Political Debate Research Articles

Polarization and hate speech based on fuzzy logic and transformers: the case of the 2023 Spanish general elections

ABSTRACT Affective polarization in the digital debate of the Spanish presidential election campaign (2023), following the sudden call of the Spanish president on July 23, was measured. Using transformers, topics were detected, and sentiment analysis techniques were applied in the political debate during the elections to measure the emotional valence of the debate. The topics that dominate most of the debate are Candidates (n1 = 17170) and Opposition (n3 = 15327). These topics also show the highest typical polarization deviances. Based on affective polarization, a polarization measure (JDJ) grounded in the fuzzy sets was applied. The topic activism has the highest polarization value, while the topic of voting has the lowest. This analysis highlights a dichotomy that defines the Spanish political reality: the positive image of conventional political participation in the face of the rejection of collective action processes.

Shaping the Narrative: Examining News Coverage of Voter ID Laws in the United States

ABSTRACT This study is the first to examine US news coverage of voter ID laws. Voter ID requirements are central to ongoing political debates about voting procedures. Despite rare cases of voter fraud by impersonation and the strong polarization over voter ID among partisan elites, there is a surprising broad bipartisan support for voter ID among the American public. Using a range of inductive computational content analysis methods, we analyse news coverage of voter ID requirements from 2013 to 2023. We find coverage differs by outlets political leaning and demonstrate a link between news media discourse and elite framing on the issue. Donald Trump’s voter fraud allegations, however, appear to have substantially shaped left-leaning media coverage from 2016, raising concerns around whether this might have helped amplify electoral conspiracies, instead of offering the public alternative ways of thinking about voter ID laws.

The Scramble for the West? Debunking the Myths around Migration from Africa and the Global South

Irregular migrants’ flows have, for several years now, been making the news headlines and are at the core of political debates. In a context of polycrisis—characterized by the post COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and its devastating impacts; the disruption of labor markets caused by the fourth industrial revolution and artificial intelligence; or geopolitical tensions in different parts of the globe that threaten the livelihoods of many communities—the desire to move from the developing and emerging world to the West can increase.

National identity politics and postcolonial sovereignty games: Greenland, Denmark, and the European Union

The relationship between Greenland and the EU is to a great degree influenced by the image of Greenland being on the path towards independence from Denmark. In both countries, identity discourse idealizes the homogenous nation state, leaving the ‘community of the realm’ in need of a good explanation. However, attempts to explain Greenland’s continued reliance on outside help in its development towards independence continuously risk infantilizing the country. As climate changes are establishing the Arctic as a site of mineral extraction and commerce, Greenland is finding new ways of diversifying its dependence. Important in this regard is the way Greenland’s relationship to the EU is played out as a series of ‘sovereignty games’ that minimize Denmark’s role as intermediary. This book looks at changes to national identity discourse and foreign policy through four analytical strategies — identifying the core concepts of Danish and Greenlandic identity through discourse analysis; reading political debates as identity-political negotiations; using qualitative interviews with key actors to see how clashing identity discourses are managed in diplomatic practice; and approaching legal texts as the ‘frozen’ outcome of these ‘sovereignty games’. In conclusion, the book draws up scenarios for how the expiry date of the ‘community of the realm’ may be extended – by finding new metaphors that will facilitate equality, and by employing Danish diplomacy to make Greenland less dependent on Denmark.

