Election Of Donald Trump Research Articles

‘I’m massively into swastikas’: Jojo Rabbit as a counter-protest to Trump-era nationalist extremism

ABSTRACT Jojo Rabbit (2019), an ‘anti-hate satire’ about a Hitler Youth member, explores autocracy and prejudice through the child’s gaze. The film subverts several Holocaust film conventions, reversing the ‘weak Jew, Gentile savior’ trope and refusing to portray Nazis as inhumanly evil to illustrate the seduction of power and the complexities of compliance and resistance during the Nazi period – and today. This article argues that the socio-political climate surrounding the film’s release created a popular media narrative of Jojo Rabbit as a metaphor for and counter-protest to the rise of nationalist extremism in America following the presidential election of Donald Trump.

MacLeish/Oppenheimer, Trump, and the Conquest of America

Archibald MacLeish (Pulitzer prize-winning poet/playwright) published his highly acclaimed essay “The Conquest of America” in the August 1949 Atlantic Monthly. His essay focused on an American crisis of national purpose, and central to his account is the importance of a national image for America. In particular, he called for a redeclaration of American purpose by appealing to a Jeffersonian “Revolution of the Individual.” MacLeish’s friend Robert Oppenheimer responded to his essay with high praise but also criticism. In this article, we use the MacLeish/ Oppenheimer exchange as a springboard for a discussion of the crisis of American democracy today exemplified by the election of Donald Trump. We take a synthetic approach, relying not simply on MacLeish/Oppenheimer but more importantly on contemporary scholars. We attempt to construct an American image with a realistic meaning for today. The image includes three interweaving political components—Liberal Democracy, Liberal Nationalism, Liberal Internationalism—complemented by America’s historical role as Democracy’s Vital Center. After sketching this national image, we discuss each component, touching on several contemporary issues as well as the general nature of the image in light of Trump and the current crisis of American democracy.

Crisis in EU-US relations under Trump: an emotional contemptuous double game of misrecognition

ABSTRACT With the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, the transatlantic relations entered a renewed period of crisis. The former US administration challenged key international norms at the core of the EU’s identity – thereby testing the EU’s ability to rethink its position in the world. Against this background, studies have attempted to analyse the EU’s response vis-à-vis the US mainly from a realist and socio-psychological perspectives. Yet little attention has been given to the crucial emotional component underlying the EU’s response – related to EU’s recognition needs. Therefore, this article proposes to analyse the transatlantic crisis under the Trump administration through the lens of recognition theories and emotions in IR. Based on the emotion discourse analysis of public statements, it shows that dynamics of misrecognition and re-affirmation of identity have been at play in this recent crisis fuelled by the powerful emotion of contempt.

Influencing People’s Populist Attitudes With Rhetoric and Emotions: An Online Experiment in the United States

Interest in populist voters has risen with the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe, and the longevity of populist leaders in countries like Italy, Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela. Yet, little attention has been given to what mechanisms may affect populist attitudes, leaving us without recommendations for media or politicians on how to mitigate populism’s known negative effects. This study investigates one such mechanism—political rhetoric working through emotional states—to determine whether grievances centered on subjective perceptions of injustice and inequities in the system operate through negative emotions to increase populist attitudes, as is often assumed in the literature, and whether an antidote to those perceptions may be found in a sense of solidarity and mutual support. For our analysis, we conducted a nationally representative online survey experiment of 2,006 respondents in the United States in November 2018. Broadly, we find evidence that negative emotional states increase populist attitudes, but positive emotions do not have an impact. Likewise, political rhetoric reinforcing a sense of unfair advantage for some people further increases populist attitudes. Importantly, we find that reducing these negative emotions by emphasizing solidarity can reduce populist attitudes. These findings not only deepen our understanding of the triggers of populism, but also take the first step in building a tested toolbox of strategies to minimize its negative effects.

Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility, hypervisibility, and the making of the modern slave

The undocumented immigrant represents a socio-legal category, referring to a subject who does not have legal standing to be in the country in which they are located. Extending from their lack of legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy spaces marked by extreme conditions of vulnerability, which were exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. The aim of this ethnographic study is to make sense of the experiences of undocumented immigrants under a particularly vicious political rhetoric. Studying the lives of Latinx undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S., our findings capture how the dynamic interplay between the types of labor that they undertake and the socio-legal identity they are attributed function together to systematically disenfranchise them. Specifically, we explicate how doing invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity culminates in extreme conditions of vulnerability. In addition to developing the concept of hypervisible identity, we also inform theory on the idea of modern slavery. We contend that without the existence of invisible labor and hypervisible identity performing as interlocking, constitutive precursors, some forms of modern slavery would be negated.

Political Disorientation and Legibility Loss in the Trumpian Years

This essay discusses political disorientation and what I define as a legibility crisis ushered in by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. After defining these concepts, it provides evidence for them and fleshes out how they were expressed in prophecies about Trump in white evangelical communities. A legibility crisis is the realization that some fundamental aspects of the symbolic domain (language, civic values, political practices, and institutions) are no longer binding or recognizable. There is a loss of touch with what was once expected political conduct, but this loss gravitates toward something that is not fully graspable in its conceptual and emotional dimensions. In examining political disorientation, I refer to a three-dimensional condition encompassing the personal, the institutional, and the analytical. This disorientation challenges our expectations about institutional norms and forces us to realize that the respectability and legitimacy of those institutions have been hollowed out. This essay will also address the culture of prophecy in some evangelical groups and how prophetic utterances shape these groups’ understanding of the American Constitution and political reality.

MAGIC IN THE AIR: MEMES, MAGIC, AND THE INTERNET

Leading up to, during, and immediately following the 2016 US election of Donald Trump, there was buzz about magic on the internet. From the meme magic of the cult of Kek to liberal witches performing binding spells, magic seemed to emerge out of thin air. However, while technology and the occult may seem like strange bedfellows, they have a cozier historical relationship then we often acknowledge. For instance, it has been well-documented that there was a synergetic relationship between telegraphy and spiritualism (Sconce, 2000) and we can consider ciphers used to construct grimoires as an antecedent to modern techno-cryptography (Reeds, 1998). In this paper, I historicize internet magic situating the recent online magical wars within the broader context of both digital and occult histories. Just as spiritualist séances articulated hopes and anxieties of mass communication, meme magic speaks to contemporary concerns and desires about information spread.

Right-Wing Leftists, Left-Wing Rightists, and Traditionalist Liberals: Core Political Values and Ideological Inconsistency at the Party-Elite Level in Bulgaria

The growth of heterodox ideological configurations, or ideological inconsistencies, among the electorate of Western countries, has been offered as one explanation for recent momentous political events, such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump as US President. Previous research, however, suggests that ideological inconsistency has been typical for Central and Eastern European (CEE) states for the past thirty years after the fall of the Socialist regimes there. Based on a survey of 102 active members of local and national party structures in Bulgaria, followed by in-depth interviews with the same respondents, I develop a conceptual and methodological approach aimed at objectively measuring Bulgarians’ political values and ideological orientations. Building on previous research on the statistical independence of the social and economic dimensions of ideology, this study identifies three main models of ideological inconsistency at the party-elite level in Bulgaria, offering evidence of the “homogeneity in ideological inconsistency” in this post-Socialist country, with party elites and electorate following the same patterns of inconsistency. The existence of a conservative value complex, integrating traditionalist, statist, and nationalist attitudes regarding the social sphere, is another major finding of the study. I discuss the specific historical and socio-cultural background contributing to ideological inconsistency in Bulgaria and potential implications for the wider CEE region.

Does the Phrase “Conspiracy Theory” Matter?

Research on conspiracy theories has proliferated since 2016, in part due to the US election of President Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasingly threatening environmental conditions. In the rush to publication given these concerning social consequences, researchers have increasingly treated as definitive a 2016 paper by Michael Wood (Political Psychology, 37(5), 695–705, 2016) that concludes that the phrase “conspiracy theory” has no negative effect upon people’s willingness to endorse a claim. We revisit Wood’s findings and its (re)uptake in the recent literature. Is the label “conspiracy theory” a pejorative? If so, does it sway or affect people’s belief in specific claims of conspiracy (i.e. particular conspiracy theories), or is the effect one that concerns claims of conspiracy more generally (i.e. all conspiracy theories)? Through an examination of the conceptual and methodological scope of Wood’s work and the results of our similar quasi-experimental design, we argue that it is premature to suggest the label “conspiracy theory” has no impact on the believability of a claim, or that it has no rhetorical power.

