This article presents an explanation for the success of the right in the 2015 Swiss parliamentary election based on the spatial model of voting. Since there is no party combining economically left with culturally authoritarian policy stances, voters with that preference combination face a difficult electoral choice. We show that they are more likely to abstain, and that those voters who turn out are more likely to cast votes for the right who represents them on cultural issues. We argue that this behavior is due to the fact that voters with this culturally conservative and economically left preferences attach more weight to cultural issues when making an electoral choice. On the aggregate, both findings imply an underrepresentation of economically left interests in the election result, and lead to a disproportional vote share for the right.
The comprehensive and systematic study of collective action organizations (AOs) requires a new methodological approach that takes into account the rise of online sources as well as the new ways in which people interact and participate in politics. This article aims to present and situate in the related literature such an approach, which was recently created and applied in two European Commission funded research projects, LIVEWHAT and TransSOL, across nine and eight countries respectively. Moving beyond recent studies using online sources, our research used a hubs website based approach to study alternative action organizations (AAOs) in the LIVEWHAT project and transnational solidarity AOs in the TransSOL project. The hubs and subhubs websites that aggregate data on AOs in multiple regions were scraped to identify national samples that offer advanced coverage of the repertoire of AO activities, as defined by the teams. These nodal websites were used as sources, similar to the way in which newspapers are treated in protest event analysis. The article situates and compares the new action organization analysis approach against its foundational protest event, protest case, and political claims analyses, as well as other approaches offering data on online activism. It outlines its main features and the related data construction process, while showcasing its application in the two European Commission cross-national projects. Finally, its merits and limitations are discussed, including a reference to how it can be used as a foundation for a mixed methods approach.
This article investigates the involvement of alternative action organizations in three forms of political advocacy in an attempt to gauge their degree of politicization. These forms can be understood as representing three different ways of making political claims: by raising public awareness with respect to a given cause or issue, by trying to influence the policy maker through “insider” lobbying activities, and by protesting in the streets as “outsiders.” Our findings show strong cross-national variations in all three forms of political activities, although not always following a consistent pattern. They also suggest that there is a relationship between the severity of the economic crisis and the form of advocacy. Most important, our analysis suggests that the politicization of alternative action organizations depends both on certain internal characteristics such as their degree of formalization and professionalization, as well as their thematic focus, and the scope of their activities, and on the broader context in terms of economic crisis, austerity policies, and political opportunities. As regards the latter, we find an impact especially on lobbying and protesting.
Measuring the polarization of legislators and parties is a key step in understanding how politics develops over time. But in parliamentary systems—where ideological positions estimated from roll calls may not be informative—producing valid estimates is extremely challenging. We suggest a new measurement strategy that makes innovative use of the "accuracy" of machine classifiers, i.e., the number of correct predictions made as a proportion of all predictions. In our case, the “labels” are the party identifications of the members of parliament, predicted from their speeches along with some information on debate subjects. Intuitively, when the learner is able to discriminate members in the two main Westminster parties well, we claim we are in a period of “high” polarization. By contrast, when the classifier has low accuracy—and makes a relatively large number of mistakes in terms of allocating members to parties based on the data—we argue parliament is in an era of "low" polarization. This approach is fast and substantively valid, and we demonstrate its merits with simulations, and by comparing the estimates from 78 years of House of Commons speeches with qualitative and quantitative historical accounts of the same. As a headline finding, we note that contemporary British politics is approximately as polarized as it was in the mid-1960s—that is, in the middle of the "postwar consensus". More broadly, we show that the technical performance of supervised learning algorithms can be directly informative about substantive matters in social science.
L'acte de juger, de porter une appréciation selon des principes éthiques ou politiques, est coextensif à la pratique humaine. La loi elle-même n'est que la conséquence d'une activité de jugement ou évaluation. Car pour qu'une norme soit édictée il faut que, préalablement, elle ait été considérée, jugée, comme bonne ou mauvaise; ou que le comportement qu'elle vise à favoriser ou à interdire soit jugé bon ou mauvais. Or la théorie longtemps dominante en épistémologie, accompagnant le positivisme, fut qu'il n'est pas possible d'avoir des jugements de valeur, ou des jugements évaluatifs objectifs, répondant à une exigence de vérité. L'article ici proposé est une tentative de démontrer, au contraire, qu'il est possible de formuler des jugements évaluatifs ayant une valeur d'objectivité et de vérité.
Une synthèse et une explication des différents arguments et controverses autour de la politique étrangère du troisième Reich. Grâce à une grille d'interprétation originale et claire, l'auteur présente une synthèse et une explication des différents arguments et controverses autour de la politique étrangère du Troisième Reich. Une attention particulière est donnée à la problématique du rôle joué par Hitler dans la politique étrangère nationale-socialiste. Démon ou dictateur faible ? Programmateur ou improvisateur ? Agent du grand capital ou incarnation d'une essence totalitaire ? Cette étude ne se limite pas au strict cadre des analyses de la diplomatie de l'Allemagne nationale-socialiste mais elle les replace dans le contexte général des discussions qui marquent le débat autour de l'interprétation du nazisme.
La révision de l'alinéa 2 de l'article 175 proposée modifie le mode d'élection du Conseil fédérale. Les sept membres du collège gouvernemental sont toujours élus par l'Assemblée fédérale, mais plus de manière individuelle. En effet, la solution préconisée ici consiste à procéder à 1'élection d'une équipe, présentée sur une liste fermée de sept candidats avec un Président désigné. En lieu et place de la sélection successive de sept individualités, l'Assemblée fédérale choisit donc entre différentes coalitions gouvernementales, par un scrutin à plusieurs tours.
Il s'agit de s'interroger sur le rôle du Général de Gaulle en matière de reconstruction de la France depuis les débats de la résistance jusqu'à son rôle de chef de gouvernement provisoire de la République française
