Western European Politics Research Articles

To see ourselves as others see us: identity and attitudes towards immigration amongst civic nationalists

ABSTRACTThis article examines how different conceptions of national identity can be linked to attitudes towards cultural pluralism. The tensions between more culturally pluralistic societies and sustained support for nationalism represent an important political issue in modern western European politics. Such tensions are of particular relevance for stateless nationalist and regionalist parties (SNRPs) for whom national/regional identity is a major political driver. This article empirically tests the relationship between different conceptions of national identity and attitudes towards cultural pluralism in two SNRPs—the Scottish National Party and the Frisian National Party. The article draws upon evidence from two unique full party membership studies and is supported with evidence from documentary analysis. A key finding is that the manner in which members conceptualise national identity has significant implications for their attitudes towards cultural pluralism, which has the potential of becoming a source of tension within SNRPs. A key implication of the article is that there is evidence that attitudes of general members and officially stated party positions and narratives diverge on issues relating to cultural pluralism and national identity. These tensions could potentially be harmful for the party's overall civic image.

Who is the European Prince?: A More or Less Machiavellian Meditation on the European Union

The distinguished Italian economist and politician Tommaso Padoa Schioppa once spoke of European Monetary Union (EMU) as a “collective prince.” The essay takes this observation as starting point to reflect on princes not as individual leaders, but as institutions engaged in projects of political integration (which according to Machiavelli, could absorb collective wisdom over time and also prove more flexible than individuals). In particular, it is asked whether The Prince might shed light both on the history and the prospects of European polity-building. It is argued that the architects of Western European politics after 1945 prioritized vivere sicuro over any conception of vivere libero by institutionalizing a model of “constrained democracy.” Various “institutional princes,” the European Commission in particular, complemented this process at a European level. Finally, the article returns to the intriguing—and at first sight so counterintuitive—notion of a monetary system as Europe’s prince. Against the background of the Eurocrisis (generally considered an existential threat to the European Union as a whole), some possible Machiavellian futures will be sketched out, in particular a new version of a collective prince and, alternatively, a strategy that trusts what Machiavelli called tumulti—ongoing political conflict—ultimately to generate a more robust form of political unity. This latter strategy also puts its faith in popular judgment in a way that very much goes against the main currents of political developments in postwar Europe.

Pretty faces, marginal races: Predicting election outcomes using trait assessments of British parliamentary candidates

The conventional wisdom on Western European politics leads us to believe that all the “action” lies with parties, because the unified parliamentary delegations in Western Europe draw voters' attention to parties' policies and images. Though British elections take place under a single member district plurality system, British parties, like their continental counterparts, are highly centralised and feature disciplined parliamentary delegations. Despite the strong ties between British candidates and their parties, we demonstrate that perceptions of candidates' personal attributes can be used to predict general election outcomes. Using a computer-based survey where subjects are asked to evaluate real British candidates using only rapidly determined first impressions of facial images, we successfully predict outcomes from the 2010 general election. Moreover, we find that perceptions of candidates' relative attractiveness are particularly useful for predicting outcomes in marginal constituencies.

