Journal articles on the topic 'Pre-electoral coalitions'

Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new dataset constructed by the author and presented here contains information on all potential pre-electoral coalition dyads in twenty industrialized parliamentary democracies from 1946 to 1998. Pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form between ideologically compatible parties. They are also more likely to form when the expected coalition size is large (but not too large) and the potential coalition partners are similar in size. Finally, they are more likely to form if the party system is ideologically polarized and the electoral rules are disproportional.

Why do political parties join coalitions to support other parties’ presidential candidates if presidents, once elected, are not bound to their pre-electoral pledges? This article argues that policy agreements made publicly between coalition partners during the campaign help parties pursue policy goals. However, parties cannot use pre-electoral coalitions to secure access to patronage, pork and government benefits under the control of presidents because they cannot hold presidents accountable to these agreements. Quantitative analysis of Latin American electoral coalitions demonstrates that political parties are more likely to form presidential electoral coalitions as the ideological distance between them decreases. Yet presidential electoral coalitions tend not to include non-programmatic political parties, even though such office-oriented parties are unconstrained by ideological considerations.

While the existence of pre-electoral coalitions fundamentally modifies the bargaining environment in which potential cabinet formulas are negotiated, the survival chances of cabinets that include them follow predictable yet different patterns to those of ‘regular’ coalition governments. This article combines original and existing data sets on Western and Central and Eastern European cabinets with information about pre-electoral coalitions (1944–2008) in order to estimate the impact of such alliances on government survival rates. In doing so, I employ a Cox Proportional Hazard model and a ‘competing risks’ research design which distinguishes between replacement and early election hazards. The findings indicate that both Western and post-communist cabinets formed by pre-electoral coalitions exhibit considerably lower rates of discretionary terminations. This effect is reversed in the case of incumbent pre-electoral coalitions. Last but not least, Western European cabinets that replicate pre-electoral coalitions are significantly less likely to end through dissolution and early elections.

While pre-electoral coalitions have important effects on the functioning of democracy, their formation has only been systematically examined in the context of established democracies. This study examines the patterns and factors of electoral alliance formation in eleven democracies in Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on joint candidate lists. It finds that electoral coalitions are more frequent in newer democracies than in established democracies. The formation of alliances is systematically related to their potential costs and benefits. On the one hand, coalitions can provide small parties with legislative representation and larger parties with important government coalition partners. On the other hand, parties face costs related to their electoral compatibility and the sharing of election candidacies and office positions.

Although it is theoretically relevant, the effect of pre-electoral coalitions on vote choice remains a largely unexplored area in the field of party strategy. The article addresses this gap by focusing on the Italian regional elections, where the electoral rules allow parties to run alone and, at the same time, to present pre-electoral coalitions on the ballot paper. This setting allows us to investigate under what conditions citizens vote for their preferred party and the coalition that this party indicated to coalesce with. The results suggest that ideological congruence and the size of the parties entering a pre-electoral agreement are decisive factors. Findings also reveal that the time elapsed since the establishment of a coalition has no effect on vote choice.

Parties coordinate on a range of activities. They invite leaders from other parties to their national meetings, run joint electoral platforms and even form parliamentary factions and coalition governments. The implications of regular cooperation such as the case of pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) for party positioning are unexplored. Parties form PECs to reduce competition for voters with ideologically close competitors and to signal their ability to cohesively govern. Building on this logic, we argue that parties’ preferences converge in PECs to demonstrate their ability to govern together and diverge when parties observe that this tactic has failed to attract voter support in past elections. We demonstrate support for our approach using data on electoral coalition participation, party positions and parties’ internal speeches. Additional evidence from an extreme case of an enduring electoral coalition in Germany shows that PECs have dramatic effects on parties’ positions.

In multi-party democracies, several parties usually have to join together in coalition to form government. Many aspects of that process have been fairly fully investigated, others less so. Among the latter is the timing of the formation and announcement of coalitions.While the dominant popular image may be one of parties meeting together after the election to hammer out a coalition agreement, pre-election coalitions of one sort or another are actually quite common. In almost half of the elections in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries since the Second World War, at least one pair of parties had pre-announced their intention to join together in government. A quarter of governments formed were based wholly (and another quarter in part) on pre-election agreements.To date, such studies as there have been of pre-election coalitions have concentrated primarily on system-level explanations – features of the electoral system (majoritarian or proportional, and so on) that make such arrangements more or less likely.3 Here we shall instead look more at the agent-level logic of ‘early’ (pre-election) versus ‘late’ (post-election) coalition formation, from the point of view of voters and parties.hypotheses concerning coalition timingIn the tradition of Downs and Riker and their coalition-theorist progeny, we shall assume that voters are interested primarily in getting policies adopted which are close to their ‘ideal points’ in policy space, and that parties are interested primarily in winning office to implement policies as close as possible to their ‘ideal points’ in policy space. That leads parties to strive for ‘minimal connected winning coalitions’: ‘connected’ in the sense that they link parties adjacent in policy space; ‘minimal’ in the sense that they involve the party's sharing power with the fewest parties backed by fewest voters that it can and still win.

This article critically assesses the argument that oppositional coordination creates democratization by elections. It argues that the previously acknowledged democratizing effect of pre-electoral coalitions is better described as an alternation effect, by which coordinated oppositional parties are more likely to win elections. The positive effect of oppositional coalitions is, however, short lived and intimately connected with cases where the election is won by the opposition. Evidence of potential endogeneity is presented, which shows that coalitions are more likely when there is a realistic chance of oppositional victories. These results were derived by utilizing an original dataset of 251 authoritarian elections in 86 countries from 1973 to 2004.

In exploring the first two decades of evolution of political programmes applied for the electoral processes in Slovenia, a young European multiparty parliamentary democracy with a proportional electoral system and multiparty government coalitions, the article contributes to a rich tradition of studying the programmes of political parties as relevant narrators of the development of democratic systems and suggests an answer to ‘why do parties write manifestos?’ The main findings include the distinct issue emphasis of parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties’ manifestos and convergence in issue emphasis over time among parliamentary parties who go on to form coalition governments. Regarding the ‘why’, these and other findings indicate that the manifestos considered here are intended more for post-election purposes – in particular, for the formation of alliances and negotiating and running a coalition government – than for attracting voters in the pre-election period. Party programmes are seen more as self-intended tools for political struggle than as promoters or control mechanisms for the further development of the democratic political system.

In Mexico, the electoral arena has experienced substantial transformations throughout the last decades. It has changed from an overwhelming stage of domination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to a competitive struggle between diverse political parties, where pre-electoral coalitions (PECS) and political alternation are a recurrent phenomenon. This paper seeks to explain the switch from an hegemonic party system (with authoritarian characteristics) to a democratic multi-party system, by stating that the Mexican Public Administration´s modernization, but especially the electoral reforms, have favored a phased configuration of a larger (and more competitive) number of parties and neutral electoral institutions. The argument is built upon the analysis of several documentary research, based on the 1977, 1986, 1990, 1996, and 2014 electoral reforms, federal and local electoral results, concluding with the Mexican political system´s development implications.

AbstractCabinet coalitions are central to the functioning of Latin American presidential systems. However, the reasons for their formation remain unclear. While recent studies suggest that presidents invite parties to the cabinet to facilitate governability and lawmaking, this study argues that the composition of cabinet coalitions is largely predetermined by commitments made before presidential elections. To analyze this argument, the study introduces the conditional logit model as a new empirical strategy for modeling cabinet choice under this type of regime. Based on a new dataset of 107 cabinets in 13 Latin American democracies, the study shows that pre-electoral commitments strongly affect cabinet formation and thereby also confound the relationship between cabinet formation and governability.

