Typing Politics: The Role of Blogs in American Politics,by Richard Davis

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of how negativity affects voters’ assessments of the positions candidates take on issues. We argue that the inferences people make about candidates’ positions on issues differ depending on whether the information they encounter comes from attack or self-promotional statements. Specifically, we posit that attacks offer two pieces of information to voters—insight into the positions of the target and the sponsor—whereas, positive information only affects perceptions of the sponsor. Further, we contend that attacks offer important correctives to candidates’ often misleading self-promotional claims. By drawing attention to the differences between the informational content of negative and positive appeals, we offer new insights into the inferences voters make about candidates’ positions on issues. We support these claims using data from an internet-based experiment employing a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 people. The paper concludes by teasing out a series of implications that arise from these insights.     

Speech Rights in America: The First Amendment,Democracy, and the Media,by Laura Stein Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism,by Samuel P. Nelson

In this article, we develop and test an economic theory of Supreme Court news. We hypothesize that information about the Third Branch is newsworthy when it has lower production costs and qualities attractive to the audiences and advertisers desired by news organizations. We examine Supreme Court news in elite newspapers, television news broadcasts, and online news sources during the October 2008 and 2010 terms. The results of our quantitative analyses indicate that all three types of news outlets are more likely to provide content about Supreme Court decisions with substantive importance but vary in their responses to costs and qualities appealing to the lay audience. We conclude by discussing the similarities and differences among news outlets with regard to their selection of Supreme Court information as news content.     

Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations

President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War One, promising to make the world safe for democracy. Advocating liberal internationalism, he called for collective security and national self-determination. He wanted democratic states to create the League of Nations as a partnership for peace in a new world order. But in his thinking and statecraft, the text of modern liberalism was intertwined with the subtext of White racism. His friendship with Thomas Dixon, Jr., and his contributions to David W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation revealed this nexus between liberalism and racism. His liberal civic ideals appeared quite different from the ultra racism of the film, which was based on Dixon's novels. He seemed to advocate inclusive nationalism, in contrast to its exclusive Americanism. The president's apparently universal principles, however, were still influenced by the White South's Lost Cause. His diplomacy and his legacy of Wilsonianism combined racism with liberalism. He adhered to the color line at home by promoting Jim Crow segregation in the federal government and abroad by limiting his liberal internationalism in practice. Historians and political scientists have typically identified Wilsonian diplomacy only with liberalism. To see him and his legacy in international history from a different perspective, which brings into focus the experience of people of color, it is necessary to recognize the subtext of racism in the text of Wilson's liberalism. Racism shaped his understanding of America's national identity and global mission, and thus his vision of liberal democracy and peace.     

Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations

President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War One, promising to make the world safe for democracy. Advocating liberal internationalism, he called for collective security and national self-determination. He wanted democratic states to create the League of Nations as a partnership for peace in a new world order. But in his thinking and statecraft, the text of modern liberalism was intertwined with the subtext of White racism. His friendship with Thomas Dixon, Jr., and his contributions to David W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation revealed this nexus between liberalism and racism. His liberal civic ideals appeared quite different from the ultra racism of the film, which was based on Dixon's novels. He seemed to advocate inclusive nationalism, in contrast to its exclusive Americanism. The president's apparently universal principles, however, were still influenced by the White South's Lost Cause. His diplomacy and his legacy of Wilsonianism combined racism with liberalism. He adhered to the color line at home by promoting Jim Crow segregation in the federal government and abroad by limiting his liberal internationalism in practice. Historians and political scientists have typically identified Wilsonian diplomacy only with liberalism. To see him and his legacy in international history from a different perspective, which brings into focus the experience of people of color, it is necessary to recognize the subtext of racism in the text of Wilson's liberalism. Racism shaped his understanding of America's national identity and global mission, and thus his vision of liberal democracy and peace.     

Henry Kissinger: Realism,Domestic Politics,and the Struggle Against Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy

Henry Kissinger was the single most controversial diplomat of the 20th century. This article explores Kissinger's approach to the philosophy of realism in international affairs, his role in Vietnam policy making, and his most recent engagement in the debate over the Iraq War. It argues that Kissinger's realism, although philosophically consistent and having roots within his own life's experience, was always tempered by his desire to exercise influence within the American political system. Once in office under Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford, Kissinger came to recognise how significantly domestic politics shaped American foreign policy. His involvement in the Vietnam War demonstrates this, and one lesson he took from that conflict was the hope that Americans could be persuaded to move away from their convictions about American exceptionalism and recognise the limits of American power.     

News,Talk, Opinion,Participation: The Part Played by Conversation in Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy can be defined as a political system based on citizens' free discussion of public issues. While most scholars have discussed deliberative democracy normatively, this study attempts to test the validity of a model of deliberative democracy through examining the interrelationships among its four components: newsmedia use, political conversation, opinion formation, and political participation. Sufficient empirical evidence was found to support the hypotheses that (a) news-media use is closely associated with the frequency of political conversation in daily life both at general and issue-specific levels; (b) willingness to argue with those who have different opinions is influenced by majority perceptions and by news-media use and political talk; (c) news-media use and political conversation have positive effects on certain measures of the quality of opinions (argument quality, consideredness, and opinionation) and perhaps on opinion consistency; and (d) news-media use and political conversation are closely associated also with participatory activities, but more so with "campaigning" than "complaining."     

The State of the Art in International Democracy Promotion: Results of a Joint European-North American Research Network

The international dimension of democracy promotion remains at best under-studied and poorly understood, and in the extreme, hotly debated and criticized by its contemporary detractors. The primary purpose of this article is to offer an overview of the 'state of the art' in international democracy promotion by drawing on the conclusions of a five-year joint European-North American research project devoted to this topic that was funded by the Finnish International Development Agency (FINNIDA). Specifically, this article draws upon our collective research endeavour to codify the principal questions, issues, and themes that are characteristic of international democracy promotion efforts to date and to assess what we have learned in terms of the further strengthening of democracy promotion efforts and therefore global democracy itself.