Election campaigns and the cyclical nature of emotions—How politicians engage in affective polarization

Do politicians get emotional during an election campaign? We examine the existence of changes in partisan in-group favoritism and partisan out-group hostility among political elites by evaluating the degree to which they fluctuate before, during and after election campaigns. The lack of elite level panel data has prevented scholars from studying the dynamics of politicians' emotions around the most emotionally intense political event in democracies: elections. We focus on Sweden around the 2014 election and follow more than 700 Swedish politicians before, during and after a national election campaign using a unique three-wave panel survey. The results reveal that politicians' emotions towards other parties are affected during the election, but less so for their own party. Our study adds to the body of recent evidence that campaigns mobilize partisan identities and increase partisan animus.     

Towards a Measurement of Extreme Left-Wing Attitudes

Previous research on left-wing extremism relied largely on measurements that are unsuitable to detect and track extreme attitudes. In the absence of a clearly defined instrument for left-wing extremism, researchers based their predictions largely on indicators like voting behaviour or the left—right self-placement scale. Building on a large-scale investigation of data from the past 20 years, the paper shows that such indicators do not serve as adequate proxies, since those labelled as ‘extreme’ do not hold extreme attitudes in most cases. Analysing a variety of left-wing extremist attitudes across the past two decades shows that there is indeed a core set of attitudes that seem to resemble what we would call a traditional left-wing extremist identity. The paper suggests an instrument that can serve as a starting point for further developing an index of left-wing extremism. Finally, the potential of the extreme left is assessed using the constructed index. The results show that the estimated potential of the new measure differs substantially from conventional measurements, not in quantity but in its composition. As a result, traditional measurements fail to predict actual left-wing extremism. In particular, anti-pluralist mindsets are heavily neglected. Implications are thus discussed for Germany, and the world at large.     

Leadership Traits and Ghana’s Foreign Policy: The Case of Jerry Rawlings’ Foreign Economic Policy of the 1980s

This article examines Ghana’s foreign policy-making with reference to internal and external determinants (structural/systemic). Besides these determinants, political actors (primarily, presidents/heads of state) have shaped the country’s foreign policy outcomes, but this field of enquiry (i.e. the individual-level analysis) has not, received much attention in the literature. To enhance the understanding of leadership and personality traits in foreign policy-making, this study draws on the theory of Leadership Trait Analysis to examine Jerry John Rawlings and Ghana’s foreign economic policy in the early 1980s. It argues that the leadership traits of Rawlings to some extent shaped Ghana’s foreign economic policy decisions in the early 1980s.     

Are School Committees a Source of Empowerment? Insights from Tanzania

Studies on user committees often critique the claim that membership to these committees empowers people. In this article, we use survey data on empowerment school committees in Tanzania to find out whether school committee membership is a source of empowerment of people at the local levels. Our findings suggest that membership in itself has limited impact on empowerment, while access to information and gender are the major sources of empowerment. However, the role of membership to the school committee is significant insofar as it can expose members to critical information on school issues.     

Justice Sensitivity and Cooperation Dynamics in Repeated Public Good Games

It is frequently observed that despite individual incentives to free ride, humans decide to cooperate with each other to increase social payoffs. In the current research, we address the effects of individual differences in justice sensitivity on cooperation. Using incentivized repeated public good games, we find that individual differences in justice sensitivity—the ease of perceiving, remembering, and reacting to injustice from the perspectives of an observer, beneficiary, or perpetrator, but not victim—substantially predicts cooperation in the absence of a punishment option. In contrast, when costly punishment is allowed for, cooperation becomes strategic as it also aims at avoiding subsequent punishment. If such a sanctioning mechanism is in place, justice sensitivity no longer predicts cooperation. The results regarding the degree of cooperation as reaction to initial non-cooperation of one’s counterparts highlight the role of justice-concerning personality traits for the sufficient provision of public goods, as sanctioning institutions are not always possible, effective, or suitable.     

Managing technological distance in internal and external collaborations: absorptive capacity routines and social integration for innovation

While high technological distance to project partners outside of the established value chain can positively influence innovation performance, project goals can only be achieved if the social integration of project members is improved in terms of coordination and communication. This paper draws on embeddedness and absorptive capacity literature to explore how social integration mechanisms translate into different learning outcomes in distant collaborations within and across organizational boundaries. Drawing upon expert interviews with project members as our primary source of data, we conducted an in-depth multiple case study analysis of a number of inter-organizational projects. Our findings indicate that the effect of different types of social integration mechanisms on learning outcomes also affect the ability to bridge distances in process and product technology. Moreover, they suggest that it is not just the extent, but also the interplay of social integration mechanisms surrounding internal and external absorptive capacity routines that enable project members to engage in the exploration, transformation and exploitation of distant knowledge. In examining how social integration mechanisms foster learning outcome in distant collaborations, our study contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity.     

“So,the Killings Continued”: Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

ABSTRACT

Many post-war states experience continuous low-intensity violence for years after the formal end of the conflict. Existing theories often focus on country-level explanations of post-war violence, such as the presence of spoilers or the nature of the peace agreement. Yet, post-war violence does not affect all communities equally; whereas some remain entrenched in violence, others escape the perpetuation of violent conflict. We argue that communities where wartime mobilization at the local level is based on the formation of alliances between armed groups and local elites are more likely to experience post-war violence, than communities where armed groups generate civilian support based on grassroots backing of the group’s political objectives. We explore this argument in a comparison of three communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which have experienced different levels of post-war violence. The analysis supports the main argument and contributes to the research on the microdynamics of civil war by outlining the implications of certain strategies of wartime mobilization and how these may generate localized legacies.