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Linking society and politics has been one of political parties' key functions in democracies around the world. Groups within political parties, like factions, auxiliary organisations and territorial party branches, have been important for parties to build such linkages because they help incorporate voters', members' and elites' interests. However, although intra -party groups have figured prominently in many studies, scholars often encountered difficulties when seeking to distinguish between them. Missing conceptual clarity is consequential because it has made communicating results across studies difficult and thus posed an obstacle to accumulating knowledge. This review brings together the literature on factionalism and party organisation to enhance conceptual clarity. Groups' organisational pervasiveness and flexibility allow distinguishing between factions, camps, auxiliary organisations and party branches. The article ends with suggestions for how to put the typology to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties are the nucleus of modern parliaments. Therefore it is crucial to understand cooperation and competition within parties. In most parliaments, we can observe some form of cooperation, like cosponsorship. In this paper, cosponsorship is used to identify the relationships of MPs within their parliamentary party group, and to infer whether this relational position has an effect on their reselection. Are better embedded and connected MPs more likely to be reselected? Do peers matter in reselection? This question is also of theoretical interest in the light of competing principals (Carey, 2007). The empirical analysis first replicates the model of MP renomination by Baumann et al. (2017), adding a new data set from the German Bundestag, used to provide the relational independent variables of cosponsorship centrality. The key finding of the analysis is that cosponsorship closeness is a significant predictor of MP reselection and can be seen as a compelling complement to the model by Baumann et al. With cooperation shown to be significant when it comes to renomination, the understanding of peer-induced competition, competing principals theory can be further developed to aid our understanding of MP cooperation and competition, delegation, agency and collective principals in modern parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalization refers to a shift over time in attention and/or power from collective actors to individuals. I focus on personalization in voting behavior, measured by the use of preference voting in flexible list-PR systems. I will argue that in a multi-level context this kind of personalization can take place at different policy levels, which could influence each other. In local elections, voters can be attracted by the mayor and/or other local figureheads, but also by the national party leader and/or national politicians figuring on the local list. Therefore, scholars should not only focus on the number and importance of people to which personalization applies ('person level' of personalization), but also on how processes at one policy level impact on other policy levels ('territorial level' of personalization). By combining literature on intra-party competition and personalization on the one hand, and on electoral patterns in multi-level states on the other, I engage in a conceptual discussion about the nature of personalization. I add empirical evidence to this conceptual discussion by analyzing preference voting patterns in local elections in Flanders (Belgium). As such, we gain more insights in the remarkable decline of preference voting that took place there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little research has focused on how legislative candidates' personal electoral support develops over time and why. This study examines the vote trajectories of individual candidates and how they vary according to candidates' personal vote-earning attributes. Longitudinal data on over 1700 candidates who between 1999 and 2019 participated in two or more parliamentary elections in the Finnish open-list proportional representation system are analysed. The findings show that the average legislative candidate's personal support increases more rapidly in the beginning of his or her electoral career and then slows down gradually over time. However, there is large heterogeneity in vote trajectories depending on candidates' socio-demographic characteristics and personal vote-earning attributes. Some candidates enjoy instant success (local councillors and celebrity candidates), while others do not win more votes initially but manage to build loyal personal followings in their district and receive positive returns from repeated candidacy (young, women, and locally rooted candidates). