Search

There are reasons to celebrate the recent publication of The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age. This is the third edition of a venerable series, which began with the Makers of Modern Strategy first published in 1943 at the height of World War II, followed in 1986 by a second edition during the Cold War. Taken together, these books are a touchstone of strategic studies, the applied multidisciplinary field that encompasses the full range of military and non-military themes concerned with global and national security, defense, and war. The New Makers reflects the evolution of strategy during the past 80 years, and its greatly expanded scope incorporates a number of firsts. Reaching backward to the classics, Sun Zi and Thucydides now join Carl Von Clausewitz at the top of the strategic pantheon, while the range of contributors, geography, and themes reflects the maturing of the field well beyond the Western world. As the two previous editions did for their own eras, The New Makers is a call to action and will be our current generation's guide to the multiple strategic challenges that are transforming our 21st century world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kazuo Ishiguro used his 2017 Nobel lecture to suggest that liberal democracies have failed to take advantage of the opportunities presented in the late twentieth century, and a new sense of anxiety is evident in The Buried Giant. While Ishiguro's early novels celebrated the freedom of expression available to those living in democratic societies, The Buried Giant explores the tensions between narrative and historical responsibility, and suggests that an excess of such freedom inevitably leads to conflict. The novel conducts this exploration through its use of fantasy, and specifically through the way that the landscape makes literal what would otherwise be figurative ways of discussing memory: memory is eroded by a magical mist, is buried beneath the ground, and is irrevocably erased by a journey across water. This landscape embodies the dangers of two opposing views. These are, firstly, the postmodern notion that history is a narrative construction and, secondly, the idea that history is an objective truth that can be retrieved. The article concludes by arguing that The Buried Giant seeks to mediate between these two extremes, proposing that ethical narrative must be constructed on the basis of a recognition of others' experiences of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a trailblazing political career, Hillary Clinton has been the focus of media attention for decades. This study examines 21 US magazine covers of the former First Lady and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate from 2010 through 2015—prior to her official bid for presidency—to investigate what these depictions of Clinton say about her and the relationship between gender, power, and politics. Based on a visual discourse analysis, we found that Clinton is presented as power-hungry, emasculating, and a surreptitious politician, with these magazine covers both overtly and subtly warning citizens about her authenticity and ambition. Such coverage reinforces misogynistic representations that disadvantage female politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's policy toward India since 2000 appears to be a sign of new directions in Japan's security policy since its decision to establish a strategic partnership with India is different from the previous policy of exclusive bilateralism centering on the US-Japan alliance. Nonetheless, Japan's recent security partnership with India is part of Japan's long-term effort to support the US-led liberal political and economic order in East Asia. This paper argues that Japan's policy toward India since 2000 has evolved toward becoming fully aligned with US policy toward the Indo-Pacific region. The critical shift in Tokyo's policy toward India came in spring 2005, when Japanese political leaders and policy elites came to recognize India as an important balancer against China as a result of the violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China. They decided to support including India into the East Asian Summit and incorporated India into their new values diplomacy. This shift in Japan's policy toward India, along with efforts to increase interoperability between Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Forces and Indian Navy, coincides with US strategy to bring India into the US-led coalition to balance against China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know much about how opinion leaders drive mass partisan polarization with position-taking cues but little on how different message types polarize citizens, and who responds most to those messages attributes. This article contributes new insights by investigating how exposure to common violent metaphors interacts with audience personality traits to polarize partisans on issues. Building from research on conflict orientations, we theorize that aggressive rhetoric primes aggression in aggressive partisans, motivating greater intransigence on party positions. As a consequence, aggressive partisans are pulled further apart on issues, thereby reducing prospects for compromise. We find support for our predictions in two large nationally diverse survey experiments conducted in very different political contexts. Our results demonstrate the subtle power of aggression in public opinion and highlight the important moderating role of individual differences in the communication of partisan conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The press is essential for creating an informed citizenry, but its existence depends on attracting and maintaining an audience. It is unclear whether supply-side effects-including those dictated by the owners of the media-influence how the media cover politics, yet this question is essential given their abilities to set the agenda and frame issues that are covered. We examine how ownership influences media behavior by investigating the impact of RupertMurdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in August 2007. We collect data on every front-page story and editorial for 27 months, and we compare the difference in