, and The Secrets promote homonormative and homonational discourse that is guided by a progressive trajectory from traditional societies to modernity, from shame to pride, from homophobia and the secrecy of the closet to gay sexual liberation and identity that follows Western standards. In contrast, films like Joe + Belle, Blush and the Arisa Mizrahi party line videos critique logical temporal conventions of development and progress, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility, and the social scenarios which regulate identities into national, sexual, and ethnic normativity. They offer new ways of being in the world, life and relationships based on queer temporality that are not necessarily founded on past lessons or future expectations, but rather derive from the desire for the “here and now.”

This too in moderation: Evaluating the effect of delegate dissatisfaction on ambitious party group switching in the European Parliament

The literature on party group switching in the European Parliament claims that members who are ideological outliers have the highest odds of changing their group label, but is it true that the most incongruent legislators are also the most successful at switching groups? This article seeks to determine whether or not voicing dissatisfaction by casting votes against the party line is associated with an increased probability of party group switching. Using logistic regression with a penalized maximum likelihood estimator, the analysis of ambitious switching (1979–2009) uses loyalty and policy distance variables to show that moderate, not extreme, outliers have the highest odds of exiting their group. These findings revise what we know about the relationship between legislative voting behavior and party switching, and they have important implications for examining the effect of policy-seeking on party switching in national parliaments.

The New Calling

The New Calling

Who Toes the Line? Mandate Type, Open-Primary Experience, and Party Defection in the Korean National Assem

Previous studies on legislative voting behavior in the Korean National Assembly (KNA) were based on two theories: "The Best of Both Worlds" vs. "Contamination." However, both these theories have paid limited attention to the electorally vulnerable condition of legislators owing to voting behavior in South Korea. In this study, we propose a conditional mandate-divide theory to elucidate party defection voting behavior in KNA. According to our findings, Proportional Representatives (PR) are more likely to defect from party-line voting than Single Member District (SMD) members, although SMDs elected through a party primary are more likely to defect from party-line voting than other SMDs. Additionally, SMDs elected with the primary experience deviate from their party line more in Yeongnam province compared to other regions. Our findings suggest that legislators' voting behavior in the mixed-member system may vary depending on their prospects of re-election, essentially shaped by their incentive structure.

Konstelasi Calon Tunggal Dalam Pemilihan Umum Kepala Daerah Kaitannya Dengan Konsep Demokrasi (Analisis Terhadap Pemilihan Umum Kepala Daerah Kabupaten Gowa Tahun 2020)

This study aims to identify and examine the occurrence of a single candidate for Regent and Deputy Regent in the general election for the regional head of Gowa Regency in 2020. This study uses a qualitative research type with a descriptive approach. Based on the source, the types of data used are primary data and secondary data. Primary data were obtained through interviews with community leaders, religious leaders, youth leaders in Gowa Regency, the chairman of the Gowa Regency KPUD, and members of the Gowa Regency DPRD as well as documentation. While secondary data is data obtained from various literatures such as books, journals, laws and other related sources. Processing and presentation of data is done descriptively. The results of the study show that the occurrence of a single candidate for Regent and Deputy Regent in the general election for the regional head of Gowa Regency in 2020 is caused by several factors, including: a). the couple Adnan Purrichta Ichsan and Abdul Rauf Mallagani were already known to most of the people of Gowa Regency before, b). There was a role or involvement of a number of figures, c). inseparable from the performance and achievements of Adnan Purrichta Ichsan and Abdul Rauf Mallagani in the previous period, d). and the absence of other candidates who appeared against the pair Adnan Purrichta Ichsan and Abdul Rauf Mallagani either from the political party line or from the individual line.

A Suggested Revision of the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines (Version: April 30, 2022)

The Department of Justice (DOJ)/Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Vertical Merger Guidelines (VMGs) were adopted by the FTC in June 2020 by a party-line 3-2 party line over the dissent of the Acting Chair. They were withdrawn by the FTC in September 2021. Withdrawal was appropriate because the VMGs are both incomplete and overly permissible. At this writing, the Guidelines are currently under revision, This draft is designed to aid that process and act as a supplement to the Guidelines that are adopted.

Twitter data reveal six distinct environmental personas

Effective digital environmental communication is integral to galvanizing public support for conservation in the age of social media. Environmental advocates require messaging strategies suited to social media platforms, including ways to identify, target, and mobilize distinct audiences. Here, we provide – to the best of our knowledge – the first systematic characterization of environmental personas on social media. Beginning with 1 million environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) followers on Twitter, of which 500,000 users met data quality criteria, we identified six personas that differ in their expression of 21 environmental issues. General consistency in the proportional composition of personas was detected across 14 countries with sufficiently large samples. Within the US, although the six personas varied in their mean political ideology, we did not observe that the personas split along political party lines. Our results pave the way for environmental advocates – including NGOs, public agencies, and researchers – to use audience segmentation methods like the methods discussed here to target and tailor messages to distinct constituencies at high speed and at large scale.

