Political Strongholds Research Articles

Fueling the party machine: Evidence from Greece during Metapolitefsi

The establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic in 1974 (Metapolitefsi) was characterized by an increased public demand for a less centralized political system. The main political parties that emerged responded by giving priority to the development of local and regional organizations and creating a wide network of grassroots movements. This led to a gradual introduction of more decentralized political institutions and a significant increase of expenses to prefectures and subsidies to municipalities. Building on two novel hand-collected datasets at the prefectural and municipal levels, our analysis provides empirical evidence of party favoritism in the spatial allocation of intergovernmental transfers during the first two decades of Metapolitefsi. We argue that governing parties diverted intergovernmental transfers towards their political strongholds and politically aligned mayors, as local authorities played the role of the focal points in the process of party building.

“The Emblem of North American Fraternity”: Opossums and Jim Crow Politics

Stephanie N. Bryan examines the cultural meanings behind opossum hunting and consumption in the US during Jim Crow apartheid—from freed people of African descent for whom these activities represented ecologically rooted foraging skills, economic independence, and household sufficiency; to whites in Georgia and other southern states who turned the opossum into a symbol of racial inferiority as they confronted the reality of Black people transitioning from human property to citizens; and to white male Democrats who cultivated the opossum supper as a theatre for regaining their political stronghold in the wake of Reconstruction and the rise of populism.

Rekinning the homeland: Rurality, gender-based genocide, and Indigenous sovereignty in colonial Canada

In the colonial state of Canada, rurality is quintessentially necropolitical, a technology of colonial nation building that has forcibly displaced hundreds of sovereign Indigenous nations to accommodate white occupation. Throughout vast rural social geographies that remain conservative political strongholds, Indigenous peoples living in their ancestral homelands are positioned as contaminants of dignified white rural life and obstacles to food and resource exploitation, agri-industrial expansion, and growing multicultural diversity. Under colonial rural logics, Indigenous bodies are disposable and ungrievable, in deeply gendered and sexualized ways. In this paper, I draw on Achille Mbembé’s concept of necropolitics to examine rural genocide as a form of colonial and neocolonial settler placemaking, with a specific focus on gender-based violence as one form of enacted necropolitics. I examine how stark racial rural inequities precipitate racialized-gendered death by enabling incessant white entitlement to Indigenous lands and bodies, allowing what the United Nations has called the gender-based genocide of Indigenous girls, women, and 2Spirit people to occur with impunity. I then consider the imperial logics of homesteading as a new/old settler tactic emerging under new anthropogenic and pandemic-related pressures, where urbanites seeking rural escapes fuel the colonial appropriation and commodification of sacred Indigenous land-based knowledges while eroding already precarious Indigenous territories. I conclude by exploring how reimplicating increasingly mobile and urbanized Indigenous young people in kinscapes—mobile, temporal circles of relations with their kin and homelands—might fortify vital Indigenous land and body sovereignties and unsettle colonial necropolitical rural ontologies.

Red Vienna: A Social Housing Experiment, 1923–1933

Abstract The moderating effects of World War I on wealth and income inequality varied with the belligerents. In Austria, the state embraced austerity measures to eliminate hyperinflation and respect commitments to the League of Nations. To fill the void, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (sdap) turned to its political stronghold in Vienna to advance its agenda of social spending and progressive taxation—Red Vienna’s signature program. The use of an electoral-cycle model finds that the construction of new buildings increased the party’s share of votes in municipal elections. The program mobilized support of young families in search of affordable and quality housing, also attracting the endorsement of the middle classes and elites, despite the higher tax burden imposed on them. The physical attributes of the new buildings and related investments, such as in schools, hospitals, and city infrastructure, benefited the entire population of Vienna.

