Media Priming in a Multi-Party Context: A Controlled Naturalistic Study in Political Communication

This study investigates media priming effects in the context of a Summit meeting of European Union (EU) leaders. It differs in four ways from most previous non-experimental priming studies: (1) it provides survey data accompanied by a content analysis of the news, (2) it compares priming effects on evaluations of a number of political leaders, who differed in their visibility in the news, (3) it involves an issue with low salience, and (4) it studies priming effects in the context of a European Parliamentary democracy. The study involves a two-wave panel study (before and after the Summit) on a representative sample of 817 Dutch adults, and a content analysis of the newspaper and television news in the 8 weeks leading up to the Summit meeting. The study shows that media priming effects occur only for the politicians who appeared visible in the news in connection with the issue. The media priming effects were not significantly moderated by political attentiveness or by political knowledge. We also explore the aggregate level consequences of priming for the popularity of leaders, and demonstrate that, as a result of media priming, two politicians became more popular, despite having received a bad press.

Biotechnology and the Modern Liberal Project

Biotechnological enhancement of human capabilities reveals a characteristically modern stance toward nature: Human nature, as given, is an impediment to be overcome on the way to full human freedom. As a form of metaphysical partisanship, the biotech enterprise seems to further the political intention of Thomas Hobbes to nullify human diversity. Commerce in biotech enhancements, and the individual liberty such commerce instantiates, is likely to have the ironic effect of psychic homogenization.

The alternative incumbency effect: Electing women legislators in Indonesia

Between the 1999 and 2009 elections the proportion of national female legislators in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority democracy, more than doubled. While this substantial increase may partly be explained by the recent imposition of a gender quota and placement mandate that have forced parties to increase the number of female candidates, quotas cannot fully explain the strong performance of women in the 2009 elections. First, many parties placed women higher on their lists than the laws required; second, voters appeared to over vote for women in some districts. Although incumbency's typical effect is to inhibit female electoral success by advantaging traditional (male) competitors, I argue that women benefited largely from an alternative effect: female incumbency can improve female candidate placement and electability by demonstrating female capacity and capability. Female newcomers benefited strongly from the presence of female incumbents in their own and bordering districts, thus suggesting a positive diffusion effect of female incumbency.     

Proportional Representation and the Framers

Techniques for conducting elections developed since 1800 have raised a question about the soundness of the American framers’ majoritarianism. John Stuart Mill notably argued that the framers’ desire to reward merit, as opposed to party loyalty, would be better served by a system of proportional representation that gave deserving minorities a voice. This article considers the likelihood that a system such as Mill proposed would have the results he hoped for; it concludes that such a system is more likely to worsen problems with the existing system of representation than to solve them.     

The Mixed Blessings of National Integration: New Perspectives on Development in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

The ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia’s uplands, including those of Vietnam, tend to be portrayed as excluded from national society and locked into poverty, environmental degradation and positions of subjugation. Recent debates about Southeast Asian uplands-lowlands relations have questioned this discourse by highlighting the diversity of experiences, the agency of ethnic minority groups, and uplanders’ strategies of state evasion. This article finds that the integration of the uplands into the Vietnamese polity should be understood as an ongoing struggle between nation-building and state expansion characterised by grand visions on the one hand, and incomplete policy implementation and uplanders’ ambiguous stance towards integration on the other.     

Die Interzedentenwarnung nach § 25c KSchG

§ 25c KSchG legt in Satz 1 eine Informationsobliegenheit des Unternehmers gegenüber dem Verbraucher im Fall einer Interzession fest. Danach hat der Unternehmer den interzedierenden Verbraucher auf die wirtschaftliche Lage des Schuldners hinzuweisen, wenn er erkennt oder erkennen muss, dass der Schuldner seine Verbindlichkeit voraussichtlich nicht oder nicht vollst?ndig erfüllen wird. Unterl?sst der Unternehmer diese Information, haftet der Interzedent nur, wenn er seine Verpflichtung trotz einer solchen Information übernommen h?tte (§ 25c S 2 KSchG). Der folgende Beitrag besch?ftigt sich unter intensiver Berücksichtigung der jüngeren Judikatur mit den vielf?ltigen Aspekten der Interzedentenschutzvorschrift des § 25c KSchG, nicht zuletzt auch mit dem Mysterium der "echten Mitschuld".