Royall Tyler’s The Contrast: The cultural foundations and the Contradictions of his Campaign for Freedom Explained

This research seeks to explore in detail the cultural foundations and the contradictions in Royall Tyler’s campaign for freedom in The contrast (1787). More particularly, it puts emphasis on how Tyler wages his “culture war” and what measure of success he achieves in the highly divisive debate about cultural nationalism in the early American republic. To shed light on the issue of cultural independence, the play is placed within the context of the turbulent early years of the new nation, when each and every American across gender, ethnic, social class, faction or party lines challenged their fellow citizens to stay true to the revolutionary principles of democracy and freedom. It is argued that with The contrast, Tyler, irked by the cultural dependency of America under The Articles of Confederation, stepped into the public sphere in 1787, the year when the first draft of the Constitution was adopted, to make up a wake-up call for Americans still captured in the culturally corrosive cobweb of British texts and textiles. The socio-historical considerations brought to bear on the drama, together with the study of the text proper, have helped us to demonstrate that the play draws its inspiration from two major American cultural sources: the American culture of performance or culture of gentility and the American culture of folk humor or laughter. This research rounds off the argument about Tyler’s cultural nationalism with the highlighting of Tyler’s curtailment of the very freedom that he seeks to expand. The curtailment of freedom in The contrast is explained in terms of Tyler’s loyalty to a strand of republicanism based on class and gender hierarchies.

Party leadership, electoral reform, and mandate-divide

AbstractPrevious studies had no consensus on whether a ‘mandate-divide’ exists between district and party-list legislators under the mixed-member system. I argued that previous studies ignored the role of the party. This article aims to explore the legislative consequences of the 2005 electoral reform and the role of parties in Taiwan. I analyzed the roll-call votes, considering abstention and absence as potential defection, along with interviews. The data cover from the fifth to eighth Legislative Yuan, two periods each before and after the electoral reform. The findings show that district legislators tended to defect from the party line than list proportional representation (PR) members in pre- and post-reform periods. However, district legislators only tended to be absent from the voting than list PR members after the electoral reform. Mandate-divide was present throughout the period, but differences were more salient before the reform. Besides, evidence stressing the influence of parties was revealed in the interviews. Party leaders enforce various punishments to enforce party discipline. The role of party became more important after the electoral reform. District legislators have higher absence rate after the electoral reform because they need to engage more in constituency service or avoid expressing their position on controversial issues. The ruling party tends to sanction the absence when they have majority in parliament.

The relationship between affective polarization and democratic backsliding: comparative evidence

ABSTRACT Why do voters vote for undemocratic politicians in a democracy? My chief contention is that affective polarization has become a primary factor driving support for undemocratic politicians. Once partisan identification turns into a salient identity in the hierarchy of group affiliations, it has the potential to widen inter-party distances. Such a political environment fosters positive beliefs of their preferred party and negative beliefs of the other party, which promote political cynicism, intolerance and increase partisan loyalty. As a result, crossing party lines becomes costly, even when incumbents violate democratic principles or incumbents’ economic policies do not appeal to supporters’ interests. This tradeoff enables undemocratic politicians to evade electoral sanctions for undemocratic behaviour. I created an extended version of Reiljan’s affective polarization application. The new dataset covers affective polarization scores of 53 countries calculated over 170 national election surveys. I find that increasing affective polarization is highly correlated with democratic backsliding, less accountability, less freedom, fewer rights, and less deliberation in democracies. However, ideological polarization has shown no correlation.

Women’s Attitudes toward Sexual Objectification in Brands: A Political Ideology Perspective

Although the issue of gender inequality dominates the public discourse, the country is sharply divided along party lines about its importance and the way to deal with it. In this polarized context, marketers struggle to devise brand communication strategies that will successfully connect with equality-conscious female consumers. By integrating research in political ideology, sexism, and brand communications, this research uncovers the types of sexual appeals that are more likely to resonate with female consumers who endorse a liberal (vs. conservative) ideology. Results of three lab experiments and a secondary data set demonstrate that liberal (vs. conservative) women are more likely to reject brands that are associated with a sexually objectified image of women. Furthermore, this effect is driven by liberal women’s rejection of benevolent sexism. These results are discussed in terms of the contributions to political ideology and brand communications research, as well as the implications for marketers’ communication strategies.

