Perceptual Screen Research Articles

Talk Local to Me: Assessing the Heterogenous Effects of Localistic Appeals

Contemporary public opinion in the United States has been characterized by affective polarization and the nationalization of political behavior. In this paper, we examine whether local framing can decrease voters’ reliance on national partisan identities when evaluating their representatives in the United States Congress. Relying on both an experimental study and observational data from senators’ Facebook posts, we find evidence that “talking local” is an effective means for representatives to bypass the “perceptual screen” of partisanship . Candidates who “go local” in their communication style are able to expand their electoral coalition by appealing to independents and outpartisans alike. Observational findings suggest that many politicians, especially those representing competitive districts, are aware of this and “go local” strategically.

Partisanship, Political Awareness, and Retrospective Evaluations, 1956–2016

A long line of research shows that voters frequently evaluate objective conditions through a perceptual screen, seeing a stronger economy and more peaceful world when their party is in power. We know less about how and why these partisan perceptual differences have changed over recent history, however. This paper combines ANES measures of retrospective evaluations from 1956 to 2016 and shows that partisan differences (1) have increased significantly over the past few decades across all types of assessments; (2) are greatest, and have changed the most, amongst the most politically aware; and (3) closely track changes in elite polarization over this time period. The extent of partisan disagreement in retrospective evaluations is thus not constant, but rather contingent on attributes of the voter and the political context. Greater political awareness and more polarized politicians result in larger partisan perceptual differences, as the most engaged citizens are the most likely to receive and internalize cues about the state of the world from their party’s elites.

Querying the Queer: A Study of the Queer Identity in the Sri Lankan English Novel

Employing the insights gleaned from queer theory, this paper engages with the literary representation of tabooed sexualities by scrutinizing the depiction of the queer character in the postIndependence Sri Lankan novel. The methodology of the study is based on a textual examination. The primary texts under scrutiny are three texts by the two pioneers of the Sri Lankan English novel, Punyakanthi Wijenaike (Giraya and Amulet) and James Goonewardena (An Asian Gambit); in which one finds the earliest appearance of the queer character in Sri Lankan English fiction. In a nutshell, the paper examines how these authors negotiate with what the feminist critics term, “the perceptual screen provided by our patriarchal cultural conditioning” by attempting to see if the works of these authors hold any subversive potential. This end is achieved by examining whether the depiction of the queer character in the novels of these authors is employed as a means of tracing a redefinition or a reaffirmation of the patriarchal social institutions such as love and family. In the exploration it becomes evident that especially in Wijenaike’s work there is a critical recognition the discriminatory aspects of certain patriarchal institutions. Nevertheless, the study unearths that in spite of the authors’ ostensibly radical move of engaging with tabooed sexualities in the Sri Lankan society in their novels, their depiction of the queer character is predominantly governed by homophobic, heterosexist undercurrents. It is hoped that this paper will throw new light on the preoccupations of the Sri Lankan English writers, enable new readings of old texts, and illuminate a previously unexplored area of experience in Sri Lankan English fiction.Key words: Sri Lankan novel, queer, homosexuality, identity, gender studies

How do different sources of partisanship influence government accountability in Europe?

The possibility of holding representatives to account through regular elections is one of the cornerstones of representative democracy. The precise role of partisanship in doing this has not been extensively examined. Using survey data from Europe (2002–2012), we show that partisanship can weaken or strengthen accountability, depending on its sources. If it is an affective-psychological attitude, as the Michigan school suggests, then it weakens accountability because it acts as a perceptual screen. If, however, it is a calculation of party performance which is constantly updated by citizens, then it strengthens accountability. The findings suggest that partisanship in Europe has been quite responsive to performance over the ten-year period. Instead of acting as a screen that inhibits accountability, partisanship appears rooted in calculations of party performance and so enhances accountability. However, the effects are asymmetric with left-leaning partisans more sensitive to the performance of their governments than right-leaning partisans.

