In the Aftermath of Earth,Wind, and Fire: Natural Disasters and Respect for Women’s Rights

Though much research has been devoted to a range of socioeconomic and political consequences of natural disasters, little is known about the possible gendered effects of disasters beyond the well-documented immediate effects on women’s physical well-being. This paper explores the extent to which natural disasters affect women’s economic and political rights in disaster-hit countries. We postulate that natural disasters are likely to contribute to the rise of systematic gendered discrimination by impairing state capacity for rights protection as well as instigating economic and political instability conducive to women’s rights violations. To substantiate the theoretical claims, we combine data on women’s economic and political rights with data on nine different natural disaster events—droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, extreme temperatures, floods, slides, volcanic eruptions, windstorms, and wildfires. Results from the data analysis for the years 1990–2011 suggest that natural disasters have a detrimental effect on the level of respect for both women’s economic and political rights. One major policy implication of our findings is that disasters could be detrimental to women’s status beyond the immediate effects on their personal livelihoods, and thus, policymakers, relief organizations, and donors should develop strategies to prevent gendered discrimination in the economy and political sphere in the affected countries.     

Opportunism and MPs’ chances of re-election: an analysis of political transformism in the Italian parliament

Public Choice - We identify as political transformists the Italian members of parliament (MPs) who cross the aisle and vote for legislation opposed by their own political group—i.e., MPs who...     

Uncertain candidates, valence, and the dynamics of candidate position-taking

This paper offers graphic illustration of so-called “valence” models of candidates responding to their perceptions of voter location in a two-party system. Models by Groseclose and others show how the combination of candidate uncertainty about the median voter location, nonzero candidate valence, and policy motivated candidates leads to departures from the median voter prediction. With one policy dimension, either there exists an equilibrium where the candidates do not converge to the median (or any other common position) or there exists no equilibrium. We offer illustrations based on plausible conditions. Under some conditions we show an equilibrium where candidates locate at separate policy positions. Under others, we illustrate the absence of equilibrium.     

Mobilizing for a ‘Europe from below’: network,territory, and place in the anti-austerity Blockupy movement

In March 2015, the anti-austerity movement, Blockupy, protested the inauguration of the ECB's new premises. This article explores Blockupy's construction of a sociospatial imaginary of a ‘Europe from below’. The article: (1) analyses the construction of the transnational Blockupy network, (2) compares the territory of the elite's austerity Eurozone with that of a different ‘Europe from below’, and (3) shows how the ECB premises have been the central place of European austerity and protest. This approach supplements recent debates on multispatiality, and shifts the lens used to analyse crises from a structural one to one emphasizing ongoing politicization ‘from below’.     

Party organizational development and the electoral performance of the radical right: exploring the role of local candidates in the breakthrough elections of the Sweden democrats 2002–2014

It is today commonplace to view radical right parties as masters of their own fates. However, whereas most authors in the field focus on dominant leaders, the impact of party organizations remains understudied. To remedy some of this, we study the impact of three unique measures of organizational development on the electoral performance of the Sweden Democrats (SD) in four consecutive local elections between 2002 and 2014. When controlling for crucial demand- and supply-side factors, while holding the appeal of the national leadership constant, we find that the size, competence, and stability of the local candidate base were all decisive for explaining the success of the SD. These findings suggest that a developed organizational base not only matters to the long-term persistence of radical right parties, but also to their electoral breakthrough. Additionally, we suggest that party organizations are likely to have a greater impact in countries where radical right parties are already established. We conclude by arguing that our findings potentially provide insights into mechanisms that explain how new parties in general establish themselves.     

‘Bigwig hatred’ and the emergence of the first Scandinavian agrarian-populist party

In the genealogy of the Scandinavian populist-party family, agrarian populism has been largely neglected and, when discussed at all, it is traced back to Finland in the late 1950s. This paper argues: (i) that agrarian populism long predated the 1950s and that it was politically salient from the decade before Finnish independence in 1917; (ii) that it is useful to distinguish between an agrarian-class and agrarian-populist party type; (iii) that in wider comparative perspective, first-wave Finnish agrarian populism was distinctive; and iv) that during the critical party-building phase, the Finnish Agrarian Party (AP) is best characterised a populist party embodying a diffuse small-farmer antipathy towards socially superior urban elites. The AP did not create this ‘bigwig hatred’ (herraviha), but in perpetuating it and ‘othering it’ within a binary ‘us-and-them’ paradigm, it became the first populist party in both Finland and Scandinavia.     

