Ideological Dimensions Research Articles

Willingness to Boycott Russian Goods in China: How Political Ideology Shapes Consumer Preferences in an Authoritarian Context

ABSTRACT Who is likely to engage in Anti-Russian boycotts in China? While existing literature focuses on ethnocentrism and nationalism as drivers of political consumerism, this article explores political boycotts that contradict the dominant discourse of the Chinese Communist Party. Drawing on original survey data, the article uses two ideological dimensions—social authoritarianism and attitudes to economic organisation – to delineate three distinct ideological leanings in China: liberalism, the New Left and neo-authoritarianism. The article demonstrates that liberals are more likely than others to support the boycott of Russian products. Additionally, all three groups are more willing to boycott Russian goods if they hold egalitarian attitudes. The findings shed light on the causes of anti-Russian sentiment in China and its likely implications for the Russian economy.

The Cognitive Trap of Rousseau's "Organic Metaphor" and the Construction of U.S. Policy in Europe and Eurasia

The ideological dimension of international relations and foreign policy represents a distinct area of interaction, often situated at the intersection of political theory and philosophy. This study explores how metaphors, particularly Rousseau’s Organic Metaphor and its adaptation by Woodrow Wilson in his conceptualization of nationalism, function as powerful cognitive tools within the political sphere. These metaphors can act as "cognitive keys" that shape the perception of socio-political realities, influencing both the understanding and actions of political actors. However, while they provide a framework for understanding the internal logic of events, they also limit cognitive freedom by acting as implicit filters. This article traces the instrumental use of these metaphors in U.S. foreign policy, particularly how Wilson’s conceptualization of nationalism, derived from Rousseau’s metaphor, was utilized to reshape the ideational landscape of European politics in the 20th century and is now being applied in Eurasia. The concept of nationalism allowed for the fragmentation of competing political entities, aligning with the U.S. strategy of divide et impera to oppose integration movements. The article further examines how these strategies, which once targeted European empires, are now being employed against emerging integration unions in Eurasia, thereby highlighting the continuity of ideological tools in American foreign policy across different historical contexts.

A multimodal understanding of the role of sound and music in gendered toy marketing.

Literature in music theory and psychology shows that, even in isolation, musical sounds can reliably encode gender-loaded messages. Musical material can be imbued with many ideological dimensions and gender is just one of them. Nonetheless, studies of the gendering of music within multimodal communicative events are sparse and lack an encompassing theoretical framework. The present study attempts to address this literature gap by employing a critical quantitative analysis of music in gendered toy marketing, which integrated a content analytical approach with multimodal affective and music-focused perceptual responses. Ratings were collected on a set of 606 commercials spanning a ten-year time frame and strong gender polarization was observed in nearly all of the collected variables. Gendered music styles in toy commercials exhibit synergistic design choices, as music in masculine-targeted adverts was substantially more abrasive-louder, more inharmonious, and more distorted-than in feminine-targeted ones. Thus, toy advertising music appeared deliberately and consistently in line with traditional gender norms. In addition, music perceptual scales and voice-related content analytical variables explain quite well the heavily polarized affective ratings. This study presents a empirical understanding of the gendering of music as constructed within multimodal discourse, reiterating the importance of the sociocultural underpinnings of music cognition. We provided a public repository with all code and data necessary to reproduce the results of this study on github.com/marinelliluca/music-role-gender-marketing.

