The “Miracle” Revisited: The De-radicalization of Korean Political Culture

The radicalism that spawned the 1987 democratic revolution was a product of civic unity across class lines. Lacking the raw power of President Park, Presidents Chun and Roh had no choice but to seek a degree of democratic legitimacy. That same weakness was reflected in their relative surrender of Blue House power over Korean chaebols. Thus there were two winners in the political transformation of those years: minjung power (the Korean equivalent of Philippine “people power”) and corporatism, now largely freed from Parkian restraints. With the subsequent dissolution of minjung unity, however, corporatism emerged as the real winner of the “democratic” revolution. That victory was consummated by the neoliberal reforms mandated by the IMF in return for a mammoth bailout package after the Crash. There was little effective resistance to this IMFism, for the reform spirit of 1987 had perished long before.     

A Panacea for all Times? The German Stability Culture as Strategic Political Resource

The German Stability Culture is frequently pointed to in the literature as the source of the country’s low inflation policies and, at the European Union level, the design of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In Germany, the term was regularly wielded by central bankers and Christian Democrat (CDU–CSU) politicians to legitimise the move to EMU in the face of a large majority of public opinion opposed – and subsequent EU-level policy developments – particularly in the context of the eurozone debt crisis that erupted in 2009. An ordered probit analysis is used to demonstrate the depth of the German Stability Culture, showing support for low inflation cuts across all party and ideological lines. Despite this ubiquity, the term has been wielded with regularity only by the centre-right Christian Democrats and is strongly associated with this party. A strategic constructivist analysis is employed to explain this uneven but persistent usage in German domestic politics.     

Scope conditions of economic voting: The Danish exception?

In country after country, economic voting analysts have found that voters react sociotropically rather than egotropically. However, in a series of papers Nannestad and Paldam have found the exact opposite result for Danish voters – a result which challenges the scope conditions of economic voting. Changing only a few minor aspects of Nannestad and Paldam’s design, including the introduction of a standard sociotropic item in their models, though, reproduces the standard result: strong sociotropic and weak egotropic effects. The challenging results thus seem to be methodological artefacts; a finding that strengthens confidence in the generalizability of the basic mechanism of economic voting. Voters are not necessarily altruists, however. Sociotropic voting may be driven by both egoistic and altruistic considerations.     

Political Awareness and Electoral Campaigns: Maximum Effects for Minimum Citizens?

Revisionists demonstrate campaigns mobilize, educate, activate predispositions, and change minds. Attention has turned from the “minimum effects” thesis to questions about the conditions under which campaigns matter and questions about which types of people are susceptible to campaign effects. Focusing on whether campaign effects are mediated by chronic political awareness, I find that current scholarship on this question is mixed. Some find that campaigns affect the politically unaware most, some find bigger effects among more aware citizens, and some find similar effects across the awareness distribution. Noting the possibility that awareness mediates different types of campaign effects differently (e.g. priming, persuasion, or learning), Zaller’s Receive–Accept-Sample framework is consulted to develop expectations. I test the RAS generated predictions using the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey pre/post panel. The results support the theory that awareness mediates different campaign effects differently.     

Equality and Human Rights: Foundations of a Common Culture?

The creation of the new GB Commission for Equality and Human Rights invites fresh reflection on the relationship between human rights and equality. This article suggests that an account of equality that goes beyond the negative notion of anti-discrimination towards a more positive value-driven conception of equal participation offers the best chance of fruitful coalition with a human rights approach. It also argues that human rights themselves must be rescued from the perception that they are primarily about civil liberties and relevant only to matters of state security and criminal justice. It is proposed that recent developments in equality law and in the understanding of the implications of human rights principles for public service delivery provide the foundation for shared values and for a common culture that is truly democratic, deliberative and participatory. The new Commission to that extent enjoys an historic opportunity.     

Higher Education as an Arena for Political Socialisation: Myth or Reality?

Political values and voting behaviour differ significantly between employees in the public and the private sectors, to the extent that some have called this one of the most important political cleavages in modern societies. But what causes these differences? The article outlines two hypotheses, one being the possibility that political values are shaped during higher education. To try and shed some light on this hypothesis, the political values of two groups of students at Agder University College in southern Norway were studied over a period of time. One group of students studied disciplines – nursing, social work, and teaching – that would almost without exception give them jobs in the public sector. The other group studied economics, a subject that for most of them would lead to a job in the private sector. Their political values were then measured at two points in time: when beginning study and after three years of studying. The main conclusion is that political values differ when the students begin to study, and that most political values change only marginally during the three‐year period. The few changes that occur during the period hint at a minor tendency for students to become more politically alike, indicating that higher education has a slight homogenising effect on political values. For one type of political values, however, rather dramatic changes take place. Both student groups acquire significantly more non‐authoritarian values during studies, indicating that higher education may be an important cause of such values.     

