Avoidance, ambiguity, alternation: Position blurring strategies in multidimensional party competition

In a multidimensional environment, parties may have compelling incentives to obscure their preferences on select issues. This study contributes to a growing literature on position blurring by demonstrating how party leaders purposively create uncertainty about where their party stands on the issue of European integration. By doing so, it theoretically and empirically disentangles the cause of position blurring—parties’ strategic behavior—from its intended political outcome. The analysis of survey and manifesto data across 14 Western European countries (1999–2019) confirms that three distinct strategies—avoidance, ambiguity, and alternation—all increase expert uncertainty about a party's position. This finding is then unpacked by examining for whom avoidance is particularly effective. This study has important implications for our understanding of party strategy, democratic representation, and political accountability.

Turnus and the End of the Epicurean World

This chapter examines the role of atomic imagery in the final book of the Aeneid, particularly with respect to Turnus’ killing of the Trojan warrior Eumedes and his final defeat by Aeneas. It argues that a web of allusions to Lucretian atomism in each of those scenes connects Turnus’ opposition to Trojan colonization with the non-teleological worldview of atomism. Thus, Turnus’ defeat marks not just the rejection of Italian political power, but also of the Epicurean cosmology with which Turnus is allusively associated. However, a number of details linking Aeneas’ killing of Turnus to Turnus’ killing of Eumedes subtly undermine this victory for Rome’s imperial teleology, suggesting that the two heroes act in fundamentally similar ways, angrily inflicting violence upon their enemies to achieve a desired political outcome.

Na drodze do wolności. Białoruska partyzantka kulturowa w przestrzeni publicznej i Internecie

Mass protests in Belarus after the presidential election in 2020 showed all weaknesses of the official propaganda. The monograph characterises the tools of the cultural protest (banners, music, street art, digital forms of resistance), which exposed a deficit of truth in the relations between the government and society. They undermine and ridicule the actions undertaken by the presidential centre as well as the long-term strategy of the official propaganda. Regardless of the political outcome, the 2020 crisis will have long-lasting political, social and cultural consequences. It is an important factor in building the contemporary Belarusian identity.

Neo-trasformismo: Historical legacies and populist revolt

There have been three main types of political outcome from the Great Recession. The first is an insurgency from the left exemplified by Podemos, now in decline, in Spain. It demands a return to classic European social democracy, but presents itself in a more radical rhetorical garb than its mid twentieth century forbears. The second is an insurgency from the right, best exemplified by Hungary’s Victor Orbán and his Fidesz Party. It demands a return to a national capitalism reminiscent of the 1930s. The third is the uniquely Italian phenomenon of the Five Star Movement-Lega combination combined with the rise of technocratic governments called into existence by an increasingly activist presidency. What explains this third, mixed model?

Bitter wins or a long-distance race? Social and political outcomes of the Spanish housing movement

This study investigates whether housing movements can produce significant outcomes. In particular, I examine the case of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), the main organization in the Spanish housing movement between 2009 and 2017. First, I discuss how their demands were framed according to specific contexts of legitimation. Second, I distinguish the nature and scope of the outcomes produced by this movement. My analysis uniquely combines a critical assessment of the PAH’s achievements with its unintended consequences and the significant social, political and economic contexts that help to explain its major outcomes. The global financial crisis, the convergence of the PAH with other anti-neoliberal movements and shifts among the dominant political parties determine the opportunities and constraints of the PAH’s development. Within this environment, the housing movement strategically operates by framing the culprits of the economic crisis in a new manner and by appealing to a broad social base beyond the impoverished mortgage holders. I also include the capacity of the movement’s organization to last, expand and increase its legitimacy as a relevant socio-political outcome. This is explained here through the articulation of the PAH’s agency (organizational form and protest repertoire) within the aforementioned contexts.

