Diversionary cheap talk: economic conditions and US foreign policy rhetoric, 1945-2010

ABSTRACT

This study explains how the economy affects the foreign policy rhetoric used by American presidents. When economic conditions deteriorate, presidents criticize foreign nations to boost their approval ratings. Presidents use this “diversionary cheap talk” in response to the misery index of unemployment plus inflation, which poses a unique threat to their popularity. They target historical rivals, which make intergroup distinctions most salient. Diversionary cheap talk is most influential for and most frequently used by Democratic presidents, whose non-core constituents prefer hawkish foreign policy but already expect it from Republican presidents. I test the observable implications of the theory with the American Diplomacy Dataset, an original record of 50,000 American foreign policy events between 1851 and 2010 drawn from a corpus of 1.3 million New York Times articles.     

Factors influencing the contamination of UK banknotes with drugs of abuse

Bank of England banknotes sampled from different locations in the UK have been analysed for the presence of cocaine, diamorphine (DAM), Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). A database of the contamination detected is routinely used as a benchmark against which the contamination detected on seized banknotes can be compared. Evidence presented at court details how banknotes seized from a suspect may differ from banknotes in general circulation in terms of their contamination with controlled drugs. A question arising from such evidence is whether seized banknotes could have become contaminated through being in circulation in drug "hot spots". In order to address this issue, a Plackett-Burman experimental design was used to investigate the influence of source location and other factors on banknote contamination with drugs of abuse. Banknotes were drawn from banks in eight regions throughout the UK. Each location could be described by a unique combination of the factors under investigation, namely whether the location was rural or urban, in the North or South of the UK, and whether it was a port of entry. The socio-economic class and the proportion of drug offenders in the area and the denomination of the banknotes were also considered as potentially influential factors. Indices were calculated to describe the degree to which samples were contaminated with different drugs, and normal probability plots were used to identify the factors that could account for the contamination observed. Whilst some factors were more influential than others, it was shown that, at the 95% confidence level, none of the proposed factors were significant influences on the contamination. Cocaine contamination on banknotes has been shown to follow a log-normal distribution. It was, therefore, possible to calculate F- and t-statistics to compare the cocaine contamination on the entire sample set with that detected on a second sample set consisting of banknotes all drawn from a single bank branch. It was shown that both inter-bank samples and intra-bank samples had similar variance and similar contamination levels at the 95% confidence level. This suggests that there are no significant regional trends in the contamination of banknotes with drugs of abuse across the UK.     

Dorset,Kincardine and peasant crisis: A comment on David Craig

David Craig's paper ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’ is to be warmly welcomed. But Craig provides no adequate analysis of the peasant crises underlying the novels which he considers. This paper considers one of Craig's novels; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. Craig's explanation of this book in terms of depopulation and the destruction of the Kincardine peasantry from outside is seen to be inadequate. Sunset Song is about the crumbling of a peasant mode of production through the working out of internal contradictions within that mode of production. As an introduction to this discussion of Sunset Song Craig's dismissal of the utility of Thomas Hardy's work for the analysis of rural class relations is argued to be distinctly premature.     

Still Divided by a Common Language: Discontentment and the Semantics of Power

In a recent response to an article of mine on the 'faces of power' controversy published in this journal ( Politics Vol. 18. No. 1), James Doyle provides an important, sophisticated and provocative attempt to rehabilitate Lukes' three-dimensional conception of power from the criticisms of myself and others. He argues, in particular, that Lukes' understanding of power is not compromised by its reliance upon a distinction between subjective and objective interests since such a distinction is, in fact, 'an integral part of the logical grammar of the concept'. Nor, he suggests, is Lukes wrong to raise the spectre of the concept of 'false consciousness since the notion of 'duping others' is also 'internal to the logic of the concept' of power. Finally, Doyle argues that my chosen reformulation of the concept of power as context- and conduct-shaping unwittingly exposes me to precisely the same criticism(s) which I direct at Lukes. In this brief response I seek to clarify and defend my earlier position in the face of certain obvious misunderstandings in Doyle's reading, whilst re-stating my principal point of departure from Lukes' formulation.     

Willing Executors of Hitler's Will? The Goldhagen Controversy, Political Analysis and the Holocaust

Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) has won its author a succession of accolades, from the American Political Science Association's prestigious Gabriel A. Almond Prize in comparative politics in 1994 to the even more prestigious Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik's Democracy Prize (awarded last in 1990). It has also occasioned an unprecedented and intense controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article I consider the attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust in the Goldhagen thesis and the controversy this has spawned. I argue that despite Goldhagen's efforts to restore the conscious human subject to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the logic of his thesis in fact serves largely to absolve German subjects of culpability for an act of barbarism he regards as at least latent in an 'exceptional' and 'eliminationist' anti-Semitism that predates the rise of fascism. I take issue with Goldhagen's identification of Hitler's willing executioners as 'Germans', arguing that if human subjects are to be restored to the analysis of the Holocaust (as, indeed, they should be), it is imperative that we acknowledge the distinctly unexceptional character of 'Ordinary Germans' and, consequently re-examine our own culpability in this most modern of atrocities.     

Tracing the Rise of Evidence-Based Juvenile Justice in Florida

The movement toward evidence-based practice in juvenile justice has encouraged a research-informed approach that prioritizes the principles of effective intervention. And yet the shifts in this direction have been uneven across different states. This pattern underscores the value of state-level case studies for understanding the pace and nature of juvenile justice reform in recent decades. The authors provide such a study for the state of Florida. They begin in 1994 with the creation of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. The authors describe the unique history in these early years and identify the political and cultural factors that variously encouraged and constrained evidence-based reform. They then describe the resulting system that pervades today. The authors emphasize four key elements that define the current operation of Florida juvenile justice. They conclude by situating Florida’s shifts within the broader dialogue on evidence-based practice in U.S. juvenile justice.