Search

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual messaging is a cornerstone of campaign strategies of political parties and candidates that can complement and amplify the effects of the written/spoken word. Through a thematic analysis of the Facebook ads of the two main political parties during the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections in India, this paper shows the interplay of identity, ideology, and gender in the visual communication strategies of political parties on Facebook as they tried to mobilize voters in an intensely polarized context. Both the incumbent and the opposition parties framed issues in their visual campaigns that were culturally situated; these issues centered around identity and ideology while simultaneously emphasizing strong leadership with gendered rhetoric. Our findings contribute to the advancement of theoretical understanding of political personalization, highlighting the intricate interplay between gender, ideological inclinations, and cultural identity, all of which profoundly influence the personalization process in the context of an intensely polarized election campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a federal political system like India, the role of the federal units bordering the neighboring countries becomes crucial in foreign policy-making toward neighboring countries. It is expected that when similar political parties or coalition partners remain in power in both the center and the states, federal politics does not hinder policy-making toward neighboring countries. Moreover, foreign policy being a central subject, federal units any way reflect passive tendencies, especially in the case of governments with the same party affiliations. Both these simplifications are contested in this paper by citing instances of the role of West Bengal and Tripura, India's two federal units bordering the neighboring country of Bangladesh, at different historical junctures, in which similar political parties in the center and the state resulted in more friction than when different political parties were in office in matters of India's foreign policy-making toward Bangladesh. The paper argues that instead of federalization of foreign policy, where federal units have an influential role, this particular experience suggests an externalization of federalism, where an external variable (Bangladesh) influences internal federal dynamics to the extent that domestic electoral politics force the political parties of the two federal units to give importance to the neighboring country in taking positions on foreign policy-making. The immediate context of fifty years of the India-Bangladesh relationship and question about over-centralization during the latest phase of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime in India push the authors to take up Bangladesh as a case to contest the given of Indian federalism in foreign policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the visual representation of "the urban people" by the Spanish leftwing populist party Unidas Podemos (UP) during the campaign for regional elections in Madrid in 2021. The political environment was characterised by increasing polarisation and the hyper-leadership of two candidates, right-wing Isabel Díaz Ayuso and UP's national leader Pablo Iglesias. In this context, UP employed a diverse range of images and audiovisual material with a specific focus on the urban dimension. This paper explores how the populist logic and societal split--the people vs. the elite--deployed by UP are visually represented and connected with the urban space. Drawing on the central role of images in politics, this paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the visual and spatial dimensions of populism by (a) exploring the connections between populist imaginary, space, and the visual; (b) advancing an empirical analysis of the image of "the people" in a left-wing political party; and (c) connecting the imaginary of populism to its geo-graphical dimension, stressing both the urban and class divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media plays a vital role for political parties' communication. Research so far has focused mainly on the use of social media for election campaigns, while little is known about party officials' use of social media for intra-party communication. Besides elections, key events for political parties are conferences, in which delegates play a central role in transmitting the party branches' perspectives to the party and vice versa. Therefore, this paper addresses a) the role played by social media regarding the communication of party delegates with their party branch, and b) the factors determining delegates' social media usage. To answer these questions, we drew on survey data collected during the 2018 party conference of the German Green Party. Based on multivariate analysis, our results indicate that party delegates' social media usage is rather low and driven by (younger) age and normative and strategic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging debate on transnational populism has thus far mainly focused on cases, which have remained relatively inconsequential due to the weak institutionalisation of the political transnationalism arena. By bringing in a better-structured arena of migrant transnationalism, this paper introduces populist political parties mobilising transnational migrants to the debate and explores the resulting phenomenon of homeland populism. The paper investigates three populist parties that operate transnationally – Ecuadorian APAIS in Spain, Turkish