Silencing Critics Kellam, Marisa; Stein, Elizabeth A.
Comparative political studies,
01/2016, Volume:
49, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The media hold democratically elected leaders accountable by exposing corruption and policy failures. Although many politicians accept media criticism as intrinsic to liberal democracy, some ...politicians rein in freedom of the press or intimidate media outlets to silence their critics. We identify circumstances that motivate and enable presidents to curb media freedom in presidential democracies. We argue that (a) presidents who hold ideological positions contrary to those of the mainstream media adopt the media as viable opponents in the absence of an effective electoral opposition, and (b) the media are vulnerable to presidential infringements on their freedom where legislatures and judiciaries hold weak powers relative to presidents, and are therefore unable to constrain presidents’ actions against media freedom. We support our argument with quantitative analyses of press freedom ratings in presidential and semi-presidential democracies from 1993 to 2013.
We consider the degrees of freedom (DoF) of the Formula Omitted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference network with arbitrary antenna configuration and practical rank-deficiency. ...Different from existing researches on the Formula Omitted MIMO interference model, the antenna number can be arbitrarily different at the transmitters, relays and receivers simultaneously, and the ranks of the channel matrices can be arbitrarily different. The exact DoF sum of this scenario is obtained. For different configurations of antennas and ranks, the outer bound is proved mainly by the min-cut outer bound and the achievability is presented with effective schemes, which combine zero-forcing (ZF) scheme, ZF over broadcast channel, interference alignment in X channel, and aligned interference neutralization (AIN) to match the outer bound. The traditional AIN scheme is modified in this paper to maximize the utilization of signal space overlap. Some related earlier works can be seen as special cases of our research.
This paper examines the relationship between media freedom from government control and citizens' political knowledge, political participation, and voter turnout. To explore these connections, I first ...examine media freedom and citizens' political knowledge in thirteen central and eastern European countries with data from Freedom House's Freedom of the Press report and the European Commission's Candidate Countries Eurobarometer survey. Next, I consider media freedom and citizens' political participation in 60 countries using data from the World Values Survey. Finally, I investigate media freedom and voter turnout in these same 60 or so countries with data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. I find that where government owns a larger share of media outlets and infrastructure, regulates the media industry more, and does more to control the content of news, citizens are more politically ignorant and apathetic. Where the media is less regulated and there is greater private ownership in the media industry, citizens are more politically knowledgeable and active. These results are robust to sample, specification, and alternative measures of media freedom.
What is, or should be, the relationship between claims of violations of the right to manifest one's religion as a result of a generally applicable law or policy, and claims of indirect discrimination ...on grounds of religion? The interrelationship of human rights protections is not a new question. Just as rights may conflict, rights may also overlap. The arrest of a human rights activist for expressing her views could violate both the prohibition against arbitrary detention and her freedom of expression. Excessive use of force against peaceful demonstrators could violate their rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and security of the person, and the prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Certain actions or inactions may implicate specific rights, such as the rights to language and culture, and to freedom of religion, opinion, or belief, and may also constitute discrimination on those same grounds.
Do Europeans like nudges? Reisch, Lucia A.; Sunstein, Cass R.
Judgment and Decision Making,
07/2016, Volume:
11, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
In recent years, many governments have shown a keen interest in “nudges” — approaches to law and policy that maintain freedom of choice, but that steer people in certain directions. Yet to ...date, there has been little evidence on whether citizens of various societies support nudges and nudging. We report the results of nationally representative surveys in six European nations: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the United Kingdom. We find strong majority support for nudges of the sort that have been adopted, or under serious consideration, in democratic nations. Despite the general European consensus, we find markedly lower levels of support for nudges in two nations: Hungary and Denmark. We are not, in general, able to connect support for nudges with distinct party affiliations.
Abstract
Academic freedom is under threat across the globe and a wave of substantial academic freedom declines affects not only autocracies but also (liberal) democracies. However, although the ...development of academic freedom has generated scholarly attention, this article presents the first systematic conceptualization and measurement of academic freedom growth and decline episodes. In particular, this article systematically analyzes the development of academic freedom across the globe and shows that global development follows waves of growth and decline. The first growth wave started in the mid-1940s and was succeeded by a second growth wave that started around 1977 and lasted for more than 30 years resulting in the greatest improvement in academic freedom that has been recorded since 1900. However, since 2013, we see an ongoing decline wave in academic freedom. Overall, this article highlights how academic freedom developed over time and across the globe in waves of growth and decline.
Conventional wireless communication architecture, a backbone of our modern society, relies on actively generated carrier signals to transfer information, leading to important challenges including ...limited spectral resources and energy consumption. Backscatter communication systems, on the other hand, modulate an antenna's impedance to encode information into already existing waves but suffer from low data rates and a lack of information security. Here, we introduce the concept of massive backscatter communication which modulates the propagation environment of stray ambient waves with a programmable metasurface. The metasurface's large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom enable unprecedented wave control and thereby secure and high-speed information transfer. Our prototype leveraging existing commodity 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signals achieves data rates on the order of hundreds of Kbps. Our technique is applicable to all types of wave phenomena and provides a fundamentally new perspective on the role of metasurfaces in future wireless communication.
We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from ...corruption and on "market freedom" defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working-age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing "market freedom" is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample, but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed-effects models.
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