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This is a manifesto—setting out the framework for the appropriate study of religious thought and practice in the context of the modern university.

Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or “manifestos,” which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process obscures the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter’s single choice of party or candidate. We address this problem through a conjoint experiment based on the actual party manifestos in Japan’s 2014 House of Representatives election. By juxtaposing sets of issue positions as hypothetical manifestos and asking respondents to choose one, our study identifies the effects of specific positions on the overall assessment of manifestos, heterogeneity in preferences among subgroups of respondents, and the popularity ranking of manifestos. Our analysis uncovers important discrepancies between voter preferences and the portrayal of the election results by politicians and the media as providing a policy mandate to the Liberal Democratic Party, underscoring the potential danger of inferring public opinion from election outcomes alone.

Inspired by Lipset and Rokkan, the field of political science has primarily focused on party oppositions as a derivative of historically anchored conflicts among social groups. Yet parties are not mere social mirrors; they are also active interpreters of social context. In a globalized era they deploy conflicting frames on how solidarity may be preserved, as recent work on populist welfare chauvinism shows. However, the role of party political agency in framing solidarity lacks an overarching framework. This article therefore proposes a Durkheimian model that takes the integrative pole of the conflict–integration dialectic seriously and distinguishes among group-based, compassionate, exchange-based and empathic frames. The authors test this solidarity framework in Flanders (Belgium) – a good case study due to its fragmented party system and increasing economic and cultural openness. The content analyses of party manifestos presented here suggest that a solidarity-based deductive approach to studying partisan competition is relevant because partisan differentiation along solidarity lines is growing; this evolution converges with similar inductive expert-based and issue-based findings.

The implications of rising parliamentary representation of populist parties have been thoroughly studied but little is known about the impact of populist state leaders on party positions. In this article, we study mainstream parties' strategic responses when a populist takes over as the leader of a nation. We use content-analytical data and large language modelling to measure positions expressed in manifestos from parties from 51 democracies between 1989 and 2018. Employing methods for causal inference from observational data, we find that right-wing populist state leaders induce mainstream parties to differentiate their positions on multiculturalism, possibly leading to polarization of the party system. Under left-wing populist leaders, mainstream parties adopt more homogenous or differentiated positions, depending on the policy category and other contextual factors. Parties are generally more responsive in emerging than advanced countries and in presidential than parliamentary systems.

According to spatial models of elections, citizen perceptions of party policy positions are a key determinant of voting choices. Yet recent scholarship from Europe suggests that voters do not adjust their perceptions according to what parties advocate in their campaigns. This article argues that voters develop a more accurate understanding of parties’ ideological positions following a leadership change because a new leader increases the credibility of party policy offerings. Focusing on Western European parties in the 1979–2012 period, it shows that having a new leader is a necessary condition for voters to more accurately perceive the left–right placements of opposition parties. Voters do not use party platforms to form perceptions of incumbent parties’ positions, regardless of whether the leader is new or veteran. These results have important implications for models of party competition and democratic representation.

Do parties listen to their voters? This article addresses this important question by moving beyond position congruence to explore whether parties respond to voters’ issue priorities. It argues that political parties respond to voters in their election manifestos, but that their responsiveness varies across different party types: namely, that large parties are more responsive to voters’ policy priorities, while government parties listen less to voters’ issue demands. The study also posits that niche parties are not generally more responsive to voter demands, but that they are more responsive to the concerns of their supporters in their owned issue areas. To test these theoretical expectations, the study combines data from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on voters’ policy priorities from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various national election studies across eighteen European democracies in sixty-three elections from 1972–2011. Our findings have important implications for understanding political representation and democratic linkage.

It is probably in the nature of manifestos to be one-eyed and just a little authoritarian: they are rallying cries to lead soldiers into battle. For that reason, history is a subject almost uniquely ill-suited to manifestos. Historians are not soldiers; they don't fight on a single front, and--at a time when, more than ever before, historians have been operating in an impressive diversity of modes and theaters--they certainly don't need to be led in one direction. In their critique, Cohen and Mandler do not dispute the validity of Guldi and Armitage's favored modes of historiography. The latter have both worked in a variety of time scales (long, short, and medium). They view quantitative and digital methods as useful tools in the historian's repertoire and use them in their own practice (as well as in this critique). They are entirely in favor of the social engagement of scholars outside the academy.

Black communities bear a hugely disproportionate share of Canada’s HIV epidemic. Black persons annually represent up to one quarter of new diagnoses, while in contrast, diagnoses have been falling among white Canadians for the past two decades. There has been a notable lack of urgency and serious debate about why the trend persists and what to do about it. For too long, public institutions have reproduced hegemonic white supremacy and profoundly mischaracterized Black life. Consequently, Black communities suffer policies and programs that buttress systemic anti-Black racism, socio-economically disenfranchise Black communities, and in the process marginalize knowledgeable, experienced, and creative Black stakeholders. The Interim Committee on HIV among Black Canadian Communities (ICHBCC) is a group of Black researchers, service providers, and community advocates who came together in early 2022 to interject urgency to the HIV crisis facing Black communities. Specifically, the ICHBCC advocates for self-determined community leadership of research, policies, and programs, backed by access to appropriate resources, to change the trajectory of HIV among Black Canadian communities. In this article, we introduce the wider community to the Black HIV Manifesto that we developed in 2022.

How does parties' use of moral rhetoric affect voter behavior? Prior comparative party research has studied party positions without much attention to how parties explain and justify their positions. Drawing insights from political and moral psychology, largue that moral rhetoric mobilizes copartisan voters by activating positive emotions about their partisan preference. I expect this to hold among copartisans who are exposed to party rhetoric. To test my argument, I measure moral rhetoric by text-analyzing party manifestos from six English-speaking democracies and measure mobilization using copartisan turnout in survey data. The results support my argument. Furthermore, I find evidence in support of the theoretical mechanism using survey experiments and panel survey data from Britain. The article shows that moral rhetoric is a party campaign frame that has important consequences for voter behavior.

The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of living together. In considering how to enact multispecies worlds, we take inspiration from Indigenous and peasant movements across the globe as well as decolonial and postcolonial scholars. With decolonization as our principal political sensibility, we offer a manifesto for abundance and outline political strategies to reckon with colonial-capitalist ruins, enact pluriversality rather than universality, and recognize animal autonomy. We advance these strategies to support abundant socioecological futures.