Suchergebnisse

Employing a dataset of 1843 think tank publications containing 37 million words, computer-assisted text analysis was used to examine the idea of austerity in British politics between 2003 and 2013. Theoretically, the article builds on the ideational turn in political research. However, in contrast to much ideational work which argues that ideas are important at times of crisis because they can address uncertainty, this article argues that moments of crisis can lead to the reformulation of ideas. Empirically, this article demonstrates the transformation of the idea of austerity. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, austerity was largely understood either in historical terms or as a practice applied in other countries. In the aftermath of the crisis, both the political right and left attempted to co-opt the idea of austerity for their own ends, combining it with various other ideational strands on which they have historically drawn.

While we know something of data-driven campaigning practices in the United States, we know much less about the role of data in other national contexts. The 2015 United Kingdom General Election offers an important case study of how such practices are evolving and being deployed in a different setting. This article draws on thirty-one in-depth interviews with political practitioners involved in the use of data for six major UK parties and electoral regulators. These interviews are employed to explore the perceived importance of data in contemporary British campaigns, to understand the data-based campaign techniques being used by UK parties, and to assess how data-driven practices are interacting with the preexisting institutional context of British politics. Going beyond the specifics of the UK case, this study raises questions about the comparative, theoretical, and normative dimensions of data-driven politics.

Research on televised election debates has been dominated by studies of the United States. As a result, we know far less about other national contexts, including many parliamentary democracies that now hold televised election debates. This article makes two contributions to address this. Theoretically, the study argues that traditional approaches for understanding the development of campaign communication practices (particularly, Americanization and hybridization) are limiting when applied to television debates and instead offers an alternative theoretical approach, the concept of speciation drawn from biological science. This is then applied in the empirical section of the article in a comparative analysis of the evolution of televised election debates in four parliamentary democracies: Australia, Canada, West Germany/Germany, and the United Kingdom. Based on this analysis, the article argues that the logic of parliamentary democracy coupled with more diffuse party systems has created a distinctive type of televised debate, generally more open to smaller parties based on their success at winning seats in the legislature.