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the knowledge on how candidate selection happens is flourishing, remarkably little attention has been paid to the selection criteria. Why do selectors prefer some candidates? This study investigates the intricate trade-offs party selectors face when having to compromise between the pursuit of three core party goals: unity, policy, and victory. When candidates score lower on one goal, do selectors favour candidates following the party line, skill for politics or ability to garner votes? Relying on 23 in-depth interviews with party selectors from three Belgian francophone parties (Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals), this research offers insight into how selectors balance their choices between candidates in a PR list context where the group equilibrium is almost as important as individual assets. I point out the interconnections selectors consider between selection criteria, and hence the need to regard the full picture when studying intra-party competition at the nomination stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary representative democracies, political competition is not only taking place between political parties but also within parties. Hitherto, research on such intra-party competition has been mostly focused on the electoral dimension, mainly looking at the distribution of preference votes among co-partisans running on the same party list. In this introduction to our symposium on intra-party competition, we argue that intra-party competition occurs in other stages of the electoral cycle than elections and involves the strategic behaviour of more actors than electoral candidates. We present an original conceptual model that introduces a multi-stage and multi-actor perspective on intra-party competition, including three stages (the nomination stage, the electoral stage and the post-electoral stage) and three key actors (voters, politicians and parties). Based on our novel conceptual model, we provide examples of strategic behaviour of each actor in each of the stages. We further introduce each contribution of this symposium and present how each contribution relates to our multi-stage and multi-actor model of intra-party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the electoral personalization of politics has stressed a trend towards a greater role of top prominent political figures (party leaders and ministers). This trend was described as centralized electoral personalization. Yet, this trend is merely one side of a more complex story. No leader attracts all voters' support, and other candidates manage to stand out despite lower resources and visibility. Using a unique dataset of 47,239 actual ballot papers cast for the 2018 Belgian local elections, we show that candidate-level, list-level and district-level factors result in distinct preference voting behaviour. While these factors lead to unmistakable forms of (de-)centralized personalized forms of elections, we furthermore, show that intermediary situations distinctively emerge. A significant number of 'subtop' candidates stand out among candidates, by attracting support from voters who do not support the mere leader of the list. This 'oligarchized personalization' would deserve greater attention in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature highlights the relevance of informal rules for candidate selection, empirical research has mainly focused on formal rules and procedures. This article contributes to our understanding by investigating how the informal rules employed by political parties impact on intra-party competition. Using the example of district nominations in Germany, and based on a longitudinal mixed methods design, the inductive analysis reveals five central informal rules: the Incumbency Rule, the Information Rule, the House Power Rule, Fairness Rules and Power-sharing Rules. These rules shape the expectations and behavior of those involved in candidate selection and have a significant impact on various aspects of intra-party competition. They decrease the number of aspirants, reduce intra-party conflict and emphasize the role of local party leaders in organizing and controlling intra-party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses parliamentary debates on marriage equality in Germany to understand what factors shape how parties deal with morality politics argumentatively. I argue that the internal divisions of parties and their coalition parties are crucial for the argumentation strategies used in parliamentary debates on morally charged wedge issues. Internally divided parties and parties that must be loyal to coalition partners confronted with internal divisions are likely to employ a discursive avoidance strategy to mitigate the potential for intra‐party and intra‐coalition polarization. To test this empirically, I examine the speeches of the German Bundestag on the Life Partnership Act in 2000 and Marriage for All in 2016 and 2017. The qualitative content analysis confirms my argument: The internally divided CDU and its coalition partners applied avoidance strategies by framing the issue primarily around constitutional principles and using procedural arguments, rather than framing the discourse as an issue of morality politics. Zusammenfassung: Der Artikel analysiert parlamentarische Debatten zur Anerkennung gleichgeschlechtlicher