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Richard Nixon and his advisors were aware of the inherent economic problems of wage–price controls: suppressed inflation, shortages, biases, avoidance, cheating, etc. Nixon's secret White House tapes reveal that Nixon disliked controls, never expecting them to extinguish inflation but only agreed to them to deflect attention from devaluation of the dollar. The political popularity of his controls changed his view of them, even producing a second freeze on retail prices in 1973. Importantly, the tapes reveal that Nixon pushed for inflationary monetary policies long after his 1972 reelection. Federal Reserve Chair, Arthur Burns, seemingly capitulated to Nixon's pressures by restraining interest rate increases in Federal Open Market Committee meetings. Politics won out over economics. Nixon and his advisors avoided addressing the reason for increasing inflation – the monetary expansion that Nixon pressured Arthur Burns to pursue in support of his 1972 re-election – an expansion that continued long after the election. This tragic policy failure was avoidable had the administration focused on controlling the true cause of the inflation.

Controversy has long swirled over the claim that Donald Trump's base has deeply rooted authoritarian tendencies, but Trump himself seems to have few doubts. Asked whether his stated wish to be dictator “on day one” of second term in office would repel voters, Trump said “I think a lot of people like it.” It is one of his invariable talking points that 74 million voters supported him in 2020, and he remains the unrivaled leader of the Republican Party, even as his rhetoric escalates to levels that cautious observers now routinely call fascistic.

Is Trump right that many people “like” his talk of dictatorship? If so, what does that mean empirically? Part of the answer to these questions was apparent early, in the results of the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), which included survey questions that we had proposed which we drew from the aptly-named “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale. Posed to voters in 2012–2013 and again in 2016, those questions elicited striking responses.

In this chapter, we revisit those responses. We begin by exploring Trump's escalating anti-democratic rhetoric in the light of themes drawn from Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno. We follow this with the text of the 2017 conference paper in which we first reported that 75% of Trump's voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically. They hoped to “get rid” of troublemakers and “crush evil.” That wish, as we show in our conclusion, remains central to Trump's appeal.

The white nationalist project of establishing a racially homogeneous state out of the United States hinges on the pursuit of power through the fragmentation of national spaces along racial lines. In a shifting political context, prominent ideologue Jared Taylor perceives Joe Biden's 2020 electoral victory as an opportunity to further engage his audience. This chapter offers a discourse analysis of seven audiovisual productions published by Taylor on the online magazine American Renaissance between the 3 November 2020 presidential election and the 6 January 2021 Capitol Hill riot. Through a multidisciplinary approach encompassing political science, race studies and information science, this case study illuminates how white nationalism uses fragmentation as both an objective and an argument. A fracture of the information contract seeks to define extremism as a bastion of objective truth, countering perceived mainstream media bias. The electoral dynamics subsequently serve as a vehicle for reshaping political dynamics and recasting partisan divisions as racial polarisation. Ultimately, this narrative arc steers towards a new strategic orientation, redefining the contours of territorial fragmentation and the white nationalist agenda itself.

This paper aims to develop an integrative framework explaining how infectious disease cues influence consumer behavior by connecting evolutionary psychology and behavioral immune system literature with consumer research.

The paper synthesizes pathogen-avoidance psychology and consumer behavior research to identify three psychological changes (affect, cognition, motivation) influencing consumer responses, developing theoretical propositions across five domains while identifying boundary conditions.

Disease cues trigger changes in affect (disgust, anxiety), cognition (narrowed attention) and motivation (self-protection). These influence consumer responses across self-regulation, social behavior/identity, information processing, evaluation and prosocial/sustainable behaviors. The framework identifies boundary conditions moderating these effects.

The framework advances understanding of disease threats’ influence on consumer behavior and suggests future research directions, including contextual effects and individual differences.

The framework helps marketers predict consumer responses to disease cues, offering insights for marketing strategies during health crises and normal times.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper provides the first comprehensive framework explaining disease cues’ systematic influence on consumer behavior through psychological changes, extending behavioral immune system theory into consumer domains.

This systematic review paper aims to investigate seasonal ambient change’s impact on the incidence of falls among older adults.

The population, exposure, outcome (PEO) structured framework was used to frame the research question prior to using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis framework. Three databases were searched, and a total of 12 studies were found for inclusion, and quality appraisal was carried out. Data extraction was performed, and narrative analysis was carried out.

Of the 12 studies, 2 found no link between seasonality and fall incidence. One study found fall rates increased during warmer months, and 9 of the 12 studies found that winter months and their associated seasonal changes led to an increase in the incidence in falls. The overall result was that cooler temperatures typically seen during winter months carried an increased risk of falling for older adults.

Additional research is needed, most likely examining the climate one lives in. However, the findings are relevant and can be used to inform health-care providers and older adults of the increased risk of falling during the winter.

This study aims to determine whether implementation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) rule will achieve the goal of providing data for preliminary analysis of banks compliance with fair lending regulations.

