Pub Date : 2024-04-04DOI: 10.1017/s1537592724000616
Dylan L. Yingling, Daniel J. Mallinson
States and interest groups are facilitating a redistribution of government powers under a new courts-first federalism. States are working to claw back powers while interest groups drafting model laws strategically tailor them to skirt the limits of federal law and, once adopted by states, prompt federal courts to review them as parties litigate to clarify their rights. States do not need to be completely successful in litigation to shift the balance of state–national power. Testing this argument, we find that the US Supreme Court grants review to 17% of model laws in our sample produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whereas merely 1% of other cases are granted certiorari. Ultimately, the states and ALEC were partly successful in constraining federal power. Thus, the combination of model legislation, impact litigation, and courts-first federalism becomes a tool for states to draw power to themselves and from the federal government.
{"title":"Courts-First Federalism: How Model Legislation Becomes Impact Litigation","authors":"Dylan L. Yingling, Daniel J. Mallinson","doi":"10.1017/s1537592724000616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592724000616","url":null,"abstract":"States and interest groups are facilitating a redistribution of government powers under a new courts-first federalism. States are working to claw back powers while interest groups drafting model laws strategically tailor them to skirt the limits of federal law and, once adopted by states, prompt federal courts to review them as parties litigate to clarify their rights. States do not need to be completely successful in litigation to shift the balance of state–national power. Testing this argument, we find that the US Supreme Court grants review to 17% of model laws in our sample produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whereas merely 1% of other cases are granted certiorari. Ultimately, the states and ALEC were partly successful in constraining federal power. Thus, the combination of model legislation, impact litigation, and courts-first federalism becomes a tool for states to draw power to themselves and from the federal government.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140742596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-03DOI: 10.1017/s1537592724000410
Thomas B. Pepinsky, Ádám Reiff, Krisztina Szabó
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a watershed moment in European politics. The invasion prompted a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient in recent decades. We study public opinion toward refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with two rounds of original survey data from 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments coupled with detailed settlement-level demographic data to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.
{"title":"The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis and the Politics of Public Opinion: Evidence from Hungary","authors":"Thomas B. Pepinsky, Ádám Reiff, Krisztina Szabó","doi":"10.1017/s1537592724000410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592724000410","url":null,"abstract":"The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a watershed moment in European politics. The invasion prompted a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient in recent decades. We study public opinion toward refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with two rounds of original survey data from 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments coupled with detailed settlement-level demographic data to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140749431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-27DOI: 10.1017/s1537592723002980
Tim Vlandas, Daphne Halikiopoulou
This article presents new empirical evidence about the impact of Jihadist terrorist attacks on far-right preferences using the “unexpected event during survey” research design. This strategy allows us to match individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) to data on Jihadist terrorist attacks to compare respondents’ party preferences before and after a terrorist attack during the same survey period in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany. We theorise and test three distinct hypotheses about how different combinations of attitudinal changes including out-group prejudice and trust in institutions impact far-right preferences. We find no statistically significant effects. Analyses of the two indirect mechanisms— i.e., prejudice and trust—yield mixed results consistent with the null effect on far-right party preferences. By showing that terrorist attacks are unlikely to decisively change party support despite attracting significant public attention and affecting political attitudes, our results challenge the argument that Jihadist terrorism necessarily benefits the far-right and highlight the importance of null effects for overcoming confirmation bias in the study of voting behaviour.
{"title":"Jihadist Terrorist Attacks and Far-Right Party Preferences: An “Unexpected Event During Survey Design” in Four European Countries","authors":"Tim Vlandas, Daphne Halikiopoulou","doi":"10.1017/s1537592723002980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592723002980","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents new empirical evidence about the impact of Jihadist terrorist attacks on far-right preferences using the “unexpected event during survey” research design. This strategy allows us to match individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) to data on Jihadist terrorist attacks to compare respondents’ party preferences before and after a terrorist attack during the same survey period in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany. We theorise and test three distinct hypotheses about how different combinations of attitudinal changes including out-group prejudice and trust in institutions impact far-right preferences. We find no statistically significant effects. Analyses of the two indirect mechanisms— i.e., prejudice and trust—yield mixed results consistent with the null effect on far-right party preferences. By showing that terrorist attacks are unlikely to decisively change party support despite attracting significant public attention and affecting political attitudes, our results challenge the argument that Jihadist terrorism necessarily benefits the far-right and highlight the importance of null effects for overcoming confirmation bias in the study of voting behaviour.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140374410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-26DOI: 10.1017/s1537592724000240
Mia Carbone, Allison Harell, Stuart Soroka
Recent years have seen a marked shift in the salience and politicization of any incorporation of race into teaching at the elementary and secondary levels. “Critical race theory” (CRT) has become a prominent feature of the current debate, even as there is a good deal of misunderstanding about what CRT actually is. Drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment, we consider the impact of the phrase “critical race theory” in activating both racial biases and partisan identity. Our expectation was that CRT would tend to activate partisanship independent of symbolic racism. Results suggest otherwise: where support for culturally relevant pedagogy is concerned, CRT appears to engage partisanship particularly amongst those who exhibit high levels of symbolic racism.
