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Behavioural public policy analysts have examined cases of individuals' failures of reason or judgement to attain their ends and have used these to justify 'means' paternalism: a form of government intervention that tries to save individuals from the consequences of those reasoning failures and to enable them better to achieve those ends. This has been challenged on a number of grounds, including too great a focus on choice-preserving interventions such as nudges, the privileging of future preferences over current ones and the possibility of state failures as damaging to individual well-being as the original reasoning failure. This paper summarizes the principal arguments in favour of means paternalism and then addresses these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long studied the influence of parties on citizens' policy preferences. Experiments conducted outside Canada have convincingly shown that the cues offered by political parties can influence people's attitudes. However, the most prominent study of party cue effects in Canada finds weak effects, concluding that Canadian parties are less influential because they are less clearly ideological than parties elsewhere. We propose that parties are actually more influential than they appear because party cue effects partly depend on variables other than partisanship, notably attitudes toward the cue-giver. This is especially true in countries like Canada with multi-party systems. We show that attitudes toward parties are not clearly reflected in partisanship in Canada. We then show that more specific measures of party and leader attitudes better account for how experimental participants react to cues than does party identification alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada has often been seen as immune from the powerful backlash against globalization and immigration that has driven political shifts elsewhere. This article challenges this belief, at least in part, by tracing the evolution of public attitudes toward immigration and analyzing the factors that have shaped the trajectory for over three decades. Drawing on nearly forty years of Environics Focus Canada surveys, combined with annual data on macro-economics and immigration flows, findings here suggest that Canadians' tolerance toward immigration responds to immigration flows and is heavily influenced by macro-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While breastfeeding mothers generally possess an official legal right of access to public places, the lived experience of breastfeeding mothers in public is marked by inequality and lack of autonomy. The motivating question of this article is, from the perspective of a breastfeeding mother, what characterizes an ideal—that is, equal and autonomous—public sphere in a liberal society? I explore in particular the issue of people, including breastfeeding mothers, who evoke discomfort or disgust. I argue that public and private spheres must be accessible in certain ways: first, every person must be able to occupy public space while embracing all significant aspects of their personhood; second, the comfort of others cannot weigh more than an individual's own needs in public; finally, all people must be able to opt for privacy in a way that does not entail invisibility or coerced exclusion. In making this argument, I describe three main ways in which breastfeeding mothers respond to the antipathy of the public sphere: exclusion, accommodation, and affirmation. I end with an exploration of the ideal of public and private spheres defined by equality and autonomy and offer concrete steps that can improve the position of breastfeeding mothers in public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do global sources of information such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, NGOs, and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior? Prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. By explicitly modeling this interaction, I show that social network structure conditions media's impact. Empirical studies of media effects that fail to consider this risk bias. Further, social network interactions can amplify media bias, leading to large swings in aggregate behavior made more severe when individuals can select into media matching their preferences. Countervailing media outlets and social elites with unified preferences can mitigate the effect of bias; however, media outlets promulgating antistatus quo bias have an advantage. Theoretical results such as these generate numerous testable hypotheses; I provide guidelines for deriving and testing hypotheses from the model and discuss several such hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about the power of cultural performances to shape and sometimes coerce public opinion and public behaviours. In the process, I intend to defend a concept which has few supporters these days: ‘political correctness’. So prevalent is this concept in our public discourse that its meanings have become habitual, thus ideologically invisible. Beginning with an examination of the term and its history, I situate it in relation to the arts through its relation to censorship, and frame it within the broad field of cultural performances to which it belongs. Concluding with a specific case study taken from theatre, I hope to perform a ‘correction’ of sorts – to reintroduce the term as a positive value and practice in an artistic milieu which has largely rejected its utility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Slogans have always been highly popular in China. They are extensively used in politics, as a typical form of public behavior. They are the most convenient and practical means of mobilizing people. Many political slogans or posters are still fresh in the memories of those who experienced the years of war or revolution in China. The most familiar slogans for people these days are those of the Communist Party of China, which exerted an enormous influence on people's lives. The English word 'slogan' has two corresponding meanings in Chinese: 'slogan' and 'poster'. Slogans are designed to be chanted, exclaimed or shouted by people in public, thus appealing to people's sense of hearing. Posters are designed to be written, and hence appeal to people's sense of vision. This paper explores political slogans from the viewpoint of logics. It analyzes their stipulative structure and the implicit presuppositions they contain. It argues that, from a formal point of view, effective slogans should be free from logical fallacy, easy to remember, and rationally demonstrable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparable survey data from Norway, Sweden and the United States are used to examine trends in political trust for the period 1964-86. During the early part of that period trust declined in all three countries; later it recovered for Norway but continued to plummet in Sweden and the United States. Three major features of the party system are hypothesized to explain the difference in these trends for the three countries. These features are: the structural aspects of the party system; the public's cognitive judgements of the parties as representatives of the policy interests; and the possibility that a negative rejection of political parties as undesirable institutions may spill over to citizen evaluations of government more generally. One major finding is that political discontent in Norway was reduced because new parties provided the disaffected with a means of representation, thus channelling dissatisfaction back into the electoral arena. In Sweden and the United States, which have more rigid party systems, accumulating dissatisfaction was directed at the regime more generally because many people failed to see any of the parties as a viable alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views in response to an article on the use of voting indices for measuring the personal ideology of congressmen, in the March 1984 issue. According to the author, voting-based indices reflect personal ideology, and the political party of the person. The author says that there is a confusion between public and personal policy, but personal ideology is correlated with public behavior.

Objective: We sought to elucidate news article reporting of adverse public psychosocial behaviors, in particular, rumor-related coverage (eg, panic, demagoguery) and exclusive behavior coverage (negative behaviors, eg, discrimination, bullying) during the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) influenza pandemic in Japan., Methods: We examined 154 Internet news-site articles reporting adverse public psychosocial responses in the first 60 days of the outbreak. Rumor-related coverage and exclusive behavior coverage were dichotomously coded as included or not. Moreover, we assessed whether or not health information (eg, coping methods, virus toxicity information) or emphasis on information quality (eg, importance of information, cautions about overreactions) were simultaneously reported., Results: Rumor-related coverage (n=120, 77.9%) was less likely to simultaneously report public health information (eg, toxicity information, health support information, and cautions about overreactions; P<.05). Conversely, exclusive behavior coverage (n=41, 26.6%) was more likely to report public health information (P<.05)., Conclusions: Rumor-related coverage was less likely to have accompanying public health information, whereas exclusive behavior coverage was more likely to include it. During public health crises, it is essential to understand that rumors and exclusive behaviors have adverse effects on the public and that accompanying public health information may help people take proactive coping actions.