Party Scene Research Articles

Sexual Assault on Campus: A Multilevel, Integrative Approach to Party Rape

This article explains why rates of sexual assault remain high on college campuses. Data are from a study of college life at a large midwestern university involving nine months of ethnographic observation of a women's floor in a “party dorm,” in-depth interviews with 42 of the floor residents, and 16 group interviews with other students. We show that sexual assault is a predictable outcome of a synergistic intersection of processes operating at individual, organizational, and interactional levels. Some processes are explicitly gendered, while others appear to be gender neutral. We discuss student homogeneity, expectations that partiers drink heavily and trust their party-mates, and residential arrangements. We explain how these factors intersect with more obviously gendered processes such as gender differences in sexual agendas, fraternity control of parties, and expectations that women be nice and defer to men. We show that partying produces fun as well as sexual assault, generating student resistance to criticizing the party scene or men's behavior in it. We conclude with implications for policy.

Taking Control by Loosing Control?: Patterns of heroin addiction in Estonia

Similarly to other countries in Eastern and Central Europe, Estonia has a relatively short experience of problems related to the use of illicit substances. In the previously “Real Socialist” countries in general, the increase in drug use among youth did not take place until the 1990s. This paper focuses on opiate users in Estonia. Unlike some other drugs, heroin does not have a trendy status, but is strongly rejected by the recreational drug users of the party scene. On the contrary, opiate users tend to be heavily marginalized. Relying on open-ended interviews with opiate users, this paper focuses on relationships between addiction and the cultural context of drug use. The majority of opiate users belong to the Russian-speaking minority, whose relative social status has considerably weakened after the restoration of Estonia's independence in 1991, and who have limited opportunities in the educational and labour markets. Young people started to use drugs from a desire to experience action, but the absence of other meaningful roles besides that of a drug user quickly led them towards addiction. However, the addicts were able to develop and maintain new competencies for living with heroin. It can be argued that addiction does not lead to a complete loss of control over their lives, but is rather an escape route from mainstream society. Heroin users do not become addicted to the drug alone but to the whole way of life centred on it.

Differences of Photographs Inducing Craving Between Alcoholics and Non-alcoholics

Many researchers have used cue reactivity paradigm to study alcohol craving. But the difference of craving response to drinks between alcoholic patients and social drinkers was little evaluated. To investigate characteristics of alcohol-related visual cues which induce alcohol craving in alcoholism, we examined the response of subjects to alcohol-related cues considering qualitative aspects. The authors developed 27 photographs related to alcohol as candidate visual cues. Thirty five patients with alcohol dependence, 35 heavy drinkers and 35 social drinkers were shown these pictures and asked to rate these 6 pictures in order of inducing alcohol craving the most. 'A glass of Soju' and 'A Party scene' were chosen as the alcohol-related visual cues which induced craving the most in the patients and heavy drinkers, respectively. The results suggest that the patients with alcohol dependence are more absorbed by alcohol without drinking context such as an atmosphere or situation involving drinking. Heavy drinkers may experience craving in anticipation of being in a drinking situation.

The party scene of Helsinki

The party scene of Helsinki

Club Drug Use in Germany

In this paper the epidemiology of club drug use in Germany, including the use of 3,4-methylendioxy-N-methamphetamine (MDMA) known as ‘ecstasy’ and related substances such as speed, amphetamines, hallucinogens, and cannabis is described on the basis of five different surveys. Two of them are representative household surveys to monitor the licit and illicit drug use behavior of the German population. The third one is a longitudinal study aimed at exploring comorbidity and posited risk and protective factors in adolescents and young adults with specific emphasis on substance use-related disorders. Since ecstasy seemed to be associated with a new music culture of the ‘90s called “techno,” two studies investigating the relationship of using ecstasy and related substances in the techno party scene are additionally presented. The question of the clinical impact of using ecstasy and related substances is raised in terms of substance use-related and mental disorders associated with the use of ecstasy. Finally, the motivation for using and stopping the use of ecstasy is addressed. It is shown that ecstasy has reached the second place (after cannabis) in illegal drug preferences of adolescents and young adults in Germany. Evidence is found that ecstasy use as well as ecstasy use-related disorders such as “abuse” and “dependence” are of a transient, “youth-limited” nature.

