Leadership succession in democratic governments and political parties is an ubiquitous but relatively understudied phenomen, where the political becomes intensely personal and vice versa. This article outlines the puzzles that leadership succession poses to political analysts, reviews the literature, and offers a conceptual framework deconstructing the process in terms of a flow from succession contexts and triggers via the role choices of key participants (incumbents and aspiring successors) through to the eventual succession outcomes. It concludes by presenting a series of testable hypotheses to describe and explain leadership successions.
The effects of exposure to Russian propaganda have long been feared; however, academic research examining responses is scarce. This study aims to investigate the responses of Russian speakers in Latvia to a narrative propagated by the Kremlin-sponsored media outlet Sputnik Latvia that narrates Latvian government policy as Russophobic. The potential to entrench existing ethnopolitical divisions has been highlighted as a possible effect of Russian speakers consuming this narration. We adopt a comprehensive, mixed-method research approach, where we first provide an analysis of the content of Sputnik Latvia's Russophobia narrative in its recent output. Then, using this analysis, we examine how Russian-speaking participants respond to this content in a preregistered survey experiment and a focus group. Theoretically, we orient around the rejection-identification model. This predicts individuals to generally experience lower well-being after perceiving group-based discrimination, but that embracing the stigmatized identity can help maintain well-being despite this perceived devaluation. Our results showed that even brief exposure to Sputnik Latvia's Russophobia narrative led to higher levels of perceived discrimination and group identification in Russian speakers. However, we found no significant effects on well-being, which deviates from extant literature on discrimination. We discuss the reasons for this and suggest future directions.
The devastating terror attacks of 11 September 2001 have often been characterized as a "bolt from the blue. " Drawing inspiration from the political psychological literature on strategic surprise, this article poses the deceptively simple question of why so many U.S. policymakers were caught so woefully off guard last year. Through a preliminary empirical exploration of three broad explanatory "cuts" derived from the relevant interdisciplinary literature psychological, bureau-organizational, and agenda-political-the authors seek to shed light on the sources of failure that may have contributed to 9/11 and point to promising avenues of investigation for future research as the available empirical record becomes more complete.