scholarly journals How Labor Market Inequality Transforms Mass Politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-355
Author(s):  
Silja Häusermann ◽  
Achim Kemmerling ◽  
David Rueda

AbstractWhy do left parties lose vote shares in times of economic crisis and hardship? Why do right-wing governments implement seemingly left-wing policies, such as labor market activation? Why is representation becoming more and more unequal? And why do workers vote for right-wing populist parties? Several political science theories propose meaningful and important answers to these key questions for comparative politics, focusing on identity politics, programmatic convergence of parties or exogenous constraints. However, there is an additional and distinct approach to all of the questions above, which emphasizes socio-structural transformations in the labor market: most of the processes above can be understood with reference to increasing labor market inequality and its political implications. The relevance and explanatory power of labor market inequality for mass politics have not been fully acknowledged in comparative political science and this is the reason for this symposium. Labor market inequality affects political preferences and behavior, electoral politics, representation, and government strategies. The main purpose of our symposium is to make broader comparative politics research aware of the crucial structural changes that labor markets have undergone in the advanced capitalist democracies of the OECD, and of the tremendous implications these changes have had for politics.

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 652-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Gerschewski

Legitimacy is a key concept in political science. It has deep normative roots in democratic theory and refers usually to righteous, just, fair, and therefore acceptable rule. However, non-democracies also try to create a following among their citizens. They also engage in justifying their rule through politicization, be it of religion, ethnicity, or ideologies ranging from left-wing communism to right-wing nationalism. Against this backdrop, I pose the question: does it make sense to use the concept of legitimacy for both types of regimes, democracies and autocracies alike? Or, do we overstretch the concept when transplanting it to the non-democratic realm? And, empirically, how can we assess to what degree a non-democracy is viewed as legitimate by its citizens? I aim therefore at defining what legitimacy and legitimation is in autocratic settings; drawing a semantic map of rival concepts like support, trust, and loyalty; and tackling concrete challenges in measuring this elusive concept.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Milena Dragićević Šešić ◽  
Mirjana Nikolić

Researching the impact of populist political communication on media, art, and the cultural sphere in Serbia, the authors investigate various different phenomena that are rising under the pretext of market liberalisation and identity politics. Deregulation of media may have brought “independence” from power, but also complete market-dependence. In the cultural sphere, pressures on the arts from right-wing populism have lead to extreme nationalism in Serbian media and cultural practices while simulta-neously seeing a commercialisation of programming. “National discussions” regarding the status of real-ity show programmes on commercial television and accusations of anti-patriotism against most promi-nent Serbian artists have been lead by right-wing populists. At the same time, this research takes into account several forms of left-wing populism, mostly developed within the independent scene.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silja Häusermann

AbstractThe growing research on post-industrial labor market inequality bears a strong—yet widely misunderstood—relevance for the literature on electoral realignment. In this contribution, I contend that the assumption of “labor market outsiders” being equal to “globalization/modernization losers” is largely mistaken. Rather, atypical work and unemployment is most widespread among service workers, whose primary electoral choice is to abstain from voting. This implies that the ongoing reconfiguration of European party systems—through the rise of right-wing populist parties—is driven by skilled and routine workers in the manufacturing sector (the traditional “insiders”). Hence, the rise of right-wing populist parties reflects a political mobilization of the formerly well-protected industrial working class, rather than of labor market outsiders.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 212-235
Author(s):  
Adam Mrozowicki ◽  
Vera Trappmann ◽  
Alexandra Seehaus ◽  
Justyna Kajta

This article explores the selected cases of the biographies of right-wing supporters from a larger sample of narrative interviews with young (18-35 years old) people in Poland and Germany. In the existing literature, we can find the socio-economic explanations of the sources of the right-wing turn (related to economic deprivation, precarisation, social exclusion, labor market competition with immigrants and others), as well as cultural explanations connected with new identity politics, symbolic exclusion and divide between society and political elites, the disembedding from previously solid communities, and the fear of new risks related to the inflow of cultural Others. Despite notable exceptions, it is rather uncommon to discuss in this context the actual biographical experiences of right-wing and far-right supporters. In the article, we take a closer look at four biographical cases of people declaring their political support for far right parties. The analysis of the cases leads to the distinction of socio-economic and socio-political pathways to right-wing populist support.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
Karen Vintges

Although for a long time, Dutch academic philosophy was characterized by a pluralism of – imported – philosophical frameworks and paradigms, in more recent decades, a type of ‘normal philosophy’, in the Kuhnian sense, has become dominant which aims to solve ethical and political problems and dilemmas through rational-normative argumentation. Contrary to what is often claimed, the new 'normal philosophy' amounts not to thinking ‘beyond the analytic-continental divide’ in a fruitful synthesis, but to the subsumption of continental philosophical themes and concepts under the analytic tradition. The potentially critical tenor of continental philosophy threatens to be ‘solved’ by this subsumption. ‘Normal philosophy’, with its emphasis on rational-normative argumentation, risks leading to a state philosophy that fits in with existing policy questions, ignoring systemic and structural power inequalities. I argue that the journal Krisis, in keeping with its original principles, should hang on to critical philosophical reflection, which today is needed more than ever, specifically – pace current right-wing and left-wing populist attacks on identity politics – on systemic, multiple forms of deprivation and oppression.  