Partnerschaften und Ehen in Deutschland, um zu verstehen, welche Faktoren die Argumentationen von Parteien im Wettbewerb um Moralpolitik beeinflussen. Ich argumentiere, dass die interne Spaltung von Parteien und ihrer Koalitionsparteien entscheidend für die Argumentationsstrategien ist, die in parlamentarischen Debatten über moralisch aufgeladene „wedge issues "verwendet werden. Intern gespaltene Parteien und Parteien, die loyal zu Koalitionspartnern sein müssen, die mit internen Spaltungen konfrontiert sind, verwenden eine diskursive Vermeidungsstrategie, um das Potenzial für eine innerparteiliche und koalitionsinterne Polarisierung abzuschwächen. Das Argument wird anhand einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse von Reden von Abgeordneten des Deutschen Bundestages zum Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz im Jahr 2000 und zur Ehe für Alle im Jahr 2016/2017 bestätigt: Die innerparteilich zerstrittene CDU und ihre Koalitionspartner wendeten Vermeidungsstrategien an, indem sie das Thema in erster Linie in Zusammenhang mit verfassungsrechtlichen Grundsätzen thematisieren und prozedurale Argumente verwendeten, anstatt den Diskurs als eine moralpolitische Frage zu gestalten. Résumé Cet article analyse les débats parlementaires afin de comprendre les facteurs qui façonnent la manière dont les partis traitent la politique morale sur le plan argumentatif. Je soutiens que les divisions au sein des partis et entre les partis d'une coalition représentent un facteur décisif dans les stratégies d'argumentation utilisées dans les débats parlementaires sur les questions morales portant à controverse (« wedge issues »). Les partis divisés en interne et les partis devant rester loyaux envers leurs partenaires de coalition, eux‐mêmes confrontés à des divisions internes, sont susceptibles d'employer une stratégie discursive d'évitement pour atténuer le potentiel de polarisation intra‐parti et intra‐coalition. Pour tester cela empiriquement, j'examine les discours du Bundestag allemand sur la loi relative au partenariat de vie enregistré en 2000 et celle instituant le mariage pour tous en 2016/17. L'analyse qualitative de ces textes confirme mon argument: La CDU, divisée en interne, et ses partenaires de coalition ont appliqué des stratégies d'évitement en abordant la question principalement autour des principes constitutionnels et en utilisant des arguments procéduraux, plutôt que de cadrer le discours comme une question de politique morale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intra‐party competition is widespread and affects political parties' strength. This article presents a model of elections in which intra‐party factions can devote resources to campaigning for the party or undermining competing factions to obtain more power. The model shows that inter‐ and intra‐party competition are substitutes: Internal competition increases when the electoral stakes are low – for example, in consensus democracies granting power to losing parties – because the incentives to focus on the fight for internal power increase. Similarly, an increase in party polarization incentivizes factions to campaign to avoid a more costly electoral loss. Factions in the moderate party campaign more than those in the extreme party; conversely, when factions in the same party are ideologically divided, extreme factions campaign more. Finally, the model studies how internal rules affect intra‐party competition, showing how parties design internal contests among factions to maximize campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Hegel's philosophy related to other philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling and Frege bringing out the nature of disagreement.

Within many countries, voters not only have to cast a vote for a political party, but also have the option to select (a) candidate(s) within that party, a so-called preferential vote. Recent studies indicate that several factors influence the success of candidates within this intra-party competition, such as ballot list position, political experience, and socio-demographic characteristics. However, it has not yet been investigated whether ideology also matters for intra-party success. This study investigates the role of the ideological position of candidates within their party on the share of preferential votes they obtain. Can candidates win preferential votes by taking ideological niche positions within the party? To investigate this question, the study uses data from a candidate survey conducted during the 2014 Belgian elections in which candidates were asked to position themselves ideologically. The results of this study indicate that ideology does not play a strong role within the intra-party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on commuters in Buffalo, New York being greeted by a new billboard near the KeyBank Center. Topics include captain's, Jack Eichel, high-profile trade request caused by a disagreement over surgical treatment for a herniated disc in his neck; and second opinion physician disagree about the appropriate course of treatment, the NHL CBA.

