Browsing by Subject "Party politics"

This dissertation investigates the role of behavioral factors in the personnel selection in authoritarian ruling parties. First, I argue that authoritarian ruling parties increase the weight of dispositional and behavioral criteria in personnel selection as a response to structural changes. Namely, the reasons behind this shift are that an authoritarian ruling party faces similar problems in personnel selection (such as heterogeneities in agents’ tasks and the multitask problem) and the party can no longer observe members’ and cadres’ loyalty based on a single indicator. Subsequently, I argue that risk attitudes, a key dispositional concept in applied psychology and behavioral politics, explain cadres’ propensities to engage in policy innovation and their obedience to the party leadership's authority and orders. I further examine two mechanisms that might explain the relationship between risk attitudes and obedience, namely sensation-seeking and loss aversion. Finally, I contend that authoritarian ruling parties employ a diversified strategy of personnel selection when they assign cadres to different offices. To test the arguments, the author employs a mixed-method approach and utilizes archival evidence, original cadre survey experiments, original survey data, and interviews in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the largest authoritarian ruling party in the world.

How are voters’ perceptions of party positions affected by the formation of coalition governments? Voters perceive parties that form coalitions together as more ideologically similar than they would have had otherwise. This framework endogenizes perceptions of parties to the coalition formation process. Instead of relying exclusively on the policies that parties are advocating in election campaigns, voters assess partners relationally based on their mutual interactions. This dissertation extends the existing literature by examining various aspects of how coalition formation impacts voters’ perceptions.

Chapter 2 explores whether voters’ perceptions of opposition parties are altered by coalition formation. Using survey data from the European Election Study 1989-2019, I find that the impact of coalition formation on voters’ perceptions of opposition parties is comparable in size to that of coalition members. However, when distinguishing between different opposition relationships the effect is much larger. Voters perceive two opposition parties divided by a centrist coalition as further apart and opposition parties located in the same bloc as closer together, holding everything else constant. Unlike previous accounts of coalition heuristics, I find that highly sophisticated voters appear more sensitive to coalition signals.

Chapter 3 analyses how cooperation between mainstream and niche parties af- fect voters’ perceptions of party positions on specific policy issues. I compare the perceptions of Dutch parties before and after collaborating with the radical right: the coalition with the List Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the support agreement with the Freedom Party in 2010. Furthermore, I examine the long-term effects of the Danish government relying on the support of the Danish People’s Party in 2001-2011. I find that mainstream parties are perceived as more restrictive towards immigration and multiculturalism after cooperating with the radical right than they would have been otherwise.

Finally, chapter 4 tests whether coalition formation has a causal effect on the perceived ideological distance between the coalition partners. Observational studies are insufficient to establish a causal relationship between coalition formation and changing perceptions. I present four survey experiments with variation in context, measurement, and treatment. I mainly find an effect of coalition formation when voters have no other information about parties.

Power derived from personal relationships especially based on school ties and local ties has become accepted as a source of human capital, and has been shown since the 1960s to be an effective tool for attaining upward social mobility in South Korea. Many researchers have largely focused on public behavior or the role of political elites, not individual members in the National Assembly. Since social network analysis is an effective research tool for examining influence of relational attributes, it has the potential to be very helpful in understanding the behavior of members in the National Assembly. This study maps relationships among members of the leading opposition party in South Korea to determine whether they affected political events occurring in early 2016—specifically the split of the leading opposition party, NPAD, into two parties, MPK and PP. Mapping a network could be helpful to find a new way to analyze actions of political leaders in a certain political event as well. I used personal information about members of the opposition parties, including their hometowns, educational institutions attended, and previous achievements to map their social networks extant at the time of the split. I used values of centralities to determine who was the hub of the network and what relationships exist between and among its members. Examining the network connecting members of the opposition parties shows that, contrary to expectations, Chun Jung-bae was the hub not Ahn Chul-soo or Moon Jae-in unlike many expectations. Determining the relationships based on school ties and local ties between members can provide researchers with new perspectives on their research into political events in South Korea.

From 1931 to 1945, during The Sino-Japanese War as officially defined in China, a group of American journalists and military personnel in China created long-form documentary reportage works on the theme of Chinese society in the Sino-Japanese War. These works did not only show the battle scenes of major battles, but also focused on the social situation in the rear of China, as well as the Sino-Japanese War in China's modern history, to analyze the causes of the outbreak of the war, the problems of Chinese society exposed in the war, and the political trend of China after the end of the war. This article argued that in this series of reportage, with the United States joining the Allies as a turning point, the focus of the author's creation has changed. In the early stages, the author's attention focused on the front-line positions, and several battlefield sketches were completed. Writers tended to be hopeful about a unified China destined to win the war during this period. But as China and the United States forged an alliance after Pearl Harbor, U.S. personnel in China gained more access to information about China, and the creators of reportage followed the government and turned their focus to China's domestic political party issues rather than fighting Japan. In their works, these authors show a sympathetic attitude toward the Chinese Communist regime and try to influence U.S. policy toward China through public opinion. These attacks on U.S. Policy in the Far East reflect the idealistic side of the writer, but their fundamental political logic remained the recognition of U.S. participation in the internal political management of the Third World after World War II. War reportage, after participating in war propaganda, showed a political rather than an objectivity.