Some political scientists and media commentators believe that, in terms of shifting public opinion, they matter barely at all, and in many instances there is something to this view.
All these commentators portray politics largely in terms of family and character, strength and weakness, particularly in terms of the role of the father.
From that perspective, Russia's actions do not look very rational and foreign commentators have explained them in terms of President Vladimir Putin's anger and feelings of humiliation after the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families.
Against a backdrop of maturing debt – the country must repay €5bn to the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund in June and July – commentators have begun to talk in terms of fatal miscalculation.
But I think those early commentators were on to something – not in terms of the work's failure to live up to the promise of its three symphonic predecessors, but in the sense of the uncompromising intellectual complexity and refinement of this music, and its expressive implacability and even tragedy.
But it does seem odd for the same commentators to be so negatively biased in terms of the interests in their audience in a dispassionate view of the financial markets' performance and prospects.
It is notable that at least one commentator, Tamar Meisels, explicitly rejects the account in terms of justification in her discussion of terrorism and torture but she accepts dirty hands as providing grounds for excuse (Meisels 2008a, 213-221).
In other words, Israeli journalists and political commentators discussed the events in distant Northern Ireland in terms of their own local realities and thus highlighted the tensions and fractures of Israeli self-perceptions in the years after the Oslo Accords and before the Second Intifada.
For, despite promises of a Marshall plan, a toxic mix of high unemployment, drug-running and resentment festers on the heavily immigrant estates that ring French towns.Nicolas Baverez, a political commentator, sums up Mr Sarkozy's problem in terms of "transgression".
