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The action of the mass media can be viewed not as a mere factor in transmitting information about reality but, more importantly, as an active component that creates social, political and cultural reality, with the mass media being both part and product of those realities. In this context, media functions appear as very important in the process of constructing social reality, ie as important activities within ideological and historical matrices where images of events from (hyper) reality are created, as well as notions and ideas about a new complex political reality. Based on this, the mass media create messages in which the communication event becomes new real events, ie the mass media participate in modeling narratives in which dominant social values are identified and meaningful discourse is produced. The analysis of information operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and their impact on cognitive cognition through misinformation, lies and deception results in new hyper reality and permanently disrupted interethnic, interfaith, and interpersonal relations.

AbstractHow has public healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments for providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending for reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of healthcare equity and lower political corruption because the health sector is particularly susceptible to political spending. Our results, obtained using ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares estimations, suggest that higher spending targeted at reducing inequitable access to health has reduced COVID deaths. Consistent with the findings of others, our results indirectly suggest that health spending is necessary, but not sufficient unless accompanied by good governance and equitable access. Equitable health systems ease the effects of COVID presumably because they allow states to reach and treat people more effectively. Spending aimed at increasing health system capacity by increasing access thus seems a sound strategy for fighting the spread of disease, ultimately benefiting us all.

Russia's decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 posed challenges for the People's Republic of China and its priorities. This article assesses the Chinese party-state's response across four dimensions: informational, diplomatic, economic, and military-strategic. Beijing has been most supportive of Moscow in the informational and diplomatic arenas; its economic posture has been mostly self-interested, and military support for Russia has remained more or less constant. China's stance on the conflict in Ukraine appears to be shaped by several factors: a perceived need to counter the United States; the desire to support Russia while minimizing the costs of doing so to Chinese interests; China's desire for internal political stability and particular features of its domestic political system that affect foreign policy decision-making; and Beijing's evolving assessments of what the Ukraine conflict might foretell for Taiwan. The article summarizes China's interests at the time the conflict began, outlines the party-state's response, and assesses potential explanations for that response, with specific attention to implications for Taiwan.

Cinema as a Tool for Constructing Civilizational Identity on the Example of the Ukrainian Film Kruty 1918 (2019). The article, inspired by the "new wave" of civilizational studies, focuses on a sphere that usually remains outside the mainstream of civilizational research: cinema. The main aim of the article is to show that the analysis of film works can be a valuable source of knowledge about the civilizational identity promoted by the political and cultural elite. This complements approaches that focus on ways to use the term "civilization" in political, academic, or media discourses, or to look for data on the "civilizational identity" of specific societies through quantitative surveys. The case analyzed in the article is the historical film Kruty 1918, generously financed by the Ukrainian state, which was released in January 2019. The studies focused on how the film expresses the "European choice" of Ukraine and how it creates specific images of the Ukrainian nation and its civilizational affiliation.

We examine how popular dissent affects the likelihood that political leaders lose power, distinguishing between types of dissent in terms of nonviolent/violent primary tactics as well as the level of individual participation. We posit that protests threaten leaders both directly through the governance costs of citizen non-compliance, and indirectly through the increased risk of elite defections in the ruling coalition. In a series of propositions we detail how the type of dissent and the magnitude of participation influence the odds of leaders surviving in office. We argue that mass nonviolent challenges tend to be more threatening to a leader's rule than violent dissent, given the characteristics of movements likely to choose nonviolent tactics. Moreover, the effectiveness of the challenge increases in the scale and size of the dissident campaign, and movements that can mobilize larger numbers have a comparative advantage in nonviolent tactics. Employing data on political leaders' tenure and dissident campaign characteristics, we provide evidence consistent with our expectations.

AbstractThis article studies the formation of a local Creative Placemaking (CPM) policy network based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and social capital perspective of policy networks. This article hypothesizes that policy beliefs, policy learning, social capital, and the perceived risks induced by defections, as well as macro‐level changes in the broader political and socio‐economic system, influence partner selection in the local CPM policy networks. The study collected survey data from policy actors participating in the Franklinton CPM‐catalyzed revitalization project in Columbus, Ohio. An exponential random graph model (ERGM) was applied to test the hypotheses. The findings partially support the hypotheses: policy learning, certain secondary policy beliefs, and risk perceptions of changes in economic and political factors are correlated with tie formation. The reciprocity‐driven bonding structure underlies the Franklinton CPM policy network, suggesting that policy actors perceive the Franklinton CPM policy network as a high‐defection‐risk network. This study has implications for policy makers in designing engagement strategies to better involve stakeholders holding different beliefs and occupying different network positions.

This study investigates the relationship between inward foreign direct investment inflows and governance of the United States, China, and Singapore. The study employs governance indicators including control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, political stability and the absence of violence, rule of law, voice, and accountability to examine the relationship between inward foreign direct investment flows and governance for the period 2002–2019. The baseline regression results are based on bivariate and multivariate regressions with fixed effects. The results confirm a direct and significant relationship between governance and foreign direct investment. The results are robust while applying other regression techniques such as Prais–Winsten regression, Driscoll–Kraay regression, and a two-step system generalized method of moments' estimation. More specifically, all six governance indicators including control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, political stability and the absence of violence, rule of law, voice, and accountability exhibit the same i.e., direct and significant relationship. The paper also suggests various recommendations for investors at the individual and country levels.

