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Political Communications.” Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting. London: Sage.
In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington's provocative and controversial thesis of a "clash of civilizations", arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995–2001 waves of the World Values Study provide survey evidence allowing us, for the first time, to sift the truth in this debate by comparing attitudes and values in 75 societies around the globe, including many Islamic and Western states.
The results confirm the first claim in Huntington's thesis: culture does matter, and indeed matters a lot, so that religious legacies leave their distinct imprint on contemporary values. But Huntington is essentially mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islamic worlds concerns democracy, as the evidence suggests striking similarities in the political values held in these societies. It remains true that Islamic nations differ from the West on issues of religious leadership, but this is not a simple dichotomous clash, as many countries around the globe display similar attitudes to Islam. Moreover the original thesis fails to identify the primary cultural fault line between the West and Islam, concerning the social issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. The values separating Islam and the West revolve far more centrally around Eros than Demos.
Kennedy School of Government Working Paper Series, Working Paper Number:RWP02-015 Submitted: 04/22/2002 The full text of this paper can be downloaded through HOLLIS if you have a valid Harvard IDWhat are the consequences of the rise of mediated or indirect channels linking parties and the electorate in modern and post–modern campaigns? Critics commonly blame the mass media (and particularly the role of television) for many of the supposed ills of representative democracy, from public disenchantment with elected leaders to increasing detachment from party loyalties, lack of awareness of public affairs, and half–empty empty ballot boxes. The argument presented in this study has three core components. Firstly, long–term evidence of trends in American elections over the last fifty years demonstrates that reports of the ill health, or even death, of traditional partisan channels of campaign communication are grossly exaggerated. Secondly evidence from the 2000 Bush–Gore US presidential elections confirms that far from ?blaming the messenger?, the role of exposure to campaign information from parties, newspapers, television news, talk radio, and the Internet has been to strengthen civic engagement in America. Lastly, expanding upon previous work, the study considers the role of popular television entertainment in this process.
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