Political Attacks Research Articles

Using Political Connections to Raise Rivals’ Costs: Evidence from an Emerging Market

AbstractIn this paper, we leverage resource dependency theory to examine the impact of political connections on rivals’ costs and how this impact is affected by rival‐side and politician‐side contingencies. Using a panel dataset of Pakistani firms, our system generalized method of moments estimates show that politically connected firms can increase their rivals’ costs by influencing their rivals’ dependency relationship with the government. This impact is attenuated by the rivals’ strategic flexibility and social legitimacy, which provide some protection or insulation from political attacks in resource markets. Together, our findings extend the contingent dynamics of resource dependency in political markets from focal firms to competitors and offer significant contributions to the corporate political activity literature and resource dependency theory.

Neuropsychology and Politics Collide in the 2024 US Presdiential Election: Pitfalls of attacks on age, language, and memory.

Public perception of dementia has emerged as a key factor in the 2024 United States presidential election. The first televised presidential debate (27 June 2024) evoked a groundswell of concern about the neuropsychological health and political viability of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. A rapid erosion of public support ensued, culminating in the collapse of the reelection campaign the following month. Political attacks on the cognitive fitness of world leaders create dissonance for clinical neuroscientists. We are ethically prohibited from remotely diagnosing public figures. Yet, we are also citizens with the right to feel and express personal concerns. In this commentary, I will address an often-uneasy relationship between politics and neuropsychology with a focus on the history and rationale for ethical guidelines such as the Goldwater Rule. I will also discuss lessons learned from recent events in the 2024 US election cycle about neurological health literacy (e.g. How is dementia diagnosed?) and broader impacts of age-based political attacks on global public health initiatives that target stigma reduction and improved early detection of dementia.

Tuned In! An affirmative mindfulness intervention for sexual and gender diverse young people

Sexual and gender diverse youth and young adults (SGDY) experience significant mental health disparities compared to non-SGDY, which is exacerbated by ongoing anti-LGBTQIA + political attacks across the U.S. SGDY lack access to culturally responsive mental health supports and are overlooked in clinical practice/research. Mindfulness is a transformative practice that fosters well-being and provides tools to address the psychological impact of discriminatory experiences. This study investigated feasibility, acceptability, and outcomes of a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI), Tuned In!, co-developed with SGDY to improve mental health and navigate and challenge the current anti-LGBTQIA + sociopolitical context. Participants (n = 56), 16 to 29 yrs., were recruited and participated online. Surveys were administered pre, post-intervention, and at 6-month follow-up. Hierarchical Linear Modeling and Reflexive Thematic Analysis were used to analyze data. Rates of engagement and retention were high. High levels of satisfaction and acceptability, a significant decrease in depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, and a significant increase in sexual self-efficacy, mindfulness, and self-compassion were found, with gains maintained at 6-month follow-up. Qualitative analysis uncovered the following themes: Development of Crucial Coping Skills and Strategies, A Sense of Community Among SGDY, Learning from Peers Through Dialogue. Study results suggest that Tuned In! is a promising intervention to improve SGDY mental health.

How negativity and policy content drive the spread of political messages

ABSTRACT Research demonstrates that negative messages spread more online, both at the elite and mass levels. We know comparatively less about the role that policy content plays, and whether that might be responsible for the effect of negativity. We examine over 1.4 million congressional tweets to test the effect of message tone and topic on the number of retweets that messages receive. We find that elite messages are retweeted more when they contain political attacks. However, even while controlling for tone, we find that messages are shared more when they discuss some “culture war” issues or when they discuss Donald Trump.

