Economic conditions and populist radical right voting: The role of issue salience

In this article, we show with the European Election Study from nine Western European countries that issue salience of the economy and immigration contributes to our understanding of the puzzling relation between economic conditions and populist radical right support. In countries with relatively weak or worsening economic conditions, the economy is considered more salient, whereas immigration loses salience – also compared to other issues. Voters who perceive the economy as most important problem are less likely to opt for the populist radical right than people who perceive immigration or even other issues as most important. Populist radical right parties appear to not only win votes on the immigration issue, they also lose votes on the economic issue. Finally, in contrast to actual economic conditions, negative perceptions of the economy increases populist radical right voting, despite stronger salience of the economy and partly due to stronger salience of immigration compared to other issues.     

服务科学优先研究方向和重点课题概述及评析

服务科学是一门新兴的复合交叉型学科,尚处于研究的初级阶段。亚利桑那州立大学服务领导研究中心历时18个月完成了一项研究报告,识别和阐明了今后服务科学研究十大全球性、跨学科的优先研究方向和重点研究课题。本文对该研究报告进行编撰、凝练和分析,希望对我国的服务科学研究提供启示和借鉴,从而激发国内服务科学研究者关注那些能为学术界...     

从国际法看中美关系中的台湾问题

台湾问题是中美关系中十分敏感的重要问题 ,回顾台湾问题形成的历史 ,从国际法的角度对台湾问题进行法理分析 ,说明美国对中国内政干涉的不合法性 ,由此也可看出国际法在当前国际政治中的重要性和局限性。     

《美国国际法杂志》南海专刊文章述评

2015年10月29日,关于菲律宾所提"南海仲裁案"的管辖权问题裁定出台,使南海问题日益复杂。回溯到该仲裁案的提出,早在菲律宾于2013年单方面提出仲裁程序的当月,《美国国际法杂志》(AJIL)发表了一期关于南海问题的专刊文章。该期论文分别从不同视角深入探讨了南海争议的焦点问题,集中展现了中西方学者在观点上的对立。专刊文章中批判中国立场的核心论点,与"南海仲裁案"中的菲方请求非常相应,亦与美国国务院在2014年12月发表的《南海报告》中的观点高度一致。《美国国际法杂志》在国际法学术界具有较大的影响力,但国内学界对这期论文并无专门的分析与比较。     

Social status,political priorities and unequal representation

Researchers on inequalities in representation debate about whether governments represent the preferences of the rich better than those of less affluent citizens. We argue that problems of high- and low-status citizens are treated differently already at the agenda-setting stage. If affluent and less affluent citizens have different priorities about which issues should be tackled by government, then these divergent group priorities explain why government favours high- over low-status citizens. Due to different levels of visibility, resources and social ties, governments pay more attention to what high-status citizens consider important in their legislative agenda and pay less attention to the issues of low-status citizens. We combined three types of data for our research design. First, we extracted the policy priorities (most important issues) for all status groups from Eurobarometer data between 2002 and 2016 for 10 European countries and matched this information with data on policy outcomes from the Comparative Agendas Project. We then strengthen our results using a focused comparison of three single country studies over longer time series. We show that a priority gap exists and has representational consequences. Our analysis has important implications for the understanding of the unequal representation of status groups as it sheds light on an important, yet so far unexplored, aspect of the political process. Since the misrepresentation of political agendas occurs at the very beginning of the policy-making process, the consequences are potentially even more severe than for the unequal treatment of preferences.     

Transforming international communications strategies

The strategy used by governments to communicate with foreign populations has changed dramatically in the twentieth century. The need perceived by governments to use such a strategy in the first place derived from numerous social changes in the 150 years before World War I, most particularly the increased role played in politics by the masses organized in nation‐states. The shifting strategy of persuasive communication since then forms part of a broader transformation of international political communication which includes technological change, organizational developments, and absolute but not necessarily relative growth in international communications transactions.

The predominant strategy developed in World War I was propaganda. It used fairly straightforward appeals to rationality, sense of morality, and such important but readily accessible emotions as hatred. Its excesses, especially the wide dissemination of atrocity stories which did not bear up well under later dispassionate examination, at once made all propaganda suspect and alerted governments to the necessity of refining their communicative techniques for the eventuality of future international conflicts.

The years before and during World War II saw international communicators—especially Goebbels in Nazi Germany and the Anglo‐American psychological warriors—develop a new strategy which utilized new knowledge about the psychological roots of human behavior. In addition to straightforward appeals to the consciousness of individuals, they sought to manipulate their audiences by playing on their deep‐seated desires and fears. Of particular importance for Nazi Germany were the allegedly racial ties of the individual to a people and the need for figures of authority.

First major experiments were made in World War II to develop an even more basic strategy of international communication: structuring the situation in which people learn their predispositions, perspectives, and behaviors. Its basic idea is to create situations in which the communicator does not have to tell the targeted audience anything at all, but in which the audience, left to its own devices, can only come to the conclusions desired by the communicator. Thus strategic bombing sought to destroy the morale of the enemy's home front and, through that action, to weaken its war‐making capacity. The postwar occupation of Germany originally sought to create a new environment in which Germans could be reeducated to democracy. Subsequent emphasis has also been on communications aimed at generating certain predispositions, such as a desire for consumer goods or a particular political style, which then spawn appropriate perspectives and behaviors.

This new strategy of structural communication has its limits. The most important of these is the difficulty of controlling all aspects of a foreign population's communications environment (which includes traditions, face‐to‐face networks, and conflicting sources of information). The potential importance of the strategy nonetheless makes it likely that governments will continue to work toward its development and implementation for their own international political purposes.     

Notes on contributors

In the Kosovo crisis, Germany for the first time since 1955 joined NATO military combat operations in a major way. While this has often been interpreted as a fundamental major departure ('normalisation') in Germany's post‐war foreign policy, this article argues that Germany's willingness to contemplate joining a NATO war even without a mandate by the UN Security Council represents an evolution, rather than a fundamental change in Germany's foreign policy orientation. This evolution can be explained best as a logical and consistent response of Germany's foreign policy identity which reconciled, through modification, its traditional post war foreign policy identity as a ‘civilian power’ to a radically different security environment.     

Using social network analysis to target criminal networks

Using social network analysis (SNA), we propose a model for targeting criminal networks. The model we present here is a revised version of our existing model (Schwartz and Rouselle in IALEIA Journal, 18(1):18–14, 2008), which itself builds on Steve Borgatti’s SNA-based key player approach. Whereas Borgatti’s approach focuses solely on actors’ network positions, our model also incorporates the relative strength or potency of actors, as well as the strength of the relationships binding network actors.

中美证券发行制度比较研究

证券发行制度是一国资本市场的准入制度。由于中美经济背景和历史条件的影响、证券市场结构和发展阶段的不同,中美证券发行制度存在较多差异。我国目前证券发行制度的完善应在强化自律组织的自主权,增加发行审阅过程的透明度,完善股票上市制度、信息披露制度上下功夫。在相关法律上明确规范证券发行等方面借鉴美国的经验,以促进我国证券业的发展。     

中国在朝鲜核问题上的作用及其受局限的原因分析

自 2002年 10月以来,朝核问题一直成为国际社会关注的热点问题。“三方会谈”以及 3次“六方会谈”的成功召开把朝核问题纳入到一个多边框架下解决,对于这个重大成果,中国所起的重要作用是国际社会有目共睹的。尽管中国在朝核问题上发挥了其他国家所不可替代的作用,但是,从朝核问题的发展过程上可以看出,中国的作用也受到很大局限。