Social media platforms take on increasingly big roles in political advertising. Microtargeting techniques facilitate the display of tailored advertisements to specific subsegments of society. Scholars worry that such techniques might cause political information to be displayed to only very small subgroups of citizens. Or that targeted communication about policy could make the mandate of elected representatives more challenging to interpret. Policy information in general and pledges, in particular, have received much scientific scrutiny. Scholars have focused largely on party (...) manifestos, but policy information and pledges communicated via online advertisements offer a new arena with new dynamics. This study uses Facebook’s ad library to describe how Dutch political campaigns advertise policy information and pledges in the run-up to the 2019 European Elections. The results show that much policy information is displayed to small subsegments of society. These findings provide evidence for concerns about pledge obfuscation, voter manipulation and mandate interpretation. (shrink)

Campaign posters and printer billboards are reviewed in this article with a focus on the slogan. The main argument is that the analysis and the function of an ad slogan can be applied to political campaign slogans. Certain similarities can be found in the purpose of the two, but also similar techniques are used to engage the audience: by using salient expressions or conversational implicatures voters are engaged in a language game that increases the chances of the slogan fulfilling (...) its purpose. For this reason, the theory of implicatures and the Graded salience hypothesis are briefly reviewed. The message becomes easier to grasp and remember because it uses familiar expressions as it is shown in the evidentiary sample. (shrink)

This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful (...) replacement of traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise. (shrink)

Political advertising to recruit the support of voters is an inherent part of politics. Today, ads are distributed via television and online, including social media. This type of advertisement attempts to recruit support by presenting convincing arguments and evoking various emotions about the candidate, opponents, and policy proposals. We discuss recent arguments and evidence that a specific social emotion, namely the concept kama muta, plays a role in political advertisements. In vernacular language, kama muta is typically labeled as (...) being moved or touched. We compare kama muta and anger theoretically and discuss how they can influence voters’ willingness to support a candidate. We then, for the first time, compare kama muta and anger empirically in the same study. Specifically, we showed American participants short political ads during the 2018 United States midterm election campaigns. All participants saw both kama muta- and anger-evoking ads from both Democratic or Republican candidates. In total, everybody watched eight ads. We assessed participants’ degree of being moved and angered by the videos and their motivation for three types of political support: ideational, financial, and personal. The emotional impact of an ad depended on its perceived source: Participants felt especially angry after watching the anger-evoking ads and especially moved by moving ads if they identified with the political party that had produced the video. Both emotions mediated were associated with increased intentions to provide support. Importantly, if one of the two emotions was evoked, its effect on political support was enhanced if participants identified with the party that had produced the ad. We discuss limitations of the method and implications of the results for future research and practice. (shrink)

The 2011 Thai general election was seen by many Thai political analysts as a watershed moment that would hopefully be the tipping point of socio-political reconciliation in the drawn out political struggle that has characterized Thai politics since 2005. The highly contested nature of Thai politics becomes salient when viewing campaign posters pictorial and linguistic content. The most controversial of which was the ``Vote No'' campaign taken on by the For Heaven and Earth Party, which is a (...) political party nominally associated with Thailand's conservative People's Alliance for Democracy. This study seeks to unwrap and decode the semiotics of this party's political campaign posters in Thailand's 2011 general election by providing cultural context to the application of multimodal discourse analysis and critical semiotics framework. I will argue that the ``Vote No'' campaign and its campaign posters depicting politicians as animals is a continuing political discourse of conservative Buddhist philosophers/scholars that reaches back to the 1980s. Furthermore, the ``Vote No'' campaign seeks to create dissonance and reinstate conservative rule via monarchial and/or military intervention by creating political deadlock thereby undermining democratic rights and rule by the exercising of democratic rights of voting, thus disenfranchising citizens by their own hand. (shrink)

State health departments are at the core of the United States public health infrastructure. Surveillance to monitor trends in disease and injury; the development, coordination, and delivery of services; and public education are some of the core functions health department employees oversee every day. As such, agencies and their employees are well positioned to inform policy decisions that affect the public’s health. However, little is known about the role of health department staff — a sizeable proportion of the public health (...) workforce — as advocates for public health policies, independent of their agency roles. Anecdotally, some health department employees with whom we have spoken expressed reluctance to engage in policy advocacy for fear of violating little known or understood agency or state rules. (shrink)

