Ideological Affiliation Research Articles

Was Margaret Thatcher a conservative? Thatcherism and society

ABSTRACT There is a long-lasting political debate on Thatcher’s ideological affiliations. Was Thatcherism more connected to conservative or old (neo)liberal ideas? While some commentators have highlighted Thatcher’s individualism, free-market ideas and radicalism as proof that her ideology was undoubtedly neoliberal, others have emphasized her moral and authoritarian views as typically conservative. The present article analyses Thatcherite views on human nature, civil society institutions and tradition, as well as radical Thatcherite approaches to traditional British institutions. Through a qualitative approach that focuses on Thatcher’s speeches and interviews but which also pays attention to the material produced by her allies, and governmental plans and policies, the article concludes that while Thatcherism resonated with new and old conservative arguments on these issues and held a broad conservative worldview, it also followed a rare but not unconservative radical approach to what its proponents believed were ‘corrupted’ institutions.

Neoplatonizm i chrześcijaństwo w twórczości Synezjusza z Cyreny (370–414) – przyczynek do zagadnienia

The article presents creative personality of Synesius of Cyrene (4th/5th century CE) against the background of ideological tendences of late antiquity. It aims to answer two questions: First, whether the term Christian Neoplatonism, rightly criticized in relation to patristic writers, reflect the nature of Synesius' outlook, and second, whether his work significantly complements our image of late antiquity in its philosophical aspect, viewed as a clash between Christian and classical, mainly Neoplatonic, philosophic paradigms. Synesius’ rich correspondence, consisting of one hundred and fifty-six letters, provides the main source for the present analysis; yet, his other works (mainly the Hymns) and biographical details are also drawn upon to attain a wholistic perspective. This broader selection of sources is necessary because a reading of his works leaves some doubt as to his ideological affiliation. On the one hand, he was a disciple of Hypatia, and, on the other, a friend of St. Theophi lus of Alexandria, who called him to the post of bishop. These and other ambiguities in the life and outlook of Synesius make him an interesting object of analysis.

RICo: Reddit ideological communities

The main objective of our research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between language usage within different communities and delineating the ideological narratives. We focus specifically on utilizing Natural Language Processing techniques to identify underlying narratives in the coded or suggestive language employed by non-normative communities associated with targeted violence. Earlier studies addressed the detection of ideological affiliation through surveys, user studies, and a limited number based on the content of text articles, which still require label curation. Previous work addressed label curation by using ideological subreddits (r/Liberal and r/Conservative for Liberal and Conservative classes) to label the articles shared on those subreddits according to their prescribed ideologies, albeit with a limited dataset.Building upon previous work, we use subreddit ideologies to categorize shared articles. In addition to the conservative and liberal classes, we introduce a new category called “Restricted” which encompasses text articles shared in subreddits that are restricted, privatized, or banned, such as r/TheDonald. The “Restricted” class encompasses posts tied to violence, regardless of conservative or liberal affiliations. Additionally, we augment our dataset with text articles from self-identified subreddits like r/progressive and r/askaconservative for the liberal and conservative classes, respectively. This results in an expanded dataset of 377,144 text articles, consisting of 72,488 liberal, 79,573 conservative, and 225,083 restricted class articles. Our goal is to analyze language variances in different ideological communities, investigate keyword relevance in labeling article orientations, especially in unseen cases (922,522 text articles), and delve into radicalized communities, conducting thorough analysis and interpretation of the results.

