Partisanship & nationalization in American elections: Evidence from presidential,senatorial, & gubernatorial elections in the U.S. counties, 1872–2020

Scholars argue that contemporary American elections are pronounced in their degree of partisanship and nationalization. While much of this work largely uncovers a heightened degree of nationalization in contemporary elections, little is known about how far back these patterns generalize. Given the limited availability of American electoral data, this work also generally focuses on a single office or during a certain segment of the post-war period since 1946. Moreover, this work largely focuses on states as salient units of analysis, masking potential variation found in U.S. counties, the smallest geographical unit constituting panel observations over time and across elections. In this note, we leverage a novel dataset of county-level election returns for President, U.S. Senate, and Governor, to specify a model assessing whether American elections are more nationalized and partisan than during any other period since the Civil War. We find evidence that presidential and Senate elections are more partisan today than any period since the Civil War, while gubernatorial elections are as partisan today as they were during the late 1800s. Our findings have implications for contemporary-based theories explaining the rise of partisanship in American elections and demonstrates the utility of county-level data in assessing electoral changes in America.     

From Provocation to Challenge: Degrowth,Capitalism and the Prospect of “Socialism without Growth”: A Commentary on Giorgios Kallis

Giorgios Kallis argues that Degrowth, as a pluralistic convergence of both theoretical perspectives and social movements, is part of a renewal of the critique of capitalism based on the ecological contradictions of this social order. In “Socialism without Growth” Kallis engages with other, more classical, approaches that have examined the contradictions of capitalism and the material conditions for a future, ecologically viable postcapitalist social order. After a quick exposition of the lineaments of a general theory of surplus and accumulation based on Bataille, Polanyi and Georgescu-Roegen, Kallis mobilizes Marx’s theory of accumulation to examine the growth drivers of capitalism. I will argue that economic growth in advanced capitalism can best be explained as a relation that articulates capitalist overproduction to overconsumption, and outline some analytical tools that such an explanation can provide to those interested in understanding the specific growth drivers of contemporary capitalism and their social and ecological consequences. This implies moving beyond the model outlined by Marx and mobilizing concepts and categories developed by the over-accumulation approach to capitalism, those developed by some of Degrowth’s most vocal Marxist critics, such as Foster. Through my dialogue with Kallis I will try and bridge these two approaches.     

Are 16-year-olds able to cast a congruent vote? Evidence from a “voting at 16” initiative in the city of Ghent (Belgium)

An often used argument against lowering the voting age to the age of 16 is that this age group would lack a sufficiently high level of “political maturity” and therefore would not be able to cast a vote that is in line with their political opinions. In this paper, we use a unique initiative set up by the city of Ghent (Belgium) to invite 16- and 17-year-olds to take part in a mock election to investigate whether adolescents are able to cast an ideologically congruent or “correct” vote. Our results do not show differences in proximity voting between adolescents and adult respondents. Furthermore, we find no evidence of socio-economic stratification in the extent to which adolescents cast a congruent vote. Our conclusion, therefore, is that this recurrent argument against lowering the voting age lacks empirical validity.     

Representing teachers as criminals in the news: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Atlanta schools’ “Cheating Scandal”

On 1 April 2015, 11 Atlanta teachers accused of changing answers on their students’ standardized tests were convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 5–20 years in prison. Despite ample news coverage, few sources investigated teachers’ motivations for altering students’ responses or explored what the consequences would have been if student scores had not been changed to passing. Moreover, the fact that the teachers’ actions resulted from systemic problems associated with working within a high-stakes testing environment is glossed over and all but lost in the reporting of the “Cheating Scandal” events. The authors conduct a critical multimodal analysis of how semiotic resources were used to represent teachers in the Atlanta “Cheating Scandal” and show how the media's framing of teachers both reflects and conceals specific interests of the powerful educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it, such as Pearson, Inc. Data sources included four online news sources from April 2015 that covered the teachers’ sentencing, and the authors analyzed the visual and verbal transformations that occurred during the process of recontextualization. Analysis revealed the construction of a moral narrative that depicted the teachers as selfish and incompetent, reinforcing the dominant paradigm driving school reform in the USA. The authors conclude by calling for more counter-narratives that expose how dominant representations reify negative public perceptions of teachers.     

Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The “Arab Spring” as a Critical Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics

The basic characteristics and historic significance of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 are given a multitude of interpretations, not least in light of the dramatic events that have followed. This article seeks to understand the uprisings as expressions of an unfolding crisis in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in the region within a historic-sociological approach to citizenship as a “contractual relationship.” A brief discussion of Egyptian developments is used to illustrate the approach. The mass mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s inspired by Nasserism and the “authoritarian bargaining” introduced at the time is contrasted with the demands for a new social contract that mobilized millions during the recent uprisings. The uprisings clearly represent a critical juncture in contemporary Arab history, but their long-term impact on the direction of the future political order in the Arab region remains an open question.     