Beatific and Horrific Futures–Substance Use According to Young Swedish Adults

Sweden has a long tradition of restrictive policies regarding both legal (such as alcohol and cigarettes) and illegal substances (such as cannabis and amphetamine). However, research is needed on how regulatory frameworks and cultural understandings of substance use play out in the lives of young adults. Utilizing the logics of critical explanation framework, I explore the different logics that young Swedes draw upon when they conceptualize legal and illegal substance use. The data included 30 interviews with 21/22-year-olds who had previously participated in a prospective cohort study. The analysis shows that substance use played a minor role in the participants’ lives. Overall, it represented an obstacle to becoming an adult with a good life. They drew on social logics related to responsibility, ambition, and health to make sense of substance use, regardless of its legal status. These social logics have been used to explain previous years’ decreased use of cigarettes and alcohol among young people, and this study shows that they may also elucidate why illegal substance use is still rare in this group in Sweden. The analysis further suggests that these social logics were naturalized through the political logics of risk and choice, which emphasize the ideal of always being vigilant and safe. To dig deeper into this discourse, I uncover the emotional and ideological dimensions of the participants’ conceptualizations by discussing how they articulate beatific or horrific futures. The beatific future holds a promise of a bright, independent, and productive life, which includes abstaining from substances or using them moderately and responsibly. The horrific, in turn, holds that careless substance use will lead to social exclusion, addiction, and death. The participants’ hopes and fears strengthened the neoliberal idea that a good life is achieved through choice, vigilance, and by avoiding risk.

CHES Canada

Abstract The ideological and issue positions of parties are known to shape citizens’ political attitudes and voting behaviour. One important way to obtain estimates of parties’ positions is to ask experts to place parties on salient ideological dimensions. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has been collecting such estimates for democracies in Europe and elsewhere. CHES Canada adds to this project by providing estimates of party positions and characteristics of Canadian federal parties and provincial parties in Ontario and Quebec. This note introduces this new data source, clarifies how the data were collected and illustrates how the data can be used to (comparatively) study party politics in Canada.

The problem of criminal charisma: State authority and the politics of narcocultura in Mexico's drug war

AbstractThis article examines Mexico's “war on drug trafficking” through its affective and ideological dimensions. By ethnographically exploring two sites of official representations of organized crime in Mexico City—the Secretariat of Defense's Drug Museum and the Institute to Give Back What Was Stolen from the People—I analyze the strategies through which the Mexican state acknowledges and addresses criminality's charisma as a key challenge to its authority. In these official representations, the drug world becomes visible in partial and selective ways, such as through drug traffickers’ confiscated possessions, which project ideas of extravagant capitalist consumption and transgressive social mobility. The state's inevitable failure to contain or redirect this criminal charisma is a symptom of a deeper problem. Such charisma is a key element constituting organized crime as a political actor that menaces state power. It does so not only through violence, but also by means of its capacity to align and organize publics ideologically by doubling and mimicking the state's forms of meaning‐making and valuation.

The EU policy discourse on EdTech and constructing the image of an excellent teacher

ABSTRACT This article presents a discourse analysis of European Union (EU) policy documents on educational uses of digital technology (EdTech) from 2015 to 2022. It explores the ideological dimensions of language use and power relations, particularly concerning the teacher's role. Despite increasing critical scrutiny, the policy discourse in this period remains predominantly unidimensional, framing EdTech as a transformative solution. The study combines corpus-assisted analysis with critical discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics to reveal how EU policy constructs a normative image of an ‘excellent' teacher inexorably linked to digital competencies. It shows how this discourse implicitly denies teachers' autonomy in technology adoption, reinforcing institutional power dynamics. The paper offers a critical perspective on the ideological underpinnings of language use in EdTech policy, challenging prevailing normative discourses and emphasising the need for a nuanced understanding of the socio-political implications and power dynamics inherent in the discourse surrounding teachers’ engagement with digital technology.

Staging a dialogue between Autonomist Marxists and Post-Marxists: The case of the alt-right multitude

Albeit in different ways, both Autonomist Marxists and Post-Marxists have proposed radical democratic theories. To Autonomist Marxists, the latest advances in capitalism would pave the way for global democracy. To Post-Marxists, the plurality of social movements would push society towards a radical model of democracy. Despite their contributions, both Autonomist Marxism and Post-Marxism have left underdeveloped the possibility that digital, affective capitalism could push society towards the opposite direction of global and radical democracy. This article explores the hypothesis that contemporary capitalism may have given birth to a multitude that aims at consolidating White, Western, and masculine supremacy. It argues that fantasies that have, for centuries, sustained the racist, xenophobic, and sexist ideological dimensions of capitalism have brought together multiple groups and individuals that have engaged in the collaborative production of conspiracy theories conveying the common belief that an idealised White/Western identity is under attack: the alt-right multitude. By merging part of the key features of the multitude proposed by Autonomist Marxists with what is known as a ‘Žižekian-Lacanian-Post-Marxist theory’, this article stages a dialogue between both schools of thought, opening new directions for research on how capitalism intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Turning universities into data-driven organisations: seven dimensions of change