Восточные элементы в российской культуре

The article examines the influence of oriental elements of culture on the development of the Russian cultural tradition. The aim of the work is to show the importance of elements of the culture of Oriental peoples in the formation of various aspects of the culture of Russian civilization and to identify its specific oriental features and characteristics. The relevance of the research is determined by changes in the current geopolitical situation of the Russian Federation, the rupture of many historical, cultural and ideological ties with Western countries a pivot towards the East, and Russia’s transition to more productive cooperation and close interaction with Eastern countries in the Asian and South Pacific regions in various spheres of public, governmental, and socio-cultural life: politics, economics and socio-cultural relations. The scientific novelty is defined by the authors’ examination of the objective characteristics of Eastern elements of culture and their comprehensive analysis of the degree of their impact on Russian cultural tradition. Moreover, in solving this research task, they proceed from the self-sufficiency of the considered Eastern elements of Russian culture without tracing their connection to other forms of cultural development of human civilization. The authors have shown that Eastern elements have played a significant role in the development of the creative, human potential of Russian culture, and the prolonged silence about this fact, focusing exclusively towards Westernized cultural patterns, violated the principle of objectivity accepted in Russian science. Revisiting this principle concerning Eastern culture promises to aid impartial researchers in objectively scrutinizing cultural processes, spanning both historical retrospectives and modern historical period. In conclusion, the research highlights the pivotal role of oriental cultural elements in shaping Russian civilization, underscoring the necessity for a balanced and objective approach to cultural analysis. Embracing this principle will facilitate a more nuanced understanding of Russian cultural development, bridging historical and modern perspectives.

Extremists of a feather flock together? Community structures, transitivity, and patterns of homophily in the US Islamist co-offending network.

Prior research suggests that members of terrorist groups prioritize forming network ties based on trust to improve their organizational and operational security. The homophily principle, which postulates that individuals tend to form relationships based on shared characteristics, can be a key mechanism through which people identify trustworthy associates. Next to homophily, the mechanism of establishing interconnected relationships through transitivity is also well-known to serve this purpose and shape community structures in social networks. We analyze the community structures of the Islamist co-offending network in the United States, which is highly violent, to assess whether homophily and transitivity determine which extremists form co-offending ties. We rely on a new database on the individual attributes and the co-offending relationships of 494 Islamist offenders radicalized in the United States between 1993 and 2020. Using community detection algorithms, we show that the US Islamist co-offending network is highly clustered, modular, and includes many small but only a few large communities. Furthermore, results from exponential random graph modeling show that transitive relationships as well as spatial proximity, ideological affiliation, and shared socio-cultural characteristics drive co-offending among US Islamist extremists. Overall, these findings demonstrate that the processes of homophily and transitivity shape violent social networks.

The myth of lesbian generation loss: Finding intergenerational solidarities in digital sexual selfhood projects

The contemporary preoccupation with lesbian’s potential obsolescence relies on implicit assumptions about the (ir)relevance of lesbian feminism to younger generations. In this article, we use the metaphor of “generation loss” to conceptualize the Gordian knot of affective and ideological ties that lie beneath this preoccupation. Contrary to the narrative of generation loss, we show how young people have begun to take up and share lesbian feminist concepts on social media platforms like TikTok. They do so in the name of resituating lesbian as a political project rather than an exclusionary demographic category. Instead of painting over lesbian feminism with the broad brushes of whiteness and trans-exclusivity, some young lesbians seek out other voices in the archive to debate whether and how this history might be recuperated as a challenge to white, cisnormative heteropatriarchy. Far from finding irrelevance, many revisiting lesbian feminism are excited to discover theories of gender, sexuality, and power that can be adapted to relocate lesbian to more durable and less essentializing territory than its current, narrowly biopolitical home. This presents a crucial opportunity to build bridges across generations and collectively resist the cooptation of lesbians as agents of white supremacist and transphobic political agendas.

Ideological Contestation in Social Media: a Content Analysis of the Promotion of Islamic Education Institutions

Faith-based schools utilize social media as a new public space to promote their Islamic identity. This research focuses on the competition between three faith-based schools in Indonesia, as depicted through their digital content on social media platforms. This research observes the social media accounts of educational institutions that are the object of research. This study uses a qualitative method. The research design follows the qualitative content analysis framework developed by Bengtsson. Data collection was obtained from in-depth interviews and documentation. The analysis technique used is content analysis. The validity of the data was triangulated. This research has significant findings that the three Islamic educational institutions investigated proactively compete to articulate the meaning of Islam according to their ideological affiliation, including concepts, content, activities and identity of educational approaches. The implications of this competition are significant because it encourages healthy competition in promoting educational ideology and categorizing Islam based on ideological affiliation. In addition, this research opens the way to a deeper understanding of the diversity of Islamic interpretations and practices in society.

