Ideological Bias Research Articles

Identifying political and ideological bias in translated newspaper articles

Abstract Translation can serve the purposes of gaining, maintaining and even abusing political power in the interests of certain political groups. In order to identify political manipulation in translated texts, a text linguistics based tool called Political Bias Screener has been developed, which includes superstructure and macrostructure analysis, critical discourse analysis and political mass communication related theories. This article describes the most relevant theoretical foundations and the component models of the Screener, investigates its validity and reliability and introduces the most important research findings obtained with its help. The findings show possible tendencies of translator behaviour and are transferable to other research fields in Translation Studies.

A influência dos ciclos políticos nos investimentos públicos em infraestrutura: um estudo nos estados brasileiros no período de 2003 a 2014

Resumo Este artigo tem como objetivo avaliar se os ciclos políticos em conjunto com viés ideológico impactam significativamente as decisões de alocação de recursos públicos em investimentos de infraestrutura nos estados brasileiros. Para atingir tal objetivo, utilizamos informações em nível estadual de 2003 a 2014 para capturar três ciclos eleitorais. Como abordagem metodológica utilizamos regressão em painel com efeitos fixos, com o objetivo de detectar características estaduais não observáveis e invariantes no tempo. Os resultados encontrados mostram a existência de influência do ciclo eleitoral se considerarmos as diferenças ideológicas interagindo com os ciclos eleitorais. Os resultados apontam que partidos de esquerda e de centro tendem a investir mais em infraestrutura em períodos pré-eleitorais se comparados com partidos de direita. Esse resultado contribui para a literatura evidenciando que ciclos podem ser mais influenciados dependendo do partido que está governando. Foi identificado adicionalmente um resultado contraintuitivo relativo ao impacto negativo nos gastos em infraestrutura quando o governador é do mesmo partido do presidente. Para essa variável, esperava-se um impacto positivo.

Animal Rights and Robot Ethics

This paper investigates challenges which anthropocentric and pathocentric ethics have to face when confronted with moral considerations about non-human animals, especially so-called disenhanced animals, and a new class of technological artifacts, namely social robots. Referring to the case of animal welfare, robot ethics emerges as a new discipline that has not yet reflected on the ideological biases that commonly underlie moral judgments toward animals and find expression in robot ethics, too. As a consequence, robot ethics perpetuates the “work of purification,” that is, the isolation and definition of a particular entity possessing a moral status. Whenever such an entity is defined, the definition excludes all those entities which could likewise possess a moral status but do not fit exactly to the pre-specified definition. The crucial question, then, is whether to seek an ethic of unconditional compassion that doesn't allow itself to be restricted by ideology and is therefore convenient for animal rights and robot ethics as well.

El Gobernador de Michoacán y el conflicto universitario de 1949. La mirada de Nemesio García Naranjo

Este artículo analiza los textos escritos por el periodista Nemesio García Naranjo, que tuvieron como tema central los sucesos desatados entre el 28 de julio y el 26 de agosto de 1949 en Morelia Michoacán (México), en donde se dio la disputa entre estudiantes y autoridades de la Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo y el Gobernador de la entidad, José María Mendoza Pardo, miembro del partido gobernante. El conflicto tuvo como detonante la muerte de dos universitarios a manos del ejército. Dicho evento desató marchas y paros universitarios en todo el país, a la vez que puso en crisis la gobernabilidad del estado de Michoacán.El análisis del corpus periodístico escrito por García Naranjo desarrollado aquí, reflexiona en dos direcciones. Por un lado, pone de relieve el talante liberal con el que examinó los sucesos y sus repercusiones sociales y políticas para el régimen; siendo precisamente este posicionamiento ideológico, una evidencia del lugar equivocado en que la historiografía ha colocado al personaje: la derecha reaccionaria y antirrevolucionaria. Por otro lado, al mostrarse que este personaje exhibió un pensamiento propio de una ‘derecha liberal’, se establece también que desde este posicionamiento juzgó los hechos en Morelia y el papel de la Universidad Michoacana, siendo una voz disonante en un escenario dominado por los sesgos ideológicos y por los intereses políticos, los cuales acusaban unánimemente a la «conjura comunista» como principal responsable.