AbstractUniversities are striving to become data-driven organisations, benefitting from data collection, analysis, and various data products, such as business intelligence, learning analytics, personalised recommendations, behavioural nudging, and automation. However, datafication of universities is not an easy process. We empirically explore the struggles and challenges of UK universities in making digital and personal data useful and valuable. We structure our analysis along seven dimensions: the aspirational dimension explores university datafication aims and the challenges of achieving them; the technological dimension explores struggles with digital infrastructure supporting datafication and data quality; the legal dimension includes data privacy, security, vendor management, and new legal complexities that datafication brings; the commercial dimension tackles proprietary data products developed using university data and relations between universities and EdTech companies; the organisational dimension discusses data governance and institutional management relevant to datafication; the ideological dimension explores ideas about data value and the paradoxes that emerge between these ideas and university practices; and the existential dimension considers how datafication changes the core functioning of universities as social institutions.

Ideological Constitutionalism

A renewed interest in the concept of ideology is evident in recent constitutional theory. Ideology has featured prominently not only in restatements of traditional Marxist positions and attempted retrievals of the material conception of the constitution, but also in democratic critiques of liberal constitutionalism and theories of constitutional identity. The intention of this article is twofold. Firstly, the article defends the explanatory power of a conception of constitutional ideology that is centred on political domination and the ‘universalisation’ of contingent power relations, rather than more diffuse notions like the symbolic construction of reality or worldviews. Secondly, the article considers distinctive ideological dimensions of modern constitutionalism. An analysis of these dimensions, I contend, confirms modern constitutionalism's strong ideological ‘potential’.

The complex relationship of words and images in picturebooks

Children’s literature scholars, specifically picturebook theorist and researchers, need to better understand the complicated nature of the separation and coming together of textual matter (words) and visual matter (images) and the range of relations between these entities. Various scholars have conceptualized the relations between word and image in vastly different ways, advocated for a range of analytical frameworks to understand these relations, and subsequently have provided a theoretical foundation for exploring the roles and functions of words and images in narrative picturebooks. More attention focusing on how picturebooks are instantiated as meaningful multimodal ensembles across technological, sensory, material, semiotic, modal, mediational, as well as ideological dimensions is necessary if we are to fully understand the ways words and image work in picturebooks and the educational potential of available and future multimodal ensembles.

Decolonial Mood Work

Abstract: This essay develops "decolonial mood work," a political project that changes affective orientations toward crises in settler society and prospects for decolonization. Decolonial mood work is a crucial supplement to scholarship that has focused on demystifying the ideological dimensions of settler colonialism. This essay shows that the regulation of affect is a central, though less addressed, operation of settler state and society. Its case is the management of houselessness in Hawai'i, which is shown to be a settler project that further dispossesses Indigenous peoples by enforcing the affects of settler home.

An Ecolexicon on Poul Poul in Toba Batak Language of Toba Dialect in Aek Kanopan: An Ecolinguistic Study

