Popular Ideology Research Articles

JAVIER MILEI AND MANAGERIAL POPULISM IN ARGENTINA: “THE SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR AS A SOCIAL BENEFACTOR”

Introduction: Javier Milei, leader of La Libertad Avanza (LLA), has become the first president in history to define himself as a liberal libertarian. Mieli’s leadership is marked by his media projection as a political outsider capable of creating an antagonistic divide between the virtuous people and the corrupt establishment. This study aims to identify and analyze the characteristics of the phenomenon known as managerial populism in the Argentine president, Javier Milei, based on three significant interventions: 1)his first speech as President of Argentina on December 10, 2023; 2) the speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 17, 2024; and 3) the address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington on February 25, 2024. Methodology: A qualitative approach will be undertaken using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This methodology Will allow us to move beyond a formalistic study of language, connecting our discourse analysis with the growing phenomenon of managerial populism. Results: At this point, we will demonstrate the three pillars upon which Milei’s managerial populism rests: a) the construction of a virtuous people in opposition to the parasitic establishment; b) the notion that social justice is neither just nor social; and c) the defense of free-market capitalism, identifying entrepreneurs as social benefactors. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that Milei’s political objective is the construction of a popular ideology based on entrepreneurial elements, positioning the economic entrepreneur as a social benefactor.

“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender, Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic

Abstract: This essay takes Angelica Schuyler—whose surname, following her husband’s, became Church in 1784—as a case study in the intersection between class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the revolutionary American republic. It argues that she and women like her held a distinctively dynastic attitude towards kinship, which shaped the norms of sociability that governed the emerging national state during the first decades of the federal government. Like other wealthy, well-connected, white women in this period, Schuyler Church disavowed the popular ideology of female domesticity and asserted power through the public display of feminine sexuality. The essay builds on studies of the so-called “republican court” in the United States, as well as scholarship on elite women’s role as powerbrokers in British and French society, to draw out the ways that their gendered experience of sexuality and family life interacted with strategies for reproducing and accumulating power. Like all other ruling classes, that of the United States depended upon women. That dependence drove the shifting political salience of gender and sexuality in the early republic.

War Comes to Westchester: The Killing of William Lounsbury

War Comes to WestchesterThe Killing of William Lounsbury Dillon Streifeneder (bio) On the morning of August 29, 1776, Pvt. Samuel Miller awoke to marching orders. An informant had come in during the night, and Miller learned that a group of Tories were enlisting men for the "royal cause" near the village of Mamaroneck. By the summer of 1776, Miller was used to such reports, but this one had added gravity. Eight days prior, nearly twenty-thousand soldiers of William Howe's invasion force had come ashore in neighboring King's County. While Miller might not have known it when he awoke on that morning, Howe's army had defeated George Washington's forces on Long Island, and the American Army was in retreat. The war had come to New York.1 After having volunteered in the winter of 1775 in Capt. Micah Townsend's company of "rangers," Miller had, since the end of June 1776, been working closely with the Westchester County Committee of Safety at White Plains, "taking up and disbanding the Tories and disaffected who were Engaged in collecting together and concerting measures to destroy the said Committee and opposing the cause of Revolution."2 While similar to previous intelligence gained from informants, the Committee responded to this report with particular urgency. With the British advancing on Long Island and having already called out the militia in response to British warships menacing the shoreline, the possibility of internal enemies acting in concert with an external invasion force threatened the entire revolutionary movement.3 The Committee was determined to suppress the threat immediately and called on its quick reaction force—Townsend's company of rangers—to apprehend the Loyalists. Before daylight, Townsend, together with Miller and about twenty others, headed southeast from [End Page 339] White Plains, following the informant toward an area of dense woods and rocks known as the Great Lots, just north of Mamaroneck.4 Finding the Loyalist hiding place, Capt. Townsend's men encircled the encampment. Aroused, Loyalist leader William Lounsbury fired his musket at the approaching militia.5 In the smoke and confusion that ensued, Lounsbury escaped and fled to a nearby cave; he then collapsed, wounded. Refusing to surrender to the pursuing militia, he tried to fend them off, wielding his musket as a club. In this turmoil, a handful of Patriots closed in and finished him off with a bayonet.6 As a local resident recalled nearly seventy years later, "Lounsberry was the first person killed in Westchester county" during the American Revolution.7 He was also, in a sense, the last casualty of the battle of Long Island. His death marked the coming of war to Westchester; it also marked a key moment of transition for the engine of the Revolution, the local committee system.8 While scholars have noted the importance of the Revolutionary committees, there are few studies that closely examine the evolution of committee activity at the local level outside of New England.9 This is problematic for two reasons. First, it has led to two starkly [End Page 340] different portrayals of the committees. One group of historians views the committees primarily as "schools of revolution," that "seldom allowed the policing of popular ideology to get out of hand."10 A second group of historians has asserted that committees were at their core "an apparatus of oppression and terror."11 The second concern is one of time and change. While not exclusively tied to the peaceable portrayal of the committees, most of these works examining the role of committees conclude their studies prior to 1776. The committees that have been studied acted as a political network, playing their role from the Stamp Act crisis until 1775, after which they lost their relevance as American Revolution transitioned into Revolutionary War. Another [End Page 341] body of work on committees has a similar problem. This second group of studies either begins their look at committees amid full-scale war after the British military invasion in 1776 or does not acknowledge that any change occurred in how people and institutions acted when war came to the neighborhood. Both interpretations are tied to a larger problem of historians not engaging...

