Leader Cults and Secularized Faiths:Religiosity, the Choice of Values and Political Preferences in Hungary

Political preferences of public employees differ from those of workers in the private sector. The former are more likely to vote for left-wing parties and orient themselves ideologically towards the left. This political cleavage can be understood as the result of occupational incentives, or alternatively, as ideological self-selection whereby individuals favoring government solutions seek employment in the public sector. We test the selection hypothesis by estimating the effects of public versus private occupational sector on political preferences before and after retirement. The data are from the Norwegian Election Surveys and cover nine national elections between 1977 and 2009. The research design addresses a series of cross-sectional data and the key challenge of endogenous retirement is handled with instrumental variables. Party choice, ideological orientation, and public spending preferences are shown to change following retirement, and former private and public employees converge. The results reject selection based on ‘hard-wired’ political preferences.

People make history, but not under freely chosen conditions, and political parties are more than the passive reflection of collective demands and preferences originating in the prepolitical sphere of social relations. Politicians actively participate in shaping people's political views (“issue leadership”). Nevertheless, it is misleading to attribute the power to create political consciousness and action exclusively to the realm of politics. Both sociological determinism and political voluntarism shun a more complex reconstruction of the relationship between social structure and politics. In this book I argue that politicians' strategies in intra- and interparty competition primarily determine their parties' electoral fortunes. Yet social and institutional settings structure the opportunities politicians may seize upon in the competitive process. Experiences in markets, work organization, and the sphere of consumption profoundly affect citizens' political aspirations and preferences. In order to promote their objectives, politicians must recognize such preferences. Is is only in the long run that public policies are likely to alter the social structure that affects citizens' everyday experiences and thus to induce a change in the process of popular preference formation itself. In this chapter I first present a sociological theory of political preference formation in advanced capitalist democracies. My argument proceeds in three steps. I begin by delineating the range of preferences people may rank order in their most basic political choices. Next, I examine the social experiences that affect citizens' predispositions over the choice of fundamental preferences. Finally, I move from the micro-level of individual experiences to the macro-level of group formation and present hypotheses about the constitution of collective ideological currents that are centered around socioeconomic categories in contemporary society.

Socioeconomic Status, Political Preference and Political Choice in Korea: Evidence from the 19th General Election

This study investigates the question of Internet mode effects in online election studies. Specifically, we examine whether Web versions of election studies can produce more accurate or truthful estimates of vote choice and party preference than their more conventional offline counterparts. Existing studies have indicated that a Web environment may lower the social context of the survey, promoting greater openness from respondents in answers on political preference items. We examine this question using data from the 2001 Australian Election Study (AES) in which a Web and mail survey were conducted. Crucially, both online and offline questionnaires relied on self-completion, a standardization lacking in previous studies and that allowed for a more controlled test of mode effects. The results reveal no significant differences in the expression of political preferences across the two surveys after controlling for key demographic and attitudinal factors. Significant differences do emerge, however, in vote choice depending on whether an individual had Internet access. We conclude that while Web mode per se does not have any notable effect on respondents' answers to political choice questions, until the issue of universal access is resolved, its substitution for existing methods would be undesirable as this would exclude an important and politically distinctive subset of the population.

New technologies have been a key driver of labor market change in recent decades. There are renewed concerns that technological developments in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence will destroy jobs and create political upheaval. This article reviews the vibrant debate about the economic consequences of recent technological change and then discusses research about how digitalization may affect political participation, vote choice, and policy preferences. It is increasingly well established that routine workers have been the main losers of recent technological change and disproportionately support populist parties. However, at the same time, digitalization also creates a large group of economic winners who support the political status quo. The mechanisms connecting technology-related workplace risks to political behavior and policy demands are less well understood. Voters may fail to fully comprehend the relative importance of different causes of structural economic change and misattribute blame to other factors. We conclude with a list of pressing research questions.

