Political Orientation Research Articles

Believing in science: Linking religious beliefs and identity with vaccination intentions and trust in science during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite evidence supporting numerous scientific issues (e.g. climate change, vaccinations) many people still doubt the legitimacy of science. Moreover, individuals may be prone to scepticism about scientific findings that misalign with their ideological beliefs and identities. This research investigated whether trust in science (as well as government and media) and COVID-19 vaccination intentions varied as a function of (non)religious group identity, religiosity, religion-science compatibility beliefs, and/or political orientation in two online studies (N = 565) with university students and a Canadian community sample between January and June 2021. In both studies, vaccination intentions and trust in science varied as a function of (non)religious group identity and beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy was further linked to religiosity through a lack of trust in science. Given the ideological divides that the pandemic has exacerbated, this research has implications for informing public health strategies for relaying scientific findings to the public and encouraging vaccine uptake in culturally appropriate ways.

Hearts and minds in Hong Kong’s New Territories: Agriculture and vegetable marketing in a Cold War borderland,circa1946–1967

AbstractUsing declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong’s rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia.

How to effectively communicate about greenhouse gas emissions with different populations

A critical aspect of climate policy is effective communication about greenhouse gas emissions (GHG-E) themselves. However, since attitudes towards climate change vary by different segments of the population, different methods of communication about GHG-E may be necessary. This study investigates different responses to GHG-E information by population and how to best communicate such information with them. Eight framing techniques following goal framing theory and moral foundations theory were developed, and a discrete choice experiment was applied to determine willingness to pay (WTP) for CO2 emissions reductions. Six segmentation analyses for people’s WTP for emissions under different framing techniques were carried out for culture, region, urban-rural residence, political leaning, attitudes and beliefs towards climate change, and income. Based on the data of 2015 respondents from six provinces of Canada, the strength of GHG information influence was tested according to different respondent segmentations. The results show that in most cases, an emoticon framing has the strongest influence, though two exceptions exist: With respect to political orientation, nearly all framings were ineffective for those on the extremes, and for those on the right (not extreme) the current label has the largest impact; With respect to climate change motivation, color framing works best for those unsure how to reduce emissions, while the current label works for those uninterested in reducing their emissions. Surprisingly, “tree” framing was most effective among those who report not being concerned about climate change. The results help policy and decision-makers improve the likelihood of climate-friendly choices being made.

Political Identity, Risk Perception, and Sport Participation: Conditional Process Analysis of Golfers’ Revisit Intent During the COVID Pandemic

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has been highly politicized in the US. This study explored the effect of individuals’ political orientation on the relationship between their risk assessments of COVID-19 and intentions to revisit the golf course. A first-stage moderated mediation model consisting of general risk awareness of COVID-19, perceived risk of playing golf, and revisit intention was introduced to specify when and how political orientation influences an individual’s decision to play golf again. Recreational golfers ( N = 199) from a survey panel took part in the study, and results showed that risk awareness of COVID-19 increases the perceived risk of playing golf while suppressing one’s intention to revisit the golf course during the pandemic. However, political orientation moderated the suppressant effect of risk awareness on revisit intent in that only Democrats showed negative effect on revisit intent while Republicans did not show any significant relationship. Findings are discussed in the context of a dual process model of political identity, and the implications for practice as well as future research are presented.

Long torn by ill fate? Wounded collective identity in light of a survey in Hungary

Abstract The primary aim of the paper is to explore the relationship between the trauma ‑focused self ‑description of Hungarian history and other factors such as sense of regional betweenness, memory, well ‑being or even the respondent’s personality (sympathy for authoritarian personality traits, political orientation, religiosity). In the current study, network analysis is used to explore the elective affinities between the above ‑mentioned variables. This method – rather than focusing on linear relationships – concentrates on interactions and feedback loops to better understand this social phenomenon. Our results show that the outlined factors form a coherent and highly stable belief system that can only be changed by significant influences.

