Terri E. Givens

Communication and Political Mobilization: Digital Media and the Organization of Anti-Iraq War Demonstrations in the U.S.

The speed and scale of mobilization in many contemporary protest events may reflect a transformation of movement organizations toward looser ties with members, enabling broader mobilization through the mechanism of dense individual-level political networks. This analysis explores the dynamics of this communication process in the case of U.S. protests against the Iraq war in 2003. We hypothesize that individual activists closest to the various sponsoring protest organizations were (a) disproportionately likely to affiliate with diverse political networks and (b) disproportionately likely to rely on digital communication media (lists, Web sites) for various types of information and action purposes. We test this model using a sample of demonstrators drawn from the United States protest sites of New York, San Francisco, and Seattle and find support for our hypotheses.

The radical right gender gap

In this article, the author argues that a gender gap exists in the vote for the radical right and that this gender gap can be explained using techniques drawn from the literature on mainstream gender gaps. The analysis emphasizes the impact of the immigration issue on the vote for the radical right. Logit and regression analysis are used to determine what can be explained by structural, situational, and political factors versus gender alone in France, Germany, and Austria. It is found that there is a gender gap, but it varies across the three cases; that attitudes toward political issues, particularly immigration, have a disproportionate impact on the probability of voting radical right but not on the gender gap specifically; and that there is a difference between men and women on the immigration issue, and blue-collar workers are more likely to be anti-immigrant than those in other sectors.

Re-engineering Legal Opportunity Structures in the European Union? The Starting Line Group and the Politics of the Racial Equality Directive

Using the Racial Equality Directive to test competing explanations concerning the types of actors who seek to liberalize legal opportunity structures, we find that it was pursued by a coalition of societal interests working through European Union institutions that sought reforms intended to facilitate strategic litigation.

Mentoring and African-American Political Scientists

One of the main goals of the Committee on the Status of Blacks (CSB) is to assess how well African-American political scientists are faring in the discipline. Given the nature of the academy, we believe an important element for success is effective mentoring. Our position is supported by the American Political Science Association (APSA) which established a Task Force on Mentoring in 2002 to address issues facing underrepresented groups within the profession. One of the initiatives is a Mentor Database designed to connect interested minority graduate students and minority faculty with political scientists who are willing to share their experiences and knowledge and give their advice and council to participants. The Committee is supportive of this initiative whose goal is to help underrepresented groups have satisfying professional careers.

Gendered Jobs: Integrating Immigrants versus Controlling Immigration in the European Union

Over the past fifteen years, concerns related to immigration and the integration of immigrants have risen to the forefront of European politics (e.g., Givens and Luedtke 2005; Guild, Groenendijk, and Carrera 2009). As anti-immigrant nationalist parties have gained ground, European governments have closed borders and even deported immigrants en masse . At the same time, countries throughout the European Union (EU) have increasingly stressed the importance of the social, economic, and cultural integration of immigrants. As immigration has become increasingly politicized across Europe, many governments have restructured themselves. Some countries have created new cabinet ministries designed to focus on immigration and immigrant integration. Other countries have assigned new immigration-related tasks to existing political bodies. In the face of new or radically transformed governance structures, one important question emerges: To what extent do women serve in immigration ministry leadership?

The Local Dimension of Migration Policymaking Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation

with this particular comparison. A huge effort has been invested in the task of mapping and interpreting the different traditions of lobbying regulation. We are left, however, with the questions: why are different regulatory approaches adopted, and why are different levels of regulation in place? These are indeed important questions and, in fact, often offer a conundrum in the study of interest groups more generally. Are differences in formal regulation attributable to some regulators being just faster or smarter than others? Chari, Hogan and Murphy do not discuss this complex issue in a very profound manner, however. They could, for instance, have paid more attention to the key properties of the interest group system. Indeed, taken in isolation and combined, the number, variation and hierarchy of the so-called lobby actors seem to be of tremendous importance. In the US an enormous number of actors are claiming to represent many different interests; their variation is huge, with single corporations and professional lobbyists in strong positions; and there exists a weakly developed hierarchy of actors without clear divisions of labour. As a consequence, public institutions in the US must relate to a much more changing kaleidoscope of interest representation than those in Europe, where a smaller number of lobby actors, characterised by less diversity and stronger coordination in the form of established hierarchies, have prevailed. In turn, government agencies meet different challenges. Although formal lobbying regulation is not strongly in place, historically important norms have developed, but the aspect of norms is not appreciated in this book. In effect, the employment of specific tools becomes a real challenge when new and stronger demands for regulation emerge; but as the book demonstrates, many actors have a positive attitude in jurisdictions with weak regulation. Thus, new regulation is likely to be implemented in different ways, under different labels, and not necessarily as ‘lobbying’ regulation per se.