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Recent scholarship on the political determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) point to the importance of a government's level of political capacity. Governments with high levels of capacity, it is argued, have the political power and economic resources to carry out preferred policy objectives. This line of reasoning, however, fails to provide insight into what these policy objectives are likely to include. The present study attempts to overcome this deficiency in the literature by modeling explicitly the interactive relationship between open market policy environments and relative political capacity (RPC). We argue that governments with open market policy frameworks and high levels of political capacity send clear signals of a political environment conducive to sustained profitability. Our empirical results confirm the expected interactive relationship, providing important insight into the expected effects of open market policies and political capacity. Adapted from the source document.

Objectives. Economics, partisanship, and demographics have all been identified as linked to support for environmental protection. The principal objective of this study is to extend the extant literature by using a larger data set and a variety of methods.Methods. We use variety of statistical methods to test measures of party strength, demographics, and economics against county‐level data from 29 environmental initiative elections in 13 states.Results. Democratic partisanship is the most consistent predictor of aggregate support for environmental measures. This trend holds through pooled, individual‐level, and ecological inference analysis. Median family income and income squared are consistently significant, as is education.Conclusion. Based on these data, we reach three general conclusions. First, while several variables are consistently significant, party strength is the most consistent predictor of pro‐environmental voting across states and initiatives. Second, our analyses suggest that limiting analyses to data from a single state or region may have important implications for statistical inferences. Lastly, a preliminary analysis using methods of ecological inference suggests that the aggregate results are robust to ecological problems.

This book offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Islamic State's use of propaganda. Combining a range of different theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, and using rigorous methods, the authors trace the origins of the Islamic State's message, laying bare the strategic logic guiding its evolution, examining each of its multi-media components, and showing how these elements work together to radicalize audiences' worldviews. This volume highlights the challenges that this sort of "full-spectrum propaganda" raises for counter terrorism forces. It is not only a one-stop resource for any analyst of IS and Salafi-jihadism, but also a rich contribution to the study of text and visual propaganda, radicalization and political violence, and international security.

AbstractReligious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their churches. Yet, direct observations of political topics in a wide set of religious settings are rare. We examine the nature of political speech by clergy with a novel dataset of over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of validation, we find political content in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven of 10 pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic data to link the sermons to demographic and political information around the church and to information about the church and pastor to evaluate the variation of political content in sermons. We find that most pastors—across location and denomination—engage around political topics, confirming the intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.

Violent extremist groups regularly use pictures in their propaganda. This practice, however, remains insufficiently understood. Conceptualizing visual images as amplifiers of narratives and emotions, the present article offers an original theoretical framework and measurement method for examining the synchronic and diachronic study of the manipulative use of images by violent extremist groups. We illustrate this framework and method with a systematic analysis of the 2,058 pictures contained in the Islamic State's propaganda magazines targeting Western audiences, exposing the "visual style" of the group, and highlighting the trends and shifts in the evolution of this style following developments on the ground.