Setting the Post War Australian Policy Agenda – Causes and Content

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch‐all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted.     

Ethnic party competition beyond the segmented market

The outbidding model of ethnic politics focuses on party competition in an ethnically perfectly segmented electoral market where no party appeals to voters across the ethnic divide. The power sharing model retains this assumption, yet tries to prevent outbidding through moderation-inducing institutional design. Empirically, imperfectly segmented electoral markets and variance of ethnic party strategies beyond radical outbidding have been observed. To provide a stepping stone towards a more complete theory of ethnic party competition, this article introduces the notion of nested competition, defined as party competition in an imperfectly segmented market where some – but not all – parties make offers across ethnic divides and where competition in intra-ethnic arenas is nested within an inter-ethnic arena of party competition. The notion of nested competition helps explain why ethnic outbidding is not omnipresent in contemporary multi-ethnic democracies. A moderate position on the ethnic dimension that appears inauspicious from the perspective of intra-ethnic competition can turn into the strategically superior choice once ethnic parties take the whole system of competitive interactions within intra- and inter-ethnic arenas into account. A case study of nested competition for Hungarian votes in the Vojvodina region of Northern Serbia illustrates the conceptual innovations.     

Monopolising the Centre: The AKP and the Uncertain Path of Turkish Democracy

The loss of reform momentum and rising authoritarianism during the most recent phase of AKP government indicate that Turkish democracy is in crisis. Although the Gezi protests emerged as a movement from below reacting to the rising authoritarianism of the AKP government, it did not turn into an organised and sustainable movement. Similarly, external anchors or reputational effects are failing to reverse the backsliding of Turkish democracy. The notion of ‘bounded communities’ is a key concept in accounting for the continued dominance of Erdo?an and the AKP in the face of significant pressure for change. Erdo?an’s victory in the August 2014 presidential elections generates both benign and pessimistic scenarios for the future of Turkish democracy.     

Realising the Public Person

In response to a crisis of representative democracy in many Western countries, (local) governments have introduced instruments to circumvent political parties in order to establish more direct links between citizens and governments. One of these instruments is rendering electoral systems more personal, that is by giving more weight to preferential voting. Preferential voting is important since it constitutes a major element of the personal vote and it determines whether parties or voters are the main decision-makers in designating representatives. We have investigated, in relation to the local elections in Flanders (Belgium), in what kind of municipalities voters are most likely to cast a preferential vote, whether the electoral reform granting voters more power has had an effect, and if it has had an effect, in what kind of municipalities. We have put forward five groups of explanatory variables: socio-demographic, political, social capital, geographic and ballot form variables. Our analysis shows that variables from each group correlate significantly with the percentage of preferential votes, with population density and electronic voting as most important variables. A comparison between the 1994 and 2006 elections often yields the reverse picture: characteristics of municipalities that have a positive effect on the percentage of preferential votes cast have a negative impact on the evolution of preferential voting and vice versa (electronic voting being an exception). This results in the only obvious effects of the electoral reform being seen in urban municipalities, because elsewhere local politics was already to a large extent personalised by politicians being locally known. We could conclude that in these rural municipalities the electoral reform was superfluous.     

Anti-Immigrant Parties,Local Presence and Electoral Success

Abstract

Does the local organisational presence of anti-immigrant parties affect their chances for electoral success? In order to answer this question, the article explores the potential of a supply-oriented explanation to anti-immigrant party success by examining the electoral advancements the Sweden Democrats (SD) made in the 2006 and 2010 elections. Our results indicate that traditional demand-side explanations to anti-immigrant party success can be successfully complemented by an ‘internal supply-side argument’ to make the electoral fates of these parties more intelligible. Whether the SD had a local organisational presence had a substantial effect on its results in the national election and on the probability of gaining representation in local councils. Thus, the party’s fate in the national as well as local elections was largely determined by whether or not it had a local organisational presence in Swedish municipalities.     

