Dimensions of the economic vote: Valence,positional and patrimony voting in Portugal's 2011 elections

This article contrasts three dimensions of economic voting, namely valence, positional and patrimony voting. Whereas the first two dimensions have been frequently explored, the patrimony variable has scarcely been tested as an explanatory variable of voting behaviour. It measures the electors' assets (both risky and non-risky), and seeks to capture the elector's wealth at election time. Using the 2011 post-election survey carried out in Portugal following the June elections, the data show that comparing of the three dimensions, valence is the most important. It was found that patrimony variables, although not significant in a comprehensive vote model, are important explanatory factors of party identification, itself a key variable of vote choice in Portugal.     

From asset to patrimony: the re-emergence of the housing question

Abstract

The global financial crisis has ushered in a major housing crisis in many European countries. The paper seeks to shed light on why, despite massive housing crises, there are few policy efforts at tackling it. Probing into the policy paradigms that have informed housing policies, the paper demonstrates a shift towards housing as an asset before the crisis. Increasingly, housing policies have become interwoven with financial markets. This has led to a major policy mismatch after the crisis: while the return of the ‘housing question’ would have required renewed efforts at establishing housing as a social right, de facto policy makers sought to stabilise financial markets. The result is a paradoxical outcome, where neoliberal market-driven programmes are embedded in increased dependence on family wealth. The article demonstrates the shift from housing as asset to housing as patrimony in three different varieties of residential regimes, represented by Ireland, Denmark and Hungary.     

Strategic Value of African Tribal Art: Auction Sales Trends as Cultural Intelligence

Military engagement of insurgents risks destruction of religious monuments and historic structures, and political and economic instability that follows armed conflict enables looting of antiquities. In combination, threats to cultural structures and movable cultural patrimony compromise cultural security. This article explores the potential of the art market for open-source intelligence assessments of cultural security. A comparison of the market value of artifacts of different ethnic origins provides a measure of the risk of looting of cultural patrimony by geographic region. Intelligence assessments of the relative desirability of cultural artifacts by region of origin can inform strategic planning to mitigate looting in conflict zones and to alert security services to emerging threats of trafficking in cultural patrimony.     

Citizenship and Res Publica : The Emergence of Republican Rights

A fourth kind of citizens' rights--the republican rights--are being recognized and enforced in the last quarter of the twentieth century, after the civil, political, and social rights have been defined. Republican rights are the rights that every citizen has that the public patrimony, the res publica , is utilized on behalf of the public interest. While civil rights protect citizens against a powerful state, republican rights protect the state against powerful citizens involved in several forms of rent-seeking. Three major types of republican rights are identified: rights to the environment, to the historical patrimony, and to the economic patrimony. The last, in flow terms, corresponds to the state's revenues, which are permanently threatened by businessmen, bureaucrats, and all kinds of special interest groups, sometimes in subtle ways. To identify and contain these threats is a major challenge for modern institutions and law systems.     

The Nouvelle Droite in Portugal: a new strategy for the radical right in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy

Marchi examines how the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) was introduced into Portugal at the end of the Salazarist regime and during the transition to democracy. The relevance of the Portuguese case lies in the fact that the early diffusion of the ND in Europe coincided with the profound crisis of the radical right in Portugal as it faced the liberalization of the authoritarian regime and repression during the revolutionary transition. For that reason the far right in Portugal, in comparative terms, can be seen to have been subject to historical constraints quite different from those in Spain and other Western European democracies. Marchi describes the groups on the Portuguese radical right, and certain figures who were inspired by the ND and disseminated its ideas in Portugal. His analysis of their main publications, their statements and the media campaign to promote the ND from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s highlights the different reasons for and ways in which Portuguese radicals engaged and dealt with the ND. Marchi also looks at the reactions of the national right-wing milieu to the spread of ND ideas. As part of his paper’s contribution to comparative studies on the transnational radical right, it also provides new evidence, derived from the Portuguese case, of the way in which one of the most important schools of right-wing thought at the end of the twentieth century has influenced extreme-right milieux all over Europe. In light of Tamir Bar-On's analysis of the ND's cultural and pan-European impact, the findings presented here confirm its transnational character while drawing on this and other cases from southern Europe to question the French movement's long-term effectiveness in reorienting the culture of the right-wing milieu.     

Multi-dimensional economic voting in Spain: The 2008 election

Economic voting studies remain contentious in Spain. The notion is widely-held that there is no economic vote in that country, due to the pervasive and effacing influences of left-right ideology. Still, a growing number of investigations show a significant impact of economic evaluation on the vote choice in Spanish national elections. At least one possible exception here is the 2008 election, where the question has received no systematic treatment. In this study, we explore the impact of economic voting in that contest. We find, first, the presence of strong economic voting of the valence kind. Second, we find that two hitherto unstudied dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony – have their own independent effect.     

