Media malaise or a virtuous circle? Exploring the causal relationships between news media exposure,political news attention and political interest

Being politically interested is one of the most important norms from a democratic perspective, as it is a crucial antecedent for voting, political knowledge, civic and political participation, and attentiveness to political information. However, only limited research has focused on the relationship between media use and political interest, despite the notion that modern politics is mediated politics. Even more important is the fact that the causal relationship between media use and political interest still has not been firmly established. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate the causal relationship between news media use and political interest. The results show that there are indeed causal and reciprocal relationships between political interest and attention to political news, and between political interest and exposure to some, but not all, news media. Overall these results lend stronger support to the perspective of media mobilisation theories than media malaise theories.     

Decoupling trends: Drivers of agency independence in telecommunications: An analysis of high and middle-income countries

Global diffusion of regulatory reforms in telecommunications has prevailed in many countries, engendering major institutional changes and entailing the establishment and/or reform of regulatory agencies. Although the triggers and timing of such agentification processes have been more or less similar, agency independence displays significant cross-country variation. Seeking to explain such variation based on a sample incorporating middle-income countries (MICs), this paper examines the impact of political-institutional settings in which the agencies operate, in addition to the impact of economic parameters. Regression analysis reveals that political rights appear as the central parameter, while their impact is more robust in MICs than in advanced countries. The results underscore considerable cross-national variation in regulatory governance, along with a noteworthy decoupling between MICs and advanced countries. Concurring with the regulatory regionalism perspective, the paper delineates distinct regional clusters, albeit remaining agnostic about the determinants of such clusters.     

The Freedom of Seduction

For most of human history, the other half of the species, women, were on the sidelines. Now they are central actors in all our societies as we negotiate the fraught transition from male‐dominated tradition to modernity and beyond. In this section we hear the voices of powerful women who in their own lives are making this historic shift.     

Peer Victimization Exposure and Subsequent Substance Use in Early Adolescence: The Role of Sleep Problems

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - While sleep problems are positively associated with both peer victimization and substance use, previous studies largely have ignored the indirect role sleep...     

Turkey’s ambivalent self: ontological insecurity in ‘Kemalism’ versus ‘Erdoğanism’

Abstract

This article aims to understand the ‘non-Western self’ and the different ways its ontological insecurity can manifest, through the example of Turkey, by contrasting Kemalism’s modernizing vision with Erdo?an’s current populism. We argue that the constructions of political narratives in Turkey (and by implication in other similar settings) derive from two interrelated aspects of the spatio-temporal hierarchies of (colonial) modernity: structural insecurity and temporal insecurity. Modern Turkey’s ontological insecurity was constructed spatially, on the one hand, as liminality and structural in-betweenness, and temporally, on the other, as lagging behind the modernization of the West. After discussing how Kemalism offered to deal with such insecurities in the twentieth century, we analyse the Justice and Development Party (AKP) period of the twenty-first century as an alternative attempted answer to these problems and explain why efforts to dismantle the Kemalist framework collapsed into its populist mirror image. The example of the Turkish case underlines the importance of focusing on the different ways in which the structural and temporal insecurities of ‘the non-Western self’ take shape at a given point and manner of entry into the modern international order.     

Do young female candidates face double barriers or an outgroup advantage? The case of the European Parliament

While intersectionality is a recurrent theme in the literature on women's political representation, few studies empirically disentangle who are the women who get elected to parliaments. An argument on biases in recruitment practices suggests that those who are members of more than one outgroup, such as young women, benefit from an ‘outgroup advantage’. In elections, a candidate with two outgroup features might attract more voter support than a candidate with just one outgroup feature. Hence, nominating a candidate that is both young and female could be a rational move by (male) elites in political parties that allows them to open fewer seats to newcomers. These expectations are tested on data for all members of the European Parliament since 1979. Not only is it found that women's presence increased steadily throughout the parliament's history, but also that women's representation is consistently highest among the group of young representatives, lower among middle-aged Members of the European Parliament and lowest among older representatives.     

The political is personal: an analysis of crowd-sourced political ideas and images from a Massive Open Online Course

ABSTRACT

The analysis of ideology at the vernacular level requires access to peer-to-peer political discussions amongst non-specialists. It is in these discursive exchanges that political views are articulated, refined, and revised. Such exchanges are, however, difficult for the researcher to capture. Here we take c.25,000 learner comments (along with several hundred image uploads) from a Massive Open Online Course, co-produced by the University of Nottingham and the British Library, as a source of such peer-to-peer political discussions. From five topics we have selected ‘Freedom’, ‘Justice’, and ‘Community’ for close analysis. The idea of ‘freedom’ generated by far the most learner discourse, being both positively appraised and highly personalized. ‘Justice’ was generally seen as something to be delivered by political institutions, although accounts of injustice were frequently personalised. Accounts of ‘community’ often focused on the trappings of nationhood, but some comments, and many images in particular, highlighted moments of ephemeral and more personal, self-chosen communities. Overall, both comments and images show that, in their interpretation of the conceptual vocabulary of politics, people frequently frame their understanding through personal experience in a very direct manner. It is not only true that the ‘personal is political’, but also, for many, that the ‘political is personal’.     

A Tale of Two Courts: The Judicialization of Electoral Politics in Asia

This article examines the judicialization of electoral politics in Asia, an important but understudied trend, as demonstrated in Thailand and Indonesia. Though the constitutional courts in both have similar histories and institutional arrangements, their electoral interventions vary radically. We argue that the diffusion or concentration of power among post‐transition elites determines whether the effect of judicial activism will be to shore up or undermine electoral governance. Where power is diffused, as in Indonesia, political actors, less able to impose their own will on the judiciary, seem to prefer a credible referee, which fosters electoral competition. Where power is concentrated, as in Thailand, elites have both the motive and the means to turn judicial activism to antidemocratic ends. By focusing on the ends, rather than the means, of judicial activism, this account goes beyond personalities and institutional design to enhance understanding of the role of the courts in transitional democracies.