The Influence of the Negative Campaign on Facebook: The Role of Political Actors and Citizens in the Use of Criticism and Political Attack in the 2016 Spanish General Elections

Social media has become an essential platform in the field of digital political communication. In the context of accommodating electoral campaigns to digital media and the absence of barriers to freedom of expression existing on these platforms, attacks on political rivals and negative campaigns are increasing on social media. This research analyzes the use of criticism on Facebook by political actors during the electoral campaign and citizens’ reactions to these messages. The sample (n = 601) contains the publications disseminated on Facebook by political parties and leaders during the electoral campaign of the general elections of 26 June 2016 in Spain. The results show that criticism is an emerging resource in the digital communication strategy of political actors, mainly used by the opposition parties and their candidates, who focus their attacks on the party and leader of the Government. Attacks are mainly focused on the professional side of their rivals, although they also give a central role to emotions. Citizens are attracted to these attacks and are prone to interact with posts that include this resource.

Managing the Feudal Remnant

For three decades Alamán acted as the Mexican agent, with wide powers, for the Sicilian nobleman, the Duke of Terranova y Monteleone, in the administration of the many and valuable properties remaining in the Marquesado del Valle de Oaxaca, the vast personal estate left to his heirs by Fernando Cortés, of whom the Duke was a lineal descendant. The estates included mortgages held on urban properties, scores of buildings in the capital and other cities, and rural properties, of which the most important was the sugar hacienda of Atlacomulco near Cuernavaca. While this earned Alamán a substantial income over the years, it also exposed him to almost constant political attack from liberals for his association with the putatively “feudal” holdings of a foreign landlord, the heir of the abhorred conqueror of the Mexican native peoples.

Nuevas funciones de Instagram en el avance de la “política espectáculo”. Claves profesionales y estrategia visual de Vox en su despegue electoral

In recent years, Instagram has become established as a powerful tool for electoral communication and building political leadership. Our objective herein is to analyze the audiovisual management of the leading party on this social media platform, Vox, in the key period of its political consolidation in Spain. The methodological design is based on content analysis. Using our own model, inspired by the structure of the five classic journalistic questions (5W), nine thematic and formal categories associated with spectacularization have been reviewed during two key periods of the electoral year 2019. The final sample includes 189 videos published via five official accounts belonging to the party with a significant volume of followers (between 735k and 21.9k). The results of this analysis provide three main contributions: the identification of an innovative use of Instagram that includes new functions such as mobilization and political attack; the identification of a reference model for audiovisual management of social media at three strategic levels (operational, thematic, and expressive); and the integration of the results into the current debate on the spectacularization of politics, the advance of populist discourse, and its democratic consequences. Resumen En los últimos años Instagram se ha consolidado como un potente canal de comunicación electoral y construcción de liderazgo político. Nuestro objetivo es analizar la gestión audiovisual del partido líder en esta red, Vox, en un período clave de su consolidación política en España. El diseño metodológico se basa en el análisis de contenido. A partir de un modelo propio, inspirado en la estructura de las cinco preguntas periodísticas clásicas (5W), se han revisado nueve categorías temáticas y formales asociadas a la espectacularización, durante dos períodos clave del año electoral 2019. Finalmente, integran la muestra 189 videos publicados en cinco cuentas oficiales del partido con un gran volumen de seguidores (entre 735k y 21,9k). El análisis realizado ofrece tres aportaciones principales: se detecta un uso innovador de Instagram que incluye nuevas funciones como la movilización y el ataque político; se identifica un modelo de referencia para la gestión audiovisual de medios sociales a partir de tres niveles estratégicos (operativo, temático y expresivo); e integra sus resultados dentro del debate actual sobre la espectacularización de la política, el avance del discurso populista y sus consecuencias democráticas.

3. Human Rights and the UK Constitution

UK law relating to civil liberties and human rights has undergone radical transformation over the last few decades, in part because of the influence exerted by the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the ECHR’) on British law. The Human Rights Act 1998 (‘the HRA’), which incorporates the civil and political rights protected by the ECHR into national law, now plays a key role in the UK’s constitutional system. It complements legislative mechanisms for protecting individual rights—such as the Equality Act 2010 —and imposes significant constraints on the exercise of public power. However, the current state of UK human rights law is controversial. The HRA is regularly subject to political attack, while leading politicians bemoan the influence exerted by the ECHR over UK law: yet no consensus exists as to how human rights should best be protected within the framework of the British constitution. It remains to be seen whether Brexit will change the dynamics of this debate.

