Substantive Political Issues Research Articles

Evolution of Brazilian Democracy: Unveiling Election Dynamics in Political Issues, Negativity, and Acclaim

In recent years, Brazil, as the world’s fourth-largest democracy, witnessed the dominance of polarized and symbolically charged electoral campaigns on social media, culminating in the election of a populist political figure in 2018 and his subsequent defeat in 2022. Extensive research has indicated that political campaigns often sidelined substantive policy proposals in favor of negative and divisive issues. However, a critical gap remains in the absence of temporal investigations contrasting the prevalence of negativity and acclaim campaigns on social media platforms during elections. This study addresses this gap by examining associations between political issues and negative and acclaim campaigns across two Brazilian electoral campaigns. Drawing upon a sample of messages posted on Twitter (n = 1,191) during the presidential elections of 2018 and 2022, our study reveals associations between substantive political issues, such as education and health, and acclaim campaign strategies, while the divisive issues of Covid-19 and corruption are associated with negative campaign strategies. Moreover, the results suggest that gender policy is related to both acclaim and negative messages since it is a polarizing issue in Brazilian politics. Our study also shows an increased negativity trend, with the 2022 presidential election campaign more likely to be negative than in 2018. By conducting a temporal analysis of Brazil’s political context, our study sheds light on the evolving dynamics of political communication in the age of social media, contributing substantially to the literature on negativity in political campaigns.

Algorithmic selection and supply of political news on Facebook

Facebook has been criticized for exposing its users to low-quality and harmful information, including fake news, hate speech, and politically one-sided content. In December 2013 and again in August 2014, the platform updated its news feed algorithm to increase user exposure to quality content of news publishers, while curbing the proliferation of non-informative posts. This paper uses a sample of German newspapers to investigate the conjecture that these modifications raised the incentives to publish quality news stories on the platform, focusing on the number and diversity of news story posts about substantive political issues. Using the newspapers’ print editions as a counterfactual, our results indicate an increase in the amount of substantive political news on Facebook by approximately 30%. This expansion occurred in a politically balanced way, except that the outlets disproportionately increased their Facebook coverage of the formerly underrepresented Linke (Left Party). Consequently, the within-outlet concentration of political viewpoints decreased by about one half of the standard deviation of our concentration indices.

Alienation, Value and Fetishism in Marx’s Critique of the State

It is well known that Marx never systematized a political theory. But he nonetheless addressed substantive political issues in a coherent and consistent way. Only an understanding of the totality o...

Revisiting truth and freedom in Orwell and Rorty

This article uses differing interpretations of a thread of narrative taken from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard to exploring the connection between philosophical truth and political liberalism. It argues that while no positive connection exists between realist truth and political liberalism, minimal negative connections do exist between Rorty’s humanistic account of truth and a basic commitment to democratic and liberal frameworks. It sees these minimal connections as limiting in their failure to provide a politics that moves beyond an exclusive concern with liberty and democracy to more substantive political issues of equality and justice. However, it also sees them as reassuring in showing how acceptance of Rorty’s humanistic account of truth in no way necessitates adopting his own ethnocentric political stance.

