Despite the Holocaust's profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of ...communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and interviews recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the Holocaust as children and young adults. Recent political, social, and cultural developments have facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in representations of the Holocaust. People are beginning to realize the significant role that memory of Holocaust plays in contemporary discussions of national identity in Eastern Europe.
This volume of original essays explores the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Devoting space to every postcommunist country, the essays inBringing the Dark Past to Lightexplore how the memory of the "dark pasts" of Eastern European nations is being recollected and reworked. In addition, it examines how this memory shapes the collective identities and the social identity of ethnic and national minorities. Memory of the Holocaust has practical implications regarding the current development of national cultures and international relationships.
The economy is so powerful in determining the results of U.S. presidential elections that political scientists can predict winners and losers with amazing accuracy long before the campaigns start. ...But if it is true that "it's the economy, Stupid," why do incumbents in good economies sometimes lose? The reason, Lynn Vavreck argues, is that what matters is not just the state of the economy but how candidates react to it. By demonstrating more precisely than ever before how candidates and their campaigns affect the economic vote,The Message Mattersprovides a powerful new way of understanding past elections--and predicting future ones.
Vavreck examines the past sixty years of presidential elections and offers a new theory of campaigns that explains why electoral victory requires more than simply being the candidate favored by prevailing economic conditions. Using data from presidential elections since 1952, she reveals why, when, and how campaign messages make a difference--and when they can outweigh economic predictors of election outcomes.
The Message Mattersdoes more than show why candidates favored by the economy must build their campaigns around economic messages. Vavreck's theory also explains why candidates disadvantaged by the economy must try to focus their elections on noneconomic issues that meet exacting criteria--and why this is so hard to do.
Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public ...opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries,Gender, War, and World Orderoffers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings.
Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework,Gender, War, and World Ordercompares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.
"Recent history suggests the United States is within reach of its first woman president. This book examines the media experiences of women political pioneers who helped pave the way to the breaking ...of the glass ceiling. It analyzes newspaper treatment of four pioneering politicians between the 1870s and 2000s and explores how media discourse of women politicians has and hasn't changed over 150 years. The women featured are Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress; Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to receive a presidential nomination at a major party's convention; and Sarah Palin, the first Republican woman vice presidential candidate. The social, political, and journalistic cultures of each woman's era are also explored to provide context for the women's media coverage. The findings illustrate that the press has used a variety of discursive strategies to delegitimize the candidacies of women politicians throughout history, which might have contributed to negative voter attitudes toward women in politics. Gendered stereotypes, gendered news frames, and double binds utilized in news coverage served to protect a male-dominated status quo. Yet a significant finding in Palin's coverage indicates that gender bias in news coverage is increasingly facing criticism, suggesting the tide may finally be turning in favor of more equalized discourse"
Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan's reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan's Aging Peace demonstrates how changing ...perceptions of security across generations has culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy.
What does the state do when public expectations exceed
its governing capacity? The Performative State
shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises
through the theatrical ...deployment of language, symbols, and
gestures of good governance-performative governance.
Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in
China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and
public opinion surveys. She demonstrates in vivid detail how
China's environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny
over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the
physical environment. They assuage public outrage by appearing
responsive, benevolent, and humble. But performative governance is
hard work. Environmental bureaucrats paradoxically work themselves
to exhaustion even when they cannot effectively implement
environmental policies. Instead of achieving "performance
legitimacy" by delivering material improvements, the state can
shape public opinion through the theatrical performance of goodwill
and sincere effort.
The Performative State also explains when performative
governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance
becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on
Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam
and the United States show that all states, democratic and
authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance.
Despite the hopes of the civil rights movement, researchers have found that the election of African Americans to office has not greatly improved the well-being of the black community. By shifting the ...focus to the white community, this book shows that black representation can have a profound impact. Utilizing national public opinion surveys, data on voting patterns in large American cities, and in-depth studies of Los Angeles and Chicago, Zoltan Hajnal demonstrates that under most black mayors there is real, positive change in the white vote and in the racial attitudes of white residents. This change occurs because black incumbency provides concrete information that disproves the fears and expectations of many white residents. These findings not only highlight the importance of black representation; they also demonstrate the critical role that information can play in racial politics to the point where black representation can profoundly alter white views and white votes.
The 2004 US election provided French citizens and their media with a springboard for re-conceiving 'self' and 'other'. Given its prominent opposition to recent US foreign policy such as the invasion ...of Iraq, a volley of insults and caustic remarks reverberated between France and the US. French observers linked the Bush administration's policies to particular groups and regions within the US, to a democratic deficit, to a perceived threat of US collapse and to the need for a stronger Europe. By examining how the French media - newspapers, television, the internet and scholarly research - represented the election from a critical geopolitical perspective, this book provides the first major in-depth study of views of the US in contemporary foreign media.
Focusing on the period between the revolutions of 1848-1849 and the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy explores the circumstances under which westerners, ...concerned about the fate of the papacy, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russian imperial power, began to conflate the Russian Orthodox Church with the state and to portray the Church as the political tool of despotic tsars. As Heather L. Bailey demonstrates, in response to this reductionist view, Russian Orthodox publicists launched a public relations campaign in the West, especially in France, in the 1850s and 1860s. The linchpin of their campaign was the building of the impressive Saint Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris, consecrated in 1861. Bailey posits that, as the embodiment of the belief that Russia had a great historical purpose inextricably tied to Orthodoxy, the Paris church both reflected and contributed to the rise of religious nationalism in Russia that followed the Crimean War. At the same time, the confrontation with westerners' negative ideas about the Eastern Church fueled a reformist spirit in Russia while contributing to a better understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy in the West.
In reggae song after reggae song Bob Marley and other reggae singers speak of the Promised Land of Ethiopia. Repatriation is a must! they cry. The Rastafari have been travelling to Ethiopia since the ...movement originated in Jamaica in 1930s. They consider it the Promised Land, and repatriation is a cornerstone of their faith. Though Ethiopians see Rastafari as immigrants, the Rastafari see themselves as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora. InVisions of Zion, Erin C. MacLeod offers the first in-depth investigation into how Ethiopians perceive Rastafari and Rastafarians within Ethiopia and the role this unique immigrant community plays within Ethiopian society.Rastafari are unusual among migrants, basing their movements on spiritual rather than economic choices. This volume offers those who study the movement a broader understanding of the implications of repatriation. Taking the Ethiopian perspective into account, it argues that migrant and diaspora identities are the products of negotiation, and it illuminates the implications of this negotiation for concepts of citizenship, as well as for our understandings of pan-Africanism and south-south migration. Providing a rare look at migration to a non-Western country, this volume also fills a gap in the broader immigration studies literature.
