Acting Out

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Holmgren

In the turbulent context of interwar Polish politics, a period bookended by the right-wing nationalists’ repression of an ethnically heterogeneous state, several popular high-quality cabarets persisted in Warsaw even as they provoked and defied the nationalists’ harsh criticism. In their best, most influential incarnation, Qui pro Quo (1919–1932) and its successors, these literary cabarets violated the right’s value system through their shows’ insistent metropolitan focus, their stars’ role-modeling of immoral behavior and parodic impersonation, and their companies’ explicitly Jewish–Gentile collaboration. In the community of the cabaret, which was even more bohemian and déclassé than that of the legitimate theater, the social and ethnic antagonisms of everyday Warsaw society mattered relatively little. Writers and players bonded with each other, above all, in furious pursuit of fun, fortune, celebrity, artistic kudos, and putting on a hit show. This analysis details how the contents and stars of Qui pro Quo challenged right-wing values. Its shows advertised the capital as a sumptuous metropolis as well as a home to an eccentric array of plebeian and underworld types, including variations on the cwaniak warszawski enacted by comedian Adolf Dymsza. Its chief female stars—Zula Pogorzelska, Mira Zimińska, and Hanna Ordonówna—incarnated big-city glamour and sexual emancipation. Its recurring Jewish characters—Józef Urstein’s Pikuś and Kazimierz Krukowski’s Lopek—functioned as modern-day Warsaw’s everymen, beleaguered and bedazzled as they assimilated to city life. Qui pro Quo’s popular defense against an exclusionary nationalism showcased collaborative artistry and diverse, charismatic stars.

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 102 ◽  
pp. 656-676
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk

The article examines the main forms and methods of agitation and propagandistic activities of monarchic parties in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Among them the author singles out such ones as periodical press, publication of books, brochures and flyers, organization of manifestations, religious processions, public prayers and funeral services, sending deputations to the monarch, organization of public lectures and readings for the people, as well as various philanthropic events. Using various forms of propagandistic activities the monarchists aspired to embrace all social groups and classes of the population in order to organize all-class and all-estate political movement in support of the autocracy. While they gained certain success in promoting their ideology, the Rights, nevertheless, lost to their adversaries from the radical opposition camp, as the monarchists constrained by their conservative ideology, could not promise immediate social and political changes to the population, and that fact was excessively used by their opponents. Moreover, the ideological paradigm of the Right camp expressed in the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” formula no longer agreed with the social and economic realities of Russia due to modernization processes that were underway in the country from the middle of the 19th century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C Gordon

AbstractOver the past 25 years, Sweden has gone from having one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems among the rich democracies to one of the least. This article advances a multi-causal explanation for this unexpected outcome. It shows how the benefit system became a target of successive right-wing governments due to its role in fostering social democratic hegemony. Employer groups, radicalized by the turbulent 1970s more profoundly than elsewhere, sought to undermine the system, and their abandonment of corporatism in the early 1990s limited unions’ capacity to restrain right-wing governments in retrenchment initiatives. Two further developments help to explain the surprising political resilience of the cuts: the emergence of a private (supplementary) insurance regime and a realignment of working-class voters from the Social Democrats to parties of the right, especially the nativist Sweden Democrats, in the context of a liberal refugee/asylum policy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Fischer ◽  
Quentin Atkinson ◽  
Ananish Chaudhuri

This chapter provides an overview of studies that use incentivised experiments to study political ideology. We look first at studies that conceptualise political ideology along a unidimensional liberal-conservative spectrum and explore whether there are behavioural differences between liberals and conservatives. While recent studies find that liberals display more pro-sociality, many other studies find that liberals and conservatives display similar levels of pro-social, ingroup-biased, normative, and punitive behaviour. We then turn to experiments that study two-dimensional political ideology as embodied in the concepts of economic conservatism/progressivism (often measured with the Social Dominance Orientation scale) and social conservatism/progressivism (usually measured with the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale). In such experiments, economic conservatives display lower levels of pro-sociality and universalism and greater tolerance of inequality and tendencies to harm outgroups. Social conservatives tend to display “groupishness”, including distrusting anonymous strangers, cooperating with ingroup members, following rules, punishing in the ultimatum game, and sometimes harming outgroups.


Author(s):  
Pradeep K. Chhibber ◽  
Rahul Verma

To the surprise of many, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) singlehandedly won a majority in the national elections of 2014. Since then the party which, once had two seats in parliament, has come to govern 21 states in India. How did the BJP become so successful? The BJP is now the principal carrier of conservatism in India. This was not the case at independence. The ideological roots of the BJP lie in the idea of Hindu majoritarianism. Over the years the BJP succeeded in accommodating conservative elements not only from the Congress but also from other right-wing parties. Its electoral success has been aided by the social and economic changes in India since the 1990s. These changes, however, have also generated contradictions within the ideological coalitions that brought about the rise of the BJP and pose a potential challenge to the party as it moves to consolidate its position.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 15-19
Author(s):  
Anatoly V. Dobrovolsky

