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Political Rhetoric (political + rhetoric)
Selected AbstractsFear Appeals in Political Rhetoric about Terrorism: An Analysis of Speeches by Australian Prime Minister HowardPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Krista De Castella This paper explores fear-arousing content in Australian former Prime Minister John Howard's political rhetoric about terrorism. We coded 27 speeches delivered between September 2001 and November 2007 for the presence of statements promoting fear-consistent appraisals (Smith & Lazarus, 1993). Fear-arousing content was present in 24 of these speeches, but the amount of fear-arousing content varied markedly. In particular, rhetoric that raised doubts about the capacity of Australia and its allies to cope with terrorism was most strongly present in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at times of declining support for government policies. Textual analysis of three key speeches confirmed a marked difference between Howard's speech given immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the second and third speeches presented prior to and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These findings indicate that Howard has not consistently employed fear-inducing rhetoric in his speeches about terrorism, but that particular speeches appear to take this form, raising the possibility that fear-arousing rhetoric may have been selectively deployed to support his political purposes at those times. [source] History as Political RhetoricPOLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2008Jim Tomlinson First page of article [source] FATHERS, SONS, AND THE STATE: Discipline and Punishment in a Wolof HinterlandCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2009DONNA L. PERRY ABSTRACT This essay builds on fieldwork in rural Senegal to examine three cases in which elder household heads called on gendarmes to physically discipline rebellious youths. These cases, which revolved around harsh acts of corporal punishment, invite inquiry into common assumptions about African families and states. The first assumption is the common dichotomy drawn between African youths, portrayed as modern and menacing, and African elders, portrayed as "traditional" and hence benign. The second assumption is the dichotomy drawn between the African family, conceived as solidary and nurturing, and the African state, conceived as alien and predatory. In examining these cases of discipline and punishment, this essay reveals the ever-shifting power relations that link Wolof household heads, dependent junior males, and state agents, and simultaneously introduces new questions about the morality of farmer,state relations and generational conflict. My analysis reveals the spatial geography of Senegal's youth crisis, which takes different forms in rural and urban locales. The anxiety of rural patriarchs is fed by a fear-mongering media obsessed with youthful anarchy in the cities, and a long-standing political rhetoric about the threat of rural out-migration. Elder men in the countryside, who experience diminishing household authority under neoliberalism, make proactive efforts to keep the urban youth crisis at bay. They seek to augment their domestic power by reestablishing links with a state that has long bolstered patriarchy but whose power is currently in decline. By lending patriarchs their coercive force, gendarmes attempt to accomplish through private, indirect means, what the postcolonial state is unable to do: maintain social order by reining in disruptive youths. The harsh disciplinary measures that gendarmes employ are not alien to Wolof culture, but integral to Wolof conceptions of child rearing. [source] Participation and/or/versus sustainability?ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2005Austria, Tensions between procedural, substantive goals in Two Local Agenda 21 processes in Sweden Abstract Local Agenda 21 (LA21) is committed to two types of goal: procedural goals substantiated primarily in the requirement to encourage greater participation in local decision making and substantive goals predominantly attached to the call for a sustainable development. In this article, we report on the LA21 processes of two communities, Helsingborg, Sweden, and Vienna, Austria. We analyse what kind of normative tension the two communities have experienced by concurrently striving for democracy and sustainability. We also discuss what impact the two LA21 processes have on local governance structures and what potentials for more fundamental system changes they hold. Our analysis shows that the challenge of actually reconciling possibly conflicting goals is far from easy. In Helsingborg, the apparent harmony of goals has been achieved partly by falling back on political rhetoric, partly by interpreting the two goals in a narrow way, i.e. sustainability policy has been reduced to environmental issues and citizen participation has been equated with ,paternalistic' consultation. The Viennese LA21 process has managed to implement the two goals in a more comprehensive way, but this has come at the cost of being marginalized by the central political actors. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source] Nation Building and Women: The Effect of Intervention on Women's AgencyFOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 1 2008Mary Caprioli Regardless of the primary motive, international military intervention aimed at nation building is partly intended to establish democratic societies. And scholars have demonstrated that intervention does have a positive impact on democratization. With democratization generally follows greater support for human rights. Feminist scholars, however, have questioned definitions of democracy in which at minimal, women's political rights are absent. This brings into question the impact of intervention on the status of women. Particularly in both Iraq and Afghanistan women's rights have become prominent in the post-invasion American political rhetoric. Since intervention seems to be associated with the spread of democratic principles, we seek to discover whether intervention actually moves societies toward gender equality. We examine all six cases of completed military intervention aimed at nation building in sovereign states during the post Cold War period. Three of the cases,El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia,evidence democratic change; whereas, the remaining three states,Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia,remain undemocratized. We test the extent to which intervention has or has not improved women's equality and find no dramatic effect, either positive or negative, of intervention on the status of women in any of the six states. [source] The Northern Ireland Peace Process and the War against Terrorism: Conflicting Conceptions?GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 3 2007Adrian Guelke Preserving Northern Ireland's peace process in the midst of a war against international terrorism has presented the British government with a series of dilemmas at the level of political rhetoric, policy-making and legislation. The peace process demands adherence to human rights standards to provide a foundation for the new political dispensation, while an implication of the necessity for a war against terrorism is that restrictions on liberty are justifiable in the name of security against the backdrop of the existence of an emergency. These conflicting conceptions for addressing political violence at the national and international