AKP in Germany and Estonian EKRE in Finland. The analysis demonstrates that the phenomenon of homeland populism shares several distinct features despite the ideological, geographic, cultural and migratory differences between the three cases. The cases also sport differences: while the construction of 'the people' depends on migratory context, the construction of 'the antagonist' is more related to the ideational variations of populism. The study also suggests that the key target group of homeland populism are economic migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is criminal law enforcement increasingly punitive, despite that the situation has improved for decades? This paper investigates this question from the perspective of political misinformation. To this end, we develop a law enforcement model with political competition and examine how political parties' campaigns affect voters' perceptions of crime and equilibrium law enforcement policy. In a political campaign stage, we show that one political party has an incentive to overstate the severity of crime, while the other party has an incentive to correct voters' beliefs. However, although the two parties attempt to change voters' beliefs in opposite directions, we find that the total effect of a political campaign is more likely to drive both parties' policies in a harsh direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies party-movement interactions in Germany, focusing on Die Linke and the AfD, the two most recent additions to Germany's multi-party system. The electoral rise of both challenger parties went along with mass protests, opposition to Hartz IV in the mid-2000s and anti-Islamic PEGIDA mobilisation in the mid-2010s. We shift the emphasis from how social movements turn into political parties, including significant organisational and personal overlap, to more indirect ways of how protest and electoral politics interact. Specifically, we identify a process composed of two interrelated mechanisms: an external politicisation spiral and an intra-party innovation spiral. We show how mass protest triggers both discursive shifts in the public sphere and internal strategic realignment, providing an opportunity for parties to ride the wave, secure their competitive advantages, and mobilise on the protestors' grievances in the electoral arena. In such a way, challenger parties can take advantage of street protests even when they do not directly emerge from a movement. Methodologically, the article is based on a paired comparison, relying on survey data and an original protest event analysis that provides novel data on anti-Hartz IV and PEGIDA protest mobilisation in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the analysis of French parties campaigning abroad during the 2017 French parliamentary elections, the paper offers a better understanding of the conduct of electoral campaigns abroad, with an emphasis on their local dimension. With its comparative focus on three very different constituencies abroad – Northern America, North-West Africa and Switzerland –, it shows how differentiated campaign strategies, rather than mere duplication of national or centralised strategies, attuned to local political dynamics and the diverse sociology of French electorates abroad are critical for electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the use of social media in the Indian Lok Sabha and assembly elections. This study focuses on using social media in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and its impact on voters. Besides, the paper also discusses the extensive use of social media in last assembly elections held in different Indian states during the COVID-19 pandemic. The onset of the pandemic has forced politicians and political parties to turn to social media for virtual campaigning. This paper covers the role of social media in the assembly elections in UP, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa, West Bengal, and Kerala. In recent years, Indian politicians have significantly relied on social media for campaigning during elections. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Election Commission's temporary restriction on rallies, the use of social media in assembly elections grew considerably. This paper also highlights social media usage in the recent 2022 assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral campaigning in India is now effectively multi-modal and inhabits both the virtual and the real sphere. However, tools and techniques of campaigning vary across parties. The two parties that this paper focuses on, the BJP and the AAP, are known for running highly organized campaigns marked by their intensity and voter reach. The paper looks at the specific case of the Delhi assembly elections of 2015 and 2020 to compare strategies and the election campaign of the two parties. The paper argues that while the campaign of both parties was methodical and micro-managed, the selection of electoral issues and customization of the campaign to the addressed audience varied. The parties are comparable in terms of being leader centric, tending towards the personalization of politics, and both conducted professionalized campaigns, yet the political marketing of the element of affect differed. To demonstrate this, the paper firstly draws on literature in the field of political communication to illustrate the role of emotions, or the aspect of affect, in an electoral campaign. Secondly, through a perusal of media reportage and analysis, the paper traces the process by which personalization was manifested and how the narrative of affect