Exposing Politicians’ Peccadilloes in Comparative Context: Explaining the Frequency of Political Sex Scandals in Eight Democracies Using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Political sex scandals are largely absent in some democracies but proliferate in others. However, there have so far been few if any comprehensive attempts to document the actual number of sex scandals that have occurred and to explain their presence (and, indeed, absence), and the one study that has (Barker's 1994 study) ended in the early 1990s and had numerous problems in relation to defining and documenting such scandals. Based on extensive research, this article documents the number of sex scandals in eight advanced industrial democracies and tries to explain their occurrence using Charles Ragin's fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The article has three goals: to determine the number of sex scandals in different democracies, explain why this might be, and demonstrate the utility of fuzzy set qualitative case analysis for small- and medium-N comparative research.     

Following the News? Reception of Uncivil Partisan Media and the Use of Incivility in Political Expression

Partisan, pundit-based media gets blamed for making political discourse more uncivil, and studies on incivility in mediated discourse have found that uncivil political media can induce negative reactions in audiences. However, how use of uncivil media affects the way individuals express their political views has yet to receive substantial scholarly attention. I hypothesize that tuning in to uncivil political media leads to an increased propensity to use incivility in textual political expression. I develop an index to identify incivility in political expressions, and test my hypothesis using panel data analysis and an open-ended survey item in the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey. I find that, consistent with my hypothesis, use of uncivil media—specifically pundit cable news and political talk radio—leads to an increased use of incivility when expressing text-based political opinions. Furthermore, this only occurs with reception of like-minded uncivil political media. I note the implications this has for online political discourse and effective deliberation.     

Blessing or Curse for Advocacy? How News Media Attention Helps Advocacy Groups to Achieve Their Policy Goals

This article asks whether and under what circumstances a presence in news media debates helps advocacy groups to achieve their policy goals in European Union (EU) legislative politics. Common wisdom holds that lobbyists eschew the public spotlight and prefer to influence policymaking from behind the scenes. This perception contrasts with the literature on media and interest groups, which typically conceives of media attention as a crucial commodity for interest groups to influence policy decisions. This article unites these seemingly contrasting stances by arguing that media attention can be both a blessing and a curse for advocacy. The central argument posited is that media attention may improve or reduce advocacy groups’ chances of preference attainment depending on how advocacy groups frame their message in the news. The analyses draw from interviews with more than 200 policy practitioners and content analysis of 3,557 media statements connected to a sample of 125 EU policy proposals. The findings demonstrate that an advocacy group’s media presence may improve preference attainment, but only when the advocacy group manages to frame its objectives in the news as aligned with the public interest.     

Voting void? Young South Africans,elections and the media

In May 2014, many of South Africa’s young citizens had the opportunity to vote in national elections for the first time. Youths who were born post-1994 (often referred to as the ‘Born Frees’) are the first generation of South Africans who live in a democratic country and hold no individual memory of life under apartheid. These young South Africans were born during a period of democracy, a time of transition and of great hope for the future. As a result of having been born outside the confines of apartheid racial segregation, they are expected to be racially integrated with their peers. The expectation which comes with the freedoms fought for by previous generations is that the youth will take up formal democratic practices, such as voting and engaging with parliament. However, during the recent national elections, the youth turnout revealed surprising differences amongst the 18–29-year age group. Young people aged 18–19 opted not to take up the right to vote – in fact, only 31 per cent of them had registered. This article interrogates the attitudes and actions of young South Africans within the political sphere, specifically by examining a group of young South Africans who are eligible to vote, as well as the role of the media in aiding or deterring voting engagement and perceptions. The central argument is that the local media fail to engage young people with content which advances their political identities. Despite high levels of media consumption, youths are engaging with formal politics as a result of pressure from family or due to socio-economic limitations, rather than a desire to add value to their citizenship.     

Should the Media Be More or Less Powerful in Politics? Individual and Contextual Explanations for Politicians and Journalists

The normative question regarding whether the media should have more or less impact on politics, as viewed by politicians and journalists, is important assuming that norms about media influences can influence behaviors. The present study is the first that combines individual and structural factors that explain political actors’ and journalists’ normative views on the media’s influence on politics. Based on a conceptualization of political communication cultures, representative micro-level survey data from more than 600 political actors and journalists within 52 German cities were combined with macro-level indicators for the political and media competition in each city. Multilevel analyses show that interactions between the actors’ characteristics and their competitive working conditions help explain their normative evaluations of the media’s influence on politics. However, individual characteristics such as actors’ role conceptions influence normative views more so than media and political competition do.     