American evangelical nationalism: history, status quo, and outlook

Evangelical nationalism is a new manifestation of American nationalism in the twenty-first century. Internally, it advocates the integration of national identity and Christian faith, claiming that “America is a Christian nation”. Externally, it pursues the “America First” and isolationist foreign policy. The early religious, political and social activities of evangelicals were mainly embodied in the religious revival called the Great Awakening. The rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and 1980s represented an essential exercise in or attempt at evangelical nationalism. The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 marked the development of conservatism, such as evangelicalism in the U.S., from a religiously conservative force to a full-blown nationalism. Evangelical nationalism rose in the context of response to dramatically changing internal and external environments, the adjustment of traditional conservative strategies, the revival of white racism, the interplay between civic and ethnic nationalism, and the crisis of modernity. On the one hand, the momentum of evangelical nationalism will diminish with the relative alleviation of conflicts both within and outside the U.S., the corresponding adjustment of conservative strategies, and especially the growth of the civic nationalist camp. On the other hand, from the perspective of “identity and ultimate belief”, although the identity problem characterized by the “culture war” will be relatively relieved with the mitigation of internal and external conditions, the United States, as a “Christian nation” underpinned by Christian culture and faith, will see evangelical nationalism resilient. Evangelical nationalism will continue to play an important role in the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States.

Increasing political polarization with disinformation: A comparative analysis of the European quality press

Political polarization and information disorders are not new phenomena on the media agenda, but they have acquired considerable prominence in the wake of international events such as the election of Donald Trump. The present article seeks to help in understanding the interrelation of these concepts –disinformation and polarization– in the European quality press in recent years. Six newspapers (El Mundo, El País, Le Figaro, Le Monde, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian) from three countries were selected on the basis of their quality, audience and representative character of their editorial lines between 2017 and late 2022, and a qualitative and quantitative frame analysis (n = 286) was carried out. Having observed all the definitions of polarization in the press, it was seen that party political alignment has the greatest presence in the international scenario, coming before the division of public opinion. In the sample, Spain has a prominent position, claiming to be a polarized pluralist country, as opposed to United Kingdom, which closely observes what happens in the United States, or France, where these phenomena have achieved less penetration. The conclusion is that political polarization is presented as a chronic problem caused by political actors who are not going to cease doing so, as opposed to information disorders, which are produced by certain specific international actors, such as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro, who take advantage of communication flows on social media and the latter’s lack of regulation. This article suggests that the way to resolve or at least alleviate the problem is by defending quality information and public media, emphasizing citizen responsibility in the face of social media.

Asymmetric Polarization in Online Media Engagement in the United States Congress

In their online communications, political elites may choose to strategically eschew mainstream media sources and engage with alternative media outlets based on ideological and strategic considerations about the type of content they wish to legitimize or amplify to their followers. This is particularly true on social media which has become a fertile breeding ground for viral non-mainstream media content. Using an extensive dataset of social media posts sent from Members of the U.S. Congress between 2011 and 2022 (6.3 million tweets, 2.3 million Facebook posts), this article explores how media engagement in congressional online communications has evolved over time. The results suggest clear trends of asymmetric polarization, both in terms of media link sharing and media handle engagement, with Republican homophily and extremity of engagement growing steadily over time. This growing extremity is explained by changing Member behavior rather than changes in the composition of Congress and is primarily driven by more ideologically extreme Members of the Republican party increasingly engaging with rightwing and alt-right media. These trends have intensified in recent years, especially after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Collectively, these results shed light on shifting ideological trends in media engagement and have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between political elites and the media in a highly polarized contemporary political environment.

