Political battlefield: aggressive metaphors,gender, and power in news coverage of Canadian party leadership contests

Our study analyzed aggressive figures of speech used by the Globe and Mail to describe the personas, performances, and prospects of women and men leadership candidates for the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, 1993, and 2004. We codified four distinct forms of power communicated by the aggressive metaphors—power over, power to, power with, and power as—to investigate what these battleground metaphors communicate about gender and political power. Our content analysis and discourse analysis of the phrases applied to each of the candidates revealed gendered assumptions about political leadership. All three women candidates in our study—Flora MacDonald (1976), Kim Campbell (1993), and Belinda Stronach (2004)—were discussed as formidable foes, capable of using considerable force in their efforts to win. Indeed, Campbell became Canada’s first and only woman prime minister. Yet, much of the aggressive mediation confirms the gendered mediation thesis that aggressive metaphors exclude women and reconstitute politics as masculine. Many of the combative phrases cast doubt on a woman candidate’s ability to successfully compete on the political battlefield.     

Gender and the Politics of Death: Female Representation,Political and Developmental Context,and Population Health in a Cross-National Panel

There is considerable speculation that female political empowerment could improve population health. Yet, evidence to date is limited, and explanations for why political empowerment would matter and the conditions under which this might be enhanced or muted are not well understood. In this article, we draw on theoretical work on the politics of representation to frame an investigation of whether increases in the percentage of females in a country’s parliament influence mortality rates. We further examine whether the relationship is conditioned by extent of democracy and economic and social development. Through multivariate longitudinal regression, we analyze four indicators of mortality in 155 countries spanning 1990 to 2014 with controls for initial country conditions, time-stable structural predispositions to higher mortality, and a number of time-varying potential confounders. Results indicate that a high level of female representation—30 % or greater in our models—has large negative associations with mortality, that these are particularly strong in lesser developed and weak democratic contexts, that high female political representation effectively offsets liabilities associated with low development, and that the relationships are robust to various operationalizations of social development. In the end, our research provides a particularly thorough accounting of the relationship between female political representation and population health, particularly by specifying the conditions under which female representation is most salient. In doing so, the research suggests important links between issues of female empowerment, political context, and developmental trajectories of countries more generally.     

Playing Numbers Or Politics? Approaches to the Prioritisation of Development Needs in South Africa

This paper uses a case study to highlight the implicit political and developmental assumptions which underpin an indicator and index based prioritisation of developmental needs. A key issue for the successful implementation of development objectives in South Africa is the identification and prioritisation of development needs. Indicators could play an important role in terms of informing the decisions made by various levels of government. An indicator based index supported by a computerised system called the Development Indicators Monitoring System (DIMS) has been used to prioritise housing and service provision need within the province of Gauteng. The article shows that the prioritisation of areas in terms of service need is sensitive to the index construction method employed. It is argued that various choices around the index construction method depend on certain developmental assumptions which are fundamentally political choices. In particular, the choice between absolute and relative indicators of need has a considerable impact on the prioritisation of areas. However, this is not a total rejection of the use of indicators in the planning process. Rather, it is a call for the appropriate use of the tools that are available.     

Political Regime and Human Capital: A Cross-Country Analysis

We examine the relationship between different dimensions of the political regime in place and human capital using a two-step structural equation model. In the first step, we employ factor analysis on 16 human capital indicators to construct two new human capital measures (basic and advanced human capital). In the second step, we estimate the impact of our political variables on human capital, using a cross-sectional structural model for some 100 countries. We conclude that democracy is positively related to basic human capital, while regime instability has a negative link with basic human capital. Governance has a positive relationship with advanced human capital, while government instability has a negative link with advanced human capital. Finally, we also find an indirect positive effect of governance and democracy on both types of human capital through their effect on income.     

Measuring Institutions: Indicators of Political and Property Rights in Malawi

This paper constructs a new set of institutional indicators for Malawi. We develop indicators of political rights, of freehold, traditional (communitarian) and intellectual property rights, based on the Malawian legislative framework. In exploring the association between our rights measures and a range of indicators of socio-economic development, we obtain limited support for a modernization process for Malawi. On the one hand, the association between the rights variables can be interpreted as a modernization nexus, with a trade-off between legally anchored private property freehold rights and political rights on the one hand, and traditional forms of communal property rights on the other. By contrast, the association between rights and a range of socioeconomic development indicators gives a more nuanced picture. For social development measures property rights measures exercise a positive impact, regardless of whether they take the form of freehold or communitarian property rights. Economic development measures respond positively only to the freehold measure, and negatively to communitarian property rights. The socioeconomic development measures are negatively associated with political rights in Malawi over the last 40 years of the twentieth century.     

