What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does ...the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers in the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
Political parties are under increasing pressure to extend and activate their voter bases by employing more innovative communication strategies. This article focuses on the social media platform ...Twitter to explore how well Swiss parties performed in terms of employing digital communication during the 2015 federal election campaign. As such, it uses the follower network as an indicator of organizational cohesion, along with two indicators of programmatic coherence based on Twitter message content. Computing density and centrality statistics allow for the quantification of these two aspects in the party networks, while the nonparametric bootstrap introduces uncertainty of the account sampling process into the analysis. Our results suggest that smaller and newer parties, as well as the Social Democrats, tend to exhibit disproportionally high levels of organizational cohesion. At the same time, most parties show comparable—and also disproportionately low—levels of programmatic coherence compared to those displayed by the Social Democrats.
Policy Diffusion: The Issue-Definition Stage Gilardi, Fabrizio; Shipan, Charles R.; Wüest, Bruno
American journal of political science,
01/2021, Letnik:
65, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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We put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion—which is the process by which policymaking in one government ...affects policymaking in other governments—have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issue-definition stage. We use topic models to estimate how policies are framed during this stage and how these frames are predicted by prior policy adoptions. Focusing on smoking restriction in U.S. states, our analysis draws upon an original data set of over 52,000 paragraphs from newspapers covering 49 states between 1996 and 2013. We find that frames regarding the policy's concrete implications are predicted by prior adoptions in other states, whereas frames regarding its normative justifications are not. Our approach and findings open the way for a new perspective to studying policy diffusion in many different areas.
In the course of election campaigns, voters pay only selectively attention to particular aspects of political problems. Such selective attention is necessary because the costs of becoming competent ...on many political problems are great. Normatively, however, such selective attention is not desirable because it lowers the chance that voters will reach well‐balanced and competent decisions. This contribution establishes the aspects of the four most salient problems from the 2015 Swiss federal election campaign: immigration, welfare, the economy and European integration. It further reveals that selective attention is higher among those who are interested in politics and who learn problem‐specific information on salient problems, and lower among those who are well‐educated, who engage in personal discussions, who use traditional media, and who learn problem‐specific information on less salient problems. Finally, it concludes that selective attention should be avoided in order to strengthen the citizens’ level of information on political problems.
Existing studies on electoral turnout in times of economic crisis have predominantly focused on disadvantaged voters. However, during the recent economic crisis, turnout among highly educated ...citizens has strongly declined as well. Existing resource-based theories of political participation cannot account for this. This article suggests that the anticipation of government inefficacy is an important driver of abstention among highly educated. Where governments are severely constrained, these citizens anticipate that the hands of future governments will be tied. Hence they are more likely to abstain out of frustration or rational calculations. The study uses the recent economic crisis as test case, as it entails particularly acute constraints on several European governments. The cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence - based on ESS survey data and different measures of government constraint in 28 European countries - provides ample support for the argument.
Economic grievances and political protest KURER, THOMAS; HÄUSERMANN, SILJA; WÜEST, BRUNO ...
European journal of political research,
08/2019, Letnik:
58, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is ...crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU‐SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine‐grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de‐mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro‐level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.
Opinion polls as a linkage mechanism between the public and politics have rarely been examined in a parliamentary context. In our comparative study (Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United ...Kingdom) we analyse if and how polls are invoked by MPs with different roles in parliamentary debates. Focusing on three theoretical aspects (responsiveness, populism and deliberation), we find that polls are indeed invoked to bring the views of the public into parliamentary debate to some degree, but they are also often used merely to support policies already developed in the political realm. Fears of the populist effect of polls are exaggerated; polls, in fact, have a positive influence on the discursive quality of parliament. Looking at parliamentary roles, we find very different patterns of poll use: while MPs oriented towards their constituencies use polls in the most direct and participatory vein, others mediate public opinion as displayed by polls through different institutions (the party, the parliament) or through expertise.
IntroductionThis chapter analyses the framing of the three public debates over globalization and the thematic structure of these crucial issues of the new cleavage. How do political actors justify ...their opposition and support of globalization, and, ultimately, how do they cue citizens' views? Throughout this volume, we have suggested that the new cleavage is driven by two different logics, an economic one and a cultural one. The economic logic articulates opposition to globalization by emphasizing the negative consequences of economic competition, and by reframing cultural and political conflicts in such a way as to intensify economic confrontation. The cultural logic, by contrast, stresses the negative consequences of cultural diversity and political integration, and interprets economic conflicts related to globalization in cultural terms. Our principal aim in analysing the framing of the globalization debates is to see where and under what circumstances the cultural logic or the economic logic comes to prevail.So far, we largely have taken for granted – based on theoretical considerations and the actual location of the issues in the political space – that immigration and European integration are dominated by the cultural logic and that the economic logic prevails in the case of economic liberalization. However, the three issues are potentially multi-faceted, and we therefore expect substantial differences in the way the new cleavage is articulated not only across but also within issues. In a first step, the present chapter sets out to open these ‘black boxes’ of the three globalization issues by breaking them up into the relevant sub-issues. This more fine-grained conceptualization will enable us to formulate more specific expectations regarding the predominant logic, which we can then assess empirically.
IntroductionThis chapter offers an account of the actors' positioning in public debates, complementing the first and second parts of the book that dealt with how the new cleavage is structured in ...party politics and the protest arena. Most importantly, we will explore which actors are pivotal contenders in public debates on the three crucial issues of globalization: immigration, European integration, and economic liberalization. Further, we will identify the cleavage coalitions that emerge from the basis of the actors' positions as well as the coalitions' framing of the integration-demarcation divide.As discussed in Chapter 8, public debates cover all arenas. This allows us to include the full variety of relevant actors engaging in conflicts over globalization in the analyses. The extension of the array of actors, however, raises important questions with regard to the analysis of the actor constellations in the new cleavage. First, it is unclear whether the new actors can be easily integrated into the two-dimensional space found in previous analyses. Second, whereas we looked at the consistency of actors' positions across arenas in Chapter 8, we will analyse the general positioning of actors in debates and the ways in which they differ across the economic and cultural aspects of the globalization debates. In addition, this chapter explains whether the articulation of the losers' potential varies substantially across countries.
IntroductionThis volume is a continuation and extension of our previous study on West European politics in the age of globalization (Kriesi et al. 2008). Aspects of continuity prevail with respect to ...the main theoretical questions introduced in Chapter 1, but we now analyse how the integration–demarcation cleavage manifests itself in various political arenas. We extend the research design as well as the empirical programme to include elections to the European Parliament and non-institutionalized forms of political participation, hence political protest, in the analysis. Furthermore, we have updated our data on national elections, and we scrutinize public debates about the three issues central to globalization processes: immigration, economic liberalization, and European integration.We primarily deal with the programmes political and other actors offer, and hence with the supply side; our analysis of citizens' attitudes is restricted to Chapter 3. As we rely on secondary data sources and common statistical procedures to explore demand, the chapter at hand focuses on the most important aspects of how we study the supply side of political competition. However, the expression of protest transcends this dichotomy somewhat, as our analysis of political protest is neither wholly supply-oriented nor entirely demand-oriented.
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