{"title":"Critical Race Theory: How Policy Language Differentially Engages Symbolic Racism and Partisanship","authors":"Mia Carbone, Allison Harell, Stuart Soroka","doi":"10.1017/s1537592724000240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592724000240","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen a marked shift in the salience and politicization of any incorporation of race into teaching at the elementary and secondary levels. “Critical race theory” (CRT) has become a prominent feature of the current debate, even as there is a good deal of misunderstanding about what CRT actually is. Drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment, we consider the impact of the phrase “critical race theory” in activating both racial biases and partisan identity. Our expectation was that CRT would tend to activate partisanship independent of symbolic racism. Results suggest otherwise: where support for culturally relevant pedagogy is concerned, CRT appears to engage partisanship particularly amongst those who exhibit high levels of symbolic racism.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140378851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-26DOI: 10.1017/s1537592724000409
Roberta Fischli, James Muldoon
This article examines the role of digital technology in enabling and enhancing democratic practices and forms of governance. It contributes to emerging debates on democratic innovations by proposing a novel theoretical account of decentralized participatory democracy. To develop our account, we draw on the experience of two EU-funded projects, D-CENT and DECODE, which produced innovative citizen participation platforms and digital public infrastructure. Bringing democratic theory into conversation with critical data studies and the new municipalism movement, we theorize how these projects advanced three political aims: organizing political communities to build collective power, empowering citizens through direct participation in decision making, and transforming political institutions. The article then analyzes the strengths and limitations of these projects to draw lessons for policy makers and practitioners for future digital democratic experiments.
{"title":"Empowering Digital Democracy","authors":"Roberta Fischli, James Muldoon","doi":"10.1017/s1537592724000409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592724000409","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the role of digital technology in enabling and enhancing democratic practices and forms of governance. It contributes to emerging debates on democratic innovations by proposing a novel theoretical account of decentralized participatory democracy. To develop our account, we draw on the experience of two EU-funded projects, D-CENT and DECODE, which produced innovative citizen participation platforms and digital public infrastructure. Bringing democratic theory into conversation with critical data studies and the new municipalism movement, we theorize how these projects advanced three political aims: organizing political communities to build collective power, empowering citizens through direct participation in decision making, and transforming political institutions. The article then analyzes the strengths and limitations of these projects to draw lessons for policy makers and practitioners for future digital democratic experiments.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140378855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-25DOI: 10.1017/s1537592723003006
Courtney Blackington, Frances Cayton
Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders’ ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT’s main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.
{"title":"How to Stay Popular: Threat, Framing, and Conspiracy Theory Longevity","authors":"Courtney Blackington, Frances Cayton","doi":"10.1017/s1537592723003006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592723003006","url":null,"abstract":"Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders’ ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT’s main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140383783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-25DOI: 10.1017/s1537592724000239
Jessie Barton Hronešová, Daniel Kreiss
This article introduces the concept of “hijacked victimhood” as a form of strategically leveraging victimhood narratives. It is a subset of strategic victimhood, which is a relatively common communicative strategy whereby groups claim victimhood status in contests over power and legitimacy. Political leaders who use the strategy of hijacked victimhood present dominant groups as in danger, as current or future victims, and in need of protection (especially by the crafter of the narrative) from oppressive forces consisting of—or indirectly representing—marginalized and subaltern groups. In the process, leaders hijacking victimhood blunt the rights-based claims of such groups. Analyzing Viktor Orbán’s and Donald Trump’s elite rhetoric in Hungary and the United States, respectively, we inductively document varieties of hijacked victimhood in their political communication, showing how Orbán leverages historical suffering and resistance while Trump constructs economic and value-based harms for dominant groups. Making both conceptual and empirical contributions, we argue that at the heart of hijacked victimhood is a reversal of the victimizer–victim dichotomy, a new portrayal of moral orders, a teleological ordering of past and future harms, and a mobilization of security threats—all used to preserve or expand a dominant group’s power.
