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41804 results in Comparative politics

Page 1976 of 2091

  • Introduction

  • J. F. V. Keiger, University of Salford
  • Book:
    Raymond Poincaré
    Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    30 January 1997, pp 1-2

  • Summary

    Raymond Poincaré is the only political figure to have exercised as decisive an influence on the first half of the Third Republic as the second. In a political career which ran from 1887 to 1929 he held most of the major offices of state both before and after the First World War. He played crucial roles in France's entry into the war, the organisation of the war effort, the peace settlement, the reparations question, the occupation of the Ruhr and the reorganisation of French finances in the 1920s. Yet as the novelist and essayist Emmanuel Berl wrote in his obituary in October 1934, ‘France never experienced for Poincaré either the flights of love it felt for Gambetta, for Jaurès, or the flights of admiration it felt for Clemenceau’. To this day he remains a controversial figure. As ‘Poincaré-la-guerre’ and ‘Poincaré-le-franc’ he has provoked opprobrium and praise. His role in the outbreak of the First World War and the sealing of ‘union sacrée’ has cast him alternately as warmonger and saviour; his management of the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 has been depicted as either a courageous effort to ensure German execution of the Versailles Treaty or as evidence of visceral Germanophobia; his role in bringing order to French finances in the 1920s has led him to be portrayed as an austere deflationist or as one of France's twentieth-century financial wizards.

  • 5 - Poincaré the diplomat

  • J. F. V. Keiger, University of Salford
  • Book:
    Raymond Poincaré
    Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    30 January 1997, pp 130-144

  • Summary

    If ever there was a chance for Poincaré to make his mark it was after the Agadir crisis. A new mood reigned in the Chamber. The international threats were well understood. There was widespread agreement on the need for a strong government that could rise above petty party squabbling. The new cabinet was well received generally. Poincaré's great goal of achieving national unity seemed distinctly attainable. But he understood how ephemeral the present consensus could prove to be. In his inaugural government statement of 16 January, for the first time in decades he chose to focus a government's policy on foreign affairs. He made clear his intention to defend the 1911 Franco–German treaty on Morocco which would allow France to work with Germany: ‘Equally it will allow us to maintain between a great neighbouring nation and France, in a sincerely pacific spirit, courteous and frank relations, inspired by a mutual respect of interests and dignity.’ He called for a strengthening of France's international position by cultivating her system of alliances; at the same time he stressed the need to strengthen national defence in view of the alarming events of recent months: ‘Although our country is profoundly pacific, she is not the master of all eventualities and intends to respect all her obligations. We shall devote careful attention to our army and navy which, like you gentlemen, we regard as the sacred pillars of the Republic and la patrie.’

  • Conclusion: Poincaré remembered

  • J. F. V. Keiger, University of Salford
  • Book:
    Raymond Poincaré
    Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    30 January 1997, pp 341-344

  • Summary

    Certain French politicians are remembered with a constancy which owes nothing to the efforts of historians. A Gambetta, a Jaurès, a Clemenceau have achieved a place in national history reflected in street names and squares from city to hamlet. Yet the commemoration of such heroes may have more to do with what local politicians believe should be political models than with the memories their constituents actually cherish. Few streets bear the name of Raymond Poincaré. In several Gallup International opinion polls carried out in post-Second World War France on historical personalities, members of the public were asked to give the name of the French person of the past or present with whom they would most wish to converse for an hour. In 1948 Napoleon carried the day, well ahead of Joan of Arc, Henry IV and Louis XIV. Clemenceau came after Louis XVI with twice the score of any other historical personage, including Poincaré. Yet Poincaré always equalled Jaurès's score of between 2 and 5 per cent along with inter alia Robespierre, Pasteur, Richelieu and Foch. Gambetta was never cited. In 1967 Gallup found that in response to the question as to which Frenchman, living or dead, had done the most for France since the Revolution, General de Gaulle came out top with Louis Pasteur at just under half his score, Napoleon half of the latter's and Clemenceau just below that. Poincaré now came equal to Léon Blum and Pétain, but had twice the score of Jaurès and General Leclerc, the only other two named personalities.

  • 7 - Reinventing Communication by Reforming Institutions

  • from Part IV - Making Democracy Work
  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp 177-203

  • Summary

    This black mood is no monopoly of America's. Britons are feeling sleazy; the French are having another bout of morosite; Italians ask whether they will ever get a cleanhanded government, even Japan, for once, wonders where its politicians are taking it. The G7, with maybe a half-exception for Germany, is the Grumpy Seven.

