‘Groping toward coexistence’: US China policy during the Johnson years

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. XXX, China (United States Government Printing Office: Washington, 1998).     

New Media and the Polarization of American Political Discourse

Scholars of political communication have long examined newsworthiness by focusing on the news choices of media organizations (Lewin, 1947 Lewin, K. 1947. Frontiers and group dynamics. Human Relations, 1: 143–153. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; White, 1950 White, D. M. 1950. The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27: 383–390. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Sigal, 1973 Sigal, L. V. 1973. Reporters and officials, Lexington, MA: Heath.  [Google Scholar]; Gans, 1979 Gans, H. J. 1979. Deciding what's news, New York: Vintage Books.  [Google Scholar]). However, in recent years these traditional arbiters of the news have increasingly been joined or even supplanted in affecting the public agenda by “new media” competitors, including cable news, talk radio, and even amateur bloggers. The standards by which this new class of decision makers evaluates news are at best only partially explained by prior studies focused on professional journalists and organizations. In this study, we seek to correct this oversight by content analyzing five online news sources—including wire services, cable news, and political blog sites—in order to compare their news judgments in the months prior to, and immediately following, the 2006 midterm election. We collected all stories from Reuters' and AP's “top political news” sections. We then investigated whether a given story was also chosen to appear on each wire's top news page (indicating greater perceived newsworthiness than those that were not chosen) and compared the wires' editorial choices to those of more partisan blogs (from the left: DailyKos.com; from the right: FreeRepublic.com) and cable outlets (FoxNews.com). We find evidence of greater partisan filtering for the latter three Web sources, and relatively greater reliance on traditional newsworthiness criteria for the news wires.     

Countering Implicit Appeals: Which Strategies Work?

Some contemporary politicians try to mobilize racial attitudes by conveying implicit racial messages against their opponents—messages in which the racial reference is subtle but recognizable and which attack the opponent for alleged misdeeds. Although targeted politicians have tried a number of different strategies to respond to implicit racial appeals, little is known about the effectiveness of these strategies. Using two survey experiments, we answer the following question: Does calling the appeal “racial” work? That is, does it neutralize the negative effects on the attacked candidate? We find mixed evidence that it does. However, offering a credible justification for the attacked behavior works more consistently. We also test whether effects vary by candidate race. The results suggest that Black candidates’ rhetorical strategies are more constrained than identical White candidates’, but that White Americans are more open to credible arguments and justifications than the previous literature implies.     

Envisioning the next generation of behavioral health and criminal justice interventions

The purpose of this paper is to cast a vision for the next generation of behavioral health and criminal justice interventions for persons with serious mental illnesses in the criminal justice system. The limitations of first generation interventions, including their primary focus on mental health treatment connection, are discussed. A person–place framework for understanding the complex factors that contribute to criminal justice involvement for this population is presented. We discuss practice and research recommendations for building more effective interventions to address both criminal justice and mental health outcomes.     

Book Reviews

Matthew Amengual, Politicized Enforcement in Argentina: Labor and Environmental Regulation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Figures, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index, 286 pp.; hardcover $99.99, ebook $80. Matthew C. Ingram, Crafting Courts in New Democracies: The Politics of Subnational Judicial Reform in Brazil and Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Maps, figures, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index, 392 pp.; hardcover, $110. Russell Crandall, The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Photographs, maps, figures, list of organizations, bibliography, index, 698 pp; hardcover $99.99, paperback $39.99, ebook $32. Luis Fernando Angosto‐Ferrández, Venezuela Reframed: Bolivarianism, Indigenous Peoples and Socialisms of the Twenty‐First Century. London: Zed Books, 2015. Appendix, bibliography, index, 312 pp.; paperback, ebook. Fábio de Castro, Barbara Hogenboom, and Michiel Baud, eds., Environmental Governance in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Tables, figures, map, bibliography, index, 350 pp.; hardcover $31, ebook. Eduardo Alemán and George Tsebelis, eds., Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 296 pp.; hardcover $90, ebook. Joseph S. Tulchin, Latin America in International Politics: Challenging U.S. Hegemony. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2016. Bibliography, index, 235 pp.; hardcover $60. Kevin P. Gallagher, The China Triangle: Latin America's China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Tables, figures, bibliography, index, 256 pp.; hardcover $27.95, ebook.     

“The roughest form of social work:” How court officials justify bail decisions

Growing research has analyzed quantitative patterns of bail decisions and outcomes, but we know far less about how court officials justify their bail decisions. To enhance understanding of how bail decisions—and their resulting pretrial outcomes—are generated, we interviewed 104 judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in a northeastern state. Court officials in our study reported three primary justifications at bail: ensuring defendants return to court, preventing crime, and lessening harm. The first two justifications have been suggested in the literature, but the latter is novel and encompasses two secondary justifications: lessening criminal legal system harm and lessening societal harm. We show how these justifications and the decisions they enable blend risk management with rehabilitation and emerge from court officials’ shared assumption of defendants’ social marginality but varied beliefs about what to do about such marginality pretrial. Each justification allows for distinct, but at times overlapping, bail decisions. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of court official decision-making, research on racial and socioeconomic inequality, and bail reform policy.     

Comparing the role of personal and organisational support on the innovative behaviour of frontline healthcare workers in Australia and the United States

This paper empirically uses a street-level bureaucrat (SLB) lens to compare the impact of personal and organisational support on the innovative behaviour of frontline healthcare workers in Australia and the United States. Survey data came from the 260 U.S. and 220 Australian respondents. The structural equation model shows that organisational (i.e. manager–subordinate relationships) and personal supports (i.e. psychological capital [PsyCap]) significantly influence the innovative behaviour of frontline SLBs in health care. Further, the mediation results show that reciprocal social exchanges provide the foundations for facilitating the growth of healthcare workers’ PsyCap, which then gives them the resilience to be innovative in the workplace. The U.S. respondents perceived stronger organisational support and consequently had a better platform for building PsyCap – providing better work conditions for facilitating innovative behaviour to bourgeon. The paper adds to SLB theory concerning the influence of two variables on SLBs' innovative behaviour, in addition to a meaningful comparison of the U.S. and Australian healthcare workers. If governments and organisations want innovative workers, then the policies must be based on empirical evidence that shows the impact on all stakeholders, including SLBs, because otherwise, irrespective of policy directives, the outcome is low levels of employee wellbeing (which likely results in limited innovative activity).     

Re-visioning the “Eye in the Sky”: targeted drone strikes and an ethics of the encounter

ABSTRACT

The complexities which beset any attempts to ascribe a foundational ethic to matters of a political stripe are well known, and continue to provoke fierce debate within studies of international relations, geopolitics and security studies. Unsurprisingly, these questions have taken on crucial import within the sub-field of critical terrorism studies (CTS), as authors grapple with the range of counter-terrorism, counter-radicalisation and counter-extremism practices enacted by the Western state as part of an ongoing ‘War on Terror.’ And while much of this scholarship has been invaluable in problematizing the concept of ‘terrorism’ per se, normative questions have proven somewhat more elusive. Through a reading of the film Eye in the Sky, along with its take on the controversial counter-terrorism practice of targeted drone assassinations, this article reiterates the case for an ethical approach which takes radical difference as the basis for any engagement with the Other. Moreover, and following international relations authors of a poststructuralist lineage, it will be argued that supplementing Levinasian ethics with Derridean deconstruction can open up new and useful ways of approaching such seemingly intractable ethical conundrums.