Alterity and History: The Cross-Current Contributions of the Work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Alterity and History: The Cross-Current Contributions of the Work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot Ethel Hazard This essay explores and celebrates Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s intellectual vision and analytical insights. Few cultural anthropologists, historians, or political theorists have produced a compendium of work that holds such pertinence for policymakers, scholars, and advanced students in the social sciences and humanities. His work provides knowledge about modern political and economic relations that never romanticizes Haitian alterity but instead, produces ethnographic and historically grounded evidence about the human realities of modern capital and oppressive political systems. Haitian alterity was not perceived as a given by Trouillot, but was rather the subject of many interlocking historical questions. Trouillot’s publications investigate European-derived political traditions in order to provide a broader, evidence-based understanding of the historical emergence of patterns of economic development, issues of governance within the Haitian nation-state and internationally, and state practices that advocated increased citizen political participation. These topics are found throughout Trouillot’s academic scholarship and were present in his public engagement and service. By placing such value on these issues, his work provides a theoretical and analytical lens through which to understand Haitian alterity not as deficit or deficient, but as unknown yet knowable. It is in this way that Trouillot’s work provides a crosscurrent of knowledge regarding the historical and contemporary realities in Haiti and the Caribbean. However, the back-and-forth relationship between European and American politics, and the regionally specific historical relationships that he advanced, also address issues pertinent to the political traditions of people of African descent throughout the Americas. Alterity includes processes involved in the making and forging of historical distinctiveness. In Trouillot’s written and public works, Haiti’s distinctiveness requires an understanding of the intersections of modern historical transformations and a substantive examination of human agency. Moreover, it was his own crosscurrent of academic and personal knowledge, as well as his [End Page 33] analytical vision and critical insights, that engaged scholarship about the construction and historical emergence of Western European politics. This scholarship neither silenced nor ignored the contributions made by people of African descent, or the political leadership within the Republic of Haiti and throughout the Americas. If the “New World” was an alternative to Europe, the Republic of Haiti, according to the scholarship of Trouillot, was an alternative to the historical transformations underway in the Americas. Most importantly, the content of Haitian history provided a necessary critique of the foundational premises held in political and economic theory that impacted a fuller ethnographic understanding of human history. In this essay, I offer specific insights regarding Trouillot’s ethnohistorical scholarship and his contributions as an engaged public intellectual. I had the benefit of having him as a professor when I first began graduate study at Johns Hopkins University. I applied to the Hopkins anthropology program because in the 1993 American Association of Anthropology Guide to Anthropology Programs, Dr. Trouillot listed the “Afro-Americas” as his area of cultural expertise. I wanted to learn what he meant by the “Afro-Americas.” During the period I attended the university as a graduate student, I began to recognize that his historical research and his public comments and writings interlocked. The “Afro-Americas” were not a static, singular object but were created by human-driven processes with important contextual locations, fraught by historical invisibility in the scholarship. Trouillot’s academic instruction included coursework that specifically trained students to understand the creation of social scientific concepts and categories. His critical intervention as a professor provided me with my own intellectual tools. It is clear after an examination of both his academic and public engagement that for Trouillot, contemporary foreign relations and politics were interrelated with historical population transformations. Historical transformations are not linked in directly causal relationships with issues of state formation and governance, but are shifts that need to be critically examined. Culture, history, and power provide the basis for important analytical discussions regarding political processes. As the Krieger Endowed Chair at Johns Hopkins, Trouillot openly discussed the tenuousness of his place and power at the table of tenured knowledge creators in US academic institutions. For more than ten years, Trouillot was...

Repressive Politics and Satire in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fairy-tales, “Little Zaches Acclaimed as Zinnober” and “Master Flea”

This article sets two of Hoffmann’s satiric fairy-tales, “Little Zaches acclaimed as Zinnober” (1819) and “Master Flea” (1822), in their socio-political context of post-Napoleonic Europe. It identifies them as political allegories through which Hoffmann comments on the instability of western European politics in the early nineteenth century. We demonstrate how Hoffmann’s position as a Prussian state judge informed his propensity for satirical observation couched in the genre of fairy-tale and variations thereof. We explore his scrutiny of hypocrisy, pride and nepotism, together with his particular focus on received ideas, such as Enlightenment rationalist principles. Concomitantly, we examine how he reworks familiar fairy-tale motifs in order to expose the effects of political repression. We compare the lampoon of his contemporary, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (founder of the Open Air Gymnasium Movement) in “Little Zaches”, with his satirization of Privy Councillor von Kamptz (Director of Prussian Military Police) as Councillor Knarrpanti in “Master Flea”, the first fairy-tale causing wry amusement, but the second leading to a high profile libel case. We align with Zipes’s argument that Hoffmann’s fairy-tales demonstrate connections between history, politics and the fairy-tale, and we show how Hoffmann’s revisioning of fairy-tale motifs mediates political satire. We extend Zipes by emphasizing Hoffmann’s use of the increasingly popular Oriental, and especially Arabian, tale. This article concludes that Hoffmann contributed significantly to the critical acclaim of the satiric fairy-tale, and that his loss of literary judgement in “Master Flea” accounts for the legal consequences which he suffered.