came to be framed in the election campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine whether opposition parties, particularly the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), can promote transition in the electoral authoritarian regime in Russia. We use the example of the National Action Party's (PAN) evolution as an "official opposition" party in Mexico and discuss how its campaign strategy and party identity evolved. Using a framework derived from the political marketing literature on party branding and rebranding, we argue that the PAN successfully rebranded itself via the electoral opportunities afforded by structure of Mexican federalism, which ultimately led to the democratic transition in 1999. We then address the possibility of a similar evolution occurring in Russia, by examining how the CPRF altered its national campaign message between 2015–2018. Finally, we speculate whether local opposition victories will spark the kind of transition in Russia that occurred in other electoral authoritarian regimes, such as Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of 'thin' anti-establishment supply assess mainly the extent of populist messages. This paper analyses the diversity of thin contestation beyond just populism. I conduct a content analysis of 142 social media campaigns by anti-establishment (AEPs) and conventional parties during 23 elections across Europe 2010–2019. We find that in addition to popular will and extra-political technocratic expertise, AEPs increasingly enacted exceptional political calling, depicted as necessary to revive 'true' formal-representative politics itself. Regression analysis shows that political vocation cues played an important auxiliary role in AEP mobilization strategies. On average, those AEPs across the political spectrum which used more political vocation messages performed better electorally ceteris paribus than those which used them less. Conventional parties instead did not universally benefit if they increasingly spotlighted thin messages. The salience of anti-establishment and populism-related rhetoric played a further role within particular AEP groups, but neither was significantly associated with stronger AEP performance altogether. In order to better understand recent political turbulence, it is therefore useful to account for more diverse thin contestation supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary public debates are often characterized by structural and substantial dissonances. This paper is concerned with normative and empirical evaluations of these dissonances and makes contributions on both levels. We argue that agonistic pluralism provides an insightful, yet often dismissed, theoretical perspective on the matter of political fragmentation. On the empirical level, we exemplify these considerations against the backdrop of the 2016 Austrian presidential elections and propose a corresponding measurement approach for political fragmentation. A combined network analysis and automated content analysis of comments on Facebook pages affiliated with political parties results in the following main findings: First, when looking at comments between different parties, fragmentation is at a low level at the beginning of the election campaign but increases over time. Second, degrees of fragmentation vary to a great extent between different parties. Third, offensive speech is one purpose for communication between political groups but not the main one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Sinn Féin and the DUP have successfully mobilised ethnic tribune strategies in order to secure dominance in the electoral politics of Northern Ireland. Alongside this development, Northern Irish society has become markedly more diverse as a result of increasing inward migration. While immigration has enriched the array of cultural variety in the territory, it has been accompanied by increasing evidence of high profile racism. This raises questions as to how political parties that have profited from ethnic tribune strategies might adapt to the realities of a more diverse society. This paper illustrates the manner in which Sinn Féin and the DUP have approached the issue of racism against ethnic minorities, using an in-depth, qualitative analysis of party language. The data are drawn from a series of interviews with elected representatives, party literature, and from debates in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Two key findings are discussed. Firstly, the paper notes a lack of clarity in the manner in which both parties approach the subjects of racism and sectarianism. Secondly, the paper highlights the process by which varieties of racism experienced by ethnic minorities, have become absorbed by debates traditionally associated with bi-national division in the territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: The paper examines the contribution of think tanks (TTs) to debating ideas and their relationship with the environment. Specifically, it analyzes the variations introduced by the electoral campaign in the political positions of TTs and the role of ideology and party affiliation as possible determinants. Methodology: The content of the web pages of ten TTs is monitored before and during the electoral campaign for the 2021 presidential elections in Chile, where numerous TTs have become protagonists. For each TT, attention to socio-political issues is analyzed, and the trend of their positions is recorded. Conclusions: The analysis shows that TTs adapt their communicative agenda to the electoral campaign and that their ideology is a principal