The authors seek to contribute to the existing discussion of the communicative function of political memes by bringing into discussion political memes used by opposition leaders in the 2018 Russian presidential election campaigns as examples of memes being purposefully deployed in targeted political communications. Specifically, they focus on Navalny’s use of the ‘yellow duck’ meme. Drawing on the existing research of memes’ mythological properties, the authors claim that the combination of dialogue and conflict as two main (...) functions entailed in the political meme is a likely key element that increases the popularity of a meme and makes it viral. The discussion of concrete examples is preceded by a discussion that contextualizes the study of a political meme within the field of communication studies as a device that offers clarity in the chaotic flow of information, is constructed by both addresser and the addressee and serves as an effective tool for promoting ideologies. (shrink)

Can an election campaign be considered a normal time period, or is it a very exceptional episode in the way the media look at political actors and issues? This is the central question of this article. We claim that during campaigns journalists work under different conditions and are confronted with politicians and parties that are more active than ever, and with a public that pays more attention to who and how politics is presented. This general claim is made (...) concrete in several hypotheses that are tested on the basis of a large dataset of Flemish news broadcasts between 2003 and 2006. Our results confirm that campaign periods strongly influence the amount, style and actors of the news in Belgium. (shrink)

The results of the European elections 2014 in Spain were characterized by the outstanding rise of a new party, Podemos, which obtained five seats in the European Parliament, despite being founded few months before the elections. The present study analyzes both the content and the presence of emotions in Podemos’ discourse on Facebook during the European electoral campaign. In particular, the affective content of both the party’s discourse and the comments of its followers will be analyzed through a pragmatic linguistic (...) approach applied to a corpus of 163 posts and 215 followers’ comments. Results show an insistence on positive emotions in the party’s discourse and a prevalence of negative emotions in the comments of the citizens.Los resultados en España de las elecciones al Parlamento Europeo de 2014 se caracterizaron por el surgimiento de un nuevo partido, Podemos, que, a pesar de haber sido fundado pocos meses antes de las elecciones, obtuvo cinco escaños en el Parlamento Europeo. En este trabajo analizamos el contenido y la presencia de emociones en el discurso de Podemos en Facebook durante la campaña electoral europea. Concretamente, se analiza el contenido afectivo del discurso del partido y de los comentarios de sus seguidores mediante una aproximación lingüística pragmática aplicada a 163 posts y 215 comentarios. Los resultados muestran una insistencia en emociones positivas por parte del partido y una prevalencia de emociones negativas en los comentarios de los internautas. (shrink)

The outcomes of a bibliographic review on political communication, in particular electoral communication in social networks, are presented here. The electoral campaigning are a crucial test to verify the transformations of the media system and of the forms and uses of the linguistic acts by dominant actors in public sphere – candidates, parties, journalists and Gatekeepers. The aim is to reconstruct the first elements of an analytical model on the transformations of the political public sphere, with which to (...) systematize the results of the main empirical research carried out in recent years, in particular those conducted with a promising methodology: Digital Trace Data Analysis. (shrink)