TOXICITY AGAINST BRAZILIAN WOMEN DEPUTIES ON TWITTER: A CATEGORIZATION OF DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE

This paper discussed categories of violent discourses and toxicity against Brazilian women deputies on Twitter through a mixed-methods (corpus linguistics approach/discursive analysis) on a dataset of 1400 tweets. Results suggest that toxic discourse in this case is largely based on violence connected to women's behavior and abilities in the political realm, rather than ideology or propositions. Ideological affiliation, while may influence the amount of toxicity created, doesn’t influence the types of toxic discourses.

Civilizing social media: The effect of geolocation on the incivility of news comments

Many social media affordances can affect the quality of online discourse, but such an effect remains understudied for the visibility of geolocation, which is available on most social media platforms. We looked at the event in which Weibo started to display users’ IP locations on 28 April 2022, which was supposed to reduce incivility as the deindividuation hypothesis predicted. Leveraging a natural experiment, we examined the effect of IP location visibility, with special attention to COVID-19-related news posts and location-based, uncivil name-calling. We found that displaying the IP location in the comments section increased location-based incivility, as geolocation can function as an effective cue that signals ideological affiliation and fuels conflicts between users holding different political positions on the Chinese Internet. Meanwhile, we characterized a moderating effect of audience size on this decivilizing effect. Our study suggests that diverse social media affordances can fuel group identification and facilitate intergroup behaviors.

MENA Region Trends Revisited

Introduction. The following article analyzes key development trends of the contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The authors provide a critical retrospective review of conclusions made in their previous works dedicated to the century-long development trends in the Middle East and neo-modernity as a new status of socio-political reality. Results. In the first part of the article, they detect a shift in some megatrends of global development that occurred as a result of the world order transformation in the 2020s. The authors conclude that such megatrends as universalization of political systems, Western-type modernization and globalization are becoming outdated. At the same time, an intensification of the anti-colonial discourse in the world politics and a revision of the colonialism phenomenon are in evidence. The second part of the article demonstrates how these trends and notions directly manifest themselves in the MENA region, impacing the specifics of political processes and complexity of socio-political systems and institutes, reinforcing the ideas of country-based nationalism, changing the nature of regional unity and strengthening the centrifugal tendencies in the regional development. In the third part, the authors point out that all these processes provide an endurance test of some sort for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a unified region that emerged in the colonial era. Discussion and Conclusion. The weakening of ideological ties within the region, rise of country-based nationalism, economic and political differentiation of the region’s states, increasing division of the subregions call the future of the Middle Eastern unity into doubt. At the same time, a growing post-colonialism trend might theoretically become a new integrative basis for emerging values and ideas. In this context, the authors designate such development trends in the region that are considered by them most relevant and sustainable in mid-term perspective.

The Communist Closet: Secrecy, Sexuality, and Ideology in the Cuban Cold War

Why were homosexuality and Communism so closely knit together in the discursive logic of the Cold War? This article explores the convergence of sexuality and ideology in scholarly and popular conversations about the Cuban Revolution. These included a transnational panic over the purported links between homosexuality and Communism, psychiatric efforts in Cuba and the Cuban exile community to link homosexuality to suspicious ideological affiliations (Communist or anti-Communist), and a shared concern with rooting out covert political threats on both sides of the Florida Straits. Situating Cuba in hemispheric perspective, I propose that secrecy itself was at issue in the widespread and conjoined preoccupation with ideology and sexuality. This turned the closet, on the one hand, and coming out, on the other, into all-purpose, politically charged signifiers in Cuban culture writ large.

