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The media, private citizens and other stakeholders regularly appraise political negotiations, but the character of these negotiations and the reasons for outcomes are little understood. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to discuss this character and explore its implications.

This is a conceptual paper. The author carried out a literature review and used his experiences in supervising political negotiation simulations.

The author argues that political negotiations have several specific characteristics that distinguish them from other kinds of negotiations. Political negotiations, for instance, tend to address often rather fuzzy public interests, involve value conflicts or are simultaneously performed “on stage” and “behind the scenes.” These characteristics may matter, as they can provide structural disincentives to negotiators, who might be tempted to focus on selling outcomes rather than on improving them (“saleability-oriented negotiating”). Hence, the author argues that political negotiators and their stakeholders face the challenge that political contexts may foster weak negotiation performances.

The author proposes an approach to political negotiations’ training that takes the findings of this paper into consideration.

This paper is the first, to the best of the author’s knowledge, to provide a detailed characterization of political negotiations and to discuss related implications.

The purpose of this paper is to try to determine to what extent differences and similarities in sociopolitical, cultural and economic backgrounds are reflected in gender role portrayals in magazine advertisements in the USA, China and Thailand.

Content analysis is used. Five different magazine categories are selected from the USA, China and Thailand in 2007: news and general interest; sports; entertainment; women's and business. The coding system employed is modified from Courtney and Lockeretz.

Overall, the paper finds that advertisers in Thailand, China and America shared some gender stereotyping. In addition, Chinese and Thai magazine advertisements show more gender stereotyping, while US advertisements show more egalitarian representations. These findings are consistent with their respective culture backgrounds.

The use of content analysis is limited because it is mainly descriptive in nature and adequate causal explanations cannot be established. Besides, this research is cross‐sectional and the changes in gender role portrayals in cultures over time cannot be sufficiently captured.

The paper's observations support the hypotheses that the sociopolitical, cultural and economic differences of the three countries lead to different gender role attitudes in each society, and these different attitudes need to be considered by international advertisers. The paper also suggests that international advertisers should carefully consider the use of gender role stereotypes in their creative design, for the benefit both of the advertisers and the society.

No similar studies have been conducted on Thai advertisements and the most recent study in China was in 1997. It is also worthwhile to examine gender role portrayals in advertisements from three countries with unique sociopolitical backgrounds: the capitalistic USA (with Judeo‐Christian values), socialist China (with weak Confucian values) and capitalistic Thailand (with strong Confucian values).