The Supreme Court (OGH) in Austria has ruled that the rejection of medical treatment for a transgender person due to a lack of trust cannot be considered discrimination based on gender identity. A plaintiff had filed lawsuits against the Vienna Regional Health Insurance Fund and a senior physician at the hospital, but the treatment was denied due to a poor doctor-patient relationship. A lawyer had refused to file a lawsuit under the Vienna Anti-Discrimination Act, as she saw it as hopeless. The lower courts dismissed the lawsuit, and the OGH agrees with this decision. The case highlights the difficulties in cooperation between lawyers and medical personnel. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how populism is linked to party organization and, specifically, intra‐party democracy. Populism can be defined as an ideology (ideational perspective), which is characterized by anti‐elitism, people‐centrism and a discourse emphasizing a moral struggle between 'good people' and 'the elite'. On the other hand, there are leadership‐focused definitions which see populism as a form of organization with personalistic control (a leadership perspective). With respect to party organization, focusing on the ideational perspective leads to the expectation that populist parties will be internally democratic, and the leadership approach will lead to the opposite expectation. Using the recently published Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) that develops party‐specific populism scores, we examine more than 200 parties in 26 countries. The results highlight that populist parties gravitate toward personalized leaders and thus develop less democratic intra‐party structures. This finding contributes to our understanding of populist parties and their organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or 'cultural' issues as much as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be dominant. We use data from surveys of members of parliament, party members and voters to explore how this shift has affected the internal coalitions of the Labour and Conservative Parties – and to provide a fresh test of 'May's Law'. We find a considerable disconnect between 'neoliberal' Conservative members of parliament and their more centrist voters on economic issues and similarly significant disagreement on cultural issues between socially liberal Labour members of parliament and their more authoritarian voters. We also find differences in both parties between parliamentarians and their grassroots members, albeit that these are much less pronounced. May's Law, not for the first time, appears not to be borne out in reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the national and international context, marked by the demand for the right to the inclusion of people with disabilities and the construction of an inclusive society, one of the obstacles is the attitudinal barriers sustained in excluding conceptions of disability. This study aimed to understand which are the conceptions of disability among students of Universidade do Algarve, Portugal. The findings show a disagreement with the metaphysical concept and an appreciation of the biological concept. It reveals the existence of a diversity of opinions regarding the social concept. Reflections on the implications of a higher education committed to educational inclusion and an inclusive society are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine the recent literature on issue competition with work on intra‐party heterogeneity to advance a novel theoretical argument. Starting from the premise that party leaders and non‐leaders have different motivations and incentives, we conjecture that issue strategies should vary across the party hierarchy. We, therefore, expect systematic intra‐party differences in the use of riding the wave and issue ownership strategies. We test this claim by linking public opinion data to manually coded information on over 3600 press releases issued by over 500 party actors across five election campaigns in Austria between 2006 and 2019. We account for self‐selection into leadership roles by exploiting transitions into and out of leadership status over time. The results show that party leaders are more likely than non‐leaders to respond to the public's issue priorities, but not more or less likely to pursue issue‐ownership strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anti‐realist's argument from moral disagreement has prematurely fallen out of favor. The argument has never been stated explicitly in correct form, and its proponents have not appealed to the best examples to support its premises. Realists have responded with a multitude of possible replies without applying them to the most convincing examples of irresolvable disagreements. The argument is a modus ponens from apparent fundamental disagreements to a disjunction of possible explanations, and then a disjunctive argument eliminating all but one alternative. The most convincing example from the point of view of the anti‐realist is the disagreement between the collectivist and the individual rights advocate, which occurs on both the levels of principle and individual judgment. Realist explanations for such disagreements include ignorance of nonmoral facts, application of principles in diverse contexts, bias, faulty reasoning, incommensurability or ties, lack of empathy or imagination, inaccessibility of moral facts, or different meanings for moral terms. I argue that none of these realist explanations for the disagreement between the collectivist and the individualist works, leaving only the anti‐realist explanation. Other realist moves, for example analogies with other areas of discourse, including disagreement among meta‐ethicists, are also shown to fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A functioning democracy relies on social interactions between people who disagree—including listening to others' viewpoints, having political discussions, and finding political compromise. Yet social life in the contemporary United States is characterized by a relative lack of interaction between Democrats and Republicans (or, social polarization). We argue that political anger contributes to social polarization by causing Americans to cut off ties with opposing partisans. We first draw on data from the American National Election Studies and the Wesleyan Media Project to show that the mass public is increasingly angry and that politicians often seek to elicit anger. We then present results from a survey experiment on nearly 3,500 Americans, finding that the exogenous introduction of anger leads partisans to socially polarize