Political Style Research Articles

Politics before God

America’s 2018 midterm elections provide an opportunity to assess white evangelical Protestants’ counterintuitive embrace of Trump. Reports of the President’s past infidelities, suspicious business deals, and possible electoral collusion with Russia appear to have done little to abate the support of America’s most socially conservative law-and-order voters - white evangelical Protestants. PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) data demonstrates though Trump never polled above 50 percent favourability with white evangelical-Protestants during the primaries, since his 2016 election the constituency has only grown more ‘Trump-drunk’ with a record 75 percent endorsing the President and his commitment to put ‘America First’. 
 Although America’s Christian right have long-standing Republican inclinations, evangelicals’ self-abasement under Trump remains difficult to understand. White evangelicals have migrated from a Christian movement guilty of overt partisan identification to a movement willing to corrupt their faith values and religious tradition for political opportunities. The effect, as Gerson (2018) notes, is a faith tradition now riddled with ‘political tribalism and hatred for political opponents, with little remaining of Christian public witness.’ Keller cuts deeper, saying ‘evangelical’ used to mean those who took the moral high ground, but now it’s nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite’ (Keller cited in Gerson, 2018). ‘With an end-justifies-the-means style of politics that would have been unimaginable before [Trump]’ (Jones cited in Coppins 2018a), it seems America’s evangelicals are putting politics before God. 
 Subsequently, this article reflects on four dimensions of Trump’s success with white evangelicals. First, it discusses howTrump and the GOP presented 2016 as the ‘last chance election’. Secondly it explores Trump’s ‘priestly rhetoric’ and evangelicals’ ‘priestly faith’ in him. Thirdly, what have white evangelical-Protestants achieved under Trump in return for their votes? Lastly, how has Trump changed American evangelicalism and the nation? Is nativism and tribalism consuming their faith-tradition just as it’s dividing the country?

Situasi Politik Pemerintahan Dinasti Umayyah dan Abbasiyah

At the end of the Rasyidin Caliphate there was division within Muslims. Politically there are two dominant groups: Hasan bin Ali and Mu’awiyah bin Abi Sufyan. Politically there are two dominant groups, Hasan bin Ali and Mu’awiyah bin Abi Sufyan. After the negotiations, for the sake of unity of Muslims, it was agreed that Hasan acknowledged Mu’awiyah as the Caliph of the Muslim marked the emergence of the Umayyad Dynasty. The moment was called 'am jama'ah (unity year) in 661. The Abbasid Dynasty was the descendant of Prophet Muhammad's uncle, al-Abbas, who supported Ali bin Abi Talib and his descendants (including Hasan bin Ali). This paper aims to discuss some of the political situation that developed when the Umayyads (661-750) and the Abbasids (750- 1258). In Mu’awiyah bin Abi Sufyan's time there was a change of the political system from the khulafaur Rashidin into a system of al-Mulk (heredity monarchy) characterized by the appointment of his son, Yazin bin Mu'awiyah. This system adopted from the Persian and Byzantine kingdoms. However, maintaining the term caliph of Islam. Mu'awiyah also used Diwan and Sheikh to run the government, with the mechanism of Shura for consultative functions. After 150 years the Umayyads, the power was changed over by Abu al-Abbas Abdullah and marked the rising of the Abbasid in 750. In the Abbasid period the political and religious issues can’t be separated, which earlier in the Umayyad period were separated. The propaganda that the caliph is the representative of the people in carrying out God's command is valid until the Judgment Day. More explicitly, the term al-Imam (which also means the leader of prayer) is the leader in political affairs. In addition, the implementation of Islamic Shari'a is also more highlighted in governing the government and legitimating the power of the caliph. In general, the political style of the Abbasids is more Persian than the more Arab Umayyads

Boring in a New Way: Estimation and Inference for Political Style at Westminster, 1935–2018

We consider the merits of claims that Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK have become more ‘boring’ over time—that is, less distinctive from one another in terms of their speech and style. We review theory and previous findings in the area, and note their ambiguity in predictions on this matter. We then provide an efficient new measurement model of distinctiveness that extends traditional efforts to statistically characterize the ‘style’ of authors, and apply it to a corpus of Hansard speeches from 1935 to 2018. In the aggregate, we find no evidence for the claim of increased boringness. But this hides intriguing covariate effects: at the MP level, panel regression results demonstrate that on average, more senior backbenchers tend to be less interesting in speech terms. We also show, however, that this pattern is changing: in recent times, it is more experienced MPs who speak most distinctively.

