scholarly journals The political theory of parties

Politik ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Wolkenstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Insufficient Attention ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The One

Political theory has for a long time paid scant attention to the topic of political parties and partisanship. In recent times, however, there has emerged a body of theoretical research that seeks to draw attention to the place of parties and partisanship in a well-functioning polity. This article offers an overview of this research, discussing approaches that focus on partisanship as an associative practice, on the one hand, and approaches that focus on the party as an institution, on the other. The article argues that, while the two approaches no doubt usefully complement each other, concentrating on partisanship at the expense of party risks paying insufficient attention to the institutional structures that ultimately connect partisans to the state and allow them to exercise power. This is problematic insofar as it is especially the party as institution whose virtues are currently called into question. Given this, the article proposes to shift the emphasis in theoretical research from partisanship-centred theories to party-centred theories.

scholarly journals Parties’ Issue Emphasis Strategies on Facebook

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Rafałowski
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Issue Ownership ◽  
The One ◽  
Issue Emphasis

In recent years, a significant amount of research has been devoted to theorising and explaining parties’ vote-seeking behaviours with regard to emphasising certain policy domains and ignoring others. These strategies are largely determined by the parties’ issue ownership and the context of the competition. In this article, I explore the interaction between these two groups of factors, that is, how a given party type and its role within the party system moderate the political actor’s responsiveness to various unfolding events. The study uses a collection of Facebook posts published by the official profiles of some of the Polish political parties. I demonstrate that the competitors develop distinct strategies of issue emphasis in accordance with the incentives coming from the events that occur on the one hand and their strengths and weaknesses related to certain issue domains on the other.

The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois'sThe Souls of Black Folk

2012 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
MELVIN L. ROGERS
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
The One

In recent decades, the concept of “the people” has received sustained theoretical attention. Unfortunately, political theorists have said very little about its explicit or implicit use in thinking about the expansion of the American polity along racial lines. The purpose of this article in taking up this issue is twofold: first, to provide a substantive account of the meaning of “the people”—what I call its descriptive and aspirational dimensions—and second, to use that description as a framework for understanding the rhetorical character of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work,The Souls of Black Folk, and its relationship to what one might call the cognitive–affective dimension of judgment. In doing so, I argue that as a work of political theory,Soulsdraws a connection between rhetoric, on the one hand, and emotional states such as sympathy and shame, on the other, to enlarge America's political and ethical imagination regarding the status of African-Americans.

scholarly journals The Memory of Communist Poland in the Third Polish Republic. A Tentative Systematisation

2016 ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
Jerzy Łazor ◽  
Wojciech Morawski
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
Communist System ◽  
Veteran Status ◽  
The One

The political discourse in Poland in the final years before the fall of communism in 1989, was based on a strong opposition between the authorities and the rest of society. Even then, however, support for the opposition was not unanimous, and it was even less so in previous years. Most Poles considered the communist system forced, exogenous, oppressive, unacceptable, and supported by the Soviet threat. Still, individual reactions were varied: there were different paths to be taken through communism. The authors of the paper discuss how these paths contributed to differing recollections of the period. They focus on the collective memory of political parties and politicians, particularly on the controversial question of collaborating with the communist regime and the rights to veteran status among the former opposition members. It is a story of two types of memory: the one stressing reconciliation and the other pushing the distinction between former regime representatives and democratic opposition members

scholarly journals The failure of mainstream parties and the impact of new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Collective Engagement

Abstract Political parties share a very bad reputation in most European countries. This paper provides an interpretation of this sentiment, reconstructing the downfall of the esteem in which parties were held and their fall since the post-war years up to present. In particular, the paper focuses on the abandonment of the parties' founding ‘logic of appropriateness’ based, on the one hand, on the ethics for collective engagement in collective environments for collective aims and, on the other hand, on the full commitment of party officials. The abandonment of these two aspects has led to a crisis of legitimacy that mainstream parties have tried to counteract in ways that have proven ineffective, as membership still declines and confidence still languishes. Finally, the paper investigates whether the new challenger parties in France, Italy and Spain have introduced organizational and behavioural changes that could eventually reverse disaffection with the political party per se.

scholarly journals The relationship between the members of parliament and political parties

2011 ◽  
pp. 259-268
Author(s):  
Svetozar Ciplic
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free Term ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Voting System ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Member Of Parliament

In this paper an attempt has been made to present one of the most prominent contradictions of the contemporary parliamentarianism in states which have a proportional voting system. This contradiction stems from the three-fold relationship between: a voter, a member of parliament (MP) and a political party from whose electoral list the MP is elected. On the one hand, a person does not have the possibility to be elected in the parliament if acting independently, outside the political party and its party mechanisms and logistical capacities. On the other hand, after being appointed the parliamentary term as a result of the party's will, the person attains the freedom, through their free term of office, to distance themselves from their political party, and even to leave it and join another political option. The paper also shows that this phenomenon significantly affects and deforms the principle of citizens' sovereignty, given that it is the political parties which have the major impact on the voters' sovereign will expressed at the elections. .

De Europese programma's van Fianna Fail, FDF-RW en Volksunie : Een gemene noemer voor Ierse nationalisten en Belgische federalisten ?

