Public and Partisan Opinions of the Speaker of the House

Using polling data from 1982 to 2009, I develop a model of public opinion toward the Speaker of the House. I show that, in addition to economic and institutional factors, the speaker's ideology and events associated with the speaker's responsibilities in office affect the public's opinion toward this congressional leader. I also examine the partisan differences in the formation of public opinions about the speaker. I find that minority party partisans are more likely to have negative evaluations of the speaker when the speaker has more ideologically extreme views which lead to higher levels of polarization. In addition, members of different parties weigh economic and institutional factors differently in their evaluations of the speaker.     

Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.     

Rally politics and political organisation: An institutionalist perspective on the French far Right

The study of the French far Right has often overlooked the relationship between parties and institutions. Here the presidentialisation of French politics under the Fifth Republic is taken to signal the institutionalisation of a form of rally politics within the French party system. Using a neo-institutionalist definition of institutions, rallies in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republic are examined in turn. The conclusion is that the relative success of the Front national (FN) should be understood in light of the opportunities provided by the institutional framework in place in France from 1958 onwards.     

Renzi: the government,the party,the future of Italian politics

On 22 February 2014 President Napolitano appointed Matteo Renzi to the office of President of the Council of Ministers (the correct title according to the Italian constitution). Since then the 39-year-old secretary of the Democratic Party has launched a series of institutional, economic, and social reforms. Claiming that it was of the utmost importance to scrap the old political class and to put Italy back to work, Renzi has already produced significant but, to say the least, controversial changes, as well as many clashes within his party and in the relationship between Italy and the European Union. This article will explore where the changes in his style of governing and in his party will lead the politics of Italy.     

Leaving on a Jet Plane: Polarization,Foreign Travel,and Comity in Congress

No political observer, politician, or political scientist doubts that party polarization has weakened the social fabric of Congress. Measuring that effect, however, is exceedingly difficult. In this article, we operationalize the congressional social fabric by examining the foreign travel behavior of members of Congress over time. We evaluate the social disintegration in Congress by examining if and whether changes in member travel can explain why the social connectedness of members has waned. Using a unique dataset of foreign travel for House members from 1977 to 2012, we find that Republican House members, in particular, have altered their foreign travel patterns. Ideologically extreme members have always been less likely to take foreign trips, but extremely conservative Republican have become much more likely to travel only with co-partisans as polarization has increased in Congress. Ideologically moderate Republicans, while still traveling as members of bipartisan delegations, have also increased their willingness to travel only with fellow Republicans. Our results suggest that bipartisan foreign travel is a victim of the partisan war waging in Congress.     

解析“东京审判史观”及其实质

“东京审判史观”是日本部分政治家和右翼势力虚构和炮制的历史观。随着日本政治的右倾化,诋毁和批判东京审判成为篡改历史教科书、否认日本战争罪行、官方参拜靖国神社等民族保守主义运动的重要组成部分,借以篡改侵略战争的历史,为战争罪犯翻案,进而消除日本国民的负罪意识,恢复日本民族的“自信”和“自豪”,以实现日本政治、军事大国化的战略目标。     

Defining Debates from the Outside Looking In: How Presidents Affect the Decisions of the House Rules Committee

In this study I demonstrate how presidents influence the decisions of the House Rules Committee. I show that, since the late 1980s, this rise in presidential influence has not been at the expense, but rather at the behest, of Speakers intent on instilling greater partisan order over the House. Speakers direct the Rules Committee to protect through restrictive rules those bills expressly supported by co-partisan presidents. Moreover, they do the same for bills opposed by presidents from the competing party. Statistical analysis of rules granted to almost 1,800 bills between 1977 and 2004 shows that these exogenous partisan factors perform more robustly than prevailing committee-based spatial models in the explanation of Rules Committee decisions in the postreform era. I conclude that scholars must continue to develop and refine formal and statistical models that explain the role and influence of partisanship not just within institutions, but also across them.     

