scholarly journals Hawkish Partisans: How Political Parties Shape Nationalist Conflicts in China and Japan

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Trevor Incerti ◽  
Daniel Mattingly ◽  
Frances Rosenbluth ◽  
Seiki Tanaka ◽  
Jiahua Yue
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Regime Types ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Ruling Party ◽  
Do So

Abstract It is well known that regime types affect international conflicts. This article explores political parties as a mechanism through which they do so. Political parties operate in fundamentally different ways in democracies vs. non-democracies, which has consequences for foreign policy. Core supporters of a party in a democracy, if they are hawkish, may be more successful at demanding hawkish behavior from their party representatives than would be their counterparts in an autocracy. The study draws on evidence from paired experiments in democratic Japan and non-democratic China to show that supporters of the ruling party in Japan punish their leaders for discouraging nationalist protests, while ruling party insiders in China are less likely to do so. Under some circumstances, then, non-democratic regimes may be better able to rein in peace-threatening displays of nationalism.

War and Democratic Constraint

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Baum ◽  
Philip B. K. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Institutions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Better Than

Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? This book shows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions—a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media—are present to make timely information accessible. The book demonstrates that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. The book explores this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts. Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book links domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.

Can partisans be pluralist? A comparative study of party member discourse in France and Hungary

2020 ◽  
pp. 136914812093059
Author(s):  
Lise Esther Herman
Keyword(s):  
Focus Group ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Party Member ◽  
Mutual Respect ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Focus Group Methodology ◽  
Party Members ◽  
Central Pillar ◽  
Do So

Pluralist norms, which prescribe certain attitudes of openness and mutual respect for diverging views, have long been considered a central pillar of liberal democracy. While democratic theorists have championed these values, they have been conflicted as to the capacity of political parties to carry them. Partisanship is widely recognized as an essential institution of democratic regimes but it has also been traditionally associated with intransigence rather than tolerance. This paper investigates this theoretical debate from an empirical standpoint, asking whether partisans can be carriers of pluralist values. It relies on focus-group methodology and software-assisted textual analysis to evaluate the extent to which the discourse of 117 party members in two different national contexts, France and Hungary, resonates with the pluralist worldview. The results of this study provide key empirical insights into the nature of partisanship, demonstrating wide variations in the extent to which partisans uphold pluralist principles, but also their capacity to do so at a stringent level.

Forging the Franchise

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Langan Teele
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
National Level ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Competitive Environments ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Massive Change ◽  
Political Emancipation ◽  
Women’S Preferences ◽  
Do So

In the 1880s, women were barred from voting in all national-level elections, but by 1920 they were going to the polls in nearly thirty countries. What caused this massive change? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not because of progressive ideas about women or suffragists' pluck. In most countries, elected politicians fiercely resisted enfranchising women, preferring to extend such rights only when it seemed electorally prudent and necessary to do so. This book demonstrates that the formation of a broad movement across social divides, and strategic alliances with political parties in competitive electoral conditions, provided the leverage that ultimately transformed women into voters. As the book shows, in competitive environments, politicians had incentives to seek out new sources of electoral influence. A broad-based suffrage movement could reinforce those incentives by providing information about women's preferences, and an infrastructure with which to mobilize future female voters. At the same time that politicians wanted to enfranchise women who were likely to support their party, suffragists also wanted to enfranchise women whose political preferences were similar to theirs. In contexts where political rifts were too deep, suffragists who were in favor of the vote in principle mobilized against their own political emancipation. Exploring tensions between elected leaders and suffragists and the uncertainty surrounding women as an electoral group, the book sheds new light on the strategic reasons behind women's enfranchisement.

scholarly journals Diasporic Foreign Policy Interest Groups in the United States: Democracy, Conflict, and Political Entrepreneurship

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Shubha Kamala Prasad ◽  
Filip Savatic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Indian American ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Political Entrepreneurs ◽  
Do So ◽  
Policy Interest

Why do some immigrant diasporas in the United States (U.S.) establish foreign policy interest groups while others do not? While scholars have demonstrated that diasporic interest groups often successfully influence U.S. foreign policy, we take a step back to ask why only certain diasporas attempt to do so in the first place. We argue that two factors increase the likelihood of diaspora mobilization: a community’s experience with democratic governance and conflict in its country of origin. We posit that these conditions make it more likely that political entrepreneurs emerge to serve as catalysts for top-down mobilization. To test our hypotheses, we collect and analyze novel data on diasporic interest groups as well as the characteristics of their respective countries of origin. In turn, we conduct the first in-depth case studies of the historical and contemporary Indian-American lobbies, using original archival and interview evidence.

