Partisanship

Die Geschichtswissenschaft sieht sich einem doppelten Vorwurf ausgesetzt: Einerseits mische sie sich zu wenig in aktuelle gesellschaftliche Debatten ein, und andererseits sei sie zu politisch –und zwar vor allem zu links. Wie ist es zu dieser Konfrontation gekommen, und was ist dran an den Vorwürfen? Sind Historikerinnen und Historiker zur engagierten Parteinahme verpflichtet oder gibt es einen neutralen Standpunkt ausserhalb? Darüber diskutieren Caspar Hirschi, Professor für Allgemeine Geschichte an der Universität St. Gallen, Gesine Krüger, Professorin für Neuere Geschichte an der Universität Zürich, und Jakob Tanner, emeritierter Professor für Allgemeine und Schweizer Geschichte an der Universität Zürich

Endorsements by retired flag and general officers are now a fixture of the presidential election cycle. However, their motivations are unclear. Retired flag officers might endorse with material, purposive, or solidarity motives. We evaluate these motivations with a new data set of 1,340 endorsements by 1,041 endorsers between 2004 and 2016 matched with campaign contributions. We find that campaign contributions, service in the Navy, and retiring as a higher ranked officer are all associated with an increased likelihood of endorsing. We conclude that about 10 retired flag officers participate to improve their material situation, 193 seek to advance their ideological preferences, and the remainder participate to demonstrate solidarity with their peers or acquaintances. These findings provide new insight into endorser motivations and civil-military relations.

It has long been recognized that the presence of politicians on the boards of directors of public firms may create inefficiencies. Nevertheless, research has so far neglected the effect of political affiliation on the appointment of Members of Parliament to the boards of public firms. This article intends to fill this gap by conducting an empirical analysis on a sample of 945 deputies of the Italian Parliament elected over the period 1996-2001. Regression discontinuity estimates show that the center-left coalition is about 25 percentage points more likely to appoint its Members of Parliament to the board of public enterprises than the center-right coalition. Political appointments become more pronounced when the center-left forms a governing coalition.

Media capture has received considerable attention. Platform companies certainly cause conditions that lead to media capture, but what is often overlooked is the way that platform companies and big tech are vulnerable to “platform capture.” Platform capture is defined as the combined influence of bad actors who rig the tech companies for their own gains, the threat of government regulation, partisanship and hyper-partisanship, and Silicon Valley’s contradictory ideology that favors libertarian conceptions of privacy, speech, and profit. This chapter discusses how it is a mistake to think that platform companies and big tech more generally are invulnerable to pressure; in fact, multi-directional pressure from a political communication network that platform companies themselves enabled stands to compromise the ability of platforms to anticipate harm and to meaningfully encourage the pro-social goals of a healthy deliberative democracy. 

...Indeed, big tech is vulnerable to being trapped by the same forces that boxed in the news media as well as new challenges specific to the technology sector and the blending of politics and political persuasion with digital technology. Platforms are hamstrung by profit model incentivized by venture capital that demands scale and data in order to keep growing. Hyper-partisanship and bad actors that further pollute our information environment and set platforms up for impossible tasks of moderation. Political elites threaten platform companies with regulatory action that in turn prompt self-corrections with potentially drastic consequences. Big tech’s own ethical foundations also play an almost suicidal role in this platform capture; ideological orientations and blind spots make spotting future problems and correcting existing ones difficult. In this chapter, I explain how platform capture is happening, first by explaining how political communication in a digital era reflects a destabilized information hierarchy, and then I discuss the vulnerabilities platforms face to capture.

Global concerns about misinformation have shed light on another escalating, and connected, international issue: political polarisation. After describing polarisation, its consequences, and its connection to misinformation, this chapter reviews research from across the social sciences, information sciences, and humanities in order to map out empirically sound and theoretically rigorous solutions to the harmful aspects of polarisation. These solutions are integral to building a new "connective democracy" in a world now defined by digital communication and the promises and perils of networked life.

