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This study proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how and why certain memes prevail as a form of political discourse online. Since memes are constantly changing as they spread, drawing inferences from a population of memes as concrete digital artifacts is a pressing challenge for researchers. This article argues that meme selection and mutation are driven by a cooperative combination of three types of communication logic: wasteful play online, social media political expression, and cultural evolution. To illustrate this concept, we map Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope Poster as it spreads online. Employing structural rhetorical analysis, the study categorizes Internet memes on branching diagrams as they evolve. We argue that mapping these variations is a useful tool for organizing memes as an expression of the values and preferences embedded in online communities. The study adds to the growing literature around the subversive nature of memetic diffusion in popular and political culture.

In this article, I provide a critical analysis of the politics of corporate social responsibility. I argue that corporate social responsibility is a strategy that enables multinational corporations to exercise power in the global political economy. Using the global extractive industries as a context, I focus on conflicts between communities, the state and multinational corporations that arise owing to the negative social and environmental impacts of mining and extraction. In particular, I analyse the role of political corporate social responsibility and multi-stakeholder initiatives in managing conflicts and argue that these initiatives cannot take into account the needs of vulnerable stakeholders. Power asymmetries between key actors in the political economy can diminish the welfare of communities impacted by extraction. Several governance challenges arise as a result of these power asymmetries and I develop a translocal governance framework from the perspective of vulnerable stakeholders that can enable a more progressive approach to societal governance of multinational corporations.

VIVERE EST COGITARE. SKETCH ON THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF PROFESSOR MARIA ZMIERCZAK The aim of the paper is presentation of the most significant scientific interests of a full pro­fessor and post-doctorate degree Maria Zmierczak, reputed and prominent scholar of history of political and legal doctrines, for many years head of the Chair of Political and Legal Doctrines and Philosophy on the Faculty of Law and Administration at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.The scientific interests of Professor Maria Zmierczak include the classical political doctrines of 19th and 20th century and chosen legal doctrines of 20th century. Among the first ones the most compelling is the research on history and the evolution of liberalism and the study on totalitarianism and fascism. The other issues analyzed by Professor Maria Zmierczak consist of the research on the Renaissance of the natural law after the Second World War and the study on the rule of law.

Abstract
The rise of the super-rich has attracted much political and academic attention in recent years. However, there have been few attempts to explain the cross-national along with the temporal variation in the rise of top incomes. Drawing on the World Wealth and Income Database, we study the income share of the top 1% in current postindustrial democracies from 1960 to 2012. We find that extreme income concentration at the top is a predominantly political phenomenon, not the result of increasing marginal productivity of top managers in markets of increasing size. Top income shares are largely unrelated to economic growth, increased knowledge-intensive production, export competitiveness, financialization and wealth accumulation, though they are related to stock market capitalization. Instead, they are closely associated with political and policy changes such as union density and centralization, secular-right governments, top marginal tax rates and investment in public tertiary education.

Tocqueville's discussion of American Indians inDemocracy in Americais often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville's text as suggesting merely that Indians are "doomed" to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville's text. We argue thatDemocracyreflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are often ignored or neglected in current scholarship, and can therefore help us to better appreciate both his text and his time.

Significant doubts persist over the effectiveness of government policy to increase the numbers or performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the UK economy. We analyse UK political manifestoes from 1964 to 2015 to examine the development of small and medium-sized enterprise policy in political discourse. We do this by analysing how the broadly defined category of 'small- and medium-sized enterprise' has been characterised in the manifestoes and assess these characterisations in relation to the empirical evidence base. We highlight three consistent themes in UK political manifestoes during 1964–2015 where small- and medium-sized enterprises have been characterised as having the potential for growth, struggling to access finance and being over-burdened by regulation. We argue that homogenising the broad range of businesses represented by the small- and medium-sized enterprise category and characterising them in these terms misrepresents them, undermining policies developed in relation to this mischaracterisation.

Abstract
The Catholic Church often plays a policy and mobilization role in American politics. We assess the degree to which the Catholic Church hierarchy — including national and state conferences of bishops — can provide uniform information to parishioners about political participation. Using a textual analysis of information distributed to parishioners in Florida in the 2012 election, we evaluate how much political information is conveyed to parishioners, the sources of this information, and the factors associated with higher or lower levels of information. While we find that most parishes provided information related to the election, there is wide diversity in the types and sources of information. And, while the Catholic hierarchy attempted to provide messaging about the importance of political participation, not all parishes complied with these efforts. Our findings are consistent with the ideas that the local community and hierarchical structure combine to shape the behavior of the parishes.

Studies of unilateral power typically analyze a single tool of presidential action (e.g., executive orders, memoranda, proclamations, and signing statements) in relative isolation. But scholars have long recognized that presidents boast a diverse toolkit with particular actions possessing variable suitability for a given political circumstance. We investigate one mechanism by which presidents may choose one tool over another: political cost. Specifically, we ask: does public perception of policy movement vary with the means used to alter the status quo? Leveraging a survey experiment conducted after the 2014 midterm elections, we find support for the idea that presidents have strong incentives to take action—any action—but that more salient means like executive orders have the potential to damage respondents' evaluations of policy change. We report initial evidence that the means of unilateral action are endogenous to political circumstances and that studies that analyze them in isolation may be vulnerable to bias.

