Ideological Makeup Research Articles

The Argumentative Structural Shifts in English-Arabic Translation of BBC News Reports: A Sociolinguistic And Cultural Perspective

The socio-cultural and ideological features of translation have become so prominent that many studies have investigated the translation shifts resulting from the linguistic transference from the source language (SL) into the target language (TL). It is the primary aim of the present article to demonstrate the nature of the structural (morpho-syntactic) shifts in the Arabic written translation of English political British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news, which may be attributable to differences in cultural, ideological and sociolinguistic backgrounds of the target language speakers (Arabic). The heterogeneity of the socio-cultural context in which the English and Arabic political discourses are communicated is reflected in the syntactic shifts in the sentential and phrasal structure in the translation process of BBC News. The target texts (TT) exhibit a substantial tendency to conform to the socio-cultural and ideological context of the target language (TL) at the expense of the morphosyntactic structure of the ST. The research methodology involves analyzing some English BBC news extracts (ST) and their Arabic translation to investigate the structural shifts in translation. The data analysis, conducted with meticulous attention to detail, shows that the Arabic translation alters the (ST) linguistic structures and shifts the socio-cultural and ideological conceptions of the target text (TT) readers. A key aspect of the methodology is the adoption of a comparative approach, which allows for a thorough examination of the structural differences and similarities and their corresponding content. The article also takes cognizance of Hatim's (1997) ideas on translation across different cultures and those of Fishman (1972) on the sociolinguistic reflections of language. The study concludes that the target readers' cultural background, ideological make-up and sociolinguistic perception can be altered due to the structural shifts in translating political news into Arabic. It shows that the structural shifts lead to specific deviations in the argumentative structure of the source text (ST) through argumentation or counter-argumentation.

Democracy at the Limit: Does the U.S. Debt Ceiling Really Enhance Fiscal Accountability?

ABSTRACT Congressional control of the U.S. debt ceiling continues to prompt uncertainty among financial markets. Nevertheless, the standard defense of a statutory debt limit invokes the idea of accountability: oversight of the national debt by democratically elected policymakers precludes fiscal profligacy. For this argument to hold water, however, one should observe that lawmakers are indeed motivated and held accountable by voters on the debt ceiling. Do policymakers' positions toward the debt ceiling reflect the preferences of their constituents? And are policymakers punished or rewarded for their stances? Analyzing roll call votes on the debt ceiling in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 2014, I show that lawmakers' positions are driven predominantly by policymaker ideology and bank campaign contributions rather than the demographics or ideological makeup of their constituencies. Furthermore, I find no evidence that Republicans nor lawmakers from conservative-leaning districts are punished by their constituents when voting to raise the debt limit. Democratic lawmakers' reelection chances are affected by their voting behavior but in the form of rewards for approving debt ceiling increases. These findings suggest the U.S. debt ceiling – in addition to posing a high financial risk – contributes little to fiscal accountability.

The Role of Judges in Selecting Efficient Norms in a Common Law System: A Law and Economics Perspective

Abstract This study delves into the common law efficiency theory, proposing that the efficiency of legal norms in common law systems predominantly depends on judges’ biases towards efficiency. By developing an economic model, it is demonstrated that the proportion of efficient norms correlates with the predisposition of judges towards efficiency, influenced by their personal beliefs. Historical analysis of common and civil law systems reveals that neither inherently guarantees efficiency; rather, their efficiency is contingent upon their adaptability to societal needs and prevailing judicial ideologies. The paper concludes that the efficiency of a legal system relies on its congruence with societal values and judicial ideologies, emphasizing that shifts in the judiciary’s ideological makeup have implications on legal system efficiency. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted process shaping legal norms in common law, highlighting the critical role of judges, societal values, and legislative dynamics.