*Citation:
Bruun Overgaard, C. S., Dudo, A., Lease, M. Masullo, G. M., Stroud, N. J., Stroud, S. R., & Woolley, S. (2021). “Building Connective Democracy: Interdisciplinary Solutions to the Problem of Polarisation,” The Routledge Companion to Media Misrepresentation and Populism, Howard Tumber & Silvio Waisbord (eds.), Routledge, pp. 569-578.

William F. Buckley afforded conservatives of all stripes a provocative rhetorical style, a gladiatorial style, as I term it. The gladiatorial style is a flashy, combative style whose ultimate aim is the creation of inflammatory drama. I claim that conservatives encountered Buckley's potent arguments about God, government, and markets and the gladiatorial style simultaneously. The theatrical appeal of Buckley's gladiatorial style inspired conservative imitators with disparate beliefs and, over several decades, became one of the principal rhetorical templates for the performance of conservatism.

Our research speaks to the ongoing debate over the extent and severity of partisan political divisions in the American society. We employ behavioral experiments to probe for affective polarization using dictator, trust, and public goods games with party identification treatments. We find that subjects who identify politically with the Democratic or Republican Party and ideologically as liberals and conservatives display stronger affective biases than politically unaffiliated and ideological moderates. Partisan subjects are less altruistic, less trusting, and less likely to contribute to a mutually beneficial public good when paired with members of the opposing party. Compared to other behavioral studies, our research suggests increasing levels of affective polarization in the way Americans relate to one another politically, bordering on the entrenched divisions one commonly sees in conflict or post- conflict societies. To overcome affective polarization, our research points to inter-group contact as a mechanism for increasing trust and bridging political divides.

Co-Authors: Sam Whitt (corresponding author), Ali Yanus, Brian McDonald, John Graeber, Mark Setzler, and Martin Kifer

With the maturation of social media as a form of communication and the decline in mainstream institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which information is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. We consider five important, new, digitally enabled " pump-valves " in the flow of socio-political information and frames: platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors. We revise the cascading network activation model of frame activation and spread, developed before digital media's rise. This new integrated model illuminates how these five features of digitalization affect relationships among elites, traditional media, and individuals, and suggests research on whether they flatten and democratize hierarchies of information control and power or entrench dominant structures. With the maturation of social media as a form of political communication and information consumption and the decline in the fortunes and authority of institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which news is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. Included among these imperatives is a reassessment of framing. In a special issue assessing communication's status as a discipline, Entman (1993) wrote of framing as a fractured paradigm, and argued conceptually-enhanced framing research could offer critical insights into the influences of communication on consciousness, behavior, and power. The concept of framing organizes scholarly understanding of exactly how communication promotes particular interpretations of reality via the interaction of individuals' existing schemas—themselves largely products of prior framing—and newly communicated information. Frames activate and spread among elites, journalists, and citizens,

Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada examines the hidden ways that political parties exert control over elected members of Canadian legislatures. Drawing on extensive interviews with politicians and staffers across the country, Whipped explains why Members of Parliament and provincial legislators toe the party line, and shows how party discipline has expanded into message discipline. It explores the phenomenon of politicians as brand ambassadors, the role of the party whip, and the inner workings of legislatures. It recounts stories from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s drive for caucus cohesion in the 1980s through to the turmoil that the SNC-Lavalin crisis wrought on Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party in 2019. From caucus meetings to vote instructions, Whipped exposes how democracy works in our age of instant communication and political polarization. The book conclusively demonstrates that party loyalty usually wins out in Canada. Filled with political tips, Whipped is a must-read for anyone interested in the real world of Canadian politics.

In his chapter on “Containing ‘Country Music Marxism,’” Reece Peck tracks the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit” as a case study, Peck demonstrates how Fox News employed its unique mix of tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially progressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, Peck illuminates how Fox endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the news sector, Peck elucidates how political-taste alignments factor into conservative news cultures. His chapter serves as a call for greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions, while relying on those very divisions in framing its news coverage.

