Introduction

The emotion of nostalgia plays a vital role in the appeal, expression, and consequences of different forms of populism. As a response to the preceding chapters in this book, this chapter considers the issues of affect or emotion1 revealed as history mobilized by populists and populist movements and analyses the work that emotions perform in this process. The aim is to offer some thoughts on how we might constructively think about and analyse emotions in these contexts through considering critical notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘registers of engagement’. As the chapters in this book reveal, one of the defining features of populism is how it draws on the past to create, following Paul Taggart (2002), concepts of ‘heartland’ (Chapter 3), as well as the construction of historically situated undervalued and excluded ‘folk’ or ‘the people’ pitted against ‘elites’ (Mudde 2004; Chapters 1, 5, 7, 8, and 11), the utilization of historical mythologizing to solidify the peoples’ ‘hero’ (Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9), the legitimation of certain memory holders of ‘the people’ (Chapters 2 and 6), or, indeed, the disassociation of the present with the past to create historical alternatives (Chapter 10). The appeal to right-wing populism of revisionist, mythologized, or overly selective histories that avoid ambiguity and emphasize the positive, heroic, and patriotic or nationalistic pride is based on the emotional valence of these histories and the work they do in managing present-day emotions or affective states.

I focus on right-wing populism because, as Stuart Hall (1979) has observed, the right continues to be far more effective than the left in organizing populist politics. There are lessons to be learnt by the left in analysing how particular emotions, specifically nostalgia, are used, which can facilitate the development of ways to challenge right-wing populism. Indeed, the affective repertoires of populism and how and why emotions are managed and mobilized are significantly different between those who hold conservative or progressive ideological positions (Jost 2019). I do not equate populism with ideology and follow Ernesto Laclau's definition (2004, 2005) that populism is most usefully understood as a particular logic of politics. Nonetheless, understanding the ideological contexts and implications of how certain emotions are expressed and managed is essential for understanding their utility within right-wing populist movements.

In this chapter we revisit a hotly contested study on the effects of having LGBT parents. Critics identified many debatable modeling choices, mostly involving data processing decisions. We analyze how robust the original results are across 2.6 million model specifications. As we show, there was a lot more to learn about this study and the role that assumptions play in producing conclusion.

Japan is the world’s fourth-largest economy and a close ally of the United States. Yet its politics are highly anomalous: It is a democracy in which one party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wins nearly every election. Even an electoral reform, expected to bring about alternations in power between two large parties, has. The chapter uses data on the outcomes of every Lower House election held since the LDP’s inception in 1955 and public opinion surveys to flesh out the puzzle of LDP dominance. It surveys three explanations for this. One emphasizes structural features of the electoral systems Japan has used and explains how they have translated into advantages for the LDP. The other two probe the reasons why voters vote for the LDP. One holds that voters vote for the LDP because they prefer its policy positions, ideological orientation, leaders, or reputation for competence. The other holds that voters vote for the LDP because of the access to central government resources its politicians enjoy. This chapter explains how over time, real-world events and empirical studies have chipped away at the explanatory power of each account. This warrants another look at this question.

‘If you want to know what it is really like here you must come at night,’ I was often told when first getting to know the jhupri labourers. They spoke of the mess (jhamela) and the fighting (ganjam). The image they draw upon most to convey life here is the sight of labourers competing for work. By day the bazaar and adjacent avenue are clogged with imported Japanese cars, dilapidated buses, CNGs and rickshaws, all slowly inching forward in the shadows of the new metro rail, protesting each metre gained with a cacophony of horns. By late evening the traffic around Kawran Bazaar calms but is replaced with a different jostling for space. As labourers catch sight of arriving trucks, they speed their flat-backed rickshaw vans towards them. Rather than face forward, they often reverse, running while swivelling the handlebars so as to arrive ready to receive sacks. With neither brakes nor chains, the labourers are masters of weaving and dodging obstacles at high speed, forcing each other off course and lobbing insults at rivals. Those who arrive first wait the least, are likely to get more of the goods to deliver and hence higher payment at the end of the night. Fights and injuries are common. Liton described the scene as: ‘The van drivers barricade the truck[s] like an army.’ The image then suggests chaos, a ruthlessness and precarity for people relying on their health and needing to work here day to day to survive and support families. In reality, however, the majority of the trucks are not unloaded in this manner and the jhupri labourers rarely race for work. Instead, most labourers wait in a queue (serial) or follow instructions from a labour leader. Work, in other words, is highly ordered. Yet the claims of precarity that the jhupri labourers evoke with these images are still very real, only materialised in a different way. Risks stem not so much from the need to race and jostle for work, but rather from the dependencies which give order to work.