‘Playing for fascism’: sportsmanship,antisemitism and the British Union of Fascists

Taking recent developments in the study of fascism as a cultural system as a starting point, Spurr examines the interrelationship between notions of race, sportsmanship and Britishness in the subculture of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). More specifically, by focusing on the BUF’s understandings of Britishness and sportsmanship, he highlights the self-reflexive qualities of the movement’s subculture in which a fascist world-view shaped not only explicitly political programmes but also the ways in which this variant of European fascism mirrored particularly English modes of defining national identity and cultural difference in the rhetoric of sportsmanship. In addition, Spurr outlines one of the many ways that this fascist culture shaped social practice in the fascist community, so reflecting an assumption that fascism was as much a lived experience as it was a world of ideas and political philosophy. In so doing, he examines the implications of the BUF’s distinctly English notion of sportsmanship for its followers’ self-definition as Britons, and how this understanding functioned in the construction of the counter-image of the Sporting Jew. As a metaphor, while seemingly rather innocuous, this characterization of the Jew enabled Mosleyites to express a multilayered critique of Jews in a manner that encapsulated their wider ideological concerns and in an idiom readily recognized in the wider context of British inter-war culture. In adopting this approach, Spurr rejects suggestions that the BUF mimicked Nazi models of antisemitism and moves beyond revisionist historiography’s concern with origins and forms to explore the cultural functions of racism in the movement’s subculture.     

‘In Canada of all places’: national belonging and the lost Canadians

This paper explores the role of kinship and ethnicity in the designation of Canadian citizenship. Using the phenomenon of Lost Canadians – people whose citizenship status is ambiguous due to conflicting laws, unfamiliarity with requirements to maintain citizenship and quixotic enforcement of these requirements – the paper offers evidence for the kinship basis of a contemporary liberal democracy and reveals the degree to which a Canadian ethnic identity is operative in this settler society. But the objective of the analytical exercise is not to rest at the observation that Canadian nationalism is ethnic. Rather, by examining the ways in which the complex rules of Canadian citizenship define or exclude people from citizenship, we see how thoroughly rule-bound the status of national belonging really is. It thus might be observed that Canadian nationalism, indeed, all nationalisms, are civic since they rest on rules for belonging. Once we notice the rule-boundedness of belonging it becomes possible to disentangle these rules – kinship rules – from their connections to nature and biology and thus to appreciate their social character. From this vantage we might begin to think about alternative, and potentially more democratic, forms of belonging.     

Institutionalising participatory and deliberative procedures: The origins of the first permanent citizens’ assembly

In the context of public disaffection towards representative democracies, political leaders are increasingly establishing citizens’ assemblies to foster participatory governance. These deliberative fora composed of randomly selected citizens have attracted much scholarly attention regarding their theoretical foundations and internal functioning. Nevertheless, we lack research that scrutinizes the reasons why political leaders create such new institutions. This article fills this gap by analysing a specific case: the first permanent randomly selected citizens’ assembly that will work in collaboration with a parliament in the long-term (Ostbelgien, Belgium). This case is analysed through a framework that pays close attention to the context in which it developed, the profiles of political elites that supported its creation, as well as the multiple objectives it was vested with. The findings reveal that initiators of citizens’ assemblies fundamentally conceive them as a way to strengthen a polity's identity, to save the electoral model of democracy, and to restore the legitimacy of traditional political leaders. Our analysis of this particular conception lead us to argue for the need of developing context-sentive approaches to participatory and deliberative procedures, as well as to discuss whether we should consider the latter as mere elites’ legitimation tools.     

‘Austria First’ revisited: a diachronic cross-sectional analysis of the gender and body politics of the extreme right

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.     

In the eye of the beholder: voters’ perceptions of party policy shifts

It is normatively desirable that parties’ policy positions match the views of their supporters, as citizens in Western democracies are primarily represented by and through parties. Existing research suggests that parties shift their policy positions, but as of today, there is only weak and inconsistent empirical evidence that voters actually perceive these shifts. Using individual-level panel data from Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, this article tests the proposition that voters perceive parties’ policy shifts only on salient issues while remaining oblivious to parties’ changing positions on issues that they do not consider important. The results demonstrate that issue saliency plays a fundamental role in explaining voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy shifts: according to this logic, democratic discourse between the elites and the electorate appears to take place at the level of policy issues that voters care about.     

