Anti-Americanism and Public Attitudes toward Transatlantic Trade

The recent debate about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has triggered widespread opposition to the trade agreement in Germany. It is not clear, however, what factors drive public attitudes toward transatlantic trade. This article explores the role of anti-Americanism in predicting attitudes toward TTIP among the German public. It argues that the impact of anti-Americanism depends on the extent to which political elites frame the TTIP proposal as a basic conflict between American and European values. Using data from two national representative surveys, it is found that attitudes toward America strongly predict support for the TTIP agreement. The results further demonstrate that the effect of national resentment is moderated by issue awareness, with citizens with a strong anti-American sentiment being significantly more likely to oppose the agreement if they follow the elite debate more closely. Taken together, the results suggest that national resentments are more important for the explanation of TTIP preferences than traditional factors such as partisanship, ideology and material concerns.     

My Return to China

There is no doubt in my mind that I will return to China to live. This may evolve to being a 50/50 arrangement with my other home in Australia, but I will return! I am not a big believer in lists, as they seem to be the hackneyed territory of gurus and spotlight seekers, but here I am going to make an exception! These are the top 10 reasons that I will come     

The Holocaust Through Latvia's Eyes: How the Nazi Party Became the Lesser of Two Evils

Internationalization of exhibitions creates cost structure distortion. What costs are being reduced thanks to international collaboration in the museum field? To determine the profitability of the model, international strategies are analyzed with two exhibitions—“Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso…the Stein Adventure,” coproduced by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux–Grand Palais organization, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris,” exhibited in major museums such as Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, or the Seattle Museum of Art.     

With Strings Attached: Statutory Delegations of Authority to the Executive Branch

While research on the influence of divided government upon legislative outputs is available, relatively little identifies the effects of divided government on legislative control of bureaucratic discretion. Some suggest that inter‐branch conflict between the President and Congress leads legislators to seek to retain legislative control over the bureaucracy. As a result, periods of divided government increase statutory control and reduce agency autonomy. Close examination of statutes creating each federal agency between 1946 and 1997 reveal that divided government increases specificity of statutory control. In addition, the particular type of divided government involving split partisan control between the chambers of Congress fosters greater specific statutory control when new government agencies are created.     

Social Anxiety and Aggression in Early Adolescents: Examining the Moderating Roles of Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking

Guided by a social information processing perspective, this study examined the unique and interactive contributions of social anxiety and two distinct components of empathy, empathic concern and perspective taking, to subsequent relational and overt aggression in early adolescents. Participants were 485 10- to 14-year old middle school students (54% female; 78% European-American) involved in two waves of a study with one year between each wave. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that higher levels of empathic concern were directly associated with decreases in subsequent relational and overt aggression one year later and buffered the impact of social anxiety on subsequent relational aggression. Although perspective taking did not moderate the impact of social anxiety on either form of aggression, it was a unique predictor of increased relational aggression one year later. Findings call for future research to assess both components of empathy separately as they relate to relational and overt aggression.     

If Brain Scans Really Detected Deception,Who Would Volunteer to be Scanned?

Abstract: Recent neuroimaging studies investigating the neural correlates of deception among healthy people, have raised the possibility that such methods may eventually be applied during legal proceedings. Were this so, who would volunteer to be scanned? We report a “natural experiment” casting some light upon this question. Following broadcast of a television series describing our team’s investigative neuroimaging of deception in 2007, we received unsolicited (public) correspondence for 12 months. Using a customized template to examine this material, three independent assessors unanimously rated 30 of an initial 56 communications as unequivocally constituting requests for a “scan” (to demonstrate their author’s “innocence”). Compared with the rest, these index communications were more likely to originate from incarcerated males, who were also more likely to engage in further correspondence. Hence, in conclusion, if neuroimaging were to become an acceptable means of demonstrating innocence then incarcerated males may well constitute those volunteering for such investigation.