This paper deploys Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory to examine the dispute over intellectual property protection and global HIV/aids medicines access. Over the 1980s and 1990s, major pharmaceutical companies and minority world governments successfully crafted a strong patent protection regime, institutionalized in the World Trade Organization's intellectual property rules. In the early 2000s, a transnational civil society campaign challenged this regime, positioning patents at the centre of a highly publicized dispute. This dispute has been retrospectively identified as a turning point (...) in medicines access discourse, with the 2001–2003 period dubbed the ‘golden window’ for expanded global HIV/aids medicines access. However, this ‘window’ has also been critiqued as an unsustainable aberration to a continuing hegemonic regime that prioritizes patent protection, to the detriment of equitable global medicines access. This paper draws on both political economy analyses and discourse theoretical concepts to examine the processes of rupture and suture in HIV/aids medicines access discourse. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the research of civic engagement processes, which are gaining more and more publicity in world political science. Applying modern professional approaches, the author offers an explanation of the recruitment of civil advocacy through a clear political goal and connection with the current situational context. The article reveals and describes the main components of measuring the involvement of political activists within the framework of modern civil advocacy campaigns. The author reveals the mechanisms (...) of expressing views and positions, protecting one’s rights and influencing decision-making processes at different levels of management. It is emphasized that civil advocacy covers a wide range of activities aimed at participation in political processes. The text examines advocacy campaigns in the political practice of consolidated democracies as organized events aimed at drawing attention to specific problems and achieving policy changes or raising public awareness. In the work, an appeal was also made to the qualification requirements and job duties of the leaders of civil campaigns. The article analyzes the actualization of the issue of civil advocacy in social and political innovations at the current stage. It is noted that in developed democratic countries a tendency to pay attention to social public innovations is outlined. It has been established that the development of civil society in Ukraine involves the development of a national model of engaging citizens in conducting advocacy campaigns. Attention is paid to attracting new active participants, for whom public advocacy campaigns become a factor in forming an environment of collaboration and expanding the circle of social communication. Emphasis is placed on the continuous inclusion of individuals and groups in activities aimed at improving the public environment and forming conscious public leadership and an atmosphere of social success. In the final part of the article, the author emphasizes that effective public involvement involves a variety of approaches. It was concluded that the decisive factor that prompts citizens to take a proactive position and participate in civil advocacy campaigns are pragmatic needs and ideas about achieving a state of satisfaction of requirements. (shrink)

Our article examines how journalistic reports and online comments have made sense of computational politics. It treats the discourse around data-driven campaigns as its object of analysis and codifies four main perspectives that have structured the debates about the use of large data sets and data analytics in elections. We study American, British, and German sources on the 2016 United States presidential election, the 2017 United Kingdom general election, and the 2017 German federal election. There, groups of speakers maneuvered (...) between enthusiastic, skeptical, agnostic, or admonitory stances and so cannot be clearly mapped onto these four discursive positions. Coming along with the inconsistent accounts, public sensemaking was marked by an atmosphere of speculation about the substance and effects of computational politics. We conclude that this equivocality helped journalists and commentators to sideline prior reporting on the issue in order to repeatedly rediscover the practices they had already covered. (shrink)

For thirteen consecutive years, Catalan public broadcasting journalists have protested against the so-called coverage quotas established by Spanish electoral regulations. According to those regulations, during election campaigns, broadcasters are required to use a calculated number related to the proportion of votes cast in the previous election to determine the amount of broadcast time they allot to each party. Journalists have repeatedly and publicly complained about the quotas, while simultaneously explaining the effects of the quotas to the audience and not (...) crediting authorship of this news. This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of the case and its historical roots from different angles: the protests, the journalists’ professional roles, the political parties’ strategies, the roles of the regulatory boards and the initiatives taken by some professional organizations and institutions. The theoretical framework focuses on the mistrust between the political class and journalists in the context of a mediatized conflict with ethical implications. The methodology includes extensive document examination, news content analysis and interviews. The results indicate that the Spanish political class has deemed the performance of the Catalan public broadcaster as tending to equate political information with electoral spots controlled by parties. The consequence of this has been an enduring conflict between politicians and Catalan journalists that distances citizens from both of them. Keywords: Spanish public media, media conflict, journalistic-political conflict, politics and ethics in media. (shrink)