The light and the dark side of judicial resistance

AbstractHow can courts resist political attacks? Despite the rich empirical studies of attacks on courts, we lack better understanding of how judges react to these challenges. Little or no attention has been paid to the theoretical aspects of judicial resistance; the structural, personal or socio‐economical motives of judges, or the dynamics between the resistance, democratic resilience and the rule of law. This article draws a novel concept map and suggests that the future scholarship should focus on three dimensions of judicial resistance. The first captures the variety of techniques available to judges who wish to avert, punish or invalidate an attack, whether they act individually or collectively and on‐bench or off‐bench. The second dimension zooms in on the motives for resistance, including the ability of judges to recognize an attack and see it as critical. It outlines factors that potentially form the cost‐benefit analysis behind judges' decisions to resist. Finally, the third dimension prompts to look into the effects of resistance (the dark and the light side), it analyses the conformity of judicial resistance with or against the principle of the rule of law and suggest its repercussions on how the public trusts and understands the courts (long‐term perspective).

Critical Thinking as an Integrative Process: Debating Wolves in Yellowstone

Abstract The topic of critical thinking has engaged philosophers, psychologists and educators for well over one hundred years. Amid polarized political attacks on the teaching of controversial issues, however, education in critical thinking appears to be nearing a new low, not only in the United States, but also in other countries being torn by partisan politics. This article reviews the ebb and flow of critical thinking efforts, suggests explanations for their discouraging results, and proposes a way forward that treats critical thinking as an integrative process advanced by Mary Parker Follet, and more recently espoused by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In the exploratory spirit of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, I am introducing this essay, not with analysis or theory, but with a narrative of educational events in all their richness of context. These events describe how middle school students addressed the question of whether wolves should be removed from the endangered species list in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States. In the course of this discussion, I wish to demonstrate that thinking critically requires moving beyond winning, losing, or compromising to resolution of conflict, and furthermore, understanding that even stable resolutions must be revisited as events change.

Media frames and images of Chinese immigrants: analyzing European newspaper narratives from 2015 to 2022

The influx of Chinese immigrants into Europe has spawned varied media frames, shaping public perceptions and attitudes towards this demographic. The portrayal of Chinese immigrants in European newspapers has become a subject of socio-political discourse, necessitating exploring the predominant narratives within the media space. This study aims to unearth and analyze the prevailing frames used in European newspapers when reporting on Chinese immigrants from 2015 to 2022, elucidating the impact of these frames on the constructed images of Chinese immigrants in societal consciousness. Employing an inductive mixed-method computational approach (ANTMN) and leveraging the Lexis database, 360 news reports from European newspapers were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Gibbs Sampling for topic modeling, semantic network procedures for network structure, and Louvain community detection algorithm for clustering consistent framework packages. The study identifies four primary frames—Integration, Social, Political, and Crime—each revealing a distinct narrative about Chinese immigrants. Furthermore, three predominant images of Chinese immigrants emerged: Failed Integrators, Targets of Political Attack, and Disruptors of Social Safety. Despite the decrease in the utilization of the Crime frame amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, an intensified prejudice against Chinese immigrants was noted. The identified frames and images have crucial implications on socio-political attitudes and policies concerning immigrants, emphasizing the necessity to address the media’s role in potentially perpetuating stereotypes and biases, thereby influencing societal coherence and policy approaches toward immigration.

Choosing to Stay: Building a Future for Gender-Diverse People in Saskatchewan through Stories of Hope and Belonging

This paper draws on the first comprehensive study of Two Spirit, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming (2STNBGN) people in Saskatchewan. Despite challenges, including rising conservatism and targeted political attacks, we temper assumptions that trans and queer people want to leave Saskatchewan for other locations where the 2STNBGN community is assumed to be bigger. Many of our participants described choosing to stay in the province as an intentional way to build community, advocate for support, and cultivate belonging. We further explore a distinctly prairie politic that includes Two Spirit and Indigiqueer projects of belonging to land and community, cross-provincial trans community organizing, and a complicated geography that supersedes binaries between urban and rural. Our research tells us that gender-diverse people on the prairies are enacted through a “grounded relationality,” a context-dependent, binary-resistant expression through place, whether that place is land, city, country, or small-town paint store. Ultimately, our research shows that despite an increasingly chilly political climate toward 2STNBGN people, Saskatchewan still bears witness to trans joy, innovative activism, and an activated trans community that is invested in a future that they are a part of.

