Changing Owners,Changing Content: Does Who Owns the News Matter for the News?

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 Rupert Murdoch’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.     

Elite and Everyday Social Contracts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Pathways to Forging a National Social Contract?

ABSTRACT

The Dayton Peace Agreement ended the violence in Bosnia–Herzegovina, however, it also solidified antagonistic political identities leading to the creation of two social contracts: an ‘elite social contract’ involving primarily political elites of the main ethnic groups and an ‘everyday social contract’ involving ordinary citizens trying to manage a complex social and economic environment. The first social contract is hegemonic, however, alternative, non-nationalist views are slowly emerging. Grassroots groups, the surviving remnants of inter-ethnic coexistence, the integrating pull of market forces and the presence of a large diaspora all constitute resources for the creation of a resilient national social contract.     

Effects of Economic and Symbolic Threat Appeals in Right-Wing Populist Advertising on Anti-Immigrant Attitudes: The Impact of Textual and Visual Appeals

Right-wing populist parties portray immigrants as economic or symbolic threats in their political advertisements by constructing a moral divide between the “good” ordinary people and “bad” immigrants. Yet, it remains unclear how these different threat appeals contribute to the formation of anti-immigrant attitudes among citizens and what role visual elements play in producing these effects. A survey-experiment with a quota sample of 471 participants reveals that, overall, symbolic threat appeals exert stronger effects on anti-immigrant attitudes than economic ones. When presented via text alone, only symbolic—not economic—threat appeals increased anti-immigrant attitudes via the activation of heuristic processing such as the reliance on negative stereotypes or feelings of anxiety, in particular among lower-educated citizens. When visuals were present, both types of threat appeals enhanced anti-immigrant attitudes among citizens across all education levels based on heuristic processing. Additionally, high image-text congruency induced cognitive argument approval resulting in higher anti-immigrant attitudes.     

提升政府公信力的路径探析

政府公信力是政治合法性的重要基础,是市场经济有效运行的重要保障,更是社会稳定和发展的前提条件。在社会转型期的今天,应加快行政管理体制改革,坚定不移地发展社会主义民主政治,加快政治文化建设,提升政府公信力。     

Humanism in the autobiographies of Edward Said and Nelson Mandela: memory as action

This paper discusses the concept of memory as a form of humanist activism in the autobiographies of Nelson Mandela and Edward Said. Mandela and Said were chosen because they dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom in South Africa and Palestine. Their engagement with the political causes of their countries turned into a concern with worldwide struggles for human rights and racial equality. While Mandela emerged as a vital force against apartheid in South Africa, Said was a well-known and influential Palestinian critic and intellectual whose writings tackle the Palestinian struggle for justice within the worldwide experience of imperialism and its binary oppositions of white/black, male/female, superior/inferior. I argue that these autobiographies bear witness to the plight of Black South Africans and Palestinians as both a shared memory resistant to erasure and a call for justice. Mandela and Said used their personal memories and life stories to construct a public reading of the meanings of the events that shaped them. Here I focus on the concept of humanist and political activity in the two autobiographies.     

Qatar’s humanitarian aid to Palestine

The purpose of this paper is to document Qatar’s recent contribution of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. We consider Qatar as an example of a mini state that relies on its wealth and soft power to further its interests in the Middle East and support a beleaguered Arab-Muslim state. The paper carries out analysis of Arabic newspapers and other documentary evidence to contextualise and estimate Qatar’s financial contribution 2010–2016. Contextualising Qatar’s aid necessitates considering Israel’s military control of the Palestinian Territories, and its ability through hard power to regulate the inflow of aid to Palestine. The paper concludes by calling for adopting the political economy perspective in dealing with humanitarian aid.     

中国非传统安全研究40年(1978-2017)：脉络、意义与图景

中国的非传统安全研究已成一门“显学”，且对相关研究、安全现实与安全政策产生了极大影响。中国40年(1978-2017年)的非传统安全研究整体上历经了酝酿与显现、阐释与呼吁、反思与深化、建构与拓展的过程；研究内容丰富且不断出新，逐步形成了较为稳定的研究类型；与国家决策的关系呈现“被忽视——边缘性——中心圈”的发展轨迹；研究驱动包括学理驱动、技术驱动、事件驱动、政策驱动和环境驱动；形成了涵盖组织机构、学生培养、知识传播、政策咨询和学术网络的制度化研究态势。在学术上具备了学派与学科的自觉，推动了安全思想的“范式转型”与“安全文明”的重塑，在政策上牵引着安全治理实践更加综合化与国际化。然而，中国非传统安全研究的理论体系还未形成，专业性、科学性、国际性不足，未来非传统安全研究需要在全球安全的研究格局、元问题与分析框架、理论体系与学派自觉、方法论与量化研究、议题深究与国际对话上有新的持续推进。     

The territoriality of personalization: New avenues for decentralized personalization in multi-level Western Europe

In light of the increasing scholarly attention to the concept of decentralized personalization, this paper argues that the territoriality (the level of government to which an MP belongs) of an MP would also lead to variations in that MP’s incentive to personalize their campaigns. Using data from the PARTIREP Comparative MP survey, this paper tests the role of the territoriality of an MP in their incentive to personalize their campaigns across nine multi-level countries in Western Europe. Although the level of personalization of campaigns does differ according to territoriality, the underlying explanatory variables do not behave uniformly across territoriality. This paper thus draws attention to the rarely explored role of territory, and the complications it may bring to the explanation of the personalization of politics.     

Credibility Enacted: Understanding the Meaning of Credible Political Leadership in the Dutch Parliamentary Election Campaign of 2010

In times of perception politics, the credibility of electoral candidates is a crucial asset in political marketing. This raises the question to which political leaders citizens attribute credibility and how political credibility is gained and lost through media performance. We analyze and compare two contrasting cases during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2010. Whereas in this campaign Mark Rutte—leader of the liberal party VVD—gained credibility, the credibility of Job Cohen—at the time, leader of the social-democratic PvdA—waned substantially. To understand this we extend the source credibility approach with a dramaturgical approach, and as such we shed light on what happens in the dynamic, interactive process between leaders and audiences in which credibility is constructed.