When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions

An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.     

The Evolution of Political Violence: The Case of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab

This research investigates the development and expansion of the al-Shabaab movement in Somalia from 2000 to 2013. Initially a marginal player in Somalia, by 2013 al-Shabaab had transformed into the most formidable armed opposition to challenge the nascent Somali government and its allies. During this time period they administered territory domestically, while expanding their tactical repertoire and geographic scope of attacks. After analyzing the historical conditions (2000–2006) from which al-Shabaab emerged, I explore the evolution of this organization through the use of historical process tracing. This entails looking for critical junctures on a global, national, and local level that had a dramatic impact on the future trajectory of the insurgency. The results show that harsh foreign interventions had many deleterious consequences, acting as an initial impetus for armed resistance, while also acting as a continuous source of controversy which al-Shabaab exploited to gain new recruits. Moreover, irreconcilable intra-organizational schisms also contributed to altering the future organizational decisions made by al-Shabaab. The culmination of these results engage and expand the theory of categorical terrorism, offering observations to help scholars and policy makers alike begin to re-conceptualize ways to study terrorism and political violence.     

Digital media and political opposition in authoritarian systems: Russia’s 2011 and 2016 Duma elections

The ability of authoritarian regimes to maintain power hinges, in part, on how well they are able to manipulate the flow of information to the masses. While authoritarian states have had success controlling traditional media, the growth of social media over the last decade has created new challenges for such regimes. The Russian experience offers an example of how an authoritarian regime responds to this potential threat. Because of the massive demonstrations surrounding the 2011–2012 Duma elections, the ruling Russian government suspected that social media provided a significant impetus for the demonstrations. Social media, through its dissemination of opposition blogs, could have helped drive negative attitudes about the governing party. As such, the government responded by employing strategies to tighten their grip on the digital flow of information. We use survey data to demonstrate that exposure to blogs via social media at the time of the demonstrations led many to believe that the elections were fraudulent. Ultimately, we contend that Russian fears concerning the importance of social media for the fomenting of opposition movements is well grounded. Social media can drive support for opposition in an autocratic state.     

The Pro-Life Movement in Japan

The birth rate in Japan is among the lowest in the world. But what about the abortion rate? This essay examines changes in abortion practice in Japan over time, and especially after WWII and the passage of the 1948 Eugenic Protection Law, comparing the influence of Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism on the practice of abortion in Japan. This essay takes a particular look at the career of Dr. Kikuta Noboru, who helped revolutionize Japanese adoption laws after his conversion to Christianity.     

The Formation of Transnational Knowledge Networks on Social Media

Transnational knowledge networks provide organizations with information useful in addressing shared problems. Social media may enable the formation of those networks, yet their role in the process has received little attention. This article examines the structure and antecedents of two networks facilitated by the microblogging platform Twitter operating in the policy domain of emergency management. One network includes national-level government agencies responsible for disaster response and recovery operations; the other includes nongovernmental organizations in the form of Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies. We use a logistic regression quadratic assignment procedure to test hypotheses derived from related literature. While findings indicate that shared language and geographic proximity shaped network formation, both networks exhibit boundary spanning behavior in which organizations sought out information from high-profile, resource-rich organizations. Those organizations helped to connect otherwise regionally bound clusters and demonstrate the nascent potential of social media to create global transnational knowledge networks.     

The Capitalocene,Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.     

Taking Fact-Checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-Checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability

Political Behavior - Are citizens willing to accept journalistic fact-checks of misleading claims from candidates they support and to update their attitudes about those candidates? Previous studies...     

How to build a time machine for public affairs executives

Temporal factors such as time and timing are so self‐evident in public affairs that they are rarely mentioned and even less frequently researched. Time is seen as the independent variable—a scaffold that underpins a calendar of communication events, legislative and regulatory processes, or issue lifecycles. However, time is a more complex and essential variable to contemplate than public affairs (and most other) executives give it credit for. This paper explores 16 unique ways to think about time, applying those dimensions to the Amazon HQ2 (second headquarters) selection process to illustrate how public affairs executives could use them to illuminate aspects of strategy and behavior they might otherwise not consider. Strategically, understanding interconnected dimensions of time improves clarity in the choice‐making process, allowing public affairs executives to exploit ideal timing as they execute their strategies.     

Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers

With the increasing spread of information technologies and their potential to filter content, some have argued that people will abandon the reading of dissenting political opinions in favor of material that is closely aligned with their own ideological position. We test this theory empirically by analyzing—both quantitatively and qualitatively—Web links among the writings of top conservative and liberal bloggers. Given our use of novel methods, we discuss in detail our sampling and data collection methodologies. We find that widely read political bloggers are much more likely to link to others who share their political views. However, we find no increase in this pattern over time. We also analyze the content of the links and find that while many of the links are based on straw-man arguments, bloggers across the political spectrum also address each others’ writing substantively, both in agreement and disagreement.     

The Pharmacist's Obligations to Patients: Dependent or Independent of the Physician's Obligations?

It has been 40 years since the seminal papers on pharmacy's status as a profession sparked debate about the pharmacist's role in health care, yet the questions they raised are just as poignant today as they were then. Questions about whether pharmacists are the experts when it comes to drug therapy information can be answered practically by assessing the perception of pharmacists' obligations to patients as being dependent on or independent of physicians' responsibilities. Both options have important implications for pharmacy's status as a profession, the value that pharmacists can add to health care, and a pharmacist's right to deny a patient emergency contraception.