The article reveals the reasons for the activation of the right-wing socialist-revolutionaries in Siberia in the early 1920s, after the introduction of a new economic policy in Soviet Russia. The author shows that a number of objective and subjective factors contributed to the activation of the right-wing social revolutionaries in Siberia. Among the objective factors, he points out the discontent of the population with the policy of the Soviet government during the years of "War Communism "and at the beginning of the NEP, the personnel" hunger " of the ruling Bolshevik Party, the close location of the Far Eastern Republic. The sharp intensification of the activities of socialist revolutionaries in the article is demonstrated on the example of Siberian societies, where revolutionaries "captured" the leading posts in the middle and lower managerial level, it has used the material basis of cooperation for the establishment of inner work, expand their outreach. And only the decisive actions of the leadership of the RCP( b), punitive measures of the Cheka/GPU bodies stopped the activity of the Social Revolutionaries, led to the defeat of the socialist opposition in the early 1920s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-216
Author(s):  
M. V. Nozhenko

The review examines a new collective monograph edited by L.S. Okuneva and A.I. Tevdoi-Burmuli: ‘Right-wing populism: Global trend and regional features’, published in 2020. The reviewer notes that a growing interest in both Russian and foreign academic community towards the phenomenon of populism has been witnessed in recent years. However, scholars still haven’t reached a consensus on the nature and content of this phenomenon, its role in the political systems of individual countries and regions, as well as on prospects for its further development. In this regard the book under review which provides a broad geographical and thematic perspective coverage is of particular relevance. At the same time, the reviewer notes that this very breadth provokes critical comments. For instance, the reviewer points to certain imbalances in the structure of the book, as well as some inconsistencies in the authors’ narratives. The latter may be related to the fact that the authors have widely differing approaches to the nature of populism. As a result, the book under review should be considered as a collection of essays united by a common theme rather than a collective monograph based on a common theoretical and methodological framework. However, this in no way downplays academic contribution of each individual author and the relevance of the book as a whole. The reviewer examines each chapter, briefly presenting the author’s position and the key findings, and concludes that the book in general contributes significantly to the academic study of the right-wing populism and raises new research questions. With regard to the latter, the book highlights both the ambiguity of populism, its immanent connection with modern trends in the development of political systems, and the social and psychological factors that contribute to the growing popularity of populist ideas.


1969 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen L. Evans

In descriptions of the political structure of the Weimar Republic, the German Center Party is usually grouped as a party of the “middle,” together with the German Democratic Party and German People's Party, between the left-wing Social Democrats and the right-wing German Nationalists. In the years after 1928, the Center showed an increasing disinclination to work in coalition with the Social Democratic Party and finally, under the leadership of Dr. Ludwig Kaas, the last chairman of the Center Party, broke completely with the Socialists. During the same years Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, made persistent, though futile, attempts to find an acceptable coalition partner for the Center on the Right, hoping, among other possibilities, to encourage a secession movement from the Nationalist Party in 1930. Because of the rapid dwindling of electoral support for the other parties of the middle, very little attention has been paid to the Center's relationship with them. It is the purpose of this article to show that the mutual antipathies between these parties and the Center were as great or greater than its antipathy toward Social Democracy on certain matters which were vital to the Center's existence. By 1928, in fact, coalition with the parties of the middle had become as unsatisfactory to the leaders of the Center as coalition with the party of the Left. The turning-point in this development was the breakup of the Marx-Keudell right-wing cabinet of 1927. The failure of that government to attain the party's goals in the realm of Kulturpolitik, i.e., religion and education, confirmed the Center's disillusionment with the workings of the parliamentary system itself.


2014 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gunnarsson Lorentzen

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse relationships and communication between Twitter actors in Swedish political conversations. More specifically, the paper aims to identify the most prominent actors, among these actors identify the sub-groups of actors with similar political affiliations, and describe and analyse the relationships and communication between these sub-groups. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected during four weeks in September 2012, using Twitter API. The material included 77,436 tweets from 10,294 Twitter actors containing the hashtag #svpol. In total, 916 prominent actors were identified and categorised according to the main political blocks, using information from their profiles. Social network analysis was utilised to map the relationships and the communication between these actors. Findings – There was a marked dominance of the three main political blocks among the 916 most prominent actors: left block, centre-right block, and right-wing block. The results from the social network analysis suggest that while polarisation exists in both followership and re-tweet networks, actors follow and re-tweet actors from other groups. The mention network did not show any signs of polarisation. The blocks differed from each other with the right-wingers being tighter and far more active, but also more distant from the others in the followership network. Originality/value – While a few papers have studied political polarisation on Twitter, this is the first to study the phenomenon using followership data, mention data, and re-tweet data.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavithra Suryanarayan

What explains the popularity of right-wing parties among the poor? This article argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, cross-class coalitions can emerge among high-status voters if they believe their social status is under threat. I demonstrate this in the context of the Indian states by exploiting an announcement by the Government of India in 1990 to implement affirmative action for lower castes—an intervention that threatened to weaken the social status of upper caste Brahmans. Using unique data from the 1931 census, this article shows that areas where Brahmans were more dominant in the 1930s experienced a higher surge in right-wing voting after this announcement than other areas. Using survey data, I find that both wealthy and poor Brahmans voted for the right wing where Brahmans were dominant in 1931. The article shows how concerns about social status may make the poor open to appeals by antiredistribution parties.


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