Harassment and Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates in the United Kingdom

The use of political violence to attain political goals has long been a source of concern. Once thought to be exclusive to countries with high levels of general violence, recent evidence suggests that harassment and intimidation of political elites in the UK is more widespread than previously thought. Using data from the 2017 general election candidate survey, we find that four in every ten candidates experienced at least one type of harassment. Evidence suggests that women and young candidates are more likely to suffer from harassment and intimidation. We conclude by formulating an agenda for future research, focussing, in particular, on the perception of harassment and the effect of harassment on political careers.     

Behavioral consequences of mixed electoral systems: Deviating voting behavior of district and list MPs in the German Bundestag

Electoral rules should affect parliamentary behavior. In particular, deputies elected from single-member districts should be more likely to deviate from the party line than deputies elected under proportional representation. This paper suggests a framework for conceptualizing and modeling the effect of the type of mandate on deputies’ propensity to cast deviating votes in mixed electoral systems. The proposed modeling strategy uses disaggregated voting data and integrates dependencies among observations in a multi-level design. Empirically, the paper analyses voting behavior in the 16th German Bundestag (2005–2009) and shows that the odds of district MPs to deviate are significantly higher despite frequent claims that the two types of MPs behave alike. However, the behavioral differences cannot be attributed to attempts by district MPs to follow their local constituents as competing principals.     

Strategic politicians,partisan roll calls,and the Tea Party: Evaluating the 2010 midterm elections

The 2010 midterm elections were politically and historically significant in several respects. This article offers a concise narrative of the congressional elections beginning with a discussion of the factors influencing the outcome of the historic election. We briefly consider established research on congressional elections and analyze the degree to which these theories apply to the specific circumstances in 2010. Throughout the article, we compare the 2010 midterms to two other recent elections, 2006 and 2008. We also examine several idiosyncratic aspects of the 2010 elections, relative to the historic midterm elections of 1994 and 2006, as well as the effects of the stimulus and healthcare reform bills and the Tea Party movement. We find strong effects for member votes on the individual roll calls, but little evidence of Tea Party influence on electoral outcomes.     

Ideological congruence between party rhetoric and policy-making

Scholars, citizens and journalists alike question whether political parties keep their electoral promises. A growing body of literature provides empirical evidence that parties do indeed keep their electoral pledges. Yet little is known about the congruence between party rhetoric between elections and the policies delivered by them. Given the increasing influence of party rhetoric in the media with respect to voting decisions, it is highly relevant to understand if parties ‘walk like they talk’. The article suggests that due to electoral reasons parties face strong incentives to deliver policy outputs which are congruent to their daily rhetoric. Analysing data on 54 policy outputs on nuclear energy, drafted by 24 parties after the Fukushima accident, the analysis finds overwhelming evidence that parties deliver ideologically congruent policy outputs to their rhetoric (incongruent only in 7.89%). These findings have important implications for our understanding of the linkage between party communication and the masses in modern media democracies.     

Private association and public brand: the dualistic conception of political parties in the common law world

This paper examines the legal conception of political parties. It does so by unearthing the history and ontology of the common law relating to political parties in international perspective. The flexibility of the unincorporated association, in which parties are understood through the private law of contract as networks of internal rules or agreements, rather than as legal entities, has proven to be a mask. In the common law’s imagination, the ideal party is a ground-up organization animated by its membership. But the law mandates no such thing, and in its statutory and constitutional conception intra-party democracy may be sublimated as parties need be no more than an electoral persona or brand.     

Party competition and citizens' political attitudes in the American states

Democratic theorists argue that vigorous competition between candidates/parties is essential for democracy to flourish because it engages citizens' political interest and ultimately makes elected officials more accountable to their constituents. Using data on citizens' perceptions of government responsiveness to their political opinions from the American National Election Studies and the Ranney measure of party competition for control of state government, we examine the effects of competition on citizens' political attitudes from 1952 to 2008. Our analysis reveals that citizens feel government is more responsive to them when there is greater competition between the two parties for control of government in their state. However, this relationship is confined only to citizens who identify with the party that controls government in their state. We also find that the relationship between competition and efficacy is strongest among citizens with lower levels of education and income. These results suggest that vigorous competition for control of state government can have important implications for citizens' political attitudes.     

Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

This article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.     

Institutions,governmental performance and the rise of political newcomers

This article analyses the institutional and contextual factors that facilitate the election of political newcomers as heads of government in democratic regimes. Using data from 870 democratic elections between 1945 and 2015, it is found that political newcomers are more likely to be successful in presidential systems, in new democracies and when party systems are weakly institutionalised. The election of politically inexperienced candidates is also related to governmental performance. Political newcomers are more successful when the economic performance of the government is bad and when the government engages in high‐level corruption.     

Party factions and coalition government: portfolio allocation in Italian Christian Democracy

In this paper I elaborate a recently advanced argument about government formation, and assess it by studying the factions of the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC). I contend that the costs of making and breaking coalitions depend on political institutions and on the configuration of actors in policy space. Comparisons across parties in Italy and other countries support this argument. So also do comparisons across party factions. The Christian Democratic factions that incurred the lowest office costs to build coalitions were those at or near the left–right median in Italy's core party. When electoral rules were rewritten in the DC, internal party competition over portfolio allocation changed as well. The paper's conclusion outlines how the argument would guide further research on party factions.     

How parties led by a woman redefine their positions: Empirical evidence for women's green,alternative and libertarian agenda

This article investigates how the sex of party heads impacts party positions and uncovers that parties led by a woman modify their stances on sociocultural but not economic debates. I argue that this pattern is a consequence of dissimilar gender gaps in policy preferences across the two ideological dimensions at the elite level. The empirical evidence, based on data for 19 developed democracies around the world between 1995 and 2018, reveals that parties led by a woman tend to emphasise green, alternative and libertarian issues. In particular, anti-growth, environmental protection and freedom and human rights become more prominent elements of party manifestos under women's leadership. Overall, these findings stress the importance of critical actors and the conditions under which the presence of women in political offices translates into responsiveness towards female citizens.     

Issue yield,campaign communication,and electoral performance: a six-country comparative analysis

Abstract

This article develops and tests a model that explains election outcomes on the basis of party strategy. It employs a new comparative dataset linking representative mass surveys from six European countries with Twitter analysis of campaign activity. The expectation is that parties whose issue agendas exploit electoral opportunities while avoiding risks will be rewarded at the polls. These risks and opportunities are modelled using issue yield, a general framework summarising public support, electoral alignments, and party credibility. Empirically, the article traces a three-step process: (1) the configuration of electoral risks and opportunities (which is captured through public opinion surveys) guides party communication (measured with Twitter data), and to the degree that (2) parties design their campaigns strategically (identified through issue yield), this in turn (3) improves their electoral performance (measured using official statistics). The analysis explains some of the most salient election outcomes of recent years.     

Online versus offline: Exploring the link between how candidates campaign and how voters cast their ballot

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in shaping citizens’ political experience. We turn to it to consume political news and, in some countries, to even cast our ballots at parliamentary elections. Leading the way in embracing Internet voting (i-voting) is Estonia where nearly half of the ballots cast during the 2019 parliamentary election were submitted online. Using original data from the 2019 Estonian Candidate Study, this paper explores the relationship between how candidates campaign and their electoral performance. It finds greater use of both offline and online campaign tools to contribute to higher vote shares as candidates win more traditional and i-votes. These positive effects are similar in size, in terms of candidates’ overall electoral performance as well as their ability to attract different types of votes. The results show not only that individual-level campaigns continue to matter, but that online campaigns have become as important as offline campaigns for candidates, and voters’ political activity often transcends the medium through which they receive political communication.     

村民自治实践中两委关系及冲突解决模式探析

两委关系作为村民自治实践中的热点问题,正日益引起人们的重视.本文立足于我国农村发展的实际,将纷繁复杂的两委关系归结为四种类型,并提出了四种相对应的冲突解决模式,旨在探讨两委冲突的解决之道.     

The performance appraisals system types and their applicability： Case and application

This study was conducted to construct a theoretical model of the performance appraisal system that including four types according to two dimensions： the programmed degree of task and the formalized degree of the performance appraisal system. The conclusion drawn by this paper was that, the Chinese enterprise should adhere to the principles of which compounding individual goal with the organization, and balancing the organization＇s adaptability and the stability, to design the performance appraisal system and then promote enterprise performance management innovation and construction of harmonious labor relationshios.     

