Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public,Media, and Political Agenda

Agenda-setting has mostly been investigated as the cognitive process set in motion by the salience of political issues in the traditional news media. The question, though, remained whether political entertainment shows—political satire, specifically—can also set the agenda. The current study investigates whether two episodes of Dutch satire show Zondag met Lubach (ZML) about the European Union-United States trade agreement Transatlantic Trade Investment and Partnership (TTIP) have triggered first-level agenda-setting effects. For that purpose, three studies have been conducted to investigate the three-step agenda-setting process (i.e., learning, understanding, acting) from saliency in satire to saliency on the public agenda, but also on the media and political agenda. Study 1: A two-wave panel survey shows that consumption of the satire show positively affected knowledge acquisition about TTIP, which is the first step in the cognitive process underlying agenda-setting. Study 2: A randomized experiment demonstrated that exposure to ZML increased the perceived understanding of TTIP, which subsequently had a positive impact on the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda. Study 3: Longitudinal time-series data provide evidence that the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda—short term—and on the political agenda—long term—were positively affected by the ZML satire episodes. The study, altogether, demonstrates satire’s ability to set the agenda of both the individual and aggregate level and emphasizes the persistent relevance of agenda-setting theory in today’s high-choice media environment.     

Utopianism and the Bush foreign policy

Amidst a renewed debate over the existence of an American empire, serious questions have emerged about whether the Bush foreign policy can be described as ‘realist’ given the widespread opposition that it encounters from academic realists. This paper is an attempt to shed light on this vexing issue by interpreting the Bush foreign policy through the lens of the broader religious–political tradition of America. Specifically, it argues that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration draw on the utopian strand of this tradition when setting their foreign policy agenda and justifying their decisions to the public. With special reference to Iraq, it discusses how three key utopian themes—the perfection of human life on earth, the possibility of limiting evil through conversion and the prospect of arresting human development—are reflected in the neoconservative agenda. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how these themes run counter to the tenets of classical realism and of the ethical and political hazards that emerge from an attempt at utopian empire.     

Discourse,genealogy and methods of text selection in international relations

Abstract

Discourse analysis, once the purview of critical theories of international politics, has emerged as a mainstream methodology for understanding international relations. While interest in such perspectives has enriched international relations theory, much about the nature of methods—that is, specific empirical processes for the gathering and analysis of evidence—is left ambiguous in this scholarship. Which texts should discourse analyses focus on? And, more practically, how should those texts be chosen? Building on discussions of case study methodology from both qualitative and interpretive social science, this article contributes to theoretical and empirical projects within discourse theory by suggesting a method for text selection: the random selection of texts. I argue that random selection processes are beneficial for discourse analyses that aim to study broad cultural patterns, such as genealogy. Random selection is not simply a means of choosing texts, but also a more comprehensive logic for thinking about the purpose of texts in discourse analysis.     

Using the personal influence model to guide theory building for participatory communication in Africa

Abstract

This article argues that the personal influence model (PIM) be used strategically to resolve conflicts and social crises in Africa. It presents PIM as a complementary, analytic discourse to participatory communication, a development paradigm commonly used globally in a variety of social programs. That discourse, as a framework for theory building, is grounded in Africa's emerging and enduring realities: (a) the growing interest of the international community to assist Africa to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, whose focus is to reduce extreme poverty by 2015; (b) the ephemeral nature of Africa's political and social stability that necessitates reducing fear, improving community security, nurturing public trust, and building inter-group relationships, all as preconditions for attaining social development, and for using a community-agency- contracts-partnerships approach to deliver development services; and (c) the palpable congruence of PIM with Africa's extensive social networks, which are typically used as communication tools for social development. Those realities guide four propositions that serve as a heuristic template for testing and refining the participatory approach, thereby guiding theory building in participatory communication in African communities. That template identifies an expansive three-concept research agenda – culture, community governance and rule of law, and economic freedom – that raises questions, defines concepts, measures key variables, and assesses outcomes.     

