Controversial Political Issues Research Articles

Desenvolvendo capacidades para a comunicação democrática: uma abordagem integrada de ensino baseada na deliberação

This study describes an innovative educational proposal to develop deliberative skills – motivation and ability to explain points of view based on reflected considerations, reciprocal involvement, and more inclusive and respectful communication. Based on theories of deliberative democracy – and expanding citizen participatory initiatives and experiences in the area of education, we propose an approach with (i) peer learning, (ii) playful and performative activities, and (iii) authentic discussions about controversial political issues. Our experiment illustrates how to develop a conceptual understanding of deliberative principles, promote selfreflection, and practise democratic discussions on contentious issues. This study has theoretical and practical implications for programs that seek to promote democratic communication.

Uncivil yet persuasive? Testing the persuasiveness of political incivility and the moderating role of populist attitudes and personality traits

AbstractPolitical incivility—that is, treating political opponents with disrespect—and its consequences are increasingly investigated. This article examines the effect of incivility on message persuasiveness and the moderating role of populist attitudes and personality traits. We test these relationships via original experimental data collected in Switzerland (Study 1, N = 1340) and the United States (Study 2, N = 1820, preregistered). In both studies, participants were asked their opinion about a controversial political issue, presented with persuasive information framed either civilly or uncivilly, and asked again their opinion about the issue to assess whether they changed their mind. Results of a between‐subject design show that incivility does not necessarily undermine the message's persuasiveness, contrary to what we expected. Notably, uncivil messages resonated more with those respondents exhibiting higher levels of populist attitudes (Study 2) and darker personality traits (both studies). Our results further suggest a connection between incivility, message congruence, and particularly cultural context, which warrants further investigations.

The role of emotions in critical thinking about European politics: Confronting anti-immigration rhetoric in the classroom

The rise of anti-immigration arguments within the European Union (EU) poses significant challenges to our democratic existence. As such, the promotion of critical thinking (CT) for the development of a multicultural citizenship education has been underlined. Recent research also shows a close connection between emotions and cognition with positive effects over students’ motivation to engage in CT. Through the analysis of focus groups with 61 Portuguese secondary school students, this research shows that they are critical about democratic political values and practices at the EU level, and highly motivated to discuss controversial political and humanitarian issues that are emotionally engaging. Educational practices that encourage the discussion of controversial topics in the classroom, welcoming students’ emotional engagement with these topics, can increase their resilience to anti-immigration rhetoric.

Corporate policy or CEO activism? Citigroup’s stance on reproductive healthcare in the USA

Research methodology The case and supporting teaching note were developed through the use of secondary sources such as company documents and archives, news articles and academic publications. Case overview/synopsis Jane Fraser, Citigroup CEO and the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank, found herself at a crossroads. Weeks prior to the company’s 2022 annual shareholder meeting, Citigroup announced it would provide reproductive health-care benefits to employees traveling out of state for an abortion. Prompted by legal developments that hinted at the potential for a widespread ban on abortions, the announcement resulted in threats from Republican lawmakers to change course or suffer financial consequences. Through the case, students explore the role of business and corporate leadership in response to controversial political issues, including the potential opportunities and threats. Complexity academic level The case is best-suited for management or other business students at the undergraduate or graduate/MBA level. The learning objectives of the case would fit well within any of the following courses: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/Business and Society; Business Ethics and Decision-Making; and Strategic Management. Instructors should position the case after students have been introduced to the topic of corporate social responsibility, ethical decision-making and/or CEO activism.

Factors influencing the update of beliefs regarding controversial political issues

ABSTRACT Selectively integrating new information contributes to belief polarization and compromises public discourse. To better understand factors that underlie biased belief updating, I conducted three pre-registered studies covering different controversial political issues. The main hypothesis was that cognitively devaluing new information hinders belief updating. Support for this hypothesis was found in only one of the three issues. The only factor that consistently influenced belief updating across issues was the discrepancy between prior beliefs and new information. These results suggest that usually people do use evidence to correct their beliefs, but may refuse to do so if doubts about its generalizability arise.

We’re a good match: Selective political friending on social networking sites

Abstract To date, the role of user behavior in the formation of politically homogeneous online environments (oftentimes called echo chambers) is not fully understood. Building on selective exposure research, we introduce the notion of selective political friending, that is, the preference for political like-mindedness in social affiliations on social networking sites. In a pre-registered laboratory experiment with users of social networking sites in Germany (N = 199), we find that users preferably build connections with those who share their opinions toward controversial political issues. Political like-mindedness outperforms other friending criteria such as popularity or career-related fit with another user. Political friending is pronounced when individuals’ pre-existing opinions are strong. The present study points to the necessity to take the motivational complexity into account when studying phenomena linked to political homogeneity on SNS.