The Causes of the Sino-Soviet Split: Russian and Western Scholarship Perspectives

The deterioration of political and ideological ties between China and the Soviet Union, known as the Sino-Soviet split, is considered a pivotal moment in Cold War history. Extensive scholarly study has been conducted over the past few decades to uncover its causes, but researchers have yet to reach a consensus. This study explores the views of Russian and Western academics regarding the origins of the communist superpowers’ split, with an emphasis on the part played by ideological, geopolitical, and subjective factors. The research findings indicate that the breakdown of their relationship cannot be attributed to a singular cause; rather, a multitude of factors, such as ideological differences, geopolitical interests, and interpersonal dynamics, interacted in a complex manner. Authors from both Russia and the West offer insightful accounts of the causes of the conflict. By working in concert, their differing perspectives create a thorough, inclusive and reliable narrative of how the division came about. In light of ongoing tensions between the US, China and Russia, a comprehensive understanding of the causes of the Sino-Soviet split provides valuable insights into the current state of international politics.

Why Do Politicians Not Act Upon Citizens’ Deliberations? Evidence From Iceland

Politicians are expressing increasing support for deliberative practices around the world. However, knowledge about their actions beyond expressing support is scarce. To address this gap in the literature, this article aims to explain why politicians do not pick up the results arising from deliberative practices and integrate them into their policies. Our analysis focuses on the 2019 deliberation in Iceland as the most likely case in which we would expect such a process to occur. We use original data from 25 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021 with Icelandic MPs elected at the national level, which also cover all the party leaders of the eight parliamentary parties in the 2017–2021 term in office. The reflexive thematic analysis finds that, irrespective of their ideological affiliation, politicians are critical of deliberative practices both in procedural and substantive terms. They display a strong belief that political representation achieved through elections must be the rule of the democratic game. As such, deliberation is considered redundant since citizens already have many ways to participate in representative democracy.

Populism and civil–military relations

ABSTRACT Scholars largely view populism as a democratic game and study it through the lens of civilian mass politics, thereby, dismissing the role of the military elite. Nevertheless, populist mobilization may introduce new dynamics into the political landscape of countries that have a long history of politically active militaries. This article scrutinizes the degree and type of civilian control of the military in populist settings. It primarily contends that incumbent populists tend to limit the veto power of the military. However, civilianization in populist regimes does not occur through a consistent reform agenda geared towards democratic governance of the security sector. Populists instead seek to gain personal control of the military through individual, communal, or ideological ties to civilian leadership. The personal model does not aim to hinder the military’s political influence. On the contrary, it politicizes the army and seeks to use it under civilian authority towards shared goals. However, populism operates on shaky ground due to the institutional decay it causes.

Теоретико-методологические основания изучения современных антиутопий: политические идеологии как социальные альтернативы в художественной литературе

The article presents an approach to the analysis of modern dystopia as a space for the representation and construction of political ideology. The modern dystopia is understood in the work as a direction of creative thought, which is a cultural example of understanding the ideological and value foundations of modernity, the historical consciousness of society and citizens, as well as possible scenarios for further development and goal setting in the future. Attention is focused on the fact that modern dystopia has a number of its own features and distinctive features, and can also be implemented in the form of “dystopia” or “heterotopia”. In this study, a classification of dystopian writers is formed according to generational characteristics (“late Soviet” – “perestroika” writers of the 2000s and 2010s), as well as according to ideological affiliation (“left Slavophiles” and “right Westerners”). It is also proposed to study the works of writers and their continuation in the form of film adaptation and socio-political discourse using three levels of analysis: the macro level (enclave-conglomerative theory by A. D. Bogaturov and A. V. Vinogradov, game theory by J. Huizinga, postmodernism); mesolevel (critical discourse analysis, content analysis); micro level (semiotic analysis). As a result, three versions of a work of art are formed.: the author’s intention; interpretation of the reader; images, ideas and symbols of the work, which have become an element of mass culture, which have been formed as a result of averaging ideas, values and meanings, supported by the majority and become popular. Thus, with the help of the formed classification of writers, understanding of modern dystopia and the presented scientific methods, it is proposed to analyze this phenomenon in the context of the formation and representation of political ideology.

