Search

Core values of librarianship are being fundamentally challenged and have been for sometime. It is a time for reflection on and clarification of them because how they are understood, communicated, and accomplished in light of November 8, 2016, calls for it. The recent election is just a manifestation of political, social, economic, and cultural shifts under way for some time that brought the disjunctures of how we approach and understand our core values to the surface. Essentially, we are playing out very old tropes in the profession by casting our values as neutral, instrumental, and technocratic--playing directly to the impulses of our neoliberal age and distorting core values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a phenomenon that was surprising to many, given the racially charged nature of the 2016 presidential election, black voter turnout was significantly lower than the previous two elections. Donald Trump's victory is attributable to many factors, one of which was the lower participation of black voters in several swing states. To a lesser extent, black support for third-party candidates also aided Trump's victory. The lower black turnout itself is attributable to several factors, but one factor specifically in the LIS realm was the prevalence of low-quality information and rhetoric and a susceptibility that some black voters had to this low-quality information and rhetoric. Librarians have a stake and a role in black voter participation. This article will present two specific tactics and other general methods for how librarians can better inform black voters and help motivate them to participate in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral politics remains a much-gendered sphere, dominated by men political actors and masculine behaviors. Media coverage of politics has often reinforced gendered norms. This article uses qualitative thematic analysis of three U.S. newspapers' coverage of the 2016 presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to explore how the mediated construction of political leaders is gendered. We identify four clear themes in news coverage: performing masculine leadership, debate as violence, emotionality, and transgression. Our findings suggest that media coverage repeatedly framed political debate in masculinist terms, framed the debate using violent rhetoric, focused on the emotional performances of the candidates, and positioned the candidates as insiders or outsiders depending on gender and political experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News media play a key role in communicating information about political parties to the American public. However, our understanding of how media depict relations between elites and the broader party coalitions remains limited. Moreover, while research suggests that forced exposure to such information can affect political attitudes, it remains unclear whether citizens are willing to selectively expose themselves to such communications. To address these two interrelated questions, this study first employs a content analysis to explore patterns in news coverage of inter- and intra-party relations throughout the Obama presidency. Next, two survey experiments investigate the degree to which such relations affect citizens' self-exposure to such information. Taken together, the analyses uncover two important asymmetries. First, throughout Obama's presidency, mass media depicted a Republican coalition virtually always against the president, yet substantial discord within the Democratic Party. Second, though partisans show no propensity to consume news depicting inparty unity (vs. disunity), both Republicans and Democrats exhibit a strong tendency to consume news stories depicting disunity in the outparty. Insofar as partisans' self-exposure to such information is a necessary precondition for attitudinal and behavioral change, these findings have notable implications for how mass media stand to shape partisanship in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposals to reduce the federal deficit have been coming from all directions. The general consensus is that reducing the federal deficit will require addressing the impact of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. None of the deficitreduction proposals address the way care is delivered and paid for. Delivery and financing reforms have the potential to slow the growth in health expenditures which, in turn, will reduce the health care share of gross domestic product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent rise of "Medicare for All" in American political discourse was many years in the making. Behind this rise is a movement composed of grassroots activists and organizations focused on the goal of establishing a single‐payer health care system in the United States. I examine the ways in which activists used narrative to interpret opportunity within their historically specific environments to work towards this goal. I find that while the Single Payer Movement's narrative practice during the Clinton era was focused on opportunity within the political sphere, the focus in the Obama era shifted to mobilizing the public sphere, or grassroots opportunity. This was related to the critique that the Obama Administration was engaging in "politics as usual", which was defined as the "enemy" of "real" health care reform. This narratively produced critique is tied to the anti‐establishment turn that factors into the current era of American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the 2012 American National Election Studies (ANES) panel data, this study explores the influence of the consumption of partisan information sources on affective polarization and investigates the mechanism underlying this relationship. The results show that exposure to pro-party television sources strengthens affective polarization among partisans. The polarizing effects of pro-party sources are mediated by the discrete negative emotions (i.e., anger and fear) toward presidential candidates. The study discusses the impact of selective exposure on deliberative and participatory democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the political advocacy and outreach strategies of organizations such as the Concerned Veterans for America, the Libre Initiative, and the Generation Opportunity under the monitoring of Charles and David Koch of the Koch network who are known for giving significant donations primarily to Republican Party candidates running for office in the U.S. from 2009 to 2016. Topics discussed include development of database consisting of the organizations' outreach events in order to evaluate the conservative outreach strategies of the target constituency, investigations of civic organizations and outreach strategies and their influence on politics, and the organizations' use of policy issues to connect with the Republican Party.