LGBTQ “selves” in films from the Reel-Lives project as signifiers of political and social change,and of personal value

To accurately reflect the complexities of unusual sexual or gender identifications in non-stereotypical ways, film documentarians are challenged to represent people as both sexual/gender identities and as subjectivities engaged in personal experiences. This imperative is explored through a semiotic lens focused on films produced through the Reel Lives youth media training project, which aims to give voice to marginalised youth, and which presents their stories on the Reel Lives website through two consequent layers of signification that successfully represents LGBTQ people in complex ways. On the one hand, the search function reflects a typology of shared characteristics associated with identity categories that speaks to political change. On the other, the film grammar showcases shared circumstances within communities in ways that redirect focus from political change to a more durable and transformative socio-cultural change. The films in turn serve a third function: to reflect gender and sexual identification as a personal resource on which participants might subjectively call for the positive recognition and re-presentation of their value as individuals.     

Comment on Harvey Jacobs' “Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?”

Jacobs draws on history, law, politics, and policy to examine the development and response of the private property movement and the social conflict over property rights and public planning. This comment suggests that the debate be broadened beyond the advocates of property rights and planning to include the interests of other members of the community, including minority and low-income households who are often affected by the outcomes. Otherwise, property will continue to be used to exclude people from democracy, rather than include them.     

“My forest, my kingdom”—Self-referentiality as a strategy in the case of small forest owners coping with government regulations

Social research that informs the implementation of natural resource policies is frequently driven by the logic of the policy system itself. A prevailing concern with achieving policy outcomes can lead, however, to lack of attention to equally important aspects, for example the challenges the policy instruments present to those they are targeting and the consequences this might have for government–citizen relationships. To help guide research into these issues we have developed a situational–interactional approach to interpretive policy analysis that seeks to examine the processes involved when people collectively make sense of government instruments. The theoretical basis is provided to a large extent by Luhmann’s theory of self-referential social systems. In addition, we operationalise the concepts of interactional framing and resemiotisation to capture the active work of the citizens in sense-making processes. We then apply our situational–interactional analysis to small-scale forest ownership in Flanders. Analysis of data from focus groups with forest owners reveals how interactions build on each other in the co-development of particular strategies to cope with government intervention. Finally, we discuss two future directions for research. First, the forest owners find themselves in an inescapable relationship with the government, and feel their autonomy is threatened. Government intervention, therefore, will almost necessarily lead to resistance. Second, forest groups enhance compatibility between the government system and the forest owners, but rather than narrowing the gap between the two worlds they tend to emphasise it.     

(Re)Making a politics of protection in immigration policy: the “criminal alien,” gendered vulnerability,and the management of risk

The two most recent Department of Homeland Security interior immigration enforcement programs, Secure Communities and the Priority Enforcement Program, have directed deportation efforts toward noncitizens convicted of crimes. One of their targets, the ‘criminal alien,’ has been (re)fashioned in political and legal discourses since the 1980s. Through critical discourse analysis of the 2013 immigration reform debates and their incorporation of the Violence Against Women Act (2013), this article examines the ways in which contemporary immigration policy renders the racialized ‘criminal alien’ (sexually) threatening to the ‘vulnerable’ woman. Dichotomous constructions of deserving and undeserving immigrants, in turn, bolster an array of strategies to manage the ‘risk’ of noncitizens, including border control and financial self-regulation.     

The Colonizer Demands its “Fair Share,” and More: Contemporary American Anti-Tribalism from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Extreme Right*

In no small part, Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in the 2003 California recall can be credited to his campaign's ability to define him as an ‘outsider’ who would save the state from casino-owning indigenous tribes that were seemingly taking over the political system and refusing to pay their ‘fair share.’ This strategy invoked the American sentiment of colonialist anti-tribalism: the view that argues for holding back any expression of tribal sovereignty that may allow tribes to thrive, because thriving tribes are a danger to America. American efforts to prevent tribal casino development, and keep tribes in a state of dependency, often fall back on anti-tribalism in this way. The first part of this article shows how anti-tribalism played a critical role in the Schwarzenegger campaign. The second part then uncovers the active nerve-center of contemporary anti-tribalism in the work of right-wing citizen groups. In all, I argue that anti-tribalism is not consigned to the American past but in fact persists as an active contemporary phenomenon that, in this case, can be clearly traced from the center-right mainstream to the far right margins of American politics.