What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites

What politicians devote attention to, is an important question as political attention is a precondition of policy change. We use an experimental design to study politicians’ attention to incoming information and deploy it among large samples of elected politicians in three countries: Belgium, Canada, and Israel. Our sample includes party leaders, ministers and regular members of parliament. These elites were confronted with short bits of summary information framed in various ways and were then asked how likely it was that they would read the full information. We test for three frames: conflict, political conflict, and responsibility. We find that framing moderates the effect of messages on politicians’ attention to information. Politicians react more strongly (i.e., they devote more attention) to political conflict frames than to non-political conflict frames and they react stronger to political responsibility attributions than to non-political responsibility attributions. Conflict frames attract more attention than consensus frames only from members of opposition parties. Political conflict frames attract more attention from government party politicians. These effects occur largely across issues and across the three countries.     

Testing the power of arguments in referendums: A Bradley–Terry approach

How can we determine which arguments in a referendum are most persuasive? We show that the Bradley–Terry model has several features that make it well-suited to this task, and thus preferable to other, more conventional approaches. Using a survey experiment conducted during an electoral reform referendum in Ontario, Canada in October 2007, we demonstrate how unstructured and structured Bradley–Terry models can be straightforwardly fitted and interpreted. In doing so, we gain insight into the factors which determine support for electoral reform. We identify a status quo bias and find that power varies with mention of fairness, local control over candidate selection, and the role of political parties. We conclude by discussing the limits, extensions and further applications of such models in electoral studies and political science more broadly.     

The Impact of News Photos on Support for Military Action

Drawing on two experiments embedded in online surveys, this article examines the impact of news photos on support for military action. In 2011, respondents were asked about support for ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan while being randomly exposed to one of two photos—one of a soldier with a child, the other of a soldier with a gun. The former photo increased expressed support for war; and the effect was greater for those who self-identify as being very interested in international affairs. Three years later, a follow-up experiment was fielded that looked both at the past intervention in Afghanistan and ongoing interventions in Syria; results were very similar. Both experiments speak to the potentially profound role of mass media in generating support (or not) for foreign military engagements, and the increased impact of frames on those who are more attentive to the issue domain.     

Transregional security cooperation after September 11, 2001

The aim of this article is to answer the question what kind of global security architecture emerged after September 11 and what functions Europe, East Asia and the United States assumed in this triadic structure. The empirical findings reveal that the transpacific security cooperation is the strengthening link in this global security structure, the transatlantic security cooperation the weakening one and the Asia–Europe Security Cooperation is to be seen as the emerging link. In order to explain these different institutional manifestations of transregional cooperation, different theories of International Relations are applied to the three cases. It comes as no surprise that neoinstitutionalism and constructivism offer the best insights into the formation and development of international institutions.

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East Asia and Europe—partners in global politics?

Practitioners and researchers have repeatedly portrayed the Asia–Europe Meeting as an institution that is not fully able to realize its agenda-setting potential in global negotiations or discourses. This paper argues that this assessment basically holds true even after 10 years of cooperation: Although ASEM tries to improve on this meagre balance by establishing a virtual secretariat and advancing common positions on trade, finance and environmental issues, cooperation between Asian and European states is frequently marred by the pitfalls of informality and the antagonisms of different cooperation cultures. Yet, successful moulding of common positions on climate change resulting in the adoption of a respective declaration may indicate an improved multilateral effectiveness of ASEM. Howard Loewen is senior research fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies (now part of GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies) in Hamburg.     

A Natural Experiment in Proposal Power and Electoral Success

Does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes? Observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes, since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill. We take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the Canadian House of Commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes. The right of noncabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lottery. Comparing outcomes between those who were granted the right to propose and those who were not, we show that incumbents of the governing party enjoy a 2.7 percentage point bonus in vote total in the election following their winning the right to introduce a single piece of legislation, which translates to a 7% increase in the probability of winning. The causal effect results from higher likeability among constituents. These results demonstrate experimentally that what politicians do as lawmakers has a causal effect on electoral outcomes.     

The Glass of Life: Medieval and Modern Stories on the Struggle to Gain and Maintain Honour

The drive to gain and maintain good reputation (honour, good name) in society functions as a primary core value in Middle Eastern and Asian societies. This phenomenon is best reflected in real-life stories. This article relates stories from the Persian world, selected from medieval Persian texts, as well as from twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iranian and Afghan short stories. While the modern story is written in a different context than the medieval epic poem or romance, the theme of gaining and maintaining the good name persists throughout. Medieval texts portray this all-encompassingstruggle in the life of the legendary heroic warrior, who models the struggle for protagonists in modern stories. For the protagonist, to have reputation means that society speaks well of them. A good name is to have a public name. But much more, the good name must include the larger family and one's tribe. It is the family name. Thirdly, the protagonist who seeks to gain and maintain a good name lives beyond themselves. Indeed, they gain a greater name. The stories are frequently laced with tragedy, as protagonists engage in what are considered to be dishonourable deeds in order to maintain their honour and good name.     

Electoral Confidence,Overconfidence, and Risky Behavior: Evidence from a Study with Elected Politicians

Political Behavior - Democratic theory makes strong assumptions about the relationship between politicians’ likelihood of retaining office and their behavior in office. Specifically,...     

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.     

The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist Temporality

Abstract

Bringing together the work of Barad and Deleuze, this article develops the concept of the living present as a frame for an emerging feminist temporality. Within feminist and queer theories, there has been much discussion of the value of non-chronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future. The author expands on this arena by discussing not only the future, but also the echoes, resonances and traces of the past—a past whose material effects continue to act as living, changing forces on the present and the future. Described as the present of retention and expectation, the living present is never a static ‘now’, but always a stretching between past and future as it contracts all past experiences and expects those yet to come. As it builds on the work of Grosz, Colebrook and others, the living present encourages non-linear, open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents a new lens through which to approach documented and assumed histories. By opening up collaborative lines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism, the thick time of the living present reveals a past of forceful, intra-active materialities. It is a realm of possibility to which one is accountable, but not bound.