Demonisation and electoral support for populist radical right parties: A temporary effect

Since the 1980s, Western Europe has experienced the surge of populist radical right parties. In an attempt to ward off these electoral newcomers, established parties have pursued strategies of disengagement, such as exclusion and de-legitimisation. This study examines the electoral effects of an excessive form of de-legitimisation, which we label ‘demonisation’. We estimate the effects of demonisation on electoral support for the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) and its predecessor Groep Wilders. Time series analyses show that demonisation has a negative effect on electoral support, but only for Groep Wilders. Once the populist radical right party has made a successful entry into the party system, demonisation does not have its intended consequences.     

Carpool Karaoke: deconstructing the directly lived experience of hearing oneself singing

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of post-modern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature.     

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship

This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.     

Do Civil Wars,Coups and Riots Have the Same Structural Determinants?

The literature on political instability focuses on institutional and leader survival or outcomes like civil wars and coups. We suggest that this approach overlooks lower levels of instability and that isolating outcomes understates the likelihood that they are manifestations of similar structural determinants. We extend the notion of instability to encompass jointly but distinctly civil wars, coups, and riots. Our explanation focuses on the role of political institutions and the related ethnopolitical strife over state power. Using data from 1950 to 2007, we find that the three outcomes share some determinants such as a factional partial democracy and the exclusion from power of a large proportion of the population; the inverted U-shaped effect of political institutions is driven by a subset of semidemocracies; and there is a substitution relationship between civil wars and coups emerging from the composition of governing coalitions.     

Foreign threat and political party change: Russia and changes in party manifestos

How do political parties react to foreign security threats? There has been very little attention paid in the literature generally to how parties react to international events, particularly how parties react to foreign policy threats. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, we examine how political parties in countries in Europe have reacted to Russian actions in terms of their emphasis on security issues. Based upon our analysis of the manifestoes from 331 parties in 36 countries we find that, generally, interstate threats have no significant effect on the military position adopted by political parties, although these effects vary by party type and by the type of threat. Russian based threats appear to be associated with the Far Left becoming more dovish (which is consistent with what would be expected by the literature) and the Far Right becoming significantly less hawkish.     

Why do Indonesian politicians promote shari’a laws? An analytic framework for Muslim-majority democracies

Taking the discussion in the existing literature on the adoption of shari’a laws in democratising Muslim-majority countries as a starting point, we posit that there are two broad motivations for democratically-elected politicians to adopt shari’a laws and regulations: ideological conviction on the one hand and response to the expressed or perceived preference of constituents on the other hand. The ‘demand side’ can be further divided into the preferences of individual voters, and the interests of groups which act as power brokers, influencing the voting choices of individual citizens. These groups may be economic, religious, or other actors. These motivations are not mutually exclusive; the passage of a given shari’a regulation may fulfil two or all three of them simultaneously. However, we posit that the interaction between the place, timing, and content of shari’a laws passed in a nation as a whole will vary in various predictable ways, according to the dominant motivations. The dominant motivation may also affect the vigour with which the law is implemented.     

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.     

The Victims’ Directive and What Victims Want From Restorative Justice

Following fierce campaigning by victims’ groups, the European Commission has entered into a process of legislative and policy reforms with the aim of repositioning the victim in criminal proceedings. By November 2015, member states will need to have demonstrated that they have modified their domestic laws to give effect to the Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. For the first time, restorative justice is explicitly regulated at EU legal level, as the Directive aims to establish a baseline for its safe implementation across member states. With this EU-wide policy backdrop and using original data, the article posits evidence-based recommendations for the implementation of the Directive. The research was carried out in 2013–14 as part of the “Restorative Justice in Europe” project co-financed by the European Commission. The research took place in the United Kingdom and combined desk research and qualitative research strategies with victims, while it triangulated its findings with follow-up surveys with offenders and professionals.     

International Disorder and China's Strategic Thoughts

Since the 2008 international financial crisis,international political and economic disorder has become obvious.Major reasons are the decline of US-led Western developed economies' global influence;US and other Western countries inaction or ineffective actions;power diffusion allowing non-state actors to intervene;a global governance short of needed rules;and mainstream economic theory's overemphasis on market roles.International disorder is a long-term process posing a potential threat to China' s national interests.The situation challenges China to create an international economic and trade order,thereby shaping itself as prophet of global free trade,shaper of international economic and trade rules,and trendsetter for globalization.