Research News

With the recent rise of polarization and adversarial politics, many have blamed political parties for constraining individuals in forming a reasoned and dispassionate view of politics and issues. In a chapter for “Research Handbook for Political Partisanship” (Edward Elgar, 2020), political scientist Philip Santoso empirically measures the strength of partisan bias across 15 European countries and concludes that it’s the structure of the media environment that shapes how citizens acquire information and form political attitudes.

Stringent water pollution regulations in China not only can help improve the environment but also significantly affect the decisions polluting companies make regarding their exports, including types of products and destinations, depending on the trade mode, economist Jingbo Cui and colleagues found in a study published in China Economic Review. They discovered that tightened standards have led to some “dirty firms” switching to less-polluting products.

Today, the United States operates nearly 800 overseas military bases in more than 70 countries. But before World War II, China hosted the largest U.S. military presence on foreign soil. A new article by historian Zach Fredman published in Modern American History examines how this presence contributed to anti-imperialist resentment by looking at a deadly 1933 accident involving the USS Panay, a U.S. Navy gunboat that Japanese aircraft famously bombed and sank near Nanjing in 1937.

Hasidic master and religious thinker R. Nachman of Braslav (1772-1810) lived in a time of extraordinary change, when imperial modernization was transforming Eastern Europe. In a new book, “A Permanent Beginning,” Duke Kunshan professor Yitzhak Lewis places Nachman’s tales and teachings in the context of the social, legal and intellectual history of the time, and lays out a new paradigm for understanding a creative genius and his formative influence on Jewish literary modernity.