Building a left coast: the legacy of the California Popular Front and the challenge to Cold War liberalism in the post-world war two era

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Im Interesse der Macht: Ungarns neues Wahlsystem

Until December 2011, Hungary had the most stable electoral system in Eastern Europe: except for an increase in the electoral threshold in 1994, no significant change had taken place since the transition from communism in 1989. On 23rd December 2011, however, Parliament passed a wholly new electoral law, which will first be used in the elections due in 2014. The purposes of this article are twofold. The first is to outline the change of electoral system that took place. The previous electoral law was, famously, one of the most complex in the world. The new law is somewhat simpler, but nevertheless retains many of the old law’s features. The second purpose is to analyse the origins and implications of the new law. Did it simply reflect the interests of those in power or did it also respond to public concerns? Can it be expected to enhance or detract from the quality of Hungarian democracy?

In the shadow of Grexit: the Greek election of 17 June 2012

This article provides an overview and analysis of the Greek June 2012 elections. Placing the elections within the broader framework of the Greek socio-political and economic context, it discusses the electoral campaign and results, juxtaposing them to the 6 May electoral round. The election results confirmed many of the trends of the previous round, including electoral volatility, the fragmentation of the party system and the rise of anti-establishment forces. The main difference was the entrenchment of the pro- versus anti- bailout division and the prominence of the question of Greece’s continued Eurozone membership.

Terrorism and cabinet duration

Terrorism can strengthen or weaken electoral support for ruling governments. We show in a simple model of coalition formation that, regardless of the direction of a public opinion shock, the impact of terrorism on cabinet duration is ambiguous. However, in an analysis of a data set including 2,400 cabinets in over 150 countries in the period 1970–2002, we find that terrorism, on average, shortens cabinet duration. This result is robust for a range of alternative terror measures and is present in both democratic as well as autocratic political regimes.

The effect of the national setting on employment practice: the case of downsizing

Although there is now a sizeable body of academic literature that tries to explain cross-country differences in terms of corporate control, capital market development, investor protection and politics, there is as yet very little literature on the degrees of protection accorded to other corporate stakeholders such as employees, based on a systematic comparison of firm level evidence. We find that both theories of legal origin and the varieties of capitalism approach are poor predictors of the relative propensity of firms to make redundancies in different settings. However, the political orientation of the government in place and even more so the nature of the electoral system are relatively good explanators of this propensity. In other words, political structures and outcomes matter more than more rigid institutional features such as legal origin. We explore the reasons for this, drawing out the implications for both theory and practice.

The origins and impact of proportional representation

This article in the peer-reviewed Oxford Bibliographies series, gives an introduction to the literatures on the varieties, origins, and effects of proportional electoral systems.

The Rise of the Golden Dawn

This chapter assesses the recent dramatic rise of the Greek Golden Dawn by examining its background, electoral base and policies/ agenda.

The impact of the elderly on inflation rates in developed countries

What explains the cross-national variation in inflation rates in developed countries? Previous literature has emphasised the role of ideas and institutions, and to a lesser extent interest groups, while leaving the role of electoral politics comparatively unexplored. This paper seeks to redress this neglect by focusing on one case where electoral politics matters for inflation: the share of the population above 65 years old in a country. I argue that countries with a larger share of elderly have lower inflation because older people are both more inflation averse and politically powerful, forcing governments to pursue lower inflation. I test my argument in three steps. First, logistic regression analysis of survey data confirms older people are more inflation averse. Second, panel data regression analysis of party manifesto data reveals that European countries with more old people have more economically orthodox political parties. Third, time series cross-section regression analyses demonstrate that the share of the elderly is negatively correlated with inflation in both a sample of 21 advanced OECD economies and a larger sample of 175 countries. Ageing may therefore push governments to adopt a low inflation regime.

A comparative study of immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands

This study deals with immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands. Scholars have recognized low level of political participation of immigrants in Sweden compared to the Netherlands. The main goal of this study is to analyze the institutional influence, mainly from political parties over immigrants’ motivation for active electoral participation. The modified actor-context model uses here as the main theoretical framework. In addition, social capital theory employs to analyze immigrants’ voluntary organizational membership. This study confirms that, Swedish immigrants have the lower participation rate in the political sphere, at lest to a certain extent, than its counterparts the Dutch immigrants. This study also confirms the argument that contextual factors can influence actor’s motivations in integration-oriented action, and similarly it validates the necessity of enlargement of the actor-context model.