The Neutrality Illusion: Biased Economics, Biased Training, and Biased Monetary Policy. Testing the Role of Ideology on FOMC Voting Behaviour

ABSTRACTThis research is trying to shed light on two myths that are usually widespread: the first one being the idea of the academic economist as a neutral scientist finding uncontestable consensual truths, thanks to uncontestable empirical methods, the second, the idea of the central banker as a Weberian neutral bureaucrat setting aside personal beliefs to act mechanically for the common good. Deconstructing this ‘neutrality illusion’, this work argues that economics is actually a divided and ideologically marked discipline despite its aim at natural-science-type-legitimacy. It argues in a related discussion that such ideological bias also impedes a purely neutral conduct of monetary policy, undermining the very idea of central bank independence. Linking these two arguments, it argues that graduate training in economics is the first place for the formation of biased preferences, because of the substantial ideological sorting that exists across universities. Using a unique database on FOMC members’ votes and ideology, the paper tests this idea empirically and despite unavoidable caveats, finds robust evidence of a systematic impact of the ideological features of their alma mater on FOMC members’ voting behaviour – impact that we found more important than the other traditional determinants of central bankers’ actions.

A comparative Study in the Military Strategies Adopted by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia respectively at the Initial Stage of the Russo-German War during the Second World War's period

This is the study on the implications of military strategies in the initial stage of the Germany-USSR War in 1941. The military strategy of Germany Army has been researched and received partially as the military doctrine in the Korean Army. On the other hand, it has widely believed that the USSR’s victory over the Germany in World War Ⅱ mainly depended upon its glacial winter climate and the huge territory. Since the 17th century, Russia(USSR) has undergone many armed conflicts, and nowadays it occupies the second place of the military capability in the world and is also known as the state led developed in the military affairs. So I emphasized that USSR’s military strategy must be concretely studied, by freeing from ideological and western bias. And to prepare for the future warfare, we need to study steadily and objectively estimate Russian military strategy, and research the implications of it. In this sense, both the validity of strategic plan and the efficiency in prosecution of the strategy are to be comparatively analyzed. The validity of strategic plan is compared by the requirements of strategy (adaptability, feasibility, acceptability), and the latter is comparatively estimated by the elements of concentrated essence of strategy and tactics’ which Liddell Hart presented in his book ‘Strategy’. And this paper concludes with the implications of both armies’ strategy. Although Germany’s victory required success in destroying the Red Army and capturing Leningrad and Ukraine, constant and random counterattacks of the Red Army saved the USSR. This study implies that there is no perfect strategic plan, but we need to recognize strategically efficient chances in developed situations and effectively exploit the ideas for achievement of the ultimate end.

Ibn Sīnā’s Philosophical Interpretation of Sūrat al-Falaq

Philosophical hermeneutics of the Qurʾān in the classical period has three major characteristics that are discussed in this paper in light of Ibn Sīnā’s work. First, philosophical hermeneutics falls under the category of symbolic interpretation (taaʾwīl)1 rather than technical/linguistic exegesis (tafsīr). Second, it selectively chooses Qurʾānic passages that lend themselves to philosophical interpretations. Third, it tends primarily towards metaphysical and moral issues, and is, for the most part, disinterested in ideological biases. This paper examines Ibn Sīnā’s interpretation of sūrat al-Falaq (Kor 113), and has two objectives: to elucidate the hermeneutical methodology adopted by Ibn Sīnā, and to investigate the consistency between the philosopher’s understanding of evil as well as the discourse used in his interpretation of al-Falaq and the treatment of the same issue in his major and minor philosophical writings. It demonstrates that, in the commentary on al-Falaq, evil emerges at the level of “particular realization” (qadar), while at the level of predetermination (qaḍā) evil is only a latent potentiality. Ibn Sīnā, in both his commentary on al-Falaq and his philosophical texts, tries to prove that evil at the level of predetermination can be explained as intended by accident (bi- al-ʿaraḍ).

