Past research suggests that beliefs and emotions operate as partially distinct determinants of political attitudes. In addition, while positive and negative beliefs about a political object are ...bipolar in structure, positive and negative emotions have been demonstrated to be relatively independent. In this past research, beliefs and emotions have been assessed with different measures. Yet current models of survey responding suggest that responses to survey items are often influenced by the manner in which the researcher poses the questions. As such, it is not clear whether the uniqueness of these belief and emotion measures reflects a bona fide difference between two underlying constructs, or merely an artifactual difference induced by differing methods of measurement. In this study, beliefs and emotions are shown to operate as partially unique predictors of candidate evaluation even when employing corresponding methods of measurement. The independence of positive and negative emotion, however, only arises when employing a dichotomous measure. When employing ordinal measures, positive and negative emotions contain a substantial component of bipolarity. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
A statistic—the similarity coefficient—is developed for assessing the property that a set of scale items measures one and only one construct. This statistic is rooted in an explicit measurement model ...and is flexible enough to be used in exploratory scale analyses, even in small samples. Methods for analyzing similarity coefficients are described and illustrated in analyses of Stimson's (1991) policy mood data and Markus' (1990) popular individualism items. The Appendix discusses the statistical properties of similarity coefficients.
The ongoing process of integration in Europe has fundamentally altered the political environment in which the political parties of the EU member states find themselves. European integration has ...produced new political issues, which cannot always be easily accommodated into existing cleavage structures, as the preceding chapters reveal. It has also changed the political opportunity structure – parties may play these new issues up or they may play them down. In this chapter, we analyze why some national political parties have stressed European integration, while others have refrained from doing so.An analysis of the salience of European integration at the party level is important for several reasons. First, it speaks directly to the topic of contestation. A prerequisite for contestation is that political actors are willing to debate an issue – there is a willingness to give the issue a modicum of salience. To what extent do political parties show such willingness?Second, salience is also critical for understanding representation in the EU. Van der Eijk and Franklin (1996; this volume; see also Reif and Schmitt 1980) have observed that European elections are rarely about the scope and nature of integration, even though at the level of the electorate a contestation potential exists. This may be a contributing factor to the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. The lack of European content in European elections may be due to an unwillingness or inability of parties to raise integration above a critical salience threshold.
Major policy changes like the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA) in the United States provide natural experiments to study attitudinal and behavior responses to law. Surprisingly, public evaluations of the ...TRA became increasingly negative after passage, while general support for the tax system became more positive in response to the changes. To explain this puzzle, we propose a dynamic model of taxpayer attitudes that is consistent with the observed loose linkage between logically-connected concepts. We briefly review the political context, objectives and impacts of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and present several studies testing the impact of self-interest, prior beliefs, and social discussion on changes in attitudes and behavior.
Results suggest that the complexity of taxes and difficulty in knowing objective impacts weakens the role of self-interest in attitudinal changes, thereby strengthening the role of prior beliefs and discussion. Evaluations of tax laws are most responsive to more politically-oriented influences.
In the era following the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has been transformed into a multilevel polity in which European issues have become important not only for ...national governments, but also for citizens, political parties, interest groups, and social movements. How is conflict over European integration structured? This is the question that this book addresses.The question of contestation over European integration has two related components. First, how do domestic and European political actors conceive the basic alternatives? Can debates over European integration, despite their complexity, be reduced to a relatively small number of dimensions? Does contestation over European integration resolve itself into a single underlying dimension, or does it involve two or more separate dimensions? Second, how is contestation over European integration related, if at all, to the issues that have characterized political life in Western Europe over the past century or more? In particular, how is contestation over European integration related to the left/right divide concerning the role of the state and equality vs. economic freedom?These topics were first raised by neofunctionalists writing in the early days of European integration. Ernst Haas paid close attention to the domestic sources of opposition and support for European integration in his classic study, The Uniting of Europe, published in 1958. However, most scholars continued to view European integration as the result of foreign policies conducted by government elites acting on a “permissive consensus” (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970).
Abstract
Background
It is unknown whether renal pathology lesions in immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN) correlate with renal outcomes over decades of follow-up.
Methods
In 1130 patients of the ...original Validation Study of the Oxford Classification for IgA Nephropathy (VALIGA) cohort, we studied the relationship between the MEST score (mesangial hypercellularity, M; endocapillary hypercellularity, E; segmental glomerulosclerosis, S; tubular atrophy/interstitial fibrosis, T), crescents (C) and other histological lesions with both a combined renal endpoint 50% estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) loss or kidney failure and the rate of eGFR decline over a follow-up period extending to 35 years median 7 years (interquartile range 4.1–10.8).
Results
In this extended analysis, M1, S1 and T1–T2 lesions as well as the whole MEST score were independently related with the combined endpoint (P < 0.01), and there was no effect modification by age for these associations, suggesting that they may be valid in children and in adults as well. Only T lesions were associated with the rate of eGFR loss in the whole cohort, whereas C showed this association only in patients not treated with immunosuppression. In separate prognostic analyses, the whole set of pathology lesions provided a gain in discrimination power over the clinical variables alone, which was similar at 5 years (+2.0%) and for the whole follow-up (+1.8%). A similar benefit was observed for risk reclassification analyses (+2.7% and +2.4%).
Conclusion
Long-term follow-up analyses of the VALIGA cohort showed that the independent relationship between kidney biopsy findings and the risk of progression towards kidney failure in IgAN remains unchanged across all age groups and decades after the renal biopsy.
Will taxpayers ever like taxes? Scholz, John T.; McGraw, Kathleen M.; Steenbergen, Marco R.
Journal of economic psychology,
12/1992, Letnik:
13, Številka:
4
Journal Article
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