Unemployment and Party Choice in Norway

By the late 1980s, the absolute number of jobless in Norway had reached the same level as that during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment in the 1930s is known to have had an impact on party choice. Among those hit by unemployment in the 1980s, however, we no longer find a strong correlation between unemployment and party choice. This situation constitutes the point of departure for this article. The relationship between joblessness and party choice is investigated on the basis of four hypotheses: (i) The incumbency thesis , which suggests that the incumbent party receives support in accordance with fluctuations in economic conditions - i. e. it is punished in bad times and rewarded in prosperous times, (ii) The policy thesis , which predicts that voters concerned about unemployment prefer the Labour Party, (iii) The social composition thesis , which argues that the fluctuations between unemployment and party choice are simply due to changes in the social composition of the unemployed, (iv) The generation thesis , which underscores that the impact of unemployment on party choice varies according to historical generation. Confronted with empirical evidence, the social composition thesis is rejected. Likewise, support for the policy thesis has gradually vanished. Some empirical support is given to the incumbency thesis . In the end, however, the generation thesis appears to be the most relevant.     

The Electoral Effect of Party Leader Approval in Norway

This article deals with the relationship between leader approval and party support. Despite an unmistakable trend towards stronger "personalization" of politics, the relationship is seen as conditional, dependent upon the particular parties and leaders as well as the political system that surrounds them. The author tries to make explicit the daunting specification and measurement problems involved in this type of analysis. A simple version of the Granger causality test and simultaneous equation models based on Norwegian panel and cross-sectional data identify leaders who appear uncompromising and adamant as the most successful vole getters.     

I'm Not That Liberal: Explaining Conservative Democratic Identification

The persistence of self-identified conservative Democrats in the electorate is puzzling. Both the ongoing Southern realignment and the recent ideological polarization should have resulted in conservative Democrats changing their party identification to accord with their discrepant ideology. Instead, the number of conservative Democrats, as a percentage of the total electorate, has held steady over the last 20 years. I propose an explanation for this phenomenon that draws upon theories of mass belief systems, as well as an element of recent political reality: the popular stigmatization of the word liberal. I argue that Democrats who are susceptible to elite cues garner positive affect toward the conservative label and negative affect toward the liberal label. They then identify themselves accordingly, regardless of their issue positions.     

各正性命:轴心时代政教思想的核心

各正性命是轴心时代政教思想的核心,解释轴心时代政教视阈各正性命的内涵,阐释为何各正性命是政教思想的核心。政教如何开启个人的各正性命,主要实施礼乐教化、尊重、引导地方习俗,遵循无为的政治来实现。     

Party Platforms and Public Childcare: Structural and Ideational Factors Shaping Policy in Norway and Sweden

While the Scandinavian countries are well‐known for their gender‐egalitarian policies, there are important intra‐Scandinavian policy differences. Through a comparative‐historical analysis of Norway and Sweden, this article illustrates how structural factors (economic and political) and ideational factors (gender and religion) interact and combine to produce the particular national policy outcomes in the post‐ Second World War period, using public childcare as a comparative case study. The economic developments pursued by the countries in the postwar period are key to understanding the political party dynamics, the perpetuation (or lack thereof) of religious and centre‐periphery cleavages, as well as the change in the political leadership's gender‐ideological orientations, and the consequences of these factors for the evolution of public childcare policy. Norway has no institutionalised childcare guarantee, private ownership of childcare is high and religion plays a role in the national preschool curriculum. In contrast, Sweden has a binding national childcare guarantee, public ownership remains high and religion plays no role in the preschool curriculum. The policy differences are theoretically interesting as factors commonly hypothesised as important to gender‐egalitarian policy outcome – on their own, or combined – cannot explain these differences. Thus, this article contributes important knowledge about the causal mechanisms behind gender‐egalitarian policy development. The study fills a gap in the comparative welfare state literature by showing how structural and ideational factors are mutually reinforcing.     

All That You Can(not) Leave Behind: Habituation and Vote Loyalty in the Netherlands

Scholarly work has pointed out that party loyalty develops with age. However, most of the literature has focused on two-party systems and employed party identification as the dependent variable in order to investigate this phenomenon. This article sheds more light on how this process takes place, employing a measure of party utility that is available for all the parties, and not only for the one that voters feel identified with (if they do at all). Findings suggest that preferences become more skewed toward the chosen party as choices are repeated, supporting the presence of some kind of habituation process in voting behavior even in contexts where the existence of multiple parties should in principle work against party loyalty. Moreover, repeated voting for a party is shown to partly explain the effect of age on loyalty. Habituation is, thus, argued to be essential in order to understand why volatility is strongly and significantly higher among young voters.     

The Electoral Effectiveness of Party Organization: Norway, 1945–1977*

Latent Variable Partial Least Squares analysis has been used to model the impact of political party organization on stable and changing patterns of party vote in Norway from 1945 to 1977. For the Norwegian Labor Party, the elaboration of a strategy of organizational encapsulation is at least as important as the economic base for maintaining the stability of the party's electoral support; it also depresses support for the opposition parties. Short-run fluctuations around the long-run stability, however, are more influence by economic changes than party organizational strategies, with the exception of the divisive 1973 election, when party organization was important for maintaining the party vote. For the non-Labor parties, party organization is less important than economic variables.     