variable in this strategy. Originality: Evidence is provided on the entry of TTs in electoral campaigns with differences between conservatives and progressives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing analyses of opposition pre-electoral alliance formation in electoral autocracies neglect their coordinated election campaigns against incumbent autocrats. This paper argues that opposition alliance joint campaigns can increase the salience of the anti-regime cleavage, signal mutual compromise, and highlight the positive material and policy gains voters will reap following regime defeat. Together, they persuade ideologically and ethnically disparate opposition supporters to engage in the cross-party strategic voting necessary to maximize opposition vote share and their chances of winning. Empirical findings from Malaysia's historic 2018 general elections support the theory's propositions. A pre-electoral survey experiment estimates that an opposition alliance's joint campaigns increases cross-party strategic voting by about 10 percentage points among opposition voters. Field interviews and ethnographic observation during the election campaigning revealed the diverse methods and mechanisms of joint campaigns. Malaysia's Pakatan Harapan opposition alliance eventually prevailed through a combination of joint campaigning against a flailing incumbent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties shape electoral outcomes by determining who stands for election and what campaign resources they have at their disposal. The introduction of gender quotas have led party leaders to nominate more women candidates, however, those women disproportionately lose. We contend that one of the reasons that women routinely lose is because party elites withhold the campaign resources necessary to mount an effective campaign. In this paper, we test this resource gatekeeping argument using data on the provision of campaign resources in Brazil. We analyze the distribution of three different types of party resources: candidate identification numbers, financial support, and television airtime. Our findings show that party elites provide female candidates less advantageous candidate identification numbers, less financial support, and less media access than they provide male candidates. Importantly, we do not find that gender gaps in campaign contributions are attributable to differences in candidate quality. This finding suggests that even when women are recruited to run for office, party elites may still undermine their electoral prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election campaign and political activity financing are scantily regulated in Botswana. This may provide an opportunity for threats to national security as business interests may exert overt influence on politicians and illicit financial flows may bloom. Currently, there is no credible way of knowing who provides what financing to whom since no one is really compelled to disclose such information before a writ is issued. Even after a writ, parties and candidates simply do not declare in accordance with the limited statutory requirement. The paper notes foreign funding of major political parties in Botswana. It then argues argues for reforms that will include banning of funding by organisations involved in crime, introduction of funding thresholds, controls to ensure that funds donated for purposes of campaign finances are used strictly for that, the setting up of a statutory body to ensure compliance as well as sanctions for non-compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the twentieth century the Irish party system was stable and unchanging, centred on Fianna Fáil, Europe's most electorally successful political party. That system suddenly collapsed in 2011 when Irish electoral politics became unusually volatile, ending decades of one-party dominance and leaving democratic elections unable to provide for government choice and accountability. This paper traces this transformation of the party system, unmasking the altered dynamics of the country's electoral competition, through a focus on its long-dominant natural party of government. It concludes by considering the challenges and prospects for Ireland's party democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economy of party politics in hybrid regime is a complex relationship which leads to political inclusion and exclusion of social groups. The institutional infrastructures and ideological state apparatuses provide ground to hybrid party politics. Political economy of party politics determines mode of electoral participation and representation to counter collective struggle. The material conditions set the stage for subsequent socio political cleavages taking place. Party politics in hybrid regime tend to fade away class based political mobilization. The neo-liberal norms reflect in the rise of electoral populism. Dialectics of populism in hybrid regimes seem a missing link to explore a rising wave of populism in party politics. This paper is theoretically utilizing concepts from Gramsci's work by taking evidences from Pakistan. The study attempts to highlight factors that how electoral rhetoric is being construed/misconstrued in controlling the base structure (voter) of electoral sphere and constructing electoral superstructure? In addition, it is also elaborated how one electoral rhetoric gives way to another electoral rhetoric constructed by a new interest group within or outside a political party to herald a shift in the electoral politics. The paper elaborates the nature of populism of party politics in hybrid