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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political corruption
Americans are not invulnerable to factual information. They do not
'backfire'; facts do not make them less accurate. Instead, they
become more accurate, even when corrections target co-partisans.
Corrections of fake news yield similar results. Among Republicans,
Trump's misstatements are less susceptible to corrections than
identical misstatements attributed to other Republicans. While we
do not observe facts affecting attitudes, multiple instances of
misinformation can increase approval of the responsible politician
- but corrections can reduce approval by similar amounts. While
corrections do not eliminate false beliefs, they reduce the share
of inaccurate beliefs among subjects in this study nearly in half.
Terrorist attacks in Norway, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France and
Turkey showed that Europe faces new security challenges. Based on
their purpose, terrorist organisations vary widely: They range from
large state-like structures to small, decentralised and
self-directed networks. How these networks develop and maintain
depends to a large degree on their financial sources and funding.
The authors look at those aspects of terrorism. They analyse
different methods of funding - how terrorist organisations,
terrorist cells and individuals raise, move and spend money to
support or carry out terrorist activities. The study also takes
international responses into account to combat the funding of
terrorism.
Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical
methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the
corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities,
hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests
that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong
impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies.
Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that
attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoing political
transition. Instead, it develops a more nuanced approach that
appreciates the complexity of corruption economies in non-Western
societies, embraces the local meanings and functions of corruption,
and recognizes the stability of new post-transitional regimes in
Eastern Europe and beyond. This book offers a critical look at the
social costs of transparency, develops a blueprint for a 'sociology
of corruption', and offers concrete and feasible policy
recommendations. It will appeal to scholars across the social
sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social
justice activists.
Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his
successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to
maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail
examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through
violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how
the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as
apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political
subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule
and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime
and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life
experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the
internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule
of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their
routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life,
inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and
infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form
of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political
engagement, while also demanding of their action.
Labeling a person, institution or particular behavior as "corrupt"
signals both political and moral disapproval and, in a functioning
democracy, should stimulate inquiry, discussion, and, if the charge
is well-founded, reform. This book argues, in a set of closely
related chapters, that the political community and scholars alike
have underestimated the extent of corruption in the United States
and elsewhere and thus, awareness of wrong-doing is limited and
discussion of necessary reform is stunted. In fact, there is a
class of behaviors and institutions that are legal, but corrupt.
They are accepted as legitimate by statute and practice, but they
inflict very real social, economic, and political damage. This book
explains why it is important to identify legally accepted
corruption and provides a series of examples of corruption using
this perspective.
Political Corruption and Democratic Governance explores the effects
of political corruption on important aspects of democratic
governing. Jongseok Woo and Eunjung Choi use a cross-national lens
to analyze how political corruption influences different areas of
politics and economics, including electoral outcomes, citizens'
evaluations of democratic norms and values, economic development,
distributional justice, and social and political trust in both
developed and developing nations. While most works on political
corruption focus on the causes of corruption, this book delves into
various consequences of it. The discussion in each chapter engages
both theoretical and empirical components of political corruption,
introducing competing theoretical arguments on a given topic and
puts them under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Each chapter involves
large-N statistical analysis to make it truly global in scope and
to overcome the limits of single (or small-N) case studies on
political corruption. This book concludes with critical evaluations
about anti-corruption efforts by various IGOs and NGOs and specific
policy recommendations to deter corruption.
This book is a unique guide to making the world a better place.
Experts apply a critical eye to the United Nations' Sustainable
Development agenda, also known as the Global Goals, which will
affect the flow of $2.5 trillion of development aid up until 2030.
Renowned economists, led by Bjorn Lomborg, determine what pursuing
different targets will cost and achieve in social, environmental
and economic benefits. There are 169 targets, covering every area
of international development - from health to education, sanitation
to conflict. Together, these analyses make the case for
prioritizing the most effective development investments. A panel of
Nobel Laureate economists identify a set of 19 phenomenal
development targets, and argue that this would achieve as much as
quadrupling the global aid budget.
This book examines security in three cities that suffer from
chronic violence: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Medellin, Colombia; and
Kingston, Jamaica. In each, democratic states contend with
subnational armed groups that dominate territory and play important
roles in politics even as they contribute to fear and insecurity.
