Search

This article analyses the image of the three abrahamic religions in the recent political programs of the French Front National (2012 and 2017) in a comparative perspective with other successful populist radical right-wing parties in EU-Countries of continental Western and Northern Europe. It will be shown that even if there is a common tendency of representing Islam negatively and avoiding overt antisemitism, there are differences with regard to Judaism and/or Israel as well as to the weight of Christianity for the national and/or European culture, which have interesting parallels with the national discourse traditions and the particular radical right-wing history of these parties., Cet article analyse l’image des trois religions abrahamites dans les programmes politiques récents du Front National en la comparant avec celle créée par d’autres partis d’extrême droite populiste de pays de l’Union Européenne appartenant à l’Europe occidentale continentale et à la Scandinavie qui ont été couronnés d’un certain succès lors des élections récentes. Il sera montré que, même si l’on peut constater une convergence quant à l’image négative créée de l’islam ainsi que dans la tendance d’éviter un antisémitisme ouvert, il y a, toutefois, des différences en ce qui concerne le judaïsme et/ou Israël et le poids attribué au christianisme dans la culture nationale et/ou européenne. On y peut observer des parallèles intéressants avec les traditions discursives nationales ainsi que l’histoire de ces partis d’extrême droite., Dieser Beitrag analysiert das Bild der abrahamitischen Religionen in den Präsidentschaftswahlprogrammen des Front National (2012 und 2017) im Vergleich zu anderen erfolgreichen rechtsextremen populistischen Parteien in EU-Ländern Nord- und Westeuropas. Die Analyse zeigt einerseits eine gemeinsame Tendenz, den Islam negativ darzustellen, andereseits auch Unterschiede zwischen den einzelnen Parteien in bezug auf die Darstellung des Judemtums und/oder Israel sowie der Bedeutung, die dem Christentum für die nationale oder europäische Identität zugemessen wird, die jeweils interessante Parallelen zu den nationalen diskursiven Traditionen und der Geschichte der jeweiligen Partei aufweisen.

One of the fundamental values of the constitutional order in the Republic of Macedonia is the principle of equality which guarantees the equal rights regardless of the gender. The recognition and the promotion of the gender equal opportunities are a necessary precondition for democratic development. In the past 24 years of the independence, the political parties in the Republic of Macedonia passed through various stages and changes, which include the attitudes of the parties towards women issues. This paper will research the capacity of the main political parties in the Macedonian bloc, SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE, to develop, adopt and implement gender sensitive policies. The research will be based on the analysis of the election programs regarding the Parliamentary elections in 1990, 2002 and2011. The analysis will cover the development of the gender sensitivity in the election programs of SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE for the period of two decades.

Political leaders are often perceived as unresponsive to the daily concerns of citizens, especially when European integration is concerned. Academic research, however, provides at most mixed evidence for the existence of such a gap. This article tries to shed light on this discrepancy by introducing an alternative measure to study leaders' responsiveness - narrative congruence - and explores the assumption that responsiveness increases leaders' credibility in the eyes of their voters. As narrative congruence is a more intricate measure that captures leaders' and followers' policy preferences and argumentation, it may better capture the gap between their positions and therefore provide a more adequate explanation for citizens' support for their leaders than traditional congruence measures like issue saliency and ideological distance. To provide a first test of this, the technique of cognitive mapping is introduced and used to explore the congruence in beliefs on European integration of four Dutch political leaders and their followers. Although the study finds a significant gap between some leaders and their followers’ narratives on Europe, it finds no evidence that this narrative congruence is related to the credibility of these leaders in the eyes of their followers. (author's abstract)

With the lingering Euro crisis, personalized competition for the Commission presidency, and a surge of Eurosceptic parties, the 2014 European Parliament elections took place against an unknown level of European Union politicization. How does this changing context affect the supply side of party competition on European issues in EP election campaigns? This article compares the 2014 and 2009 EP elections in two EU founding members with high electoral support for radical left and radical right Euroscepticism - France and the Netherlands. We study publically visible patterns of partisan mobilization in the written news media with semi-automated content analyses. The data indicate that visible party mobilization on EU issues was on average not significantly higher in 2014. While particularly mainstream and especially incumbent parties publically mobilize on European issues during both campaigns, the radical right's mobilization efforts have become more visible during the 2014 elections. Examining the temporal dynamics within electoral campaigns, we show that the Eurosceptic fringes exhibit significant contagion effects on the mainstream parties, but that the extent of this contagion was surprisingly lower in the 2014 campaign. As a result, the increasing EU politicization between the 2009 and 2014 electoral contests has not resulted in an enhanced and more interactive supply of partisan debate about Europe. (author's abstract)

Policy and program design is a major theme of contemporary policy research, aimed at improving the understanding of how the processes, methods and tools of policy-making are employed to better formulate effective policies and pro-grams, and to understand the reasons why such designs are not forthcoming. However while many efforts have been made to evaluate policy design, less work has focused on program designs. This article sets out to fill this gap in knowledge of design practices in policy-making. It outlines the nature of the study of policy design with a particular focus on the nature of programs and the lessons derived from empirical experience regarding the conditions that enhance program effectiveness.