The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and, thus, more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.     

Hanging in,stepping up and stepping out: livelihood aspirations and strategies of the poor

In recent years understanding of poverty and of ways in which people escape from or fall into poverty has become more holistic. This should improve the capabilities of policy analysts and others working to reduce poverty, but it also makes analysis more complex. This article describes a simple schema which integrates multi-dimensional, multi-level, and dynamic understandings of poverty, of poor people's livelihoods, and of changing roles of agricultural systems. The article suggests three broad types of strategy pursued by poor people: ‘hanging in’, ‘stepping up’, and ‘stepping out’. This simple schema explicitly recognises the dynamic aspirations of poor people, diversity among them, and livelihood diversification. It also brings together aspirations of poor people with wider sectoral, inter-sectoral, and macro-economic questions about policies necessary for the realisation of those aspirations.     

委内瑞拉玻利瓦尔的政治进程

委内瑞拉玻利瓦尔共和国位于南美洲大陆的北部,濒临加勒比海,西与哥伦比亚为邻,南接巴西,东连圭亚那,国土面积916045平方千米,拥有3000千米长的海岸线,人口2500万,自然资源丰富多样。直到19世纪初期,委内瑞拉一直是西班牙的殖民地。1811年,委内瑞拉宣布独立并开始了一段殊死的战争时期,直至大约1825年才最终获得独立。这期间,哥伦比亚、厄瓜多尔和秘鲁也先后独立,还建立了一个新的国家——玻利维亚。这场解放运动的领袖就是委内瑞拉人——西蒙·玻利瓦尔(1783年出生于加拉加斯)。这些国家独立运动的基本政治主张均来自玻利瓦尔的思想,其中有…     

Filling In the Missing Link Between Universalism and Democracy: The Case of Costa Rica

This article explores a missing link in the recent literature on the formation of social policies: that between democracy and universalism, one desirable yet elusive feature of these policies. We base our argument on a case study of Costa Rica, the most successful case of universalism in Latin America. We proceed by first depicting Costa Rica's peculiar policy architecture, based on the incremental expansion of benefits funded on payroll taxes. Then we reconstruct the policy process to stress the key role played by technopoliticians in a democratic context. Backed by political leadership and equipped with international ideas, technopoliticians drove social policy design from agenda setting to adoption and implementation. Third, we argue that key aspects of the policy architecture established in the early 1940s were fundamental building blocks for a distinctive and seldom explored road to universalism. We conclude considering contemporary implications.