Political Spectrum Research Articles

Criminal Offenses against voting rights

Abstract The right to choose as a political right dates back to the ancient times of humankind. The right to choose in its beginnings was in a narrow circle of people. It did not include the entire political, economic and social spectrum, but different groups, classes and interests. The saying can be that there were no real elections. Even Kosovo, in the history of its political development, dates the right to universal and equal suffrage after the Second World War. However, those elections were never free and not even based on the will of citizens to be elected and to vote. The candidates for election were the favorites of the occupying and monist power. The monistic one-party system, as such, by itself could not offer even an approximate opportunity to hold free and democratic elections. In fact, the right to free and democratic elections for the first time was sanctioned and implemented in the first elections for the Republic of Kosovo institutions (Constitutional Framework, 2001). This paper aims to explore different aspects of the complex phenomenon of criminal offenses against voting rights, in order to raise the level of treatment of this phenomenon in Kosovo’s society. The organization of free and democratic elections and their success is one of the key points of evaluation of new democracies, considering that free elections are the foundation of a democratic society. Conceiving that this process is related to the quality of life of the voter, to the perspective of society and the development of the country in general.

Who Does(n't) Target You?

Political campaigns are increasingly investing in targeted advertising on social media platforms to reach voters. Despite critical implications for citizens and elections, little is known about the targeting strategies deployed by political parties — especially in countries beyond the global north. This paper provides a comprehensive descriptive analysis of political microtargeting practices on Facebook and Instagram across 95 countries during 113 national elections. By analyzing the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, we explore targeting strategies of 54k political advertisers who ran 2.5 million ads between August 2020 and December 2022. The findings indicate that election campaigns worldwide utilize targeted advertising. Most commonly, spending is allocated towards a single targeting criterion, however, in wealthier countries and electoral systems with proportional representation, a greater amount of money is spent on microtargeting by combining multiple criteria. Furthermore, targeting strategies vary along ideological lines of political parties who seek out voters more typically aligned with each side of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, parties use microtargeting irrespective of political ideology. Our findings offer the first comparative analysis of political microtargeting on Meta platforms for countries across all continents. Methodologically, we introduce a semi-automatic method to identify worldwide political advertisers using multiple data sources. Our study deepens the understanding of how country and party contexts explain differences in targeting strategies, highlighting the need for more research beyond the global north. Finally, our results have important implications for policy makers, and other stakeholders who seek to develop regulations to address the challenges posed by political microtargeting techniques.

Import shocks and voting behavior in Europe revisited

We provide first evidence for the long-run causal impact that Chinese imports to European regions had on voting outcomes and revisit earlier estimates of the short-run impact for a methodological reason. The fringes of the political spectrum gained ground many years after the China shock plateaued and, unlike an earlier study by Colantone and Stanig (2018b), we do not find any robust evidence for a short-run effect on far-right votes. Instead, far-left and populist parties gained in the short run. We identify persistent long-run effects of import shocks on voting. These effects are biased towards populism and, to a lesser extent, to the far-right.

Re-politicising Anti-Trafficking: Migration, labour, and the war in Ukraine

Drawing on multi-method research, this article demonstrates that the risks of large-scale trafficking due to the war in Ukraine were mitigated by granting Ukrainians more extensive rights than typically afforded to refugees. This shows the advantages of rights-based approaches to migration and labour exploitation. We draw on Bakhtin’s and Žižek’s work on the carnivalesque to argue that mainstream anti-trafficking initiatives—which are depoliticised and able to win support and funding from across the political spectrum—often serve merely as theatrical and distracting sideshows diverting attention from more impactful activities and the normalised exploitation within capitalism. However, avoiding trafficking is insufficient if Ukrainian citizens and residents still endure exploitative conditions. A weakened legal framework for workers’ rights within Ukraine alongside inadequate labour protections across Europe have facilitated such exploitation. In contrast to the depoliticised stance of the anti-trafficking industry, this article concludes that more explicitly political actions supporting migrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and access to welfare and public services will not only more effectively challenge trafficking but also prevent other exploitation of migrants.