Varieties of Positivism in Western European Political Thought, c. 1945–1970: An Introduction

Summary This article introduces a set of essays examining the state of political thought in the Western European democracies of Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and Sweden in the post-war period between 1945 and 1970. In particular, as well as simply filling a gap, they seek to demonstrate that political theory in this period was more vibrant than has traditionally been maintained. A key part of this argument is that the discipline was less adversely affected by the ascendancy of positivism than historians and political theorists have normally argued, not least because ‘positivism’ was in fact a more diverse and varied phenomenon than is usually recognised. For while some positivists drew on either behaviourist social science of linguistic philosophy to justify their denial that moral and political values could be discussed rationally with reference to theoretical arguments, others argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that had made traditional political theory irrelevant. This meant that although few political theorists in this period were able to refute all types of positivism entirely, they were able to take issue with different aspects of it, and hence, at least to some extent, to pursue their discipline normatively. However, experiences in different Western European countries nevertheless varied widely. In Britain, normative political theorists faced both versions of the positivist challenge, but their ripostes were largely couched in academic terms, whether addressing the ‘end of ideology’ thesis, behaviourism or linguistic positivism. In West Germany, by contrast, the debate over positivism was much more overtly political, since the legacy of the Weimar republic caused the issue of whether political values in general, and laws in particular, were rationally justifiable to be a peculiarly sensitive one. But even in Sweden, which had a much quieter history, and has often been seen as the epitome of a technocratic political system, it is revealed that the degree to which ‘the end of ideology’ had been reached was much more keenly contested in practical politics than has previously been thought. And in France, it is revealed that there was more interesting academic political theorising being prosecuted than has traditionally been acknowledged, by such thinkers as Jacques Maritain and Raymond Aron, even if there was admittedly less than in, for example, Britain. And lastly, in Italy, despite a badly functioning political system, which tended to encourage cynicism about politics in general, there were in fact important and sophisticated attempts at formulating coherent normative positions, at least on an ideological level. Whatever the differences, however, the conclusion is clear: normative political theory was in general in much better health during this period than has traditionally been admitted, and, as such, is worthy of considerable further exploration.

What's Left of Leftism?

A novel brand of laissez-faire that lay outside the political mainstream in the early postwar years was broadly hailed at the dawn of the twenty-first century as the common sense of a global age. Yet how to understand neoliberalism as a specifically political thing, especially in the unlikely terrains of Western European and leftist politics, is unclear. This article mobilizes field theory to conceptualize and investigate neoliberal politics in Western democracies, treating the left-right axis as a variable but fundamental organizing dichotomy over which mainstream political parties exert a unique definitional influence. To trace how this dichotomy has shifted over time, I develop a novel index of political neoliberalism using data on the electoral programs of mainstream parties across 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1945 and 2004. I find that between the 1970s and 2004 a revised political center emerged, featuring a new concept of state responsibility and the means by which it should govern: a historical shift that took root across the left-right spectrum among mainstream parties and that was as much in evidence in Continental, Nordic, and southern countries as in Anglo-liberal countries. The overall trend can be fairly characterized as the rise of a specifically neoliberal politics. I suggest that a full explanation requires both a political sociology and a sociology of knowledge, attending to the organizational and cultural bases of Western party systems.

'The Contending Kingdoms': France and England 1420-1700

Studies of England and France come in many shapes and sizes, but for the late medieval and early modern period four have predominated. There are investigations of cultural transmission, usually from France to England. There are essays in comparative political analysis, usually pointing up the contrasts between a precociously centralized medieval England and an increasingly absolutist early modern France. There are reconstructions of French attitudes to the English and English attitudes to the French. And, commonest by far, there are accounts of the wars and (less often) negotiations between the two rival monarchies whose struggle dominated western European politics for nearly three centuries and influenced it for generations more. It is the aim of The Contending Kingdoms to ring the changes on this pattern. The editor's introduction reviews the historiography of Anglo-French relations and Anglo-French comparisons in the volume's chosen period, helpfully pointing out areas where coverage is surprisingly thin, such as trade or the diplomacy of the 1630s. The nine contributors then essay a series of studies in Anglo-French comparisons and connections.