Critical Theory has an uneasy relationship to philosophy, and it is not straightforward at all whether it constitutes a philosophical position: it both aims to transcend philosophy and insists on the need for it. On the one hand, it stands in the tradition of Marx (and Engels), who famously said in The German Ideology that ‘we know only a single science, the science of history’; in the tradition of Kierkegaard and others who are suspicious of the success of and need for certain discursive grounding; and in the tradition of Hegel, who insisted on philosophy as always coming second to practical achievements; as well as in the tradition of Freud, with its calling into question some of the most fundamental notions of traditional philosophy (such as the self and its autonomy). At the very least, this results in a commitment to a truly interdisciplinary approach, and in some authors (such as Adorno) it even leads to a certain anti-philosophical stance, where normative partisanship is not philosophically grounded and the very idea of a philosophical system is seen as an anathema. Traditional metaphysics, Kantian transcendental philosophy, logical positivism and empiricism are just as much rejected as fundamental ontology. On the other hand, the very same authors (including notably Adorno) insist on the continued need for philosophy and require critique of philosophical positions to be, in important senses, internal to philosophy, and, for example, not descend to a crudely Marxist sociology of ideas, whereby theories are reduced to the class position and interests of their authors and supporters. The relentless self-reflexivity mandated by Critical Theory also pushes its proponents in the direction of what has traditionally been described as philosophy. In this Chapter, I investigate this uneasy relationship with philosophy by way of a case study of Adorno’s Critical Theory.

Despite concerns about the effects of pro-Russian disinformation on Western public opinion, evidence of its reach remains scarce. We hypothesize that conservative individuals will be more likely than liberals to be potentially exposed to pro-Russian disinfor-mation in digital networks. We evaluate the hypothesis using a large data set of U.S.-based Twitter users, testing how ideology is associated with disinformation about the 2014 crash of the MH17 aircraft over eastern Ukraine. We find that potential exposure to disinformation is concentrated among the most conservative individuals. Moving from the most liberal to the most conservative individuals in the sample is associated with a change in the conditional probability of potential exposure to disinformation from 6.5% to 45.2%. We corroborate the finding using a second, validated data set on individual party registration. The results indicate that the reach of online, pro-Russian disinformation into U.S. audiences is distinctly ideologically asymmetric.

This article uses data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test Fiorina's assertion that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth. Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists—they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens. Moreover, contrary to Fiorina's suggestion that polarization turns off voters and depresses turnout, our evidence indicates that polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.

Self-perceived political orientation (i.e., how liberal or conservative one views him or herself) has a substantial influence on one’s political party and candidate preferences. Theoretical and empirical work within the fields of psychology, sociology, and political science, however, suggest that factors in addition to mere group membership (e.g., political orientation) affect attitudes toward members of an outgroup (e.g., members of an opposing political orientation). The current chapter explores this possibility by using the integrated threat theory (ITT; Stephan & Stephan, 2000) to examine the factors that influence individuals’ attitudes toward Republicans and Democrats. According to the ITT, negative attitudes toward members of an outgroup arise from the perception of four threats pertaining to that outgroup: realistic threats, symbolic threats, intergroup anxiety, and negative stereotypes. In the months leading up to the 2004 American presidential election, 301 participants completed a survey assessing these four threats posed by Republicans and Democrats. Not surprisingly, multiple regression analyses confirmed that self-perceived political orientation significantly predicted attitudes toward both parties. This relationship between self-perceived political orientation and attitudes toward both parties, however, was fully mediated by the four threats of the ITT. These results suggest that previous research in the social sciences has overlooked critical variables that are necessary for explaining voting behavior. Our discussion focuses on how these results relate to the literature in intergroup relations, as well as the implications thesefindings have for future research and political campaigns.

Using large Twitter datasets collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we examined how partisanship shapes patterns of sharing and commenting on candidate fact-check rulings. Our results indicate that partisans selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party's candidate, resulting in an ideologically narrow flow of fact checks to their followers. We also find evidence of hostile media perception in users' public accusations of bias on the part of fact-checking organizations. Additionally, Republicans showed stronger outgroup negativity and hostility toward fact checkers than Democrats. These findings help us understand " selective sharing " as a complementary process to selective exposure, as well as identifying asymmetries between partisans in their sharing practices.

