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Mnemonic politics among Philippine voters: a social media measurement approach
... Research indicates that voters in areas with stronger support for Duterte in the 2016 election are more likely to express nostalgic views about the authoritarian past, as reflected in social media posts. 90 This aligns with studies suggesting that Filipinos, while generally supportive of democracy 91 , may also show openness to non-democratic alternatives. Such a tendency to view the authoritarian past positively helps explain why many voters support the son of a former dictator. ...
The electoral victory of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son and namesake of the ousted Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., has sparked significant debate among academics and commentators. This outcome underscores the need to refine prevailing analytical frameworks, particularly within the broader context of authoritarian resurgence in fragile democracies. This paper critically evaluates existing perspectives on Marcos Jr.’s victory, including arguments centered on historical revisionism, social media disinformation, and the “Duterte effect,” and advances supplemental theoretical approaches. We argue that the Marcos family’s political comeback illustrates the persistent influence of latent authoritarian values among citizens in post-authoritarian democracies. In addition, we identify three key potential determinants of authoritarian resurgence: (1) pro-dictator bias, (2) risk-aversion and preference for continuity, and (3) the role of multiple memory systems in shaping electoral behavior. By proposing these analytical perspectives and key areas of focus, this study aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of Philippine politics and democratization, while contributing to the broader discourse on contemporary challenges facing post-authoritarian democracies worldwide, marked by authoritarian nostalgia and democratic decline.
The integrity of global elections is increasingly under threat from artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. As AI continues to permeate various aspects of society, its influence on political processes and elections has become a critical area of concern. This is because AI language models are far from neutral or objective; they inherit biases from their training data and the individuals who design and utilize them, which can sway voter decisions and affect global elections and democracy. In this research paper, we explore how AI can directly impact election outcomes through various techniques. These include the use of generative AI for disseminating false political information, favoring certain parties over others, and creating fake narratives, content, images, videos, and voice clones to undermine opposition. We highlight how AI threats can influence voter behavior and election outcomes, focusing on critical areas, including political polarization, deepfakes, disinformation, propaganda, and biased campaigns. In response to these challenges, we propose a Blockchain-based Deepfake Authenticity Verification Framework (B-DAVF) designed to detect and authenticate deepfake content in real time. It leverages the transparency of blockchain technology to reinforce electoral integrity. Finally, we also propose comprehensive countermeasures, including enhanced legislation, technological solutions, and public education initiatives, to mitigate the risks associated with AI in electoral contexts, proactively safeguard democracy, and promote fair elections.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic initially threatened the populist legacy of Philippine President Rodrigo R. Duterte. Despite implementing one of the longest and strictest lockdowns globally, the country is still struggling to control the virus. While Duterte appears victorious in his assault on human rights and media freedom, his government’s record in fighting the virus is spotty at best. Yet, Duterte’s populism proved resilient. He remains extremely popular, with a September national survey reporting 81% approval of his government’s response to the pandemic and 91% of respondents expressing trust in his leadership.
Democratic backsliding by incumbents is one of the most prevalent forms of backsliding in recent global trends of democratic erosion. Understanding the attitude of voters toward backsliding incumbents is crucial because popular support is the basis of legitimacy for these incumbents. This article studies voter attitudes in the Philippines, where democracy was subverted by the incumbent president, Rodrigo Duterte, who served from 2016 to 2022. Specifically, we examine the validity of the claim that Filipino voters are acquiring a “taste for illiberal rule” made by some scholars. First, we analyzed the survey data regarding the support for various types of political systems, where part of the data comes from our originally commissioned survey at the Social Weather Stations. Second, we explored Pulse Asia's longitudinal survey data on martial-rule support. Our investigation of these survey data did not find substantive support for the “taste for illiberal rule” proposition. Further, we argue that Filipino voters are contingent supporters of illiberal politics while supporting the procedural principles of democracy at the baseline.
