Globalization, Party Positions, and the Median Voter

The authors argue that the effects of economic globalization on social democratic parties in Western Europe are conditional on the position of the median voter. If the median is far enough to the right, such parties will adopt business-friendly policies because they are required to win office. Only when the median is relatively far to the left will globalization constrain social democratic parties, forcing them to adopt policies further to the right in order to retain credibility. It is on this basis the authors argue that empirical studies are misspecified unless they include an interaction between measures of globalization and the position of the median. In addition to presenting formal theoretical arguments, the article reports empirical findings from fifteen countries in the period from 1973 to 2002 that support the conclusion that the effects of globalization are indeed contingent on the median. The authors find that the effects of globalization are significant for social democratic parties only in circumstances in which the median is relatively far to the left

Why Dominant Governing Parties Are Cross-Nationally Influential

Previous research suggests that political parties learn from and emulate the successful election strategies of governing parties in other countries. But what explains variation in the degree of influence that governing parties have on their foreign counterparts? We argue that “clarity of responsibility” within government, or the concentration of executive responsibility in the hands of a dominant governing party, allows parties to learn from the most obviously electorally successful incumbents. It therefore enhances the cross-national diffusion of party programs. To test this expectation, we analyze parties’ policy positions in 26 established democracies since 1977. Our results indicate that parties disproportionately learn from and emulate dominant, highclarity foreign incumbents. This finding contributes to a better understanding of the political consequences of “government clarity” and sheds new light on the heuristics that engender party policy diffusion by demonstrating that the most visible foreign incumbents, whose platforms have yielded concentrated power in office, influence party politics “at home.

Weapons of the Powerful: Authoritarian Elite Competition and Politicized Anticorruption in China

What motivates authoritarian regimes to crack down on corruption? We argue that just as partisan competition in democracies tends to politicize corruption, authoritarian leaders may exploit anticorruption campaigns to target rival supporters during internal power struggles for consolidating their power base. We apply this theoretical framework to provincial leadership turnover in China and test it using an anticorruption data set. We find that intraelite power competition, captured by the informal power configuration of government incumbents and their predecessors, can increase investigations of corrupt senior officials by up to 20%. The intensity of anticorruption propaganda exhibits a similar pattern. The findings indicate that informal politics can propel strong anticorruption drives in countries without democratically-accountable institutions, although the drives tend to be selective, arbitrary, and factionally biased.postprin

Up, close and personal: the new Front National visual strategy under Marine Le Pen

Extensive analyses of Marine Le Pen’s media interventions as leader of the French Front National have revealed mostly rhetorical differences from her father’s discourse. In particular, despite Marine Le Pen’s professed openness toward women and their policy concerns, and despite her professed intention to transform the FN into party suitable for government, there has been little progress in these directions. However, the FN’s visual discourse has been all but ignored by the scholarly analysis, despite the fact that campaign visuals encode significant social and political information. This paper finds that the FN candidates’ visual presentation has undergone major transformations from the 2007 to the 2012 legislative elections. Specifically FN candidates in 2012 are more likely to visually portray themselves like mainstream party candidates. Compared to the 2007 elections, women candidates, in particular, were more likely to visually promote their personal qualities in 2012, in some respects more than 2012 men candidates

Vibrational excitation induced by electron beam and cosmic rays in normal and superconductive aluminum bars

We report new measurements of the acoustic excitation of an Al5056 superconductive bar when hit by an electron beam, in a previously unexplored temperature range, down to 0.35 K. These data, analyzed together with previous results of the RAP experiment obtained for T > 0.54 K, show a vibrational response enhanced by a factor 4.9 with respect to that measured in the normal state. This enhancement explains the anomalous large signals due to cosmic rays previously detected in the NAUTILUS gravitational wave detector.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology and Heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude

Is government contestability an integral part of the definition of democracy?

Is government contestability an integral part of the definition of democracy? The answer to this question affects the way we classify political systems in which, despite a formally open political structure, a dominant political group faces weak opposition from other political parties and civil society organizations – an indication of a low degree of government contestability. In Robert Dahl’s polyarchy, contestability is an essential dimension of democracy and, consequently, one-party dominance is classified as an ‘inclusive hegemony’ outside his conception of democracy. For procedural definitions of democracy, however, dominant party systems are legitimate outcomes of electoral competition provided that there have been no formal restrictions to the exercise of civil and political rights. The article examines the boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism, broadens the notion of authoritarian controls to include soft manipulative practices and explains why government contestability should be regarded as a constitutive property of democracy