Генетическое тестирование в практиках заботы о здоровье (по материалам эмпирического исследования)

The article contains the results obtained during an empirical study of health care practices among people of a large Russian city implemented in a combined strategy in 2020–2021. Our focus remains on the reference of citizens to the procedure of DNA diagnostics as a novel instrument of health-saving behavior and attitude to genetic knowledge in general. The obtained data allow concluding that genetic testing is not widely popular among population today, as only 9,5% of those interviewed have ever done it. DNA diagnostics is more frequently used by young women and men with high income and don’t trusting modern medicine, which probably reflects the actual condition of the market of genetic services in our country. Apart from financial possibilities, involvement into consumer genomics is influenced by insufficient trust in DNA information, and suspecting that players on the market of genetic services obtain economic profit. However, the most important argument against it consists in the discovered discrepancy between perception of genetic data as something inevitable and currently popular ideology of healthy lifestyle, meaning that a person can influence the outcome of the efforts made. As a result, research participants are not willing to become the everlasting ‘patients-in-waiting’ even in case of existing symptoms, but implement their ‘right not to know’. Under these conditions, an important task includes organization of active promoting awareness that unlocks potential, capabilities and limitations of genetic diagnostics.

Annavin Thiravida karuthiyal

If Periyar is the root father of Dravidian thought, then its hero can be the scholar Anna. The great man who fought for the individual ideals of self-respect, femininity, equality, rationality, fraternity, caste discrimination and non-discriminatory society through Dravidian policy was an individual who followed them and uttered Dravidian ideologies on the stage in his own erudition. Scholar Anna, who is a versatile personality in writing, speaking, acting and acting, has been a star of hope in the Tamil community. Anna's insider “Grandfather Anna is an intellectual genius, a political dawn, a rationalist, Father Periyar's personal commander, an artistic guard, a turning point in the screen, an Ingersoll in casting caste, religion, sectarian music, a master of music in the preservation of the mother tongue. Wake up, the conversation is a famous beacon there, and Grandfather Anna is hailed as a good university,” S. Maruthavanan identifies. Scholar Anna Dravid was the one who transformed the movement into a popular ideology. Father Periyar set up his campaign very simply to attract the uneducated. Anna was the one who targeted the literate middle-class people created by the shoe impact.The familiarity and reading habits of Tamil literature that developed during and after the liberation of the country created a kind of awareness among the people through drama, film, stage, visual, question and media influences. This was exactly what Anna and his Dravidian movement used. The study summarizes how Anna, through Anna's works and speeches, sowed the seeds of Dravidian ideology in our society for change.