This study explores how authoritarian distributive policies may not only generate political support for the autocrat but may also help sustain powerful and lasting authoritarian legacies. We use microlevel data from South Korea's New Village Movement, a 1970s rural development program implemented under dictator Park Chung‐hee and widely touted as contributing to the country's rapid economic development. Our analysis shows that townships in receipt of larger cash transfers cast more votes for Park's incumbent party in the subsequent election. More importantly, we show that the effects of the subsidies still appeared almost four decades later in 2012, when the dictator's daughter was democratically elected as the president of South Korea. We show that these effects were not driven by villagers’ long‐term income gains or enhanced social capital due to the program but by the unwavering support of the beneficiary villagers for the dictator, whose legacy remained strong long after democratization.
We know a lot about the new wave of autocrats and how they operate but much less about why so many people, particularly in the developing world, are cheering them on. Case-in-point: How do we make sense of widespread popular support for Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's strongman rule? Scholars generally cite frustration with a democracy widely regarded as elite-dominated and endemically corrupt, but this account is underspecified. Filipinos have been frustrated with liberal democracy for a long time and Duterte is not the first law-and-order candidate to seek the presidency. I will argue that we need to situate Duterte's election and enduring appeal in the conversation about democracy as it has unfolded on the ground. Specifically, (1) repeated failures to reform democracy have resulted in (2) conditional support for democracy and increasing openness to certain authoritarian forms of government. (3) These attitudes manifest on the ground as calls for “disciplining” democracy. (4) Rodrigo Duterte is seen as a “strong leader” and the answer to such calls, hence his enormous popularity. I will provide evidence for each of these claims and make the case for grounding the illiberal turn in people's experience of democracy.
This article examines issues linked to monetization on social media platforms through an investigation of the work of social media influence in the Philippines. Based on a series of semistructured interviews with Filipino influencers, we asked how influencers understand, engage, and commodify the audience for their content. We suggest that social media influence work in the Philippines is defined by globally connected but locally rooted practices of performed authenticity through which creators employ conscious and identifiable strategies to cultivate a local audience that mostly occupies very different socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural positions from the creators themselves. We argue that understanding authenticity as work that can be performed and negotiated between producers and their audiences offers new and interesting directions in approaching the commodification of social media audiences.
Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism.
This article scrutinizes the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism. Different populist figures utilize nostalgia by referring to their country's 'good old' glorious days and exploiting resentment of the elites and establishment. Populists instrumentalize nostalgia in order to create their populist heartland, which is a retrospectively constructed utopia based on an abandoned but undead past. Using two original datasets from Turkey, this study first analyzes whether collective nostalgia characterizes populist attitudes of the electorate. The results illustrate that collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after controlling for various independent variables, including religiosity, partisan-ship, satisfaction with life and Euroscepticism. Secondly, the study tests whether nostalgic messages affect populist attitudes using an online survey experiment. The results indicate that Ottoman nostalgia helps increase populist attitudes. Kemalist nostalgia, however, has a weak direct effect on populist attitudes that disappears after controlling for party preference.
The article compares the political trajectories of authoritarian diasporas in Indonesia and the Philippines, namely the subset of former regime officials that disperse across the electoral space after a regime transition. The main finding is that after the Suharto and Marcos dictatorships collapsed in 1998 and 1986 respectively, Indonesia's authoritarian successor party (ASP) fared better than the ASP in the Philippines. However, the authoritarian diaspora did better in the Philippines than in Indonesia. Engaging with existing scholarship on authoritarian successor parties and authoritarian diasporas, the article argues that the two variables shaping defection calculi are the prevailing levels of party institutionalization of both the authoritarian successor party and alternative parties as well as the type of reversionary clientelistic network available to elites in post-transition politics.
Agenda setting and issue framing research investigates how frames impact public attention, policy decisions, and political outcomes. Social media sites, such as Twitter, provide opportunities to study framing dynamics in an important area of political discourse. We present a method for identifying frames in tweets and measuring their effectiveness. We use topic modeling combined with manual validation to identify recurrent problem frames and topics in thousands of tweets by gun rights and gun control groups following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, shooting. We find that each side used Twitter to advance policy narratives about the problem in Parkland. Gun rights groups’ narratives implied that more gun restrictions were not the solution. Their most effective frame focused on officials’ failures to enforce existing laws. In contrast, gun control groups portrayed easy access to guns as the problem and emphasized the importance of mobilizing politically to force change.