political coverage between the New York Times (NYT) and WSJ using a difference-in-differences design. We show that the amount of political content in the opinion pages of the two papers were unchanged by the sale, but the WSJ's front-page coverage of politics increased markedly relative to the NYT. Similar patterns emerge when comparing the WSJ's content to USA Today and the Washington Post. Our finding highlights potential limits to journalists' ability to fulfill their supposed watchdog role in democracies without interference from owners in the boardroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the policies pursued by successful examples of developmental states be transferred to other countries under current global conditions? This question has represented one of the key concerns of the academic community in the wake of this reinterpretation of East Asian developmental success. This article will contribute to both the Latin American literature and the developmental state literature simultaneously and symbiotically, through arguing that Argentina in the period 2003-2015 represents an excellent empirical opportunity to revisit key debates associated with the concern of transferable lessons from the original East Asian developmental state experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development is no longer simply conceived of as economic growth, but also as encapsulating human development, the role of the developmental state must be rethought. Focusing on the state's ability to deliver collective goods such as welfare has become an important task for developing and developed nations alike, and nowhere is this more important than in China. Consequently, intimate connections between the political and industrial elites are no longer sufficient and may actually be counterproductive to the success of the developmental state. Diverging from traditional developmental states, China shows that incorporation of new stakeholders is not premised on principles of human development. The novelty that China brings to re-thinking and re-articulating a new developmental state framework is that the development state of the twenty-first century can create new alliances such as with non-governmental organisations to meet human development objectives, but substantive change with regards to how the state is organised is not a precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday agreement offers a useful vantage point from which to review the agreement’s progress, particularly because the anniversary coincides with Brexit, a process likely to place it under particular strain. Using both evidence offered elsewhere in this collection and new material, this article reviews the two decades since the agreement in 1998 using as a framework the three relationships that the agreement sought to address. First, it argues that a combination of structural reform, social change, demographic transformation and political reconfiguration has substantially removed the incentives for inter-communal conflict in Northern Ireland, though without completely eliminating overt political violence, as worrying indicators of dissent survive. Second, it contends that the provisions of the agreement for the promotion of institutionalised cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic have had limited impact, but that they have been supplemented by new forms of all-Ireland integration driven by change at EU level. Third, the article suggests that the once-hostile relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom has mellowed, a change that both facilitated the settlement of 1998 and was itself reinforced by this. The article concludes that the institutions established by the Good Friday agreement have had a mixed impact, and that they face a particular challenge in the context of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the influence of the party reforms of 2012 and the ‘counter-reforms’ of 2013-2014 on the Russian party system, and the structure of political and electoral cleavages in Russian regions. The emergence of new political parties in 2012-2013 led to a temporary increase in electoral competition, an augmentation of the political space, and a rise in the number of electoral cleavages, but these developments did not weaken the domination of United Russia. The trend towards an ever greater tightening up of entry requirements for contestation in the elections led to a lowering of the number of political and, consequently, electoral cleavages, in addition to a reconfiguration of the political space. The study shows that there was an unbalancing of the political cleavage structure in 2012-2015: the socioeconomic political cleavage, whose primary place is a key determinant of equilibrium, ceded the top position to the authoritarian-democratic cleavage in 2012-2013, and to the ‘Ukrainian’ (systemic) cleavage in 2014-2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the extent to which campaigns are consistent across communications channels in the issues that they emphasize. We compare the issue agendas in candidates' television advertising, tweets and emails from dozens of U.S. Senate races in 2014, creating a measure of issue convergence for each candidate. We find moderate levels of issue consistency, though issue agendas match more strongly for television ads and Twitter, two channels that speak to a more general audience. Our findings speak to the ability of campaigns to foster a common understanding of issue priorities among the public and the ability of voters to hold candidates accountable for their promises once in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 9/11, the ‘Five Eyes’ countries have seen a dramatic rise in intelligence training and education courses across the national security and law enforcement contexts. However, there remains little publicly available empirical evidence to demonstrate specifically where improvements have been made to workplace practices and processes as a result of this investment. This article, argues that the education sector in the intelligence discipline lacks an evaluation research agenda, for validating the workplace effectiveness of training and education programs. Further, a first step in understanding whether