Blowback Operations as Rebel Strategy: How Sectarian Violence Spread from Syria into Lebanon, 2013–14

ABSTRACT Why and how do conflict and violence spread across international borders? This article introduces a new theoretical framework for blowback operations, where a civil war combatant launches terrorist attacks in the home country of a foreign actor to compel this actor to end a military intervention. Using this framework, we explain how military intervention by Hezbollah in Syria sparked a bombing campaign by Sunni jihadi groups inside Lebanon. Novel quantitative and qualitative evidence reveals how perpetrators deployed violence strategically to maximize their coercive leverage. Rather than indiscriminately attacking Lebanese Shia civilians—as their hardline sectarian discourse would suggest—Jihadi groups, including local Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, primarily targeted Hezbollah political strongholds to force it to withdraw from Syria. Hezbollah, seeking domestic stability due to its strong position in the Lebanese political system, generally responded with restraint and thereby avoided escalating the episode into civil war. The growing reach and prominence of armed non-state actors, especially across the Middle East, increasingly make their cross-border operations an important feature of sub-state conflict.

Ancient Derbent in the History of the Early Christian World

Derbent has gone down in history as an outstanding monument of world fortification erected in the 5th–7th centuries AD to protect against the invasions of nomads of Eurasia. Extensivearchaeological research of Derbent, under the guidance of the author, revealed completely new stages of the city’s existence, and Derbent emerged not only as the main military and political stronghold of the world powers of the medieval East in the Caucasus but also as the largest economic and religious center of the region, where Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism penetrated and developed early. Derbent acquired a special significance in the history of the Christian world of the Caucasus during the reign of the Sasanian kings Yezdegerd II (439–457) and Peroz (459–484), ardent opponents of Christianity, when the struggle of the peoples of the Caucasus with the “teaching of magicians” severely aggravated. The Derbent fortifications began to play an important role in the anti-Iranian uprisings of the Caucasian rulers who relied on the nomads and mountaineers of the North Caucasus in their fight against the Sasanians. It was in the 60s of the 5th centuries, as our excavations have shown, that a cruciform temple was erected in the citadel of Derbent, which was transformed at the beginning of the 17th century into a reservoir. The most recent geophysical research, conducted in 2020, using georadar and laser scanning and photogrammetry confirmed the data obtained during the excavations about the religious purpose of the cross-domed structure in the citadel and its identification with the Christian temple of the 5th century, one of the oldest in Russia.

Afterword

Afterword Rodrigo Lazo Some years ago, before starting graduate school, I travelled to the Galápagos Islands. As someone originally from Ecuador, I was aware that the islands are a province of the "República del Ecuador" but also very far from the coastal and Andean regions that are the economic and political strongholds in my country of birth. Anyone who has managed to reach that archipelago knows that to experience the natural variety of the group it is necessary to navigate from one enchanting island to another. Galápagos tourism has always relied on local small boats and yachts taking tourists to the different islands, and it was aboard the appropriately named Albatross that I stumbled on a collection in the ship's tiny library containing "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles." The sketches offered Galápagos lore shared by guides as part of the visit—stories of buccaneers and castaways. It also became quickly apparent that the sketches did not seem to be about the islands before me. As I stared at the volcanic formations and contemplated the friendly animal-life, the Galápagos looked nothing like "five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot" (Piazza Tales 179). Nor were they as elusive as Salvator R. Tarnmoor's delusional account conveys. While I do not regularly look for veracity in fiction—and Melville's invocation of sites and references in South America are not always invested in accuracy—the difference between what I apprehended in the Galápagos and the sketches prompted questions that continue to hang like an albatross around my neck: Why was a writer associated with US literary nationalism engaging with locations that were distant to his New England home and also distant from the part of Ecuador where I had been born? And what kind of referential weight did these sketches carry for Melville's work and, more generally, the way people in the United States view Latin America? With those questions foremost, I note that three of the five pieces in this special issue on Melville and the region we are calling "Spanish America" place "The Encantadas" at the center of their arguments and take a variety of approaches: philosophy and epistemology, questions of allegory, and a US-centric historicism. Those very different critical directions appear to pull away [End Page 103] from Spanish America and remind us of the complicated relationship of "The Encantadas" to the geographic destination that inspires its organization. Anna Brickhouse, for example, argues that the sketches dwell in "a space of philosophical rupture, a vantage point for meditation on the West: its enduring problem of evil, its invention of the human, and its perpetual creation of theodicies that justify the world's racial and geographical apportionment of suffering" (37–8). In connecting her interpretation to Western thought more generally, Brickhouse offers a more ample terrain than the very geographic location that draws the sketches. Taking a different approach, Yoshiaki Furui reads "The Encantadas" in relation to the temporality of the discourse of Manifest Destiny and the teleology of Euro-American modernity. These types of shifts should be no surprise given that, as I have noted, the Galápagos themselves are geographically and culturally distant from the mainland. Long uninhabited by humans, the islands are "Spanish" only in the poetry of colonial assumption. Both historically and in Melville's sketches, the Galápagos are distant geographically from the area we associate with Spanish America. As such, "The Encantadas" offers a series of literary and cultural dislocations and critical navigations that send readers in a variety of directions. The contributors to this special issue follow that spirit and see "Spanish America" as an opportunity for departure as much as a necessary critical stopping point when reading Melville. The special issue makes a convincing case for the importance of "Spanish markers" as a set of referents in Melville's writing. As Emilio Irigoyen shows in his textually attentive introduction, some of Melville's Spanish American images, words, and motifs return from one text to another. These range from humorously off-handed remarks by narrators to more serious contemplation about the implications of a hemispheric American...

