Communicating in the post‐truth era: Analyses of crisis response strategies of Presidents Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte

The rhetoric of then U.S. President‐elect Donald Trump and Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte had triggered a shift in global political discourse (Greene, 2016 ). This study examines their responses on three similar crises: disrespectful remarks towards women, associations with controversial political figures, and remarks threatening geopolitical relations. Data from prestige publications, Washington Post (U.S.) and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, were analyzed during the acute stage of each crisis. Findings showed that both men employed confusing strategy combinations in their crisis responses. Despite incoherent application and contradictory strategies, they survived threats to their image as evidenced by poll results. New strategies (diversion and logorrhea) and a strategy amplifier (machismo) were uncovered. These strategies tapped on ambiguity and were found to be successfully employed in a post‐truth landscape. This study builds on Benoit's ( 2006 ) argument that “any attempt by a president to repair a damaged image … clearly merits scholarly attention” (p. 138).     

Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age,period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.     

Designing for equitable civic engagement: Participatory design and discourse in contested spaces

A common theme of research on participatory democracy and citizen engagement centres on the need for empirical studies that conduct a deep exploration of the nuances and complexities of these processes. This article offers a distinct response to this need through an examination of two ethnographic case studies of a participatory budgeting process in a multilingual, highly diverse community in which Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants were involved. By analyzing participants discourse from the case studies, the findings highlight the risks and rewards of reframing participatory processes as design decisions rather than static procedures.     

Recruitment into Organized Crime: An Agent-Based Approach Testing the Impact of Different Policies

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - We test the effects of four policy scenarios on recruitment into organized crime. The policy scenarios target (i) organized crime leaders and (ii) facilitators...     

Ingredients of institutional reputations and citizen engagement with regulators

The purpose of this study is to examine the link between the reputational components of efficacy and moral reliability of institutions, and citizens' compliance with institutional recommendations. Research on bureaucratic reputations highlights the significance of positive political reputations based on credibility and legitimacy, but the impact of these components is not systematically isolated and studied. We draw insights from political psychology to move beyond a positive‐negative valence‐based approach of reputation, and highlight the different effect of efficacy and moral reliability components of reputation on citizens' cooperation, engagement in water saving activities, and levels of complaints. We use the Cypriot Water Authority as a case study and inquire how its institutional reputation influences Cypriot citizens' behavior regarding water use. Our data was collected via a representative national survey administered to a random sample of 800 Cypriots in the spring of 2009 and show that favorable perceptions of particular components of institutional reputation shape the levels of satisfaction with specific organizational outputs.     

Analyzing Multiple-Item Measures of Crime and Deviance I: Item Response Theory Scaling

Multiple-item measures of self-reported offending typically provide the principal outcome measures for individual level research on the causes of crime and deviance. This article directs attention to the substantial problems presented by the task of forming composite scores for these measures, and it presents a possible solution to those problems. We consider scaling by means of the graded response model from item response theory (IRT) as a potential means of overcoming the shortcomings of traditional summative scaling and of obtaining valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses of our measures. We illustrate this strategy through a scale analysis of a fourteen-item, self-report measure of delinquency, using three years of data from the Monitoring the Future study, an annual national survey of high school seniors. The graded response model proves to be consistent with the data, and it provides results that address important substantive questions about self-report measures. The findings are informative about the strengths and weaknesses of alternative strategies for developing self-report instruments, indicating that there is little to be gained by making fine distinctions in the frequency of individual delinquent acts.