Can the Democrats Win Again?

After losing two successive elections, debate has raged within the Democratic party over how to win back power without comprising the principles which the party has long stood for. This article explores the reasons why the Democrats were unable to defeat George W. Bush in 2004, despite the numerous problems of the incumbent' first term, and asks what lessons the Democrats can learn from their defeat. The second half of the article focuses on what issues and policies the Democrats should concentrate and what strategies the party should adopt in order to improve its image and broaden its popular appeal ahead of the 2008 election.     

2004年美国大选对美国选举制度的影响

2004 年美国大选中技术构件的改进,提高了美国选举制度的可操作性和合理性;竞选开销创历史新高,加深了金钱政治对选举制度民主公平原则的侵蚀;候选人通过谎言和反面信息争取选票,违背了选举制度的诚信道德准则。     

美国总统选举人团制度

总统选举入团制度是美国总统选举制度的重要组成部分.总统选举人团方案本身就是各种利益妥协的结果.经过二百多年的演变和发展,总统选举人团制度的内容和运行方式发生了诸多变化.迄今为止,它仍然是选举美国总统的重要机制,但存在许多缺陷和弊端.     

代表理论与代表组成结构问题分析

代表理论的核心问题是在代表和选民之间建立一种制度约束和激励机制,保证民主选举的真正有效与民主政治的正常运行。本文认为"代表组成结构"充分体现了民主选举的优越性,将之作为选举前分配名额比例和选举中提出确定候选人名单的依据,并没有一种坚实的代表理论作为支撑。实践证明,千方百计落实事先设计的代表结构比例,反而会牺牲民主选举的真实性。应该以代表理论反思我国选举制度运行过程中出现的弊端,改进与完善人大代表的选举,使得我国人民代表大会制度有一个健康的发展。     

Do volatile voters vote less correctly? An analysis of correct voting among vote (intention) switchers in US presidential election campaigns

The literature on electoral volatility and the literature on electoral campaigns hold contradictory views on voters switching vote (intention) during the campaign. In this note, we shed new light on this contradiction, making two contributions. First, we investigate the extent to which stable and volatile voters choose the correct party. Second, we distinguish levels of correct voting and the impact of the act of switching on the correctness of the vote. Our analyses of vote-switching in American elections show that, while volatile voters are less likely to vote correctly, they are more likely to switch from an incorrect to the correct party than vice versa. Furthermore, we show that following the campaign more closely makes voters more likely to switch vote (intention) towards the correct party.     

村委会选举中的富人贿选现象分析

富人贿选是我国村民自治实践中不可回避的客观现实。富人贿选具有严重的社会危害性,其消极影响主要表现为：压制了农村的民主萌芽,损害了党和政府的形象,加剧了农村社会矛盾,造成了村民“政治冷漠”。结合我国村民自治的发展实践,要想使富人贿选现象得到有效的抑制,一要进一步加强村务公开和民主管理工作,二要不断完善相关法律制度,三要规范村委会成员候选人资格条件,四要加强对选举的指导和监督。     

Intraparty Hostility: Social Identity,Subidentity, and the Hostile Media Effect in a Contested Primary

The hostile media effect (HME) has generally been tested in terms of in-groups and out-groups, with a “neutral” story in between. This ignores the nature of many social groups as comprising subgroups, often but not always sharing feelings of connectedness and purpose. In cases when bounded subgroups are at odds with one another, HME provides little guidance. A contested partisan primary provides such a case. This study takes identity centrality, candidate favorability, and perceived social network homogeneity as measures of partisanship and involvement, hypothesizing relationships between each and perceived bias against one’s candidate and party. Findings show that markers of candidate-focused social identity predict greater perceived bias against one’s candidate during the 2016 primary season, while party-focused identity fails to predict perceived bias against one’s party. This suggests that candidate support identity overrides plain partisanship during primaries, supporting concern that a heated primary might damage general election party unity. Subsequent postconvention findings suggest that the salience of candidate-focused identity fades, while homogeneity of one’s network regarding party support helps to make perceived hostility toward one’s party identity more salient. However, as campaigns become more candidate-centered, the contestation between nested candidate and party identities may grow fiercer.     

It Can't Happen Here,1 or Has It? Sinclair Lewis's Fascist America

Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, anticipated many aspects of Donald J. Trump's 2016 campaign and election in his 1935 satirical dystopia, It Can't Happen Here. It was his most popular novel to date and is still satisfying, thought-provoking political theater. Lewis was influenced by growing totalitarianism in Europe, reported on by his second wife, foreign correspondent, Dorothy Thompson. Noting the power of Father Coughlin and Huey Long, among others, to mobilize a public still suffering from the Great Depression, Lewis feared a fascist takeover of the American government by democratic means. Lewis's fictional nightmare features a loutish, ignorant demagogue, who is manipulated by a sinister ghostwriter adviser. With support from a resentful League of Forgotten Men, the demagogue is elected President and quickly establishes a military, racist, and anti-Semitic dictatorship. It Can't Happen Here dramatizes the dire consequences of this takeover, which is not taken seriously at first by Lewis's newspaper editor protagonist, but then is increasingly resisted. Lewis is a social satirist in the Mark Twain tradition, and his novel is worth reading today for its suggestive parallels with current history and its good-hearted humor.     

Credibility Enacted: Understanding the Meaning of Credible Political Leadership in the Dutch Parliamentary Election Campaign of 2010

In times of perception politics, the credibility of electoral candidates is a crucial asset in political marketing. This raises the question to which political leaders citizens attribute credibility and how political credibility is gained and lost through media performance. We analyze and compare two contrasting cases during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2010. Whereas in this campaign Mark Rutte—leader of the liberal party VVD—gained credibility, the credibility of Job Cohen—at the time, leader of the social-democratic PvdA—waned substantially. To understand this we extend the source credibility approach with a dramaturgical approach, and as such we shed light on what happens in the dynamic, interactive process between leaders and audiences in which credibility is constructed.     

Incumbency,internal processes and renomination in Indian parties

This paper analyses a critical aspect of the internal functioning of five major Indian political parties, namely the nomination of candidates for parliamentary elections, focusing on the pattern of renomination of former candidates and incumbents. The data are analysed against the literature on the structure and functioning of Indian parties, and interview material on the process of nomination in the 2009 and 2004 elections. From the perspective of a six-fold typology of centralisation of nomination processes drawn from the comparative literature, it is found that all the parties analysed are in either the second-most centralised, or even most centralised categories, and that for the three major national parties, Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist), past performance plays a role in nominations, the majority of incumbents being renominated in the post-1989 period.