The object of this study is the philosophical anthropology that appeared and took shape, even if in filigree, in the historical fracture – a true and proper event, as in Alain Badiou’s ontological reflection – that opened up in the European Resistance to Nazi-fascism. We have grasped this anthropology with a philosophical ‘take’ on texts and signs of a non-philosophical form such as testimonies, letters, novels, films and political posters, which, if they are interpellated correctly, express a valuable speculative intention. An intention that was characterised by a clear ethical-political coloration, which is here used to show the existential ‘resurgence’ that the Resistance subjects set in motion with their attempt to delineate their own anthropology. Chapter I examines the constellation of Resistance literature and its inherently moral dimension. This morality resides in the evental nature of the experience being narrated, as well as in the transformation of the narrator into a witness, which the Resistance entailed. The literature thus demonstrates not only its immanent representative properties, but also its vocation of pursuing on a different plane the same loyalty to the truth process that begins with the choice to resist and to fight. Chapter II delves into the theme of the choice to resist, capturing its ethical-political element, starting from its inescapable setting in terms of its historical determinations. Indeed, it is in the position that the subject takes faced with the bind imposed on him by his time – that is, in the subject’s consciousself-attachment to this necessity and in his reflection on his own fate – that the gesture of choosing to resist expresses its emancipatory potential and heralds the political status of the partisan, in a plural horizon of recognition. Chapter III captures the anthropological dimension of the Resistance in terms of its structural oscillation between the exemplary and the shadowed. The presence of the Resistance subject expresses the very syntax of his political action. The truth of the act of Resistance is located in its existence both on the level of representation and in its inexhaustible reference to an axiological horizon, as is its indelible – even if at times liminal – difference with regard to the anthropological register that took shape under the Fascist regimes. The partisan is continually “coming to, arriving at” his presence, Andrea Zanzotto writes. In the uncertain suspension of his appearance – in his wanderings – he is representing the meaning of his own action and his own anthropology, indicating it without ever exhausting its full significance. As Levinas would say, the fascist, conversely, is confined to his own presence, he “is” in this presence. His own corporeal presence is a finished idea of man, whose meaning is nailed down. Finally, the conclusions look into the nexuses of co-possibility between philosophical practice and Resistance praxis – bearing dual testimony to a peculiar form of contemporaneity to one’s own time – declining them in terms of consciousness and, with particular reference to Jean Cavaillès’s work, conceptually.

Americans are increasingly polarized by a variety of metrics. The dimensions, extent, causes, and consequences of that polarization have been the subject of much debate. Yet despite the centrality of religion to early discussions, the analytical focus on America's divides has largely shifted toward partisan identity, political ideology, race, and class interests. I show that religion remains powerfully implicated in all dimensions of American polarization, and sociologists must once again make religion more central to their analyses. After outlining research on American polarization, focusing on the role of religion, I survey findings within the burgeoning literatures on cultural transformation processes, (white) Christian nationalism, complex religion, and Americans' attitudes toward science in order to underscore the centrality of ethno-religious identities, religious demography, and religious institutions for both shaping and exacerbating various forms of polarization. Lastly, I propose an agenda for elucidating religion's ongoing role in understanding polarization beyond public opinion research at the macro-, meso-, and microlevels. Though polarization research has been dominated by political scientists, leveraging religion in our analyses-not merely as a sui generis "variable," but as a "site" of complex social behavior-facilitates novel sociological contributions to these literatures via our relative attention to multiple levels of analysis, theoretical eclecticism, and methodological fluidity.