France’s reluctant parliamentarisation of military deployments: the 2008 constitutional reform in practice

Abstract

This paper investigates changes in the French parliament’s role in the control of military missions, introduced by the 2008 constitutional reform, and examines their effects on practices of parliamentary control and legislative?executive interactions. The paper analyses how the constitutional changes have developed; the attitudes of parliamentarians towards control; the knowledges they relate to legislative-executive relations; and the post-reform practice of parliamentary control of French military missions. Although legislative?executive relations with regard to military missions have been recalibrated and formalised, they have not fundamentally challenged the executive’s lead. Reasons include a strong belief in the need for effectiveness, acceptance of the institutional order, and a foreign policy culture of executive leadership. French parliamentarians value their new powers, but mostly do not seek their further extension.     

Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite

ABSTRACT

Born in 1968, the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) is a ‘cultural school of thought’. It created a sophisticated European-wide political culture of the revolutionary right in an anti-fascist age; it helped to nurture the discourse of ‘political correctness’ among extreme right-wing political parties, and turned former French ultra-nationalists into pan-Europeanists seeking to smash the egalitarian heritage of 1789. Bar-On argues that the ND world-view has been shaped by transnational influences and that the ND has, in turn, shaped a decidedly more right-wing political culture in Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of ND ideas is a product of three key factors: first, the intellectual output and prestige of ND leader Alain de Benoist; second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND's pan-European project that mimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-war neo-fascists into the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened up by the decline of the European left after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Bar-On concludes by considering the influence of the ND on contemporary European politics, as well as the implications for the struggles against racism and the extreme right.     

Reconsidering Nordic Party Space1

The erosion of the social and economic bases underlying traditional party systems has led analysts to search for new cleavage structures undergirding the present party systems. Meanwhile, analysts have identified a range of issue dimensions that also bear on voters’ party preferences. This article studies the degree to which grid-group theory's four political biases of hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism can make inroads into the left–right dimension's stronghold in accounting for voters’ party preference. The analysis draws on a 1999 survey in the five Nordic countries (N= 4,832). The method combines voters’ party preferences with their scores on issue dimensions, or political dimensions. Analyses show that conventional party families, with one exception, are not identified along any of the five political orientations. Only the five conservative parties are exclusively identified as a party family on the left–right dimension. Party preference is more closely associated with the left–right dimension than the political biases. Sweden has the purest and simplest party cleavage, whereas Denmark has the most composite one. Across the Nordic countries, the green party family is most dissimilar, whereas the progress siblings are most alike. The left–right dimension accounts well for differences between parties within polities, whereas political biases, and egalitarianism in particular, account well for differences between parties of similar origin across polities.     

Unity in Diversity: Contending Conceptions of the French Nation and Republic

This article argues that there is not one conception of the French nation and Republic among French Republicans, but two. One theory is assimilationist and centralising. It regards the Republic as one and indivisible and the French nation a cultural whole. The other is more regionalist, envisaging a republic that is perhaps indivisible, but certainly diverse and respectful of local cultures. The article traces these contending conceptions through three constitutional debates: the debate on the reform of the Empire in 1946; the debate on the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992; and the recent debate on decentralisation, which was re-launched at the beginning of the 2000s by the left and subsequently taken over by the right.     

European Union Institutions and French Political Careers

This article examines one aspect of the relationship between European Union institutions and the French political field: politicians' careers. What is the value of positions in the Commission and the European Parliament for French politicians in terms of career mobility? This study shows that the value of the Commission as a source of domestic political capital has risen since the 1950s, whereas the value of the European Parliament has remained relatively low. The position of Commissioner is now comparable to a ministerial-level position. Membership in the European Parliament has remained secondary to a national political career. Yet, as a result of the European Parliament's peripheral position in the French political field, new social groups, linking the regions to the European institutions or forming cross-partisan interest groups, have been created. Evidence shows that if the European Union institutions present an alternative type of political capital to national political capital, political careers and ambitions are still formed in national terms. National mechanisms for the formation of groups having a vested interest in the relative autonomy of supranational political institutions have not developed sufficiently. This inadequacy might be the single most important reason for the democratic deficit in the European Union. We are not in business at all; we are in politics. (Former President of the EC Commission Walter Hallstein, quoted in Swann 1990, vii)     

Support for the Far Right in the 2014 European Parliament Elections: A Comparative Perspective

The May 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections were characterised by the success of far‐right Eurosceptic parties, including the French Front National, UKIP, the Danish People's Party, the Hungarian Jobbik, the Austrian FPÖ, the True Finns and the Greek Golden Dawn. However, a closer look at the results across Europe indicates that the success of far‐right parties in the EP elections is neither a linear nor a clear‐cut phenomenon: (1) the far right actually declined in many European countries compared to the 2009 results; (2) some of the countries that have experienced the worst of the economic crisis, including Spain, Portugal and Ireland, did not experience a significant rise in far‐right party support; and (3) ‘far right’ is too broad an umbrella term, covering parties that are too different from each other to be grouped in one single party family.     

The Online Citizen: Is Social Media Changing Citizens’ Beliefs About Democratic Values?