This article narrates the development of the antinuclear movement from the bottom up, showing how local protests initiated changes in Germans' ideas about democracy and public participation, precipitating the Green Party's emergence. The narrative begins with the pre-history of the 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor site in Southern Baden. It shows that vintners' concerns about the future of their livelihoods underpinned protests at Wyhl, but argues that the anti-reactor coalition grew in breadth after government officials' perceived misconduct caused local people to connect their agricultural concerns with democracy matters. It then explains how local protests like the Wyhl occupation influenced the formation of the German Green Party in the late 1970s, showing how the sorts of convergences that occurred amidst “single issue” protests like the anti-Wyhl struggle enabled a wide variety of activists to come together in the new party. Thus, the article argues that particular, local concerns initiated a rethinking of participation in electoral politics. Far from fracturing society, these local concerns promoted diverse new coalitions and shaped an inclusive approach to electoral politics.

Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves ‘frustrated’ by the restricted choice menu on offer in the SMD, being effectively forced to split their vote between different parties. Here we explore the different behaviours of frustrated voters in the 1996 mixed-member election to Italy's Chamber of Deputies, characterizing these as being either in some sense non-strategic (concerned above all with the relative policy platforms of candidates) or strategic (concerned above all to influence the eventual composition of government). Using an extended method for ecological inference, we parameterize and estimate rates of different types of ticket-splitting at the district level, and link the degree of what we characterize as strategic voting to the relative policy distance between the respective local representatives of the Italian pre-electoral coalitions.

Abstract Building on the framework of electoral contention, we investigate the interaction dynamics between social movements and political parties during elections. We argue that social media today is an important venue for these interactions, and consequently, analysing social media data is useful for understanding the shifts in the conflict and alliance structures between movements and parties. We find that Twitter discussions on the climate change movement during the 2019 electoral period in Finland reveal a process of pre-election approaching and post-election distancing between the movement and parties. The Greens and the Left formed mutually beneficial coalitions with the movement preceding the elections and took distance from one another after these parties entered the government. These findings suggest that research on movement-party interaction should pay more attention to social media and undertake comparative studies to assess whether the approaching-distancing process and its constituent mechanisms characterise movements beyond the climate strikes in Finland.

This article explores the growing popularity of alternative presidential candidates — those from outside the two dominant coalitions — in Chile from 2009 to 2017. Following a theoretical discussion that focuses on the causes of voter discontent with the political establishment, we formulate four hypotheses. We view support for alternative presidential candidates as a function of ideological detachment, declining political engagement, the economic vote, and socio-demographic shifts in the electorate. We use three pre-electoral Centro de Estudios Públicos surveys to present probit models and predicted probabilities. Our findings suggest that a distinct segment of Chilean voters is behind the rise of alternative presidential candidates. Younger and more educated voters who identify less with the traditional left-right ideological scale and political parties and suffer from economic anxiety—viewing the economy as performing well nationally while remaining pessimistic about their financial prospects—comprise this subgroup.

The topicality of the article is that the party system of Spain is undergoing serious transformations, the positioning of political forces and their ideologies, the organizational structure are changing significantly. National parliamentary elections are held for the fourth time in 4 years, which is unique to the countries of consolidated democracy. Trends in the development of Spain are relevant for cross- national comparisons of party systems. Methods – systems approach, synchronous comparative analysis, a secondary analysis of the results of opinion polls, mapping of party support in the elections. Materials: regulations; statements by party leaders; pre-election programs; results of sociological surveys; statistics on the results of elections. Results: The crisis of the party system in Spain is peculiar to the transition from a bipartisan model to a model of moderate pluralism, increased fragmentation, significant volatility, and the dependence of the main national parties on the support of regional parties. In the electoral cycle of 2019, the party system of Spain is a system of moderate pluralism (5 leading actors) with the growing role of regional parties, pragmatic coalitions are inevitable for creating a government. The economic recovery of 2014–2019 influenced the decline in the influence of “Unidos Podemos”, their electorate partially returned to the PSOE. In European and subnational elections, these trends are even more pronounced due to the format of electoral systems and the isolation of regional party systems. The threefold structure of the Spanish electorate, distributed mainly among left-leaning centers, center-right and regional nationalists, is preserved. An analysis of the statistical results of the elections and questionnaires proves an inversely correlated relationship between the level of support for the PSOE and “Unidos Podemos” in the center-left segment, and the level of support for the People’s Party, “Citizens” and “Vox” in the center-right camp. The influence of parties is extremely uneven across autonomous communities, and unevenness is increasing. The increase in the instability of the party system in Spain is predicted due to the growing influence of new parties and the underdeveloped culture of parliamentary coalitions. This process increases the chances of Catalan nationalists. A radical reform of the political system of Spain is brewing; the electorate of the left parties expresses the greatest demand for reform.

Parties often enter pre-election coalitions (PECs) in presidential elections while remaining independent in legislative races. Parties that support a presidential candidate should see legislative gains given the increase in their national electoral profile. Yet fewer presidential candidates often leads to fewer legislative parties, suggesting that participation in PECs reduces parties’ independent legislative representation. In this article, we examine how specific strategies in the presidential race affect parties’ legislative vote share. Using an original dataset of over 2300 party-level observations in 23 democracies across Europe and South America from 1975 to 2010, we show that the benefits of a party’s presidential strategy are conditional on its size. We find that smaller parties benefit from coattails when they run on their own or lead a PEC, while no parties benefit from joining a PEC. Our findings have important implications for understanding how parties’ presidential strategies influence their legislative success and system-level legislative fragmentation.

Political unrest in 2014 threatened Lesotho’s newly found democratic stability. Observers focus on educating the public about the electoral system and encouraging pre-election coalition discussions. However, this analysis suggests that such remedies ignore the institutional influences of Lesotho’s electoral system that undermine both public understanding and stability. Furthermore, a statistical analysis of district competition finds the 2015 elections to be largely consistent with previous elections, but that the percentage of rejected ballots correlates with a district victory for the largest party. Although this may simply be a statistical anomaly, the findings highlight structural challenges and reconsideration of electoral reforms.

Abstract The last election in the Slovak and Czech Republic was special. It not only took place before the official electoral period (pre-elections), but new political parties were “again” successful. The article focuses not only on both elections in the last two years in a comparative perspective, but it analyses the opportunity structure of success as well, including types of new political parties (according to Lucardie). The article seeks to answer the question: why are new political parties electorally successful, able to break into parliament and even become part of a coalition government? We assume that the emergence and success of new political parties in both countries relied on the ability to promote “old” ideas in a new fashion, colloquially referred to as “new suits” or “old” ideological flows in new breeze.