level are addressed. [source] Ambivalence, Contradiction, and Symbiosis: Carers' and Mental Health Users' RightsLAW & POLICY, Issue 4 2007VICTORIA YEATES This article explores the emergence of separate rights for carers and psychiatric service users. Although political rhetoric and policy documents largely assume symbiosis between carer and cared-for person, increasingly the law reflects that their rights and interests may conflict and operate in opposition one to another. This article examines the social and policy factors that lie behind these developments and disentangles some of the ambivalences, contradictions, and symbioses that characterize this area of law. While service users' rights in relation to decisions about their care have emerged from the shadow of family rights, carers' rights to community support services have emerged as an adjunct to service users' rights. The article explores the development of the rights paradigm in promoting the welfare of mentally disordered people and their carer, and the current limits of separation between their respective entitlements. [source] Fear Appeals in Political Rhetoric about Terrorism: An Analysis of Speeches by Australian Prime Minister HowardPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Krista De Castella This paper explores fear-arousing content in Australian former Prime Minister John Howard's political rhetoric about terrorism. We coded 27 speeches delivered between September 2001 and November 2007 for the presence of statements promoting fear-consistent appraisals (Smith & Lazarus, 1993). Fear-arousing content was present in 24 of these speeches, but the amount of fear-arousing content varied markedly. In particular, rhetoric that raised doubts about the capacity of Australia and its allies to cope with terrorism was most strongly present in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at times of declining support for government policies. Textual analysis of three key speeches confirmed a marked difference between Howard's speech given immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the second and third speeches presented prior to and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These findings indicate that Howard has not consistently employed fear-inducing rhetoric in his speeches about terrorism, but that particular speeches appear to take this form, raising the possibility that fear-arousing rhetoric may have been selectively deployed to support his political purposes at those times. [source] Individual Differences in Public Opinion about Youth Crime and Justice in SwanseaTHE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 4 2007KEVIN HAINES Gender and age differences in estimations of youth crime were compared to official and self-reported youth offending statistics nationally and locally. Attitudes to sentencing and preventative measures were evaluated with reference to Swansea's positive, inclusionary approach to young people. Findings indicate that the Swansea public overestimates the extent of youth crime locally, yet it remains ambivalent about appropriate sentencing responses, favouring both punitive and preventative measures. This suggests that local public opinion is shaped by national media and political rhetoric, rather than the local realities of youth offending. [source] A National Call to Action: CDC's 2001 Urban and Rural Health ChartbookTHE JOURNAL OF RURAL HEALTH, Issue 3 2002Alan Morgan M.P.A. Summary It remains to be seen i f Congress will recognize the CDC report as a national call to action, or whether future CDC reports will simply record the ongoing health disparities of rural America. Regardless of the Congressional outcome in 2002, the CDC report clearly succeeds in moving the national debate on rural concerns beyond the political rhetoric and into a datadriven debate. [source] Predicting Support for Eliminating the Dividend Tax: The Role of Framing and Attributions for WealthANALYSES OF SOCIAL ISSUES & PUBLIC POLICY, Issue 1 2005Heather E. Bullock The proposed elimination of the dividend tax was among the most debated aspects of the Bush administration's economic stimulus package. Both the fairness of the initiative and who would benefit from it were questioned. Drawing on the political rhetoric of these debates, 86 respondents completed materials assessing the effects of framing and attributions for wealth on support for eliminating the dividend tax. The participants were less supportive of eliminating the dividend tax when it was framed as benefiting the wealthy than when the initiative was framed as benefiting the general public. Attributing wealth to personal initiative and "warm" feelings toward the wealthy emerged as the most powerful predictors of supporting the tax's elimination. Implications for social policy and economic justice are discussed. [source] Dealing with uncertainty: adaptive approaches to sustainable river managementAQUATIC CONSERVATION: MARINE AND FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS, Issue 4 2002M.J. CLARKArticle first published online: 5 AUG 200 Abstract 1.Sustainable river management is the proclaimed aim of many agencies and institutions, but it remains challenging to bring this worthy ideal from the level of political rhetoric to that of practical river management. 2.Amongst the many drivers that already pressure the river manager, from internal institutional goals, through political aspirations to systemic change within the biophysical process system, one common element emerges, that of prevailing uncertainty. 3.Once it has been accepted that conventional science and engineering approaches to uncertainty (risk) minimization may be sub-optimal in a truly holistic (biophysical, socio-economic, political) system, the challenge emerges of developing a more appropriate framework without destroying over-burdened managers and management systems in the process. 4.It is argued that the necessary components are often already in place or under consideration. A linked model is proposed comprising practical measures of sustainability, robust approaches to uncertainty (if necessary, involving attitude change), responsive (adaptive) management frameworks, and an important underpinning of fuzzy decision support. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Public health metaphors in Australian policy on asylum seekersAUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, Issue 1 2009Glenda Koutroulis Abstract Objective: To analyse the way in which a public health metaphor has been incorporated into Australian political practice to justify the exclusion or mistreatment of unwelcome non-citizens, giving particular attention to recent asylum seekers. Approach: Starting with a personal experience of working in an immigration detention centre and then drawing on media reports and published scholarship, I critique political rhetoric and policy on asylum seekers, arguing that the significance of a public health metaphor lies in its effectiveness in persuading the public that refugees and asylum seekers are a moral contaminant that threatens the nation and has to be contained. Conclusion: Acceptance of the metaphor sanctions humanly degrading inferences, policies and actions. Public health professionals therefore have a responsibility to challenge the political use of public health and associated metaphors. Implications: Substituting the existing metaphor for one that is more morally acceptable could help to redefine refugees and asylum seekers more positively and promote compassion in political leaders and the community. [source] | ||||||||||||||||