The Side Effect of Political Standing: Corporate Activism and Its Impact on Stock Returns

Taking sides on controversial political issues such as gun control, abortion, immigration, or diversity is increasingly common among large companies. What remains unclear, however, is whether this type of strategy—known as “corporate activism”—has positive or negative effects on these companies. The use of the concept of corporate activism on different variables affecting the companies is relatively recent. This article analyses the effect of corporate activism on the stock market performance of US companies through the analysis of the sample collected. Although there are some recent articles published on this topic, none of them measures the risk associated with the use of this type of strategy. For the development of the research, the well-known Fama–French modelling framework is applied to estimate the differences between companies that participate in corporate activism initiatives versus those that remain outside this strategy. The findings complement previous research showing that companies that use corporate activism have lower market risk than companies that do not engage in this type of strategy. These results can be useful in identifying the advantages and disadvantages of corporate activism initiatives and, in addition, they can also help companies to evaluate the use of corporate activism as a strategic tool and as a driver of social change.

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

Mind over matter: how biased perceptions of political knowledge influence selection and evaluation of political YouTube channels

PurposeIn the face of increasing political polarization worldwide, this study explores whether people create biased perceptions of political knowledge and how this affects their selection and evaluation of political content on YouTube.Design/methodology/approachFor this study, an online experiment was conducted with 441 panels of South Korean respondents. In the first phase, participants answered 10 questions designed to capture their level of objective political knowledge, and for each question, they indicated whether they had responded to that question correctly as a means of measuring their subjective political knowledge. In the second phase, two types of YouTube thumbnails were presented to represent progressive and conservative claims on two controversial political issues, and participants rated and selected the content they would like to see.FindingsParticipants with low political knowledge perceived their knowledge as more than it really was. In contrast, participants with high political knowledge perceived their political knowledge as less than it really was. This biased perception of political knowledge influences respondents' choice and evaluation of political YouTube channel videos.Originality/valueAt a time when political polarization is increasing around the world, this study sought to explore how perceptions of political knowledge differ from actual political knowledge by applying the Dunning-Kruger effect. The authors also used political YouTube channels, whose role in forming public opinion and political influence is rapidly growing, to study the behavior and attitudes of a group of Korean respondents in the media according to their actual and perceived level of political literacy.

Ideological polarization during a pandemic: Tracking the alignment of attitudes toward COVID containment policies and left-right self-identification.

Research on opinion polarization has focused on growing divides in positions toward political issues between the more politically and ideologically engaged parts of the population. However, it is fundamentally difficult to track the alignment process between ideological group identity and issue positions because classically controversial political issues are already strongly associated with ideological or partisan identity. This study uses the COVID pandemic as an unique opportunity to investigate polarizing trends in the population. Pandemic management policies were not a politicized issue before COVID, but became strongly contested after governments all across the world initiated policies to contain the pandemic. We use data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) to track trajectories in attitudes toward current COVID measures over the course of more than a year of the pandemic. We differentiate individuals by their ideological self-identity as measured by left-right self-placement. Results suggest that all ideological groups viewed the containment measures as similarly appropriate in the very beginning. However, already in the first weeks, individuals who identify as right-wing increasingly viewed the policies as too extreme, whereas centrists and left-wing identifiers viewed them as appropriate. Opinion differences between left-wing and right-wing identifiers solidified over the course of the pandemic, while centrists fluctuated between left and right self-identifiers. However, at the end of our observation period, there are signs of convergence between all groups. We discuss these findings from the perspective of theoretical models of opinion polarization and suggest that polarization dynamics are likely to stop when the political context (salience of certain issues and concrete material threats) changes.

“Untouched by your Do-gooder Propaganda”

The role of the media in polarizing the debate on immigration has been subject to a growing amount of research; yet little is known about whether and how online comment sections related to news articles on immigration reshape the journalistic narrative. This study examines readers’ reactions to the media coverage by employing a quantitative content analysis of over 6,000 users’ comments responding to 128 online news articles on immigration. It concludes that generally the discussants’ perspective does not differ significantly from the medium’s framing of the issue with one important exception: the human rights frame accentuated by the medium is strictly refused by the discussants. The discussants also bring the economic and cultural aspects of immigration into the debate. The article thus contributes to a more general understanding of the role the users’ discussions play in shaping the debates on controversial political issues.

