In this open access book, Kofi Anani finds ways forward through the Blended Representation Principle (BRP), which stipulates that power be shared between leaders selected on the basis of ...Western-democratic ideals and leaders chosen on the basis of traditional African norms and conventions. Drawing on his research and professional experience, Anani shows how incorporating the BRP into African leadership and governance thinking would encourage more voluntary public participation in politics, guarantee transparency and accountability in decision-making, particularly when it comes to the use of public resources, and ultimately encourage more public confidence in leaders. Anani also provides concrete suggestions for how to achieve all this, not through quick fixes, but rather through educational campaigns directed at public officials and through new communities of learning and practice designed to champion the BRP in villages, schools, workplaces, places of worship, and other social organizations. This book is a must-read for all scholars and students of postcolonial governance and leadership, and it is of keen interest to anyone concerned with how Western-style state-making might ultimately find a balance with other, indigenous modes of social organization. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.
This open access book examines the various ways that shame, shaming and stigma became an integral part of the United Kingdom’s public health response to COVID-19 during 2020. As the Covid-19 pandemic ...unfolded in 2020, it quickly became clear that experiences of shame, shaming and stigma dominated personal and public life. From healthcare workers insulted in the streets to anti-Asian racism, the online shaming of “Covidiots” to the identification of the “lepers of Leicester”, public animus about the pandemic found scapegoats for its frustrations. Interventions by the UK government maximised rather than minimized these phenomena. Instead of developing robust strategies to address shame, the government’s healthcare policies and rhetoric seemed to exacerbate experiences of shame, shaming and stigma, relying on a language and logic that intensified oppositional, antagonistic thinking, while dissimulating about its own responsibilities. Through a series of six case studies taken from the events of 2020, this thought-provoking book identifies a systemic failure to manage shame-producing circumstances in the UK. Ultimately, it addresses the experience of shame as a crucial, if often overlooked, consequence of pandemic politics, and advocates for a "shame sensitive" approach to public health responses. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.
The growing usage of social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility of investigating the web as a device to explore and track political preferences. In the present ...paper we apply a method recently proposed by other social scientists to three different scenarios, by analyzing on one side the online popularity of Italian political leaders throughout 2011, and on the other the voting intention of French Internet users in both the 2012 presidential ballot and the subsequent legislative election. While Internet users are not necessarily representative of the whole population of a country’s citizens, our analysis shows a remarkable ability for social media to forecast electoral results, as well as a noteworthy correlation between social media and the results of traditional mass surveys. We also illustrate that the predictive ability of social media analysis strengthens as the number of citizens expressing their opinion online increases, provided that the citizens act consistently on these opinions.
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Growing alarm has been expressed about populism in mainstream political parties, yet the vast majority of scholarship investigating populism has documented the role of radical right populist parties ...rather than that of mainstream parties. This article draws on non-essentialist understandings of populism—the idea that populism is a central aspect of democracy and not restricted to the realm of radical political parties and “populist” leaders—to examine how mainstream political leaders discursively articulate the antagonism between “the people” and the institutional order. We also examine how mainstream party leaders, who are likely to be deeply embedded in the institutional order, negotiate tensions between the institutionalized system and populist articulation. We study this in the Australian context, which is appropriate for examining populism in mainstream political parties given that far-right and far-left parties have gained much smaller shares of electoral support in Australia than elsewhere. Our findings indicate that mainstream party leaders discursively construct the idea of “the people” by homogenizing disparate social demands and claiming their right to represent the community as a whole. In doing so, these leaders must negotiate pressures from the institutionalized order in the form of clientelism and accountability. This article contributes insights on the reconciliation of contemporary populism with institutionalized settings and processes.
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In Europe’s recent history, there have been several challenges to the strength of the European Union—Brexit, COVID, financial crises, and global tensions—bringing an increased need to understand the ...ways that the European Union (EU) could successfully stay together or fall apart. In examining how the European Union has changed since 1993, important puzzles have emerged, including how national government functions are transferred to the EU without reforming the EU, how increased transparency is announced while decisions are approved in informal meetings, and how the effects of the polarizing rise of Euroscepticism can be managed to still promote the formation of solidarity and trust among Europeans. To understand these puzzles, Thomas König introduces a new theory of (supra)national partyism to help explain the causes and consequences of choices made by political leaders for Europe. He uses a game-theoretical perspective to look at how conditions for leaders change through accessions of new members, shocks, and crises, and separates institutional choices into two different games played by office- and policy-seeking political leaders—the interstate summit game and the national game of party competition. The Dynamics of European Integration reveals how the reorganization of electoral systems can harness dissensus and polarization among diverse national constituencies to enable the promotion of solidarity and trust in the EU.
