The Ségolène Royal Phenomenon: Political Renewal in France?

This article analyses Ségolène Royal's rise during 2006 to become the first ever female mainstream French presidential candidate in the context of ongoing presidentialising tendencies within the French Fifth Republic. It considers the extent to which Royal's candidacy represented a turning point for the French Left, not only because of her gender, but also because of her challenge to the Left's traditional organisational and ideological norms of presidential electoral politics. Her participatory democratic campaign organisation, Désirs d'Avenir by-passed traditional party authority structures throughout 2006. However, in the face of declining poll ratings, Royal's candidacy reverted to a more orthodox relationship to the PS as 'presidential party'. Ideologically, her novel political language and down-to-earth style combine with a complex blend of egalitarianism and authoritarianism which treads novel ground. Yet the intriguing elements of her political vision have struggled to coalesce into a coherent and credible presidential programme.     

2008年大选后马来西亚政党政治的走势

2008年大选后,马来西亚执政党近四十年来在国会中的绝对优势被打破,一党独大制正在受到日益增大的转型压力.国民阵线面临着如何重塑执政合法性的问题,而反对党则会在加强联合的基础上进一步向执政党发起挑战.但在新的形势下执政党仍然具有较强的制度韧性,凭借其结构性优势还能继续执政,真正意义上的两线制或两党制短期内难以确立.     

Bring the party back in: Institutional design for ‘smart election fraud’

Autocrats face a dilemma. Continue with fraudulent electoral practices and risk revolt, or reduce fraud and risk losing elections. One solution is to structure electoral governance such that it allows for independence and professionalism at the center, lending credibility to the electoral process, and partisan local-level administration, enabling fraud at the micro level. Partisan poll workers can help deliver the vote by the use of ‘smart fraud’ – fraud that minimizes the risk of being caught and is used only when needed. In Armenia, the ruling party's vote share, as a proportion of all registered voters, increases with 2.5 percentage points in polling stations where the chairperson was randomly assigned to the ruling party. Fraud forensics suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this was falsification of the results protocol during the count. I conjecture that fraud is only used in high-stakes elections and that election observers are unable to detect it.     

“These Few Small Boats”: Representations of Asylum Seekers During Australia’s 1977 and 2001 Elections

ABSTRACT

This paper compares the asylum-seeker discourses of prime minister Malcolm Fraser and his minister for immigration and ethnic affairs, Michael MacKellar, during Australia’s 1977 federal election campaign, with those of prime minister John Howard and his minister for immigration and multicultural affairs, Philip Ruddock, during the much-analysed 2001 election campaign. It argues that in 1977 Fraser was not an outspoken advocate for asylum seekers as he was later in life, but that his silence—when considered in conjunction with MacKellar’s emphatic and humanising statements—functioned to depoliticise boat arrivals and calm public concerns. Further, it demonstrates that the arguments prosecuted by the Howard government in 2001 were not new; similar arguments had been made in 1977 but were decisively rebutted by MacKellar at the time. This analysis ultimately suggests that while government discourses have the power to amplify the latent fears and hostilities that can lead to moral panics, they also have the capacity to defuse them.     

The political phenotype of the disgust sensitive: Correlates of a new abbreviated measure of disgust sensitivity

The fields of political psychology and election studies often live separate lives. One reason has been the difficulty of including long psychological question batteries in the high-quality, representative samples that are the hallmark of election studies. In this study, we examine a novel one-item measure of psychological differences in sensitivity to one particular emotion: disgust. We demonstrate that disgust sensitivity serves as a foundational political difference that colors a very large range of social and political attitudes and behaviors: including ideology, political engagement, reactions towards outgroups, support for government intervention, behavior during a pandemic, and vote choice.     

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.     

If you ask,they will come (to register and vote): Field experiments with state election agencies on encouraging voter registration

We address the frequent critique that voter registration is a barrier to participation in the US. Institutional reforms to voter registration produce only small impacts on participation. We show the registration barrier can be reduced without changing laws or administrative processes using official communication seeking to change individual political behavior. In collaboration with state election agencies in two states, we conducted large-scale field experiments using low cost postcards aimed at increasing registration among eligible but unregistered citizens. The experiments find statistically and substantively significant effects on registration and turnout in subsequent elections. The research partnership with election officials is unusual and important for understanding electoral participation. Further, the population targeted for registration is broader than prior experiments on voter registration in the US. The results provide important insights about voter registration as a barrier to political participation, plus practical guidance for election officials to reduce this barrier.     

Treated politicians,treated voters: A natural experiment on political budget cycles

Although pre-electoral political manipulation of the budget — the political budget cycle (PBC) — has been long investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing. There also exist ongoing debates over how the budget is manipulated for electoral purposes. We address these issues by exploiting a natural experiment in Japan, where the timing of both executive and legislative elections in municipalities is fixed, staggered, and as good as random, and by using the detailed items of the municipal budget. We find that total and capital expenditures follow the PBC, but tax revenue does not. We also find that executive elections are associated with the PBC, but legislative elections are not. Against the conventional wisdom that democratic or developed countries are free from the PBC, our case of Japan offers an intriguing exception.     

Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft,Facebook, Twitter,and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle

This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election campaigns, in addition to field observations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We find that technology firms are motivated to work in the political space for marketing, advertising revenue, and relationship-building in the service of lobbying efforts. To facilitate this, these firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics. Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers. We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content, and execution. Given this, we argue that political communication scholars need to consider social media firms as more active agents in political processes than previously appreciated in the literature.     

Transparency for Results: Testing a Model of Performance Management in Open Government Initiatives

Government transparency continues to challenge existing frameworks for understanding organizational performance. Transparency has proven difficult to measure and results assessing its impacts are mixed. This article sets forward a model of performance-based accountability in open government initiatives. Data come from the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) database of over 1,000 transparency initiatives across 50 countries in 2013. Ordered logistic regression estimates the effect of management practices on three different measures of transparency performance, and the results broadly support the model. Expert interviews from two country cases offer insight into how performance management is used in the context of transparency reforms.