across a range of settings. Our findings suggest that increasing levels of political anger paralyze politics and harm democracy by influencing Americans' social interactions and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asynchronous, anonymous online debaters might be less likely than face-to-face debaters to value their public self-image (face), and thus disagree more freely. In this study, we examined whether polite disagreements (as opposed to rude ones) help online debaters win over audience members. An analysis of the most voted-on 100 political debates on Debate.org (200 debaters; 1,750 voters; 472,652 words) showed that debate initiators who used politer face-saving strategies to disagree (i.e., using expressions such as negatives with agree words rather than disagree or harsh rejection words) were more likely to receive more audience votes and win their debates. These results suggest that politeness tactics during online debates increase effectiveness, align with normative ideals, and yield pragmatic gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how an alternative media narrative of general partisan agreement can spill over onto individuals' perceptions of how much partisan groups agree on specific issues. Consistent with the idea that a media narrative emphasizing partisan differences leads individuals to hold inaccurate views of what partisans think, recent national probability sample surveys showed that Americans inaccurately perceived that most Democrats and most Republicans held opposing beliefs about whether global warming has been occurring when, in fact, the majorities of both parties agree that the world is warming. To determine if an alternative narrative can rectify this misperception, experiments that exposed some participants to a message highlighting areas in which Democrats and Republicans agree were embedded in a series of non-probability sample surveys (Study 1, N =1,000; Study 2, N = 3,007). Study 1 demonstrates that this alternative narrative, compared to a narrative highlighting disagreement, leads people to perceive more Republicans to think that the world has been warming and, in turn, a decreased partisan gap on the issue. Study 2 replicates these findings and provides evidence that respondents enter the study already exposed to a narrative emphasizing disagreement. Mediation analyses of both studies suggest that the alternative narrative can indirectly lead Republican respondents to express the belief that global warming exists via updating their perceptions of what co-partisans think. Thus, a narrative emphasizing the ways in which partisans agree rather than disagree can help address the misperception that Republicans and Democrats hold opposing beliefs on global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative debates are a thriving field in comparative politics. They make representation work by offering legislators the opportunity to take the floor and represent their constituents. In this paper, we review the key theoretical concepts and empirical findings in a maturing field. We begin by addressing what legislative debates are and why we should study them to learn about inter‐ and intra‐party politics. Next, we look at the contributions springing from Proksch and Slapin's ground‐breaking model. In so doing, our review suggests that recent work extends the original model to include further dimensions of legislative debates. Third, we examine the role of legislative debates as mechanisms of representation, focusing on gender. Four, we examine the challenges of the comparative analysis of legislative debates. Finally, we map the road ahead by discussing four avenues of future research and some key questions that remain unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expulsion of party members for the expression of dissent is a common practice in democratic states around the world, which can have momentous consequences for individual parties and the political system at large. In this article, we address the question of whether limitations on party members' free speech can be defended on normative grounds. Drawing on a conception of parties that sees them as broader membership organisations that allow citizens to exercise political agency in a unique fashion, as well as on insights from the broader normative-theoretical literature on organisations, we build a strong presumptive case that interference with party members' political freedoms is normatively problematic. Exploring numerous weighty arguments in favour of limiting freedom of speech within parties, we find that none of them provides a knock-down argument against our case. The argument we advance has important implications for contemporary theoretical debates about parties and partisanship, and for the regulation of parties' internal affairs more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence of public opinion blindly following political leader rhetoric has important implications for the scope of elite influence and normative democratic concerns. Past research, however, does not test the strength of real world leader cues amid signals that conflict with a leader's policy message, and thus has not gauged sthe robustness of the "follow-the-leader" dynamic. The current study explores whether two different conflicting signals – 1) opposing intra-party Congressional elite cues and 2) negative policy information that gives compelling reasons to oppose a policy – attenuate leader influence in support of a realistic counter-stereotypical policy. A national survey experiment with two parallel partisan designs shows that individuals follow their leader to a substantial degree whether or not conflicting signals are present. Conflicting co-party elite cues do not attenuate leader influence among Republicans. For Democrats, although they weaken amid opposition, leader cues still shape mass opinion sizably. Providing substantially more information about the policy at hand does not make either partisan group much less likely to follow their leader, a finding that holds regardless of individuals' preexisting ideology in the policy area. Results demonstrate the broad conditions under which "follow-the-leader" behavior holds and reveal a stronger nature of elite influence than previously understood. Party elites and information fail to effectively constrain the sway of prominent leaders, who have considerable latitude in positions they can take without losing mass support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on exploring and defending the importance of usability for moral theories including disagreements in moral belief and in normative moral theory.

