Campaign: A Content Analysis of the New Zealand-based Chinese Language Ethnic Media’s Coverage of the 2008, 2011 and 2014 New Zealand General Elections

<p>New Zealand’s ethnic Chinese population has grown significantly since the selection criteria of immigrants shifted from being defined by ethnic or national origin to personal merit in 1987. The ease with which non-citizens can vote in New Zealand, and the potential of New Zealand’s Mixed Member Proportional electoral system to amplify the political impact of minority groups means that informing this growing demographic is crucially important. Many recent migrants are prevented by language barriers from accessing English language news. Consequently, the Chinese language ethnic media constitute the key source of political information for many ethnic Chinese voters. Because of this, these media are expected to provide a civic forum for pluralistic debate enabling those with the right to vote to do so in a way that is congruent with their political and social preferences. Despite their importance, the ethnic Chinese language ethnic media in New Zealand have been the subject of few studies. In response, this thesis utilises the method of content analysis to examine civic forums provided by the Chinese Herald, Home Voice, and the New Zealand Messenger during the 2008, 2011 and 2014 general election campaigns. The findings indicate that political coverage deviated from the normative expectations of the civic forum in a number of ways, including a strong incumbency bias – particularly when the National Party was in power; high levels of favourable coverage towards the ACT Party and the consequent marginalisation of many other parties. In addition, National Party candidate Yang Jian occupied a position of unique visibility during the 2014 election campaign while New Zealand First were subject to high levels of negative coverage. These normative deviations, possibly stemming from the resource constraints that the newspapers operate within and coupled with their role as ethnic media outlets serving and advocating for minority groups, can hamper the readership’s capacity for meaningful electoral participation.</p>

Campaign: A Content Analysis of the New Zealand-based Chinese Language Ethnic Media’s Coverage of the 2008, 2011 and 2014 New Zealand General Elections

<p>New Zealand’s ethnic Chinese population has grown significantly since the selection criteria of immigrants shifted from being defined by ethnic or national origin to personal merit in 1987. The ease with which non-citizens can vote in New Zealand, and the potential of New Zealand’s Mixed Member Proportional electoral system to amplify the political impact of minority groups means that informing this growing demographic is crucially important. Many recent migrants are prevented by language barriers from accessing English language news. Consequently, the Chinese language ethnic media constitute the key source of political information for many ethnic Chinese voters. Because of this, these media are expected to provide a civic forum for pluralistic debate enabling those with the right to vote to do so in a way that is congruent with their political and social preferences. Despite their importance, the ethnic Chinese language ethnic media in New Zealand have been the subject of few studies. In response, this thesis utilises the method of content analysis to examine civic forums provided by the Chinese Herald, Home Voice, and the New Zealand Messenger during the 2008, 2011 and 2014 general election campaigns. The findings indicate that political coverage deviated from the normative expectations of the civic forum in a number of ways, including a strong incumbency bias – particularly when the National Party was in power; high levels of favourable coverage towards the ACT Party and the consequent marginalisation of many other parties. In addition, National Party candidate Yang Jian occupied a position of unique visibility during the 2014 election campaign while New Zealand First were subject to high levels of negative coverage. These normative deviations, possibly stemming from the resource constraints that the newspapers operate within and coupled with their role as ethnic media outlets serving and advocating for minority groups, can hamper the readership’s capacity for meaningful electoral participation.</p>

Institutional Mechanisms and Civic Forum in Coastal Village Governance in Indonesia

The article brings focus to the subject of ensuring the financial capacity of Ukraine as an essential prerequisite for further transformations of the national economy. The modern problems of making state economic policy in the conditions of the corporatocracy are covered. The disadvantages of implementing the state economic policy under the influence of corporatocracy, as a new type of government, which expresses the interests of transnational corporations, are considered. Indicators are determined to assess the spread of corporatocracy in Ukraine when assessing the system of indicators of economic relations between residents and non-residents in the study of the interdependence of the monetary base and international reserves. The implications of currency board for the financial capacity of the state are analyzed. Proposals for improvement of the domestic financial and credit system have been elaborated. The study used the following methodological tools: historical, logical, analysis, tabular, graphical, and comparative methods; abstraction and concretization; generalization.

Revolution by the law: Transformation of the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly 1989–1990

This study looks at the role of the Federal Assembly in the Velvet Revolution. With the disintegration of the communist party, the Federal Assembly became unexpectedly a key constitutional institution with far reaching powers in times of rapid political change. The revolutionary movement Civic Forum forced through a legislation that enabled to recall substantial part of the members of the parliament and replace them by its own candidates through co-optation. This method of “cleansing” of the parliament had far-reaching consequences for the post-November Czechoslovak political culture.

Demokrasi dan Kinerja Pers Indonesia

Mass media, especially, press have important rules in the democration process. There are three criteria to evaluate performance of the press. Press as a civic forum, it’s related to Habermas’s public sphere that there is space for citizen to discuss about public interest in the free condition. Press as a watch-dog, that it’s means press has to protec minority rights from malfuntion of majority power. Press as a mobilization agent, it’s medium to increase society involment in the politic process.

Participation and deliberation: a case study of readers’ comments to news stories on the Brazilian presidential campaign

The Internet has created new “dialogical spaces” (Oblak, 2005) where issues of common concern can be discussed, serving to democratize the public sphere. As a potential deliberative section and a civic forum, readers’ comments in newspapers’ websites constitute a locus for public debate and ideas exchange provided by the mainstream media. As a case study, this article intends to assess the quality of audience participation in online news sites, by analysing the readers’ comments in the news about the Brazilian presidential campaign (September-November 2010) in the online versions of two Portuguese newspapers.

The Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism after 1989

The article describes the rise and fall of the Civic Movement during the early 1990s, the most distinct post-dissident political group in Czech politics after 1989. Basically it follows two lines of enquiry. The first describes the post—Charter 77 community of people during the first years after the 1989 Czechoslovak democratic revolution, when strong personalities of the Czech culture and civic activism from its midst strove to cultivate a vision of “November 1989” in the nascent Czech democratic political culture and to promote the Velvet Revolution’s ethos as its base, first in the Civic Forum and later through one of the successor organisations, Civic Movement. Analysing the main reasons why these efforts were rather unsuccessful, the article turns to the “the politics of history” of the early Czechoslovak and Czech democracy. The “politics towards the past,” namely, turned out to be a soft spot of the post-dissident political elite and actually one of the main conflict points among the various cultural-political streams stemming from the former anticommunist opposition. The second line of enquiry focuses on this community’s half-hearted, if not even forced attempt at a political-ideological delineation heading towards socially conceived liberalism. The article describes how this attempt at recasting the “legacy” of former dissidence into a civic or social liberal political form also failed relatively soon due to the structural development of the Czech political system as well as internal ideological and political diversity of the Civic Movement.