The Changing Roles of House Party Leadership Organizations: The House Republican Policy Committee

More than 100 members in each of the two House party caucuses participate in the parties’ formal organizations—the extended party leadership. What purposes do these institutional components of the parties serve, and how and why have they changed over the last three decades? This article begins to answer these questions through a case study of the Republican Policy Committee based on primary documents as well as quantitative analysis. I show that the Republican leadership has used the committee for participation, coordination, and communication functions within the Conference, but that the roles of the committee have changed substantially in response to strengthening party government conditions, GOP majority status, heightened competition for control of the House, and the individual goals of key Republican leaders. Among other changes, the committee became more important for coordinating policy positions and strategy during the 1980s, but the strong, centralized majority leadership in the 1990s diminished this important coordination function and left the committee with an emphasis on partisan communication.     

冷战后的日本共产党

本文总结了冷战后日本共产党理论路线调整的具体内容,阐释了日本共产党选举业绩的波动状况及原因,并指出日本共产党的政治在21世纪初期政党政治的演变中具有不可或缺的意义。     

Containment and intensification in political war: Carl Schmitt and the Clausewitzian heritage

This article provides the first comprehensive and chronological analysis of Carl Schmitt’s reception of Carl von Clausewitz. While earlier scholarship has mostly stressed Schmitt’s shift from Clausewitzian ‘instrumentality’ to an ‘existential’ view of war, I note some inherent difficulties in this dichotomy and instead promote the parallel distinction between two argument types: those of containment and intensification. Schmitt theorized both limited political war and the intensification of war out of traditional bounds, and focusing on one should not eclipse the other. Further, both elements are identifiable already in Clausewitz. I analyse Schmitt’s oscillation between containment and intensification arguments chronologically from the mid-1920s to the 1960s. Despite sometimes nominally rejecting Clausewitz’s famous thesis of war as the continuation of politics, Schmitt nevertheless affirmed the idea of war’s political nature. I conclude that Schmitt’s view can be read as a radicalized version of the Clausewitzian political theory of war rather than a strict deviation from it. This becomes evident as soon as we place Schmitt’s partly incoherent observations on Clausewitz in their argumentative contexts.     

Divided Government and the Rise of Social Regulation

Political scientists have debated the causes of divided government since the Reagan administration. In addition, a handful of scholars have also pondered the possible consequences of divided party rule for politics and policy. Still, one serious oversight in the divided'government literature is the potential consequences of divided party rule for the types of policy pursued during divided and unified party regimes. Divided government may create incentives for conflicting institutions to use social regulation debates, often considered the most divisive public policy debates, as "wedges" in order to damage the opposing party in future elections. Each party also has an incentive to embrace social regulation in order to reaffirm its allegiance to its core constituency. This article tests the hypothesis that divided government produces more important social regulation votes than unified government. I define the population of important votes as all Key Votes in the House of Representatives from 1953 to 1998. The data analysis reveals that important social regulation votes are in fact more prominent during eras of divided government than during unified party control. This finding has potential implications for the tenor of our national politics as well as the public trust.     

李闻惨案之善后

1946年7月发生在昆明的李闻惨案,是战后中国政治史上一个影响十分广泛的事件。这一惨案出现在全面内战一触即发的前夕,遭到暗杀的李公朴、闻一多均为推动国共和谈的中国第三大政党中国民主同盟的中央委员,加之他们惨死于同城,相隔仅仅三天,因而立即引起国内外的强烈反应。多年来,无论大陆还是台湾,在回顾国民党丧失大陆政权的原因时,都不约而同地认为这一事件是国民党失去人心的一个重要标志。李闻惨案已过去65年,但围绕这一事件的性质、责任、处置等方面表现的矛盾与展开的角逐,还有不少有待深入探讨的空间。如惨案初期关于事件性质的论争,即反映了不同政治势力立足于各自立场对这一事件的基本判断;惨案制造者的抵赖与歪曲,则凸现了不同力量在责任追究问题上的博弈;而国内外的强烈舆论以及美国政府的介入,也一定程度上影响美国援华政策的实施;至于蒋介石处置该事件方针的形成和执行,同样表现了战后中国政治受不同因素制约的复杂与交错。对于这些目前研究相对薄弱的问题进行梳理和考察,显然有助于进一步理解李闻惨案为什么会给国民党统治造成难以弥补的创伤,也有助于了解和把握各种矛盾在战后中国政治转型中的作用与演变。     