Democracies across the globe are shaken by a new class of populist right‐wing politicians. A defining element of right‐wing populism is a preference for antagonistic rhetoric to describe opponents. Three studies connect support for right‐wing populist rhetoric to collective nostalgia for the past. Importantly, the results show that collective nostalgia can both increase and decrease support for right‐wing populist antagonistic rhetoric, depending on how the past is conceptualized. Nostalgia for a past characterized by political incorrectness is associated with increased support, whereas nostalgia for the past's greater decorum is associated with decreased support for right‐wing populism. Studies 1 and 2 show this with vignettes. Study 3 measures support for Trump and the GOP in the 2018 midterm elections. Although right‐wing populism is often seen as the result of a wave of nostalgia, our results show that this link can be disconnected and even reversed.
On 18 November 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte allowed the interment of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani or Heroes’ Cemetery. This essay interrogates the discrepancy between two mnemonic signifiers that lay claim to patriotism and nationhood: the Libingan and Marcos’ body. Close reading the burial process via the frameworks of memory, ideology, cultural studies, and translation studies allows a focus, not only on the cemetery as a site but also on the mnemonic discursive interventions of the Marcos family. As hegemonic memory agents fueled by money, myth, and exilic privileges linked to the USA, the Marcoses exploit the political translated body of the patriarch. As such, dictatorial exile is partly divested of its admonishing power. While the translation (as mobility and “survival”) of the corpse attempts to absorb the heroic signification of the cemetery, in turn, the honorable signification of the lieu de mémoire is also discursively challenged. Hence, while Marcos now rests among the heroes, most of his desaparecidos still want entombment. Notions of the nation are also therefore challenged. The paper thus demonstrates how a “fixed” mnemonic signifier, such as a cemetery exemplifying patriotism, can be modified through “memory entrepreneurs.” Understanding memory-as-process, and not only memory-as-site, allows us to discern the hegemonic meaning-making in memory politics by revealing the means and not only the ends. This perspective questions the malleability of space and takes us towards the horizon of what Ricœur calls a “just allotment of memory.”
We propose a distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary autocratic ruling strategies and develop novel theoretical propositions on the legacy that these strategies leave on citizens' political attitudes once the autocratic regime broke down. Using data of 1.3 million survey respondents from 71 countries and Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort models we estimate between and within cohort differences in citizens' democratic support. We find that inclusionary regimes-with wider redistribution of socioeconomic and political benefits-leave a stronger anti-democratic legacy than exclusionary regimes on the political attitudes of their citizens. Similarly, citizens who were part of the winning group in an autocracy are more critical with democracy compared to citizens who were part of discriminated groups. This paper contributes to our understanding about how autocracies affect the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens.
Nowadays, a lot of Filipinos are keen on traveling locally and abroad that encourages different airline companies to enhance their services to gain more clients. In this study, we extracted Twitter tweets about the three major airlines in the country today, Cebu Pacific, Air Asia, and Philippine Airlines. Various models, techniques and classifiers were introduced in computing the sentiment scores of the Tweets gathered which is useful to different fields like education and businesses. This study aims to apply a new approach in implementing sentiment analysis task thru pattern matching using a regular expression and implementing lexicon-based scoring of sentiments. Its main purpose is to assign the correct polarity to get the sentiments of the Filipino travelers.
