We examine contradictions of populism and resource extraction in Mongolia in the context of the recent presidential election of Khaltmaa Battulga, who is often portrayed as dangerously populist. We ...consider Battulga's victory as an echo of Mongolian voters' sense of dispossession and discontent driven by gross wealth disparity and precarious livelihoods. Rather than treating these concerns as mere tools of the populist political agenda, we view them as moments of resistance to the asymmetry between accumulation and dispossession in Mongolia, a central outcome of twenty-five years of the neoliberal regime. We situate our analysis of Mongolia's resource politics through an examination of the world's second largest undeveloped copper-gold mine, Oyu Tolgoi. The mine offers a window into the country's turbulent resource politics that has concentrated wealth among a powerful few while nearly one third of Mongolians remain trapped in vicious poverty. Relying on fieldwork conducted over several years, the article argues that public grievances against the asymmetry of accumulation and dispossession are routinely discounted by discursive tools within the populist paradigm. "Resource nationalism," in particular, is used by those who promote neoliberalism and the open market as a pejorative label to silence public grievances. Key Words: accumulation by dispossession, Mongolia, Oyu Tolgoi, populism, resource nationalism.
我们检视经常被描绘成高度危险的民粹主义者--哈勒特马．巴特图勒嘎（Khaltmaa Battulga）在蒙古的晚近总统选举脉络下, 民粹主义与资源搾取之间的冲突。我们将巴特图勒嘎的胜利, 视为蒙古选民对严重的财富不均和不稳定的生计所导致的剥夺感和不满之反应。我们并非将这些考量视为仅只是民粹政治议程的工具, 而是将其视为对蒙古的积累与剥夺之间的不对称之反抗时刻, 该现象是长达二十五年的新自由主义体制所造成的主要结果。我们通过检视世界第二大尚未开发的铜金矿奥尤陶勒盖（Oyu Tolgoi）来定位蒙古的资源政治。该矿场提供窥探蒙古财富聚焦少数有权力者、但近乎三分之一的蒙古人仍深陷极度贫穷的动盪资源政治的一扇窗。本文根据若干年的田野工作, 主张公众对于不对等的积累与剥夺之不满, 一再受到民粹主义范式的论述工具所贬抑。特别是"资源国族主义"被提倡新自由主义者与市场开放者用来作为使公众不满消音的贬抑标籤。关键词：掠夺式积累, 蒙古, 奥尤陶勒盖, 民粹主义, 资源国族主义。
Examinamos las contradicciones del populismo y la extracción de recursos en Mongolia en el contexto de la reciente elección presidencial de Khaltmaa Battulga, quien a menudo es retratado como peligrosamente populista. Consideramos la victoria de Battulga como un eco del sentido de desposesión y descontento de los votantes de Mongolia, motivado por la desigualdad bruta de la riqueza y los precarios niveles de vida. Más que tratar estas preocupaciones como simples herramientas de la agenda política populista, las consideramos como momentos de resistencia a la asimetría entre acumulación y desposesión en Mongolia, un resultado principal de veinticinco años de régimen neoliberal. Situamos nuestro análisis de la política de los recursos de Mongolia por medio de un examen de la segunda más grande mina subdesarrollada de cobre-oro del mundo, Oyu Tolgoi. La mina es una ventana hacia la turbulenta política de los recursos del país que ha concentrado la riqueza entre unos pocos poderosos mientras que cerca de un tercio de los mongoles siguen atrapados en una pobreza descomunal. Dependiendo del trabajo de campo conducido durante varios años, el artículo arguye que las quejas públicas contra la asimetría de la acumulación y la desposesión son rutinariamente descartadas con herramientas discursivas dentro del paradigma populista. EL "nacionalismo de los recursos," en particular, es usado por quienes promueven el neoliberalismo y el libre mercado como etiqueta peyorativa para silenciar los reclamos públicos. Palabras clave: acumulación por desposesión, Mongolia, nacionalismo de los recursos, Oyu Tolgoi, populismo.