The Changing Politics of Organised Interests

Since the mid-1970s, Western European politics have undergone significant changes – and this has been particularly marked in the arena of ‘interest politics’. In this article I list some apodictic statements about these changes and speculate about their potential explanations. To the extent that these descriptive generalisations have some accuracy and that the potential explanations have some validity, we can then conclude that the hegemony of political parties is declining. This is not to say that parties will be replaced by either associations or movements. These three forms of representation are not locked into a zero-sum game. In the past, they have grown together and supported each other. Nothing says that they cannot also decline together in the present. What we can say, however, is that there has been a generalised loosening of the links between interests and organisations.

What Can Students Learn from the Spanish Case in Comparative Politics Courses?

What can undergraduate students of comparative politics learn from studying Spain? Clearly, many professors do not see any good reasons to integrate Spain in introductory courses on comparative politics or European politics. Spain is often considered as a country on the periphery of western Europe—geographically, economically, and politically—and thus not worth spending time discussing in introductory courses on comparative politics or even western European politics. Given the time constraints of short semesters, instructors have to make choices about which topics and countries to cover when choosing European case studies for their syllabus, and often settle for a mix of the “classic” cases such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, and “newer” cases, such as new democracies in eastern and central Europe. Spain fits neither the established, advanced industrialized democracies category nor is it of much obvious interest for studying the latest developments in EU expansion. Spain re-democratized in the latter half of the 1970s and is currently celebrating 30 years of electoral democracy. The country joined the EU, then the European Communities, in 1986, together with Portugal and Greece. Thus, the newness of Spanish democracy and its EU membership has long since passed as a point of interest for college instruction, giving way to the new democracies in central and eastern Europe and the more recent waves of EU expansion. At the same time, Spanish democracy is too young to present a classic case of advanced industrialized democracies. In short, Spain does not appear to have much inherent appeal for undergraduate comparative politics courses. I gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Wendy Whitman in collecting information on textbooks and syllabi.

Coalition Theory in Praxis: A Comparative Politics Simulation of the Cabinet Formation Process

American politics, few simulations exist for courses in comparative politics (Dodge 1983; Endersby and Webber 1995; Hensley 1993; Suransky 1983; Winham 1991). Yet many aspects of comparative politics seem particularly ripe for simulation. What simulations do best is provide a framework of rules that shape individual behavior (Walcott 1980). In this way, students can learn the effects of institutional design-a common theme in comparative politics-by experiencing these effects. This article describes a role-playing simulation of coalition cabinet formation processes in Europe originally designed for an upper-level undergraduate course on Western European politics. Our project was designed to address a significant gap in the simulations literature with re-

Lobbying and public relations in a European context

Structural changes in Western European politics increases the importance of lobbying. The “political deficit” of the European Union has created an exploding lobbying market which is mirrored in the increased importance of lobbying at the national state level in Europe. This study looks at the role of corporate PR managers in corporate lobbying in one European country, Norway, and looks at connections between experience at the national level and the European level. The study confirms a hypothesis that company lobbying is run by company CEOs, with the PR manager playing a crucial role. A structural change in the way lobbying is organized seems to be that single companies to an increasing extent build their own lobbying networks, independent of trade associations. They sometimes use MPs to get access, but do not use external lobbying consultants extensively. According to this study, there is an increasing tendency to attempt to influence members of parliament, not only civil servants.

Western European Political Science: An Acquisition Study

National bibliographies from 1990 for France, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Iceland, and Catalonia (Spain) formed the basis for a study of U.S. and Canadian acquisitions in the field of Western European political science materials. Of the materials deemed important to be available in at least one research library in the United States or Canada, 15 percent of French, 30 percent of Italian, 55 percent of Swedish, 19 percent of Catalan, 75 percent of Icelandic, and 57 percent of Belgian materials were not found in a search of RLIN and OCLC. The citations were further examined for patterns of ownership, and it was found that in some cases traditional collecting patterns and agreements still seemed to be functioning to bring some materials into libraries, but in other cases a lack or decline of traditional commitments meant that these countries were particularly underrepresented in research library collections. Factors in addition to acquisition funding were identifies as important in providing for adequte collecting levels. These include adequate staff in collection development and acquisitions, as well as attention to cataloging these materials and making information about their availability accessible

The Crisis of Socialism in Europe, by Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks

The recent revolutions in Eastern Europe and the recasting of socialism in Western Europe since 1989 have given rise to intense debate over the origins, character and implications of the crisis of socialism. Is socialism in ideological, electoral or organizational decline? Is the decline inevitable or can socialism be revitalized? This volume draws together historians and political scientists of Eastern and Western European politics to address these questions. The collection begins with an historical overview of socialism in Western Europe and moves towards the suggestion of a framework for a post-socialist discourse. Among the topics covered are the birth and death of communism as a regime in Eastern Europe; how different forms of national communism were smothered by Sovietization in the post-war period; the origins of recent revolutions in Eastern Europe; the potential for social democracy in Hungary; the role of the Left in a reunified Germany and directions for the Left in general.