A REVIEW OF GREEN POLICY FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Environmental problems and the destruction of nature have been seen as one of the most important problems faced by humans and all other species. Since the rise of industrial capitalism, environmental problems have continued to be relevant. Accordantly, industrialization has been the absolute root of evil for green politics. In other words, the critique of industrialization represents the theme of the green movement. Green politics with anti-industrialism shapes itself over principles such as ecological limits of growth, contentment with less, reduction of consumption and population, respect for nature, generic justice, decentralization, rejection of discrimination, ecologically conscious citizens, creating projections of green ideals on daily life, small-scale technology and topicality. Green idea which was previously limited to environment and nature protectionism, has radicalized and developed its own depictions of "heaven" with green society imaginations which is in a sense an inherent feature of ideologies. On the other hand, green politics differs from other ideologies by putting the nature to the point of its vision and action. The Green movement, which accelerated its institutionalization activities at the end of the twentieth century, reached remarkable voting rates, especially in European countries, and succeeded in creating a universal public opinion on the issues that it could bend the policies. Since then green formations and contents have been observed in Turkey as well. However, ecological trends have lagged behind the development targets from right to left of the political spectrum.

Does news literacy help combat misinformation? The interplay of news literacy, political ideology, and ideological media use on COVID-19 misperceptions

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the urgency of working across lines of political difference to combat misinformation. This paper asks: Does having news literacy matter in reducing misperceptions, and importantly, for whom does having news literacy matter? Using a national survey of US adults (N = 1700) that included the largest set of COVID-19-related misperceptions examined to date (k = 84), we tested how the effects of news literacy on misperceptions vary across ideology and ideological media consumption. Although holding a higher level of news literacy is associated with fewer misperceptions in general, it helps conservatives less than it helps liberals. Moreover, although news literacy is associated with mitigating the misperception-inducing effect of ideological media consumption on both ends of the political spectrum, this potential benefit appears to be weaker for conservative media use than for liberal media use. Finally, the benefit of having news literacy is maximized among cross-cutting consumers of ideological media but dampened among like-minded consumers, particularly conservatives with heavy conservative media consumption. We discuss the implications of our findings for identifying subgroups for future news literacy interventions and understanding the potentials and challenges of using news literacy to combat misinformation in a polarized climate.

Идейно-политический спектр: общеметодологический контекст и ситуация в современной России

The concept of the “ideological and political spectrum” in the political science literature is used to describe various ideologies and their propagators, such as political parties and social movements. However, there is no single definition of this term. In fact, the ideological and political spectrum reflects the diversity of political parties or their counterparts. As a rule, this refers to the main characteristic of the internal structure of the ideological and political scale, that is, the positioning of parties and social movements based on the right-left spectrum. The aim of the article is to identify the specifics of the tradition of distinguishing between right-wing and left-wing political parties in the methodological context. Objectives: to identify the basic principles on the basis of which certain political parties belong to the right or left political spectrum; to consider the situation of differentiation between left and right in the Russian political field. It is concluded that there is practically no division between left and right in Russian society. A significant part of respondents in the Russian Federation are unaware of the differences between right-wing or left-wing parties, which indicates a low level of their political awareness. It is stated that the main feature of the majority of political parties in modern Russia is a gravitation towards values and principles, rather than ideological doctrines.

Rewriting the plan of the world: Peter Thiel’s messianic rhetoric and the end of progressive neoliberalism

ABSTRACT Following the 2007–8 financial crisis, far-Right conservatives advanced a reactionary political turn, seeking to replace the prevailing political order, what Nancy Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism,” with an overtly exclusionary and rapacious form of capitalism. This article investigates how entrepreneur Peter Thiel sought to shape this transition, adopting a messianic rhetoric to return capitalism to its essential principles. Employing Giorgio Agamben’s study of Saint Paul, I argue that Thiel employed a Pauline stance to realize a plērōma, or fullness, of capitalism, preserving the profit motive while jettisoning neoliberalism’s deployment of progressivism. In this analysis, I build upon rhetorical scholars’ exploration of contemporary neoliberal discourse, framing the billionaire rhetor as a uniquely agentive figure in twenty-first-century capitalism and positing neoliberalism as an eminently versatile rhetorical logic capable of operationalizing arguments from across the political spectrum.