In the May 2016 elections, a significant number from among the Philippine urban middle class helped elect President Rodrigo Duterte, a candidate who seemed to pose a threat to democratic governance. The voting behavior of a Philippine middle class "who should know better" has caught the attention of many foreign observers, and raised the question: Why are the Filipino middle-class ambivalent about democracy? This article seeks to contribute to this discussion by pursuing three lines of inquiry: first, what is democratic ambivalence, what are the challenges it poses to existing theory, and why does it matter; second, how does ambivalence-simultaneously saying "yes" and "no" to democracy-manifest in Filipino middle-class evaluations of democracy; and third, what are its possible explanations. The article contends that ambivalence poses difficult questions for scholars of democracy, which call for a re-engagement with a contingent conception of middle-class democratic support. Through analysis of interview data, it suggests that a narrative of "in the Philippines, freedom needs restraint" is shared among a middle-class public; rather than being understood as a rejection of liberal democracy, the ambivalent narrative reflects a negotiated response to the experience and observation of how democracy "works." Finally, the article suggests that the search for the roots of this "authoritarian nostalgia" may need to consider the normative legacies of the American colonial period; in particular, the use of "democracy" as a discourse to justify the abuse of power and the imposition of a subjugating authority. Contemporary middle-class democratic imaginaries may still bear the weight of these founding contradictions. Yet while ambivalence may reflect the contradictions and compromises of democracy in the past, it also holds potential, since ambivalence signals a rejection of the status quo and the desire for change.
Significance
Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to citizens who were “left behind” economically. These claims were based on the strong cross-sectional relationship between Trump support and lacking a college education. Using a representative panel from 2012 to 2016, I find that change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond theories emphasizing changes in issue salience to better understand the meaning of election outcomes when public preferences and candidates’ positions are changing.
Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through re-election or re-appointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This paper investigates this question using an original dataset on constitutional origins and the fate of the upper echelon of outgoing authoritarian elites across Latin America from 1900-2015. I find that authoritarian elites from outgoing regimes that impose a holdover constitution that sticks through democratization are more likely to regain political or economic power-especially through national positions where the potential payoffs are largest-and less likely to face severe or nominal punishment. I also find a positive role for political capital among former elites. These results are robust to alternative explanations of authoritarian elites' fate and using instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity. The findings have important implications for democratic consolidation and quality.
Following trends in Europe over the past decade, support for the Radical Right has recently grown more significant in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the United Kingdom has witnessed the rise of Radical Right fringe groups, the United States’ political spectrum has been altered by the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. This article asks what predicts White individuals’ support for such groups. In original, representative surveys of White individuals in Great Britain and the United States, we use an innovative technique to measure subjective social, political, and economic status that captures individuals’ perceptions of increasing or decreasing deprivation over time. We then analyze the impact of these deprivation measures on support for the Radical Right among Republicans (Conservatives), Democrats (Labourites), and Independents. We show that nostalgic deprivation among White respondents drives support for the Radical Right in the United Kingdom and the United States.
In the literature, explanations of support for populist radical right (PRR) parties usually focus on voters’ socio-structural grievances, political discontent or policy positions. This article suggests an additional and possibly overarching explanation: societal pessimism. The central argument is that the nostalgic character of PRR ideology resonates with societal pessimism among its voters. Using European Social Survey data from 2012, the study compares levels of societal pessimism among PRR, radical left, mainstream left and mainstream right (MR) voters in eight European countries. The results show that societal pessimism is distributed in a tilted U-curve, with the highest levels indeed observed among PRR voters, followed by radical left voters. Societal pessimism increases the chance of a PRR vote (compared to a MR vote) controlling for a range of established factors. Further analyses show that societal pessimism is the only attitude on which MR and PRR voters take opposite, extreme positions. Finally, there is tentative evidence that societal pessimism is channelled through various more specific ideological positions taken by PRR voters, such as opposition to immigration.
This study aims to determine whether the results obtained by applying sentiment analysis to data extracted from social media can reveal the political preferences of citizens to a greater degree of accuracy than traditional public opinion surveys. The researcher collected and analyzed 92,441 tweets related to the Brazilian presidential candidates during the second round of elections in 2014. The analysis results were compared with six voter preference polls conducted by the Datafolha Research Institute. The results showed that sentiment analysis may indicate voter preferences at an accuracy that was only 1% to 8% different than that of traditional research, which has an average accuracy of 81.05%.