Exploring Program Process at Movimiento La Libertad: Examining Nuances of Youth Programs That Develop Latinx Critical Consciousness Toward Educational Injustice and Anti-Immigrant Politics

ABSTRACT In the midst of political attacks on public schools to prevent discussions on social injustice and Latinx youth culture, there are after-school programs that nurture Latinx youth critical consciousness and social justice activism. This study uses agencies of transformational resistance (ATR) as a framework to explore one after-school program’s organizational processes that foster Latinx critical consciousness and social justice activism. Using semi-structured interviews, the data revealed the (a) curriculum, (b) pedagogy, and (c) co-conspirators are three organizational processes that nurtured Latinx youth critical consciousness. This study contributes to the critical youth development scholarship by highlighting nuances of three program processes of one Latinx youth afterschool program in an urban city in Iowa. This study suggests afterschool programs afford Latinx with organizational processes that nurture their critical consciousness. The Midwest, and specifically Iowa, have a growing Latinx population that is understudied.

“The Ties that Bind are those that Punish: Network Polarization and Federal Crime Policy Gridlock, 1979–2005”

Abstract Largely overlooked in research on criminal legal expansion is the rise of political polarization and its attendant consequences for crime policy. Drawing on theories of intergroup collaboration and policymaking research, I argue that network polarization—low frequencies of collaborative relations between lawmakers belonging to distinct political groups—negatively affects crime legislation passage by reducing information flows, increasing intergroup hostility, and creating opportunities for political attacks. To evaluate this perspective, I recreate dynamic legislative networks between 1979 and 2005 using data on 1,897,019 cosponsorship relationships between 1537 federal lawmakers and the outcomes of 5950 federal crime bills. Results illustrate that increases in partisan network segregation and the number of densely clustered subgroups both have negative effects on bill passage. These relationships are not moderated by majority party status and peak during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when prison growth showed its first signs of slowing. These findings provide new insight to the relationship between polarization and policy and suggest that increases in network polarization may be partly responsible for declines in crime policy adoption observed in recent decades.

Overworked & underappreciated: How uncertainty, long hours, & partisan politics undermined teachers’ morale throughout the COVID-19 pandemic

Five waves of interviews with teachers' union leaders in diverse settings indicate that fears about health and safety, alongside uncertainty, strained teachers’ relationships with administrators and community early in the pandemic. Over time, an unrelenting workload, constantly shifting demands, and partisan political attacks on teachers and schools dampened morale. Pandemic stressors layered on top of preexisting stressors to undermine teacher morale in a way that appears lasting; efforts to improve morale should be multidimensional, addressing working conditions but also public regard.

Environmental and individual predictors of resilience for queer-spectrum college students

In the United States, anti-queer mobilization (e.g. demonstrations, propaganda, political attacks) has increased in recent years. Although campus climate data from the past decades for queer-spectrum individuals show promising trends, these students still navigate numerous academic, social, and health challenges in the college. Given students’ efforts to traverse these issues, this exploratory study of 8,988 queer-spectrum students examines both individual and collegiate environmental predictors of resilience. Results highlight the importance of queer-spectrum students’ experiences of the environment, particularly a sense of belonging and active engagement in both conversations across difference and behaviors that promote social change. Thus, to cultivate queer resilience, educators must attend to queer-spectrum students’ perceptions of campus climate as well as activism and cross-cultural dialogue.