Political Protestantism: The Detroit Citizens League and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan

This article considers the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force in Detroit in the 1924 and 1925 elections. In the 1910s, the Detroit Citizens League had risen in Detroit politics through its practice of the rhetoric of political Protestantism, designed to mobilize Protestant laymen through religious appeals. In the 1920s, this style of politics backfired on the Citizens League: after spending years focusing on Detroit’s business elite, Protestants abandoned the Citizens League in droves when that organization backed a Catholic for mayor. By turning to the Ku Klux Klan, many Protestant voters found an organization making the appeals that they had backed a decade before and which was better at incorporating them than the Citizens League. Ultimately, the Citizens League’s response to the Klan was complicated both by reluctance to further alienate past supporters and by an inability to unite politically with past foes.

The Netherlands: Political development and data for 2017

The year 2017 was a period of contradictionary development in terms of political stability in the Netherlands. On te one hand, the Mark Rutte II cabinet, the longest serving cabinet since the Second World War, was the first since 1998 to complete the entire term. On the other hand, the highly volatile 2017 national elections yielded the most fractionalized parliament in Dutch history. The ensuing cabinet formation was the longest on to date.

Pragmatically synthesizing existing conspiracy styles: blending paranoia and politics in Richard Nixon’s early-career anticommunist rhetoric

In the field’s long conversation on conspiracy rhetoric, the most robust topic has been the theorization of the paranoid and political styles. Thus far, these styles and their evaluative criteria have been theorized as wholly separate. However, certain discourses and rhetors blend the styles. To understand this blending, I introduce the concept of pragmatism to argue that the existing styles can be synthesized. Through my analysis of three of Richard Nixon’s anticommunist conspiracy texts, I demonstrate that his rhetoric is a pragmatic synthesis of paranoia and politics. I conclude the paper by suggesting further avenues for research on conspiracy within the field, including the possibility that there may be a “pragmatic style.”

What is conservatism? History, ideology and party

Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring Burke to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived.

An Adaptive and Interactive Agent Based ITS for Cognitive Skill Prediction and Improvement

This paper proposes an adaptive and interactive agent based intelligent tutoring system for cognitive ability realization and improvement (ITSCARE - Intelligent Tutoring System for Cognitive Ability Realization and Improvement). ITSCARE allows the learners to realize their cognitive ability and to improve their cognition while studying the course. It provides different types of course materials which are dynamically adapted. It also increases the confidence level of the learners and provides an effective learning experience. This system also provides game based learning which influences the learners to get motivated and focus on the course. After the completion of each chapter, a test is conducted to predict the cognitive ability where students are assessed using their help seeking skills during the test and cognitive skill factors such as memory, concentration, attention in detail etc,. It uses politeness style to provide the test results and feed back to the students which keep the learner interest in the subject. Collaborative learning among the learner is improved by conducting quiz competition where a group of students participate and a winner is chosen. It uses different type of software agent to predict and improve the cognitive skill.

III. Talking about War

Pope Francis titled his recent World Day of Peace message “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace.” The use of the word “style” is unusual but important. It reveals the significance of the way we talk about the questions of violence and peace—our rhetoric, in other words. It has been suggested that talking about “just war theory” can, in fact, obstruct the development and use of nonviolent techniques for the resolution of conflict. My contribution to this roundtable will examine the extent to which that is the case.

Googling for Trump: investigating online information seeking during the 2016 US presidential election

ABSTRACTSearch engines are increasingly used by citizens to seek out political information. Both the high frequency of use and the high credibility attributed to them by their users emphasize the need for research on search engines’ role in the democratic process. The present paper reports on a case study on online information seeking (OIS) via search engines during the 2016 US presidential election. Presidential candidate Donald Trump was largely unknown as a politician, was opposed by the vast majority in elite circles, broke the standard niceties of politics, and practiced a style of politics based on riot and conflict. Based on these attention-gaining maneuvers, we predicted that citizens would show an OIS bias toward Trump (compared to Hillary Clinton). Importantly, we hypothesized that key events broadly categorizable as gaffes, scandal, or gossip influenced OIS bias due to a general negativity bias. We used a retrospective database study relying on query share data from the search engine Google to test these assumptions. Consistent with our predictions, we found that there was a substantial OIS bias toward Trump and that negatively-valenced key events influenced the size of the OIS bias meaningfully. Of interest, additional analyses revealed a correlation between OIS bias and election outcome: The higher the OIS bias toward Trump, the less citizens voted for Trump. We offer post hoc theorizing on this explorative finding.