Dalit Counterpublic and Social Space on Indian Campuses

This article discusses three different university campuses in India (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Osmania University, and the English and Foreign Languages University) and their political and social environments with a particular focus on Dalit student activism from March to June, 2013, and from January to March, 2014 when this ethnographic research was conducted. It questions what place Dalit student activism, constituting the ‘counterpublic’ (Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002), occupied in these campuses; how Dalit student activists interacted with other student political groups; what characteristic features the Dalit student activism had on each campus. This article discusses the changing power relations in Indian universities and the role of ‘social space’ (Bourdieu, 2018) in negotiating social statuses. Dalit student activists actively engaged in appropriating social space by installing Dalit symbolic icons on the university campuses, bringing up caste issues to public attention and thus temporarily turning certain campuses into ‘political strongholds’ (Jaoul, 2012) of the Dalit movement. Contributing to the recent scholarship on student politics in South Asia this article argues for the understanding of interactive relation between campus space and student politics, showing how Dalit students changed the campus space through symbolic appropriation and, conversely, how historically constituted campus spaces affected the nature of Dalit student activism in each of the discussed localities.

A new dominant party in India? Putting the 2019 BJP victory into comparative and historical perspective

ABSTRACTThe 2019 Indian national election delivered a convincing victory to the BJP and, along with it, prognostications of future BJP election wins. The BJP’s victory was certainly impressive, but does it portend a prolonged period of BJP rule at the national level? As of 2019, any predictions of the BJP’s long-term dominance are premature. The election revealed that the BJP possesses relatively few of the party-system advantages common to other dominant parties, including India’s former dominant party, Congress, during its period of dominance. Whereas a party is ideally situated to become dominant when it is large, enjoys a deep and broad base of support, and faces an opposition that is both fragmented and stigmatized, the BJP’s main advantage lies in its relatively deep support base in its political strongholds. On other dimensions, the BJP has far less in common with other dominant parties.

Too Young, Too Strident, Too Radical, Too Dangerous: American Women Pursue Political Voice