Parties,Recruitment and Modernisation: Evidence from Local Election Candidates

Using pooled data from four separate nationwide surveys of local election candidates conducted from 2006–09 the paper assesses the role and importance of parties in the recruitment and selection of candidates. In many respects candidates are similar to councillors with men outnumbering women in a two to one ratio, with very few non-white candidates coming forward for selection and an age bias towards older rather than younger people. Candidates are found generally to have higher educational qualifications and to be employed in professional and managerial populations than in the public at large. Although a majority of candidates are resident in the ward that they contest a large fraction live elsewhere, suggesting that local parties cast the net widely during the recruitment process. The data suggest that the recruitment networks used by parties are relatively closed with many candidates reporting prior experience as local party officer holders or as members of charitable organisations and local public bodies. For two-thirds of candidates the initial decision to stand follows from a request by someone else, often a fellow party member. Women are more likely to be asked than men. Although candidates are aware of the current under-representation of some social and ethnic groups they are generally against using affirmative action measures to redress any imbalance. Although local parties are sometimes seen as contributing towards the problem of under-representation of some groups on council benches the data suggest than an increase in independent candidates would be unlikely to improve the situation and could perhaps cause it to deteriorate still further.     

Democracy promotion: the relationship of political parties and civil society

Organizations involved in the growing field of democracy promotion need to find effective ways to aid both political parties and civil organizations and, where necessary, to foster close collaboration between them. But they also must respect their autonomy and help them realize their own democratic objectives. It is important to recognize the differences between the two sectors: civil society should not be subordinate to parties, and it would be a mistake to wrap the party sector into an undifferentiated concept of civil society. Strategies to assist democracy should, then, distinguish between four main political contexts: authoritarian; emerging democracy; post-dictatorial situations where government is not committed to democracy; and war-torn or post-conflict countries.     

Revisiting the crisis of representation thesis: the Indian context

This article addresses the ‘crisis of representation’ thesis by examining some of the findings of a survey conducted in Delhi in 2003. On the basis of the data collected during the course of the survey, it revisits two rather significant questions that have been thrown up by the thesis. First, how valid is the assumption that people have lost confidence in the capacity of political parties to represent them in forums of policymaking? Second, have people really come to believe that civil society groups, such as non-governmental organizations, can better help them resolve the oft intractable problems of everyday life? The answers to these questions could help to throw light on two vital political and theoretical issues: the relationship between citizens and the world of representative politics in particular, and the adequacy of representative democracy in general. The findings of the research project tell us that the crisis of representation runs deep and that people seem to have lost confidence in the ability or indeed the political will of all organizations, whether they belong to the political or the civil domain, to address their basic problems.     

Democratization and electoral turnovers in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond

This study criticizes approaches equating opposition electoral victories with democratization in competitive authoritarian regimes. Not only are these approaches theoretically problematic, but there are also important empirical reasons to distinguish between electoral turnovers and democratization. The study goes on to explain why some African turnovers have been successful in bringing about democratization while others have not. This study promotes an approach in which opposition victories may be used as an independent variable that, under certain circumstances, could promote democratization. Using evidence from the cases of Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya, it is argued that electoral uncertainty caused by a low level of party institutionalization has been an important obstacle to democratization by alternation in the African context.     

Shifting borders: Islamophobia as common ground for building pan-European right-wing unity

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Islamophobia has become a useful tool for right-wing parties to mobilize electors in many European nation-states. The general xenophobic campaigns of the 1980s have given way to Islamophobia as a specific expression of racism. It is not only the new incarnations of right-wing populist parties that are making use of Islamophobic populism, but also right-wing extremist parties, whose traditions hark back to fascist or Nazi parties. This development appears unsurprising, as Islamophobia has somehow become a kind of ‘accepted racism’, found not only on the margins of European societies but also at the centre. Another interesting concomitant shift is the attempt by such parties to gain wider acceptance in mainstream societies by distancing themselves from a former antisemitic profile. While the main focus on an exclusive identity politics in the frame of nation-states previously divided the far right and complicated transnational cooperation, a shared Islamophobia has the potential to be a common ground for strengthening the transnational links of right-wing parties. This shift from antisemitism to Islamophobia goes beyond European borders and enables Europe's far right to connect to Israeli parties and the far right in the United States. Hafez's article explores this thesis by analysing the European Alliance for Freedom, a pan-European alliance of far-right members of the European parliament that has brought various formerly antagonistic parties together through a common anti-Muslim programme, and is trying to become a formal European parliamentary fraction in the wake of its victory in the European elections in May 2014.