Search Results

Research Questions for Comparative Investigation

Michael D. McDonald and Ian Budge

in Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate

This chapter describes the data and the way thse are deployed operationally in the subsequent analysis. The data falls into three main categories: aggregate voting results for post-war national ... More

This chapter describes the data and the way thse are deployed operationally in the subsequent analysis. The data falls into three main categories: aggregate voting results for post-war national elections over 21 democracies with the resulting distribution of seats in parliaments and places in cabinets; policy preferences stated by all significant parties in each election in their published policy programme (their manifesto or platform); party policy preferences can also be weighted if they are in government by their share of cabinet seats. The research questions asked with these data are how far policy outputs compare with preferences on an election-to-election and government-to-government basis. More importantly, how policy relationships evolve over time canbe examined, and equilibria both for policy and preferences can be established and compared.Less

Political Parties and Party Systems

Hans‐Dieter Klingemann

in The European Voter: A Comparative Study Of Modern Democracies

This chapter offers a historical description of the development of the national party systems of the countries represented in the book. First, it provides an overview of the political parties in the ... More

This chapter offers a historical description of the development of the national party systems of the countries represented in the book. First, it provides an overview of the political parties in the various countries and classifies them by party family. Second, it deals with three aspects of inter-party competition which have been singled out as important by previous research efforts: (1) the number of political parties (fragmentation), (2) the ideological distance between parties (polarization), and (3) the degree of electoral change (volatility). Measures of these characteristics allow a basic description of the structure and dynamics of party systems.Less

From Platform Declarations to Policy Outcomes: Changing Party Profiles and Partisan Influence Over Policy

Miki L. Caul and Mark M. Gray

in Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Examines whether the role of parties in policy‐making has changed substantially since the 1950s. The chapter uses data from the Comparative Manifestos Project and aggregate policy measures to assess ... More

Examines whether the role of parties in policy‐making has changed substantially since the 1950s. The chapter uses data from the Comparative Manifestos Project and aggregate policy measures to assess long‐term trends in parties’ policy positions, and governing parties’ impacts on policy outcomes for 15 advanced industrial democracies. The chapter first analyses how the parties’ policy profiles have changed over time. Second, it examines whether parties are becoming increasingly flexible in terms of the issues they emphasize, moving from a strategy of selling a consistent package of policies toward marketing an increasingly volatile variety of issues. Third, it analyses changes in the degree of partisan impact on policy outputs, concluding that despite a pattern of ideological convergence, there is less evidence that the policy impact of parties has eroded over time.Less

Four Manifestos

Khavn de la Cruz

in Southeast Asian Independent Cinema

Four Manifestos by Filipino Independent Director Khavn de la Cruz

Mean Voter Representation Versus Partisan Constituency Representation: Do Parties Respond to the Mean Voter Position or to Their Supporters?

Lawrence Ezrow

in Linking Citizens and Parties: How Electoral Systems Matter for Political Representation

Do political parties respond to shifts in the preferences of their supporters or to the mean voter position? Cross‐national analyses – based on observations from Eurobarometer surveys and parties' ... More

Do political parties respond to shifts in the preferences of their supporters or to the mean voter position? Cross‐national analyses – based on observations from Eurobarometer surveys and parties' policy programs in fifteen countries from 1973 to 2002 – suggest that mainstream parties respond to shifts in the mean voter position. Alternatively, niche parties respond to shifts in the mean position of their supporters. The chapter reports an additional finding that there is no evidence that electoral systems mediate – namely, they do not determine whether parties are more or less likely to respond to the mean voter position or to their supporters. Again, lowering the level of analysis to consider the ‘type of party’ (niche and mainstream) is best for understanding to which group parties respond.Less

The Free Germany Manifesto and the German People: (August 6, 1943)

Franz Neumann

in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort

This chapter examines the significance of the Free Germany Manifesto to the German people. Three facts made the Free Germany Manifesto significant: the backing it apparently received from the Soviet ... More

This chapter examines the significance of the Free Germany Manifesto to the German people. Three facts made the Free Germany Manifesto significant: the backing it apparently received from the Soviet Union; the revolutionary implication of the manifesto; and its appeal to the desire for national self-preservation. The chapter first provides an overview of the content of the Free Germany Manifesto before discussing its target groups, which included workers, peasants, those strata of the middle classes which have been proletarized in the process of total mobilization, and a large part of the intelligentsia. It then considers National Bolshevism and its two origins, one in the Communist Party of Germany and the other in the nationalistic organizations, especially the Free Corps. It also analyzes the strength of communism and of other anti-Nazi groups in Germany.Less

The Communist Manifesto

Roman Szporluk

in Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List

The chapter discusses Marx's synthesis of history, politics, and the future that is The Communist Manifesto. This book confronts the question of the relationship between nationalism and communism. In ... More

The chapter discusses Marx's synthesis of history, politics, and the future that is The Communist Manifesto. This book confronts the question of the relationship between nationalism and communism. In order to understand the Big Book, one has to know that Karl Marx no longer saw the need to construct a system to support his program. The principles of communism in the Manifesto were not invented. It actually sprung from the struggles of the existing class. It shows the framework of Marx's position on the nation. It is an “antinationalist manifesto”. The prospect of a national alliance was unthinkable. Two main points were brought out: firstly, Marx was not alone in his stand that Europe was in a state of crisis and secondly, Marx's contemporaries shared his myopia about nationalism. In fact, nationalism was already changing the social reality. Though at that time, not even the most influential 19th-century thinkers recognized its force.Less

