Political Disagreement Research Articles

German stakeholder perceptions of an EU carbon border adjustment mechanism

The European Commission has proposed a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that would apply the carbon price prevailing in the EU emissions trading system to import-related emissions. We conducted a survey to study perceptions of an EU CBAM among German key stakeholders from industry, civil society, and research in July 2021. We find that substantial support for CBAM exists as well as the expectation that the mechanism will eventually be introduced. We identified divergent views on key design options among stakeholder groups. Stakeholders from industry generally favour the continuation of free allocation of emissions allowances, rebates for exporters from the EU, coverage of only scope 1 emissions, and use of revenues for domestic spending. Stakeholders from civil society prefer phasing out free allocation, coverage only of imports, an emissions scope including all indirect emissions, exempting low-income countries and countries that do implement non-price-based climate policies, and the use of revenues to finance green transformation in low-income countries. Respondents from research would generally rather see free allocation being phased out, emissions coverage of scope 1 and 2, exemptions for low-income countries and countries that do implement non-price-based policies with comparable effects in relevant sectors and a transfer of revenues to support clean technologies in low-income countries and green technologies in the EU. Our survey design allows us to identify three cross-stakeholder group clusters, one containing stakeholders who are comparably more hesitant towards CBAM, a second one with respondents most in favour of introducing CBAM, as well as a ‘middle ground’ cluster which contains views that are often in between the other two. We also compare the survey responses to the design of the Commission’s CBAM proposal to identify the most likely points of political disagreement.

The Impact of the Ukraine-Russia Conflict on the Aviation Sector: February-May 2022

Aviation; it is a global sector that affects many areas such as education, trade, tourism, and is also affected by many situations such as epidemics, economic fluctuations, political disagreements and military intervention. For this reason, the disagreement between Ukraine and Russia also quietly affects the aviation industry. Although disagreements seem to continue between the two countries, issues such as the closure of airspaces, changes in flight costs as a result of changing routes, the situation of aircraft and component manufacturers, tourism and aviation security concern aviation globally. In this study, which was conducted to reveal the impact of the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the aviation sector, case study research, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. In a four-month period, sources such as newspaper news, internet news sites, websites of authorities were scanned, and it was tried to reveal how the conflict was reflected in the aviation industry. This method was chosen considering that it is suitable for this study in terms of revealing what happened in the past, how people were affected, how the processes took place, and what the results were. Between February 24 and March 2, when the disagreements between the two countries began, all flights to Ukraine were stopped, while air traffic in neighbouring countries decreased. International passenger traffic of Russian airlines decreased by at least four times in March 2022 compared to March 2021, and by sixteen times compared to March 2019. The Ukraine-Russia conflict also negatively affected the flight times of passenger flights between East and West. As a result of the study, the great impact of the four-month period, which is thought to be short, on the aviation sector has been tried to be revealed.

Shame on Who? Experimentally Reducing Shame During Political Arguments on Twitter

Online political arguments have a reputation for being futile exchanges, partially because people often respond more punitively to those who do not share their views, a phenomenon called ingroup bias. We explore how ingroup bias affects political disagreements online, and how respect can mitigate its effects. Towards this goal, we conducted an experiment on Twitter systematically varying respectful versus neutral disagreement language across people who did and did not share views. We found that people who do not share views were most likely to reply to disagreements, and neutral disagreements generated more discussions than respectful disagreements. However, we also found that using respectful language increased respectful language received in return, and it reduced the effects of ingroup bias across conversations with people who do and do not share the same views. We conclude with recommendations to promote respectful language on social media and build shame resiliency online, such as designs that encourages thoughtful engagement and a peer support network that allows users to share shame experiences online.

