State Political Parties Research Articles

Medicaid Expansion Case Study: Differences Between Florida and New York Medicaid Expansion Policy

Health access is an essential aspect of social equity. Expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has increased healthcare access for more than 21 million people in the United States, and 10 states have chosen not to participate in Medicaid expansion. This study investigates the factors influencing states’ decisions on Medicaid expansion under the ACA and its implications for social equity. It uses a comparative case study of New York (expansion) and Florida (non-expansion) to reveal the complex determinants of Medicaid expansion decisions. These determinants are crucial for understanding and promoting social equity in pursuing public purposes. Political affiliations, lobbying, and a state’s economic climate significantly shape Medicaid policies. Unfortunately, grassroots advocacy groups encountered significant challenges in Florida, where health associations tended to align closely with their state political parties. Despite the challenges, organizations must advocate for improved healthcare access and Medicaid expansion to address social equity concerns.

Multicultural personality and intergroup forgiveness between United States political parties

AbstractThe purpose of this research was to investigate whether multicultural personality orientation as measured by the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire short form (MPQ) predicted intergroup forgiveness, decisions to forgive, revenge intentions, and avoidance intentions in the context of U.S. political conflict. We conducted three replicated studies across three different political, contextual samples. Study 1 was collected from a majority liberal, majority People of Color sample (N = 301), Study 2 was a majority liberal, majority White sample (N = 125), and Study 3 was a majority conservative, majority White sample (N = 160). Participants in these studies completed items from the MPQ short form and read a hypothetical political violence event committed against their political ingroup by a political outgroup. Overall, we found that the cultural empathy subscale of the MPQ short form was a consistent positive predictor of forgiveness even in the presence of other relevant predictors such as strength of ingroup identification and political ideology. We also performed a mini meta‐analysis across our three collected studies which further supported cultural empathy as a consistent positive predictor of intergroup forgiveness.

Increased female political representation associated with lower county-level uninsured and preventable hospitalizations rates in the United States, 2013–2018

ObjectiveAlthough women comprise 50% of the population, females remain underrepresented in government. Inequitable female political representation, a form of structural sexism, may impact population health. Previous studies focused primarily on individual health behaviors and low- or middle-income countries. To date, no study has examined the association between female political representation and healthcare access and utilization, immediately policy-amenable outcomes, in the United States. Study designThis was a repeated cross-sectional study. MethodsThis study uses 2013–2018 county-level data from the County Rankings. I performed multilevel analyses to determine the relationships between state-level female representation (% female state legislators) and two outcomes—the percentage of county-level population under age 65 years without health insurance (primary outcome) and the county-level preventable hospitalization rates (secondary outcome of interest). Potential confounders included county-level and state-level characteristics such as the unemployment rate. I also examined whether associations differed by political party control of the state legislature. ResultsIn the fully adjusted model, one standard deviation difference in female political representation was associated with a decrease of 0.22 percentage points in county-level uninsured (95% confidence interval = −0.32, −0.12). The association between female political representation and preventable hospitalization rate differed according to state political party in control, with a decrease found only among counties in democratic/split controlled states (−80.51, 95% confidence interval = −149.65, −11.38). ConclusionsThe results suggest that policy intervention addressing the underrepresentation of women in government may help increase the proportion of uninsured and, under certain circumstances, decrease county-level unnecessary hospitalizations. However, further research is needed to better understand the role of political party control in modifying noted associations.

Do Party Rules Matter? An Examination of State Party Bylaws and Congressional Nominations

This paper considers whether the rules governing state political parties help to explain primary election outcomes. I theorize political parties will see lower levels of competition during primary elections when they have bylaws that centralize power within the state central committee. To test this expectation, I created a dataset of state-level party rules by collecting and coding provisions within the bylaws of all 100 state-level Republican and Democratic parties. I operationalize party centralization of power as whether or not elected officials are represented within each party’s formal membership, their state central committee, and whether or not each party has an endorsement or neutrality policy when it comes to contested primaries. I find the centralization of party power does correlate with lower levels of competition in primary elections for the House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020. Specifically, parties are more likely to see uncontested primaries when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and are more likely to see fewer candidates in general when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and when they do not have rules that require the state central committee to remain neutral during contested primary elections. While evaluating the causes of this trend is beyond the scope of this paper, these findings appear to be driven by Republican primaries.