Numbers in regulatory intermediation: Exploring the role of performance measurement between legitimacy and compliance

Much regulatory intermediation has come to entail forms of calculation and performance measurement. In this paper we analyze the role of performance measurement in regulatory intermediation in a transnational multistakeholder setting where intermediation lacks an official mandate. We do this through a study of the Access to Medicine Index, which ranks pharmaceutical companies in terms of their access to medicine policies and practices in developing countries. We conceptualize multistakeholder intermediaries as “second order rulemakers” reconciling diverse and often competing implicit and explicit rules across the governance field. We then detail various intermediation roles of performance measurement between attaining input and output legitimacy and enticing compliance among targets. Our case demonstrates how the selective formalization of measurement processes and the related ability to move back and forth from the role of intermediary to that of “ad hoc rulemaker” are important conditions for achieving and maintaining legitimacy. Furthermore, it shows that for multistakeholder intermediaries that rely on performance measurement, compliance by targets depends on the uptake of performance information by powerful constituencies. This illustrates how addressing legitimacy concerns and enticing compliance through performance measurement should be examined as co‐emerging processes.     

Mapping the linkage between corporate social responsibility and organizational performance along with examining the moderating effect of ownership

Environmental and social initiatives taken by organizations under corporate social responsibility (CSR) have attracted stakeholder's attention and global resonance in the recent times. Alike Western countries, the concept of corporate social responsibility is not new in India rather it has been imbibed in the tradition of Indian society to donate voluntarily for social causes. As a result, a paradigm shift has been noticed where “voluntarism” in CSR has got replaced with a mandatory obligation. This has been made mandatory through an amendment of new Companies Act, 2013. The current study through empirical observations emphases on examining the impact of CSR related activities on the organizational performance with the moderating effect of organizational ownership. A model is proposed and tested using SEM through AMOS. Data were collected from 265 respondents including senior CSR managers and other working professionals of select organizations. The results show a significant and positive relationship between CSR activities and organizational performance. It is also found that organizational ownership has no moderating effect on the relationship between activities conducted under CSR and the performance of the organizations. The analytical finding of the study has a practical implication for the managers of various organizations in the Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, India.     

Examining the nexus between situational factors and job performance through the mediating role of work engagement and self-efficacy

The situational perspectives theory of job performance is a fundamental aspect of organizational and managerial psychology. Consequently, there is growing interest in conducting additional research to assess situational factors and job performance through the theoretical frameworks of social learning and social exchange theories, which are seldom applied in these domains. The data has been collected from 365 employees working in Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL). It was found that supervisor support stimulates job performance. It is also deduced that self-efficacy mediates the relationship while work engagement does not mediate the relationship between supervisor support and job performance. The situational perspectives theory of job performance provides a supportive framework for the development of PTCL employees. This work should be of interest in the area of situational factors and performance improvement. This study is one of the very few studies conducted to empirically assess the influence of situational factor on performance through the mediating role of work engagement and self-efficacy.     

Taking stock of policy performance in Central and Eastern Europe: Policy outcomes between policy reform,transitional pressure and international influence

Despite the ever growing body of scholarly work on policy developments in the post‐communist New Member States of the European Union (NMS), systematic comparisons of policy outcome performance and its determinants are still scarce. This article identifies patterns of post‐communist policy outcomes across the fields of economic, social and environmental policy. By employing pooled time‐series cross‐sectional analysis with a Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition (FEVD) estimator it investigates to what extent policy outcome performance is determined by differing policy efforts (outputs or reform tracks), transitional conditions and international influences. Although citizens are still negatively affected by the initial economic recession, especially in the social domain, policy reforms and efforts are decisive in determining the outcome performance of the NMS relative to one another in the longer run. Successful and comprehensive market reforms and steering capabilities prove to be particularly important in this regard. Furthermore, internationalisation has an important, albeit ambiguous, impact. While exposure to the world market is reflected in negative policy performance, interaction with and financial commitment from Western European Union countries promote positive policy outcomes.