Two-Level Game Analysis on US Decision to Withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

Abstract
 This study analyzes the reasons behind the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017. Using descriptive methods and Two-level Game theory as an analytical tool supported by secondary data, we found some domestic factors driving this policy. First, different preferences existed between the government as the “chief negotiator” and interest groups and public opinion representing domestic interests. Two-level game theory explains that international agreement can only be ratified if the win-set negotiations are in overlapping conditions or where international and domestic preferences find a meeting point. However, no common ground between international and domestic preferences resulted in a deadlock. Second, the U.S. public strongly resisted the agreement. Public opinion and hearings are factors that, to some extent, can become obstacles for national governments in international negotiations. Ratification is not only carried out through a formal process (legislative approval) but also through an informal process (public opinion and approval). In addition, the election of Donald Trump, who carried protectionist values with his “America First” slogan, strengthened the position of the opposing groups and those who embraced protectionist values. Therefore, the election of Trump as the president marked the end of the TPP debate because both the executive as the “chief negotiator” and the dominant domestic group rejected the ratification.
 Keywords: Trans-Pacific Partnership, Two-Level Game Theory, United States

Thinking for Themselves: Bootstraps Discourse and the Imagined Epistemology of Reactionary YouTube Audiences

ABSTRACT In recent years, popular interest in disinformation has coalesced around a series of high-profile events, starting with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. While Facebook and Twitter drew the most scrutiny in the immediate aftermath of these events, attention has turned in recent years to YouTube as a source of right-wing disinformation and radicalization. While the bulk of the extant literature on this topic has focused on the supply of right-wing content on YouTube – including quantitative studies examining the impact of the recommendation algorithm and qualitative studies exploring the rhetoric and micro-celebrity practices of reactionary channels – few studies have examined what draws viewers to the videos they watch. This paper aims to fill this gap in research by analyzing interviews with 18 current and former fans of US-centric reactionary YouTube channels. Based on these interviews, I introduce the concept of bootstraps epistemology as a way of understanding right-wing approaches to accessing political truth and knowledge.

The Politics of Police

The connection between racially prejudiced policing and politics has a long history in the United States. In the current period, police organizations have displayed unprecedented support for Republican presidential candidates, and both have organized against social movements focused on addressing racial disparities in police contact. Yet despite strong connections between law enforcement and party politics, we know almost nothing about the relationship between partisan identity and the behavior of police officers. Using millions of traffic stop records from the Florida Highway Patrol and linked voter records, the present study shows that White Republican officers exhibit a larger racial disparity than White Democratic officers in their propensity to search motorists whom they have stopped. This result is robust to an array of alternative empirical tests and holds across varying sociodemographic contexts. I also find that both White Republican and White Democratic officers grew more biased between 2012 and 2020, a period characterized by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump.

Women Grab Back: Exclusion, Policy Threat, and Women’s Political Ambition

Previous work suggests that observing women officeholders increases women’s political ambition. Yet, jumps in women’s representation in the United States’ “Years of the Woman”—following the Anita Hill testimonies and the election of Donald Trump—are linked to women’s exclusion from political decision-making. Drawing on focus groups with prospective women candidates, we theorize that exclusion when combined with a gendered policy threat increases women’s political ambition. Using survey experiments replicated across different samples, we show that women who read about an all-male city council poised to legislate on women’s rights report increased ambition compared with their pretreatment ambition levels and to women in other treatment groups. Women’s increased sense of political efficacy drives these results. When women’s rights are not under discussion, men’s overrepresentation does not move (or even depresses) women’s ambition. Seeing the policy consequences of their exclusion causes some women to seek a seat at the table.

Black women married to White men: What the women see as the challenges

ABSTRACT With interracial marriages on the rise, a need exists to learn more about what challenges spouses in these marriages may face, especially during a period of U.S. history when race is increaingly becoming a part of the national conversation following the election of Donald Trump and the 2020 protests. While marriages between Asians, Blacks, Latinx populations, and Whites have all increased, Black-White marriages, in particular, have been in the crucible given the legacy of U.S. enslavement with Whites dominating Blacks as well as the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling related to a Black woman married to a White man. This article, based on qualitative interviews with 14 Black women married to White men, offers five themes that emerged from these interviews. These themes are: dealing with in-laws; negativity from outsiders; perspective taking and exhaustion; the impact of current events; and defining Blackness. Black Idenity Development is used as a theoretical framework.

