Agenda Setting,Public Opinion,and the Issue of Immigration Reform*

Objective. Agenda‐setting theory is used to motivate hypotheses about how media coverage of immigration influences public perceptions of its importance. The authors seek to offer a more complete explanation of public opinion on immigration by exploring differences in the effects of immigration news in border and nonborder states. Method. This article employs content analyses of newspaper coverage of immigration and Gallup public opinion data over a 12‐month period (January–December 2006). Respondents' identification of immigration as a “Most Important Problem” is modeled as a conditional relationship between border state/nonborder state residence and media coverage, ethnic context, and individual‐level demographics. Results. Media attention to immigration is greater in border states than in nonborder states; as a result, residents of border states are more likely to identify immigration as a most important problem than are residents of nonborder states. Conclusions. The analyses point to the importance of geography and news coverage in explanations of public opinion on immigration.     

Stochastic Learning Dynamics and Speed of Convergence in Population Games

We study how long it takes for large populations of interacting agents to come close to Nash equilibrium when they adapt their behavior using a stochastic better reply dynamic. Prior work considers this question mainly for 2 × 2 games and potential games; here we characterize convergence times for general weakly acyclic games, including coordination games, dominance solvable games, games with strategic complementarities, potential games, and many others with applications in economics, biology, and distributed control. If players' better replies are governed by idiosyncratic shocks, the convergence time can grow exponentially in the population size; moreover, this is true even in games with very simple payoff structures. However, if their responses are sufficiently correlated due to aggregate shocks, the convergence time is greatly accelerated; in fact, it is bounded for all sufficiently large populations. We provide explicit bounds on the speed of convergence as a function of key structural parameters including the number of strategies, the length of the better reply paths, the extent to which players can influence the payoffs of others, and the desired degree of approximation to Nash equilibrium.     

DISCONTINUITY OF OUTPUT CONVERGENCE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES: WHY HAS THE COURSE CHANGED?

Has the progress of output convergence changed within the United States? This article examines the output convergence among U.S. states for the last five decades by making several improvements over the extant literature. By applying a battery of convergence tests designed to capture nonlinear transitional dynamics to real output per worker data (i.e., nominal values deflated by state‐level price), we find that output convergence has not been a feature of the continental United States since the 1970s. Instead, output convergence has proceeded among four subgroups within which constituent states have certain characteristics in common. Our regression analysis suggests that state‐level characteristics related to technology and human capital play a crucial role in accounting for the formation and composition of convergence clubs, in agreement with the recent theoretical models of growth and development (e.g., Aghion et al. 2009; Gennaioli et al. 2013b). The level of technology, proxied by patents, turns out to be a consistently significant determinant even after controlling for endogeneity, suggesting that frictions in the diffusion of technology and human capital may have led to clustering of states with different levels of productivity. Our results therefore cast doubt on the common view that diffusion of knowledge and technology across state borders is frictionless. (JEL O47, O51)     

New Ways to Promote Proenvironmental Behavior: Expanding and Evaluating Motives for Environmentally Responsible Behavior

This article contends that while striving to promote environmentallyresponsible behavior, we have focused attention too narrowly on just two classes of motives. There is a need to expand the range of motives available to practitioners and to provide a framework within which motives can be evaluated for both their immediate and long-term effectiveness. The article then examines a strategy for promoting environmentally responsible behavior that has significant potential. This strategy is based on a particular form of motivation called intrinsic satisfaction. Nine studies are reviewed that have outlined the structure of intrinsic satisfaction. A key theme discussed is the human inclination for competence. This fundamental human concern is shown to have both a general form and a resource-specific version.     

Similarities and Differences between Leadership and Management: High‐Performance Competencies in the British Royal Navy

This paper describes the research, analysis and development of a model clarifying the similarities and differences in competencies and personality factors 1 associated with effective Leadership and Management in the Royal Navy. A questionnaire study was conducted on a sample of 261 Officers and Ratings (Sailors). Their performance was rated through the organization's rigorous appraisal process, whilst competency and personality data were gathered through the Occupational Personality Questionnaire and the Leadership Dimensions Questionnaire. The results identify the common and unique relevance of specific competencies and personality factors and so provide an illuminating insight into the differences between the constructs of leadership and management. The critical factors related to effective leadership and management performance are also identified.     

Ethics and social media: Implications for sociolinguistics in the networked public1

As a popular agora for writing identity into being, the networked public of social media sites presents exciting and unprecedented possibilities for sociolinguistic research. At the same time, these sites raise a wealth of unfamiliar methodological and ethical issues, and debate concerning appropriate ethical measures for research targeting online discourse communities is emergent. One of the most pressing debates concerns the visibility of online interaction (i.e. its locus between the public and private ends of the continuum). Although they exist freely online, networked publics are not public forums. They are governed by both personal and communal norms, and they are networked. This combination of factors gives rise to unique ethical challenges, particularly in the case of Facebook, an accessible and data‐rich, yet problematic, research site. This paper reviews the ethical difficulties presented by Facebook, and presents a framework for ethnographic sociolinguistic research that uses this site as a source of data. En tant qu’espace public privilégié pour la création de l’identitéà travers l’écriture, le public ?réseauté? (interconnecté) des sites des médias sociaux présente des possibilités prometteuses et sans précédent pour la recherché en sociolinguistique. Cependant, ces sites soulèvent de nombreuses questions méthodologiques et éthiques qui sont nouvelles, d’où l’émergence de discussions portant sur les mesures éthiques appropriées pour la recherche qui vise les communautés discursives en ligne. Un des débats concerne la visibilité de l’interaction en ligne (c.‐à‐d. sa place entre les extrémités privée et publique du continuum). Bien qu’ils existent de façon libre en ligne, les réseaux publics ne sont pas des forums publics. Ils sont gouvernés à la fois par des normes personnelles et communautaires, et ils sont interconnectés. Cette combinaison de facteurs donne naissance à des défis éthiques uniques, en particulier dans le cas de Facebook, un site de recherche accessible et riche en données, mais problématique. Cet article passe en revue les difficultés éthiques que Facebook présente, et offre un cadre de travail pour la recherche sociolinguistique ethnographique utilisant ce site comme source de données. [French]     

Body Talk: Some Thoughts On Anorexia

In this paper, I will attempt to address questions about the dynamics of anorexia within family relationships, the ways in which anorexic thinking encapsulates itself in the mind, and how it can leave both the therapist and the family feeling ‘starved out’. I will also address some organisational issues, in the ways the therapeutic agency can come to mirror the anorexic dilemma. How does the metaphor of ‘growing’ and ‘growing up’ join with the anorexic crisis? I will discuss the cases of both a boy and a girl with anorexia, in order to think about the dynamic differences in the ‘becoming of a man’ and the ‘becoming of a woman’.