World communications after UNESCO

Abstract

The withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) represented an abrupt change in the long debate over the role of mass media, especially the so‐called New World Information Order. The NWIO issue itself was not a justification to withdraw, but other factors—corruption and incompetence within UNESCO and ill‐conceived programs— were. The debate, however, did spark a renewal of interest in the role of communications, particularly telecommunications, to promote Third World economic and political development. It also produced a modest but important commitment by U.S. government and private mass media to increase technical assistance and training programs. Despite the UNESCO rhetoric, support for the Western tradition of independence between mass media and government remains strong among Third World journalists.     

Leaders Without Borders: Familiarity as a Moderator of Transnational Source Cue Effects

The role of source cue effects in transnational persuasion (in which a foreign actor attempts to persuade an audience in another jurisdiction) is largely unexplored in both the political communication and international relations literatures. This article investigates transnational source cue effects using two source cue experiments that test the persuasiveness of German chancellor Angela Merkel and UK prime minister David Cameron in a Canadian context. The experiments were embedded in an online survey administered to student participants at a Canadian university in January 2011. As might be expected, the foreign leaders exerted positive source cue effects among participants who held positive impressions of the leaders and backlash effects among those who held strongly negative impressions. These effects, however, were moderated by participants’ level of political awareness, with the largest effects observed among participants who had an intermediate level of awareness. It is argued that this nonlinear moderating effect can be attributed to the countervailing effects of attitude stability and source familiarity (both of which are associated with political awareness) on individuals’ susceptibility to source cue effects. Finally, cueing David Cameron had approximately equivalent source cue effects on participants’ attitudes towards government spending on foreign aid and welfare, suggesting that foreign leaders may be able to move opinion on domestic as well as on foreign policy issues. Overall, these results validate existing models of source cue effects in a transnational context and point to the scope and limitations of national leaders’ ability to engage in direct public diplomacy.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix: Question Wordings for Survey Experiments; Table A1: Balance Tests for Afghanistan and Cameron Cue Experiments; and Table A2: Underlying Salience of Domestic and Foreign Policy Spending.]     

Coping with the Cuts? The Management of the Worst Financial Settlement in Living Memory

The scale of the cuts to local government finance, coupled with increasing demand for services, has led to unprecedented ‘budget gaps’ in council budgets. Arguably, two competing narratives of the trajectory of local government have emerged in which contrasting futures are imagined for the sector – a positive story of adaptation and survival and more negative one of residualisation and marginalisation. Drawing on case study evidence from three English local authorities, the paper distinguishes and provides examples of three strategic approaches to managing austerity – efficiency, retrenchment and investment. It demonstrates how and why the balance of these strategies has shifted between the early and later phases of austerity and considers the extent to which the evidence of the case studies provide support for either the survival or marginalisation narrative. The paper concludes by arguing that a third narrative – responsibilisation – captures more fully the trajectory of local government in England.     

Symposium Introduction: Local Responses to ‘Austerity’

This introduction to the symposium sets out the context for local government in the United Kingdom at the current time. It outlines the scale of the reductions in funding since 2010, showing how uneven these cuts have been across the country and the reasons for this. It also describes the increased exposure to risk of both local government and of the citizens and communities it serves. The central question for the papers which follow is how local government is responding to these twin challenges. The papers provide insights from a number of detailed studies of individual authorities, exploring the strategies adopted to manage in response. The analyses focus on the distributive consequences for individuals and communities, but they also reflect on the wider consequences for local government itself. A particular concern is whether local responses are changing as austerity moves from its initial to its later phase.     

Book reviews and notes etc.

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PUBLIC LAW AND POLITICS: Edited by C. Harlow. [Sweet & Maxwell. 1986. 255 pp. £28.00 (hardback).]

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DISCUSSIONS IN BIOETHICS. VHS Videos. [Educational Media International, 25 Boileau Road, London W5 3AL. £75.00 (sale); £20.00 (rental).]     

Convergence in British Cultural Policy: The Social,the Cultural,and the Economic

It is increasingly the case that cultural policy at all levels of governance is expected to address a suite of concerns much broader than those traditionally associated with the arts and creative practice. Indeed, in many nations, including most notably Britain, the concerns of cultural policy now embrace the economic and the social, as well as the cultural. In Britain, this convergence is occurring as part of a broader policy concern to ameliorate social exclusion by providing people with opportunities to participate in the creative economy. Drawing on the findings of a major study of the factors shaping cultural policy internationally, this article identifies and maps the priorities, key intersections, and convergences associated with these priorities in British cultural policy. The article argues that, in spite of taking different forms and having varying emphases depending on the constituency and the level of governance involved, the convergence agenda currently dominating British cultural policy is nevertheless remarkably consistent in terms of the discourses surrounding culture, the remit of the cultural sphere, and strategic policy implementation.