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.     

Just the Two of Us? Civil Conflicts,Pro-State Militants,and the Violence Premium

Quantitative literature discussing violence in civil conflicts tends towards a typical model of engagement between governments and revolutionaries. Whilst recent work has shown the significant impact of multiple anti-government groups, a further feature remains understudied—the role of pro-state militants. This article theorizes a “violence premium” when such groups arise, which leads to all connected groups devoting greater energy to conflict than they would in isolation. Employing duration analysis and data from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where Republicans act as revolutionary insurgents, Loyalists as pro-state militants, and the British Army as government forces, the violence premium is empirically confirmed. Both Loyalists and Republicans deviate from their underlying strategies to attack more frequently when violence by their rivals increases, with Republicans and the British Army engaging in the same way. An extended analysis, accounting for the status of the victim, shows that the violence premium resulting from interaction between Loyalists and Republicans targeted only the civilian population of Northern Ireland, elucidating the sectarian component of The Troubles. These results show that including all conflict parties and considering how they are linked are important features in studies that aim to determine the net level of violence in civil conflicts.     

Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises

Within Japanese popular culture, manga and anime have played a significant role in mediating responses to the outcome of the Pacific War. Miyazaki Hayao's (possibly) final feature-length film, The Wind Rises, has been an important addition to the preceding body of popular media ‘texts’ that raise such themes. This article aims to address the question of how far cinematic animation can reasonably be obliged to follow the kinds of historiographical concerns that inevitably arise when engaging with Japan's militarist past. To answer this question, considerable space is devoted to examining the historical context of what others have done in the post-war period and integrate that commentary into an analysis of how the works of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao fit amongst a succession of creative works that have been co-opted in the reshaping of historical perceptions of the Japanese at war amongst the Japanese themselves. This will also require some incidental discussion of methodological issues that arise when dealing with such cases as vehicles for understanding transformations in historical consciousness. Ultimately it is argued that Miyazaki does indeed make an important contribution to the commentary on the Japanese war experience, although it must, perhaps unavoidably, be on highly personal terms so far as The Wind Rises is concerned.     

社会中的马来西亚国家:意象与实践

本文旨在以第13届国会选举之后马来西亚政治、经济、社会诸领域的状况为主要依据,对作为意象的马来西亚国家和作为实践的马来西亚国家进行考察,进而展开以下两方面的论证:(1)马来西亚国家各组成部分的实践过程如何形塑着马来西亚国家的主导原则与主导功能;(2)马来西亚国家建构与政治制度化的不足及其出路。     

当代社会学视野下的消费

日常生活世界一个最深刻的社会变迁,在于人们和物品之间的关系发生了根本性的变化:随着物品从生产资料转变为消费品,人们也从生产关系中的某一类主体(所有者或劳动者),转变成为一个消费者。消费社会学由于关注到了消费过程诸环节中突生性社会机制和社会力量所具有的社会后果,其相对的学科优势和合法性是明显的。     

国际组织对公共养老保险改革的影响

本文采用文献法和历史分析法,研究了国际组织在不同阶段对各国公共养老保险改革施加影响的途径和方式,尤其是国际组织在我国养老保险"统账结合"制度的建立与发展过程中发挥的作用。在此基础上,提出了针对我国养老保险制度改革的政策建议。     

Explaining postwar wage compression

One of the main problems confronting labor unions during wage bargaining is how to deal with the conflicting demands of different groups of workers over the division of labor market earnings. This article explains how their internal organizational blueprint determines how they deal with this and criticizes the scholarly preoccupation with union density and wage bargaining centralization as explanatory variables for cross-national and temporal variation in wage inequality. It does so based on a critical analysis of collective bargaining in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom during the first four decades of the postwar period.     

What is Black British Feminism?

Young looks at the place of black feminists in today's academy in Britain, and poses some questions for contemporary self-identified black and white feminists based in that country. There is a new confidence among some black, professional Britons but infiltration into the academy remains problematic for many. Black British feminists and writers are largely absent in so-called postcolonial literary canons developed in the Anglo-American institutions, and by and large black British feminists are only offered fragile support by white feminists. Although African-American feminism offers intellectual sustenance and networks, the situation in the United States is very different, particularly as, there, black feminism has had much more impact and recognition. Discussions of the intersections of race, class and gender are rare in Britain outside black feminism, and there has been much less attention than in the States to black women's writing. Perhaps some kind of 'provisional essentialism' is still needed, for it is difficult for black feminist academics ever to feel the question of race is optional. It can be argued that 'blackness' is used to describe women of very different origins, and can obscure differential histories, but 'blackness' is always a political concept, not a register of national belonging. Black women have transformed British culture, but white feminists have largely failed to understand their problems. Attention to the social history of black women in Britain, and particularly to the creative work of black women writers, filmmakers and other cultural workers, is the place at which a new analysis should begin.     

East Is East and South Is South: The Cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy

Boehmer begins by outlining suggestive parallels between the doubly orientalizing reception of an Indian woman poet, Sarojini Naidu, in 1890s London, and the publicity and critical enthusiasm surrounding the appearance of Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things , in the 1990s. Building on these century-broad connections, she goes on to observe how, despite its liberatory agendas, certain constructions within postcolonial criticism appear to emerge virtually intact out of the colonial discourses of the past: in particular, the conflation of biology and biography in representations of the writing of the South, and constructions of a singular oriental femaleness, and an extravagant oriental style. The second part of the essay examines more closely these seemingly 'neo-orientalist' underpinnings of postcolonial literary criticism located in the West, and then considers resistances to these, both in terms of cultural contextualization and verbal recalcitrance.