Defining Defamation: Community in the Age of the Internet

The ability to instantly communicate with a global audience has created numerous legal uncertainties as jurists struggle to adapt age-old jurisprudence to modern-day technologies —and defamation jurisprudence is no exception. The definition of a plaintiff's community is critical to his or her ability to succeed in a defamation lawsuit, often determining whether the plaintiff is a public figure or whether the plaintiff's reputation has been injured in his or her community. This article examines federal and state defamation jurisprudence to compare the factors courts have used to define community in both traditional print and broadcast cases with the factors used in more recent Internet defamation cases. It then suggests three possible rubrics courts could employ to more uniformly define community in Internet defamation cases.     

“I Won't Back Down?” Complexity and Courage in Government Executive Decision Making

Senior government executives make many difficult decisions, but research suggests that individual cognitive limitations and the pathologies of “groupthink” impede their ability to make value‐maximizing choices. From this literature has emerged a normative model that Irving Janis calls “vigilant problem solving,” a process intended for the most complex decisions. To explore its use by senior public officials, the authors interviewed 20 heads of subcabinet‐level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking how they made their most difficult decisions. The initial focus was on whether they employed a vigilant approach to making decisions that were informationally, technically, or politically complex. Most executives identified their single most‐difficult decision as one that required courage; they often made such courageous decisions after personal reflection and/or consultation with a small number of trusted advisors rather in ways that could be described as vigilant. The different approaches for making complex decisions, compared with those involving courage, are discussed and a contingency model of effective executive decision making is proposed that requires leaders (and their advisors) to be “ambidextrous” in their approach.     

Modelling the dynamics of support for a right-wing populist party: the case of UKIP

Similar to a number of other right-wing populist parties in Europe, Great Britain's United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has experienced increased public support in recent years. Using aggregate data from monthly national surveys conducted between April 2004 and April 2014, time series analyses demonstrate that the dynamics of UKIP support were influenced by a combination of spatial and valence issues. A spatial issue, Euroscepticism, was fundamental, with UKIP support moving in dynamic equilibrium with changing public attitudes towards EU membership. In addition, widespread anti-immigration sentiment and dissatisfaction with the performance of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government combined with the “oxygen of publicity” to propel UKIP's surge. The political context after the 2010 general election helped as well by enabling UKIP to benefit from valence considerations. Many voters continued to doubt the competence of the major opposition party, Labour, while the Liberal Democrats were part of the government and, hence, unavailable as a protest vehicle. Since many of the forces driving UKIP support are beyond its control, the party's prospects are highly uncertain.     

Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.