We address the problem of performing polarity classification on Twitter over different languages, focusing on English and Spanish, comparing three techniques: (1) a monolingual model which knows the language in which the opinion is written, (2) a monolingual model that acts based on the decision provided by a language identification tool and (3) a multilingual model trained on a multilingual dataset that does not need any language recognition step. Results show that multilingual models are even able to outperform the monolingual models on some monolingual sets. We introduce the first code-switching corpus with sentiment labels, showing the robustness of a multilingual approach.
This study explores the nature and promise of citizen engagement in Twitter during calamities, specifically in the context of typhoon Yolanda. Through topic modeling and content analysis, the article explores the “acts of civic engagement” expressed in disaster tweets and how the character of the tweets changed over a five-month period. The article adopts the actualizing citizenship model which offers an alternative understanding of citizenship as performative and which is relevant for the analysis of social media engagement by citizens. The article concludes with a reflection of the nature and typology of Twitter-mediated communication during calamities, highlighting the active engagement of celebrities in disaster tweets, and analysis of whether and how these can be construed as acts of civic engagement.
Twenty-five years after the fall of communism in Poland, a considerable number of citizens manifest nostalgia for the communist times. In this article, we approach this phenomenon within the framework of autobiographical memory and decide between two sets of hypotheses, one predicting that postcommunist nostalgia is experienced mostly by people who are dissatisfied with the present time (transformation “losers”) and the other predicting that it is the memory of the happy and most recollected past, and memories of particular decades of communism, that mostly trigger nostalgia. The study, carried out on a representative sample of Poles who remembered communism, provided stronger confirmation of the “negative present” hypothesis, but the positive past is also shown to matter. The decade of communism whose memory turned out to predict nostalgia the best was the 1980s and not, as predicted, the 1970s.
The growing usage of social media by a wider audience of citizens sharply increases the possibility of investigating the web as a device to explore and track political preferences. In the present paper we apply a method recently proposed by other social scientists to three different scenarios, by analyzing on one side the online popularity of Italian political leaders throughout 2011, and on the other the voting intention of French Internet users in both the 2012 presidential ballot and the subsequent legislative election. While Internet users are not necessarily representative of the whole population of a country’s citizens, our analysis shows a remarkable ability for social media to forecast electoral results, as well as a noteworthy correlation between social media and the results of traditional mass surveys. We also illustrate that the predictive ability of social media analysis strengthens as the number of citizens expressing their opinion online increases, provided that the citizens act consistently on these opinions.
We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self-reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.
This paper examines how the system change following the collapse of socialism affected the political outlook of citizens by comparing the satisfaction with democracy among several generations of Eastern Europeans. I investigate whether people who were mainly influenced by a socialist upbringing have problems with adjusting to the circumstances of democratic regimes or, alternatively, whether the consolidation of democracy is driven by economic considerations. Using pooled cross-sectional data covering the period from 1990 to 2003, this study employs generalized additive models, which allow the separation of generational differences. The paper obtains strong support for the socialist socialization hypothesis, but also finds evidence that Eastern Europeans’ assessment of the economic situation reduces the impact of generational differences on democratic support. This research provides important insights into the micro mechanisms underlying system change from authoritarian regimes to democracy.
Using an original survey of adolescents in post-communist Russia and Ukraine, this study analyzes attitudes toward the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The results demonstrate how contextual factors – the republic's position within the former Soviet Union and prior history of colonization – affect the level of nostalgia among the young generation. Based upon semi-structured interviews with adolescents, the study identifies sources of positive and negative attitudes toward the Soviet demise. Furthermore, the research reveals cross-national differences in the relationship between Soviet nostalgia and national pride.