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110370
Author(s):  
Pippa Norris

In recent years, a progressive “cancel culture” in society, right-wing politicians and commentators claim, has silenced alternative perspectives, ostracized contrarians, and eviscerated robust intellectual debate, with college campuses at the vanguard of this development. These arguments can be dismissed as rhetorical dog whistles devoid of substantive meaning, myths designed to fire up the MAGA faithful, outrage progressives, and distract from urgent real-world problems. Given heated contention, however, something more fundamental may be at work. To understand this phenomenon, the opening section defines the core concept and theorizes that perceptions of this phenomenon are likely to depend upon how far individual values fit the dominant group culture. Within academia, scholars most likely to perceive “silencing” are mismatched or non-congruent cases, where they are “fish-out-of-water.” The next section describes how empirical survey evidence is used to test this prediction within the discipline of political science. Data are derived from a global survey, the World of Political Science, 2019, involving almost 2500 scholars studying or working in over 100 countries. The next section describes the results. The conclusion summarizes the key findings and considers their broader implications. Overall, the evidence confirms the “fish-out-of-water” congruence thesis. As predicted, in post-industrial societies, characterized by predominately liberal social cultures, like the US, Sweden, and UK, right-wing scholars were most likely to perceive that they faced an increasingly chilly climate. By contrast, in developing societies characterized by more traditional moral cultures, like Nigeria, it was left-wing scholars who reported that a cancel culture had worsened. This contrast is consistent with Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence thesis, where mainstream values in any group gradually flourish to become the predominant culture, while, due to social pressures, dissenting minority voices become muted. The ratchet effect eventually muffles contrarians. The evidence suggests that the cancel culture is not simply a rhetorical myth; scholars may be less willing to speak up to defend their moral beliefs if they believe that their views are not widely shared by colleagues or the wider society to which they belong.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-52
Author(s):  
Thomas Grünhage ◽  
Martin Reuter

AbstractThough meat-consumption is known to be a key factor in environmental damage, veganism and vegetarianism are still perceived to be left-wing-phenomena, ironically not penetrating to those who hold ideologies of conservation. Logical contradictions and historical counter-examples cast doubt on a substantive connection between political orientation and meat-eating. Instead, common psychological factors may predispose people toward both: left vs. right-wing political orientation and self-restrictive vs. omnivore eating preferences. Moral foundations have been shown to explain why even seemingly contradictory issue stances are brought forward in the context of the same ideological or political orientation. Here, we expand on these findings by showing the moral foundations to connect political orientation and vegan and vegetarian eating preferences as well as specific strategies of meat-eating justification in a large German sample. Specifically, the binding foundations authority and purity as well as avoidance tendencies are shown to differentially interact with meat-eating across the political spectrum with stronger effects for left-wing adherents and centrists than for the right-wing. Mediation analyses reveal that substantive parts of the association between political orientation and self-restriction in eating are attributable to differences in the moral makeup of left- and right-wing adherents. Connecting our results to prior work on the explanatory power of moral foundations for the political polarization of environmentalism, we discuss how our results may inform inter-ideologically appealing communications of reducing meat consumption, which is a worthwhile and necessary goal for mitigating climate change.


1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (04) ◽  
pp. 404-405
Author(s):  
Marian D. Irish ◽  
James W. Prothro

Academicians are properly suspicious of efforts to characterize all the intellectual currents of a decade by a single phrase. But perhaps our less cautious friends in journalism are not so far wrong in suggesting that we are returning in the 1970s to the conservatism of the 1950s. The first edition ofThe Politics of American Democracy(1959) was denounced by a John Birch group in California for its left-wing orientation. The only previous broadside attack on the book to appear in print was directed at the third and fourth editions (1965, 1968); this attack, which appeared in a 1970 issue of theNewsletterof the Caucus for a New Political Science, denounced the book for its right-wing, pro-system biases. Now we have come full circle and find the fifth (1971) edition denounced because “spokesmen of the left seem to have been given more than equal time.” In some respects we are gratified to think Mr. Stevens' critique must prove we have not grown more conservative with each edition, and we shall certainly display his comments to our children, nieces, nephews, junior colleagues, and students.More seriously, however, we cannot be gratified to have our scholarship and our integrity impugned. We do not wish to overreact, but the charge that we are guilty of “bizarre statements of ‘fact’ and misrepresentations of the academic literature” and the suggestion that we “can no longer claim to be speaking as … political scientists[s]” can hardly be interpreted to mean that we have merely slipped into occasional error.


Author(s):  
René Pawera ◽  
Monika Lavrovičová ◽  
Lucia Húsenicová

An important element of the management of modern companies and organizations is the proper use of diversity management and equal opportunities, aimed at eliminating discrimination in the labor market. The paper summarizes the starting points for these processes in the labor market. It describes the tendencies of the development of the solved problem in the context of the labor market conditions of the Slovak Republic. Key words: labor market inequality, equal opportunities management, diversity management


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