Political and bureaucratic dilemmas in social indicators for policy making

This paper identifies a variety of political and bureaucratic constraints on the use of social indicators in policy making, including those associated with nonuse, misuse, quantification, and value-weighting. The basic elements in the policy making process are identified as value-conflict, bureaucratic maintenance, and analytic rationality. These elements and the activites of policy making are then related to social indicator research. Means for overcoming the constraints are discussed including: the use of sensitivity analysis, improved communication, a commitment to intellectural pluralism and moral responsibility, and especially improved policy modeling.     

First Politics,Then Culture: Accounting for Ethnic Differences in Demographic Behavior in Kenya

Ethnic differences in demographic behavior tend to be disguised behind analytically opaque labels like “district” or “region,” or else subjected to simplistic cultural explanations. Drawing on new political economy, sociological theory and the political science literature on sub‐Saharan Africa, this article proposes an alternative explanatory model and tests it empirically with reference to Kenya. Access to political power and, through power, access to a state's resources—including resources devoted to clinics, schools, labor opportunities, and other determinants of demographic behavior—are advanced as the key factors underlying ethnic differences. District‐level estimates of “political capital” are introduced and merged with two waves of Demographic and Health Survey data. The effects on models of contraceptive use are explored. Results confirm that measures of political capital explain residual ethnic differences in use, providing strong support for a political approach to the analysis of demographic behavior.     

Interior Immigration Enforcement and Political Participation of U.S. Citizens in Mixed-Status Households

The 2000s have witnessed an expansion of interior immigration enforcement in the United States. At the same time, the country has experienced a major demographic transformation, with the number of U.S. citizens living in mixed-status households—that is, households where at least one family member is an unauthorized migrant—reaching 16 million. U.S. citizens living in mixed-status households are personally connected to the struggles experienced by their unauthorized family members. For them, immigration policy is likely to shape their current and future voting behavior. Using data from the 2002–2014 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplements, we examine whether intensified immigration enforcement has affected the political engagement of U.S. citizens living in mixed-status households. We find that immigration enforcement has chilled their electoral participation by lowering their propensity to register by 5 %; however, it has not visibly affected their voting propensity among those registered. Importantly, their lower voting registration likelihood does not seem to reflect indifference for community and public matters, given that it has been accompanied by greater involvement in civic forms of political participation, such as volunteering. Understanding how immigration policy affects the political participation of a fast-growing segment of the electorate is imperative because they will inevitably constitute a rapidly rising political force in future elections.     

De Facto Versus de Jure Political Institutions in the Long-Run: A Multivariate Analysis, 1820–2000

In this paper we use the components of the PolityIV project’s polity2 and Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy indicators to analyse the relationship between de jure and de facto political institutions from 1820 until 2000 with a canonical correlation method corrected for the sample selection bias. We find considerable fluctuation in the relationship between the two measures. After a moderate positive correlation found during the first half of the nineteenth century, the two measures become statistically unrelated until the 1940s. The relationship becomes strong and positive only in the second half of the twentieth century. The relationship between de jure and de facto political institutions hence can be described as a U-curve, reminiscent to an inverse Kuznets-curve.     

Political Distrust and Social Capital in Europe and the USA

Levels of rising political distrust in the USA and parts of Europe attracted political scientists’ attention in the 1990s, and urged them to look at possible consequences of this phenomenon for the functioning of democracies and social life. Approximately during the same period, from a sociological viewpoint, social capital theorists started studying the effects of declining social capital on political and economic life. In this article, we looked at the relationship between political distrust and social capital from an interdisciplinary perspective. We studied the relationship in six European countries from three regions (North-West, South and East), and the USA, and we were interested in the question of whether this relationship varies over the regions, or whether it is approximately the same everywhere. We used ISPP data from the 2004 wave, which included a range of social capital indicators and political distrust items. Social capital was subdivided into four dimensions, namely, networks (membership of organizations), interpersonal or social trust, social norms (citizenship norms), and linking social capital (political activities). First we studied the effect of political distrust on these four dimensions of social capital, while controlling for other variables such as political efficacy, political interest and a set of socio-structural background variables. One of our main findings was that the only significant effect of political distrust we found throughout all countries was a negative effect on one dimension of social capital, namely, interpersonal trust: the more people distrust politicians and people in government, the less they trust other people in general, even when controlled for all other variables. The reverse relationship led us to the same conclusion: the more people tend to trust people in general, the less they distrust politics, a result we found in all countries. This finding refutes the claim that there is no or either only a very weak relationship between political and social trust, as some have strongly argued before. Other important political attitudes connected to social capital were political interest and political efficacy, and for political distrust it was external efficacy. Significant socio-economic factors were religiousness and educational level for membership of voluntary organizations, educational level for interpersonal trust, religiousness for citizenship norms, and educational level and age for political activities. The reciprocal relationship was strongest in the USA and North-Western Europe, as were the explained variances of our (more extensive) regression models. In Southern and Eastern Europe other factors appear to be at work which influence both social capital and political distrust.     

