Political Divide, Weak Property Rights, and Infrastructure Provision: An Empirical Examination of Takings Decisions in Jerusalem

In this article I use a unique hand-coded dataset of all expropriation exercises in Jerusalem over a twenty-five-year period to test the distribution of the expropriation burden across political communities. I identify the ethnoreligious group to which the impacted landowner belongs and the community that would benefit from the decision. I find that Palestinian property constitutes 38 percent of all land taken over the years, while only 10 percent of all land taken has been repurposed for their local community needs. Conversely, Jewish owners have contributed only 4 percent of all land taken while benefiting from 33 percent of the land taken for their community needs. I also find that land not owned by Jews has a higher propensity to be taken for citywide purposes by ten to twenty-three times than Jewish land, depending on the purpose and the type of property rights involved. This sharp gap can be attributed to the political power relations in the city. The case study enables me to test the relationship between weak property rights and infrastructure provision. As property rights are formally recorded and recognized selectively in some but not in all parts of the city, the article provides the first empirical evidence to the effect of weak property rights on the risk of expropriation. I find that the propensity for noncommunity purpose takings of nonformalized land for which Palestinians claim ownership but have no official records to is significantly higher when compared to formalized Palestinian land. This outcome contradicts the conventional wisdom in the literature that weak property rights help explain limited infrastructure development.

Cross-segmental parties in consociational systems: Downplaying prowess to access power in Northern Ireland

Political parties are afforded a key role in making consociational democracy work; however, parties that dis-identify with salient identities and appeal to voters across the ethno-political divide face barriers when interacting with voters and with other, segmental parties. Nevertheless, such cross-segmental parties often thrive and even ascend to power. Northern Ireland’s cross-segmental parties – the Alliance Party, the Green Party, and People before Profit – have sought to traverse group-specific voter interests and set their agenda apart from that of segmental parties. For such parties to be considered ‘coalitionable’, they should outline their (potential) governing contribution to complement other political parties’ agendas. Cross-segmental parties’ participation in government makes them appear electable, but it is the focus on bipartisan concerns that consolidates their electoral success and ensures their political relevance. We focus on the evolution of Alliance’s political agenda and fill a gap in the literature on the relevance of cross-segmental parties in consociations.

Romantyzm polityczny Jarosława Jakubowskiego albo przepisywanie Dziadów (na prawicy)

The article analyses two dramas by Jarosław Jakubowski: Dożynki and Nowy Legion (New legion), which their author designed as attempts at updating the political frame of Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), (especially ‘Warsaw salon’), read in the context of the ‘Smoleńsk romanticism.’ The right-wing approach to Mickiewicz’s archdrama offers a diagnosis of the social and political divide (‘two Poland’) in the aspect of the clash between two worldviews: left-wing and liberal versus right-wing. Mickiewicz’s authority is supposed to strengthen the right-wing diagnoses, hence it is easy to spot the numerous attempts at instrumental and anachronic reading of the romantic legacy. At the same time, the analysed dramas show the importance and the textual and ideological productivity of the romantic paradigm.

Media bias exposure and the incidence of COVID-19 in the USA

The role of the media as a source of reliable health information during the COVID-19 pandemic has come under intense scrutiny, with claims of misinformation and partisanship coming from all sides of the political divide. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between exposure to biased media outlets and the likelihood of testing positive for COVID-19 in the USA. I use detailed household data extracted from the 2020 American National Election Study in order to gauge media consumption patterns, coupled with data on media bias scores for different outlets and programmes. I combine these variables to compute media bias exposure values for each respondent, and relate these to the likelihood of a positive COVID-19 test within each respondent’s household, controlling for a variety of other factors including partisanship, social media use, trust in the media and several socioeconomic and demographic variables. The results indicate that media bias exposure is significantly related to COVID-19 incidence, and in particular the coefficients show that a 1% increase in exposure to left-wing media is associated with a 0.2% decrease in the probability of a positive COVID-19 test. Conversely, I find no significant relationship between right-wing media exposure and COVID-19 infection rates. I also find a significantly higher likelihood of contracting COVID-19 among low socioeconomic status households, suggesting a disproportionate impact of the pandemic on such cohorts. These findings are robust to a number of tests, and emphasise the importance of aligning media messages with those advocated by leading medical experts during public health crises.

