Political Self-expression Research Articles

Why Do People Share Political Information and Misinformation Online? Developing a Bottom-Up Descriptive Framework

Social media users are key actors in the spreading of misleading or incorrect information. To develop an integrative parsimonious summary of social media users’ own accounts of motives for sharing political information, we conducted: (1) a literature review of motives for personally sharing false information as reported by social media users and (2) qualitative research concerning these motives using an innovative, ecologically valid method. Based on our findings, we developed a pool of items evaluating social media users’ motives for sharing false political information, which we then tested and analyzed the dimensionality of in (3) a pre-registered questionnaire-based study to identify key clusters of users’ own accounts of motives for sharing both true and false political information. The current findings show that there are distinct sets of motives people report for their misinformation sharing behavior: prosocial activism, attack or manipulation of others, entertainment, awareness, political self-expression, and fighting false information. Also, these sets of motives are associated with variables known to predict sharing misinformation, and some of these sets predict social media users’ self-reports of having shared misinformation in the past. Our findings highlight and elaborate on users’ motives that reflect a concern with “making things better” and acting in a manner that is beneficial to society as a whole, and suggest that different interventions may be required to combat misinformation sharing driven by different motives. A potential set of 18 items that could be used in questionnaires measuring motivations for sharing political news online is described.

‘Who, if not me?’ How political self-categorizations shape the meaning of political self-expression on social media as a citizenship norm

ABSTRACT With political self-expression emerging as a prominent practice of political participation on social media platforms, scholars have hypothesized that this practice may have evolved into a norm and component of ‘good citizenship.’ Empirical findings, however, are inconclusive, as some young people express their politics out of a sense of civic duty, while others view this engagement as a waste of time. Based on the idea that how we define ourselves impacts the normative meanings that we attach to things in the social world, the study explores the role of social identities in people’s evaluations of expressive engagement. Empirically, the study is based on qualitative interview data with social media users in Serbia (n = 18). The findings show that engaging in political self-expression does not appear to be a citizenship norm but a personal norm in individuals with pronounced political self-concepts who perceive that their core self-category is at stake in the public discourse. Moreover, people employ social categorizations, such as ideology, partisanship, and social class, to evaluate the content and form of political self-expression as good or bad. Aside from issues of political self-expression, the study challenges the idea that individual understandings of what it means to be a good citizen are universal and static and that people’s subjective positionality in social contexts matters.

Mobilised yet unaffiliated: Italian youth and the uneven return to political participation

ABSTRACT Young people have long been considered the most politically apathetic section of the population. Yet, recent elections in the United States and Europe seem to point to a reversal of this trend. To explore this issue, we analyse a survey on youth and political participation in Italy conducted in 2018. Comparing the results with a similar 2004 survey, we find strong evidence of a growth of political participation by young people. Following our model of intensities of participation (low/medium/high), we find that political participation has been growing at the level of low-intensity (voting, consuming news, discussing politics in small circles) and medium-intensity activities (contact and interaction with politicians and political self-expression), also thanks to social media use. With high-intensity activities (campaigning and organisation) the picture is more contradictory. While there has been some growth in attendance to protest events and other non-institutional activities, organisational membership is declining. We argue that this contradiction between high mobilisation and low organisational affiliation cannot be explained simply as stemming from generational suspicion of institutional politics, but that it reflects a problem of supply, the inability of organisations to successfully integrate young people and overcome their distrust of the political class.

Girlhood (It’s complicated)

Girlhood (It’s complicated) is an exhibition at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), part of the Smithsonian Institution, which opened in October of 2020. Created with federal funding as part of the American Women’s History Initiative (AWHI), the exhibition commemorates the centennial of women’s suffrage. To put a fresh spin on this anniversary and draw attention to larger, intertwining issues of gender and politics in the United States, the exhibition team chose to explore the history of girlhood and girls as political actors as the focus of the show. Drawing on the rich, interdisciplinary literature of girlhood studies and inspired by zines as a form of identity creation and political self-expression, the show aims to create a public history of girlhood that unveils the public lives of girls in the past and showcases the many ways in which they, even without the vote or formal political power, have had a political voice in American history. The exhibition is open at the NMAH from October 2020 to January 2023, and will travel with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service through 2026.

