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It's confirmed: Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry is pulling
away from the Louisiana gubernatorial field, rendering moot the mythology
about how little-known or also-ran politicians score surprising victories for
the state's top office.

Another media consortium has put out a poll on the
race, pegging Landry's support at 36 percent. As in the other
survey released earlier this week, former Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
cabinet member Democrat Shawn Wilson pulls
in 26 percent, and everybody else is in single digits with 14 percent undecided,
say the likely voters. These numbers were slightly worse for Landry and
slightly better for Wilson than the previous poll, but nevertheless reaffirm a
Landry-Wilson runoff looms on the horizon where Landry will win decisively.

This provides another blow to the hopes of the anybody-but-Landry
coterie of political activists, who keep hoping somehow another non-Democrat
challenger will emerge to slip past Wilson into the runoff. The thinking is
that a large portion of Democrats, some Republicans, and about half of all
others don't like Landry enough so that he would lose in a runoff to such a
candidate.

Other data from the poll didn't exactly provide
much aid and comfort for that line of reasoning. Over three quarters of the sample
formed an opinion about Landry, with half of it approving of him and just 28
percent disapproving, suggesting he could win a runoff against any opponent, if
narrowly. Driving part of that, he grabbed 14 percent of the vote intention of
black respondents, a little below that of the previous poll but at a level
typically higher significantly than statewide GOP gubernatorial or Senate
candidates.

Again, these are dynamics difficult to change with
the amount of money the Landry campaign has at its disposal. For any single
non-Democrat to make a charge, they have to pick off non-Democrat voters, and
Landry has three-fifths of Republicans and almost a third of other voters in
his column. But with a war chest around the eight-figure range, Landry has
plenty of resources to minimize erosion of his support, while other don't have
nearly enough to chip away at him and grab from other candidates.

And they can't depend upon Democrats to help them
out. Wilson and the party brass know that, absent a live
boy/dead girl scenario, he's dead in the water, but they have to keep going
because they have to field a quality candidate to keep the party refreshed and
able to provide down ballot assistance. The debacle of 2011 they surely haven't
forgotten, when the party ended up backing an obscure schoolteacher rookie
against Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, who decimated the field. When the dust cleared,
the GOP picked up seven House and nine Senate seats from 2007, although
party-switching and special elections throughout the first three years of Jindal's
term meant in practical terms a pickup of five House and one Senate as a direct
result of the 2011 elections. Wilson has to stay in and actively campaigning if
Democrats have any chance of maintaining their Legislature numbers and to maximize
their chances in some local contests.

As Landry began to run up huge fundraising numbers
and anecdotal evidence that he was the guy to beat, background whispering among
the chattering classes emerged not to speak too quickly of his coronation. Rather,
they alleged that recent Louisiana electoral history supposedly showed front
running gubernatorial candidates often were caught by surprise opponents who started out
quite modestly.

That's never been the case. The narrative seems to
have its origins from the 1987 contest where Democrat Rep. Buddy Roemer had bumped
along in single digits until breaking out close to election day, pushing Prisoner
#03128-095, known outside the big house as Democrat Gov. Edwin Edwards, into
second place and out of a runoff when Edwards withdrew. But it wasn't that big
of a surprise because Roemer made great pains to distinguish himself from the
other main contestants – two other congressmen, one a Republican, and the secretary
of state – with a campaign of fiscal conservatism and a record to match,
unrelenting criticism of Edwards, and a base outside of south Louisiana while
the others divided that area.

It seemed reinforced in 1995 race when Democrat
state Sen. Mike Foster, up against a former governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer,
and congressman, came from relative obscurity to win. Actually, that was in the
cards long before election day as polling early on showed him with good favorable/unfavorable
numbers, as long as he could become well-known to the electorate. He did, because
of the record amount of money he threw into the campaign (a good chunk of his
own), and because he strategically switched to the GOP label upon qualifying,
just as that had become a meaningful asset in campaigning (keep in mind when
Foster first won his Senate seat in 1987, Republicans had all of 5 seats in
that chamber and 17 on the House side). The official GOP apparatus welcomed
him, abandoning not only Roemer trying for another term, but also their
official endorsee who didn't even bother to qualify.

Sometimes the scenario is attempted to be applied
to the 2003 election of Democrat Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco. But Blanco was the
front runner who didn't fade against Jindal and a Democrat attorney general,
state senator, and party head,, who always placed in the top two in polls and
who in the last four months of the year raised and spent nearly $4 million, not
much less than Jindal, to consolidate a field that gave 60 percent of its vote
to Democrats in the general election.

