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Party Elites (party + elite)
Selected AbstractsShould I stay or should I go?EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 5 2008An experimental study on voter responses to pre-electoral coalitions Party elites, however, do not know how voters will respond to the coalition formation at the polls. In this article, the authors report on an experimental study among 1,255 Belgian students. In order to study voter responses to the formation of PECs, respondents were presented with two ballots: one with individual parties (party vote condition) and one with coalitions (coalition vote condition). The aim of this experiment is to predict under what conditions party supporters will follow their initially preferred party into the coalition and vote for the PEC, and under what conditions they would desert the PEC at the polls. The decision whether to follow the coalition or not can be traced back to four considerations: dislike of the coalition partner; ideological congruence between coalition partners; size of the initially preferred party; and being attracted to a specific high-profile candidate. (Dis)liking the coalition partner is independent from the ideological congruence between the two coalition partners. The study's results also show support for an adjustment effect, as respondents became more loyal toward cartels over the course of the 2003,2005 observation period. [source] MPs and web technologies: an untapped opportunity?JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2003Nigel Jackson Abstract MPs have not previously been assigned a major role in electoral campaigning, being considered only one element of a political party's ,marketing' tools for winning votes. Evidence now suggests that the relationship between MPs and their constituents is changing. The concept of ,constituency service' implies that individual MPs can have a much greater influence on local voters and so possibly buck national trends. At the same time the concept of the ,permanent campaign' is transforming political campaigning whereby the political elite needs ever-greater control of the tools used to provide messages to voters. The internet is a potential battleground between MPs who want greater control of their own local campaigning and the party elite who want to ensure a consistent, coherent and controlled message. The Internet is a new addition to the campaigning armoury, yet the focus so far has been on e-government, e-democracy and election campaigns. By concentrating on how and why MPs use their websites this paper considers whether MPs have fully understood and utilised this new medium. Key questions include whether their websites are ,sticky', interactive and a means of creating a targeted message. The findings of this detailed study of MPs' websites show that apart from a few pioneers, MPs have not progressed beyond using the Internet as ,shovelware' , the vast majority view their website as an electronic brochure and not a new form of two-way communication. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications [source] The Transition to ,New' Social Democracy: The Role of Capitalism, Representation and (Hampered) ContestationBRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2009David J. Bailey This article argues that existing accounts of the transformation from ,traditional' to ,new' social democracy has thus far only identified the contextual changes that have prompted this move. In doing so, they have failed to account for the motives of social democratic party actors in undertaking the transition to ,new' social democracy in response to those changes. The article draws upon a critical realist method, and Marxist and anti-representational theories, to conceptualise ,traditional' social democratic party relations as suffering from tensions between constituents' demands for decommodification, the attempt by party elites to contain (and thereby ,represent') those demands and the (in)compatibility of this process of containment with the need to recommodify social relations in the light of periodic crises in contemporary capitalism. It argues that these tensions explain the attempt by party elites to promote the move towards ,new' social democracy, the (eventual) acquiescence of party constituents to those attempts and the subsequent exit from social democratic constituencies which has resulted. The argument is made with reference to the British Labour Party and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). [source] Political Representation and Gender in Brazil: Quotas for Women and their ImpactBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2008LUIS F. MIGUEL In the 1990s, Brazilian Congress approved an electoral quota for female candidates in parliamentary competition (with exception of the Senate). The reticence of the law and the peculiarities of the Brazilian open lists electoral system have given rise to concern that the quotas will fail. In fact, there has been no great increase in the number of women in Brazilian legislatives , there has been some change in the municipalities, a little less in the states and almost nothing at the federal level. Analysing in detail the results of four elections to the federal Chamber of Deputies, two before and two after the quotas, it becomes apparent that, in Brazil, the impact of quotas is mediated far more than in other countries. Quotas provide, above all, an incentive to party elites to support an increase in the number of female political leaders, and the results may appear only at mid term. [source] | ||||||||||