Political Contagion Research Articles

Far-right domino: Towards an integrated framework of political contagion

Predominant theories explain the electoral success of far right (FR) parties since the late 1990s within national boundaries. We offer an alternative approach to prevailing cross-national comparisons, by examining patterns of transnational diffusion through a novel integrated analytical framework of transmission of FR electoral habits and party strategies in Europe. Using a new regional database of national and European parliament elections, spanning 7,652 electoral outcomes from 2000 to 2017, we find evidence of spillovers of both FR vote and party positions. Contagion takes place between geographically and culturally proximate countries. Positive transmission is carried through foreign contextual factors in the short run and voting externalities in the long run. Impulse responses indicate that the transmission peaks 4–5 years after an unanticipated shock in foreign FR vote shares or policy positions. Our findings have policy implications for countering xenophobia, right-wing radicalism, and extremism: spillovers entail strong voting externalities which render national policies ineffective, highlighting the need for European-level policies, which can internalize these externalities.

Brexit Domino? The Political Contagion Effects of Voter-endorsed Withdrawals from International Institutions

This article examines the systemic implications of the growing popular backlash against international cooperation and analyzes how voter-endorsed attempts to withdraw from international institutions reverberate abroad. Observing other countries’ disintegration experiences allows voters to better assess the feasibility and desirability of such withdrawals. More positive withdrawal experiences encourage exit-support abroad, whereas negative experiences are likely to have a deterring effect. These contagion effects will be conditioned by the availability of information and voters’ willingness to learn. The article empirically examines this argument for the case of Brexit. It leverages original survey data from 58,959 EU-27 Europeans collected in six survey waves during the Brexit withdrawal negotiations and from a two-wave survey of 2,241 Swiss voters conducted around the first Brexit extension in spring 2019. It finds both encouragement and deterrence effects, which are bigger when respondents pay attention to Brexit and are dampened by motivated reasoning.

Political Contagion and Electoral Populism: Content Analysis of Campaign speeches in United Kingdom and United States

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the definition of populism as a political communication style and to the identification of the populist’s stylistic features and elements as a mode of persuasive communication that has been recently adopted by leaders of mainstream political parties. This research intends to explore how to measure the employment of the populist style of political communication. This research investigated to what extent this style was adopted by Hilary Clinton and David Cameron in their latest campaign discourses in 2016; comparing their speeches before and after the rise of the populist zeitgeist. Two main theories were applied the rational choice theory which describes how political actors apply a behavioral rule in by deciding what tools or techniques are used to reach to specific goals and purposes such as winning votes in elections and the theory of behavioral contagion explains why politicians would act in a populistic style consciously or even unconsciously.Quantitative content analysis was carried out to measure the intensity of populist communication. A purposive sampling was conducted in which speeches were selected five months before the voting day; one speech per month and speeches that contained controversial themes were selected for the sake of covering a diversity of issues and topics that are of people’s concerns. In total twenty speeches were analyzed, ten for Clinton (five from USPE in 2008 and another five from 2016). As for Cameron’s speeches five were selected from GE in 2010 and five other speeches from 2016 Brexit referendum elections. Both candidates have been influenced into adopting the populist communication style. The thesis proved that there is a positive correlation between the successful electoral performance of populist actors and the adoption of the populist style of communication by mainstream politicians in their campaign discourses.

Radical Contagion and Healthy Literature in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the revolution in France served as a catalyst for heavily allegorical political rhetoric, and the idea that radical politics were contagious became commonplace in conservative writing and oratory. This political contagion is described by Blackwood's as raging through the ranks of the rural poor as late as 1830. Confronted by this threat, Blackwood's promoted itself alternatively as a stimulant or as a cure for the metaphorical poison or infection that radical publications were seen to be spreading amongst the poor. Blackwood's also strove to maintain the political health of its readership by identifying healthy literature for its readers and the lower order. This article analyzes Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine's application of the vocabulary of disease and contagion to radical politics and publications, and considers questions of taste, class, and Britishness in discussions of healthy reading habits.