The functions and positions of political parties in consociational democracies: theoretical and empirical contexts

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-33
Author(s):  
O. Morhuniuk
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Further Development

An article is devoted to the analysis of the functions and formats of political parties in consociational democracies. In particular, it is defined that parties that represent the interests of certain subcultures in society and that reach a consensus among themselves at the level of political agreements are called segmental. At the same time, parties that encapsulate different subgroups of the society that cooperate inside the party within main features of the consociational theory (grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality in representations, and independence of segments or society subcultures) are called consociational. The theory of consociationalism has received a wide range of theoretical additions and criticism from political scientists over the past fifty years. And while political parties should have been, by definition, one of the key aspects of research within such democratic regimes (parties are part of large coalitions and agents of representation of certain subcultures), there is very scarce number of literature that focuses on this aspect. Therefore, the presented article provides a description of the functions of political parties that could be observed as inside their subcultures as well as in interaction with other segmental parties. Based on the experience of two European countries in the period of “classical” consociationalism (Belgium and the Netherlands), we explain the functions of the parties we have defined in such societies with examples of relevant consociational practices in them. Simultaneously with the analysis of segmental parties, the article also offers the characteristics of consociational parties. The emergence of such parties has its own institutional and historical features. The way of further development of the party system and the level of preservation of consociational practices makes it possible to understand the nature of changes in the societies. Similarly, the analysis of the forms of party competition and interaction between segmental parties makes it possible to outline the forms of those consociational changes that are taking place in the research countries.

Political Asylum in Germany: International Norms and Domestic Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-49
Author(s):  
John Bendix ◽  
Niklaus Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Expected Utility ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Political Asylum ◽  
German Politics

Although political asylum has been at the forefront of contemporaryGerman politics for over two decades, it has not been much discussedin political science. Studying asylum is important, however,because it challenges assertions in both comparative politics andinternational relations that national interest drives decision-making.Political parties use national interest arguments to justify claims thatonly their agenda is best for the country, and governments arguesimilarly when questions about corporatist bargaining practices arise.More theoretically, realists in international relations have positedthat because some values “are preferable to others … it is possible todiscover, cumulate, and objectify a single national interest.” Whileinitially associated with Hans Morgenthau’s equating of nationalinterest to power, particularly in foreign policy, this position hassince been extended to argue that states can be seen as unitary rationalactors who carefully calculate the costs of alternative courses ofaction in their efforts to maximize expected utility.

scholarly journals Cleavages and Government in Slovenia and Montenegro

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-621
Author(s):  
Alenka Krašovec ◽  
Nemanja Batrićević
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Party System ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Multiparty Systems ◽  
Cleavage Structure ◽  
System Characteristics ◽  
Ruling Party

AbstractIn this article we identify the factors that contribute to the formation and especially the durability/stability of governments in both Slovenia and Montenegro after they formally introduced multiparty systems and following their democratic transition, with a focus on the effect of cleavages and party system characteristics generally. Although these two polities share several important similarities (small size, common institutional setting during Yugoslav era, aspirations for membership in international organisations etc.), the nature of governments’ durability/stability in the democratic era entails distinct differences. While Montenegro stands out in post-socialist Europe as the only case where the ruling party has not been overthrown, Slovenia has been led by many governments composed of different political parties. While it seems that in neither country are the ideological characteristics of the governments able to explain their duration/stability to any important extent, it is obvious that the cleavage structure in the two countries has varied, as has the importance of particular cleavages.

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