Retrospective rhetoric is considered to be one of the most influential political master frames used in response to the multiple crises in Europe. However, there are significant knowledge gaps in this area. First, there is no comprehensive analytical tool for studying the display of nostalgia in politics. Second, there is limited knowledge regarding the role of social media in disseminating nostalgic narratives. Third, there is a lack of data on citizens’ responses to nostalgia during election campaigns. This article addresses these gaps by identifying the patterns of political nostalgia in the Facebook communications of the Hungarian political forces running for seats in the 2019 European parliamentary election. In addition to a qualitative content analysis of the nostalgic posts, the paper investigates their reception by the social media users who reacted to the messages. The data was gathered during the seven-week official campaign period until the election on May 26. The study confirms that right-wing, nationalist politicians expressed nostalgia more often than left-leaning leaders, and the analysis also shows that nostalgic messages are not very efficient in terms of user engagement and the numbers of emoji responses. Our results therefore mitigate the concerns about the influence of political nostalgia in Hungary.
The 2016-2017 Candlelight Revolution was one of the most significant events in recent South Korean politics, but little attention has been paid to the powerful conservative counter-movement that accompanied and followed the candlelight protests. This counter-movement was symbolized by demonstrations by flag-carriers who found Park Geun-Hye's impeachment and Moon Jae-In's inauguration incomprehensible. They argued that Park was innocent, called for her release from prison, and claimed that Moon's election was illegitimate. An analysis of speeches made during conservative counter-protests between 2016 and 2019 illustrates how these activists reject the values of a new era in South Korean political and economic life. Instead, their speeches conveyed a clear desire to have the legacy of the industrialization generation recognized in contemporary South Korea. These flag-carriers are evidence that a marginalized set of desires and aspirations about South Korean nationalism and identity coexist with the progressive views of the candlelight protesters. The persistence of such an intense and partisan worldview, however, poses a threat to the future of liberal democracy in South Korea. ARTICLE HISTORY
Gives a comprehensive overview of national elections and referendums in South East Asia, East Asia, and the South Pacific. For all relevant states, the legal provisions on suffrage as well as parliamentary and presidential electoral systems are analysed in both a historical and a comparative manner. Investigates the effects of elections and electoral systems on the development of the political regimes. The concluding section summarizes the context‐specific availability and reliability of official electoral statistics. The appendix presents the basic features of the parliamentary electoral systems currently applied in the 30 states of the three regions.
Across many nascent democracies, living historical memories of past conflicts are vulnerable to contestation. Past scholarship explains such mnemonic dissonances as the outcome of either broad cultural scripts or top-down political maneuvering. Building on these insights, we utilize the concept of sociogenesis to show how contested memories are semiotically mediated within institutional and informal spaces. Across two studies, we employ mixed methods designs to examine social representations of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, using (a) nationally endorsed history textbooks (N = 86 pages), and (b) online comments (N = 9605) on public YouTube videos (N = 978). We find that textbooks construct the dictatorship in terms of veiled apologetics, leveraging representational strategies of balanced reportage to commensurate the dictatorship's legacies of abuse against contributions to economic and infrastructure programs. Meanwhile, social media messages represent the regime in terms of insurgent nostalgia, which yearns for a mythologized past under the strongman Marcos in rejection of an elite-coded democratic present. We discuss implications of our findings for broader social psychological discussions of living historical memories in the context of structural fragility, linking to related debates on critical history education, digital democracy, and the resurgence of authoritarianism locally and worldwide.
How can leaders recover public trust and approval when government performance is low? We argue politicians use speeches evoking images of deceased predecessors to reactivate support temporarily. This distracts supporters from the poor performance and arouses empathy and nostalgia among them, causing them to perceive the current leader more favorably. We test this argument by scraping for all speeches by Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. We identify all instances when she referenced Juan Perón—the charismatic founder of the Justice Party. We find that as Kirchner’s approval rating decreases, the number of Perón references increases. To identify the causal mechanism and to ensure that endogeneity is not a concern, we employ text analysis and a natural experiment—courtesy of LAPOP. The results provide robust evidence that leaders reference their dead predecessors to evoke positive feelings. However, while doing so can improve public opinion, the effects manifest only in the short term and among supporters.
