Over the years, political cartoons have triggered debate and fierce and violent reactions. Apparently, cartoonists are able to get their critical, ‘negative’ message across both to the political elite and the general public at large. This line of reasoning, however, assumes that the communication between cartoonists and their mass public is successful, i.e., that the message that the cartoonist intends to send is correctly interpreted and received as intended. This is not obvious, since the decoding of the encrypted message of a cartoon is a complicated process that can easily go wrong, as the scarce research on the topic suggests. This study explores the idea that cartoons are correctly understood on the basis of a unique large scale survey in which over 24,000 respondents were asked via multiple-choice questions to identify the original, intended message of 11 cartoons of two Dutch cartoonists. The results show that overall it is extremely hard to correctly understand the meaning of cartoons. Moreover, among the few factors that help explain the difference in the capability to correctly understand cartoons, political preference is prominent and intriguing. People tend to ascribe a meaning to cartoons/cartoonists that fits their own political stand, and this suggests that psychological mechanisms are at work that may explain that more often than not the communication between the cartoonist and his public should likely be labelled miscommunication.

For many reasons multiculturalism has become a convenient punching bag. One of the criticisms is that multiculturalism undermines social cohesion and therefore erodes the basis for a redistribution policy. Closely related to this critique is that multiculturalism pushes immigrants into unemployment and makes them dependent on the welfare state. In this article, both criticisms are evaluated. We clarify why multiculturalism does not necessarily undermine the (support for) welfare state nor impede the socioeconomic equality of immigrants. What is needed and what remains necessary is the outline of a multicultural welfare state.

Since the summer of 2013, the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Especially for the EU, this is one of the policy priorities for the present term. TTIP is supposed to bring much-needed growth and jobs and to enable the EU to remain a global standardsetter, all without lowering EU levels of regulatory protection. Opponents of the agreement, however, fear that TTIP would lead to a regulatory race-to-the-bottom. This article scrutinizes these claims through a detailed document analysis complemented with a number of interviews. It is embedded in the political-economic literature on the trade-regulation nexus as well as on exporting standards and secondary literature on past EU-US regulatory cooperation attempts. We argue that the effects of TTIP are dependent on the concrete mode of regulatory convergence chosen in the agreement. If, as seems presently most plausible, the negotiators opt for bilateral mutual recognition as their preferred mode for regulatory convergence, the plausibility that TTIP would lead to global standards is reduced. The risk of running into a regulatory race-to-the-bottom increases in that case, but will ultimately depend on the number of sectors where this mode is applicable and under which conditions this is applied. We conclude that the probability is low that the TTIP agreement being negotiated will lead either to a significant increase in global standards or to a direct large-scale race-to-the-bottom.