Ordinary Citizens Research Articles

ASSESSING NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT’S EFFORTS IN SAFEGUARDING CITIZENS, UTILITIES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE FROM TERRORIST ATTACKS

Vulnerable places are usually the targets of terrorist attacks everywhere in the world. The scenario is quite the same in Nigeria. Boko Haram and other terrorist groups in Nigeria have attacked ordinary citizens and infrastructure like schools and hospitals. Especially crowded places are the main targets of the terrorists. To mitigate this security challenge, the Nigerian government factored in the protection of soft targets in its National Counter-Terrorism Strategy (NACTEST). The second pillar of NACTEST, known as “to secure,” is in charge of this assignment. The NACTEST document was launched in 2014 by President Jonathan as a standing policy to combat terrorism in Nigeria. It is expected that this strategy needs to be evaluated since it has been in operation for more than half a decade. The focus of this paper is to examine the extent to which the Nigerian government has successively protected soft targets from terrorism attacks. The paper makes use of both primary and secondary data as sources of data gathering and content analysis for data analysis. The research makes use of the NACTEST document and bases its evaluation on the specified objectives of the NACTEST second pillar, “to secure." It also adopts asymmetric theory as its theoretical framework. The paper discovered that the Nigerian government has, to a large extent, successively protected the vulnerable, like civilian citizens, utilities, and infrastructure. However, sporadic attacks by terrorists are equally a challenge that the government needs to handle seriously. The paper recommended, among others, that the government should provide needed resources, both human and material, for security and better performance.

Application of the Theory of Routine Activities in Criminology to the General Crime Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina

A significant number of criminologists, applying the theory of routine activities, believe that a criminal offense is the result of three convergent elements that combine in time and space (a motivated perpetrator, a suitable target, and the absence of adequate protection). When analyzing these three independent factors, custody is usually given a less significant position in this triangle, without any real reason. It is important to point out that the social structure can significantly affect any form of its violation because ordinary citizens can largely protect each other, as well as citizens' property. In the context of this paper, we will consider routine activities in the light of certain daily determining activities, such as education, economic crises, unemployment, mass communication means, migration, family circumstances, and free time, which can be key to explaining the rate of increase or decrease in crime. When all these activities are analyzed through the theory of routine activity, then we can have a complete overview in terms of criminal activity and the exposure to a criminal act of an individual or the social community as a whole.

Лингвопрагматические характеристики двуязычия в акадийском медиадискурсе

The aim of the study is to identify the peculiarities of the implementation of pragmatic attitudes of the Acadian linguistic personality regarding bilingualism (goals pursued when covering bilingualism, values associated with bilingualism, etc.) in the media discourse of the province. The paper presents the results of analysing 100 newspaper articles covering various aspects of bilingualism in the region – the main themes and subthemes associated with bilingualism are identified and both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data are conducted. The study is novel in that it presents the first characterization of the coverage of bilingualism in the Acadian press. As a result, the study reveals that regarding the coverage of bilingualism, the New Brunswick press primarily focuses on internal provincial affairs – the representation of bilingualism at the national level is barely reflected; failures and problems related to the implementation of bilingualism in the province are covered more extensively than the successes and achievements of implementing the institutional bilingualism policy. There is explicit criticism of the implementation of the language policy by the regional authorities – their actions and inactions; the articles note violations of Francophones’ rights and numerous difficulties in implementing bilingualism, including those arising from the entrenched conflict between Anglophones and Francophones in the province. However, measures to develop real bilingualism in various spheres of public life undertaken by the government, organizations, and ordinary citizens of the region are also highlighted; the authors of the articles and interviewees postulate ideas about the economic benefits of bilingualism and its value as part of the Acadian identity.

What Does the World's Biggest Tech Event Tell Us? Key Pointers from CES 2024

Getting to know what's in the making by tech industry leaders is something transformative to anyone's awareness in the 21 century. It's like our grandparents having to read journal every morning. What would people at that time consider the person who doesn't read the journal at all? You name it. For tech it's the same; knowing how the technological landscape is shaping helps you prepare for the future by being emotionally ready. For software engineers, it's even critical than ordinary citizens. This is because it's more than emotional readiness. It is career and professional readiness as well. But how you will get to know the key technology industry leaders are working on? One of the key venues is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It is an annual giant event that brings in tech leaders in the industry to talk about their latest innovations. This paper brings to you key observations from CES 2024, held in January. From those observations you can extrapolate key future points about the tech ahead of us.

Reaction-diffusion models of crimo–taxis in a street

In this paper, two reaction-diffusion models describing the interaction among susceptible people (ordinary citizens), infective people (drug users/dealers), and law enforcement personnel are analyzed. The models here considered are a generalization of the crimo-taxis model originally proposed by Epstein in 1997. The modifications allow us to describe various scenarios. We analyze the equilibrium points, together with their stability, of the homogeneous system. Moreover, according to the Turing approach to reaction–diffusion models, we investigate the instability driven processes and the emergence of patterns in the complete models.

