Project description:The province of Ontario, Canada, has a longstanding history of non-partisanship in municipal elections. In this distinctive context, we report results on citizen attitudes toward municipal partisanship using a survey of eligible voters in Canada's most populous province. Using a mixed-methods approach, we focus on three interrelated research questions. First, how much does citizen support for municipal parties depend on the type of party under consideration? Second, what reasons do citizens provide for their preference for either municipal political parties or independents? Finally, what are the correlates of support for municipal parties? We find little support for municipal political parties, and that many voters have sophisticated reasons for preferring either independents or parties. We also identify several factors associated with support for parties. These results provide an in-depth picture of attitudes on municipal partisanship in Ontario, and suggest that public opinion may provide an overlooked mechanism that maintains Ontario's non-partisanship.
Project description:Two important human action selection processes are the choice by citizens of parties to support in elections and the choice by party leaders of policy 'packages' offered to citizens in order to attract this support. Having reviewed approaches analysing these choices and the reasons for doing this using the methodology of agent-based modelling, we extend a recent agent-based model of party competition to treat the number and identity of political parties as an output of, rather than an input to, the process of party competition. Party birth is modelled as an endogenous change of agent type from citizen to party leader, which requires describing citizen dissatisfaction with the history of the system. Endogenous birth and death of parties transforms into a dynamic system even in an environment where all agents have otherwise non-responsive adaptive rules. A key parameter is the survival threshold, with lower thresholds leaving citizens on average less dissatisfied. Paradoxically, the adaptive rule most successful for party leaders in winning votes makes citizens on average less happy than under other policy-selection rules.
Project description:This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties' policy preferences in the relatively new, cross-sectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six countries, comparing the preferences of parties in Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom over the past two decades. It probes the data for evidence of validity through content validation and convergent/discriminant validation and engages with the debate on position-taking in environmental policy by developing a positional measure that incorporates 'pro' and 'anti' climate policy preferences. The analysis provides evidence for the validity of the new measures, shows that they are distinct from comparable measures of environmental policy preferences and argues that they are more comprehensive than existing climate policy measures. The new measures strengthen the basis for answering questions that are central to climate politics and to party politics. The approach developed here has important implications for the study of new, complex or cross-cutting policy issues and issues that include both valence and positional aspects.
Project description:This study explored the Korean media's framing of COVID-19 and its impact on people's support for the government. A disaster such as a public health crisis has political consequences. COVID-19 is no exception. However, the direction of the effect is not easily determined. To properly understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to analyze how the media frames the crisis. Using Structural Topic Model, this study examines the Korean media's framing of COVID-19 and especially pays attention to international comparative framing. Based on our analysis results, we argue that expanded framing, which compared the quarantine performance of Korea and other countries, induced a positive change in people's attitudes toward the government, leading to a major political victory for the ruling party in the legislative election. Our research not only identifies the impact of international comparative framing on government support but also contributes to the development of methods for measuring media framing utilizing topic modeling methods.
Project description:Although political party support and attitudes towards the political system are closely related, the temporal ordering of these associations is unclear. Indeed, prior research identifies both partisan-led change in system attitudes and system attitude-led change in party support. Using a ten-year (2010-2020) national probability sample of New Zealand adults (N = 66,359), we test these associations by modelling the within-person cross-lagged effects between conservative and liberal party support, and political system justification. During conservative-led governments, increases in conservative party support predicted increases in political system justification more strongly than vice versa. The 2017 shift to a liberal-led government was met with an immediate reversal of the effects of party support on system justification, but the effect of system justification on party support took a full year to reverse. These results demonstrate people's perceptions of the fairness of the political system depend on their support for the party in power.