Explaining the Decline of Macro‐corporatist Political Bargaining Structures in Advanced Capitalist Societies

A growing consensus among many observers of Western European politics has developed in recent years that, in certain countries, national level, consensus‐based political bargaining arrangements involving representatives of organized capital, trade unions, and the state are giving way to more sectorally‐based, conflictual forms of relations. These developments suggest an overall decline in the efficacy of national‐level corporatist institutional structures in the liberal democracies of Western Europe. This article contends that neither of the two general theoretical approaches to the study of corporatism ‐ the liberal model of the “neocorporatist state” (which fails to acknowledge the potential for serious system‐threatening instability within corporatism) nor the Marxist model of corporatist “political structures” (which incorrectly predicts labor‐generated corporatist instability due to inevitable rank‐and‐file discontent with the policy outputs of corporatist forms) ‐ can account for this current wave of macro‐corporatist instability and decline. In response to this theoretical impasse, this article develops a capitalist‐centered explanation for the declining significance of corporatist forms. Business interests, it is maintained, may no longer be viewing corporatist arrangements as beneficial due to certain domestic structural economic changes and to transformations in the global capitalist system.

Elitist theory and political tolerance in Western Europe

This paper addresses the problem of democratic elitism within the context of Western European politics. An entrenched assertion of the so-calledelitist theory of democracy is that elites are more strongly committed to democratic values such as political tolerance than are ordinary citizens. The processes through which elites become more tolerant include political socialization, resocialization, political practice, and experience. Some have even argued that elites are the primary carriers of thedemocratic creed. Our purpose here is to test several hypothese drawn from elitist theory. Relying on opinion surveys conducted in each of the twelve nations of the European Community in 1988, we focus on political tolerance. Our basic hypothesis is that political activism contributes to greater political tolerance. Special attention is given to a sample of opinion leaders as a test of the elitist theory. The analysis is conducted both at the level of the individual citizen and the level of the nation state. This is one of very few efforts to test elitist theory from a broad, cross-national perspective. Consequently, the analysis will be crucial in recasting elitist theory to comport more closely with empirical evidence.

“The family farm”: A review of a central concept in western European agricultural politics

“The family farm”: A review of a central concept in western European agricultural politics

Elections and Parties in Greece

IN THE SEVEN YEARS SINCE THE FALL OF THE COLONELS' dictatorship in Greece, a new Greek party has established firm political roots. With the accession of Greece to the European Community on 1 January 1981, the new parties have been brought into the Western European political orbit, a development which marks the rehabilitation of a political system ostracized by virtue of its period of dictatorship. Unlike Portugal and Spain, however, which also seek membership of the European Community, the Greek period of dictatorship – lasting seven years post-war – represents much more an historical aberration, for Greece not only has an ancient history which saw the birth of democratic government, it also has enjoyed far more democratic than dictatorial governments in its modern period.