Too Young, Too Strident, Too Radical, Too Dangerous:American Women Pursue Political Voice Emma Jones Lapsansky (bio) and Marion W. Roydhouse (bio) United states, August of 2020: on the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which removed legal restrictions from American women's right to vote, a woman is on a major-party ticket for an American presidential election.1 Much has changed in the near century-and-a-half since Victoria Claflin Woodhull, representing a tiny, marginal political party, made a bid for the presidency, and much has changed in the ways that historians have understood, analyzed, and narrated those changes. The essays gathered here reflect some of the dynamics associated with those changes, including how "politics" has come to connote not only formal political structures of party politics and government but also informal arenas of power and public influence. When Woodhull appeared on the national ballot in 1872, representing the "Equal Rights" party that she herself had spearheaded, she—like the women candidates who would follow her—had already crafted a remarkable career.2 As a founding partner of Wall Street's first female-owned brokerage house, and as one of America's earliest woman newspaper publishers, Woodhull had made a Benjamin Franklin–like transformation from modest beginnings to well-heeled and well-known public figure. Famous for her unorthodox ideas about women's sexuality, clairvoyance, and the abolition of the death penalty, as well as for her flamboyant personal style, Woodhull also challenged the radical economic and political theories of the day. Unlike Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued that [End Page 245] women needed to be brought into the political sphere, Woodhull insisted that women's concerns with class and economic insecurity were inherently political. That she was too young to be president—she would not have reached the constitutionally mandated age of thirty-five until after the inauguration—seems not to have been a concern, since no one (probably even Woodhull herself) expected her to win.3 Woodhull was preceded and followed by women of equal grit—and equally underpowered political machines. Abolitionist and women's rights advocate Lucretia Coffin Mott (1848) and legal powerhouse Belva Lockwood (1884 and 1888) were early standard-bearers in a list of more than four dozen stouthearted women—young and old, Black and White—who battered at the White House door. After Lockwood, more than seven decades elapsed before Margaret Chase Smith (1964), Charlene Mitchell (1968), Shirley Chisholm (1972), and Lenora Branch Fulani (1988, 1992)—the latter three of whom were African American—renewed the assault on the bastion of America's white, male political stronghold.4 Then, in 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton—described by many as "too strident"—almost got in. Women are also scarce in the congressional chambers of power. As of the 2020 presidential election, the US Senate has only twenty-six women, and the 102 elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 compose less than 24 percent of that body. Though women first arrived in Congress in 1916 (Montana's Jeannette Rankin), only since the 1990s have women represented sizeable proportions or leadership—a reality that reflects, in part, the fact that since the 1980s women voters began to outnumber men. Nearly two-thirds of the 325 women elected to the House since 1916 arrived after 1992—and nearly half of those after 1998.5 [End Page 246] Women's bids for office are, of course, only one aspect of the story. Since the 1990s, increasing scholarship on voting trends post-1920 has also shaped a fascinating narrative. For example, we now know that despite the myths and fears promulgated by historians and politicians alike since 1920, women's voting choices have not been only gender-driven. Most early suffragists—recognizing such factors as race, ethnicity, class, and region—anticipated neither a national woman's party nor a solid women's voting bloc. Indeed, looking at the one hundred years since 1920, Christina Wolbrecht points out, "gender is not the most salient political identity shaping electoral behavior for most women (or men)."6 The percentage of eligible women voting grew steadily from 30–35 percent in 1920 until the 1964 presidential election...

Mathematical models of political districting for more representative governments

Political Districting, the problem of partitioning a geographical region into sub-regions as electoral districts for political seat assignment, has been widely studied by researchers of both social and mathematical sciences. In the US, one Congressional representative is elected for each such district, and the Constitution requires compactness, geographical contiguity, and population balance for any such district. “Gerrymandering,” i.e., misuse of re-districting once every 10 years (after each new census) to benefit a particular political party or current incumbent(s), has been practiced for decades, and political strongholds for individual parties have been formed. The vast majority, if not all, of the current literature and proposed software tools on political districting focus on how to achieve the non-political constitutional requirements. Election and re-districting are political processes; we believe that software tools are needed to achieve political purposes. In this paper, we present two mathematical optimization models to implement two new political criteria: fairness and competitiveness. Fairness aims to ensure fair allocation of seats to political parties considering the distribution of voters. Competitiveness aims to maximize the number of competitive districts to prevent districting solutions that provide clear advantage to one political party. We show that the feasibility problem associated with each of the two optimization models is NP-complete. Both models are implemented with a case study of South Carolina. The numerical results of six scenarios demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency. A strategy is proposed to deal with the issue of computational complexity associated with a state that is partitioned into a large number of indivisible area/population units, e.g., census tracks, as building blocks of electoral districts. The two models can be extended or modified to address fairness and competitiveness issues in some political systems with three or more political parties.

