Search results for "political economy"
showing 10 items of 637 documents
Northern Ireland: Sectarianism, Civil Society and Democratic Deepening
2013
The main aim of this chapter is to provide an overview and evaluation of evidence of efforts at peace-building at the level of civil society (rather than political processes, where most analyses have focused) in Northern Ireland, particularly since the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. How successful have attempts, at the level of civil society, by the people of Northern Ireland, the Irish and British governments, the EU and US governments and other actors been in creating community cohesion in a society with a long history of social and political division? In particular, what has been the role of cross-community and religious groups in these efforts? A second aim is to begin to articula…
Left-Authoritarians and Voter Turnout in West European Countries
2017
Parties with a left profile on economic issues and an authoritarian profile on socio-cultural issues have been largely absent from the supply side of the typical post-World-War-II policy space of West European democracies. As a result, citizens with economically left and socio-culturally authoritarian policy positions have faced difficulties in identifying parties that match their preference bundle. Building on previous inquiries into the party preferences of left-authoritarians, this study hypothesizes that the cross-pressures left-authoritarians typically encounter when looking for a party that matches their preferences translate into an overall lower likelihood to turn out to vote in nat…
Theoretical and Analytical Framework
2021
Analytically, the present work relies on two foundations, Anthony Downs’ (1957) Proximity model of electoral competition which states that political parties or candidates will seek to position themselves as close as possible to the (preferred) policy positions of voters and Ian Budge’s past election model (1994), according to which parties and candidates use the results of past elections in order to gain information about the electorate landscape. Both models rely on a ‘marketplace’ analogy with demand and supply. Candidates, parties, and politicians supply policies (advertised as policy positions), while the electorate, voters, and constituencies demand policies. Just like in a marketplace…
Eurosceptic Contagion and European Elections
2021
At the onset, the starting perspective here has been that the main arena for political struggle is the national one. One of the most influential approaches in the study of European and European Union politics has been the second-order election thesis (Reif & Schmitt, 1980). According to this school of thought, elections to the European Parliament have actually functioned as somewhat less important national elections (hence second order, akin to US midterm elections), and the main arena for political conflict over EU policy lies at the national level. This book has so far largely shared these assumptions and premises and has as a consequence focused on the effect of Eurosceptic Parties’ succ…
Coalition building in the UN Security Council
2014
Political coalitions in the international system are still understudied in International Relations theory. This article claims that the formation of and variations in coalitions in the international system are affected by changes in their bargaining power and bargaining environment related to the global leadership cycle and by long-term organisational changes of the international political system. Identifying the Security Council as the institution in which states are more likely to keep their systemic preferences at the institutional level, the article studies the presence, formation and change of coalitions in the international system by testing variations in the behaviour of the Securit…
The Mediatization of E-Campaigning: Evidence From German Party Websites in State, National, and European Parliamentary Elections 2002-2009
2012
The rise of e-campaigning is often associated with its ability to circumvent journalistic principles of news selection and presentation. By this, parties and candidates are said to free themselves from the discretionary power of the mass media and to reach voters in an unfiltered way. This conventional wisdom is tested through a comparative content analysis of German party websites in state, national, and European parliamentary elections between 2002 and 2009. The results show that e-campaigns in all elections adhere in their messages to the media logic. Specifically, they replicate those patterns of offline coverage that have been held accountable for rising political alienation and civic …
It’s a matter of confidence. Institutions, government stability and economic outcomes
2021
In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that poss…
The Shaping of Public Economic Discourse in Postwar America: The 1947 Meat Shortage and Franco Modigliani’s Meat Plan
2015
Abstract This paper discusses the American debate over price controls and economic stabilization after World War II, when the transition from a war economy to a peace economy was characterized by bottlenecks in the productive system and shortages of food and other basic consumer goods, directly affecting the living standard of the population, the public opinion, and political discourse. Specifically, we will focus on the economist Franco Modigliani and his proposal for a “Plan to meet the problem of rising meat and other food prices without bureaucratic controls.” The plan prepared by Modigliani in October 1947 was based on a system of taxes and subsidies to foster a proper distribution of …
Terrorism and Tourism: two sides of the same coin
2018
The present short essay brings the problem of terrorism into the foreground. Basically, terrorism not only was catalogued as the major threat for Western civilization but also for tourism and hospitality industries. We hold the thesis that far from being affected by, tourism and terrorism share the same origin, the same point of convergence, which dates back towards nineteen century and the unification and formation of the first worker unions. Though polemic, our argumentation is based on the historical facts and evidence left by the action of first anarchists in the US. The same benefits prompted by anarchosyndicalists who by an extreme violence shocked the government, were the background …
The Construction of Collective Memory: from Franco to Democracy
2004
Collective memory is neither spontaneous nor random, but the result of a series of selective practices. It establishes group identity and sets power relations between groups. The author considers the process of selection through a case study of the transformation of Franco’s regime in Spain into a democracy. Collective memory of the time is shown to be organized around an event (the Munich Coalition or contubernio) and around the democratic transition. The author traces two opposing notions, negationist (denying any importance to Munich) and the pro-democratic, and concludes that the memory of the transition is only the memory of those who won the civil war, who were also those who enginee…