Which Narrative Strategies Durably Reduce Prejudice? Evidence from Field and Survey Experiments Supporting the Efficacy of Perspective-Getting

Exclusionary attitudes towards outgroups contribute to social and political challenges worldwide. Previous field experiments found that interpersonal conversations employing multiple narrative strategies can durably reduce exclusionary attitudes. We theoretically distinguish between three of these narrative strategies: narratives which promote analogic perspective taking, vicarious perspective-giving, and perspective-getting. Previous research has assigned these strategies together in a compound treatment, leaving open important theoretical and practical questions about each's effectiveness. We present results from three field studies and a survey experiment that individually manipulate their presence. Across the field studies, we find omitting prompts to engage in analogic perspective-taking and vicarious perspective-giving does not diminish effects; conversations employing only perspective-getting narratives durably reduce exclusionary attitudes. Results from within-subject analyses and a survey experiment similarly show that perspective-getting consistently reduces exclusionary attitudes and activates multiple mechanisms. These results refine theoretical understandings of prejudice reduction and support facilitating perspective-getting in conversations intended to reduce exclusionary attitudes.     

Gender Differences in Worry About a Terrorist Attack: A Cross-National Examination of Individual- and National-Level Factors

Prior research has found gender to be associated with worry about crime and terrorism. We used World Values Survey data to assess gender differences in worry about terrorism across 54 nations. Analyses also examined the influence of individual- and national-level factors. Women were significantly more worried about terrorism in 22 of the 54 nations. Men in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and New Zealand were significantly more worried about terrorism than women. Individuals were more likely to worry about terrorism as the nation’s average mortality count in terrorist incidents increased. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Reflections on Habermas on Democracy

Jürgen Habermas is a radical democrat. The source of that self-designation is that his conception of democracy—what he calls “discursive democracy”—is founded on the ideal of “a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens,” coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. The author discusses three large challenges to this radical-democratic ideal of collective self-regulation: 1) What is the role of private autonomy in a radical-democratic view? 2) What role does reason play in collective self-regulation? 3) What relevance might a radical-democratic outlook have for contemporary democracies? The author addresses these questions by considering Habermas' answers, and then presenting alternative responses to them. The alternatives are also radical-democratic in inspiration, but they draw on a richer set of normative-political ideas than Habermas wants to rely on, and are more ambitious in their hopes for democratic practice.     

Who Benefits from Aid for Trade? Comparing the Effects on Recipient versus Donor Exports

Abstract

Recent studies offer an ambiguous picture on the effectiveness of foreign aid in strengthening the export capacity of recipient countries. Moreover, the literature on aid for trade (AfT) has often neglected the fact that exporters in the donor countries may be among the main beneficiaries. We simultaneously estimate and compare the effects of AfT on trade in both directions. We find that AfT increases recipient exports to donors as well as recipient imports from donors. The first effect tends to dominate the latter, which contradicts the sceptical view that donors grant AfT primarily to promote their own export interests.     

Does the State Promote Communal Violence for Electoral Reasons?

It has often been alleged, most recently in the recommendations of India's National Advisory Council (NAC), that the Indian state promotes, or is complicit in, Hindu-Muslim violence for political or electoral reasons. But the evidence for the claim has historically been sketchy. In StevenWilkinson's work, Votes and Violence, the argument is that the evidence supporting state complicity is systematic.We examine this argument and find it to be fundamentally flawed.     

Social Networks and Protest Participation: Evidence from 130 Million Twitter Users

Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. Social media and their global use by protesters offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe real‐time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real‐world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protest in Paris, which, unusually, record real‐world protest attendance and network structure measured beyond egocentric networks. We devise a test of social theories of protest that hold that participation depends on exposure to others' intentions and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strongly consistent with these theories, showing that protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties than comparable nonprotesters. These results offer the first large‐scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure has consequences for protest participation.     

Sustaining the State: Legal Consciousness and the Construction of Legality in Competing Abortion Activists' Narratives

This article investigates how activists involved in both sides of the street politics of abortion simultaneously create, are constrained by, and use law when recounting a period of conflict that resulted in litigation. The activists‐turned‐litigants' construction of legality is explored by identifying and analyzing patterns of inclusion, absence, amendment, and type of law (i.e., state or extrastate) in and across the stories they tell. It is found that even though there are multiple reasons to expect all of these activists to resist or amend the state's conception of law, their narratives ultimately reproduce state law's legitimacy and power. The activists' stories also illustrate that legal consciousness is contextually and experientially based and is therefore subject to change. This finding has implications for legal mobilization as well as for the nature of legal consciousness.     

Agency in earth system governance: refining a research agenda

In the face of global environmental change, a key question for the social sciences is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their natural environment. In this context, a new long-term research program, the Earth System Governance Project, proposes several key issues to be examined: architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation and access. The contributions to this special issue have focused on the analytical problem of agency. For example, they have examined newly emerging or understudied agents of global environmental governance, or offered a fresh assessment of agency in the context of existing governance mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism. This concluding article outlines several insights provided by the contributions to this special issue regarding four key questions underlying the study of agency in global environmental governance. First, they call attention to the ingredients or processes that characterize agency in the first place and thus distinguish actors from agents. Secondly, the authors highlight the differences among agents and how they interact with each other. Thirdly, they point toward variation in the ways that agents may acquire authority. Finally, the contributions to this special issue suggest that there may be several approaches to evaluating agency, with different consequences. Thus, taken together, the contributions to this special issue provide a starting point for broadening our understanding of agency in earth system governance.