Levels,trends and determinants of pluralism: A comparative analysis of U.S. counties

This paper is concerned with developing empirical indicators of pluralism, monitoring them over time, and theoretically constructing and empirically estimating a multivariate model to explain variation between U.S. counties. New analytical findings are presented regarding levels, trends and determinants in two aspects of pluralism: voter turnout and interparty political competition. Three social structural components — structural incentives, structural barriers, and structural cleavages were measured and used to explain the majority of the variation between counties in these two indicators of pluralism.     

Narrating Instability: Political detouring in Jerusalem

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ethnography of guided tours in politically contested spaces by interrogating their use for political advocacy by Palestinian guides in the Old City of Jerusalem. It advances the guided tour genre as a potentially transformative encounter for tourists, while offering reflection on its possibilities and limitations for solidarity. Analyzing the narrative framework of the tour vis-à-vis the cityscape shows that guides strategically employ both discourse and movement to convince tourists of the injustice of the Israeli occupation through a practice called political detouring. It reveals how guides manipulate the tour genre’s dynamic nature by spontaneously altering its trajectories to expose the corresponding instability of Palestinian lives in Jerusalem.     

Sex/love skirmishes: “swinging,” “polyamory,” and the politics of naming

The contested definitions of “swinging” and “polyamory” reveal profound inconsistencies in the logics of sex, love, commitment, and coupledom. In this article, I use a number of non-monogamy blogs and online glossaries as examples of the way these two words are often deployed against each other in an effort to position the speaker in relation to mononormative practices of sex and love. Leaving aside questions of the accuracy of particular definitions, I map a range of definitions against two existing scholarly/activist tools for describing relationship styles, specifically Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle” and Meg-John Barker’s sex/love continuums. This exercise is doubly fruitful: first, the tools reveal the political stakes of the definitional debates; second, the definitions demonstrate that the distinctions we commonly use to distinguish between types of relationships—including types of non-monogamous relationships—in fact rely on mononormative assumptions about sex, love, and friendship. If “mononormativity” is defined as the system of ideas, institutions, and practical orientations that provide the backdrop against which the idea of monogamy as coherent, common, natural, and right congeals, the sex/love skirmishes of “swinging” and “polyamory” remind us that its logics are both pervasive and deeply fractured.     

Internal consistency of demographic assumptions in the shared socioeconomic pathways

A new set of alternative socioeconomic scenarios for climate change researches—the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs)—includes for the first time a more comprehensive set of demographic conditions on population, urbanization, and education as the central scenario elements, along with other aspects of society, in order to facilitate better analyses of challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, it also raises a new question about the internal consistency of assumptions on different demographic and economic trends under each SSP. This paper examines whether the interactions between the demographic and economic factors implied by the assumptions in the SSP projections are consistent with the research literature, and whether they are consistently represented in the projection results. Our analysis shows that the interactions implied by the demographic assumptions in the SSPs are generally consistent with findings from the literature, and the majority of the assumed relationships are also evident in the projected trends. It also reveals some inconsistency issues, resulting mainly from the use of inconsistent definitions of regions and limitations in our understanding of future changes in the patterns of interactions at different stages of socioeconomic development. Finally, we offer recommendations on how to improve demographic assumptions in the extended SSPs, and how to use the projections of SSP central elements in climate change research.     

The Contextual Effects of Political Trust on Happiness: Evidence from China

Political trust is often considered as legitimacy enhancing, but whether political trust is well-being enhancing is still underexplored. Using micro data from the East Asian Social Survey 2012, this study investigates the association between province-level/aggregate political trust and individual happiness in China, and explores the role of economic development in influencing individual political trust after the period of rapid growth in 1990–2010. Results show a positive and significant contextual effect of political trust on individual happiness in China, with the endogeneity problem addressed by an instrument variables method. Currently in China, it is a higher provincial rate of GDP growth rather than GDP per capita that predicts a higher level of political trust. Economic growth still significantly reinforces the level of individual political trust and even helps to raise individual political trust among economically disadvantaged populations. The “critical citizens” phenomenon has not yet grown into a nationwide trend. Since the positive contextual effect of political trust on individual subjective well-being, policy makers are encouraged to maintain the stock of political trust through good governance.     

