Generations,political attitudes and voting behavior in Taiwan and Hong Kong

Society changes with the addition of new members. Different generations have distinct historical experiences, which may shape their political stance across a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. This symposium includes four articles analyzing generational politics in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The studies show that there are behavioral and attitudinal differences between the young and the old in both places. As overall voter turnout has declined in Taiwan, youth turnout has declined even more. In particular, the “China factor” is the main driving force to the younger generations’ political activism. Youths in both Taiwan and Hong Kong exhibit a strong local identity that differentiates them from the Chinese. The stronger the identity is, the more politically active they are.     

A generational model of political learning

We propose a mathematical framework for modeling opinion change using large-scale longitudinal data sets. Our framework encompasses two varieties of Bayesian learning theory as well as Mannheim's theory of generational responses to political events. The basic assumptions underlying the model are (1) that historical periods are characterized by shocks to existing political opinions, and (2) that individuals of different ages may attach different weights to those political shocks. Political generations emerge endogenously from these basic assumptions: the political views of identifiable birth cohorts differ, and evolve distinctively through time, due to the interaction of age-specific weights with period-specific shocks. We employ this model to examine generational changes in party identification using survey data from the 1952–2008 American National Election Studies.     

Political socialization,political gender gaps and the intergenerational transmission of left-right ideology

While left and right are the main terms to distinguish political views in Western Europe, the family socialization of citizens has mainly been studied in terms of partisan preferences rather than identification with these ideological blocks. Therefore, this study investigates the intergenerational transmission of left-right ideological positions in two European multiparty systems. To investigate expectations regarding gendered patterns in political socialization, ideological transmission between mothers, fathers, daughters and sons are analyzed, making use of German and Swiss household data. The results underline the relevance of the family in the transmission of political ideology in multiparty systems, showing high contemporary parent–child concordance in ideological positioning in line with classic work in political socialization. Moreover, the study demonstrates how the gender-generation gap in political ideology is consequential for this process. Young women consistently place themselves on the left of men across all combinations of parental ideology, which indicates that the gender-generation gap trumps other gendered patterns in intergenerational transmission. Consequently, daughters are less likely than sons to take over their parents’ rightist positions, while parent–son transmission is equally large on the left and the right. This also means that left-leaning parents have a general advantage over right-leaning parents in having their ideological identification reproduced by their daughters. The study highlights the importance of differentiating between the transmission of left- and right-wing ideology in political socialization processes. Moreover, it demonstrates that the distinction by offspring gender is imperative when studying the intergenerational transmission of traits that display gender differences within and between parental and offspring generations. The findings point at the active role of especially female offspring in the political socialization process, as they seem to be more strongly impacted by influences outside the family that sustain generational processes of further gender realignment.     

The generational decay of Euroscepticism in the UK and the EU referendum

A prominent feature of media coverage during the UK’s referendum on European Union (EU) membership was the stark difference between the pro-EU young and their Eurosceptic elders, widely assumed to reflect a generational divide. The positive relationship between age and hostility towards the EU is well established in academic research, however only Down, and Wilson [(2013). “A rising generation of Europeans? Life-cycle and cohort effects on support for ‘Europe’.” European Journal of Political Research 52: 431–456] have considered whether this reflects a generational or life-cycle effect. While their research confirms that there is such a generational effect, their capacity to explain it is limited. This study utilizes data from Britain and builds on previous attempts to identify and explain generational trends in Euroscepticism, bridging it with studies on individual-level determinants of hostility towards the EU, providing the most detailed assessment of the extent and causes of generational differences in Euroscepticism to date. The results confirm that today’s young people are the most supportive generation of EU membership, caused by a combination of factors including their experience of the EU during their formative years, their relationships with domestic political institutions, and their access to education.     

