scholarly journals Demonstration of Discursive Power: the Top Party Leadership of the USSR and Organizing the Celebration of May 1 and November 7 (1950–1960s)

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Aleksei D. Popov ◽  
◽  
Nikita Yu. Pivovarov ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rostislav I. Kapeliushnikov

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of “statistical cacophony”. Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of “fair play”. The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of “struggle against inequality” has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Gregor Zons ◽  
Anna Halstenbach

AbstractDespite its right-wing populist character, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) shows no signs of a strong party leadership. We ascribe this state of the party leadership to the AfD’s institutionalization as a new party and show how organizational features interact with the skill set and goals of the party leaders. At the party level, we, firstly, outline the organizational change at the top of the party and the party leader selection rules. Secondly, we depict leadership turnover and competitiveness. At the leader level, we investigate the failure of Bernd Lucke, the key founder and one of the initial party leaders, as a manifestation of the leadership-structure dilemma of new parties. Embedded in a leadership team and faced with a growing extra-parliamentary party structure, Lucke tried to secure his initial autonomy and position of power by an attempt to become the sole party leader. His subsequent exit from the AfD laid bare the fact that he was not able to manage the challenges of the organizational consolidation phase, in which a new party needs a coordinator and consensus-builder. The AfD itself has proven its organizational autonomy from its initial leaders and its distaste for a strong and centralized party leadership. The barriers for the latter remain in place while, at the same time, the party institutionalization is still on-going, especially regarding its place in the German party competition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172098571
Author(s):  
Scott James ◽  
Hussein Kassim ◽  
Thomas Warren

This article aims to generate new insights into the City’s influence during the Brexit negotiations. Integrating theories of discursive institutionalism and business power, we set out to analyse the dynamic ‘discursive power’ of finance. From this perspective, a key source of the City’s influence historically has been a powerful strategic discourse about London’s role as Europe’s leading global financial centre. This was strengthened following the financial crisis to emphasise its contribution to the ‘real’ economy and emerging regulatory threats from the EU. We argue that Brexit challenges the City’s discursive power by removing ‘ideational constraints’ on acceptable policy discourse, and undermining the ‘discursive co-production’ of financial power by government and industry. By encouraging financial actors to re-evaluate their interests, this has contributed to increasing discursive fragmentation and incoherence. Evidence for this comes from the City’s ambiguous policy preferences on Brexit, and the emergence of a rival pro-Brexit ‘discursive coalition’.


1984 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 24-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Young

The legacies of the Cultural Revolution have been nowhere more enduring than in the Chinese Communist Party organization. Since late 1967, when the process of rebuilding the shattered Party began, strengthening Party leadership has been a principal theme of Chinese politics; that theme has become even more pronounced in recent years. It is now claimed that earlier efforts achieved nothing, and that during the whole “decade of turmoil” until 1976, disarray in the Party persisted and political authority declined still further. Recent programmes of Party reform, therefore, still seek to overcome the malign effects of the Cultural Revolution in order to achieve the complementary objectives of reviving abandoned Party “traditions” and refashioning the Party according to the new political direction demanded by its present leaders.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511668510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrin Tiidenberg ◽  
Nancy K. Baym

This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives. Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly stalked in its celebrity manifestations. This propagates narrow visions of what a “normal” pregnancy or “normal” pregnant woman should be like. We argue that pregnant women on Instagram do pregnancy via three overlapping and complimentary discourses of “learn it,” “buy it,” and “work it.” Together these form the current authoritative knowledge of pregnancy we call “intensive pregnancy” as performed on Instagram. Concurrently, this article highlights how the combined discursive power of hashtags, images, and captions may influence and enforce discursive hegemonies.


1974 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 1593-1604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis P. Westefield

In this paper one party leadership strategy with respect to the committee system of the House is examined. Building on several relatively clear concepts such as compliance, quality of assignment, expectation, scarcity, and exchange, a very elementary, yet explicit, theory is constructed. It is shown that the leaders pursue a strategy of accommodation. The leaders increase the number of positions on those committees prized by the members in order to guarantee a steady supply of resources to gain leverage with the members. But a steady increase in the supply of positions reduces the scarcity of positions and hence their value to the leaders. Thus, a consequence of the strategy is the need periodically to reorganize or make adjustments in the committee system.


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