How’s Life After the Collapse? Populism as a Representation Linkage and the Emergence of a Populist/Anti-Populist Political Divide in Italy (1994–2018)

Populism is a hot topic in academia. The causes of this phenomenon have received much attention with many studies focusing on the role of the high levels of unresponsiveness of mainstream parties in triggering a populist response. In this respect, in many cases, populist parties have become a relevant electoral force in the concomitance with an electoral decline of mainstream political options, mostly in the last decades. This article considers a situation in which the whole party system’s unresponsiveness reaches its zenith, and the party system collapses. A collapse is the result of the incapacity of most of the parties in the system to fulfill their basic function, i.e., to represent voters’ interests. When this happens, none of the types of linkages—programmatic, clientelist, or personalist—that tie parties and voters are effective. Empirical observation shows that in those cases populism can perform as a sort of representation linkage to re-connect parti(es) and voters on the basis of the moral distinction between “the people” and “the elite.” Through a discursive strategy of blame attribution, populistm can attract a large portion of the vote. At this point, its opposing ideology—anti-populism—also arouses. In other words, populism/anti-populism may result in a political cleavage that structures the party system by itself or, more frequently, with other cleavages. To elucidate this argument, the paper explores the case of Italy between 1994 and 2018. The electoral relevance of populist parties translated first into a discursive cleavage, which, in turn, changed the space of competition with the emergence of a new political axis, namely populism/anti-populism. This paper's central claim is that the dynamics of partisan competition cannot be understood by overlooking the populism/anti-populism political divide. The conclusion touches on one implication of the emergence of this political cleavage, namely change of the incentives for coalition building. In fact, when populism and anti-populism structure, at least partially, the party system changing the space of interparty competition, this in turn may affect the determinants behind parties’ coalition-building choices.

The Czech Republic

This chapter provides an extended look at health politics and the universal health system based on a compulsory social health insurance in the Czech Republic. It traces the historical development of the Czech healthcare system, characterized by a systemic shift from an insurance system to a fully state-run Soviet Semashko model of healthcare provision. Since the fall of communism in 1989, the Czech healthcare system has undergone significant reforms, including a return to a Bismarckian insurance system and market-oriented reforms in delivery and financing of health services. The post-communist reforms were characterized by the crystallization of the left–right political divide in healthcare policymaking. As the chapter argues, this division became particularly pronounced in the context of reforms introducing user fees for medical services and hospital privatization, both of which were controversial issues, with critics arguing that these reforms posed a major threat to the system’s solidarity.

When Polarization Triggers Out-Group “Counter-Projection” Across the Political Divide

Although projecting one’s own characteristics onto another person is pervasive, “counter-projection,” or seeing the opposite of oneself in others is also sometimes found, with implications for intergroup conflict. After a focused review of previous studies finding counter-projection (often unexpectedly), we map conditions for counter-projection to an individual out-group member. Counter-projection requires identified antagonistic groups, is moderated by in-group identity, and is moderated by which information is assessed in the target person. Using political groups defined by support for former U.S. President Trump, across our Initial Experiment ( N = 725) and Confirmatory Experiment ( N = 618), we found counter-projection to individual political out-group targets for moral beliefs, personality traits, and everyday likes (e.g., preference for dogs vs. cats). Counter-projection was increased by in-group identification and overlapped considerably with “oppositional” out-group stereotypes, but we also found counter-projection independent of out-group stereotypes (degree of overlap with stereotyping depended on the information being projected).