Arab Local Government in Israel: Partial Modernisation as an Explanatory Variable for Shortages in Management

About one-third of all local and regional councils in Israel are Arab. Ever since their establishment, and especially during the last decade, the Arab authorities have suffered from financial crises and from administrative and organisational deficiencies that jeopardize their functioning. Arab local politics is characterised by the increased strength of traditional clan-affiliated forces, at the expense of modern representative groups. The present article has tried to explain the problems that beset the management of Arab local government in Israel. We believe that the explanation is rooted in the fact that ‘partial modernisation’ is the dominant explanatory variable for Arab local government shortages.     

Catastrophic New Age Groups and Public Order

This article examines the recent emergence of separatist, countercultural groups observing a disaster-prone view of the future shaped by variations of New Age religion. While these groups have not uniformly adopted violent strategies against outsiders, the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo case should alert authorities to the potential for violent activism that exists in some New Age collectivities during periods when the group is experiencing an episode of stress. Particular attention is given here to the psychodynamic shift which took place in a Montana-based New Age religious movement as its visions of a forthcoming earthly disaster mobilized the membership to prepare for a cataclysmic event. It is likely that law enforcement agencies will encounter more cases of millennial excitement in catastrophic New Age groups in the near-term future as the approach of the year 2000 stimulates the apocalyptic imaginations of these countercultural movements.     

A New Typology of Electoral Violence: Insights from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Existing literature on election violence has focused on how violence suppresses voter participation or shapes their preferences. Yet, there are other targets of election violence beyond voters who have so far received little attention: candidates and government agencies. By intimidating rival candidates into dropping out of the race, political hopefuls can literally reduce the number of competitors and increase their likelihood of winning. Likewise, aspiring candidates can target government agencies perceived to be responsible for holding elections to push for electorally beneficial decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new typology of electoral violence and utilize new data of election violence that occur around executive elections in Indonesia from 2005 through 2012. The types of violence we identified differ in these ways: a) Of all cases of electoral violence observed in this article, most incidents were targeted towards candidates and government bodies; b) candidates are generally targeted before elections, whereas voter-targeting incidents are spread out evenly before and after elections and government-targeted violence tends to occur afterwards; c) pre-election violence is concentrated in formerly separatist areas, but post-election violence is more common in districts with prior ethnocommunal violence. These distinctions stress the importance of examining when and why different strategies are adopted.     

The Transformation of Going Public: President Clinton,the First Lady,and Health Care Reform

This article examines the going public thesis in the context of U.S. President Clintons health care reform campaign in 1993 and 1994. This case study highlights the changing nature of presidential public relations. The novel use of the first lady as a public spokesperson for a presidential initiative also raises new questions about presidential public relations and its impact on congressional behavior. Data for the study include appearances and speeches by the president and first lady concerning health care reform over an 11-month period. Results suggest that certain presidential public activities assist presidents in gaining public support for their policies. However, most presidential public efforts may be thwarted by issue advertising from opponents in a more combative public environment. A going public strategy may not provide a forum to explain sophisticated policies and to build alliances in support of these policies over a substantial period of time.     

Crises of confidence: Rhetorical constraints for incumbent party successors

Crises of confidence have plagued the American presidency since the introduction of television into the political sphere. Recognizing from previous research that unpopular incumbents use rhetoric in an effort to regain their credibility, this study looks at these rhetorical choices to see how they constrain or provide opportunities for the incumbent party's successors. Specifically, the study looks at the rhetoric surrounding instances where presidents have dropped 20 points in Gallup approval ratings within the last two years of their terms.

The study reveals that an unpopular incumbent's interest in regaining the public's faith is frequently at odds with his successor's interests. Incumbents need to remove themselves as the cause of the crisis, convince the public that they have the solution to the problem, and bide enough time to affect the situation. These choices tend to constrain the simplicity, flexibility, and timeliness of the successor's choices for rhetorically resolving the crises.     

The Mass Media as Sentinel: Why Bad News About Issues is Good News for Participation

This article argues that negative news coverage of politically relevant social issues stimulates political participation by shaping citizen awareness of collective problems and interest in politics. By drawing citizen attention to social problems that government may attend to, the press acts as a sentinel for the mass public, cuing them to periods when participation is more important. Drawing on an analysis of the 1974 National Election Study in combination with the Center for Political Studies' content analysis of newspapers, I find evidence that bad news about issues is good news for participation.     

Television,Power, and the Public in Russia,by Ellen Mickiewicz

In the fall of 1994 a nonpartisan and nonprofit voter information organization Project Vote Smart-designed and implemented an education project for "atrisk" voters in northern California. The Project Vote Smart (PVS) effort was a systematic attempt to provide typically nonvoting groups both information and incentive to participate in the November general election. The results presented here suggest that the receipt of PVS materials did not directly increase the likelihood of voting or election interest. However, the receipt of PVS materials did make voters feel better about the resources they had to bring to bear on electoral choices.     

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]     

The 2012 United States election and the implications for East Asia

Abstract

The 2012 election resulted in a major victory for President Obama and while his Democratic Party improved its Congressional strength, the House of Representatives remains under Republican control. The election revealed the depth of America's political and voter divisions with each party showing dramatically different areas of strength and weakness. Yet the election did not hinge on foreign policy leaving the Obama administration likely to continue most of its earlier policies toward East Asia as marked by the multilayered ‘pivot’ toward Asia. Relations with China and North Korea are likely to remain difficult to manage while US–ROK links should be far smoother. Of particular concern is the economic sluggishness and rising nationalism in Japan which could well cause bilateral problems with the US and regional problems with Japan's neighbors, including US ally, South Korea. And at home the bipolar divisions over how best to deal with America's economic revitalization could well impede US abilities to exert a convincing multi-dimensional role in the region.     

Structural Models of Voter Behavior in the 2000 Polish Presidential Election

Abstract

The data of the 2000 Polish presidential election have been analyzed according to Newman and Sheth's model of voter's choice behavior (1985). Although this model was originally interpreted within the statistical perspective of discriminant analysis, it could be also extended within the framework of structural equation methodology. Namely, if the seven cognitive domains (Issues and Policies, Emotional Feelings, Candidate Image, Current Events, Epistemic Issues, Social Imagery and Epistemic Issues) are assumed to be distinct and separate, they can be treated as independent (predictive) variables with the voter's intention as a dependent or predicted variable. The three models were tested and the resuits of path analysis show the complex pattern of mutual interdependence between the cognitive domains and voter behavior. The specificity of the cause-effect relationship obtained by the structural equation methodology presented in the paper allows us to put forward some practical suggestions regarding the way electoral campaigns should be conducted.