How established parties reduce other parties’ electoral support: the strategy of parroting the pariah

In every democracy, established political parties are challenged by other parties. Established parties react in various ways to other parties’ presence. A key hypothesis in the relevant literature is that established parties can decrease another party’s electoral support by parroting it, i.e. adopting its core policy issue position. This article argues, and demonstrates empirically, that this hypothesised effect mainly occurs in the event that a critical prerequisite is in place. Parroting a party decreases its support only if that party is ostracised at the same time. The article classifies a party as ostracised if its largest established competitor systematically rules out all political cooperation with it. Analysing 296 election results of 28 West European parties (1944–2011), evidence is found for a parrot effect – however, concerning ostracised parties only. On several occasions established parties have substantially decreased another party’s support by simultaneously parroting that party and ostracising it.     

Iran’s nuclear programme and diplomacy under pressure

A recent explosion at the Natanz nuclear complex set back Iran’s nuclear development by one to two years but may encourage Iran to move its centrifuge production underground, where it will be hidden from international supervision. While Iran is also under diplomatic pressure, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 is likely to survive until the US presidential election in November.     

To adapt or to disregard? Parties’ reactions to external shocks

How do parties react to unanticipated events such as external shocks? Do they adapt to the consequences of the external shock or do they disregard them? Using the global financial crisis as an empirical example and testing the expectations for parties’ economic policy shifts in 23 European democracies based on Chapel Hill Expert Survey data, the article demonstrates that government parties react more to an external shock than opposition parties, particularly in countries where the external shock has been more severe. This has implications for a broader literature in comparative politics by fostering the dialogue between the political economy literature on external shocks and the literature on party policy shifts by showing the significant impact exogenous events can have on party positioning.     

Reconstructing the French ‘Etat’: Progress of the loi Defferre

French local government has been subjected to sweeping reforms since the Socialist Party took office. The numerous measures, not yet all finalised or implemented, are aimed at creating a decentralised administration with local democratic control, particularly through the creation of local civil service corps and the transfer of tax‐revenues to the localities. It is apparent that considerable administrative problems will arise, and the parties will also be affected, not least by the introduction of PR voting at the local level. Democratic control will be enhanced and there will be a greater apparent politicisation of the administration, but it is also to be expected that the bureaucracy will protect its own interests and priorities.     

National Political Parties and European Governance: The Consequences of ‘Missing in Action’

This article first summarises the findings of a three-year research project on the Europeanisation of national party organisation, then proceeds to a critical analysis of the consequences for national as well as EU governance. The account begins with the general finding that mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties have not created new procedures to make their leaders more accountable for their actions in EU decision-making, nor expanded to any appreciable degree the number and/or influence of party personnel responsible in the area of EU matters. It then identifies three clusters of impact: a) public opinion and partisan discourse; b) the legitimacy of both MEPs and transnational party federations; and c) the dynamics of party government at the national level. The article concludes with discussion of the ‘democratic deficit’ inside parties and the merits of politicising the EU without taking into consideration the role of national parties.     

Religion between Nation and Europe: The French and Belgian ‘No’ to the Christian Heritage of Europe

Religion has new salience in contemporary European politics, but its range and nature are still not properly understood. In contrast with most other member states, France and Belgium held a common position of refusal regarding any reference to the Christian heritage of Europe in the now defunct Constitutional Treaty. The two countries were however motivated by two different models of laïcité anchored in distinct socio-political historical paths: the French all-encompassing laïcité, supposing the neutrality of the public space; and the Belgian institutionalised laïcité, organising the pluralism of philosophical and confessional worldviews. The analysis addresses the dynamics of each national configuration in the wider perspective of the interactions between religion and politics today; the patterns of European negotiations; the effects of this issue on domestic politics and mobilisations of civil society. It concludes that religion in the integration process is a way of reformulating old symbolic resources and of coming to terms with identity and social adaptations, rather than a source of political cleavages.     

How do established voters react to new parties? The case of Italy, 1985–2008

The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties – indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset consisting of election studies conducted in Italy between 1985 and 2008. We find that a new party system causes confusion as to where parties stand in left-right terms, making it difficult for voters to make their choices on the basis of ideological cues. The confusion is greatest among older voters – those already set in their habits of voting, but only the very oldest cohorts (containing voters over 60 years old) are significantly debilitated.     

‘The clash of races’ and ‘the Jewish intelligence’: a specifically French form of social antisemitism

The phenomenon of ‘social antisemitism’ is well known. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, an idiosyncratic variant had emerged in France. Where, elsewhere, social antisemitism tended to be ingrained and unthinking, this French variant was (typically) more theoretical, and its practitioners tended to be among the most prominent authors and thinkers. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, and also developed a series of facile generalizations about the essentially inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. Griffiths examines this phenomenon, both for its characteristics and for its widespread existence in French intellectual circles, by taking a specific subject: the reception of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann. A wide range of writers and critics—a number of whom had in other circumstances a reputation for liberal values and attitudes, and had been among those who had deplored the excesses of the antisemitic mob during the Dreyfus affair—are found to echo the views put forward by Lacretelle in that novel, and even to elaborate on them. Many of these writers were to adopt a completely different attitude towards the Jews after the Second World War; when the position of the Jews was fully realized, their earlier ‘social antisemitism’ proved less powerful than their human sympathies. But this is not to devalue the importance of the danger posed by social antisemitism, which could provide the basis for far more virulent forms of racism to flourish.     