And the same applies to the 2015 election of Democrat
state Rep. John Bel Edwards, who, facing no significant intraparty challenge,
led almost every poll against a fragmented GOP field and spent over $7 million
(about a million of his own) to build out name recognition. The only difference
between him and Blanco was he led substantially going into the runoff but he
had to pick off some Republican general election support rather than try to
prevent erosion of second-choice votes.

There are clear lessons here. If you are a polling
front runner, have relatively lots of resources, and have decent comparative
approval numbers, you won't get caught. For those who aren't, you can catch him
the front runner only if he has soft approval numbers, you don't, and you have money
close to that of him.

None of this applies to 2023. At 50 or so days out, Landry has led every poll with good numbers and money to burn. His opponents
have no better, if not worse, approval figures with nowhere close the bucks to
alter the dynamics. Simply, it's his race to lose.

Politicians frequently intervene in the regulation of financial accounting. Evidence from the accounting literature shows that regulatory capture by special interests helps explain these interventions. However, many accounting rules have broad economic or social consequences, such as their effects on income distribution or private sector subsidies. The perception of these consequences varies with a politician's ideology. Therefore, if accounting rules produce those consequences, ideology plausibly spills over and explains a politician's stance on the technical accounting issue, beyond special interest pressure. We use two prominent U.S. political debates about fair value accounting and the expensing of employee stock options to disentangle the role of ideology from special interest pressure. In both debates, ideology explains politicians' involvement at exactly those points when the debate focuses on the economic consequences of accounting regulation (i.e., bank bailouts and top management compensation). Once the debates focus on more technical issues, connections to special interests remain the dominant force.

The serious implications of privatizing state-owned enterprises for politicians, managers, and investors make such decisions highly contingent on firm characteristics and past performance, complicating the identification of the privatization effects. A unique opportunity for this identification arises from a rule of promotion of local politicians based on age requirements in China. This paper finds that Chinese cities whose top officials were older than age 58 were 20 percent less likely to privatize local state-owned enterprises during the wave of state-owned enterprise restructuring starting in the late 1990s. Relying on the regression discontinuity design, the analysis finds that privatizations led to productivity gains of more than 170 percent, an order of magnitude larger than the traditional estimates based on the firm fixed effect specification (including its random-growth variant). The paper further finds that the privatization effects are significantly larger when the government is less involved in the affairs of local firms. The findings underscore the need to deal with the time-varying selectivity of privatizations and highlight the crucial role that state-owned enterprise privatizations played in China's economic takeoff.

Social uprisings clearly show that social media tools, especially Twitter, help news spread more than the press does recently. In some cases Twitter substitutes traditional media if censorship is enlarged to such a level that the mainstream media channels prefer not to reflect the actual volume of the protests. Twitter is also utilized by politicians during such events to reinforce "us vs. them" division, and to gain support and legitimization for their own actions. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to investigate the recurring speech patterns in the tweets of top-level politicians during the Gezi Park protests that started in Istanbul Turkey in June 2013 and spread the country rapidly. We study the tweets to draw conclusions on whether the politicians' statements represent marginalization and polarization efforts during the Gezi Park protests. In this paper, we consider social uprising as a communal expression of both political and apolitical opposition to the party in power. Our analysis reveals that the politicians' tweets are mainly characterized by a discourse that guides the public into some conscious direction that may reproduce marginalization and polarization among the public at large.

After a theoretical overview of factors which could influence aldermen's use of information, this paper presents some findings of survey research on 262 aldermen of 140 Dutch municipalities with 20,000 or more inhabitants. The findings of the survey indicate that many respondents considered the output-orientedness of planning and control documents to be far from perfect. Moreover, many aldermen hardly appreciated the output-oriented information on developments and performances that was available in their organizations. The sources of performance information of which most aldermen – who are elected politicians -made by far the most use were informal, verbal consultations and formal meetings with official top managers. They made much less use of, for example, formal, written information in budgets, annual reports, and management reports. A statistical analysis of the variables in the survey showed that certain characteristics may influence aldermen's opinions on and use of various sources of performance information. However, the analysis did not always indicate significant differences between information preferences of subgroups of aldermen.

AbstractThis article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

Abstract
Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ in their ability, parties face a trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking candidates in decreasing order of competence ensures that elected politicians are most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for candidates that may lead parties not to place their best candidates at the top of the list. We examine this trade-off in a game-theoretical model in which parties rank their candidates on a list, candidates choose their campaign effort, and the election is a team contest for multiple prizes. We analyze how the candidates' objectives, voters' attention and media coverage, incumbency, the number of parties competing in the election, and the electoral environment influence how parties rank candidates.

