Quotas,women's leadership and grassroots women activists: Bringing women into the party?

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra-party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.     

Two Cheers for Richards and Smith: Beyond Anti‐Politics?

In a recent issue of The Political Quarterly, Richards and Smith critiqued Flinders’ work on anti‐politics, suggesting that there needs to be much more focus on supply‐side explanations and recognising that much of the problem lies with politicians, contra Flinders. Here, we argue instead that it is crucial to recognise how supply‐side and demand side explanations interact. For us, politicians need to be more responsive to citizens, but, at the same time, citizens need to recognise problems of contemporary governing. Overall, much is changing in the way in which citizens engage and it is crucial that these changes are understood.     

Analyzing the representativeness of internet political participation

Political participation researchers have developed several evaluative techniques to assess the representativeness of political participation patterns. Yet, while the Internet has become a mainstream avenue for political participation in the United States, current assessments of online participation insufficiently apply these methods. To incorporate these methods we begin by drawing upon resource theory to inform two-stage ordered-logit models of online and offline political participation. Our results suggest that the factors predicting online participation often differ from the factors that predict offline participation. Even so, we find that those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds tend to disproportionately possess these distinct online determinants. Next, we use a wide spectrum of political opinion questions to determine whether online participators opinions reflect or distort those of the general population. Overall, we find that online participation tends to relate moderately with liberal preferences. However, because offline participation relates to political attitudes similarly, the Internet only marginally advantages the political voice of liberals. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results.     

An Analysis of Political Ambition in Britain

Representative democracies require sufficient numbers of citizens to put themselves forward as candidates for political office. Existing studies have shown that political institutions are not representative of the population as a whole, suggesting that political ambition is not evenly distributed across all potential candidates. We discuss evidence from the first systematic study of political ambition in Britain, examining the question of who is interested in putting themselves forward for political office. We find patterns in the distribution of political ambition that help to explain why British political institutions do not look like the British people as a whole and include a gender gap, a social class gap, an education gap, a north–south divide, and a personality gap. We discuss the implications of our findings for political parties, arguing that they need to adjust practices of candidate recruitment in such a way that minimises the effects of these biases.     

Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach

Persistent gender gaps in political officeholding and mass political participation jeopardize women's equal representation in government. This paper brings new evidence to the longstanding hypotheses that the presence of additional female candidates and officeholders helps address these gaps by empowering other women to vote or run for office themselves. With a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3813 US state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man, I find that the election of additional women in competitive US state legislative elections has no discernible causal effects on other women's political participation at the mass or elite levels. These estimates are precise enough to rule out even substantively small effects. These results stand in stark contrast to a number of findings from India, suggesting that although electing the first women in a society can have these empowering effects, remaining barriers to women's inclusion in American democracy go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can themselves erode.     

Different worlds of contention? Protest in Northwestern,Southern and Eastern Europe

Despite the voluminous literature on the ‘normalisation of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left-wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ‘second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross-national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate-level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right-wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left-wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right-wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.     

Ethnoregionalist Politics From a Structuralist Perspective： Social Identities,Functional and Territorial Cleavages,and the Political Preferences of Minorities

This paper examines the nature and intensity of regional and ethnic minority demands on the example of voting preferences for ethnoregionalist parties in select regions across Europe. It argues that territorial distinctiveness and cultural identities are insufficient to explain minority demands for political representation. The political preferences of ethnoregional groups reflect overlapping and cross-cutting functional, territorial, and symbolic differences, which collectively form the determinants of electoral support for ethnoregionalist parties across Europe. The relative weight and additive effects of territorial and functional cleavages may vary according to national context but the pattern is consistent. The paper conducts cross-national comparison of representative territorial structures spanning across the West-East divide in European studies by including regional configurations in Western Europe （Scotland in the UK and Flanders in Belgium） and ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe （the Hungarian minority in Romania and the ethnic Turkish minority in Bulgaria）. The findings suggest that ethnoregional groups do not necessarily pursue cultural distinctiveness and/or regional autonomy. They are also likely to seek representation and access to government based on socioeconomic status, ideology, and political attitudes. Ethnoregionalist demands for representation thus reflect the growing overlap between the territorial, cultural, and ideological aspects of political conflict.     

Racial Solidarity and Political Participation

Studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s generally confirmed that racial group solidarity boosted rates of participation among African Americans. But since the 1980s, research has tended to conclude that the effect of solidarity on voter turnout among blacks and other minorities has moderated if not faded entirely. We hypothesize that part of this observed decline is explained by a dilution of measures of group solidarity in recent studies. We argue that a fair test of racial solidarity requires using a comprehensive measure that incorporates both psychological “identification” and the ideological beliefs that comprise “consciousness.” Moreover, we hypothesize that the effects of solidarity, will vary across forms of participation and be greatest on political activities that require group coordination. Our re-analysis of the 1984 NBES using separate measures of identification and consciousness indicates that the more narrowly circumscribed measures of these concepts used in recent studies are likely to have underestimated its influence on political participation. We show that racial identification and consciousness had a modest effect on voting turnout in 1984, but a significant influence on participation in several traditional campaign activities, petitioning government officials, and especially participation in protests and boycotts.     

A Long Way to Go: The Final Report of the Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation

The Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation reported in January 2010. The report calls for a host of measures to improve the representativeness of the House of Commons and to revitalise political parties, as well as to enhance citizenship education, develop youth and community citizenship engagement programmes, and more generally to revitalise British democracy. Early responses indicate that the government and political parties will take the report seriously. The report is thoughtful, thorough and extensive, a treasure trove for policy makers, advocates and researchers. If it has a weakness, it is that it shows a better understanding of parliamentary reform than of party reform.     

近50年来政治文化研究的回顾

政治文化是政治学发展史上后行为主义实证政治学时代的产物.本文着重对国外政治文化的四个主要流派和国内从1987年以来产生的四种不同观点进行了综合归纳和分析,并在此基础上提出了自己对相关概念的认识和理解.     

Participation for What? A Policy-motivated Approach to Political Activism

Normatively and intuitively, we conceive of political participation as an integral component of democratic policymaking. However, research on participation generally does not include policy considerations as part of individuals’ decisions to engage in activism. I offer an opportunity model of participation that begins to study how policy goals shape individual participation and how aggregate participation shapes policymaking. The central argument is that individuals’ policy goals allow them to recognize those moments when it is most efficient and/or effective to take action. Examining black participation from 1980 to 1994, I show that black Americans are more likely to participate when they face external threats, are embedded in social networks, and have greater access to policymakers. Most importantly, the recognition of these opportunities varies according to individuals’ resources. This research moves beyond the discussion of who participates to address the equally fundamental question: participation for what?