The European Court of Justice and the Annulment of the Tobacco Advertisement Directive: Friend of National Sovereignty or Foe of Public Health?

In Case C-376/98 Germany v Council the European Court of Justice annulled a Directive which banned the advertisement and sponsorship of tobacco. The judgment sanctions regulatory policy-making at the national rather than the Community level. The paper examines the legal basis of the annulment, its effect on economic efficiency and the implied role of the Court in the formulation of public policy in Europe. Within the institutional limits of the judicial power to determine policy, the Court focused on whether or not disparate national laws restrict free movement and distort competition and affirmed the primacy of the nation state to regulate economic activity.     

我国城乡居民收入差距演变及影响因素分析

城乡居民收入差距过大已经成为制约经济运行和影响社会稳定的一个重要因素．以城乡二元结构为视角，从定性和定量角度具体分析和研究城乡居民收入差距问题，重点分析我国城乡居民收入差距的历史演变，并从城乡二元体制、农业产业的弱质性、农村产业结构不合理、产权制度不合理和农村金融业发展滞后等方面阐释了城乡居民收入差距扩大的原因，提出缩小我国城乡居民收入差距的对策。     

Priming,Issue Ownership,and Party Support: The Electoral Gains of an Issue-Friendly Media Agenda

Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns.” We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple parties and issues. The results provide support for the basic electoral implication of issue ownership theory, showing that increased media attention to owned issues increases support for the issue owners. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the effect of the ownership mechanism materializes differently for opposition and government parties. Opposition parties benefit from media attention to owned issues without losing ground when news concentrates on issues owned by government parties, while government parties, always struggling with the electoral cost of ruling, lose votes when news about opposition-owned issues increases without gaining support when the media agenda is “issue-friendly.”     

Any Publicity or Good Publicity? A Competitive Test of Visibility- and Tonality-Based Media Effects on Voting Behavior

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.     

The effects of visual priming on information processing in child sexual offenders

Abstract

Child sexual offenders are hypothesized to hold offence-supportive beliefs that set them apart from others. The current study seeks support for this view via a cognitive-experimental approach. Child sexual offenders and offender controls were exposed to pictures of semi-clothed children (priming condition) or clothed, mature adults (control condition). Participants then read ambiguous sentences describing children's actions that could be interpreted in a sexualized manner. Next, participants completed a surprise recognition test in which half the sentences were re-presented in an unambiguously sexual form, and half in an unambiguously non-sexual form. Contrary to hypotheses, primed and/or control child sexual offenders did not show a memory bias for sexualized sentences, suggesting that they did not interpret the original sentences in line with offence-supportive beliefs. Results raise questions about whether child sexual offenders universally hold abnormal beliefs that facilitate their offending. Results also highlight the need for further experimental research within this field.     

Understanding Campaign Strategy

SUMMARY

The role of professional political consultants in campaigns is not very well understood, at least from a theoretical perspective. As a result, we know very little about how campaign strategy is developed. This article is an attempt to think theoretically about how professional campaign operatives craft strategies for candidates. It begins with a review of previous research on consultants and campaign strategy. That work helps lay a foundation for a theory of professional campaign activity that focuses on the development of campaign strategy. I then turn to campaign professionals themselves. Based on interviews with numerous consultants and other campaign operatives, I identify common approaches to building strategy within campaigns. Finally, I explain the notion of ‘deliberate priming,’ a theoretical understanding of professionally run campaigns that emerges from the consultant interviews and previous scholarship in this field.     

Agenda-Setting and Priming in Prime Time Television: Crime Dramas as Political Cues

The effects of agenda-setting and priming are well established in regard to the news media. Considerably less attention has been paid to these phenomena in entertainment media, in spite of the fact that entertainment media enjoy larger audiences than do news media and often address political topics. This article argues that the psychological mechanism hypothesized to lead to agenda-setting and priming effectsthat is, changes in construct accessibilityapplies as equally to entertainment media as it does to news media. Moreover, we contend that the frequency, consistency, and duration of entertainment media treatments of political issues encourage chronic accessibility of those issues. We test these hypotheses looking at television crime dramas as a source of political information. Using data from two controlled laboratory experiments and the 1995 National Election Study Pilot Study, we demonstrate that viewing crime dramas significantly increases concerns about crime and that these concerns significantly affect viewers' opinions of the president. The NES Pilot Study data suggest that these effects are restricted to frequent viewers of crime dramas, supporting a chronic accessibility model of agenda-setting and priming. These findings extend our growing understanding of how non-news sources of political information contribute to the construction of political attitudes.     

监外执行罪犯管理体制转变之探讨

社区矫正作为我国刑罚执行领域中监外执行的主要形式已试点展开,而试点背景下的公安机关与司法行政机关共同对监外执行罪犯进行监管的“二元监管体制”存在诸多问题,应逐步破解困境,实现向司法行政机关社区矫正机构和街道司法所为监外执行罪犯监管主体模式即社区矫正“一元主导体制”模式的转变。     

President Obama on the ballot: Referendum voting and racial spillover in the 2014 midterm elections

The 2014 elections were widely viewed as a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama. Republicans ran against the incumbent president, and many view the Republican Party's victories in 2014 as a mass rejection of President Obama's policies. We argue that this account of the 2014 elections is incomplete. We advance the theory of racial spillover—that associating an attitude object with President Obama causes public opinion to polarize on the basis of racial attitudes—to explain both vote choice and referendum voting in the 2014 elections. In an analysis of the CCES and an original survey, we show that congressional vote choice was strongly racialized in 2014. We go on to show that perceptions of the election as a referendum on President Obama were also racialized, and that these perceptions mediated the link between racial animus and 2014 congressional vote choice. This represents the first study to show that racialized congressional evaluations continued into 2014 and we provide direct evidence that attitudes about President Obama mediated the effect of racial animus on congressional vote choice. We conclude by discussing the implications for referendum voting, racial spillover, and the 2014 midterm elections.     

冷战后影响中日关系的结构性因素检验

在影响中日关系的众多因素中，结构性因素是非常重要的。文章在梳理了之前学者对中日关系影响因素研究的基础上，选取了几项论及比较集中的影响因素进行检验，并对其进行了概念操作化，将其定量为可以分析的具体指标。在数据的选用上，文章选择了1991年-2011年中日关系及各项影响指标的相关数据，并分别对每项指标进行二元回归分析。研究发现，影响中日关系的结构性矛盾是现实存在的，东亚格局的变化和中国的崛起都会使中日关系下降，而中美关系的改善不仅不能使中日关系得到改善，反而会加剧中日之间的矛盾和对抗，这一点与许多学者提出的“日本在对华战略上跟随美国脚步”的观点相反。