When autocratic ruling parties accede to democratization, they do not always fade away into history. Following forty-one transitions since 1940, including those in Mexico, Taiwan, Bulgaria and Ghana, the ruling party survived and won power after democratization. Why do some former autocratic parties prosper under democracy while others quickly dissolve? What effect does this have on democratic survival? This article uses original data to predict the post-transition fates of eighty-four autocratic ruling parties through 2015. Whereas extant theories emphasize radical reinvention and outsider struggle, the author argues that success is instead about maintaining ruling-party advantages into the democratic period. Parties succeed when they have authoritarian legacies that easily translate to democratic competition, such as broad programmatic experience, strong organization and policy success. In addition, democratic institutions that disadvantage new parties and actors benefit autocratic parties. Lastly, an instrumental variables design shows that autocratic party success negatively impacts democratic survival and quality.
This article discusses the metaphorical constructions of martial law that emerge from selected speeches and publications of Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to 1985. Using a sociocognitive perspective informed by conceptual metaphor studies, the author surfaces conceptualizations that constitute a schema in which constitutional authoritarianism is central to national life and Marcos as an authoritarian is rendered a democrat. This schema had been sustained throughout Marcos’s authoritarian rule and has become so embedded in Philippine political discourse that it gets to be invoked by political rhetors long after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship.
Cambridge Core - Latin American Government, Politics and Policy - Life after Dictatorship - edited by James Loxton
It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism’s Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology-the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies’ lasting influence on public opinion, Communism’s Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.
This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts. Brings a new approach to one of the most important topics in politics: the origins of democracy and its consequences Covers a broad historical and geographic scope, presenting data on and discusses political regimes throughout the world since 1800 Uses state of the art quantitative (statistical) and qualitative (process tracing) methods. © Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo 2018. All rights reserved.
Objective
In this article, we seek to extend our understanding of the partisan lenses through which Americans view politics by investigating if there is partisan polarization in views of the past. Current political issues are frequently contextualized with references to the past. Despite these frequent evocations of the past, public opinion scholars’ knowledge of how citizens view earlier eras is incomplete.
Methods
We evaluate competing explanations of the effect of the past on present political attitudes: generational effects, partisanship, and ideology. To do this, we administered a novel battery of questions to a nationally representative sample drawn from the 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project.
Results
The data show evidence of generational effects, but also of partisanship in the case of opinions of governmental performance, and of ideology in the case of evaluations of culture and quality of life.
Conclusion
This study suggests that Americans are divided not just in their views of the present, but also in their views on the past. To the extent that peoples’ evaluations are shaped by how well government is performing relative to some past era of good performance, polarization in views of the past could have long‐lasting effects on how Americans evaluate the government.
Democratization has fundamentally changed the formal institutional structure of Indonesian politics, but a wealth of contemporary research has demonstrated that the informal mechanisms of power and influence have survived the transition. This paper uses a unique, hand-collected dataset of information on Indonesian public figures over the democratic transition to empirically catalogue the changes and continuities in Indonesian politics since democratization. Our results provide quantitative evidence for substantial change in Indonesia's political economy over the last decade and a half, with the simultaneous rise of the private sector and decline of the military and the state as avenues to political influence at the national level. Our evidence also suggests that the origins of this transition pre-date democratization itself.
This book examines the effect of economic conditions on election results in five post-communist countries--Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic--in the first decade of post-communist elections. It is the first book length study of economic voting outside of established democracies, as well as one of the few comparative studies of voting in post-communist countries generally. The study relies on an original database composed of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral data, and the analysis features a broadly based comparative assessment of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analysis
Nostalgia for the communist past originates in positive evaluations of communist political and economic systems and in identification with the Soviet Union. It is people's socialization in a particular political culture and identity, rather than their negative feelings toward the current regime and its performance, that explains this phenomenon. The same factors operate in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, irrespective of country-specific developments.
