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In 1964, as the polarizing Civil Rights Act made its way through the House and Senate, and Congress navigated one of the most tumultuous eras in American history, a Harris Poll put the institution's approval rating at 60 percent. Why then, fifty years later, has the public's approval of Congress eroded to an all-time low of 10 percent? Working Congress: A Guide for Senators, Representatives, and Citizens seeks to isolate the reasons for Congress's staggering decline in public opinion, and to propose remedies to reverse the grave dysfunction in America's most important political institution.Aid

Embodied cognition research has shown how actions or body positions may affect cognitive processes, such as autobiographical memory retrieval or judgments. The present study examined the role of body balance (to the left or the right) in participants on their attributions to political parties. Participants thought they stood upright on aWii™ Balance Board, while they were actually slightly tilted to the left or the right. Participants then ascribed fairly general political statements to one of 10 political parties that are represented in the Dutch House of Representatives. Results showed a significant interaction of congruent leaning direction with left-or right-wing party attribution. When the same analyses were performed with the political parties being divided into affiliations to the right, center, and left based on participants' personal opinions rather than a ruling classification, no effects were found. The study provides evidence that conceptual metaphors are activated by manipulating body balance implicitly. Moreover, people's judgments may be colored by seemingly trivial circumstances such as standing slightly out of balance.

Party mergers are a new development in Myanmar politics. Given that such mergers often assist the consolidation of new democratic regimes, some broader system-wide effects may also occur. Myanmar's ethnic parties consistently choose merger strategies over other forms of pre-electoral coalition. This highlights a transition from a focus on questions of authoritarianism and democracy to one on the creation of a federal system of government with a stronger cleavage between competing Bamar and ethnic nationalisms. Despite cooperation among political parties outside the electoral process, pre-electoral coalitions such as constituency-sharing or campaigning for allies have generally not been successful. Five of the six mergers among ethnic parties attempted prior to the 2015 general election failed. However, between 2017 and 2019, five mergers involving parties representing the Chin, Kachin, Kayah, Kayin or Karen, and Mon ethnicities, achieved success. The successful mergers were motivated not only by desires for electoral success in 2020 but also by shared federal aims, which involve ethnic parties in Chin, Kachin, Kayah, Kayin or Karen, and Mon states forming a strong local party in their respective regions to strive for ethnic equality and self-determination. The mergers are between parties with markedly different platforms and their success is conditioned by their preferences for particular kinds of federalism. Mergers cannot guarantee electoral success. And other pre-electoral coalitions, such as avoiding competition for the same constituencies, also proved successful in the 2018 by-elections. But what mergers can uniquely do is respond to public demand for parties to unite and make the resulting party stronger in terms of resources and public support. In general, mergers can reduce system fragmentation, avoid vote wastage and lead to the formation of stable parties. Ethnic party mergers also simplify party labels for voters and make it easier for them to vote on the basis of ethnic preferences. In addition, mergers can increase public interest and political participation among members of ethnic communities.

Politicians increasingly promote Britishness. We thus ask who do they think has difficulty feeling British and why do they think this? Scholars have not yet tried to address these questions and in this article we attempt to do so. Using interviews with former home secretaries, junior ministers and their shadow cabinet counterparts, we examine whether leading politicians think that Muslims have difficulty feeling British. We show that senior members of the main political parties are not only internally divided on this issue, but that a cross-party divide exists and that many of the members of these divisions are unaware of the relevant sociological data. Adapted from the source document.

In a region where democratization has led to a proliferation of opposition parties, pre-electoral coalitions represent an obvious means by which to reduce excessive party fragmentation in Africa. However, this article examines whether such coalitions facilitate democratic consolidation in terms of contributing to incumbent turnovers as well as creating competitive, institutionalized party systems. Election data for all opposition coalitions formed in Africa's electoral democracies since 2000 reveals that coalitions rarely result in incumbent defeat. In addition, I find that a sizeable share of a country's total electoral volatility is often due to fluctuations in voting for opposition parties that enter and exit coalitions, indicating the inability of coalition members to build loyal constituencies and become institutionalized over time. I argue that this is because many of these coalitions are primarily office-seeking and consist of parties that are distinguished predominantly by the personality of their leaders rather than a distinct political programme that is relevant to the concerns of African citizens. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Political platform of the Revolutionary National Party based on the ideological content of the revolution that establishes the management of the state focusing on the economy, social equality, social improvement, development of the Agrarian reform, improvement of labor conditions of workers, health care, education, and protection of the natural resources. / Plataforma política del Partido Nacional Revolucionario que se sustenta con el contenido ideológico de la Revolución, estableciendo la rectoría del Estado en la economía, igualdad social, mejoramiento social, desarrollo de la reforma agraria, mejoramiento de las condiciones del trabajador, protección a la salud, impartición de educación y protección de los recursos naturales.

This paper focuses on desire & its animating force in the Pauline Hanson One Nation Party. Examining the symbolic logic underpinning the rapport between Pauline Hanson & her constituency, it explores the connection between forms of love & forms of political organization. Locating the implosion of One Nation within the context of Hanson's failure to sustain the love-bonds of a totalitarian leader with her/his followers, it argues that the lack of democracy within One Nation was not a cause of its failure. The desire animating One Nation was for an autocratic leader & the totalitarian structure of One Nation posed no obstacle to the movement's fortunes until love shifted the libidinal field. Adapted from the source document.

"The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators. Goodnow contends that the civil service reformers persuasively argued that the separation of administration from politics, far from destroying the democratic links with the people, actually served to enhance democracy. While John Rohr, in his outstanding new introduction carefully notes loopholes in the theoretical scaffold of Goodnow's argument, he is also careful to express his appreciation of the pragmatic ground for this new sense of government as needing a partnership of the elected and the appointed. Goodnow was profoundly influenced by European currents, especially the Hegelian. As a result, the work aims at a political philosophy meant to move considerably beyond the purely pragmatic needs of government. For it was the relationships, the need for national unity in a country that was devised to account for and accommodate pluralism and diversity, that attracted Goodnow's legal background and normative impulses alike. That issues of legitimacy and power distribution were never entirely resolved by Goodnow does not alter the fact that this is perhaps the most important work, along with that of James Bryce, to emerge from this formative period to connect processes of governance with systems of democracy."--Provided by publisher.

What happens to the state elite of an authoritarian regime after its collapse? This article proposes an answer by examining the Tunisian case after the fall of Ben Ali's regime in 2011. Based on a corpus of in-depth interviews with sixty or so ex-politicians or civil servants, the article starts by describing the collapse of the regime in terms of the experience and perceptions of some of those who had served it. This is not presented as a series of institutional and political events linked up in a homogenous and unidirectional process, but rather as a variety of individual experiences, each unique. The fall of the regime thereby emerges as a concrete experience of political relegation, documented in precise detail by the accounts given of it. Analyzing this experience provides a way of testing several hypotheses regarding the post-revolutionary careers of former senior officials, stressing just how complex and diverse the paths are for reintegrating the political class.