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Scholarship on congressional public relations has been limited and largely focused on the relationships between individual members and their constituents rather than on Congress as an institution. Unlike other organizations, the United States Congress lacks a cohesive organizational identity, with members often "running against Congress" or bifurcated into partisan camps. On June 14th, 2017, shooter James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican members of Congress, their staff, and members of their families as they practiced for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity, a rare but long-standing tradition of bipartisan camaraderie among members. In the days that followed, members in both chambers responded to the attack through statements, interviews, floor speeches, and social media posts. I analyze 106 of these messages through the lenses of organizational voice and organizational identity. I argue that by positioning the attack as an assault on Congress and on the purity of America's pastime, members rejected partisan framings of the attack while espousing a shared rejection of political violence. Most importantly, members constituted a cohesive, bipartisan identity for Congress that stood in opposition to dominant trends of affective polarization and declining social capital among members. The study illustrates the constitutive potential of restorative rhetoric following a disaster and the unique insights to be gleaned from an institutional understanding of congressional public relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a new model of political communication with the emphasis on media literacy as an important factor for political information dissemination in the society suggesting new perspectives for political public relations activities. The authors combine concepts from media literacy studies (Buckingham, 2003; Carlsson, 2019; Jones-Jang et al., 2021; Len-Ríos et al., 2016; Rasi et al., 2021), public relations research (Friedenberg, 1997; Holladay, Coombs, 2013; Moloney, 2006; Newman, 1999), and public opinion theory (Bykov, Kuzmin, 2017; Lilleker, 2014; McNair, 2007; Simons, 2019; Zaller, 1992) to derive a four-component model, conceptualizing the importance of media literacy for political communication in Russia, comprising specific factors into a four components: socio-demographic profile, media literacy, media effects, and political effects. Results show how socio-demographic profile, media literacy, media effects, and political effects vary in affecting the process of political communication in Russia. It is also demonstrated how digital literacy acts as a mediator in the political communication process. The study relies on the results of the available public opinion polls in Russia (Kazakov, 2017; LevadaCenter, 2019) and online survey (N = 632) conducted by the authors in the beginning of 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends in U.S. health have been mixed, with improvements among some groups and geographic areas alongside declines among others. Medical sociologists have contributed to the understanding of those disparate trends, although important questions remain. In this article, we review trends since the 1980s in key indicators of U.S. health and weigh evidence from the last decade on their causes. To better understand contemporary trends in health, we propose that commonly used conceptual frameworks, such as social determinants of health, should be strengthened by prominently incorporating commercial, political-economic, and legal determinants. We illustrate how these structural determinants can provide new insights into health trends, using disparate health trajectories across U.S. states as an example. We conclude with suggestions for future research: focusing on structural causes of health trends and inequalities, expanding interdisciplinary perspectives, and integrating methods better equipped to handle the complexity of causal processes driving health trends and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some issues receive more interest from the public, while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We rely on data collected from Twitter and use a combination of human coding and machine learning to analyse what facilitates interactions from the public. We find that most political actors did not try to engage with the public about EU issues, and lack of engagement results in less interactions from the general public. Our findings contribute to understanding why EU issues still play a secondary role in European politics, but at the same time highlight what low‐cost communicational tools might be useful to overcome this expansion deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approval affects congressional support for the president, with a reelection motivation the main linkage mechanism. Yet, the literature has not fully explored this linkage due to theoretical barriers and serious data limitations. Using a new theory and novel data, we argue that the impact of the reelection motivation should vary with contextual factors. This paper identifies two such factors rarely explored together: member party and chamber. We hypothesize that opposition party legislators will be more responsive to constituent approval than co-partisans, but this partisan differential will hold only for the Senate, not the House. We test our hypothesis on House and Senate data, from 2006 through 2012, using multiple regression poststratification (MRP) to measure district and state approval of the president. The analysis finds support for the chamber differences hypothesis that has implications for partisanship and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores why, at critical moments, governments may withhold vital information from the public. We explain this phenomenon by what we call idiosyncratic events, or events independent of the information receiver's state-contingent payoff functions. Idiosyncratic events often influence the receiver's belief on the sender's performance. If such events are correlated with the events determining the payoff functions, the sender may withhold information so as to improve his image. This result may be applied to the manipulation of information regarding a number of recent real-world phenomena, including the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 and the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how a unique research approach was used to evaluate how different communication channel experiences influenced floating voters during the campaign period of the 2010 British general election. Most previous research focuses on voting behaviour as a single cross-sectional phenomenon, and on self-assessments of the relative importance of marketing communications - during, or more typically after, the campaign. This study outlines the influence of different marketing communications (including word-of-mouth and PR through mediated communications) over time using a longitudinal panel of floating voters and a real-time tracking approach. Results indicate the relative importance of the debates, used in 2010 for the first time in the UK, and more surprisingly the relative importance of party election broadcasts and posters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gradual transfer of regulatory functions from national states to those of the European Union together with the establishment of the single market have all contributed to the Europeanization of the business lobby. Yet few could have envisaged the rapidity with which firms' have developed their political skills and subtlety, let alone the important role they would play in Europe. This article explores how the large firm has come to play such a prominent role in EU public policy making and compares and contrasts European development with the American experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the change in political conditions and quality of life in pre-1917 Russia and the Soviet Union. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, remarked on the absence of continuity in the transition from pre-revolutionary Russia to the Soviet Union. It is stated that the American or Western ideas played an important role in underlining the perceptions of the Soviet Union. However, the Russian language is known to be the language of the multi-national Soviet Union. It is reported that the Russian state has been the largest territorial existence since the seventeenth century. The natural environment of Russian-speaking people has uncurled the starting of the present millennium. All these factors will command the policies of the country in future.

