scholarly journals Intimate Connections: Political Interests and Group Activity in State and Local Parties

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 257-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise L. Baer ◽  
Julie A. Dolan

Using data from the 1988 Party Elite Study, this paper tests two different models of how interests and parties are related among a national sample of state and local party leaders and activists. Two models of interest intermediation are compared: the pluralist model stressing consensus and bipartisanship, and the party government model stressing conflict and partisanship. New research is reviewed suggesting that political interests have become nationalized and work within the parties. Using Stinchcombe’s "crucial experiment," opposing assumptions of the two models are compared. While we do not test whether interests and parties are equally strong, we do find that strong parties and strong interests share a complementary, even intimate relationship. Strong support is found for the pervasiveness of interests among party elites, the presence of distinct party-linked ideological differences between group members and non-members, linkage between interest membership and organized party factions, group structuring of political information and communication, and a group consciousness. Based on these findings, we find support for the advent of true factions in the contemporary party system, and the conflict model of partisan intermediation in the post-reform party system is confirmed. The fact that interests are so strongly intertwined with the state and local parties provides disconfirmation of the pervasive myth that strong interests lead to decline at the grassroots.

1979 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arend Lijphart

For the purpose of determining the relative influence of the three potentially most important social and demographic factors on party choice–social class, religion, and language–a comparison of Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland provides a “crucial experiment,” because these three variables are simultaneously present in all four countries. Building on the major earlier research achievements in comparative electoral behavior, this four-country multivariate analysis compares the indices of voting and the party choice “trees” on the basis of national sample surveys conducted in the 1970s. From this crucial contest among the three determinants of party choice, religion emerges as the victor, language as a strong runner-up, and class as a distant third. The surprising strength of the religious factor can be explained in terms of the “freezing” of past conflict dimensions in the party system and the presence of alternative, regional-federal, structures for the expression of linguistic interests.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 87-95
Author(s):  
D.L. TSYBAKOV ◽  

The purpose of the article is to assess the nature of the evolution of the institution of political parties in post – Soviet Russia. The article substantiates that political parties continue to be one of the leading political institutions in the modern Russian Federation. The premature to recognize the functional incapacity of party institutions in the post-industrial/information society is noted. It is argued that political parties continue to be a link between society and state power, and retain the potential for targeted and regular influence on strategic directions of social development. The research methodology is based on the principles of consistency, which allowed us to analyze various sources of information and empirical data on trends and prospects for the evolution of the party system in the Russian Federation. As a result, the authors come to the conclusion that in Russian conditions the convergence of party elites with state bureaucracy is increasing, and there is a distance between political parties and civil society.


2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn A. Kapinus ◽  
Michael P. Johnson

Using data from a 1980 national sample of married men and women, the analysis examines the utility of the family life cycle concept, employing as dependent variables constructs from Johnson’s conceptualization of commitment. They argue, in disagreement with two classic critiques of the family life cycle concept, that the predictive power of family life cycle is, for many dependent variables, quite independent of age or length of marriage. Their analyses demonstrate that, when using dependent variables one would expect to be related to the presence and ages of children, family life cycle remains a useful predictive tool.


2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 316-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol J. Romanowski , ◽  
Rakesh Nagi

In variant design, the proliferation of bills of materials makes it difficult for designers to find previous designs that would aid in completing a new design task. This research presents a novel, data mining approach to forming generic bills of materials (GBOMs), entities that represent the different variants in a product family and facilitate the search for similar designs and configuration of new variants. The technical difficulties include: (i) developing families or categories for products, assemblies, and component parts; (ii) generalizing purchased parts and quantifying their similarity; (iii) performing tree union; and (iv) establishing design constraints. These challenges are met through data mining methods such as text and tree mining, a new tree union procedure, and embodying the GBOM and design constraints in constrained XML. The paper concludes with a case study, using data from a manufacturer of nurse call devices, and identifies a new research direction for data mining motivated by the domains of engineering design and information.


