Political Communication and the Nigerian Democratic Experiment: Critical Insights from Yorùbá Philosophy

Nigeria’s political sphere is fraught with violence, electoral frauds, unfulfilled promises and negligence on the part of the ruling class, hence political communication in Nigeria have been faced with hostility from electorates spurred by public distrust of the mass media. This essay philosophically argues for a culture-bound understanding of political communication in a way that enables a strategic decolonization of communication concepts and ideologies. This cultural understanding advocates the need for the domestication of information prior to their application in a way that enable us to properly reflect on and engage with the existential complexities of Africa’s political landscapes. The central claim of the Yorùbá political communication is that local and national communicative principles in political discourses should be subsumed under epistemic, ontological, and ethical dimensions drawn from Yorùbá histories, cultures, and values. This essay therefore deploys Yorùbá philosophical insights underlying the creation, distribution, use and control of information as a political resource that could be adopted by governments, organizations, the media, and individuals in Nigeria.

Protesters at the news gates: An experimental study of journalists’ news judgment of protest events

Media attention is a key political resource for protesters. This implies that journalists are a crucial audience to which protesters seek to appeal. We study to what extent features of protest, of journalists, and of news organizations affect journalists’ news judgment. We exposed 78 Spanish journalists to vignettes of asylum seeker protests. Four features were systematically manipulated: protesters’ worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). The experiments scrutinize the extent to which journalists consider a protest newsworthy (presence) and the likelihood that a protest is featured on a newspaper’s front page (prominence). Our results show that in terms of media presence, high turnout is key. Highly unified protesters, in contrast, are considered less newsworthy. Regarding prominence, strongly committed demonstrators more easily make it to the frontpage. Individual characteristics of journalists have no direct effect on news judgment. Journalists’ editorial status and ideological (outlet) placement only moderate the effect of some of the protest features, although in terms of front-page placement a more potent adversary versus ally effect is distinguished.

Charakter (Character)

The lexeme Charakter denotes the set of innate or acquired dispositions that make an individual or a nation distinctive, determine its behaviour, and give it psychological and moral strength. Charakter plays a central role in Goethe’s moral psychology and his ethical thought in general, as well as in his thinking on culture. His psychological and ethical thought is notoriously hard to classify or to align with the main traditions of European thought. His concern with Charakter could be said to belong to the broad classical tradition of virtue ethics, in the sense that Goethe placed moral character at the heart of ethics. However, in contrast to the classical tradition of virtue ethics, which holds that both the rational and the non-rational parts of humans contribute to a virtuous character, and that virtues can be conceptualized clearly, Goethe resists the claims of reason on our moral character. His early writings on culture and the drama Egmont have a Rousseauian flavour: Charakter represents a natural force that is endangered by civilization. After the French Revolution and in opposition to the emergence of liberalism, Goethe came to see Charakter as a political resource that was superior to political rationality. In his most sustained engagements with philosophical ethics—his essays on Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1805) and Isaac Newton (1810)—Goethe argues, in deliberate opposition to Kant, that natural Charakter has at least as much ethical force as reason and that naturalistic descriptions of human behaviour are at least as valid as moral ones. Moreover, Charakter has the advantage of leading us by a more direct and reliable route to morally good outcomes. In this sense, it can be said without risk of exaggeration that Charakter displaces rationality in Goethe’s ethical thought.

Bariery nauki. Szkic o epistemologicznych granicach ludzkiego poznania

The article is devoted to the analysis of factors that prevent or limit the development of broadly understood science. The following types of limitations have been distinguished: psychosocial, biological, political, resource barriers and the final nature of science. Biological barriers lie in human sensory endowment. Psychosocial barriers are determined by the conditions of the functioning of human societies. Resource barriers are constraints on economic and energy reserves. The problem of the scope of science is understood as the finite scope of the mysteries of science itself – the fact of a limited number of possible discoveries.

Over a Barrel? Oil Busts and Petrostate Stability

Do oil busts destabilize petrostates? This article asserts that existing political resource curse theories overpredict the likelihood of instability during oil busts because they overlook petrostates’ agency. It argues that, by employing the “petrostates’ toolkit”—a collection of strategies for mitigating the negative consequences of low oil prices—most oil producers can survive even prolonged oil busts. Through within-case comparisons of thirty petrostates’ political stability before and after the 2014 oil price collapse, it finds that most petrostates were more or equally stable during the bust than before it. The article also presents a case study showing how Saudi Arabia used the petrostates’ toolkit to remain politically stable after the 2014 collapse. The article concludes that petrostates are not “over a barrel” during oil busts.

Anti-corruption protests, alliance system and political polarization

The fight against corruption has become, in recent years, one of the main international causes. Many studies have been done on the effects and consequences of corrupt and corrupting practices for the political system and for the general society. However, there are still few who are dedicated to analyzing the conditions and dynamics of the fight against corruption as a public and international cause and its consequences and impacts on national political systems. Therefore, the objective of this article is to examine the emergence and spread of anti-corruption movements and protests in Brazil, between 2013 and 2018. I aim to demonstrate that the emergence and development of anti-corruption protests and mobilizations in this period are related to the crisis and collapse of the “alliance system” between the main political leaders and organizations, becoming a political resource to recompose and change such alignments. This analysis shows the relevance of the “political dimension” to understand the process of emergence and the development of protests and mobilizations against corruption.

Does Information Break the Political Resource Curse? Experimental Evidence from Mozambique

Natural resources can have a negative impact on the economy through corruption and civil conflict. This paper tests whether information can counteract this political resource curse. We implement a large-scale field experiment following the dissemination of information about a substantial natural gas discovery in Mozambique. We measure outcomes related to the behavior of citizens and local leaders through georeferenced conflict data, behavioral activities, lab-in-the-field experiments, and surveys. We find that information targeting citizens and their involvement in public deliberations increases local mobilization and decreases violence. By contrast, when information reaches only local leaders, it increases elite capture and rent-seeking. (JEL C73, D72, D74, O13, O17, Q33, Q34)