Abstract Economic diplomacy receives growing interest in the field of international relations research ever since the end of the cold war. Despite the vast number of literature on economic diplomacy, there are not many studies measuring the effect of economic diplomacy quantitatively. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to measure economic diplomacy using the event study method that observes the influence of specific events on stock prices. In this study, the summit talks between the EU and China are selected as specific events that are considered as a form of economic diplomacy, and Airbus stock price, the proxy of the reaction to the economic diplomacy, was observed to verify the influence of it. The study categorized the summit talks by the type of participants whether the top politicians were included or not. The result shows that, among all summit talks, the summit talks between top politicians between the EU and China influence the stock price of Airbus positively, and it is statistically significant.

Under closed-list proportional representation, a party's electoral list determines the order in which legislative seats are allocated to candidates. When candidates differ in their ability, parties face a trade-off between competence and incentives. Ranking candidates in decreasing order of competence ensures that elected politicians are most competent. Yet, party lists create incentives for candidates that may push parties not to rank candidates in decreasing competence order. We examine this trade-off in a game-theoretical model in which parties rank their candidate on a list, candidates choose their campaign effort, and the election is a team contest for multiple prizes. We show that the trade-off between competence and incentives depends on candidates' objective and the electoral environment. In particular, parties rank candidates in decreasing order of competence if candidates value enough post-electoral high offices or media coverage focuses on candidates at the top of the list.

AbstractAnthony King thought and wrote a great deal about British prime ministers and political leadership more generally. But in contrast to the way in which single papers embodied his contribution to our understanding of 'government overload', 'executive‐legislative relations' and 'career politicians', his contribution to our understanding of the prime ministership was defined by a body of work. This essay explores that body of work and identifies some of the themes that characterised it. It then relates King's work to claims about the 'presidentialisation' of the office, as well as the importance of the expectations surrounding contemporary prime ministers. As Britain grapples with the challenge of Brexit, we should all take note of his counsel against expecting too much in the way of 'strong' prime ministerial leadership.

More than ever, women are achieving outstanding levels of professional success. Whether CEOs, board members, entrepreneurs, or high performers, women are a game-changing force in the global economy. But women want and need to be paid appropriately for their contributions--no matter what rung of the ladder they're on. There has never been a stronger focus on women's pay than now, from politicians to activists to corporate America. Rise to the Top is written from the inside perspective of a leading female executive-compensation advisor who understands how pay is determined and rewards and benefits are granted in corporate America. Rise to the Top: Discusses how companies approach compensation--the compensation game and its many players plus women's roles in that process Highlights the integral role that personality type plays in how women are perceived in the workplace and how their work style affects their paycheck Reveals the four female "powerhouse personality types" and shares specific strategies on how women can leverage these work styles to earn more money and rewards Whatever your level of accomplishment or position, Rise to the Top will help you earn what you deserve!

The digital sphere and social media platforms have prompted new logics regarding information access and influence flows among media, politicians, and citizens. In this exploratory study, via a machine learning software and with data visualization methods, we analyzed social media data in order to find patterns that can contribute to comprehend the new dynamics of influence between the media, politicians, and citizenship in the context of social media and digital communication, specifically on Twitter. We analyzed who the top 50 Spanish generalist media with most followers started following in 2017, 2018, and 2019 on Twitter, the quintessential informational network. To do so, we melded data visualization computational and manual methods. We used an artificial intelligence big data analysis software to visualize the network of media from Spain in order to identify the sample. Afterward, we extracted the top followed accounts by the sample and categorized them in types of accounts, institution/citizenship, country, number of followers, and gender, to proceed with the data visualization to identify trends and patterns. The results show that these media accounts started following mainly accounts that belonged to male politicians from Spain. We could also spot among the years of the study an inversely proportional trend from the media that went from following mainly institutions to following a majority of citizens, and to start following more accounts with a smaller number of followers every year. The tendency to follow accounts from Spain that belong to men grew or remained a majority among the years of the study.

Günter Grass has primarily been perceived by research and the public as an author. But he was also an influential political actor. His political work was not just limited to the Brandt era but also helped to define the Berlin Republic. By harnessing his communicative power, he shaped public discourses as an intellectual and advised top politicians, as unpublished sources and background conversations show.