Greenland at the Crossroads

At the end of March 2010, a domestic political event suddenly made Greenland a hot topic in Danish current affairs: Lene Espersen, the leader of the Conservative People's party and the new minister of foreign affairs, decided not to attend the meeting of the foreign ministers of five circumpolar countries (Canada, Denmark/ Greenland, United States, Norway, and Russia) to be held on March 29 in Chelsea, Quebec. The reason given by the minister - a long-planned family holiday on Majorca - provoked a flood of vehement criticism that seriously undermined her credibility. Although she had just been appointed the previous month and was a neophyte in foreign affairs, Espersen did not judge it necessary to meet the likes of Hillary Clinton. Another meeting was to be held a bit later in any event, she explained, and only an overview was on the agenda for this one. In the end, Lars Barfoed, the Danish minister of justice, stood in for her at the meeting (and very competently, it should be noted).The most insightful commentators on this affair (in Greenland and elsewhere) pointed out that Danish public opinion was far more interested in the minister's cavalier approach than the substantive political issues. Indeed, this headline-grabbing episode speaks volumes about the average Dane's lack of interest in the far-flung autonomous territory. This was not, however, the case for the preceding minister of foreign affairs, Per Stig M0Uer, also a Conservative People's party member, who had been a pular of the successive centre-right governments since the 2001 changeover of power. M0Uer was the moving force behind the 2008 Ilulissat declaration, to which I wul return later in this article. M0Uer's announcement, made prior to the February 2010 ministerial shuffle, that he planned to attend the Chelsea meeting did not stop Espersen from sloughing off that professional obligation. This les s -than- glorious episode was an unfortunate one for the government of Lars Ijztkke Rasmussen, which, already damaged by the fauure of the 2009 UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen, was in any event markedly less popular than that of his predecessor, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was prime minister from 2001 until his April 2009 designation as secretary-general of NATO.The crisis of confidence sparked by Espersen in the spring of 2010 has continued to deepen. Alarming poUs published at the end of the year showed that support for her Conservative party had been effectively cut in half and was sitting around the four- or five-percent level. Because her own popularity had dropped to its lowest level, Espersen stepped down as president of the party in January 2011. She did however retain the portfolio of minister of foreign affairs and in this capacity she received her Arctic Council colleagues and the representatives of the indigenous populations at Nuuk on 12 May 2011. During this official meeting Sweden succeeded Denmark as the chair of this international body for a two-year term. In an apparent effort to counter the strong criticism endured by Espersen the previous year, Clinton heaped praise on her Danish coUeague during the summit's closing press conference.1 Although this eloquent defence was duly noted by the press, the overall critical attitude towards the Danish foreign minister remained unchanged.It is interesting to compare the relative importance accorded to polar questions by the two Scandinavian countries bordering on the Arctic Ocean, Norway and Denmark.2 In his 2008 book  Gjere en Forskjell (Making a Difference), Norway's current foreign minister, Jonas Gahr StOTe, set out the key points of his intended foreign policy. It is striking to note that one of the first two chapters of this book is entirely devoted to the Arctic and the final chapter stresses the critical importance of Norway's most northerly regions. StOTe clearly believes that his country should give this issue the highest priority. Although Store's then-counterpart in Denmark, Per Stig M0ller, did not write a similar book, he did analyze Denmark's foreign policy that same year in the context of a research seminar. …

Open Documents and Democracy: A Political Basis for Open Document Standards

The modern information society depends upon an enormous variety of electronic devices in order to function on a day-to-day basis. Information and communication technology (ICT) devices are able to exchange information only if they adhere to common communication protocols, technical interfaces, and information formats. ICT standards are the blueprints enabling users to access, create, and exchange information regardless of their hardware or software choices. Increasingly, governments are establishing policies to use ICT products based on standards that adhere to principles of openness and interoperability. For example, Japan instituted a policy that government agencies and ministries should procure software products that support internationally accepted open standards. The Brazilian federal government issued an interoperability architecture establishing the adoption of open standards, such as Open Document Format (ODF), for technology used within the executive branch of the federal government. Similarly, Belgium's federal Council of Ministers approved a proposal to adopt open document standards for creating and exchanging office documents such as text files, spreadsheets, and presentations. Academic analyses of open standards policies usually address economic and technical concerns. But technological design is also political. Technologies both embody values and, once developed, have political consequences. Rationales for government procurement policies based on principles of openness and interoperability should not be viewed exclusively through an economic or a technical lens, but through the prism of the principles that provide democratic governments with their legitimacy. This paper employs democratic theory as a method of political and ethical inquiry into the implications of openness in information and communication standards. Our account describes four ways in which standards can have political implications: 1. Standards can have implications for other democratic processes; 2. Standards can affect the broader social conditions relevant to democracy; 3. The content and material implications of standards can themselves constitute substantive political issues; and 4. The internal processes of standards-setting can be viewed politically. After providing examples of each of these political implications, we examine various conceptions of openness in standards and describe maximal and minimal definitions of openness as conceptual poles that anchor each end of the spectrum of potential standards policy options. We then develop some guidelines as to the specific contexts in which democratic values require a greater degree of openness in both the substance of technical standards and their development, and consider these imperatives in the political context of electronic public documents. Finally, we describe some selected cases of government ICT procurement policies based on standards that adhere to principles of openness. Our overarching conclusion, emanating from both the theoretical and descriptive portions of this study, suggests that movements toward open standards, particularly in the context of electronic public documents, are highly beneficial for citizens who value democratic principles.

Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More about Politics?

To paraphrase slightly, I have been asked to focus on the apparent tensions between making genuinely scientific contributions by advancing knowledge in rigorous ways within specialized subfields, on the one hand, and addressing substantive political issues of general interest in accessible fashion, on the other. My view is that, though we should try to do both things, we should give priority to the latter—to helping both disciplinary and general public understandings of important substantive political issues become better informed and reasoned. To adopt this priority is still, I believe, to pursue the main tasks of political science as scientifically as possible; but it is true that this course involves significant tradeoffs.