“It Must Change”: The Art of Digression in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Srikanth Reddy

in Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry

This chapter examines the place of digression in Modernist debates surrounding the theory of aesthetics in relation to American political culture. Wallace Stevens adopts digression as a governing ... More

This chapter examines the place of digression in Modernist debates surrounding the theory of aesthetics in relation to American political culture. Wallace Stevens adopts digression as a governing trope of the ars poetica in order to undo the politically “purposeful” genres of polemic and manifesto which dominate aesthetic theory in the Modernist period. In this poem, Stevens frames theoretical ratiocination within a digressive logic “in which there seems / To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or / Not apprehended well.” The question of evasion, raised within Stevens’ lifetime through the poet’s dispute with the Marxist critic Stanley Burnshaw, marks an encounter between aestheticism and the politics of purpose in American intellectual culture of the period. At once raising and deconstructing the idea of purpose, the digressive ars poetica serves as the stage upon which Stevens mobilizes Kant’s aesthetic theory to underwrite poetic form in the Modernist lyric.Less

Egalitarian Millennialism: Marx the Rooster and Marxism (Nineteenth Century ce)

Richard Landes

in Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience

Beginning with a discussion of Babeuf's Communist variant on the (failed) French Revolution, the chapter analyzes Marx as a “rooster” (a secular Joachite) whose prophecies of a world revolution in ... More

Beginning with a discussion of Babeuf's Communist variant on the (failed) French Revolution, the chapter analyzes Marx as a “rooster” (a secular Joachite) whose prophecies of a world revolution in 1848 proved wrong (compared with Meyerbeer's response), but who spent the rest of his life trying to explain—as roosters so often do—how he was right about the scenario, but wrong about the timing. The chapter addresses the issue of Marx's denial of any millennial component to his thinking, his adoption of the politique du pire, and the broader problem of “secular millennialism,” including the problem of “envy” in the appeal of Communist promises.Less

Relating Elector to Voter Preferences

Ian Budge, Hans Keman, Michael McDonald, and Paul Pennings

in Organizing Democratic Choice: Party Representation Over Time

As citizen-electors and voters are different bodies of people, particularly in terms of the choice situation within which they express their preferences, we cannot simply assume that they are the ... More

As citizen-electors and voters are different bodies of people, particularly in terms of the choice situation within which they express their preferences, we cannot simply assume that they are the same. They have to be compared explicitly. Democracy has to guarantee a necessary connection between public policy and citizen preferences, so we have in the first place to see how far voter and electoral preferences correspond. It cannot simply be assumed that they do. Comparing Eurobaromoter Left-Right self placements by electors with the positions stated out by voters in elections we find only limited correspondence in terms of election-by-election congruence and responsiveness but very substantial long term correspondence, especially between their mean positions. This gives an assurance that elections and voters do represent electors fairly over the long term.Less

Crisis and Withdrawal: The Programme Undermined and Retracted, 1612–25

Howard Hotson

in Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform

In the years after his return to Herborn, Johann Heinrich Alsted's commitment to Ramon Lull and the art of memory sustained a series of assaults from near and far. Five years and ten publications ... More

In the years after his return to Herborn, Johann Heinrich Alsted's commitment to Ramon Lull and the art of memory sustained a series of assaults from near and far. Five years and ten publications later, his commitment seems if anything to have grown and to be extending itself from logic and mnemonics into cosmology and physics, from the ‘alchemical logic’ of Lull to alchemy itself. Of the four systems of physics which the work proposes to harmonize, chemical physics is declared to be ‘by far the most ancient of all except the Mosaic’. The origins of the Rosicrucian uproar have long been shrouded in mystery. The authorship of the first of the Rosicrucian manifestos, the Fama fraternitatis, was attributed to Tobias Hess. The publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos was not an isolated event. No other centre in the Reformed world seems to have matched either the intense preoccupation with occultism or the immediate participation in the clamour surrounding the Rosicrucians.Less

Tiki Manifesto

Dan Taulapapa McMullin

in Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific

This chapter presents Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s poem “Tiki Manifesto,” which takes one’s very physical profile as a marker of identity and laments its having been stolen and devalued (and commodified) ... More

This chapter presents Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s poem “Tiki Manifesto,” which takes one’s very physical profile as a marker of identity and laments its having been stolen and devalued (and commodified) by an elusive enemy.Less

Propagation without Propaganda

John T. Lysaker

in Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought

This chapter discusses the genre of the manifesto. The manifesto, Lysaker states, stages a confrontation with history and is very fitting to the contemporary moment. It is, however, not aligned with ... More

This chapter discusses the genre of the manifesto. The manifesto, Lysaker states, stages a confrontation with history and is very fitting to the contemporary moment. It is, however, not aligned with much philosophical thought, though it contains philosophical propositions. It seeks allegiance and is light on proof, unlike most philosophical writing.Less

New Awareness Of A Scientist’s Responsibility

KLAUS HENTSCHEL

in The Mental Aftermath: The Mentality of German Physicists 1945-1949

The political encouragements in the Physikalische Blätter reflected the budding awareness among German scientists of their social responsibility. This awareness is specifically articulated in the ... More

The political encouragements in the Physikalische Blätter reflected the budding awareness among German scientists of their social responsibility. This awareness is specifically articulated in the revised statutes of the German Physical Society (DPG). It later bore fruit in the — perhaps apologetically motivated — Mainau and G öttingen manifestos for responsible nuclear armaments policy. The popularization of science was seen as an effective antidote to socially blind over-specialization in science.Less