Political parties and social groups: New perspectives and data on group and policy appeals

2020 ◽  
pp. 135406882090799
Author(s):  
Alexander Horn ◽  
Anthony Kevins ◽  
Carsten Jensen ◽  
Kees van Kersbergen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Functional Equivalent ◽  
Policy Problems ◽  
Policy Proposals ◽  
Frequent Reference

This article contributes to the literature on party appeals to social groups by introducing a new dataset on group and policy appeals in Scandinavia (2009–2015). In addition to coding to what social groups parties appeal, we collected information on what policies parties offer for the groups they mention and what goals and instruments they specify for such policies. The latter advance makes it possible to present new insights on the extent to which group appeals are actually substantial and meaningful. We find that left, centre and right parties appeal to broad demographic categories rather than class. There are almost no appeals to the middle class, although the frequent reference to a category ‘all’ can be interpreted as a functional equivalent for middle-class appeals. Finally, parties clearly still make substantial policy proposals and address concrete policy problems, but with only small differences in such appeals across the left–right spectrum.

Still Connecting with Society?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elin Haugsgjerd Allern ◽  
Tània Verge
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
Organized Interests ◽  
Social Interests ◽  
Sources Of Variation ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Formal Status ◽  
Formal Rules

How parties structure their interaction with social groups is a key determinant of their capacity to provide linkage between the institutions of government and the public at large. This chapter investigates the extent to which modern political parties use formal measures to connect to relevant societal interests and strengthen their anchorage in society. The analysis centres on parties’ use of formal rules governing affiliation and representation to link with externally organized interests and parties’ establishment of sub-organizations with representation rights within the party. The chapter authors develop and test several hypotheses concerning cross-country and within-country sources of variation in formal linkage and test them empirically. In addition, they examine whether formal status and representation rights shape parties’ ability to represent descriptively the associated latent social interests focusing on the case of women and ethnic minorities.

Saints and Sinners

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Stephen Farrall ◽  
Susanne Karstedt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Violent Offenders ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Market Place ◽  
The West ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Offending Trajectories ◽  
Detailed Picture

This chapter draws upon qualitative and quantitative data to assess the extent of both victimization and offending in the market place. It examines what consumers did when they found they had been cheated, and discusses the extent to which there is an overlap between being a victim and offender. The chapter paints a detailed picture of victimization, offending, and the degree to which these are related. Findings show that some types of victimization are very common in all three regions, like e.g. unnecessary repairs, while considerable differences exist between them in terms of being offered too little by one’s insurer (most common in West Germany), or being sold faulty second-hand goods (most common in England and Wales). Differences in offending are by far more distinct, with the West Germans outdoing their East Germans and English and Welsh counterparts. For both victimization and offending trajectories of mostly ‘slow-burning change’ were detected for all three regions. Middle-class consumers do not differ from disadvantaged social groups with regard to the relation between victimization and offending: the findings suggest as strong a relationship between victimization and offending, similar to what is usually found for violent offenders and their victimization in marginalized neighbourhoods.

Beyond Quietism: Party Institutionalisation, Salafism, and the Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 796-817
Author(s):  
Francesco Cavatorta ◽  
Valeria Resta
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Political Program ◽  
Party Institutionalization ◽  
Policy Proposals

AbstractBreaking with a long tradition of political quietism, many Salafis in Tunisia and Egypt decided to found political parties and participate in competitive elections after the collapse of the regime. In doing so, they had to present a political program to voters, including policy proposals on economic issues. The article examines how Salafi parties dealt with economic policy-making and finds that they reluctantly engaged with it, offering contradictory and naïve policies meant to pander to the electorate. Policy-making preferences and positions on economic issues are employed to look at the degree of party institutionalization Salafi parties have.

India’s Middle Class

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Entrepreneurship ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Ordinary Folk ◽  
Social Entities

The category “middle class” can refer to quite different social entities. In the United States, it is often used as a synonym for “ordinary folk.” In the United Kingdom it references an elite with economic and social privileges. In India, “the middle class” acquired its own valence through a history that encompasses colonialism, nationalism, and desire for upward social mobility. At one level the Indian middle class was evidently derivative. Indians who wished to emulate the achievements and standing of the British middle class adopted the category, “middle class” as a self-descriptor. Yet the Indian middle class was hardly a modular replica of a metropolitan “original.” The context of colonialism, indigenous hierarchies, and various local histories shaped the nature of the Indian middle class as much as any colonial model. Composed of people—often salaried professionals—who were reasonably well off but not among India’s richest, being middle class in colonial India was less a direct product of social and economic standing and more the result of endeavors of cultural and political entrepreneurship. These efforts gave the middle class its shape and its aspirations to cultural and political hegemony. The same history, in turn, shaped a variety of discourses about the nature of society, politics, culture, and morality in both colonial and post-independent India. Contradictions were inherent in the constitution of the middle class in colonial India, and continue to be apparent today. These contradictions become even more evident as newer, formerly subaltern social groups, seek to participate in a world created through middle class imaginations of society, culture, politics and economics.