The Pegida Movement and German Political Culture: Is Right‐Wing Populism Here to Stay?

This article outlines the rise and fall of the ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’ (Pegida), a right‐wing populist street movement that originated in the city of Dresden in October 2014 and peaked in January 2015. The Pegida movement combined fear of ‘Islamisation’ with general criticism of Germany's political class and the mainstream media. This ambivalent and largely undefined political profile proved its strength in mobilising a significant minority of right‐wing citizens in the local context of Dresden and the federal state of Saxony, but generally failed to spill over to other parts of Germany. The social profile of the Pegida movement, which included ‘ordinary citizens’ with centre‐right to far‐right attitudes, points to significant overlap between general disenchantment of the political centre ground in Germany with the political system, as outlined in recent sociological research, and the ability of a largely leaderless populism to mobilise in the streets.     

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?     

Local Autonomy or National Equality? A Conflict of Values and Interests for Political Leaders

Local autonomy and national equality are conflicting political values. Finding the balance between autonomy and equality is a difficult challenge for local leaders in multi-level government systems everywhere. This article aims to find factors that explain the attitudes of local representatives in these matters. The results show that left–right ideology, party interest and local economic interest all have substantial effects on the representatives’ attitudes. Representatives on the right are generally more positive to local autonomy and more critical to equalisation compared to representatives on the left, but the ideological stance of right-wing representatives depends on the economic strength of their municipality. Left-wing representatives are less affected by local economic interests. Representatives of all colours are more positive to increasing local autonomy when they are part of a local ruling majority. The study builds on data from a survey of all local representatives in Sweden.     

Erratum: The Political Economy of Inflation: Bargaining Structure or Central Bank Independence?

The causes of inflation are commonly analyzed as the function of either the organization of wage bargaining or the independence of the central bank. Although these explanations are widely treated as competing, recent evidence suggests that there may be merit to both arguments. This paper presents a game-theoretic model of wage bargaining and monetary policy-making that shows why the two institutional causes are not only complementary, but elements of a more encompassing logic. The empirical superiority of this synthesizing model is demonstrated by reanalyzing data used in Al-Marhubi and Willett (1995) and by presenting new evidence.     

Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action against Corruption

This article calls into question one of the implicit assumptions linking democratic accountability to reduced corruption, namely, that citizens will expose institutions rife with venality and mobilize for better government. Instead, mobilization may be contingent on the type of corruption. The study develops a distinction between need and greed corruption and suggest that citizens are more likely to engage in the fight against corruption when corruption is needed to gain access to “fair” treatment (need corruption) as opposed to special illicit advantages (greed corruption). Using data from the Global Corruption Barometer 2013, the study suggest that need corruption mobilizes citizens, in particular if they perceive that fellow citizens will also engage, while greed corruption leads to secrecy, demobilization, and a propensity to “free ride” on other citizens’ anticorruption efforts. The study thereby contributes to a better understanding of fundamental conditions for collective action against corruption and explaining why greed corruption persists in societies with well‐established institutions for accountability.     

Diagnosising the Identity Crisis of Culture: Are We Learning Nothing from History?

Abstract

This paper argues that we should think of culture and identity as separate concepts, involving distinct objects of enquiry. Whilst identity based theories tend to tell fragmented stories about culture and become overly concerned with difference and particular subjectivities, this paper claims that cultures emerge from a process of internal negotiation which requires only coherence and not homogeneity. In other words, members of cultures need not share all their features in order to be genuine members.     

YouTube: A Political Advertising Tool? A Case Study of the Use of YouTube in the Campaign for the European Parliament Elections 2009

Political campaigns are made to attract the attention from citizens. The beginning of its adaption is linked to the appearance of the social media and user-generated content. Since the number of users of social network sites in Europe constantly grows, 2009 was the first time that these websites were used in political marketing purposes for the European Parliament elections. This is an exploratory study of the nature and extent of video-based social media, studied through the content analysis of YouTube videos created for the electoral campaign for the 2009 European Parliament . ( 2009 ). European elections . Retrieved from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections2009/default.htm?language=en  [Google Scholar] European Parliament elections by 13 political parties from four EU states. Results have shown the specificities of political advertising on the YouTube, a raising interest in social media among citizens in Europe, and the development of this way of campaigning.