The Piety and Aspirations of Education Muslim Middle Class in Yogyakarta

Elite Islamic schools have recently become the alternative of the urban Muslim middle class. Its presence has raised alternative educational options in addition to madrassa and pesantren. As a student city and a fertile ground for investment, Yogyakarta is an excellent place for private schools to establish to accommodate the middle ups’, including Muslim families, needs. Using a qualitative approach, the study obtains data from both literature and field work and was held in Yogyakarta from March 2017 to December 2018. This research shows that the idea of elite Islamic schools in Yogyakarta was backgrounded by the eagerness to provide qualified Islamic education without neglecting the government’s policy on it. Characterized as a non-partisan Islamic school in Yogyakarta, Al-Azhar is a modern Islamic school that vocalizes moderate Islamic belief with no specific ideological affiliation. Budi Mulia Dua presents Islamic education emphasizing egalitarianism, inclusivity, and introduces Islamic values substantively without ignoring person-to-person relationships.

Identity crisis of Algerians diaspora between self-culture and foreign language

The Algerian novel, written in French, addressed various issues relating to Algerian man, as it was able to portray his reality and express his personality with creative artistic insights. However, the problems of identity and religious, ethnic and ideological affiliation continued to occupy the minds of Algerian immigrant novelists who lived away from the homeland and language. Hence, was the Algerian novelist able to overcome the identity crisis in his journey of searching for the Algerian self and expressing its cultural particularities in his literature? Or did the language barrier prevent it? The research therefore highlights the issue of proving national identity while writing in the language of the other among Algerian novelists such as Malek Haddad, who likened French language writings to exile.

MODEL OF PARTICIPATION AND POLITICAL AFFILIATION OF THE MATARAMAN SOCIETY OF EAST JAVA, INDONESIA

This study aims to describe the model of participation and political affiliation of the Mataraman people of East Java, Indonesia. The method used in this study is a combination method using an unbalanced mixture model (Concurrent embedded). The subjects in this study are the Mataraman people, namely people who live in the City/Regency of Madiun, Magetan, Nganjuk, Ponorogo, Ngawi, Trenggalek, and Pacitan. To collect data from existing subjects, the methods used are interviews, observations, and documentation and questionnaires. Meanwhile, to analyze the data, Miles and Huberman interactive technique was used, as well as descriptive analysis. The results of this study indicate that the political participation model of the Mataraman community can be categorized as high. In terms of political behavior, the political participation model of the Mataraman community can be grouped into three categories, namely active, passive, and apathetic. The results of this study also show that the practice of money politics (money politics) in political celebrations in the Mataraman community is still quite high. Meanwhile, the ideological affiliation of Mataraman voters can be grouped into four, namely religious/religious-based ideological affiliation, nationalist-based ideological affiliation, nationalist-religious-based ideological affiliation, and change or program-based voter affiliation.

“The connections between the enemy at home and the enemy in Spain”: Langston Hughes’ black internationalism in the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT From July to December 1937, Langston Hughes travelled to Spain to cover the Civil War as a correspondent. The five months he spent travelling throughout Spain gave rise to a prolific repertoire on which the author left a manifest ideological imprint. His observations from within and the ideological perspectives revealed the potential of travel writing as a tool to re-examine the local and international boundaries critically. This paper navigates Hughes’ dispatches in wartime Spain, which distanced him from traditional journalistic practices by demonstrating a clear preference for the ordinary, and a subjective interpretation of the events driven by an unambiguous ideological affiliation to the Loyalist faction. The analysis of the texts sheds light on how international travel facilitated Black connections and on the importance of travel to the politics of Black internationalism.

La ideología liberal y la participación electoral en España (2010-2020): el comportamiento diferencial del votante liberal

This article makes a first approximation to the electoral participation of liberals in Spain. Using the CIS monthly barometers and covering the period of a decade from 2010 to 2020, we analyze whether liberal ideology has influenced electoral participation. The logistic regression analyses employed include ideology in addition to other socioeconomic, attitudinal and conjunctural aspects as control variables. The results show that liberal voters have a lower electoral participation that is directly attributed to their ideological affiliation. For the elections studied, the differential behavior associated with liberal ideology is robustly maintained even after the self-placement on the left-right axis —namely, the metric traditionally used to approximate the effect of ideology— is included in the model. This greater abstentionism associated with liberal ideology does not seem to be entirely explained by the greater distrust in political institutions that these voters tend to show.