The manipulation of electoral laws for partisan advantage has been a common practice for elected officials throughout American history. Increases in polarization and political competition over the last 30 years have heightened the incentives for lawmakers to exploit the rules of the 'electoral game,' contributing to an upsurge in legislative activity at the state-level (Wang 2012; Lee 2016). Even in the era of polarization, however, much of the variation in states' electoral laws cannot be explained simply by partisanship. Rather, alterations are often due to a complex relationship involving elite-mass interactions, demographics, democratic values, as well as exogenous shocks in the form of 'democratic deficiencies' (Shugart 2001). I will explore these and other factors as motivating factors for institutional change in the American states by examining the decision among state-level legislators to introduce and/or enact three types of electoral laws: 1) altering the stringency of voter ID laws; 2) expanding or restricting 'convenience voting' practices (registration, non-election day voting); and 3) whether to establish an independent redistricting commission. I will employ a mixed method framework to analyze this decision at two legislative stages: agenda-setting and enactment. I hypothesize that exogenous factors (national politics, policy entrepreneurs, networks) are more influential in the agenda-setting stage of the policy process, while endogenous factors (political competition, party control, political culture and democratic values) are more influential during the enactment stage of the policy process. I also expect to find that ideational concerns serve as a constraint on lawmakers' ability to propose and enact electoral laws that result in egregious violations of democratic norms. The findings presented in this dissertation will contribute to the scholarly understanding of the policy process, institutional change, as well as the extent to which lawmakers are able to manipulate electoral laws to insulate themselves from political accountability. 2

Der Artikel ist einigen bislang wenig erforschten Aspekten der Romaverfolgung in der besetzten Ukraine in den Jahren 1941–1944 gewidmet. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet die Überlegung, dass die Besatzer weder im rumänisch noch im deutsch kontrollierten Teil der Ukraine über ausreichende eigene Ressourcen verfügt hätten, um ihre Politik gegenüber den Roma systematisch zu verfolgen. Da an der Durchführung dieser Politik zahlreiche Vertreter der Mehrheitsbevölkerung beteiligt waren, gewinnt die Erforschung der von der lokalen Bevölkerung bei der „Lösung der Zigeunerfrage“ eingenommenen Haltung stark an Bedeutung. Der Autor beleuchtet die den Roma entgegengebrachte Einstellung verschiedener Gruppen der einheimischen Bevölkerung und setzt sich exemplarisch mit den wichtigsten militärpolitischen Akteuren (wie kommunistische und nationalistische Partisanen) sowie mit der Rolle der Zivilverwaltung und der Hilfspolizei auseinander.

The rise of interpretive news opened a gap between journalism and what people need from news. Modern journalism aims to provide a mature explanation for what happened, insight into what will come next, and a repeatable performance by reporters. With events placed in context, the public can pursue future action based on expert reporting. But US news has mainly proved callow, fallible, and hasty, despite a century of change. Reflections on a project tracking 125 years of news content suggest that flawed news opens more space for engagement than modern journalism can offer. Realism in news confronts the main problems of partisanism, sensationalism, and cynicism. Mainstream journalists resist lurid or partisan coverage to build public trust, but again appear to have failed, especially in the digital era. The implication is that all three could spur vigorous citizenship, partisanism teaching consensus-building, sensationalism teaching moderation, and untrustworthiness teaching self-reliance. The crisis of journalism seems to accompany perils for the people, but modern news at its height of power likely dampened public engagement, a danger itself. Only a different news philosophy can accommodate bottom-up knowledge for audiences resisting topdown journalism. Despite nostalgia for modernism, another news philosophy will not mark an end to democracy.

Se analizaron los patrones de compromiso y desafección políticos entre cuatro grupos relevantes de ciudadanos a partir de sus niveles de partidismo y de movilización cognitiva. Los resultados revelan diferencias significativas entre grupos, con aquellos con mayor grado de movilización cognitiva (partidistas cognitivos y apartidistas) exhibiendo niveles superiores de eficacia política interna, así como menor apatía política cuando se les compara con los grupos con bajos valores en esta variable (partidistas rituales y apolíticos).

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal-democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to particular discursive norms. What the article calls a 'liberal ethics of populism' turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who 'the people' are in a way that is compatible with liberal-democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people.

