Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments on Candidate Choice and Casualty Tolerance

In this article, we model the effect of foreign policy attitudes on both vote choice and casualty tolerance, using survey data collected during the 2004 election. We show that prospective judgments of the likelihood of success in Iraq and retrospective judgments of whether the war in Iraq was right are significant determinants of both vote choice and casualty tolerance. The prospective judgment of success is key in predicting casualty tolerance, while retrospective judgment of whether the war was right takes precedence in determining vote choice. In addition, there is an important interaction between the two variables, so the effect of one is conditional on the value of the other. We believe this is compelling evidence that foreign policy matters, and that it matters in reasonable ways.

A Question of Authority: Religion and Cultural Conflict in the 2004 Election

In this study I adopt a view of cultural conflict that extends beyond the usual set of controversial “moral” issues like abortion and gay rights to include symbolic issues related to patriotism and group affect. Using a set of survey items asking about respondents’ preferences in child-rearing, I create a measure of individuals’ orientations toward authority that proves to be a potent predictor of attitudes on cultural issues, affect toward social groups, party identification, and vote choice. This authority effect persists even in the presence of extensive multivariate controls for demographic and religious variables. I find that both authority measures and religion measures shape political attitudes, suggesting the need for a multi-faceted approach to understanding cultural conflict.

Implicit Attitudes,Explicit Choices: When Subliminal Priming Predicts Candidate Preference

Citizens are asked to make many judgments in politics, often in the face of scarce information and limited motivation. In making political judgments, citizens may rely upon a variety of cues, including the partisanship, ethnicity, race, or sex of candidates. Some cues, however, are more democratically troublesome than others. Democratic norms of equality suggest that attitudes towards racial or ethnic groups should not influence citizens’ evaluations of candidates. Often, however, attitudes towards these groups do matter. This article identifies a limiting condition on the effect of group attitudes: the presence of a party cue. I demonstrate that attitudes towards Hispanics influence willingness to support a Hispanic candidate, but only in the absence of a party cue. The article also contributes to existing work by analyzing both explicit and implicit measures of attitudes towards groups. Explicit measures include stereotypes and feeling thermometers; implicit measures are derived from a subliminal priming task. Subjects with positive attitudes towards Hispanics (whether these attitudes were measured implicitly or explicitly) were more likely to support the Hispanic candidate, in the absence of party cues. Subjects with negative attitudes towards Hispanics were less likely to support the Hispanic candidate, in the absence of party cues. The presence of party cues, however, eliminates the impact of attitudes towards Hispanics on political choice.

In Principle <Emphasis Type="Italic">and</Emphasis> in Practice: Learning Political Tolerance in Eastern and Western Europe

Political tolerance is a key democratic value believed to undergird successful and healthy democracies. In nascent democracies especially, citizens must tolerate the views and participation of opposing groups in order to ensure methodical transfers of power with successive elections. Yet, despite its importance, little research considers tolerance outside established democracies. In this paper, we compare political tolerance across eight Eastern European countries and six Western countries. We demonstrate that mean levels of tolerance are lower in the newly democratized countries of Eastern Europe and then examine whether they are a function of East Europeans’ limited experience with democracy. We also test whether established individual-level theories of tolerance replicate across this wide range of new and old democracies. We find some support for theories of democratic learning and also show that models of tolerance operate differently across the range of countries in our sample.

An Alternative Approach to Estimating Who is Most Likely to Respond to Changes in Registration Laws

Scholars often seek to understand which individuals are most responsive to the change in some treatment. Such work inevitably faces issues of identification. When the dependent variable is binary, the assumption that the largest effect occurs where p = 0.5 is also encountered. I apply Manski’s [(1995). Identification problems in the social sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] non-parametric Bounds approach, which relaxes the functional form and distributional assumptions found in traditional models, in an attempt to resolve the long standing debate on which types of individuals are most affected by changes in registration laws. Under the standard assumption that treats the selection of registration laws as exogenous, the results revise the current understanding. By exploring the power of various behavioral assumptions, new insights into the study of policy changes emerge, calling into question some of the assumptions that are standard in the literature.

Media Priming in a Multi-Party Context: A Controlled Naturalistic Study in Political Communication

This study investigates media priming effects in the context of a Summit meeting of European Union (EU) leaders. It differs in four ways from most previous non-experimental priming studies: (1) it provides survey data accompanied by a content analysis of the news, (2) it compares priming effects on evaluations of a number of political leaders, who differed in their visibility in the news, (3) it involves an issue with low salience, and (4) it studies priming effects in the context of a European Parliamentary democracy. The study involves a two-wave panel study (before and after the Summit) on a representative sample of 817 Dutch adults, and a content analysis of the newspaper and television news in the 8 weeks leading up to the Summit meeting. The study shows that media priming effects occur only for the politicians who appeared visible in the news in connection with the issue. The media priming effects were not significantly moderated by political attentiveness or by political knowledge. We also explore the aggregate level consequences of priming for the popularity of leaders, and demonstrate that, as a result of media priming, two politicians became more popular, despite having received a bad press.

Biotechnology and the Modern Liberal Project

Biotechnological enhancement of human capabilities reveals a characteristically modern stance toward nature: Human nature, as given, is an impediment to be overcome on the way to full human freedom. As a form of metaphysical partisanship, the biotech enterprise seems to further the political intention of Thomas Hobbes to nullify human diversity. Commerce in biotech enhancements, and the individual liberty such commerce instantiates, is likely to have the ironic effect of psychic homogenization.

公安行政强制措施法律适用探析

作为行政强制在公安行政执法领域的具体化和重要表现形式,公安行政强制措施与社会安定和可持续发展具有极为密切的联系,是一个非常重要的理论与实践问题。当前,应当进一步理顺规制公安行政强制措施的相关法律依据,并根据《行政强制法》的规定,结合公安实战具体情况,加强对公安行政强制措施实施程序的分析研究,从而切实发挥公安行政强制措施应有的功能和作用。     

突发事件中公共产品的需求与供给

应急管理是突发事件中各参与主体在政府主导下实现公共产品有效供给的过程。突发事件打破了系统内部资源与外部环境之间的平衡,改变了系统的价值分配模式,使公共产品呈现"高需求、低供给"的非常状态,这决定了突发事件中公共产品具有时间属性、空间属性、层次属性和权利属性。突发事件改变了人们的需求层次,不同的需求层次要求不同形态的公共产品供给。在突发事件的各个阶段,需要不同形态的公共产品;但具体到某一特定阶段,某种形态的公共产品需求会占主导。由于突发事件中公共产品需求的多变性和形态的多样性,公共产品供给必须以政府为主导,社会组织、企业和公民等有效参与、协调合作,以建立公共产品的多元供给模式。     

FTIR图像—单点模式法无损鉴别不同品牌激光打印机墨粉色痕

利用傅里叶红外图像系统,采用单点模式对收集到的八种品牌激光打印机墨粉色痕进行红外扫描,采集样品红外光谱,并对其中两种样品红外光谱进行二阶导数运算,得到对应的二阶导数光谱。实验表明,该方法可有效区分不同品牌激光打印机墨粉色痕,并可为其他书写材料无损检验鉴定提供借鉴。