The War over Iraq: Selling War to the American Public

The Holocaust has become an important part of the everyday discourse of American life. Indeed, it has become one of the central historical analogies for thinking about U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. The received wisdom about the Holocaust among most Americans is that the United States and the rest of the civilized world turned away Jews seeking to escape Nazi Germany before World War II, and then sat idly by while the Third Reich murdered nearly 6 million of them during the course of the war. In light of this reprehensible indifference, the United States shares some responsibility for the Holocaust, and it must “never again” allow large numbers of people to be slaughtered because of their race, ethnicity, or religion. Historical analogies are ubiquitous in foreign policy debates. Not only do they routinely shape state behavior, they usually do so for the worse. Hence, we should be wary of all historical analogies and examine them carefully to make sure they are based on sound history and used wisely by policymakers. The widely accepted Holocaust analogy illustrates, in my view, both how analogies are frequently based on a faulty reading of history and that policies based on them have not always served U.S. interests.     

The Path to Political Substance: Exploring the Mediated Discourse Surrounding Controversial Media Texts

This article proceeds from the assumption that entertainment texts—particularly controversial ones—function in a broad intertextual field and that their political significance does not lie solely in their value as stand-alone texts, or in their direct influence on political knowledge, attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, but in their ability to instigate politically relevant discussions in other media venues. Focusing on the mediated discourse surrounding two controversial U.S. docudramas, The Reagans and The Path to 9/11, this study examines the political qualities of the public discourse surrounding these docudramas in the U.S. news media and investigates which factors were significant predictors of political substance in this discourse. Based on a distinction between “issue substance” and “media substance” as the two major types of political substance that emerge in the discourse surrounding controversial texts, the analysis demonstrates how these types of political substance varied across the two docudramas and across various dimensions of the discourse, among them the time in which the discussion took place. The analytical framework presented in this article is offered as a platform for future examinations of the contribution of media-centered political scandals to public discourse, the conditions under which entertainment texts spur substantive political discussions, and the complex interactions between journalism, entertainment, and politics in contemporary media environments.     

Developing terrorism coverage: variances in news framing of the January 2015 attacks in Paris and Borno

Written news coverage of an event influences public perception and understanding of that event. Through agenda setting and news framing, journalists control the importance and substance of readers’ beliefs about the event. While existing research has been conducted on the relationship between media coverage and the geographic location of the country an event took place in, there is limited understanding of this relationship in terms of terrorist events. Utilising an agenda-setting theory and news framing theory lens to compare news coverage of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and Borno, Nigeria revealed significant variances in the overall coverage, headline style and discourse usage based on the event. In particular, the American news coverage positively framed France through detailed, sympathetic coverage and negatively framed Nigeria by overgeneralising and placing blame. Determining the origin and impacts of these variances is integral to forming a more comprehensive understanding of international terrorism and the most effective ways to combat it.     

The Chocolate Conundrum: A Simple Simulation of a Canonical Management Problem

This article describes an exercise that simulates one of the most famous of all human management problems: the “tragedy of the commons.” Coined by Garret Hardin in 1968, the term refers to any situation in which people acting rationally to meet their individual interests wind up depleting a shared resource to the detriment of all participants. Because these patterns arise in many real‐world situations — from global warming and natural resource management to free‐rider problems in markets and organizations — this exercise may interest a broad range of negotiation scholars, teachers, and practitioners. The Chocolate Conundrum is a simple exercise that uses candy to demonstrate the tension between individual and collective interests that arises in all social dilemmas. Because these dynamics also arise in many real situations, the exercise can be a powerful teaching tool for instructors in management, public policy, sociology, economics, and many other social science disciplines. Unlike some other simulations of collective action problems, this exercise is simple to administer, requires no computation or tallying of results, and works with a broad range of audiences and group sizes.     

Grabbing attention: An experimental investigation of headlines during campaigns

In this article, we review two research programs that could benefit from a more extensive dialogue: media and policy studies of agenda setting. We focus on three key distinctions that divide these two robust research programs: the agenda(s) under investigation (public versus policymaking), the typical level of analysis (individual versus systemic), and framing effects (individual versus macro level). We map out these differences and their impacts on understanding the policy process. There is often a policy disconnect in the agenda-setting studies that emanate from the media tradition. Though interested in the effects of political communication, scholars from this tradition often fail to link the media to policy outcomes, policy change, or agenda change. Policy process scholars have increasingly rejected simple linear models in favor of models emphasizing complex feedback effects. This suggests a different role for the media—one of highlighting attributes in a multifaceted political reality and involvement in positive feedback cycles. Yet, political communication scholars have for the most part been insensitive to these potentials. We advocate a shared agenda centering on the role of the media in the political system from an information processing framework, emphasizing the reciprocal effects of each on the other.     

