How Exposure to Violence Affects Ethnic Voting

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dino Hadzic ◽  
David Carlson ◽  
Margit Tavits

How does wartime exposure to ethnic violence affect the political preferences of ordinary citizens? Are high-violence communities more or less likely to reject the politicization of ethnicity post-war? We argue that community-level experience with wartime violence solidifies ethnic identities, fosters intra-ethnic cohesion and increases distrust toward non-co-ethnics, thereby making ethnic parties the most attractive channels of representation and contributing to the politicization of ethnicity. Employing data on wartime casualties at the community level and pre- as well as post-war election results in Bosnia, we find strong support for this argument. The findings hold across a number of robustness checks. Using post-war survey data, we also provide evidence that offers suggestive support for the proposed causal mechanism.

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES ADAMS ◽  
MICHAEL CLARK ◽  
LAWRENCE EZROW ◽  
GARRETT GLASGOW

Previous research explains the evolution of parties' ideological positions in terms of decision rules that stress the uncertainty of the political environment. The authors extend this research by examining whether parties adjust their ideologies in response to two possible influences: shifts in public opinion, and past election results. Their empirical analyses, which are based on the Comparative Manifesto Project's codings of parties' post-war programmes in eight West European nations, suggest that parties respond to shifts in public opinion, but that these effects are only significant in situations where public opinion is clearly shifting away from the party's policy positions. By contrast, no evidence is found here that parties adjust their ideologies in response to past election results. These findings have important implications for parties' election strategies and for models of political representation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 402-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andranik Tumasjan ◽  
Timm O. Sprenger ◽  
Philipp G. Sandner ◽  
Isabell M. Welpe

This study investigates whether microblogging messages on Twitter validly mirror the political landscape off-line and can be used to predict election results. In the context of the 2009 German federal election, we conducted a sentiment analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is used extensively for political deliberation and that the mere number of party mentions accurately reflects the election result. The tweets' sentiment (e.g., positive and negative emotions associated with a politician) corresponds closely to voters' political preferences. In addition, party sentiment profiles reflect the similarity of political positions between parties. We derive suggestions for further research and discuss the use of microblogging services to aggregate dispersed information.


Author(s):  
Bryn Rosenfeld

This chapter seeks to expand the grasp of authoritarian resilience and bottom-up pressures for democratization in states where economic growth is increasing the size of the middle-class. It explains why and under what conditions growth of the middle-class may not increase popular pressure on regimes to democratize. It also looks at a wide array of survey data on the political preferences and behaviors of the middle-classes in the post-communist countries. The chapter emphasizes that a variety of development strategies can drive an expansion of the middle-class, which differ in their effect on the formation of democratic constituencies. It examines multiple pathways to expansion of the middle-class that lead to greater support for democracy.


1971 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 1018-1032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Erickson

This paper presents evidence that candidate issue positions have a measurable impact on elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. For eight election years, electoral margins of Northern incumbent congressional candidates were examined to test the proposition that “moderates” within each party are better vote getters than those whose roll call records reflect their party's ideological extreme. The effects of roll call positions on election results were estimated by examining the relationships between roll call “extremism” and vote margins with district presidential voting held constant as a control for normal constituency voting habits. Although no strong support was found for the proposition that Democratic Representatives lose electoral support when they take extremely liberal roll call positions, a clear pattern emerged for Republicans: the Republican Congressmen who are the best vote getters tend to be the relative moderates and liberals who avoid the extreme conservative end of the political spectrum. An analysis of survey data suggests that the small group of voters whose electoral decisions are influenced by their Republican Congressman's roll call performance are found within the ranks of a select group who are both free of strong partisan motivations and highly politically informed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 495-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Syrovatka

The presidential and parliamentary elections were a political earthquake for the French political system. While the two big parties experienced massive losses of political support, the rise of new political formations took place. Emmanuel Macron is not only the youngest president of the V. Republic so far, he is also the first president not to be supported by either one of the two biggest parties. This article argues that the election results are an expression of a deep crisis of representation in France that is rooted in the economic transformations of the 1970s. The article analyses the political situation after the elections and tries to give an outlook on further political developments in France.


2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haruo Nakagawa

Akin to the previous, 2014 event, with no data on voter ethnicity, no exit polls, and few post-election analyses, the 2018 Fiji election results remain something of a mystery despite the fact that there had been a significant swing in voting in favour of Opposition political parties. There have been several studies about the election results, but most of them have been done without much quantitative analyses. This study examines voting patterns of Fiji’s 2018 election by provinces, and rural-urban localities, as well as by candidates, and also compares the 2018 and 2014 elections by spending a substantial time classifying officially released data by polling stations and individual candidates. Some of the data are then further aggregated according to the political parties to which those candidates belonged. The current electoral system in Fiji is a version of a proportional system, but its use is rare and this study will provide an interesting case study of the Open List Proportional System. At the end of the analyses, this study considers possible reasons for the swing in favour of the Opposition.


Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham

This chapter evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis. This section establishes connections between three sets of theoretical questions: the common practice of describing modernity and its wake in terms of a drive towards increasing complexity; the meaning and cultural legacy of phrases such as ‘military-industrial complex’ and sundry derivations in the political sphere; and the intricacies and ambiguities subtending the term ‘complex’ within psychoanalytic theory. As a concept that Freud both utilised and repudiated, the provocative power of the term ‘complex’ is linked to the way it thwarts various attempts at systemization (providing nonetheless an apparatus of sorts through which contemporary science, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Freud, Eisenhower, and post-war politics can be articulated to one another).


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-235
Author(s):  
Yury Korgunyuk

Abstract The article analyzes the weak points of the Manifesto Project’s methodology, such as its emphasis on issue salience, instead of issue positions; bringing the content of manifestos under too broad categories formulated at the beginning of the project; not quite the appropriate technique of factor analysis etc. An alternative methodology is proposed that focuses on party positions on issues which generate the largest polarization in the political space. It also enriches the empirical base of the studies and adjusts the technique of factor analysis. In order to reveal political cleavages inside these dimensions, the so called electoral cleavages (factors of territorial differences in voting for various parties) are taken as a starting point: factor loadings of parties in the electoral and political spaces are compared through correlation and regression analyses. The proposed methodology is applied to an analysis of election results in Russia (2016) and Germany (2017).


Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.


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