Disembedded Politics: Neoliberal Reform and Labour Market Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe

Defying predictions of radical liberalization, labour market institutions in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe are characterized by relatively protective employment legislation, sometimes combined with collective bargaining rights. However, not all protective employment regimes survived political attack by neoliberal reformers. Existing theories in comparative political economy suggest that employment regimes reflect the relative political power of producer groups. Others have suggested that in Central and Eastern Europe the content of labour market reform was determined by the coercive influence of transnational actors. Through a comparative analysis of labour market reform in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia, this article finds that trade unions played a key role in early institutional settlements over labour markets. However, in Romania and Slovakia, these institutional settlements were subsequently undermined by attacks by ideologically motivated domestic elites in episodes of disembedded politics. The article develops the concept of disembedded politics and demonstrates its importance in post-socialist institutional change.

Guilt by Innuendo: The GAO’s Political Attack on Agency Training Programs, 1940

In 1940, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released to Congress a slashing attack on in-house training programs in executive branch departments and agencies. The GAO had always used a strict constructionist approach to evaluate the legality of agency spending on training: Was it explicitly authorized by Congress? However, this report was much more of a broad-ranging political and ideological attack on training programs, including accusations of Communist influence and–contradictorily–influence by the Rockefellers. The report can be seen as one of the major attempts by the Congressional conservative coalition to stem the tide of modern personnel administration in the federal executive branch.

Political attack on Romania’s rule of law may succeed

Headline ROMANIA: Political attack on rule of law may succeed

Michelle Obama, the Media Circus, and America’s Racial Obsession

This chapter shifts the focus to Michelle Obama, a figure whose family's experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and northward migration make her nearly as important a cultural figure as her husband. It explains how media coverage of Michelle Obama during the campaign was shaped not only by Americans' expectations of prospective first ladies, but by a long history of powerful stereotypes of black women and their bodies. While praised and admired by many, Michelle Obama had become a target whose attackers utilized an ever-expanding twenty-four/seven cable news cycle and the unprecedented forum of the blogosphere to promulgate every sort of personal and political attack. In the process, they dredged up deep-seated stereotypes of African American women—the domineering “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” the more recently minted “angry black woman”—and used them to construct an unappealing and even threatening image of the candidate's wife.

Martin Luther’s Life, 1526–1546

Luther’s life in the years after 1525 was relatively placid in comparison to the turbulence he experienced between the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses and his marriage to Katharina von Bora in 1525. To be sure, there were events and controversies aplenty, and many of them impacted the circumstances of his daily life, altered or sharpened the focus of his theological work, and influenced the shape his movement would take after his death. He remained to the end a central figure in both church and civil affairs, supporting the evangelical reform of the European churches and offering his advice—and his criticism—to any who would listen. Limitations on his travel resulting from the Edict of Worms made him a sideline player at the Augsburg Diet of 1530, but he contributed crucially to Evangelical identity through his two catechisms of 1529, as well as the Smalcald Articles he wrote to define and defend Evangelical faith and practice. The elder Luther also assumed a leading role in Wittenberg’s university. He was its most famous professor as well as its most powerfully creative thinker. In 1535 he became dean of its faculty as well. As dean, he presided over a number of important disputations dealing with such issues as ecclesiology, Christology, and the doctrine of the Trinity. He also remained little Wittenberg’s most famous and influential person, eclipsing in many ways even his own prince electors. People of low status and high sought out Dr. Luther for advice of every kind. Informally, he became a powerful patron. Luther continued as well to lecture and publish theological works during this period, notably biblical “commentaries” (typically based on classroom lectures), a treatise on the church and one on the papacy, and a harsh series of treatises against the Jews. He remained the most influential contributor to Evangelical self-understanding, opposing, for example, both the Anti-trinitarian thinkers outside his movement (Servetus, Campanus) and the antinomian thinkers within it (Agricola). The German Bible translation project he had begun at the Wartburg resulted at last in the complete “Luther Bible” (1534). Together with a team of colleagues he dubbed “my Sanhedrin,” he continued to work on this project, with the last revised edition appearing in 1545. Notwithstanding the abiding apocalyptic angst and increasing world weariness that frequently marked the works of his later years, his theological vitality continued largely unabated. The elder Luther was not content merely to repeat the settled truths he had discovered in his youth, but continued to “shake every tree” in the great forest of Scripture in his quest to know God rightly and serve him faithfully. As Luther moved into his fifties and sixties he also suffered from a steadily debilitating complex of interrelated health issues. His death at age sixty-two on February 18, 1546, left his movement without its charismatic leader and thus vulnerable to both external political attack and internal theological division. Contrary to Saxon legal practice, he designated Katharina his sole heir.