Don't call me a populist! The meaning of populism for western European parties and politicians

In recent years a common understanding of the core elements of populist communication has been achieved in academia. Yet, we know less about how the term populism is used by political parties themselves, despite widespread assumptions about the use of populism as a battle term to disqualify competitors. Based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Twitter content from mainstream and populist actors in six western European countries, this study finds that populism is indeed used by mainstream parties in a pejorative way in order to label political competitors. Yet, not only populist but also mainstream competitors are labeled populist by the center parties linking a variety of different negative meanings to the term, which are often of a less demonizing nature not questioning the legitimacy of others. Populists in Italy and France refer to the term in a positive way, while Spanish and German populists rather reject the label.     

Don't Forget to Vote: Text Message Reminders as a Mobilization Tool

Current explanations of effective voter mobilization strategies maintain that turnout increases only when a potential voter is persuaded to participate through increased social connectedness. The connectedness explanation does not take into account, however, that registered voters, by registering, have already signaled their interest in voting. The theory presented in this article predicts that impersonal, noticeable   messages can succeed in increasing the likelihood that a registered voter will turn out by reminding the recipient that Election Day is approaching. Text messaging is examined as an example of an impersonal, noticeable communication to potential voters. A nationwide field experiment (n = 8,053) in the 2006 election finds that text message reminders produce a statistically significant 3.0 percentage point increase in the likelihood of voting. While increasing social connectedness has been shown to positively affect voter turnout, the results of this study, in combination with empirical evidence from prior studies, suggest that connectedness is not a necessary condition for a successful mobilization campaign. For certain voters, a noticeable reminder is sufficient to drive them to the polls.     

A call for budget reform

This article calls for reform of the U.S. Federal budget from two perspectives, preparation and content. The first aspect of reform proposes to amend the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 by eliminating the requirement for an executive budget. It proposes replacing the executive budget submission with a budget prepared by a joint executive-legislative council. While the decision-making process for approval of the budget would remain the same, the council-proposed budget would eliminate several time consuming issues of disagreement such as whose economic estimates are used. The second aspect of reform proposes an examination of the contents of the budget. The current budget focuses on agency appropriations and the debt/surplus figure. Many more issues such as unfunded pension liabilities, true costs of credit, value of government-owned assets and the number of appropriations are largely neglected. This aspect of the budget should be examined by a non-partisan group of experts to make recommendations for an improvement in the informational content of the budget. Improved information could help support sound decisionmaking. The article contends that we can preserve the constitutional separation of powers dealing with the budget while we simply improve the methods used to prepare the document itself, and once the document is prepared it would be structured so it can be examined in a meaningful manner by interested citizens in order to ascertain the financial conditions of the country.