Trends in Theorizing Sortition

In recent years, political scientists have devoted increasing attention to sortition – the random selection of ordinary citizens for political decision-making. This has been accompanied by a number of real-world experiments in which randomly-selected bodies provide input into the political process. The result has been a large and growing literature on the topic. Recent contributions to that literature have detailed proposals for expanded use of sortition, most of which combine election and sortition in innovative and ambitious ways. The use of sortition in these proposals is justified in various ways, many of which involve the way random selection can generate bodies capable of high-quality deliberation. There is more controversy regarding the connection between sortition and democracy. Some regard sortition as a uniquely democratic selection mechanism, while others regard election and sortition as advancing competing democratic values, generating the need for a tradeoff between them. Future research on sortition will no doubt further explore both the value of sortition and its democratic credentials.

The Institute of Gubernatorial Elections as a Marker of Regional Features of the Political Culture of Russians (based on the results of Russian single voting day-2023)

The author examines the institution of elections of heads of subjects of the Russian Federation as a product of political and cultural orientations of both state and political figures of the federal and regional levels of government, and the ordinary citizens. Using comparative and statistical analysis, the relationship between political attitudes and expectations of Russians and the transformation of gubernatorial elections in the period from 1991 to 2022 is explored. The significance of the ethnonational and socio-economic specifics of the political culture of Russians in legitimizing such changes is described. During the analysis of direct gubernatorial elections in 2023, current features of political culture in the context of regions are noted, which may be important in the transformation of the institution of gubernatorial elections. The author compares the results of the gubernatorial campaigns of 2018 and 2023 from the point of view of the landscape of political involvement of Russians and the dynamics of support for federal parties in the regions. The phenomenon of distant electronic voting is analyzed, and the weakness of its perception by residents of Russian regions to ensure accessibility of elections and fair political competition.

From paperwork to pixels: workload and digital governance in Armenian local authorities

This study examines the impact of amalgamation reforms on workload and digital governance within Armenian local authorities, against a backdrop of decentralization and government consolidation. It explores how these reforms affect public servants at different governmental levels and ordinary citizens, highlighting the transition towards e-governance as a mitigatory strategy. The research employed a mixed-method approach, incorporating document analysis, semi-structured interviews with government officials across various levels, and focus group discussions with citizens from amalgamated communities. This comprehensive methodology aimed to assess the shifts in workload distribution and the effectiveness of digital governance tools post-amalgamation. Findings indicate a significant shift in work responsibilities towards local administrators, particularly after community amalgamations, leading to increased workloads. While digital governance tools were introduced to alleviate these pressures, their effectiveness varied. Smaller communities reported satisfaction with service delivery improvements, attributing this to enhanced government support and capacity. However, larger communities faced challenges, including dissatisfaction with service delivery, loss of local identity, and perceived inequities in tax contributions versus benefits received. The study reveals that while amalgamation and digital governance initiatives aim to enhance administrative efficiency and public service delivery, they also present complex challenges. These include managing increased workloads and ensuring equitable service provision across communities. The research contributes to the discourse on local governance reform, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that considers the implications for democracy, accountability, and citizen engagement in the face of significant structural changes.

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that captures the notion that consumption by ordinary citizens poses a status threat to ruling elites. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income—sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face a greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a new dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws. It is unfortunately an established fact that both men and womenfolk have, in utterly irresponsible manner, driven extravagance in dress and new styles to such shameful and wanton extremes that the different classes are barely to be known apart. —Nuremberg Ordnance of 1657, Quoted in Hunt (1996)

Analyzing sentiments towards E-Levy policy implementation in Ghana using twitter data

AbstractA newly proposed or implemented government policy often encounters challenges. Ghanaian citizens have always look down negatively upon their government’s policies, hence those are rarely appreciated. This paper ponders over the Ghanaian government’s proposal of electronic levy on mobile money transactions which was announced in the 2022 budget on November 17, 2021. We have scrutinized this governmental policy through the ordinary citizen's perspective using lexicon-based sentiment analysis on Twitter data. Lexicons are collections of words that express specific emotions, and deals with interpreting emotions like happiness, frustration, anger, and sadness. Twitter, serving as a means for people to share their views, provides enormous user generated content, beneficial for research purposes. We collected e-levy specific Twitter data in five phases, namely; policy introduction, popularity, discussion, feeble, and debate phases. The policy introduction phase recorded the least volume of data containing 1400 tweets, among which our sentiment analyzer classifies 8.93% as positive, 89.29% as neutral, and 1.78% as negative. The debate phase recorded the highest amount of data containing 18.423 tweets, among which 24.43% tweets are classified as positive, 59.29% as neutral, and 16.28% as negative. An analysis on the entire data containing 38,771 tweets reports 25.50% positive, 59.02% neutral, and 15.48% negative tweets. Our study determines that people are not largely unhappy established by the stable positive sentiment percentage, however, there is a high neutral score in all the phases.