This chapter introduces the operation Remove. The starting point is the question of how to account for conflicting structure assignments in syntax. After excluding the standard means of syntactic movement for certain cases, several predecessors and alternatives of Remove are discussed (among them tree pruning, S-bar deletion, and exfoliation). In addition, the concept of coanalysis is critically evaluated. The core of the chapter is devoted to introducing Remove as an elementary operation that is the complete mirror image of Merge in that it triggers structure removal rather than structure building, and that it obeys exactly the same restrictions (with respect to triggers, strict cyclicity, etc.). On this basis, the different effects that Remove has for removal of phrases versus removal of heads are illustrated. Some general consequences are discussed next, concerning short life cycle effects, incompatibilities with other constraints (in particular, this holds for the Projection Principle), and semantic interpretation.

In the Wicked Tenants parable, a landowner plants a vineyard, a symbol of Israel, and lets it out to tenants who resort to violence when the landowner sends first servants and then his own son to report on how the vineyard is faring. Underlying the parable is the hostile, violent behavior of Joseph’s brothers when their father, Jacob, sent Joseph to bring back a report on them.

This chapter focuses on the second stage of the candidate emergence process and examines the role gender plays in determining whether a potential candidate actually runs for office. We have the opportunity to assess the role gender plays in transforming politically engaged citizens into actual candidates because 295 people in the 2021 sample ran for office at some point in their lives. Our analysis reveals that the stark gender differences evident in the first stage of the process fade considerably. But because women are far less likely than men to consider running for office, fewer women than men ever face the decision to enter an actual race. Moreover, when we turn to interest in running for office at some point in the future, gender differences persist. Female potential candidates are significantly less likely than men to express interest in a future candidacy, at least in part because of their more negative attitudes about campaigning. Whether we consider retrospective or prospective interest in entering the electoral arena, prospects for closing the gender gap in political ambition are bleak.

Introduction

This chapter suggests that the Mahabharata has played a central role in the forging of concepts and practices of sovereignty in modern India. I argue that while British and Indian elites deployed the Mahabharata to legitimate the construction of centralized regimes of state sovereignty – imperial sovereignty and nation-state sovereignty – more socially marginal actors, such as ‘lower-caste’ and female activists, as well as sections of the middle-class literati, used the epic to express more democratic, polycentric models of sovereignty. These debates reverberated across state legislatures and princely courts, literary gatherings and peasant assemblies, theatres and secret revolutionary meetings. As Indians journeyed abroad, the Mahabharata came alive in political ritual and deliberation, uniting Indians with other anti-colonial Asians who were carving out their own projects of national sovereignty. The Mahabharata thus helped in decolonizing and democratizing sovereignty in South Asia. In every way, it fulfils the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel's (1770–1831) definition of epics as embodying ‘the spirits of peoples’, ‘the proper foundations of a national consciousness’.

The Mahabharata and State Formation in Early Modern India

The Mahabharata was central to state formation in early modern South Asia. In the 1580s, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, called the Razmnamah (Book of War). There were earlier precedents of Indo-Muslim rulers and officials commissioning translations of the epic. The fifteenth-century ruler of Kashmir, Zayn al-Abidin, is said to have commissioned a translation into Persian, though the text has not survived. Later, Laskar Paragal Khan, governor of Chittagong in eastern Bengal, driven by intellectual curiosity (kutuhale puchhilek), asked Kavindra Parameshvar Das to author a Bengali translation in the early sixteenth century. Parameshwar, in turn, eulogized his patron as an incarnation of righteousness (dharma avatar). Translations of the Mahabharata legitimated regional state formation across South Asia.

However, the Mughal project had a wider pan-subcontinental legacy. Akbar aimed to create an Indo-Persian grammar of kingship that would enable mutual intelligibility and dialogue between Hindu and Muslim subjects across the empire. Audrey Truschke has argued that the translation occasionally abbreviated religious–philosophical discussions present in the epic, including criticisms of kingship and war, while emphasizing and expanding the discussions on just monarchy. The Mahabharata combined themes of martial heroism and ethical kingship in a manner that eminently suited the Mughal ruling classes.