The first part of this essay considers Sri Aurobindo’s nationalism and contextualizes it within the colonial-national interchange and the modern understanding of the nation. It then problematizes Hindutva’s attempts to reductively appropriate Sri Aurobindo’s pluralistic and evolutionary nationalism. In the second part, a close reading is conducted of a well-known nationalist speech of Sri Aurob...

This paper offers an approach to analyzing political rhetoric in videogames intended to carry ideological bias, based on cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s notion of metaphor and frame as the principle organizers or political discourse. I then argue for three ways games function in relation to ideological frames: reinforcement, contestation, and exposition through examples of political games (T...

This paper investigates convergence in left-right ideological positions in The Netherlands using cointegration techniques. Our sample consists of 765 weekly observations on those positions as well as on the corresponding political party preference. The time series data display nonstationary patterns in the sense that their means are not constant over time. Therefore, we rely on recently develop...

We study political activism by several interest groups with private signals. When their ideological distance to the policymaker is small, a “low-trust” regime prevails: agents frequently lobby even when it is unwarranted, taking advantage of the conŽ rmation provided by others’ activism; conversely, the policymaker responds only to generalized pressure. When ideological distance is large, a “hi...

Television news has been the predominant way of understanding the world around us, but individual news broadcasters can frame or mislead audience’s understanding about political and social issues. We aim to develop a computer system that can automatically identify highly biased television news, which may prompt audience to seek news stories from contrasting viewpoints. But can computers determi...

Japan’s values diplomacy was proposed by Tarou Asou Taro Aso in 2007. And in the period of Fukuda ruling, this diplomacy contemporarily withdrew from Japanese diplomatic stage, but its democratic values concept is still displayed in diplomatic activities. After Tarou Asou Taro Aso became the prime minister, what would be the position of values diplomacy in Japanese strategy and national policy?...

This paper implements a unified model of individual abstention and vote choice to analyze policy-based alienation and indifference in Brazil’s 2002 presidential election. The results indicate that both alienation and indifference depressed turnout, with indifference contributing slightly more to voter abstention. Also, the determinants of alienation and indifference differed considerably, the f...

1.1 The question how much income inequality is acceptable All modern nations engage in active income redistribution and have a system that taxes the wealthy to a greater extent than the poor. Redistributive policies are accompanied by a continuous discussion on the question of how much income inequality is justified (e.g. Pen and Tinbergen, 1977; Sen, 1997). This discussion has an important ide...

The article discusses the central aspects of the trajectory of the National Immunization Program as regards the dynamics of sectoral policy. Heir to successful experiences of the past yet conceived at an entirely different moment, the Program followed the triumphant Campaign to Eradicate Smallpox and inaugurated a new phase in the history of public policy in the field of prevention. Under one s...

An expanding literature indicates that in multiparty systems with coalition governments, citizens consider the post-electoral bargaining process among parties when casting their vote. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the nature of voters' coalition preferences. This paper uses data from the Austrian National Election Study to examine the determinants as well as the independence of prefere...