/pdf/feeling-and-thinking-preferences-need-no-inferences-q4mw2hj8rx.pdf

Feeling and thinking : Preferences need no inferences

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

/pdf/international-norm-dynamics-and-political-change-37ig9r9dlq.pdf

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the theoretical and empirical literature that addresses aging and discourse comprehension. A series of five studies guided by a particular working memory viewpoint regarding the formation of inferences during discourse processing is described in the chapter. Compensatory strategies may be used with different degrees of likelihood across the life span largely as a function of efficiency with which inhibitory mechanisms function because these largely determine the facility with which memory can be searched. The consequences for discourse comprehension in particular may be profound because the establishment of a coherent representation of a message hinges on the timely retrieval of information necessary to establish coreference among certain critical ideas. Discourse comprehension is an ideal domain for assessing limited capacity frameworks because most models of discourse processing assume that multiple components, demanding substantially different levels of cognitive resources, are involved. For example, access to a lexical representation from either a visual array or an auditory message is virtually capacity free.

Working Memory, Comprehension, and Aging: A Review and a New View

In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or part of 2001. Armed conflict remains a serious problem in the post-Cold War period. For three decades, the Correlates of War project has served as the main supplier of reliable data used in longitudinal studies of external and internal armed conflict. The COW datasets on war use the relatively high threshold of 1,000 battle-deaths. The Uppsala dataset on armed conflict has a lower threshold, 25 annual battle-deaths, but has so far been available for only the post-Cold War period. This dataset has now been backdated to the end of World War II. This article presents a report on armed conflict based on this backdate as well as another annual update. It presents the procedures for the backdating, as well as trends over time and breakdowns for the type of conflict. It assesses the criteria for measuring armed conflict and discusses some directions for future data collection in this area.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1555346.pdf

Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset

The End of History and the Last Man

Originally published in 1973 by John Wiley & Sons, this volume presents a rigorous analysis of public opinion on the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and on the Presidents who led us during those conflicts. Shows how polling results are often misused, and develops many unconventional conclusions.

War, presidents, and public opinion

I think [my grandchildren] will be proud of two things. What I did for the Negro and seeing it through in Vietnam for all of Asia. The Negro cost me 15 points in the polls and Vietnam cost me 20.Lyndon B. JohnsonWith tenacious regularity over the last two and a half decades the Gallup Poll has posed to its cross-section samples of the American public the following query, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way (the incumbent) is handling his job as President?” The responses to this curious question form an index known as “Presidential popularity.” According to Richard Neustadt, the index is “widely taken to approximate reality” in Washington and reports about its behavior are “very widely read” there, including, the quotation above would suggest, the highest circles.Plotted over time, the index forms probably the longest continuous trend line in polling history. This study seeks to analyze the behavior of this line for the period from the beginning of the Truman administration in 1945 to the end of the Johnson administration in January 1969 during which time the popularity question was asked some 300 times.Four variables are used as predictors of a President's popularity. These include a measure of the length of time the incumbent has been in office as well as variables which attempt to estimate the influence on his rating of major international events, economic slump and war. To assess the independent impact of each of these variables as they interact in association with Presidential popularity, multiple regression analysis is used as the basic analytic technique.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1955610.pdf

Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson

Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War

In this article I assess the violence that took place in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda in the 1990s and argue that the whole concept of “ethnic warfare” may be severely misguided. Speciacally, insofar as it is taken to imply a war of all against all and neighbor against neighbor—a condition in which pretty much everyone in one ethnic group becomes the ardent, dedicated, and murderous enemy of everyone in another group—ethnic war essentially does not exist. I argue instead that ethnic warfare more closely resembles nonethnic warfare, because it is waged by small groups of combatants, groups that purport to aght and kill in the name of some larger entity. Often, in fact, “ethnic war” is substantially a condition in which a mass of essentially mild, ordinary people can unwillingly and in considerable bewilderment come under the vicious and arbitrary control of small groups of armed thugs. I consider arst the violent conoicts in Croatia and Bosnia. These were spawned not so much by the convulsive surging of ancient hatreds or by frenzies whipped up by demagogic politicians and the media as by the ministrations of small—sometimes very small—bands of opportunistic marauders recruited by political leaders and operating under their general guidance. Many of these participants were drawn from street gangs or from bands of soccer hooligans. Others were criminals speciacally released from prison for the purpose. Their participation was required because the Yugoslav army, despite years of supposedly inouential nationalist propaganda and centuries

The Banality of "Ethnic War"

General perceived self-efficacy pertains to optimistic beliefs about being able to cope with a large variety of stressors. It is measured with a ten-item scale that has proven useful in cross-cultural research. Previous findings suggest that the construct is universal and that it applies to the majority of cultures worldwide. The present investigation adds a new facet to it: can perceived self-efficacy be measured as part of an interactive computer session while surfing the Internet? A total of 1,437 computer users responded to a survey on the web, half of them young men and women below the age of 26. These data were compared to 290 Canadian university students, 274 teachers in Germany, and 3,077 high school students in Germany. It turned out that all psychometric characteristics were satisfactory. Some evidence for validity emerged. It is suggested that innovative methods of data collection be considered when developing a psychometric scale.

John Mueller

Papers

War, presidents, and public opinion

Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson

Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War

The Banality of "Ethnic War"

Assessment of perceived general self-efficacy on the Internet : Data collection in cyberspace