How interest groups influence public opinion: Arguments matter more than the sources

Through what mechanism do interest groups shape public opinion on concrete policies? In this article, three hypotheses are proposed that distinguish between the effect of the arguments conveyed by interest groups and the effect of interest groups as source cues. Two survey experiments on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TIPP) and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change allow the testing of these hypotheses. The resulting evidence from several countries shows that, with respect to interest groups’ attempts at shaping public opinion, arguments matter more than their sources. This is so even when accounting for people's trust in the interest groups that serve as source cues and for people's level of information about a policy. The finding that interest groups affect public opinion via arguments rather than as source cues has implications for the literature on elite influence on public opinion and the normative evaluation of interest group activities.     

京津冀协同发展背景下的政策协同评估研究——基于省级“十三五”专项规划文本的分析

从国家层面提出的京津冀协同发展战略,对于推动京津冀一体化,打造以创新为特征的世界级城市群具有重要指导意义。在此背景下,实现区域协同目标,需要率先发挥政策的先导作用。为了保障政策制定的绩效水平,对京津冀三地的政策协同状况进行评估具有重要意义。根据政策协同理论的相关内容,借鉴日趋成熟的政策分析模型,融合文本分析的量化研究方法,构建了基于纵向维度和横向维度的政策协同分析框架,同时运用政策协同量化标准对北京、天津、河北三地的省级"十三五"专项规划进行了指标评分和数据分析,得出了有关京津冀地区政策协同状况的研究发现。     

传播要素视角下网络衍生舆情成因的多维分析

衍生舆情是近年来网络舆情所呈现的新特点,尤其由突发公共事件引发的网络舆情,衍生舆情的出现几乎成为一种必然,其所造成的“二次影响”甚至超过原生舆情,给舆情危机的防范和应对带来了更大的挑战。基于此,从传播要素的视角探讨在由突发公共事件引发网络舆情中出现衍生舆情的成因。研究认为,突发公共事件是衍生舆情出现的前提,其模糊性、关联性和刺激性会对衍生舆情产生直接影响;政府、媒体和公众是衍生舆情形成的重要因素,在信息传播中它们基于各自利益诉求而呈现的不同行为逻辑是衍生舆情产生的根本原因。     

Regulating Autonomy: An Assessment of Policy Language for Highly Automated Vehicles

Self‐driving cars (also known as driverless cars, autonomous vehicles, and highly automated vehicles [HAVs]) will change the regulatory, political, and ethical frameworks surrounding motor vehicles. At the highest levels of automation, HAVs are operated by independent machine agents, making decisions without the direct intervention of humans. The current transportation system assumes human intervention though, including legal and moral responsibilities of human operators. Has the development of these artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous system (AS) technologies outpaced the ethical and political conversations? This paper examines discussions of HAVs, driver responsibility, and technology failure to highlight the differences between how the policy‐making institutions in the United States (Congress and the Public Administration) and technology and transportation experts are or are not speaking about responsibility in the context of autonomous systems technologies. We report findings from a big data analysis of corpus‐level documents to find that enthusiasm for HAVs has outpaced other discussions of the technology.     

Policy Narratives across Two Languages: A Comparative Study using the Narrative Policy Framework

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) focuses on the role of narratives, drawing from a rich scholarship in narrative, language, and culture. Despite the understanding that narratives are constructions of language and that narrative construction differs across languages, NPF studies have not focused on policy narratives in languages other than English. Language characteristics of narratives are important to assess the stability of policy narratives when there are multiple dominant languages in a political system. This study investigates the use of narrative elements in policy narratives in agricultural biotechnology policy in India across Hindi and English media coverage to examine the NPF assumption that narratives have generalizable narrative elements irrespective of variation in linguistic context and, specifically, tests the transportability of narrative elements. Findings validate the transportability of narrative elements in Hindi narratives, indicate variation in the use of narrative elements over time, and have implications for applying NPF across languages.     

Negotiating universalism in India and Latin America: Fiscal decentralization,subnational politics and social outcomes

ABSTRACT

This is the introductory paper for a special issue which focuses on an exploration of how vertical inter-governmental political and fiscal bargains and horizontal variation in political, social and economic conditions across regions contribute to or undermine the provision of inclusive and sustainable social policies at the subnational level in Latin America and India. The papers incorporate both federal, as well as decentralized unitary states, pointing to common political tensions across unitary and federal settings despite the typically greater institutionalization of regional autonomy in federal countries. Jointly, the papers examine the territorial dimension of universalism and explore, in greater and empirical detail, the causal links between fiscal transfers, social policies and outcomes, highlighting the political dynamics that shape fiscal decentralization reforms and the welfare state. This introductory essay reviews existing scholarship, and highlights the contribution of the special issue to understanding these issues beyond OECD contexts.     

(Re)Making a politics of protection in immigration policy: the “criminal alien,” gendered vulnerability,and the management of risk

The two most recent Department of Homeland Security interior immigration enforcement programs, Secure Communities and the Priority Enforcement Program, have directed deportation efforts toward noncitizens convicted of crimes. One of their targets, the ‘criminal alien,’ has been (re)fashioned in political and legal discourses since the 1980s. Through critical discourse analysis of the 2013 immigration reform debates and their incorporation of the Violence Against Women Act (2013), this article examines the ways in which contemporary immigration policy renders the racialized ‘criminal alien’ (sexually) threatening to the ‘vulnerable’ woman. Dichotomous constructions of deserving and undeserving immigrants, in turn, bolster an array of strategies to manage the ‘risk’ of noncitizens, including border control and financial self-regulation.     

Venue Preference and Earthquake Mitigation Policy: Expanding the Micro‐Model of Policy Choice

Seismologists have reported that a majority of recent earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by the activities of oil and gas companies. Despite this fact, there is evidence of strong opposition toward earthquake mitigation policy. In this article, we argue that how individuals define issues affect their policy choice. Furthermore, we incorporate the concept of venue shopping from the literature on macro theories of the policy process to investigate the effect of problem definition in shaping individual venue preference for policy choice. Using unique survey data, we find that problem definition, particularly issue causality and issue image, is strongly related to individual support for earthquake mitigation policy. However, a more nuanced relationship between individual problem definition and venue preference is observed. Our findings contribute to scholarly endeavors to understand the politics of problem definition at an individual level, which may be the precursor of understanding policy choices at the institutional level.     

Governance gaps in eradicating forced labor: From global to domestic supply chains

A growing body of scholarship analyzes the emergence and resilience of forced labor in developing countries within global value chains. However, little is known about how forced labor arises within domestic supply chains concentrated within national borders, producing products for domestic consumption. We conduct one of the first studies of forced labor in domestic supply chains, through a cross‐industry comparison of the regulatory gaps surrounding forced labor in the United Kingdom. We find that understanding the dynamics of forced labor in domestic supply chains requires us to conceptually modify the global value chain framework to understand similarities and differences across these contexts. We conclude that addressing the governance gaps that surround forced labor will require scholars and policymakers to carefully refine their thinking about how we might design operative governance that effectively engages with local variation.     

公安质量管理的标杆机制

公安服务水平和质量已经成为公民评价执政党与政府的形象与效率的日益重要的指标之一,如何提高公安质量,从体制或机制上确保公安产品的合法性与科学性,已经成为公安部门关注的热点。本文从质量管理机制的视角,引出公安质量管理的标杆机制,以期为我国提升公安质量起到支持作用。