Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

As it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.     

The Role of Citizen Participation and the Use of Social Media Platforms in the Participatory Budgeting Process

In the United States participatory budgeting (PB) is a relatively new and innovative approach to municipal budgeting that has implications for improving the role of citizen participation in the budgetary process. The research is based on personal interviews with local community leaders involved in the PB process in the 49th Ward of Chicago, Illinois; the 6th Ward of St. Louis, Missouri; and the City of Boston, Massachusetts. Highlights are provided of the specific experiences and perceptions of these community leaders with a particular emphasis on the use of social media platforms in engaging citizens in the PB process. This article concludes with recommendations for creating a PB infrastructure, for increasing citizen participation in the PB process, and for assessing and increasing the impact of PB in cities within the United States.     

Polarized preferences versus polarizing policies

Much of contemporary political debate in the United States focuses on the issue of polarization: specifically, its causal antecedents and its consequences for policymaking and political conflict. In this article, we argue that partisan preference polarization—conventionally defined as the difference in the favored policy positions of legislators from the two major parties—is not a sufficient statistic for potential political conflict in national politics . Rather, a well-defined measure of potential conflict must take into account (1) the locations of status quo policies and proposed alternatives; and (2) the shape of underlying utility functions. We propose measures of the likely contentiousness of a given status quo policy and of a proposal to move that policy. We then demonstrate the usefulness of these measures using estimates of utility function and final passage vote parameters on enacted legislation from the 111th US Senate (2009–2011).     

The Role of Former Combatants in Preventing Youth Involvement in Terrorism in Northern Ireland: A Framework for Assessing Former Islamic State Combatants

The article engages with emerging debates on the potential role returning Islamic State fighters may have in preventing violence and whether nonviolent radical ideology acts as a conveyor-belt or firewall to violence. Rather than focusing on former combatant ideologies, it demonstrates how framing processes—not ideology per se—are more salient indicators of whether former combatants will act as conveyor-belts or firewalls to violence. The analytical framework developed for analyzing framing processes is then applied to the case of Northern Ireland. It argues that ideology shapes and constrains the type of antiviolence framing that may emerge, which provides a middle ground between the two perspectives in the literature. Furthermore, the article highlights the importance of network structures, incentives, and opportunities insofar as these can shape antiviolence framing and improve resonance among audiences. While recognizing the differences between cases, the framework is then used to argue that former Islamic State combatants can play a preventative role depending on whether their antiviolence framing is based on durable structural conditions, de-glamorizes violence, and is supported by networks that incentivize its diffusion—not on whether they have denounced their ideology.     

Youth Adversities Amplify the Association between Adult Stressors and Chronic Inflammation in a Domain Specific Manner: Nuancing the Early Life Sensitivity Model

There is strong evidence that chronic, systemic inflammation hastens onset of the diseases of old age that ultimately lead to death. Importantly, several studies suggest that childhood adversity predicts chronic inflammation. Unfortunately, this research has been plagued by retrospective reports of childhood adversity, an absence of controls for adult stressors, and a failure to investigate various competing models of the link between childhood adversity and chronic inflammation. The present study was designed to address these limitations. Using 18 years of data collected from 413 African Americans (58% female) included in the Family and Community Health Study, hierarchical regression analyses provided support for a nuanced early life sensitivity explanation for the link between early adversity and adult chronic inflammation. Controlling for health risk behaviors and adult SES, late childhood (ages 10–12) adversity amplified the association between adult adversity (age 29) and chronic inflammation. This interaction operated in a domain-specific fashion. Harsh parenting amplified the relation between intimate partner hostility and inflammation, whereas early discrimination amplified the relation between adult discrimination and inflammation. These findings suggest that individuals may be primed to respond physiologically to adverse adult circumstances that resemble those experienced earlier in life.

     

E Pluribus Unum: fostering a new era of citizenship by teaching civic engagement and healthy civic discourse

• In a time of profound national challenge and change, it is important to promote a new definition of active citizenship locally, nationally and globally. As the effects of economic, political and social globalization continue to underscore interdependence, the imperative of fostering democratic minds among a citizenry is evermore important. It is essential to conceive a common future that encourages the participation of all American citizens; inviting diversity as an asset and broadly reawakening the call to leverage the rich potentials of pluralism in search of common solutions. However, many schools are retreating from basic civics lessons and are not teaching students how to become active citizens. More importantly, public institutions overall do not appear to be advancing the fundamental awareness and skills required for sifting through political hucksterism, opinion masquerading as news and political spin. It is essential for our schools and public institutions to teach the responsibilities and joy of active citizenship. To meet the challenges of democratic cooperation and social cohesion, leaders and citizens alike should be taught and encouraged to openly question, to critique and even to criticize the status quo. The means for cultivating and institutionalizing such habits on a broad scale involves educational reformation and initiatives in civics and citizenship education to increase opportunities for meaningful public engagement. These are by no means the only answer, but they are a critical component for meeting the challenges of truly inclusive and active representative democracy where out of many, we are one.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Misogyny,Dionysianism and a new model of Greek tragedy

The subject of misogyny in Greek culture is widely recognized as of capital importance in understanding our attitude towards women as well as the general culture context within which that attitude is framed. Yet despite the obvious importance of this subject there has been little attention given to the way misogyny in fifth‐centry Athens was an integral part of its greatest art form, the tragic drama. Only when a model of tragedy is developed which accounts for the typological opposition between the male “tragic hero” and Dionysus will it be possible to understand how women function within this particular literary genre as the essential “other” of repressive male consciousness.