WHAT DOES THE DMK’S 2021 ELECTION CAMPAIGN SONG FOCUS ON? : A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Methods to convince voters are continuously evolving since the inception of elections. Contesting political parties have used every possible media from posters to short videos to approach and impress voters. With creativity paving ways to innovative campaign strategy and methods, studies focusing on them are gaining momentum. Campaign songs play an engaging role in this campaign communication strategy in the state of Tamil Nadu. Initially, campaign songs were written to create awareness of parties’ name, symbol, and ideology among the illiterate population. With time, the focus of the songs has shifted to party leaders. The 2021 Tamil Nadu election witnessed the release of campaign songs by state and national political parties. Thanks to social media, these songs had massive reach on social networking sites among people of all age groups. In this context, this paper aims to analyze the official campaign song released by the state political party DMK for the 2021 Tamil Nadu election based on the multimodal discourse analysis informed by Visual grammar.

The Parliament of India’s General Election to the 17th Lok Sabha in 2019: An Analysis

India’s Election Commission of India (ECI) is an autonomous, quasi judicial constitutional body created in 1950 under an article 324 of the Constitution of India. It is the supreme body vested with the powers of superintendence, direction and control of all aspects of elections to offices of the President and the Vice President of India, both the houses of Parliament (Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha), State Legislative Assemblies as well as State Legislative Councils and Union Territories Legislative Assemblies. In fact, ECI is an independent of an executive or the party or party led alliance parties in power at the centre. All the states and the Union Territories (UTs), who had election commissions are working under this ECI have the powers to conduct elections for rural and urban local bodies in their respective states and UTs. The Indian national and state political parties have released their respective election manifestos policies for contesting the Parliament of India’s general election to the 17th Lok Sabha in 2019 in order to win for forming a 5 years central government purpose at New Delhi in India. The BJP led NDA has won this election with significant number of Member of Parliament (MP) seats.

Partisanship and Polarization in State Court Vacancies

Backlogs and long delays in the confirmation of federal judicial nominees have become a common occurrence in Washington, leaving many federal benches understaffed and overworked. While this phenomenon has been well studied at the federal level examining political and institutional factors at play beyond senatorial courtesy, little is known if delay occurs in court systems of the individual American states, or how extensive the obstruction and the delay should it occur. We examine judicial appointments in states having the selection system of gubernatorial nomination and legislative confirmation. We focus on the duration of the judicial vacancies on state intermediate appellate courts and courts of last resort from 2000 to 2016 and explain the variation over time in the length of this process. We show that partisan division and increases in the polarization of state political parties work together to influence timely staffing of these critical institutions in the American states. Ultimately, these findings offer insight into the issues caused by political gridlock over judicial selection and offer practical institutional remedies to this problem.

Tamil Nadu Politics and Tamil Cinema: A Symbiotic Relationship?

From the second-half of the twentieth century, a nascent Tamil cinema became increasingly influential in Tamil society and more prominent in political life. The Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in 1944, morphed into the DMK and AIADMK, two dominant state political parties in Tamil Nadu. Through the medium of film, some of its leading lights, C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, cultivated cinema audiences and the voting public in the political ideologies of the Dravidian movement and subsequently became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The symbiotic relationship between politics and Tamil cinema has meant that political and social commentaries and the assertion of Tamil nationalistic ideas was commonplace in Tamil films. In recent years, Tamil cinema has become the vehicle for raising a wide range of concerns ranging from caste, class and gender and state/nation politics, marking a shift that focusses on everyday politics in the state. In this article, we present a critical survey of the role of Tamil cinema in disseminating particular realities and politics of identity that speak to an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity, the concomitant disavowal of broader conceptions of Indian-ness or belonging to the Indian nation, as well as the use of cinema to address everyday politics in the State.