Book review: The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation

Book review: The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation

Paranoid Science: The Christian Right’s War on Reality, by ANTONY ALUMKAL

One of the oldest problem areas in sociology, the relationship between religion and science has taken on renewed importance in light of recent controversies about biomedical research, sexuality, and the environment. Antony Alumkal’s Paranoid Science, therefore, arrives at a crucial moment in our understanding of how religion and science are mobilized in the public sphere. Through an in-depth analysis of texts, films, and other materials that serve as the intellectual foundation for evangelical anti-science movements, Alumkal takes on a central question in the literature on secularization, namely, how do religious individuals and organizations respond to the growing centrality of science in society? More specifically, he asks, how do we make sense of some evangelicals’ rejection of science, or as the book’s subtitle puts it, “the Christian right’s war on reality?” The conceptual framework for the book is Richard Hofstadter’s theory of a paranoid style of politics. Originally developed to analyze conspiratorial, right-wing political thought, Alumkal adapts the argument to understand religious movements’ opposition to science. Alumkal’s study is set apart from others by his comparative analysis of four distinctive episodes (evolution, the ex-gay movement, bioethics, and climate change) where conservative Christian movements coalesced around a rejection of mainstream science. This comparative approach is especially well suited for identifying common themes in these movements’ attempts to undermine science. It is also revealing of how differences in the frames employed by these movements ultimately contributed to differences in their success. Throughout the book, Alumkal is careful to articulate the ideological heterogeneity among evangelicals. He notes that three of the four anti-science movements he studies are coalitions of conservative and moderate evangelicals. Only on the issue of climate change have moderate evangelicals broken with conservatives’ rejection of science.

Mito, simboli e stile dell'Europa unita

This article analyzes Niccolo Zapponi’s works devoted to such themes as European civilisation and Western Europe during the second half of twentieth century. In his approach, he dedicates great attention to the concept of modernity and to those collective mentalities which characterize the process of European unification and define some of its most peculiar aspects. This article takes into consideration two main fields. On the one hand, Europe is conceived as the product of a long-lasting acculturation process; on the other, as the result of political and institutional unification with its more recent historical background, symbolism and political style mainly defined by its ruling class.

Il fascismo: questioni di cultura e di stile

Among Italian historians, Niccolo Zapponi has been one of those who best grasped the meaning and innovative character of George L. Mosse’s historiography. Adopting it in an original way and drawing from the suggestions of other disciplines as well, between the Seventies and the Nineties of the last century Zapponi launched his study of the Italian culture between the two wars. He did so, moving from the assumption that the origins of political ideologies should be found in collective, long-term mentalities, rather than in the works of prominent intellectuals. This essay shows that his research, at the boundary between the history of ideas and the history of mentality, demonstrated how much fascist ideology itself was deeply rooted in European culture, thereby overcoming the long dispute on the very existence of a fascist culture. Once he recognized the importance of the aesthetic, ritual and symbolic dimensions of modern mass politics, Zapponi moved on studying fascist political style, focusing on its underlying ethical codes. What emerged is not only the fascist objective to impose in this way its own pedagogical model and its vision of modernity, but also a kind of «moral self-discipline», aiming at offering survival strategies in situations of crisis and rapid changes.

The Quest for Information Privacy in Africa

The Quest for Information Privacy in Africa

Town planning and socialist realism: new Academic District in Wroclaw (Poland) – unfinished projects from the 1950s

ABSTRACTSocialist Realism was the standard method in Polish architectural design and urban planning between 1949 and 1956. This was a special period in Polish history – a time of intensive post-war reconstruction, introduction of a planned economy, and creation of a new political and social order. Socialist Realism was undoubtedly a ‘political style’, a tool for communist propaganda. Yet, in urban planning, apart from its excessive monumentality and axial symmetry, it was mostly dominated by universal models. These stemmed from the requirements to create clear compositional systems, use urban areas rationally, distribute housing, industry and commerce complexes functionally, and to pay attention to proper hygiene. Strong emphasis was also placed on the need to build new ‘centrally located social complexes that would dominate the space’ in historic cities, one of which is discussed in this article. The new Academic District was a visionary concept and attempts were made to bring it to life in Wroclaw – the largest city in the so-called Recovered Territories that became part of Poland after the Second World War. Due to the scale of the development, its estimated cost, and the political changes that took place in Poland in 1956, only a small part of the new district was built.