scholarly journals Coercive Localization in Southwest Vietnam

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Third ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
Indochina War

This paper describes the protracted struggles by ethnic Khmers in An Giang Province to regain farmland taken from them by ethnic Vietnamese migrants during their forced absence from the Vietnam-Cambodian border during and after the Third Indochina War. Efforts by the original landowners to organize collectively to seek justice from national authorities were stifled by local officials motivated to preserve the new status quo and were ideologically delegitimized by members of the rural middle class. The findings shed new light on ethnic minority political agency and show how the Vietnamese state is drawn materially and discursively into conflicts between competing social groups.

The Politics of North Korea's Unification Policies 1950–1965

1967 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soon Sung Cho
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Research Organization ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Frequency Intensity

Since the April 1960 student-led revolution there, debate in South Korea on the peaceful unification of the two Koreas has increased in frequency, intensity, and popularity among students, intellectuals, political parties, and other social groups. Popular support for independent and peaceful unification is rapidly mounting. This changing mood may be due to more effective North Korean propaganda as well as to the unhappy economic conditions in South Korea. In response to North Korea's aggressive unification campaign, the ROK (Republic of Korea) government has found it necessary to set up a research organization dedicated solely to the study of problems of unification.

Dynamics of the social structure of the Russian middle class

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Алексеенок ◽  
Anna Alekseenok ◽  
Гальцова ◽  
Anna Galtsova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Social Self ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Financial Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Analysis Of Dynamics

The article presents a study of the dynamics of the social structure of the Russian middle class. It examines the dynamics of a number of different social groups in Russia in 2003-2014, «blocking» signs for the population which is not a member of the middle class, 2003-2014, self-assessment of the dynamics of 2014 and the possible dynamics for the next year of the financial position in the last year prior the survey in the different groups of the population. Also the analysis of dynamics of value orientations of different population groups, social identity, of the ways and the main types of leisure in the middle class is held. The article compares the model of Russian social structure, built on the basis of social self-assessment of the status of the Russian people in 2014 and 2000.

The Centre Party, Conservatives, and the Radical Right

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Baranowski
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
The State ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
People's Party ◽  
System P ◽  
National Coalition

This chapter focuses on two major Weimar political parties, the anti-republican German National People’s Party (DNVP) and Catholic Centre Party, which acknowledged the Weimar Republic’s legitimacy and occupied a crucial position in every national coalition until mid-1932. Ultimately the DNVP’s support crumbled because it could not meet the expectations of its middle-class constituents. Although the Centre’s electorate remained stable by comparison, both parties succumbed ultimately to the determination of conservative elites after 1930 to pursue their interests through the commanding heights of the state and impose an authoritarian system.

Some General Characteristics of Nonpartisan Elections

1952 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 766-776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Adrian
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Corporate Structure ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Nonpartisan Elections

Out of the middle-class businessman's “Efficiency and Economy Movement” that reached full strength in the second decade of the twentieth century came a series of innovations designed to place government “on a business basis” and to weaken the power of the political parties. The movement was inspired both by the example of the success of the corporate structure in trade and industry and by revulsion against the low standards of morality to be found in many sectors of political party activity around the turn of the century. The contemporary brand of politician had recently been exposed by the “muck-rakers” and the prestige of the parties had reached a very low level.Of the numerous ideas and mechanisms adopted as a result of the reform movement, one of the most unusual was that of election without party designation. Early in the twentieth century, under the theory that judges are neutral referees, not political officers, and that political activities should therefore be discouraged in the choosing of them, many communities initiated “nonpartisan” elections (the term that is usually applied) in the balloting for judicial posts.

Race, Culture, and Class

2019 ◽  
pp. 339-358
Author(s):  
Richard Drayton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Society ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Global Middle Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
Internal Integration ◽  
The Moment

This chapter takes a broader perspective, demonstrating that the middle class in every society has been both “middle” in terms of status, and “middle” in terms of its capacity for engagement with social groups above or below. The history of the global middle class is in essence the history of global processes of mediation. The post-1500 early modern forms of globalization had three key effects. First, the moment of European hegemony in the period from circa 1750 to 1950 was correlated with the internal integration of Western Christendom and its diasporas on the basis of ideas of “civilization” and “whiteness” and with an ever-expanding external regime of links between Western European and non-European social formations. Second, connected to these processes of integration and external linkages was the production, and growth in importance, of mediating groups in every corner of the globe, of which the European bourgeois was a local and privileged expression. Third, linked to this violent integration of international society, and the associated primacy of mediation and mediators, was a process of standardization of social imaginaries, manners, and customs, a pressure toward the reduction of specific complexity into general categories, toward uniformity.

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