The Post-Truth Analysis of Farmers Suicides Explored in Shoes of The Dead by Kota Neelima


 
 
 
 The infamous farmer-suicides in India, owing to the incapability of debt-repayment house a major concern in the nation. The irony of it is, although more than 70 per cent of the Indian working population is engaged in agriculture, this sector remains gruesomely neglected by the media attention as they do not benefit any profit or merit from them. The news narrative is generally predetermined by the media editors, curated to address the popular ideology of the dominant rule. Post- Truth claims that news is “manufactured truth” highly influenced by the emotional appeal aspertheoristLeeMcIntyre. KotaNeelimaanalysestheissueoffarmer'ssuicide from the journalistic reportage angle. The article studies subverted theory of post- truth in the indigenous scenario of her novel Shoes of the Dead. These novels present the dual narratives of the agriculturists as well as the policy-makers to bring out an approach to the reality at the ground level and the media projected level. The article encompasses a study of Marxist' Reification' by examining the political influences on the media-inconspicuous author exposing the moral blindspots that determine the reasons behind the suicides, and their coverage on national media. The fictional narrative of Kota Neelima infuses her journalistic influences reflecting on the tussle between media ethics of journalism and corporate political demands of the media editors. The current farmer's protests regarding the repeal of the new Farm laws are an outcry of farmers disgusted by the failed promises of compensation of failed crops.
 
 
 

In pursuit of identity (relevance of the philosophy of N. Berdyaev)

This article discusses the topic of identity in the religious philosophy of N. Berdyaev. The author emphasizes the importance of this topic for the philosopher alongside the problematic of freedom and creativity. Emphasis is placed on the existential-religious traditions of Berdyaev’s philosophy, which views a particular individual in his relation to the society and history. According to Berdyaev, an individual is a puzzle not as an organism or social being, but as the identity; the spiritual aspect alone does not depend or determined by the society, which indicates its freedom, although not absolute. The conclusion is made on the relevance of philosophical reflections of N. Berdyaev for the modern state of social development. The author comes into line with the prophetic ideas of the philosopher on the approaching process of dehumanization in spheres of cultural and social life, and namely, dehumanization of moral consciousness. A human fades out as an integral, internally centered, spiritually focused being, who retains cohesion and unity. The author is forced to acknowledge the transformation of moral and ethical values of society, loss of innate thinking, increasing dependence on popular culture and consumer ideology, undermined faith in the future and self-confidence.

Awareness on the possible adverse effects of Garcinia cambogia: A scientific approach

The modern popular ideology is that plant-based products do not have adverse effects. Hence, people are fond of using herbal products of their choice to treat their own ailments or anyone else. As majority of the population are not aware of herbal toxicity concept, the use of formulated single or combined medicinal and/or nutritional plant extracts or isolated compounds to treat chronic diseases are increasingly popular due to the widespread concerns regarding the adverse effects of pharmaceutical drugs. Awareness from the scientific community to bring society to its senses regarding the safety issue of a herbal product is rare. Garcinia gummi-gutta (more popularly known by the synonym Garcinia cambogia in commercial preparations), belonging to the family of Clusiaceae (alt. Guttiferae) is a popularly consumed weight-loss nutraceutical. This review aims to highlight the possible adverse effects of G. cambogia. For the said purpose, 147 articles were collected from PubMed, Web of Science and Google scholar. Literature review revealed a plethora of beneficial actions. Investigational outcomes and clinical evidences hint the possible adverse effects likely to be linked with the use of G. cambogia. However, the use of G. cambogia as an anti-obesity agent is advisable as long as the therapeutic value outweighs the adverse effect.

CURRICULUM IDEOLOGIES UNDERPINNING CURRICULUM IN TANZANIA: A PRE-SERVICE SCIENCE TEACHERS PERSPECTIVES

This paper discusses on the major curriculum ideologies/theories that have informed curriculum decision in the world. There are four ideologies that have been used in history of curriculum development namely Scholar Academic Ideology, Social Efficiency Ideology, Learner Centered Ideology and the Social Reconstruction Ideology. This survey type study aims to investigate pre-service science teachers’ curriculum ideologies. The participants consist of 202 pre-service science teachers enrolled in Bachelor of Science with education at Mkwawa University College of Education (A constituent college of the University of Dar es Salaam) located in Iringa Region-Tanzania. The obtained data were analyzed using frequencies, percentages, and arithmetic means. The findings indicate that Social Reconstruction is popular ideology concerning the learning, childhood and evaluation while at the same time it was the least popular ideology concerning the role of school, role of teachers and knowledge. Article visualizations:

Backlash against human rights shaming: emotions in groups

AbstractHuman rights advocates continue to use shaming as a central tool despite recognizing its declining effectiveness. Shame is indeed a potent motivator, but its effects are often counterproductive for this purpose. Especially when wielded by cultural outsiders in ways that appear to condemn local social practices, shaming is likely to produce anger, resistance, backlash, and deviance from outgroup norms, or denial and evasion. Shaming can easily be interpreted as a show of contempt, which risks triggering fears for the autonomy and security of the group. In these circumstances, established religious and elite networks can employ traditional normative counter-narratives to recruit a popular base for resistance. If this counter-mobilization becomes entrenched in mass social movements, popular ideology, and enduring institutions, the unintended consequences of shaming may leave human rights advocates farther from their goal.