Navigating Political Disagreement in Social Work: An Analysis of Past Literature, Ethical Guidance, and Case Examples

Political advocacy is a core tenet of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics. As a profes-sion, social work has the responsibility to remain aware of trends that threaten the well- being of diverse populations. Th e historic connection between oppression and policy is undeniable, and the standards and principles in the Code of Ethics require social workers to intervene and be aware of political trends. However, at times, social workers’ political views may not refl ect the clients’ views. Navigating situations in which a client expresses political content with the social worker requires careful consideration and improvements in the available guidance. Prior literature addresses the political confl ict in Israel, Palestine, and Northern Ireland during times of extreme tension in those cultures. Yet, stark contrasts between the United States and those cultures exist, thus justifying the need for specifi c guidance for U.S. social workers. Currently, the state of society and social work in the United States requires social workers to dedicate increased attentiveness to these types of situations. As such, the connection between social work and political action is undeniable and worthy of further investigation. To do so, two relevant case examples from a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) will be assessed in which guidance from the NASW Code of Ethics, existing approaches, and prior literature will be applied. Th e evaluation of these case examples is intended to inform the decisions of other U.S.- based social workers confronting political disagreement with clients in direct practice work.

Hidden policy conflicts? Administrative strategies to manage depoliticisation

As a way to manage political disagreements over public policies, political representatives might be tempted to avoid open discussions by depoliticising political issues—hoping that the conflict may eventually disappear. When decision-makers employ such strategies, it is up to the administration to make political priorities and manage unresolved policy conflicts. Earlier studies indicate that there are at least two strategies that administrators can employ to manage such ambiguities: (re)framing and technical depoliticisation. This article reveals that public administrators also employ a third framing strategy: repoliticisation, where administrators seek to endow their policy areas with political power by connecting politicians to the work and implementation of policies. The study is based on 38 interviews from 11 municipalities in Sweden.

When and why "staying out of it" backfires in moral and political disagreements.

People care where others around them stand on contentious moral and political issues. Yet when faced with the prospect of taking sides and the possibility of alienating observers with whom they might disagree, actors often try to "stay out of it"-communicating that they would rather not to take a side at all. We demonstrate that despite its intuitive appeal for reducing conflict, opting not to take sides over moralized issues can harm trust, even relative to siding against an observer's viewpoint outright. Across eleven experiments (N = 4,383) using controlled scenarios, real press video clips, and incentivized economic games, we find that attempts to stay out of the fray are often interpreted as deceptive and untrustworthy. When actors choose not to take sides, observers often ascribe concealed opposition, an attribution of strategic deception which provokes distrust and undermines real-stakes cooperation and partner choice. We further demonstrate that this effect arises only when staying out of it seems strategic: Actors who seem to hold genuine middle-ground beliefs or who lack incentives for impression management are not distrusted for avoiding conflict. People are often asked to take sides in moral and political disagreement. Our findings outline a reputational risk awaiting those who opt not to do so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Algorithmic News Diversity and Democratic Theory: Adding Agonism to the Mix

The role news recommenders can play in stimulating news diversity is receiving increasing amounts of attention. Democratic theory plays an important role in this debate because it helps explain why news diversity is important and which kinds of news diversity should be pursued. In this article, I observe that the current literature on news recommenders and news diversity largely draws on a narrow set of theories of liberal and deliberative democracy. Another strand of democratic theory often referred to as ‘agonism’ is often ignored. This, I argue, is a mistake. Liberal and deliberative theories of democracy focus on the question of how political disagreements and conflicts can be resolved in a rational and legitimate manner. Agonism, to the contrary, stresses the ineradicability of conflict and the need to make conflict productive. This difference in thinking about the purpose of democratic politics can also lead to new ways of thinking about the value of news diversity and role algorithmic news recommenders should play in promoting it. The overall aim of the article is (re)introduce agonistic theory to the news recommender context and to argue that agonism deserves more serious attention.

