Taking various professional groups in the early modern period (diplomats, merchants, artists) as a starting point, this book offers exciting new perspectives on early modern brokerage as a widespread ...practice of transmission and dissemination of political, intellectual and cultural ideas.
Michael Madigan rose from the Chicago machine to hold unprecedented
power as Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. In his
thirty-six years wielding the gavel, Madigan outlasted governors,
...passed or blocked legislation at will, and outmaneuvered virtually
every attempt to limit his reach.
Veteran reporter Ray Long draws on four decades of observing
state government to provide the definitive political analysis of
Michael Madigan. Secretive, intimidating, shrewd,
power-hungry--Madigan mesmerized his admirers and often left his
opponents too beaten down to oppose him. Long vividly recreates the
battles that defined the Madigan era, from stunning James Thompson
with a lightning-strike tax increase, to pressing for a pension
overhaul that ultimately failed in the courts, to steering the
House toward the Rod Blagojevich impeachment. Long also shines a
light on the machinery that kept the Speaker in power. Head of a
patronage army, Madigan ruthlessly used his influence and
fundraising prowess to reward loyalists and aid his daughter's
electoral fortunes. At the same time, he reshaped bills to
guarantee he and his Democratic troops shared in the partisan
spoils of his legislative victories. Yet Madigan's position as the
state's seemingly invulnerable power broker could not survive
scandals among his close associates and the widespread belief that
his time as Speaker had finally reached its end.
Unsparing and authoritative, The House That Madigan
Built is the page-turning account of one the most powerful
politicians in Illinois history.
How should we theorize and normatively assess those individual and collective actors who claim to represent others for political purposes, but do so without the electoral authorization and ...accountability usually thought to be at the heart of democratic representation? In this article, I offer conceptual tools for assessing the democratic legitimacy of such “self-appointed” representatives. I argue that these kinds of political actors bring two constituencies into being: the authorizing—that group empowered by the claim to exercise authorization and demand accountability—and the affected—that group affected, or potentially affected, by collective decisions. Self-appointed representation provides democratically legitimate representation when it provides political presence for affected constituencies and is authorized by and held accountable to them. I develop the critical tools to assess the democratic credentials of self-appointed representatives by identifying nonelectoral mechanisms of authorization and accountability that may empower affected constituencies to exercise authorization and demand accountability.
•Large-scale eddy-covariance flux datasets need to be used with footprint-awareness•Using a fixed-extent target area across sites can bias model-data integration•Most sites do not represent the ...dominant land-cover type at a larger spatial extent•A representativeness index provides general guidance for site selection and data use
Large datasets of greenhouse gas and energy surface-atmosphere fluxes measured with the eddy-covariance technique (e.g., FLUXNET2015, AmeriFlux BASE) are widely used to benchmark models and remote-sensing products. This study addresses one of the major challenges facing model-data integration: To what spatial extent do flux measurements taken at individual eddy-covariance sites reflect model- or satellite-based grid cells? We evaluate flux footprints—the temporally dynamic source areas that contribute to measured fluxes—and the representativeness of these footprints for target areas (e.g., within 250–3000 m radii around flux towers) that are often used in flux-data synthesis and modeling studies. We examine the land-cover composition and vegetation characteristics, represented here by the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), in the flux footprints and target areas across 214 AmeriFlux sites, and evaluate potential biases as a consequence of the footprint-to-target-area mismatch. Monthly 80% footprint climatologies vary across sites and through time ranging four orders of magnitude from 103 to 107 m2 due to the measurement heights, underlying vegetation- and ground-surface characteristics, wind directions, and turbulent state of the atmosphere. Few eddy-covariance sites are located in a truly homogeneous landscape. Thus, the common model-data integration approaches that use a fixed-extent target area across sites introduce biases on the order of 4%–20% for EVI and 6%–20% for the dominant land cover percentage. These biases are site-specific functions of measurement heights, target area extents, and land-surface characteristics. We advocate that flux datasets need to be used with footprint awareness, especially in research and applications that benchmark against models and data products with explicit spatial information. We propose a simple representativeness index based on our evaluations that can be used as a guide to identify site-periods suitable for specific applications and to provide general guidance for data use.