AbstractFiscal capacity is regularly linked to warfare and democratization. However, the majority of income taxes – a cornerstone of government finance – were introduced by non-democratic states in peacetime. This paper is concerned with how autocratic politics shape the adoption and expansion of income taxes. Political institutions help overcome a commitment problem related to investments in taxation. To avoid being deposed by his or her elite supporters, a ruler needs to guarantee that new taxes will not be used opportunistically (e.g. expropriating the elite). If the elite supporters can effectively monitor the government, any transgressions will be detected and punishable. Institutions such as legislatures solve this commitment problem when they allow oversight and monitoring over the executive branch. The empirical implications are straightforward: in places with strong institutional oversight, which allows the elite to monitor the executive, we should observe higher fiscal capacity. I find support for this by analyzing newly available historical datasets over tax revenues, tax introduction dates, and political institutions.

This research is an in-depth study on the influence of money in local body elections in India, particularly Gram Panchayat, which is the lowest tier of local governance, and consequences thereof. The age of the voters, genders and their education plays a significant factor in stigmatising the vote-buying behaviour. Women, youths and educated have more stigma towards vote buying. Vote buying takes different forms in different places and is more intense in some places than others. The degree to which democracy is afflicted by these ills, and the particular kind of damage inflicted, thus vary. Vote-buying, should also be noted, has consequences that extend beyond the political realm. Certain kinds of vote buying affect the economy by driving up land prices and concentrating landownership which may have long-term political implications. Most of the cases of the incidence of money is found in the places where real estate business is booming with huge population. The competition is more in the Panchayats where there is more income and grants available in these bodies.

This paper aims to empirically verify the possible existence of "a Chinese effect ", that is, a substitution effect between the Chinese and the EU-15 investment in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, which has been recently involved in the Belt and Road and 17+1 Initiatives. Such an effect can result from the strengthened political orientation of several CEEauthoritarian populist and illiberal elites towards China, which can, in turn, discourage the EU-15 from investing in the CEE region. Despite intensified Sino-CEE political relations, the results of the analysis conducted on 15 CEE countries during 2010–2018 suggest that the Chinese FDI does not substitute for investment from the EU-15 market since the expectations regarding the FDI cooperation between China and the CEE region have not been met. Moreover, most of the Chinese investment has been made via mergers and acquisitions, and not via greenfield FDI, which may lead to exaggerations of the relatively weak Chinese influence in the CEE region.

Abstract
Contrary to expectations, economic interdependence has not tempered security conflict between China and the United States. In response to perceived domestic and external threats, the Chinese Communist Party's actions to ensure regime security have generated insecurity in other states, causing them to adopt measures to constrain Chinese firms. Security dilemma dynamics best explain the subsequent reactions from many advanced industrialized countries to the evolution of China's political economy into party-state capitalism. Party-state capitalism manifests in two signature ways: (1) expansion of party-state authority in firms through changes in corporate governance and state-led financial instruments; and (2) enforcement of political fealty among various economic actors. Together, these trends have blurred the distinction between state and private capital in China and resulted in backlash, including intensified investment reviews, campaigns to exclude Chinese firms from strategic sectors, and the creation of novel domestic and international institutions to address perceived threats from Chinese actors. The uniqueness of China's model has prompted significant reorganization of the rules governing capitalism, both nationally and globally.

This article presents some theoretical reflections, and one empirical case study, on the contribution of geopolitics to the study of EU foreign policy. The article asks in particular how geopolitics can contribute to causal explanation in foreign policy. First, the article identifies and discusses two problems with a crude, early version of geopolitics: arbitrariness in the measurement of dependent and independent variables, and spurious causation. Second, drawing from concepts developed by rational choice theorists, the article argues that geopolitics can prove insightful in at least two ways. The first way in which geopolitics can establish causal explanations is when it studies how geography provides opportunity to act, that is, options for a political actor. The second way in which geopolitics is useful is that it can establish causality through negation (an event was prevented, or made more difficult, by geographical features). Both ways are illustrated through the example of empires and colonialism and their influence over EU foreign policy.
EU foreign policy, Geopolitics, Methodology, Political geography, Empire

This article examines the history of information control in the first half of the twentieth century in Afghanistan. This was a period of great turmoil. The world fought two devastating wars and Afghanistan went through major political and social transformations that included several violent regime changes. Despite being a neutral state, the Afghan capital attracted European rivals who campaigned for the hearts and minds of Afghans. In addition to foreign intrigues, the Afghan rulers, too, used certain information practices as part of their surveillance regimes to suppress political dissent and public unrest. A contribution to media history in Afghanistan, this article looks into how the state tried to control the flow of information in this period through surveillance, censorship, and the spread of misinformation. This was an era when print and other media technologies gained significant popularity in Afghanistan but people continued to use mostly word-of-mouth to communicate information. Despite its best efforts, which often involved brute force, the article argues, the state was not always successful in preventing people from talking with each other.

This paper considers a host of definitions and labels attached to the concept of smart cities to identify four dimensions that ground a review of ethical concerns emerging from the current debate. These are: (1) network infrastructure, with the corresponding concerns of control, surveillance, and data privacy and ownership; (2) post-political governance, embodied in the tensions between public and private decision-making and cities as post-political entities; (3) social inclusion, expressed in the aspects of citizen participation and inclusion, and inequality and discrimination; and (4) sustainability, with a specific focus on the environment as an element to protect but also as a strategic element for the future. Given the persisting disagreements around the definition of a smart city, the article identifies in these four dimensions a more stable reference framework within which ethical concerns can be clustered and discussed. Identifying these dimensions makes possible a review of the ethical implications of smart cities that is transversal to their different types and resilient towards the unsettled debate over their definition.