The US,Iran and ‘maximum pressure’

Tensions between the United States and Iran have risen sharply in recent weeks. The Iran nuclear deal may collapse permanently in the coming months. While the leader of neither country appears to want war, conflict remains possible due to misperception and miscalculation.     

Japan’s approach toward Asian regional security: from ‘hub-and-spoke’ bilateralism to ‘multi-tiered’

This article argues that Japan’s growing activism in promoting multilateral regional security arrangements since the early 1990s stems from the country’s adoption of the ‘multi-tiered approach’; a new policy perspective that packages different types of coordination among region states, including bilateral, multilateral, and minilateral or subregional, in a layered, hierarchical manner. The significance of the approach explains why Japan has retained its enthusiasm for promoting multilateral arrangements, despite continuous criticism of their effectiveness and significance, as well as the marked decline in Japan’s economic power to support financially the country’s activism in regional institution-building. Meanwhile, the multi-tiered approach also explains Japan’s effort to maintain and strengthen its bilateral security relationship with the United States during the last decade. Four factors – a perceived change in the regional security order, growing self-recognition of major-power status, the legacy of history, and constitutional constraints – worked essentially to lead Japanese policy-makers to settle on a multi-tiered approach as a desirable policy choice in shaping the country’s security policy in post-Cold WarAsia.     

Challenges of Local Ownership: Understanding the Outcomes of the International Community’s ‘Light Footprint’ Approach to the Nepal Peace Process

This article investigates whether a ‘light footprint’ approach to peacekeeping and peacebuilding by the international community more effectively addresses local drivers of conflict than the dominant model of large, multidimensional peace operations. It considers international engagement in the Nepalese peace process through the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), and argues that the international community’s approach to local ownership became more focused on non-imposition and therefore less politically engaged over time as a result of both local and international factors. This facilitated local elite ownership of the process, which fundamentally undermined the international community’s capacity to support peace consolidation as elites moved away from key transformational pledges of the peace settlement.     

The North Korean abduction issue: emotions,securitisation and the reconstruction of Japanese identity from ‘aggressor’ to ‘victim’ and from ‘pacifist’ to ‘normal’

Abstract

After Kim Jong-il's confession in 2002 that North Korean agents had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, North Korea has become the most detested country in Japan, and the normalisation of bilateral relations has been put on the back burner. The abduction issue has taken precedence in Japan even over North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. It has also grossly overshadowed the atrocities for which Imperial Japan was responsible in the 20th century. Why has there been such strong emphasis on an issue that could be disregarded as comparatively ‘less important’? This article understands the ascendency of the abduction issue as the epitome of an identity shift under way in Japan – from the identity of a curiously ‘peaceful’ and inherently ‘abnormal’ state, to that of a more ‘normal’ one. The differentiation of North Korea as ‘abnormal’ emphasises Japan's own (claim to) ‘normality’. Indeed, by incarnating the perils of Japan's own ‘pacifist’ ‘abnormality’, which has been so central to the collective sense of Japanese ‘Self’ in the post-war period, the abduction issue has become a very emotional argument for Japan's ‘normalisation’ in security and defence terms. The transformation from ‘abnormal’ to ‘normal’ is further enabled by Japan trading places with North Korea in the discourse, so that Japan is defined as ‘victim’ (rather than former aggressor) and North Korea as ‘aggressor’ (rather than former victim). What is at stake here is the question whether Japan is ‘normalising’ or ‘remilitarising’, and the role of the abduction issue discourse in enabling such foreign and security policy change.     

Political Parties and ‘the Immigration Issue’: Issue Ownership in Swedish Parliamentary Elections 1991–2010

Why is ‘the immigration issue’ rarely polemical for the Swedish mainstream when it divides parties across Europe? Several factors suggest fertile ground for conflict, yet parties hesitate to capitalise on anti-immigration cues. Based on interviews with Swedish MPs, the article discusses two interlinked issues. First, immigration crystallises conflicting ideological streams: market liberalism vs. value conservatism (for the centre-right) and international solidarity vs. welfare state/labour market protectionism (for the centre-left), and stressing the ‘wrong’ stream detracts attention from parties' core competencies. Second, since competition, when present, revolves around issue ownership, parties that are less trusted on immigration will divert attention to areas of higher competence. Whether immigration becomes politicised is not necessarily dependent on electoral grievances or a radical right presence but on parties' ability to handle and negotiate these conflicting streams and issue priorities. An appreciation of the party politics of immigration is thus central to understanding when, and why, immigration becomes an ‘issue’.     

New Parties: Game Changers or ‘Much Ado About Nothing'?

This article is about the new parties that competed at the Danish parliamentary election of 2019. It addresses three key questions: why did they emerge, what types of parties were they and what impact did they have on Danish party politics. We can identify the causes for their emergence and participation in interplay of relatively lenient rules for party registration, personal ambition, recent events – particularly the Syrian crisis and arrival of refugees – as well as anti-establishment sentiments on the political right. The three new parties shared salient characteristics: they had dominant leaders, were genuinely new, had extraparliamentary origins and were independent of societal organizations. In terms of effects on the party system, the main impact was during the campaign where the strongly anti-immigration agenda proposed by two of the parties dominated the conversation and appeared to cause some movement by established parties in a more immigrant friendly direction. Only one of the far right parties won seats in parliament and its prospects of wielding influence on policy with a Socialdemocratic government are slim.