Party Control and Responsiveness

Different parliamentary activities allow Members of Parliament (MPs) varying amounts of autonomy. Previous studies have shown that, in parliamentary systems with strong parties and party-centered electoral rules, MPs have limited room for crossing the party line in the legislature both in voting and speech. Further, party-centered systems limit MP’s ability to address electoral concerns of their constituency; they are less responsive. In this paper, I combine these findings by showing that even within system variation in party control over institutions affects the levels of responsiveness in parliamentary questions. By linking MP’s constituency mentions with different types of questions, my results show that the institutional design in the Norwegian Storting affects the level of MP constituency signaling. Specifically, I show that questions with low levels of party control and public attention (written questions and question time) give MPs far more opportunity to raise constituency specific issues than the more party controlled activities (interpellations and question hours). Consequently, I argue that responsiveness does not disappear in party-centered systems; it is located at lower-level institutions. Particularly, some types of questions, where shirking from the party line is less consequential and the party organizations have less control over its members, allow for constituency signaling.

Personality and the Policy Positions of Politicians

Politicians’ support of or opposition to concrete policies is uniquely consequential for policymaking, public opinion, and a host of other societal outcomes. Explaining their policy positions is therefore a major research agenda in political science. Here, we evaluate the role of politicians’ personality traits, measured with the Big Five typology, in shaping how liberal or conservative their economic and social policy positions are. While existing research establishes this link among nonelites, it is far from obvious that the same holds for politicians, who have systematically different personality profiles, and whose positions are constrained by party lines. Using an in‐person study of 893 legislators in five countries who completed personality questionnaires and provided detailed issue positions, we find that Openness to Experience is strongly and positively predictive of politicians’ liberal positions on both economic and social policies, but a null relationship for Conscientiousness. We also find that Extraversion predicts more conservative economic (but not social) policy positions. We discuss implications for the role of elites’ individual characteristics in policymaking.

The effects of partisan framing on COVID-19 attitudes: Experimental evidence from early and late pandemic

Political polarization has dominated news coverage of Americans’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this research note, we report findings from two experimental studies, in which we present respondents with news stories about COVID-19 mitigation measures that emphasize partisan difference or accord. The stories present the same numeric facts about public opinion, but highlight either the partisan gap that existed at the time of the study, or the fact that large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats supported the measures at the time. Results from our first study, conducted late April 2020, show that a media frame drawing attention to shared concern across party lines produced a less polarized response to social-distancing restrictions than a frame that drew attention to partisan difference. Our findings suggest that the extensive media coverage about the red-blue divide in COVID-19 opinions reinforced partisan polarization. These results, however, did not replicate in a second study conducted much later in the pandemic. Qualitative data collected across the two studies demonstrate the degree to which polarization had rapidly become a dominant narrative in Americans’ thinking about COVID-19.

Reimagining the enlightenment: Alternate timelines and utopian futures in the Scottish independence movement

ABSTRACT This article explores how Scottish National Party (SNP) activists in Edinburgh reimagine the enlightenment past to provide alternate timelines that are appropriated in the projection of utopian futures for an independent Scotland. Starting with the question ‘what if history had happened differently?’, SNP activists harness the ‘what ifs’ and ‘would haves’ of alternate timelines where the enlightenment continues uninterrupted by the political union of Scotland and England. This approach facilitates a form of futural revisionism which captures the potentiality of the past to become utopian future without foregoing the SNP’s commitment to civic, rather than ethnic, nationalism. Thus, SNP activists are able to tow the party line of rejecting nostalgic historicism to remain open to all citizens of Scotland while still affectively engaging with the past to provide wishful utopian images for their independent future.

Election Strategies of Winning Candidates A Comparative Study of NA 126 (Lahore) and NA 263 (Loralai)

This research explores the election strategies of winning candidates of NA 126 Lahore and NA 263 Loralai. Through a comparative study, it is found that different candidates had used different strategies which were suited to the socio-cultural norms of the constituencies and mindset of the voters. The candidates of NA 126 (Lahore) adopted the strategies of “Managing Election’s Day (bringing the voters out of their homes and posting trained polling agents), targeting their opponents, the use of social media, telephone messaging, corner meetings, door to door campaign and strategy of change while the candidates of NA 263 (Loralai) used the strategy of “making electoral alliances”, caste system, nationalism, personal popularity and their background of middle class. The most effective strategy of winning candidates among these strategies, was “managing the polling day at tactical level”. Furthermore, it is noticed that the voters of NA 263 (Loralai) often cast their vote to the candidates who visit to their homes during the election campaign while the voters of NA 126 (Lahore) are the supporters of political parties and more women cast their votes on party lines and political leadership. Besides, the people of NA 263 (Loralai) cast their ballots for personal benefits and nepotism. Thus, the election strategies of winning candidates are different from each other (126 Lahore and 263 Loralai). The candidates of both constituencies adopted different strategies, according to the aspirations of the voters and traits of the region.