white allyship means a transfer of power levine-rasky, cynthia; ghaffar-siddiqui, sabreena
Contexts (Berkeley, Calif.),
11/2020, Letnik:
19, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
The conspicuous shift in public opinion on issues of race, branded in 2019 as the “Great Awokening,” has reached an all-time high with protests in over 140 U.S. cities after Floyd’s murder of May 25, ...2020. But will the current resurgence in protests lead to enduring change?
Political Understanding Lepoutre, Maxime
British journal of political science,
04/2023, Letnik:
53, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy – and especially participatory ideals of democracy. ...I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one's model of political reality is compatible with – and indeed can positively enhance – one's understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political falsehoods does not necessarily establish that they lack political understanding. I then address three worries: that voters cannot generally engage in such political modelling; that political modelling obscures facts that are crucial to political understanding; and that successful political modelling would require knowing that one's model contains falsehoods. My responses reveal how, going forward, we should measure political ignorance, and they highlight the standing importance of participatory democracy.
In Exploring NORDIC COOL in Literary History twenty-one scholars in collaboration question the seemingly natural fit between "Nordic" and "Cool" by investigating its variegated trajectories through ...literary history, from medieval legends to digital poetry.
A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis ...that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people's worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people's judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects' posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.
This study aims to investigate the relationships between citizens’ populist attitudes, perceptions of public opinion, and perceptions of mainstream news media. Relying on social identity theory as an ...explanatory framework, this article argues that populist citizens assume that public opinion is congruent with their own opinion and that mainstream media reporting is hostile toward their own views. To date, only anecdotal evidence suggests that both assumptions are true. The relationships are investigated in a cross-sectional survey with samples drawn from four Western European countries (N = 3,354). Multigroup regression analysis supports our hypotheses: False consensus and hostile media perceptions can clearly be linked to populist attitudes in all four regions under investigation. Moreover, our findings show a gap between hostile media perceptions and congruent public opinion perceptions, which increases with increasing populist attitudes to the point that the persuasive press inference mechanism is annulled.
PDF
