No abstract

A central theme in media research has been the transition from traditional broadcast media, like television and radio, to social media and streaming services. For both researchers and practitioners in the field, a crucial concern has been how to understand the emerging forms of flexibility and interactivity that characterize the use of new media platforms. This article adds to this work by analyzing new viewing and audience practices of the streaming platform Twitch, addressing how emergent ways of viewing and engaging with broadcasts both challenges and revitalizes established concepts from television audience studies. For some years, researchers and media analytics have been discussing to which extent Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and other on-demand streaming services represents the death of linear-TV (see e.g. Lotz, 2014Lotz, , 2017Buonanno, 2016). Conventional wisdom dictates that only sports and other great events will uphold the flow, linearity and liveness of traditional television (see e.g. Stover and Moner, 2014;Esler, 2016;Dhoest and Simons, 2016). However, our analysis shows how linear-TV is re-emerging in other, novel forms as well. Central to the analysis is our concepts of "spatial switching" and "affective switching", which is used to illuminate the ways in which Twitch practices and infrastructures introduces new dimensions of flexibility, convenience and user-control to our understandings of the concepts of "flow", "liveness" and "linear-TV".

Why do certain ministers remain in their post for years while others have their time in office cut short? Drawing on the broader literature on portfolio allocation, this article argues that the saliency of individual portfolios shapes ministerial turnover. The main argument is that ministerial dismissals are less likely to occur the higher the saliency attributed to the ministerial portfolio since ministers appointed to important posts are more likely to have been through extensive screening before appointment. Importantly, it is also posited in the article that the effect of portfolio salience is conditioned by government approval ratings: when government ratings are on the decline, prime ministers are less likely to reshuffle or fire important ministers than when approval ratings are improving. To test these claims, Cox proportional hazards models are applied to a new dataset on ministerial turnover in Scandinavia during the postwar period. The results strongly support the proposition that portfolio saliency matters for ministerial survival, and that this effect is moderated by government popularity.

The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics. The authors use comparative data on portfolio design reforms in nine Western European countries since the 1970s to demonstrate how the design of government portfolios changes over time. Specifically, they show that portfolios are changed frequently (on average about once a year) and that such shifts are more likely after changes in the prime ministership or the party composition of the government. These findings suggest a political logic behind these reforms based on the preferences and power of political parties and politicians. They have major implications for the study of institutional design and coalition politics.

Abstract:The dataset of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) is one the most known and often used datasets in comparative studies of Western Europe. However, the Danish part of the data is very problematic. On average, nearly a third of the content of the Danish manifestos is deemed impossible to code. A close examination of the Danish data reveals large variation in the number of coded sentences across time and parties. An analysis of the manifestos on which the coding is based sets all the warning lights flashing. Firstly, not all manifestos are in fact manifestos; a number consists of other political texts, i.e. speeches, drafts or even stem from different elections, for instance municipal manifestos masquerading as national manifestos. Secondly, the large variation in the length of the manifestos across time suggests that the information derived from them is not readily comparable. This leads to a distorted picture of the positions of the Danish parties. The conclusion of this paper is that in order for the Danish part of the CMP dataset to become more trustworthy it is necessary to search the archives, find the actual manifestos and recode them.