Cult of the vulva vs. cult of the phallus: A case study of media presentations of some famous genitals

The society we live in is patriarchal, binary and hierarchically coded, evident from social and economic inequality and the stereotyping of men and women. Men are portrayed as active subjects and women as passive objects. Gender stereotyping extends to glorifying the male genitals as active, powerful, excellent and superior and objectifying the female genitals as passive, weak and corrupt. The social power of the media is essential in selecting information through agenda-setting and media framing. This article researches how the two most influential Croatian daily news portals, the progressive Jutarnji list and the conservative Večernji list, present female and male genitals in the media articles, mainly focusing on the genitals of celebrities. Famous people and celebrities are commodified into products created to influence the audience. The media presentation of their genitals can also affect the social perception of female and male sexuality. The research is based on a linguistic discourse analysis that includes language, context and interpretation on articles published in the digital extensions of Jutarnji list and Večernji list in the summer months of 2022 as units of analysis. The analytical matrix includes textual and visual ways of presenting the genitals of celebrities (attributes and connotations), their value and political orientation, and the valorization of sexuality along the axis of sex and gender. Research shows that digital extensions of Croatian daily newspapers (including the portal gloria.hr and sportski.jutarnji.hr), despite their different value orientations, are stereotypical and follow the accepted patriarchal binary dogma of male–female, positive–negative, active–passive, powerful–powerless, and that they depict male and female genitals with a visible cult-phallic media perspective.

Deliberative thinking increases tolerance of minority group practices: Testing a dual-process model of tolerance.

Tolerance of minority beliefs and practices is typically considered a critical ingredient for an equal and diverse society. Psychologically, people can use both intuitive and deliberative cognitive sources to make tolerance judgments. Following dual-process theories, this research uses survey experiments to manipulate intuitive versus deliberative thinking to examine whether deliberative thinking increases tolerance of minority practices. Across three studies using nationally representative samples of Dutch majority members (N = 1,811), we find that deliberative thinking increases tolerance, regardless of whether people deliberate over pragmatic or principled reasons for accepting contested minority practices and social changes. These findings are similar across a range of minority practices and robust across gender, age, educational level, and political orientation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

“You are either with us, or against us”: The association between dichotomous thinking and political extremism among Israeli voters

Purpose of the study: people prone to political extremism often exhibit a rather simplistic black-and-white view of social reality. This is a consequence of the psychological tendency to perceive and interpret the world in a certain way. The hypothesis underlying this study is that this tendency manifests in a style of thinking defined as “dichotomous thinking”. That is, a tendency to perceive and interpret the world in terms of binary options (i.e., “black or white”, “good or bad”, or “all or nothing”). The study was conducted in Israel during the 2019 election campaign, which initiated a prolonged political crisis leading to deep polarisation between the two main political camps in Israel. Participants (N = 312) completed an online survey, which included a demographic questionnaire and measures of political identification and dichotomous thinking style. The study found both linear and quadratic associations between dichotomous thinking and political identification. Thus, dichotomous thinking was associated with both right-wing political orientation and an overall propensity for political extremism, both right-wing and left-wing. These results provide empirical support for theoretical models suggesting that there is a U-shaped relationship between cognitive rigidity and political identification, but this relationship is stronger at the right end of the political spectrum

Refining Sentiment Predictions: Obtaining an Unbiased Business Sentiment Index from Japanese Newspapers

Economic indices, such as the consumer price index, gross domestic product, and purchasing managers’ index, are typically computed based on economic data (e.g., prices of goods and incomes) and surveys. Recently, there has been considerable research to predict these indices using alternative data. One such approach is to utilize textual data, specifically newspaper articles, to predict a business sentiment index (BSI). However, newspapers often exhibit biases, which may impact the resulting index. This potential issue has not received adequate attention. Thus, this work first investigates whether these biases do influence the predicted indices and then proposes an approach to obtaining an unbiased business sentiment index. For this purpose, we analyze multiple Japanese newspapers, including one financial and three general papers with varied political orientations. We then predict a monthly BSI for each newspaper based on its content using a Transformer-based sentiment analysis model. To achieve an unbiased BSI, we employ the dynamic factor model. This model decomposes the time series of BSIs into a common dynamic factor shared across different newspapers and specific dynamic factors unique to individual newspapers. Our experiment indicates that the magnitudes of the predicted BSIs and the specific dynamic factors closely align with the political stances of the newspapers. Furthermore, the common dynamic factor exhibits a stronger and more positive correlation with composite indices and a survey-based BSI, namely the Tankan index.