Towards a chequebook democracy? Business,parties and the funding of politics in Italy and the United States

This article seeks to establish to what extent Silvio Berlusconi's entry into electoral politics as leader of Forza Italia signals an ‘Americanization’ of Italian politics. It argues that Italian party democracy is moving in an ‘American’ direction in two ways. First, Italian party organizations are declining, leading to a more candidate-centred type of electoral politics. Second, the decline of parties is enhancing the ability of business to use its financial clout to tailor public policy to its own requirements. However, these trends do not have identical effects in Italy and the United States. This article will also show that this process of ‘Americanization’ interacts with the existing political praxis and institutional framework of Italian politics to produce an outcome which differs from both the traditional Western European model and the American model of party democracy. It will be concluded that this outcome seriously undermines representative democracy in Italy.     

Reforming the Italian constitution

Abstract

The third parliamentary Bicameral Committee established to reform the Italian constitution conducted its business from January to June 1997. The results have been controversial and have attracted a great deal of criticism. The Committee's recommendations are subject to amendment by parliament and must then be approved (or rejected) in a general referendum. The Committee ended up recommending what is essentially a French‐style semi‐presidential system. It is accompanied by an electoral law that offers a premium of an additional 20 per cent of the seats to the majority, 55 per cent to be elected in simple majority electoral districts, and 25 per cent to be distributed nationally on a proportional basis. PDS leader Massimo D'Alema, chair of the Committee, has claimed victory since the Commitee produced a positive outcome, yet in fact he has certainly lost since he preferred a strong ‘premier’ model and a majority runoff electoral system. The Committee demonstrated that small parties, especially the former Christian Democrats, can exert influence over larger ones, that the parries retain firm control over the process of institutional reform, that the three major party leaders — D'Alema, Berlusconi and Fini — preferred their own reciprocal legitimization over the attainment of any major reform, and that Italy's political‐institutional transition is not yet over. Indeed, the proposed reforms are likely to prove neither sufficient nor adequate.     

Dealignment and demobilisation? Nonvoting in New Zealand 1938–1990

New Zealand has had a reputation for high voting participation, but age‐eligible turnout has declined since 1938 and, despite a brief recovery between 1975 and 1984, continued to fall subsequently. By 1990 it was far closer to the average turnout of Western democracies. Brief analysis of aggregate data since 1938 sets the scene for more specific study of individual‐level data from the 1963, 1981, and 1990 elections, which indicates effects which are minimal for institutional factors, small for social and demographic variables, and substantial for changes in public attitudes. In particular, dealignment of the party system and voter demobilisation are associated with declining interest in politics, political efficacy, and party identification. While also associated with extra‐parliamentary mass action to the partial detriment of voting among the university‐educated in 1981, a more general mobilisation of postmaterialist issues was probably responsible for the post‐1975 turnout recovery. After 1984 the longer‐term trend was reestablished.     

6. ACTES DE PRÉSENCE: PRESENCE IN FASCIST POLITICAL CULTURE1

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence‐based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of “the philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the “presentification of the past.” This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural “L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica” (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past.     

Party Ideologies and Regional Inequality: An Analysis of Party Manifestos in Japan

ABSTRACT

Regional inequality within Japan has been a key political issue in Japanese politics throughout the entire postwar period. In this analysis, we examine how Japanese parties have positioned themselves on the question of regional inequality, focusing on how the party system response has been shaped by ideas and ideologies. The article analyses two 15-year periods separated by a quarter of a century (1960–75 and 2000–15) during which regional inequalities became a particularly salient and pressing issue. We compare institutional and socioeconomic contexts, broader governing ideas, and policy responses to this issue by major parties in their election platforms (manifestos). We find that party ideology and broader paradigms continued to shape party responses to regional inequality during both periods.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.