From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women’s Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canada and the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts from the 1940s to the 1970s. Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentation of the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants, but the legacy of earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.

Islam as The State Ideology: Exploring from Gramsci’s Notion of Power, Culture and Ideology

The paper aims at establishing relationships between culture, power, and the state ideology. The reading of Malaysian politics through Gramsci’s conceptual framework provides a tentative interpretation on the state’s exercise of power with popular consent, the structure of power, relation between the state and subaltern groups. Reading through the concept of hegemony, the paper explores the construction and enactment of Islam by the power of the state. It highlights how Islam came to be constructed as the state ideology and how the state establishes and maintains the hegemonic position. On this basis, Islam has been used to produce a specific set of structures in Malaysia to gain national-popular support. The state-society relations will be explored through Gramsci’s notion of civil society to illustrate the possible resistance to the state power. The paper suggests that civil society as a field of contestation in Malaysia. The 14th General Election result has demonstrated that ideology could be contested, hence challenging the state’s domination or coercive power. In conclusion, this paper has demonstrated the previous state’s struggle with civil actors in dominating and maintaining its popular ideology. It could be seen how actors of nonconformist voices in civil society have mobilised themselves into organised groups and institutions to undermine the state hegemony thus assisting the change of the ruling power in the GE14. After 61 years of Independence, Malaysia is finally celebrated the new ruling party. Keywords: Civil society, culture, ideology, power, state hegemony.

“¿Es la "demokratía" semejante a la democracia? Lecturas contemporáneas de la democracia ateniense

En este artículo analizaré dos importantes aproximaciones contemporáneas a la democracia ateniense. Se trata de las interpretaciones enfrentadas de dos helenistas que han arrojado nueva luz sobre el conocimiento de la democracia clásica. Mogens H. Hansen se ha centrado especialmente en el estudio de las instituciones como fundamento del poder democrático, mientras Josiah Ober, basándose en los textos retóricos, pretende reconstruir la ideología popular a la que hace responsable del dominio político del dêmos sobre la elite. Intentaré, a su vez, trazar las líneas de filiación teórica de ambas posturas y, para ello, abordaré una segunda cuestión, la de qué es la polis griega, un estado o una sociedad sin estado. Mi conclusión es que la lectura de Hansen está muy cercana a la historiografía liberal de G. Grote, mientras que la de Ober no es ajena a las lecturas antropológicas y comunitaristas.

Christianity, sexuality and citizenship in Africa: critical intersections

ABSTRACTCitizenship in sub-Saharan Africa has undergone profound changes in recent decades as part of wider social and political dynamics. One notable development is the emergence of Christianity, especially in its Pentecostal-Charismatic forms, as a public religion. Christian actors, beliefs and practices have increasingly come to manifest themselves in the public sphere, actively engage with politics, define narratives of nationhood and shape notions of citizenship. A second major development is the emergence of sexuality as a critical site of citizenship and nationhood in postcolonial Africa. On the one hand, many political and religious leaders are invested in a popular ideology of the heterosexual family as the basis of nation-building, while on the other hand, LGBT communities are becoming more visible and claim recognition from the state. The contributions to this special issue engage these two contrasting developments, examining the interconnections between Christianity, sexuality and citizenship empirically and theoretically through case studies in various African contexts and from several academic disciplines and critical perspectives.