Convergence analysis of health expenditure in Indian states: Do political factors matter?

Economic theory argues that most often the extent and pattern of expenditure by government is politically driven. In India, in spite of poor health indicators, public spending on health is inadequate which encourages to study the impact of political factors on the nexus between per-capita GDP and public health expenditure for Indian states during 1980–2016. States are categorized into two converging groups which have been identified on the basis of Phillips and Sul convergence analysis. Bihar was the only state among the 20 states, which was non-convergent. Each convergent group is further analysed with panel corrected standard error model since traditional fixed or random effect models were found to have cross interdependence of errors. Political factors like centre–state political affiliation, party continuation and political unanimity are taken as explanatory variables for this analysis. Empirical findings suggest that political factors play major role in determining health expenditure in each category group but strength of impact differs across two groups.

White Counties Stand Apart: The Primacy of Residential Segregation in COVID-19 and HIV Diagnoses

Emerging epidemiological data suggest that white Americans have a lower risk of acquiring COVID-19. Although many studies have pointed to the role of systemic racism in COVID-19 racial/ethnic disparities, few studies have examined the contribution of racial segregation. Residential segregation is associated with differing health outcomes by race/ethnicity for various diseases, including HIV. This commentary documents differing HIV and COVID-19 outcomes and service delivery by race/ethnicity and the crucial role of racial segregation. Using publicly available Census data, we divide US counties into quintiles by percentage of non-Hispanic white residents and examine HIV diagnoses and COVID-19 per 100,000 population. HIV diagnoses decrease as the proportion of white residents increase across US counties. COVID-19 diagnoses follow a similar pattern: Counties with the highest proportion of white residents have the fewest cases of COVID-19 irrespective of geographic region or state political party inclination (i.e., red or blue states). Moreover, comparatively fewer COVID-19 diagnoses have occurred in primarily white counties throughout the duration of the US COVID-19 pandemic. Systemic drivers place racial minorities at greater risk for COVID-19 and HIV. Individual-level characteristics (e.g., underlying health conditions for COVID-19 or risk behavior for HIV) do not fully explain excess disease burden in racial minority communities. Corresponding interventions must use structural- and policy-level solutions to address racial and ethnic health disparities.

Women in State Political Parties

Morgan C. Matthews on whether the 2018 midterm election was unusual or part of a broader gender polarization pattern?

Women running the party and women running for Congress: An examination of state party diversity and candidate emergence in the 2018 midterm elections

Using a new data set of state political party bylaws and demographics of state party chairs, I evaluate whether women were more likely to run for Congress during the 2018 midterm elections from parties with higher levels of gender diversity. I construct three measures of gender diversity, whether each party was chaired by a woman, granted committee membership to an allied women’s group, and required gender parity among their committee members. Democratic parties are more likely to be chaired by a woman and to require gender parity among their members, but Republican parties are more likely to grant membership to allied women’s groups. Considering the implications of these rules, I find Democratic women were more likely to run for Congress representing parties that grant membership to an allied women’s group and parties chaired by a woman.

The Impact of State Political Party Association on the Gender Wage Gap

This study investigates whether political party association impacts the gender wage gap in the United States of America. This study is motivated by the impact of gender wage gap on females’ choice of major, which directly impacts the national economy. Gender wage gap data is collected from 50 states; Mississippi is a proxy for the Republican Party and New York is a proxy for the Democratic Party. The empirical results reveal that political party association is positively and significantly associated with the gender wage gap. This study is the first to document the relationship between gender wage gap and political party association.

