THE PRIVATIZATION OF VIOLENCE*

Norbert Elias's (1939) work on “the civilizing process” highlighted the long‐term decline in violence within Western societies. A substantial amount of more recent anthropological and historical evidence suggests that violence has evolved not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well. In particular, the social characteristics of the parties to violence have changed over time. Drawing on Donald Black's (1976, 1993a) theoretical ideas on conflict management, the present paper proposes that as intimate social ties weakened and the state strengthened, collective and nonintimate forms of (nonpolitical) violence declined significantly. Consequently, violence increasingly became less public, more private. Pockets of residual public violence can, however, still be found within modern state societies. Privatization varies, then, across time and social space.     

Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

As it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.     

Local leaders and the distribution of central government funds: Evidence from 18 European democracies

This article looks at the relationship between the political affiliation of local leaders and the distribution of government funds with the help of a new dataset on local elections from 18 European countries between 2000 and 2013. It finds that central governments are more likely to target regions with high density of local councils affiliated with the parties in government only under certain institutional arrangements. The relationship exists where local councils enjoy little power and thus are less able to claim credit for the funds independent of the central government. The relationship is also present where local leaders are involved in the selection of candidates for national office.     

Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.     

Partisanship and Incumbency in Presidential Elections

Party identification is a standard part of our understanding of presidential voting, but the effects of presidential incumbency on presidential voting have not been recognized in most voting models. Democratic candidates in the twentieth century received 10 percent more of the two-party vote when Democratic incumbents were running for reelection than when Republican incumbents were running. National Election Studies surveys show that the effect of incumbency varies with individual partisanship, with the greatest effect, as expected, among independents. Opposition party identifiers defect at a higher rate than incumbent party identifiers when the incumbent is running for reelection. Even after controlling for retrospective and prospective economic voting, a 6 percent effect is found for incumbency. Incumbency thus conditions the impact of partisanship on presidential voting.     

Intergovernmental councils in the United States

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on intergovernmental councils (IGCs) in the United States in which prominent state-level executive politicians, that is, governors, play a leadership role. In the US case, these IGCs developed out of a desire to facilitate interstate information exchanges and a need for state governments to join forces to protect their autonomy vis-à-vis the federal government. In this latter role, the councils function as lobbyists for state government interests. The research question driving the analysis has to do with impact: what difference do executive-led IGCs make, either vertically or horizontally, in the US federal system? The question of impact is particularly relevant because growing partisan polarization in contemporary federal and state political institutions complicates collective action by states.     

Food or Thought? Assessing Internal and External Factors Affecting Evaluations of Instructor Effectiveness

Within the broader literature concerned with potential bias in student measures of instructor effectiveness, two broad types of bias have been shown to operate in a course: internal and external. Missing is an assessment of the relative influence of each bias type in the classroom. Do internal or external types of bias matter more or less to student measures of instructor effectiveness? This question is of interest to those who recognize that many forms of bias operate in the classroom simultaneously and to great effect on course evaluations. Through the combination of quasi-experimental and survey methods, we attempt to do something not done before — simultaneously measure and compare the effects of one internal and one external type of bias to which we refer, following convention in the literature, as an internal factor and an external factor. Our findings indicate that, while both factors studied are important, perception of instructor partisanship (internal factor) is more influential on student course evaluations than our external factor (experimental treatment — literally a chocolate treat). The upshot is that American government instructors should be especially careful stating partisan positions in class.     

Memory for Positive and Negative Political TV Ads: The Role of Partisanship and Gamma Power

Despite generating widespread contempt, political TV ads play an important informational role in the lives of citizens. This study examines effects of Ad Type (Positive, Negative, and Comparison) on recognition memory for candidate issue positions. Potential moderators (Ad Sponsor Partisanship X Viewer Partisanship, Ad Type X Viewer Ideology, Ad Type X Viewer Partisanship) of political ad memory are explored, and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings are used to examine whether semantic processing (indexed as brain activity in the gamma band frequency range) mediates main or moderated effects of Ad Type on Memory. Results reveal a significant interaction between Ad Type and Partisanship, with Republicans remembering more from positive relative to negative ads (significant), and Democrats remembering more from negative ads (marginally significant). A direct effect of Gamma on Memory highlights the considerable potential that EEG (in general) and the gamma frequency band (in particular) may hold for the study of message processing.     

Legacies Versus Politics: Herbert Hoover, Partisan Conflict, and the Symbolic Appeal of Associationalism in the 1920s

The concept of a policy legacy has come into widespread use among scholars in history and the social sciences, yet the concept has not been subject to close scrutiny. We suggest that policy legacies tend to underexplain outcomes and minimize conventional politics and historical contingencies. These tendencies are evident in the revisionist literature on American politics in the aftermath of the First World War. That work stresses continuities between wartime mobilization and postwar policy, especially under the auspices of Herbert Hoover and the Commerce Department. We maintain that a rupture marks the transition between the war and the Republican era that followed and that the emphasis on wartime legacies distorts the political realities of the Harding–Coolidge era. We conclude by noting the risks of policy legacy approaches in historical analysis.     

Partisanship and independence: the peculiar moralism of American politics

Against the background of historical antipartyism in practice and in democratic theory, and with a focus on American political thought, this paper takes issue with contemporary arguments that value the political identity ‘Independent’ and disparage partisanship. A typology of ‘Independent’ is offered and both empirical and moral claims about the superiority of Independent voters are rebutted, with particular focus on the ‘weightlessness’ of Independents. The reasons to appreciate the moral distinctiveness of partisanship for democracy are set out: commitment to political pluralism, to regulated political rivalry, and to shifting responsibility for governing. Inclusiveness, comprehensiveness, and compromisingness set the contours for an ethic of partisanship.