Восприятие Европы в молодежной среде в контексте новых реалий мировой политики (на материалах Краснодара)

In the context of large-scale geopolitical changes, the study of the subjective space of politics and mechanisms for its design takes on great importance. It can define the images of political actors and the results of their perception by different social communities. The article presents results of the study aimed to define how young people perceive the image of Europe. The model of social perception of the object consists of several key components: the content of image (objective parameters), the factors influencing the perception of this image (contextual, communicative and subjective), and the functions of image that affect the national identity formation. The main method of collecting empirical data was discussion in focus groups formed by people from various segments of youth from Krasnodar and the region. To stimulate discussion, a number of techniques were used: projective drawing, methodology of unfinished sentences, mapping, semantic differential technique, scaling. To assess and conceptualize the data obtained, the results were discussed with experts. The explanatory model of the image of Europe proposed in the study allows us to cover the complexity, multidimensionality and interdependence of its structural elements. Being part of subjective space of politics, the image of Europe consists of rational and unconscious components that have verbal and visual projections in a system of cognitive, affective and behavioral attitudes and are changing under the influence of a complex of structural and dynamic factors. The image of Europe in the notions of modern youth is represented by a multi-level and multi-component dynamic design. Due to the impact of a system of external and internal factors, mechanisms and institutions of socialization, targeted and spontaneous influences, components of the image of Europe are structured into a system of basic constants and variables. Our study showed that the constant parameters of the image are formed, as a rule, under the influence of structural factors, while variable parameters – under the influence of dynamic factors. The most important “perceptual screen” affecting the “core” of the image of Europe in the perception of our respondents is the education system. As for peripheral components, Internet resources play a crucial role in their formation, especially such as social networks, blogs and online games. The study also showed existence of a generation gap in the youth’s perception of the image of Europe, which is mainly based on personal experience of acquaintance with the European countries.

Objective Quality Assessment and Perceptual Compression of Screen Content Images.

Screen content image (SCI) has recently emerged as an active topic due to the rapidly increasing demand in many graphically rich services such as wireless displays and virtual desktops. SCIs are often composed of pictorial regions and computer generated textual/graphical content, which exhibit different statistical properties that often lead to different viewer behaviors. Inspired by this, we propose an objective quality assessment approach for SCIs that incorporates both visual field adaptation and information content weighting into structural similarity based local quality assessment. Furthermore, we develop a perceptual screen content coding scheme based on the newly proposed quality assessment measure, targeting at further improving the SCI compression performance. Experimental results show that the proposed quality assessment method not only better predicts the perceptual quality of SCIs, but also demonstrates great potentials in the design of perceptually optimal SCI compression schemes.

The Limits of Issue Ownership Dynamics: The Constraining Effect of Party Preference

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party “owns” the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. However, based on the broad literature on partisan bias, we predict that parties' efforts to change issue ownership perceptions will have a difficult time breaching the perceptual screen created by a voter's party preference. Using two separate experiments with a similar design we show that the effect of partisan issue messages on issue competence is moderated by party preference. The effect of issue messages is reinforced when people already like a party, and blocked when people dislike a party.

Political corruption, economy, and citizens' evaluation of democracy in South Korea

South Korean politics has been haunted by numerous corruption scandals as well as the prosecution of politicians and their cronies for their corruption. Yet despite the prevalence and salience of political corruption, many citizens of South Korea tend to overlook the problem by continuing to support corrupt politicians and administrations. This study defines under what circumstances political corruption shapes citizens' judgment of government and the political system as a whole in South Korea. The results indicate that national economic conditions as a perceptual screen mediate the effect of political corruption on the evaluation of democratic governance.

