The notion that a healthy democracy requires a public who discusses politics is based on the assumption that discussions expose people to perspective that differ from their own. That people generally ...prefer to avoid political disagreements, however, suggests that people may withhold their opinions during such encounters. This work couples survey responses and a content analysis of sixty political discussions from a nationally representative sample to investigate the relationships among political opinion expression, diversity, and disagreement and how those variables function across liberal, conservative, and politically heterogeneous groups. Findings challenge the extent to which disagreement dampens political opinion expression and whether ideologically mixed groups expose people to more diverse views than those that are politically homogeneous.
Se describe y evalúa la aplicación de la técnica análisis supervisado de sentimientos en comunicación política a través de un clasificador en tiempo real de opiniones políticas en tweets en español ...utilizando técnicas de aprendizaje automático (machine learning), tanto en un ordenador local como usando computación distribuida comercial para problemas de datos masivos (big data). Describimos las técnicas y métodos emergentes asociados y analizamos las oportunidades que para la comunicación política representan estas innovaciones.
Este articulo presenta y desarrolla un análisis composicional con representación de biplots como propuesta innovadora para un abordaje metodológico de representación de la teoría de la agenda-setting ...para la opinión sobre política en la prensa escrita. Para ello, se desarrolla un análisis de contenido de los artículos de opinión sobre política de los periódicos El País, El Mundo, ABC, La Razón y La Vanguardia, en el período de las Elecciones Generales españolas de 2015, para posteriormente aplicar el método composicional como procedimiento que permite representar la teoría de la agenda-setting, teniendo en cuenta la proporcionalidad de la presencia de los temas y superando los tradicionales métodos correlacionales. Los resultados prueban la viabilidad metodológica, a la vez que aportan una visión hasta el momento inexplorada sobre la agenda-setting en el caso en estudio.
Although populism does not dictate a coherent ideological or programmatic agenda, some of its elements still leave distinct marks on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper ...argues for the study of populism in its tangible policy impacts and scrutinizes the nexus of populism and foreign policy in contemporary Turkey under President Erdoğan's rule. Despite the abundant references to the 'people' in the populist rhetoric, it identifies personalization in foreign policy decision-making, nationalization in foreign policy implementation, and civilizationalization in the foreign policy discourse. Having established the patterns of populist foreign policy from a wider reading, this study then examines, generally, how populism has informed Turkish foreign policy and, specifically, Turkey's approach to the recent border disputes over the gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has ...neither given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyze digital hermeneutics “in theory” by confronting and systematizing the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: (1) between “methodological” and “ontological” digital hermeneutics; (2) between data- and text-oriented digital hermeneutics; and (3) between “quantitative” and “qualitative” credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics “in action”, by critically analyzing the uses of digital data (notably tweets) for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines.
This article describes the history of the journal published by the UK Market research Society (MRS). The reasons for introducing a journal are discussed, and the competitive context, at that time and ...onwards. Changes in the format, title and content of the journal over time are described, and its evolution from an in-house production to its current status within the journal portfolio of a leading international academic publishing house. The changing nature of the two main communities with the most interest in the journal, academics and practitioners, are described and the impact on the journal are discussed. Finally, the article summarises some of the many key contributions that the journal has made to the body of knowledge and evidence in the fields of market and social research.
This article focuses on the potential of leisure to encourage political cross-talk among everyday citizens, exposing its discussants to different political perspectives. Though our literature has ...long championed leisure for its public sphere effects, little research has examined its actual impact. To generate interest in this line of inquiry, I discuss the value of everyday cross-talk for democratic citizenship and consider the role leisure possibly plays in its advancement. Evidence is reported from the few studies outside of our field that focus on casual political talk in seemingly nonpolitical environments and activities. Finally, potential reactions to political talk in leisure contexts and the outcome(s) of such talk are explored. The article ends with questions posed to offer guidance for future research.
Building upon two political opinion polls, we formally test for structural breaks in the approval rates of major Croatian political parties, the Government, and the general societal direction. ...Departing from the mainstream studies of political sentiment, we find asymmetries between the macroeconomy and incumbent's approval rates. Namely, only major economic turmoil can alter the way citizens evaluate political parties. The found structural breaks are driven by corruption scandals involving high party officials, and by major negative economic shocks, confirming the loss aversion concept. During economic booms, political sentiment exhibits a separate trajectory, independent of the macroeconomy. We also test for threshold effects in the generating process of political sentiment, finding that it reacts significantly only to large unemployment levels. The stated conclusions are in line with the prevailing narrative that the Croatian political landscape is highly polarised, divided over ideological issues and socio-cultural norms, so voters in typical economic circumstances do not evaluate incumbents based on their economic performance, but on their successfulness in representing ideological positions.
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