curriculum are ‘fit for purpose’ may be articulating some underlying common normative principles for evaluating programs in any intelligence context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of ASEAN have focused on why ASEAN community building has emphasised liberal norms such as human rights, democracy promotion and a commitment to wider participation while maintaining a set of sovereignty-preserving regional principles – the ASEAN Way norms – that have been more suited to securing illiberal agendas and the authoritarian practices of state elites. ASEAN's seeming progressive turn is argued to be instrumentally aimed at buttressing the legitimacy of the grouping as a credible regional institution in international society in which these norms are widely accepted though not uncontested. With recent developments suggesting further consolidation of, or a return to, authoritarian tendencies across the region, state-based modes of governance may become more limited in terms of what ASEAN member states are prepared to endorse. It is, therefore, time for scholars to expand analysis to explore how transnational issues and problems may be functionally governed outside of formal regional institutions involving non-state actors in key roles. While the turn to privately generated standards, rules and practices in global governance is well-recognised and researched, the disparate studies on private governance in South-East Asia are rarely cumulated into a more coherent research programme that addresses the effectiveness of private governance as well as its normative implications. These questions point to a promising agenda for research on regionalandother transnational modes of governance in South-East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japan has featured prominently in The Pacific Review (TPR) since the journal's inception; and the very first issue in 1988 was essentially a Japan special issue with four out of six articles devoted to considering the implications of the country's then seemingly relentless rise as a regional and increasingly global power. Thereafter, TPR has carefully documented Japan's changing international pathway, forming indispensable reading for all Japan experts. TPR has always been distinguished by a rare ability to question the conventional wisdom on the study of Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kind of challenge did a rising Japan in the 1970s and 1980s pose to the United States, and how does that differ from the challenge that China has posed to US primacy in East Asia since the early 2000s? This article compares and contrasts US responses to these two shifts in relative power, in the process aiming to elucidate how changes that portend a power transition are understood and dealt with and how great powers manage the security order at times of disruption. In these respects, the article contributes to the empirical understanding of why some power transitions do not result in conflict given the tools available to great powers to manage relations at times of stress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article calls for a unified approach for studying the issues of race and ethnicity. Topics discussed include the ways in which the distinct concepts of race and ethnicity can be used to highlight social issues in the 21st century, the difference between race and ethnicity in terms of providing explanations for the different aspects of inequality and the various recommendations on how race and ethnicity scholarships can be merged.

In the article, “U.S. RacialandEthnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes,andindividual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We pose several questions that emerged for us from Valdez and Golash-Boza’s “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the twenty-first Century.” First, we raise questions about their framing of the problem with current scholarship – are immigration/ethnicity and race scholars talking past each other or are they having more fundamental disagreements? Second, we raise questions about their critique of the “the race literature” – do too many of us ignore questions of agency and inclusion? Finally, we raise questions about the stability and utility of the concepts they deploy (“race” and “ethnicity”) and draw on recent scholarship that has argued that we need new language or frameworks to adequately describe the reality on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this response to Valdez and Golash-Boza’s article, U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the twenty-first century, I commend the authors for raising critical issues about the traditional lack of integration of race and ethnicity paradigms. However, I argue that, in an effort to make their claim about the distinction between the ethnicity and race paradigms, they end up oversimplifying some of the literature and overlook the ways in which race and ethnicity scholarship from the twenty-first century has made important advances towards paradigm integration. In my response I provide an alternate reading of some of the literature that the authors critique, focusing on the Mexican middle-class case. I then highlight scholars who are working towards race–ethnicity integration, moving past old paradigm divides. I conclude my response by introducing the concept of the “ethnoracial core”, which I believe moves us in the direction that Valdez and Golash-Boza are proposing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study of U.S. racialandethnic relations is often reduced to the study of racialorethnic relations. This article reveals the limitations of a focus on ethnicity or race, in isolation, and instead urges a new framework that brings them together. We consider three cases that have been conceptualized by the ethnicity paradigm as assimilation projects and by the race paradigm as structural racism projects, respectively: (1) African-American entrepreneurs; (2) the Mexican middle class; and (3) black immigrant deportees. We reveal the shortcomings of the ethnicity paradigm to consider race as a structural force or to acknowledge that structural racism conditions incorporation in marked ways; and the limitations of the race paradigm