One of the important things that must continue to be explored and maintained is the richness of the ecolexicon of a tradition, culture, and customs. This research is about the Ecolexicon Treasures of Poul Poul in Toba Batak languange of Toba dialect in Aek Kanopan. The purpose of this study is to explore the wealth of ecolexicon about Poul Poul and to explain the social praxis associated with each ecolexicon in Toba dialect of Toba Batak language in Aek Kanopan based on the study of Ecolinguistics. This research uses qualitative method. Data for the Poul Poul ecolexicon were obtained through interview techniques and recording techniques. Furthermore, the data analysis uses qualitative description, which means the data is collected, classified, and presented in a table. The results show that there are 14 ecolexicons of Poul Poul in Toba Batak language of the Toba dialect in Aek Kanopan; consisting of 8 nouns, 5 verbs, and 1 adjective. In this ecolexicon, there are 2 vocabularies that have shifted, namely grated coconut 'hurhuran' and poul poul shifted to the term 'topung mata'. This shift in the ecolexicon is influenced by two aspects of social praxis, namely the sociological dimension, which includes maintaining relationships and simplicity between members of the social community, and the ideological dimension, which includes beliefs. So, the collection of Poul Poul ecolecticons in the Toba Batak language of the Toba dialect in Aek Kanopan is very diverse. To ensure that these ecolecticons are not lost in the midst of the rapid development of the civilization of the Toba Batak community, they must be explored again and maintained. Thus, Toba Batak-speaking community living in Aek Kanopan must more actively participate in maintaining and preserving the environment and its ecolexicon so that the next generation not only hears the story but also sees its existence.

Teaching Students About Race and Racism: Navigating Dimensions of Political Ideology

This teaching case explores the complexities of teaching students about race and racism, a struggle complicated by political efforts to restrict the discussion of critical educational theories. It emphasizes the political ideologies that faculty must consider as they teach in an academic setting. The case narrative illuminates the complexity of diverse and divisive political ideologies that veer from scholarship into emotion. This case offers questions for further reflection on solutions to these challenges.

An investigation of teacher candidates’ ideologies towards emergent bilingual students

ABSTRACT This study examined how teacher candidates’ beliefs about language and ideologies towards emergent bilinguals (EBs’) are influenced by the number of bilingual and English as a second language methods (BEM) courses they complete, and if their perspectives further evolve as they spend time in field placements. A total of 293 pre-service teachers completed Fitzsimmons-Doolan’s 2011 language ideology dimensions survey at the beginning of an academic semester. At the end of the term candidates responded to three open-ended questions, and responses were analysed and categorised into three themes: what candidates need to know, what EBs’ academic needs are, and what a culturally relevant teacher preparation curriculum must offer. Findings suggest participants’ visions of schooling seemed to change after completing two or more BEM courses, and after reaching a 21–30 clinical hour scaffold working in an instructional capacity with EBs in K-12 schools.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of ChatGPT’s Role in Knowledge and Power Production

Based on the significance and role of ChatGPT in the power and knowledge production, this research aims to display how ChatGPT responds to questions that are by nature controversial and debatable, as their values depend on the agency or power that answers them. The main question of this work is whether this artificial intellegince model is influenced by any discourse(s). The approaches employed in this work are Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis. It is contended that discourses are ubiquitously everywhere in social practices. To Fairclough and Foucault, language production is strongly connected to power and knowledge production. Therefore, utilising a qualitative method in the examination, the work wishes to identify the discourse(s) that can affect ChatGPT’s responses and discuss its implications for knowledge and power production. The research discovered that ChatGPT’s answers unveiled a prejudice towards capitalist discourse, established knowledge, and suppressed alternative opinions. Also, the definitions of capitalism and communism by ChatGPT were insufficient because the political and ideological dimensions of capitalism were ignored, which can be considered major findings of this present work regarding the two selected systems. This indicates that ChatGPT’s knowledge production, an example or model from the ongoing technological revolution, cannot be relied on for being biased in its responses.

