To Run or Not to Run: Estimates of a Black Contender's Delegate Strength at the 1984 Democratic Convention

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (04) ◽  
pp. 673-677
Author(s):  
James I. Lengle
Keyword(s):  
Black Community ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Black Candidate ◽  
Black Vote ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Presidential Nomination ◽  
Vice Presidency ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind

The possibility of a black contender for the Democratic presidential nomination has raised many interesting questions. Has the Democratic Party and its past nominees taken the black vote for granted? Can the black community reach a consensus on a black issue agenda? Can it agree on a candidate? Could a black candidate actually hurt black interests by dividing the liberal vote and throwing the nomination to a more conservative Democratic contender? Could the strategy seriously backfire in other less obvious ways? Do the presumed benefits, both symbolic and real, outweigh the potential costs? Could the threat of a candidacy be just as beneficial to black interests as the candidacy itself? Are there other strategies during the nomination process that could enhance black political power even more?Although the debate has covered a wide range of questions, one crucial question has been ignored: how many delegates could a black presidential contender conceivably win in 1984? While few experts believe that a black contender could win a majority of delegates, many argue that, if the contest is close between two other contenders, blacks could be “kingmakers,” crowning the nominee in exchange for major policy concessions, patronage appointments, and, conceivably, the vice-presidency. If the nomination is not close, then a group of black delegates, at a minimum, would increase substantially black influence on important rules and platform decisions. Hopes based on these or any other convention scenario the mind can devise, however, depend on how well a black contender fares in the race for delegates. The larger his delegation, the more power he can potentially wield at the convention. Conversely, the smaller his delegation, the less power he will have.

The Cities on the Hill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Ogorzalek
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The New Deal

Recent electoral cycles have drawn attention to an urban–rural divide at the heart of American politics. This book traces the origins of red and blue America. The urbanicity divide began with the creation of an urban political order that united leaders from major cities and changed the Democratic Party during the New Deal era. These cities, despite being the site of serious, complex conflicts at home, are remarkably cohesive in national politics because members of city delegations represent their city as well as their district. Even though their constituents often don’t see eye-to-eye on important issues, members of these city delegations represent a united city position known as progressive liberalism. Using a wide range of congressional evidence and a unique dataset measuring the urbanicity of U.S. House districts over time, this book argues that city cohesion, an invaluable tool used by cities to address their urgent governance needs through higher levels of government, is fostered by local institutions developed to provide local political order. Crucially, these integrative institutions also helped foster the development of civil rights liberalism by linking constituencies that were not natural allies in support of group pluralism and racial equality. This in turn led to the departure from the coalition of the Southern Democrats, and to our contemporary political environment. The urban combination of diversity and liberalism—supported by institutions that make allies out of rivals—teaches us lessons for governing in a world increasingly characterized by deep social difference and political fragmentation.

Democratic Disarray: Organizational Messaging Coherence and the Local Echoing Press During the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucus

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110108
Author(s):  
Eric C. Wiemer ◽  
Joshua M. Scacco ◽  
Brenda Berkelaar
Keyword(s):  
Crisis Management ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Organizational Crisis ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Timely Manner ◽  
Presidential Nomination ◽  
Des Moines ◽  
American Elections

The Iowa caucuses are the inaugural event of the American presidential nomination process. When the state Democratic Party failed to report the 2020 caucus results in a timely manner and manage the consequences, the crisis situation threatened the legitimacy of the party and the integrity of the results. This research presents an in-depth case of the Iowa Democratic Party’s public communication response regarding an event described by the Des Moines Register as “hell” and a “results catastrophe.” Specifically, we were interested in how the Iowa Democratic Party responded to the crisis event and the extent to which the party organization was successful in disseminating favorable messaging about the caucus process to the local press. Drawing on organizational crisis management and echoing press perspectives, this analysis uses network and qualitative analytic approaches to assess message development, dissemination, and ultimately adoption. A local event with national implications presents a critical case in investigating how a political party, due to its institutional role in American elections and unique organizational structure, struggled to respond to the crisis.

scholarly journals Activity in the brain’s valuation and mentalizing networks is associated with propagation of online recommendations

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa C. Baek ◽  
Matthew Brook O’Donnell ◽  
Christin Scholz ◽  
Rui Pei ◽  
Javier O. Garcia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Opinion Change ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mentalizing System

AbstractWord of mouth recommendations influence a wide range of choices and behaviors. What takes place in the mind of recommendation receivers that determines whether they will be successfully influenced? Prior work suggests that brain systems implicated in assessing the value of stimuli (i.e., subjective valuation) and understanding others’ mental states (i.e., mentalizing) play key roles. The current study used neuroimaging and natural language classifiers to extend these findings in a naturalistic context and tested the extent to which the two systems work together or independently in responding to social influence. First, we show that in response to text-based social media recommendations, activity in both the brain’s valuation system and mentalizing system was associated with greater likelihood of opinion change. Second, participants were more likely to update their opinions in response to negative, compared to positive, recommendations, with activity in the mentalizing system scaling with the negativity of the recommendations. Third, decreased functional connectivity between valuation and mentalizing systems was associated with opinion change. Results highlight the role of brain regions involved in mentalizing and positive valuation in recommendation propagation, and further show that mentalizing may be particularly key in processing negative recommendations, whereas the valuation system is relevant in evaluating both positive and negative recommendations.