Constructing Disraeli in Twentieth-Century Conservatism

Abstract Since the 1960s, when historians first dethroned the dominant view of Benjamin Disraeli as a Tory democrat and social reformer, his association with an interventionist, socially inclusive Conservatism has largely been considered an exercise in political myth-making. This focus on the Disraeli ‘myth’ has tended to obscure the myriad and substantive ways in which Disraeli’s life and works were interpreted and put to work in Conservative ideological debates and political practice in the twentieth century, reducing them to social policy and state intervention in the economy and overlooking the lineages of his political career in Conservative political economy debates, conceptions of the nation and the constitution, and imperial and foreign policy thinking. This article examines interpretations of Disraeli, and how his legacy was constructed, by conservative biographers, historians and public intellectuals from the decades after his death until the historiography of the 1960s. It traces how Disraeli was memorialised and celebrated in the Conservative movement and popular culture; how his life and works were interpreted for popular audiences by an important group of conservative historians in the inter-war period; and how Disraeli was mobilised in Conservative and Unionist Party debates on tariff reform, social reform, the nation and empire, concluding in the aftermath of the Second World War, when his legacy and statecraft were consistently evoked in Conservative debates on post-war Britain. It demonstrates that Disraeli was interpreted in much more diverse ways, and with more diverse political objectives, than the standard readings of the Disraelian tradition have hitherto appreciated.

An Analysis of the Religious Solidarity Discourses Regarding the Syrian Refugees in Türkiye

Following the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, a massive migration of Syrian nationals to Türkiye has been a significant phenomenon. This situation has become a problematic issue, as the massive presence of Syrian refugees in Türkiye has become an important part of the domestic political agenda. The politicization of the refugee issue has long since presented a duality of conflicting opinions among the Turkish society, whereas it has led to political debates between pro-government and opposition groups. In light of these developments, Turkish government elites have produced discourses of religious solidarity with the aim of providing tolerance and social acceptance for Syrian refugees and thus legitimizing the open door policy of the government toward these refugees. The aim of this study is to analyze and categorize the themes that constitute the basis of the discourses of religious solidarity regarding Syrian refugees in Türkiye. In this context, a second aim is to demonstrate how these themes have been welcomed in a positive manner by their adoption and recognition by Turkish society. To these aims, governmental discourses of religious solidarity and a sample consisting of 980 posts on the digital platform X have been analyzed by using the critical discourse analysis technique and have been categorized under two discursive themes, namely the ensar–muhacir analogy and the emphases on the Ottoman legacy. The conformity between these discourses and the government’s ideological orientation and the degree to which these discourses have been welcomed and adopted by the Turkish society have been discussed in detail.

Different impacts of similar crises? The financial and COVID-19 crisis in border and non-border regions

ABSTRACT The last two decades have seen an increase in the number and intensity of shocks and crises. The financial crisis of 2008/2009 and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020/2021 have led to economic recessions. During the COVID-19 crisis, national borders and the impact of crises in border regions were often the subject of political debate and media coverage. Border-regional resilience has only been discussed in the academic discourse for the last few years. This article uses a diverse set of socio-economic indicators to examine the (border)–regional resilience of German regions in the wake of the financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. A distinction is made between border and non-border regions, urban and rural regions, and regions in the old and new German federal states. The results show, first, that the COVID-19 crisis had a stronger socio-economic impact than the financial crisis. Second, border regions tended to be more affected by the financial crisis than non-border regions. Surprisingly, this was not the case for the border-specific COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, the study shows that it is not so much the border location that determines regional resilience, but rather the socio-economic level, the degree of urbanization and the associated embeddedness in global networks.

Toward effective protection of victims of human trafficking in mixed migration flows: referral mechanisms shaped on individual need. The Italian experience and the European perspective