The Party Faithful: Partisan Images,Candidate Religion,and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice—“partisan voting”—depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate's religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate's religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.     

落实党员权利是发展党内民主的基础

党员是党的主体。党员主体权利能否得到保障 ,决定着党内民主的实现程度。因此 ,发展党内民主的基础在于保障和落实党员的权利 ,这必须从制度上保障党员各项权利的落实。     

Measuring Party Identification: Britain, Canada, and the United States

The article proposes an empirically based reflection on how to measure party identification cross nationally, using data from the 1997 Canadian Election Study, the 1997 British Election Study, and the 1996 American National Election Study. These studies included both traditional national questions and a new common one, which allows for an assessment of the effects of question wording on the distribution and correlates of party identification. We show that the distribution of party identification is strongly affected by question wording and that the relationship between party identification and variables such as party and leader ratings, and voting behavior does not quite conform to theoretical expectations. We point out problems in the wording of party identification questions and propose an alternative formulation.     

All Glory is Fleeting: Sigint and the Fight Against International Terrorism

This article discusses the important role that Signals Intelligence (Sigint) has played, and continues to play, in the war against international terrorism. It sets out what is known or can be authoritatively established about the role that Sigint played in the events leading up to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, especially the performance of America's Sigint organization, the National Security Agency (NSA). The article also analyzes what the potential future role of Sigint may be in the war on terrorism given the ever changing nature of terrorist operations, the growing number of technological impediments to effective Sigint collection against terrorist targets, and shifting geostrategic considerations on the part of the nations engaged in the fight against the international terrorists.     

Extremist Outbidding in Ethnic Party Systems is Not Inevitable: Tribune Parties in Northern Ireland

The ethnic outbidding thesis predicts centrifugal polarisation in ethnically divided party systems. We argue instead that the incentives of power-sharing institutions can encourage the development of electoral strategies based on 'ethnic tribune appeals' in which parties combine robust ethnic identity representation with increased pragmatism over resource allocation. We test these arguments in Northern Ireland and show that though evidence of direct vote switching from moderate parties to ostensibly 'extreme' parties is prima facie consistent with the outbidding thesis, attitudinal convergence between the nationalist and unionist communities on the main political issues is not. The recent electoral success of the DUP and Sinn Féin can instead be explained by these parties' 'ethnic tribune' appeals. Many voters simultaneously endorse peace, prosperity and (increasingly) power sharing but also want the strongest voice to protect their ethnonational interests. Identity voting for ethnic tribune parties implies a degree of resolve in advocating ethnic group interests, but does not entail the increased polarisation implied by outbidding models. Like their voters, ethnic tribune parties can be simultaneously pragmatic (with regard to resources) and intransigent (with regard to identity), so that despite appearances to the contrary, the power-sharing institutions in Northern Ireland incentivise centripetal dynamics that inhibit outbidding.     

RPR officials: a report on an inquiry into the Neo-Gaullist Party elite

Abstract. Based upon a questionnaire survey of delegates to the RPR National Congress held in Grenoble in November 1984, this paper summarizes a three-dimensional analysis of RPR officials (demographic and sociological identification; political mobilization, party functions and activism; ideological trends and political attitudes) which seeks to appraise how the evolution of the Gaullist movement correlates with changes in French politics between 1976 and 1986.     

Fluctuating Party Identification in Great Britain: Patterns Revealed by Four Years of a Longitudinal Study

The concept of party identification is widely used in British electoral studies, but its value as a measure of underlying links between voters and parties, irrespective of short-term fluctuations in partisan popularity, has come under increased scrutiny recently. Data from the first four waves of a longitudinal study provide evidence of substantial variability in the strength of voters' identification with the three main British political parties, suggesting the need for research into the causes of, and meanings associated with, such fluctuations.     

试析马来西亚的一党优势制——政治稳定的视角

作为一个正处于现代化进程中的东南亚新兴国家,马来西亚还面临着多元民族、多元宗教和多元文化的复杂国情,但其政党制度较为成功地实现了长期的政治稳定。面对近年来马来西亚中产阶级的崛起和公民社会的发展,兼具民主与权威特点的马来西亚政党制度仍然具有很强的适应性,这与其较高的制度化水平有着密切关系。     

加强民办非企业单位党建工作研究

民办非企业单位是伴随着改革开放的历程而逐步发展起来、活跃在社会各个层面的新社会组织,其在推动社会发展、维护社会稳定、培育和完善社会主义市场经济体系、解决社会就业等方面发挥着重要的作用,但目前民办非企业单位党建工作却面临许多难点和困境.为此,必须深入实际,加强调查研究,积极探索符合民办非企业单位特点和规律的党建工作途经,从而促进新社会组织健康稳步发展.