Media Culture, Politics, and Society

From the 1960s to the present, media culture in the United States has been a battleground between competing social groups with some artifacts advancing liberal or radical posi­tions and others conservative ones. Likewise, some artifacts of media culture promote progressive positions and representations of gender, sexual preference, race or ethnicity, while others articulate reactionary forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and rightwing values and beliefs, thus many films articulate a contradictory matrix of liberal, radical, and reactionary representations, discourses, and narratives. In this article, I argue that media culture can provide important insights into the psychological, socio-political, and ideological make-up of U.S. society at a given point in history. Reading culture diagnos­tically allows one to gain insights into social problems and conflicts, and to appraise the dominant ideologies and emergent oppositional forces. This approach thus involves a dialectic of text and context, using texts to read social realities and context to help situate and interpret key artifacts of media culture in the 21 st century.

Micro-politics: Anti-Oedipus and the wall of ultra-liberalism

ContextDeleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus series has shaped several generations of radical left political thought, promoting an accelerationist understanding of revolutionizing capitalism. Despite the lasting influence of the concepts developed in this work, the changing dynamics of capitalist social life, particularly increasing social and institutional fragmentation, have called the core itinerary of these concepts and their application to political struggle into serious question. ObjectiveThis paper critically examines the theoretical presuppositions that drove the Anti-Oedipus series, with particular focus on the first volume, and asks whether the repertoire of concepts developed in this work remain relevant to the contemporary left. MethodAfter an investigation that focuses on the movement away from a Marxist-centered praxis and understanding of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus, an analysis of the conception of the “Oedipal form” is presented and critiqued with reference to a wide range of post-Lacanian political thinkers. ResultsAnti-Oedipus has made a tremendous influence on the theoretical understanding of today's anti-capitalist left. Its concepts have been adopted in two main ways on the contemporary left: a radical abolitionist politics of opacity and a new form of left-accelerationist utopian socialism. InterpretationsThese two tendencies of political thought are critically analyzed and diagnosed as inadequate to facing the political and social challenges of our time, but they remain nonetheless important intellectual tendencies for understanding the ideological makeup of today's left.

Conditional satisfaction: political support, congruence, and cabinet composition

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between citizen satisfaction with the functioning of democracy and ideological congruence. We focus on how this relationship may vary by government type, paying attention to the conditioning effects of coalition governments’ ideological make-up and individual-level education. Our analyses rely on harmonized survey data covering one million respondents in 28 countries over a 40-year period. We find limited evidence that the relationship between citizen satisfaction and ideological congruence is conditional on national government type. All coalitions are not, however, created equal. Comparing single-party governments to multi-party governments with different ideological compositions, we find striking differences, but only for the higher educated. While the negative relationship between citizen satisfaction and ideological incongruence is similar for lower-educated citizens in single-party and multi-party coalition settings (irrespective of cabinet composition), for the higher educated, the relationship weakens as a function of the ideological diversity of the coalition cabinet.

The Weight of RBG’s Crown: Jewish Feminism and Its Appropriations

AbstractThis article takes a critical look at the “Notorious RBG” iconography that has proliferated since the 2010s, when shifts in the ideological makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court caused Ginsburg to find herself more frequently in dissent. Attending to the trope’s origins in the “King of New York” photo shoot featuring Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, it situates Notorious RBG rhetoric in the long history of Jewish racial ventriloquism in the United States. Through close readings of children’s literature, memes, film, pop biography, and merchandise, I consider what the racial codings of RBG’s crown tell us about Jewish feminisms in contemporary pop culture. The identification of Ginsburg with Wallace registers tensions between assimilationist and de-assimilationist Jewish identities, liberal and intersectional feminisms, and the affective politics of stoicism and rage. I argue that Notorious iconography problematically works to install Ginsburg as the standard-bearer of both the white Jewish Second Wave and its Black feminist critique.

Uncooperative society, uncooperative politics or both? Trust, polarization, populism and COVID-19 deaths across European regions.

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID‐19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non‐supporters – that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro‐healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make‐up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division – or what we refer to as ‘uncooperative politics’. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning – in particular those that lean more populist – and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make‐up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more ‘tan’ on the ‘GAL‐TAN’ spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left‐right or GAL‐TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen‐level trust and populist elite‐level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic.