Tax evasion is a problem everywhere, but it is a much bigger policy problem in some countries than it is in others. The Italian government estimates that it loses more than 27 percent of total tax revenue to evasion, whereas the Swedish government estimates their "tax gap" to be less than 9 percent. What explains this variation? We test for the importance of culturally based attitudes and institutionally structured rules for taxes and benefits through a unique set of cross-national experiments and attitudinal surveys done in multiple locations across Italy, the UK, the United States, and Sweden. Participants in each location were presented with identical conditions based on institutional variations (tax rates, redistribution regimes, benefits) and asked to complete a survey afterward concerning their attitudes toward a number of social and political issues. A mixed-model analysis of the 2,537 subjects in our study reveals consistent influence of institutional scenarios and three attitude scales measuring pro-redistributive ideology, fiscal responsibility, and perceived government competence. Country effects, however, are more mixed and inconsistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the fundamental role that race and ethnicity play in U.S. society, sensitive survey items on this subject can often lead individuals to underreport their true attitudes. Previous studies have shown that the absence of an interviewer reduces the pressure to provide socially desirable responses. The 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES), where both interviewer and self-administered surveys were used, allows us to test whether mode effects emerge in the way respondents answer survey items related to racial attitudes. We also expect mode effects to vary based on the extent to which individuals are politically socialized in the United States. We find that respondents tend to underreport their racial animosity in interview-administered versus online surveys. Moreover, underreporting is nonexistent in the responses provided by foreign-born Latinos, but emerges for U.S.-born Latinos, Blacks, and Whites. These findings pose a number of implications for our understanding of racial attitudes and survey mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on oversight of the bureaucracy typically conceives of legislatures as unitary actors. But most oversight is conducted by individual legislators who contact agencies directly. I acquire the correspondence logs of 16 bureaucratic agencies and re-evaluate the conventional proposition that ideological disagreement drives oversight. I identify the effect of this disagreement by exploiting the transition from George Bush to Barack Obama, which shifted the ideological orientation of agencies through turnover in agency personnel. Contrary to existing research, I find ideological conflict has a negligible effect on oversight, whereas committee roles and narrow district interests are primary drivers. The findings may indicate that absent incentives induced by public auditing, legislator behavior is driven by policy valence concerns rather than ideology. The results further suggest collective action in Congress may pose greater obstacles to bureaucratic oversight than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians react to administrative policy making by developing systems of oversight. Existing studies largely emphasize the advantages of reactive oversight, where politicians wait for interest groups to pull a “fire alarm” on noncompliant activity. Less attention has been paid to proactive oversight, where politicians police administrators directly. To evaluate the effectiveness of “police patrol” oversight, I look to the White House, which has been policing regulatory proposals since the Nixon administration. I show how policing, or regulatory review, has made agencies more responsive to the president, both by singling out noncompliant proposals and, critically, by shaping agency behavior in anticipation of review. My findings suggest that police patrol oversight is more efficient than previously acknowledged, notably because the associated deterrence effects yield low-cost compliance. I conclude with a discussion of why Congress, despite having similar incentives to control administrators, has not adopted a parallel system of policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When making appointments to bureaucratic positions, presidents often have to balance various appointee traits, including loyalty, competence, connections, campaign experience, and potential electoral benefit. Previous research has suggested that patronage appointees—often characterized as those individuals appointed because of campaign experience, electoral benefit, or other nonpolicy political benefits—tend to be placed in low-priority agencies whose missions are ideological matches to the president and in positions where they will have minimal effects on agency outcomes. However, this research has overlooked the role of agency structure and the ease with which appointees can be placed into—or removed from—office. This article focuses on agency decision-maker independence, or the extent to which agency structure limits the appointment/removal of key agency decision makers. Using data on individuals appointed in the first six months of the Obama administration, I find that presidents put fewer patronage appointees into agencies whose structural features promote agency decision-maker independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between racial attitudes and public opinion about climate change is examined. Public opinion data from Pew and American National Election Studies surveys are used to show that racial identification and prejudices are increasingly correlated with opinions about climate change during the Obama presidency. Results show that racial identification became a significant predictor of climate change concern following Obama’s election in 2008, and that high levels of racial resentment are strongly correlated with reduced agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change. These results offer evidence for an effect termed the spillover of racialization. This helps further explain why the public remains so polarized on climate change, given the extent to which racial grievances and identities have become entangled with elite communication about climate change and its related policies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the 2016 presidential election through the lens of Stormfront, the first Internet Web site dedicated to individuals who self-identify as white nationalists. Since 1995, the year of its inception, Stormfront has grown to 318,688 members worldwide. At the end of December 2016, the site contained 944,557 threads and 12,206,400 individual posts. The Internet site is a rich source of material that represents attitudes of a segment of the white population who believe that they are marginalized due to multiculturalism and immigration patterns from Latin America along with countries from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Findings indicate that not all people who are affiliated with Stormfront supported Donald Trump's candidacy and subsequent election. Some discussants hoped, that if elected, he would shake up Washington and many supported his opinions about women, minority populations, and immigration. One of the key factors in less than overwhelming support among white nationalists who populate the online world of Stormfront was distrust based on his Jewish connections through his daughter Ivanka and son in law, Jared Kushner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 election of Donald Trump has been one of the most controversial in the recent political history of the United States. While many have correctly described and criticized his leadership as a president, they tend to focus these issues within the framework of the worrying and unique personality traits of the current president. This article will take a different approach, and attempts to understand Donald Trump as man of his times, in many ways a singularly precise personification of today's neoliberal inspired zeitgeist. The article will focus on four elements of the neoliberal project: "post truth", disaster capitalism, individualism, and the dumbing down of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the federal and state-level outcomes of the 2016 election cycle to argue that the Democratic Party is increasingly becoming irrelevant. As a result, the question is posed 'What do the Democrats need to do to be relevant?' To answer it, county-level data from the most politically strategic important areas of the country are analyzed. What the data shows is that the dominant issue of the past election, at least implicitly, was economic inequality. Hence, to solve this widespread issue, a Green New Deal platform is put forward that will solve virtually all of the economic crises facing the lower and middle classes, while additionally mitigating manmade climate change. However, doing so will face opposition from entrenched interests. To compensate, a political strategy is put forth that will enable progressive interests to ensure an ability to adequately implement a Green New Deal, tackle economic inequality, and make traditionally Democratic ideals relevant once again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of contemporary political debate in the United States focuses on the issue of polarization: specifically, its causal antecedents and its consequences for policymaking and political conflict. In this article, we argue that partisan preference polarization—conventionally defined as the difference in the favored policy positions of legislators from the two major parties—is not a sufficient statistic for potential political conflict in national politics. Rather, a well-defined measure of potential conflict must take into account (1) the locations of status quo policies and proposed alternatives; and (2) the shape of underlying utility functions. We propose measures of the likely contentiousness of a given status quo policy and of a proposal to move that policy. We then demonstrate the usefulness of these measures using estimates of utility function and final passage vote parameters on enacted legislation from the 111th US Senate (2009-2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship suggests that American partisans dislike other party members so much that partisanship has become the main social divide in modern politics. We argue that at least one measure of this "affective polarization" conflates a dislike for members of the other party with a dislike for partisanship in general. The measure asks people how they feel about their child marrying someone from another party. What seems like negative affect toward the other party is, in fact, negative affect toward partisans from either side of the aisle and political discussion in general. Relying on two national experiments, we demonstrate that although some Americans are politically polarized, more simply want to avoid talking about politics. In fact, many people do not want their child to marry someone from their own party if that hypothetical in-law were to discuss politics frequently. Supplementary analyses using ANES feeling thermometers show that inparty feeling thermometer ratings have decreased in recent years among weak and leaning partisans. As a result, the feeling thermometer results confirm the conclusion from the experiments. Polarization is a phenomenon concentrated in the one-third of Americans who consider themselves strong partisans. More individuals are averse to partisan politics. The analyses demonstrate how affective polarization exists alongside weakening partisan identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the functions of blackness in science fiction, supernatural, horror and fantasy during former U.S. President Barack Obama's era. Particular focus is given on the fantasy television program "Sleepy Hollow," which confirmed the veiw of American exceptionalism. It examines the program's re-visioning of American history and culture.