Partisanship and Information Processing: Perceptions and Expectations

Democratic theory assumes that citizens can fairly evaluate political candidates and parties. Research into citizens’ judgments, however, has long since indicated a problem with this assumption: instead of seeing the world clearly, citizens’ party loyalties may distort their perceptions. The authors of The American Voter conclude, for example, that identifying with a party raises a that colors how people view the political world. Despite partisanship’s widely accepted importance in structuring political behavior, few studies have tested this claim. Does partisanship actually distort perceptions? In this paper, we test this long-standing claim against an alternative view of partisanship, which sees it as a cognitive or that allows citizens to situate new information within their larger understanding of the political world.Drawing on recent work in psychology, we use two experiments that manipulate the placement of a party labels, putting them either before or after politically relevant information that we later ask respondents to evaluate. If party is simply a shortcut that has no effect on perceptions, the order of the party labels should have no effect on subjects’ evaluations of the substantive information. On the other hand, if party functions as a powerful that alters the experience of reading the information, subjects who receive the cue at the start of the information should exhibit a higher party effect than those who receive it at the end. We find no support for the perceptual screen model across either experiment.

MBA Attitudes Toward Business: What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us or Help Us

MBA students are often treated as a blank sheet of paper on which the MBA program and its faculty etch and imprint the knowledge and philosophy of business success. Implicit in this thinking is that students are willing neophytes in this ritualistic process without a perceptual screen shaping and molding the content being espoused by legions of business philosophers—both academic and professional. The author sheds light on the attitudinal states of the MBA students who occupy those many seats, engage in class discussions, analyze cases, and finally are knighted as Masters of the Universe. Quite surprisingly, MBA students have diverse attitudes toward the business community. In a sample of 866 MBA students representing 27 MBA programs around the United States, the research suggests that these students do not embrace all aspects of business practices. Students are biased, skeptical and, on certain issues, downright critical of the community they are about to join.

Perceptual causality in the amodal completion of kinetic structures.

Perceptual causality as an amodal completion of kinetic structures was demonstrated. The experimental situation was as follows: a square appeared on the left, moved from left to right till it touched one side of a stationary rectangle (a perceptual screen), and disappeared; after a while, another square appeared at the other side of the rectangle and moved right. The first square moved faster than the second one. Sometimes, two moving objects were perceived, with an amodal launching effect: the first moving object seemed to collide with the second one behind the screen. When both the screen and the occluding interval were small, despite the discrepancy of velocities, a single moving object was perceived, but the object seemed to abruptly change its speed behind the screen. The perception of an amodal completion of movement raises some theoretical issues: the discrepancy between amodal completion of kinetic structures and that of static ones, the problem of perceptual identity, and figure-ground segregation in dynamic scene. The dilemma of the naive subject will also be discussed.

Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (review)

