Party Unity and Discipline in Canadian Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
J. P. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
Party Discipline ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The People ◽  
Canadian Politics ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Individual

Anyone with a passing understanding of Canadian politics is aware of the stubborn presence of party discipline in the parliamentary system. It is not a phenomenon that has been left to the stuffy corners of the ivory tower. Political actors and the media have complained about party discipline for decades. Reforms have been proposed; party leaders have promised new ways forward. As a central trait of Canadian Parliament, party discipline has driven away voters—it has even inspired the development of new political parties. What role can Canadian political science play in understanding party discipline 75 years after these familiar sentiments appeared in the predecessor to this journal: “How could this control [party discipline] be destroyed, and the individual member be made an independent critic of government and of legislation, and a responsible servant of the people” (Morton, 1946: 136)? It turns out Canadian political science has much to offer. With the publication of J. F. Godbout's Lost on Division: Party Unity in the Canadian Parliament and Alex Marland's Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada, 2020 has been a monumental year for the study of Canadian Parliament and political parties.

scholarly journals The kiss of death. Public service media under right-wing populist attack

2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312199133
Author(s):  
Christina Holtz-Bacha
Keyword(s):  
Public Service ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Democratic Accountability ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Control ◽  
The Media ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
Public Scrutiny

With the surge of populism in Europe, public service broadcasting has come under increased pressure. The established media are considered part of the corrupt elite not serving the interests of the people. The public service media, for which pluralism is at the core of their remit, are a particular thorn in the side of the populists. Therefore, they attack the financial basis of public service, which is supposed to guarantee their independence. The populist attacks on the traditional broadcasting corporations meet with the interests of neoliberal politics and of those political actors who want to evade public scrutiny and democratic control and do no longer feel committed to democratic accountability. The assaults on the public service media are thus an assault on freedom of the media and further increase the pressure on the democratic system.

V. Party Politics in the New Japanese Diet

1948 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1163-1180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Williams
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Steering Committee ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
New Order ◽  
Popular Government ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Internal Procedures ◽  
Japanese Diet

Internal Procedures. Unschooled in the history and theory of Occidental parliamentarism, the old political factions, with new names, naturally try to adapt the new order of things in the Diet to the normal Japanese pattern. Their modus operandi during the first and second sessions—by way of adjusting to the Diet as the “highest organ of state power”—is an eventful chapter in the development of popular government in Japan.Basic is the fact that political parties manage the Diet: every action is a party action, every vote a party vote, every decision a party decision. The individual member stands for nothing. Bills and resolutions, motions of any kind, speeches, interpellations, filibustering, even heckling and rowdyism, in committee and House sessions—all are products of political parties.The primary agency through which political parties collectively manipulate the Diet is an entirely new piece of legislative machinery, the “Steering Committee,” one of 21 standing committees in each House.

News Media as Gatekeepers, Critics, and Initiators of Populist Communication: How Journalists in Ten Countries Deal with the Populist Challenge

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Wettstein ◽  
Frank Esser ◽  
Anne Schulz ◽  
Dominique S. Wirz ◽  
Werner Wirth
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The People ◽  
The Media ◽  
Comparative Content

In the wake of the recent successes of populist political actors and discussions about its causes in Europe, the contribution of the media has become an issue of public debate. We identify three roles—as gatekeepers, interpreters, and initiators—the media can assume in their coverage of populist actors, populist ideology, and populist communication. A comparative content analysis of nine thousand stories from fifty-nine news outlets in ten European countries shows that both media factors (e.g., tabloid orientation) and political factors (e.g., response of mainstream parties) influence the extent and nature of populism in the media. Although newspapers in most countries do not overrepresent populist actors and tend to evaluate them negatively, we still find abundant populist content in the news. Several media outlets like to present themselves as mouthpieces of the people while, at the same time, cover politicians and parties with antiinstitutional undertones.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefaan Walgrave ◽  
Peter Van Aelst
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Individual

Recently, the number of studies examining whether media coverage has an effect on the political agenda has been growing strongly. Most studies found that preceding media coverage does exert an effect on the subsequent attention for issues by political actors. These effects are contingent, though, they depend on the type of issue and the type of political actor one is dealing with. Most extant work has drawn on aggregate time-series designs, and the field is as good as fully non-comparative. To further develop our knowledge about how and why the mass media exert influence on the political agenda, three ways forward are suggested. First, we need better theory about why political actors would adopt media issues and start devoting attention to them. The core of such a theory should be the notion of the applicability of information encapsulated in the media coverage to the goals and the task at hand of the political actors. Media information has a number of features that make it very attractive for political actors to use—it is often negative, for instance. Second, we plead for a disaggregation of the level of analysis from the institutional level (e.g., parliament) or the collective actor level (e.g., party) to the individual level (e.g., members of parliament). Since individuals process media information, and since the goals and tasks of individuals that trigger the applicability mechanism are diverse, the best way to move forward is to tackle the agenda setting puzzle at the individual level. This implies surveying individual elites or, even better, implementing experimental designs to individual elite actors. Third, the field is in dire need of comparative work comparing how political actors respond to media coverage across countries or political systems.