Nested Pyramid Structures: Political Parties in Taiwanese Elections

The nature of the political party in Taiwan has been insufficiently problematized in recent writings on the island's elections. Based on field research this article argues that the informal structure of political support in Taiwan takes the shape of nested pyramid structures, built of successive dyadic support relations between politician and supporter and two politicians at different hierarchical levels, culminating in a handful of top political leaders. The political party is only the widest kind of support network, and in lower-level elections not the central agent. The dyads in Taiwan politics differ from traditional patron–client relations in being more dynamic, equal and voluntary. This informal political structure coupled with generally weak party loyalty and large benefits of incumbency produces pervasive party instability and subsequent election instability at higher election levels. The number of top political leaders and relations between them are critical in structuring the party scene.

Cocaine Use in Europe – A Multi-Centre Study

An increase in the use of cocaine and crack in several parts of Europe has raised the question whether this trend is similar to that of the USA in the 1980s. However, research in the field of cocaine use in Europe has been only sporadic. Therefore, a European multi-centre and multi-modal project was designed to study specific aspects of cocaine and crack use in Europe, in order to develop guidelines for public health strategies. Data on prevalence rates were analysed for the general population and for specific subgroups. Despite large differences between countries in the prevalence of cocaine use in the general population, most countries show an increase in the last few years. The highest rate with a lifetime prevalence of 5.2% was found for the United Kingdom, although with a plateau effect around the year 2000. With regard to specific subgroups, three groups seem to show a higher prevalence than the general population: (1) youth, especially in the party scene; (2) socially marginalized groups, such as homeless and prostitutes or those found in open drug scenes; (3) opiate-dependent patients in maintenance treatment who additionally use cocaine. Specific strategies need to be developed to address problematic cocaine use in these subgroups.

An alternative approach for defining the boundaries of ‘party families’: examples from the Israeli extreme right‐wing party scene

For many years the ‘party family’ concept has been utilised by scholars for the purpose of classifying political parties across both countries and time. Like many other concepts in political science, the ‘party family’ idea is widely used, yet has suffered from a certain level of ambiguity. In this study, we try to clarify and re‐emphasise the importance of the ‘party family’ concept. We do so by offering an integrative approach for the classification of ‘party families’. This approach brings together two different theoretical schools (the ideological and the sociological approaches) for classifying ‘party families’, and also combines various methodologies (qualitative content analysis, ecological analysis and survey‐based quantitative analysis) as essential tools for defining ‘party families’. The deeply polarised party system in Israel, and especially the expanding extreme right‐wing ‘party family’ in the country, serve as our case study. The decision to focus only on one political system is meant to illustrate the importance of the ‘party family’ concept, not only for its common use as a tool in the comparative classification of parties across countries and time but also for the study of single‐party systems which are characterised by multi‐partism or polarised pluralism.

