Suchergebnisse

AbstractTraditional research on political parties pays little attention to the temporal focus of communication. It usually concentrates on promises, issue attention, and policy positions. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to nostalgic rhetoric and may even adjust issue positions when policy is framed in nostalgic terms. This article presents a novel dataset, PolNos, which contains six text-based measures of nostalgic rhetoric in 1,648 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 1946 to 2018. The measures combine dictionaries, word embeddings, sentiment approaches, and supervised machine learning. Our analysis yields a consistent result: nostalgia is most prevalent in manifestos of culturally conservative parties, notably Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. However, substantial variation remains regarding regional differences and whether nostalgia concerns the economy or culture. We discuss the implications and use of our dataset for studying political parties, party competition, and elections.

Parliamentary debate is one major outlet for Members of Parliament (MPs), who spend lots of time preparing for and participating in such discussions. In this paper, we investigate in how far the focus MPs choose in their speeches varies as the economic, partisan and electoral context changes. We choose to study the dynamics nature of speech content in the UK House of Commons, as British MPs enjoy broad discretion regarding the content of their speeches. This paper analyses the constituency, national or partisan focus of all speeches held in the House of Commons between January 1996 and September 2004. We find that government and opposition MPs react differently to contextual changes. Government MPs generally have a higher district focus, which is increased further when the local economy declines and when the governing party becomes more popular.

Parliamentary debate is one major outlet for Members of Parliament (MPs), who spend lots of time preparing for and participating in such discussions. In this paper, we investigate in how far the focus MPs choose in their speeches varies as the economic, partisan and electoral context changes. We choose to study the dynamics nature of speech content in the UK House of Commons, as British MPs enjoy broad discretion regarding the content of their speeches. This paper analyses the constituency, national or partisan focus of all speeches held in the House of Commons between January 1996 and September 2004. We find that government and opposition MPs react differently to contextual changes. Government MPs generally have a higher district focus, which is increased further when the local economy declines and when the governing party becomes more popular.

Parliamentary debate is one major outlet for Members of Parliament (MPs), who spend lots of time preparing for and participating in such discussions. In this paper, we investigate in how far the focus MPs choose in their speeches varies as the economic, partisan and electoral context changes. We choose to study the dynamics nature of speech content in the UK House of Commons, as British MPs enjoy broad discretion regarding the content of their speeches. This paper analyses the constituency, national or partisan focus of all speeches held in the House of Commons between January 1996 and September 2004. We find that government and opposition MPs react differently to contextual changes. Government MPs generally have a higher district focus, which is increased further when the local economy declines and when the governing party becomes more popular.

"One of the fundamental uses of surveys is the measurement of policy preferences. We
can ask voters how they locate themselves on policy dimensions of substantive interests,
and we can ask them how they perceive the positions of political parties. Likewise,
we can use surveys to get political elite to reveal their policy positions or experts to
judge the positions of parties on a set of salient policy dimensions. Increasingly, such
surveys present respondents with issue scales defined as trade-offs between different
policy goals. Surprisingly, scholars have not paid much attention to the fact that
such scales are directional and include an implicit reference point: the status quo.
We examine the effects of indicating an explicit status quo midpoint in trade-off issue
questions using an experimental setup in an online survey that was part of the German
National Election Study in 2009. We show that status quo labeling has three major
effects. First, the indication of the status quo significantly reduces item non-response.
Second, issue scales with status quo indication change respondents' self-placement and
the perception of political parties due to the provision of an explicit reference point.
Third, individually perceived ideological distances between a voter and her preferred
party are smaller when a status quo is indicated. This leads to a slightly stronger
predictor of ideological distance in a conditional logit model of vote choice. The findings
have implications for designers and users of voter and expert surveys." (author's abstract)

AbstractWe argue that the success of the European Convention in producing a Constitutional Treaty was possible because of the agenda control exercised by the Praesidium and in particular its President. Given that even Intergovernmental Conferences despite months of preparations sometimes fail to produce any results, the failure of negotiations in the Convention was a distinct possibility. Another serious possibility would have been an 'anarchic' document, in which different parts would have reflected the prevalence of different majorities. The President of the Convention was able to avoid both of these possibilities. Our argument is that Giscard d'Estaing was able to produce the results through the astute use of three significant tools that he developed. First, he limited the number of amendments from Convention delegates by imposing time limits on the whole process. Second, he created an iterated agenda‐setting process in order to modify amendments. Third, he prohibited voting, and produced results 'by consensus', defining the meaning of the term himself. Understanding that the European Convention was an exceptional event made possible by the combination of a creative, consistent and overpowering agenda‐setting process as well as the impasse created by the status quo (Nice Treaty) explains how we came to the EU Constitutional Treaty and how difficult it will be to move away from this document.