从2018年地方选举看俄罗斯左翼政党发展态势

俄罗斯地方选举的结果往往能够反映出俄罗斯的政治社会形势、中央地方关系的变化情况以及精英的流动和发展状况,对国家杜马选举甚至俄罗斯总统选举都有一定的影响。2018年俄地方选举呈现出不同以往的特点,普京支持的“统一俄罗斯”党不仅失去多个地区的领导权,在地区立法机构的席位也大幅缩水。相比之下,俄罗斯联邦共产党则取得了不错的竞选成绩,在所有参选地区的得票率都有所提升,大幅提高了在地区立法机构中的席位占比。但是由于政治当局的打压、左翼政党内部的分裂和俄罗斯联邦共产党自身的发展局限,俄罗斯左翼政党在短期内依然无法与强大的政权党抗衡。不断进行理论创新、加强党的自身建设、联合其他左翼政党和爱国力量,才是俄罗斯左翼政党复兴的长远之计。     

我国乡村贿选及其治理对策研究

在村民委员会换届选举中，我国出现了较为严重的乡村贿选问题。乡村贿选侵犯了村民的选举权，滋生了村官腐败现象，败坏了社会风气，危及到农村的社会稳定。乡村贿选是行贿人（候选人）、受贿人（选民）等相关人员在特定的法律制度背帚下为了自身的利益而相互作用的结果。因此，需要加快法律制度建设，完善相关的法律体系，强化对贿选的惩罚力度，提高贿选的违法成本，使行贿人和受贿人双方都无利可图，从而有效地遏制贿选的发生和泛滥。     

The Political Economy of Facebook Advertising: Election Spending,Regulation and Targeting Online

Political advertising on Facebook is the latest in a long line of developments in campaign practice, and is a tool that has been mobilised extensively in elections around the world. In this article, we explore what we know about Facebook advertising at elections and ask what existing data from the UK Electoral Commission can reveal about current usage. Highlighting the principles behind Facebook advertising, we argue that existing metrics offer little insight into current campaign trends—posing analytical, methodological and normative challenges for academics and electoral regulators alike. Moreover, we argue that these challenges strike at the heart of debates about democratic responsibility and the degree to which governments should cede responsibility to commercial actors who may have differing understandings of fundamental democratic norms.     

‘Austria First’ revisited: a diachronic cross-sectional analysis of the gender and body politics of the extreme right

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.     

The distorting effects of racial animus on proximity voting in the 2016 elections

While the use of racial appeals by the 2016 Trump campaign is indisputable, researchers are actively debating their precise role in influencing voter behavior in the election. We seek to expand upon existing research which finds that racial animus electorally benefited the Trump campaign. We examine to what extent those benefits also materialized for GOP candidates down-ballot and whether racial animus distorted ideological proximity voting in the 2016 election. We find that racial animus among voters helped Republicans at multiple ballot levels and that higher levels of racial animus distorted spatial voting among voters ideologically closest to the Democratic candidate.     

“Lucy says today she is a Labordoodle”: how the dogs-of-Instagram reveal voter preferences

Instagram is an image-centric social media application, launched in October 2010 with the explicit aim of allowing members to share their smart phone photos with the world. Posts typically combine photographs with a short verbal text, and as such provide fertile ground for multisemiotic analysis. Further, at times of political significance or upheaval, Instagram, like other social media platforms, provides a space for the public to express opinions or emotions. The fact that citizens do this through a combination of words and images on Instagram is the subject of analysis in this article. Using a dataset of 92 Instagram posts that made use of the discourse tagging hashtag #dogsatpollingstations at the time of the 2016 Australian federal election, this study demonstrates the multisemiotic strategies used by members of the public to show their dissatisfaction with the incumbent government, and their endorsement of other political parties. The study also demonstrates the triangulation of multiple methods, and as such is an example of corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis.     

The house size effect and the referendum paradox in U.S. presidential elections

Barthélémy et al. (2014), extending the work of Neubauer and Zeitlin (2003), show that some U.S. presidential elections are subject to a ‘House size effect’ in that the winner of the election, i.e., the candidate who wins a majority of electoral votes, depends on the size of the House of Representatives. The conditions for the effect relate to the number of ‘Senate’ versus ‘House’ electoral votes won by each candidate, but the relationship is not straightforward due to ‘locally chaotic’ effects in the apportionment of House seats among the states as House size changes. Clearly a Presidential election that is subject to the House size effect exhibits the referendum paradox, i.e., the electoral vote winner is the popular vote loser, for some House sizes but not for others.     

庸人政治、偏激取向与民主社会的异化

现代社会民主化进程中往往呈现出两种现象:一是庸人往往占据高位,而那些事变创造性人物则越来越为主流社会所遗弃,导致新思想对社会产生作用的时滞越来越长;二是呈现出强烈的极端性和好斗性,那些拥有权力优势的国家和个人更易于实行机会主义。究其原因,这体现了当今民主体制的缺陷和相关条件的不成熟。一者,如果对民主选举的范围和内容不进行界定,那么多数至上规则中获得优胜的往往是基于影响力原则而不是贤能原则;二者,如果社会大众的教育水平没有达到一定程度,那么集体行动往往会呈现出狂热和非理性。     

对社会主义协商民主的理论阐释

协商民主是20世纪80年代兴起于西方的一种民主理论范式。传入中国后,引起了国内学者的广泛关注,党的十八大提出了发展"社会主义协商民主"的目标。从结构上看,社会主义协商民主应该包括党内协商民主、执政协商民主、国内党际协商民主以及人民协商民主四个方面。就目前而言,我国既存在着发展社会主义协商民主的有利因素,同时也存在着民主传统缺失、选举民主不发达、公民社会发育不成熟等不利因素。发展社会主义协商民主,在思想上要正确理解社会主义协商民主与西方协商民主、政治协商以及选举民主的内在区别,在制度上要将协商嵌入票决民主的已有制度结构,在行动上要选好社会主义协商民主的突破口。     

'Brazil Needs to Change': Change as Iteration and the Iteration of Change in Brazil's 2002 Presidential Election1

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's triumph in Brazil's 2002 presidential election was construed in terms of a promise of radical change against the holders of the status quo . This article argues that in fact a more subtle political game was a stake in the election, a contest over the meaning and limits of change itself. The article examines how the various players – Lula da Silva, outgoing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the PSDB's presidential candidate José Serra – invoked and iterated a discourse of change to define and redefine the political dividing lines that marked out the electoral dispute and attempted to set or fix the distinctions between their political positions.