Developments in American politics 9

This textbook provides students of US Politics with an informed scholarly analysis of recent developments in the American political environment, using historical background to contextualize contemporary issues. As the ninth edition, this book reviews a time of political controversy in the United States, touching on topics such as gender, economic policy, gun control, immigration, the media, healthcare, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the widespread social protests against police brutality. The book looks both backwards to Trump's presidency and forward to Biden's. Ultimately, the editors and contributors evaluate the significance of these events on the future of American politics, providing a perspective that is at once broad and meticulous. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

Classifying Chest X-Ray Images using Residual Neural Network

This unprecedented time of the COVID-19 outbreak challenged the status-quo whether it is on business operation, political leadership, scientific capability, engineering implementation, data analysis, and strategic thinking, in terms of resiliency, agility, and innovativeness. Due to some identified constraints, while addressing the issue of global health, human ingenuity has proven again that in times of crisis, it is our best asset. Constraints like limited testing capacity and lack of real-time information regarding the spread of the virus, are the highest priority in the mitigation process, aside from the development of vaccines and the pushing through of vaccination programs. Using the available Chest X-Ray Images dataset and an AI-Computer Vision Technique called Convolutional Neural Network, features of the images were extracted and classified as COVID-19 positive or not. This paper proposes the usage of the 18-layer Residual Neural Network (ResNet-18) as an architecture instead of other ResNet with a higher number of layers. The researcher achieves the highest validation accuracy of 99.26%. Moving forward, using this lower number of layers in training a model classifier, resolves the issue of device constraints such as storage capacity and computing resources while still assuring highly accurate outputs. © 2022 IEEE.

Decoding Rahul Gandhi's public deliberation with experts

This is summary of comments on Rahul Gandhi's much publicised discussions with experts on prescriptions to deal with COVID-19 pandemic and its impact. The article questions the purpose of theses deliberations and comments on the political impact of this public spectacle on brand Rahul Gandhi. There is no doubt that perception and symbolism sometimes matter more than reality in politics but then it should be consciously cultivated to portray the right image. The political space is dominated by super human leaders like Prime Minister Modi who claim mastery on everything. Rahul Gandhi needs to understand his key capabilities ensure that the right message effectively reaches his target audience through the offline and online media.

THREATS TO DEMOCRACY: CAN IT BE SUSTAINED, AND WHAT MIGHT REPLACE IT?

Democracy has increasingly come under pressure as democratic norms are being eroded. This article explores why democratic processes are at risk in Europe and the United States and what might replace them. It reflects the thinking of the Study Group on Democracy convened under the auspices of the International Association for Intelligence Education in 2022. Its deliberations identified a set of underlying key drivers, documented how they manifested, and speculated on what new forms of governance might replace democratic rule. Recent trends cited include the corruption of norms, the disruptive influence of social media, the growing diversity of society, the shift from community-based problem-solving to reliance on identity politics, the emergence of existential threats, and the need for strong leadership. The group concludes that prospects for sustaining democratic institutions can best be understood by viewing future trends along two perspectives: the complexity of society and modes of decision-making.

Introduction to the special issue

According to the World Health Organization, a pandemic occurs when a newly discovered disease spreads rapidly across the globe. The capacity of states to respond to pandemics is determined by various factors, including the availability of resources, the level of development, scientific and technological advancements, and the quality of governance that allows for the effective implementation of policies with equitable outcomes. Along with lessons to be learned from the experience of New Zealand as one of the most competent managers of COVID-19, other studies have focused on predictors for receiving vaccines, government intervention strategies for preventing and controlling the virus through systems thinking, resilient leadership and life skills, support to women entrepreneurs, the role of policy actors in implementing social distancing, and co-creation of COVID-19 responses. Gauld noted the strain on the health system and advocated for financial help to ensure compliance with COVID-19 criteria to decrease negative repercussions on the public and business.

Political leadership in times of pandemic in the Spanish State and Euskadi

This article analyzes the political leadership of the President of the Spanish State Pedro Sánchez in the management of COVID-19 during the fifteen months following the first declaration of the state of alarm and the counterweight exercised by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) to incorporate the Autonomous Communities in such management. The systematization and analysis of the information obtained from different documentary sources, as well as the legal techniques used by the central government, allows us to identify four leadership patterns that correspond to their respective pandemic management models, shaped, in part, by the action of the PNV. The identified leadership patterns show that, although the pandemic made it possible for Sánchez to demonstrate his leadership capacity, the latter is diluted when he decides in the fourth phase to judicialize political decisions on the pandemic, which means questioning the role of leadership politicians to deal with crises. © 2023, Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. All rights reserved.