Community-Based Tourism and Political Communitarianism in Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil

Community-based tourism is advocated by indigenous organizations and leftist actors throughout Latin America as a tool for furthering their political and cultural agenda. The ideological biases and structural weaknesses of this model become apparent in a case study of the fishing village of Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil. The communitarian agenda currently being implemented by means of the community-based tourism project in Prainha is based upon an ideological construct and being imposed through political engineering upon what is simply a local segment of Brazilian rural society. As a result, it is encountering strong resistance. There is also structural tension between the inevitable sociocultural change caused by the development of tourism and the rigidity and essentialism of a community-based tourism model offering a “traditional way of life” as a touristic product. The model is ultimately conflictual and unstable, and there is serious doubt about its long-term sustainability. Organizações indígenas e instituições de esquerda defendem o turismo comunitário na América Latina como forma de apoio às suas agendas políticas e culturais. Contudo, a fragilidade estrutural e o preconceito ideológico desse modelo tornam-se aparente no caso de uma vila de pesca em Prainha do Canto Verde, no Brasil. A agenda comunitária hoje implementada por meio do projeto de turismo comunitário em Prainha baseia-se em construção ideológica e é imposta por meio de engenharia política do que consiste somente de um segmento local da sociedade rural brasileira. Consequentemente, essa agenda encontra forte resistência. Demais, há tensão estrutural entre as mudanças culturais inevitáveis, causadas pelo desenvolvimento do turismo, e a rigidez e essencialismo do modelo de turismo comunitário que oferece “um estilo de vida tradicional” como produto turístico. O modelo é fundamentalmente conflitante e instável, suscitando dúvidas quanto à sua sustentabilidade a longo prazo.

Identifying Structural Models of Committee Decisions with Heterogeneous Tastes and Ideological Bias

We study the nonparametric identification and estimation of a structural model for committee decisions. Members of a committee share a common information set, but differ in ideological bias while processing multiple information sources and in individual tastes while weighing multiple objectives. We consider two cases of the model where committee members have or don't have strategic incentives for making recommendations that conform with the committee decision. For both cases, pure-strategy Bayesian Nash equilibria exist, and we show how to use variations in the common information set to recover the distribution of members' private types from individual recommendation patterns. Building on the identification result, we estimate a structural model of interest rate decisions by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England. We find some evidence that recommendations from external committee members are less distorted by strategic incentives than internal members. There is also evidence that MPC members differ more in their tastes for multiple objectives than in ideological bias.

Identifying Structural Models of Committee Decisions With Heterogeneous Tastes and Ideological Bias

In practice, members of a committee often make different recommendations despite a common goal and shared sources of information. We study the nonparametric identification and estimation of a structural model, where such discrepancies are rationalized by the members’ unobserved types, which consist of ideological bias while weighing different sources of information, and tastes for multiple objectives announced in the policy target. We consider models with and without strategic incentives for members to make recommendations that conform to the final committee decision. We show that pure-strategy Bayesian Nash equilibria exist in both cases, and that the variation in common information recorded in the data helps us to recover the distribution of private types from the members’ choices. Building on the identification result, we estimate a structural model of interest rate decisions by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England. We find some evidence that the external committee members are less affected by strategic incentives for conformity in their recommendations than the internal members. We also find that the difference in ideological bias between external and internal members is statistically insignificant. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

<b>Do encontro da saúde com a educação: o escolanovismo e seus desdobramentos em debate

A presente investigação, apoiada em noções foucaultianas, tem como objetivo analisar os jogos discursivos sediados no encontro entre os campos da saúde e da pedagogia brasileiras a partir dos anos 1920, encontro este protagonizado, sobretudo, pelo escolanovismo. Para tanto, foram analisadas, no primeiro momento, algumas obras da coleção Bibliotheca de Educação a cargo de autores-chave do Movimento da Escola Nova, nas quais avulta o primado de que a cognição estaria subordinada a processos pertinentes à fisiologia cerebral. No segundo momento, procedeu-se à sondagem, num conjunto de periódicos educacionais contemporâneos, de estudos dedicados a criticar os vieses higienistas, ideológicos ou normativos supostamente inerentes ao escolanovismo, cujas análises mostraram-se cativas de uma abordagem denunciadora das relações de poder-saber ali vigentes, tendo estas, segundo os autores recenseados, gerado indefectíveis efeitos patologizantes às práticas escolares. À guisa de conclusão, aventou-se um giro analítico capaz de pôr em xeque abordagens apoiadas nas noções apriorísticas de desenvolvimento, esclarecimento e representação, em favor de reflexões voltadas ao jogo ininterrupto entre processos de subjetivação e políticas de veridicção que demarcam a atualidade educacional.