More than Just the Final Straw: Stolen Elections as Revolutionary Triggers

Stolen elections are triggering events that overcome barriers to revolutionary action against electoral authoritarian regimes. They mobilize ordinary citizens, strengthen the opposition, and divide the regime. As neo-institutionalist theories of revolution suggest, the relative openness of electoral authoritarianism inhibits mass protest. But when elections are stolen, regimes undergo “closure,” increasing the probability of protest. The failure of other potential revolutionary precipitants underlines that stolen elections are not merely replaceable final straws. Stolen elections have not only been crucial for the emergence of revolutionary situations, they have shaped outcomes as well. Linking popular mobilization to fraudulent elections has become part of the repertoire of contention of democratic revolutionaries.

Una memoria consensuada : El Informe Rettig

No cabe duda que hoy día la memoria de la dictadura militar (1973-1990) está presente en la vida cotidiana de Chile más que ningún otro periodo histórico. La razón se encuentra en los trágicos sucesos que se vivieron duran- te esos años en materia de derechos humanos. Don Patricio Aylwin, primer presidente electo democráticamente en tras 17 años de autoritarismo y una figura comprometida con los derechos humanos, era consciente de la necesi- dad de investigar la verdad de los crímenes de lesa humanidad ocurridos en Chile. Para ello creó la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, aunque consideró menester limitar el contenido de su informe con el fin de no amedrentar a las Fuerzas Armadas, las cuales gozaban todavía de mucho poder. Asimismo, el apoyo electoral de los partidos de derecha fue un factor que logró coartar el contenido del informe de la comisión. En este trabajo se presentan aquellas cuestiones que más relevancia tuvieron en la conformación de la verdad de la represión, tales como sus objetivos, sus integrantes y su metodología.

Hårda nypor för ett mjukt samhälle? : Om medialisering och rasifiering i utspelspolitikens Sverige

Toughness for a soft society? On medialisation, racialisation and the politics of spin in Sweden In recent years, issues concerning the future of “multicultural Sweden” have become a salient feature in Swedish politics. One important actor in recent years’ debates about the problems confronting “multicultural Sweden” is the Swedish Liberal Party. Since the general election of 2002, the party has gained both publicity and electoral support by focusing the question of “integration of immigrants” in terms of assimilation and intensified demands aimed at the “immigrant Others”. In this article, the party’s recent developments in the area of integration policy is analysed within the framework of two general processes in contemporary politics, the politics of racialisation and the medialisation of politics. The party’s successful interventions in the area of integration policy are built on an intimate as well as complex interplay between racialisation and medialisation. The agenda articulated by the party, further, has several similarities with the agenda of “authoritarian populist” movements throughout Europe.

Candidate Quality and Voter Response in U.S. House Elections

We propose and test the implications of a two-dimensional concept of candidate quality in U.S. House elections. Strategic quality is composed of the skills and resources necessary to wage an effective campaign; personal quality is composed of the characteristics most ordinary citizens value in their leaders and representatives, such as personal integrity and dedication to public service. We employ district informants in studies of the 1998 and 2002 congressional elections to measure these qualities in candidates, and we merge mass survey data with the district informant indicators to assess constituents’ awareness and evaluation of House candidates, and voting choice. We find that awareness tends to be responsive to candidates’ strategic quality, and that incumbent evaluation is remarkably responsive to variation in personal quality, even taking into account the quality of challenger emergence. These and other findings appear to support a more positive view of citizen capacity than is common in the congressional elections literature, especially in light of the electoral security of House incumbents.

Incumbency Reconsidered: Prospects, Strategic Entry, and Incumbent Quality in U.S. House Elections

Efforts to estimate the magnitude of the incumbency effect in U.S. House elections and assess its political meaning have been complicated by two omitted-variables problems. First, in the absence of an adequate measure of incumbent prospects, estimates of the magnitude of the incumbency effect fail to control for selection effects associated with the decision incumbents make about whether to run for reelection. Strategic incumbents enter races they think they can win and withdraw when they expect to lose. The consequence is an upward bias in estimates of incumbents’ electoral advantages. Second, the normative implications of high reelection rates cannot be assessed without measuring incumbent quality, since a possible explanation for their electoral success is that incumbents are of high quality and doing a good job. We propose a strategy for measuring incumbent prospects and quality, demonstrate the strategic nature of incumbent and challenger entry, re-estimate the incumbency effect, and show that incumbent quality has an impact on electoral outcomes. Our conclusion is that incumbents’ advantages in House elections have been over estimated while the positive basis of incumbent safety is typically under appreciated.