Evaluating the Roles of Regional Based Political Parties in Fostering Ethnic Unity in Benishangul Gumuz Regional State, Ethiopia (Since 1991)

In multi-ethnic federations which were particularly established to manage the existing diversity, the political parties should promote, preserve and protect the existing diversity and simultaneously endorse the sense of unity. Under multi-ethnic states political parties as one main actor should audaciously nurture sense of unity in diversity ideally and practically. Here, fostering ethnic unity means not only sharing identical political philosophy among individuals or groups, but it also remind as that individuals or groups may have differences in opinion and leaning. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to critically examining the practical role of regional based political parties in promotion of ethnic unity under contemporary Benishangul Gumuz Regional State (hereafter used as BGRS). In this regard, the author of this paper collected various empirical data through personal interviews, focus group discussions and administering survey questionnaire. Based on the information gained through various research instruments the author concluded that despite the fact that the government has recognized the creation of ethnic political parties as a positive political measure to promote every ethnic group in the country to have a sense of belonging, but in contrast, the existence of ethnic based political parties and hasty mushrooming of narrow ethno-nationalist politics has constituted one major impediment to promote unity and peaceful coexistence among various ethnic groups in BGRS. Moreover, the writer also argued that organizing political parties only through political lens of ethnicity would gradually create elevated ethnic fundamentalism, chauvinism and parochialism among politicians and individuals. And later it also opened the door for politicians and individuals to play lopsided proxy ethnic political game within the neighbouring regional states and consequently this situation tend to ethnic conflict. Thus, this kind of political party establishment road-map in the country has paved the way to series ethnic conflicts which resulted major predicaments and disunity among various ethnic groups in the country in general and regional states in particular. Keywords: Political Party; BGRS; Ethnicity; Ethnic Unity; Ethnic Conflict; Ethnic Diversity; Politicians DOI : 10.7176/RHSS/9-1-06

Consolidated state political party control and the enactment of obesity-related policies in the United States

States play a key role in addressing obesity and its risk factors through policymaking, but there is variation in state activity nationally. The goal of this study was to examine whether the presence of a consolidated Democratic or Republican “trifecta” – when a state's governorship and both houses of the legislature are dominated by the same political party – or divided government (i.e., without a trifecta) is associated with obesity-related policy content and enactment. In 2016 and 2017, we gathered state bills and laws utilizing the CDC Chronic Disease State Policy Tracking System, and examined the association between state-level political party control and the enactment of state-level obesity-related policies in all states during 2009–2015. The three areas of interest included: policies specifically addressing obesity, nutrition, or physical activity in communities, schools, or workplaces using a public health framework; neutral policies, such as creating government task forces; and policies that employed a business-interest framework (e.g., Commonsense Consumption Acts that prohibit consumer lawsuits against restaurant establishments). Using divided governments as the reference group, we found that states with Democratic trifectas enacted significantly more laws, and more laws with a public health framework. Republican trifecta states enacted more laws related to physical activity, and in some states like Texas, Republican trifectas were exceptionally active in passing policies with a public health framework. States with Republican trifectas enacted a statistically similar amount of laws as states with divided governments. These findings suggest promise across states for obesity-related public health policymaking under a variety of political regimes.

The party politics of legislative‒executive relations in security and defence policy

The move from territorial defence to ‘wars of choice’ has influenced the domestic politics of military interventions. This paper examines the extent to which both the substance and the procedure of military interventions are contested among political parties. Regarding the substance, our analysis of Chapel Hill Expert Survey data demonstrates that across European states political parties on the right are more supportive of military missions than those on the left. On the decision-making procedures, our case studies of Germany, France, Spain and the United Kingdom show that political parties on the left tend to favour strong parliamentary control whereas those on the right tend to prefer an unconstrained executive, although with differences across countries. These findings challenge the view that ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ and contribute to a better understanding of how political parties and parliaments influence military interventions.