Multilevel governance and political leadership: crisis communication in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic

Consistency in crisis communication is a key aspect of effective political leadership during crises, but can be difficult in multilevel systems due to the number of leaders and fragmentation of policymaking powers. The literature on multilevel governance suggests that centralisation enhances consistency in crisis communication while decentralisation leads to inconsistency. Consistency in crisis communication is also expected to depend on whether leaders coordinate crisis management. Comparing crisis communication in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper shows that centralisation does not automatically lead to consistent crisis communication. At the same time, decentralised decision making does not necessarily undermine consistency. Overall, crisis communication tends to be more consistent when leaders coordinate crisis management. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of European Public Policy is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Understanding Responses to Worship Regulations in the Pandemic Era: Text Data Mining Analysis in the Indonesian Context

This paper aims to examine the critical discourse on responses to worship regulations during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Diverse responses emanated from the media, religious leaders, and civil society organizations in the Indonesian context. The wide range of responses to worship regulations is reflected in continuous debate, demonstrating two primary groups, one in support of the government regulations and the other opposed to limitations on congregational worship activities. This shows the need for the proper messaging of content and dissemination to promote behavioral changes relative to relevant health issues. In order to achieve the main objective, we employed a qualitative method involving a discourse analysis of several leading online news sources' viewpoints, religious leaders' viewpoints, and religious organizations' public statements. This study found two main factors associated with the response to worship regulations in the pandemic era. The main finding involved supportive and contradictive orientations. The supportive path indicated a supportive response, referring to the enhancement of the proper analysis of public worship regulations, while the contradictive one referred to the continuation of life as normal, free of restrictions and regulations. This study suggests that clear details on the reasons for restrictions and regulations are required on all forms of social media in order to provide all parties with a better understanding of the need for these measures.

A Bleak Future Awaits Nurses in Traditional Employment Worldwide: Insights on Practice and Career Alternatives

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested world leaders' capacity to manage, and they have been found wanting. Traditional, institutionalised health services will shortly be unsustainable due to unconvincing leadership and inept managerial capacity to identify and alleviate risks to nurses and other workers on the pandemic front line. The aim of this paper is to share insights on nursing career and practice options to provide nursing services to our communities;and canvass anticipated resistance to nurses choosing autonomous practice models in independent business approaches to health care provision. From analysis of the evidence and literature, it was found that the systematic ill treatment and mismanagement of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic is appalling. Nurses are exiting hospitals and health systems across the globe. Some are leaving nursing itself. On any measure, the situation is a wholesale disaster and a wanton waste of skilled and dedicated people. When hospital and health systems become too toxic for nurses and nursing services to function fully and thrive, and when government officials and politicians trivialise and disrespect the work and value of nursing, it is time for nurses to consider other employment and practice model options. In conclusion, A groundswell of support is needed for nurses to remove normalised policies that bind them to medical control, and to break medical monopoly on universal health insurance funding to permit access by nurses to sufficient specified items to earn a wage as independent practitioners. The implications for nursing and health policy makers are: nurse safety and practice integrity need to be central to policy deliberations that affect spending on risk management and reduction. Policies that put nurses and patients at increased risk encourage those with a choice, to abandon unsafe health system employment. Administrative accountability for staff and patient safety affected by their decisions has long been neglected in health systems around the world. It is time for a reckoning. © 2023, Thailand Nursing and Midwifery Council. All rights reserved.

"Well, did you enjoy molesting your home town?”: a quantitative analysis of the relational awareness in mayors' public responses to the COVID-19 anti-curfew riots in the Netherlands

When several local mayors fiercely denunciated the violent riots that erupted after a curfew was imposed as a COVID-19 mitigant in the Netherlands, journalistic and academics critics soon warned that such responses often unjustly and counter-effectively depoliticize and delegitimize public protest. The commentators joined a choir of scholars who postulate that public authorities readily distance themselves from troublemakers, let alone acknowledge their grievances. However, our content analysis of mayors' public responses to the Dutch 2021 anti-curfew riots in 719 newspaper articles finds that office holders portray considerable relational awareness. We find that mayors communicate a complex leadership style that crucially combines strict law enforcement with interpersonal empathy. © Niels Karsten, Sara Stronks & Simone van de Wetering.

