Ministerial Approvals in 2021 clearly articulated for the first time the wide range of circumstances under which abortion in Lao People\'s Democratic Republic (PDR) is legal. These approvals likely reflect norms around abortion existent since the establishment of the Lao PDR in 1975: unregulated abortion is and remains illegal, but abortion that meets certain criteria is and has always been legal in Lao PDR. The legal status of abortion was fuzzy in practice until 2021, likely due to cultural factors. Buddhist conceptions of life and morality contribute to a widespread sense that abortion is fundamentally wrong and ought to be illegal. Laos\' political culture strongly values solidarity, meaning prolonged public discussion of potentially divisive topics is rare. As a result, abortion is often misunderstood in international research. For instance, Laos regularly appears on lists of the few countries where abortion is completely banned. Abortion is also not a politically charged topic in Lao PDR. Women\'s experiences of accessing abortion are not rooted in a rights-based discourse. Instead, abortion is a possible (and legal) path in Laos, but one that entails considerable anguish and concern about its moral and ethical consequences.

When the COVID-19 virus first arrived in the United States in early 2020, many epidemiologists and public health officers counseled for shutdowns and advised policymakers to prepare for a major pandemic. In 2020, though, US society was rife with major political and cultural divides. Some elected leaders promoted policies at odds with the experts, and many people refused to heed the public health-based communications about the coming pandemic. Additionally, the capacity to respond to a pandemic was distributed in the country in a highly unequal fashion. This paper analyzes the noteworthy geopolitical patterns of COVID-19 illnesses, subsequent demands on hospitals, and resulting deaths. This description is based on a snapshot of archival data gathered in the midst of the pandemic during late January and early February of 2021. Demographic data, indicators of political party support, indicators of citizen attitudes, and public health compliance behaviors are combined in a multivariate analysis to explain COVID-19 outcomes at the local government (county) level. The analysis suggests strongly that regional political culture and local demographics played a substantial role in determining the severity of the public health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
当COVID‐19病毒于2020年初首次传入美国时，许多流行病学家和公共卫生官员建议实行关闭措施，并建议政策制定者为大流行做好准备。不过，2020年的美国社会充斥着重大的政治分歧和文化分歧。一些当选领导人推行的政策与专家意见相左，并且许多人忽视了有关即将到来的大流行的公共卫生传播。此外，应对大流行的能力在该国以高度不平等的方式进行分配。本文分析了值得注意的COVID‐19地缘政治模式、对医院的需求量以及由此导致的死亡数。该描述基于2021年1月下旬和2月上旬大流行期间收集的档案数据简介。人口统计数据、政党支持指标、公民态度指标以及公共卫生合规行为被用于多变量分析，以期解释地方政府（县级）的COVID‐19影响。分析强烈表明，区域政治文化和地方人口统计数据在“确定 COVID‐19大流行对公共卫生影响的严重程度”方面发挥了重要作用。.
Cuando el virus COVID‐19 llegó por primera vez a los Estados Unidos a principios de 2020, muchos epidemiólogos y funcionarios de salud pública recomendaron cierres y aconsejaron a los legisladores que se prepararan para una gran pandemia. Sin embargo, en 2020, la sociedad estadounidense estaba plagada de grandes divisiones políticas y culturales. Algunos líderes electos promovieron políticas en desacuerdo con los expertos, y muchas personas se negaron a prestar atención a las comunicaciones basadas en la salud pública sobre la próxima pandemia. Además, la capacidad de respuesta ante una pandemia se distribuyó en el país de manera muy desigual. Este documento analiza los patrones geopolíticos notables de las enfermedades de COVID‐19, las demandas posteriores en los hospitales y las muertes resultantes. Esta descripción se basa en una instantánea de los datos de archivo recopilados en medio de la pandemia a fines de enero y principios de febrero de 2021. Los datos demográficos, los indicadores de apoyo a los partidos políticos, los indicadores de las actitudes de los ciudadanos y los comportamientos de cumplimiento de la salud pública se combinan en un modelo multivariado. análisis para explicar los resultados de COVID‐19 a nivel del gobierno local (condado). El análisis sugiere fuertemente que la cultura política regional y la demografía local desempeñaron un papel importante en la determinación de la gravedad del impacto de la pandemia de COVID‐19 en la salud pública.