regimes by uncovering the tactics of hegemonic group's covert leaders to have an effective influence over a ruling political party for a long time. In this study, the tactics are described as set of maneuverings that are undertaken by ideological hegemony. Therefore, the reason for designing such tactics is a strategy of political elite or the powerful interest groups to set up (or influence) a political party that serves the interests of powerful groups more effectively in a hybrid political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the scholarly consensus is that VOX is a far-right political party in European terms, questions remain regarding whether or not its politics contain elements of populism. This research paper explores the Twitter and Instagram strategy deployed by Santiago Abascal, leader of VOX, during the 10 November 2019 general election campaign to assess whether his messaging includes characteristic features of populist rhetoric, to analyze the uses to which he puts social media, and to understand the features of the leadership he projects via social networks. The research methodology is content analysis applied to the 136 and 26 posts on Abascal’s Twitter and Instagram accounts, respectively, during the election campaign. The findings suggest that Abascal’s discourse is marked by a conservative and nativist form of Spanish nationalism; however, it is also shaped by an anti-establishment rhetoric and antagonistic message that pits la España Viva [‘Living Spain’] against la dictadura progre [‘the progressive dictatorship’], reflecting the inclusion of some features of populism. A further conclusion is that these social media platforms are the preferred propaganda tools used to communicate the candidate’s agenda, although each network evinces certain distinctive characteristics: Twitter channels a polarizing message via aggressive and critical rhetoric, whereas Instagram posts are designed to show the human side of the candidate’s profile. Thus, it would seem that the aim is to articulate a populist-inflected form of charismatic leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research shows that prior studies have been based on a survey methodology that systematically underestimates vote buying. Survey questions that rely on filter questions and include the phrase "in exchange for your vote" make respondents less likely to self-report receiving gifts during political campaigns. In turn, direct questioning that help respondents remember whether they received an electoral gift makes them more likely to report it. The findings of this paper suggest that prior vote-buying surveys have underestimated the amount of clientelism by political parties in Latin America. When following our proposed question wording, our research finds that the clientelistic linkages between parties and voters are stronger than previously considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the use of Twitter by the candidates for the presidency of the Government of Spain of the five main parties at the national level -PSOE, PP, Vox, Podemos and Ciudadanos- of the general elections campaigns held in April and November 2019. The main purpose of our study is to determine the strategies used of the microblogging network by the leaders, both in terms of activity, interaction and notoriety and in terms of topics and discursive development, as well as their similarities and differences. The secondary objective is to study the evolution of these strategies both between the two campaigns and with respect to previous elections. To this end, the research is based on a content analysis methodology that studies quantitative, qualitative and discursive elements. The results reveal an uneven use of Twitter in terms of the frequency of updates, but similar in terms of its unidirectionality, with scarce interaction with other users and a predominance of tweets with their own content over retweets. The dissemination of other people's content was used almost entirely to promote the candidate's political party and, to a lesser extent, to interact with journalists. Dialogue with citizens was almost always residual, both in retweets and in responses. This utilitarian conception of the microblogging network was accompanied by a polarizing thematic selection, with an almost general preponderance of political issues over policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodology for performing electoral geomarketing to identify potential voters from each political party and to understand their characteristics. Such information can be useful for optimizing the resources of a political party when preparing the election campaign. In this paper, a statistical study is conducted to analyze the relationship between electoral data and several socio-demographic, dependence, migratory, economic, and educational variables. A geoportal, called Geo- Chess (https://upvusig.car.upv.es/geochess/) is used to create all the thematic maps, graphs, and the majority of statistical studies. The geoportal permits visualization of the thematic maps and graphs shown in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines human- and computer-mediated content analysis to advance the understanding of how far-right parties are using new media to mobilize their supporters in the transitioning Ukrainian democracy. This study's theoretical approach employs the framework of connective action logic; results suggest that young and challenger parties are more adoptive of this logic, and provide opportunities for personalized engagement to their supporters. Moreover, use of interactive