Ya no creemos en eso: Ideological impacts, racialized labor, and COVID-19 in the San Gabriel Valley restaurant industry

The San Gabriel Valley is described in academic and popular discussions as an ethnoburb, given its significant Chinese and Asian diasporic population which impacts this region’s cultural, political, and economic composition. The culinary industry, specifically, has been central in capturing and marketing the authentic cultural appearance of this region. Nonetheless, while politics of authenticity drive this region the aim of this article is to uncover the essence of the San Gabriel Valley culinary industry, one that is inherently dependent on Latinx working-class immigrant labor. Specifically, in this project, I study how the COVID-19 pandemic uniquely impacted the Latinx immigrant restaurant workers in this region’s Chinese restaurants. Data collected comes from semi-structured interviews with Latinx immigrant restaurant workers and participant observation conducted with the Restaurant Opportunity Center-Los Angeles. Based on this research, I describe the racialized labor dimensions within the San Gabriel Valley restaurants and the inherent distrust of government aid by Latinx workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anchored in a critical political and economic framework, I argue for the expansion of the ethnoburb framework to center the ideological dimension of capitalism given that exploitation and oppression are central to the popularity of Los Angeles restaurants in general and to those in the San Gabriel Valley in particular. This institutionalized anti-immigrant violence facilitates low pay and precarious employment within the restaurants and the deliberate decisions by workers to avoid seeking government aid given a history of immigrant repression. Finally, this article has applications for nonprofit and government entities responsible for dispersing resources for the Latinx immigrant working class in the service sector and uncovering the labor realities within the San Gabriel Valley.

How and why aversive personality is expressed in political preferences.

Political orientation reflects beliefs, opinions, and values that are, at least in part, rooted in stable interindividual differences. Whereas evidence has accumulated with regard to the relevance of basic personality dimensions, especially concerning the sociocultural dimension of political ideology, less attention has been paid to the more specific dispositional tendency to assign a higher weight to one's own utility above others' (i.e., socially aversive personality), which is likely to play a pivotal role concerning the economic dimension of political ideology in particular. In three studies with over 66,000 participants from 38 countries, we show that individuals with elevated levels in aversive personality tend to endorse more right-wing political orientations in terms of a single left-right dimension, hold relevant ideological beliefs tied to both sociocultural and economic conservatism, and report corresponding electoral voting behavior. We further provide support for the idea that this overlap between a dispositional tendency toward aversive behavior and a right-wing political orientation can be attributed to shared belief systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Re-learning culture in cities beyond the West

Urban scholars have long engaged with the role of culture in cities. Tracing this debate, this article outlines the evolutions of culture as an object of study in inquiries on the urban and wishes to trouble two persisting trends in this literature. The first is a geographical and theoretical Eurocentric vision of culture, often framing cities beyond the West as exceptions or needing validation through a comparison with a Western case or theoretical model; the second is an economistic vision of culture under neoliberalism, neglecting the political and ideological dimensions of culture. As a step in overcoming these limitations, this article builds around the notion of ‘re-learning’, to re-insert memory, informality and conflicting heritage into the debate on culture in cities. Drawing on an ethnography of the street ‘Avenida 26’ in Bogotá, Colombia, the article shows that informal cultural practices in the middle of segregation and urban violence can hardly be grasped through the current framing of culture in cities. Yet, they invite an opening up of such a framing to include different ways to cohabit and navigate space through everyday minor engagements. These multifaceted cultural realities urge us to ‘re-learn’ culture in cities anywhere and advance theorisation on culture that takes non-Western urban spaces seriously.

‘Our opinions really matter': conceptualising and operationalising authentic student voice through negotiated integrated curriculum

ABSTRACT Student democratic participation in schools is often limited to involvement in school councils with associated dangers of tokenism and speaking for others. There is limited space for students to have a voice in what is learned due to mandated state curricula and scepticism about student capacity, even though consultation with students about matters that affect them is a legally binding obligation under Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These challenges have resulted in limited research on operationalising substantive student voice. Student agency remains feasible within the boundaries of the formal curriculum, but with significant limitations on decision-making. This paper conceptualises the relationship between student voice and agency, mediated by forms of curricular engagement. We posit that ideological dimensions of engagement and associated student positionality exert a dominant influence on voice and agency. Furthermore, we examine the potential for more authentic approaches to voice and agency to dynamically alter student engagement. Empirically, we draw on work on curriculum negotiation and integration to consider the operationalisation of student voice as the fundamental driver of curriculum, with authentic engagement and agency as emergent properties. Practical considerations for incorporating such approaches in state curricula are explored.