Vulnerability and the Climate Change Regime

Climate change is precipitating social issues that are not traceable to a discreet, culpable actor. This is because greenhouse gas accumulation in the stratosphere is a global problem transcending the socio-political boundaries that law uses to assign responsibility. The diffuse nature of climate change calls for new legal approaches that can provide greater juridical responsiveness[1] to social problems and universal human vulnerability that is emerging in the wake of one of the most pressing environmental challenges facing the international community today.[2] Those social problems include displacement and dispossession of indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend directly on their environment, such as Arctic communities in Alaska, rural dwellers in the Himalayas, livestock farmers in the Kalahari, and forest-dwellers in the Amazon.[3] Farming communities reliant upon rain-fed agriculture also face food insecurity due to changing, unpredictable rainfall patterns.[4] While social impacts may be most keenly felt at the local level, the global nature of climate change means that jurisprudential bases of law at all levels—local, national, regional, and international[5]—need to promote coherent legal responses that recognize the global genesis of what may be seen as localized problems.This essay will draw on human vulnerability theory to discuss law’s role in promoting social justice in the wake of climate change. Vulnerability is the “characteristic that positions us in relation to each other as human beings and also suggests a relationship of responsibility between the state and its institutions and the individual.”[6] Vulnerability theory critiques the contemporary understanding of “the legal subject,” which is built on an ideology that values liberty over equality and manipulates contractual concepts such as choice and consent to justify exploitation and structural inequality.[7] That inequality has distorted and constrained the conception of the legal subject into a narrow and limited autonomous subject that is at the center of the analysis that law uses to organize society.[8] Human vulnerability theory calls for enriching the legal subject by placing it in social context, and engaging with its complex and dynamic characteristics. The paper is divided into five Parts. Part I provides an overview of human vulnerability theory. Part II presents a vulnerability perspective on liberalism and neoliberalism, two theories that underlie the current global climate regime. Part III examines the concept of vulnerability in the climate discourse, while Part IV applies human vulnerability theory to the global climate regime. The final part states the conclusions. [1] Anna Grear, Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and co-Symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject, in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Paradigm for Law and Politics 41, 41 (Martha Alberston Fineman & Anna Grear eds., 2013). [2] David Hunter, James Salzman & Durwood Zaelke, International Environmental Law & Policy 3rd ed. 631. Foundation Press, NY (2007). [3]Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, http://www.un.org/en/events/indigenousday/pdf/Backgrounder_ClimateChange_FINAL.pdf [http://perma.cc/7G3H-M9MP]. [4] Berhanu F. Alemaw & Timothy Simalenga, Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in Rainfed Farming Systems: A Modeling Framework for Scaling-Out Climate Smart Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, 4 Am. J. of Climate Change 313 (2015). [5]See Klaus Bosselmann, The Rule of Law Grounded in Earth (2013), p.5. [6]Vulnerability and the Human Condition, Emory University, http://web.gs.emory.edu/vulnerability/index.html [http://perma.cc/D363-SFCR] [hereinafter Vulnerability Index]. [7]Definitions of Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, Emory University, http://web.gs.emory.edu/vulnerability/about/definitions.html [http://perma.cc/D363-SFCR]. [8]See Martha Albertson Fineman, The Autonomy Myth, The New Press (2004). In this book, Fineman argues that popular ideology in the United States (and adopted in other common law based legal systems) has become fixated on the myth that citizens are and should be autonomous. However, the fact is that dependency is unavoidable in any society and human beings are more or less dependent on others at all stages in the human life-cycle. I extend the notion of dependency to our dependence on the environment and the resources it provides for our subsistence on Earth throughout our lives.

Rabbi Wolf Meisel’s Attempt to Establish a Midstream Judaism in Hungary, 1859-1867

Abstract During the years that led to the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1869, Orthodoxy reigned relatively unchallenged in communities of long standing or East European immigration, while Neology spread in the recently founded urban synagogues. Only the steadily growing community of Pest, Hungary’s economic capital, presented an appropriate testing-ground for religious forces that tried to withstand the progressive cleavage. My paper will focus on the exceptional moment after 1859, when Chief Rabbi Wolf Meisel (1815-1867), a Bohemian compatriot of Zacharias Frankel, formulated in his short-lived journal Der Carmel a popular midstream ideology that was largely independent from the Breslau-style „Science of Judaism.” Jointly attacked by the Orthodox party as well as by Leopold Löw’s progressive journal Ben-Chananja, Meisel’s religious position was undermined by the rise of Hungarian nationalism and the more successfully mediatized Magyarization efforts of the Neologs. My paper will ask for the ideological and social characteristics of Rabbi Meisel’s failed peace movement, the controversy it aroused, and its long-term repercussions on Hungarian Jewish modernism.

