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Public Rhetoric (public + rhetoric)
Selected AbstractsDrug education: myth and realityDRUG AND ALCOHOL REVIEW, Issue 1 2001GRAEME HAWTHORNE Abstract Recently there has been an increase in Australian public funds for drug education. The accompanying rhetoric asserts that it is to enable abstinence among young people. This contradicts some State Government education guidelines endorsing harm minimization. A literature search of the key electronic databases, drug agency libraries, the Internet and reference lists identified evaluation research in school-based drug education. There is little evidence to support the new public rhetoric. The predictors of adolescent drug use are social and personal; schools can have little effect on these. Four models of drug education are described. Schools, however, mix-and-match activities from different models, and exposure is too slight for major effects on behaviours. Although methodological difficulties affect findings, none of the drug education models show consistent behavioural effects over time. There is a mismatch between the new public rhetoric and the evaluation research literature. Reasons for this are explored, including that there are two stakeholder groups, one with exaggerated ideological anti-drug messages and the other with more realistic perspectives about what schools can reasonably achieve. The paradox is that the rhetoric is needed for continued funding, yet this same rhetoric sets up criteria which doom drug education to failure. [source] Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated timeAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2007JANE I. GUYER A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long-term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals' views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event-driven temporal frames. [source] Moralische Geste oder Angst vor Boykott?PERSPEKTIVEN DER WIRTSCHAFTSPOLITIK, Issue 1 2002Welche Großunternehmen beteiligten sich aus welchen Gründen an der Entschädigung ehemaliger NS-Zwangsarbeiter? The German compensation program for former forced labourers in WWII is jointly financed by the German federation and a voluntarily constituted industry fund. The fund requested all German firms to join, regardless of age and role in the war. We explore the motives behind whether or not firms named in the top 500 joined the fund. In contrast to the public rhetoric which placed an emphasis on moral motives, we find that the most significant cause for a firm's decision to join was its export share, and thus its vulnerability to class-action suits and boycott threats. [source] Elites and the Diffusion of Foreign Models in RussiaPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2004Sharon Werning Rivera Globalization has sparked renewed interest in the diffusion of ideas and norms across boundaries. Although much work has focused on diffusion at the macro-level and on the groups that transmit ideas, few researchers have studied the cognitive processes of political elites as they weigh the merits of various foreign-inspired models. Drawing on a series of original, in-depth interviews with Russian parliamentarians and high-ranking bureaucrats conducted in 1996, this paper makes two contributions to the study of individual-level borrowing in the Russian context. First, the openness of Russian elites to foreign borrowing is investigated; despite the public rhetoric about Russia's uniqueness, a substantial number of Russian elites are willing to borrow from foreign experience , particularly from models of European welfare capitalism. Second, three explanations of why policy-makers prefer to emulate some countries rather than others are tested , because they are similar to their own country either geographically, historically or culturally (comparability); because they have geostrategic prominence (prestige); or because they excel economically and/or politically (performance). Comparability and prestige are found to be of lesser importance than performance to Russian elites when considering the merits of various foreign models. Given that Russia closely approximates a most-likely case for validating explanations stressing comparability, this suggests that the array of foreign ideas that could become part and parcel of Russia's transition process is probably wider than is usually assumed. It also implies that, in general, the regional dimension of diffusion plays a smaller role than previously theorized. [source] George Bush and the 102d Congress: The Impact of Public and "Private" Veto Threats on Policy OutcomesPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2003Richard S. Conley Using archival data uncovered at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, this article develops a typology of veto threats and compares the effect of "private" and "public" veto threats on policy outcomes in the 102d Congress (1991-1992) by legislative significance. The results suggest that formal models of veto threats have overstated the centrality of public rhetoric for an effective strategy. Private veto threats issued outside the public eye halted a host of minor legislation to which Bush objected. Veto threats that started off behind the scenes, only to be made public later, served as early signals that frequently won the president concessions on routine bills. By contrast, public threats on highly salient legislation were most likely to yield vetoes and inter-branch confrontation. [source] What Presidents Talk about: The Nixon CasePRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2003Lawrence R. Jacobs Aside from the much-analyzed State of the Union addresses and other major speeches, existing research tells us little about which issues presidents emphasize in their public rhetoric, how they do it, why, and with what effects. This article closely analyzes the public rhetoric of Richard Nixon over his entire presidency. The first section catalogs key characteristics of Nixon's rhetoric that confirm central expectations of the modern "public presidency" including the tendency of the "rhetorical presidency" toward oral rather than written formats, the orientation of "going public" by primarily addressing the general public rather than elite audiences, and a "two-presidency" tilt toward emphasizing foreign over domestic policy. In addition, the article uses the month-to-month variations in the amount and content of presidential rhetoric to examine two hypotheses,that presidential rhetoric is a strategic tool that presidents use to affect real-world events (rhetoric-driven events) and that rhetoric is cast about by the winds of the world (event-driven rhetoric). Despite the impression in some presidential studies that presidents are primarily movers of events, our findings offer substantial support for the event-driven rhetoric hypothesis and only some evidence of the rhetoric-driven event hypothesis. [source] Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin against the Settlers: A Stakeholder AnalysisPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 2 2007Israel Drori This case study considers how a minority stakeholder group of Israeli settlers blocked Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiatives. Drawing on interviews with those who served in Rabin's administration and with the settlers' leaders, this article contends that the prime minister's use of adversarial public rhetoric against the settlers denied the legitimacy of an influential stakeholder group, triggering a backlash of intense militancy from the right-wing minority. This, coupled with Rabin's failure to deal with opposing coalitions, diminished his capacity to implement "land for peace" initiatives. The case illustrates a leader's failure to maintain adequate forms of engagement with key stakeholders. The accompanying analysis demonstrates that stakeholder theories, though incomplete in their existing forms, can still illuminate the high risk and ineffectiveness of denying the legitimacy of stakeholder groups and the strategic importance of maintaining channels of flexible negotiation and cooperation with seemingly marginal groups when high-stakes rivalries are likely to ensue. [source] | |||||||||||||