Electorates in several East European countries have thrown their support behind reconstructed communist parties. Is personal economic hardship driving this phenomenon? We argue that political behavior in postcommunist societies is fundamentally structured by interpretations of the transition histories, which were centrally constitutive events. We propose a structural equation model in which understandings of the past mediate the relationship between personal circumstances and satisfaction with economic reforms. We analyze cross-sectional data collected in Poland immediately after the 1993 parliamentary elections and find, consistent with our hypotheses, that understandings of the past exert as much of an effect on attitudes toward reforms as do personal economic assessments. We use multinomial logit to analyze vote choice and find that personal economic circumstances are of little importance. Attitudes toward economic reforms have a limited effect on voting behavior, but their importance is eclipsed by understandings of the past and other factors, such as religion.
Sentiment analysis in a multilingual world remains a challenging problem, because developing language-specific sentiment lexicons is an extremely resourceintensive process. Such lexicons remain a scarce resource for most languages. In this paper, we address this lexicon gap by building high-quality sentiment lexicons for 136 major languages. We integrate a variety of linguistic resources to produce an immense knowledge graph. By appropriately propagating from seed words, we construct sentiment lexicons for each component language of our graph. Our lexicons have a polarity agreement of 95.7% with published lexicons, while achieving an overall coverage of 45.2%. We demonstrate the performance of our lexicons in an extrinsic analysis of 2,000 distinct historical figures' Wikipedia articles on 30 languages. Despite cultural difference and the intended neutrality of Wikipedia articles, our lexicons show an average sentiment correlation of 0.28 across all language pairs.
This study explores how economic performance prior to democratic transitions affects the fate of successors to authoritarian rulers in new democracies. It investigates 70 founding election outcomes, finding that successful economic performance under an authoritarian regime increases the vote share of successors. It also finds that the past economic performance of authoritarian rulers decreases the likelihood of government alternation to democratic oppositions. Interim governments that initiate democratic transition, however, are neither blamed nor rewarded for economic conditions during transition periods. This study concludes that electorates are not myopic and that economic voting is not a knee-jerk reaction to short-term economic performance in new democracies.
What could be motivating voters in transition countries to vote for lead- ers who have proven themselves to be skilled at violating human rights, repress- ing civil liberties, and ruling without democratic institutions? We test hypotheses related to this question by using a least-similar-systems design in which we search for common predictors of vote choice in presidential elections from two coun- tries that differ in their past and present political and economic situations: Bolivia and Russia. We find consistent patterns in these two very different countries, which leads to the conclusion that voters for ex-authoritarian candidates or par- ties are not merely motivated by considerations that typically shape vote choice in long-standing democracies, but are also distinguished by a preference for non- democratic political systems.
This paper discusses issues raised in Aijaz Ahmad's recent work, In Theory. Ahmad's work is centred on three critical essays on Edward Said, Salman Rushdie and Fredric Jameson who have a common ideological affiliation, in his view, to a new kind of radicalism. This derives its inspiration from postmodernist thinking in varying forms, substituting the marxist idea of belongingness by a radical form of unbelonging. This paper argues that while many of Ahmad's critical observations are perceptive, his general approach is marred by an unwillingness to extend criticism to his own premises. It is highly political, but its politics is one of nostalgia.
From Bangkok to Manila, Taipei, Seoul, and Ulaanbaatar, East Asia's third-wave democracies are in distress. Data from the first and second Asian Barometer Surveys can help us systematically to assess the extent of normative commitment to democracy that citizens feel in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Compared to levels of popular support for democracy, strength of authoritarian detachment, and satisfaction with the performance of democracy observed in other regions, our six East Asian democracies appear on a par with similarly situated societies elsewhere in the world. The lesson is that this form of government must win citizens' support through better performance.
We describe latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a generative probabilistic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA is a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, in which each item of a collection is modeled as a finite mixture over an underlying set of topics. Each topic is, in turn, modeled as an infinite mixture over an underlying set of topic probabilities. In the context of text modeling, the topic probabilities provide an explicit representation of a document. We present efficient approximate inference techniques based on variational methods and an EM algorithm for empirical Bayes parameter estimation. We report results in document modeling, text classification, and collaborative filtering, comparing to a mixture of unigrams model and the probabilistic LSI model.