Operation Power Pack: Dominican Republic

This chapter examines Lyndon Johnson’s decision to invade the Dominican Republic in 1965 against the backdrop of an escalating war in Vietnam. The intervention, which began on April 28, sought to forestall what the administration feared would be a communist takeover by preventing the so-called constitutionalist forces who had gained control of the capital from consolidating power during an incipient civil war. The central finding is that the presence of two legal exemptions to nonintervention made it possible for Johnson to rely on overt action. Initially, decision makers used the presence of endangered nationals to justify deploying U.S. military forces to the island. These troops were then able to stay on to ensure a favorable political outcome under the auspices of an Inter-American Peacekeeping Force which was created by the Organization of American States in early May. The administration leaned heavily on these legal exemptions in the days and weeks after the operation began.

How Poverty Became a Violation of Human Rights: The Production of a New Political Subject, France and Belgium, 1964–88

The institutionalization of guaranteed minimum income systems in France and Belgium, carried out through the modernization of assistance schemes (Minimex in 1974, RMI in 1988), has generally been presented as the political outcome of the “rediscovery” of “hidden” poverty in the “affluent” societies of the mid-1960s. This article argues that a vision of this shift in terms of a “discovery,” however, suffers from significant limitations. To understand the historical pedigree of the reforms, this article will examine how the issue of “poverty” as such, was not simply “discovered” as a neglected social ill, but rather, “produced” to allow for new techniques of social intervention. The theoretical discovery of the “poverty” issue then, was marked by the slow constitution of a new political subject known as the “poor,” whose categorization and conceptualization would stand in stark opposition to the postwar welfare state notions of social justice and equality.

Processing news on social media. The political incidental news exposure model (PINE)

This article outlines the Political Incidental News Exposure Model. The Political Incidental News Exposure Model understands incidental news exposure as a dynamic process and distinguishes two levels of incidental news exposure: the passive scanning of incidentally encountered political information (first level) and the intentional processing of incidentally encountered content appraised as relevant (second level). After encountering political information incidentally, recipients briefly check the content for relevance (i.e., first level). If content is appraised as relevant, recipients switch to more intensive processing (i.e., second level incidental news exposure). Importantly, second-level incidental news exposure is assumed to have stronger effects on political outcome variables like participation and knowledge than first-level incidental news exposure. The Political Incidental News Exposure Model further acknowledges intention-based (i.e., incidental news exposure while not looking for political news) and topic-based incidental news exposure (i.e., incidental news exposure while looking for other political news) and it conceptualizes incidental news exposure with respect to political and non-political content. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

How not to Occupy Bartleby

This article aims to discuss how Bartleby, the character from Herman Melville’s homonymous story, Bartleby, The Scrivener re-emerged in the Occupy Movement in Wall Street. Here, I intend to argue that Bartleby has been wrongly appropriated, which in turn, may explain the shortcomings of the movement. The Occupy Wall Street took possession of Bartleby because in Melville’s story, he occupies the premises of a lawyer’s office in Wall Street. However, this appropriation has dismissed the political 'inefficacy' of Bartleby’s formula, 'I would prefer not to'. As I shall argue, the formula exposes instead a residual political emancipation, generating a contingency. Rather than attempting to find some political agency within Melville’s figure, we should recognise the capacity of his formula for political insurgency. With this perspective in mind, I shall revise this appropriation to suggest that despite the political contingency of Bartleby’s formula, this should not be regarded as a means to a political outcome.

Sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandates: The Jurists’ Debates

The mandate system took shape at an inflexion point in the evolution from an international system based on rule over territories to one based on rule over peoples. Political compromises made at the Paris Peace Conference resulted in the creation of a new political agent, the League of Nations Mandate, with no clear sovereign. In seeking to systematize this political outcome, jurists located sovereignty with the victorious Great Powers, the League itself, and with the peoples of the mandate territories. Yet they never achieved a consensus, which created an absence at the centre of the mandate system that politics would have to fill throughout the interwar period.