Media Motivation and Elite Rhetoric in Comparative Perspective

The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one another. We surveyed 111 incumbent Members of Parliament in Belgium, Canada, and Israel and analyzed a large sample of their parliamentary speeches. The findings demonstrate that motivation to attain media coverage and act upon information from the news media leads politicians to strategically display simple and unidimensional rhetoric due to newsworthiness considerations, but only in countries where the media constitute important resources for reelection. The results contribute to extant literature by demonstrating a media effect on elite deliberation and by emphasizing the moderating role of political systems on the nature of elite rhetoric.     

An Evaluation Framework for Budget Reforms: A Guide for Assessing Public Budget Systems and Selecting Budget Process Reforms

While new tax proposals are evaluated with reference to formal evaluation criteria, no such standards exist for evaluating budget proposals. We propose an analytic framework to assess budgets across a series of dimensions, including whether it instills aggregate fiscal discipline, facilitates strategic prioritization of expenditures, and encourages effective and efficient use of budgeted resources, offering fiscal stability. The process also may be transparent, timely, and support public awareness and participation. We use this framework to evaluate the US budget, considering both areas of systematic inefficiency, while reviewing the history of budget reforms. We examine recent, frequently offered proposals that target specific budget process goals, considering how each affects all the budgeting goals, including interactions. We consider how a potential reform, aimed at addressing the failure to accomplish one normative goal, may impacts other goals, sometimes to the point of undermining overall progress.     

Budgeting Rules and Program Outcomes

It is not efficient for a budget system either to enable excessively frequent changes in programs and tax policies or to be rigid and unresponsive. Program durability is one measure of how a budget system weighs the competing goals of resoluteness and responsiveness. The federal budget has different processes—mandatory and discretionary spending and tax expenditures—each based in separate congressional committees and relying on separate procedures. This article examines the budget systems' durability. One finding is that mandatory spending programs and tax expenditures are more durable than programs backed by discretionary spending. However, while programs targeted to vulnerable populations and supporting long‐term planning, such as in income support and health, might benefit from durability, these programs display shorter durability, not longer. While displaying greater durability, tax expenditures do respond to changes in different economic sectors, based on the changes in spending of other budget systems.     

Super-optimizing china: reunification as an example

Whereas political issues and problems in China are complicated, efforts to “super-optimize” are essential and can be fruitful. The reunification issue is discussed to illustrate even highly politicized problems in China are amenable to super-optimum solutions. At the moment, some reunification options have been proposed: KMT-CCP negotiation on equal footing; KMT's military takeover; CCP's military takeover; the “one country, two systems” formula, convergence by democratization, and incremental convergence through trading and communication. Yet, neither parties find the alternatives desirable in terms of optimal satisfaction. By applying SOS rule # 2 (finding items that will provide large benefits to one side but only small costs to the other side), # 5 (combining the conservative and liberal alternatives where they are not mutually exclusive), and # 6 (removing the source of the conflict), reunification and democratization are made feasible and all parties concerned are better off. The specific proposals are that Taiwan should introduce a wholesale buy-out scheme that costs US$30 billion, that a new republic be established, and that legislative powers should be shared among the majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions. Together, these arrangements could ensure stability and result in democratization.     

Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case

According to symbolic politics theory, group fears and narratives of group identity that justify hostility are key causes of violent ethno-national conflict. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, widely accepted narratives on each side define group identity and group relations in ways that generate incompatible demands on Jerusalem, territory, refugees, security, and other issues. Historical memories of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and other tragedies generate fears of extinction on both sides, and stereotypes encourage beliefs on each side that the other responds only to force. These narratives enable hard-line leaders on both sides to manipulate emotive symbols to block compromise and escalate conflict. Thus the cause of both the failure of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in 2000-01 and the simultaneous outbreak of the latest Palestinian-Israeli war lies in the irreconcilable demands that are rooted in each side's competing narratives of national identity.     

The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy

ABSTRACT

What strategies does the United States pursue when it no longer perceives overt military intervention as politically viable or desirable but the problems or issues for which it was formerly undertaken remain? This analysis identifies three such periods in American foreign policy since the United States became a World Power and draws from the work of Peter Hall to develop a typology of strategies according to the magnitude of policy change. These range from adjustment in the settings of interventionism – persistence; the substitution of alternative instruments of foreign policy – ameliorism; and the principled rejection of interventionism in conjunction with a more systematic critique of prevailing foreign policy assumptions – transformationalism. Yet each approach is beset by certain structural limits and contradictions arising from the domestic politics and constitutional-institutional system of the United States that are important in understandiing and appreciating more fully the challenges – and opportunities – of the period ‘after interventionism’.