Competing for the Platform: How Organized Interests affect Party Positioning in the United States

What explains which groups are included in a party coalition in any given election cycle? Recent advances in political party theory suggest that policy demanders comprise parties, and that the composition of a party coalition varies from election to election. We theorize three conditions under which parties articulate an interest group?s preferred positions in its quadrennial platform: when groups are ideologically proximate to the party median, when groups display party loyalty, and when groups are flush with resources. Using computer-assisted content analysis on a unique and rich data source, we examine three cycles of testimony that 80 organized groups provided to the Democratic Party. The analysis compares group requests with the content of Democratic and Republican National Committee platforms in 1996, 2000, and 2004. Results show that parties reward loyal groups and those that are ideologically proximate to the party, but offer no confirmation of a resource effect

Theorizing Institutional Scandal and the Regulatory State

One by one, UK public institutions are being scandalised for corruption, immorality or incompetence and subjected to trial by media and criminal prosecution. The state?s historic response to public sector scandal ? denial and neutralisation ? has been replaced with acknowledgement and regulation in the form of the re-vamped public inquiry. Public institutions are being cut adrift and left to account in isolation for their scandalous failures. Yet the state?s attempts to distance itself from its scandalised institutions, while extending its regulatory control over them, are risky. Both the regulatory state and its public inquiries risk being consumed by the scandal they are trying to manage

Negativity in political news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings

The concept of negativity in political news has not reached the status of a homogenous, overarching theoretical concept. This article proposes conceptual understandings, categorizations and practical operationalizations of negativity in the news that reflect the consensus of existing work paying special attention to recent European research. This work aims to systematize existing concepts and categories in order to increase comparability and cumulativity of empirical evidence. To structure and standardize dimensions of negativity in the news we differentiate firstly between negativity and confrontation, secondly between frame-related negativity and individual actor-related negativity, and thirdly between non-directional and directional dimensions of negativity. This article provides a common set of indicators and matrice-based classifications of negativity (and its antithesis) in the news to measure and categorize its intensity and multi-dimensionality