试析韩国的政治粉丝社团现象

以特定政治人为核心聚合起来的粉丝社团是韩国政党政治的新现象,在近十年的发展中对推动韩国政党政治发展发挥了重要作用。政治粉丝社团中,文化共享型与个人追随型社团政治色彩相对淡薄,而政党支援型、运动支援型等政治倾向型社团有着强烈的政治色彩,发挥着类政党的作用。年轻人的政治心理、政党有意推动、轰动效应、政治偏好、市民社会的发展是政治粉丝社团的成因。在政治生活中,这些社团发挥着宣传工具、党内制衡、代言工具和政治后备军的作用。同时,粉丝社团在发挥着政治造星功用的同时,也因过度竞争和论功行赏等试图影响政治的消极面而备受质疑。     

The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning, 2004–2012

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics.     

Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft,Facebook, Twitter,and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle

This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election campaigns, in addition to field observations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We find that technology firms are motivated to work in the political space for marketing, advertising revenue, and relationship-building in the service of lobbying efforts. To facilitate this, these firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics. Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers. We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content, and execution. Given this, we argue that political communication scholars need to consider social media firms as more active agents in political processes than previously appreciated in the literature.     

Protecting people's livelihoods,restarting nuclear reactors: ‘risk recalibration’ in Prime Minister Noda's 8 June 2012 national address

Given popular concerns about nuclear accidents in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese state shut down the last of its fifty-four reactors for inspections on 5 May 2012, the first time the country had been without nuclear energy since May 1970. However, on 8 June 2012, in a nationwide address, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko justified a resumption of nuclear power generation at the Oi nuclear plant in Oimachi, Fukui Prefecture. This article examines Noda's speech as an example of ‘risk recalibration’. The first section outlines the underlying theoretical assumptions, while the second section provides the context behind the speech. This involved the input of political, economic and social actors as they vied for policy influence. The third section then analyses the risk rationality used in the speech itself. The argument is that while the speech is an important example of risk rationality operating through discourse as a medium of power, the overall ‘recalibration’ runs contrary to what recent studies have shown in other areas. In short, it is held that the speech follows a more traditional paternalistic logic of centralized risk management rather than a neoliberal logic of ‘individual responsibility’.     

Digital Fit as a Leg-Up for Nongovernmental Organizations’ Media and Political Success

Two important and understudied dimensions of the interaction between politics and the digital revolution are the impact of digital technology on the ability of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to win more media coverage and to successfully influence the political processes. This original quantitative comparison of 50 Israeli NGOs examined two main issues: the impact of technology on the ability of organizations to achieve mass media and political success and whether some groups are better positioned than others to exploit technology to their advantage. A theoretical concept labeled digital fit was introduced and put to a statistical test using data from a survey of 50 NGO leaders and a survey of 15 key politicians who were asked to rank the political impact of organizations they are familiar with from relevant parliamentary committees they are members of. Digital fit is defined as a cluster of digitally related variables that puts political actors in a better position to harness digital technology to self-produce and self-distribute multimedia messages for the purpose of advocating their cause to mass media outlets and politicians. A prospective dimension of digital fit is its potential to stimulate power shifts between the old guard of successful political-communication actors and a new breed of successful challengers. Results showed that digital fit had a strong positive direct effect on mass media success and a mediated influence on political success. There are positive signs that conventional models are shifting in a way that empowers new political actors.     

当代菲律宾家族政治与女性权力政治参与的关系

当代菲律宾女性权力参与程度很高,而且有自己的特色,即不仅女议员、女总统、女部长比例较高,而且政治家的妻女也拥有较大权力,其女性权力参与可分为正式权力参与和非正式权力参与,两者都有合法的渠道和机制。菲律宾女性权力参与又与家族政治密切相关,在缺乏民主的威权时期,女性更多是以非正式的方式参与权力政治,主要起辅助、补充、配合的角色。在民主转型时代,民主选举加上家族政治,大大促进了政治家族的女性参与正式权力领域。但是,家族政治本身就是与民主政治相对立的,实际上,家族政治是菲律宾政治发展的一个毒瘤,阻碍了菲律宾民主政治的成熟,也降低了普通公民,尤其是普通妇女群体参与权力政治的可能性,最终阻碍了女性政治参与的进一步提升。