Time Spent in the House: Gender and the Political Careers of U.S. House Members

AbstractMore women are running for and serving in the U.S. House of Representatives than ever before, but how does gender influence the careers of House members once they arrive in Congress? We find that gender matters in two important ways: first, freshmen women are older than freshmen men. Second, women are both more likely to lose a reelection race and more likely to retire because of electoral concerns than men. The result is that women have significantly shorter careers in the House than men. Both factors—women's delayed entry and early exit—produce fewer women in the House at any given time than if these disparities did not exist. These findings have significant consequences for the House's demographic makeup, ideological makeup, and policy agenda. The broader implication of our findings is that more women in the electoral arena is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make the representation of women truly equal.

Political ideology moderates consumer response to brand crisis apologies for data breaches

Many firms unfortunately experience data breaches in which personal records information are accessed by external agents without firms' and consumers' consent. To improve customer relationships and re-build equity, it is important for brands to apologize, and many do. In the current inquiry, we study how consumers' political ideology moderates their brand trust and purchase intentions after brands apologize for a data breach. In two experimental studies, we report that an apology for a data breach has little sway in conservatives' (vs. liberals') brand trust (Study 1) and purchase intentions (Study 2). The explanation is that conservatives (liberals) have entity (incremental) beliefs, so they see firms as unlikely to change even after an apology or statement of how they intend to mitigate future data breaches. Although our context is on data breaches and how consumers with different political ideologies consider privacy breaches of personal data, we are also the first to examine how consumers respond to a brand crisis apology based on their political ideology. Consequently, understanding who a firm's consumers are in terms of their ideological makeup is crucial in predicting the effectiveness of an apology for data breaches in order to restore brand equity.

The Politics of Deference

Like so much else in our politics, the administrative state is fiercely contested. Conservatives decry its legitimacy and seek to limit its power; liberals defend its necessity and legality. Debates have increasingly centered on the doctrine of Chevron deference, under which courts defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutory language. Given both sides’ increasingly entrenched positions, it is easy to think that conservatives have always warned of the dangers of deference, while liberals have always defended its virtues. Not so. This Article tells the political history of deference for the first time, using previously untapped primary sources including presidential and congressional archives, statements by interest groups, and partisan media sources. It recounts how the politics of deference have varied over time, even though the issue is often framed in terms that resist evolutionary analysis. As the administrative state grew in the 1970s, conservatives in Congress sought to rein in deference, while liberals defended it. These positions reversed in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration relied on flexible readings of statutes in service of its deregulatory efforts, including in the Chevron case itself. After a period of political detente, the 2010s witnessed a resurgence of conservative opposition and liberal support for Chevron, driven largely by the ascendance of libertarian interests in the Republican Party and the increasingly central role of administrative policymaking to the agenda of the Democratic Party. The Article then develops a framework for understanding the shifting politics of deference. It argues that the politics of deference are the politics of regulation: for nearly a half-century, partisans and interest groups have viewed doctrinal debates as inexorably tied to interests in policy outcomes. Positions about Chevron have varied based on which party controls the presidency and the ideological makeup of the federal courts. But the parties are also asymmetrically reliant on the administrative state, and thus on judicial deference. Liberals depend on deference to advance their regulatory goals in the face of an often-gridlocked Congress, while conservatives have many paths to accomplishing their deregulatory ends. The conservative turn against the so-called “deep state” and Chevron’s non-application in areas where conservatives most favor deference (such as national security) further exacerbate the partisan split on the doctrine. And Chevron has become a rhetorical cudgel in broader partisan debates about the legality and legitimacy of the administrative state as a whole. Unless these dynamics change, Chevron deference will continue to have a political valence. And so long as the doctrine is understood to create winners and losers, partisans and interest groups will fight to ensure its survival or hasten its demise.

Campus Free Speech in Polarised Times

Tensions around open expression at universities in the United States and around the world arise mainly from two sources. Campus members increasingly call to restrict hurtful and hate-based speech, and demand silencing, ‘cancelling’ or ‘de-platforming’ outside speakers and campus members who espouse extreme ideological views. At the same time, public and political actors from outside the university attempt to undermine its independence by demanding greater voice to conservative speakers, in an effort to rebalance the ideological makeup of the university. Inclusive freedom – an approach that focuses on ways to promote both open expression and an inclusive climate in contemporary universities – is presented as a theoretical and a practical response to these tensions. Inclusive freedom is anchored in the university’s core mission, bounded by its educational and research goals, and reflects a practical commitment to allowing everyone to participate in an open exchange, which starts from all participants recognising their equal standing and dignity.