Accounts of crisis in Europe have proliferated since late 2009. This article investigates the relationship between the diagnosis of crisis and the cohesion and enlargement of the 'European project' in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article adopts Michel Foucault's understanding of diagnosis as a strategic activity of language in order to re-construct the diagnostic discourse in relation to ongoing events in Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. Diagnostic practice produces accounts of crisis that are clinical, moralising, and prescriptive, affixing meanings to complex and overdetermined events in order that they can be acted upon. Diagnoses of the crises in Greece and Macedonia converge in their identification of political and cultural features of the national political economy in need of expert correction. The diagnosis of crisis emerges as an essential feature of European Union governmentality, which functions to delimit the bounds of political contestation in times of uncertainty and upheaval in favor of technocratic interventions.

Abstract
The paper explores the role of competing notions of what does it mean to have a testament of the law of the past in Christian and Rabbinic corpora of text and thought. The argument probes and renegotiates the complex relationships of the Christian suspension of Old Testament by the New Testament and the Rabbinic suspension of (any) new testament in the two Talmudim. It consequently draws implications of that analysis for understanding the relationships of the two Talmudim to the tradition of hermeneutics of texts, as influenced as the latter has been by theological and literary approaches of various Christian theologies of the two Testaments. As a part of that analysis the articles justifies the task of advancing and providing a critique of political theology and political philology as modes of thought and investigation. That provides a way to ask anew the question about relationships between theology, literary theory, and political thought.

Past research has produced convincing evidence for the association between perceived societal threat and political conservatism. Based on the view of political worldviews and threat perceptions as multifaceted constructs, the present study suggests that certain types of perceived threat are actually associated with the endorsement of more politically liberal positions. Employing a three-wave naturalistic design, we examined the unique longitudinal effects of perceived threats from real-life political events that challenge either liberal or conservative values, on conflict-related attitudes, using a nationally representative sample of Jewish-Israelis ( N = 437). Consistent with our hypotheses, perceived threat from events that challenge conservative values was associated with increased militaristic attitudes and decreased willingness to compromise for peace over time, whereas perceived threat from events that challenge liberal values was related to decreased militaristic attitudes and increased willingness to compromise for peace over time. Theoretical and practical implications of these longitudinal effects are discussed.

While the phenomenon of selfie photographs in the media has been extensively analysed by academics, Selfie Journalism was recently introduced and constitutes one of the most notable phenomena within the digital media environment, raising a number of issues relating to notions of infotainment and impartial reporting, especially in 'difficult' sectors, such as politics. This paper identifies the specific characteristics of Selfie Journalism in political reporting. Based on both quantitative and qualitative research, the study analyses these characteristics in the period of parliamentary elections of 2016 in Cyprus. The aim of the study is dual: first, to examine the extensive use of Selfie Journalism by candidates themselves in political campaigning and, secondly, to examine the impact of this phenomenon upon the media and, in turn, media engagement in such political tactics. The greater scope of this study evolves around the argument that Selfie Journalism, as a new species of participatory journalism, has penetrated the media in an effort to attract larger audiences.

This article develops the concept of cyborg activism as novel configuration of democratic subjectivity in the Information Age by exploring the online collectivity Anonymous as a prototype. By fusing elements of human/machine and organic/digital, the cyborg disrupts modern logics of binary thinking. Cyborg activism emerges as the reconfiguration of equality/hierarchy, reason/emotion and nihilism/idealism. Anonymous demonstrates how through the use of contingent and ephemeral digital personae hierarchies in cyborg activism prove more volatile than in face-to-face settings. Emotions appear as an essential part of a politics of passion, which enables pursuing laughter and joy, expressing anger and experiencing empowerment as part of a reasoned, strategic politics. Anonymous' political content reconfigures nihilist sentiments, frustration and political disenchantment, on one hand, with idealist world views, on the other. This enables the cohabitation and partial integration of a great diversity of political claims rooted in various ideologies.

Contemporary currents of the Polish nationalist thought —an attempt at division in terms of the category of "tradition"This article aims at outlining the method of dividing the Polish political thought. For this purpose the category of "tradition" is used "Tradition" is perceived by the author as a type of conscious and reflective choice of achievements of the past made in the present. Based on "tradition" the author distinguishes the following currents of the Polish nationalist thought: the current of Neo-National Democracy, the current of National Radicalism, the Catholic National current, as well as the Progressive current and the current of Slavonic Neo-Paganism. Apart from political thought the tradition of Polish nationalism also includes political movement issues, literature and art. An important role in the reception and transmission of "tradition" to contemporary times is played by its guardians, which means people who endeavor to pass it on in a form desired by them.

This article explores whether national political agendas influenced the content of domestic and foreign television news media coverage of the 2011 Israel–Hamas Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal. The deal, which released Israeli soldier Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners, is the largest prisoner exchange agreement in Israeli history for a single live soldier, but the third largest prisoner exchange agreement as a whole. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 2,162 news reports from five international and national news networks – BBC, CNN, Fox and Israel's Channels 1 and 2. The findings suggest important differences in the way foreign and national news networks cover controversial political events. Findings reveal that Israeli networks strongly aligned themselves with the government's position, while the BBC provided the most balanced coverage. Prominent differences were found between the two US channels – CNN and Fox News. This work builds on a growing body of research on media framing of political events.