Confronting Politics: The Role of Conflict Orientation in Shaping Political Debate

Previous research (Testa et al 2014, Mutz 2015) finds that conflict orientation—individuals’ psychological predisposition towards conflict--conditions attitudes of people in the United States in the face of political disagreement. However, little research has been done into how conflict orientation influences the ways in which people engage in conversation that has the potential to become uncomfortable or contentious. While we argue that conflict orientation has a significant impact on the way college students discuss politics, results from series of interviews with undergraduate students about their thoughts and ideas regarding political incivility and campus free speech suggest that this is not the case. Instead we find that deliberation and small-group conversation can bring both the conflict-avoidant and conflict-approaching into the political conversation.

Their Daily Dread: Russian Orthodox Christians in Red Scare Detroit, 1918–1920

Abstract After World War I, Americans shifted xenophobic fears of German “Huns” to Russian “Reds.” Historians have largely ignored, however, that among the thousands of Slavic immigrants targeted in the ensuing First Red Scare were adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church. One example was on Detroit's east side, where ethnic Russian automotive workers used the spiritual, social, and educational resources of All Saints Russian Orthodox Church and a parish-affiliated fraternal organization, the Russian National Home, to advance in the Motor City's competitive labor market. Yet the Russian Revolutions of 1917 altered neighborhood dynamics, manifesting political disagreements that fractured the congregation. In April 1919, federal agents arrested thirteen men from the All Saints community, using sworn affidavits from other parishioners to allege the men constituted a dangerous “soviet” plotting to seize the church for revolutionary purposes. Exploring lived experiences in one immigrant neighborhood adversely affected by the Red Scare, this article excavates links between Russian Orthodox Christians and the Progressive Era political left. It also explores how amid heightened nativism, immigrants themselves seized on the federal government's zeal to root out “Reds,” wielding the full power of the Red Scare surveillance and deportation state to police the boundaries of their own religious community.

The Political Consequences of Online Disagreement: The Filtering of Communication Networks in a Polarized Political Context

The present study challenges prevailing beliefs and research on the role of social media in supporting deliberation and an active public sphere. Based on a two-wave online panel survey ( n = 791) of the adult population of Hong Kong, as one case of a politically polarized society, we examine the degree to which individuals disconnect from those with whom they politically disagree with on social media. The analysis indicates that exposure to disagreement does indeed lead people to filter their information repertoire by disconnecting from those with whom they disagree. A moderated mediation analysis finds that political disagreement indirectly influenced activist participation through information repertoire filtration. However, in contrast to expectations, this effect was stronger when individuals had a lower level of affective polarization. Our findings underscore the value of focusing on the behavior of users to complement research on access to information about politics.

ПОЛЕМИКА ЭРНСТА ЮНГЕРА С НАЦИОНАЛ-СОЦИАЛИЗМОМ В ГОДЫ ВЕЙМАРСКОЙ РЕСПУБЛИКИ

The article examines the problems of political journalism of the German right in the years of the Weimar Republic as an example of the analysis of the place, interpretation and significance of the Jewish question in the creative heritage of Ernst Junger. In the conditions of post-war Germany, anti-Semitism acquired a political sound due to the fact that a significant percentage of German Jews were represented in the revolutionary government, the Social Democratic and radical left parties, who turned into the face of the Weimar Republic. Antisemitismus became an important domestic political component of the struggle against the Weimar political system, which allowed reducing political controversy to racial and national components. The unity and difference between the political journalism of the Nazis and E. Junger as the leader of the "new nationalism" is analyzed. The place of the Jewish question as a political problem is considered in the context of the nationalist ideas of the Weimar right. The study of the peculiarities of the understanding of Jewry in the ideas of E. Junger and its difference from the Nazi interpretation is being carried out. The desire of National Socialism to turn anti-Semitism into one of the structural components of ideology and political journalism made it possible to group political opponents into a single racially defined whole and concentrate the entire range of political means of struggle against it. The political divergence of E. Junger and National Socialism was based in addition to political divergences and on the fact that the place of the Jewish question in his ideas did not occupy any significant place, not in terms of ideological or personal.