Ideology, Partisanship, and Change

This paper analyzes changes in the Croatian party system in the 1990-2016 period by looking at trends in the ideological makeup of voters of the main center-right (HDZ) and center-left (SDP) parties. An assessment of changes in voter self-placement on a left-right scale has shown a gradual increase in the ideological distance among voters of these parties. Further, the paper detected a trend towards an increase in the share of self-declared far-right voters among HDZ voters and far-left voters among SDP voters. In addition, an analysis of categorical ideological identification has demonstrated that, on average, two thirds of HDZ voters were Christian Democrats, while two thirds of SDP voters were Social Democrats. However, among all Christian Democrats, an average of 55 percent voted for the HDZ, while just shy of 60 percent of Social Democrats voted for the SDP. Finally, a logistic regression analysis has confirmed the importance of the cultural dimension of voter behavior in Croatia. Religiosity levels, as well as left-right self-placement serve as rather good predictors of a vote for the HDZ and the SDP, with the model showing greater explanatory strength for HDZ voters. In conclusion, the observed trends in ideological characteristics of HDZ and SDP voters could serve as pointers of underlying shifts in patterns of party competition and offer clues to the increased instability of the Croatian party system following the 2015 and 2016 parliamentary elections.

Taking Note: Justice Harry A. Blackmun's Observations from Oral Argument about Life, the Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court

Taking Note: Justice Harry A. Blackmun's Observations from Oral Argument about Life, the Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court

Right-wing populism’s (ab)use of the past in Italy and the Netherlands

Historical analysis is increasingly used as a tool in the study of present-day populism in Europe. The past is often explored as a source of analogies through which to examine today’s populism, and at other times in search of causal mechanisms to explain the current populist wave. In this paper we focus on a third kind of link between populism and the past, namely the ways populist movements and leaders use and abuse history and historical memory in their quest for mass support. This angle on the populism/history nexus can yield deep insight into the ideological make-up of these movements and their voters, and populism’s discursive dynamics and strategies.Focusing on contemporary right-wing populism and its approach to the dark past of European countries, the paper conducts an exploratory analysis that posits three ways in which the past is (ab)used by populists: (a) the positive reassessment of dark history; (b) the recourse to fake history; (c) the evocation and subsequent denial of links with the dark past. In examining each, we use examples taken from the cases of Italy and The Netherlands to check the plausibility of our categories across different national cases.

Nation, nature, purity: extreme-right biodiversity in Germany

ABSTRACTIn this article, Forchtner investigates the construction of an ‘ideal’, extreme-right, ecologically sensitive subject. A concern for the natural environment is in no way new to the extreme right, and has long been part of its ideological make-up. In particular, claims that the laws of nature are applicable to the social world and that a community is embedded in an ecosystem have long been features of a right-wing ecological imaginary. Through an analysis of all the articles on a paradigmatic ecological issue, biodiversity, published in Germany’s exemplary extreme-right magazine preoccupied with ecology, Umwelt & Aktiv (Environment & Active), this cultural imaginary is reconstructed. Included in it as key themes are human responsibility for environmental degradation, the ecological value of flora and fauna, and criticism of modernity’s levelling tendencies (both biologically and culturally). Taking responsibility for the community’s Heimat (homeland) is, consequently, a crucial element for this subject: a subject who aims for purity, order and the stability of ecosystems.