When the Going Gets Tough, Leaders Use Metaphors and Storytelling: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study on Communication in the Context of COVID-19 and Ukraine Crises

Metaphors and storytelling are important communication tools that play a significant role in leadership and organizational life. Leaders have used metaphors and storytelling to enhance their written and verbal communication from ancient times, since Aristotle, to the modern age. In the present research, we focus on the use of storytelling and metaphors by leaders in times of crisis. We perform a qualitative analysis of the public statements and addresses of the leaders of two different countries in the context of recent worldwide crises: The prime minister of Greece during the COVID-19 health crisis and the president of Ukraine during the outbreak of the conflict with Russia in 2022. Based on existing evidence, their effectiveness in convincing their subordinates and conveying their intended meaning either nationally or internationally during the aforementioned crises has been widely recognized. Our analysis reveals that both leaders have consistently utilized metaphors and storytelling in their efforts to be more convincing and empowering. We also find that the higher the intensity of the crisis, the more pronounced the use of metaphors and stories. We accordingly provide an analysis of the types and frequency of use of the aforementioned communication tools. Reflecting on our findings, we provide specific insight for practice by leaders, discuss theoretical implications, and suggest directions for future research.

Official Information on Twitter during the Pandemic in Spain

This article shows the use of Twitter that the main official spokespersons of the Spanish government made during the first weeks of the pandemic, with the aim of analyzing how government health campaigns were managed during the exceptional period of the state of alarm to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and whether the instructions in terms of institutional management of communication to combat the infodemic set by the World Health Organization (WHO) were followed. This research considers the diffusion of official information in different phases of the first three months of the government's action (102 days) from the outbreak of COVID-19 in Spain (March 2020) and how it developed its approach to crisis communication using the Twitter accounts of the President of the Spanish government (@sanchezcastejon), front-line leaders and the Ministry of Health (@sanidadgob), the main public institution responsible for health crisis management with the hashtags #EsteVirusLoParamosUnidos and #COVID-19. The results of a sample of 750 tweets reveal how the official sources used a model of online communication with a particular emphasis on informative and motivational tweets from leaders aimed at audiences (media and the general public). At the same time, there is also an instructive function about the pandemic towards audiences (general public and companies), with the Ministry and health authorities playing a key, proactive role in an attempt to achieve informative transparency to mitigate the pandemic and infodemic.

U.S. SINGAPORE RELATIONS *

Though geographically only about three times the size of Washington, DC, and with a population of about 5.9 million, the city-state of Singapore exerts economic and diplomatic influence on par with much larger countries. Its stable government, strong economic performance, educated citizenry, and strategic position along key shipping lanes afford it a large role in regional and global affairs. For the United States, Singapore has been a partner in both trade and security initiatives and an advocate of a strong U.S. role in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, Singapore's leaders have aimed to maintain close relations with China, and to maintain positive ties with all regional powers.

"Do as I say but not as I do": Influence of political leaders' populist communication styles on public adherence in a crisis using the global case of COVID-19 movement restrictions.

This paper explores the influence of political leaders' populist communication styles on public adherence to government policies regarding COVID-19 containment. We adopt a mixed-methods approach that combines: theory building with a nested multicase study design for Study 1 and an empirical study in a natural setting for Study 2. Based on the results from Studies 1 and 2, we develop two propositions that we further explain theoretically: (P1) countries with political leaders associated with engaging or intimate populist communication styles (i.e., the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Ireland) exhibit better public adherence to their governments' COVID-19 movement restrictions than do countries with political leaders associated with communication styles that combine the champion of the people and engaging styles (i.e., the US); (P2) the country whose political leader is associated with a combination of engaging and intimate populist communication styles (i.e., Singapore) exhibits better public adherence to the government's COVID-19 movement restrictions than do countries whose political leaders adopted solely engaging or solely intimate styles, namely, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. This paper contributes to the research on political leadership in crises and populist political communication.