Violated by Rebels, Violated by Family: Returnee Girls of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda

In the prologue to his book Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa, Richard Reid recounts how in the first few years of the third millennium, the region of North-East Africa has been enmeshed in conflict. This region which includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Southern Sudan has experienced intermittent violent conflicts and destruction by wars based on reasons and excuses ranging from ethnicity and religion, to political disagreements caused by thirst for power. This region also includes Northern Uganda, particularly Acholi-land, which was caught up in the throes of violent conflict since the mid- eighties, between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government of Uganda. For more than three decades, Acholi-land was engulfed in untold suffering, unleashed upon its population by foes from without and, tragically, attackers from within! An historical occupation of being exceptionally good soldiers that had stood them in good stead in colonial and post-colonial times turned out to be a curse they would always true!

Finnish Civil Servants on Harmonization in the Asylum System: A Study in Horizontal Europeanization

This article presents a Finnish perspective on harmonization within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). The article analyses results from a study of the judgments and experiences of Finnish civil servants concerning the harmonization of the CEAS. The year 2015 constitutes a shift in asylum policies in many European countries, and a key question is how this shift has influenced the process of harmonization of asylum policies and practices. Senior civil servants working in the state administration of asylum and migration issues in Finland were interviewed anonymously as part of a comparative European research project (CEASEVAL). The interviews indicate that EU‐wide administrative cooperation has developed into a broad and diverse cooperation in recent years. The interviewees in Finland generally found harmonization of the asylum system to be necessary, which was connected to a need for greater predictability of the outcomes of the system. The results of the study suggest that Finnish asylum administration is developing toward harmonized practices involving transnational and supranational administrative cooperation in the field of asylum. The results support the conclusion of previous research that there is a process of horizontal Europeanization in which administrative practices develop organically within national asylum administration, independently of political disagreements at the EU level. This is relevant both to the framing of political issues and to research on Finnish migration and asylum policies, which need to take into account the ongoing European harmonization of policies and administrative practices.

The post-politicization of rental housing financialization: News media, elite storytelling and Australia's new build to rent market

This article explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the emergence of build to rent housing (BTR) in Australia which helped depoliticize this new wave of rental housing financialization. It argues that (digital) news media—an age-old medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology of financialized capitalism through which this consensus is ‘policed’. Specifically, reporting scripted the rise of institutional investors into Australia's rental sector in ways that disavowed properly political disagreements vis-à-vis BTR. Its analysis is informed by post-political theories, which converge around a shared concern with how political disagreement is disavowed and replaced with technocratic governance, consensus and a privileging of certain orders of subjects. Post-foundational thinker Jacques Rancière's thinking on aesthetic regimes assists in exploring this consensus and its limits by foregrounding how regimes of representation delineate what can be said and argued (and different agents' authority to speak). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that news media restricts the coordinates of public debate through: (1) technical storylines that guide public audiences to understand and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset class whose expansion is a matter of national economic interest; (2) strategic silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding BTR's dual function as an asset class and as housing; and (3) endorsement of BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR thinkable in this way. The aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public BTR debate represents a post-political strategy that assists in non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia, albeit with limits.

POLITICAL POLARIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON MENTAL HEALTH: WHERE DO WE STAND?

POLITICAL POLARIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON MENTAL HEALTH: WHERE DO WE STAND?

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Parent–Adolescent Political Disagreement and Adolescent Political Development amid Duterte’s Presidency: A Positioning Analysis

Despite its significant ramifications on promoting youth political competence, literature has paid little attention to parent–adolescent political disagreement and the relational dynamics underlying the phenomenon. Our study deploys positioning analysis to examine how Filipino adolescents navigate conflict-filled parent–adolescent political discussions, especially those in relation to President Rodrigo Duterte’s leadership. Interview accounts yield three storylines characterizing political disagreement episodes among participants and their parents: a control struggle storyline, a credibility contest storyline and a moral scramble storyline. Each storyline consists of adolescents and parents adopting competing positions to gain discursive advantages related to their developmental, rational or moral standing. They leverage these advantages towards influencing political opinions articulated within the family space. We conclude with a discussion of our findings vis-à-vis the need to reconceptualize political disagreement as a dynamic process, the interface between micro-level parent–adolescent political disagreement and macro-level sociopolitical discourses and the functions political disagreement serves in adolescent development.