'Unfinished Business': Ethnic Complementarities and the Political Contagion of Conflict and Peace in Gujarat

I examine how the historical legacies of inter-ethnic complementarity and competition interact with contemporary electoral competition in shaping patterns of ethnic violence. Using local comparisons within Gujarat, a single Indian state known for both its non-violent local traditions and for widespread ethnic pogroms in 2002, I provide evidence that where political competition was focused upon towns where ethnic groups have historically competed, there was a rise in the propensity for ethnic rioting and increased electoral support for the incumbent party complicit in the violence. However, where political competition was focused in towns that historically enjoyed inter-ethnic complementarities, there were fewer ethnic riots, and these towns also voted against the incumbent. These historic legacies proved to be important predictors of the identity of the winner even in very close electoral races. I argue that these results reflect the role local inter-ethnic economic relations can play in altering the nature and the benefits of political campaigns that encourage ethnic violence.

Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

The outbreak narrative, which tells the evolving story of disease emergence, is the central theme of this book by Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke University. Wald discusses and challenges outbreak narratives that use a formulaic plot line: identification of an emerging infection, discussion of global networks through which diseases travel, and a chronicle of the epidemiologic work that results in disease containment. The expectation created by that formula, Wald contends, has at times hampered our ability to address such emerging diseases as HIV infection because we distort or exaggerate the story to fit the formula. Possibly more important, she claims, is the development of the outbreak narrative in the late 19th century, which coincided with emergence of urban sociology and the concept of social contagion. During this time, circulation of ideas and attitudes turned individuals into social groups and cultures, and terms such as contagion and infection entered lay language. Wald describes Mary Mallon, “Typhoid Mary,” as the prototypical healthy carrier whose outbreak narrative led to a new way of thinking about social relationships and social responsibility. Her status as an immigrant contributed to society’s blaming and stigmatizing immigrants because of their association with communicable disease (especially venereal disease), a stigma reanimated in the 1980s with the emergence of HIV and its most infamous carrier, Patient Zero. Wald’s analysis of disease emergence also notes its simultaneous evolution with social, religious, and political changes. The viral metaphor was applied to biologic warfare in the 1950s and expanded to describe political contagion. According to J. Edgar Hoover, “the bloody virus of communism” was spread by agents (carriers) trying to “infiltrate and colonize this country.” The microbe is the worthy foe in epidemiologists’ stories, which can be seen as analogous to good detective stories that have happy endings and draw attention to urgent problems. However, Wald warns, what makes the story appealing can distort articulation of the problem. The danger, she believes, lies in the storytelling, not in the epidemiology or laboratory science. Wald also notes that epidemiology’s shift away from infectious diseases beginning in the 1960s removed the heroic edge from the field. She writes, “Sociology did not make for risk, exciting disease detectives.” Wald is wary of the limitations of the outbreak narrative and advocates a model for global health based on social justice. The book is academic in presentation, and Wald’s conclusions are not always compelling. For example, her discussion of epidemiologic horror in books and movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers will intrigue some readers and put off others who might find this analysis extreme and detracting from the serious tone of the rest of the book. Still, the thesis involving the outbreak narrative is interesting, and readers intrigued by the influence of epidemiology on emerging infections as well as its broader implications to society and the world will find this book worthwhile.

Political Contagion and Party Affiliation: A Case Study of Adults and Adolescents in Scotland

Political Contagion and Party Affiliation: A Case Study of Adults and Adolescents in Scotland

Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism: The United States and Weimar Germany

The United States and Weimar Germany One of the most salient features of an innovative work published in the I96os is the discussion by William McPhee and Jack Ferguson of immunization.I This construct may be viewed as a specific extension of general learning theory. People who participate across time in an electoral system develop partisan commitments as they grow older. As these commitments become entrenched with age and with reinforcing primary-group relations, voters should become increasingly immunized from political appeals arising outside of that part of the electoral mainstream to which they have become committed. Thus occurs the authors' paradox: For politics of a relatively moderate center to dominate the system, the individuals and groups in it must acquire immoderate political commitments. A major contributor to this pattern is the family's role in the political socialization of the young. There is a strong and well-documented tendency, particularly in the United States, for partisan or tendence identification to be transmitted from parents (especially fathers) to their children. The inverse of political immunization, of course, is political contagion: the vulnerability of an electorate or one of its major elements to capture by a radical movement arising outside of the political system. Converse argues on the basis of survey evidence that time is a crucial component of stability in any system of electoral politics.2 He concludes that the longer an electoral system or political regime endures, the greater must be the shocks that would suffice to overthrow it. Or, stated from a different perspective, the greatest danger to a democratic electoral system occurs in its infancy, i.e., in a period when attachments are still relatively feeble for a very large part of the total electorate.