Under No Circumstances? What the Chinese Really Think about the Wartime Use of Nuclear Weapons

Abstract The idea of using nuclear weapons to kill noncombatants is said to evoke strong moral opprobrium among millions of individuals across the globe, such that national leaders should be constrained from using the weapons even when such a decision would be strategically sensible. Classical area scholarship and recent survey evidence suggest that this “nuclear taboo” is strong among the Chinese public, buttressed by culturally grounded preferences for moderation in warfare. Drawing on findings in cultural sociology and political behavior, we argue that previous studies mislead on the extent to which ordinary Chinese citizens might oppose the use of nuclear weapons in a real military clash, primarily due to a failure to distinguish baseline preferences for nuclear nonuse from the willingness to approve of governmental decisions to use these weapons. Results from an original survey experiment fielded in mainland China show that many individuals who personally dislike the idea of using nuclear weapons are nonetheless willing to support their leaders’ decision to do so. Our study contributes new and systematic knowledge about Chinese nuclear attitudes and highlights the value of harnessing interdisciplinary insights to inform the research agenda on the nuclear taboo.

Enactors of the State: The Everyday Coproduction of Security in the Prevention of Radicalisation

Since 2001, studies of (counter)terrorism and (counter)radicalisation have burgeoned. However, at times, these literatures have reduced the agency of ordinary citizens, imagining them as ‘actors of the state’ and ‘petty sovereigns’. By integrating vernacular security approaches with allied research in Education, we develop a novel ontological conceptualisation of ordinary citizens as ‘enactors of the state’, engaged in the everyday coproduction of security. The article presents the findings of a survey, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, conducted in Manchester’s Further Education sector, following the 2017 Arena attack. We capture the security enactments of 95 elites, professionals, teachers, and students. Our data reveal the complex interactions, ensembles, and assemblages at the heart of security’s everyday coproduction. In contrast to existing approaches, we show how this creative dynamic operates through citizens’ variegated imbrications with state policy, complex relationalities, and subtle nuances in everyday enactment.

Good Politicians: Experimental Evidence on Motivations for Political Candidacy and Government Performance

Abstract How can we motivate good politicians—those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens’ preferences—to enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. Emphasizing prosocial motives for holding political office instead of personal returns—such as the ability to help others versus enhancing one’s own respect and status—raises the likelihood that individuals run for office and that voters elect them. A year later, the treatment improves the alignment of policy with citizens’ preferences. These effects emerge only when treatments are randomly delivered in a public setting. Taken together, the results demonstrate that how politics is perceived shapes who decides to run for office, who is elected, as well the policies that democracies deliver.

Developing behavioral models of citizens for adapting to and mitigating climate change: a study on four prefectures in Japan

Individual behaviors of citizens are important for implementing the necessary measures for adapting to climate change. However, studies on the adaptive behaviors of ordinary citizens are limited. Therefore, in this study, we developed behavioral models to understand individual behaviors for adaption to and mitigation of climate change. We compared four behavior groups, namely, G1, individual mitigation; G2, individual adaptive; G3, long-term adaptive; and G4, solar-energy system installation behaviors. Following a questionnaire survey for the four behavioral groups, behavioral models were developed using structural equation modeling, which considered psychological factors along with selected attitudes, perceived effectiveness, norms, benefits, practicality, and intention. Furthermore, we considered the recognition and attribution of local climate change as key factors for adaptation behaviors toward local climate change. The behaviors of citizens in four prefectures in Japan, namely, Nagano, Tokyo, Saitama, and Kanagawa were considered. Among them, Nagano Prefecture, wherein the implementation of adaptation measures was at a low level while that of mitigation measures was at a high level, showed a differing trend. In the behavioral models, the recognition of local climate change directly affected the behavior of citizens in the individual adaptive behavior group. In both the individual adaptive and long-term adaptive behavior groups, the impact of benefits was substantial, with significant differences across local areas. Thus, effective adaptation strategies might involve tangible and familiar examples demonstrating the consequences of behavior, thus enhancing citizens' behavior evaluation perception and fostering its acceptance as a desirable behavior. Tailoring adaptation strategies to specific local contexts might also be necessity. To encourage citizens to adapt to climate change and its impacts, we propose two-way efforts, instead of providing one-way information, by supporting citizens to think about self-help and mutual help effectively. Our study can serve as a reference for future studies focusing on citizen behavior about climate change mitigation and enhance their adaptation for locally implemented strategies.