In Search of the Expressive Citizen

Abstract Scholars have often used generational changes in citizenship norms to theorize new forms of youth political expression on social media. Public opinion data has been employed to demonstrate that young people’s perceptions of what it means to be a “good citizen” (i.e., injunctive citizenship norms) have shifted toward models of citizenship that value self-expression. Yet several fundamental assumptions of this dominant image of the young “expressive citizen” remain untested. Using data from a national survey of young Americans (ages 18–24) collected during the 2018 US midterm election, the present study examines: a) if youth indeed view expression as a relatively important part of being a good citizen; and b) if injunctive norms concerning political expression are positively associated with engagement in political expression on social media. Findings indicate that injunctive expressive norms are distinct, but rated as the least important of all injunctive norms. Further, injunctive expressive norms were only modestly associated with social media political expression and difficult to empirically distinguish from what respondents viewed as personally important (i.e., personal expressive norms). While these findings challenge the way past research has theorized and measured the normative role of political expression among young people, they also reveal promising future directions. Specifically, the finding that traditionally marginalized youth place more normative value on political self-expression suggests an important next step for studying the expressive citizen in the age of social media.

THE PHENOMENON OF CORPOREALITY IN THE PERFORMATIVE PARADIGM: FROM GATHERINGS TO POLITICAL ISSUES

Problem setting. The contemporary sociopolitical reality reflects high dynamics of the cultural development and features uncertainty, insecurity unexpectedness, transfer and fragmentation. These conditions transform the traditional views on social and political practices, revisiting individual understanding of identity. To describe cultural process peculiarities, social and humanitarian sciences actively use the performative approach, which allows researchers to focus on the underlying force of human actions and the way they generate cultural senses.While studying social and political actors a major theme is the phenomenon of masses, which testifies to significant changes in political discourse, in particular, the destruction of the traditional channels of political expression.Recent research and publications analysis. In today’s conditions of the crisis in interpretation there is a trend to go beyond the meaning and address trans-semiotic elements of the human existence. The process of rethinking the mankind discursive interpretation and sense genesis opens a way to corporeality theories that enable to reproduce subjective experience in the performative paradigm. The study of performatives and their potential to create socially and politically meaningful effects is a promising and insufficiently developed field of research.Paper objective. The research discusses the phenomenon of corporeality as a new practice of political self-expression within the performative approach.Paper main body. The study is devoted to the contemporary research into the problems of corporeality and its role in the political discourse.Structural and post-structural philosophy understands reality as a text and, respectively, focuses on the communicative role of the language and the interpretational nature of human-world relations. This semiotic discourse substitutes the sense with meaning. It was shown that the discourse approach, based on the link between the world and the language, interpretations, exchange of meanings and their production in the human world building does not consider the opportunities of the trans-semiotic experience.It was confirmed that the conceptualization of new political practices in the conditions of world rewriting by itself is a most important theme in the modern philosophy and it sets the task to search for new approaches to the issue of a political subject as an agent. It was demonstrated that one of these approaches emerges in the theory of performativity. Under the conditions of corporal communication a performance is the means of personality expression, the way to enter communication, which implies certain attitude and understanding from other communicators.The paper deals with the prospect of considering political issues, given in the performative paradigm and followed in the works by Judith Butler, and other researchers of the new political realm. It was particularly shown that the body as a discursive field always has a political perspective. Therefore, the work dwells on the concepts of gathering, power, precarity, democracy, justice, sources of corporeality politicization etc. It was emphasized that the phenomenon of going out into the street, caused by the vulnerability and dramatism of personal stories, requires considering such motives, and also reflecting on the conditions and ways of accepting political attitude on the whole.Conclusions of the research. The conventional political articulation is being replaced by the density of corporeality and performance, which is, in turn, becoming a new driver of political processes. One of the versions of the political subject is gathering unlike masses, parties and people. This approach outlines a broad field of research into the new political language for contemporary political practices.

Growing Political: Violence, Community Forestry, and Environmental Defender Subjectivity

Why do environmental defenders continue to participate in community-based efforts to protect the environment despite threats to their lives and minimal success in deterring or punishing offenders? Examining Community Forestry initiatives in Cambodia, we find that forest protection is not only a means to gain environmental, economic, or social benefits, but also a means for forest defenders to assert themselves as political actors in relation to the state and other citizens. Rather than simply repressing and disciplining forest dwelling populations, violence against defenders shapes their subjectivity and re-politicizes their lives. Distinguishing between various forms of violence associated with different illicit forest users, we highlight how forest protection becomes a means of political self-expression and rights-based resistance as forest defenders reinterpret direct violence through experiences and understandings of structural and symbolic violence. Participation in CF thus unlocks ways of being political and contesting oppressive structures while acting within sanctioned institutions.

Staging incapacitation: the corporeal politics of hunger striking

This essay examines the ongoing hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Through an analysis of news media compiled by journalists reporting on the timelines of the strikes, and various prisoner testimonials, I contextualize how hunger striking has been historically understood to be grounds for emancipation from, and resistance to, state violence and carceral techniques. I further present an analysis of the 1981 Irish death fast to consider how prisoners’ resistance to corporeal wholeness comes to function as a viable form of political self-expression. Focusing on both the state’s suppression of embodied protest as well as the weaponization of the prisoner’s body, I argue that although geopolitically different, in both the Guantánamo and Irish strikes, forms of corporeal incapacitation function as the mechanisms through which protest and discipline register.