Local cohesion and radical right support: The case of the Swiss People’s Party

Radical right parties have become effective electoral competitors in many parts of Western Europe yet failed to achieve success in others. Much recent scholarship seeks to understand variation in radical right support. Here, we argue that local social cohesion boosts these parties’ vote shares. We use Swiss census data at the municipal level to measure local cohesion, drawing on indicators of residents’ commuting patterns, linguistic similarities and home ownership. Regression analysis shows that social cohesion is a positive predictor of local level support for the Swiss People’s Party, but not for any other major party. Hierarchical logit models combining aggregate cohesion measures with survey data demonstrate this contextual effect on individuals’ vote choices.     

Public debt stabilization: the relevance of policymakers’ time horizons

Policymakers are stuck in time. Political short-termism, policy myopia, policy short-sightedness, and similar words have been coined to emphasize the present-centric policy thinking. Politics tends to produce short time horizons, and as a result, policymakers often fail to use present opportunities to mitigate future harms. Focusing on fiscal and monetary strategic interactions, given different separate decision makers, our paper aims to explore the effects of policymakers’ time horizons on debt stabilization. To formalize our ideas, we use the novel concept of Nonlinear-model-predictive-control Feedback Nash Equilibrium (NFNE) and find that present-centric policy thinking and decision horizons matters under several dimensions.     

One for me and one for you? The spillover effect of heads of lists on the presence and success of candidates of immigrant origin

As gatekeepers to elected office, party selectors are often held responsible for the political under-representation of social groups, including immigrant-origin citizens. This article investigates how the socio-demographic characteristics (immigrant background and gender) of heads of list affect the presence and success of immigrant-origin candidates. Heads of lists constitute a unique group, as they simultaneously act as selectors and role models for aspirants and voters. We rely on an original dataset based on the 2018 local elections in Flanders (Belgium) (N = 31,173 candidates on 1309 lists). To our knowledge, it is the first time such a big endeavour is undertaken. The results show that whereas having an immigrant-origin head of list has a positive effect on both the presence and success of other immigrant-origin candidates, having a female head of list does not. We find a spillover effect within one under-represented group, but not between under-represented groups.     

Victims’ Rights and Distributive Justice: In Search of Actors

The aim of this article is to discuss the role that victim groups and organizations may have in framing and supporting an accountability agenda, as well as their potential for endorsing a distributive justice agenda. The article explores two empirical cases where victims' rights have been introduced and applied by victim organizations to promote accountability—Colombia and Peru. It will be argued that if transitional justice in general and victim reparations in particular are to embark in a quest for distributive justice, it cannot do so without considering victims as political actors, and putting forward demands in terms of victims’ rights.     

Conspicuous Consumption,Croyance, and the Problem of the Two Timons: Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens

The article investigates the astonishing volte-face that Timon performs in Shakespeare and Middleton's Timon of Athens. The main character is not, as is often claimed, unaware of what is going on around him, he is not simply the naïve victim of his avaricious guests, but rather complicit in his own delusions. My reading is informed by two different theoretical concepts: Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” on the one hand (supported by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital), and Octave Mannoni’s concept of “croyance” (belief) on the other. By combining these two distinct theories, I want to account for the characteristics of both Timon’s individual (psychological) and public (economic) behaviour, and its radical change between Acts 1–2 and Acts 3–5 of the play. I argue that in Timon of Athens, Shakespeare and Middleton explore the different forms of capital and its limited convertibility in the early modern mercantilist society.     

Polarizing without legitimizing: The effect of lead candidates’ campaigns on perceptions of the EU democracy

Has the presence of Spitzenkandidaten—“lead-candidates”—in the 2014 European parliamentary election mobilized citizens in support of the EU? A core goal of this innovation was to bring the EU closer to its citizens and to boost turnout. We therefore examine how the presence of leading candidates affects perceptions of the EU democracy. Contrary to what innovators had hoped for, we find that the presence of lead candidates has polarized the European public. Those who support the EU believe the EU has become more democratic as a result of the leading candidates. But those who generally view the EU skeptically oppose it even more when they are aware of the presence of pro-EU candidates.