Abstract: In some ways, electoral geography has never been more popular. From the detailed, online maps of the Brexit vote to discussions of the electoral college versus the popular vote in the 2016 Trump–Clinton U.S. presidential contest, the relationships among geography, voting, and political power have seldom been more visible. The popularity of electoral geography in social and news media, however, does not necessarily reflect its presence in scholarly discussions, and indeed, in some ways, the former has replaced the latter. Digital technology and the burgeoning availability of electronic data mean that it is easier than ever to create maps of votes, often in near real time. Yet the academic field of electoral geography encompasses more than just mapping votes, including the study of election campaigns, political parties, electoral systems, and gerrymandering. The 3 major approaches are the geography of voting (mapping and visualizing votes), geographic influences on voting (the effect of place on political preferences and behavior), and the geography of representation (the analysis of electoral systems). Indeed, the structure of the electoral system, including gerrymandering, is often the key to understanding how political and racial/ethnic minorities can (or cannot) wield power and influence. This article examines each approach after a brief review of the historical origins of the subfield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hallmark finding in the study of public opinion is that many citizens approach the political realm with one-sided attitudes that color their judgments, making attitude change difficult. This finding highlights the importance of citizens with weak prior attitudes, since they might represent a segment of the electorate that is more susceptible to influence. The judgment processes of citizens with weak attitudes, however, are poorly understood. Drawing from dual-process models in psychology, I test the idea that citizens with weak explicit attitudes rely on implicit attitudes as they render political judgments. I find support for this conjecture in experimental and observational data. There are two main contributions. First, I show that an important and understudied segment of the electorate arrives at political decisions via automatic (but nonetheless predictable) mental processes. Second, I characterize the conditions under which implicit political attitudes matter more and less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding public preferences for governing processes is an understudied area of research. In this paper, I evaluate a set of critical assumptions relating to process preferences that the literature has thus far not addressed. I specifically address the claims made by John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse in their seminal book, Stealth Democracy, which suggests that people prefer political decisions to be made via expert-based governing arrangements to promote a level of efficiency and effectiveness within the government that elected officials cannot provide. Using original questions from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I find concurring evidence that citizens are not strongly attached to standard participatory processes found in democracy. However, upon using more precise measurements and placing expert processes into contemporary context, preferences weaken and appear to be shallow in nature. In an era where process preferences are receiving more attention as trust in government wanes, it is important to understand the depth of these preferences and their potential to change politics. These results suggest it is imperative for future scholars to approach the study of process preferences with care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on Donald Trump's U.S. presidential campaign and election as the 45th U.S. president. It discusses the importance of critical comedy for political discourse, critical public pedagogy and racial justice. It also discusses political humor of Trump's candidacy, election and presidency.

