Across established democracies, citizens express high levels of support for decision making via referendums. What drives these preferences remains yet unclear. In this article it is argued that, ...first, process preferences are less stable than previously assumed but vary substantially across policy proposals. Second, it is suggested that instrumental considerations play an important role in shaping citizens’ preferences for referendums. Specifically, citizens who favour the policy proposal or believe that they hold a majority opinion are expected to express more support for the use of referendums. An original survey was designed and conducted in the Netherlands (N = 1,289) that contains both between and within respondent variation across a range of policy proposals. The findings support these arguments: Both the desire for a specific policy change and the perception of being in the majority with one's policy preference relate to support for the use of referendums across policy proposals, levels of governance, and between and within respondents. This study contributes to a better understanding of process preferences by showing that these preferences have a non‐stable component and that instrumental considerations play an important role in citizens’ support for referendums.
Intractable conflicts constitute violent and threatening environments that lead to intense emotions and polarized attitudes. Sadness is one emotion frequently elicited by the price of such conflicts. ...This investigation characterized the effects of sadness on conflict‐related information processing and attitudes in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Findings from four experimental studies suggest that both incidental and integral sadness can induce a depolarization of political attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 163), sadness reduced the effect of political ideology on conflict‐related decisions. Sadness reduced the effect of political ideology on in‐group bias in resource allocation in Studies 2 (N = 213) and 4 (N = 274), willingness to negotiate in Studies 1 and 3 (N = 174), and openness to information supporting the out‐group's perspective (Study 4). Overall, in addition to its more negative implications, these results suggest that sadness (compared to both the non‐emotional and anger conditions) may have a bright side, since it may induce depolarization of political attitudes in intractable conflicts.
Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by ...the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.
As described in two articles in the September‐October 2021 issue of the Hastings Center Report, most crisis standards of care (CSC) plans include triage algorithms to guide the allocation of critical ...care resources to some patients and not others under conditions of extreme scarcity. The plans also include other important CSC strategies, but it is the notion of rationing scarce resources via triage that especially captured the imaginations of ethicists. Vigorous arguments have arisen over whether triage algorithms should be designed to prioritize patients based on predictions of short‐, near‐, or long‐term survival. Additionally, there are ongoing debates about the ability of current algorithms to estimate patient survival accurately enough to be useful in triage and about the role of values like equity in triage protocols. Relatively few debates have noted, however, that while the development of CSC triage protocols has been based in medicine, public health, and ethics, the activation of CSC plans remains a political decision.
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Aim. To consider the institutionalization of lobbying from the viewpoint of different approaches to the interpretation of the term "institutionalization" and its refraction in the ...context of lobbying.
Methodology. The main content of the study is the analysis of foreign and domestic literature in the context of the development of scientific thought about the institutions and the institutionalization of such a political process as lobbying. The author uses both general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, comparison) and methods of political science (for example, institutional method).
Results. In the article, the author considers normative, organizational, interactive approaches to the lobbying institutionalization interpretation. The integral approach is also used for a more comprehensive and in-depth consideration of the process.
Research implications. The article reviews the evolution of theoretical concepts, as well as in highlighting the specifics of lobbying as a process within the framework of four scientific approaches. The practical significance is in the analysis of the structural elements of lobbying, which can be used to develop mechanisms for managing this practice.
Political decisions usually affect a large number of people but the point is to what extent these decisions are justified and verified, and to what extent, they have gone through the correct ...decision-making mechanisms. The negative consequences of some of these decisions have been motivating many researchers to figure out where the problem comes from. However, the problem is that most of these researchers have seen them in a suspended, abstract, and isolated way. The purpose of this article is, first of all, to provide criteria for evaluating these decisions, and in the next step, to identify the most important challenges of the government's political decision-making. In the third step, it tries to provide examples of these challenges with regard to the provided indicators, and then to show the relationship which they are related to the issue of "accountability" and their ultimate relationship with the gap between the government - the nation, and the weakness of the civil society. The research method in this article is descriptive-analytical and gathering data is based on documents, finally, statistical samples have been used to examine the process of several important political decisions. The specific finding of this article is that political decision-making is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon whose transparency, verification, and justification are closely related to the question of accountability and finally democratic mechanisms, and the existence of strong civil forces and political parties.
Academics and practitioners are increasingly interested in deliberative minipublics and whether these can address widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary politics. While optimism seems to ...prevail, there is also talk that the use of minipublics may backfire. When the government disregards a minipublic's recommendations, this could lead to more dissatisfaction than not asking for its advice in the first place. Using an online survey experiment in Belgium (n = 3,102), we find that, compared to a representative decision‐making process, a minipublic tends to bring about higher political support when its recommendations are fully adopted by the government, whereas it generates lower political support when its recommendations are not adopted. This study presents novel insights into whether and when the use of minipublics may alleviate or aggravate political dissatisfaction among the public at large.
Recent research has shown that rapid judgments about the personality traits of political candidates, based solely on their appearance, can predict their electoral success. This suggests that voters ...rely heavily on appearances when choosing which candidate to elect. Here we review this literature and examine the determinants of the relationship between appearance-based trait inferences and voting. We also reanalyze previous data to show that facial competence is a highly robust and specific predictor of political preferences. Finally, we introduce a computer model of face-based competence judgments, which we use to derive some of the facial features associated with these judgments.
We study how host country politics influence internationalization. Our meta‐analysis clarifies which ideas receive support across the empirical literature and reveals new theoretical insights in ...three areas: the conceptualization of host country politics, the impact of host country politics on internationalization steps, and the moderating influence of home‐country conditions on the previous relation. First, regarding the concept of host country politics, we propose analysing host country politics rather than political risk, and separating political decision‐making, i.e., regulation creation, from political administration, i.e., regulation implementation. Second, on the effect of host country politics on internationalization steps, we suggest a dynamic management across the internationalization process, with managers shifting from avoiding harm through country selection to pre‐empting harm through entry mode selection, to adapting to harm to ensure survival. Third, studying how home‐country conditions modify the impact of host country politics on internationalization, we propose that multinationals build political and uncertainty management capabilities from their exposure to home country conditions that help them manage host country politics better.
Collective action will be effective in achieving broader social change goals to the extent that it influences public opinion yet the degree to which collective action “works” in changing opinion is ...rarely studied. Experiment 1 (n = 158) showed that, consistent with a logic of strategic non-violence, non-violent collective action more effectively conveys a sense of the illegitimacy of the issue and the efficacy of the group, thereby promoting support for future non-violent actions. Experiment 2 (n = 139) explored the moderating role of allegations of corruption. A social context of corruption effectively undermined the efficacy and legitimacy of non-violent collective action, relative to support for violence, thereby promoting (indirectly) support for future extreme action. The implications of this research, for the logic of strategic non-violence and mobilizing supportive public opinion, are discussed.
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