Project description:In light of the recent rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe, it is an intriguing question under which conditions people agree with right-wing political statements. The present study investigates whether mere labelling of political statements as endorsed by a right-wing populist party influences people's agreement with such statements. In the study (pre-registered; N = 221 German voters), it is shown than that supporters of the right-wing populist party indicated higher agreement with the statements when they were labelled as being endorsed by the party (vs. not labelled), whereas non-supporters indicated lower agreement with the labelled than with the non-labelled statements. We conclude that labelling of the very same political statements changes voters' agreement with these statements. The results imply that rather than (dis)agreeing with the content of the statements per se, people may (dis)agree with right-wing populist statements because they come from a specific source (i.e., the right-wing populist party).
Project description:Previous research has sought to explain the rise of right-wing populist leaders in terms of the evolutionary framework of dominance and prestige. In this framework, dominance is defined as high social rank acquired via coercion and fear, and prestige is defined as high social rank acquired via competence and admiration. Previous studies have shown that right-wing populist leaders are rated as more dominant than non-populist leaders, and right-wing populist/dominant leaders are favoured in times of economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict. In this paper, we explore and critique this application of dominance-prestige to politics. First, we argue that the dominance-prestige framework, originally developed to explain inter-personal relationships within small-scale societies characterised by face-to-face interaction, does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies which have frequent anonymous interaction and complex ingroup-outgroup dynamics. Second, we show that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict a preference not only for dominant leaders, but also for prestigious leaders. Third, we show that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are not fixed, and depend on the political ideology of the perceiver: people view leaders who share their ideology as prestigious, and those who oppose their ideology as dominant, whether that ideology is liberal or conservative. Fourth, we show that political ideology is a stronger predictor than economic uncertainty of preference for Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election, contradicting previous findings that link Trump's success to economic uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that, if economic uncertainty does not directly affect preferences for right-wing populist leaders, other features of their discourse such as higher emotionality might explain their success.
Project description:People desire agentic representations of their personal and collective selves, such as their own nation. When national agency is put into question, this should increase their inclination to restore it, particularly when they simultaneously lack perceptions of personal control. In this article, we test this hypothesis of group-based control in the context of political elections occurring during socio-economic crises. We propose that people who are reminded of low (vs. high) personal control will have an increased tendency to reject traditional political parties that stand for the maintenance of a non-agentic political system. We experimentally manipulated the salience of low vs. high personal control in five studies and measured participants' intentions to support traditional and new political parties. Across four of five studies, in line with the predictions, low personal control reduced support for the main traditional conservative party (e.g., Partido Popular (PP) in Spain, the Republicans in France). These results appeared in contexts of national economic and/or political crisis, and were most pronounced when low (vs. high) national agency was made salient in Studies 4 and 5. The findings support the notion that rejecting the stability of the national political system can serve as a means to maintain a sense of control through the collective self.
Project description:ObjectiveAustralia's dominant food system encourages the overconsumption of foods detrimental for human and planetary health. Despite this, Australia has limited policies to reduce the burden of disease and protect the environment. Political donations from the food industry may contribute to policy inertia on this issue. We aimed to explore the extent of political donations made by the food industry in Queensland and investigate the timing of public health nutrition policies in relation to these donations.DesignWe collected publicly declared political donations data in Queensland, Australia, as it has the most transparent donation records. Policy data were sourced from the Australian National and Queensland State Parliaments, and consultations from the Australian and New Zealand Ministerial Forum on Food Regulation.SettingQueensland, Australia.ParticipantsNot applicable.ResultsThe Liberal National Party (LNP) received 68 % of all donations, with most immediately preceding the 2017 and 2020 state elections. The Australian Labor Party, despite forming government for the time period under study, received only 17 % of total donations. Most donations were given by the meat industry, followed by the sugar industry. Few policies exist to protect and improve human and planetary health, with limited associations with political donations for most industries except sugar.ConclusionsIndustry preference for the LNP, particularly as most donations coincided with election periods, may be due to the party's emphasis on minimal state involvement in economic and social affairs. The relationship between industry donations and policies is not clear, partly due to the limited number of policies implemented overall.