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Widespread homeownership has traditionally been considered a favourable factor for the stability of democracies in Europe and America. Analysis of variance in perceived legitimacy between Singapore and Hong Kong suggests that the stabilising effect of widespread homeownership does not only apply to democracies, but also to authoritarian regimes. This article proposes that a regime, be it democratic or not, tends to enjoy a higher level of legitimacy when homeownership is more popular, ceteris paribus. Our finding sheds light on the conventional wisdom on several scores, particularly by extending the analysis of the political impacts of homeownership to Asian countries, and reaffirming its importance in maintaining political stability.

While the importance of news media to politics is widely acknowledged, it is only relatively recently that entertainment media have received similar recognition. There is now a substantial body of research on the impact of popular culture on various aspects of the political process, from political knowledge to political engagement. This article is intended as a further contribution to this literature. It reports on a study into how young people in the UK use forms of media entertainment (television, music and video games) to reflect upon the wider world of politics and their role within it. It reveals that, while popular culture does act as a source of political knowledge and does serve to motivate feelings about the conduct of politics, it does not do so straightforwardly, but rather by way of the aesthetic and other judgements made by young people of the 'authenticity' and 'realism' of the sources of their cultural pleasure. This has policy implications for the attempt to re-engage young people in politics by means of popular culture and 'celebrity politics'. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, we argue that policy punctuations differ from each other in ways that reflect distinct types of political change. We identify three main kinds. The first are procedural changes that have unique unrelated policies within the same issue area. Within the remaining large policy changes, high‐salience punctuations are associated with increased attention in the media, whereas low‐salience punctuations do not attract such scrutiny. The analysis applies the typology to data from the UK Policy Agendas Project, identifying punctuations from the content of Acts of the UK Parliament between 1911 and 2008. Using evidence from the historical record and the data series, the analysis places each observation within the typology. We claim that the typology has a more general application and could be replicated in other jurisdictions and time periods. We conclude that attention to the historical record and qualitative studies of punctuations can complement and inform the analysis of aggregate data series.

As the US economy has struggled back to life, its woes have emerged as a unifying theme among Americans on the fringe. The right-skewing Patriot movement may not share social values with left-leaning anarchists, but both groups point to and fixate on the same economic stories: bank insolvency, currency devaluation, derivatives fraud, total-collapse scenarios, the perniciousness of the Federal Reserve, and the need to return to a gold standard. Extremists in America are reading the same economic headlines and pondering the same potential tipping points. The trend toward reality-based conspiracies extends well beyond economics, but since 2008, the financial crisis and ongoing recession have provided copious grist for the mill, reinforcing the crucial expectation shared by most domestic extremists: America's imminent downfall. American extremists of every stripe are increasingly following the same headlines and hearing the same alarm bells, most visibly in the economic realm, but also in stories of mass shootings, government surveillance, and civil liberties. Some might be tempted to take action. Adapted from the source document.