Empirical analysis of the CFPB’s implementation of Dodd–Frank Section 1071.

The data available under the CFPB’s rule will suggest that banks provide less access to minority borrowers, which would be a violation of fair lending regulations. The authors show that the addition of a simple credit risk variable shows that community banks provide fair access for minority borrowers to loans.

The analysis is limited to one year of the Fed’s Small Business Credit Survey (2017). Also, the authors are limited to the data collected by the survey.

Bank regulations tend to be one size fits all, which creates high compliance costs for small (community) banks with questionable benefits. The implementation of Section 1071 appears to be another example of this pattern, as the results suggest that the implementation of the CFPB’s rule for Section 1071 is unlikely to achieve its goals.

The results have significant public policy implications for the design and implementation of banking regulations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first research project on the topic.

Contrasting the Madisonian model of democracy with Westminster style arrangements, this chapter examines how American political scientists and policymakers expressed second thoughts about the constitutional settlement of 1787 and looked towards the British political system for possible reforms to their own. In particular, it details the arguments offered by Thomas Finletter, James MacGregor Burns, and others, from the 1940s through to the early 1960s that the United States might adopt certain features of the Westminster model. The chapter analyzes their proposals and the – essentially negative – reception that they received. It concludes by addressing the failure of these proposals and the endurance of fragmented government within the United States.

Far from being united under the banner of sisterhood, American women opposed each other on the issue of gender equality in the 1970s–1980s. As the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed the US Congress in 1972, antifeminists mobilized under the lead of Phyllis Schlafly to prevent its ratification. Identified as major threat to traditional families, the ERA would have mandated that “equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex” (section 1). If this sociocultural and political struggle around women's rights revealed the different loyalties and interests of women at the time, it also testified to the institutional fragmentation of power in the country. Conservative women were not only fighting against feminism to preserve the privileged position they thought they occupied in the patriarchy; they were also animated by a strong anti-federal government sentiment. A combined examination of these antifeminist and anti-governmental stances reveals some the reasons why the ERA was eventually never added to the Constitution and could also explain why the United States is such a disunited country, especially regarding women's rights.

The United States experienced its own damaging attempt at secession between 1861 and 1865, and one would expect the US Government to condemn all secession attempts at home and abroad. This paper examines four cases of secession in sub-Saharan Africa and the US policy toward those independence movements: Katanga, Biafra, Eritrea, and South Sudan. The finding is that the American Government's policy toward fragmentation in other countries has surprisingly not been characterized by a condemnation of the secessionist movements. The US response has most often been tacit support or reluctant opposition to nascent independence movements, which always stopped short of full diplomatic recognition prior to 1991. Anticommunism also played a role in US foreign policy decisions regarding secession abroad during the Cold War but did not lead in any case examined to open political or military intervention.

The purpose of this study is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how the intricate interconnections between oil price fluctuations, supply chain disruptions and shifting demand patterns collectively shape inflation dynamics within the Chinese economy, especially during critical periods such as the Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical events like the Russia–Ukraine conflict. The importance of assessing the impact of oil price volatility on China’s inflation becomes particularly pronounced amidst these challenging circumstances.

This study uses the Markov Regime-Switching generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (MRS-GARCH) family of models under student’s t-distributions to measure the uncertainty of oil prices and the inflation rate during the period spanning from 1994 to 2023 in China.

The results indicate that the MRS-GJR-GARCH-in-mean (MRS-GARCH-M) models, when used under student’s t-distributions, exhibit superior performance in modeling the volatility of both oil prices and the inflation rate. This finding underscores the effectiveness of these models in capturing the intricacies of volatility dynamics in the context of oil prices and inflation. The study has identified compelling evidence of regime-switching behavior within the oil price market. Subsequently, the author conducted an analysis by extracting the forecastable component, which represents the expected variation, from the best-fitted models. This allowed us to isolate the time series of oil price uncertainty, representing the unforecastable component. With this unforecastable component in hand, the author proceeded to estimate the impact of oil price fluctuations on the inflation rate. To accomplish this, the author used an autoregressive distributed lag model, which enables us to explore the dynamic relationships and lags between these crucial economic variables. The study further reveals that fluctuations in oil prices exert a noteworthy and discernible influence on the inflation rate, with distinct patterns observed across different economic regimes. The findings indicate a consistent positive impact of oil prices on inflation rate uncertainty, particularly within export-oriented and import-oriented industries, under both of these economic regimes.

This study offers original value by analyzing the impact of crude oil price volatility on inflation in China. It provides unique insights into the relationship between energy market fluctuations and macroeconomic stability in one of the world’s largest economies. By focusing on crude oil – a critical but often overlooked component – this research enhances understanding of how energy price dynamics influence inflationary trends. The findings can inform policymakers and stakeholders about the significance of energy market stability for maintaining economic stability and guiding inflation control measures in China.