Gendered political space: civil society,contingency theory,and the substantive representation of women

Whilst existing civil society studies generally fail to systematically examine the way that contextual factors shape women’s representation in the civil sphere, political science has predominantly focused on legislative settings. This article responds to the resultant knowledge-gap by examining the hitherto underexplored role of civil society as a political space integral to the substantive representation of women (SRW)—or, the process by which women’s concerns are advanced in policy and politics. The article uses grounded theory in order propose a systematic analytical model showing how the SRW is a contingent process whereby the motives of civil society organizations are translated into action repertoires shaped by three (non-discrete) spheres: political, socioeconomic, and organizational. Its wider contribution to civil society scholarship is in highlighting how civil society is a complex, heterogeneous political space wherein SRW claims-making requires cognizance of the co-presence of contingent factors that offer immanent explanatory power.     

Majesty and mercy: undocumented immigration,deferred removal action,and the spectacle of sovereign exceptionalism

The article casts a critical gaze at the Obama Administration’s decision – articulated in a series of bureaucratic memos and directives issued June 2010–July 2012 – to exercise prosecutorial discretion in processing 300,000 undocumented immigrants slated for deportation from the US Commentators on the partisan left hailed the Administration’s decision as a pragmatic and humane effort to implement federal immigration laws. Commentators on the partisan right argued that prosecutorial discretion constituted an effective – and illegal – abdication of the president’s mandate to execute the letter of immigration law. This article positions the decision, instead, at the nexus of sovereign exceptionalism and political community-building and argues that deferred action constitutes the highest and most controversial deployment of the “majesty” of territorial state sovereignty: the process of selectively meting out “mercy” to those who approximate the set of expectations bound up in the notion of the “good” American. Petitioners for deferred action status, I argue, function, ideologically, to construct the undocumented petitioner’s liminality as help and reify the sovereign power’s exceptionalism. The discussion, in turn, invites us to revisit Schmittian and Agambenian conceptions of sovereign exceptionalism and rethink the work sovereign prerogative does in the everyday.     

Exit, collective action and polycentric political systems

Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School’s important contributions include the development of the concept of “polycentric” political systems and the demonstration that solutions to common-pool resource problems may be solved voluntarily by rational individuals, even in situations that resemble Prisoners’ Dilemmas. The program, however, pays little attention to how individuals’ ability to exit may affect the interaction in Prisoners’ Dilemma-like situations, for worse or better. We argue why this is a worthwhile consideration and survey results from public choice and game theory.     

It Runs in the Family

What motivates citizens to run for office? Recent work has shown that early life parental socialization is strongly associated with a desire to run for office. However, parents not only shape their children’s political environment, they also pass along their genes to those same children. A growing area of research has shown that individual differences in a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes are linked to genetic differences. As a result, genetic factors may confound the observed political similarities among parents and their children. This study analyzes Swedish register data containing information on all nominated and elected candidates in the ten parliamentary, county council, and municipal elections from 1982 to 2014 for a large sample of adoptees and their adoptive and biological parents. By studying the similarity in political ambition within both adoptive and biological families, our research design allows us to disentangle so-called “pre-birth” factors, such as genes and pre-natal environment, and “post-birth” factors like parental socialization. We find that the likelihood of standing as a political candidate is twice as high if one’s parent has been a candidate. We also find that the effects of pre-birth and post-birth factors are approximately equal in size. In addition, we test a number of potential pre- and post-birth transmission mechanisms. First, disconfirming our expectations, the pre-birth effects do not seem to be mediated by cognitive ability or leadership skills. Second, consistent with a role modeling mechanism, we find evidence of a strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughters.     

Neighborhood Disorder and Local Participation: Examining the Political Relevance of “Broken Windows”

Anyone who has lived in, driven through or walked by a “bad” neighborhood has a sense of the attributes that render such places unique: graffiti, litter, public intoxication and much more. According to the well-known theory of “broken windows,” these readily observable corporeal characteristics signal neighborhood disorder and lead to increased criminal behavior. This article investigates the implications of disorder for political behavior, taking particular care to distinguish between the objective tangible conditions of disorder and residents’ subjective interpretations of those conditions. Utilizing exceptionally rich data, this analysis reveals that while certain aspects of objective “reality” are consequential, perceptions of such reality are a more powerful mechanism through which neighborhood disorder impacts local political engagement. For some political outcomes, a heightened sense of the problems associated with disorder is linearly associated with an increase in participation. For others, the pattern is parabolic: those who perceive so little disorder that they remain content or so much disorder that they become disaffected are substantially less likely to take action to make their communities better. Ultimately, holding objective contextual features constant, the lenses through which residents interpret things like “broken windows” are critical determinants of grassroots politics. This information, combined with broader understandings of what shapes perceptions of disorder, lays the foundation for structuring policy in ways that facilitate grassroots activism—a vital component of the American democratic process.     