Social media websites are rapidly changing the way that Americans live and communicate with one another. Social media sites encourage individuals to constantly share information about one’s self (and constantly seek information about others) that would have been private in the past. This experience can alter how an individual views the world in ways that political scientists have not been able to fully capture. In a cross-sectional survey of the American public I find a strong correlation between the use of Facebook and personal blogs and support for civil liberties. Individuals who spend more time self-publicizing on the Internet seem to value freedom of expression more, but also value the right to privacy less than individuals who use social media less often. This pattern suggests that technology may be altering American attitudes on basic democratic values and highlights the need for dynamic research designs that account for the causal effect Internet use may have on individual political development.     

Two-round elections, one-round determinants? Evidence from the French municipal elections

Using a new database of French municipalities that covers 821 towns and two elections (2001 and 2008), we examine how the budget structure, degree of electoral competition and the economic context affect the share of votes for the incumbent. We take into account the institutional details of the two-round structure of the electoral process created by French electoral rules (dual ballot under plurality rules). We show that in the first round of the electoral process, spending on equipment (including infrastructures) can influence the voter, and that electoral competition has a strong impact on the incumbent’s score. In the second round, the incumbent’s vote is affected more by national considerations and local budget variables have no effect. We show that the dynamics between the first and the second rounds are intense. The results suggest that the determinants of each round’s outcome in a two-round electoral process are different.     

To Serve and Survey: French Gendarmes as International Police in Peacebuilding Missions in Bosnia and Kosovo

ABSTRACT

This article scrutinises everyday practices of French gendarmes who were sent as international police in UN and NATO missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Drawing on qualitative material, it argues that their encounters on the ground largely shaped their practices. Rather than melting into the internationalised peacebuilding milieu, gendarmes endeavoured to serve and survey, that is, to establish relationships with civilian populations as a means to collect security-related intelligence for their national government. The sociology of peacebuilding encounters on the ground thus unveils Peaceland’s social divides and invites to take into account the historicity of the peacebuilders’ societies.     

How programmatic profiles of niche parties affect their electoral performance

Previous studies on the electoral performance of niche parties have not fully taken into account the evolutionary aspect of the programmatic profiles of these parties, although the majority of these parties were analysed from when they first came into existence, as new parties. Acknowledging the variation in programmatic profiles between niche parties and over time, the article argues that the electoral effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration as programmatic features of niche parties vary over their lifecycle. When entering the electoral arena, niche parties benefit from high levels of nicheness and programmatic concentration. However, these positive effects decrease as parties grow older and face different challenges to those of their early days. The empirical analysis of green and extreme right parties in this article supports the corresponding hypotheses. Results show that the positive effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration vanish over time and indicate niche parties’ own influence on their electoral destiny.     

Authority and the study of French politics: A response to Duclaud‐Williams

This article reconsiders the value of French authority attitudes for the understanding of French politics in the light of Duclaud‐Williams’ recent critique of the works of Michel Crozier. It is argued that the criticisms made by Duclaud‐Williams do not amount to a refutation of Crozier's thesis or of the type of approach it represents, and that advances in this area are more likely to come from further attempts at identifying empirically the nature and role of French authority norms, such as that of Schonfeld, which is discussed and evaluated here.     

Media and politics in French political science

Abstract. The study of the relationship between media and politics has long been marginal in French political science. The take–off of research has been stimulated by the impact of the Presidential election under the Fifth republic and by the increasing role of television and spin–doctors in this new electoral context. If French studies on political communication converge with international research, they are also characterised by strong peculiarities. The material of case–studies is not campaign–centred, but gives room to various TV programmes, to a wide range of media uses by French politicians. The contribution of historians, the influence of a literary tradition of 'textual' analysis of political speech are important. The publishing of books on this topic also reveals a surprisingly intense participation from spin– doctors, journalists and even politicians. Three main 'schools' are contributing to the dynamics of French research. Linked to the tradition of semiological and literary studies the first one focuses on the study of political discourse in the media. Merging the legacy of English–speaking studies and the French tradition of electoral studies a second one develops an analysis of the campaigning process and of its effects. More recently, a new generation of researchers has widened the object of research to the complex network of relations between politicians, journalists and consultant. Linking successfully the most recent developments or international research and the peculiarities of academic tradition, research on political communication appears as one of the most dynamic areas of French political science.     

The image of the Jews in Hungarian public opinion

ABSTRACT

Nowhere has the debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ been as fierce and relevant as in France. In recent years this country has witnessed high recorded levels of antisemitism, prompting many commentators to claim the existence of an anti-sémitisme nouveau. Something has indeed changed, at least in terms of the nature, frequency and perpetrators of antisemitic violence in France. Previously connected exclusively to the extreme right, it has now also become associated with a group that is itself a victim of discrimination: ethnic minority youths living in the poor suburbs (banlieues). Peace first discusses and explains the statistics produced by the French watchdog on racism and antisemitism as well as the effects of the Middle East conflict. He then traces the debate on this ‘new antisemitism’ in the French context, contrasting the views of the label's promoters and opponents. He argues that, while antisemitism has undoubtedly evolved, the ‘new’ label is effectively erroneous as it fuses supposedly leftist and ‘Muslim’ antisemitism into one entity when they are not necessarily linked. In addition, he offers vital clarification of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism along with suggestions for further research.