U.S. National Identity,Political Elites,and a Patriotic Press Following September 11

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, U.S. government and military leaders often articulated distinctly pro-American themes in their public communications. We argue that this national identity discourse was at the heart of the U.S. government's attempt to unite the American public and to mobilize support for the ensuing "war on terrorism." With this perspective, we content analyzed Time and Newsweek newsmagazines for the five weeks following September 11 to identify potential communication strategies employed by government and military leaders to promote a sense of U.S. national identity. Findings suggest (a) that government and military officials consistently emphasized American core values and themes of U.S. strength and power while simultaneously demonizing the "enemy," and (b) that journalists closely paralleled these nationalist themes in their language.     

Letters of Intent: Election Campaigning and Orchestrated Public Debate in Local Newspapers' Letters to the Editor

Drawing on the findings of an extensive study of local and regional newspaper reporting of the 2001 UK general election, this article contests the widely held view that readers' letters' pages provide a public forum for discussion and debate initiated by readers. The article argues that during election campaigns, local parties may become highly influential in shaping the contents of letters pages as part of their broader media based campaigning strategy. For their part, editors select letters not simply according to their newsworthiness but to reflect the identity of the newspaper, to meet the perceived preferences of readers, as well as the more prosaic requirements of availability of space and editorial imperatives concerning balance. A fivefold typology of readers' letters is constructed and illustrated by reference to newspaper discussions of, among other matters, British membership of Europe and issues around taxation.     

EGOHOODS AS WAVES WASHING ACROSS THE CITY: A NEW MEASURE OF “NEIGHBORHOODS”

Defining “neighborhoods” is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes. Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of “neighborhood,” we argue that previous strategies relying on nonoverlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed. The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods: egohoods. These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with nonoverlapping boundaries. This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities: Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson. The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts. The results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the nonoverlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by using our egohood approach.     

Deinstitutionalization and Its Impact on Swedish Corrections

The dominant approach in Swedish corrections is to deinstitutionalize as many offenders as possible. This started in the 1960's when Sweden decided that rehabilitation, and secondarily deterrence, would be the overriding goals of its correctional program. This has remained true despite the statistical evidence indicating that the goal of rehabilitation has not been achieved to any significant extent. The dominant belief in Sweden is that prison is harmful and counterproductive when the overall aim is to reintegrate the offender into society.     

THE NEW GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS FOR NHS FOUNDATION TRUST HOSPITALS: REFRAMING GOVERNORS AS META‐REGULATORS

New governance arrangements for NHS Foundation Trusts (FTs) aimed to replace centralized state ownership of acute English hospitals with a new form of social ownership. Under this, trusts would exist as independent public interest organizations on the model of mutuals and co‐operative societies. Assessing the impact of the new arrangements on the management structure of four acute hospitals, we demonstrate that FTs have failed to deliver social ownership and local accountability on this model. We suggest that policy‐makers should re‐frame the governance apparatus associated with mutualism and social ownership in terms of the concept of meta‐regulation. By re‐framing governors as meta‐regulators, regulatory institutions would acquire new powers to steer FTs towards sustainable forms of compliance via non‐coercive, non‐intrusive means.     

Determinants of regime type in newly independent states

Abstract.  Since 1945, newly independent states have differed from longer lived states in their greater risk of violent conflict and more challenging environment for democratisation. The authors of this article theorise that certain economic, demographic, violence-related and external factors should affect the regime type (level of democracy versus autocracy) in newly independent states. Examining exclusively newly independent states that have undergone major political transitions allows one to determine factors favouring democracy over autocracy under such volatile circumstances. The authors test several hypotheses, using cross-sectional and cross-sectional time-series analyses, and find that economic development elevates the level of democracy in new states. Cultural heterogeneity has no effect, but external factors play an important role. Genocide and politicide reduce democracy, while civil wars have the opposite effect. These findings prove robust to alternative measurements of the dependent variable and alternative model specifications.