We analyze the relationship between different dimensions of the quality of the political system and the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data are retrieved from open-access databases for 98 countries. We apply a multivariable regression model to identify the relationship between various factors likely to affect the number of COVID-19 deaths, in addition to different dimensions of the quality of the political system. We find that the high quality of the electoral process in a country is associated with more COVID-19 deaths, while good political culture is associated with fewer deaths. As expected, we also find that trust in government and experiences with pandemics in the past is negatively related to COVID-19 deaths. Finally, a high GDP per capita is significantly associated with more COVID-19 deaths. Our findings illustrate that rapid, effective, and comprehensive government measures can protect society from the spread of a virus, but citizen compliance is also essential to policy success.

With the rapid development of the Internet, political culture plays an increasingly prominent role in ethical guidance and value orientation, and the intergenerational inheritance of political culture in various countries needs to be carried out in a sophisticated way. From the perspective of empathic narrative, this study applies the network text analysis method to detect the cultural communication regularities to the contemporary young adults in online political communication and explores contemporary young adults\' perception of online political culture through empirical analysis. Moreover, it proposes the empathic narrative logic of online political communication by comparing the existing communication elements and the urgently needed communication elements. Our findings suggest that we need to deepen the cognitive empathy, stabilize the emotional empathy, and adjust the emotional bias in online political communication.

This paper will study the potential applicability of the strategic imagination method to international security analysis, which has been previously used to improve prognostic quality in business studies. The method should allow security experts to think about the future by considering \"what if\" situations, and creatively assess the probability of different threats, even those that appear as improbable to others. The components of the method include strategic fit (the actor\'s competence between its abilities and the needs of market), structure (the degree of concentration and maturity), competitive advantages (the extent to which the resources denied to the competition can be gathered, for example, access to novel technology), and strategic focus (i.e., on cost advantages, a differentiated product or exploitation of a market niche), in which a strategic advantage can be obtained by changing rules or deliberately creating turbulence. Strategic imagination can promote an academic discussion on changing nature of global processes like the emergence of global security market and provide nonorthodox methods for advancing a qualitative security analysis. Educated forecasting by connecting today\'s developments with strategic imagination offers an important component in building successful security strategies and supportive public policies, especially in what concerns psychological warfare. For example, in the current COVID-19 crisis, main efforts have been made to defend against its national consequences (e.g., various restrictions introduced by individual countries), and less attention has been paid to cooperative strategies that can significantly reduce the global spread of the virus.

Research demonstrates that Teen Dating Violence (TDV) programs impact TDV knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, decreasing the odds of TDV victimization and perpetration. Studies indicate that students who do not complete a TDV intervention have significantly higher odds of physical and emotional TDV victimization and emotional TDV perpetration. This study uses multiple logistic regression and multiple linear regression to examine predictors of the presence and the strength of state legislation addressing TDV education and school policies. Results indicate some success in predicting the existence of TDV laws but less support for forecasting the strength of the policies passed. Dominant political party and state median income were found to be potentially important determinants of TDV state school policies. A state\'s political culture influenced the strength of states\' TDV policies. Showing that policy existence and strength are related to different processes is important for advocates to understand. Future research should look at additional variables and explore legislative histories.

