Clientelism and Control: PAP’s Fight for Safety in GE2015

Abstract

This article looks at the reasons the People’s Action Party (PAP) secured its decisive victory in the 2015 general election. The discussion examines the impact of the campaign and pre-election period on voting behaviour. While the opposition’s performance before and during the campaign reactivated its core supporters, the PAP’s control of the political narrative, rejuvenation of its grassroots machinery and effective use of resources provided an advantage that was instrumental in their electoral success. Most Singaporeans had decided how they would vote before the campaign began. Despite perceptions that the election was about the economy and the nationalist rhetoric associated with Singapore’s 50th anniversary and the passing of statesman Lee Kuan Yew, the argument in the paper suggests that the 2015 election provides insights into the breadth of clientelist politics in Singapore and how important state patronage and the control of the state are for holding on to political power in the city-state.     

名人代言虚假广告的法律规制

近些年,请名人做产品广告或出任企业形象代言人之风盛行。但是,在名人代言的产品或服务广告中存在着违法、虚假内容,而我国相关法律、法规没有明确规定名人在虚假广告中的责任。应通过建立名人代言广告的审查及禁止准入制度;明确其代言虚假广告的法律责任;推进公益诉讼等来进行规制。     

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.     

Complaining about rivals: Indifference,cooperation, and competition in the governance of advertising

What should rivals do when they see competitors breaking agreed rules within systems of self‐regulation? This study investigates compliant behavior among British advertisers to empirically answer this question. It analyses five years of complaints (n = 146,062) and adjudications (n = 4,832) published by the self‐regulatory body for the British advertising industry. The majority of firms adopt a strategy of indifference and rarely regulate their rivals. Highly engaged firms either adopt an angelic strategy as they use their resources to complain about their rivals; a deviant strategy as they are subject to a large number of complaints; or a predatory strategy as they attack their rivals through advertising regulation. This illustrates a unique form of regulatory capture in which a regulatory system becomes an arena of competition for some actors while continuing as a governance mechanism for others.     

A sociosemiotic approach to consumer engagement in user-generated advertising

User-generated advertising (UGA) has been booming over the past few years as marketers have been actively seeking to enhance consumer engagement. Yet, our understanding of the implications, the importance and the potential of UGA from a cultural branding point of view remains limited. This study furnishes the conceptual model of consumer cultural engagement in order to appreciate in a more nuanced manner than afforded by consumer sentiment analyses how UGA contributes to fleshing out co-creatively a brand vision. To this end, a sociosemiotic approach is pursued by dimensionalizing the cultural resources employed in UGA along the interlocking layers of text/register/domain in a cline of instantiation. The conceptual model is exemplified by recourse to a UGA corpus from the 10th and final wave of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl promo mechanism, undergirded by a mixed methods research design that features a grounded theoretical procedure, facilitated by quantitative analyses.     

Troubling the ontological bubble: middle school students challenging gender stereotypes

In this paper, we discuss how a selection of eighth-grade students (13–14-year-olds) responded when they were asked to publicly challenge the gender binary for a critical media literacy school assignment in the USA. We describe the ways in which students negotiated the dual projects of complying with the assignment to create video ads that challenged gender stereotypes and maintaining their gendered sense of self. While the videos had virtually all students disrupting gender in some way, many did so even as they reinforced the notion of gender as a binary. We apply the idea of ontological bubble, as well as concepts from post-structural theories, to help us make sense of the different methods students used to maintain the gender binary.     

Rebels without a Cause? The Irish Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty

The Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty follows a pattern of class-voting also seen in the 2005 referendums on the European Constitution. However, the poll differed in other respects. Polling in the wake of the vote suggested that the main reason given for voting no was a lack of knowledge about the treaty (22 per cent of no voters holding that view). A further 40 per cent of the voters voted no because they claimed not to understand the Treaty. This is in contrast to referendums in 2005 in Spain and the Netherlands where, respectively 70 and 51 per cent, of those with a self confessed 'very limited ' knowledge of the Constitution voted yes.     

Elements of Negativity: Volume and Proportion in Exposure to Negative Advertising

Recent studies contend that negative advertising benefits voters. However, these studies only measure the volume of negativity in campaigns, often relying on survey data on voter behavior coupled with estimates of negative ad exposure. Theories of information processing indicate that the proportion of negativity may yield influences spanning a range of judgments related to candidate construction and voting behavior, yielding effects that are different from the influence of sheer volume. Thus, I argue that the proportion of negativity also has an influence, and that it is likely more often to be detrimental. I examine this claim using survey data and conclude that prevailing accounts of the effects of negative advertising campaigns are underspecified and, as a result, potentially overly optimistic. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

宽严相济刑事政策与刑事检察工作

宽严相济刑事政策是继惩办与宽大相结合、“严打”刑事政策后的新发展,其核心是区别对待,当宽则宽,该严则严,宽严互补。在刑事检察工作中贯彻落实宽严相济的刑事政策具有重大的现实意义,目前重点要强调“宽”的一面。要通过树立宽严相济的执法理念,扩大相对不起诉的适用范围,建立繁简分流的办案机制,正确运用批准逮捕权和刑事和解制度等来实现“宽”的一面。通过区别犯罪种类和情形,依法从重从严打击严重刑事犯罪,从而实现“严”的一面。     

Parties’ issue strategies on the drawing board: the 2017 Austrian case

Abstract

Parties may rely on different issue agendas when tailoring their electoral campaigns in an attempt to win elections. This paper compares two key party issue strategies to examine which one the victorious Austrian Peoples’ Party (ÖVP) relied on the most during the 2017 Austrian election campaign vis-à-vis its main competitors. These two key party strategies are the ‘riding-the-wave’ model, which posits that parties focus on issues that currently concern voters the most and the recent ‘issue-yield model’, which instead suggests that parties adopt strategic behaviour targeting all those issues with genuine opportunities for electoral expansion. It is found that, compared to the other main parties in the 2017 Austrian election campaign, the ÖVP was the one most clearly relying on the issue-yield approach. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party’s exploitation of issue strategies, and voter representation beyond the Austrian case.