{"title":"Strategically Hijacking Victimhood: A Political Communication Strategy in the Discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump","authors":"Jessie Barton Hronešová, Daniel Kreiss","doi":"10.1017/s1537592724000239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592724000239","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the concept of “hijacked victimhood” as a form of strategically leveraging victimhood narratives. It is a subset of strategic victimhood, which is a relatively common communicative strategy whereby groups claim victimhood status in contests over power and legitimacy. Political leaders who use the strategy of hijacked victimhood present dominant groups as in danger, as current or future victims, and in need of protection (especially by the crafter of the narrative) from oppressive forces consisting of—or indirectly representing—marginalized and subaltern groups. In the process, leaders hijacking victimhood blunt the rights-based claims of such groups. Analyzing Viktor Orbán’s and Donald Trump’s elite rhetoric in Hungary and the United States, respectively, we inductively document varieties of hijacked victimhood in their political communication, showing how Orbán leverages historical suffering and resistance while Trump constructs economic and value-based harms for dominant groups. Making both conceptual and empirical contributions, we argue that at the heart of hijacked victimhood is a reversal of the victimizer–victim dichotomy, a new portrayal of moral orders, a teleological ordering of past and future harms, and a mobilization of security threats—all used to preserve or expand a dominant group’s power.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140383952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-02DOI: 10.1017/s1537592723002955
Robert M. Fishman
Do demonstrations tend to deepen or endanger democracy? I examine this theme of major debate between scholars and among political actors, analyzing how the United States and other democracies have dealt with—and been shaped by—popular pressure on representative institutions. Cases that are discussed include Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as examples drawn from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I offer clear principles to differentiate between types of protest that deepen democracy, advance the goal of inclusion, and others that endanger democratic principles. Among the issues I take up is whether the location of protest—for example, adjacent to or even inside legislative chambers—is decisive. Rejecting that approach, my argument instead emphasizes the difference between protests intended to influence policy-making or the political agenda and those that use intimidation or violence to replace the primacy of elections in selecting office holders. The discussion argues that conceptualizing demonstrations as complementary to the work of representative institutions can help to promote the difficult to obtain objective of political equality between citizens. The article also asks whether consensus on this matter can be attained and if so how.
{"title":"Deepening or Endangering Democracy: Demonstrations and Institutions under Representative Government","authors":"Robert M. Fishman","doi":"10.1017/s1537592723002955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592723002955","url":null,"abstract":"Do demonstrations tend to deepen or endanger democracy? I examine this theme of major debate between scholars and among political actors, analyzing how the United States and other democracies have dealt with—and been shaped by—popular pressure on representative institutions. Cases that are discussed include Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as examples drawn from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I offer clear principles to differentiate between types of protest that deepen democracy, advance the goal of inclusion, and others that endanger democratic principles. Among the issues I take up is whether the location of protest—for example, adjacent to or even inside legislative chambers—is decisive. Rejecting that approach, my argument instead emphasizes the difference between protests intended to influence policy-making or the political agenda and those that use intimidation or violence to replace the primacy of elections in selecting office holders. The discussion argues that conceptualizing demonstrations as complementary to the work of representative institutions can help to promote the difficult to obtain objective of political equality between citizens. The article also asks whether consensus on this matter can be attained and if so how.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139389843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-11DOI: 10.1017/s1537592723002852
S. Malthaner, Francis O’Connor, Lasse Lindekilde
The proliferation of lone-actor terrorist attacks over the past decade has led to a rapidly expanding literature and a subfield of research. However, this research has only to a limited degree been brought into wider discussions on political violence and social movements. In the present article, we take up this synthetic challenge and argue the need to theorize the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor terrorism. The article proposes a novel analytical framework for understanding lone-actor terrorism. We provide a conceptualization that draws attention to the social embeddedness of terrorist lone-actor radicalization and the collective dynamic of lone-actor attacks. Our point of departure is the recurrent finding that lone-actor terrorists are in fact not that alone, and that their attacks tend to cluster in time and space. First, we propose to conceive of lone-actor radicalization as a relational pathway shaped by social ties and interactions with radical milieus/movements. Second, taking inspiration from Charles Tilly’s notion of “scattered attacks” as a pattern of dispersed, loosely coordinated collective violence, we suggest three complementary ways of analyzing these processes and their temporal and interactive dynamic. We argue that theorizing the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor political violence is not only about addressing an empirical puzzle (the abundance of social ties; the clustered pattern of violent attacks), but about analytically capturing an entirely different and potentially increasingly relevant logic of violent processes. Thereby, and paradoxically, the very notion of “lone actors” can help us to understand the social dynamics of collective political violence more generally.
