Mass–elite differences in new democracies: Tunisia as a case study (2010–2016)

This article argues for inductive exploration of mass–elite differences in new democracies. Grounded in the “delegate model” of political representation, I do this by studying issue positions and issue salience of masses before turning to elites. The article demonstrates this approach using Tunisia, the only Arab democracy, by analysing survey data and originally coded party manifesto data. From an issue position perspective, the article uncovers mass–elite incongruence on the democratic–authoritarian and secular–Islamist political dimensions. From an issue salience lens, there is mass–elite congruence on the economic dimension. How mass–elite incongruence unfolds might affect the future of democracy in Tunisia.

Media, public opinion and parliamentary agendas’ effect in political parties’ agenda-setting

Why do parties pay more attention to some policy issues than to others? To what extent does policy attention conveyed by the media, public opinion, and parliament explain party agenda-setting? And, more specifically, to what extent does the media agenda influence other agenda effects? This paper addresses these questions in an original manner by analyzing the influence of these three agendas – media, public opinion, and parliament – in party manifesto elaboration. The analysis relies on an extensive database of the Portuguese Policy Agendas Project that includes media attention, voter preferences, parliamentary questions and pledges in manifestos, between 1995 and 2015. Our findings show that the media agenda is the most influential in party manifesto elaboration, and that the other agendas have a stronger effect when the media also give attention to the issue. This depends, however, on the political party being in cabinet or in opposition, as well as on the economic context. These findings have important implications for party competition literature.

Poetry and Poem

This section consists of one relatively short text, which takes the form of a manifesto: ‘the Rhythm Party Manifesto’. It is a chapter of the book with the ironic title Célébration de la poésie (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2001) which is a reflection on what a poem is and does. But as every reflexion, it is situated. Meschonnic attacks his contemporary French intellectual scene and its representation of poetry – what he considers not only a use and abuse of poetry, but also a misunderstanding based on a wrong conception of language. Meschonnic explains here his definition of the poem as opposed to a fixed idea about poetry. Meschonnic insists on the uniqueness and unforeseeability of a poem. As soon as we believe we know what poetry is, there cannot be poetry anymore. Consequently, by celebrating it, we have preconceived ideas and miss what makes a poem a poem.

Raising the flag among the ruins: the crisis as helping hand for opposition parties?

Within the context of the economic downturn in southern Eurozone countries and the imposition of new constraints on national policy-making, this article examines the congruence between party issue prioritization, during and after the electoral phase. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of four countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) and use of party manifesto and parliamentary question data. We found that between the electoral and parliamentary arenas, parties tend to emphasize different issues. However, this occurs in different ways across time, countries, and parties. We propose a measurement of issue congruence in agenda framing between the pre- and post-electoral phases to assess to what extent elections provide a guide for public policies. Moreover, we propose arguments to explain different results in the analyzed countries and across parties. We show that the crisis magnified the capacity of the opposition to maintain programmatic coherence – a helping hand for opposition parties (including the radical ones) that succeeded in boosting the relevance of their signature issues.

The Belgian Agendas Project

The Belgian Agendas Project started in 2001 and has been funded by four different research grants. Initially, the Belgian Project used a codebook other than the common CAP codebook widely used right now. The bulk of the data has been coded manually and now mostly covers the 1999–2010 period (with many datasets going back to earlier periods). A peculiarity of the Belgian data is the fact that it comes from two, largely separate political systems that ‘clash’ on the national level. Party and media systems, for example, are entirely separate. The Belgian media agenda is coded particularly extensively, as the Belgian team started from an interest in the media’s effect on politics. The Belgian team has also played a pioneering role in the party manifesto coding and the protest coding.

Conclusion: Three Scenarios, One Story?

This concluding chapter argues that as the three western allies crossed the threshold of victory after profoundly different wartime experiences, their postwar moments were bound to vary as well. Independently from one another, progressives in the three countries held comparable values and agendas for postwar change, which they encapsulated in three manifestos: the Common Program of the clandestine National Council of the Resistance (CNR) in early 1944; the Labour Party manifesto for the 1945 British general election, Let Us Face the Future; and The People's Program for 1944 of the CIO-PAC for the U.S. election of November 1944. When aligned, these three programs constitute a new portal into the postwar moment. Domestic postwar struggles in each country form three distinct scenarios, but they constitute a single story as well, foreshadowed by the common themes in the three manifestos.

Populism and the politics of redemption

This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption through regaining possession: of a lower status, a wounded identity, a diminished or lost control. Highly moralized images of the past – historical or archetypal – are mobilized by populist leaders to castigate the present and accelerate the urgency of change in it. The argument is illustrated with Caesar’s Column, a futuristic novel written by the Minnesota populist leader Ignatius Donnelly. The complex and ambivalent structure of this dystopian novel – a textual source for the Populist Party manifesto in the 1890s, which stands in contrast with agrarian populism as everyday utopia – enables us to move beyond the polarized positions dominating the current debate. Reading Caesar’s Column ultimately shows that populism can be both a corrective and a danger to democracy, but not for the reasons usually stated in the literature.