A micro-model that focuses on political opinion leadership within an extended nomological network is developed and tested. Data were gathered from a sample of voters in an election. The results ...indicate that political opinion leadership played a central role in the voting behavior. Key antecedents to opinion leadership were voter involvement, subjective knowledge, and indirectly, information seeking behavior. Important consequences were voting stability, perceived risk and political satisfaction. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This study examined whether authoritarians experiencing economic threat are more likely than other authoritarians to support social policy and political agendas that restrict benefits or curtail ...rights for disadvantaged groups. A sample of 131 college students completed questionnaires that measured authoritarianism, degree of economic and societal insecurity, and attitudes toward eight political issues. Economic and social insecurity were indexed to perceptions of whether one's standard of living had declined, whether income inequality had grown among social classes, and whether crime, race relations, environmental quality, and governmental services had worsened. The political scales reflected issues currently debated in public forums; they included funding mechanisms for social security and health care, the state's role in regulating abortion, government services for illegal immigrants, terminating welfare for unemployed women with children, and regulation of sexual conduct. A logistic model found that, relative to non-threatened authoritarians or nonauthoritarians, threatened authoritarians were six times as likely to favor restricting benefits to powerless groups and eight times as likely to support the state's preventing women from securing an abortion. These results are discussed in terms of systemic changes in the economy that have resulted in declines in real income and increasing income inequality.
This paper explores how the degree of female spouses' political interest affects male spouses' views about women's empowerment using individual level data in Japan. Controlling for unobserved ...area-specific fixed effects, results show that males are likely to consider women's empowerment important if their spouses are interested in politics. This spouse effect is observed for conservative males but not for progressive-neutral males. Results were unchanged when the endogeneity bias caused by spouses' political interests were controlled for. These findings suggest that female family members' political interests and views play an important role in determining male views regarding women's issues.
Trotz der hohen Vielfalt und Allgegenwart an Möglichkeiten, der eignen Meinung online Ausdruck zu verleihen, sind viele Menschen nicht oder nur begrenzt bereit, sich daran zu beteiligen. In diesem ...Beitrag wird daher am Beispiel von Facebook untersucht, warum politische Partizipationsangebote nicht genutzt werden. Dafür werden die etablierten Erklärungen aus dem Civic Voluntarism Model mit spezifischen, auf die Partizipation bei Facebook bezogenen Prädiktoren ergänzt. Zur Überprüfung der Annahmen wird eine Online- Befragung mit n = 463 Personen durchgeführt. Insbesondere Befürchtungen von Folgen im Offline-Bereich sowie eines hohen Aufwandes und eine negative Einschätzung der von politischen Institutionen angebotenen Inhalte können erklären, warum diese Personen Facebook nicht zur politischen Partizipation nutzen. Weitere Prädiktoren sind eine geringe Nutzung von Offline-Partizipationsformen und eine geringe Sichtbarkeit politischer Posts auf der Facebook-Startseite.
Von Unworten zu Untaten Bade, Klaus J.
Historical social research. Supplement (Köln),
10/2018
30
Journal Article
»From misswords to missdeeds: Cultural anxiety, populism, and enemy images in the German discussion on migration and asylum«. The immigration society in Germany is divided: Cultural pragmatists, on ...the one hand, have long since accepted cultural diversity as a very normal day-to-day experience. Cultural pessimists, on the other hand, are driven by the historically mistaken search for a way back to cultural homogeneity; a situation that has never existed in German history. Virulent defensive attitudes against an Islam which is equated with terroristic Islamism, against refugees and asylum seekers as well as against so-called poverty migrants, especially Roma people from south-east-Europe, are today’s connecting themes that keep together all culturalistic, radical racist and right-wing extremistic ideas and movements in Germany and Europe. On top of that, a new and growing anti-Semitism is widespread even among Muslim immigrants. Such defensive attitudes provoked a growing xenophobic aggressiveness among radical groups and were a motivating factor for attacks on accommodations of asylum seekers, mosques, and synagogues. In this context even more dangerous than populist attitudes of politicians is their tacit consent with hate speeches about immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and so-called poverty migrants.
This paper addresses the task of political orientation prediction and assigning a person to one of `democrat' or `republican' classes based on Twitter data that is produced by republicans and ...democrat voters. We have used Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks and Support Vector Machine, algorithms to model the classification process. Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks performed better and we have achieved 77.92% accuracy rate.
In diesem Beitrag beschäftigen wir uns mit den Charakteristika von Blogs als einer Spielart digitaler Narrative und mit der Frage, was wir aus ihnen über persönliche Erzählungen von Mutterschaft, ...Familie, Ernährung und die Verfügbarkeit von Ressourcen lernen können. Wir untersuchten hierzu die Posts in zwei Blogs über insgesamt sechs Monate, die von Müttern im Kontext beschränkter ökonomischer, sozio-emotionaler, zeitlicher und ökologischer Knappheit verfasst wurden, auf die Stützung oder Überschreitung normativer Narrative. In diesem Beitrag konzentrieren wir uns darauf, wie auf den "About Me"-Seiten dieser Blogs geschriebene und visuelle Narrative, semantische Vieldeutigkeit und Widersprüchlichkeit, Stile und Plattform überschreitende Genres sowohl normative als auch transgressive Erzählungen über Mutterschaft und Familie, die eigene Involviertheit der Bloggerinnen und die Verfügbarkeit von Ressourcen verdeutlicht werden. Abschließend diskutieren wir Grenzen unserer Studie bzw. wie und in welchem Ausmaß die Blogs, die wir betrachtet haben, Hinweise auf politische Positionierung und politisches Handeln geben.