The article presents the discussion on era of the greatest press freedom in Russia. Topics include leading defender of press freedom and offering up the politically motivated lawsuit as a disagreement between economic entities; group of Orthodox believers appearing at the Sakharov Centre and beginning to defile and destroying the artworks; and offences against the sentiments of religious believers and defilement of religious shrines.

In spite of broad interest in internal party dynamics, with previous literature relatedly demonstrating that voters are not oblivious to party infighting, very little attention has been paid to the antecedents of voter perceptions of intra-party conflict. This article addresses this research deficit with the support of empirical evidence gathered over the course of the 2017 Austrian national election campaign. The study examines variations in perceived intra-party conflict over time, both across parties and within the same party. We find that although voter perceptions largely mirror actual distinctions in intra-party fighting, conspicuous individual-level variations can also be identified owing to attention to the election campaign and motivated reasoning in information processing. These results have important consequences for our understanding of voter perceptions of intra-party conflict and the role of election campaigns, with potential implications for party strategies during election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the effects of party defections on the attitudes of politicians who remain loyal to the party? We answer by combining multiple sources of data into a comprehensive novel data set on parliamentary party switching, to estimate how this affects the perceived distance between a politician and his party. Focusing on the theory of cognitive dissonance and the black sheep effect, we hypothesize that politicians perceive themselves closer to their parties when those parties recently suffered defections. The effect should be greater among incumbent politicians as they directly experience divisions, but also among officials dissatisfied with the leadership as their dissonance should be stronger. Statistical analyses of data from two elite surveys, on a sample of 13,256 politicians belonging to 92 parties that ran in 28 elections held between 2005 and 2015 in 14 countries, provide support for our hypotheses and shed light on the consequences of intra-party defections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does economic inequality warp voters' views about party platforms? If so, are voters' perceptual biases systemically shaped by their economic status? Drawing from a psychological theory of class conflict, we argue that income inequality heightens disagreement about party positions among people with different economic status. Analyzing survey responses on perceived ideological positions of 700 + parties in over 110 elections, we reveal that poorer and richer voters systematically misperceive the positions of parties in opposite directions, and that the extent to which they do so is larger in more unequal societies. We also show that class‐based perceptual disagreement is particularly salient among left‐ and right‐leaning parties, but not among centrist parties. Our findings question a fundamental principle of representative democracy, suggesting that even a basic consensus on the ideological placements of parties cannot be taken for granted in highly unequal societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties' internal dynamics change when they adopt party-wide ballots for important policy and personnel decisions? Parties in parliamentary democracies are increasingly using such procedures, but researchers still disagree about their impact on partisan politics. This article argues that in order to pin down such effects, researchers should more systematically account for how such ballots are conducted. The argument is developed with respect to party unity. Intra-party ballots are described as multi-stage procedures with key rules at each stage whose attributes can exacerbate or mitigate the tensions unleashed by contestation over party decisions. It demonstrates the feasibility of such an approach by proposing measures taken from the Political Party Database (PPDB). It then uses examples from PPDB data to show that these procedures do vary in practice. Having demonstrated how rule differences can be measured using existing or easily gathered data, the paper concludes by calling on future research on intra-party democracy to accept the challenge of studying party ballots in their full procedural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on nomination procedures and intra-party politics shows that engagement in personalized parliamentary activities helps legislators get re-elected and promoted in the party list. However, as a considerable body of scholarly work suggests, women in leadership positions who are perceived to disconfirm the well-known gender stereotypes by being "too assertive" and "agentic" in the workplace may suffer from what social psychologists call the "backlash effect" (i.e., facing economic and social sanctions). Integrating insights from the literatures on perceptions of female leadership and intra-party politics, we reveal the differential effect of legislative speechmaking on the career prospects of male and female members of parliament (MPs). Specifically, using an original dataset of over thirty-five thousand parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 2,140 MPs who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 1995 and 2011, we show that the well-documented positive effect of engagement in parliamentary activities on career prospects holds for male MPs, but not for their female counterparts. In fact, we found that female MPs who were active on the legislative floor were significantly less likely to get renominated and promoted in the party rank. These results