Public support in the United States for elective oocyte cryopreservation

To determine whether public support for oocyte cryopreservation (OC) exists and if support varies by demographic factors. Cross-sectional electronic survey. Not applicable. A nationally representative sample based on age, sex, and race of 1,064 people in the United States recruited by the company SurveyMonkey. Completion of an online questionnaire. Supporters of OC for various indications were compared with participants who were neutral or in opposition by means of log binomial regression to calculate risk ratios. Statistical models were adjusted for demographic characteristics, including sex, race, age, income, sexual orientation, education, marital status, state political party affiliation, and history of being a parent. OC for cancer patients was the indication most supported (89%), followed by delayed childbearing for career advancement (72%), current lack of a partner (63%), and insufficient funds for child rearing (58%). Despite considerable support for OC, only 37% agreed employers should fund egg freezing for employees. Older age was associated with lower support for all indications of OC. Younger age, single status, never being a parent, identifying as a sexual minority, and atheist/agnostic religion were associated with the survey taker personally considering OC. Compared with women, men demonstrated lower support for women undergoing OC for "lack of a male partner," and for future use of cryopreserved oocytes without being married. In a nationally representative sample, the majority of respondents support elective OC. The indication for OC was associated with significant differences in support.

Challenges of Albania towards the European Integration

This paper examines the role of European Union has in developing a real democracy. At present, our country faces various challenges while it aligns itself in the road of democratization and in European integration. In my opinion, the most important three are: 1-The need for a well-rounded and good intending political and administrative elite. 2-The need for truly independent government branches as described in the constitution. 3-The need for an independent civic society. The main objectives of this study are to: Define the concept of the Albanian democracy; to identify the key factors affecting the lack of democracy. This paper tries to discuss the present problems and challenges towards the process of democratization and European integration too. At the last is to propose possible strategic approach for democracy to develop the whole society towards the European Integration. The paper is based on different theories related to democracy and political parties. This paper analyzes the relation between Albania and European Union is progressing during the transition period, try to give an overview between their relation these years and takes into consideration the impact of others actors in society in building a real democracy such as are: cultural factors, political parties, civil society and especially the relation between the citizens and representatives of a state (political parties). DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s2p571

Polarization without Parties: Term Limits and Legislative Partisanship in Nebraska's Unicameral Legislature

AbstractDespite a long history of nonpartisanship, the Nebraska state legislature has polarized rapidly within the past decade. Using interviews and campaign finance records, we examine politics in the modern Unicam to investigate nonpartisan polarization. We find that newly instituted term limits created opportunities for the state's political parties to recruit and finance candidates in an increasingly partisan fashion. Social network analysis suggests that there is a growing level of structure to campaign donations, with political elites increasingly less likely to contribute across party lines. The results offer a compelling example of parties overcoming institutions designed to eliminate them.

The unintended effects of political party affirmative action policies on female candidates’ nomination chances

Some state political party organizations that hold nominating conventions implement affirmative action (AA) policies to encourage the nomination of women and minority candidates. This paper assesses whether these policies help or hinder female candidates seeking statewide office. On the one hand, these policies could benefit female candidates since they demonstrate an organization's commitment to diversity. On the other hand, diversity and AA policies may have negative, unintended consequences for female candidates such as promoting gender stereotype activation or creating a stigma of incompetence for female candidates. I examine whether and how delegates’ awareness of these policies shapes candidate evaluations, gender stereotypes, and nominee choice. I test this by analyzing unique survey data from Democratic state nominating convention delegates who evaluate candidates in statewide nominations in four states. The results suggest that while evaluations of the female candidate are not downgraded, focus on AA leads Democratic delegates to inflate their views of her male opponent. Furthermore, when delegates perceive that their party focuses on AA, they are less likely to choose the female candidate, in part because this perceived focus highlights that female candidates might lack masculine strengths. The resulting implications for female candidates and political party organizations are discussed.