Social media engagement against fear of restrictions and surveillance: The mediating role of privacy management

The impact of state restriction and surveillance on social media engagement has been widely investigated in communication studies. However, these studies tend not to capture the moment when these restrictions are implemented and citizens experience a high level of uncertainty. Addressing the implementation of a national security law (NSL) in Hong Kong, we used two-wave panel data to understand political engagement on Facebook before and shortly after the law was enacted. We find a serial mediation path in which pan-democratic and localist users (those who tend to oppose the government) showed greater fear of the law; this encouraged more active privacy management which was related to a higher level of engagement after the enactment of NSL, implying that these users responded strategically through restricting the visibility of their engagement. This mediation path is moderated by the level of political disagreement users encountered on Facebook. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The effect of cross-cutting exposure on attitude change: examining the mediating role of response behaviors and the moderating role of openness to diversity and social network homogeneity

ABSTRACT Using nationally representative data in Taiwan, this study investigated the effect of cross-cutting exposure on social media on attitudinal change. Findings showed that the way people responded to political disagreement on social media matters. People’s attitudes were likely to change when they checked cross-cutting information and expressed opinion after being exposed to it, but not when they ignored the disagreeing information after the exposure. Accordingly, checking disagreeing information and expressing opinion played a significant role in mediating the relationship between exposure to cross-cutting information and attitude change. More importantly, the indirect effect of cross-cutting exposure on attitude through information checking was contingent on the levels of individuals’ openness to diversity and social network homogeneity. The indirect effect was strengthened when the level of openness to diversity was higher but weakened when the level of social network homogeneity was higher. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Asymmetric Communication and Internal Exclusion in Everyday Political Talk

Citizens' everyday political talk is the foundation and mainspring of deliberative democracy. Accordingly, citizens' equal and inclusive participation in political discussions is deemed crucial for this “talk-centric” vision of normatively superior democratic will-formation. Yet, discussing politics is a quite demanding activity, and research has shown that de facto not everyone has equal access to this arena of political communication. Some citizens talk about public affairs almost constantly, others more sparingly, and yet others not at all. These inequalities reflect imbalances in structural and psychological resources. Little is known, however, about what happens once individuals have entered conversations about public affairs. The article breaks new ground by examining communicative asymmetries that ordinary people experience when talking about politics with members of their overall and core networks. By muting their voices they disadvantage certain citizens, thus impairing the discursive equality that is essential for deliberative democracy. Drawing on a unique high-quality survey conducted in Germany, the article finds such experiences to take different forms of which some are quite widespread. Many citizens resort to passive listening and contribute little to unfolding conversations. Smaller shares misrepresent their true standpoints, change subjects to avoid problematic topics, drop out of unpleasant conversations, or feel silenced by other interlocutors. The article contextualizes these communicative asymmetries in the broader theoretical framework of deliberative democrats' conception of discursive inequality. To examine how they come about it proposes and tests a model of internal exclusion that refers to social structural inequality, psychological dispositions, and attributes of the discussant networks within which political conversations take place. Social structural inequality is found to be of limited relevance. Individuals' communicative efficacy and orientations toward political conflict are more important predictors of their ability to cope with the challenges of political talk than aspects of general politicization like political interest, attitude strength and internal efficacy. Encountering political disagreement is normatively central for deliberative democracy, but empirically it stands out as a powerful social driver of asymmetric communication. Its impact is strongly conditioned by individuals' structural attributes and psychological dispositions.