Manipulation in Newspaper Articles : A Political Discourse Analysis of Lexical Choice and Manipulation in Japanese Newspaper Crisis Reporting in the case of North Korea

This paper analyzes some forms of linguistic manipulation in Japanese in newspapers when reporting on North Korea and its nuclear tests. The focus lies on lexical ambiguity in headlines and journalist’s voices in the body of the articles, that results in manipulation of the minds of the readers. The study is based on a corpus of nine articles from two of Japan’s largest newspapers Yomiuri Online and Asahi Shimbun Digital. The linguistic phenomenon that contribute to create manipulation are divided into Short Term Memory impact or Long Term Memory impact and examples will be discussed under each of the categories.The main results of the study are that headlines in Japanese newspapers do not make use of an ambiguous, double grounded structure. However, the articles are filled with explicit and implied attitudes as well as attributed material from people of a high social status, which suggests that manipulation of the long term memory is a tool used in Japanese media.

A comparative study of immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands

This study deals with immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands. Scholars have recognized low level of political participation of immigrants in Sweden compared to the Netherlands. The main goal of this study is to analyze the institutional influence, mainly from political parties over immigrants’ motivation for active electoral participation. The modified actor-context model uses here as the main theoretical framework. In addition, social capital theory employs to analyze immigrants’ voluntary organizational membership. This study confirms that, Swedish immigrants have the lower participation rate in the political sphere, at lest to a certain extent, than its counterparts the Dutch immigrants. This study also confirms the argument that contextual factors can influence actor’s motivations in integration-oriented action, and similarly it validates the necessity of enlargement of the actor-context model.

Towards Presidential Rule in Ukraine : Hybrid Regime Dynamics under Semi-Presidentialism

This article sets out to analyse recent regime developments in Ukraine in relation to semi-presidentialism. The article asks: to what extent and in what ways theoretical arguments against semi-presidentialism (premier-presidential and president-parliamentary systems) are relevant for understanding the changing directions of the Ukrainian regime since the 1990s? The article also reviews the by now overwhelming evidence suggesting that President Yanukovych is turning Ukraine into a more authoritarian hybrid regime and raises the question to what extent the president-parliamentary system might serve this end. The article argues that both kinds of semi-presidentialism have, in different ways, exacerbated rather than mitigated institutional conflict and political stalemate. The return to the president-parliamentary system in 2010 – the constitutional arrangement with the most dismal record of democratisation – was a step in the wrong direction. The premier-presidential regime was by no means ideal, but it had at least two advantages. It weakened the presidential dominance and it explicitly anchored the survival of the government in parliament. The return to the 1996 constitution ties in well with the notion that President Viktor Yanukovych has embarked on an outright authoritarian path.

The Big Crunch : A Mapping of the Swedish Party System from 1991 to 2010

Previous research claims that there has been a narrowing of distance between the Swedish political parties. Typically, such research into political distance has primarily focused on studying voters rather than the political parties themselves. In this article, the author conducts a longitudinal analysis of Comparative Manifesto Project data to determine if, and to what extent, the political parties have converged ideologically on a Left-Right continuum in the period 1991-2010. After first unraveling the concept of political distance, the author moves on to explain why the ideological dispersion of political parties is an important and consequential characteristic within party systems. Furthermore, the author argues that the Left-Right ideological scale continues to be a highly useful model with which to conceptualize and study this characteristic. The author then discusses the methodological approach and explains why quantitative manifesto data, often overlooked in favor of voter interview data, is deemed a valid and reliable material for measuring the ideological positions of political parties. The findings are that there indeed have been over all tendencies of ideological convergence between the blocs and that, in terms of how political parties are dispersed on a Left- Right ideological continuum, by 2010, the Swedish party system (the Sweden Democrats excluded) had become much less polarized than it had been in 1991.