technologies by the studied parties also goes hand in hand with a smaller proportion of opinionated messages in their Twitter network, in spite of the inherent polarizing nature of these parties. Implications of these findings for research on future political campaigns conclude this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an analysis of public profiles of self-identified lesbian, bisexual and trans candidates during the 2020 municipal elections. Our goal, based on an intersectional perspective, is to describe and analyze some of the characteristics present in the identity discourses of these candidates during their campaigns. We observed 132 candidacies on Instagram, from 20 political parties, in 21 Brazilian states. Data collection, via CrowdTangle, was carried out between September 27 and November 15 - from the beginning of the electoral campaign until the end of the first round - and resulted in 3.385 publications. To analyze this data, we used content analysis (CA). Data were selected according to the presence of intersectional elements, resulting in a final corpus of 359 publications. Among the results, we highlight: Instagram is the main platform used, especially for its affordances; LBT candidacies are often crossed by class, generation, religion and ethnic-racial belongings; race and gender identity markers are not named by white and cisgender women; representativeness is central to the candidacies, many of them unprecedented in their cities; and, finally, there is a proliferation identities seeking to occupy Brazilian’s politics spaces and using digital platforms to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a 38-item nine dimensional statistically valid structural model of political mix for a developing country. The methodological approach of the study is based on 2357 primary data collected from rural and urban voters in Bangladesh. Results of the paper revealed significant differences in priorities between the two voter groups on political mix items. In one hand, rural voters were found to prefer candidates promoted by celebrities and national leaders, were swayed by public opinion, and even influenced by the sight of large sculptures of party symbols or effigies of the candidates in the campaign trail. On the other hand, urban voters were found to take into account the candidates' modesty, their powers of articulation, as well as the economic and psychological cost of the candidates' victory while making the electoral decision. The study recommends utilizing voter information systems to identify and nominate candidates as well as use party chairperson and national icons for word of mouth promotion and concludes by suggesting areas for further research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the individual-level building blocks of getting out the vote (GOTV) for electoral parties that represent subaltern sectors in resource scarce environments. Drawing on theories of protest waves, social movement fields, and threat-induced collective action, we examine the likelihood of campaigning in left party electoral mobilization and party identification. The study implements a modified version of the Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) survey protocol and respondent selection design. We use a sympathy pool sample of over 1,200 May Day participants in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras to explain the micro-foundations of electoral proselytizing of political parties advocating for disadvantaged populations. We found that involvement in left party electoral campaigning was largely driven by resources deposited during anti-neoliberal protest waves, including prior movement-type protest, civic organizational activity, and economic threat perceptions. Campaigning for the anti-neoliberal party was also associated with a higher level of post-election party identification. The findings suggest that left parties may at times partially overcome economic and political resource deficits by mobilizing individuals deeply embedded in the social movement field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research note, I analyse the case of DiEM25, a pan-European movement that decided to contest for the 2019 European elections and ran in seven different countries with the same programme. Focussing on Germany, I discuss how the different logics of spontaneity in social movements and party politics both enabled and constrained the electoral campaign. Building on official documentation as well as my own experience as part of the campaign, I suggest that organizational complexity, lack of resources and reluctance to embrace electoral politics on the part of movement-oriented members finally contributed to the failure to secure seats in European parliament. The paper also contextualizes both the political junctures of DiEM25's emergence and the political opportunity structures in Germany at the time of the campaign arguing that the political space was quite narrow in light of political contenders and public opinion in Germany in relation to the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greenland is a strongly autonomous subnational island jurisdiction (SNIJ) within the Kingdom of Denmark. This paper takes its point of departure in studies of politics in small island territories to ask to what extent Greenland matches findings from other small island states and SNIJs in terms of personalisation of politics, party performance, and political cleavages that do not follow left-right divides. Even though Greenland possesses a strongly multiparty system, supported by elections involving party-list