Political participation,political action and political identities: young d/deaf people's perspectives

This paper critically examines the dominant, and predominantly negative, discourses around young people's political participation, or supposed lack of it. Drawing upon contemporary debates about young people within geography, political science and sociology, it considers the ways in which a redefinition of what constitutes ‘the political’ is required if young people's engagement in political participation is to be understood fully. The paper reports on research conducted with young D/deaf people that did not intentionally set out to research their political participation, action or identi ties, but which uncovered a range of political aspects in their lives and experiences. It explores the ways in which volunteering can be defined as political action and, after de Certeau and Scott, how the use of British Sign Language can be a resistive act, a tactic or weapon of the weak. Threaded throughout the paper is a consideration of the ways in which there are complex geographies of activism at play.     

Age,period and cohort analysis in a comparative context: Political generations and political participation repertoires in Western Europe

This paper presents a method for studying age-period-cohort effects in a comparative context where repeated cross-sectional data are available covering a suitably long period of time. The method consists in the application of multi-level models with country as the higher level of analysis and random coefficients to model variables which vary at the country-level. Additionally, the application of generalized additive models (GAMs) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) provides robust empirical tests of cohort categorizations applied in this and previous studies to estimate otherwise collinear effects. To illustrate the method, I derive and test the theory that generations will be differentiated in their patterns of participation based on the ascendancy of certain repertoires in the era of their political socialization.     

Sheldon Wolin and Democracy: Seeing Through Loss

This article offers an interpretation of Sheldon Wolin’s political thought and assesses its ongoing significance in the context of a Donald Trump presidency. Given the inegalitarian aspects of Trump’s efforts to “Make America Great Again,” there may now be a temptation to spurn any political narrative rooted in a sense of loss for American democracy’s Golden Age. However, while Sheldon Wolin is a thinker of the Left, the “archaic” vision of decentralized democracy that he advances in the 1980s also warns against the loss of local memories, cultures, and practices. This perspective validates conservative concerns regarding rapid economic and social shifts and yields distinctive insights into the failings of liberalism. The article traces how Wolin’s archaic vision of democracy first develops out of his postwar critique of liberalism and his engagement with student activism of the 1960s. It then examines the limitations of Wolin’s focus on loss and traces shifts in his thought over time. Ultimately, his work urges the Left to be attentive to local traditions and narratives of loss but also suggests that democracy should be understood as “polymorphous.”     

Elitist theory and political tolerance in Western Europe

This paper addresses the problem of democratic elitism within the context of Western European politics. An entrenched assertion of the so-calledelitist theory of democracy is that elites are more strongly committed to democratic values such as political tolerance than are ordinary citizens. The processes through which elites become more tolerant include political socialization, resocialization, political practice, and experience. Some have even argued that elites are the primary carriers of thedemocratic creed. Our purpose here is to test several hypothese drawn from elitist theory. Relying on opinion surveys conducted in each of the twelve nations of the European Community in 1988, we focus on political tolerance. Our basic hypothesis is that political activism contributes to greater political tolerance. Special attention is given to a sample of opinion leaders as a test of the elitist theory. The analysis is conducted both at the level of the individual citizen and the level of the nation state. This is one of very few efforts to test elitist theory from a broad, cross-national perspective. Consequently, the analysis will be crucial in recasting elitist theory to comport more closely with empirical evidence.     

What's past is prologue,or is it? Generational effects on voter turnout in post-communist countries, 1990–2013

A common theme in studies of voter turnout in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is that the legacy of communism attenuates electoral participation. It is argued that socialization and the political habits that emerged under communism impeded democratic development by not motivating citizen activism. This paper examines this claim for voter turnout in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland for all general elections since 1990 using cohort analysis on pooled crosssectional post-election surveys from given countries. This paper shows that socialization and political habit formation under communism have had no discernible effect on voter turnout in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary between 1990 and 2013. Generational effects are evident in Poland suggesting that this country's political history is qualitatively different from that of its neighbours. This research is important in highlighting that citizens' political development within non-liberal democratic regimes does not always lead to lower levels of voter turnout. Consequently, the decline in turnout in CEE is likely to have attitudinal rather than generational origins where contemporary rather than historical political developments are most important.     