When Social Media Attack: How Exposure to Political Attacks on Social Media Promotes Anger and Political Cynicism

Political cynicism is rising in many democracies throughout the world. At the same time, people increasingly use social media to access news and political information. However, much of the political content people see on these platforms is hostile, uncivil, and attacking. This study examines whether exposure to these political attacks on social media is associated with political cynicism and, if so, whether negative emotions like anger and anxiety play a mediating role in this process. Using data from a panel survey of American adults ( N = 1,800) collected during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, this study examines whether exposure to political attacks on social media is related to both emotions about the state of the country and political cynicism. Data indicate that people who were exposed to more political attacks on social media were more politically cynical. Further, perceived exposure to political attacks on social media was associated with more anger about the state of the United States, which was subsequently related to greater levels of political cynicism. The results provide evidence that exposure to political attacks on social media might contribute to both negative emotions about the country and political cynicism.

SATIRIČNA PREDSTAVA KAPITALISTIČKIH VRIJEDNOSTI U DRAMI KERIL ČERČIL „OZBILJNA LOVA“

The anti-utopia presented in Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money functions as a mirror-image of Great Britain from the 1980s when its Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher unleashed the forces of capitalist anarchy and relieved the citizens of any moral and social responsibility. İn this play, featuring the brokers from London stock exchange, Churchill dramatizes the hedonistic world of insanely rich and immoral people who in their pursuit of profit and ways to increase their corporate and financial empires follow the precepts of selfish opportunism and ignore all social scruples. Using theatrical devices to achieve an alienating effect and prevent the identification of viewers with the characters and the presented material, such as the use of songs and especially the text written in verse, Churchill puts emphasis on the critical observation and consideration of this play, whose political efficiency is sometimes questioned. However, this satirical portrayal of commercial totalitarianism should not be taken as politically restricted because Churchill’s political attack functions, not through the politics of utopia, but effective criticism which aims at the very center of the system. Through material criticism of this anti-utopian world in which neoliberal ethical laws are exposed as pitiful values worthy of hooligans, yobs, and parasites, Churchill actually breaks down the trajectory of capitalist reform and calls into question the entire system of capitalist economy.

Judicial Responses to Politically Sensitive Cases in an Authoritarian Setting: The Case of Hong Kong

Courts around the globe have increasingly handled politically sensitive issues. Judicial decisions that are unfavourable to the political elites may invite political attacks. An emerging literature has explored how courts around the world develop strategies to respond to politically thorny issues. This article contributes to this literature by studying how courts in Hong Kong develop strategies for handling politically sensitive cases. Based on in-depth analysis of 58 politically sensitive cases that were heard by courts in Hong Kong between 1999 and 2023, this article finds that Hong Kong’s courts adopt the following strategies: deference to the government, denying standing to the applicants, ruling that the applicants failed to follow the proper procedures, deciding that a dispute does not exist, delaying the political and legal effects of judgments that are unfavourable to the government, and emphasising that politics plays no role in judges’ decisions.

A “hard question”: Gender affirming care and gender distress in a social world

AbstractGender affirming care for youth is currently under political attack across the United States. Critics of affirming care often leverage a biological and fixed notion of gender as assigned at birth, which is at odds with how gender has been theorized academically for decades. Yet for some feminist clinicians, the popularized version of SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION present within rhetoric about the purpose of affirmative intervention also seems to undercut the legitimacy of care. In this article, I track how the difficult problems of the origins of gender itself, problems seemingly exposed by the invocation of the SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION of gender, are managed within the field of gender affirming care. I show how by drawing on the narrative power of very young gender expansive people, and by orienting clinical care away from identity towards DISTRESS, medical providers can align themselves both with feminist desires to change how gender ideology functions in the social world, and with the need to provide interventions that allow youth to embody the gender they desire.

Injustice, deindustrialisation and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in Scotland

ABSTRACT The transition out of coal production in Scotland was managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s, prioritising workforce voice and communal security. Under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments in the 1980s, the position changed abruptly. Colliery closures and redundancies accelerated; miners and coal communities were subject to political attack. The criminalisation and victimisation of union officials and activists during the 1984–1985 strike against pit closures was disproportionately greater in Scotland than in England and Wales. The oral history testimony of strike veterans provides a powerful narrative of historical unfairness, imposed by a hostile anti-union government, National Coal Board officials, police officers and sheriffs. Their stories of injustice on picket lines and in communities nevertheless qualify a tendency in oral histories of deindustrialisation to pessimism and loss. Strike veterans spoke positively about the strike and its political meaning. Their memories constitute a usable past, present in subsequent campaigning. The Miners’ Strike (Pardons) Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2022, was an important outcome, making provision for the collective and posthumous pardon of people with strike-related convictions from 1984–1985.