proportional representation within a single multimember constituency, a single political party, Siumut, has led the government for all but a brief period since the advent of Greenlandic autonomy in 1979. By considering Greenland's political ecosystem, spatially and personally conditioned aspects of voter behaviour, and coalition-building processes, paying particular attention to the 24 April 2018 parliamentary elections, we argue that it is inappropriate to study Greenland as a monolithic political unit or to draw oversimplified analogies with party politics from large state Western liberal democracies. Instead, Greenlandic politics must be understood in relation to the island territory's particular historical, geographical, and societal characteristics as well as its electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Facebook is used by political parties during elections to extend or accelerate their reach within the electorate and how successful these efforts are. Specifically, we compare the content and style of parties' Facebook posts during the 2014 European parliament elections, and how this affects followers' responses in terms of liking, sharing and commenting on the posts. Our findings reveal while that the timing and visual content of posts are important in increasing voters' attention, interactivity matters most. Responsive party posts on Facebooks are significantly more likely to be shared, liked, and commented on by users. Given that follower reactions, particularly sharing, helps to increase the visibility of party communication through indirect or two-step flow communication (online and offline), these findings are important in advancing our understanding of how and why social media campaigns are able to influence voters and thus affect election outcomes. For parties themselves the results provide some useful insights into what makes for an 'effective' Facebook campaign in terms of how they can accelerate the reach of their communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational choice theories of political behaviour start from the premise that parties seek policy, office, and votes. In accordance with this premise, previous research has shown that electoral performance and office achievement independently affect party leader survival. However, we know little about how goal attainment interacts across these two domains. This paper proposes a novel hypothesis stating that intrinsic goals (office) dominate over purely instrumental ones (votes). As a result, the impact of electoral performance on party leader survival should be conditional on office achievement. Using data on over 500 party leaders in 14 parliamentary democracies between 1965 and 2012, we show that electoral performance and office achievement strongly affect leadership turnover. However, we also demonstrate that the electoral performance effect disappears when parties enter or exit office at the same time. These results constitute the best direct evidence to date that parties prioritise office achievement over electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, electoral politics are not only about differences in opinion but also about differences in perception. In this paper, I analyze how ideologically extreme and moderate voters perceive political parties of different ideological outlooks. I aim to determine whether ideological polarization has a double component: Ideologically extreme voters are farther away from their non-supported parties not only because of their extreme positions but also because they allocate these parties more to the extremes than moderate voters. By using cross-sectional data from several elections over more than 20 years and comparing more than one million three hundred thousand respondents' perceptions of more than 1200 parties, I find that ideologically extreme and moderate voters have different views of political parties: Extreme voters perceive parties to be more extreme than moderate voters. This difference in perceptions leads extreme voters to have more biased perceptions of parties' positions on the left–right dimension than moderate voters. In all, the results suggest that voters' perceptions of parties differ from what would be expected from models in which voters try to diminish cognitive dissonance by rationalizing their decisions: More ideologically extreme voters perceive parties on the other side of the ideological spectrum as more extreme. Beyond showing that extremism should be considered a key variable to understand voters' perceptions of parties and subjective polarization, the existence of a double component of ideological polarization suggests that reconciling different policy preferences will be categorically harder for those ideologically in the extremes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pakistani politics is full of political rhetoric. Attractive slogans are used by leaders of political parties to inspire and set the mood of public about a particular issue. Even parliament is neglected by politicians. This political immaturity led the nation towards street politics and polarization in the society. Due to elements of intolerance in politics, leadership could not find consensus and viable solutions. The paper analyzes political rhetoric; slogan politics and role of parliament in Pakistan especially focusing on the first one year of Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz's (PML-N) current government. In this context, political parties and their leaders' popular statements particularly in print media containing rhetoric and slogans to resolve two important issues