The concept of social transformations and their impact on political culture


 The concept of social transformations refers to the permanent movement that leads to the transition from one situation to another in which the overall features of all aspects of social life change. It is linked to the radical changes that take place in the social system and its internal structure, and there are no societies devoid of social transformations, whether in their economic, intellectual, or cultural levels. These transformations often occur gradually, as they are constantly changing and new systems, other traditions, and cultures different from those that prevailed in them arise. Political culture is part of the general culture that exists in every society, and it consists of a group of elements that are defined by an organized framework and operate in the political field that links individuals to the political system. It is directly affected by the changes that occur in society, which lead as a whole to comprehensive transformations in the economic, social, political, and intellectual structure because it includes all the political orientations of the members of society that affect the different levels of political life, and there is a link between the orientations of individuals and their political positions and their social and economic conditions.
 

Geographies and Histories of World Literature in Interwar Italian Magazines

Abstract This article adopts a historiographical approach to analyse some key debates on world literature that played out in literary and cultural magazines during the Italian Fascist dictatorship. It shows that by hosting such debates – especially on realism – in seemingly random fashion, literary and cultural magazines in the 1920s and 1930s significantly contributed to problematise the cultural politics of a xenophobic regime regarding the arts in general, and literature in particular. To this end, I focus on journals of different sizes, political orientations and visibility to provide different theorisations of world literature. Finally, by discussing the multiple epitomes of world literature that the magazines created, I question the presence of what may be considered a coherent national, or even canonical, literature to argue that world and national literatures could co-exist when made to function not just as literary but also as a cultural mechanism.

Citizen requests and the price of public information: An experimental test

Pricing of public goods is particularly challenging for public services that are strongly rights-based in character. Such is the case of freedom of information requesting procedures. Costs have implications for how citizens will treat requesting procedures as well as how their views and attitudes towards procedures will be affected. This study examines these causes and consequences using an online experiment with 925 citizens. The findings show that even low costs can have an influence on how willing citizens are to submit requests as well as their satisfaction with the procedure and perception of fairness. Public service motivation and political orientation moderate these effects, but only to a small degree. These findings have implications for citizen participation policies given that citizen attitudes to the right to information depends strongly on trade-offs between the value of information and financial costs of requesting.

On the Issue of Conflict Potential of Socio-Political Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere

This article examines the features of socio-political discourse based on the texts of online blogs of public opinion leaders —I. Varlamov, Yu. Latynina, R. Kadyrov, N. Mikhalkov, S. Mikheev, and M. Simonyan. The purpose of the article is to determine the degree of conflictogenicity of the texts of the Russian blogosphere, specifically the blogs of media personalities, public opinion leaders; the results obtained will provide for predicting and preventing the occurrence of conflict situations by establishing and reducing the conflict index of the text, the main indicator of which is frequency of the corresponding lexical markers. The authors distinguish several subtypes of socio-political discourse and their features. The genre specificity of such new media phenomenon as Internet blog is considered. There is a high degree of conflictogenicity in analytical texts, signaled by specific lexical markers identified with the help of the content analysis method. Foreign policy texts, regardless of their authors’ personal views, appear to have the greatest number of conflict markers, which means that political analytics, the object of consideration of which lies in the plane of international and intercultural communication, has a significant degree of conflict potential. In the Internet, as in journalism in general, the addressees of texts and the addressees of conflicting vocabulary are not the same due to the specificity of discursive space, in which direct recipients of information are blog subscribers, who as a rule have a political orientation close to that of the author. The very same conflicting vocabulary refers to persons who occupy the opposite position. The manifestation of conflictogenicity in blog texts is analyzed at three levels: stylistic, semantic and pragmatic, which makes it possible to identify all the features of conflictogenicity markers in the liberal, patriotic and official subtypes of socio-political discourse. The specificity of such features is revealed in each of the three main subtypes of the Internet discourse: liberal, patriotic and official. In the authors’ blogs under analysis, the highest index of conflict is characteristic of texts belonging to the liberal subtype of socio-political discourse due to the greater frequency of use of the units related to lexical markers of conflict, their stylistically reduced modality—up to obscene words. At the same time, the conflict nature of the patriotic and official subtypes is closer to the traditional journalism style and shows less expressiveness in the use of metaphors, irony, phraseology, words with a seme of direct negative evaluation.

