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A Novel Approach to Politics turns conventional textbook wisdom on its head by using pop culture references to illustrate key concepts and cover recent political events. This is a textbook you will want to read. Adopters of previous editions from schools all over the country are thanking author Douglas A. Van Belle for some of their best student evaluations to date. With this Fifth Edition, Douglas A. Van Belle brings the book fully up to date with recent events such as Trump’s executive orders on immigration, the 2016 elections in the US, current policy debates including recent court decisions that may affect gerrymandering, international happenings such as Brexit, and other assorted inte...
A textbook your students will want to read. "If you would like students to understand hard political concepts, this work makes it accessible for them. By using pop culture, we can open ideological ideas and students are not bound by their own preconceived ideas." —Leah Murray, Weber State University A Novel Approach to Politics turns the conventional textbook wisdom on its head by using pop culture references to illustrate key concepts and cover recent political events. Adopters of previous editions are thanking author Douglas A. Van Belle for some of their best student evaluations to date. With this Seventh Edition, Van Belle brings the book fully up-to-date with recent events, current po...
Van Belle provides the first systematic analysis of the effects that press freedom has on the conduct of international politics. The institutionalization of press freedoms within a state and the free flow of information between the free presses of different nations creates a foreign policy decision making environment that systematically limits policy options, generates domestic political imperatives, and provides specific benefits to a leader. This shapes some aspects of foreign policy in a consistent and empirically identifiable manner, most notably by limiting international conflicts. When social-psychological propositions regarding dehumanization and the acceptance of killing in war are i...
In Between Science and Society: Charting the Space of Science Fiction, Douglas A. Van Belle uses interviews with 24 science fiction authors to analyze the conceptual space that science fiction occupies between science and society. Using these interviews, Van Belle studies the similarities and differences between the academic and professional understandings of the genre. Between Science and Society argues that, for authors, all of the aspects of the genre that are emphasized by academics, such as science communication and depictions of scientists, are secondary to the artistic effort to entertain through storytelling. Through his interviews, Van Belle explores both the genre's place in relation to science and society and key elements to surviving as a professional science fiction author. Van Belle creates a definition of science fiction based on the creative ideals expressed by these authors and compared to those that arise from the academic perspective, showing that academics are struggling to engage one of the two central ideals of the genre.
This is the first sustained comparative examination of the importance of media attention on the provision of economic assistance, suggesting that the news media is an important medium for policy makers to gauge potential domestic political pressures and thus the need to be responsive and even anticipatory in addressing problems real or perceived. Particular attention is paid to the responsiveness of bureaucracies, long held to be among the most insulated institutions of government. Cross-national in scope, this book looks at the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Japan, facilitating a nuanced understanding of the interaction of international and domestic politics as mediated by the media.
In a far distant future, humans have become the rodents of the galaxy. Infesting the walls of nearly every ship that trades across the stars, thriving at the bottom of gravity wells that are too deep for the massive predatory species that rule the sky, they occupy a precarious niche as neither predator nor prey. But the place of humans in galactic civilization is the furthest thing from Constance's mind. Driven to the point of despair by a crusty old boss who is so infuriating he might very well be the embodiment of the universe's perfect jackass, she is overwhelmed by the demands of her engineering apprenticeship. She has no reason to think that the aliens on incoming ship want anything mor...
Scholars of international relations and international communications view the extent of media freedom from country to country as a key comparative indicator either by itself or in correlation with other indices of national political and economic development. This indicator serves as a bellwether for gauging the health and spread of democracy. Historical Guide to World Media Freedom brings together comprehensive historical data on media freedom since World War II, providing consistent and comparable measures of media freedom in all independent countries for the years 1948 to the present. The work also includes country-by country summaries, analyses of historical and regional trends in media f...
Venus has become a world of Zeppelin cities where merchants fly carbon-fiber airships. Whalers harpoon tin behemoths that rise from the murky depths. And the only woman who can save it all from ruin is being hunted by a man willing to do anything to seize her father’s empire. Privilege is a double-edged sword. As a young noblewoman, Willamette Lolofi has an education and the freedom to indulge her curiosities. But the political marriage she faces won’t let her stop the looming threat she has discovered. Countless cities, towns, and estates ride the winds of The Drift, a hospitable layer in the Venusian atmosphere, but they will eventually fall to ruin. As the tin behemoths that lift prec...
What are the ideal roles the mass media should play as an institution to strengthen democratic governance and thus bolster human development? Under what conditions do media systems succeed or fail to meet these objectives? And what strategic reforms would close the gap between the democratic promise and performance of media systems? Working within the notion of the democratic public sphere, 'Public Sentinel: News Media and Governance Reform' emphasizes the institutional or collective roles of the news media as watchdogs over the powerful, as agenda setters calling attention to social needs in natural and human-caused disasters and humanitarian crises, and as gatekeepers incorporating a diver...