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Canada is one of many representative democracies with low youth representation in parliament of the age cohorts 30 years or under, 35 years or under, and 40 years or under. While most research tries ...to examine structural- or party-level factors responsible for youth's low presence in politics, our study is interested in politicians' perspectives. Are candidates and elected officials aware of youth's low presence in the Canadian House of Commons? Do they find this dearth of representation problematic, and if so, what remedies do they suggest to alleviate the situation? We try to answer these questions through original survey research of candidates and elected representatives of the 2019 and 2021 Canadian general elections. Our results reveal interesting patterns. Most of the surveyed are aware that youth representation is lacking behind youth's distributive share of the population in Canada. However, only a minority of the survey respondents finds this problematic. Interestingly, there is also not enough support for proactive measures such as youth quotas or term limits to increase youth representation in the House of Commons.
When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to ...the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but they are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations of political power are incompatible with democracy, and with a commitment to social equality more generally, when they consist in some having greater arbitrary power to influence decisions according to their idiosyncratic preferences. A novel account of the relationship between power and social status clarifies the role of social equality in the justification of democracy, including a representative democracy in which public officials have more political power than ordinary citizens.
Democratic representation presumes that politicians know what the public wants. Ideally, politicians have accurate perceptions not only of which policies citizens prefer (positions), but also of ...which issues citizens prefer to be dealt with first (priorities). How accurate are elites' perceptions of the public's priorities? And, if elite estimations are incorrect, is there inequality in these perceptions? Using data from two surveys - one measuring citizens' priorities and one gauging representatives' perceptions thereof - in Belgium, Canada and Israel, this article shows that politicians' perceptions of the extent to which citizens want them to undertake action on various issues are not entirely accurate. Importantly, politicians' perceptions appear to be biased towards the preferences of the male, highly educated, and politically interested citizens. These key findings apply to all three countries under study. When it comes to gender specifically, it is found that female politicians' estimations are no less skewed towards male preferences than male politicians' estimations, which suggests the skew is not the consequence of bad descriptive representation but rather of certain segments of citizens being more politically active. All in all, the results show that inequality in representation might partly be driven by underlying perceptual inaccuracy.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1928830 .
This study investigates two competing opinions regarding the role of social media platforms in partisan polarization. The “echo chambers” view focuses on the highly fragmented, customized, and ...niche-oriented aspects of social media and suggests these venues foster greater political polarization of public opinion. An alternative, which we term the “crosscutting interactions” view, focuses on the openness of the Internet and social media, with different opinions just a click away. This view thus argues that polarization would not be especially problematic on these outlets. Exploiting the variation among members of the U.S. House of Representatives in measured positions of political ideology, this study estimates the association between politicians' ideological positions and the size of their Twitter readership. The evidence shows a strong polarization on Twitter readership, which supports the echo chambers view. Lastly, we discuss the implications of this evidence for governments' use of social media in collecting new ideas and opinions from the public.
•Politicians with extreme ideological positions have more Twitter followers.•Even with traditional media as a control variable, the above holds true.•Social media may contribute to heightened levels of political extremism.•Political polarization may be especially problematic in social media.
Politicians regularly bargain with colleagues and other actors. Bargaining dynamics are central to theories of legislative politics and representative democracy, bearing directly on the substance and ...success of legislation, policy, and on politicians’ careers. Yet, controlled evidence on how legislators bargain is scarce. Do they apply different strategies when engaging different actors? If so, what are they, and why? To study these questions, we field an ultimatum game bargaining experiment to 1,100 sitting politicians in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. We find that politicians exhibit a strong partisan bias when bargaining, a pattern that we document across all of our cases. The size of the partisan bias in bargaining is about double the size when politicians engage citizens than when they face colleagues. We discuss implications for existing models of bargaining and outline future research directions.
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