Through a nested three-city, six-neighborhood analysis of the role
of criminal groups in governance, this research provides a deep
understanding of the impact of crime on political experience.
Neighborhoods controlled by different types of armed actors,
operating in the same institutional context, build alliances with
state officials and participate in political life through the
structures created by these armed actors. The data demonstrates the
effects criminal dominance can have on security, civil society,
elections, and policymaking. Far from reflecting a breakdown of
order, varying types of criminal groups generate different local
lived political experiences.
Dishonesty is ubiquitous in our world. The news is frequently
filled with high-profile cases of corporate fraud, large-scale
corruption, lying politicians, and the hypocrisy of public figures.
On a smaller scale, ordinary people often cheat, lie, misreport
their taxes, and mislead others in their daily life. Despite such
prevalence of cheating, corruption, and concealment, people
typically consider themselves to be honest, and often believe
themselves to be more moral than most others. This book aims to
resolve this paradox by addressing the question of why people are
dishonest all too often. What motivates dishonesty, and how are
people able to perceive themselves as moral despite their dishonest
behaviour? What personality and interpersonal factors make
dishonesty more likely? And what can be done to recognise and
reduce dishonesty? This is a fascinating overview of
state-of-the-art research on dishonesty, with prominent scholars
offering their views to clarify the roots of dishonesty.
Canonical theories of political economy struggle to explain
patterns of distribution in authoritarian regimes. In this Element,
Albertus, Fenner, and Slater challenge existing models and
introduce an alternative, supply-side, and state-centered theory of
'coercive distribution'. Authoritarian regimes proactively deploy
distributive policies as advantageous strategies to consolidate
their monopoly on power. These policies contribute to authoritarian
durability by undercutting rival elites and enmeshing the masses in
lasting relations of coercive dependence. The authors illustrate
the patterns, timing, and breadth of coercive distribution with
global and Latin American quantitative evidence and with a series
of historical case studies from regimes in Latin America, Asia, and
the Middle East. By recognizing distribution's coercive dimensions,
they account for empirical patterns of distribution that do not fit
with quasi-democratic understandings of distribution as quid pro
quo exchange. Under authoritarian conditions, distribution is less
an alternative to coercion than one of its most effective
expressions.
Prominent media scholars have argued that the dissemination of
propaganda is an important function of the news media. Yet, despite
public controversies about 'fake news' and 'misinformation', there
has been very little discussion on techniques of propaganda.
Building on critical theory, most notably Herman and Chomsky's
Propaganda Model, Florian Zollmann's pioneering study brings
propaganda back to the forefront of the debate. On the basis of a
forensic examination of 1,911 newspaper articles, Zollmann
investigates US, UK and German media reporting of the military
operations in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Egypt. The book
demonstrates how 'humanitarian intervention' and 'R2P' are only
evoked in the news media if so called 'enemy' countries of Western
states are the perpetrators of human rights violations. Zollmann's
work evidences that the news media plays a crucial propaganda role
in facilitating a selective process of shaming during the build-up
towards military interventions. This process has led to an erosion
of internationally agreed norms of non-intervention, as enshrined
in the UN Charter.
Dialectics of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Educational Responses
examines how global financial and socio-political systems propagate
a lopsided dialectic of current events that influences teachers'
pedagogies of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The lopsided dialectic is
one that encourages patriotism and militarism, conceals
imperialism, and shuts out Muslim voices. Interviews with Muslim
American students and high school teachers plus textual analysis of
high school U.S. history textbooks demonstrate how curriculum and
educators impact marginalized students' identities and sense of
belonging. As Muslim students describe their isolation and fear,
and teachers discuss the challenges they face, readers will also
learn how "us versus them" rhetoric deflects attention from the
erosion of democratic values and the underlying socio-economic
reasons for the War on Terror. Dialectics of 9/11 and the War on
Terror: Educational Responses is easy-to-read and directed toward
teachers, scholars, and curriculum developers, and includes
actionable suggestions for teaching these topics in a balanced and
holistic way. The ultimate goal of Dialectics of 9/11 and the War
on Terror: Educational Responses is to grow critical dialectical
pedagogy (CDP), a new introduction to the field of critical
pedagogy, in order to nurture the next generation of global
citizens. Dialectics of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Educational
Responses can be used in teacher training, curriculum and
instruction, multicultural education, secondary social studies
education, research in education courses, as well as other areas of
instruction.
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