Through the Highball Glass

Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Postwar America. By Lori Rotskoff. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 336 pages. $45 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). In reading Lori Rotskoff's Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Postwar America, I found myself haunted by a scene from a film whose release coincided with the book's publication, Todd Haynes's homage to 1950s melodrama, Far from Heaven (2002). In it, the sparkling facade of a suburban cocktail party is shattered when the host, who drinks to dull the pain of his losing battle against homosexual desire, begins verbally abusing his long-suffering wife. The heroine—whose plans for the party have throughout the film signified her desperate efforts to shore up their crumbling marriage and idyllic image as "Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech"—moves swiftly to smooth over the incident, chiding, "Darling, don't you think you've already had enough?" even as she bustles to refresh her guests' cocktails. The scene crystallizes the key historical contradictions anatomized in Rotskoff's fascinating study of alcohol and marriage in postwar America: the simultaneous glamorization of social drinking and pathologization of "problem" drinking, the construction of alcoholism as symptom of a deeper crisis in masculinity, and the demand that the alcoholic's wife both preserve [End Page 489] the facade of normalcy and subordinate her own needs to her husband's therapeutic process. While alcohol plays only a supporting role in the film's dramatization of the rift between suburban ideals and painful realities, Love on the Rocks brings such moments into sharp focus, using the intertwined discourses of drink, alcoholism, and recovery as lenses through which to examine the larger ideological contradictions of postwar America. Rotskoff mines an impressive archive of historical evidence—from the professional discourses of psychologists, physicians, and social workers, to popular fiction and film, to the internal records of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Al-Anon. Building upon the now-familiar association of consumer culture and therapeutic discourse, Rotskoff argues that alcoholism emerged as "the primary, even paradigmatic illness of overindulgence by the 1950s" (234). Moreover, she makes a compelling case that examining such discourses of individual pathology and dysfunction can help us better understand the ideals and norms of the dominant culture, since the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like alcoholism reveal implicit norms about "healthy" masculinity, marriage, and family life. As models of "problem drinking" shifted from a moralizing discourse of "sin" targeted at working-class and immigrant others to a therapeutic discourse of "sickness" focused on white, native-born, middle-class family men, Rotskoff suggests, discourses of alcoholism and recovery redefined the white middle-class family no longer as an unquestioned norm but rather as an institution in crisis, wracked with contradictions that threatened to destroy it from within. A lucid, insightful, and richly documented cultural history, Love on the Rocks makes a valuable contribution to the growing scholarly and popular interest in "the darker underside of domestic life during the mid-twentieth century" (8).1 As the cocktail party scene from Far from Heaven suggests, postwar attitudes toward alcohol were deeply divided between an increasingly pathologized disease model of "problem drinking" and a normalization and glamorization of "social drinking" as a "tension reliever," "social lubricant," and hallmark of modernity (62). Post-repeal consumer culture celebrated heterosocial drinking—from the after-work highball to the suburban cocktail party—as a natural release from workaday pressures and as a pleasant ritual of companionate marriage and domesticity. At the same time, the figure of the solitary problem drinker provided the very standard against which "moderate" and "social" [End Page 490] drinking could be measured. Moreover, the emergent "disease model" of alcoholism, in striking contrast with the temperance-era indictments of "demon rum," located the problem not in the substance consumed but in the psyche of the problem drinker. Echoing Warren Susman's distinction between the culture of "character" and the culture of "personality," Rotskoff demonstrates that problem drinking was increasingly...

“Flirting with Boundaries”: A Professor's Narrative Tale Contemplating Research of the Wild Side

This narrative explores some of the boundaries that ethnographers may encounter as they contemplate the viability of studying their own behavior in risqué social settings. The author examines his personal journal entries written about his participation in the downtown college party scene—the wild side—in Athens, Georgia, for ways that his professional identity, race, gender, age, sexuality, and marital status place him in a precarious professional position. His statuses negate the viability of formally studying college students' social behavior because his own behavior as a participant-observer would flirt with, rub against, or cross social, administrative, or legal boundaries. The author concludes that ethnographers' narratives expose human vulnerabilities, but it is these vulnerabilities that give the narratives their richness for explaining the workings of broader society.

Kulturelle Einrichtungen als Impulsgeber für Stadtentwicklung?

Culture is an important issue for urban development—it is the epitome of urbanity. Culture may contribute to a town's reputation far beyond its immediate environs. Culture as a location factor is as important as culture as a catalyst for urban development. Cultural activities have been a significant factor in the development of Zurich West, a major booming development area of Zurich/Switzerland. At first, cultural activities prospered in limited niches on former industrial sites—they were expanded ant took root and finally even the “Schauspielhaus,” the city's main theater, created a cultural center with new stages in a large ship construction shed. For some years, the development of Zurich West, promoted by the city through cooperative development planning, took on dynamic characteristics, particularly with regard to cultural utilization. Today, Zurich West also profits from an amazing diversity of culture—outstanding contemporary art galleries and museums in an old brewery building, popular culture at the Cinemax Center, a musical theater at the former Maag factory site, and last but not least the striking cultural center in the ship construction shed. These cultural facilities are supplemented by a variety of restaurants of all kinds and fluctuating locations supporting the flourishing party scene. Zurich West's unique characteristic is its multifacetted cultural scene.