{"title":"Scattered Attacks: The Collective Dynamics of Lone-Actor Terrorism","authors":"S. Malthaner, Francis O’Connor, Lasse Lindekilde","doi":"10.1017/s1537592723002852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592723002852","url":null,"abstract":"The proliferation of lone-actor terrorist attacks over the past decade has led to a rapidly expanding literature and a subfield of research. However, this research has only to a limited degree been brought into wider discussions on political violence and social movements. In the present article, we take up this synthetic challenge and argue the need to theorize the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor terrorism. The article proposes a novel analytical framework for understanding lone-actor terrorism. We provide a conceptualization that draws attention to the social embeddedness of terrorist lone-actor radicalization and the collective dynamic of lone-actor attacks. Our point of departure is the recurrent finding that lone-actor terrorists are in fact not that alone, and that their attacks tend to cluster in time and space. First, we propose to conceive of lone-actor radicalization as a relational pathway shaped by social ties and interactions with radical milieus/movements. Second, taking inspiration from Charles Tilly’s notion of “scattered attacks” as a pattern of dispersed, loosely coordinated collective violence, we suggest three complementary ways of analyzing these processes and their temporal and interactive dynamic. We argue that theorizing the social and collective dynamics of lone-actor political violence is not only about addressing an empirical puzzle (the abundance of social ties; the clustered pattern of violent attacks), but about analytically capturing an entirely different and potentially increasingly relevant logic of violent processes. Thereby, and paradoxically, the very notion of “lone actors” can help us to understand the social dynamics of collective political violence more generally.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139010327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-06DOI: 10.1017/s153759272300289x
Kevin J. Elliott
What is it like to be a partisan? How do individuals experience their relationship to political parties? The most common answer today, both in popular discourse and much political science, is identity, but many individuals do not identify with parties. Rather, they relate to parties in terms of psychological closeness or affinity—they do not say “we” about the party, as do identifiers, but rather “they.” In this article, I argue that both the empirical and normative study of partisanship would be improved by recognizing that these are two fundamentally different ways for individuals to be attached to parties and that these distinct experiences coexist within most democracies today. Acknowledging this basic plurality of partisanships would remedy the current tendency among empirical studies to homogenize partisanship as either identity or closeness and so would avoid falsifying the experience of many citizens who fall into the opposite category. In polarized contexts, moreover, it could help break up dualistic and antagonistic thinking about how to perform partisanship and diversify public understandings of how to be a partisan. Recognizing the plurality of partisanships would also improve the explosion of normative theorizing about partisanship found in the ground-breaking work of scholars like Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, and Jonathan White and Lea Ypi. I show how identity and closeness partisanship—and the interaction between them—have transformative consequences for each of these scholars’ theories of partisanship, either furthering or threatening them. The article aims to improve the conceptualization of partisanship and to model a salutary engagement between normative and empirical inquiry within political science.
{"title":"What Is It Like To Be a Partisan? Measures of Partisanship and Its Value for Democracy","authors":"Kevin J. Elliott","doi":"10.1017/s153759272300289x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s153759272300289x","url":null,"abstract":"What is it like to be a partisan? How do individuals experience their relationship to political parties? The most common answer today, both in popular discourse and much political science, is identity, but many individuals do not identify with parties. Rather, they relate to parties in terms of psychological closeness or affinity—they do not say “we” about the party, as do identifiers, but rather “they.” In this article, I argue that both the empirical and normative study of partisanship would be improved by recognizing that these are two fundamentally different ways for individuals to be attached to parties and that these distinct experiences coexist within most democracies today. Acknowledging this basic plurality of partisanships would remedy the current tendency among empirical studies to homogenize partisanship as either identity or closeness and so would avoid falsifying the experience of many citizens who fall into the opposite category. In polarized contexts, moreover, it could help break up dualistic and antagonistic thinking about how to perform partisanship and diversify public understandings of how to be a partisan. Recognizing the plurality of partisanships would also improve the explosion of normative theorizing about partisanship found in the ground-breaking work of scholars like Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, and Jonathan White and Lea Ypi. I show how identity and closeness partisanship—and the interaction between them—have transformative consequences for each of these scholars’ theories of partisanship, either furthering or threatening them. The article aims to improve the conceptualization of partisanship and to model a salutary engagement between normative and empirical inquiry within political science.","PeriodicalId":48097,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138594560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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