Stakeholders in the political marketing context

Stakeholders influence the ability of organisations to achieve their aims, but little work has been carried out into understanding the stakeholder concept as applied to political actors. This paper first discusses the contextual nature of stakeholders using normative and strategic, and broad and narrow dimensions, integrating these 2 dimensions with power asymmetries and reciprocity. This paper then argues that a broad stakeholder concept for the political marketing context reconciles strategic and normative issues, as whilst successful interactions with specific stakeholders are necessary to achieve completed political exchanges of value, all stakeholders that exist in democratic societies have some form of moral claim to representation. As each political exchange of value consists of 3 consecutive interactions, the direct stakeholders in 1 interaction become indirect stakeholders in subsequent interactions. As each interaction occurs within a “marketplace” context, interactions in previous marketplace(s) together with expectations of the impact on future marketplace(s) influence current decision‐making. Finally, it is proposed that in the political marketing context, the stakeholder concept can be defined as “context‐specific agents that directly or indirectly influence or are influenced by the political actor.”     

Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be “theory from above.” This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.     

Foucault and the Telos of Power

In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.     

Political interest furthers partisanship in England,Scotland, and Wales

According to much of the literature, partisanship in Britain exercises little independent influence on the vote but merely reflects voters’ prospective and retrospective evaluations of the parties’ performance with regard to their management of the economy, national security, and public services. In this view, partisanship comes close to Fiorina’s model of a “running tally” of political experiences. Similarly, Dalton’s notion of “cognitive mobilization” suggests that seeking out political information should undermine both the need for and the likelihood of party identification. Applying Mixed Markov Latent Class Analysis to the British Election Study Panel 1997–2000, we challenge these perceptions by demonstrating that partisanship is more stable than previously thought, and that high levels of political interest are linked to higher levels of partisanship and possible also to higher levels of stability. This is much more in line with classic ideas about party identification than with “revisionist” critiques of the Michigan model, and with current models of political cognition. Moreover, it suggests that political interest renders affective ties more powerful in stabilizing themselves.     

Generations and Socialization into Electoral Participation in Finland

This article examines the extent to which political socialization accounts for generational differences in electoral participation found in recent studies. Political socialization is defined as the learning process in which an individual adopts various political attitudes, values and patterns of actions from his or her environment. The analysis is based on the Finnish National Elections Study 2003. The results show that even though politics has had the smallest role during the formative years of the youngest generation and they most often do not know their parents' partisanship, this generation has received the most encouragement for voting and the attitudinal change towards voting within an individual's life span has been the most positive. Consequently, the study shows that if there were no differences in the socialization between the youngest and the older generations, the difference in turnout would be larger if only sex and socioeconomic factors were taken into account. Based on these results, the author draws the conclusion that, rather than political socialization, the factors behind the low turnout among the young generation have to be searched for elsewhere.     

A Political Outlier: the Distinct Politics of the Millennial Generation

The generation one comes of age politically is an important determinant in one’s political identity. As a result, there is the potential for a disparity of the vote choice among different generations. Today, the youngest generation of American adults—the so-called Millennial Generation—have developed distinct political leanings that are significantly to the left of older generations Since Millennials have achieved adulthood and gained the right to vote the generation has consistently been a generational outlier. The strong pro-Democratic vote of the Millennials has its roots in the generation being both very pro-Obama and very anti-Bush. The Millennials support for the Democratic Party, however, is also due to the generation’s liberal views on policy that are a product of Millennials’ relative diversity, high education levels, global perspective on politics, and lack of religiosity. The huge generation gap that has emerged since Millennials have entered the electorate suggests that there is an emerging realignment of the electorate along generational lines. With generational replacement, Millennials thus have the potential to alter the direction of American politics.