i.e. electoral reforms and energy crisis has been examined. Political parties' initiatives in the form of calling attention notices, questions, resolutions, bills, motions and point of orders in the parliament have also been assessed followed by recommendations. The paper highlights that politicians generally use rhetoric and slogan politics instead of using parliament to satisfy the public on various issues. The paper recommends that political parties should enhance intellectual depth of party members and leaders so that they can effectively use the forum of parliament for resolving issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers examples of women successfully running as independents at the national level in the Middle East, investigating how existing electoral systems impacted their ability to contest political office. Women in the region face a host of challenges when it comes to launching political campaigns outside of sociocultural norms. Most extant literature on political participation focuses on parties as the primary vector for female participation in the Global North and South. However, women in the Middle East often cannot rely on this mechanism due to the absence of political parties or existing parties' unwillingness to back women for cultural reasons. Yet, the region hosts many female independents holding office at the national level. Through the cases of Jordan, Egypt, and Oman, I unpack this phenomenon using an institutional argument and assess what the emergence of such candidates bodes for the future of women in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web allows political parties to segment and microtarget specific groups of voters. This paper seeks to measure voter targeting online focusing on catch-all parties and client parties' websites during the 2008 and 2013 Austrian general elections and the 2009 and 2013 German federal elections. Thereby, this comparative longitudinal analysis also aims to provide insights into the development process of political targeting strategies. From a theoretical perspective, catch-all parties try to appeal to a diverse spectrum of potential voters, whereas client parties are aiming at a more specific type of voter. The results of the content analysis show that (a) information and services on parties' websites increasingly focus on addressing the general public and (b) differences between catch-all and client parties have been reduced between campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties may rely on different issue agendas when tailoring their electoral campaigns in an attempt to win elections. This paper compares two key party issue strategies to examine which one the victorious Austrian Peoples' Party (ÖVP) relied on the most during the 2017 Austrian election campaign vis-à-vis its main competitors. These two key party strategies are the 'riding-the-wave' model, which posits that parties focus on issues that currently concern voters the most and the recent 'issue-yield model', which instead suggests that parties adopt strategic behaviour targeting all those issues with genuine opportunities for electoral expansion. It is found that, compared to the other main parties in the 2017 Austrian election campaign, the ÖVP was the one most clearly relying on the issue-yield approach. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party's exploitation of issue strategies, and voter representation beyond the Austrian case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work analyzes the political partisan representation of the government succession in Piauí in 1958 in the section “Political Flagrant” in the newspaper Folha da Manhã. Once the owner was the deputy Marcos Parente (UDN), the daily newspaper kept an editorial line very refined to the political interests of the udenistas and, for this reason, the paper was signed as opposition to the governor of Piauí, Gen. Jacob Manoel Gayoso and Almendra, from PSD. Based on the theory of journalism and in the methodology of Discourse Analysis, the articles published in the section “Political Flagrant” were analyzed from January to April 1958 that discuss about the situation of PSD of Piauí and the backstage of the situationism, when the parties and the political groups were prepared for the election campaign on October 3rd. Thus, it is verified that Folha da Manhã subscribed to itself and to the reader a journalism of credibility based on rhetoric of truth of facts and, dialectically, it was concerned as a political weapon to face the discursive battle strongly proponent that was struggled with the other newspapers from Teresina in the period cut out to study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of a series of investigations on the phenomenon of political clientelism in Galicia (Spain). The main objective is to verify the theoretical and empirical relationship between the phenomenon of clientelism and its funding through corrupt methods. The article uses a theoretical definition of clientelism and corruption as differentiated phenomena that can, nevertheless, become interdependent and overlapping at an empirical plane. This, in turn, gives rise to hybrid phenomena. The text proposes an analytical framework to explore the linkage between both concepts, especially when corruption becomes an instrument for financing patron-client networks. The paper presents the results of an original research based on three thorough case studies of clientelistic relationship where political corruption has taken place to finance the party machine and distribute favours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]