Book Reviews Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, 272 pp. $29.95 paper. The City of Angels has a long history that is studded with frequent racial riots. As early as 1871 a mob action was taken against defenseless Chinese residents whose homes and shops were destroyed by whites who felt the Chinese were responsible for their unemployment. The riots that broke out in 1965, often labeled the 1965 Watts Rebellion, were certainly part of the long legacy of a city plagued by racial and ethnic conflicts resulting from unjust discrimination . The most recent race riots that Los Angeles experienced in the spring of 1992 were not unique when viewed within the context of race relations in the past. The main characters may have changed, but the stage remains almost the same. The 1992 Los Angeles riots were triggered by people who felt that an injustice had been committed in the verdict of the Rodney King case. Although the rioters may have initially been motivated by a desire to seek vengeance against whites, they quickly turned their anger against Koreans, thereby making the riots appear to be a racial conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans. The media, in their constant search for exciting and unusual coverage for national and international broadcasts, capitalized on this aspect, no doubt contributing to the widespread public perception that the riots were exclusively a conflict between the two minority groups. The authors reject this misconception and attempt to put the 1 992 riots in wider historical, socioKorean Studies, Volume21. ©1997 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. BOOK REVIEWS123 logical, and political perspective. Three major themes, (1) the transnational character of the Korean diaspora, (2) the heterogeneity of Korean Americans, and (3) a critique of American ideologies, run throughout the book, which is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1, "The Los Angeles Riots: the Korean American Story," argues against the notion that the 1992 riots were a repetition of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. When the former is viewed within the context of the latter, then the place of Korean Americans is not only minimized, but also lost. The notion that the 1992 riots were nothing but a reprise of the 1965 Watts Riots distorts what actually happened not only to the Korean American community in Los Angeles, but also to the urban landscape ofAmerica. Such a notion also ignores the harsh realities of the damage done to Korean Americans. More than half of the 3,100 businesses owned by Korean Americans suffered from the riots, with property losses reaching $350 million. In other words, Korean Americans became the chief victims of the riots. Despite the property damage and human suffering that Korean Americans experienced, the conflict cannot simply be characterized as one between Korean and African Americans. Chapter 2, "Reckoning via the Riots," presents a variety of responses to the riots voiced by Korean American residents in Los Angeles during interviews with the authors. Filtering through the perceptual screen of these interviewees were their sense of estrangement in their adopted homeland, their indignation of being betrayed and deceived by the American creed, their sense of helplessness and hopelessness about their future, and finally a great diversity of opinions and thoughts about their own country and American society. The authors believe that this diversity constitutes the transnational nature of the Korean diaspora. Chapter 3, "Diaspora Formation: Modernity and Mobility," presents a brief but cogent history of Korean immigration to the United States since the early 1900s. The authors stress two major themes in their condensed account of the past 100 years of Korean immigration: (1) the diversity of the Koreans who immigrated to America since 1945, and (2) the different perspectives of Koreatown in Los Angeles. The two primary motivations that brought the Korean immigrants to America were the quest for modernization and for economic and probably social mobility. The availability of college education in America, the gender inequality still prevalent in their native society, lack of mobility among peasants and urban workers, and the notion of freedom in America attracted Koreans to the United States. (Two minor...

MEASURING GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE: COMMENT

Previous article No AccessNOTES AND COMMENTSMEASURING GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE: COMMENTJOHN H. BECKJOHN H. BECK Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by National Tax Journal Volume 43, Number 2June 1990 Published for: The National Tax Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/NTJ41788839 Views: 2Total views on this site © 1990 National Tax Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Party Identification as a Perceptual Screen: Temporal Priority, Reality & the Voting Act

The theory of party identification-despite the important place it occupies in psychology and socialization literature-has rarely been clearly formulated or tested. An exception is the analysis by the Michigan Survey Research Center. Charles Helm sees a number of difficulties with the theory and suggests here a different formulation of the voting act. He argues that both from the explanatory and the moral standpoint the process of voting requires that a distinction be made between what people do and what happens to them.

Voter Information Sources in a Nonpartisan Local Election

behavior or political participation of any type is in part a function of political stimuli available to citizen. Those who receive a greater number of stimuli are more likely to participate and to participate actively.' The reception of stimuli is a function of individual's perceptual screen. A number of studies have found that persons who have high exposure to one media generally have high exposure to several different kinds, and this continues throughout a political campaign.2 Those who are high in consumption of non-political stimuli tend to be high in consumption of political stimuli,3 and persons who are interested in politics are more attentive to political stimuli than those who are less interested.4 Individuals who are more exposed to communications media are more likely to be interested in politics, to vote, to have a party preference, to discuss politics, to have opinions on issues congruent with party stands, and to support candidate of their party. Exposure to media and interest in politics are mutually reinforcing, with interest leading to more exposure and increased exposure leading to greater political interest. The mass media perform function in a partisan election of assisting voters in cognitive process of associating party affiliation with candidate name, and also serve preliminary function of alerting voters to mere existence of an impending election.7 The absence of party as an active organization to provide a clue to alternatives available may cause voters in nonpartisan elections to seek other voting cues. Among voting cues are those provided by mass media or by organizations with a base in local community. Banfield and Wilson have stated that the readers of newspapers and members of civic associations, labor unions, women's clubs, and like often rely heavily upon an 'approved slate' in choosing among party-less and for most voters, meaningless, names on ballot.s