This study examined the application of Benford's Law to analyse the 2015 and 2019 presidential election data in Nigeria. Data obtained from the electoral body were analysed using frequency ...distribution and Spearman Rank Correlation tests at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that the second digits distributions of the vote counts for the two major political parties, registered voters and total vote counts in both elections do not conform to the distributional pattern predicted by Benford's Law. The study recommends that stakeholders should aim for an electoral reform that allows the use of forensic analysis of electoral data in Nigeria.
The United States has historically accepted and resettled refugees by opening its doors to those fleeing violence, armed conflict, or persecution around the world. However, the degree of receptivity ...toward refugee resettlement has vacillated over time. This study examines the challenges and opportunities that Refugee Resettlement Agencies (RRAs) experienced prior to and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The findings presented in this paper, based on focus groups with the RRA staff, revealed that there is a greater need for understanding the refugee resettlement process and how changing immigration policies impact state-federal funding.
Nannestad and Paldam (Public Choice 79:213–245, 1994) published herein an extremely influential review of the literature linking economics and elections, what they called the "VP functions." In that ...work, they offered a number of conclusions, in proposition form, about the state of the evidence in this field. We present the key ones (16 in all), and assess the extent to which they continue to hold, in light of the new evidence about what has come to be known as economic voting. As shall be shown, Nannestad and Paldam were prescient in their early establishment of many of the principal results explaining how the economy moves the vote choice.
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason. Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between ...political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
Drawing on the 2012 American National Election Studies (ANES) panel data, this study explores the influence of the consumption of partisan information sources on affective polarization and ...investigates the mechanism underlying this relationship. The results show that exposure to pro-party television sources strengthens affective polarization among partisans. The polarizing effects of pro-party sources are mediated by the discrete negative emotions (i.e., anger and fear) toward presidential candidates. The study discusses the impact of selective exposure on deliberative and participatory democracies.
Purpose
Social media (SM) platforms have become major sources for generating, sharing and gathering political and election news. Although there appears to be an assumption that reliance on SM for ...political news consumption will continue to gain in popularity, there are reasons to believe that many Americans are retreating from using SM for political news. The purpose of this study is to examine if Americans are reducing reliance on SM for political news and to analyze why retreat may be happening.
Design/methodology/approach
Using longitudinal panel data from Pew’s American Trends Panel study, the authors tracked 993 respondents from February of 2016 to November of 2019 to monitor their reliance on SM for political news leading up to the 2020 US presidential election.
Findings
The results of this study indicate that a sizeable percentage of people (about a third) are retreating from SM platforms for political news consumption and some are abandoning it altogether – people we refer to as new SM “nones.” The authors find that retreat from SM is associated with increased distrust of the information found on the platforms. Concerns about fake news, incivility on SM and information overload were unrelated to retreat from use of SM for political news consumption.
Originality/value
The findings of this study are novel and suggest that reliance on SM for political news by the public may have waxed, seen its zenith and may now be waning largely because of distrust in the information found on SM platforms.
Ukraine's tug-of-war between Russia and the West has had significant and lasting consequences for the country. In 2013, Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president aligned with Russia, opted against ...signing an association agreement with the European Union. This agreement aimed to facilitate trade and travel between the EU and Ukraine. This decision sparked widespread protests that coalesced in Kyiv's Maidan Square, eventually becoming known as the Euromaidan protests. In this study, we analyze the protest data from 2013, sourced from Ukraine's Center for Social and Labor Research. Despite the dataset's limitations and occasional inconsistencies, we demonstrate the extraction of valuable insights and the construction of a descriptive model from such data. Our investigation reveals a pre-existing state of self-excitation within the system even before the onset of the Euromaidan protests. This self-excitation intensified during the Euromaidan protests. A statistical analysis indicates that the government's utilization of force correlates with increased future protests, exacerbating rather than quelling the protest movement. Furthermore, we introduce the implementation of Hawkes process models to comprehend the spatiotemporal dynamics of the protest activity. Our findings highlight that, while protest activities spread across the entire country, the driving force behind the dynamics of these protests was the level of activity in Kyiv. Furthermore, in contrast to prior research that emphasized geographical proximity as a key predictor of event propagation, our study illustrates that the political alignment among oblasts, which are the distinct municipalities comprising Ukraine, had a more profound impact than mere geographic distance. This underscores the significance of social and cultural factors in molding the trajectory of political movements.
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