A corpus-based discourse analysis of reparations inertia

The movement for reparations for those enslaved on the North American continent from 1450 to 1866 has a long history fraught with debate, criticized by individuals on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Specific points of contention include how much money should be allocated, who the recipients and potential liable parties should be, and what specific form reparations should take. Accounting for this historical opposition, this paper employs a corpus-based discourse analysis to examine the communicative barriers to implementing reparations. The corpora consisted of YouTube comments posted to news reports of six cities’ reparations proposals. I utilized Sketch Engine to examine frequency of keywords, collocations, and concordance, followed by a close-reading discourse analysis of lexical, grammatical, and tonal elements. The analysis revealed myriad constructions of reparations resulting in inertia, the institutional tendency to preserve the status quo. This discursive formation is consequential not only for its implications for reparations, but for broader structural reform efforts.

“Crew, don’t go anywhere near this man!” the co-construction of celebrity and responsible capitalism in broadcast interviews with a chief executive officer

Celebrity CEOs espousing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are receiving increasing media attention. However, researchers have not yet examined how CEOs and journalists co-create meaning about CSR in broadcast talk, an unscripted genre of news making, rife with contestation and cooperation. This paper presents a Conversation Analysis of six interviews featuring Dan Price, a CEO who pledged to “solve income inequality” by restructuring salaries in his company. Findings suggest that CSR anchored a process of double branding in which the CEO promoted himself and journalists reaffirmed their news philosophy. Price’s warm embrace by journalists across the political spectrum demonstrates a collaborative process of “celebrification”. Price created a transferable persona that appealed, through a mixture of political targeting and strategic ambiguity, to diverse audiences. Journalists elevated this persona by serving pseudo-criticism and showing identification. The story thus provided corporate media with the opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to “responsible capitalism”.

Prioritising local sea level rise adaptation pathways in Shenzhen and Hong Kong using cost-benefit analysis

Local governments face urgent challenges from sea-level rise (SLR), impacting coastal urban areas significantly. Despite a shared commitment to adapting to climate change and SLR-induced hazards, strategies for SLR adaptation vary significantly between cities, reflecting a spectrum of political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. This paper examines potential SLR adaptation strategies in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, cities with different political and socio-economic frameworks, to understand the effectiveness of varied local adaptation pathways to meet adaptation objectives. Through an analysis of shoreline adaptation infrastructures, including natural shelters and hard defense structures, alongside historical coastal reclamation data from 1985 to 2020, we identify the most cost-effective adaptation pathway. Specifically, our cost-benefit analysis reveals that Shenzhen's “Hybrid management” pathway offers superior economic efficiency, increasing benefits by up to 63% for only a 7%–16% rise in protection costs. Conversely, Hong Kong's “Relative-risk Reduction” pathway shows less timely adaptation actions, indicating a need for more dynamic approaches. The findings highlight the pitfalls of overly rigid SLR adaptation strategies and the necessity for flexible, transition-capable adaptation pathways to better manage future uncertainties. Lessons learned from this study will enable refinement of local SLR adaptation pathway approaches and could significantly improve decision-making under uncertainty in other coastal cities based on investment perspective.