Over the summer month of August 2008, Georgia launched a large-scale military offensive against South Ossetia in an attempt of reconquering the territory. Four years later, on October 1, 2012, Georgia is holding its first Parliamentary Elections after the conflict that caused so much harm. The Parliamentary Elections constitute the 7th legislative elections held since Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It is however the first time for Georgia to elect an alternative party from the ruling party solely based on principle of democratic vote. The article examines the almost ten years of President Saakashvili’s Administration. During this decade, Saakashvili’s United National Movement government realized many positive works. Works like the successful reform of police forces and the determined force-back of corruption. These liberating works were all eagerly welcomed by Europe and other western nations. However, in the apparent loss of sense of reality towards the end of its reign, Georgia’s United National Movement government turned to dictating and ordering as a main style of governing. This in turn pushed citizens away from Saakashvili’s politics into voting for the opposition. Unforeseen by even the most experienced Southern Caucasus and Georgia experts, Georgia’s 2012 Parliamentary Elections gave way to the opposition coalition Georgian Dream to sweep to victory, leaving President Saakashvili to ceded defeat. Despite President Saakashvili’s statement that he would go into opposition there has not been a complete paradigm shift in Georgia’s domestic politics. With the Georgian Dream’s failure to gain a constitutional majority and questions over the ideological compatibility of the coalition – along with the fact that United National Movement still has the greatest representation in Parliament relative to the other parties, Saakashvili and his supporters keep hold to substantial political leverage. Also, Saakashvili will remain President until the October 2013 election. His opponent, Prime Minister Ivanishvili is expected to manifest himself, bringing in a less contentious, more pragmatic approach to relations with the country’s giant neighbour to the north. Overall, it can be said that Georgia’s unrivalled ballot-box transfer of power elevated the country to a category fundamentally higher in terms of democratic development than virtually all other post-Soviet states. This has been the more remarkable even since Georgia had been widely cited as an example case of a failed state, with a destroyed infrastructure and economy, dysfunctional state institutions and something approaching anarchy as its governance model. The impact of the ongoing reform of Georgia’s constitution and electoral law has lead to major shifts in Georgia’s political landscape. However, opinions vary as to whether the farsighted amendments made to the Georgian constitution on the initiative of the United National Movement are a genuine attempt to improve the country’s system of governance or that they rather are an effort by the incumbent president to cling on to power. The adoption of the amendments and the timing of their entry into force strongly suggest that the latter might be the case. Meanwhile, as a result of the changes to the Georgian constitution, a system of dual power has come in place. These and other factors suggest that Georgia’s political landscape is set to become more predictable. The article examines the degree to which this can be held true. In the streets of Tbilisi, hundred days into the reign of the new government, there is an air of optimism amongst the people. This holds especially true when it comes to youth. The hope is that the Georgian Dream becomes a Georgian reality. The disappointment otherwise might be shattering. In spring 2013, the new leadership offers new opportunities for Georgia. It can improve its democratic system and economic growth and establish a dialogue with Russia and the breakaway districts of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This would alleviate the frozen conflict and tense security dilemma’ on the Administrative Boundary Lines. Yet, if the transition of power does not go well, there will be prolonged power struggles that could cripple the policy making and cast Georgia back to pre-Saakashvili times. The article addresses the overall question whether the smooth transfer of power Georgia achieved after October’s election sets a standard for democracy in the region depending on whether the new government can strengthen the independence and accountability of state institutions in what remains a fragile, even potentially explosive political climate. The victory of the Georgian Dream Coalition over the United National Movement has brought pluralism into Georgian policymaking. However this political pluralism also includes that awkward dual powers; Georgia’s good cop and bad cop.

Na de Eerste Wereldoorlog en de invoering van het enkelvoudig stemrecht voor mannen werd de socialistische partij bijna even groot als de katholieke. De verkiezingen verscherpten de regionale en ideologische asymmetrie. De katholieke partij behield de absolute meerderheid in Vlaanderen, de socialistische verwierf een gelijkaardige positie in Wallonië. Nationaal werden coalitieregeringen noodzakelijk. In de Kamer veroverden zowel de socialisten als de christendemocratische vleugel een machtsbasis, maar tot de regering doordringen bleek veel moeilijker. Die bleven gedomineerd door de conservatieve katholieke vleugel en de liberale partij, met steun van de koning en van de haute finance. Eenmaal het socialistische minimumprogramma uit angst voor een sociale revolutie aanvaard (1918-1921), werden de socialisten nog slechts getolereerd tijdens crisissituaties of als het niet anders kon (1925-1927, 1935-1940). Het verklaart een toenemende frustratie bij Waalse socialisten. Tevens bemoeilijkte hun antiklerikalisme de samenwerking van Vlaamse socialisten met christendemocraten en Vlaamsgezinden, zoals in Antwerpen, en dat gold ook voor de vorming van regeringen. In de BWP waren de verhoudingen veranderd. De macht lag nu gespreid over vier actoren: de federaties, het partijbestuur, de parlementsfractie en eventueel de ministers. De eenheid was bij momenten ver zoek. In 1919 was het Vlaamse socialisme veel sterker geworden. In Vlaanderen behaalde het 24 zetels (18 meer dan in 1914) en werd het met 25,5% de tweede grootste partij. Bovendien was de dominantie van Gent verschoven naar Antwerpen, dat met zes zetels de vierde grootste federatie van de BWP werd. Het aantrekken van Camille Huysmans als boegbeeld versterkte haar Vlaamsgezind profiel. In een eerste fase moest Huysmans nog de Vlaamse kwestie als een vrije kwestie verdedigen. Zelfs tegen de Gentse en de Kortrijkse federatie in, die de vooroorlogse Vlaamsgezinde hoofdeis – de vernederland-sing van de Gentse universiteit – hadden losgelaten. Naar 1930 toe, de viering van honderd jaar België, was de Vlaamse beweging opnieuw sterker geworden en werd gevreesd voor de electorale doorbraak van een Vlaams-nationalistische partij. Een globale oplossing voor het Vlaamse probleem begon zich op te dringen. Dat gold ook voor de BWP. Interne tegenstellingen moesten overbrugd worden zodat, gezien de financiële crisis, de sociaaleconomische thema’s alle aandacht konden krijgen. Daarbij stonden de eenheid van België en van de partij voorop. In maart 1929 leidde dit tot het ‘Compromis des Belges’ en een paar maanden later tot het minder bekende en radicalere partijstandpunt, het ‘Compromis des socialistes belges’. Voortbouwend op de vooroorlogse visie van het bestaan van twee volken binnen België, werd dit doorgetrokken tot het recht op culturele autonomie van elk volk, gebaseerd op het principe van regionale eentaligheid, ten koste van de taalminderheden. Voor de Vlaamse socialisten kwam dit neer op een volledige vernederlandsing van Vlaanderen, te beginnen met het onderwijs en de Gentse universiteit. Niet zonder enige tegenzin ging een meerderheid van Waalse socialisten daarmee akkoord. In ruil eisten zij dat in België werd afgezien van elke vorm van verplichte tweetaligheid, gezien als een vorm van Vlaams kolonialisme. Eentalige Walen hadden in Wallonië en in nationale instellingen (leger, centrale besturen) recht op aanwerving en carrière zonder kennis van het Nederlands, zoals ook de kennis ervan als tweede landstaal in Wallonië niet mocht worden opgelegd. De betekenis van dit interne compromis kreeg in de historiografie onvoldoende aandacht. Dat geldt ook voor de vaststelling dat beide nationale arbeidersbewegingen, de BWP vanuit de oppositie, in 1930-1932 mee de invoering van het territorialiteitsbeginsel hebben geforceerd. Een tussentijdse fase C uit het model van Miroslav Hroch.________‘Frenemies’? 2Communitarian tensions in the Socialist Party 1919-1940. Division, Compromise. Crisis. Part One: 1918-1935After the First World War and the introduction of simple universal male suffrage, the Socialist Party was almost as large as the Catholic Party. Elections sharpened the regional and ideological asymmetry. The Catholic Party maintained an absolute majority in Flanders; the Socialists acquired a similar position in Wallonia. Coalition gov-ernments were a necessity at the national level. In the Chamber, both the Socialists and the Christian Democratic wing of the Catholics had a strong base of power, but entering in the government turned out to be much more difficult. Governments remained dominated by the conservative wing of the Catholic Party and by the Liberal Party, with support from the king and high finance. Once the Socialist minimum program had been accepted out of fear of a social revolution in the years 1918-1921, the Socialists were only tolerated in government during crises or in case there was no other possibility (1925-1927, 1935-1940). This explains an increasing frustration among Walloon Socialists. At the same time, Flemish Socialists’ anticlericalism hindered their cooperation with Christian Democrats and members of the Flemish Movement, as in Antwerp, and that also held true for the forming of national governments.In the Belgian Workers’ Party (BWP), balance had changed. Power now lay spread among four actors: the federations, the party administration, the parliamentary faction, and sometimes, government ministers. Unity was sometimes hard to find. In 1919 Flemish socialism became much stronger. In Flanders it took 25 seats (18 more than in 1914) and, with 25.5% of the vote, was the second-largest party. In addition, the centre of gravity moved from Ghent to Antwerp, which with six seats became the fourth-largest federation in the BWP. Camille Huysmans’s appeal as the figurehead strengthened its profile with regard to the Flemish Movement. At first, Huysmans had to defend the treatment of the Flemish Question as a matter of individual conscience for party members, even against the Ghent and Kortrijk federations, which had abandoned the foremost pre-war demand of the Flemish Movement, the transformation of the University of Ghent into a Dutch-language institution. As 1930, the centenary of Belgium, approached, the Flemish Movement became stronger once again and an electoral breakthrough by a Flemish nationalist party was feared. An overall solution to the Flemish problem was pressing, also in the BWP. Internal divisions needed to be bridged in order to give full attention to socioeconomic questions, in light of the financial crisis. The unity of Belgium and of the party came first and foremost. In 1929 this led to the ‘Compromis des Belges’ (Compromise of the Belgians) and a few months later to the lesser-known but more radical position of the party, the ‘Compromise of the Belgian Socialists’. Building on the pre-war vision of the existence of two peoples within Belgium, this point of view was imbued with the right of each people to cultural autonomy, based on the principle of regional monolingualism, at the expense of linguistic minorities. For Flemish socialists this came down to a full transformation of Flanders into a Dutch-speaking society, beginning with education and the University of Ghent. The majority of Walloon socialists went along with this, though not without some reluctance. In return, they demanded the elimination of any form of required bilingualism in Belgium, which they saw as a form of Flemish colonialism. In Wallonia and in national institutions (the army, the central administration), monolingual Walloons had a right to be recruited and have a career without a knowledge of Dutch, just as knowledge of Dutch as a second national language was not supposed to be imposed in Wallonia. The significance of this internal compromise has received insufficient attention in the historiography. The same observation applies to the finding that both national workers’ movements – the BWP from the ranks of the opposition – forced the introduction of the principle of territoriality in 1930-1932: an interim phase C of Miroslav Hroch’s model.

