ThePolitical TricksofAbe

正Japan’s leader hopes to salvage his power by way of an early election Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dissolved the House of Representatives,or the lower house in the country’s bicameral parliament,on November 21.A consequent snap election will be held on December 14,two years ahead of schedule.In recent months,the Japanese economy has continued to slide and entered a technical     

Mid-Term Misfortune

正Barack obama strives for a sound legacy Predictably,the U.S.Republican Party(GOP)took back the Senate after eight years in a landslide victory during the mid-term congressional election in November.While the GOP is still in control of the House of Representatives,it also gained ground in state governor elections in Illinois,Maryland,Iowa and Colorado—the traditional spheres of influence of the Democrats.     

Arab Local Government in Israel: Partial Modernisation as an Explanatory Variable for Shortages in Management

About one-third of all local and regional councils in Israel are Arab. Ever since their establishment, and especially during the last decade, the Arab authorities have suffered from financial crises and from administrative and organisational deficiencies that jeopardize their functioning. Arab local politics is characterised by the increased strength of traditional clan-affiliated forces, at the expense of modern representative groups. The present article has tried to explain the problems that beset the management of Arab local government in Israel. We believe that the explanation is rooted in the fact that ‘partial modernisation’ is the dominant explanatory variable for Arab local government shortages.     

A New Typology of Electoral Violence: Insights from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Existing literature on election violence has focused on how violence suppresses voter participation or shapes their preferences. Yet, there are other targets of election violence beyond voters who have so far received little attention: candidates and government agencies. By intimidating rival candidates into dropping out of the race, political hopefuls can literally reduce the number of competitors and increase their likelihood of winning. Likewise, aspiring candidates can target government agencies perceived to be responsible for holding elections to push for electorally beneficial decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new typology of electoral violence and utilize new data of election violence that occur around executive elections in Indonesia from 2005 through 2012. The types of violence we identified differ in these ways: a) Of all cases of electoral violence observed in this article, most incidents were targeted towards candidates and government bodies; b) candidates are generally targeted before elections, whereas voter-targeting incidents are spread out evenly before and after elections and government-targeted violence tends to occur afterwards; c) pre-election violence is concentrated in formerly separatist areas, but post-election violence is more common in districts with prior ethnocommunal violence. These distinctions stress the importance of examining when and why different strategies are adopted.     

The Mass Media as Sentinel: Why Bad News About Issues is Good News for Participation

This article argues that negative news coverage of politically relevant social issues stimulates political participation by shaping citizen awareness of collective problems and interest in politics. By drawing citizen attention to social problems that government may attend to, the press acts as a sentinel for the mass public, cuing them to periods when participation is more important. Drawing on an analysis of the 1974 National Election Study in combination with the Center for Political Studies' content analysis of newspapers, I find evidence that bad news about issues is good news for participation.     

Television,Power, and the Public in Russia,by Ellen Mickiewicz

In the fall of 1994 a nonpartisan and nonprofit voter information organization Project Vote Smart-designed and implemented an education project for "atrisk" voters in northern California. The Project Vote Smart (PVS) effort was a systematic attempt to provide typically nonvoting groups both information and incentive to participate in the November general election. The results presented here suggest that the receipt of PVS materials did not directly increase the likelihood of voting or election interest. However, the receipt of PVS materials did make voters feel better about the resources they had to bring to bear on electoral choices.     

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]     

The 2012 United States election and the implications for East Asia

Abstract

The 2012 election resulted in a major victory for President Obama and while his Democratic Party improved its Congressional strength, the House of Representatives remains under Republican control. The election revealed the depth of America's political and voter divisions with each party showing dramatically different areas of strength and weakness. Yet the election did not hinge on foreign policy leaving the Obama administration likely to continue most of its earlier policies toward East Asia as marked by the multilayered ‘pivot’ toward Asia. Relations with China and North Korea are likely to remain difficult to manage while US–ROK links should be far smoother. Of particular concern is the economic sluggishness and rising nationalism in Japan which could well cause bilateral problems with the US and regional problems with Japan's neighbors, including US ally, South Korea. And at home the bipolar divisions over how best to deal with America's economic revitalization could well impede US abilities to exert a convincing multi-dimensional role in the region.     

Structural Models of Voter Behavior in the 2000 Polish Presidential Election

Abstract

The data of the 2000 Polish presidential election have been analyzed according to Newman and Sheth's model of voter's choice behavior (1985). Although this model was originally interpreted within the statistical perspective of discriminant analysis, it could be also extended within the framework of structural equation methodology. Namely, if the seven cognitive domains (Issues and Policies, Emotional Feelings, Candidate Image, Current Events, Epistemic Issues, Social Imagery and Epistemic Issues) are assumed to be distinct and separate, they can be treated as independent (predictive) variables with the voter's intention as a dependent or predicted variable. The three models were tested and the resuits of path analysis show the complex pattern of mutual interdependence between the cognitive domains and voter behavior. The specificity of the cause-effect relationship obtained by the structural equation methodology presented in the paper allows us to put forward some practical suggestions regarding the way electoral campaigns should be conducted.     

To the Advantage of the Big Parties but They Seem to Lose Interest—TV Advertising During the 2002 German National Election Campaign

Abstract

Since the introduction of commercial broadcasting in Germany during the 1980s, parties are allowed to purchase airtime in addition to the free airtime they receive on public channels. This has led to an increasing disadvantage for the smaller parties. In addition to the fact that a graded system of allocation of airtime is applied for ads on public TV and small parties receive fewer slots than their big competitors, they cannot afford to buy extra airtime. Comparisons of style and content of the party ads further show that the bigger parties produce highly professional ads while the broadcasts of smaller parties are often unprofessional and almost home-style. While the spots allow unknown parties to receive the attention of the audience, their unprofessional offerings might work to their disadvantage. While the ads of the 2002 electoral campaign have confirmed these developments, analyses of the ads of the big parties at the same time hint at a growing disenchantment with the ads as a campaign channel. Even the big parties tend to invest less money in their TV campaign than in former campaigns, which at least partly seems to be due to unfavorable conditions for electoral advertising on TV. This paper presents findings from analyses of the party ads in 2002 which are compared with findings from a long-term analysis which covers the elections since 1957, the first year in which party ads were shown on German TV.