Economists’ interest in collective decision after World War II: a history

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.

Legitimizing ethno-sectarian conflicts for power: Construction of victimhood and disenfranchisement in Iraqi media interactions

The article examines micro-argumentative patterns in 12 debate-like political interactions to account for the discursive construction of victimhood and disenfranchisements used to legitimize ethno-sectarian conflicts for power in Iraqi media interactions across traditional and new media. The analysis found that the interlocutors employed a limited number of argumentative patterns to voice their (dis)agreement and legitimize their viewpoints; these argumentative patterns were either action-oriented or actor-oriented. Action-oriented (de)legitimizing patterns tended to be short-ranged in nature, focusing on the efficiency of the actions (de)legitimized. Alternatively, actor-oriented argumentative patterns were used to legitimize the long-rooted ideological biases about self and others and, therefore, seemed to have a panoramic focus on the ethno-sectarian conflicts for power in the country. The analysis showed that even the interactions that focused on discussing the efficiency of specific political actions and agendas tended to evolve into ideological debates about ethno-sectarian identities and communally biased interpretations of the political scene. This kind of identity politics seems to be motivated by, and to concurrently enhance, the sentiments of disenfranchisement and victimhood, which may further deepen inter-communal rifts in the country.

Alternatives–Pitfalls of polarized internationalism: protest against Cuban medical solidarity

Since 1960, the Cuban government has been providing health care internationalism programmes throughout the globe. Despite the now overwhelming international recognition for Cuba’s medical efforts, protests against Cuban medical personnel working abroad are not uncommon. This article analyzes comparable patterns of protest in Brazil, Bolivia, and Haiti, where the protests have been driven primarily by ideological and class biases, as well as the Venezuelan case, where Cuban initiatives have been more politicized than elsewhere.

Police harassment and the politicization of Jewish youth in interwar Bessarabia

ABSTRACTThe article analyzes how regionalist antagonism and ideological bias mediated Romanian police officials’ surveillance of the Jewish community in interwar Bessarabia. It compares the characterizations of Jewish politics found in police files from Bessarabia with those in Yiddish-language autobiographies by Bessarabian Jewish young people. Because officials attributed subversive, conspiratorial intent to movements across the Jewish political spectrum, they were never motivated to acquire more than a cursory understanding of the complex Jewish political arena they were surveilling. Had their intelligence not been hampered by lack of relevant language skills, mistrust of all Bessarabians regardless of ethnicity, and antisemitic stereotypes, officials might have seen that the young people they found so threatening were involved in highly ineffective and powerless politics. Instead, Romanian officials and Bessarabian Jewish youth were caught in a cycle of intractable cultural misunderstanding: police harassment exacerbated frantic and ideologically incoherent political activity among Jewish youth, which in turn reinforced suspicions of a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy. I argue that this dynamic conforms in some respects to regional patterns, but that those patterns alone are insufficient for understanding this case. Rather, the encounter between Romanian officials and Bessarabian Jews is reminiscent of a colonial encounter, one in which cultural misunderstandings have hardened into intractable distrust.

«Запад» и «не Запад» в пространстве теории международных отношений

Recently the question of “pro-Western” orientation of the IR theory turned to become in the center of the academic discussions. Its critics as well as the adherents of “non-Western” theories are partly right. Really, during more than one and a half century the theory of international relations, born and developed mostly in the West had been mostly supporting the ideas, being forms first in Europe, later in the USA. The Anglo-Saxon authors are still dominating in the discipline, not only quantitatively (the huge scale of the publications of literature and professional magazines in English plus influence of the universities and scientific centers) as well as qualitatively (impressive financing opens the possibilities for the working out of the new ideas and the development of the ideas of different “schools” of thought - political realism, liberalism, constructivism, postmodernism, post-Marxism etc.). In the theories of IR was felt ideological biases. But on the wave of decolonization and later, in the context of the rising of Asian and other countries in world politics, the “Western” dominance was challenged by the IR-scholars from PR of Chine, India etc., who try to construct their own theories of international relations. The balance is slowly but continuously changing. But “Non-Western” theories are also not free from the ideological biases. Quite often they reject or severely criticize “Western” theories just because of their origin. Even more often they in fact continue to develop the same “Western” ideas, just adding to them the local thinker’s names or mentioning some national traditions or religious and cultural heritage. But if the Theory of international relations is a science, then, strictly speaking, in what country its main personalities were born and what language they were speaking, is not important. Obviously, the elements of ideology would be present. Just like any other social science, which deals not only with structures, but with human beings as well, it would be inevitably ideological. But it does not mean that theory may be identified with ideology. To solve this problem is possible through deconstruction of the theories, their “cleaning” of too obvious ideological moments - so the position of the IR scholar has to be a priori critical but preserving already achieved essence.

