1,721,078 research outputs found
Not Only Solitary Leaders at the Top: The Experience of Sharing Party Leadership
No full textCurrent research, especially in recent times, has recognized the centrality of party leaders and their individual characteristics (Blondel and Thiébault 2010; Musella 2018; Cross and Pilet 2015). As a consequence of the rise of some ‘personal’ parties controlled by their founders (from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to Macron’s En Marche) and of an increasing personalization within parties and political organizations, the attention has been especially directed towards vertical leadership, which implies just one leader at the top, rather than towards cases of leadership duos or teams (for an exception, see t’Hart and Walter 2014). However, one-chief leadership is not the only existing model of party governance neither the process of personalization involves necessarily just a single leader. The team leadership of Five Star Movement in Italy and the experience of co-leadership of Green parties in Germany, Belgium or in UK can be taken as examples of alternative models.
The paper will discuss the conceptual and theoretical bases to analyze those cases in which powers and responsibilities at the top level of party organizations and governments appear to be shared among different individuals rather than concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Drawing on the literature of organization theory (Pearce and Conger 2003; Alvarez and Svejenova 2005; de Voogt and Hommes 2007) the paper will analyze different concepts (co-leadership, team leadership, leadership duos, leadership couple, shared leadership, etc.) and their existing and/or potential applications to the political field.
The paper aims, firstly, at highlighting some key dimensions – for example, complementarity, division of labor, and role differentiation – to be used to distinguish different types of political leadership. Secondly, the paper intends to develop a set of indicators covering both communication and organizational aspects. As regards the former aspect, the goal will be to assess to what extent the communication is leader-centered and how many actors are in charge of it; as regards the latter, the focus will be both on the degree of leaders’ autonomy in the party governance and the power distribution in the executives. Finally, the paper will consider some key issues about the selection of co-leaders, the relationship between them and with their collaborators and staffs, the performance and durability of their association
The Five-Star Movement as a laboratory for leadership consolidation in populist digital parties
No full textDespite being a relatively young party, the Italian Five-Star Movement (M5S) has already experienced so many changes in its leadership arrangement that it may be seen as an ideal case study for studying leadership transformation and consolidation. What insights may derive from the M5S’s experience? And are they relevant to the new demands posed on leadership by the new times? Starting with the analysis of this case, the paper intends to focus on two main aspects that may be central to the study of leadership in the 21st century.
First, the party founded by the former comedian Beppe Grillo in collaboration with the ICT entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio has always adopted forms of collective leadership (Campus, Switek and Valbruzzi, in preparation). It emerged from the collaboration of a tandem of founders; after their departure, the M5S introduced a series of power-sharing arrangements. Therefore, it may help to understand if these leadership structures perform well and can be considered as real alternatives to individual leadership.
Second, M5S’s difficulties in adopting a stable leadership arrangement after the founding phase illustrate the issue of leadership succession in those ‘movement-parties’ (Kitschelt 2006) undergoing a process of institutionalization once the party obtains parliamentary representation and passes the ‘executive threshold’. However, in the case of the Five-Star Movement there are challenges that are absolutely peculiar to this new type of party. In fact, the M5S represents the prototype of what has been recently defined as a ‘digital party’ (Gerbaudo 2019), namely, a ‘digital native’ party organization that has been formed through the diffusion of new technologies. Unlike traditional party organizations, digital parties require the introduction of digital intermediaries into the structure of political parties to facilitate internal communication, engage in political decision-making and transform the overall experience of participation in political parties. In the case of the M5S, digital intermediation is provided by an external association headed by Davide Casaleggio, son of one of the party founders. Although this association operates outside the formal boundaries of the party organization, its control of some of the most crucial functions of the party affects the internal balance of power, the process of decision-making and the composition of the leadership structure.
Thus, the analysis of the M5S will provide new evidence on the transformation of the contemporary political leadership. And, even more importantly, it allows for better understanding the impact that digital technologies may have on leadership formation and consolidation even in cases of more traditional parties that, unlike the M5S, are provided with an organization on the ground, but are incorporating digital platforms as further operative tools
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Who Will Fix the Economy? Expectations and Trust in the European Institutions
No full textThe chapter is based on data from a large-scale internationally comparative research project that examined how Europeans understand the challenges facing the euro and workings of the EU and ECB through the news media of their countries. In carrying out the research, more than 10,000 articles from 40 newspapers in ten countries were analysed. These included the leading business/financial paper, the leading conservative and liberal papers, and the leading tabloid in each country.
If the press in different countries has different views on European institutions, the most salient result of our analysis is that there is an evident intra-country homogeneity; that is, all the coded newspapers belonging to the same country share similar attitudes. What emerges as predominant is the feeling that the way of looking at the EU is still forged by domestic predispositions and circumstances and, therefore, all the same-country newspapers tend to align around some general views. In other words, our results do not offer any evidence of the existence of a supranational European public media sphere forged by some types of newspapers or by ideological blocks
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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