to take seriously group members’ agency in fostering social capital that can mediate racial inequality. Instead, we offer a unifying approach to reveals how ethnicity and race condition members’ life chances within the U.S. social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant narrative of global income inequality is one of convergence. Recent high-profile publications by Branko Milanovic and the World Bank claim that the global Gini coefficient has declined since 1988, and that inter-country inequality has declined since 1960. But the convergence narrative relies on a misleading presentation of the data. It obscures the fact that convergence is driven mostly by China; it fails to acknowledge rising absolute inequality; and it ignores divergence between geopolitical regions. This paper suggests alternative measures that bring geopolitics back in by looking at the gap between the core and periphery of the world system. From this perspective, global inequality has tripled since 1960. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to provide responses to some of the many unanswered questions about the making and the transformation of the uprising in Syria by exploring a new avenue of research: media development aid. Most academic interest has been oriented towards the role that the new media played at the time of the uprising; insufficient interest, by contrast, has been directed to the development of the sector in the years predating it. What emerges from this article is that the Syrian media landscape was strongly supported by international development aid during the years prior to the outbreak of the uprising of 2011. By looking at the complex structure of media aid architecture and investigating the practices and programmes implemented by some representative organisations, this article reflects on the field of media development as a new modus operandi of the West (the EU and US especially), to promote democracy through alternative and non-collateral, bottom-up support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current media hype covering (undocumented) mobility to Europe produces powerful images. Global media, politicians, scientists, artists and activists take part in the production of the tragic border regime in the Mediterranean (Lampedusa) and the negotiation of the limits of European hospitality. In a first step, the article envisages the social imagination and its signifying processes staging mobile people as threat, victim or hero/liberator. These figures are related to discourses of security as well as to humanitarian or critical perspectives and are part of the political economy of the migration industry. As these figures are gendered, the representation of mobile women is addressed in a second step. Women are hardly depicted as a social threat or as political heroes/liberators. On the contrary, the entanglement of signifying processes of the social imagination brings forth the figure of mobile women as traumatized victim and/or as caring mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has resulted in a steady decline in trade through the Arabian Sea and higher costs of doing business for multiple world regions. The EU has responded to the threat with a large-scale anti-piracy operation in the Horn of Africa, which constitutes the first free-standing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) military operation that is not entirely dependent on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planning and assets. The operation is designed to interdict Somali piracy operations across the Gulf of Aden and to keep some of the world’s busiest sea lanes open for reasons of world trade. This article argues that the EU preoccupation with military solutions to the piracy problem, based on interventions through the Somali federal government with an emphasis on security, is insufficient because it fails to address the underlying causes of piracy and misunderstands the Somali socio-cultural-security nexus and the need for practical longer term land-based approaches to development. The reduction of Somali piracy activities can be linked to this increased military response capacity as well as to increased security precautions undertaken by shipping companies, but none of these strategies has succeeded in dismantling piracy networks. They therefore offer only a temporary and costly stopgap measure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How we understand the state is important when addressing issues of human rights. During the debate on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, the country was, at times, presented as nearly uniformly homophobic, exemplified by references to ‘Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill’. The state, which does discriminate against gender and sexual minorities, is comprised of different institutions and people, holding, at times, conflicting positions. This paper documents these differing positions that parts of the state adopted, along with how those positions changed over time in response to political changes and lobbying from civil society. Uncovering gaps in the coherence of the state by identifying these opposing views is useful both for how we understand and study the state, and for activism against political homophobias. Strategies against legislation similar to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill can target those within most likely to oppose such laws. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 9/11, the American policy towards Africa has been strongly influenced by national security interests and in particular by the fight against international terrorism and Islamic radicalisation. Traditionally, the American Africa policy has been the result of bureaucratic policymaking with the Pentagon and the State Department playing prominent roles. The paper argues that in the current century, evangelical Christian lobby groups have gained increasing influence on policymaking on Africa. Because policymaking has been influenced by a number of different actors, the American Africa policy may appear incoherent and ambiguous if judged narrowly on the expectation that it only aims to take care of US national security concerns and economic self-interests. The paper concludes that Africa was important to the United States during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama because of the combination of strong security interests and strong domestic lobby groups that have pressured to place Africa on the US foreign policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite its peace process, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided society. The legacy of a 30-year conflict has ensured that the state continues to be prone to outbreaks of violence over contentious issues such as Orange Order parading and the flying of national flags. This paper argues that in order to address this legacy, there is a need to confront the Othering processes that have helped to generate and sustain division. It will argue that programmes of adult education can play an important role in helping the conflicting groups to reimagine their ‘exclusive’ notions of the nation to one capable of incorporating the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Local political elites in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been unable not only to use existing political institutions but also to reform them. It triggered two informal attempts to create an agreement on the institutional reform undertaken in the years 2008–2009. The paper focuses on comparison of both processes, following the main assumption that decision-making processes in multi-ethnic environment depends not on inter-ethnic, but intra-ethnic competition. This argument was supported by Georg Tsebelis’ nested game theory, which explains the phenomenon by introducing the concept of two arenas and multiple games while one variable, monopoly of intra-ethnic representation, is considered crucial to limit the outbidding chain. Consequently, it was concluded that the Prud negotiations with exactly one actor from each group were supposed to be more successful than the much more diverse Butmir talks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Present-day Flanders is characterized by the contrast between the impressive electoral successes of the pro-independence Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), and the very lukewarm attitude of its population towards independence. This success should be seen as one of the consequences of the regionalization of political identities in Belgium and the promotion of a Flemish identity by the Flemish regional government. Rather than a vote for independence, however, support for the N-VA corresponds with a rejection of interregional solidarity and more in general a preference for a more right-wing style of governance based on the principles of self-help and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Regional autonomy is guaranteed in the constitution of Iraq, yet between 2006 and 2014 the Shiite prime minister at the time, Nouri al-Maliki, did his utmost to limit the power of both Kurds and Sunnis. Maliki worked to further centralise governance and amassed greater controls and power—from militarily to legislative—for his party. Instead of strengthening and securing Iraq, Maliki's actions have led to a rise in both Kurdish and Sunni nationalisms, which has resulted in civil war and the effective failure of the Iraqi state. This article analyses how Maliki's actions enabled the rise of the Islamic State, and have changed the dynamics of Iraq. It proposes that, in light of these changes, the best way forward for the effective running of the country is the implementation of federalism across Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social media is growing as a technological and social phenomenon, with billions of people using it every day around the world. Given its increasing ubiquity, researchers continue to seek to understand social media and its implications for the social world. Part of the growing body of scholarship on social media includes uncovering the most effective methodologies for exploration that appropriately consider differences between the technology of social media and the ways in which people use them. New directions for social media research include the use of big data and analysing the socio-technical nature of social media. Using data from an ongoing study on college Millennials that includes questions about their thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement, the author suggests another direction for future research: studying the implications of social media as an informational source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, formerly British permanent representative to the UN, who has had long experience of dealing with Russia in the context of diplomacy, considers whether the current moment of Russian dominance in Syria and the Middle East, combined with the recent general disengagement of the western powers in the region, could be considered as marking the beginning of a general period of Russian hegemony in the Middle East. The article takes into account the global geopolitical situation, the recent history of Russia and the Middle East, the consequences of western intervention in Iraq, and the motivations of the Russian government particularly in view of its recent engagement in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the tremendous visibility of popular mobilization in the last decade, scholars have increasingly directed their attention to the streets to examine the dynamics of power and resistance. Among emerging venues of politics, this study examines street art and graffiti as a performance of resistance in the 2011 Tahrir Revolution and 2013 Gezi Protests in Egypt and Turkey, respectively. As re-appropriation of the urban landscape and modes of self-expression, street art and graffiti lie at the intersection of politics, space, and identity. Inspired by James C. Scott's concept of ‘arts of resistance’, this study takes up these ‘street arts of resistance’ as revealing the hidden transcript, namely, the self-disclosure of subordinates under the politics of disguise. While unpacking that subversive power, this study rests on its claim that street art and graffiti not only seek to represent, but also to perform and interject. Thereafter, it examines how these modes of visual culture interrupt time, space, and