Stability and Change in Youths’ Political Interest

Political interest is a key for the survival and development of democracies. Therefore, it is important to establish when political interest develops. We examined changes in political interest—when and in which directions—among youths between 13 and 28 years of age. We followed five age groups of Swedish youths over 2 years, with a total of 2621 participants. Analysis of stability coefficients supported the idea that political interest becomes more stable with age. From their early twenties, youths’ political interest was found to be as stable as has been earlier reported for adults. Among adolescents, the lowest stability rate was observed in the youngest cohort (ages 13–15). The results also showed that, when taking the increase in political interest into account, the proportion of youths losing their interest in politics corresponded to the proportion of youths gaining interest over time. On the whole, this study brings new insights on the development of political interest over time. It provides empirical evidence on when political interest is most susceptible to change and on how it is likely to change. Implications for research and intervention are discussed.     

The US Decennial Census: Political Questions,Scientific Answers

The US decennial census was initiated in 1790 to facilitate nation‐building tasks, especially that of reconfiguring political representation as the population grew and settled new territories. To this basic task of power distribution have been added other key governmental functions, such as the use of census data in guiding revenue sharing and in the enforcement of nondiscriminatory policies. Throughout its history the census has been the focus of partisan clashes. Following the identification of the “differential undercount” a measure of how census coverage differs across demographic groups and geographic areas–the partisan battles intensified, and in recent decades have come to focus not just on how the census counts are used but how the census data are collected. It has been argued that census methodology could be designed to predetermine given partisan outcomes, and for the 2000 census this charge shifted from “could be” to “is.” The Census Bureau has taken extraordinary steps to demonstrate that no partisan considerations have affected the design or implementation of the census, and that its decisions are based solely on the best technical judgment available.     

Away from Dissatisfaction,Closer to Well-Being: A Multidimensional Synthetic Measure

As part of the international debate on methods for measuring the social progress of a population, there has been increasing interest in individual subjective opinions about different aspects of quality of life (elementary indicators). In the literature, many methods have been introduced for producing measures of subjective well-being based on these opinions. Some of these methods aim to construct synthetic measures that allow us to consider all the aspects simultaneously. This topic often requires subjective methodological choices and/or distributional assumptions and, when the opinions are encoded by means of categorical ordinal values, the eventual quantification of the original variables. Here, starting from the Istat multipurpose survey on households’—aspects of daily life, we propose an original method for constructing a global satisfaction index. We introduce a variable based on the joint distribution of all the elementary indicators that is able to express the individual degree of global satisfaction. This approach allows us to maintain the original ordinal data scale and to avoid any aggregation formula. By comparing the observed distribution of the new variable and the theoretical one, which refers to the situation of overall dissatisfaction (all individuals are dissatisfied for every aspect), we propose three indices of global satisfaction. We also implemented two simulation studies that confirms both the efficacy and robustness of our method. We then applied it to measure the global satisfaction degree of the Italian population, using Istat multipurpose survey data for the year 2013.     

An Indicator for the Measurement of Political Participation: The Case of Italy

In the modern globalized world, political participation is of paramount importance for balanced socio-economic growth and for human development. The Indagine Multiscopo sulle famiglie, a survey by Italian public institutions (ISTAT and CNEL), provides a wide range of data to evaluate specific aspects of Italian life. This work uses a set of data from the Indagine to analyse political participation in Italy at a regional level, by means of a composite indicator using parametric (Pena’s distance) and non-parametric (Mazziotta–Pareto Index) techniques. We have obtained a ranking that shows the level of political participation in different territorial contexts. The aim is to analyse the relation between Italian regions and the political behaviour of their communities: political discussions, participation in political meetings and marches, voluntary activity or donations to political parties and so on. The ranking is not correlated to voter turnout. We can assume that the politically engaged minority are unable to convince and involve the rest. At the same time, these small groups do not alter the general mistrust in parties and, generally speaking, in politics, which is spreading across Italy and also Europe.     

Formal models and methods for the analysis of kinship and household organization

This paper discusses the use of formal models for analyzing kin-group and household organization. The authors begin by presenting a conceptual framework that relates the supply of kin to rules of household formation, demographic constraints, and observed household structure. This framework is used to evaluate an array of techniques and models of kinship and households. Kin relations and household structures can be described using a unifying model designed to identify the dynamic of a system of states out of and into which the units of analysis can move. The behavior of the system is identified through knowledge of transition rates. It is then possible to link such transition rates to coarse indicators of the system, such as proportions occupying a state and distribution of the units by state. Analytic, macro-, and microsimulation models are just alternative ways of linking a state-space and measures of transition rates to final indicators or outcomes. No model can avoid addressing the independence, homogeneity, and time-invariance assumptions, or the 2-sex problem.