Various scholars have recently argued that niche parties are to be distinguished from mainstream parties, in particular because the two party types differ in their programmes, behaviour and ...strategies. However, so far there has been no attempt to provide a concise, measureable definition of the niche-party concept. In this article I argue that niche parties are best defined as parties that compete primarily on a small number of non-economic issues. The occurrence of niche parties is then operationalized and measured using issue salience information provided by expert surveys and manifesto data. After comparing the findings with existing definitions, the main characteristics of the niche parties identified are examined in a final step.
•We examine the impact of political ideology on climate change.•Investigating the potential channels by which political ideology affects climate change.•Studying whether the effect of political ...ideology on climate change varies among different countries.•Investigating the interaction effect of political ideology and democracies on climate change.
This research tests the casual link from political ideology to national greenhouse gas emissions by utilizing multinational panel data covering 98 countries during the period 1990–2016. Overall, the baseline results and robustness tests show a political divide on national greenhouse gas emissions, whereby compared to right-wing governments, left-wing governments are more likely to exhibit less carbon dioxide emissions. We further explore this topic from the perspectives of energy efficiency and education. Three-stage OLS regressions suggest that leftist parties increase energy efficiency and spend more on secondary education, which lead to less greenhouse gas emissions. We also introduce the interaction between political ideology and economic performance as well as globalization to test the moderating effects of economic performance and globalization. The study further looks into the interaction effects of political ideology and democracies on greenhouse gas emissions by dividing the whole sample into two sub-samples. The results indicate that the ideology effect on greenhouse gas emissions varies among countries with different economic performances or different degrees of political globalization, as well as between democracies and non-democracies.
There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have ...examined the effects of personality and motivational factors on ideological orientations as well as differences in moral reasoning and brain functioning between liberals and conservatives. In political science, studies have investigated possible genetic influences on ideology as well as the role of personality factors. Virtually all of this research begins with the assumption that it is possible to understand the determinants and consequences of ideology via a unidimensional conceptualization. We argue that a unidimensional model of ideology provides an incomplete basis for the study of political ideology. We show that two dimensions—economic and social ideology—are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences. More importantly, we demonstrate that the determinants of these two ideological dimensions are vastly different across a wide range of variables. Focusing on a single ideological dimension obscures these differences and, in some cases, makes it difficult to observe important determinants of ideology. We also show that this multidimensionality leads to a significant amount of heterogeneity in the structure of ideology that must be modeled to fully understand the structure and determinants of political attitudes.
We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online ...communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.
There is a strong political divide on climate change in the US general public, with Liberals and Democrats expressing greater belief in and concern about climate change than Conservatives and ...Republicans. Recent studies find a similar though less pronounced divide in other countries. Its leadership in international climate policy making warrants extending this line of research to the European Union (EU). The extent of a left-right ideological divide on climate change views is examined via Eurobarometer survey data on the publics of 25 EU countries before the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2009 'climategate' controversy and COP-15 in Copenhagen, and an increase in organized climate change denial campaigns. Citizens on the left consistently reported stronger belief in climate change and support for action to mitigate it than did citizens on the right in 14 Western European countries. There was no such ideological divide in 11 former Communist countries, likely due to the low political salience of climate change and the differing meaning of left-right identification in these countries.
Our country's higher education is based on “literacy” and “cultivating people” as the core. How to silently integrate ideological and political elements into the teaching process of engineering ...professional courses is a problem that requires thinking and long-term construction. In order to cultivate high-skilled and high-quality talents with both talents and virtues, it is urgent to build an ideological and political program suitable for engineering courses. On the basis of analyzing the national boundary attributes of engineering majors, this paper integrates ideological and political elements into engineering majors, and constructs an ideological and political teaching system for engineering majors. On the basis of knowledge imparting, ability training, and spiritual shaping in the design of professional courses, six ideological and political goals of courses are cultivated, and the ideological and political curriculum construction framework of professional courses is constructed by combining three teaching modules, and three ideological and political strategies are integrated into three courses. Taking the course of “Motor and Electrical Control Technology” as an example, this paper discusses the feasibility of the ideological and political construction plan for engineering majors.
This article analyzes the turn towards Israel in parts of the German and Austrian extreme right since 2010 in a historical perspective. Both political parties in the focus of the analysis, AfD and ...FPÖ, and the extreme right in general have a history of antisemitism, antizionism and hostility towards Israel and Zionism. After establishing antizionism as an inherent part of antisemitism almost from its outset, several exceptions from this rule are analyzed with respect to the relationship of the two. All of the introduced positive references towards Zionism and Israel from an antisemitic background will turn out to be based on antisemitic images of Jews, Zionism and the State of Israel. They fulfill a certain end to antisemitism itself, its denial and its bearers, and thus serve the preservation of the ideology rather than, as has been suggested, marking an end to antisemitism or being solely strategically motivated.
Conventional wisdom holds that partisanship and political ideology, writ large, are some of the most powerful explanations of attitudes towards climate change and environmental politics. While ...compelling, most studies focus on a narrow definition of political ideology in the US. This study adds to the literature by assessing the relationship between populism, climate skepticism, and support for environmental protection. Populism offers an orthogonal dimension to partisanship and left-right self-placement, which broadens the scope of the concept. Assessing the UK facilitates understanding the role of political ideology beyond the strong party sorting apparent in the US. Data from the 2015 British Election Study offer strong support for the proposition that populism holds a consequential role in climate and environmental politics.
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