Even though operating within a different electoral system, Great Britain is rapidly following in the footsteps of the United States in the area of political communications. Electoral communications, including advertising, have found a place in the British political process. This study seeks to find what place and is based largely on personal interviews with politicians, party officials, broadcast and print journalists, academicians and advertising agency executives. Emphasis is on the marketing and communications efforts of the Conservative Party as the leader in the trend toward American-style campaigning. However, both the Labour Party and SDP/Liberal Alliance are also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on political history of Israel in 1977. Topics discussed include adoption of Likud party to power the Israel government; economic, social, political and cultural transformation of Israeli society; and views on community development of the Israel. It also mentions Impact of political changes on the religious conditions of the society.

The U.S. Constitution's authors sought through a deliberately designed equilibrium to maintain boundaries delineating the branches and constraining the reach of America's federal government. The Framers aimed to pit opposing agendas of powerful persons and of aggregate interest groups against each other in order to mute political excesses. However, this constitutional architecture neglected the potential of intrapsychic conflict within individuals to resonate through group psychodynamic processes and thereby weaken constitutional boundaries safeguarding republican institutions. Andrew Jackson's presidency is analyzed in that context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion on textual-contextual analysis in political communication and media research. It argues that taking into consideration both text and context throughout an analysis of the process of production enables the observation of the relation between the social and the linguistic. It opens up a non-deterministic perspective for the analysis of the above relation. The article rests upon an empirical study on the production of discourses for the campaign of European Parliament elections. The use of such a multilevel approach adds important elements to the research findings, particularly in terms of showing on the one hand how power relations within ‘Europarties’ results in the construction of common European identities in different European Union (EU) states, and on the other hand how professionalization of political communication reinforces discursive dissimilarities between parties of the same ideological family in different EU states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many other areas of life, the notion of risk has recently become central to discourses related to politics. This research article shows how political and media representatives use the notion of risk in their rhetoric, making it an important part of and a powerful resource for manipulation. It is demonstrated how stances taken by speakers on different political issues reflect their social, political and moral views, showing that risk has become a common construct around which a political situation in the modern world is described, organized and practiced. In most general terms, stance is understood here as the way of expressing one’s viewpoint concerning the object of interaction, which in this study is risk. The theoretical background of the research is situated within socially constructivist approaches to discourse analysis. We argue that risk has become one of the defining social and cultural characteristics of modern society. The research focuses on the ways stances on risks are constructed at the linguistic level by means of certain structural and formal qualities, and on how these linguistic features are related to social interaction under the conditions of political, moral, economic and social crisis in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author’s views on the ways for political science scholars to interact with the public. The author offers various examples of time consuming activities such as engaging in intellectual debates on Facebook, Twitter, writing op-eds, blogging, conducting an interview, assisting community organizations, university activism. Risks involved in engaging with the public such as censorship, risk for marginalized groups, and offensive feedback from anonymous individuals are also discussed.

The parliamentary media adviser is commonly portrayed as a partisan "spin-doctor," with little distinction made between the inherent partisan nature of the role and the personal partisanship of the practitioner. Semistructured qualitative interviews with 21 journalists who became parliamentary media advisers highlight the difference between the two and offer practitioner perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of partisanship in that role. At one extreme is the "true believer"; at the other is the "legal advocate," with the "committed expert" in between. In doing so, this article challenges the simple, dominant conception of the partisan "spin-doctor.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reach of social media is prodigious. Its ubiquitous nature has reshaped the ways in which government agencies can communicate with citizens. But amidst the rush to embrace the opportunities of Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, governments have had to lay down rules to govern how and when public service departments should use social media. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the formal rules and guidelines in place across four Westminster jurisdictions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK – to identify the types of behaviours and activities that are seen as desirable when public servants are reaching out to the wider public through social media. The article argues that the horizontal communication patterns associated with social media are fundamentally at odds with the hierarchical structures of the Westminster system of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the development of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Recognition of the 18 arms control measures reached by the group since its founding in 1971; History of the emergence of the agency within the U.S. State Department; Importance of establishing the agency's relationship to the State Department and the U.S. president; Issue over the impact of the agency's name on its purpose.

ABSTRACT To fight criminal organizations effectively, governments require support from significant segments of society. Citizen support provides important leverage for executives, allowing them to continue their policies. Yet winning citizens' hearts and minds is not easy. Public security is a deeply complex issue. Responsibility is shared among different levels of government; information is highly mediated by mass media and individual acquaintances; and security has a strong effect on peoples' emotions, since it threatens to affect their most valuable assets-life and property. How do citizens translate their assessments of public security into presidential approval? To answer this question, this study develops explicit theoretical insights into the conditions under which different dimensions of public security affect presidential approval. The arguments are tested using Mexico as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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