Anger, Anxiety, and Selective Exposure to Terrorist Violence

We examine the political consequence of exposure to widely available video content of terror violence. In a two-wave survey of Americans, we assess who is exposed to, and seeks out, terror-related video content in the first wave and then observe who decides to watch raw video footage of the Boston marathon terror attack in the second. We focus centrally on anxiety and anger as differing emotional reactions to the threat of terrorism and document their influence on exposure to terror violence. Anxiety generates avoidance of violent terror content whereas anger increases its consumption. Moreover, we find that anger increases exposure to violent terror content and in addition enhances support for punitive and retaliatory anti-terrorism policy. We discuss the implications of our findings for the broader dynamics of terrorist violence and the emotional basis of selective news exposure.

Prawo siły jako polityczna konsekwencja naturalizmu — na przykładzie myśli Jeana-Jacques’a Rousseau

The law of force as a political consequence of naturalism: on the example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau rejected the Enlightenment ideas of reason, equality and progress. He experienced the charm of physical vigour and male causative power. He preached the apotheosis of primal instincts and the cult of strength. Rousseau’s historiosophy disavowed the optimistic vision of the Enlightenment and became its main competitor. The philosopher questioned the existing civilization; on its debris he wanted to restore the natural order based on biologically conditioned inequalities.

A gun gap in voter choice

Chapter 2 presents a framework to examine the vote choices of gun owners. Using data from the General Social Survey and American National Election Studies, two important empirical regularities emerge. First, compared to those who do not own a guns, people who do own guns reliably vote Republican. In addition, the divide between the vote choices of gun owners and nonowners is growing. Since 2004, the “gun gap” has nearly doubled. Second, the more guns an individual owns, the more likely he or she is to vote Republican. In this respect, purchasing a gun or guns is an act of some political consequence.

Against Bot Democracy: The Dangers of Epistemic Double-Counting

The article focuses on the question of how each of us should deliberate internally when forming judgements. That is a matter of political consequence, insofar as those judgements stand behind our votes. I argue that some violations of epistemic independence like message repetition can, if the receivers are not aware of the repetition, lead them to double-count information they have already taken into account, thus distorting their judgments. One upshot is that each of us should ignore or heavily discount certain sorts of inputs (e.g., bot messages or retweets) that are likely just to be repetition of what we have already taken into account in our internal deliberations. I propose various deliberative norms that may protect our internal deliberations from epistemic double-counting, and argue that opinion leaders have special epistemic duties of care to shield their audiences from clone claims.

The Relation between Truth and Politics, Once Again

This chapter returns to the question whether there are truths that politics ought to track. We argue, first, that while there may occasionally be reasons to practise ‘epistemic abstinence’, there are plenty of important factual matters of major political consequence that can and should be tracked. It is sometimes argued, second, that the pursuit of truth can be abused to coerce. Our proposal, however, is about enfranchising everyone for democratic truth-seeking, not enabling coercion by the few. Admittedly, third, not all matters can and should be put to a vote. Sometimes surprise is necessary, and occasionally decisions are all about values and not facts. Finally, who should decide what is true? All we claim is that competence deriving from good epistemic performance is a good-making feature of a system of government. Democratic majorities have epistemic authority on the basis of their superior truth-tracking.

Mbembe at the Lekgotla of Foucault’s Self-Styling and African Identity

Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault’s notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity—which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe’s view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essentialist and anti-essentialist views of African identity and their socio-political and material consequence. Except for Jewsiewicki (2002), none has interrogated Mbembe’s appropriation of Foucault’s notion of the practice of liberty or self-styling and its theoretical and political consequence on Mbembe’s conception of the socio-political and cultural freedom of the African subjects. It is the aim of this essay to interrogate Mbembe’s narrow appropriation of Foucault’s conception of self-styling and its consequent problematic theorisation of African identity as enacted by practices of the self. By way of introduction, I will contextualise Mbembe’s critique of African modes of imagining African identity, before I analyse his bounded appropriation of Foucault’s notion of self-styling, and conclude by exposing his consequent problematic conception of African practices of freedom.

Planning the Socialist Housing District in Bucharest and the Soviet influence, 1947–1960

This article details some of the processes through which Romanian architectural culture transformed under Soviet influence in the 1950s and through which architects came to redefine the organization of the profession, the planning of the city, and methods of design. The urban housing district (referred to as cvartal) and the rationalization of architectural design through type-solutions (tipizare or typization) were two architectural themes of particular political consequence and thus especially subjected to the pressures of Soviet precedent. The article shows, however, that the Soviet principles and policies brought to bear on the design of architectural types and the planning of the cvartal belonged in large part to a set of generic modernist principles that crossed political lines. The article aims to nuance the negative view of Sovietization as the imposition of entirely foreign concerns: archival sources, publications of the time, and architectural examples show that Soviet models reoriented but continued preexisting Romanian preoccupations with the planning of the modern city. Furthermore, Sovietization was not an isolationist phenomenon that hindered innovation: rather than standing as an obstacle to modernization, Soviet models connected Romania’s architectural culture to international postwar debates on mass housing and new urban forms.

What The Heck Are We Doing in Ottumwa, Anyway? Presidential Candidate Visits and Their Political Consequence

This article investigates the purpose and effects of presidential campaign visits. I recount common strategic rationales for rallies, town hall meetings, impromptu conversations, and the like, and then show how candidate visits are geographically assigned. I also investigate the impact of campaign visits, finding that while state-level political factors influence the location of visits, the visits themselves have little effect on local media markets. Finally, a bespoke survey is used to measure visits’ influence on visited and unvisited respondents in the closing stages of the 2012 presidential election: respondents are shown to have little knowledge about candidate visits, and the visits themselves have only a small and evanescent effect on voter intentions.