An overview of emerging trends on trafficking of human beings in Italy shows not only an extremely heterogeneous phenomenon but also a complex overlapping of experiences and need of protection of every single victim. In the context of mixed migration flows, persons reaching Italy through the Central Mediterranean and the Balkan routes have often experienced or are at risk of trafficking, and they also apply for international protection upon arrival. Legal categories such as “victims,” “asylum seekers,” and “refugees” are increasingly interconnected and not exhaustive in describing individual experiences and multifaceted vulnerabilities. Against this background, ensuring early identification and assistance for victims of trafficking among asylum seekers is extremely relevant. In Italy, this has led to the development of good practices aimed at implementing the coordination between the asylum and the anti-trafficking systems. In particular, specific Guidelines for Asylum authorities have been adopted to preliminarily identify potential victims of trafficking within the asylum procedure and enable their effective access to protection measures. To comply with specific provisions of the European Trafficking Directive and its transposition into the Italian legal framework, the Guidelines have created a referral mechanism among the asylum authorities and the anti-trafficking system that is unique in the European context. For this reason, the present contribution aims at describing this good practice, its implementation and effects—also at the juridical level—and its limits. Indeed, after the adoption of the instrument, a higher recognition rate of international protection for victims of trafficking has been registered in Italy, both at the administrative and judicial levels; asylum seekers and refugees have also increased their access to the specific protection program for trafficking survivors. In general, the system has strengthened its capacity to fulfill the legal obligation of identifying victims through a multi-agency approach. On the other hand, the ability to conduct screening and preliminary identification of victims of trafficking among asylum seekers is still limited to the “victim model” in terms of gender (women) and form of exploitation (sexual), and to certain stages of the asylum procedure (the first instance before the asylum authorities). With reference to this latter, a comprehensive protection response at the borders is missing despite the political debate on sea and land arrivals to Italy and the recent introduction of border procedures for the assessment of asylum applications. Given the geographical and political centrality of the south-Mediterranean situation in the current migration agenda, the goal of this paper is to analyze the Italian experience on referral mechanisms among trafficking and asylum as an experience that would help to shape future European prospects. The ongoing evolution of mixed migration flows—with particular reference to secondary movement across European countries—and the revised European Directive on trafficking in persons impose the promotion of a reflection on referral mechanisms with a transnational perspective enabling effective protection and the meeting of specific human rights.

Beyond coercion: Weaker states' domestic political motivations for political clauses in preferential trade agreements

AbstractPolitical scientists have debated under what circumstances countries choose to integrate sovereignty‐limiting provisions into their international agreements. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that powerful countries bully weak countries into political acquiescence, weak countries can deliberately adopt such provisions as a deterrence against potential non‐democratic takeovers. Using a novel dataset on political provisions in all preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed between 1945 and 2018, we find that the greater, the weaker countries' risk of non‐democratic takeovers, the more likely they are to adopt democracy‐promoting and rule‐of‐law provisions in their PTAs. This finding suggests that a government's desire to tie the opposition's hands can also lead it to tie its own hands. Our findings have implications for not only the scholarly and political debates on commitments in international treaties but also the growing literature on non‐trade issues in PTAs.

From roadmap to regulation: will there be a transatlantic approach to governing artificial intelligence?

ABSTRACT The transformative nature and accelerating pace of development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have generated frenzied political debate and urgent calls for regulation. The European Union’s (EU) AI Act is one of the earliest, most ambitious, legally binding efforts to regulate high-risk AI systems. This article argues that the thrust of the EU’s focus on ‘ethical and secure’ AI and its first-mover regulatory status have helped to foster transatlantic cooperation on AI governance. To probe this assertion, the article analyzes the ethical underpinnings and key provisions of the AI Act and compares them to policy developments in the United States. The analysis provides preliminary evidence of policy similarities across the Atlantic from an alignment of ethical concerns to a shared understanding of the risks and associated need for common guidelines and standards in the AI sector. Tracing agreements within the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) suggests further cooperation and relative congruence in the EU and US approaches to AI.

Hansard as Literary Reception: The Uses of Poetry in Australian Political Debate, 1901–1950

ABSTRACT Hansard—Australia’s record of parliamentary debate—might seem an unlikely site for literary analysis. It is, however, a publisher of original poetry and its criticism a forum for the performance and citation of poetry, and a complex archive of literary reception in Australia since Federation. In this paper, we discuss our findings in relation to the uses of poetry in the Australian Hansard from 1901 to 1950, focusing on how the work of two settler Australian poet-parliamentarians, J. K. McDougall and John Cash Neild, is put to use in parliamentary speeches as recorded in Hansard. Together, these examples indicate that poetry is not only deployed for a range of heightened rhetorical effects on the floor of parliament; it is also part of the fabric of routine political debate, put to a range of adversarial and racist purposes, and part of the wider history of literary publication and reception.