Episodic populist backlashes against urban climate actions

Populism is multilayered and involves two main dimensions – ideology and strategy – which are employed within and beyond political parties. These dimensions can result in sometimes overlapping but generally divergent backlashes, targeting specific climate and sustainability interventions in cities. This critical commentary presents episodic populist backlashes against urban climate actions by exploring how they create their own political landscapes across the political spectrum in cities against progressive urban climate agendas. Specifically, the article examines how episodic populist backlashes manifest on an urban scale and highlights the need for urban scholars to pay more attention to the phenomenon. The article proposes two complementary explanations for why populism precedes urban climate actions in episodic and thematic ways. These explanations include policy backlashes against diffused global climate norms in cities, and counter-movements and rhetoric against climate justice and what it entails, such as inclusion in decision-making and intersectionality. The article then concludes by offering a research agenda on the episodic populist backlashes against urban climate actions, which highlights the need for a better understanding of how episodic populist movements might emerge into global climate policy diffusion, and climate justice coupled with intersectionality in cities of the Global North and Global South.

‘Prudence, Foresight, Courage, Oeconomy’: glass beehives and English society, 1650–1680

ABSTRACT During the English Civil War and subsequent Restoration, beekeeping provided a ready set of moral examples for those seeking answers about the ‘natural’ structure of society. The practice itself also underwent a number of substantial changes, moving from a traditional craft practice to a more knowledge-focused, technologically complex one. The advent of glass-windowed hives in the latter half of the sixteenth century allowed intellectuals from across the political spectrum to directly observe bees as a way of gathering knowledge about how to understand the divine plan and, with that understanding, improve human society.

God and State Above All

Abstract This article explores how politically active Polish women starting in the late nineteenth century until the start of World War II viewed themselves and their duties vis-a-vis the Polish nation. It traces the women's movement in Poland from the first calls for women's right to work, to their eventual enfranchisement under a newly independent Polish state in 1918. Challenges to women's equality took many forms: men from both sides of the political spectrum viewed women's entry into the salaried workforce and the public sphere as largely undesirable and deployed a variety of arguments to reinforce traditional gender hierarchy. Yet many educated Polish women, even from conservative, Catholic perspectives, viewed their engagement in the public sphere as necessary work for the good of the Polish nation. This article uses letters, political pamphlets, and published works to explore how modern Polish women attempted to strike a balance between breaking and preserving traditional notions of gender in order to secure new rights for themselves in a volatile political atmosphere. While Polish women's groups differed on their vision of the ideal Polish state, they generally agreed that women's roles as mothers provided the moral legitimacy required to act in the public sphere. They successfully carved a space for themselves in the new Polish state of 1918 but remained marginalized in a separate and unequal status in the interwar period.

‘Have you seen this?’: Constructing and controlling reality in The Assassination of Katie Hopkins (2018)

In 2018, against a backdrop of post-truth politics, celebrity culture and shock journalism, Chris Bush and Matt Winkworth premiered their fake verbatim musical, The Assassination of Katie Hopkins. This musical explored the ramifications of the fictionalized death of the notorious tabloid-topper Hopkins, while questioning the authenticity of the verbatim form. In doing so, the creators considered new possibilities for musical theatre. This article will explore Bush and Winkworth’s attempt to critique the cultural and political landscape, using the already ethically complex vehicle of verbatim theatre. It will consider the musical in relation to the political promiscuity of performance and slippage between the polarities of an ever-changing political spectrum. It will consider Jannerone’s concept of vanguard performance and explore the performative responses to the musical about Hopkins in the alt-right press. As we question dominant ideologies within musical theatre and embrace the sense of being, at all times, ‘post-something’, this article considers how writers can document this time of interregnum to reflect a world where ‘change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty’.

Blasphemy in the Electoral Politics of Pakistan

This paper aims to contribute to the existing corpus of literature on the role of religion in Pakistan's politics by taking the issue of blasphemy as a central variable. The research examines how the issue of blasphemy is used in Pakistan's politics by the mainstream political parties across the political spectrum, from far-right to center-left, by analyzing the parties' slogans, manifestos, rhetoric, and mobilization tactics in the 2018 general elections. To make sense of why these parties are utilizing blasphemy as a political tool, the paper also employs a conceptual framework towards the end of the paper. By understanding how blasphemy is instrumentalized in the country’s politics, the paper seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the interplay between religion, and politics in Pakistan.