Waiting for Reagan

WAITING FOR REAGAN Simon Serfaty JLhe past four years have been years of few accomplishments, numerous miscalculations, and recurring crises in U.S. foreign policy. The Carter administration, because it lacked any structural consistency, made of its reversals a routine rarely seen in the recent past. Begun as a collégial administration that said aloud what it wanted to do, it soon ceased to say what it wanted as it lost control ofwhat it did. Never truly credible to the adversaries, the Carter foreign policies could neither gain any lasting support from the allies nor generate a firm consensus at home. In due time, to be sure, the Reagan administration will also be subjected to much criticism, as dissent is an avenue to power which observers will once more find irresistible to travel. Yet such criticism need not come with a reassessment of the failures of the outgoing administration. The initial Carter Grand Design, as stated at Notre Dame University in early 1977, and the improvisations and contradictions that characterized its implementation are well known. They were received at first with an indulgence that showed that the good intentions of the new president were well understood: a Year of transition, it was said after the first twelve months; a Year of adjustment; it was-hoped the following year; a Year of education, it was thought as we entered what was to be a long election year.1 Yet, already in 1977, confusion in style and an agitation in substance invited setbacks and crises. Although it is not unusual for a new president to want to assert an identity of his 'See for example my own essays on the administration, including: "A Quarter Before Carter," Proceedings, American Political Science Convention, Washington, D.C, September 1977; "Brzezinski : Play It Again, Zbig," Foreign Policy, 57 (Fall 1978), 3-21; and "Une politique étrangère introuvable," Politique Internationale, Winter 1979-1980, 178-192. Simon Serfaty is AssociateProfessor o/T/.S.ForeignPolicy atSAIS, and has served as Director ofthe School's Bologna Center and ofthe Washington Center ofForeign Policy Research. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Western European politics. 23 24 SAIS REVIEW own in foreign policy, the attempt was made this time with a determination and a thoroughness that had not been seen since the John Foster Dulles years, at least. Where the Nixon-Ford administration had reluctantly accepted the constraints imposed by the Congress and a public opinion still traumatized by the Vietnam war, the Carter administration appeared to welcome such constraints—constraints which several of its most influential members had helped initiate during their own years in the opposition. Indeed, there was much arrogance in the innumerable objectives that were specifically scheduled for completion during the first few months ofthe administration. Everywhere, success was promised quickly, including the adoption ofa zero-budget approach to the making of foreign policy and the juggling of the agenda that had been inherited from the previous administration. Carter, however, neglected to define his priorities. In January 1978, with failure thus written in the first year of transition—in spite (or because) of the ratification of the Panama treaty—the president was already promising to face "the world as it is." Accordingly, the new year was to be the Year of adjustment. In dealing with the Soviet Union, Notre Dame gave way first to Wake Forest, and next to Annapolis. Apparently dismissed earlier for being "not even a rival," Soviet military power was now acknowledged with a respect that invited empty threats. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski identified the new "maraudeurs" and their proxies in Africa and elsewhere in a growing "arc ofcrisis"—but what to do ifnot to show ever more patience and moderation: no B-Is, no Tridents, no cruise missiles, no neutron bombs, no MXs. Unable to deal with more than one issue at a time, the administration was making commendable efforts in the Middle East but—Camp David notwithstanding—at the expense of the impending disaster in Iran. It was focusing at last on southern Africa but it was neglecting the rising problems in North Africa and in the Horn. The most elementary contradictions were arising: how to seek...

Economic Development and the Transformation of the Italian Party System

That socialism is a necessity has never struck the masses with the compelling force of a flash of lightning.... long as misery, the lack of basic necessities, was the condition of the majority, the need for a revolution could be regarded as obvious. . . . Nowadays, in the richer societies, it is not so clear that the status quo represents the greatest possible evil.'1 How European politics have changed since the class-bound polemics of a generation ago! The statement above was written not by a staid social scientist but by an advocate of the radical European Left. It is well known that an economic miracle has transformed Europe sociologically since the war. But has it also had the political result of stilling the radicals on both fronts and transforming their political parties into identical marketing organizations? Such a proposition, self-evident to some, has seldom been treated as an empirical question. Particularly in the light of recent events in Europe, the time is ripe for more careful inquiry into the actual linkage between social and economic change on the one hand and changes in the party system on the other. Students of Western European politics have identified three general areas of change in the party system which are said to be related to the economic miracle of the postwar period. First, economic change is said to have contributed directly to a slackening of social conflict, and thence to a depolarization of the political struggle. The argument runs roughly as follows: As the wealth of a nation increases, the status gap inherent in poor countries, where the rich perceive the poor as vulgar outcasts, is reduced. differences in style of life are reduced, so are the tensions of stratification. And increased education enhances the propensity of different groups to tolerate each other, to accept the complex idea that truth and error are not necessarily on one side.2 Second, the old mass-party structure-based upon a high ratio of members to voters and a dense network of sections-is changing to a looser aggregation, particularly under the electoral impact of the mass media