the self, along with their respective effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do some states and state coalitions, acting within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), support harder legalization of the global climate regime? In order to explain why, the effects of four causal factors are considered: climate vulnerability, the emission intensity of the national economy, a state's power position, and socialization into climate norms. To identify the legalization positions of UNFCCC actors, an original content analysis is conducted of all the submission and meeting statements made at the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform during the years 2012-2015. Subsequently, a qualitative comparative analysis is carried out to find out which combinations of the causal factors offer a sufficient explanation for the analyzed outcome, leading to the identification of two causal pathways that lead states to endorse harder legalization of the climate regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health disparities among sexual minority adults ages 50 and older have been documented. Factors such as lifetime discrimination and internalized stigma may deter sexual minority individuals from seeking health services. Several studies suggest that health information technology may facilitate health education and outreach to populations whose health behaviors are affected by stigma such as older sexual minority people. This study examined the role of sexual minority identity as a factor that is associated with health information technology use. Data from the 2013-2014 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) were analyzed. Multivariate logistic regressions were used to compare the odds of using technology as a resource for health information between sexual minority versus heterosexual US adults aged 50 and older. Adjusting for sociodemographic variables and health variables, sexual minority participants had increased odds of using computers to look up health information on the Internet (OR = 2.01, 95% CI 1.53-2.64), using computers to fill a prescription (OR = 1.97, 95% CI 1.36-2.85), and using computers to communicate with health-care provider by e-mail (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.55-2.92), compared with heterosexuals. Findings reveal greater use of health information technology among older sexual minority adults when compared to their heterosexual counterparts. While sensitive, competent providers and culturally appropriate prevention services are essential to meeting the needs of aging sexual minority populations, health information technology use may be an innovative means of reducing disparities in information access as structural changes are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the federal election campaign in Canada in 2011 with regard to the Conservative Party of Canada's (CPC) campaign strategies and their apologies for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident and Chinese Canadian exclusion. Topics include the elements of CPC's apology discourse, the role of the Asian Conservative Members of Parliament in CPC's campaigns, and the party's investment in ethnic media campaigns.

This paper examines the social media strategies of candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We use textual analysis to understand what candidates focused on. We assess eight themes covered in Twitter posts. For example, Clinton focused on GUN CONTROL, while Sanders focused on climate change. Using Facebook data, we introduce a topic modeling approach, latent Dirichlet allocation, to the political marketing literature. This allows us to uncover what topics the candidates focus on without researcher intervention and, using a dynamic model, show how this changes over time. We note that Clinton’s focus on Trump increases toward the end of the primary campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to understand why monks played a central role in anti-Muslim violence in transitional Myanmar (2013-2014). We argue that scapegoating is one of many strategies used by monks to gain visibility, to strengthen their autonomous networks, and to increase their social credentials. By analyzing two episodes of monks' participation in religious violence (1930s and 2013-2014), we identify two factors that make scapegoating strategies more likely: (a) decentralized religions foster a multiplicity of organizations and provide incentives for leaders to be entrepreneurial and compete for followers; while (b) the rapid pluralization of the public sphere explains the timing, because it intensifies competition among religious leaders and between religious and secular leaders for social ascendency and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a set of recent books published in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a road map for understanding its outcome and a research agenda for political communication scholars in the years ahead. This article focuses on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, a field study that documents the roles that identity, narratives, and emotions play in shaping the political beliefs and behavior of White Tea Party supporters. Building on these insights, through an analysis of 123 content analyses published in Political Communication between 2003-2016, we demonstrate gaps in our field and argue that scholarship can grow analytically and empirically by accounting for the findings of these books. We conclude with suggestions for future research into people’s perceptions of identity, group status, deprivation, and political power, as well as the role of media, political actors, and social groups in creating these narratives of American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When examining media effects on voting intentions, scholars of political communication have either focused on visibility- or tonality-based effects. Our study compares these effect models, asking whether the explanations are complementary or competitive; it goes beyond previous studies by considering interactions between media cues and voters’ attitudes. We draw on panel survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) that is combined with content analysis data of the main evening news broadcast in Germany. Findings show that visibility- and tonality-based effects are similar in potency, but tone-based effects are more contingent on attitudes toward parties and candidates. Both types of cues can backfire: higher visibility and more positive tonality can have negative effects on some attitude groups, which is in part moderated by the expectations about government coalitions. We find that visibility and tonality are rather complementary cues that both influence voting behavior. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea that VAA users are more likely to cast a ballot in elections as a result. The extent to which electoral participation iscausedby using a VAA, however, remains unclear. Against this background, we reassess the mobilizing effect of VAAs by means of a multi-method approach. Our cross-sectional analysis of 12 national election study data sets provides further support to the idea that VAA usage increases users’ chances of casting a ballot in elections as compared to non-users. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in the context of the 2013 Italian parliamentary election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one another. We surveyed 111 incumbent Members of Parliament in Belgium, Canada, and Israel and analyzed a large sample of their parliamentary speeches. The findings demonstrate that motivation to attain media coverage and act upon information from the news media leads politicians to strategically display simple and unidimensional rhetoric due to newsworthiness considerations, but only in countries where the media constitute important resources for reelection. The results contribute to extant literature by demonstrating a media effect on elite deliberation and by emphasizing the moderating role of political systems on the nature of elite rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to the current discussions concerning an adequate framework for intelligence ethics. The first part critically scrutinises the use of Just War Theory in intelligence ethics with specific focus on the just cause criterion. We argue that using self-defence as justifying cause for all intelligence activities is inadequate, in particular in relation to the collection and use of intelligence for preventive purposes. In the second part of the paper, we tentatively suggest an alternative moral framework for preventive intelligence, understood as intelligence activities with no specific suspicion or aggressor. We suggest that the moral permissibility of such activities requires a civilised moral framework, in which openness, transparency and informed consent constitute crucial elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much speculation about whether China will democratize and avoid conflict with India in the twenty-first century. Yet, few studies have investigated how contemporary Chinese view India and its democracy. Addressing this gap in the literature, the authors examined Chinese media coverage of India's two-month long April-May 2014 parliamentary election, the largest election in world history, through systematic analysis of over 500 articles from ten major mass media outlets and over 27,000 messages transmitted on Sina Weibo social media. As might be expected, Chinese mass media generally portrayed India and its elections in a condescending fashion while avoiding discussion of 'democracy'. However, the authors found a much broader array of viewpoints on Chinese social media including considerable praise for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and extensive discussion about the intrinsic and instrumental merits of democracy both in India and in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the cycle after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is emblematic of the political dynamics that influence counterterrorism policymaking in the U.S. democratic system. Topics covered include the role of public opinion in policymaking in a democratic system, and ways in which crisis lawmaking shapes counterterrorism policy. Also mentioned are the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, and how the public's perceived level of threat determines the public demand for national security measures.

The article discusses whether neoliberalism is a viable model for India's foreign, economic and strategic policies in the face of rapid changes in the external environment. Topics covered include barriers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to complete the economic reforms mission, doubts regarding the efficacy of Modi's policy on Pakistan, and the economy-first approach to foreign policy he adopted when he was elected to office in 2014. Also mentioned are typologies that classify Indian strategic paradigms, neoliberals' belief that India's transformation into an economic great power would result in India's ascendance as a military and diplomatic power and India's relationship with China, Pakistan and the U.S.

The article discusses the Israeli government's design of the first Israeli National Cyber Security Strategy. Topics covered include how the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks influenced national-level intelligence and security decisions, the establishment of the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) arrangement in 2002, and the establishment of the National Cyber Initiative task force in 2011. Also mentioned are the creation of the Israel National Cyber Bureau, elements of the Israeli Concept of Operations (CONOP), and the strategy's implications for international security.

The article discusses how India's slow emergence as a regional security actor is a reflection of its strategic policy preferences. Topics covered include India's prioritization of defense against local threats on northern land borders, vested interests in strategic relationships with Russia, China and Middle Eastern countries, and factors limiting India's regional posture and partnership with the U.S. Also mentioned are recommendations for U.S. policy on ways to maximize potential policy convergence, the evolution of India's strategic autonomy doctrine, and preparations made for large-scale direct conflict.