Crimscapes. Kulturanthropologische Perspektiven auf Politiken der Kriminalisierung

At the end of the last century, criminalisation has become a globally accepted mode of governing social problems. Using two policy fields, sea rescue in the Mediterranean and combating hate speech on the internet, we propose a cultural anthropological perspective on the punitive turn and the politics of criminalisation. Using the concept of crimscapes, we describe the dynamic landscapes that unfold around criminal justice interventions, in which new figures of threat and vulnerability emerge, moral orders are restructured and new constellations of actors and practices are brought to the fore. By relating different policy fields, understood as local articulations of global dynamics of criminalisation, the concept also points to the ambivalences of this policy, which can also have an enabling and protective effect alongside exclusionary, stratifying and punitive effects. This underlines the need for critical cultural anthropological research that highlights the ambivalences and contradictions of criminalisation and contributes to an informed critique that is not based solely on normative evaluations, but can also draw attention to unintended effects and contradictions in political debates.

Norman Gash: Political Historian

AbstractThis article commemorates the 40th anniversary of the publication of Lord Liverpool by Norman Gash (1912–2009). It considers Gash as a historian who both wrote about 19th‐century politics and expressed political views of his own. These views became increasingly prominent in the 1980s, during Margaret Thatcher's period of office. Thatcher's unexpected public endorsement of Lord Liverpool was reflected in Gash's open support for Thatcher's economic policies in the face of internal party critics, including those who appealed to the legacy of Benjamin Disraeli. Far from being uncomfortable about Thatcher's radicalism, as is sometimes argued, Gash used a series of newspaper interventions to accommodate Thatcherism within Conservative Party history. This drew favourable analogies between Thatcher and Liverpool, but more especially with Sir Robert Peel. Gash did not abandon academic scholarship for public commentary during the 1980s, but at no period in his life was he as willing to join in contemporary political debate as the years in which he was writing and researching Lord Liverpool.

From Valuable Merchandise to Violent Rebels

From the moment the Dutch West Indian Company formally entered the slave trade in 1637, the Dutch periodical press consistently carried reports on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. This article offers a long-term analysis of this coverage in the Dutch Republic, showing for the first time how the representation of slavery developed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It demonstrates, first, that through the periodical press, knowledge of slavery was more widely spread in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century than is often assumed. The consistent, if intermittent, newspaper coverage meant that – well before the debates on abolition emerged – Dutch readers would be familiar with stereotypes of enslaved Africans as valuable merchandise or violent rebels. Second, this article argues that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the periodical press offered its readers an ambiguous and contradictory image of slavery, contributing, on the one hand, to a public discourse underpinning slavery by depicting enslaved Africans as violent rebels, while at the same time covering political debates on the abolition of slavery.

Wars of Words: Early Modern Piracy in the Caribbean

War requires the collision of two or more forces. It implies the ideological invention of an “enemy.” The changing faces of that enemy are fueled by entrenched or emergent powers bent upon spreading their hegemonic supremacy and legitimate order over material and conceptual spaces. In this dynamic, the “pirate” enters the stage as the classical hostis humani generis (“enemy of humankind”). However, the classification and identity of the pirate are both fluid and contingent, informing discourses of warfare and challenging the limits of categories related to order and legitimacy. The following three-part essay traces the correlation between war and the making and remaking of “the pirate” and how the figure of the pirate was fundamental to the establishment of specific hegemonies while examining the relationship between the varying discourses of the enemy and the concept of legitimate wars in the early modern period. The first part studies the legal and political debates around the concepts of “just war,” “just enemy,” and “sovereignty” in the context of the Anglo-Spanish War (c1586-1604). The second section explores the aftermath of said war that contributed to the development of a new nomenclature of piracy in the Caribbean region and the establishment of sedentary and commercial societies living at the margins of European wars. Moving to the 17th and 18th centuries, the third part introduces the figure of Miguel Enríquez, a Caribbean-born black corsair, a character located at the intersection of war and commerce, away from previous paradigms of “just war” and “just enemy.”