    - The Economist

    Our analysis of language, institutions, and the decline of governing ideas in the United States and Sweden has been guided by three basic propositions. T h e first is that ideas and language matter in political life - that they have consequences and often shape public policies as well as public attitudes and political actions. It is likewise clear that ideas and the rhetoric used to convey those ideas mobilize support or opposition around particular policies, however well or poorly conceived those policies may be. Second, we have taken the marketplace of ideas as a point of departure and proposed a way of understanding how rhetoric is produced, used politically, and exchanged for political support in two very different polities. In all idea markets, the keys to production, valuation, exchange, and consumer satisfaction are the kinds of institutional regulatory processes at work. We outlined four broad regulatory mechanisms that can be found in various configurations in all liberal democracies: electoral and party systems, campaign finance practices, interest group systems, and mass media. T h i r d, we contend that the institutional forms and interactions among these regulatory mechanisms constrain the production, distribution, and valuation of ideas in elections and public policy debates. T h e uses of this framework for comparative analysis were illustrated with case studies of the following:

  • The rise and fall of two important governing ideas: the New Deal in the United States and the folkhem in Sweden.

  • The United States (1986) and Swedish (1990) tax reforms.

  • The candidate and party rhetoric in recent American and Swedish national elections.

    • Our primary interest has been to understand how governing ideas are produced in different political systems and how these systems respond to the decline of ideas and the growing disjunctures among parties, leaders, publics, and the agendas of governments.

  • 4 - The Rise and Fall of the Folkhem in Swedish Politics

  • from Part II - The Great Twentieth-Century Governing Ideas
  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp 86-114

  • Summary

    Per Albin [Hansson] was an extraordinarily adept manipulator of political symbols. He knew the dangers of attacking such sacred bourgeois values as peace, unity, the home, the flag, and the nation; instead he appropriated them for Social Democracy. The conception of the “people's home” not only took a central opposition symbol to convey the Social Democratic values of security, equality, and solidarity, but it equipped Swedish society with a great symbol of the democratic community in opposition to Nazism. Humankind does not live by policy statements and rational choice alone, a fact Per Albin appreciated and utilized by elaborating an extraordinarily evocative and effective political image.

    - Tim Tilton

    The dominant political idea of the twentieth century in Sweden has been the folkhem, the vision of government as a home that protects the nation's people much as a family's home protects each of its members. Like the New Deal, this vision introduced the idea of an active and protective government to a nation that had previously embraced a much diminished role for the state in the welfare of society. However, unlike the New Deal, the folkhem provided a rhetorical foundation for what became the most evolved welfare state among the world's democracies. T h e evolution of such a sweeping policy agenda did not happen without political struggles and social conflicts, yet these periods of turmoil are often overlooked by observers who see Swedish Social Democracy as more consensual than conflictual. We argue that it is precisely the overriding rhetorical direction provided by the folkhem idea that enabled leaders to t u rn potentially serious conflicts into remarkable levels of consensus for roughly half a century. In this sense, the alternative views of conflict and consensus in Swedish politics represent a false dichotomy that can be reconciled only by understanding the pragmatic uses of this grand political symbol. Similarly, the recent discontent of voters can be understood less as a return to some sort of class conflict or as an abandonment of consensual politics than as a growing failure of the folkhem vision to offer new solutions to today's changing political conditions.

Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
  • Communication and Government in Sweden and the United States
  • Erik Asard, W. Lance Bennett
  • Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997
  • How do citizens and leaders in democratic nations communicate about their problems and prospects for the future? What can be learned from other nations about how to communicate in more effective and satisfying ways? These are important questions in an age of instant electronic communication in which the populations of the world's industrial democracies are wired for all manner of input. This book, first published in 1997, explores the institutional links between society and government that shape political communication. These regulators of national communication include parties and electoral representation systems, interest group processes, campaign finance mechanisms, and the media - factors that are familiar to anyone who follows politics yet that may not be recognized for their combined effects on the quality of political discourse. The authors show how these core elements of political systems affect the ways in which people communicate, and how effective that communication is at defining public problems and identifying workable solutions.

  • 2 - The Idea of a Marketplace

  • from Part I - The Marketplace of Ideas
  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp 27-50

  • Summary

    Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy misspecifies the basic market in which political parties operate. Not voters but investors constitute their major constituency.