Paradoxes of the self: the autobiographical construction of the subject in the Italian Communist Party and in Italian neo-feminism

This article compares the autobiographical practices used by the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in the aftermath of the Second World War with those developed by Italian neo-feminism from the late 1960s onwards. The former involved a repeated injunction for activists to write about and express themselves upon joining the party, in what amounted to self-criticism. The latter, meanwhile, took shape as a result of self-consciousness exercises practised by feminist groups in various cities across Italy. The terms of comparison of this article aim to describe what changed and what remained the same in the technologies used to produce the political self within the Italian Left in the twentieth century, beginning from its split in the 1960s. In this context, the paper reveals that the communist and feminist experiences were supported by the same discursive mechanism, which hinged on a paradoxical enunciation of the self. Communist activists and feminists thus faced the same difficulty in political self-expression, which was resolved in two different ways, both equally unsatisfactory. In conclusion, examining the communist autobiographical injunction allows a radical critical reappraisal of the idea that the use of the first person and the political affirmation of subjectivity are determining features exclusively bound to the feminist experience.

The Right to Sit: Symbolic Expression and the Pledge of Allegiance in New York Public Schools, 1969–1973

New York History Winter 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 84 The Right to Sit: Symbolic Expression and the Pledge of Allegiance in New York Public Schools, 1969–1973 Aaron G. Fountain Jr., Indiana University at Bloomington On January 31, 1970, the New York Times ran a profile article on twelve-year-old Mary Frain, a junior high school student in Queens who had recently won a court case that granted her the right to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance.1 She had refused to stand in silence or leave the classroom while her classmates recited the Pledge. Her defiance derived from her objection to the phrase “liberty and justice for all,” believing that it contradicted the current plight of marginalized groups. “That’s not true…for the blacks and poor whites,” she said. “The poor have to live in cold miserable places. And it’s obvious that the blacks are oppressed.” Despite the legal victory and the comfort provided by her parents, she had experienced bullying from some of her peers, who called her a commie and recited the Pledge to her in the schoolyard, and from complete strangers, who made prank calls and wrote demeaning letters to her home. Her classmate and fellow plaintiff, Susan Keller, had transferred to a private school because her mother feared the very real prospect of bullying. Unforeseen to Frain, she would only enjoy her newly granted freedom briefly. In February 1970, her father was dismissed from his teaching job at the College of New Rochelle. This forced the family to move from their home because of their inability to pay rent.2 Frain’s situation was one of several incidents involving students who refused to stand and salute to the flag for political purposes. Between 1969 and 1973, a number of junior high and high school students in New York 1. The phrase “The Right to Sit” comes from a news brief in the “Nation” section in Time, December 9, 1969, 12. 2. “Girl Hears a False Note in Pledge of Allegiance,” New York Times, January 31, 1970, A33; “New Rochelle Girls College Dismisses Controversial Sociology Profess,” New York Times, February 22, 1970, A47; Charles Elster, telephone interview with author, July 7, 2012. Administrators at the College of New Rochelle never gave their reasons for not renewing William Frain’s contract, but Frain believed that his leftist political views led to his dismissal. Fountain Jr. Symbolic Expression and the Pledge of Allegiance in New York Public Schools, 1969–1973 85 refused to comply with a state law requiring participation in the Pledge of Allegiance. These students asked to remain seated because they could not, in good conscience, recite the final phrase “liberty and justice for all.” In their views, it belied the widespread racial discrimination faced by minority groups. They argued that remaining seated was a constitutionally protected form of political expression. In response, school authorities threatened them with suspension if the pupils rejected both of the schools’ alternatives: either stand silently or leave the classroom. Most students complied, but some still refused and were suspended. The students who were suspended contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to seek legal representation . Their cases were heard by school boards and federal courts, which usually ruled in their favor. The outcome expanded political selfexpression rights that were granted to students in the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines, a case that school authorities ignored until legal action forced their compliance. This article contributes to the existing scholarship on the Pledge of Allegiance. Although the Pledge might appear as a minor ritual recited mostly by schoolchildren, it has been at the center of political debates over the meaning of patriotism for decades. The scholars who have studied controversies over the Pledge have focused largely on the legal challenges by Jehovah’s Witnesses, the addition of the words “under God” in 1954, the 1988 Presidential election in which the Pledge became a political weapon, and Michael Newdow’s Supreme Court case to remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge in 2002.3 In his study on the history of the Pledge, political scientist Richard Ellis documented...

