Bridging the ideological space: A cross‐national analysis of the distance of party switching

Scholars have investigated the characteristics of volatile voters ever since the first voter surveys were carried out and they have paid specific attention to the role of political sophistication on vote switching. Nevertheless, the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear. With increasing volatility over the past decades this question has furthermore grown in relevance. Is the growing unpredictability of elections mostly driven by sophisticated voters making well‐considered choices or is the balance of power in the hands of unsophisticated ‘floating voters’? Several scholars have argued that even under conditions of increasing volatility switching is still mostly confined to changes to ideologically close parties. Most researchers, however, have used rather crude measures to investigate this ‘leap’ between parties. To advance research in this field, this article directly models the ideological distance bridged by volatile voters when investigating the link between political sophistication and volatility. This is done using Comparative Study of Electoral systems (CSES) data that encompass a broad sample of recent parliamentary elections worldwide. Results indicate that voters with an intermediate level of political knowledge are most likely to switch overall. When taking into account the ideological distance of party switching, however, the confining impact of political knowledge on the vote choices made is clearly dominant, resulting in a linear decrease of the distance bridged as voters become more knowledgeable.     

Truth and Politics: Thinking About Evidence‐Based Policy in the Age Of Spin

Evidence‐based policy and the contemporary politics of spin are said to characterise contemporary politics and policy. The paper asks firstly what sense is to be made of this coincidence, and then documents this coincidence. It then asks how credible is the conception of ‘evidence’ espoused by advocates of evidence‐based policy when it is conventionally represented as an ‘objective’ counter to ideology, spin or opinion? It points to major problems with the conventional understandings of ‘evidence’. It is suggested that while the evidence‐based policy literature relies on the associations ‘evidence’ is presumed to have with ‘sensory data’, this is neither the case nor all that defensible. The paper reprises arguments advanced by Henry Mayer and Hannah Arendt that the relationship of politics to the empirical was and is a far more complex relationship than is conventionally understood to be the case.     

China-Europe Relations Undergo Comprehensive Upgrade简

正CHINA-Europe interaction is gathering pace around the tenth anniversary of the comprehensive strategic partnership between China and the EU.Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte visited China in November 2013.A week later,Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang met with President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the 16th meeting of Chinese and European Union leaders.Shortly after,Li Keqiang     

Fruitful Cooperation between China and Dominica——An Interview with David Xu,Special Envoy of the Commonwealth of Dominica

正THIS year marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Commonwealth of Dominica.China’s1.3 billion-strong population dwarfs Dominica’s less than 100,000 inhabitants.However,the two countries share a common understanding of equality and mutual benefit and have developed bilateral relations noticeably over the past 10 years,witnessed by achieve-     

Between punishment and discipline: comparing strategies to control unauthorized immigration in the United States

Immigration scholars have noted the rise of a distinctive discourse concerning immigrants in the United States. The ‘immigrant threat’ discourse is said to portray immigrants as an existential threat to the country and contributes to highly restrictive enforcement policies. Through a close examination of national political debates concerning comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) (2005–2007), the paper shows that most politicians involved in this debate (from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans) agreed with the basic assumptions of this general discourse. But the paper also identifies important variants on the ‘threat’ discourse and associated strategies. Hardline conservatives stressed that the essential ‘illegalness’ of immigrants posed a threat to the country. Protecting the nation state from this threat required policies to totally banish all undocumented immigrants from the country, irrespective of their ‘good’ conduct or exceptional circumstances. Moderate and liberal reform advocates agreed with the idea that undocumented immigrants posed a threat to the country. However, they believed that banishment alone could not address the threat. Instead they advocated a strategy of risk management whereby the population would be differentiated according to levels of risk (high to low priority) and policies of inclusion and exclusion would be adjusted accordingly. This would allow the government to incorporate low risk/priority immigrants while freeing government resources to target the ‘truly threatening’ groups (i.e., criminals, delinquents, homeless, repeat unauthorized entries, etc.). Thus, while both sides conceded that undocumented immigrants were a threat to the country, they developed important variants on the discourse and contrasting policy solutions to exert control over the population.     

Introduction: the body as a site for politics: citizenship and practices of contemporary slavery

This special issue of Citizenship Studies brings the meaning of citizenship into dialogue with recent work on the body and with practices of contemporary slavery. In bringing the concepts of citizenship, bodies and slavery into collision, we highlight the need to couple slavery with possibilities of citizenship as an alternative to the way in which, as Paddy McQueen below puts it, ‘citizenship and slavery are mutually exclusive: one can be either a citizen or a slave, not both’. Recent ideas about the body as a site for politics, where the body is understood in terms of embodied relationality in a situation – a necessarily social category – are a means for bringing about a richer encounter between the concepts of citizenship understood as political subjectivity (as developed in the work of Engin Isin), bodies and slavery. Practices of slavery deny relationality, based instead on a binary master/slave logic of power relations. This introduction connects citizenship with slavery, by identifying citizenship as embodied political subjectivity and slavery as one of the conditions in which the very possibility of this is denied. Taking embodied relationality into account, recognising the necessarily social embodiment of concepts and abjuring an abstract, disembodied sphere of concepts, thus disrupts the standard understanding of slavery as rights violations.     

Private association and public brand: the dualistic conception of political parties in the common law world

This paper examines the legal conception of political parties. It does so by unearthing the history and ontology of the common law relating to political parties in international perspective. The flexibility of the unincorporated association, in which parties are understood through the private law of contract as networks of internal rules or agreements, rather than as legal entities, has proven to be a mask. In the common law’s imagination, the ideal party is a ground-up organization animated by its membership. But the law mandates no such thing, and in its statutory and constitutional conception intra-party democracy may be sublimated as parties need be no more than an electoral persona or brand.     

建设廉洁政治:从理念到实践

党的十八大报告提出"建设廉洁政治",意义重大。廉洁政治,就是不以权谋私的政治。在社会主义中国,干部清正、政府清廉、政治清明,共同构成廉洁政治建设的基本形态。作为具有典型意义的实践探索,延安时期和建国初期的廉洁政治建设对当前有重要的镜鉴价值。建设廉洁政治的实践路径:要稳妥推进政治体制改革,化解权力过于集中的风险;走中国特色反腐倡廉道路,树立廉政自觉与自信;贯彻党的群众路线,发挥群众在廉政建设中的主体作用;加快构建完善的国家廉政体系,形成严密的反腐铁笼;深化反腐败体制机制与机构改革,激发反腐败活力;开展学习和实践党章活动,维护党章的权威性和严肃性。     

Guide to Authors

正Published by China Institute of International Studies,China International Studies is China’s first English-language journal on diplomacy and international politics for formal circulation.The magazine mainly publishes the latest research achievements of Chinese scholars and specialists on China’s diplomacy,international politics and international relations under     

All aboard? Scottish and Welsh multi-level voting; competence,leadership and blame-attribution

ABSTRACT

Scotland and Wales went to the polls on the same day in 2016, the former in a post- independence referendum environment and the latter shortly after receiving further devolved powers. Despite this horizontal simultaneity, the results in these elections displayed considerable diversity. Sub-state elections are often classified as second-order and as such are characterized by lower turnouts, anti-government voting and small party support. However regional elections in the United Kingdom sit uncomfortably in this definition. This article focuses on the experience of Scotland and Wales, exploring regional and national factors that help to explain regional electoral outcomes. It examines valence models, multi-level blame attribution, and relative national and regional party leader support. In a second stage, a multinomial logistic regression is undertaken, finding that the relative importance of regional and national factors differs between the two regions.