Dis/ordering politics: urban riots and the socio-political configuration of contemporary Niger

AbstractThis article focuses on ‘generic moments of becoming’, historical sedimentation and patterns of recurrent protests to explain the structural drivers that sparked the dramatic increase in urban protests and riots in Niger between 2013 and 2018. It identifies several factors in the country's socio-political configuration as particularly important for understanding the protests: new media and politics by proxy, political machines, the social and political embeddedness of civil society, ethnicity and regional political strongholds, the legacy ofFrançafrique, religious reform movements, and male youth violence. In examining these drivers, the article aims to provide an informative overview of contemporary politics and society in Niger and to counter culturalist, ahistoric and Eurocentric notions of ‘African disorder’.

Suzanne Miyamoto, PhD, RN, FAAN

Suzanne Miyamoto, PhD, RN, FAAN

Foreign Direct Investment Inflows in Ghana: Is There Any Political and Priority Influence in the Distribution among the Sectors and Regions of the Ghanaian Economy?

Political influence is taking certain vital role in foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow operations on the account of economic growth and development on Ghana’s economy. To determine whether there has been any political and priority influence in the distribution of FDI registered projects over the past years, perceived strongholds of some regions in terms of presidential and parliamentary elections were considered. Using descriptive statistics approach which promotes the examination of the leverage of foreign direct investment in a quantitative mode based on the data collected from the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre between 2013 and 2017, it was realized that, these perceived strongholds of some regions received less or none of the registered projects through foreign direct investment. However, regions like the Upper East and Upper West, political strongholds of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) recorded no registered projects between 2012 and 2016 during the NDC’s term of governance reflecting less or no political influence in the distribution of the registered projects accumulated through FDI. It was also revealed that, the service sector has been receiving much of the FDI projects due to its greater percentage share contribution to Ghana’s gross domestic product (GDP). It is suggested that, FDI registered projects should not be centered in Greater Accra alone if the country needs a universal and equal development across the various regions.

Land Acquisition in Contemporary India: The Growth Agenda, Legislation and Resistance

Land acquisition legislation in India has been a subject of public debate since Independence. Guided by the socialist pattern of economy, the government initiated land reforms in India but could only partially achieve this objective due to political stronghold of landed class in rural areas. Land was, however, acquired for building dams, mines and infrastructure. Such developmental initiatives were justified as steps being taken to achieve rapid economic development necessary for public welfare in the longer run. Also, there was little resistance to land acquisition as the level of political consciousness was low and there were few unorganised political organisations to channel the voices. In the post-liberalisation period, land acquisition legislations resulted from the thrust for commercialisation and fast track industrial investments. The new model of growth based on relentless competition implicit in a market economy created immense opportunities for the expansion of private business. Pro-business governments found it imperative to make prominent changes in the existing laws to smoothen the process of land acquisition. But, such measures have faced challenges on public platforms. Resistance to land acquisition is far more organised and powerful than what it was in the past. The article studies the politics of land acquisition in the light of recent steps taken by the pro-business governments to amend land laws and the resistance faced at both institutional and societal levels.

On the cultural front: the Bund and the Yiddish secular school movement in interwar Poland

The Central Yiddish School Organisation (TSYSHO), which provided secular education in Yiddish for Jews in Poland, was a supraparty organisation of which the Bund was the most influential part. Although the number of TSYSHO schools and students declined in the 1930s, its projects continued to receive a favourable response among Polish Jews during that decade. The visibility of Bundists in TSYSHO contributed to an extension of the Bund's reach beyond its traditional supporters, Jewish workers, to supporters of the Yiddish cultural system, for whom education in Yiddish was of essential importance. At the same time, the school community built within and around TSYSHO schools embodied the labour community, a Bundist ideal, and strengthened thereby the unity of the Jewish working class, which functioned as the Bund's political stronghold, and from which most of TSYSHO's students were recruited.