Articulation of Islamic Political Parties in The Constellation of National Politics Post Democratic Transition

This research aims to examine the articulation of Islamic political parties post democratic transition. This is a literature study with an empirical sociological approach which is analyzed by means of content analysis. The results of the research show that Islamic political parties during the post democratic transition have fluctuated; however, they have never moved from the middle class. In the last five elections, it can be seen that Islamic political parties have stagnated (and even seems to decline) and are difficult to grow and develop. There are several contributing factors; first, the increasing number of Islamic political parties has caused the concentration of Muslims to break into many Islamic political parties. Second, the increasingly diluted political orientation of Muslims towards Islamic political parties. The secularization of politics that had occurred during the new order had contributed to the changing of political orientation of Muslims who no longer identified the party with Islam; third, the failure of Islamic political parties to show themselves as parties that have a distinctive difference compared to other nationalist political parties both related to political behavior or image and work programs; fourth, the shrewdness of nationalist parties in approaching Muslims by establishing wing organizations in each party; and the last one, the internal conflicts of Islamic political party elites that make constituents become apathetic about the future of these political parties.

Political Extremism in a Global Perspective

Examining data from the World Value Survey about left-right political orientation, the paper explores political extremism among common people worldwide. Our analysis reveals (i) a positive correlation between left-wing and right-wing extremism across countries, (ii) an average rise in political extremism globally in the last decade, (iii) greater political extremism in less developed countries, (iv) and a surge, during the last decade, in political extremism for less developed countries and for countries where development has not met expectations. Besides offering a picture of how successful political extremism is globally, our investigation provides insight into the driving forces behind this phenomenon.

Stop Apologizing- A Review of Professing Criticism

In this review, I provide at look into the recently published text Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. In doing so, I explore the strengths and weaknesses of the text from a distanced perspective, with some particular attention to the relevance of the text to literary scholars with political orientations and connections to the history of theory.

Stop Apologizing: A Review of John Guillory's Professing Criticism

In this review, I provide at look into the recently published text Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. In doing so, I explore the strengths and weaknesses of the text from a distanced perspective, with some particular attention to the relevance of the text to literary scholars with political orientations and connections to the history of theory.

Attributes and Activities of Religious Communities in Italy: First Results from a City Congregations Study (CCS)

This article explores the attributes and religious, social and political activities of local religious groups in three Italian cities across all religious traditions. This is the first application of Congregations Study methodology in Italy to analyze the social composition, structure and activities of religious communities. The research was conducted between 2020 and 2021 with a total number of 877 communities mapped in the cities of Bologna, Milan and Brescia, and their surroundings. All local religious groups in three cities and their surroundings were counted and one key informant per group was interviewed (N = 566) with a Congregations Study questionnaire. Based on the results of the interviews, we found that, during the last decade, the dynamics of growth of adults’ and children’s regular religious participation was distinct within the Muslim and Christian Orthodox communities. Social service for elderly, environmental programs and political activity were found to be promoted by the Catholic communities to a stronger degree, while activities linked to the support of migrants were endorsed stronger by Muslim and Orthodox groups. Moreover, this study assessed the theological, ethical and political orientation of religious communities, highlighting different trends across religious traditions. The article discusses various configurations of urban religious diversity by bringing similarities and contrasts between communities of dominant religious tradition and minority religions, thus questioning the applicability of City Congregations Study (CCS) methodology to the analysis of configurations of religious diversity in Italy.

Mass Shootings Anxiety Scale: A preliminary psychometric study

Mass shootings have caused many to feel anxious and afraid of this seemingly common event. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop and evaluate the properties of the Mass Shootings Anxiety Scale (MSAS), which is a five-item scale that was based on 759 adults. The MSAS demonstrated solid reliability (α and ω of 0.93), factorial validity (PCA and CFA support), and convergent validity (e.g., correlations with functional impairment and drug/alcohol coping). The MSAS also measures anxiety equivalently across gender, political orientation, and gun violence exposure groups. The MSAS not only discriminates well between persons with and without dysfunctional anxiety, using a cut score of ≥10 (92% sensitivity and 89% specificity), but also demonstrates incremental validity by explaining 5% to 16% additional variance in important outcomes beyond sociodemographics and posttraumatic stress. These preliminary results support the MSAS as a valid screening tool for clinical practice and scholarly inquiry.

La coltre del silenzio: timori e speranze

The blanket of silence: fears and hopes
 ABSTRACT: The silence of the parties governing the country and those belonging to the opposition persists. Their political orientation on the 'ecclesiastical matters' is yet to be shared, as well as their position on the need for a more general law on religious freedom. The new conservative government keeps silent. There are signs of a possible failure to comply with the pluralistic principle, which is the cornerstone of the secular nature of the State. Between hopes and fears, the latter could prevail.