"While it is true that Yves R. Simon did not intend this to be a history book, __The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought __is an important historical work well deserving of a close reading by students of twentieth-century European history and international relations. This book, which finds a worthy English translation after too many years, was Simon's first serious foray into the public square on the side of justice and the common good. Simon's analysis is wide-ranging, incisive, and (...) brimming with far-sighted political acumen." --_Robert Ventresca, King's University College_ "The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 led to the memorable plea of Emperor Haile Selassie before the League of Nations as his country's freedom died. Easier to forget is that it also sparked a surprisingly familiar intellectual dispute over the legitimacy of the bombing and the relevance of international law, as depressingly many European intellectuals rallied behind Benito Mussolini's campaign as a defense of the West and the cause of 'civilization.' The unsparing critique leveled against these frequently religious apologists for imperialism by Yves Simon, French Catholic thinker and later American university professor, is an eye-opening reminder of the terms of debate, and the larger constellation of forces of the turbulent era. Anthony Simon and his colleagues deserve thanks for making this precious and moving document available, since its ethical kernel, like its model of Catholic intellectualism, remain highly relevant." --_Samuel Moyn, Columbia University_ "__The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought_ _offers a very important discussion grounded in traditional metaphysics and in a sound sense of historical circumstances. This little book is a gem. --_George Anastaplo, Loyola University of Chicago_ Yves Simon was one of the preeminent Thomistic philosophers and political theorists of the twentieth century. He saw it as a moral duty to understand human reality and to use philosophical analysis to examine contemporary politics when they embodied philosophical errors or vicious ideologies. In __The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought__, Simon extracts principles from the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France and applies them to Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethopia. As Simon's analysis shows, the relatively obscure events leading up to the Italian invasion had larger implications for Europe and the world, perhaps even paving the way for Vichy France's collaboration with Hitler's German New Order. This book, available for the first time in English, offers an interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory and pre-emptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern political climate. (shrink)

Unlike other states, California retained a large proportion of the child care centers that had been established during World War II. In 1946, the California state government allocated state funds for child care in response to a vigorous child care campaign. The campaign, which was, in large part, a working mothers movement, was a “transformed maternalist” movement. It used maternalist rhetoric to defend state-subsidized child care that was criticized by more traditional maternalists. Using resource mobilization theory, I explain the relatively (...) high degree of political mobilization on the child care issue in California in terms of the greater availability of co-optable social resources, which California's relatively large wartime child care program provided, and the existence of movement entrepreneurs willing to mobilize these latent resources. Child care advocates were successful because they operated within a relatively favorable political opportunity structure since they did not have to contend with a strained state treasury or a mobilized countermovement and were able to garner the support of a wide variety of women's and social organizations and an influential social reformer. (shrink)

Previous research on gender and political leadership has narrowly defined gender consciousness, failing to account for the broader commitments, concerns, and loyalties held by women of color. In this article, the author calls for an intersectional approach to analyzing the gender consciousness of political leaders. She presents findings from four months of participant observation in a Latina candidate’s campaign for city council. The author finds that the campaign presented an intersectional consciousness in the candidate’s messages, using gendered discourses (...) to frame her commitment to issues of greatest concern to Hispanic and low-income communities. The campaign’s mobilization efforts targeted both women and Hispanics, but focused most of its resources into courting the vote of middle- and upper-class white women. Contrary to recent claims that intersectionality has outlived its usefulness as an analytic tool, the author argues that intersectionality remains an underutilized and much-needed framework for helping to close gaps in the understanding of political life. (shrink)

"While it is true that Yves R. Simon did not intend this to be a history book, The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought is an important historical work well deserving of a close reading by students of twentieth-century European history and international relations. This book, which finds a worthy English translation after too many years, was Simon's first serious foray into the public square on the side of justice and the common good. Simon's analysis is wide-ranging, incisive, and (...) brimming with far-sighted political acumen." --Robert Ventresca, King's University College "The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 led to the memorable plea of Emperor Haile Selassie before the League of Nations as his country's freedom died. Easier to forget is that it also sparked a surprisingly familiar intellectual dispute over the legitimacy of the bombing and the relevance of international law, as depressingly many European intellectuals rallied behind Benito Mussolini's campaign as a defense of the West and the cause of 'civilization.' The unsparing critique leveled against these frequently religious apologists for imperialism by Yves Simon, French Catholic thinker and later American university professor, is an eye-opening reminder of the terms of debate, and the larger constellation of forces of the turbulent era. Anthony Simon and his colleagues deserve thanks for making this precious and moving document available, since its ethical kernel, like its model of Catholic intellectualism, remain highly relevant." --Samuel Moyn, Columbia University "The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought offers a very important discussion grounded in traditional metaphysics and in a sound sense of historical circumstances. This little book is a gem. --George Anastaplo, Loyola University of Chicago Yves Simon was one of the preeminent Thomistic philosophers and political theorists of the twentieth century. He saw it as a moral duty to understand human reality and to use philosophical analysis to examine contemporary politics when they embodied philosophical errors or vicious ideologies. In The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought, Simon extracts principles from the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France and applies them to Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethopia. As Simon's analysis shows, the relatively obscure events leading up to the Italian invasion had larger implications for Europe and the world, perhaps even paving the way for Vichy France's collaboration with Hitler's German New Order. This book, available for the first time in English, offers an interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory and pre-emptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern political climate. (shrink)

