‘You Can't Always Get What You Want’: The effects of winning and losing in a referendum on citizens' referendum support

In Western democracies, many citizens support the use of referendums. However, as referendums create satisfying outcomes for citizens with majority views, they could generate ambivalent feelings among voters for the minority option. Little is known about the effects of winning or losing a referendum for citizens' referendum support. This article analyses multiple-wave survey data from five referendums in Bavaria (Germany), Finland and the Netherlands. The findings show that losers' referendum support decreases in nearly all cases, but there is very limited evidence for an increase of winners' referendum support. Nevertheless, the results clearly indicate a winner-loser gap, suggesting that referendums have relatively more positive effects for winners' than for losers' referendum support. As such, this article extends previous findings of the non-stability of referendum support. As the legitimacy of democratic institutions depends upon losers' consent, these findings have important implications for the democratic potential of referendums.     

A ‘society … divisible into the blessed and the unblessed’: Michael Young and Meritocracy in Postwar Britain

‘Meritocracy’ continues to unfold as both core conceptual framework and political ideal of the language of social mobility. In recent decades, politicians of various hues have declared it a sine qua non of the so-called ‘classless society’. The longer trajectory of postwar discourses of equality reveal a more chequered conceptual past. Its origins in the forums of revisionist social democracy of the 1950s, and subsequently popularised in the writings of social democratic polymath, Michael Young, are much more circumspect. The article considers pivotal contributions and developments of this conceptual history and trajectory. It considers the origins and emergence of meritocracy as a dimension of discourses of equality in the 1950s, and the formative contribution of Michael Young, reaction and responses on the left to his 1958 seminal work, The Rise of the Meritocracy, and the subsequent ‘meritocratic turn’. In spite of its satirical origins and warnings of dire social consequences, meritocracy presently enjoys a confirmatory position as a concept of opportunity and social mobility, as an embedded ideal of social organisation and means of allocating differential rewards.     

Populists,Producers and the Politics of Rentiership

Populism studies finds itself in a crisis of originality. While some scholars have signalled over-usage, others have argued that by contextualising populism, we are able to specify our own ‘populist moment’ and remedy the term’s slipperiness. This article opts for the latter tactic through a comparison of two aspects of contemporary populism with late nineteenth century precedents. In the late nineteenth century, the American People’s Party pioneered a mode of mass politics anchored in agrarian and industrial labour which launched the term ‘populism’ in Western discourse. Contemporary populists show rhetorical and political overlap with this template, but also come up against two new constraints: (1) a stagnant capitalism increasingly centred on ‘rentiership’; and (2) a disorganised civil society. These factors render today’s populism resistant to analogy but also conceptually more specific, sharpening the contours of our populist moment.     

Fact Checking is About What we Change not Just Who we Reach

This article explores how the UK’s fact-checking organisation Full Fact has sought to tackle misinformation since its inception in 2010. Full Fact describes itself as a ‘second generation’ fact-checking organisation with dual aims of seeking to stop the spread of specific pieces of inaccurate information and using the evidence base from fact checking to secure systemic changes that help make misinformation rarer and less harmful. Ultimately, we are pursuing culture change. We are trying to create institutions in societies that can help anchor public debate to reality and to challenge the casual acceptance of deceptive and misleading behaviour.     

互联网 + 对中国企业民主管理实践的影响

当前,"互联网+"已经升级为中国国家战略,政府出台政策号召群团组织要拥抱互联网,中华全国总工会积极推动互联网与工会工作例如企业民主管理相融合,互联网正逐渐打破传统企业民主管理政治参与现状,职工由被动参与向主动参与转变,由部分参与向全部参与转变,互联网助推中国企业民主管理回归产业民主实质。     

Against Localism: Does Decentralising Power to Communities Fail Minorities?

The continued decline in levels of political engagement among British citizens has led many politicians, commentators and academics from across the political spectrum to advocate a move toward a more direct form of democracy via some kind of localism. The claim is that citizens feel increasingly estranged from the democratic process, and from those organisations on which they have historically relied to represent them within the political system. Consequently, localists argue, there now exists a gap between the people, the institutions which are supposed to work on their behalf, and the decisions made in their name, so the system needs to be reformed in such a way as to give individuals and local communities more of a direct input into the decision-making process. Calls for a more direct form of democracy via localism are popular among members of the progressive left and the 'new Conservative' right, and have become so dominant in political discourse that it is often suggested that 'we are all localists now'. This article raises questions about the localist agenda, and suggests that the adoption of a more direct form of democracy in Britain may not only fail to address the decline in political engagement, but may also result in the exclusion, marginalisation, and oppression of minority groups.     

Relativism

Modern democracies increasingly confuse civic or political equality with a radical relativism that calls into question legitimate principles of hierarchy and the very idea of reasonable value judgments. This confusion reflects a “corruption,” in Montesquieu’s sense, of democracy rooted in a refusal to recognize distinctions that are integral to both human nature and social life. A moderate form of cultural relativism is a genuine intellectual achievement that helps combat ethnocentrism and allows one to better appreciate the full range of human experience. But criteria of meaning and truth are by no means entirely dependent upon cultural context. Our contemporary awareness of the “relativity” of cultures and historical experiences must be complemented by a robust appreciation of the universality of Reason and citizenship.

Liberal Democracy Series I, 1972–1988: Definition, measurement, and trajectories

The purpose of this paper is to provide the definitional and empirical background to the Liberal Democracy Series I Index of democracy that is available in Bollen (1998) but whose rationale has not been published. More specifically, the paper (1) gives a definition of liberal democracy that has guided the formation of this index, (2) describes measures that correspond to this definition, (3) provides a measurement model that links the indicators of democracy to the latent variables that represent the concept, (4) explains the construction of the Liberal Democracy Series I Index, and (5) compares the Series I democracy measure to two other widely used democracy measures in a latent curve model. The Liberal Democracy Series I Index provides a simple unweighted measure of liberal democracy that minimizes the bias in expert ratings, is highly reliable and highly correlated with the latent liberal democracy variable. The evidenced reviewed here suggests that its measurement properties are superior to the Polity and Vanhanen democracy indices with the exception that it is available for a more limited period of years than these latter two.     

执政安全与党内民主建设中的风险防范

维护执政安全,防控执政风险,是执政党巩固执政地位的必然要求.执政党的执政风险可能来自多个方面,其中包括执政党自身的民主建设状况,故必须加强党内民主建设,发展党内民主.如果在党内民主建设中出现原则性偏差或措施失当,有可能在党内造成思想多元、成员分层、组织分派、政治权威降低等,从而削弱党的凝聚力和战斗力,进而威胁党的执政地位和党的生存发展.因此,在推进党内民主建设时,必须强化风险防范意识,并从目标、方向、道路、制度、程序等方面着手,探索出一条增量式、渐进式的党内民主发展道路.     

坚持和巩固马克思主义指导思想的一元化——兼论西方“普世价值”观的本质

近年来,国内外某些人鼓吹和宣扬的以民主、自由、人权等为主要内容的“普世价值”观,实际上是资产阶级在当今世界实行西化、和平演变和“颜色革命”的工具。社会主义社会是高度重视和发展民主、自由、人权的社会;坚持和完善社会主义民主、自由、人权,是中国特色社会主义发展的重要任务。在社会意识形态领域中,必须毫不动摇地坚持马克思主义指导思想的一元化。