We consider the characteristics of one form of digital narrative -the blog- and what they may offer to personal narratives about mothering, families, and food and other resources. We draw on narrative analysis of six months of posts from two blogs about feeding families, written by mothers in the context of constrained economic, time, socioemotional, and environmental resources, to make a second-order analysis of the features of blogs that operate to support or transgress normative narratives. We focus on how, on the "About Me" pages of these blogs, the relations between the written and visual narratives, and the semantic multiplicities and contradictions, the styles and the cross-platform genres of the written stories, generate both normative and transgressive narratives around mothering and family, the bloggers' own involvements with the blog, and resource issues. In conclusion, we discuss the limitations of our analysis, and how and to what extent the features of blogs on which we have focused may work to generate narratives of political positioning and action.
В статье представлен анализ работ специалистов ведущих европейских экспертно-аналитических центров, работающих в области востоковедения и международных исследований, по выдвинутому в 2013 г. ...Китайской Народной Республикой проекту «Один пояс, один путь» (ОПОП). Выявляются наиболее специфичные оценки и основные тренды в подходах к рассмотрению существа проекта. В силу того, что Россия также является непосредственным участником ОПОП, сопоставление различных оценок и данных, полученных российскими и зарубежными синологами, важно для выработки комплексной стратегии участия страны в данном китайском проекте с максимально четким пониманием политики Китая и возможной выгоды для собственного развития. В рамках статьи последовательно изучены аналитические доклады, индивидуальные и коллективные брошюры и комментарии, опубликованные научными центрами как Западной, так и Центральной и Восточной Европы. В результатах исследования отмечается, что большинство европейских синологов рассматривают ОПОП не в качестве формы помощи КНР другим странам, а как чисто коммерческое начинание, работающее в большинстве случаев исключительно на китайские интересы; выделяются рассматриваемые европейскими авторами предпосылки, проблемы и факторы развития ОПОП, а также восприятие его как проекта, конкурирующего с другими интеграционными инициативами на евразийском пространстве, в первую очередь с Евразийским экономическим союзом. Также выделены рекомендации, которые европейские синологи адресуют политикам своих стран, в первую очередь это более тщательная экспертиза планов участия в ОПОП и проведение четкого разграничения между проектами, в которых выгоду может получить один Китай, и возможными взаимовыгодными инициативами.
This paper presents the analysis of the leading European think tanks’ research on The Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI) proposed by the Chinese government in 2013. We point out the most specific assessments
and main trends within the existing approaches to the mentioned initiative. Since Russia is a direct participant of
this project, the comparison of Russian and foreign sinologists’ views seems to be important for working out a
complex strategy of Russia’s participation in the Chinese project with a clear understanding of China’s policy and
possible advantages for our country. The study has been carried out with the help of comparative analysis and
historical genesis approach, which let us understand and formulate the major points of the European experts’
evaluation. The selection of the think tanks, whose publications have been investigated, is conditioned by the area
of their activity – international and oriental studies. The paper consequently discusses the collective monographs,
reports, brochures and commentaries, issued by the think tanks of Western, Central and Eastern Europe.
The research results show that the majority of European sinologists view The Belt and Road Initiative not
as a form of aid to foreign countries, but as an entirely commercial initiative serving the Chinese interests. The main
reasons for BRI implementation, put forward by the EU experts include energy security, the need for the development
of China’s western regions, the purpose to get better access to natural resources in different regions of the world,
as well as the yuan internationalization. Furthermore, BRI is definitely viewed by the European experts as a project,
competing with other integration initiatives in Eurasia, primarily with the Eurasian Economic Union. Finally, the
paper gives the recommendations, given by the European think tanks to their governments. In particular, the main
idea is to develop the most sophisticated and scrutinized expert evaluation of all BRI projects entered by the
European countries, and to differentiate among China-oriented initiatives and mutually beneficial ones.
We study if the language of administration of a survey has an effect on the answers of bilingual respondents to questions measuring political dimensions. This is done in two steps. In the first we ...test whether the measurement instruments are equivalent for the same individual in two languages. After measurement invariance is established, we test if latent mean differences are significant across the two languages. We also test if the correlation of the same concept in two languages is equal to one or not. Results show evidence for language effects, the latent correlation is below one, although mean differences are not significant. We use data of the LISS migration panel in a within subject design, respondents answer a questionnaire twice first in Dutch and then in their (second) native language among Arabic, English, German, Papiamento and Turkish.
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