This article compares political clientelism and datafied campaigning as two modes of relating politicians/parties and voters that are centred around voter surveillance. It contributes to the discussion on consequences of Big Data by showing similarities of datafied campaigns with a type of electoral politics that pre-dates the advent of mass media and is usually regarded as deficient. It thus departs from the predominant perspective on datafication and surveillance, which draws on Foucault, in order to identify the particular challenges (...) that datafication poses in the realm of democratic electoral politics. They are related to four major aspects in which datafied campaigning resembles political clientelism, as opposed to the combination of ideology, issue-based campaigning and media appeal that characterized Western European party politics in the second half of the 20th century. It personalizes the relationship between politicians and voters with the help of intermediaries; it is based on an asymmetric and iterative monitoring of voters; it implies a strong particularism and an affinity with populist appeals; and it is ambivalent with regard to the volition of voters. The identification of these similarities renders general concerns about the consequences of datafied campaigning for democracy more concrete. It offers a mirror in which seemingly novel practices are revealed to have implications that are well known to be problematic for the quality of democracy. (shrink)

Examines the various explanations that have been given for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's losses in the 1982 and 1986 California gubernatorial campaigns. The authors offer important advice for all black candidates running against whites for office today.

La révision de la Constitution nigériane prévue en 1956 fut perçue par le Women Movement of Nigeria (WM) comme une occasion pour revendiquer l’inclusion politique des femmes. L’article Allocation system for women, écrit en 1954 par Mrs Elizabeth Adekogbe, présidente du WM, met en évidence les droits politiques qu’elles réclament, notamment l’accès au suffrage et à l’éligibilité. Ces revendications divisent les femmes qui, selon leur appartenance politique, ont des conceptions différentes de l’émancipation politique. Ces divisions invitent à déconstruire la catégorie (...) « femmes du Nigéria » et à interroger la pluralité de leurs revendications, largement inspirées des débats qui ont eu lieu en Europe occidentale à propos de l’accès au suffrage féminin. Cet article permet aussi de s’interroger sur les parallélismes avec les suffragistes occidentales et en conséquent sur le concept de « citoyenneté » et sur son emploi et non-emploi de la part de ces femmes africaines. (shrink)

Many argue that an important goal of campaign finance reform should be to ensure that competing candidates have roughly equal financial resources with which to contest campaigns. Although there are...

This study examines online advocacy campaigns by five women action groups in Nigeria and Ghana. Based on modern social movement theories, the study utilizes computer-mediated discourse analysis to qualitatively analyze the content of the websites and social media platforms of these groups. Findings show that social media provide women advocacy groups a voice that tend to defy intimidation and the traditional patriarchal stereotypes to demand the rights of women to political leadership. Discourse structures of protest discourses include imperative (...) statements or direct acts that demand change by all means. Through online activism, the advocacy groups extend their voices, and activities to reach national and international audiences and communities of people – also reaching out to the most vulnerable rural women and the underprivileged. However, only a small percentage of women in rural areas have access to the Internet, thereby limiting participation in online activism in cities and urban centers. (shrink)

The current spread of democracy has not enabled the poor to use rights to win equity, raising questions about whether the poor and weak can use liberal democratic freedoms to address inequality. An oft-cited model of success, however, is the Treatment Action Campaign ’s campaign to press the South African government into distributing anti-retroviral medication to people living with HIV/aids. This article finds that TAC’s strategy of using the rights and rules of constitutional democracy to win gains may offer an (...) exemplar for forms of collective action which can win substantive equality, but that the model remains of limited application. (shrink)

One of the important lessons to take away from Rohit Parikh’s impressive body of work is that logicians and computer scientists have much to gain by focusing their attention on the intricacies of political campaigns. Drawing on recent work developing a theory of expressive voting, we study the dynamics of voters’ opinions during an election. In this paper, we develop a model in which the relative importance of the different issues that concern a voter may change either in (...) response to candidates’ statements during a campaign or due to unforeseen events. We study how changes in a voter?s attention to the issues influence voting behavior under voting systems such as plurality rule and approval voting. We argue that it can be worthwhile for candidates to reshape public focus, but that doing so can be a complex and risky activity. (shrink)

Recently Communist China has launched an all-out campaign to criticize Confucius. It has taken a thoroughly negative and nihilistic attitude in a vigorous attempt to vilify Confucius and his thought.

Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses of competition. As (...) we demonstrate, however, elections present even more difficult challenges than other adversarial contexts, because no centralized regulation is available to halt potential arms races. Turning next to recent scholarship on populism and partisanship, we articulate an alternative framework for campaign ethics, which allows candidates greater room to maneuver in their appeals to democratic populations while nevertheless requiring adherence to norms of social and political pluralism. (shrink)

The majority of the women who campaigned to save the Vane Tempest Colliery from closure in 1993 were involved because of their political understanding and allegiances rather than as a consequence of their practical involvement in mining life. Even those women who were married to miners did not conform to the stereotypical conception of ‘miner's wife’. However, the supporting labour movement and the media persisted in conceptualizing the Women's Vigil through romantic and masculinist discourses of miners and mining communities (...) which could only locate the women as ‘wives’, which confined the campaign within historical stereotypes no longer appropriate to the actual situation and which persistently set the idea of socialism against that of feminism. This not only situated the women's campaign as secondary and subject to that of the NUM but it also subverted the possibilities of the women fully articulating their own experience and understanding within the campaign. The situation was further complicated by memories of the miners’ strike of 1984–5 in which women played such an important role. One aspect of this role, that of maintaining mining families in the face of hardship, continued to inform understanding of the women's role in the fight to prevent closure, although it was no longer appropriate. The Women's Vigil engaged with a much wider set of concerns and with a wider range of individuals and groups than did that of the miners themselves. There were serious possibilities for broadening the political campaign around the women's slogan of ‘Jobs, community and environment’ which were never fully exploited because of the difficulties of admitting that women could inhabit any position other than that of ‘miners’ wives’. This experience of the Vane Tempest Vigil indicates the significance and the centrality of gender issues within class based political action. (shrink)

Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book (...) seeks to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life. Thompson surveys ethical conflicts of public officials over a range of political issues, including nuclear deterrence, foreign intervention, undercover investigation, bureaucratic negligence, campaign finance, the privacy of officials, health care, welfare paternalism, drug and safety regulation, and social experimentation. He views these conflicts from the perspectives of many different kinds of public officials - elected and appointed executives at several levels of government, administrators, judges, legislators, governmental advisers, and even doctors, lawyers, social workers, and journalists whose professional roles often thrust them into public life. In clarifying the ethical problems faced by officials, Thompson combines theoretical analysis with practical prescription, and begins to define a field of inquiry for which many have said there is a need but to which few have yet contributed. Philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, lawyers, and other professionals interested in ethics in government will gain insight from this book. (shrink)

Amongst other methods, political campaigns employ microtargeting, a specific technique used to address the individual voter. In the US, microtargeting relies on a broad set of collected data about the individual. However, due to the unavailability of comparable data in Germany, the practice of microtargeting is far more challenging. Citizens in Germany widely treat social media platforms as a means for political debate. The digital traces they leave through their interactions provide a rich information pool, which can (...) create the necessary conditions for political microtargeting following appropriate algorithmic processing. More specifically, data mining techniques enable information gathering about a people's general opinion, party preferences and other non-political characteristics. Through the application of data-intensive algorithms, it is possible to cluster users in respect of common attributes, and through profiling identify whom and how to influence. Applying machine learning algorithms, this paper explores the possibility to identify micro groups of users, which can potentially be targeted with special campaign messages, and how this approach can be expanded to large parts of the electorate. Lastly, based on these technical capabilities, we discuss the ethical and political implications for the German political system. (shrink)

