In January 2015, three terrorists killed 17 people in Paris. In a time in which fears of immigrants and Muslims are spread in Europe and right wing movements are gaining support, this event built a foundation for actors of centre right and right wing parties to use the attacks in their favor. The aim of this study was to investigate how French and German media reported on the attacks, which measures were suggested in response to the attacks by political actors and how media facilitated possible securitization moves. By conducting this case study for which French and German newspaper articles were collected through the database Lexis Nexis and analyzed through content and discourse analysis, a contribution to security studies was made. The analytical framework used, Securitization Theory with an integration of Framing Theory, proved valuable as it indicated that media, by framing the issues connected to the Paris Attacks in favor of securitizing actors, facilitated securitization moves. Securitizing actors were mainly centre right politicians in Germany and the French right wing party National Front. Furthermore, German newspaper articles on the attacks outnumbered French newspaper articles, indicating the high level of media attention to the key event. However, the role of Islam was mentioned in more French newspaper articles than it was the case in German newspapers. Overall, terrorism and Islam were portrayed as a threat to the referent objects of the West, its citizens and values, fostering an essentialist and dichotomist understanding of the West and Islam.

While clientelism has been intensively studied in comparative politics from very different theoretical perspectives and angles, scholars typically emphasize the importance of organized networks and long-term relations for sustaining electoral clientelism. However, electoral clientelism continues to be widespread in many countries despite the absence of organized parties or electoral machines. In order to account for this puzzle, I propose an informational approach that stresses the indirect effects that investments in electoral clientelism have on vote intentions. By distributing minor consumer goods, politicians buy the participation of poor voters at rallies and different sorts of campaign events. I argue that this particular subtype of electoral clientelism -- "campaign clientelism" -- helps politicians improvise political organizations, influence indifferent clients, and signal their electoral viability to strategic actors. Thus, by influencing competition and the dynamics of the race, campaign clientelism shapes vote choices and electoral outcomes. Campaign clientelism affects vote choices through two causal mechanisms. First, this subtype of electoral clientelism can help establish candidates' electoral viability, especially where alternative signals provided by well-organized parties are weak. By turning out large numbers of people at rallies, candidates establish and demonstrate their electoral prospects to the media, donors, rent-seeking activists, and voters. In this way, politicians induce more and more voters to support them strategically. Second, campaign clientelism can convince unattached rally participants of the candidates' electoral desirability. While providing different sorts of information at campaign events, politicians help campaign clients make choices. Other things being equal, viable and desirable candidates have better chances of actually achieving office. Qualitative, quantitative, and experimental evidence from Peru, a democracy without parties, supports the informational theory's expectations. / text

While I do not dispute the pivotal role played by party leaders in setting and shifting a party position, I argue that the impetus for party shifts sometimes comes from the "bottom-up"--that is, from party members themselves. At times, the party position held by the leadership conflicts with some members' constituency interests. Faced with this conflict, backbench members use the legislative process to signal their intention to defect from the party on policy unless the leadership modifies the party's existing position. Party members' party-splitting votes under constituency pressures, however, do not always lead the party into a new brand. If one party, particularly a majority party, is divided but the other party is united over a policy issue, this issue drives a wedge within the majority party. If this wedge issue continues to split the majority party and unite the minority party, the majority party is likely to shift its policy position to solve its dilemma of party division. To test my theory of party position shifts, I explore three historical cases in which there was position change by one or both parties over immigration, national security, and trade. More specifically, these include: the switch of congressional Republicans from anti- to pro-exclusion on Chinese immigration in the post-Reconstruction period; the shift of congressional Democrats from a party of "guns" and "butter" to a party of only "butter" in the post-Vietnam War era; and Republican and Democratic flip-flopping on China and MFN in the post-Cold War period. My findings suggest that policy change in these cases is driven by the shifting preferences of members as they try to resolve tension between the party and the constituency. Sometimes party rank-and-file members are in the driver's seat in defining the parties' positions. This is as true for foreign policy as it is for domestic policy. My dissertation shows that in a representative democracy, the transition from voters' preferences to lawmakers' votes occurs through the politics of procedural voting strategies in Congress. / text

This dissertation examines the determinants of the effect of partisanship on support for a parliamentary government. In doing so, I address a set of related questions, using Japan as an example. I begin with a descriptive question: Is the effect of partisanship on the job approval of the administration changing over time? To answer this question, using 1960-2001 time series data, I demonstrate the changing impact of the job approval rate of the cabinets over this period. Then I turn to explanation for the change and ask: Why does the effect change over time? I hypothesize that supporters of newly established parties in the government are less likely to be influenced by their partisanship when evaluating the cabinet' performance. Partisanship, defined here as a predisposition to support a particular political party, grows with the cumulative effect of political experience and learning. There is, however, less opportunity for newly established and political parties to have such loyal supporters. My second hypothesis holds that supporters of ruling parties to which the prime minister does not belong are less likely to make partisan judgments in appraising the cabinet's performance. Party identification extends to the government in which the party participates, the partisan effect on the appraisal of the government's performance emerges. The party affiliation of the prime minister influences to what extent people associate the government with the party. / text

This dissertation offers an intellectual and institutional history of party polarization and ideological realignment in the postwar United States. It treats the construction of an ideologically sorted party system as a political project carried out by conscious actors within and around the Democratic and Republican parties. The work of these activists, interest groups, and political elites helped to produce, by the last decades of the twentieth century, an unpredicted and still-continuing era of strong, polarized partisanship in American politics. In tracking their work, the dissertation also account for changing ideas about the party system over time, starting with an influential postwar scholarly doctrine that cast bipartisanship as a problem for which polarization would provide the solution. / History

In the past decade, party systems have collapsed in Venezuela and Peru. Scholars have suggested that Colombia may be following a similar fate. I argue it is not. Despite loosing national elections the Liberal Party still wins subnationally. Regional clientelistic networks, based on goods that do not depend upon the central state, help provide votes to those candidates who have been in politics the longest. The latter are likely to be liberal politicians, with privileged positions within the party. They get nominated, thus, they have no reason to defect. Because they distribute goods that are independent from the national state, they also have little incentive to promote national candidates. Consequently, the LP wins within the regions but is unable to attain control of national offices. As long as it keeps doing so this party is unlikely to disappear. / text

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