Interest over knowledge: A Jewish-Arab comparison of teachers’ willingness to conduct CPI discussions

ABSTRACT In this endeavour to examine teachers’ willingness to discuss controversial political issues in class, we focused on four variables that received little attention so far: teachers’ vested interest, knowledge, the topic of discussion, and teachers’ ethnicity. 1130 teachers in Israel, 832 Jewish and 298 Arab, answered an online questionnaire that focused on three scenarios of sustainability, multiculturalism, and #MeToo. The issue of multiculturalism was deemed as the most controversial by both populations, followed by #MeToo and sustainability. Teachers’ vested interest was the best predictor of willingness to engage in CPI discussions in all populations, all topics, and in general, while knowledge was found to be a poor predictor. Differences between Arab and Jewish teachers were found in the other predictors: general attitudes towards CPI were significant among Jewish teachers, while attitude towards disclosure was significant among Arab teachers. We argue that this is a reflection of power relations in Israel: Arab teachers have to navigate in a complex situation as a minority, and to evaluate pragmatic considerations carefully on each topic. We encourage teachers and teacher trainers to re-consider the emphasis on knowledge in their role, and for teachers to reflect upon their motivations to engage in discussions.

Political Campaigns on Social Media and Users’ Behavior in the Context of Spiral of Silence

The current research was conducted to study Political Campaigns on social media (Facebook) and the spiral of silence effect on youth. The objectives of the study were to explore how youth use Facebook to determine the climate of opinions related to politics; to examine the implementation of the spiral of silence theory on the issue of politicians’ accountability process in the current regime in Pakistan. The purposive sampling technique was use for the collection of samples from the University of Sargodha and comprised of (N= 300) youth participants,including (n=150) males and (n=150) females. A questionnaire was Well-designed for assessing opinion climate and inclination to share their views on controversial political issues. Results of the current study revealed that individuals are more likely to speak out on controversial topics through Facebook than other communication channel. Findings indicate that social media plays an important role in setting up the direction of the public opinion climate beside the group of close friends, which also important role in the assessment of opinion climate on controversial political issues,including politicians’ accountability process. In Pakistan, political polarization is on the rise. It this context spiral of silence for deviant opinion is evident from the findings.

Rural/Urban Differences: Persistence or Decline☆

A long line of sociological research has found that rural residents tend to be more conservative than urban residents in the U.S. on a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. Two primary arguments have been utilized to understand why these differences exist. First, rural/urban differences were thought to be largely a function of rural isolation and differences in types of employment. As rural areas have become less isolated and employment differences have diminished, rural/urban differences are thought to diminish as well. Any remaining rural/urban differences can largely be explained by social class variations. Second, differing interaction patterns in rural areas resulting from fewer people and lower population densities continue to make rural areas unique. This manuscript found strong support for the second argument that rural areas remain unique. Even when statistically controlling for race/ethnicity and social class, rural residents were much more likely to vote for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, were more likely to choose the conservative side on six controversial political issues than urban residents. These findings have important implications in understanding our deeply divided nation. The need for quality social science research to understand modern rural America is apparent.

Classroom Controversy in the Midst of Political Polarization: The Essential Role of School Administrators

It has been well established that controversial issue discussions are an integral component to a high-quality civic education. However, as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, teachers have become more hesitant to engage students in discussions of controversial political issues. Two decades worth of literature on teaching controversial issues has shown that a primary factor in determining whether teachers will engage students in controversial issue discussions is whether they feel supported by their school administrators. Yet, school leaders have rarely been the focus of civic education efforts. This article seeks to bridge that divide by first providing a review of the research showing the importance of engaging with controversy in K-12 education and the influence of school leadership on that process and then ending with implications for school administrators who wish to support teachers who broach controversy in their classrooms.

Relational Becoming: Considering Classroom Dialogue in Ethico-ontological Terms

This paper draws on Bakhtin’s ethico-ontological vision of dialogue to theorize “relational becoming” on a micro-level. To do so, it introduces three “ethical dimensions of dialogue” (responsibility, responsiveness, and capacitation) and develops the interrelated concepts of addressability and presencing as analytical lenses. Drawing on transcript data from a series of high school and college students’ discussions about controversial political issues, the analysis examines how interlocutors made themselves addressable, addressed each other, and were “presenced” in dialogue. It also discusses the ethico-ontological potential of these interactions, identifying a problematic tendency among interlocutors to not “show up” in verbal discourse in a variety of ways, including, in particular, reliance on abstractions.