Elite Domination of Public Doubts About Climate Change (Not Evolution)

This article examines the sources of ideological skepticism about two issues where there is a scientific consensus: climate change and evolution. The results indicate that self-identified conservatives doubt global warming in large part because of elite rhetoric, but that evolution beliefs are unrelated to reception of political discourse. News reception is perhaps the strongest predictor of conservatives’ climate change skepticism, but has no influence on their aversion to evolution. Moreover, the article leverages three sources of variation in elite discourse on climate change—temporal, cross-national, and experimental—to show that changes in the prevalence of ideological cues strongly affect public opinion about global warming. Politically attentive conservatives, in fact, were more likely to believe scientists about global warming than liberals were in the 1990s before the media depicted climate change as a partisan issue. The United States is also the only nation where political interest significantly predicts both conservatives’ skepticism about, and liberals’ belief in, climate change. Finally, evidence from a national survey experiment suggests that Americans would be less skeptical of manmade global warming if more Republicans in Congress believed in it, but a growing Congressional consensus about evolution would not diminish doubts about its existence.     

‘Good governance’ and ‘state failure’: genealogies of imperial discourse

Current international policy discourse routinely characterizes the condition of African states in terms of either ‘good governance’, on one hand, or ‘fragility’ and ‘failure’, on the other. This conceptual vocabulary and analytical approach has become entrenched within the public imagination more broadly, and is reproduced in academic analysis, largely without serious questioning or critique. Some scholars, however, have argued that the entire discourse of ‘state failure’ should be rejected as a valid approach to understanding, analysis and explanation of social and political conditions in Africa. This position seeks both to demonstrate the analytical and explanatory emptiness of the conceptual framework of ‘state failure’, and to reject the uncritical adoption of strands of imperial discourse by academic scholars. This article contributes to this position by examining the failed state discourse as a modern form of racialized international thought. It argues that the discourse must be recognized as a contemporary successor to a much longer genealogy of imperial discourse about Africa and other non-European societies.     

A Multimodal Interaction Analysis of Selected 2015 Nigerian Election Campaign Adverts

ABSTRACT

Politics is intrinsic to the human societal structure and the exploration of language in politics has attracted the attention of social scientists and discourse/linguistic analysts. The role of mass media in framing political discourse has also been explored, particularly as the media is often exploited as a resource for influencing the audience. With the proliferation of the Internet and its democratising potentials, graphics and audio have become veritable tools for courting political patronage and maintaining positive perception by politicians. The present study analyses campaign videos from the two dominant parties during the 2015 Nigerian election. Six videos—three for each party—were selected and downloaded for the study. Employing the Multimodal Interaction Analysis theory as its framework, the research accounted for embodied and disembodied communicative modes in linguistically constructing and infusing meanings as campaign strategies to win the confidence of the voting public. The study identified history, declaratives, subtle imperatives, and linguistic tagging as discursive strategies used in political campaign videos. The study concluded that multimodal political advertisements strengthen Nigerian politics and engender positive citizenship participation in democratic practices.     

British Peace Activism and ‘New’ Diplomacy: Revisiting the 1899 Hague Peace Conference

This analysis provides a re-appraisal of the 1899 Hague Conference by looking more closely at how citizen activists—notably in Britain but also transnationally—used it as a forum through which to press their agenda onto politicians and diplomatists. In so doing, this assembly existed as a stepping-stone between the ‘old’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century and the ‘new’ diplomacy of the twentieth. Peace activists identified and harnessed a growing body of progressive public opinion—on both a domestic and international scale—in the hope of compelling governments to take the necessary steps towards realising their ambitions of peace, disarmament, and international arbitration. Although the tangible outcomes of the 1899 Conference were limited, the precedents it established not only paved the way for further advances in international law, but also facilitated ever closer public and press scrutiny of international affairs into the twentieth century.     

The choice for multilateralism: Foreign aid and American foreign policy

Why do governments choose multilateralism? We examine a principal-agent model in which states trade some control over the policy for greater burden sharing. The theory generates observable hypotheses regarding the reasons for and the patterns of support and opposition to multilateralism. To focus our study, we analyze support for bilateral and multilateral foreign aid giving in the US. Using new survey data, we provide evidence about the correlates of public and elite support for multilateral engagement. We find weak support for multilateralism and deep partisan divisions. Reflecting elite discourse, public opinion divides over two competing rationales—burden sharing and control—when faced with the choice between multilateral and bilateral aid channels. As domestic groups’ preferences over aid policy diverge from those of the multilateral institution, maintaining control over aid policy becomes more salient and support for multilateralism falls.     