From 1992 until 2015, Austria had a very restrictive Reproductive Medicine Law (FMedG, 1992) that prohibited a number of treatments such as egg donation, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), heterologous sperm donation for IVF/intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) as well as general access to assisted reproductive technology for same-sex couples. As one consequence of this rather prohibitive law, Austrian physicians active in the area of assisted reproductive technology co-operated with, or had daughter institutes in, countries with less restrictive legislation such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which are only a few hours\' drive away. For a long time, liberalisation of the Reproductive Medicine Law was blocked by the fierce and seemingly unresolvable struggle between the restrictive conservative party (ÖVP) and the permissive social democrats\' party (SPÖ). In 2014 the impasse, which had lasted for decades, was finally resolved in favour of a more liberal Reproductive Medicine Law that permits egg donation, PGD in some cases and heterologous sperm donation for IVF/ICSI and lesbian couples. Assisted reproductive technology treatments for single women and surrogate motherhood remain prohibited. The new Reproductive Medicine Law was heavily opposed by the Catholic Church, by some conservatives and by disability associations. By applying the concept of political culture, this paper explains why a liberalisation of the Reproductive Medicine Law was blocked for decades, and how the sudden policy change came about.

Non-confrontational engagement practices like ethical consumption are a popular form of everyday politics. Existing research into these practices offers positive evaluations (highlighting the value of everyday engagement in public life) and critical perspectives (questioning whether myriad small acts can address structural barriers to equity and sustainability). Meanwhile, less emphasis has been placed on understanding the underlying ideals and motivations for political action that seeks to avoid traditional politics. In order to advance such understanding, this case study uses participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 57 individuals whose daily paid or unpaid leadership roles shape eat-local initiatives. We find that in the local food realm, participants idealize pleasurable, convivial and pragmatic engagement and these ideals culminate in a particular form of everyday action we term \'small-p politics\'. The paper offers a theoretically and empirically informed investigation of non-traditional political engagement in eat-local movements, concluding that it emerges from a site where: (a) cultural change is prioritized above contentious politics; (b) rejecting traditional political activity is linked with achieving tangible outcomes; and (c) consumers are deemed the ideal agents of change. Non-traditional politics play a prominent role in the landscape of contemporary civic engagement. This research advances our existing knowledge of such practices by providing a thick description of the political ideals that endorse consumption-based approaches to change in the realm of local food.

This article investigates how the political culture of Guan (care/control) in China is played out across the platforms of the state, the community and the family through the lens of caring for people with severe mental illness in urban Shanghai. Based on ethnographic data collected from six communities in a district of Shanghai, we provide a nuanced understanding of the roles of family members, street committees and other governmental organizations in their daily practices of caring for people with severe mental illness. We show the complicated and intertwined relationships between local governmental agents and the family. We argue that the political culture of Guan, which permeates the everyday life of Chinese people, tends to objectify its subjects and reflects a long history of patriarchy in Chinese society. Without further changing such political cultural arrangements, respect for the agency of mentally ill patients, the effort of bringing humanistic psychiatric reforms to China, will be in vain.

Anti-smoking campaigns are widely viewed as a success case in public health policy. However, smoking rates continue to vary widely across U.S. states and the success of anti-smoking campaigns is contingent upon states\' adoption of anti-smoking policies. Though state anti-smoking policy is a product of a political process, studies of the effect of policies on smoking prevalence have largely ignored how politics shapes policy adoption, which, in turn, impact state health outcomes. Policies may also have different effects in different political contexts. This study tests how state politics affects smoking prevalence both through the policies that states adopt (with policies playing a mediating role on health outcomes) or as an effect modifier of behavior (tobacco control policies may work differently in states in which the public is more or less receptive to them). The study uses publicly available data to construct a time-series cross-section dataset of state smoking prevalence, state political context, cigarette excise taxes, indoor smoking policies, and demographic characteristics from 1995 to 2013. Political ideology is measured using a validated indicator of the ideology of state legislatures and of the citizens of a state. We assess the relationship between state political context and state smoking prevalence rates adjusting for demographic characteristics and accounting for the mediating/moderating role of state policies with time and state fixed effects. We find that more liberal state ideology predicts lower adult smoking rates, but that the relationship between state ideology and adult smoking prevalence is only partly explained by state anti-smoking policies.