Why do parties form pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) in executive elections? The party of the executive candidate may welcome coalition partners because of the votes that they can deliver. However, PECs often include parties that bring few votes to the coalition. I theorize that parties with a candidate in the executive election welcome small parties because of the campaign resources that they bring to the PEC. I test this argument using data from mayoral elections in Brazil, where parties do not control access to advertisement on radio/TV. The results indicate that campaign resources increase the likelihood of being admitted to a PEC when the party without an executive candidate has few votes to offer.

Coalition theories of presidential regimes have frequently assumed coalition formation is a mostly post-electoral phenomenon. We challenge this view by showing that pre-electoral bargaining shapes to a substantial extent minority presidents’ disposition to cooperate with the legislature by forming a majority cabinet. Examining a dataset of pre- and post-electoral coalitions from 18 Latin American countries, we find that majority coalition cabinets are more likely to occur when elected presidents form pre-electoral coalitions (PECs), to the extent that pre-electoral agreements create stronger incentives for cooperation, by relying on a broader set of rewards than any post-electoral agreement. Moreover, we find that the likelihood of majority coalition formation increases as the share of PEC seats increases, thus reducing the need to engage in post-electoral bargaining. Our findings carry important implications for the study of cabinet formation in presidential regimes by introducing pre-electoral agreements as a key determinant of cabinet formation.

This article proposes a new approach to the study of coalition formation in presidential regimes. Drawing on a dataset covering 33 Latin American governments, the article shows that coalition cabinets are, mostly, the product of pre-electoral agreements. I present a six-stage timing of coalition agreements, including four degrees of earliness. Then, I challenge this consideration with the most common – institutional – arguments from the literature about the survival of coalitions in presidential regimes. The findings are quite interesting since they point out that earlier agreements are relevant conditions for enduring coalitions. Moreover, and surprisingly, I show that the institutional argument seems to have been overrated by the literature.

<pre><em><span lang="EN">This paper discusses the relationship between the President and the House of Representatives and the coalition government based on the three years of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), who was trapped in inter-institutional competition as a consequence of a mixture of presidential and multi-party systems</span></em><em><span lang="IN">.</span></em><em></em><em><span lang="IN">Initialy</span></em><em><span lang="EN">, President Jokowi has the desire to realize a coalition based on ideology and the same program (consensus coalition) between political parties, but the reality, it is difficult to make it happen in government,</span></em><em><span lang="IN"> finally President Jokowi re-elected a coalition of “all parties”</span></em><em><span lang="EN">. </span></em><em><span lang="IN">Using </span></em><em><span lang="EN">some of the basics of Scott Mainwaring and David Altman about presidential and multiparty combination systems and coalitions in presidential systems, complemented by several Coalitions. Then, complete the results of Otto Kirchheimer on Catch All Party, to outline the transformation of the party in this modern era. Accompanied by discussions on political parties in Indonesia, based on Yasraf Amir Piliang's description of political nomadism. Based on the facts and outcomes, a combination of presidential and multiparty systems and the government's management of government by President Jokowi, which manages a "fat" coalition with accommodative leadership and transactional performances. Matters relating to the harmonious relationship between the President and the House of Representatives with the consequence that the President is committed to realizing an unconditional coalition and not for the power-seats. Coalition management can be done because the choice of the party that develops as a supporter of the government is also based not only on the need for political imagery in order to encourage electoral in the political market, but also in the spirit of the party.</span></em><em></em></pre><pre><em><span lang="EN"> </span></em><span lang="EN"> </span></pre><pre><strong><em><span lang="NO-BOK">Key</span></em></strong><strong><em></em></strong><strong><em><span lang="NO-BOK">words</span></em></strong><em><span lang="NO-BOK">: </span></em><em><span lang="EN">Presidential System, Coalition Government, the President-Parliament Relations, Leadership Jokowi </span></em><em></em></pre>

Conclusions about the potential for peace via power-sharing are mixed. For some, power-sharing does little to overcome the commitment problem characterizing a transition from conflict, while others argue that such concessions provide signals of parties’ willingness to incur costs. This article develops and tests a new theory, aiming to shed light on the mechanisms through which power-sharing bargains help to overcome the commitment problem. I argue that government parties tend to hold an electoral and military advantage, which heightens incentives for rebel leaders to defect from a settlement prior to conceding their capacity to use violence. Where settlements provide discrete guarantees that offset the risks of electoral defeat and the co-optation of forces, these incentives for pre-emptive defection should be mitigated. I offer a novel disaggregation of provisional power-sharing subtypes, distinguishing between long-term and short-term arrangements. The analysis rests on an original, cross-national dataset of government-and-rebel dyads to negotiated settlements signed between 1975 and 2015 (N = 168). The logistic regression results clearly indicate that power-sharing settlements stipulating ‘consociational’-style reforms are significantly more likely to resolve conflict between settlement dyads, all else equal. Meanwhile, standard conceptualizations of power-sharing, which include transitional coalitions and troop integration, appear unlikely to secure rebel commitment beyond the transition period, which helps to explain the contradictory findings in existing research.