The Survival of Words: Revolution and Class Struggle

How did Kirchnerismo, initially a motley coalition of progressive Peronists and born-again Menemistas and Duhaldistas trying to scrape together some form of governability from the 2001 default, turn into one of the ‘pink tide’ governments most virulently hated by the Right? Why did long-forgotten concepts and terminologies from the epic past of revolutionary struggle suddenly resurface in the context of what, at least from the viewpoint of the autonomist Left, was hardly more than a mildly redistributive administration of scarcity, aided by the post-millennial commodity boom? In this intervention, historian Javier Trímboli urges us to take seriously some of the discursive anachronisms that flourished during Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s periods in office (2003–2015), which, he suggests, rather than merely a form of discursive cover for clientelist politics, may have been symptomatic of the way in which some of the foundational fault-lines of modern Argentine society continue to shape political identities, styles and forms of struggle in the present.

The Contradictions of Macronism

Since French president Emmanuel Macron defeated the National Front's Marine Le Pen in last year's election, his style of politics has been feted by liberals as a bulwark against far-right populism. But what is Macronism? And does it really propose new ideas and solutions capable of definitively defeating populism? Macronism broke the Republican and Socialist coalitions which dominated since the Fifth Republic's beginning, brining liberals together with neoliberals.

Pseudo Aristides: On political style and On simple style. Attribution and the nature of treaties

Pseudo Aristides: On political style and On simple style. Attribution and the nature of treaties

The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler's Life in West Virginia Politics by Carter Taylor Seaton

Reviewed by: The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler's Life in West Virginia Politics by Carter Taylor Seaton Mark Myers The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler's Life in West Virginia Politics. By Carter Taylor Seaton. (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 427.) In her fascinating work, The Rebel in the Red Jeep, Carter Taylor Seaton recounts the life and times of Ken Hechler, former West Virginia congressman and secretary of state. Seaton begins her work by placing Hechler within the context of "great man" theory, which argues that specific people influenced [End Page 133] the course of history. Seaton recognizes that historians have largely discounted this theory, yet does argue that Hechler is a "great man" in the history of the country, even if specific events did influence the course of his career (1). The major themes of the biography are rebellion and the importance of personal politics throughout his career. Seaton approaches Hechler's life both chronologically and thematically, examining his early life chronologically, while dealing with his career in Congress issue by issue. This approach provides a logical cohesiveness to the biography. In the chapters on Hechler's formative years, Seaton does an excellent job in connecting his upbringing and education to his future political style. Hechler's parents taught him lessons of responsibility and frugality, while also contributing to his low self-esteem, which only improved as he entered college and graduate school, ultimately earning a PhD from Columbia. It was also at Swarthmore, where Hechler attended as an undergraduate, that he became especially interested in politicians who put the public interest before personal gain. The lessons he learned from his upbringing and education clearly influenced the trajectory of his political career. Seaton also does an excellent job in explaining how important Hechler's work in the Truman White House was to his future political career. Hechler served as a researcher and speech writer for Truman and took away the importance of personal politics from his time working for the president. This connection can be clearly seen in his various campaigns, but especially his first campaign for Congress in 1958. As a candidate who would not toe the party line, Hechler had to find a way to overcome the Democratic party machine and a popular Republican congressman in West Virginia. He did so through this form of personal politics learned during his service under President Truman, as especially shown by his efforts to connect with voters through his use of his personal vehicle, eventually a red jeep, as his campaign office, which allowed him to stay on the trail consistently. This effort to get to know the electorate paid off in his ultimate successful election to Congress. Seaton points out that Hechler was particularly successful in reaching voters who normally did not vote. The two strongest aspects of the biography are the thematic second half of the book and the sources Seaton used in the book. Seaton does an outstanding job of approaching Hechler's career in Congress thematically by separating the chapters by issue. Throughout this section of the work, Seaton effectively uses Hechler's position on the different issues to illustrate both his progressive ideals and his willingness to be a maverick in Congress. The most effective chapter is the one on Civil Rights. Not only was Hechler supportive of Civil Rights legislation in Congress, he was also the only member of Congress to attend the Selma to Montgomery march in support of the Voting [End Page 134] Rights Act of 1965. Hechler's willingness to do what he felt was right, despite the political risks, was one key characteristic of his political career. Seaton also used excellent sources. She had unprecedented access to Hechler and his papers, and made good use of other archival resources, including collections at the Truman library. Although there are some concerns about the use of great-man theory in the work, Seaton has provided an excellent biography of one of West Virginia's most interesting and influential politicians. Anyone interested in the political history of West Virginia would benefit from reading this well-done biography. Mark Myers Indiana Academy, Ball State...