The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.     

Cooking the books: Bureaucratic politicization and policy knowledge

Accurate knowledge about societal conditions and public policies is an important public good in any polity, yet governments across the world differ dramatically in the extent to which they collect and publish such knowledge. This article develops and tests the argument that this variation to some extent can be traced to the degree of bureaucratic politicization in a polity. A politicized bureaucracy offers politicians greater opportunities to demand from bureaucrats—and raises incentives for bureaucrats to supply—public policy knowledge that is strategically biased or suppressed in a manner that benefits incumbents reputationally. Due to electoral competition, we suggest that the link between bureaucratic politicization and politicized policy knowledge will be stronger in democracies than in autocracies. A case analysis of Argentina's statistical agency lends credence to the underlying causal mechanism. Time‐series cross‐sectional analyses confirm the broader validity of the expectations and show that the relationship is present only in democracies.     

A rhetorical view of isms: an introduction

ABSTRACT

The article highlights the prominence of ism concepts in everyday and scholarly languages worldwide and presents a conceptual history and rhetorical perspective on how to study them. It also serves as an introduction to this special issue, which contributes to linguistically oriented research on political ideologies and transnational intellectual history. Although isms have gained some attention in connection with the study of ideas in history, political ideologies and theoretical discussions on analytical categories in scholarship, they have rarely been the main target of research. By focusing on the rhetorical use of ism concepts as a whole, the article directs new attention to the rhetorical potential of the use of isms in political controversies, the translation of isms and the alleged universal character of isms. The article suggests a new way of analysing political ideas, ideologies and analytical categories by applying a contextually sensitive understanding of the ism as words and their rhetorical use. It also presents an agenda for the study of isms globally.     

Isms,ideologies and setting the agenda for public debate

ABSTRACT

This article presents a long-term account of isms from antiquity to the present. It discusses the spread of isms into nearly all spheres of life and why isms are still perceived as ideological. Based on a combined analysis of word frequencies in large digital libraries and more detailed contextual discussions of patriotism, liberalism, nationalism and totalitarianism, the article studies the emergence of isms and their potential transformation from pejorative labels to concepts of group-identification and analytical categories. Isms have been highlighted as future-oriented concepts on which modern political ideologies were built from the early nineteenth century on. Isms have also been identified as being collectively responsible for the twentieth-century experience that has been conceptualized as totalitarianism. While elaborating the notion of isms as ideological future-oriented ‘concepts of movement’, the article points out their crucial role in forging historic roots for these modern ideologies as well as for religious and cultural phenomena. By emphasizing the rhetorical potential in using isms as words of abuse, forging traditions for isms and claiming universal applicability to isms, the article provides insight into the constant renegotiation of the relationship between ideologies and isms, a phenomenon that has gained increased topicality in recent decades.     

Caught in quicksand? Compliance and legitimacy challenges in using regulatory sandboxes to manage emerging technologies

Regulatory sandboxes have become the latest development in regulatory reform, starting first in financial regulation and now expanding to other sectors. While sandboxes offer notable potential benefits for managing emerging technologies, achieving desirable policy outcomes with this novel regulatory instrument also comes with technical and political challenges. This article offers a framework to characterize regulatory sandboxes in any sector, involving a blend of (1) approval regulation with broad-based standards, (2) restricted discretion by the regulator for specific norms, (3) process-oriented regulation, (4) an outcomes-orientation, and (5) structured regulator–regulatee information sharing or dialogue. Using this model, the article outlines issues in compliance and legitimacy, including in trust and accountability, responsive enforcement, the politics of participation, and post-sandbox oversight. The article concludes by calling for greater scrutiny when considering implementing a sandbox instrument, with attention to sector-specific concerns, and offering directions for empirical evaluation of regulatory sandboxes.     

War & Society,Centeno, Miguel A. and Elaine Enriquez. (Cambridge,UK: Polity Press, 2016).

A bumper sticker on many cars in college and university parking lots proclaims: “WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.” Most American students and faculty spend their entire time at university without thinking about war, except that they want to avoid it at all cost. Miguel Centeno, the Musgrave Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Elaine Enriquez, a research fellow also at Princeton, argue that war has been a normal part of human existence since time immemorial and that it deserves to be studied as a sociopolitical phenomenon in its own right. The authors employ a longue durée comparative approach to demonstrate how war has been responsible for some of humankind’s fundamental institutions and practices, and thus must not be condemned as immoral, irrational, stupid, or evil. War has a history of its own that deserves serious study.     

The Political Consequences of National Crisis Management: Micro-Level Evidence from German Voters during the 2008/09 Global Economic Crisis

How does national crisis management affect the electoral fortunes of coalition governments? Drawing on micro-level data from just before the 2009 federal elections in Germany, this article investigates how voters' evaluation of specific policies against the global financial crisis affected approval of and voting intentions for the then-governing grand coalition. We find that voters in favour of the two most prominent anti-crisis policies, the car-scrap bonus and the public guarantee for banks, were more likely to approve of and to vote for the two incumbent parties. These evaluations of specific policies influenced individuals' vote choice in addition to their assessments of the economic situation more generally and in addition to party identification. This suggests that even in the greatest economic turmoil with blurred political responsibilities, government parties can win or lose voters through the implementation of specific economic policies.