Within a one-dimensional spatial framework, we deduce that partiesto go negative’, by blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values, increase with their ideological proximity. We test our hypothesis by considering the long period of no-cabinet alternation that characterized both Italy and Japan. In particular, we focus on the (spatial) incentives of the Italian Communist Party and of the Japanese Socialist Party to emphasize on a particular topic related to negative campaigning, i.e. political corruption issues. The status (...) of the perennial opposition held by both parties, together with the existence of several political corruption scandals during the period considered, makes the Italian and the Japanese political systems particularly apt to test our hypothesis. The results, based on data derived from electoral programs, support our theoretical insights. (shrink)

During presidential campaigns, party members often operate Facebook pages or groups concurrently with the official communications of their respective political parties. However, there is limited evidence regarding the true motivations of these partisans, and how their efforts supplement the online strategies of the parties. Our study is based on interviews conducted with party members who ran Facebook pages to support a candidate during the 2022 French presidential campaign. It sheds light on how they managed their Facebook pages, often (...) autonomously, to serve as supplementary tools to their grassroots tactics and ultimately to bring the campaign closer to the voters. This finding highlights the emergence of a hybrid model of online campaign organization, the partisan-managed campaigning model, which challenges both the traditional top-down model, in which the campaign is managed by the central party, and the more recent citizen-initiated campaign model. (shrink)

In contemporary democracies, the image that political leaders project is of central importance to their electoral appeal, however, studies of image projection have mainly been based on textual messages, undermining often visual content such as photos, memes and postcards. This study explores populist leaders image projection through visuals on Facebook in a cross-national context, with the aim of verifying if politicians use images to promote their political action or if they instead implement more complex strategies of self-branding and (...) personalisation. The analysis focuses on the election campaign period for the 2019 European elections and proposes a comparison between four leaders that joined the European Parliament’s Group of Identity and Democracy, namely Matteo Salvini for Italy, Heinz-Christian Strache for Austria, Marine Le Pen for France and Alice Weidel for Germany. According to our analysis, important differences emerge in the use that leaders make of the images disseminated on Facebook. Some of them, in fact, disseminate almost exclusively images that are strictly related to their electoral campaign, while others seek a true identification with their voters, following the pattern of intimization. (shrink)

This paper examines histories of postvaccinal breaks in immunity to rabies in domestic dogs between 1950 and the 1960s. It utilizes Veterinary and Native Commissioner's reports and newspapers in arguing that there is a gap in current southern African rabies historiography as it is yet to grapple with narratives about vaccine technologies. Current southern African rabies histories overly focus on white South African urban case studies. Focusing on the histories of postvaccinal breaks in immunity to rabies in Southern Rhodesia helps (...) to explain why rabies became an ineradicable canine disease in southern Africa during this period. The paper focuses on the political economy of the mass vaccination of dogs, the costs attached to the Veterinary Department's decision to ignore other canine diseases in African areas, and how this, combined with other policy measures such as dog taxation, in undermining rabies vaccination campaigns. Overall, it shows that African dog-owners resorted to a myriad of responses to coercive rabies regulations. This complexity ultimately resulted in canine rabies becoming a difficult disease to eradicate. (shrink)

This study presents the manifestations of irrational practices in recent Romanian politics. Providing a short history of the mystical and the occult in Romanian politics, this research uses as a case study the alleged use of the occult “violet flame” in the presidential campaign of 2009. By showing how public religiousness and the daily mystical practices are changing, the author is describing the transformations of the national political communication under the pressure of the news media, which are becoming more (...) and more pervasive to the occult discourses and the magical thinking. The author describes these transformations as part of the general transformations of the political imaginary inRomania. The Romanian public psyche belongs more and more to the culture of infotainment, a culture based on cultivating superficiality, where mystical and simplistic thinking have replaced the traditional processes of public exchange of reasonable ideas. Thus a main trait of this video-pathology in which the Romanian media is engulfed, is the substitution of the rational discourses with the superficial understanding of the world and supernatural explanations about the universe. One of the conclusions is that the manifestations and functions of the irrational in the Romanian political sphere have become more innocuously connected with a deep mysticism already in place, and are profoundly changing the society as a whole. (shrink)

