At the Nexus of Observational and Experimental Research: Theory,Specification, and Analysis of Experiments with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

Experimentalists are increasingly examining heterogeneous treatment effects, in which observed individual-level characteristics are hypothesized to moderate an experimental treatment effect. Such work places researchers at the nexus of experimental and observational approaches. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical and statistical issues that can arise in testing such hypotheses. We note that inclusion of an observed (as opposed to randomly-assigned) moderator introduces the possibility of confounds that are commonplace in observational data analysis but too-easily ignored in experimental data analysis. We simulate several different data generating processes that include heterogeneous treatment effects, and we discuss the implications of various statistical models. We aim to provide researchers who examine heterogeneous treatment effects with background and advice that enable them to identify where common issues may arise and to develop research designs and implement statistical tests that will mitigate them.     

The structure of foreign policy attitudes in transatlantic perspective: Comparing the United States,United Kingdom,France and Germany

While public opinion about foreign policy has been studied extensively in the United States, there is less systematic research of foreign policy opinions in other countries. Given that public opinion about international affairs affects who gets elected in democracies and then constrains the foreign policies available to leaders once elected, both comparative politics and international relations scholarship benefit from more systematic investigation of foreign policy attitudes outside the United States. Using new data, this article presents a common set of core constructs structuring both American and European attitudes about foreign policy. Surveys conducted in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) provide an expanded set of foreign policy‐related survey items that are analysed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Measurement equivalence is specifically tested and a common four‐factor structure that fits the data in all four countries is found. Consequently, valid, direct comparisons of the foreign policy preferences of four world powers are made. In the process, the four‐factor model confirms and expands previous work on the structure of foreign policy attitudes. The article also demonstrates the capability of ESEM in testing the dimensionality and cross‐national equivalence of social science concepts.     

State Capacity,Bureaucratic Politicization,and Corruption in the Brazilian State

Responding to recent articles in Governance highlighting the need for improved measurement of bureaucratic characteristics, this article describes efforts to map Brazil's federal agencies on three dimensions—capacity, autonomy, and partisan dominance—derived from data on more than 326,000 civil servants. The article provides a “proof of concept” about the utility of agency‐level measures of these variables, demonstrating how they relate to an output common to all agencies: corruption. The article provides a first step in the direction of building a comparative research program that offers objective evaluation of bureaucracies within nation‐states, with the intent of better disentangling their impact on governance outcomes.     

Governance in the Age of Digital Media and Branding

The politicization of government communications requires intense control. Centralization of government power accompanies advances in information and communications technology, as political elites use branding strategy in an attempt to impose discipline on their messengers and on media coverage. The strategic appeal of public sector branding is that it replaces conflicting messages with penetrating message reinforcement. Among the notable features are central control, a marketing ethos, a master brand, communications cohesiveness, and message simplicity. Together these features work to conflate the party government and the public service, which perpetuates trends of centralization. Using Canada's Conservative government (2006–2015) as a case study, public sector branding explains the hyper control over government communications and demonstrates why these developments can be expected to last, regardless of which party or leader is in control.     

From ambiguity to contestation: discourse(s) of non-traditional security in the ASEAN community

‘Non-traditional security’ (NTS) is prominently featured in the agenda of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other ASEAN-led institutions in the Asia-Pacific. ‘NTS’ brings together a series transnational and non-military security threats that are considered common among regional states, urgent for them to attend to, and non-sensitive all at the same time. This a priori makes it a self-evident focus of attempts to bring regional security cooperation ‘to a higher plane’. However, this paper reveals that the uncontroversial character of NTS is overestimated, by shedding light on the co-existence of divergent – and potentially contradictory – interpretations of its meaning and implications in ASEAN and the wider region. In a context where ASEAN's relevance to the pursuit of regional security is increasingly being measured against its (in)ability to provide a coherent approach to security challenges that affect the region, the contested nature of NTS has important implications for the grouping's resilience in the twenty-first century.     

Containing Environmentalism: Risk,Rationality, and Value in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez

This article revisits regulatory debates about environmental valuation following the Exxon Valdez oil spill to argue that the spill can be seen as a constitutive moment in the rise of neoliberalism. I show that rationalizing environmental values was not simply about applying market rationality to the natural world, but entailed reexamining the nature of that rationality itself and its relevance to social behavior. I then trace the reverberations of these debates beyond the realm of environmental policy, highlighting an underappreciated legacy of the Valdez: the first credit default swap, executed in response to an unprecedented punitive fine leveled against Exxon. Illuminating the linked histories of environmental valuation, corporate environmentalism, and financialization through that event, I argue that environmental valuation is a political problem through which neoliberal strategies for the governance of life (both human and nonhuman) have been forged.     

Videogame analysis: a social-semiotic approach

The relevance of videogames in the contemporary cultural ecosystem and their social impact make it necessary to develop theories and analytical models to understand the expressive potential of videogame design, and how videogames work as texts, giving shape to certain values, behavioural patterns and ideological visions. To do so, it is crucial to build a bridge between game studies and contemporary semiotics. Thus, with this aim, we present in this paper an analysis model for studying videogames as texts that combines theoretical and methodological elements from social semiotics and procedural rhetorics, a specific branch of game studies. Our model is based on four levels: the narrative, ludo-narrative, system-gameplay and designer-player dimensions. As a case study, the model is applied to the videogame The Last of Us.     

Shaping the Evolution of the Information Flow: The Centralizing Mechanisms in the Evolution of the North American Tobacco Quitline Consortium

The research reported here is an analysis of the evolution of the relationships that comprise a single public health network, focusing especially on the position of the network administrative organization (Provan and Kenis 2008 Provan, K. G. and P. Kenis. 2008. “Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18(2): 229–252.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in the flow of knowledge among a large number of organizations providing similar services. Our study examines the North American Quitline Consortium (NAQC), a multi-sector network that spans the US and Canada and whose members provide telephone-based tobacco cessation services to anyone interested in quitting smoking. Data were collected using web-based surveys at three different points of time. Implications are discussed for network organizing, for both theory and practice, focusing especially on the importance of the network administrative organization in shaping the evolution of the whole network information flow.