    - Thomas Ferguson

    Although Ferguson (1995: 37) may err toward another extreme by pointing out the extraordinary impact of party finance on the selection and framing of political issues, his corrective is a useful reminder that the exchange of ideas in democracies is not just an idealistic and rarefied dialogue between citizens and leaders. Parties do not listen to voters only; they must also bend to the will of those who support them or risk losing their competitive place in elections. T h u s, party finance mechanisms become important considerations for understanding the patterns of communication in polities. As we shall see, by contrast the public financing of Swedish parties opened up a broad spectrum of debate about issues as varied as the future of the welfare state and the evolution of a national energy policy based on environmental protection. Moreover, Swedish parties that suffer catastrophic misfortune with ideas that suddenly prove unpopular - as was the case of the Communists after the end of the Cold War - are given a cushion of time in which to develop new ideas (and even change their name). T h e protections of Swedish public finance saw the popularity of the newly named Left Party rebound to stunning levels in the polls within five years of its sudden fall from grace.

    In the United States, the combination of institutional factors that act upon the formulation of political programs often have more of a wearing than a building effect. T h e Democrats, for example, have suffered an idea slump of such magnitude that party conferences to invent a new “story” to present to the voters have become as regular as they have proved uneventful. In a poll taken by the Wirthlin Group on the eve of the 1996 election campaign, for example, voters gave their hearts to the Democrats but credited the Republicans with being the party with the clear vision.

  • 6 - The Marketplace of Ideas in Elections and Campaign Rhetoric

  • from Part III - Rhetoric and Government: Understanding Public Policy and Elections
  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp 142-174

  • Summary

    Campaigns are the conversation of democracy, and the one that just concluded was angry, deeply personal, powerfully ideological and exceedingly negative…. Many experts worry that negative advertising reached new highs — or lows - in the 1994 [U.S.] campaign and only insured that the voters would remain angry and cynical about their politicians… Still, many scholars and politicians argue that incremental reforms are unlikely to truly change the nature of the political debate. Campaigns do not happen in a vacuum, they say “Why should people expect politics to be any different from the rest of the culture?” asked Representative Barney Frank,

    Democrat of Massachusetts. “It's not as if politics is deteriorating but everybody's watching Shakespeare “ Mr. [Thomas] Mann also noted that anger and cynicism are not unique to the United States. “I worry a lot about the fraying of the civic culture, but we have to understand what is going on around the world,” he said. “There's a lot of undifferentiated animus toward elites, suspicion of government and politics and an unwillingness to strike out.” Angry times, in other words, breed angry campaigns. What is less clear, however, is how the cycle ever ends.

    - Robin Toner

    The four regulatory mechanisms referred to throughout this book have clear implications for elections. During the course of an election campaign, parties and candidates, according to traditional democratic theory, present - or should present - their views and positions on a broad range of issues and face each other in open debate. In an ideal electoral marketplace that is devoid of market disturbances among the regulatory mechanisms, the free flow of ideas ensures that the voters are well informed about the issues and alternatives and thus are able to make an enlightened choice. T h e mass media are instrumental in ensuring that ideas, issues, and candidates are widely and fairly covered to enable the electorate to choose between competing viewpoints. Ideally and theoretically, at least, election campaigns should enrich the public dialogue and strengthen the democratic process.

  • Preface

  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp vii-xvi

  • Summary

    How do citizens and leaders in democratic nations communicate about their problems and prospects for the future? What can be learned from other nations about how to communicate in more effective and satisfying ways? These are important questions in an age of instant electronic communication in which the populations of the world's industrial democracies are wired for all manner of input. T h e irony, or perhaps the result, of communication in this Digital Age is that the quality of political ideas in many nations has deteriorated into simplistic sloganeering and angry rhetoric with little perceptible improvement in the human political condition. This book explores the institutional links between society and government that shape political communication. These regulators of national communication include parties and electoral representation systems, interest group processes, campaign finance mechanisms, and the media - factors that are familiar to anyone who follows politics, yet that may not be recognized for their combined effects on the quality of political discourse. We propose to explore how these core elements of political systems affect the ways in which people communicate and how effective that communication is at defining public problems and identifying workable solutions.