An essay on political discourses about Latin communities and identities in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential nomination which the author called as racial presidentialities is presented. It examines the broader rhetorics of presidentiality, the political and cultural discourses that use the presidency and/or presidential candidates to construct broader meanings of racial politics. Also discussed is the role of race in U.S. national identity.

An essay on political dynasties and democracy in the U.S. is presented. It examines the ways in which a historical and contemporary phenomenon as the fear of political dynasties as a long-standing element of national politics. It explores the role of dynasties in national elections, particularly the 2016 election. It also offers comments about political dynasties and democracy.

Did President Barak Obama's discussion of racial policies lead to a public backlash and invoke sentiments of racial resentment? Previous studies of citizens' racial attitudes suggest that the American public tends to have an unfavorable view of race-specific policies that provide advantages and unique resources to minorities. Moreover, these programs invoke sentiments of racial resentment. However, I argue that when the president leads on racial issues by implementing and discussing race-specific policies, he can guide perceptions on race in the direction of the public policy that was enacted. Through original experiments, I find strong support for this claim. I conclude with a discussion of the implications this work has for rhetorical approaches presidents take to address inequality from the Oval Office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unified Republican Party control of the federal government after the 2016 election brought a reversal of several Obama administration policies, especially those adopted via executive and administrative action in areas such as immigration, energy, the environment, and LGBT rights. The 2016 election also prompted a reversal of partisan perspectives with respect to federal-state relations, as Republicans in Washington moved to preempt state discretion in various areas, whereas Democrats in state capitols challenged the legality of presidential actions and resisted federal efforts to constrain state and local discretion. In this essay, we discuss these themes through an analysis of developments in 2016 and early 2017 regarding health care, immigration, education, marijuana, and energy and environmental policy. We also consider key U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting the contours of state policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key development during the Obama Administration was the increasing importance of state attorneys general (AGs) in national policymaking. This article examines the dual role that AGs played during the Obama years. The first role was highly contentious, with Republican AGs leading several multistate challenges to Obama Administration priorities and successfully limiting President Obama’s policy legacy. The second role was more cooperative, involving increasing coordination between AGs and their federal counterparts in national enforcement efforts. Relying on case studies in the areas of immigration enforcement, climate change regulation, and the oversight of for-profit higher education, this article highlights several crucial trends concerning the activities of these important state-level actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In partnership with state Democratic parties and the Obama campaign, the authors surveyed staffers from nearly 200 electoral campaigns in 2012, asking about the expected vote share in their races. Political operatives’ perceptions of closeness can affect how they campaign and represent citizens, but their perceptions may be wildly inaccurate: campaigns may irrationally fear close contests or be unrealistically optimistic. Findings indicate that political operatives are more optimistic than fearful, and that incumbent and higher-office campaigns are more accurate at assessing their chances. While the public may be better served by politicians fearing defeat, campaigns are typically staffed by workers who are over-confident, which may limit the purported benefits of electoral competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines President Barack Obama's March 28, 2011 address on the war in Libya to theorize a shift in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which violence is insulated from critique through the numbing of public sensation. In contrast to traditional persuasive appeals aimed at securing collective participation and approval for war, Obama's oratory is characteristic of "light war," a mode of conflict that flows more freely by placing few demands on thought, feeling, and attention. I argue that Obama's rhetoric limits the potential for audiences to sense the material consequences of war through a set of kairotic justifications in which violence is considered "just" in the dual sense that it just ended, and that it is just war, or merely a banal and quotidian version of conflict. After unpacking the anesthetizing features of Obama's discourse, I conclude by addressing the prospects of resistance given the compressed interval for public thought and feeling to interrupt violent practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research demonstrated that racial prejudice played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election, but relatively less is known about the relationship between prejudice and public opinion throughout the Obama administration. In the present research, we examined not only whether racial attitudes were associated with evaluations of Mr. Obama and his administration, but also whether they may have influenced the development of more general political attitudes during the early years of the Obama administration. We investigated this question using panel data from a nationally representative sample of Americans interviewed between September 2008 and July 2010. Racial attitudes measured prior to the election predicted early disapproval of President Obama's handling of important issues. Early disapproval of President Obama's performance, in turn, predicted later perceptions of whether the state of the nation was improving. Further, the divergence between high-prejudice and low-prejudice individuals in their perceptions of the state of the nation became greater over time, consistent with the idea that racial attitudes were more powerfully expressed in political judgments as time passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, U.S. relations with Russia and media reaction to Trump's interview with Bill O'Reilly.

An understanding of Donald Trump’s presidency must begin with his uniqueness in a domain that has been alluded to since his election, but little understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given its potential to quickly spread internationally and initially uncontrollable nature, the 2014 to 2015 Ebola outbreak has implications for global biosecurity. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Technical Reachback provided near real-time analysis and recommendations as outbreak-relevant events unfolded. Our review of often-conflicting or incomplete information was required to answer policy decision makers about the expanding Ebola epidemic, and enable the formulation of best-possible U.S. Department of Defense and Government response. Challenging questions often did not have obvious information available from which to provide a definitive answer. Nevertheless, through use of best-practice science and medicine, we provided timely and scientifically accurate weekly review for decision makers. Our comprehensive analyses included the nature of the outbreak, its global and national impact, contributing factors to this and future Ebola outbreaks, the U.S. Government and international response, and continuing interventions. We also provided guidance for Ebola transmission outside of West Africa, medical countermeasures, challenges with the international response, lessons learned, major constraints, and considerations for future preparedness. We believe an assessment of these events may help an improved response for future infectious disease outbreaks with global and national security implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acknowledging the renewed interest for public media in the United States since 2008, as well as the reminiscence of futurist philosophy in official speeches, we look into the reality of public media 2.0, and the place of public television in the context of Obama's America. We examine the contradictions and problems inherited from the liberal tradition, and describe how public television emerged in the United States, with a view to clarify what is left today of the initial ideal and to determine whether the present conditions are favourable to public media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the victory of businessman Donald Trump over former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with topics including the election results, the impact of Barack Obama's tenure, and the Republican Party.