The Ideological Shadow of Authoritarianism

How do left-right labels take on meaning in new democracies? Most of the literature either assumes that a common understanding of ideology is readily available to new democracies or points to variation in the dominance of different social cleavages. We propose an alternative theory, which focuses on the legacy of the authoritarian past. Dictatorships are not ideologically neutral. They are linked either to the left or to the right. Neither are they positively evaluated by most citizens and political elites after democratization. Combining these two observations, we derive a model of ideological learning. In its purest form, the model suggests that when the authoritarian regime is linked to the left (right), the new democratic regime will be characterised by an anti-left (anti-right) bias. We test our hypothesis with a new individual-level repeated cross-sectional dataset that covers all Latin American and European new democracies. We find significant ideological bias, which tends to evaporate over time and as the political system consolidates. We also show that the strength and durability of ideological bias is mediated by indoctrination under the previous regime. The findings carry important implications for our understanding of authoritarian legacies and party system development in new democracies.

Corruption Gone Wild: Transnational Criminal Law and the International Trade in Endangered Species

The goal of this essay is to sketch how, and with what effect, the problems of corruption and endangered animal trafficking have been linked in international law. To that end, I first compare and contrast the “hard law” legal frameworks on corruption and on animal trafficking. After that, I illustrate how those two regimes have been related in international reports, “soft” (nonbinding) international instruments, and UN Security Council resolutions. Finally, I caution against an automatic merger of these areas of law and agendas for global law reform. Like other transnational criminal laws, the anticorruption treaties have practical limitations, ideological biases, and potentials for unintended consequences. These features qualify their utility as “tools” in the fight for animal welfare. They may also mask the ways in which efforts to prevent and suppress wildlife trafficking are both anthropocentric and sources of human insecurity.

OBAMA AND LIBERAL AFRO-PESSIMISM

This article disputes academic accounts of Afro-pessimism, which see it as a product of ideological or discursive bias in the viewer, or as a crude generalisation across very different countries and cultures by examining the context for and major themes of Afro-pessimism after 1994. In particular, it shows that modern Afro-pessimism is largely a product of liberal concerns and liberal media. It demonstrates the salience of these themes by showing how they permeate and influence former US President Barack Obama’s African outlook by a close reference to his speech to the Ghanaian parliament in 2009 and suggests that they may provide the context for the views of current US President Donald Trump.

Notes from a New Reading

Inspired by a seminar given at EHESS in 1982, published in different versions and for the first time in the form of a book in 1989 (Grignon & Passeron, 1983, 1985, 2015), Le Savant et le Populaire has not lost any of its relevance. The sociological questions that Jean-Claude Passeron and I wrote about have become “societal questions” that are constantly rehashed in the media; the term “populism” is increasingly popular. The relations between the dominant and the dominated classes, between the “elites” and the People, “real people” or “the man in the street,” figure more and more prominently at the centre of opinion debates. The same can be said of that which concerns the “acceptance” of immigrants from foreign cultures: should they assimilate into our culture to be integrated into society, or preserve their cultural identity (i.e., their otherness) at the risk of becoming isolated and excluded? We are concerned by those topics, but they are not what we are most interested in: we deal with populism in sociology and literature, not in politics. These topics can add obstacles and risks for the sociologist who ventures to study popular and dominated classes and cultures. The political stakes that this study involves run the risk of waking the intellectual “who we know sleeps within every sociologist” (Grignon & Passeron 2015: 117), and of skewing our interpretations, or even our observations, by subjecting them to ideological biases and prejudices. For we sociologists, the releva