Reinforcing or Breaking Party Systems? Internet Communication Technologies and Party Competition in Comparative Context

Many scholars speculate about the political implications of Internet proliferation. The Internet might, for example, open new channels of communication, which should benefit ideologically extreme and electorally small parties. On the other hand, the Internet might push party systems toward normalization, ultimately reinforcing the extant dominance of incumbent parties. We draw on data from 205 small and extreme parties in 35 countries and focus on both party- and system-level outcomes to investigate some of the most pressing research questions from this debate. We find that where party systems were previously concentrated or restrictive, Internet proliferation has no effect on votes for small and extreme parties. By contrast, in more permissive settings, Internet proliferation has had the small—but measurable—effect of driving up votes for these parties. At the level of the party system as a whole, however, we find little evidence that Internet proliferation increases either polarization or fragmentation.     

Reflections on Habermas on Democracy

Jürgen Habermas is a radical democrat. The source of that self-designation is that his conception of democracy—what he calls “discursive democracy”—is founded on the ideal of “a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens,” coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. The author discusses three large challenges to this radical-democratic ideal of collective self-regulation: 1) What is the role of private autonomy in a radical-democratic view? 2) What role does reason play in collective self-regulation? 3) What relevance might a radical-democratic outlook have for contemporary democracies? The author addresses these questions by considering Habermas' answers, and then presenting alternative responses to them. The alternatives are also radical-democratic in inspiration, but they draw on a richer set of normative-political ideas than Habermas wants to rely on, and are more ambitious in their hopes for democratic practice.     

Does the State Promote Communal Violence for Electoral Reasons?

It has often been alleged, most recently in the recommendations of India's National Advisory Council (NAC), that the Indian state promotes, or is complicit in, Hindu-Muslim violence for political or electoral reasons. But the evidence for the claim has historically been sketchy. In StevenWilkinson's work, Votes and Violence, the argument is that the evidence supporting state complicity is systematic.We examine this argument and find it to be fundamentally flawed.     

Changing the Debate About “Success” in Conflict Resolution Efforts

This essay outlines a conceptual framework for discussing success in interactive conflict resolution and in conflict resolution efforts more generally. It first proposes reasons why evaluation is crucial for improving practice. An overview of the new framework and its development are then presented. This gives the reader a window into its construction and some of the challenges of evaluation in conflict intervention processes. Next, the uses of the framework are explained as well as how its use helps to change the debate about successful processes. Finally, this article discusses how the theoretician, practitioner, and researcher-evaluator can use this framework for their own purposes, and how evaluating processes based upon their goals helps to improve the theory, practice, and research of the field.     

Self-Control Theory and Nonlinear Effects on Offending

Objectives

This paper examines Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (A general theory of crime. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990) self-control theory and develops theoretical arguments for why self-control may have a differential effect on offending depending on the level of self-control.

Methods

We test the argument that the association between self-control and violent offending (n = 5,681) and non-violent offending (5,672) is nonlinear by using generalized propensity score analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

Results

The results indicate that self-control and offending are nonlinearly related in a manner that involves two thresholds. Specifically, among individuals at the high end of the self-control spectrum, there was little evidence of an association between variation in self-control and offending. However, among individuals in the middle part of the self-control spectrum, a positive association obtained—that is, the greater the level of low self-control, the greater the likelihood of offending. Finally, among individuals at the low end of the self-control spectrum, there was, once again, little evidence of an association.

Conclusions

A nonlinear association between self-control and offending may exist and have implications for self-control theory and tests of it. Studies are needed to investigate further the possibility of a nonlinear association and to test empirically the mechanisms that give rise to it.     

Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.