Télémaque, Ṭahṭāwī and the (Counter-) Enlightenment in the Arab World

The Arab cultural awakening (Nahḍa) was one of the most pervasive and consequential intellectual movements in modern history. A key figure within this movement was the Egyptian civil servant, educator, translator and Islamic scholar Rifā‛a Rāfi‛ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873). Having visited Paris, he developed an interest in the moral, social and political ideas that were prevalent in nineteenth-century France. However, most current scholarship agrees that because of their secular nature, these ideas were of limited use for a devout Muslim such as Ṭahṭāwī in his own cultural and political context. In 1850 Ṭahṭāwī translated François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), and while it has been suggested that this novel may have influenced Ṭahṭāwī’s later works, his translation of it has been mostly ignored by modern researchers. In this paper we demonstrate that Ṭahṭāwī found Télémaque to contain many potentially suitable moral and political lessons to translate into the modernizing Arabic-Islamic culture of the late nineteenth century. First, we present a history of the reception and cultural position of Fénelon’s Télémaque in France. This will help scholars understand it as a popular text across ideologies and philosophical movements. Then we discuss Ṭahṭāwī’s ideological makeup, specifically in relation to modernity. Lastly, we offer a discussion of passages from Ṭahṭāwī’s translation of Télémaque. This allows us to expose some of Ṭahṭāwī’s discursive strategies in Islamizing and Arabizing the concepts and ideas present in the novel, thus laying the conceptual groundwork for his later philosophical writings. On a broader level, this paper examines if and how Ṭahṭāwī’s own ideas and his appropriation of those of Fénelon as present in Télémaque can be plausibly included in the category of a ‘global Counter-Enlightenment’.

“Mommy Killed Him”: Gender, Family, and History in Wes Craven’s <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em> (1984)

Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) tends to have been read as either a showcase of female agency, or as a celebration of misogyny. We argue that this film is significant in the history of gender in horror cinema, and that ascertaining this importance means moving beyond those polarised readings. Specifically, we read Craven's film in the context of the socio-political environment in which it was produced. A Nightmare on Elm Street was released during the height of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan (like his counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, in Britain) championed a traditional, middle-class, white, heterosexual and heterosexist model of the nuclear family. Within this family model, women were seen as passive reproducers of the nation. Women were responsible for raising the children, who were figured as being similarly docile. We argue that this film both contests and endorses the sexual politics of Reagan's idealised family. Nightmare's so-called 'final girl', Nancy, does indeed have agency; she retaliates against familial authority (both that of her morally ambiguous parents and the sinisterly paternalistic Freddy Krueger). Yet, Nancy also becomes a kind of mother figure; in being assigned (by the script) the task of destroying Krueger, she becomes responsible for protecting the youth-and, yes, the families- of Elm Street; of continuing the job started by her parents. The future of Middle America lies in this final girl's hands.

Beyond the 2008 Great Recession: Economic factors and electoral support for the radical left in Europe

One of the most striking political developments occurring during the Great Recession has been the growth of the radical left in some European countries. Though the literature is far from conclusive, it has generally been argued that the economy is not a main reason driving people’s support for non-mainstream parties (particularly the Greens and the radical right). In this article, we contend that this is not the case for radical left parties (RLPs), which despite pursuing other agendas do still compete very strongly on economic issues. Using individual-level data for 56 elections taking place between 1996 and 2016 in 15 European countries, we find a positive effect of unemployment on support for RLPs, and only very weak evidence that this effect depends on voters’ ideology or whether the mainstream (Social Democrats) left is in office. We conclude that unemployment enables the radical left to increase its support regardless of the political context but does not significantly change by itself the ideological makeup of its electorate.

Reconciling the god and gender gaps: the influence of women in church politics

ABSTRACTSocial scientists have long recognized women as being both more religious and more liberal than men. Indeed, men have been disaffiliating from churches and the Democratic Party at higher rates than women for several decades. Moreover, we show evidence to suggest that churchgoing women, while less liberal than women in the general population, are nevertheless more liberal than churchgoing men. Given these trends, one might expect churches to have become more liberal in response to these changing demographics. However, using nationally representative data of American congregations and their adherents, we show that churches with a higher percentage of female congregants are actually more conservative. We suggest that the institutional structure of churches limits the ideological influence and contributions of women within the church community. Specifically, women are often excluded formally or informally from decision-making leadership positions in the church. When women are allowed greater access to leadership positions, however, we find that congregations do tend to be less politically conservative. These findings suggest that churches and other civic organizations, which are major direct and indirect political actors, may be insulated from changes in the partisan or ideological makeup of their membership through their allocation of important leadership roles.