2013 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Langfield

What is responsible for the decline of democratically dominant parties and the corresponding growth of competitive party systems? This article argues that, despite a ruling party's dominance, opposition forces can gain by winning important subnational offices and then creating a governance record that they can use to win new supporters. It focuses on South Africa as a paradigmatic dominant party system, tracing the increased competitiveness of elections in Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province between 1999 and 2010. These events show how party strategies may evolve, reflecting how party elites can learn from forming coalitions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (05) ◽  
pp. A08
Author(s):  
Jagadish Thaker ◽  
Brian Floyd

Scientists highlight that actions that address environmental protection and climate change can also help with reducing infectious disease threats. Results using data from a national sample survey in New Zealand indicate that perceptions of co-benefits of actions to address environmental protection that also protect against infectious disease outbreaks such as the coronavirus is associated with policy support and political engagement. This association was partly mediated through perceived collective efficacy. Local councils with higher level of community collective efficacy were more likely to declare climate emergency. Communication about potential co-benefits is likely to shape public engagement and enact policy change.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eike Mark Rinke ◽  
Patricia Moy

While it is a truism that political voice is a cornerstone of democratic theory, less theorizing has focused on its counterpart, political listening. Drawing upon research related to listening practices, this study operationalizes for empirical study Dobson’s (2014) normative concepts of apophatic listening, which is dialogic and facilitates discussion across lines of difference, and cataphatic listening, which is monologic and disruptive in nature. Using data from a national sample survey of Latinos fielded shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election (N = 720), we provide an empirical test of these listening practices’ democratic value by examining how relational and analytical listening (dimensions of apophatic practices) and task-oriented and critical listening (dimensions of cataphatic practices) are associated with various political outcomes, including political interest, knowledge, trust, and participation. Findings indicate that, from a normative point of view, task-oriented listening was unrelated or negatively related to political outcomes while relational listening had ambivalent relations. However, the two cognitive-epistemic dimensions of both types of listening – analytical listening and critical (error-seeking) listening – were both strongly and positively related to most studied political outcomes. These findings offer nuanced evidence that apophatic and cataphatic listening might not necessarily be at odds with each other where democratically desirable outcomes are concerned.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Kumar

The 2030 agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlights the importance of sanitation and sets the Goal #6: ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. While rural households in India have witnessed a marginal improvement in access to toilet facility in recent decades, they continue to face high levels of deprivation along with spatial and socio-economic disparities and exclusions, which have been highlighted in this article using data from Census of India, National Sample Surveys and Baseline Survey. Determinants of households having access to latrine facility in the house have been estimated using an econometric exercise and contribution of caste-based factors of the gap in access among various social groups have been estimated using decomposition technique on household-level information from National Sample Survey data. Households located in backward regions and belonging to the weaker sections of society, such as poor, wage labourers, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, have been found to be the most deprived and excluded. Thus, there is an urgent need to pace up the developmental efforts for rural sanitation to achieve the SDGs, along with complementary measures to focus on backward regions, weaker sections and socio-spatial position of households in rural India.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mátyás Árvai ◽  
Zoltán Czajlik ◽  
János Mészáros ◽  
Balázs Nagy ◽  
László Pásztor

<p>Cropmarks are a major factor in the effectiveness of traditional aerial archaeology. The positive and negative features shown up by cropmarks are the role of the different cultivated plants and the importance of precipitation and other elements of the physical environment. In co-operation with the experts of the Eötvös Loránd University a new research was initiated to compare the pedological features of cropmark plots (CMP) and non-cropmark plots (nCMP) in order to identify demonstrable differences between them. For this purpose, the spatial soil information on primary soil properties provided by DOSoReMI.hu was employed. To compensate for the inherent vagueness of spatial predictions, together with the fact that the definition of CMPs and nCMPs is somewhat indefinite, the comparisons were carried out using data-driven, statistical approaches. In the first round three pilot areas were investigated, where Chernozem and Meadow type soils proved to be correlated with the formation of cropmarks. Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests and Random Forest models showed a different relative predominance of pedological variables in each study area. The geomorphological differences between the study areas explain these variations satisfactorily. In the next round, the identified relationships between cropmarking and soil features are planned to be utilized in the spatial inference of soil properties, where crop-marking sites will represent a unique, spatially non-exhaustive auxiliary information.</p>


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