The Fragmented Mind

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief State ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.

scholarly journals The Metamorphosis of the Victim of Crime: From Crime to Culture and the Implications for Justice

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Walklate
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
As If

Beck (2015: 81) observes, metamorphosis ‘is proceeding latently, behind the mind walls of unintended side effects, which are being constructed as ‘natural’ and ‘self-evident’. Thus Beck’s concept of metamorphosis conceives of social change as unnoticed and unacknowledged. Such change is evident in the contemporary ever present invocation of the ‘victim’ in a wide range of different, crime-soaked circumstances. This paper is concerned to explore this metamorphosis of the ‘victim’ in reflecting on two narratives: the victim narrative and the trauma narrative. The contemporary conflation of these two narratives has led Agamben (1999: 13) to suggest that policy has proceeded as if ‘“testis” (the testimony of a person as a third party in a trial or a law suit) can be conflated with “superstes” (a person who has lived through something and can thereby bear witness to it)’. The paper makes the case that this conflation has consequences for understandings of justice.

scholarly journals On the formation of the phenomenon of the power of the moscow dynasty through the prism of historical anthropology (late 14th – first half of the 15th centuries)

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Maksim N. Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of the formation of the ideology of the Moscow principality. The purpose of this study is to identify the ideological origins and features of the formation of the ideology of the rule of the Moscow sovereigns at the end of the XIV the first half of the XV centuries. To achieve this goal, the historian, firstly, draws on a wide range of sources, which will demonstrate the scale of changes in the theoretical foundations and ways of representing the power of the Moscow princes; secondly, the author took the principles of studying the phenomenon of power formulated by representatives of the Russian direction of historical anthropology as the basis for the research program of this article. Using the advantages of the existing approach, the researcher determined which ideas, images, forms and mechanisms were used to consolidate in the minds of contemporaries new ideas about the constantly expanding powers of power of the Moscow princes. The article concludes that the created great-power image of the Moscow rulers laid the ideological foundation for the growth of the political power of the Moscow principality.

scholarly journals Verbal Politeness as an Important Tool of Diplomacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Venera Nagimovna Yapparova ◽  
Juliya Viktorovna Ageeva ◽  
Adamka Pavol
Keyword(s):  
Russian Federation ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Legal Force

This article examines the notion of diplomatic courtesy and analyzes the ways of its language expression in Russian diplomatic discourse on the example of the speeches delivered by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov. Diplomatic courtesy is considered by the authors as an integral part of the diplomatic language, which, being a component of the official business style, is characterized by standardization, normalization, lack of emotionality and neutrality. At the same time, the diplomatic language allows the use of language means that are not regulated by the diplomatic protocol, which act as euphemisms and allow expressing opinions on acute political problems without violating the existing rules of diplomatic communication. The success of diplomatic communication is achieved with the help of universal speech formulas that serve as a means of manifesting courtesy and correspond to the standards of diplomatic communication. Such speech formulas themselves do not have legal force, but they have great moral and political power, since they contribute to the regulation of the nature of relations between countries. The article shows that diplomatic courtesy can be both positive and negative. The degree of courtesy in a diplomat's speech may depend on a wide range of various factors conditioned by the dependence of diplomatic etiquette on the specifics of interaction between communicants. Based on the results of the conducted research, the authors came to the conclusion that during various meetings the Minister of Foreign Affairs uses the following verbal means - speech formulas of greeting, address, compliment, invitation, gratitude, condolence, farewell. The frequency of such speech formulas is explained by the need of abidance of an international protocol that prescribes to diplomatic staff a certain sequence of verbal and non-verbal actions.

Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517-1625)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

The period 1517–1625 was crucial for the development of political thought. During this time of expanding empires, religious upheaval, and social change, new ideas about the organization and purpose of human communities began to be debated. In particular, there was a concern to understand the political or civil community as bounded, limited in geographical terms and with its own particular structures, characteristics, and history. There was also a growing focus, in the wake of the Reformation, on civil or political authority as distinct from the church or religious authority. To explain these new ideas about political power, the concept of sovereignty began to be used, alongside a new language of reason of state. Yet political theories based upon religion still maintained significant traction, particularly claims for the divine right of kings. In the midst of these developments, the language of natural law became increasingly important as a means of legitimizing political power; natural law provided a rationale for earthly authority that was separate from Christianity and its use enabled new arguments for religious toleration. This book offers a new reading of early modern political thought, drawing on a wide range of sources from Europe and beyond. It makes connections between Christian Europe and the Muslim societies that lay to its south and east, showing the extent to which concerns about the legitimacy of political power were shared. It demonstrates that the history of political thought can both benefit from, and remain distinctive within, the wider field of intellectual history.

Political, Social, and Cultural Legacies

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
J.S. Grewal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Considerable Importance ◽  
Main Stream ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Legacies

A long struggle for political power that culminated in the establishment of Khalsa Raj in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was the most striking legacy of Guru Gobind Singh. Significantly, a wide range of literature was produced during this period by Sikh writers in new as well as old literary forms. The Dasam Granth emerged as a text of considerable importance. The doctrines of Guru Granth and Guru Panth crystallized, and influenced the religious, social and political life of the Khalsa. The Singhs formed the main stream of the Sikh Panth at the end of the century. Singh identity was sharpened to make the Khalsa visibly the ‘third community’ (tisar panth).

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Lea Raible
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Political Power ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Narrow View ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
International Human

The conclusion revisits the central tenets and strands of the argument: how to understand interpretation, why jurisdiction is necessary, and how to account for it in international human rights law, how to relate it to territory, and how to apply jurisdiction as political power to a wide range of cases. It futher connects the theory of extraterritoriality developed in the previous chapters to wider considerations and takes stock of which questions have been answered and which questions remain. Finally, we consider why a narrow view of human rights might be our best option if we want to advance claims of global justice.

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