Gay Men, Lesbians and Substances of Abuse and the “Club and Circuit Party Scene”

Abstract Many researchers believe that substance use rates are higher among gay men and lesbians than in the general population. In particular, recreational drugs, used as part of weekend and night “life” are particularly popular. In recent years these so called “club drugs” have become a regular part of many gay men and women's social life. MDMA, better known as “Ecstasy,” is a synthetic amphetamine derivative, with some unique physiological properties. MDMA can induce depression and panic attacks in those who use it. A serious concern is the potential that MDMA may cause long lasting, even permanent neuropsychiatric damage, in particular to serotonin neurons. Ketamine, “Special K,” is a dissasociative anesthetic which induces feelings of unreality, and may even cause catato-nia (a “K hole”). GHB is a naturally occurring biological substance which has effects similar to alcohol. Modest doses can cause sleep, and coma. There have been a growing number of reports of fatal overdoses associated with GHB. The...

Supporting conditions for the survival of extreme right‐wing parties in Israel

The bitter failure of the extreme right‐wing parties in the Israeli national elections of 1999 led many to believe in the decline of right‐wing extremism in Israeli politics. This article argues that the extreme right has not only not declined but has, in fact, expanded. This premise arises from broader definitions of right‐wing extremism, analysis of the Israeli extreme right and the implementation of a comparative perspective. Furthermore, the article seeks to explain the success and expansion of this political camp and thus offers a ‘pyramid shaped’ explanatory model. The factors introduced in the model start with the very basic foundations of the polity ‐ the political culture, proceeding to the social level, with discussion on the foundations of social cleavages. Towards the top of the pyramid, we address narrower factors ‐structural and political ‐ and at the summit are variables such as the party scene and finally party organization.

Gay men, lesbians and substances of abuse and the “club and circuit party scene”: What clinicians should know

Gay men, lesbians and substances of abuse and the “club and circuit party scene”: What clinicians should know

Raves, drugs, dealing and driving: qualitative data from a West Australian sample

AbstractThis qualitative paper from a study of 83 people who attended raves or dance parties in Perth, Western Australia describes what respondents saw as the attractions and less good things about the rave/dance party scene, their views of the place of drug use within the scene, experiences obtaining and providing drugs and addresses the issue of driving while intoxicated. Non‐drug factors such as lighting, music, dancing, the non‐violent atmosphere, sense of social cohesion and relative lack of predatory male sexual behaviour were the major attractions of the scene, yet it was noted that these were enhanced by the effects of dance drugs, especially ecstasy. There were dual concerns that younger participants were at increased risk of drug‐related harm and brought unwanted drug‐related media attention and disrepute on the scene. The study supports the view that raves are not ‘drug supermarkets’, with most respondents obtaining their drugs many days before the event. A substantial minority of respondents described travelling to or from raves with drivers who were drug‐affected. Less than half those who discussed the issue said they considered whether the driver was under the influence. This is of concern and has implications for policing practices, peer education and rave‐related materials.

Representation deficit in a new democracy: theoretical considerations and the Hungarian case

In harmony with recent literature the article combines different approaches to describe how representation has become more complex while also more ambiguous in the process of democratic transition. First, with respect to parliament, the author argues that still a public bias prevails towards “direct representation” in Hungary (i.e. people assume to realize personal or local interests with the help of their MPs). In line with this, MPs—however strongly they are tied to parties—seem to pay particular attention to constituency representation although they are reluctant to report on their connections with interest groups or other interest organizations. Second, regarding the party dimension, it is found that although the national party scene in Hungary has remained unchanged in the past seven years, enormous electoral uncertainties and representation deficit prevail in its background and electoral linkages are weak. Parties are not well organized externally as demonstrated by membership figures and by the number of local organizations; internally, the major intra-party events (like candidate selection or leadership election) only vaguely reveal the representative dimension. Finally, experiences in Hungary thus far prove that the responsible party model cannot be applied at all: party programmes do not include clear policies and even if so, the policies often change during the electoral cycle.