Political attacks and the undermining of the bureaucracy: The impact on civil servants' well‐being

AbstractCountries are facing the deterioration of democratic institutions under a process named democratic backsliding. In this context, political attacks on public organizations become more frequent and intense. While previous studies have examined how civil servants counteract and resist political attacks, their ultimate impact on civil servants' well‐being remains underexplored. To shed light on this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design with civil servants from Brazil. The first phase of the study is qualitative and exploratory. The second is quantitative and we tested if perceived political attacks was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, would lead to a greater incidence of physical health symptoms. Both studies provide compelling evidence of the negative impact of political attacks on civil servants' emotional and physical health, which may have significant consequences for the performance of public organizations and the effective functioning of the democracy.

복합 위기와 지속가능 민주주의

Nowadays, the world faces the ‘Polycrisis’ which may be called as the systemic risk. The climate crisis, the geo-political crisis, and the risk of the stagflation etc., which are universe not to be limited to the specific country but to impact to all the countries which exist in the global system. However, all the countries have the accumulated but not-solved problems in accordance with their social condition in them. Those can be appeared as the special crisis combined with the global polycrisis. In Korea, there are the most critical three problems. One is the inequality problem which makes the political, economical and social polarization more serious since the financial crisis in 1997. The other is the population extinction, which leads the province extinction and the hyper-aging society. Those problems combined with the global polycrisis, construct the Korean special crisis. But the populistic political trend, which is the last critical problem, makes the Korean special crisis more difficult to overcome. The populistic political trend only focuses on the political attack to the rival party for the political interest. And what is worse, they attack the rival party even with the fake news. Some of those crises result from the Neo-Liberalism paradigm. Or Neo-Liberal paradigm exacerbates some of those crises. Thus to overcome the crises, at first, we need the transition from the Neo-Liberal paradigm. And if we do not overcome through the effectiveness and the efficacy of democracy, the threat to the democracy itself like the emergence of populism will be strenthened. The direction to overcome the crises coincides with the accomplishment of SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) which was resolved at UN General Assembly in 2015. Therefore, we need the ‘Sustainable Democracy’ paradigm as the new paradigm to overcome the crises and for the sustainability of the democracy.

Examining the mental health needs of sexual and gender minority youth to articulate a multitiered system of supports for schools

AbstractSexual and gender minority youth (SGMY) experience more significant mental health concerns compared to their cisgender and heterosexual peers, especially within recent years, as a result of the relentless political attacks on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual+ (LGBTQIA+) community. Given that youth spend the majority of their time in school, it is pertinent that schools invest in prevention and intervention strategies to support LGBTQIA+ youth and address their mental health needs, including strategies to reduce the disproportionate rates of suicide among trans and nonbinary young people. Minority stress theory posits that mental health disparities between LGBTQIA+ youth and non‐LGBTQIA+ youth are a product of structural risk factors, such as discriminatory and homophobic environments, which lead to increased psychological distress among SGM youth. Therefore, in addressing the mental health needs of LGBTQIA+ youth it is imperative that a multitiered system of supports model focuses on systemic changes to enhance the overall school climate through prevention and promotion efforts (tier 1), as well as individualized, direct interventions and coordinated care for students in need of greater support (tiers 2 and 3). To this end, findings from a comprehensive literature review were used to propose a model of tiered school‐based mental health services tailored for LGBTQIA+ youth. Implications for implementation and training focused on prevention and intervention approaches to create LGBTQIA+‐affirming schools for LGBTQIA+ youth are discussed.