Contemporary scholarship on intra-party democracy pays a great deal of attention to aggregative procedures like primaries or membership ballots, but widely ignores deliberative procedures within parties. This article begins by highlighting why scholars should care about deliberation within parties, discussing several functions intra-party deliberation is said to serve in the democratic theory literature. It then goes on to explore the deliberative credentials of political discussion among party members, drawing on group interviews with party members in two Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria. Two issues are investigated: the preconditions for deliberation among party members and their justificatory patterns. The results of the analysis suggest that parties can be genuine vehicles of deliberation, and thus point towards a research programme on intra-party democracy that differs quite starkly from that which prevails.

For decades now, congressional parties have been the most significant political organisations on Capitol Hill as class and cultural issues have produced increasingly sharp ideological divisions between Democrats and Republicans engendering congressional parties that are cohesive and ideologically polarised parties to an extent that would have been unknown to members of the Congress in the mid-twentieth century and to the framers of the US Constitution in the late eighteenth century.

As we have moved into the second decade of the twenty-first century, both partisanship and partisan polarisation in the Congress have strengthened even further from 10 or 20 years ago, at the same time that American voters care neither for the Congress as an institution nor its parties. Polarisation, however, has not been symmetric: For, typically ignored in many journalistic accounts, congressional Republicans have moved much more sharply to the right than have congressional Democrats to the left, never more so than since the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. There is no shortage of examples of the effects of asymmetric partisan polarisation on contemporary policymaking in Washington, most notably, over the debt increase in late 2011.  This episode also demonstrates the level of political uncertainty that polarisation engenders: policy outcomes in each chamber have necessarily become much more volatile while the probability of congressional-presidential agreement in writing major legislation decreases under conditions of split-party government, whereas it increases significantly. This pattern of policymaking is a far cry from the naïve anti-party expectations of the US Constitution’s framers; and, apparently, not what most Americans want.

The study follows the trajectory of a group of re-emigrants who took an active part in the partisan (antifascist, or Communist) resistance movement during the Second World War in Yugoslavia and who established their own partisan unit, the Czechoslovak Brigade of Jan Žižka. After the war, partisans with Czechoslovak citizenship decided to answer the call from Czechoslovakia, and they and their families settled the areas from which the old German residents had been expelled. After their arrival, the state welcomed them as antifascist heroes (freedom fighters), but at the local level, they were accepted as undesired “outlanders”, “other Czechs”, or “Yugoslavians”. After Cominform issued its first resolution, the regime of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia stigmatized them as being “unreliable for the state”. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, they found themselves in
a position of memory bearers, a position that did not correspond to the contemporary hegemonic anti-Communist narrative. Due to this fact, the second generation of re-emigrants in particular feels that their ancestors have been unjustifiably erased from history, their legacy and imagined family honour unrecognized. At their own commemorative meetings, they clearly demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the contemporary exclusion of their partisan ancestors from the post-Communist national narrative. I argue in the text that the perceived non-ethnic otherness in the past alongside their historical experience and the contemporary post-Communist politics of memory led the re-emigrants to the formation of their own memory community (and thus identity).

In the course of its democratic transition toward a party of the masses, the Italian Communists had to prove themselves both good comrades and ordinary Italians. The article analyzes this double bind as an integral part of Gramscian and Togliattian thought and discusses its problematic consequences for the idea of a ‘New Man’ which was to be created under Communist auspices. The ideal comrade as a prefiguration of the ‘New Man’ ought to be an authentic part of the masses, showing strong links to the autochthonous traditions of Italian culture, but at the same time needed to act in the realm of intellectual progressiveness and moral superiority. The resultant compromise was a comrade who did not seek to become much different, only to become much better within all his social roles. However, the masses entering the Communist Party – which ensured its strength – forced party officials to accept the moral and intellectual deficiencies of their comrades on the road to proving itself to be an all-Italian party. Hence the post-fascist Communist ideal of a ‘New Man’ as well as the roads to reach him were deeply entangled with Italian traditions and conditions.