Purpose: This paper envisioned examining the participation of women political leaders in the local decision-making organs in Tanzania. Specifically, the study aimed to examine the number of women ...represented in the study local government structures (LGSs), the motives behind women participating in the LGSs and the duration of service in the study LGSs. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study used a cross-sectional descriptive research design. A cluster sampling technique was used to obtain the study villages and Mitaa. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches with different data collection methods were used. To collect quantitative data, questionnaires were administered to 390 household heads both men and women in the study villages/Mitaa, while qualitative data were gathered using an interview guide, Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and non-participant observation checklist. Quantitative data collected were analyzed and presented in tables and figures while the qualitative ones were thematically analyzed. Findings: The study revealed that the number of women's participation in various local committees in the study of local government structures has increased by 50% (Dodoma City) and 30% (Bahi District). However, motives for women leaders’ participation are constrained by limited continuity of tenure in the political office. Therefore, suitable interventions are recommended to address the existing capacity gaps. Research Limitation: The study targeted to involve an equal number of men and women household heads in each study village and Mitaa, however in some villages it happened to have less number of women than men household heads. Practical implication: This study recommends that more spaces should be given to women to participate in local decision-making structures and hold seats to enhance gender equality in politics. Originality/Value: This study focuses on the gender parity framework in local politics. It brings an understanding to the various government departments, ministries responsible for women and other stakeholders regarding the opportunities available for women to participate in local politics.
Why do some dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We argue that institutions promote the survival of dictatorships by facilitating authoritarian power-sharing. ...Specifically, institutions such as parties, legislatures, and advisory councils alleviate commitment and monitoring problems between the dictator and his allies caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. However, because authoritarian power-sharing succeeds only when it is backed by a credible threat of a rebellion by the dictator’s allies, institutions will be ineffective or break down when an imbalance of power within the ruling coalition undermines this threat’s credibility. Our arguments clarify the complex interaction between collective action, commitment, and monitoring problems in authoritarian governance. We use both historical and large-N data to assess new empirical predictions about the relationship between political institutions, leader survival, and the concentration of power in dictatorships.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
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Ethnic favoritism: An axiom of politics? De Luca, Giacomo; Hodler, Roland; Raschky, Paul A. ...
Journal of development economics,
20/May , Volume:
132
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We study ethnic favoritism in a global sample and rely on nighttime light intensity to capture a broad range of preferential policies targeted towards the political leaders' ethnic homelands. We ...construct two panel data sets with several thousand ethnographic regions from around 140 multi-ethnic countries and annual observations from 1992 to 2013. We find robust evidence for ethnic favoritism: nighttime light becomes 7%–10% more intense in the political leaders' ethnic homelands. We document that ethnic favoritism is a global phenomenon not restricted to Africa, poor countries, or autocracies. We also provide evidence that ethnic favoritism is partly motivated by electoral concerns and more prevalent in the presence of ethnic parties.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
Journalists frequently turn to Twitter for quotes from elite and non-elite sources to include within their online news articles. While recent research has found that including posts from ordinary ...people can influence news consumers’ issue perceptions, there is limited research on the impact of including politicians’ posts. We conduct two similar survey experiments, with Republican and Democrat respondents, to test the relative impact of including Donald Trump’s tweets in a news article either in embedded format, quoted in plain text, or quoted in paraphrased format. Among Republicans, embedded tweets were unique in eliciting positive emotions which mediated higher ratings of Donald Trump’s warmth and competence. Among Democrats, no significant differences were elicited by tweet format on perceptions of Trump. However, Democrats rated articles containing verbatim Trump tweets as significantly lower in journalistic quality. Results are discussed in relevance to journalist–politician power relations and perceptions of journalistic quality.
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Attractive political candidates receive more votes on Election Day compared to their less attractive competitors. One well-cited theoretical account for this attractiveness effect (White et al., ...2013) holds that it reflects an adaptive psychological response to disease threats. Voters are predicted to upregulate preferences for attractiveness because it constitutes a cue to health. The global COVID-19 pandemic constitutes an ecologically relevant and realistic setting for further testing this prediction. Here, we report the results from six tests of the prediction based on two large and nationally representative surveys conducted in Denmark (n = 3297) at the outbreak of the pandemic and one year later. Utilizing experimental techniques, validated individual difference measures of perceived disease threat and geographic data on COVID-19 severity, we do not find that disease threats like the COVID-19 pandemic upregulate preferences for attractive and healthy political or non-political leaders. Instead, respondents display heightened preferences for health in socially proximate relations (i.e. colleagues). Moreover, individuals who react aversively to situations involving risks of pathogen transmission (scoring high in Germ Aversion) report higher importance of a wide range of leadership traits, rather than for health and attractiveness in particular. Results are discussed in relation to evolutionary accounts of leadership and followership.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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