Listening as Religious Practice (Part One): Exploring Quantitative Data from an Empirical Study of the Cultural Habits of Music Fans

This article explores and reflects upon the role that music consumption may be playing in the flexible field of cultural expression, identity formation, and meaning-making activity in the West, as overt commitment to organised religion continues to decline and prove fragile. Using quantitative data from a 2009–2010 study of 231 music users, the authors locate and analyse the respondents’ declarations about their listening practices in relation to their other socio-cultural habits and life-commitments. The article explores the genres and themes of music listened to, the means by which the music is accessed, the frequency of listening, and the scale and nature of non-musical commitments. The significance of differences between replies of male and female respondents and between replies of self-identified religious and non-religious respondents is also considered. The article concludes that, while listening habits differ only slightly between religious and non-religious respondents, there are differences in three significant respects: music use with respect to political self-expression; access of ‘life-worlds’/the narratives that people live by; the frequency and technological format of listening.

Queer Identity Management and Political Self-Expression on Social Networking Sites: A Co-Cultural Approach to the Spiral of Silence

Social networking sites can facilitate self-expression, but for some, that freedom is constrained. This study investigated factors that influence LGBT+ individuals' identity management and political expression on social media. We interviewed 52 participants aged 18 to 53 around the 2012 U.S. election. Using co-cultural theory, we investigated communicative practices employed by queer-identified individuals on Facebook. Participants whose LGBT+ identity was not known by the social network (i.e., those who were still in the closet) revealed a spiral of silence, wherein they were silenced by the perceived heteronormative majority. Participants whose identity was known (i.e., those who were out) revealed a spiral of silencing as they used the site's affordances to empower their vocal minority and silence the dominant group.

Consuming Ourselves to Dearth

This article proposes an agenda for research on the relation of structural inequality to the study of politics and consumption in the field of communication. The authors review evidence for increasing inequality in the United States and argue that (1) consumption choices and desires are strongly constrained by structural location; (2) political beliefs and attitudes are shaped by location in the income or class structure; and (3) consumption as a form of political self-expression or civic identity, for example, boycotting or “buycotting,” is also constrained by economic structural location. Given these propositions, it becomes critical to analytically situate notions of personalization of politics within the context of increasing economic inequality.

A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization

Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between 'close friends' who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.

Latino and anglo political portraits: lessons from intercultural field research

Authors report sharply contrasting portraits of Anglo and Latino political values and behaviors, urging careful consideration of these differences in plans to include Latinos in civic life in the US. Reported data were collected during two and one half years of ethnographic field research which accompanied a domestic diversity program. 1 1 This report summarizes a symposium presented at the meetings of the International Academy of Intercultural Research, March 17, 1998 in Fullerton, CA. The authors want to thank panelists Rosita Albert, Milton Bennett, Dan Landis, and Frank Montalvo for their thoughtful comments which have helped guide preparation of this report. We are deeply appreciative of the support of project fundors — Fairfax County, VA, the Mobil Corporation, and the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation — for endorsing an exploratory action research venture. Our most deeply felt thanks go to United Community Ministries, a non-profit human service agency in Alexandria, VA, that so generously supported, hosted, and guided this project. We also want to acknowlege the valuable editorial assistance of Fathali Moghaddam and Gail Weigl at Georgetown University. Developed in the Washington, DC metro area, the Hispanic Leadership Project set out to prepare leaders from a recently arrived Latino immigrant population — primarily from El Salvador — to advocate and form political alliances on behalf of their people. With joint local government and private foundation support, project designers sought alternatives to the marginalization and misrepresentation which are common experiences of Latino peoples recently settled in the US. Intentionally inclusive, but accidentally ethnocentric, the Hispanic Leadership Program could not realize most of its ambitious goals for social change, but proved to be a very heuristically powerful approach to set certain Anglo and Latino cultural patterns in bold relief, particularly those related to political self-expression and world view. Despite the specific features of its context and participants, the project offers broader lessons to guide future research and practice; noted are guidelines for quantitative follow-up study and for subsequent efforts to foster Latino participation in politics. The Hispanic Leadership Project and companion research are offered as a demonstration of learning to be extracted from putative program failures and from use of qualitative methods in intercultural research.

When is a turtle a turtle ?

The rock art of Lake of the Woods (Ontario) is analyzed in an attempt to determine some basic but particular social organizational features of the society that produced it perhaps 5 000 years ago. A model for interpreting certain stylistic features of tribal art is proposed. The model is based on a consideration of the contradictory tendencies inherent in contemporary North American Indian social structure. It is argued that the interpretations generally offered in the literature fail to take account of the delicate interplay between symbols and their everyday referents, an interplay that is conditioned by the way in which aggregative and dispersive qualities in social organization are expressed in political self-expression. The model is applied to representation of turtle images, which, it is proposed, are mediators between aggregative and dispersive tendencies in Amerindian socio-political organization.