Ties that bind: DfID and the emerging security and development agenda

The security and development nexus is on the public agenda of policy-makers and analysts as never before. It is becoming an article of faith that security and development are ‘inextricably linked’. The content and confines of the security and development agenda, however, are contested and confused. As one interviewee put it, ‘it's as if security is the new development and development is the new security’. This paper sets out to map the landscape of the development and security agenda in order that it might be navigated better. The focus is on how policy debates in this area are shifting, rather than on how these shifts are being implemented on the ground. Particular reference is made to the Department for International Development and its Strategy for Security and Development—an analysis of which throws into relief the tensions between the two spheres. It is argued that understanding the linkages between security and development must involve more than simply asserting that either one necessarily encompasses, requires or reinforces the other. Statements on security and development must be scrutinised against basic questions, not least whose security is at issue.     

A comparison of consensus and voting in public decision making

Conclusion As much as consensus decision making may be in vogue, as much as it may feel like an appropriate and progressive form of civil discourse, it is not without its problems and it may not always be the best avenue to pursue.Policymaking about community problems requires all the creativity we can bring to the task. One of the areas where we might best apply our creativity is in the continual search for improved models of civil discourse and decision making. Consensus-based approaches hold great promise for addressing thorny issues like dispersed public housing, but we need to remember that such methods are relatively new to most of us, and that we are still feeling our way with them.These cautionary comments, however, should not be embraced by public officials as excuses for keeping citizens out of public policy setting. Governments work best ultimately where there is broad consensus for their policies. Bernie Jones is associate director for university resources in the Colorado Center for Community Development at the University of Colorado at Denver, where he also holds an appointment as associate professor of urban and regional planning. His mailing address is Campus Box 128, University of Colorado at Denver, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, Colo. 80217-3364.     

Endogenous knowledge and the development question in Africa*

An apt analogy for speaking to Africa's experience with development is offered by the twinning of colonialism and modernization. While colonialism left behind some forms of hybridity and mimicry, the urge to decolonize—to be free from the colonizer's control in every possible way—was integral to all anti-colonial criticism after the Second World War. The politics of decolonization followed by the new states in the mid twentieth century, however, displayed an uncritical emphasis on modernization, in which development, pursued—with technology and tools of scientific progress—was a catching-up exercise with the West. As an epistemological export from the West, taking the form of science as hegemony and ideology within colonial discourse, this has not delivered material progress for Africa. The widespread concern about the intractability and magnitude of the problems facing the continent has made development a popular theme in the literature on African studies. The disappointment across various academic circles and the popular press over the dwindling prospects of development in Africa—illustrated in its food insecurity, low life expectancy and the familiar litany of its ills—has made revisiting the debates on African development both compelling and timely. Much has consequently been written on what development is or should be about in Africa. This article underlines the centrality of endogenous knowledge as the material precondition for autonomous development for Africa.     

The Clash of Historical Analogies and Their Influence on Decision-Making: The Case of Iraqi Reconstruction Under George W. Bush

Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature on United States foreign policy, there was no consensus within the George W. Bush Administration on the parallel between the reconstruction of Iraq and that of post-Second World War Germany and Japan. Systematic analysis of available sources shows that the decision-makers drew a large number of different historical analogies—73 in all. This analysis takes a fresh look at the use of analogies regarding Iraqi reconstruction. We divide the period of April 2003 to June 2008 into four phases, in each of which a different analogy predominates—Afghanistan, Germany and Japan, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Analysis of the analogies embraced by five distinct groups within the Administration’s decision-making team—nationalist hawks, neoconservatives, administrators of Iraq, realist internationalists and the president—clarifies the affinities and tensions amongst them.     

Social Protection in India: A Welfare State Sans Public Goods?

Of the two principal components of social welfare policy—basic public services and social protection—India has focused disproportionately on the latter in the last two decades, expanding existing social protection programs and creating new ones. By contrast, the country’s basic public services, such as primary education, public health, and water and sanitation have languished. What explains this uneven focus? Why has India prioritized social protection over public services? This article considers explanations suggested by the existing literature on welfare states and concludes that they do not account adequately for the Indian case. Instead, it argues, the prioritization of social protection in India results from a combination of political, ideational, and institutional factors rooted in India’s political economy.