Progressive cities: Urban–rural polarisation of social values and economic development around the world

In contrast to the conservative values of rural populations, cities are often seen as bulwarks of more tolerant, liberal and progressive values. This urban–rural divide in values has become one of the major fault lines in Western democracies, underpinning major political events of the last decade, not least the election of Donald Trump. Yet, beyond a small number of countries, there is little evidence that cities really are more liberal than rural areas. Evolutionary modernisation theory suggests that socio-economic development may lead to the spread of progressive, self-expression values but provides little guidance on the role of cities in this process. Has an urban–rural split in values developed across the world? And does this gap depend on the economic development of a country? We answer these questions using a large cross-sectional dataset covering 66 countries. Despite the inherent challenges in identifying and operationalising a globally-consistent definition of what is ‘urban’, we show that there are marked and significant urban–rural differences in progressive values, defined as tolerant attitudes to immigration, gender rights and family life. These differences exist even when controlling for observable compositional effects, suggesting that cities do play a role in the spread of progressive values. Yet, these results only apply at higher levels of economic development suggesting that, for cities to leave behind rural areas in terms of liberal values, the satisfying of certain material needs is a prerequisite.

Challenges and Opportunities in the International Higher Education “Post-Pandemic” Landscape

International education is a vast field of scholarship and practice. Internationalization of higher education (IHE) has been contested, debated, deconstructed, and reconstructed. While some have discussed the end of internationalization (Brandenburg & De Wit, 2011), others have discussed reimagining or rebuilding this field of practice (Stein, 2021). Since the post-World War II era, the international education sector has faced many challenges including the Cold War, 9/11 and its responses, the election of Donald Trump, and Brexit, but perhaps nothing compares to COVID-19. The pandemic has severely impacted the core of the internationalization of higher education – human mobility. CISN reached out to three IHE scholars and leading practitioners in the USA and Canada to learn about their visions for the future of IHE in the “post-pandemic” landscape. We encourage readers to send us their comments about their own responses to the following questions and their thoughts on the responses from Dr. Sonja Knutson, Dr. Harvey Charles, and Dr. Adel El Zaïm outlined here.

U.S. Foreign Policy under President Trump: The Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea Regions

The current phase in international relations can be best characterized by one word – transition. The Post-Cold War order is rapidly disappearing, creating strategic ambiguity for all actors. The U.S. hegemony is over or close to over despite the fact that militarily Washington will be safely far out of reach for several decades to come. However, the growing national debt, the looming crisis in the Social Security and Medicare systems, uncontrolled migration, growing populism and partisan fighting does not bode well for the future of U.S. dominance. At the same time, no nation, be it China, Russia, India or Brazil, has the necessary resources or will to compete for the new world hegemony. The absence of a world hegemon means that no state has the power to enforce the implementation of key international rules and norms. Regardless how one perceives the international principles – as balanced or biased – the rule-based order at least provides a minimal level of stability since the actors involved on the international stage have a clear understanding what may and may not be done. However, since the late 2000s the situation has changed. We are increasingly facing an international security architecture where key actors may easily break the norms and rules, and this will eventually bring us to a situation upon which no rules can be based. The election of President Trump sent shock waves through the United States’ political establishment and surprised international relations pundits worldwide. Despite the apparent growth of the right-wing populist movements in different parts of the world, the culmination of which was presumably the BREXIT referendum held in June 2016, few if any could imagine that a real estate developer and reality TV star had any chance of defeating one of the most respected representatives of the US political establishment. The November 2016 elections had widespread implications on both American domestic and foreign policies. President Trump’s decision to denounce globalism created a situation where the so-called “vertical globalism” (Western-led efforts to spread a liberal international order all over the world through the promotion of democracy and a market economy) might be transformed into a “horizontal globalism” based on regional integration models covering vast territories of Europe and Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this paper we will analyze President Trump’s foreign policy in several key geographical areas and its implications. However, in order to better understand the significant changes in U.S. foreign policy ushered in by President Trump and make predictions for future developments, it is worth starting with an examination of Trump’s foreign policy perceptions as well as of the ongoing debates within the foreign policy establishment itself.