Trust in Political Leadership During COVID-19 Pandemic: A Positive Trend Between Trust in Government Decisions and COVID-19-Related Worries

A possible explanation for the positive association may be related to the fact that during the period of the study (i.e., upon the announcement of the second lockdown), the leaders in Israel conveyed the message that the virus was very dangerous. [...]those who had trust in the leaders were more afraid of the virus than those who did not have trust (something along the lines of, "Wow, if they - the people I trust - are afraid, then there must really be reason to be afraid"). According to attachment style studies, leaders' or caregivers' own avoidance and anxiety, which might be related to a failure to defend and take care of "their people," can lead to negative implications for "their people's" mental health (7). Coping with COVID-19: Exposure to COVID-19 and negative impact on livelihood predict elevated mental health problems in Chinese adults.

I politici e l'immigrazione su Facebook: come si (de)legittima il discorso migratorio durante l'emergenza sanitaria

In this article we analyse how the immigration issue is narrated during the Covid-19 outbreak by several Italian political actors. We select Facebook as the main digital arena of political communication in the Italian public sphere. Quantitative analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis have been applied to politicians' posts aiming at identifying the linguistic strategies that contribute to instrumentalizing the emergency and aim to reinforce the politicization of the issue. Findings suggest that the main discursive strategies used by politicians do not only include migrants as a danger for the spread of the virus, but the migratory narration is systematically organized on negative campaigning blaming political opponents. The contribution helps to reveal how the anti-migration discourse is reproduced during the Covid-19 outbreak and how the politicization of the migration serves as a context for the normalization of migrant's exclusion.

"En, goed gevoel dat je je stad naar de vernieling hebt geholpen?” Een kwantitatieve analyse van het relationeel besef van burgemeesters in hun publieke reacties op de avondklokrellen

"Well, did you enjoy molesting your home town?”: a quantitative analysis of the relational awareness in mayors' public responses to the COVID-19 anti-curfew riots in the NetherlandsWhen several local mayors fiercely denunciated the violent riots that erupted after a curfew was imposed as a COVID-19 mitigant in the Netherlands, journalistic and academics critics soon warned that such responses often unjustly and counter-effectively depoliticize and delegitimize public protest. The commentators joined a choir of scholars who postulate that public authorities readily distance themselves from troublemakers, let alone acknowledge their grievances. However, our content analysis of mayors' public responses to the Dutch 2021 anti-curfew riots in 719 newspaper articles finds that office holders portray considerable relational awareness. We find that mayors communicate a complex leadership style that crucially combines strict law enforcement with interpersonal empathy.

The Chinese Communist Party and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Face Loss, Status Anxiety, Resentment

The COVID-19 pandemic gave new impetus to the influence of face and status on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the political leadership of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Occurring when relations between the PRC and the liberal-democratic world were already tense, the pandemic introduced a new vector into a highly politicised context involving domestic and global audiences. It caused the CCP acute embarrassment, undermined its status ambition, and intensified an extant resentment towards perceived competitors and critical voices. Anxieties about loss of face and status manifested in the histrionics and policies of CCP/PRC officials and state media towards the United States and Australia.

New institutional leadership goes viral EU crisis reforms and the coming about of the covid recovery fund

This article reconstructs the coming about of the 750 billion EU Covid Recovery Fund. We provide an embedded process‐tracing analysis of the dynamics from mid‐March 2020, when the idea of ‘Corona‐bonds' was parachuted onto the Heads' Agenda, up until the ‘historic' deal on the Multiannual Financial Framework and Recovery Fund of 21 July. Where most media accounts and scholarly assessments focus on the high‐level deal making between political leaders, we trace the proceedings inside the EU's institutional machinery, which produced the solutions and laid out the groundwork for a deal. The reconstruction assesses the role and influence of the EU institutions – the European Commission in particular – in producing this major step. We show that the process was characterized by a handicapped European Council, which hampered the ability of member states to oversee and control developments. The conclusions discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of (institutional) leadership and policy making during crisis.

A Welcome, A Warning, and A Wish: On Entering a Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership for Social Justice in the Year 2020

After the cancelation of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2020) due to the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), the substantive content of my presentation for the plenary, "Higher Education in the Time of Trump: Resistance and Critique” came into confluence with my invitation to deliver the 2020 Keynote to the 17th Incoming Cohort of the doctorate program in Educational Leadership for Social Justice, School of Education, Loyola Marymount University. This presentation delivered via ZOOM on June 18, 2020, calls forth a broader confluence of our current political climate under the "leadership” of Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and national social justice activism linked with the Black Lives Matter Movement. Truly we are living protest and recovery in repressive times with a connectivity between the three. This message is both particular and plural to the audience that it was originally presented, and now to a diverse readership in these repressive times.