Studies in individualism/collectivism (Triandis, McCusker & Hui, 1990) have revealed a considerable cultural connotation of the phenomena. The aim of our investigation was to develop a cross-culturally equivalent psychometric instrument for measuring individualistic versus collectivistic orientation on the basis of the shared representation of individualism/collectivism among Bulgarians. By applying the psychosemantic methodology we extracted seven concepts which form the individualism/collectivism dimension. The proposed instrument, labelled Bulgarian individualism/collectivism (BIC) scale, consists of a preference choice between the two words in every possible pair of the seven words. Validation studies included investigation of the relationship between the BIC scale and value orientation, between the BIC scale and general views of society and political preferences, and between the BIC scale and behavioural intentions such as the intention to start a business of one's own, the intention to emigrate, and the choice of professional vocation. Results were compared with the relationship of these variables to other measures of individualism/collectivism (scales of Triandis and Brown). The results suggest that the BIC scale reveals a more global orientation, whereas the other scales are concerned with specific everyday behaviours. A comparison between Bulgarian and American samples revealed some specificity in the Bulgarian social representation of individualism/collectivism, which can be explained by the extremely collectivistic norms of the former communist society in Bulgaria.

Reaching voters in presidential elections frequently involves using identity politics. On the other side, first-time voters might serve as prospective targets for gaining supporters. This study aims to investigate the link between first-time voters' choices for presidential candidates and the social identities (faith, gender, and ethnicity) of presidential candidates. Social Identity Theory is the leading theory that explains the relationship between social identity and political choice preferences. This quantitative survey study looks at the relationship between political candidates' social identities and the preferences of first-time voters in Indonesia in 2023. The study's findings indicate a connection between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates' social identities and the decisions made by first-time voters. For instance, the political choices of first-time voters are directly correlated with their gender, notably whether they will accept or approve of female presidents and vice presidents. The study's findings indicate that first-time voters are open to electing a female president. An interesting finding to highlight is how new voters tend to be open to the choice of president and vice president of other religions. Most first-time voters (respondents) accept presidents and vice presidents from minority religions such as Catholics, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, and local religions.

Growing global debates surrounding parental school choice underscore the relevance of school place allocation. While there is much research on school choice, the enactment of such allocation policy is rarely analysed. Responding to this research gap, this article investigates how local politicians in Berlin put public primary school place allocation into practice. Building on approaches of policy enactment and policy field analysis, this article examines the ‘doing’ of Berlin primary school place allocation with the concurrency of catchment areas and parental school choice. Methodologically, this article draws on semi-structured interviews with three inner-city district school department heads in Berlin. Using qualitative content analysis, their political objectives, scope and strategies are analysed. The findings demonstrate that local politicians can interpret the allocation process in line with their political objectives. Consequently, there is surprising variation between the districts’ enactment of primary school place allocation policy. Policymakers’ political preferences for either school choice or social diversity are influential, as is the local context (e.g. school place shortages). The study highlights the importance of local actors and identifies three political strategies used to influence school place allocation, which might inform local politicians’ strategies elsewhere.

A multidimensional scaling analysis is presented for replicated layouts of pairwise choice responses. In most applications the replicates will represent individuals who respond to all pairs in some set of objects. The replicates and the objects are scaled in a joint space by means of an inner product model which assigns weights to each of the dimensions of the space. Least squares estimates of the replicates' and objects' coordinates, and of unscalability parameters, are obtained through a manipulation of the error sum of squares for fitting the model. The solution involves the reduction of a three-way least squares problem to two subproblems, one trivial and the other solvable by classical least squares matrix factorization. The analytic technique is illustrated with political preference data and is contrasted with multidimensional unfolding in the domain of preferential choice.

ABSTRACTA multidimensional scaling analysis is presented for replicated layouts of pairwise choice responses. In most applications the replicates will represent individuals who respond to all pairs in some set of objects. The replicates and the objects are scaled in a joint space by means of a linear model which assigns weights to each of the dimensions of the space. Least squares estimates of the replicates' and objects' coordinates, and of unscalability parameters, are obtained through a manipulation of the error sum of squares for fitting the linear model. The solution involves the reduction of a three‐way least squares problem to two subproblems, one trivial and the other solvable by classical least squares matrix factorization. The analytic technique is illustrated with political preference data and is contrasted with multidimensional unfolding in the domain of preferential choice.