Can Informed Public Deliberation Overcome Clientelism? Experimental Evidence from Benin

This paper studies the electoral effects of town hall meetings based on programmatic, nonclientelist platforms. The experiment involves the cooperation of leading candidates in a presidential election in Benin. A campaign strategy based solely on these meetings was assigned to randomly selected villages and compared to the standard strategy of clientelist rallies. We find that treatment reduces the prevalence of clientelism and does not affect turnout. Treatment also lowers the vote shares for the candidate with a political stronghold in the village and is more effective in garnering votes in regions where a candidate does not have a political stronghold. (JEL D72, O17)

Supply or Demand? Migration and Political Manipulation in Mexico

Collective remittances are the money flows sent by hometown associations (HTAs) of migrants from the USA to their communities of origin. In Mexico, the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants matches by three the amounts that HTAs send back to their localities to invest in public projects. In previous research, we found that municipalities ruled by the party of the federal government were more likely to participate in the Program. The political bias in participation and fund allocation may stem from two possible mechanisms: HTAs’ decisions to invest in some municipalities but not in others may reflect migrants’ political preferences (a demand-driven bias). Alternatively, government officials may use the Program to finance their own political objectives (a supply-driven bias). To determine which of these two mechanisms is at work, we studied a 2 × 2 matrix of statistically selected cases of high-migration municipalities in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. We carried out over 60 semistructured interviews with state and municipal Program administrators, local politicians, and migrant leaders from these municipalities. Our qualitative study indicates that migrant leaders are clearly pragmatic and that the political bias found is driven by elected officials strategically using the Program. The bias in favor of political strongholds is reinforced by the Program’s requirements for cooperation among different levels of government. This study casts doubt about the effectiveness of public–private partnerships as valid formulas to reduce political manipulation. It also questions the ability of matching grant programs to reach the areas where public resources are most needed.

The making of a political stronghold: A Dalit neighbourhood’s exit from the Hindu Nationalist riot system

This article highlights the contribution of political competition and people’s movements to the dynamics of symbolization of space. In India, the symbolic appropriation of space represents an important yet under-explored local repertoire of collective action that impacts the contemporary reproduction of local subjectivities. This case study narrates the political conflict that occurred in a Dalit (Untouchable) basti of the North Indian city of Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh). One political faction of the youth sought to overpower the Hindu Nationalist faction and turn the neighbourhood from an armed bastion of the Hindu nationalist politics and Hindu-Muslim violence into a stronghold of Dalit emancipation. Interrogating the notion of political stronghold, the study documents the techniques and stakes involved as well as the power networks that were mobilized in this localized political battle, which contributed to the defeat of a local riot system .

Autochtonie, Libéralisation Politique, et Construction d'une Sphère Publique Locale au Cameroun

Abstract:This study focuses on the hegemonic struggles between two ethnic communities, the Mbo and the Bamiléké, in Santchou, West Cameroon. At issue is the sharing of political roles in this locality, which point to issues of political representation. In this district, these roles (mayor, representative, etc.) were under the single party rule of the ethnic minority Mbo, who are a majority in this area but a minority in the rest of the district, where the Bamileke are the majority. In this monolithic context, where all protests were banned, the Bamileke had given up and accepted this arrangement. With the advent of the multiparty system and democracy, in which mayors are now elected and no longer simply nominated, uncertainty has been hovering over this political stronghold of the Mbo. Nevertheless, the Mbo have been able to hold onto the post of mayor and acquire other political posts as well. However, unlike during the single party era, the situation created by the political liberalization has offered to the Bamileke a public space where they can discuss the allocation of local political positions, and manifest their disagreement with the hegemonic trend. In the footsteps of Habermas and many other authors such as Cottereau, this study underlines the need to talk about public spaces in a plural form, instead of a single public space, in order to put in context the internal dynamics of popular cultures engendering subcultural public spheres or places of emerging democracy.