    Our main argument is that fundamental changes have occurred in the way that most democratic nations conduct their public discourse - how publics and leaders, in effect, define themselves in the contemporary world. T h e link between rhetoric and the workings (and breakdowns) of government has never been more apparent. We are witnessing rebellious voters and renegade candidates the world over taking often misguided aim at institutions of power. We take a more systematic look at how institutions forged in earlier eras may limit the terms of national debate. At the same time, it is clear that not all nations face the same institutional limitations, making the study of national differences as important as the concern about common trends. The political marketplace in many Western democracies has been transformed from being a forum for heated debate and a comparatively lively exchange of ideas into one dominated by only a few substantive issues and a lot of quite streamlined rhetoric that is more likely to be the product of political marketing research than of inspired leadership.

  • 5 - Idea Markets and the Policy Process: Tax Reform in Sweden and the United States

  • from Part III - Rhetoric and Government: Understanding Public Policy and Elections
  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp 117-141

  • Summary

    Taxation is a critical arena in the politics of who gets what in society and who pays for it in all polities.

    - Sven Steinmo

    Tax reform is a good opening case for exploring the interactions among institutions, communication, and policy processes because it discourages ideological claims that competitive markets necessarily produce felicitous results. The U.S. case was notable for the open competition among parties, interests, and the president for definition of a policy situation that was covered extensively (and in some economic detail) by the news media. Yet when the reform had been signed into law, few of the players, whether elites or publics, ended up happy with the outcome. Although some experts pronounced the results impressive, both as a feat of economic redistribution and as an accomplishment of bipartisan politics, few of the leaders responsible concluded that their political capital had been well spent. Perhaps more disturbing, the majority of the public regarded the tax law as an example of the interest group struggles and party politics that had corrupted Washington. T h e source of the unhappiness, we think, was a generalized inability of any faction to control the rhetorical definition of the policymaking situation, resulting in diminished control over the course of the policy process and its outcome, and decidedly little control over how the process and the outcomes were communicated to the public. Such a competitive idea market may have discouraged political domination by particular factions but without the fruits of Madisonian consensus in the bargain.

    This American experience with tax reform illustrates the capacity of poorly integrated or coordinated political institutions to reduce a good idea to hollow rhetoric in the minds of many citizens. Perhaps the greatest irony of this process is that government actually implemented the sort of public preferences observed by Page and Shapiro (1992) in their studies of opinion and policy, yet neither the proceedings nor the results were communicated in ways that led citizens to confer legitimacy on either their government or their representatives. The comparison case of Sweden suggests that different institutional arrangements, particularly involving parties and interest representation, permit different strategies for managing public debates with implications for both the coherence of resulting policies and levels of public support.

  • 3 - The Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism in the United States

  • from Part II - The Great Twentieth-Century Governing Ideas
  • Erik Asard, Uppsala universitet, Sweden, W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
  • Book:
    Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas
    Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997, pp 53-85

  • Summary

    The Democrats are in danger of again playing the role they did in the era of Grover Cleveland, that is of being the Everybody Else Party, a loose ragtag union, born of historical accidents and composed of … disparate elements….

    To anyone living among the tired, two-jobbed, worried and scrambling middle classes, it should be obvious there are uncounted millions whom the Republicans do not and never will represent. But neither do the Democrats and the ones who led their party into this election should all be locked up under a witless protection program.

    - Nicholas von Hoffman, on the 1994 election

    Within the bounds of culture and the fates of history, societies are often characterized most sharply by the political ideas that evolve to guide public debates. Governing ideas and the market mechanisms that act upon them (parties, finance arrangements, interest processes, and mass communications media) structure national debates on policy questions like tax reform, and they affect the clarity of choices, the credibility of promises, and the degree of party loyalty in elections. More generally, governing ideas set the terms for conflict and change in society.

    In this chapter and the next, we explore the great domestic political debates of the twentieth century in Sweden and the United States, showing how two grand sets of governing ideas arose in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s and continued to set the tone of national politics until the 1990s. T h e important differences we identify are not so much the obvious contrasts between the Swedish and the American ways of thinking about society and its problems, but the deeper structure of political rhetoric itself. In the Swedish case, we find the development of an ideology that broke free of earlier conservative ideas, articulating a coherent set of social principles and goals, along with guidelines about how government should promote those goals. T h e key, and the irony, here is that this ideational break with Swedish conservatism was accomplished not through a forcefully articulated socialist ideology but with a more broadly appealing image of a government that would provide security, order, and respect for the members of society, much as a well-functioning home cares for all the members of a family.

Page 1976 of 2091