A Mountain to Climb: The Labour Together 2019 Election Review

The Labour Together review of the 2019 election brings together polling data, survey data, interviews, and submissions from across the Labour movement. An unpopular leader, tensions around the Brexit position, and a manifesto which was not seen as credible, are all found to have contributed to the scale of the defeat, but Labour’s unexpectedly strong performance in 2017 also masked long-term issues in its connection with the electorate and within the party’s campaign organisation. The report attempts to move beyond simply diagnosing the difficulties the party faces, but some of the thorniest issues for the party to resolve are nonetheless left unresolved.     

Digital Election Observation: Regulatory Challenges around Legal Online Content

Between public debates about ‘hacking’ elections, so-called ‘fake news’ and online disinformation campaigns, it has become hard to imagine what free and fair elections in a digital environment could look like. This challenge is particularly pronounced for election observers who monitor free and fair elections. How should election observers fulfil this task when reliable data in online media campaigns are often not even available to media regulators? The following article provides a brief overview of existing challenges around online content regulation and how these apply to elections and election observation. It then considers where resources for digital electoral observation exist and how most effectively to build on these before, in conclusion, discussing next steps and potential opportunities to develop digital election observation further.     

Critical election and a new party system: Italy after the 2015 regional election

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical.     

Where you lead we will follow: a longitudinal study of strategic political communication in election campaigning

The ways in which election campaigns are planned, organized, and conducted have changed considerably during recent decades, and political parties constantly employ new ideas and practices in order to communicate as strategically and effectively as possible. The concept of strategic political communication refers to an organization's purposeful management of information and communication to achieve certain political goals. In this article, we focus on the role of the individual political party in developing election campaigning. The empirical material covers the 2002, 2006, and 2010 Swedish national election campaigns and illustrates how political parties lead and follow each other in the development of strategic political communication. By exploring party agency, this article contributes to the understanding of how ideas and practices of strategic political communication emerge and develop over time in election campaigning.     

The Myths of Data-Driven Campaigning

Campaigns’ ability to use data and analytics to make informed decisions about the strategies and tactics they deploy is unparalleled, and also understudied. While much has been written about the possibilities of data driven campaigning, the on-the-ground realities are often much less precise and much less novel than journalistic coverage implies. This piece investigates the gap between the rhetoric of data driven campaigning and actual campaign practices, especially as it relates to how the 2016 Trump campaign compares to the 2016 Clinton campaign, other prior presidential campaigns, and down-ballot races in recent years. It focuses on the use of analytics in two channels in particular, social media and email, as those offer many opportunities for targeting and message testing. Ultimately, I argue that despite the great amount of journalistic attention paid to the Trump campaign’s novel use of data and analytics, their email campaign was significantly underpowered, while their use of Facebook analytics was comparable in quality and greater in quantity than other leaders in the field.     

Fighting your friends? A study of intra-party violence in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Second, low levels of competitiveness – typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence – increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes.     

Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe

Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning of the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe stood at a crossroads. This period of imbalance and uncertainty affected the violent interaction in newly reformed electoral arenas with serious consequences for legitimizing democratic change. Despite the well-documented tension that existed in the region, the importance of violence in the electoral arena is rather neglected. The article approaches this gap as the first attempt to map electoral violence in a new typological environment where the process of transformation has affected political pluralism and the patterns of political contest. It argues that electoral violence is not a rare phenomenon in the region of post-Communist Europe and the dynamic varies on a great scale. Moreover, the article presents a picture of electoral violence occurring in different settings with potentially different contextual preconditions that need to be studied separately.     

新农村建设中的乡村民主选举探析——以湖南省S县T乡为例

建设社会主义新农村离不开村民自治的推进和完善.而民主选举是村民自治的首要标志,也是村民自治的基础.作者在文中以湖南省S县T乡为个案,通过深入调查,介绍该乡民主选举的现状,解析存在的问题及其产生的主要原因,进而提出改进与完善的对策建议.     

论抗战时期陕甘宁边区的民主选举及其启示

抗战时期,陕甘宁边区大力推进民主选举,推行普遍、平等、直接、无记名的选举原则,实行竞选和"三三制"选举政策。陕甘宁边区的民主选举,为我们今天完善选举制度、发展人民民主、建设社会主义和谐社会留下了宝贵的经验和启迪。     

佛州缠讼激--记2000年美国总统选举在佛州的法庭纷争

2000年美国总统选举是美国历史上拖得时间最长、斗争最激烈、双方最为世界瞩目的一次大选.佛州的"白宫之战"则是决定选战胜负的关键一役.更为世人称奇的是,共和党布什阵营和民主党阵营戈尔,破天荒地将总统宝座之争先后诉诸于法庭.围绕着选举应反映民意还是应遵守联邦以及各州的司法规定,从州法院缠讼到联邦法院,从基层法院打到最高法院,最后由联邦最高法院9位大法官以5票对4票的裁决,一槌定音粉碎了戈尔入主白宫的美梦,把布什送进了白宫.