Res Publica ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Joan Hart ◽  
Bruno De Witte
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
European Integration ◽  
National Level ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Economic Importance ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
The One

The article compares the attitude of the Irish Fianna Fait, the Flemish Volksunie, and the coalition of the Rassemblement Wallon and the Francophone Brussels' PDF, towards Europe and their programmes for the European elections.These parties do not define themselves on a socio-economic or religious basis, as most of the other European political parties do, but give ideological priority to the ethnic or national factor. Does this imply a common and distinctive attitude to European integration ?The answer must be no; they disagree not only on sectoral policies, but their fundamental outlook is different.  FDF-RW and VU, on the one hand, though bitter opponents on the national level, both favour a federal Europe, in order to promote autonomy for their respective regions.Fianna Fait on the other hand, white recognizing the political and economic importance of Europe, is sceptical on the institutional level.  Fianna Faits approach is essentially pragmatic, being a government party identifying its interests with the national interest, whereas the Belgian federalists cannot identify themselves with the existing Belgian state.  Therefore it is unlikely at present that Fianna Fait wilt leave its European allies - the Gaullists - to join a hypothetic regionalist grouping in European Parliament.

scholarly journals The political AI

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Attila Gyulai ◽  
Anna Ujlaki
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
The One

This article adopts a political theoretical perspective to address the problem of AI regulation. By disregarding the political problem of enforceability, it is argued that the applied ethics approach dominant in the discussions on AI regulation is incomplete. Applying realist political theory, the article demonstrates how prescriptive accounts of the development, use, and functioning of AI are necessarily political. First, the political nature of the problem is investigated by focusing on the use of AI in politics on the one hand and the political nature of the AI regulation problem on the other. Second, the article claims that by revisiting some of the oldest political and theoretical questions, the discourse on guidelines and regulation can be enriched through the adoption of AGI and superintelligence as tools for political theoretical inquiry.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Ontology ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The One ◽  
The Revolution

The introduction begins by arguing that political theory has been driven by base assumptions concerning the agency and transparency of the subject. Such assumptions are what were challenged by Marxist thinking, which, through the failure of the revolution to materialise in industrialised nations, instigated a more refined turn to ideology in the works of the neo-Marxists. Arguing this turn is limited in its focus on pre-conscious interests, I outline post-Marxism as an attempt to move towards an analysis of unconscious libidinal investments, which also signifies a turn to human ontology. The ontological turn faces a split, however, been transcendence on the one hand an immanence on the other. In exploring the two positions, it is argued that immanence has been rejected to the point of vindicating of transcendence as a necessary position in order to conceptualise the political. The chapter ends by arguing that this rejection and the related vindication, is premised a gross misreading and misunderstanding of immanence; that immanence is the ontological centre of micropolitics as that which precedes the politics of identity and representation. Moreover, this is an ontology that, at least insofar as it concerns the political, starts with Sartre and is developed by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze.

Les nouveaux mouvements sociaux constituent-ils un défi pour les partis politiques? Le cas du Québec

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Réjean Pelletier ◽  
Daniel Guérin
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Mouvements Sociaux ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The One ◽  
Parti Quebecois

AbstractDoes the rise of new social movements (NSMs) represent a challenge for the traditional political parties in Quebec? Though this question can be answered from many perspectives, this study focuses on the programmatic aspect of this challenge that encompasses both a number of new societal issues and adherence to new values promoted by the NSMs. More precisely, it addresses the following questions: have the issues of environment and the respect of women's rights been already integrated into the political platforms of the two mainstream political parties in Quebec, the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Parti Québécois? Can the activists of those political parties be distinguished from the members of environmental and women's rights movements with regard to their values? On the one hand, both the Liberal party and the Parti Québécois have for a long time incorporated into their platforms issues linked to the defence of the environment and to the promotion of gender equality. On the other hand, the authors observe that the adherence to postmaterialist values is stronger in the NSMs than in the parties. One main conclusion is that one cannot compare adherence to the new values in the parties and the NSMs as two homogeneous blocs. Instead, the authors see four distinct organizations. They encourage further research to examine other dimensions of the problem such as the organizational aspect of the political challenge posed by the rise of NSMs.

An Anthropological Approach to the Islamic Turn in Indonesia's Regional Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Millie
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
West Java ◽  
Long Time ◽  
National Life ◽  
Public Ethics ◽  
Anthropological Approach ◽  
The One ◽  
Embodied Practice

AbstractExisting analyses of the Islamic turn in regional Islamic politics in Indonesia have overlooked the possibility that these politics – often critiqued for their negative implications for minorities and vulnerable segments – are to some extent reflections of indigenous cultural dispositions. Drawing on the author's long-time ethnographic work in West Java, as well as recent anthropological theorising about public ethics in Islamic societies, the article identifies a significant correlation between, on the one hand, the practical forms and legislative outputs of the regional Islamic turn, and on the other, a characteristic notion of public decorum that is asserted in routines of embodied Islamic observance. The article notes that this extension of an embodied, practice-based public ethics into the political regimes of national life has created conflict with the disembodied civic order established in Indonesia's constitution and state ideology.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document