The life of the party: festive vision in modern fiction

Critics have long recognised the links between community festivals and literary art. comedies and tragedies of the ancient Greeks grew out of their festivals. Anglo-Saxon poetry was often read at festive occasions. And, as such critics as Northrop Frye and C L Barber have shown, the structural patterns of Renaissance drama are inseparable from their festive origins. In The Life of the Party. Christopher Ames argues that the private party has become the festival of modern culture and has served as a shaping force in the fiction of many important 20th-century writers. Drawing upon and extending the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, Ames contends that parties have inherited much of the spirit and social function of earlier community wide festivals and carnivals. Showing how the growth of the modern novel parallels the emergence of the private party as the main form of modern celebration. Ames examines the centrality of party scenes and the festive vision in works by several British and American authors. In the experimental fiction of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the mingling of many voices at the party challenges both social and narrative decorum. For F Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green, the party becomes a microcosm of a decadent society and informs a festive vision characteristic of the literature that emerged between the wars. And in postmodern works by Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, the novelists celebrate the disruptive and liberating force of parties even as they illustrate the dangers of chaos through scenes of the party-gone-wild. With its creative applications of literary theory and ethnographic studies of festival, The Life of the Party demonstrates the persistence of the festive vision and its significance in the evolution of modern fiction.

The Changing Party Scene in West Germany and the Consequences for Stable Democracy

In the 1980's the West Germany party system finds itself in a new stage of development which bodes well for the continued long-term development of the second republic. Drawing on research from the comparative historical development of party systems and democratic regimes as well as from analysis of the recent elections, it is suggested that the concentration process in the party system of 1949–1983 has evolved into a more dispersed pattern with predominantly positive consequences for the Bonn democracy. The rise of the Greens, the gradual decline of the SPD, and the center-right coalition of CDU/CSU/FDP are analyzed from the standpoint of their contribution to stable and effective democracy. The nature of the coalition dynamics on both sides of the right-left spectrum are discussed with the conclusion that while West Germany is predominantly a Parteiendemokratie, the new forms of participation, the further development of pluralism, and the increased competition of ideas make it a democracy governed essentially by parliamentary parties yet more responsive to extraparliamentary forces.

Cinema Sings the Blues

Parallels between film and jazz are numerous. Both, ironically four-letter words, were born and nurtured on the fringes of proper society during the decades following the turn of the century. Both, after torturous childhoods battling charges of illegitimacy, finally found respectability among Presidential recognitions and college curricula. And both, according to today's prophesizing pundits, are destined to vault proudly into the future as America's prime contributions to twentieth-century art. Other parallels stem from each medium's technical base. At first dependent on physical/mechanical means of production, each has faced major confrontations with increasingly expanded and sophisticated webs of electronic technology. For film, the double jolts of synchronized sound and television forced radical rewirings of the medium's aesthetic and economic premises. For jazz, the impact of radio and successive waves of new recording modes had similar impact. Today, and tomorrow, film is squaring off with lasers, cassettes and discs; jazz, in the meantime, is attempting to incorporate synthesizers, modulators and multi-track recorders. While film and jazz have traveled along parallel tracks, essentially, their courses have been separate. However, there are intersections where the two have met head on. These junctures are the focus of this essay which is only intended as a provisional map for future expeditions. Film and jazz first met in the darkened, smoke-filled chambers of Bijou Dreams during the first decade of this century.1 Sitting beneath cataracts of flickering images, pianists ragged and riffed through the pop and standard tunes of the day. Sometimes their efforts helped underscore the drama. Mostly, however, their improvised medleys served to fill up the aural void and cover up the wisecracks and whirs from the projector.2 As the need for supportive musical backgrounds became more apparent, ragtime passages came to be reserved for nightclub and party scenes. In recognition of this ability to indicate time, place and situation, silent film mentor Erno Rapee included sixty-two Rags in his comprehensive handbook, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures.3 After the hardships of World War I, Americans wanted to kick up their heels and dance on into the night. As often as not, what they turned to was jazz. In particular, they sought the kind of musical exuberance found in the