Ideological Segregation Research Articles

Policy Implications of Arabic Instruction in Israeli Jewish Schools

Arabic instruction in Israel's Jewish school sector is unsatisfactory by both objective and subjective measures. This is surprising given that Arabic is an official language, that Arabs have a substantial presence in the country, and the powerful forces that support Arabic instruction. The rationale of Arabic instruction is linked to the needs of the Zionist project of Jewish sectarianism. Ironically, it is this very project as a set of ideologies and social practices, and the institutional forces that embody it, that subvert Arabic instruction. Too few students study Arabic, mostly as a result of the poor value of Arabic as linguistic capital. Here, the linguistic political economy reflects the physical, social, political, economic, and ideological segregation and marginalization of Arabs in Israel. The quality of instruction is further eroded by the very powerful stakeholders that militate for expanding Arabic instruction—namely the security apparatus, academia, and Arabic teachers—all of whom are serve...

Ideological Segregation Online and Offline

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.

Pushing the boundaries in Northern Ireland: young people, violence and sectarianism

Pushing the boundaries in Northern Ireland: young people, violence and sectarianism

Competition and Democracy

ECONOMISTs have often argued that if an industry acts as a monopolist it would be desirable government policy either to break up the monopoly or, if this is undesirable because of increasing returns, to regulate and perhaps even nationalize it.' This proposition, although extremely well known and often accepted as obvious, turns out upon close examination to be far from obvious, and to involve several assumptions of doubtful validity. The argument supporting this proposition goes something as follows: Monopolies cause a maldistribution of resources, since the price charged by a monopolist exceeds marginal costs and an optimal distribution requires price equal to marginal cost. An optimal allocation would occur if the industry were made competitive, since price equals marginal costs in competitive industries. If the industry were a "natural" monopoly, price could be made equal to marginal cost either indirectly by government regulation or directly by government administration. Therefore, the recommendation is an anti-trust law to prevent or break up contrived monopolies and government regulation or government administration of natural monopolies. The non-sequitor in this argument is the sentence beginning with "therefore"; the recommendation of government intervention does not follow from the demonstration that government intervention could improve matters. Demonstrating that a set of government decisions would improve matters is not the same as demonstrating that actual government decisions would do so. This kind of inference is logically equivalent to identifying the actual workings of the market sector with its ideal workings. In Section I a theory of the workings of a political democracy under ideal conditions is developed. It is shown that an ideal democracy is very similar