The article discusses the U.S. presidential election in November 2016 with topics including businessman Donald Trump's victory in the election over rival Hillary Clinton, the mass media coverage of Trump's achievement, and democratic socialism.

The article discusses aspects of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which businessman Donald Trump won over former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with topics including Trump's appeal to economic insecurity, Clinton's defeat due to arrogance and inattention, and the future of Democrats.

The article focuses on the politics and government of the U.S. following Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election including the two demands of the Trump campaign, and the role of the pre-modern institutional peculiarities of the U.S. state and the working-class in Trump's victory.

A reprint of the article "The Trump Triumph: Looking Back and Moving Forward Together," by Bobbie Ragsdale that was published in the November 10, 2016 issue of the "Kennedy School Review" is presented. It discusses the issues confronted by the Trump administration upon assumption in office including the rising premiums of healhcare insurance under the Obamacare and the way the Trump administration addressed them.

The 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) reported significant increases in social isolation and significant decreases in ego network size relative to previous periods. These results have been repeatedly challenged. Critics have argued that malfeasant interviewers, coding errors, or training effects lie behind these results. While each critique has some merit, none precisely identify the cause of decreased ego network size. In this article, we show that it matters that the 2004 GSS unlike other GSS surveys was fielded during a highly polarized election period. We find that the difference in network size between nonpartisan and partisan voters in the 2004 GSS is larger than in all other GSS surveys. We further discover that core discussion network size decreases precipitously in the period immediately around the first (2004) presidential debate, suggesting that the debate frames "important matters" as political matters. This political priming effect is stronger where geographic polarization is weaker and among those who are politically interested and talk about politics more often. Combined, these findings identify the specific mechanism for the reported decline in network size, indicate that inferences about increased social isolation in America arising from the 2004 GSS are unwarranted, and suggest the emergence of increased political isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several volumes of books published by scholars, journalists and commentators of different political affiliation who have analyzed the personality of former U.S. President Barack Obama, his political agenda, and the programs he has made during his two mandates. Discussed are cultural and intellectual influences that have shaped Obama's personality and his political conception by analyzing his main speeches, essays written by him, and his articles in "Harvard Law Review."

Controversies over voting outcomes, and subsequent laws to seemingly curb irregularities, have led to increased scrutiny over the process of voting day activities. While studies find evidence that majorities perceive rampant fraud, the explanations for these opinions have mainly pointed to political predispositions, largely ignoring the influence of racial attitudes. We propose that contemporary opinions on electoral malfeasance are shaped by the context of a popularly elected African American president, Barack Obama, and subsequent racial resentments. Analyses of data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study reveals that racial resentment significantly predicts higher perceiver electoral malfeasance, even after controlling for political predispositions. Surprisingly, significant racial resentment effects exist among both Obama and McCain supporters, and these effects are strongest among those who perceived Obama won because of his race. Our results highlight the hyper racialized spill-over effects into judgements about the political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the circumstances under which U.S. presidents have invoked American exceptionalism in major speeches and how this concept has culminated in the Obama presidency. We find that U.S. presidents have increased their invocations of American exceptionalism since the Second World War and that they have relied heavily on this concept in times of national crises. Moreover, we demonstrate the overwhelming propensity of President Obama, relative to his predecessors, to emphasize American exceptionalism. We argue that this is due to the double-crisis nature of his presidency – two major wars and a recession – in addition to the racial bind that he has endured throughout his presidency. We reflect on the implications for other minority politicians and the broader American public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Issue evolution is a well-established theoretical perspective in the analysis of long-term party competition and partisanship in the US. However, this perspective has rarely been used to analyze political elite effects on partisan polarization in European multiparty systems. Consequently, I apply the issue evolution perspective to polarization in a European multiparty system. I find an emergence of cultural issues in Denmark, where mass level polarization on cultural issues followed elite level polarization. Unlike two-party systems, niche parties drive issue evolution on the elite level, which is then followed by niche partisan polarization and, finally, mainstream party adaption. The findings illustrate the mechanisms of issue evolution in a European-style multiparty system and the role of niche parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]