Navigating the margins of the (education) system: Spanish young people in a post-economic crisis context

ABSTRACT The relationship between material deprivation, economic poverty and education exclusion has been a focus of attention in numerous political and academic debates. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between structural positions – and material disadvantages – and young people’s educational trajectories (especially, educational exclusion and early school leaving processes), as well as the role of schooling institutions and subjective dispositions as mediating factors. The study, centred on a working-class city in Spain, draws on qualitative methods: semi-structured interviews with key informants (n = 26) and life-stories of young people in a situation of or at risk for Early school leaving (ESL, n = 25). Our results point to a complex, contextual, and non-deterministic relationship between structural positions and educational trajectories and to the key role played by schooling institutions and subjective dispositions as mediators of that relationship. Finally, we conclude this paper reflecting on the role of the State in reducing ESL-processes.

Religious Unification, Regional Divergence: Exploring Multifaceted Linguistic Practices and Identities among the Israeli Druze and the Druze Community in the Golan Heights

This study delves into a comparative analysis of language and identity within two distinct Druze communities: those residing in the Golan Heights, who transitioned from Syrian to Israeli governance post the 1967 War, and their counterparts within Israel proper. Both communities find themselves situated as 'sandwiched' communities, with the Golan Druze caught between Israeli and Syrian nationalisms and the Israeli Druze positioned amid the dynamics of Israel and the Arabs. Given the fluid nature of collective identities, which are subject to continuous shaping by sociopolitical influences within and beyond state boundaries, this study focuses on two pivotal political debates in each community during the fieldwork period. The Israeli Druze community is primarily concerned with the Israeli-Nation State law controversy. Meanwhile, the Golan Heights Druze community is grappling with the intensifying and widely publicized speculation regarding secret negotiations between Assad's regime and Israel, which suggests that the Golan was sold to Israel rather than being a result of a 'lost war.' This study explores how these debates gradually shape the collective identities of the respective communities. The research illuminates how navigating between opposing forces leads to the emergence of novel national identities and linguistic variations within these 'sandwiched' contexts.

The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse: US Primary Debates in Cross-Lingual Online Spaces

This cross-lingual project examines how social media posts of Spanish- and English-language media impact incivility in user comments during the 2020 primary political debates in the United States. We analyzed Facebook posts of news organizations that hosted the debates and used a state-of-the-art machine-learning model to analyze the corresponding comments. Our findings reveal distinct journalistic cultures on the post-level: English-language media are significantly more likely to use interpretation while Spanish-language media employ more audience-engagement and factual reporting strategies. We argue that in order to understand incivility in social media discourse during political debates, we need to consider journalistic cultures: While interpretative reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the English-language discourse, factual reporting explains lower levels of incivility in the Spanish-language discourse. We suggest that we need to consider how features of news reporting (textual and visual) impact discourse quality directly but also indirectly via emotional arousal in comments.

The Complex Dynamics of Indigenous Education in Mid-Twentieth-Century: Ecuador as a Theater for Political Debate

Abstract Activists in Ecuador established in the 1940s what have come to be remembered as the country's first Indigenous-run bilingual schools. Or at least this is the image that their founders presented when reflecting back on their achievements years later, and what has become fixed in the minds of subsequent educators. Archival records, however, present a more complicated picture. Rather than as “Indigenous” or “bilingual,” the recently formed Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (Ecuadorean Federation of Indians) had created them as “syndicate” schools to mobilize against the racial discrimination and economic exploitation that agricultural workers faced on government-owned haciendas. In the process, organizers came into conflict with government policies that mandated the creation of public schools in rural communities and on haciendas. The competing school systems became an arena in which public policy debates were carried out with ramifications that extended to rival notions of how society should be properly organized.

Competing Models of Political Debate: Popular Representation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Meeting Hall

Competing Models of Political Debate: Popular Representation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Meeting Hall