(9200 words + iconographic appendix): chapter for the Renaissance volume (eds. Virginia Cox and Joanne Paul) of the Cultural History of Democracy (6 volumes) - Bloomsbury (scientific project editor: Eugenio Biagini, Cambridge, History) -- 2021
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/cultural-history-of-democracy-9781350042933/

The existing literature suggests that partisanship in Latin America is relatively weak. However, these findings have been based largely on a survey methodology that systematically underestimates partisanship. This study provides caution about measuring party identification when it is framed in a short-term time horizon and includes a filter question—as most comparative surveys do—since this tends to result in an underestimation of levels of partisanship in the region. In turn, surveys that rely on a question wording that is more consistent with early theories of voting behavior show that the proportion of voters who self-identify with a political party is larger than the literature assumed. The findings of this paper have broader implications for studies in comparative politics. They suggest that the existing literature on parties and party systems has underestimated the ability of political parties in Latin America to recruit and create strong linkages with the electorate.

Since the (re) structuring collective memory always implies particular political processes, in the case of Ivan Goran Kovačić and his narrative poem "The Pit" ("Jama"), the fundamental text of the Partisan canon of Croatian literature, it may be divided into two periods with a transitional watershed of the 90s (or the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) as a historical turning point. Post-Yugoslav revisionist processes of the memory of World War II, which then started, inevitably had to influence the "myth about Goran", up to that time in the conventional memory constructed around three key points. The first was his leaving Zagreb, together with Vladimir Nazor, to join the Partisans; the second was the revelation of Ustasha crimes in the epic poem The Pit and third his death by a "chetnikʼs knife", which he prophetically hinted at in his poem "My Tomb". Furthermore, the critical reception of The Pit from its first edition takes place on two plans of expression-artistic (fine arts) and literary. These "two lives" of one epic poem had different destinies and also attached to themselves different memories including forgetting strategies of (re)structuring collective memory.

Numerous studies find associations between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation. While such findings are often interpreted as evidence that social media causally promotes conspiracy beliefs, we theorize that this relationship is conditional on other individual-level predispositions. Across two studies, we examine the relationship between beliefs in conspiracy theories and media use, finding that individuals who get their news from social media and use social media frequently express more beliefs in some types of conspiracy theories and misinformation. However, we also find that these relationships are conditional on conspiracy thinking-the predisposition to interpret salient events as products of conspiracies-such that social media use becomes more strongly associated with conspiracy beliefs as conspiracy thinking intensifies. This pattern, which we observe across many beliefs from two studies, clarifies the relationship between social media use and beliefs in dubious ideas.

José Maria Scassa se tornou a partir da década de 1950, um dos principais nomes da cobertura especializada em esportes na TV brasileira. O propósito deste trabalho é identificar relações entre o comentarista esportivo e o Golpe de 1964, que instaurou a Ditadura Militar no país. Antes da derrubada de João Goulart, Scassa manteve ligações próximas com a União Democrática Nacional (UDN), legenda responsável por oferecer sustentação à investida antidemocrática, e chegou a lançar candidatura a vereador do Distrito Federal pelo partido em 1954. A investigação se dará por meio da abordagem histórica de Luca (2005) de, sobre e por meio de periódicos na imprensa.

Петренко А.А. «Где можно с ружьем в руках, где нельзя — тайно, хитростью и лукавством»: боевые инструкции бойцам Народного Союза Защиты Родины и Свободы Б.В. Савинкова // Гражданские конфликты и гражданские войны в истории. Исторические документы и актуальные проблемы археографии, источниковедения, российской и всеобщей истории нового и новейшего времени : Сборник материалов Восьмой международной конференции молодых ученых и специалистов «Clio-2018» / [отв. ред. А. К. Сорокин]. – М. : Политическая энциклопедия, 2018, С. 317-321.

This article explores what the contours of a pragmatist theory of rhetoric would be like in its democratic instantiation. The threat of partisan thought and dogmatism in argument is examined as a threat to the sort of democratic community pragmatists such as John Dewey desired to create. Partisans fail to realize not only their own limitations in pursuing the true and the good but also the fact that solving problems
through overly partisan forms of reasoning or argument only creates future obstacles to community life. This provides an extended reading of what Dewey meant by free communication: communication not only free from legal constraints and censorship but also free from the binding habits of thought and interaction that can be identified as
“partisan perfect reasoning.”