Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to ...join or avoid a war?War and Democratic Constraintshows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions-a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media-are present to make timely information accessible.
Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts.
Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq,War and Democratic Constraintlinks domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.
War stories Baum, Matthew; Groeling, Tim J
2010., 20091214, 2009, 2010, 2010-01-01, 20100101
eBook
How does the American public formulate its opinions about U.S. foreign policy and military engagement abroad? War Stories argues that the media systematically distort the information the public ...vitally needs to determine whether to support such initiatives, for reasons having more to do with journalists' professional interests than the merits of the policies, and that this has significant consequences for national security. Matthew Baum and Tim Groeling develop a "strategic bias" theory that explains the foreign-policy communication process as a three-way interaction among the press, political elites, and the public, each of which has distinct interests, biases, and incentives.
Soft news goes to war Baum, Matthew A; Baum, Matthew A
2003., 20111016, 2011, 2003
eBook
The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that ...public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling "byproduct" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the "soft news" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy.
The science of fake news Lazer, David M J; Baum, Matthew A; Benkler, Yochai ...
Science,
03/2018, Letnik:
359, Številka:
6380
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort
The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over ...the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed. Below, we discuss extant social and computer science research regarding belief in fake news and the mechanisms by which it spreads. Fake news has a long history, but we focus on unanswered scientific questions raised by the proliferation of its most recent, politically oriented incarnation. Beyond selected references in the text, suggested further reading can be found in the supplementary materials.
We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding ...regions, and ring roads displace about an additional 20%, with stronger effects in the richer coastal and central regions. Each radial railroad reduces central city industrial GDP by about 20%, with ring roads displacing an additional 50%. We provide evidence that radial highways decentralize service sector activity, radial railroads decentralize industrial activity, and ring roads decentralize both. Historical transportation infrastructure provides identifying variation in more recent measures of infrastructure.
Scholars of political communication have long examined newsworthiness by focusing on the news choices of media organizations (
Lewin, 1947
;
White, 1950
;
Sigal, 1973
;
Gans, 1979
). However, in ...recent years these traditional arbiters of the news have increasingly been joined or even supplanted in affecting the public agenda by "new media" competitors, including cable news, talk radio, and even amateur bloggers. The standards by which this new class of decision makers evaluates news are at best only partially explained by prior studies focused on professional journalists and organizations. In this study, we seek to correct this oversight by content analyzing five online news sources-including wire services, cable news, and political blog sites-in order to compare their news judgments in the months prior to, and immediately following, the 2006 midterm election. We collected all stories from Reuters' and AP's "top political news" sections. We then investigated whether a given story was also chosen to appear on each wire's top news page (indicating greater perceived newsworthiness than those that were not chosen) and compared the wires' editorial choices to those of more partisan blogs (from the left: DailyKos.com; from the right: FreeRepublic.com) and cable outlets (FoxNews.com). We find evidence of greater partisan filtering for the latter three Web sources, and relatively greater reliance on traditional newsworthiness criteria for the news wires.
Importance
Persistence of COVID-19 symptoms beyond 2 months, or long COVID, is increasingly recognized as a common sequela of acute infection.
Objectives
To estimate the prevalence of and ...sociodemographic factors associated with long COVID and to identify whether the predominant variant at the time of infection and prior vaccination status are associated with differential risk.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This cross-sectional study comprised 8 waves of a nonprobability internet survey conducted between February 5, 2021, and July 6, 2022, among individuals aged 18 years or older, inclusive of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Long COVID, defined as reporting continued COVID-19 symptoms beyond 2 months after the initial month of symptoms, among individuals with self-reported positive results of a polymerase chain reaction test or antigen test.
Results
The 16 091 survey respondents reporting test-confirmed COVID-19 illness at least 2 months prior had a mean age of 40.5 (15.2) years; 10 075 (62.6%) were women, and 6016 (37.4%) were men; 817 (5.1%) were Asian, 1826 (11.3%) were Black, 1546 (9.6%) were Hispanic, and 11 425 (71.0%) were White. From this cohort, 2359 individuals (14.7%) reported continued COVID-19 symptoms more than 2 months after acute illness. Reweighted to reflect national sociodemographic distributions, these individuals represented 13.9% of those who had tested positive for COVID-19, or 1.7% of US adults. In logistic regression models, older age per decade above 40 years (adjusted odds ratio OR, 1.15; 95% CI, 1.12-1.19) and female gender (adjusted OR, 1.91; 95% CI, 1.73-2.13) were associated with greater risk of persistence of long COVID; individuals with a graduate education vs high school or less (adjusted OR, 0.67; 95% CI, 0.56-0.79) and urban vs rural residence (adjusted OR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.64-0.86) were less likely to report persistence of long COVID. Compared with ancestral COVID-19, infection during periods when the Epsilon variant (OR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.69-0.95) or the Omicron variant (OR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.64-0.92) predominated in the US was associated with diminished likelihood of long COVID. Completion of the primary vaccine series prior to acute illness was associated with diminished risk for long COVID (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.60-0.86).
Conclusions and Relevance
This study suggests that long COVID is prevalent and associated with female gender and older age, while risk may be diminished by completion of primary vaccination series prior to infection.
We investigate the effects of the recently constructed Chinese national highway system on local economic outcomes. On average, roads that improve access to local markets have small or negative ...effects on prefecture economic activity and population. However, these averages mask a distinct pattern of winners and losers. With better regional highways, economic output and population increase in regional primates at the expense of hinterland prefectures. Highways also affect patterns of specialization. With better regional highways, regional primates specialize more in manufacturing and services, while peripheral areas lose manufacturing but gain in agriculture. Better access to international ports promotes greater population, GDP, and private sector wages on average, effects that are probably larger in hinterland than primate prefectures. An important policy implication is that investing in local transport infrastructure to promote growth of hinterland prefectures has the opposite effect, causing them to specialize more in agriculture and lose economic activity.
Depression can affect individuals’ attitudes by enhancing cognitive biases and altering perceptions of control. We investigate the relationship between depressive symptoms and Americans’ attitudes ...regarding domestic extremist violence. We develop a theory that suggests the association between depression and support for political violence depends on conspiracy beliefs, participatory inclinations, and their combination. We test our theory using a two‐wave national survey panel from November 2020 and January 2021. We find that among those who hold conspiracy beliefs and/or have participatory inclinations, depression is positively associated with support for election violence and the January 6 Capitol riots. The participatory inclination dynamic is particularly strong for men. Our findings reveal how the intersection of two concerning features of American society—poor mental health and conspiratorial beliefs—strongly relate to another feature: support for political violence. The results also make clear that interventions aimed at addressing depression can potentially have substantial political consequences.
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