Populist orientations of Ukrainians during a full-scale war

The article analyzes the populist attitudes in a society that has experienced full-scale external aggression under the conditions of populist rule and the “rally around the flag” effect. Typically, in countries where populists are in power, there is a decline in anti-elitist sentiment and a rise in support for anti-democratic orientations. However, after the landslide victory of populists in Ukraine in 2019 and even during the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, citizens demonstrated an increased level of support for populist ideas. In particular, most Ukrainians agree with populist ideas of people-centrism. Public opinion is still dominated by anti-establishment and anti-elitist orientations, despite national unity during the war and support for the current government. On the other hand, while advocating the absolute primacy of popular sovereignty, citizens are divided on whether they want to be represented in politics by an ordinary citizen rather than an experienced politician. Moreover, most Ukrainians do not agree with the expediency of violating the law to achieve a political result. Support for populism in Ukraine is concentrated primarily among economically disadvantaged people living in small towns, less educated, older people, and those with financial problems. At the same time, the populist orientations of Ukrainians during the war were not determined by regional or ethnolinguistic distinctions.

The Struggle for Equality and Religious Tolerance: Women's Presence and Leadership in Protestant Circles in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Abstract: In 1559 two Protestant communities were discovered in Spain. A striking number of women—ordinary citizens, noblewomen, nuns—lived in those communities. Several played preeminent roles as teachers, preceptors, and feminist leaders who fought to defend their religious freedom and rights. This article aims to remove their names from oblivion, to describe the decisive role they played in Protestant circles in sixteenth-century Spain, and to analyze their philosophical and theological thinking.

Capital City Cruising: Surveillance, Pleasure, and Discursive Practices of Queer Communities in Ottawa

This study investigates how men who have sex with men (MSM) discern, discuss, and defy issues of surveillance in the context of casual, public sex​​—also known as cruising—and how these exchanges constitute and inform subaltern counter-surveillance measures. Focusing on written exchanges by users of the queer hook-up website Squirt, I analyze how individuals share information about the safety and surveillance of cruising locations in the Greater Ottawa Area. This work concludes that surveillance and cruising is normalized, and that both police and ordinary citizens present safety risks. Because of this, great care is taken to act discreetly and not infringe on the safety of non-cruisers. Finally, environmental factors contribute greatly to both the construction and circumvention of surveillance infrastructure. The data additionally complicate surveillance realism (Dencik and Cable 2017), since cruisers accept the presence of surveillance but not the inevitable impact of it.

A Cross-Section of Korean People’s Thoughts on the Immobility Situation Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic created an immobility situation that was not just a quarantine issue, but formed meta-discourses in all areas related to human life, including politics, economy, diplomacy, education, and culture. Even in the urgent situation of these meta-discourses in which nations had to decide on their future, discourses existed about daily life and the unusual lives of individuals caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. To record the testimonies of that era, the Mobility Humanities Education Center at Konkuk University has collected writings on life changed after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which were written by middle and high school students, college students, and ordinary citizens. This paper attempts a narrative analysis of the 51 essays to explore how Koreans are influenced by meta-discourses, to examine that era, and make suggestions for the future.

Lay theories of place effects

AbstractCombining research in political geography and social psychology, this article investigates lay theories of “place effects”—that is, ordinary citizens' beliefs about the effects that urban or rural places have on the individuals who live in them. We do so using a novel survey vignette embedded in a large‐scale survey of the Canadian public. Our results suggest that (1) citizens see rural identities as less malleable than urban identities, (2) lay theories of place effects depend on citizens' own place identities, and (3) lay theories of place effects are stronger for nonpolitical than for political place‐based characteristics. We also find that lay theories of place effects are associated with individual‐level characteristics that are connected to cosmopolitan‐communitarian divides, such as ideology and postsecondary education. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for the growing literature on urban–rural divides and for research on citizens' implicit theories of places and their political consequences.

Citizen Participation during the 2014 Protest in Burkina Faso: Aspiring to a ‘good State’

Abstract Analyses of the 2014 protest in Burkina Faso have predominantly focused on some of the movement’s major activists, to the neglect of ordinary citizens. Yet, while citizens’ participation in Burkina Faso in 2014 echoed to some extent the agendas of activists, it built on citizens’ own political subjectivities. Drawing on original interviews and Afrobarometer survey data, we show that Burkinabè citizens were motivated to protest by unmet expectations of the ‘good state’, as experienced in their daily existence in the sense of hardship and unequal treatment by the political system. These expectations and aspirations reflected citizens’ deeper political beliefs or political subjectivities, as already expressed in years prior to the 2014 political crisis. Overall, the article shows how looking at protest from the bottom-up can shift our understanding of political mobilization and its motives: citizen protest constitutes its own political phenomenon, in Burkina Faso and beyond, and should not be subsumed by analyses largely derived from speaking to major activists.