LIBERALIZATION OF BASIC BUSINESS CONDITIONS POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF UZBEKISTAN

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Murodulla Mirzaev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The People ◽  
Legal Foundations ◽  
Business Conditions ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual

The article is devoted to the liberalization of the conditions of activity of the main political institutions of Uzbekistan. Reform of the representative bodies of authority and the legal foundations of the activities of political parties was carried out on the basis of the goals set in the Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan, in the program documents of the President of the Republic and embodied in the ideology of national independence. This means: ensuring the independence and prosperity of the motherland, the well-being of the people, the realization of the rights and freedoms of the individual, confidence in a peaceful and safe future for the country

Post as Much and as Diversely as Possible

2019 ◽  
pp. 983-1004
Author(s):  
Alem Maksuti ◽  
Tomaž Deželan
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Message Delivery ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Different Types

The daily interaction between political parties and voters is a driving force in election campaigns and can influence their outcomes. The theory of campaign intensity holds that the timing of message delivery in an election campaign is a key component of the strategies used by political actors. However, this theory also warns political actors to be cautious about the timing of different types of messages sent during the election campaign. Our objective is to examine the intensity and types of messages Slovenian political actors communicated through Twitter during different stages in the 2014 national election campaign. Our study conducts a content analysis of 7,113 tweets posted during the last four weeks of the official election campaign. It includes 17 official accounts of Slovenian parties, party leaders, and influential party twitterians. The results indicated that the stage of the campaign and the differences between established and fringe political parties significantly influenced the intensity of Twitter communications during the study period. The results also revealed that the political actors tweeted different types of political messages (e.g., to inform and to persuade voters) during different stages of the campaign.

Defying expectations: what leader insurgencies reveal about media and party incapacity in the time of ‘audience democracy’

2018 ◽  
Vol 167 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Walter ◽  
Zareh Ghazarian
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
New Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Engagement ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Political communication and citizen engagement have been impacted by crises in both political parties and conventional media models. This article contends that the confluence of these crises has been insufficiently understood, and that this lack of understanding depends upon a third element: the dissolution of a ‘holding culture’, a sense of the ‘rules of the game’ that has constituted the ground on which parties and the media operated and generated the imaginative space for constituting community. This dissolution might be represented as resistance to a now discredited political class, once constituted by ‘old’ political and media elites, and promising a new culture – with the potential for parties to be more responsive to ‘the people’, and for a more diversified and representative media. By looking at case studies of leadership insurgency in parties and the impact of new media in creating the discursive conditions for their emergence, this article explores the realities in relation to political communication and democratic engagement.

Public Opinion, Political Communication and the Internet

Politics ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Savigny
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
Potential Challenge

In contemporary society public opinion is generally mediated by the mass media, which has come to encompass the Habermasian ‘public sphere’. This arena is now characterised by the conflict between market and democratic principles, by competing interests of politicians and the media. The presentation of information for debate becomes distorted. The opinion of the ‘public’ is no longer created through deliberation, but is constructed through systems of communication, in conflict with political actors, who seek to retain control of the dissemination of information. The expansion of the internet as a new method of communication provides a potential challenge to the primacy of the traditional media and political parties as formers of public opinion.

scholarly journals Komunikacja liderów polskich partii politycznych w mediach społecznościowych w okresie pełnego cyklu wyborczego w latach 2014–2015

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Marta Bodys
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Communication Analysis ◽  
Election Cycle ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Research

Communication of the leaders of Polish political parties in social media during the full election cycle 2014–2015This paper presents the results of research on the communication of relevant leaders in the years 2014–2015, during the campaign period before the four elections: to the European Parliament, local, parliamentary and presidential. Quantitative and qualitative research deals with the communication of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Donald Tusk, Ewa Kopacz, Janusz Piechocinski, Leszek Miller, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, Ryszard Petru and Paweł Kukiz. The analysis is mainly focused on communication of party leaders on Facebook and Twitter. The research described in this article is not only a political party leader’s communication analysis but also a comparative material for further research into political actors’ communication.

scholarly journals Framing the Refugee Crisis in Online Media: A Romanian Perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicoleta Corbu ◽  
Raluca Buturoiu ◽  
Flavia Durach
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The Media ◽  
Tone Of Voice ◽  
The Individual

The European Union (EU) is under severe pressure, due to the multiple crises it has to manage. Among them, the refugee crisis is remarkable, since it is shaking both the individual member states and the EU as a whole. The media coverage of the refugee crisis is important because the media still are the main source of information concerning distant issues (the refugee crisis included), and as such it facilitates people’s access to social reality. Using the perspective of agenda-setting and the conceptual background of framing theory, we aim to (1) identify the most prominent frames online media employ with reference to the refugee crisis, and (2) reveal the tone of voice online media use when portraying issues related to this crisis. To achieve these two goals, we content analyzed 1493 online news articles, published between April 15, 2015 and February 29, 2016. Main findings show that online media outlets mainly refer to the refugee crisis in terms of responsibility and conflict, in this order of prominence. At the same time, online media portals prefer using a reasonably balanced viewpoint when portraying the refugees, and a slightly negative one in terms of attitudes towards the European Union.

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