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 saw the breakthrough of online political campaigning in the UK. Despite the outcome, research and media alike concluded that the main pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland, outdid the main pro-union campaign, Better Together, in the online battle. This article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how YS and BT used social media affordances in order to legitimize their own and de-legitimize their opponents’ positions. The material consists of multimodal tweets published by YS and BT in (...) the run-up to the referendum. The article employs a model for multimodal legitimation that takes into consideration the construction of authority, moral evaluation and the construction and justifications of means and goals. The findings show that both campaigns made extensive use of de-legitimating strategies, although YS was more balanced. The article also shows that the campaigns’ communicative choices had implications for the construction and justification of goals and means, with YS running a more visionary campaign than BT. (shrink)

Political campaigns increasingly rely on Facebook for reaching their constituents, particularly through ad targeting. Facebook’s business model is premised on a promise to connect advertisers with the “right” users: those likely to click, download, engage, purchase. The company pursues this promise by algorithmically inferring users’ interests from their data and providing advertisers with a means of targeting users by their inferred interests. In this study, we explore for whom this interest classification system works in order to build on (...) conversations in critical data studies about the ways such systems produce knowledge about the world rooted in power structures. We critically analyze the classification system from a variety of empirical vantage points—via user data; Facebook documentation, training, and patents; and Facebook’s tools for advertisers—and through theoretical concepts from a variety of domains. In this, we focus on the ways the classification system shapes possibilities for political representation and voice, particularly for people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people. We argue that this “big data-driven” classification system should be read as political: it articulates a stance not only on what issues are or are not important in the U.S. public sphere, but also on who is considered a significant enough public to be adequately accounted for. (shrink)

The recognition perspective is a valuable lens through which identity struggles and historical marginalization and abuses can be explored. This study analyzes Ireland’s Justice for Magdalene (JFM) campaign between 2009–2013; JFM was a group that fought for a state apology and redress for women and girls confined to Catholic-run laundries between the 1920s and 1990s. Such institutions formed part of the post-colonial Irish identity and church-state structure, within which many women and girls once suffered. We document the rhetorical dimension of (...) how a resolution was ultimately reached following the campaign’s transformation of women’s individual experiences into the collective voice of an advocacy group with targeted political goals. Focusing on JFM’s public press releases, we consider the media logic and rhetorical strategies of the group, which effectively built a case against the state. At the core of the discussion is the balance between the instrumental and constitutive functions of the organization’s messaging. (shrink)

Ned O'Gorman's Politics for Everybody is, at its core, a defense of politics for our polarized times. In an accessible and impassioned style, O'Gorman argues for a political middle ground, which is not aligned with any particular party or ideology, but which embraces the worth, value, and importance of politics itself. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, O'Gorman shows how political thinking is rooted in common sense and everyday experiences, and is rooted in all of us, even and especially when (...) politics is the last thing we want to talk about. Resisting the deadening of political experience by the bombast of contemporary media, the impoverishment of public discourse, and the low-minded violence of smear campaigns, O'Gorman calls for a purer, simpler relation to politics, one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange, which can be critical without being hateful. Politics for Everybody is, in short, a defense of the dignity of politics in the age of its infamy, and a plea for the notion that to give politics a thinking chance, we must take it more seriously, not write it off. (shrink)

A brand is a complex construction. In addition to its tangible and intangible dimensions, it implies an intrinsic relational dimension associated to any brand building process. The relational dimension is even more visible in the case of the political brand. The political brand brings with it a symbolic construction in which the experience of a diffuse form of sacredness is central, by the presence of the inadequate report specific to the manifestations related to the sacred representations. On the (...) one hand, we are experiencing a meeting that creates the context of identity, and on the other hand a cohabitation that highlights the role of alterity. The brand imposes itself as a symbolic construction based on this game of identity and alterity in a global communication market. Communication advisers must pay attention to this symbolic dimension. It is the expressive form in which interpersonal relationships manifest themselves as assuming the values and meanings that individuals place under the idea of having a better life. The orientation towards the development of political brands understood as personal brands corresponds to a phase of professionalization of politics and political communication in electoral campaigns, but also in the stages between campaigns. At the same time, political brands grow in importance in times of crisis, both because they offer exemplary models and because they synthesize the mythological elements of the imaginary of abundance, trust and authentic dialogue. (shrink)