Top-down Pattern Research Articles

Politics without Citizens? Public Opinion, Television News, the President, and Real-World Factors in Chile, 2000-2005

This study tests the generalizability of agenda-setting theory in less developed democracies by analyzing data on public opinion, television news coverage, presidential policy, and real-world indicators from Chile between 2000 and 2005. After tracking attention to five different issues—crime, unemployment, health, poverty, and education—we estimate both average and issue-specific agenda-setting effects using time-series, cross-sectional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. The results show that there are multidirectional influences between the public, television news, and the president. Both the public and the president appeared responsive to prior news coverage, and while news coverage was not influenced by public attention, it was affected by presidential rhetoric. While these processes differed from one issue to another, overall there was a top-down pattern of agenda adoption: Policy preferences are “negotiated” between the president and the news media, with no noticeable input from the public. From a comparative perspective, the evidence shows that television news in Chile are considerably powerful and that citizens’ priorities are basically ignored by the elites, although their maneuvering is still constrained by objective conditions.

Does a Sick Cingulate Syndrome Promote Anxiety

When normal individuals adapt to emotional conflict, activation in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) dampens emotional processing in the amygdala, a top-down inhibitory pattern. To examine this aspect of emotional processing in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), investigators compared patterns of brain activation and adaptation during the experience of implicit emotional conflict in 17 patients with GAD and 24 healthy controls. Participants were asked to …

Man induced change in community control in the north-western Black Sea: The top-down bottom-up balance

The present study shows how marine commercial fish food webs dramatically changed in the north-western Black Sea on both pelagic and benthic environments. Fisheries landings, diversity and equitability strongly decreased between 1965–1970 and 2001–2005. Fishes adapted their feeding behaviour to the increasingly low species diversity of the Black Sea communities. Their food web became poor and simplified following the loss of many top predator species and their trophic links. Linkage density, connectivity and Lyapunov stability proxy strongly decreased. The north-western Black Sea system switched from a complex top-down and bottom-up functioning pattern to a dominantly bottom-up functioning pattern. This study contributes to a better understanding of these transformations within the Danube–Black Sea system in the last decades. An attempt is made to relate these changes with river inputs, fisheries and coastal pollution.

Standardization: Studies From the Germanic Languages (review)

Reviewed by: Standardization: Studies from the Germanic languages ed. by Andrew R. Linn, Nicola McLelland K. Aaron Smith Standardization: Studies from the Germanic languages. Ed. by Andrew R. Linn and Nicola McLelland. (Current issues in linguistic theory 235.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 248. ISBN 1588113663. $107 (Hb). Following the introduction by Nicola McClelland and Andrew R. Linn to Standardization: Studies from the Germanic languages, the fourteen articles are divided into three sections. In the first section, ‘Diffusing and shaping the standard’, Ana Deumert (‘Standardization and social networks: The emergence and diffusion of standard Afrikaans’) shows that the traditional focus on strong ties in social network theory is insufficient for an account of standardization of Afrikaans. Wim Vandenbussche (‘Dutch orthography in lower, middle and upper class documents in 19th-century Flanders’) concludes that standardization debates had little effect on nineteenth-century writers of Dutch for whom, instead, there was a slow process of standardization with a top-down diffusion pattern. Stefan Elspaß (‘Standard German in the 19th century? (Counter-) evidence from the private correspondence of “ordinary people” ’) discusses variation in three grammatical features reported to have been standardized by the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. Elspaß shows that this was hardly the case and argues that the variation was partly reinforced by elementary school teachers who were unsure about their own command of the standard. Nils Langer (‘On the importance of foreign language grammars for a history of standard German’) makes the case that information from foreign language grammars can provide insight in drawing up the history of languages which he exemplifies with auxiliary tun and polynegation in German. In the final paper in this section (‘Norms and standards in 16th century Swedish orthography’), Alexander Y. Zheltukhin argues that despite spelling variation in the sixteenth century in Sweden, a set of norms was firmly established in religious writings of the time. The next collection of papers comes under a section titled ‘Standard and identity’ and begins with a paper by Luc de Grauwe (‘Emerging mother-tongue awareness: The special case of Dutch and German in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period’) discussing the growing separation of identities among speakers of varieties of Germanic. The next article by Jetje de Groof (‘Two hundred years of language planning in Belgium’) presents the history of language planning activities in Belgium as a means of understanding the present-day language situation. Kendra Willson (‘Political inflections: Grammar and the Icelandic surname debate’) discusses arguments concerning the adoption of a European-like system of surnames in place of the traditional patronymic system in Iceland. In the final paper of this section (‘Standardization, language change, resistance and the question of linguistic threat: 18th-century English and present-day German’), Peter Hohenhaus shows that concerns about the linguistic threat of Anglicization in German are not founded. The final section of the book, ‘Non-standardization, de-standardization and re-standardization’, begins with an article by Gerald Newton summarizing ‘The standardization of Luxembourgish’. Arthur O. [End Page 537] Sandved (‘Language planning in Norway: A bold experiment with unexpected results’) shows that despite more than one hundred years of language planning in Norway, three standard varieties have emerged, and Anthonia Feitsma (‘ “Democratic” and “elitist” trends and a Frisian standard’) argues that because speakers have not aspired to a Dutch norm, but have instead established a unique linguistic identity, the standardization of Frisian contains a strong vernacular element. Ane Kleine (‘Yiddish: No state, no status—no standard?’) gives an account of the rather remarkable standardization of Yiddish despite the lack of a political center. Finally, Marko Modiano (‘Standardization processes and the mid-Atlantic English paradigm’) discusses the emergence of a standard second language variety of English used among Europeans, which, in contradistinction to the historical prominence of British English in Europe, incorporates forms from several other Englishes. K. Aaron Smith Illinois State University Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature, and Music

Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature, and Music. Ed. Dru Dougherty and Milton Azevedo. Berkeley: U of California at Berkeley, 1999. 258 pages. This tome suits a wide range of interests. One informative chapter introduces uses of digitized media (Faulhaber 9-25); while others are clearly linguistics chapters (Rogers 154-64, Rasico 165-74, and Sempere-Martinez 175-97). Other essays examine homoerotic poetry in two languages, a religious text, music, and various other contributions. Cortijo-Ocana (40-56) proposes an inane hypothesis suggesting that Luis de Lucena (or a member of his Salamanca literary circle) may have written the first anonymous act of the Celestina. Bower i Font's chapter (57-67) on a brief devotional text (originally published in Catalan), and all its various translations, is of interest to the non-specialist. My only editorial comment regarding these essays is the following: I question the universality of Marcos-Marin's top-down pattern (23) of regarding... a human creature, especially men viewing women (hair first, feet last, in a top-down pattern). The rest of the chapter constitutes a serious comparative study. McNerney (68 - 80) describes the lives and works of writers from various centuries and autonomies (as they are now officially called). She boldly asserts that many Galician-Potuguese troubadours who wrote in a woman's voice actually sang songs authored by women (68). Fernandez-Vega (81-92) seems to agree with McNerney's contention (74) that widowhood was often the best social and economic possibility for women, for many centuries, in Iberia. Fernandez-Vega recounts the life and work of Jeronima de Gales, twice-widowed, and famous for her high-quality printing. Bergmann's chapter (93-108) on Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atras and Roig's El temps de les cireres, combining a variety of themes, remains accessible to teh 'lay reader. I admit to postponing reading Robles-Saez's Houses in Catalan and Castilian Writers of the 1990s (109-22), mistakenly believing that the essay focused on Women in Mental Institutions. I confess to preparing myself for reading a potentially depressing article. Circumventing the title, one finds that Robles-Saes demonstrates a rare combination of humor and literary analysis. Godoy (123-53) follows the gay discourse in Spain from the Generation of '27 to the present. Expressing a preference for the homotexts of Mesquida (written in Catalan) to those of Villena (a Spanish-language writer), he contrasts the former's straightforward sexuality to the latter's idealized view. Altisent's chapter (134-53) on Mendoza's novel Una comedia ligera presents a dilemma for this reviewer. Altisent skillfully draws us into the labyrinthine world of Mendoza's novel, only to leave us questioning whether we should waste our time reading this trivial work (135). …

Attention to Issues in a System of Separated Powers: The Macrodynamics of American Policy Agendas

Theories of agenda setting ignore the macrodynamics of shifts in attention to policy issues in the American system of separated powers. Changes in attention to issues emerge from interactions between the three branches of government, as well as interactions between the government and the public. To map these complexities, we use vector autoregression methods to sort out the causal sequences and macrodynamics of issue attention over time between systemic and institutional agendas for three broad issue areas. The analyses reveal significant interactions among the institutional agendas and between the systemic and institutional agendas, but provide more support for a top-down pattern of issue attention than for the bottom-up pattern suggested by most past literature. Reductionist theories positing either a linear, unidirectional sequence of issue movement or randomness should be viewed cautiously in light of these findings, which point to the need for more holistic views of agenda setting.

Vertical stratification of feeding by Japanese beetles within linden tree canopies: selective foraging or height per se?

Adult Japanese beetles, Popillia japonica Newman (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), tend to aggregate and feed most heavily in the upper canopy of host plants, defoliating them from the top down. We examined characteristics of linden (Tilia cordata L.) foliage from different canopy zones and tested two hypotheses that might account for vertical stratification of feeding by this vagile, polyphagous folivore. In the field, P. japonica caused 4-12 times more damage to upper canopy leaves in full sunlight than to lower canopy leaves in sun or shade. However, this within-tree pattern apparently cannot be explained by differences in nutritional parameters (protein, water, and sugar content) or "defensive" properties (toughness, tannins) of leaves. Furthermore, beetles did not discriminate between foliage from different canopy zones in laboratory choice tests, nor were fecundity or longevity higher for beetles fed upper canopy, sun-exposed leaves. Clonal grape plants suspended from vertical posts in the field at 3.65, 1.83 or 0 m above ground showed a top-down defoliation pattern identical to that seen in linden trees. This suggests that the height of foliage per se strongly affects initial orientation and attack by P. japonica. Recent related studies have shown that both sexes of P. japonica are strongly attracted to host volatiles induced by feeding of conspecific beetles. We suggest that Japanese beetles begin to feed in the upper canopy for reasons unrelated to host nutritional variation (e.g., behavioral thermoregulation, visual orientation to the host silhouette), and that top-down defoliation follows as additional beetles are attracted to feeding-induced volatiles acting as aggregation kairomones.

Indonesia 1990: Democratization and Social Forces

Both foreign and local observers of Indonesia generally agree that the government is the dominant force in local politics. Political life does indeed usually seem to be governed by a small ruling ?lite. This was certainly true in the past, and politics still generally conforms to a top-down pattern whereby important political decisions are taken by the inner circle of advisers around President Soeharto. But perhaps it is time to review this accepted wisdom on Indonesian politics. During 1990 a number of developments took place which indicate that membership of this inner circle is beginning to increase. It is, of course, not possible to point to a single event as marking a turning-point in state-society relations, beyond which society has become more powerful. Taken together, however, these developments show that the arena for meaningful political activity has broadened, reaching beyond the small ruling clique of senior military officers and state officials ? and sometimes beyond the state apparatus altogether. This article provides an overview of important political, economic, and religious developments during 1990, events which suggest that the hierarchical nature of political activity in Indonesia may be changing.