Echoes of Postfeminism in American Students’ Narratives of Study Abroad in France

Author(s): Kinginger, Celeste | Abstract: In qualitative research on Americans in study abroad contexts, female gender often emerges as problematic, with young women portrayed as hapless victims of sexual harassment. The assumption underlying interpretation of these studies appears to maintain that female students are victimized because they find themselves in places where inherently superior American discourses of gender equity do not prevail. Meanwhile, however, scrutiny of participants’ stories reveals deeper mysteries, to do with gender trouble from home that students bring to their experiences abroad. This paper adopts a narrative approach to interview and journal data from a previous study in which American students, both male and female, recount their experiences in France. Their accounts are linked to the sociocultural history and popular ideology of Franco-American relations and to images of study abroad in the American media. Students’ stories draw upon and contest an amalgam of images related to social class, gender, and national identity, which are embedded in perennial American representations of French language learning as social class transcendence. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, this phenomenon has morphed into a contemporary postfeminist self-help literature for would-be Frenchwomen, which celebrates anachronistic images of women as accomplished homemakers and objects of sexual desire who nevertheless control their destinies through artful styling of self and navigation of the global marketplace. “Frenchness,” with or without corresponding language ability, symbolizes membership in the mobilized, global elite. Thus, while a second language offers potentially new resources for the performance of gendered identity, this study shows how the relationship between such resources and learners’ desires is mediated by previous participation in specific discourses of gender and social class, which may or may not prioritize language learning per se.

Ideological Expectations for Value Consensus in Chinese Society

Surveys have shown that popular ideology has tended to move from pluralism to clustering around dualism at this sensitive and critical moment for the formation of value consensus in contemporary China. The formation of a “value consensus” or “common values” must answer three questions: “What is ‘common’ about this consensus?” How can ‘consensus’ be reached?” “How can ‘values’ be legitimated?” On the basis of survey information, this paper presents the basic argument that what is common lies in ethics; consensus in spirit; and value legitimacy in our national cultural home. Ordinary people have three major ideological expectations of value consensus in contemporary China: expectation of ethical enlightenment with the theme of turning “I” into “we”; expectation of a spiritual baptism with the value “unity of the individual and the universal” and expectation of the endeavor to “return home.” Specifically, their content is as follows: to protect ethical existence and undertake the re- enlightenment of ethical consciousness at the national, family and group levels; to sublate “atomistic exploration” of the theory and mode of rationalistic ethics and carry out the “spiritual’ construction of the three great ethical entities of society, state and family; and to “go back home” to national cultural traditions and ethics and build value legitimacy. These three major expectations can be condensed into three ideas: protecting ethics, reviving “spirit” and going back “home.”

Popular Ideology and Public Policy in Europe: Trends and Popular Ideology as a Determinant of Public Policies?

Does popular ideology affect public policies enacted in a country? The baseline argument links popular ideology input to policy output. Either a population more often elects a party with its favored ideology into office, which then implements policies in line with popular ideology. Alternatively, all parties pursue policies more in line with popular ideology. Under the first view, popular ideology should affect government composition, which then matters for policy. Under the second view, policies should track popular ideology, but there should not be an effect of government ideology. If governments were perfect agents, a shift in popular ideology would translate in policy. This is not the case. This leaves two explanations: either that all governments purse the same policies in response to the same problems, or that governments do not actually care about their principals’ ideological demands. Comparing, which policies track popular ideology and which are independent of it, indicates that governments follow popular ideology in policies, where they have no bureaucratic self-interest in certain policy developments, but otherwise pursue their own agenda.

Hostile Politics: Sallust and the Rhetoric of Popular Champions in the Late Republic

Morstein-Marx’s thesis (2004) of “ideological monotony” in contional rhetoric in the late Roman republic has become the dominant paradigm in analyses of Roman oratory and the Roman people, with far-reaching implications for our understanding of the power of the elite in Roman politics. This article challenges his thesis. I argue that Sallust’s evidence allows us to reconstruct a distinctive popular ideology of “hostile politics”—politics constructed as an engagement of two enemy powers, where one is conquered, enslaved, and despoiled, and fear is the only effective political weapon which remains.