“Stop Giving Us the Negatives of the Other Side’s Aims”: The EU Referendum Through Letters to the Editor

ABSTRACT The referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU gave citizens the final say on one of the most controversial political issues in modern Britain, crossing social classes, traditional political cleavages, and political parties. In an attempt to examine how the public made sense of Brexit and its potential consequences, we analyse all letters to the editor discussing Brexit or the campaign published in British daily national newspapers in the two months before the referendum. Through a content analysis of 1419 letters, we examine the main themes, capturing the key concerns, criticisms, and political aspirations expressed by citizens. Leave messages largely dominated in Leave newspapers, whereas a wider range of voices were represented in Remain titles. Leave voices, therefore, resonated more strongly throughout the letters. Our analysis points to changing forms of public debate: in a debate dominated by negativity, readers mainly argued against leaving or remaining in the EU, as opposed to arguing in favour of these options, to the extent that some readers expressed frustration with the negativity of the campaigns, and of media coverage. Ultimately, this study tentatively explores whether these fora constituted arenas for debate, or off-line echo-chambers.

Pragmatics of Eponyms in Political Discourse (On the Material of the Speeches of Politicians)

Eponyms are complicated, unique constructs named after people and places used in special-professional areas of science. One of those specific areas is politics/political discourse. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the political discourse of politicians (Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin) in the period from 2012 to 2017 to reveal the pragmatic potential and skillful use of eponyms used by the latter when they ran for presidency as a means of influence. Results show that eponyms are becoming powerful language tools of political discourse. At each stage of work, various methods were used to complete the analysis. Such methods include the diachronic method, definition analysis (descriptive method), and discourse analysis. Using different methods, especially discourse analysis, considerably facilitated the research process, enabling the identification of the pragmatic effects of eponyms. The main reasons that eponyms frequently appear in political discourse are the existence of new political eras, modern political events, and controversial political issues.

Othello as a play-within-the-film in post-independence Indian cinema1

This article aims to explore the appropriation of Othello as a play-within-the-film in three Indian movies: Anbu (), Saptapadi () and Ratha Thilagam (). Anbu and Ratha Thilagam are Tamil movies, whereas Saptapadi is an example of Bengali cinema. In the three films, the same scene from Shakespeare’s Othello – the murder scene – is performed as part of college theatricals. Although the films immediately associate Shakespeare with education, their appropriation of Othello goes beyond a college performance and provides insight on the main plot. The performance of the murder scene foreshadows the rest of the plot (Anbu and Ratha Thilagam), and explores racial dynamics and miscegenation in relation to the protagonists in Saptapadi. Anbu, Saptapadi and Ratha Thilagam introduce variations to the plot to add new layers of meaning. As the three films are set in postcolonial India, the use of the Shakespearean play inevitably becomes a site of negotiation between colonizers and colonized; the three films negotiate changing controversial political issues across the time period to which they all belong. Anbu, Saptapadi and Ratha Thilagam generate then a new understanding of Othello, which becomes paramount to trace the evolution of Shakespeare in postcolonial India.

Minority-Group Teachers‘ Different Attitudes toward Controversial Political Issues in Israel (Diferencias actitudinales de los docentes de grupos minoritarios en relación con las controversias políticas en Israel)

ABSTRACT The importance of teachers holding discussions of controversial political issues (CPI) in class is commonly acknowledged, but teachers vary in their willingness to engage in such discussions. The aim of this study is to compare different groups of minority teachers with regards to their attitudes towards CPI. Questionnaires were obtained from 282 teachers belonging to five different minority-teacher groups in Israel. Their attitudes towards conducting discussions of CPI were examined in relation to self-efficacy, acculturation attitudes and demographic variables. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that teachers’ pluralistic acculturation attitude was the most important predictor of attitudes towards CPI, followed by teachers’ social self-efficacy. Arab teachers scored lower than all other groups on organizational self-efficacy and exhibited the most integrationist approaches, while teachers of low-incidence ethnic origin exhibited the most assimilationist approach. The research draws attention to the diversity of diversity — that different minority groups approach the issue of CPI depending on the nature of their relationship with the majority group, the size and political power of the minority group and its acculturation approach.