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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

ENTERTAINMENT, POLITICS & CULTURAL DIPLOMACY
OCT 23, 2008 - 1:44PM PDT
Posted by Johanna Blakley
All posts by this author

When it comes to entertainment, leisure and play, people generally exercise more freedom of choice than in any other realm of modern life. They choose to watch a movie, play chess, go to a concert, or go shopping because they find it amusing. In short, look at the way people entertain themselves and you’ll discover what people wish to do for one's own sake. If you’re looking for a window into the global village, to assess its condition and its attitudes toward every imaginable aspect of contemporary life, there can be no better portal than global entertainment. Last month, the Norman Lear Center, a research institute located at the USC Annenberg School, released findings from the second in a series of surveys we’re conducting with Zogby International. The goal of the surveys has been to ascertain whether there is a connection between an individual’s political beliefs and their entertainment and leisure preferences. The stakes for cultural diplomacy are quite high: it has been notoriously difficult to prove that cultural diplomacy is an effective method to communicate a communal set of values across international borders. The Zogby/Lear Center surveys – which have been conducted exclusively in the United States so far, though we plan to take them global – reveal a strong connection between the way people amuse themselves and their political convictions. In addition, we found a remarkable willingness among respondents to admit to the impact that fictional entertainment has on their behavior in the real world. The Zogby/Lear Center survey is unique in a few fundamental ways. Instead of asking respondents to describe their own political ideology, we created a political typology based on how respondents evaluated 42 statements about political values. Using statistical clustering analysis, the typology revealed three significant clusters of respondents: "reds," as we decided to call them, make up 41% of the national sample, while "blues" comprise 34% and "purples" 24%. The same respondents were asked about their preferred leisure-time activities and their favorite radio and TV shows, Web sites, movies, games and sports. The online survey was conducted August 19–28, 2008, including 3,167 adults nationwide and carrying a margin of error of +/– 1.8 percentage points. A previous survey, using the same political typology, was administered in June 2007. Each of the three groups has distinctly different demographic characteristics, political beliefs and entertainment preferences (profiles of each group are available here). In fact, in the 2007 survey, we found that if the ideological group on the conservative end of the spectrum (Reds) demonstrated a preference for a certain TV or film genre, then it was very likely that the group on the liberal end of the spectrum (Blues) would demonstrate a distaste for that genre, and vice versa. Even the group in the middle of the spectrum (Purples) tended to gravitate toward genres that the other groups disliked, except for dramatic and educational programming. FULL TEXT
 
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Celia Durkin on July 3, 2009 @ 12:35 am:
The International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy 2009
Call for Applications
Berlin, 27th – 31st July, 2009

The International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy 2009 will bring together experts from the fields of academia, politics, and the private sector for a weeklong program that will focus on the role of soft power in the international environment. The following are a selection of the confirmed speakers for the Symposium:


* Jorge Sampaio, UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, Former President of Portugal (1996-2006)
* Joaquim Chissano, Former President of Mozambique (1986-2005), Former Chairperson of the African Union (2003-2004)
* Dr. Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Former President of Latvia (1999-2007)
* Cassam Uteem, Former President of the Republic of Mauritius (1992-2002)
* Dr. Vasile Puşcaş, Romanian Minister for European Affairs
* Ints Dālderis, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Latvia
* Borys Tarasyuk, Member of Parliament and Former Foreign Minister of the Ukraine (1998-2000, 2005-2007)
* Dr. Erkki Tuomioja, Member of Parliament and Former Foreign Minister of Finland (2000-2007)


Further information about the Symposium can be found under: http://www.icd-internationalsymposium.org

The program brochure, including the timetable, can be found under: http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/content/articles/symposium/documents/International_Symposium_on_Cultural_Diplomacy_2009_brochure.pdf

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