A tale of two regions: geopolitics,identities, narratives,and conflict in Kharkiv and the Donbas

In 2014 Russia occupied and then annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and subsequently incited and later directly supported a rebellion in southeastern Ukraine, ostensibly in both cases to protect the Russian-speaking population. Although the Crimean gambit was quickly resolved in Russia’s favor, at least on the ground, the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine continues with huge loss of life, well over 2 million internally displaced persons, and massive damage to infrastructure. On the other hand, in the neighboring Kharkiv region, the population remained loyal to the Ukrainian state and Russian incitements to rebellion were rebuffed. This paper delves deeper into the mindset of the residents of eastern Ukraine to ascertain why support for Russia differs between these two regions. It focuses on the identities, memories, and narratives of the main groups of residents inhabiting the Donbas and Kharkiv Oblast. Then it compares the attributes of these main groups to each other to illustrate their differences. It characterizes the geopolitical narratives promoted by Russia to generate support for its actions to re-construct the Russian geostrategic area of control and demonstrates where and with which group these emotive narratives were successful and where and why they failed.     

Popular Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention,for a Little While

Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential–legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divided government, however, popular presidents can direct congressional attention, at least for a little while. Unpopular presidents, by contrast, are irrelevant.     

Pre-1949 Chinese IR: an occluded history

Chinese scholars have achieved a comprehensive consensus on the disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) in China. However, this collective understanding of the evolution of Chinese IR is problematic because it denies the existence of pre-1949 Chinese IR and mistakenly sets the starting point of Chinese IR to be the mid 1960s, thus providing a progressive image of the IR discipline in China which is historically untenable. This essay rectifies this misunderstanding by reconstructing the history of Chinese IR before 1949. It verifies the existence of pre-1949 Chinese IR by reviewing the IR-relevant institutional setting in Chinese universities before 1949 and comparing the situation before 1949 with that in the mid 1960s, when the three IR departments were established. Further, the essay tentatively explains why pre-1949 Chinese IR has disappeared in the mainstream discourse of the history of Chinese IR. It argues that the interruption of the evolution of IR in China in the early 1950s and the specific power–knowledge interaction mode established in Chinese IR in the late 1950s are the two main causes responsible for the absence of pre-1949 Chinese IR in the history of the IR discipline in China.     

Capturing Curiosity: Using Internet Search Trends to Measure Public Attentiveness

While scholars have made great strides in formulating theories and measuring public attention, “most important problem” and media‐based indicators are less than ideal measures. In order to address this shortcoming, this article borrows from health‐care epidemiology to measure public attention based on Internet search trends. In doing so, it reviews the innovative ways in which scientists have used search activity to track the spread of infectious disease, discusses the ease and flexibility with which search data can be gathered, and then subjects a Google‐based search measure to a series of validity tests. In particular, the analysis subjects the proposed measure to a battery of visual and statistical tests for convergent validity by comparing it with the most commonly used media‐based measure of public attention—issue coverage in the New York Times. Across a range of policy issues (health care, global warming, and terrorism), the proposed measure demonstrates convergent validity. The article concludes by posing a series of important questions that the new measure will allow researchers to address.     

Moral Panics and Punctuated Equilibrium in Public Policy: An Analysis of the Criminal Justice Policy Agenda in Britain

How and when issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial question in the study of public policy. This article considers how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames. In so doing they create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to disrupt the existing policy consensus. In a test of this theory, we assess the factors behind the rise of crime on the policy agenda in Britain between 1960 and 2010. We adopt an integrative mixed-methods approach, drawing upon a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This enables us to analyze the rise of crime as a policy problem, the breakdown of the political-institutional consensus on crime, the moral panic that followed the murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993, the emergence of new issue frames around crime and social/moral decay more broadly, and how—in combination—these contributed to an escalation of political rhetoric and action on crime, led by policy entrepreneurs in the Labour and Conservative parties.     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

论地缘战略的主体间性——兼论中国地缘战略抉择

主体间性一词是20世纪西方哲学凸显出来的一个重要概念,对这一问题的研究有助于解决本体论、认识论和伦理学等多方面的问题。简单来说,主体间性就是主体之间的交互作用。主体间性具有物质性、实践性、历史性和社会性,其存在于集体主体之中,可以通过"教化"获得。据此,本文通过对四个经典地缘政治理论,即国家有机体论、海权论、陆权论和边缘地带论的历史分析,挖掘了隐含在其中的主体间性。并以美国对苏联和中国实施的地缘战略围堵为例,通过分析同一地缘战略所导致的截然不同结果,表明了地缘战略的构建、制定和实施都必须遵循主体间性。最后根据主体间性提出中国未来地缘战略抉择。     

Surfing for Problems: Advocacy Group Strategy in U.S. Forestry Policy

John Kingdon sets out a multiple streams approach to policymaking, whereby problems, solutions, and politics develop independently of one another. Kingdon's work suggests that advocates with pet policies may continually search the problem stream, looking for prominent issues to attach to their preferred solutions. I call this process "problem surfing." This paper provides an empirical test of problem surfing through the use of a case study of environmental advocacy. The paper examines Wilderness Society and Sierra Club advocacy for sustainable forestry practices from 1971 to 1994 through an analysis of articles in member magazines and interview data. Problem surfing is revealed to be a complex strategic process. I find evidence that advocacy groups adjust the problems they associate their solutions with over time to take advantage of salient issues. However, problem surfing appears to be influenced by more than just problem salience.     

Vertical Politics in Horizontal Policy Networks: Framework Setting as Coupling Arrangement

Horizontal governance arrangements potentially conflict with the very principles of the representative democracy and its political institutions. This conflict manifests itself in the interaction between representatives and the executive power: Although the former has the formal power to decide upon policies and to check their implementation, the latter participates in horizontal networks and therefore has more resources to influence the content, evolvement, and outcomes of the policy process. This erodes the power position of representatives. Framework setting is commonly suggested as an arrangement for representatives to enhance their grip on policy processes. The authors of this contribution examine the effects of framework setting as coupling mechanism between horizontal networks and vertical politics in six policy processes in a Dutch province. Based on network theory and research findings, they suggest redefining the concept of framework setting in order to make it more attuned to the complex, interdependent, and dynamic nature of policymaking in networks.