Compensational voting refers to when voters cast a vote for a more extreme party than they prefer, in order to push policies closer to an ideal point. This article develops the idea of compensational voting in regard to pre-electoral coalition signals and polling trends. The argument is that a significant share of voters consider the relative strength of the parties in their preferred pre-electoral coalition, and adjust their vote choice accordingly. This is elaborated by conducting a mixed logit model over eight Swedish general elections where parties were more or less clear about their intentions to collaborate with other parties. Combining unique data from parties’ election manifestos including negative and positive quotes about other parties with polling trends and voters’ approval rating of parties, the analysis lends support to the idea that this type of coalition-oriented compensational voting occurs.

Introduction In October 2007, the federal Coalition government legislated that all eligible migrants and refugees who want to become Australian citizens must sit and pass the newly designed Australian citizenship test. Prime Minister John Howard stated that by studying the essential knowledge on Australian culture, history and values that his government had defined in official citizenship test resources, migrants seeking the conferral of Australian citizenship would become "integrated" into the broader, "mainstream" community and attain a sense of belonging as new Australian citizens (qtd. in "Howard Defends Citizenship Test"). In this paper, I conduct a genealogical analysis of Becoming an Australian Citizen, the resource booklet that contains all of the information needed to prepare for the test. Focusing specifically on the section in the booklet entitled A Story of Australia which details Australian history and framing my research through a Foucauldian perspective on governmentality that focuses on the interrelationship with truth, power and knowledge in the production of subjectivities, I suggest that the inclusion of the subject of history in the test was constituted as a new order of knowledge that aimed to shape new citizens' understanding of what constituted the "correct" version of Australian identity. History was hence promoted as a form of knowledge that relied on objectivity in order to excavate the truths of Australia's past. These truths, it was claimed, had shaped the very values that the Australian people lived by and that now prospective citizens were expected to embrace. My objective is to problematise this claim that the discipline of history consists of objective truths and to move beyond recent debates in politics and historiography known as the history wars. I suggest that history instead should be viewed as a "curative science" (Foucault 90), that is, a transformative form of knowledge that focuses on the discontinuities as well as the continuities in Australia's past and which has the potential to "delimit truths" (Weeks) and thus heal the fatal impact of an official history dominated by notions of progress and achievements. This kind of cultural research not only has the capacity to influence policy-making in the field of civic education for migrant citizens, but it also has the potential to broaden understanding of Australia's past by drawing on alternative stories of Australia including the ruptures and counter stories that come together to form the multiplicity that is Australian identity. Values Eclipsing History The test was introduced at a time when the impact of globalisation was shifting conceptions of the conferral of citizenship in many Western nations from a notion of new citizens gaining legal and political rights to a concept through which becoming a naturalized citizen meant adopting a nation's particular way of life and embracing a set of core national values (Allison; Grattan; Johnson). In Australia, these values were defined as a set of principles based around liberal-democratic notions of freedom, equality, the rule of law and tolerance and promoted as "central to Australia remaining a stable, prosperous and peaceful community" (DIC 5). The Howard government believed that social cohesion was threatened by the differences emanating from recent arrivals, particularly non-Christian and non-white arrivals who did not share Australian values. These threats were contextualized through such incidents as asylum seekers allegedly throwing children overboard, the Cronulla Beach riots in 2005 and terrorist attacks close to home in Bali. Adopting Australian values was promoted as the solution to this crisis of difference. In this way, the Australian values promoted through the Australian citizenship test were allotted "a reforming role" whilst migrants and their differences were targeted as "objects of reform" (Bennett 105). Reform would be achieved by prospective citizens engaging freely in the ethical conduct of self-study of the history and values contained in the citizenship resource booklet. With some notable exceptions (see e.g. Lake and Tavan), inclusion of historical content in the test received less public scrutiny than Australian values. This is despite the fact that 37 per cent of the booklet's content was dedicated to Australian history compared to only 7 per cent dedicated to Australian values. This is also remarkable since previously, media and scholarly attention over the preceding two decades had agonised over how British colonisation and indigenous dispossession were to be represented in Australian public institutions. Popularly known as the history wars, these debates now seemed irrelevant for regulating the conduct of new citizens. The Year of the Apology: The End of the History Wars? There was also a burgeoning feeling among the broader community that a truce was in sight in the history wars (cf. Riley; Throsby). This view was supported by the outcome of the November 2007 federal election when the Howard government was defeated after eleven years in office. John Howard had been a key player in the history wars, intervening in decisions as wide ranging as the management of national museums and the preparation of high school history curricula. In his final year as prime minister, Howard became involved with overseeing what historical content was to be included in Becoming an Australian Citizen (cf. Andrews; Hirst). This had a lasting impact as even after Howard's electoral defeat, the Australian citizenship test and its accompanying resource booklet still remained in use for another two years as the essential guide that was to inform test candidates on how to be model Australian citizens. Whilst Howard's test was retained Kevin Rudd made the official Apology to the Stolen Generation as one of his first acts as prime minister in February 2008. His electoral victory was heralded as the coming of "a new intellectual culture" with "deep thinking and balanced analysis" (Nile). The Apology was also celebrated in both media and academic circles as the beginning of the process of reconciliation for both relations with indigenous and non-indigenous Australians as well as "reconciling" the controversies in history that had plagued Howard's prime ministership. In popular culture, too, the end of the history wars seemed imminent. In film, the Apology was celebrated with the release of Australia in November of that same year. Luhrmann's film became a box office hit that was later taken up by Tourism Australia to promote the nation as a desirable destination for international tourists. Langton praised it as an "eccentrically postmodern account of a recent frontier" that "has leaped over the ruins of the 'history wars' and given Australians a new past" and concluded that the film presented "an alternative history from the one John Howard and his followers constructed" (12). Similar appraisals had been made of the Australian citizenship test as the author of the historical content in the resource booklet, John Hirst, revealed that the final version of A Story of Australia "was not John Howard's and was organised contrary to his declared preference for narrative" (35). Hirst is a conservative historian who was employed by the Howard government to write "the official history of Australia" (28) for migrants and who had previously worked on other projects initiated by the Howard government, including the high school history curriculum review known as the History Summit in 2006. In an article entitled Australia: The Official History and published in The Monthly of that very same year as the Apology, Hirst divulged how in writing A Story of Australia for the citizenship resource booklet, his aim was to be "fair-minded and balanced" (31). He claimed to do this by detailing what he understood as the "two sides" in Australia's historical and political controversies relating to "Aboriginal affairs" (31), known more commonly as the history wars. Hirst's resolve was to "report the position of the two sides" (31), choosing to briefly focus on the views of historian Henry Reynolds and the political scientist Robert Manne on the one side, as well as presenting the conservative views of journalists Keith Windshuttle and Andrew Bolt on the other side (31-32). Hirst was undoubtedly referring to the two sides in the history wars that are characterised by on the one hand, commentators who believe that the brutal impact of British colonisation on indigenous peoples should be acknowledged whilst those on the other who believe that Australians should focus on celebrating their nation's relatively "peaceful past". Popularly characterised as the black armband view against the white blindfold view of Australian history, this definition does not capture the complexities, ruptures and messiness of Australia's contested past or of the debates that surround it. Hirst's categorisation, is rather problematic; while Windshuttle and Bolt's association is somewhat understandable considering their shared support in denying the existence of the Stolen Generation and massacres of indigenous communities, the association of Reynolds with Manne is certainly contestable and can be viewed as a simplistic grouping together of the "bleeding hearts" in discourses surrounding Australian history. As with the film Australia, Hirst wanted to be "the recorder of myth and memory and not simply the critical historian" (32). Unlike the film Australia, Hirst remained committed to a particular view of the discipline of history that was committed to notions of objectivity and authenticity, stating that he "was not writing this history to embody (his) own views" (31) but rather, his purpose was to introduce to new citizens what he thought captured "what Australians of today knew and valued and celebrated in their history" (32). The textual analysis that follows will illustrate that despite the declaration of a "balanced" view of Australian history being produced for migrant consumption and the call for a truce in the history wars, A Story of Australia still reflected the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative that was not concerned with recognising any side of history that dealt with the fatal impact of colonialism in stories of Australia. Disrupting the Two Sides of History The success of Australia was built on lands taken from Aboriginal people after European settlement in 1788 (DIC 32). [...]The Aboriginal people were not without friends […]. Governor Macquarie (1810-1821) took a special interest in them, running a school for their children and offering them land for farming. But very few Aboriginal people were willing to move into European society; they were not very interested in what the Europeans had to offer. (DIC 32) Despite its author's protestations against a narrative format, A Story of Australia is written as a thematic narrative that is mainly concerned with describing a nation's trajectory towards progress. It includes the usual primary school project heroes of European explorers and settlers, all of them men: Captain James Cook, Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie (17-18). It privileges a British heritage and ignores the multicultural make-up of the Australian population. In this Australian story, the convict settlers are an important factor in nation building as they found "new opportunities in this strange colony" (18) and "the ordinary soldier, the digger is a national hero" (21). Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, are described in the past tense as part of pre-history having "hunter-gatherer traditions" (32), whose culture exists today only in spectacle and who have only themselves to blame for their marginalisation by refusing the help of the white settlers. Most notable in this particular version of history are the absent stories and absent characters; there is little mention of the achievements of women and nation-building is presented as an exclusively masculine enterprise. There is also scarce mention of the contribution of migrants. Also absent is any mention of the colonisation of the Australian continent that dispossessed its Indigenous peoples. For instance, the implementation of the assimilation policy that required the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families is not even named as the Stolen Generation in the resource booklet, and the fight for native land rights encapsulated in the historic Mabo decision of 1992 is referred to as merely a "separatist policy" (33). In this way, it cannot be claimed that this is a balanced portrayal of Australia's past even by Hirst's own standards for it is difficult to locate the side represented by Reynolds and Manne. Once again, comparisons with the film Australia are useful. Although praised for raising "many thorny issues" relating to "national legitimacy and Aboriginal sovereignty" (Konishi and Nugent), Ashenden concludes that the film is "a mix of muttering, avoidance of touchy topics, and sporadic outbursts". Hogan also argues that the film Australia is "an exercise in national wish fulfillment, staged as a high budget, unabashedly commercial and sporadically ironic spectacle" that "offers symbolic absolution for the violence of colonialism" (63). Additionally, Hirst's description of a "successful" nation being built on the "uncultivated" indigenous lands suggests that colonisation was necessary and unavoidable if Australia was to progress into a civilised nation. Both Hirst's A Story of Australia and his Australia: The Official History share more than just the audacious appropriation of a proper noun with the film Australia as these cultural texts grant prominence to the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative of Australian history while playing down the unpalatable episodes, making any prospective citizen who does not accept these "balanced" versions of historical truths as deviant and unworthy of becoming an Australian citizen. Our Australian Story: Reconciling the Fatal Impact The Australian citizenship test and its accompanying booklet, Becoming an Australian Citizen were replaced in October 2009 with a revised test and a new booklet entitled, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. The Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee deemed the 2007 original test to be "flawed, intimidating to some and discriminatory" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 3). It replaced mandatory knowledge of Australian values with that of the Citizenship Pledge and determined that the subject of Australian history, although "nice-to-know" was not essential for assessing the suitability of the conferral of Australian citizenship. History content is now included in the new booklet in the non-testable section under the more inclusive title of Our Australian Story. This particular version of history now names the Stolen Generation, includes references to Australia's multicultural make up and even recognises some of the fatal effects of British colonisation. The Apology features prominently over three long paragraphs (71) and Indigenous dispossession is now described under the title of Fatal Impact as follows: The early governors were told not to harm the Aboriginal people, but the British settlers moved onto Aboriginal land and many Aboriginal people were killed. Settlers were usually not punished for committing these crimes. (58) So does this change in tone in the official history in the resource booklet for prospective citizens "prove" that the history wars are over? This more conciliatory version of Australia's past is still not the "real proof" that the history wars are over for despite broadening its categories of what constitutes as historical truth, these truths still privilege an exclusive white perspective. For example, in the new resource booklet, detail on the Stolen Generation is included as a relevant historical event in relation to what the office of Prime Minister, the Bringing Them Home Report and the Official Apology have achieved for Indigenous Australians and for the national identity, stating that "the Sorry speech was an important step forward for all Australians" (71). Perhaps then, we need to discard this way of thinking that frames the past as an ethical struggle between right and wrong and a moral battle between victors and losers. If we cease thinking of our nation's history as a battleground between celebrators and mourners and stop framing our national identity in terms of achievers and those who were not interested in building the nation, then we recognise that these "war" discourses are only the products of "games of truth" invented by governments, expert historians and their institutions. In this way, official texts can produce the possibility for a range of players from new directions to participate in what content can be included as historical truths in Australian stories and what is possible in productions of official Australian identities. The Australian Citizenship Review Committee understood this potential impact as it has recommended "the government commit to reviewing the content of the book at regular intervals given the evolving nature of Australian society" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 25). In disrupting the self-evident notion of a balanced history of facts with its evocation of an equal society and by exposing how governmental institutions have used these texts as instruments of social governance (cf. Bennett), we can come to understand that there are other ways of being Australian and alternative perspectives on Australian history. The production of official histories can work towards producing a "curative science" that heals the fatal impact of the past. The impact of this kind of cultural research should be directed towards the discourse of history wars. In this way, history becomes not a battlefield but "a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes" (Foucault 90) which has the capacity to transform Australian society into a society inclusive of all indigenous, non-indigenous and migrant citizens and which can work towards reconciliation of the nation's history, and perhaps, even of its people. References Allison, Lyn. "Citizenship Test Is the New Aussie Cringe." The Drum. ABC News. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-09-28/citizenship-test-is-the-new-aussie-cringe/683634›. Andrews, Kevin. "Citizenship Test Resource Released." MediaNet Press Release Wire 26 Aug. 2007: 1. Ashenden, Dean. "Luhrmann, Us, and Them." Inside Story 18 Dec. 2008. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/luhrmann-us-and-them/›. Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee. Moving Forward... Improving Pathways to Citizenship. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Australian Government. Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. Belconnen: National Communications Branch of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2009.Bennett, Tony. Culture: A Reformer's Science. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998. DIC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Becoming an Australian Citizen: Citizenship. Your Commitment to Australia. Canberra, 2007.Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100. Grattan, Michelle. "Accept Australian Values or Get Out." The Age 25 Aug. 2005: 1. Hirst, John. "Australia: The Official History." The Monthly 6 Feb. 2008: 28-35. "Howard Defends Citizenship Test." The Age 11 Dec. 2006. Howard, John. "A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006 - Address to the National Press Club, 25 January." PM's News Room: Speeches. Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Johnson, Carol. "John Howard's 'Values' and Australian Identity." Australian Journal of Political Science 42.2 (2007): 195-209. Konishi, Shino, and Maria Nugent. "Reviewing Indigenous History in Baz Luhrmann's Australia." Inside Story 4 Dec. 2009. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/reviewing-indigenous-history-in-baz-luhrmanns-australia/›. Lake, Marilyn. "Wasn't This a Government Obsessed with Historical 'Truth'?" The Age 29 Oct. 2007: 13. Langton, Marcia. "Faraway Downs Fantasy Resonates Close to Home." Sunday Age 23 November 2008: 12. Nile, Richard. "End of the Culture Wars." Richard Nile Blog. The Australian 28 Nov. 2007. Riley, Mark. "Sorry, But the PM Says the Culture Wars Are Over." Sydney Morning Herald 10 Sep. 2003: 1. Tavan, Gwenda. "Testing Times: The Problem of 'History' in the Howard Government's Australian Citizenship Test." Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Neumann, Klaus and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: ANU E P, 2009. Throsby, David. "A Truce in the Culture Wars." Sydney Morning Herald 26 Apr. 2008: 32. Weeks, Jeffrey. "Foucault for Historians." History Workshop 14 (Autumn 1982): 106-19.

Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up (Anderson and Bows). And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable (Barry, Ecological Modernisation; Adger et al.). Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses. With its antecedent in sustainable development discourse, by emphasising technological innovation, eco-efficiency, and markets, EM purports to transcend the familiar dichotomy between the economy and the environment (Hajer; Barry, ‘Towards’). It rebuts the 1970s “limits to growth” perspective and affirms that “the only possible way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process of modernisation” (Mol qtd. in York and Rosa 272, emphasis in original). Its narrative is one in which the “dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar transforms into an ecological butterfly” (Huber, qtd. in Spaargaren and Mol). How is it that a discourse notoriously quiet on endless growth, consumer culture, and the offshoring of dirty production could become the cutting edge of environmental policy? To answer this question we need to examine the discursive and ideological effects of EM discourse. In particular, we must analyse the strategies that work to continually naturalise dominant institutions and create the appearance that they are fit to respond to climate change. Co-opting Environmental Discourse Two features characterise state environmental discourse in EM nations: an almost universal recognition of the problem, and the reassurance that present institutions are capable of addressing it. The key organs of neoliberal capitalism—markets and states—have “gone green”. In boardrooms, in advertising and public relations, in governments, and in international fora, climate change is near the top of the agenda. While EM is the latest form of this discourse, early hints can be seen in President Nixon’s embrace of the environment and Margaret Thatcher’s late-1980s green rhetoric. More recently, David Cameron led a successful Conservative Party “detoxification” program with an ostentatious rhetorical strategy featuring the electoral slogan, “Vote blue, go green” (Carter). We can explain this transformation with reference to a key shift in the discursive history of environmental politics. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s brought a new symbolic field, a new discourse, into the public sphere. Yet by the 1990s the movement was no longer the sole proprietor of its discourse (Eder 203). It had lost control of its symbols. Politicians, corporations, and media outlets had assumed a dominant role in efforts to define “what climate change was and what it meant for the world” (Carvalho and Burgess 1464). I contend that the dramatic rise to prominence of environmental issues in party-political discourse is not purely due to short-term tactical vote-winning strategy. Nor is it the case that governments are finally, reluctantly waking up to the scientific reality of ecological degradation. Instead, they are engaged in a proactive attempt to redefine the contours of green critique so as to take the discourse onto territory in which established interests already control the high ground. The result is the defusing of the oppositional element of political ecology (Dryzek et al. 665–6), as well as social critique in general: what I term the gentrification of climate change. If we view environmentalism as, at least partially, a cultural politics in which contested definitions of problem is the key political battleground, we can trace how dominant interests have redefined the contours of climate change discourse. We can reveal the extent to which environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted. The key feature of this strategy is to present climate change as a mere aberration against a background of business-as-usual. The solutions that are presented are overwhelmingly extensions of existing institutions: bringing CO2 into the market, the optimistic development of new techno-scientific solutions to climate problems, extending regulatory regimes into hitherto overlooked domains. The agent of this co-optive strategy is not the state, industry, capital, or any other manifest actor, but a “historic bloc” cutting across divisions between society, politics, and economy (Laclau and Mouffe 42). The agent is an abstract coalition that is definable only to the extent that its strategic interests momentarily intersect at one point or another. The state acts as a locus, but the bloc is itself not reducible to the state. We might also think of the agent as an assemblage of conditions of social reproduction, in which dominant social, political, and economic interests have a stake. The bloc has learned the lesson that to be a player in a definitional battle one must recognise what is being fought over. Thus, exhortations to address climate change and build a green economy represent the first stage of the definitional battle for climate change: an attempt to enter the contest. In practical terms, this has manifest as the marking out of a self-serving division between action and inaction. Articulated through a binary modality climate change becomes something we either address/act on/tackle—or not. Under such a grammar even the most meagre efforts can be presented as “tackling climate change.” Thus Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 on a platform of “action on climate change”, and he frequently implored that Australia would “do its bit” on climate change during his term. Tony Blair is able to declare that “tackling climate change… need not limit greater economic opportunity” and mean it in all sincerity (Barry, ‘Towards’ 112). So deployed, this binary logic minimises climate change to a level at which existing institutions are validated as capable of addressing the “problem,” and the government legitimised for its moral, green stand. The Hegemonic Articulation of Climate Change The historic bloc’s main task in the high-ground strategy is to re-articulate the threat in terms of its own hegemonic discourse: market economics. The widely publicised and highly influential Stern Review, commissioned by the British Government, is the standard-bearer of how to think about climate change from an economic perspective. It follows a supremely EM logic: economy and ecology have been reconciled. The Review presents climate change, famously, as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” (Stern et al. viii). The structuring horizon of the Stern Review is the correction of this failure, the overcoming of what is perceived to be not a systemic problem requiring a reappraisal of social institutions, but an issue of carbon pricing, technology policy, and measures aimed at “reducing barriers to behavioural change”. Stern insists that “we can be ‘green’ and grow. Indeed, if we are not ‘green’, we will eventually undermine growth, however measured” (iv). He reassures us that “tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries” (viii). Yet Stern’s seemingly miraculous reconciliation of growth with climate change mitigation in fact implies a severe degree of warming. The Stern Review aims to stabilise carbon dioxide equivalent concentrations at 550ppm, which would correspond to an increase of global temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. As Foster et al. note, this scenario, from an orthodox economist who is perceived as being pro-environment, is ecologically unsustainable and is viewed as catastrophic by many scientists (Foster, Clark, and York 1087–88). The reason Stern gives for not attempting deeper cuts is that they “are unlikely to be economically viable” (Stern et al. 231). In other words, the economy-ecology articulation is not a meeting of equals. Central to the policy prescriptions of EM is the marketising of environmental “bads” like carbon emissions. Carbon trading schemes, held in high esteem by moderate environmentalists and market economists alike, are the favoured instruments for such a task. Yet, in practice, these schemes can do more harm than good. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as a way of addressing the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” it represented Australia’s “initial foray into ecological modernisation” (Curran 211). Denounced for its weak targets and massive polluter provisions, the Scheme was opposed by environmental groups, the CSIRO, and even the government’s own climate change advisor (Taylor; Wilkinson). While the Scheme’s defenders claimed it was as a step in the right direction, these opponents believed it would hurt more than help the environment. A key strategy in enshrining a particular hegemonic articulation is the repetition and reinforcement of key articulations in a way which is not overtly ideological. As Spash notes of the Stern Review, while it does connect to climate change such issues as distributive justice, value and ethical conflicts, intergenerational issues, this amounts to nothing but lip service given the analysis comes pre-formed in an orthodox economics mould. The complex of interconnected issues raised by climate change is reduced to the impact of carbon control on consumption growth (see also Swyngedouw and While, Jonas, and Gibbs). It is as if the system of relations we call global capitalism—relations between state and industry, science and technology, society and nature, labour and capital, North and South—are irrelevant to climate change, which is nothing but an unfortunate over-concentration of certain gases. In redrawing the discursive boundaries in this way it appears that climate change is a temporary blip on the path to a greener prosperity—as if markets and capitalism merely required minor tinkering to put them on the green-growth path. Markets are constituted as legitimate tools for managing climate change, in concert with regulation internalised within neoliberal state competition (While, Jonas, and Gibbs 81). The ecology-economy articulation both marketises “green,” and “greens” markets. Consonant with the capitalism-environment articulation is the prominence of the sovereign individual. Both the state and the media work to reproduce subjects largely as consumers (of products and politics) rather than citizens, framing environmental responsibility as the responsibility to consume “wisely” (Carvalho). Of course, what is obscured in this “self-greening” discourse is the culpability of consumption itself, and of a capitalist economy based on endless consumption growth, exploitation of resources, and the pursuit of new markets. Greening Technology EM also “greens” technology. Central to its pro-growth ethos is the tapering off of ecosystem impacts through green technologies like solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. While green technologies are preferable to dependence upon resource-intensive technologies of oil and coal, that they may actually deliver on such promises has been shown to be contingent upon efficiency outstripping economic growth, a prospect that is dubious at best, especially considering the EM settlement is one in which any change to consumption practices is off the agenda. As Barry and Paterson put it, “all current experience suggests that, in most areas, efficiency gains per unit of consumption are usually outstripped by overall increases in consumption” (770). The characteristic ideological manoeuvre of foregrounding non-representative examples is evident here: green technologies comprise a tiny fraction of all large-scale deployed technologies, yet command the bulk of attention and work to cast technology generally in a green light. It is also false to assume that green technologies do not put their own demands on material resources. Deploying renewables on the scale that is required to address climate change demands enormous quantities of concrete, steel, glass and rare earth minerals, and vast programs of land-clearing to house solar and wind plants (Charlton 40). Further, claims that economic growth can become detached from ecological disturbance are premised on a limited basket of ecological indicators. Corporate marketing strategies are driving this green-technology articulation. While a single advertisement represents an appeal to consume an individual commodity, taken collectively advertising institutes a culture of consumption. Individually, “greenwash” is the effort to spin one company’s environmental programs out of proportion while minimising the systemic degradation that production entails. But as a burgeoning social institution, greenwash constitutes an ideological apparatus constructing industry as fundamentally working in the interests of ecology. In turn, each corporate image of pristine blue skies, flourishing ecosystems, wind farms, and solar panels constitutes a harmonious fantasy of green industry. As David Mackay, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government has pointed out, the political rhetoric of green technology lulls people into a false sense of security (qtd. in Charlton 38). Again, a binary logic works to portray greener technologies—such as gas, “clean coal”, and biomass combustion—as green. Rescuing Legitimacy There are essentially two critical forces that are defused in the high-ground strategy’s definitional project. The first is the scientific discourse which maintains that the measures proposed by leading governments are well below what is required to reign in dangerous climate change. This seems to be invisible not so much because it is radical but because it is obscured by the uncertainties in which climate science is couched, and by EM’s noble-sounding rhetoric. The second is the radical critique which argues that climate change is a classic symptom of an internal contradiction of a capitalist economy seeking endless growth in a finite world. The historic bloc’s successful redefinition strategy appears to jam the frequency of serious, scientifically credible climate discourse, yet at the level of hegemonic struggle its effects range wider. In redefining climate change and other key signifiers of green critique – “environment”, “ecology”, “green”, “planet”—it expropriates key properties of its antagonist. Were it not that climate change is now defined on the cheery, reassuring ground of EM discourse, the gravity of the alarming—rather than alarmist (Risbey)—scientific discourse may just have offered radical critique the ammunition it needed to provoke society into serious deliberations over its socioeconomic path. Radical green critique is not in itself the chief enemy of the historic bloc. But it is a privileged element within antagonistic discourse and reinforces the critical element of the feminist, civil rights, and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this way ecology has tended to act as a nodal point binding general social critique: all of the other demands began to be inscribed with the green critique, just as the green critique became a metaphor for all of the others (Laclau). The metaphorical value of the green critique not only relates to the size and vibrancy of the movement—the immediate visibility of ecological destruction stood as a powerful symbol of the kernel of antagonistic politics: a sense that society had fundamentally gone awry. While green critique demands that progress should be conditional upon ecology, EM professes that progress is already green (Eder 217n). Thus the great win achieved by the high-ground strategy is not over radical green critique per se but over the shifting coalition that threatens its legitimacy. As Stavrakakis observes, what is novel about green discourse is nothing essential to the signifiers it deploys, but the way that a common signifier comes to stand in and structure the field as a whole – to serve as a nodal point. It has a number of signifiers: environmental sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and non-violence, all of which are “quilted” around the master-signifiers of “ecology”, “green”, or “planet”. While these master-signifiers are not unique to green ideology, what is unique is that they stand at the centre. But the crucial point to note about the green signifier at the heart of political ecology is that its value is accorded, in large part, through its negation of the dominant ideology. That is to say, it is not that green ideology stands as merely another way of mapping the social; rather, the master-signifier "green" contains an implicit refutation of the dominant social order. That “green” is now almost wholly evacuated of its radical connotations speaks to the effectiveness of the redefinitional effort.The historic bloc is aided in its efforts by the complexity of climate change. Such opacity is characteristic of contemporary risks, whose threats are mostly “a type of virtual reality, real virtuality” (Beck 213). The political struggle then takes place at the level of meaning, and power is played out in a contest to fix the definitions of key risks such as climate change. When relations of (risk) definition replace relations of production as the site of the effects of power, a double mystification ensues and shifts in the ground on which the struggle takes place may go unnoticed. Conclusion By articulating ecology with markets and technology, EM transforms the threat of climate change into an opportunity, a new motor of neoliberal legitimacy. The historic bloc has co-opted environmentalist discourse to promote a gentrified climate change which present institutions are capable of managing: “We are at the fork in the road between order and catastrophe. Stick with us. 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