scholarly journals When do the poor vote for the right-wing and why: Status inequality and vote choice in the Indian states

Author(s):  
Pavithra Suryanarayan
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.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elina Kestilä-Kekkonen ◽  
Peter Söderlund

What populist right parties offer (the supply side) should be examined in relation to the preferences of the populist right electorate (the demand side). This article examines how the supply and demand in the electoral market are met by assessing the relative importance of party, party leader, and district-level candidate for the right-wing populist vote. The study is set in an electoral system, which uses preferential voting for candidates in multi-member districts, namely Finland, where all three objects of vote choice may matter. We analyse post-election survey data for the 2011 parliamentary election in which the right-wing populist True Finns party gained almost one fifth of the national vote. The results show that being guided by the characteristics of the party leader is a much stronger predictor the of the True Finns vote than being affected by party or district-level candidate characteristics.


1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 17-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulo Freire ◽  
Vivian Schelling

One of the key figures in the Popular Culture Movement, Paulo Freire is the founder of a revolutionary educational method which brought literacy — and political awareness — to thousands of the poor in Brazil. His books, which have played a key role in adult literacy movements throughout the world, have been banned by many dictatorial governments, including those of South Africa and, most recently, Haiti. Forced into exile from his own country following the right-wing coup in 1964, Freire finally returned in 1980. In São Paulo he talked to Vivian Schelling about his work


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


Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb

Through a critical appropriation of Hannah Arendt, and a more sympathetic engagement with Theodor W. Adorno and psychoanalysis, this book develops a new theoretical approach to understanding Austrians’ repression of their collaboration with National Socialist Germany. Drawing on original, extensive archival research, from court documents on Nazi perpetrators to public controversies on theater plays and museums, the book exposes the defensive mechanisms Austrians have used to repress individual and collective political guilt, which led to their failure to work through their past. It exposes the damaging psychological and political consequences such failure has had and continues to have for Austrian democracy today—such as the continuing electoral growth of the right-wing populist Freedom Party in Austria, which highlights the timeliness of the book. However, the theoretical concepts and practical suggestions the book introduces to counteract the repression of individual and collective political guilt are relevant beyond the Austrian context. It shows us that only when individuals and nations live up to guilt are they in a position to take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes. Combining theoretical insights with historical analysis, The Politics of Repressed Guilt is an important addition to critical scholarship that explores the pathological implications of guilt repression for democratic political life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk

The present article examines the place of the Jewish question in the ideology of the monarchist (right-wing, “black hundred”) parties. In spite of certain ideological differences in the right-wing camp (moderate Rights, Rights and extreme Right-Wing), anti-Semitism was characteristic of all monarchist parties to a certain extent, in any case before the First World War. That fact was reflected in the party documents, resolutions of the monarchist congresses, publications and speeches of the Right-Wing leaders. The suggestions of the monarchists in solving the Jewish questions added up to the preservation and strengthening of the existing restrictions with respect to the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. If in the beginning the restrictions were main in the economic, cultural and everyday life spheres, after the convocation of the State Duma the Rights strived after limiting also the political rights of the Jewish population of the Empire, seeing it as one of the primary guarantees for autocracy preservation in Russia, that was the main political goal of the conservatives.


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.


This volume seeks to initiate a new interdisciplinary field of scholarly research focused on the study of right-wing media and conservative news. To date, the study of conservative or right-wing media has proceeded unevenly, cross-cutting several traditional disciplines and subfields, with little continuity or citational overlap. This book posits a new multifaceted object of analysis—conservative news cultures—designed to promote concerted interdisciplinary investigation into the consistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among the sites of production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. With contributors from the fields of journalism studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology, the book models the capacious field it seeks to promote. Its contributors draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods—from archival analysis to regression analysis of survey data to rhetorical analysis—to elucidate case studies focused on conservative news cultures in the United States and the United Kingdom. From the National Review to Fox News, from the National Rifle Association to Brexit, from media policy to liberal media bias, this book is designed as an introduction to right-wing media and an opening salvo in the interdisciplinary field of conservative news studies.


Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter focuses on the role of the dominant player in conservative media, Fox News, during the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. It looks at three case studies to illustrate how Fox News used its position at the core of the right-wing media ecosystem repeatedly to mount propaganda attacks in support of Trump: the Michael Flynn firing in March 2017, when Fox adopted the “deep state” framing of the entire controversy; the James Comey firing and Robert Mueller appointment in May 2017; when Fox propagated the Seth Rich murder conspiracy; and in October and November, when the arrests of Paul Manafort and guilty plea of Flynn seemed to mark a new level of threat to the president, Fox reframed the Uranium One story as an attack on the integrity of the FBI and Justice Department officials in charge of the investigation.


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