The role of contextual factors in the electoral resurgence of extreme right-wing forces in Spain: The case of Andalusia

Up until the end of 2018, extreme right-wing parties and their anti-immigration discourse, now a common occurrence in other European countries, had not appeared on the Spanish political scene. However, in December of that year, the Spanish extreme right-wing party VOX reversed this trend and made significant electoral gains in the Andalusian regional elections. This phenomenon has led us to analyse, in this study, the role played by contextual factors (i.e., out-group size, territorial concentration of the immigrant population, demographic change in settlement locations, aggregated educational level and unemployment rate among the receiving society) in the rise in the number of VOX voters. To achieve this, VOX's results from all the polling stations in Andalusia contained in its 5946 census tracts were analysed. At the same time, each census tract was associated with its demographic, economic and educational data, and their relationship was analysed using a multilevel analysis with Mplus. The results show that the presence of economic immigrants is indeed associated with a higher percentage of VOX voters in Andalusia. However, despite this general trend, those census tracts with a high territorial concentration of Maghrebi immigrants are associated with a lower percentage of support for this extreme right-wing party. The opposite is found for Romanian immigrants. Moreover, areas with larger percentages of people with a high level of education influenced greater support for VOX. Thus our findings suggest the traditional explanations for the increased support for extreme right-wing parties in northern Europe do not provide clear patterns that can be extrapolated to Andalusia.     

Mixed messages & bounded rationality: The perverse consequences of real ID for immigration policy

Policies concerning undocumented immigrants are inevitably ambivalent, creating uncertainty and confusion in the implementation process. We identify a clear example of this ambivalence —U.S. law setting standards for determining the credibility of asylum seekers—that resulted in an increase in asylum grants despite policymakers' intention to make it harder for individuals to obtain the status. We argue that this law, The REAL ID Act of 2005, sent mixed messages to immigration judges (IJs), street-level bureaucrats who implement immigration policy. It increased IJ discretion, but set vague limits. We theorize that IJs, behaving in a bounded rationality framework, use their professional legal training as a short-cut and look primarily to the courts for guidance. Our evidence supports our argument. After the passage of the REAL ID Act, IJ decision-making is more closely aligned with the preferences of their political and legal principals, and, in the final score, the federal circuit courts are the winners.     

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.     

Immigration and Refugee Crises in Fourth-Century Greece: An Athenian Perspective

Abstract

The fourth-century B.C. was a period during which a large number of Greek cities were affected by civil wars, military conquests, and destruction, with the displacement of large numbers of men, women and children as a result. This has implications for the modern debate on Athenian attitudes to immigration, which normally focuses on just two groups of free non-citizens: adult, able-bodied men who moved to Athens voluntarily to take advantage of the city’s economic opportunities and (more recently) on the free non-citizen population who had come to Athens as slaves and who stayed on after their manumission. This article argues that refugees were likely to have constituted a considerable component of the migration to Athens during certain troubled periods in the course of the fourth century. This means that the size of Athens’s immigrant population was likely to have fluctuated considerably, that many of the refugees would have been destitute, that women and children (sometimes unaccompanied by adult male relatives) may have made up an even greater proportion of the non-citizen population than normally assumed, and, thus, that a considerable number of these immigrants would not have been able to contribute substantially to Athens’s grain trade or military. The implications of this for our assessment of the Athenian motives for admitting groups of refugees are discussed, and it is argued that the requirement that all male and all unaccompanied female immigrants had to find an Athenian sponsor and pay a special metic tax may have constituted a certain level of control over immigrant numbers.     

Japanese Intelligence Operations in Scandinavia during World War II

Japanese intelligence operations in Scandinavia became active after the collapse of Poland in September 1939. Both the Japanese and the Finns exchanged information on Soviet military cryptography and tried to decrypt the enemy's codes. As a result of the cooperation, the Finns succeeded in decrypting Soviet naval code at the beginning of the Continuation War. Onodera Makoto, Japanese military attaché in Sweden, collected a lot of valuable information on the Allied Powers in the neutral country, though the General Staff in Tokyo disregarded them as unreliable.     

Institutionalization of Islam in Secular Europe: The Influence of State–Religion Relations on Anti‐Muslim Attitudes

This study examines church–state relations in Europe, and analyzes their influence on anti‐immigrant attitudes. The literature explains this relationship primarily with religious demographics, or state privileges for the majority faith. Alternately, this study focuses on the status of the majority religion. It argues that, in countries with a national church, citizens are more likely to consider the institutionalization of a new religion to be occurring at the expense of the national heritage, and react negatively. To test that hypothesis, the study focuses on Muslim immigrants in Europe, and builds an index that gauges the extent to which European states institutionalize Islam. Then, employing multilevel regression analysis, it investigates how the institutionalization of Islam influences anti‐Muslim prejudice in different contexts of church–state regimes. Individual‐level data come from the latest wave of the European Values Study, and cover 31 countries. Findings indicate that, in European countries with a national church, institutionalization of Islam increases anti‐Muslim prejudice. In countries without a national church, however, institutionalization leads to tolerance. These results confirm the continuing relevance of religion on the national level in Europe, despite the decline in individual religiosity.     

Open Door or Sphere of Influence?: The Diplomacy of the Japanese–French Entente and Fukien Question, 1905–1907

Japanese–French negotiation for their 1907 entente revealed contrasting approaches to the application of the Open Door principle in China, particularly to the Fukien province after the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Having learned about France's wish to receive Japanese guarantee for the safety of its colony in Indo-China, Japan strove to define Fukien as its additional sphere of influence once it had secured much needed loans in the Paris financial market. France tried to resist Japan's request to define Fukien as its sphere by adopting a secret note, and attempted to restrain Japan's future expansion into China by enmeshing Japan in the web of political and financial ententes with itself and Britain supporting Open Door. This approach of France was a continuation of French policy toward East Asia since the Boxer Uprising, securing its economic interests by supporting Open Door rather than pursuing territorial competition with other great powers in China. In contrast, the Japanese government strenuously attempted to weaken the general application of Open Door doctrine in China, and could define Fukien as Japan's additional sphere by securing a secret explanatory note for such a purpose.     

抗战时期陕甘宁边区代耕问题研究

抗日根据地的代耕是根据地政权实行的帮助没有劳动力或劳动力不足的抗工属和退伍军人代耕、代种、代管、代收的制度。在陕甘宁边区,它是诸多优抗措施中最中心的方式。边区政府颁布了一系列相关条例和细则,制定了代耕原则、代耕办法、代耕方式及加强代耕的组织领导和思想教育等措施。代耕的实施,对改善抗工属及退伍军人的生活,稳定军心,激励士气乃至抗战的胜利起到了重要作用。边区的代耕充分体现了统一战线的政治特征和全民性、长期性等时代特色。     

日伪时期的南京英美侨民及其活动

侵华日军当局在南京大屠杀后,到1941年12月太平洋战争爆发前,基于其外交政策的需要,对继续留驻在南京的英美侨民,采取表面的礼遇、利用与事实上的限制、打击的两面态度与两手政策;而英美侨民则在艰难的条件下,与之进行了针锋相对的斗争.这是南京抗战史与中国抗战史的一项重要内容,呈现出纷繁复杂而又丰富多彩的内容与特点.这段过去被长期忽视的抗战史内容,应引起史学界的重视.