Elite Cues and Economic Policy Attitudes: The Mediating Role of Economic Hardship

Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes.

The Brigade of the Great Hungarian Plain The crimes of the most notorious military detachment during the wave of paramilitary violence called the Hungarian White Terror in 1919–1921, and the further life of a radical right-wing paramilitary commander

In 1919–1920s, paramilitary violence was an almost natural phenomenon in Hungary, like in many other countries of Central Europe. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the new right-wing government, establishing its power with the help of the Entente powers, could difficulty rule the quasi anarchistic conditions. In 1919–1921, Hungary was terrorized by irregular military formations that were formally part of the National Army, and radical right-wing soldiers committed serious crimes frequently by anti-Semitic motivations. One of the most notorious military detachment was organised by young first lieutenant of the Air Force Iván Héjjas, who, with the help of his armed militiamen, abusing the anarchistic conditions due to civil war, build up his own quasi private state in the town of Kecskemét and in its neighbourhood, the Great Hungarian Plain. His rule lasted for two years, his subordinates murdered and/or robbed hundreds of people, mainly of Jewish origin, but later they were given amnesty. Héjjas later became an influential radical right-wing politician of the Hungarian political scene in the period between the two world wars. The present research article makes an attempt to reconstruct the wave of paramilitary violence of Iván Héjjas’s detachment, and also examines of the further life of a used-to-be radical right-wing paramilitary commander and politician who gradually became member of the Hungarian political elite, despite his notorious past.

The New Religious Political Right in Neo-Apartheid South Africa

This article argues that, in similar ways that scholars such as Kaye (1987) and Apple (1990) have respectively demonstrated how post 1970s America and Britain fused the neo-liberal discourse of free markets with the neo-conservative Christian discourse of moral rightness to found a New Right, we can apply this analytical model in post-apartheid/neo-apartheid South Africa. The aim of this analytical comparison is to support the broad claim that the article makes about the rise of the New Right in contemporary South Africa as directly related to the fusion of neo-Pentecostal Christianity with neoliberal economics in very salient ways. Using discourse analysis, the article demonstrates how the New Right in South Africa also draws from the language of crisis to justify a response that brings together the interlocking of race, religion, and neoliberalism. The paper’s main argument is that, a different type of New Right is emerging in current day South Africa, one that is not simply the purview of whitenationalism, but has main appeal also within the black middle-class.

Socio-political choice of Russia in the context of ideologies

In the article, the author analyzes the differences in value orientations and the specifics of the party-political systems of Western countries and Russia, the features of the basic values of the United Russia party and the value orientations of Russian citizens. The problem of borrowing and using successful foreign experience and finding one's own way of development has always been in the center of Russian political discourse. Today conservative as well as liberal approaches prevail in politics in Western countries, until recently they were present in the form of the ideology of the new right. In Russia the dominant “United Russia” party has been in power since 2003 and it positions itself as an all-encompassing or "catch-all" party. However, there are liberal and conservative wings in United Russia. The second one is closer to the ideological platform of the parties of the new right, which in practice in politics abandon the model of the welfare state. According to the surveys, in Russia the neoliberal values recorded in the program documents of United Russia do not meet the expectations of the majority of Russians who demand an active social policy. This contradiction, according to the author, is connected with the decline in popularity of the pro-presidential United Russia, which Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to stop by supporting social programs, while relying on some members of United Russia and the ONF. United Russia won the elections to the State Duma in 2021, but the influence of socially oriented political parties in society and the state is increasing.

The Two Faces of the ‘Global Right’: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives

Studies of the Global Right usually trace its intellectual underpinnings to the revolutionary conservative New Right and its ideas claiming to defend an ‘ethno-pluralist’ European identity from the multiculturalist threat of a ‘Great Replacement’ through immigration. A second lineage, which we refer to as ‘national-conservative’, is less explored and is more concerned with threats to moral order and the loss of moral bearing due to liberalism’s relativism. These two intellectual lineages, and corresponding political alignments, engender different political projects of the Global Right, which is not that coherent as it seems. Taking a long-term historical-ideational perspective that underlines the power of ideologies as templates, we argue that a closer look at the different intellectual traditions of the Global Right can help explain the contrasting political preferences for socio-economic action, institution-building and transnational cooperation.