imply that the challenges facing women in leadership positions go beyond electoral competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a comparative analysis of electoral intra-party competition in four countries – Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland and Luxembourg – based on an original data set of 79,621 candidates and 3150 party lists covering the last quarter century (1994–2017). We use two measures to describe the nature of intra-party competition over time, across countries and across party lists: a Gini coefficient and a measure of the effective number of candidates. First, in terms of change over time (personalization) – contra the presidentialization thesis – there is no concentration of intra-party competition around a few leaders over time. Second, in terms of the dynamics of concentration of votes (personalized politics), the results suggest a move beyond the clear-cut divide found in the literature between centralized and decentralized forms of personalized politics. Instead, personalized politics is best described by the concept of 'elitization', meaning the concentration of most votes on a medium-sized group of candidates (5–10 per lists). Finally, three sets of factors condition intra-party electoral competition: the electoral rules organizing preference votes, the level of elections (European, national and regional) and the presence on the party lists of incumbent politicians (party leaders, ministers and parliamentarians). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staging an open contest is a democratic method to choose a party leader, though its electoral consequences remain unclear. I argue that leadership contests are electorally detrimental to governing parties. Competitive contests signal intraparty policy and/or personality conflict to voters, which damages governing parties' perceived unity as well as competence in the policy‐making process. Thus, leadership contests undermine governing parties' performances in parliamentary elections. Moreover, since voters evaluate governing parties' record in office more than their rhetoric, unlike opposition parties, they cannot repair the image of incompetence/disunity by reshaping their rhetoric and/or policy direction. This implies that leadership contests damage governing parties' electoral prospects more than they do to opposition parties' electoral performances. Results from statistical testing with original data from 14 countries support my argument. In addition, these results are not endogenous to the contests' timing; degree of competitiveness; leadership selection rules; whether or not the incumbent retains office; norms of contests; or how predecessors left office. These findings underscore the need to investigate the relationship between intraparty dynamics and election outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts, and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them, represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding the scope of partisan polarization. We test between these alternatives with experiments that offer incentives for correct survey responses and allow respondents to search for information before answering each question. We find that partisan cheerleading inflates divides in factual information, but only modestly. Incentives have no impact on partisan divides in information search; these divides are no different from those that occur outside the survey context when we examine web‐browsing data from the same respondents. Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the parts of the protest statement highlighting a desire for addressing racial inequities at the law school. Topics include protest creating ambiguities for current and future classroom norms; profession depending upon preserving the possibility of good-faith disagreement in an academic setting; and significantly disrupting the learning environment and placing a burden on Black students.

Political contractualism is important in societies characterized by substantial moral and political disagreement and diversity. The very disagreement that makes the social contract necessary, however, also makes agreement difficult. Call this the paradox of diversity, which is the result of a tension between two necessary conditions of political contractualism: existence and stability. The first involves showing the possibility of some agreement, while the second involves showing that the agreement can persist. To solve both of these problems, I develop a multilevel contract theory that I call the "open society" model of political contractualism that incorporates diversity into the contractual model at different levels solving the existence problem, while avoiding fragility in the face of the stability problem. This approach is able to take advantage of the benefits of institutional diversity while providing a stable framework for productive political disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of voting rules on delay in a multilateral bargaining experiment with costly communication. Our design is based on a variant of the Baron–Ferejohn framework. Communication takes place after a proposer is selected and before a proposal is made. In contrast to prior experiments, communication is directly associated with costs in our setup. Specifically, every second of communication increases the probability that the game is terminated before a proposal can be made. In case of 'breakdown', each player receives an exogenously fixed disagreement value. Those values sum up to less than the amount of the available surplus, implying that delay owing to communication is costly. We vary the decision rule (majority versus unanimity) as well as the distribution of disagreement values (symmetric or asymmetric). We find that unanimity rule leads to longer communication delays and more frequent breakdowns in asymmetric, but not in symmetric situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]