Meat politics at the dinner table

Few food groups are subject to the same depth and scope of critique as meat. Yet little is known about how the Canadian public feels about meat production and consumption. In other jurisdictions, meat has been a politically polarizing topic; thus, we focus our analysis on political differences (and similarities) in orientations toward meat. In this paper, we draw on survey data collected on a quota sample of Canadians (n=2328) in order to address the following questions: to what extent do Canadians across the political spectrum agree that meat is a problem? Where is there overlap, and where is there disagreement? We find that, despite small but statistically significant differences across political ideology in Canadians’ meat-related attitudes, preferences, and practices, there is widespread agreement that meat is delicious, that it poses risks to health, and that many livestock production practices violate animal welfare ethics. The majority of Canadians would prefer to source meat that is locally-produced and raised on a small farm. These patterns illustrate high levels of discomfort with large-scale animal agriculture. This study fills an important gap in Canadian food studies by interrogating public perceptions of meat and identifying areas of political convergence and divergence on meat-related attitudes, preferences, and practices.

Are People Willing to Pay for Reduced Inequality?

Would consumers be willing to pay more for goods for which there is less inequality in wages across those involved in their production? In incentive-compatible behavioral choice studies on representative samples of the English and U.S. populations, we find significantly positive willingness to pay for such inequality reductions in more than 80% of subjects. Although it varies with political leaning and the extent of the inequality reduction, willingness to pay is positive across the political spectrum and for all studied inequality differences. It is higher for more intuitive and informative inequality-reporting formats. Our findings have policy implications for both governments and firms. On the one hand, they suggest the promise of universal provision of product-level inequality information as a tool for moderating income inequality. On the other hand, they highlight the potential relevance of inequality reporting for firms’ marketing strategies. This paper was accepted by Dorothea Kübler, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche [LabEx Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX-0047] and the Fondation HEC [Budget F]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01974 .

The Catholic Church and Refugees in Slovenia

In Slovenia, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) is the largest, most influential, richest, and most politically significant among all religious organisations. In estimating its contribution related to migration and the refugee situation it is necessary to consider the wider context of Slovenian society, primarily four characteristics: (1) despite the principle of separation of state and religious spheres, it is in relation to the Roman Catholic Church that the bulk of unresolved issues and occasional exacerbations occur; (2) while Slovenian public opinion is rather volatile in its expression of social distance to foreigners, it does not represent the main problem; (3) Slovenia’s state politics are very closed to refugees; and (4) political parties from the right wing of the political spectrum are rather xenophobic. While the Catholic Caritas plays a positive role in the care of refugees, the RCC has always supported the right-wing political parties when they come to power, and it is also susceptible to Islamophobia.

The Politics of Transdisciplinarity

This paper aims to theorize the role of transdisciplinarity in politics. I do this by arguing for an ontological pluralism, using the ideas of Basarab Nicolescu, suggesting a political view can equate to a layer of reality. Nicolescu’s thought indicates that we should think beyond and transcend the political spectrum- a political view is not just a view but an actual part of reality. Next, I use ‘Mode 2’ Science to suggest we should adopt a distributed epistemology which sees everyone as bearers of knowledge, I suggest that politics should take this into consideration. This fits with the pluralism indicated by Nicolescu. Furthermore, I suggest ‘Mode 2’ Science also says that institutions should be permeable- the difference between state, science and society should not be seen as solid. Institutions should also be seen as transitory in nature. Next, I argue Edgar Morin’s complex thinking indicates how we should gather knowledge and how society should be governed. Particularly, it shows that governance should consist of teams, in which the state acts as a catalyst for bringing a wide group of people together. These ‘teams’ and the state can be activated or deactivated depending on the situation, therefore preventing an accumulation of power, while also allowing effective governance if required. Finally, I use complex network theory to characterize how the pertinent temporary configurations of relations would work and the factors that might affect them. Using network theory allows us to conceptualize these relations as dynamic, connected, vulnerable, clustered and yet also having a few figures (in this case the state) that can connect people. Following all of this, we come to a new pluralistic, egalitarian, transitory, but most of all transdisciplinary view of governance.