The majority of Americans think that politics has an "incivility problem" and that this problem is only getting worse. Research demonstrates that negativity and rudeness in politics have been ...increasing for decades. But how does this tide of impolite-to-outrageous language affect our reactions to media coverage and our political behavior? Disrespectful Democracy offers a new account of the relationship between incivility and political behavior based on a key individual predisposition-conflict orientation. Individuals experience conflict in different ways; some enjoy arguments while others are uncomfortable and avoid confrontation. Drawing on a range of original surveys and experiments, Emily Sydnor contends that the rise of incivility in political media has transformed political involvement. Citizens now need to be able to tolerate or even welcome incivility in the public sphere in order to participate in the democratic process. Yet individuals who are turned off by incivility are not brought back in by civil presentation of issues. Sydnor considers the challenges in evaluating incivility's normative benefits and harms to the political system: despite some detrimental aspects, certain levels of incivility in certain venues can promote political engagement, and confrontational behavior can be a vital tool in the citizen's democratic arsenal. A rigorous and empirically informed analysis of political rhetoric and behavior,Disrespectful Democracy also proposes strategies to engage citizens across the range of conflict orientations.
What drives some to violence against the state while others, living in the same place at the same time, turn to nonviolent resistance? And in this age of Islamist terrorism and Islamophobia, does the ...practice of Islam encourage violence? Structural explanations of violence fail to answer these questions. InWhether to Kill, Stephanie Dornschneider applies the methodology of cognitive mapping to study the beliefs that motivate individuals to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism. Using a double-paired comparison with control groups, Dornschneider conducted extensive ethnographic interviews with violent and nonviolent Muslims and non-Muslims in both Egypt and Germany, speaking with them about their lives and contexts and what drove them to resist the state. After coding their responses into cognitive maps, which make visible the connections between an individual's beliefs and decisions for behavior, Dornschneider used a computer model to analyze the huge number of possible factors driving people to choose or not choose violence, eventually identifying ten reasoning processes by which violent individuals can be differentiated from nonviolent ones.
Whether to Killtakes a new approach to understanding terrorism. Through first-person accounts of those involved in both violent and nonviolent action against the state-from members of groups as diverse as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jihad, the Socialist German Student Union, and the Red Army Faction-then analyzing that data via cognitive mapping, Stephanie Dornschneider has opened up new perspectives on what drives people to-or away from-the use of political violence.
Preservation and protection of environment appears as one of the largest challenges of our time. It necessitates urgent but also comprehensive, planetary action. One of the key issues is to define a ...scope of future international instrument as well as its definition. This requires global political action, which will then eventually translate into a coordinated legal action and finally articulate itself in viable international treaty. Institutional collaboration among stakeholders and agencies needs to be improved as much as the currently existing approaches need to be harmonized. Only an improved institutional framework between agencies and stakeholders that protects environment could enhance and accelerate cooperation to the levels equal to an environmental and climate change challenge. The very creation of such framework could also contribute to the harmonization of monitoring and reporting systems. It will also lead to more coordinated, more effective and properly financed policy instruments as well as more efficient legal enforcement on supranational, national and sub-national level.
Shocking moments in society create an extraordinary political environment that permits political and opinion changes that are unlikely during times of normal politics. Strong emotions felt by the ...public during catastrophes - even if experienced only vicariously through media coverage - are a powerful motivator of public opinion and activism. This is particularly true when emotional reactions coincide with attributing blame to governmental agencies or officials. By examining public opinion during one extraordinary event, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Lonna Rae Atkeson and Cherie D. Maestas show how media information interacts with emotion in shaping a wide range of political opinions about government and political leaders. Catastrophic events bring citizens together, provide common experiences and information, and create opinions that transcend traditional political boundaries. These moments encourage citizens to re-examine their understanding of government, its leaders and its role in a society from a less partisan perspective.
Expert political judgment Tetlock, Philip E
2005., 20170905, 2009, 2005, 2005-01-01, 2017-08-29, 20050101
eBook
The intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This book fills that need. Here, Philip E. ...Tetlock explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox—the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events—is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits—the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat.
► We used Moral Foundations Theory to predict culture war attitudes. ► Moral foundation scores predicted attitudes beyond ideology and demographics. ► The strongest predicting foundation across ...disparate issues was purity/desecration. ► The role of moral intuitions about purity in ideology deserve further study.
Commentators have noted that the issue stands taken by each side of the American “culture war” lack conceptual consistency and can even seem contradictory. We sought to understand the psychological underpinnings of culture war attitudes using Moral Foundations Theory. In two studies involving 24,739 participants and 20 such issues (e.g. abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage), we found that endorsement of five moral foundations predicted judgments about these issues over and above ideology, age, gender, religious attendance, and interest in politics. Our results suggest that dispositional tendencies, particularly a person’s moral intuitions, may underlie, motivate, and unite ideological positions across a variety of issues and offer new insights into the multiple “moral threads” connecting disparate political positions.
This study analyses the names of political formations (politonyms) in Spain from the start of the country’s transition to democracy in 1976 to the present day. Based on a corpus of more than 5,000 ...names, the evolution of the creative systems is examined according to a series of parameters: the hallmarks of territoriality, the use of collective names, and ideologically defined terms, as well as the global nature of the name and language used. The quantitative data confirm constant elements in the structuring of politonyms on the one hand, and changes in trends associated with historical events and the evolution of the political course itself, on the other.
The implicit association test (IAT) is one of several measures of implicit attitudes, but it has attracted especially intense criticism. Some methodological objections are valid, but they are damning ...only if one accepts false analogies between the IAT and measures of intellectual aptitude, clinical diagnosis, or physical height. Other objections are predicated on misconceptions of the nature of attitudes (which are context-sensitive and reflect personal and cultural forces) or the naive assumption that people cannot be biased against their own group. Other criticisms are ideological, pertaining to questions of moral and political value, such as whether it is good to have fewer pro-White/anti-Black implicit attitudes and to provide respondents with feedback about their implicit attitudes. Implicit-attitude measures have been extremely useful in predicting voting and other political behavior. An indirect, unobtrusive, context-sensitive measure of attitudes is far more useful to social and political psychologists than an IQ test or clinical “diagnosis” would be, insofar as it reflects a dynamic Lewinian conception of the “person in the situation.”
This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. First, using unique representative ...probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes). Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past. Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012. Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.
We tested whether conservatives and liberals are similarly or differentially likely to deny scientific claims that conflict with their preferred conclusions. Participants were randomly assigned to ...read about a study with correct results that were either consistent or inconsistent with their attitude about one of several issues (e.g., carbon emissions). Participants were asked to interpret numerical results and decide what the study concluded. After being informed of the correct interpretation, participants rated how much they agreed with, found knowledgeable, and trusted the researchers’ correct interpretation. Both liberals and conservatives engaged in motivated interpretation of study results and denied the correct interpretation of those results when that interpretation conflicted with their attitudes. Our study suggests that the same motivational processes underlie differences in the political priorities of those on the left and the right.
PDF
