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This document is a collection of abstracts from articles published in the journal International Affairs. The articles cover a range of topics related to the impact of smartphones and digital connectivity on global crises. Some of the topics include information warfare in eastern Congo, the role of smartphones in shaping political dynamics in Mali, and the use of digital platforms in the Somali Horn of Africa. The articles provide insights into the ways in which smartphones and digital technologies are shaping various aspects of global affairs. Additionally, the document includes policy paper executive summaries on topics such as the failures of western foreign policy and the potential of circular economy solutions for European Union strategic autonomy. These summaries offer a brief overview of each paper's main arguments and findings, providing library patrons with a starting point for further exploration of these topics. [Extracted from the article]

Several prominent international organizations (IOs) maintain decision-making structures that under-represent developing countries. This paper argues that individuals in developing countries are more supportive of engaging with IOs that give a greater voice to fellow developing countries. We posit that the balance of decision-making power influences support for IOs by improving perceptions of both input legitimacy and output legitimacy. Empirically, we focus on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and draw on original survey experiments in four developing countries: Argentina, China, South Africa, and Turkey. Results reveal that increased representation of developing countries increases public support for IMF participation. We also find consistent evidence that this effect works through an input legitimacy mechanism, specifically by improving perceptions of procedural fairness. These findings suggest that public support for IOs is affected by the balance of decision-making power within these organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns over the existence of a global "information disorder" marked by the contamination of the public sphere with deception campaigns have grown in recent years. This "disorder" has domestic and international dimensions, with multiple state actors standing accused of malicious influence abroad. Previous research, focused on the Global North, has neglected the potential role of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments in shaping public opinion in the Global South, where problems with foreign influence operations have persisted for decades. Using survey data (N  = 4,613) collected in Angola, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zambia in late 2022, this paper addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the relationship between individuals' worldviews and news consumption, and their support of strategic disinformation narratives favored by Russia and China, both of which have been active in trying to use the news media to influence public opinion. At a country level, we find that support for these narratives is most pronounced in Ethiopia and South Africa, while at an individual level, we find limited evidence that news consumption is connected to the adoption of these narratives. In discussing these findings, we argue that African public opinion is simultaneously shaped by global, geopolitical shifts and domestic, and local contestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to defend moral relativism from the accusation that it would make it irrational to classify past changes in public opinion as instances of moral progress, for they would constitute an improvement only from our current point of view. The argument is this. For our assessment of a change in public opinion as an instance of moral progress to be rational, we need to take the moral claims made before the change to be false simpliciter while being open to the possibility that we ourselves change our minds at some point. These two things can be made compatible if we construe moral relativism as taking the truth of moral claims to be relative to the context of assessment. Thus understood, moral relativism is in fact the only view that makes room for talk of moral progress, as the rest of candidate positions make it irrational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public views on international organizations (IOs) have become a matter of central concern. While actors in world politics increasingly try to legitimize or delegitimize IOs, scholars have begun investigating such phenomena systematically. This paper provides the most comprehensive IO (de)legitimation study to date. Building on cueing theory, and considering input as well as output legitimacy, I examine the isolated and combined effects of delegitimation and self-legitimation on public perceptions of IOs. I concentrate on government criticism and citizen protests as two salient practices of delegitimation. In investigating self-legitimation, I focus on IOs' public statements and institutional reforms. I study public opinion on the UN, World Bank, and WHO, as IOs of different functional scopes and levels of salience. In 2021, I conducted survey experiments on more than 32,000 citizens in ten countries worldwide (Australia, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Kenya, South Korea, and Turkey) – weighted by age, gender, region, and education. My main findings are: Delegitimation by governments and citizen protests has some limited effectiveness, depending on the IO in question. While IO self-legitimization statements and reforms in themselves do not boost public support for IOs, they are generally effective at neutralizing delegitimation attempts by governments and citizen protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on the results of a survey we conducted on the Japanese public's attitudes toward astronomy. This survey was conducted via an online questionnaire, with 2000 responses received. Based on these data, we present what kind of interest the general public in Japan has in astronomy. We also conducted a questionnaire survey of those involved in communicating astronomy to the public, in order to examine how they differ from the general public. The results suggest that while there are clear differences between these groups in terms of their engagement in astronomy, there is also continuity between them when looking at their attributes in more detail. The data presented in this paper could help us to promote the communication of astronomy to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity—or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations of LGBT individuals. Rural identifiers are also less likely to support pro-LGBT policy measures than nonrural identifiers. Nevertheless, I find the magnitude of the effects of rural identity on anti-LGBT views to be surprisingly small. It is also the case that, on average, rural identifiers exhibit net-positive estimations of LGBT individuals and are broadly supportive of LGBT rights, suggesting that elected officials enacting anti-LGBT legislation in rural areas of the United States are potentially out of step with the preferences of their electorate. These findings also have implications for what it means to hold a rural identity beyond a generalized animosity toward urban areas, and for understanding urban-rural divergences in US public opinion on issues such as LGBT rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often look to the examples set by other countries when thinking about how to deal with problems at home. But what explains why some countries are more likely to serve as role models than others? Are people influenced mainly by the examples set by countries that are considered to be particularly successful in a given policy area? Or are they influenced to a greater extent by countries that are more familiar to them, or that appear more similar to their own? In this paper, we test these hypotheses using two large (n |$\ > {\rm{\ }}$| 2,000) survey-based experiments conducted in the United States. The first focuses on environmental issues, while the second focuses on human rights issues. In both studies, the respondents were presented with a randomly drawn list of countries and asked to indicate how relevant the examples that these countries set should be to policy discussions in the United States. Our results suggest that the US public's perception of the relevance of other countries' experiences is driven primarily by the extent to which the respondent perceives the other countries as familiar to them, or similar to the United States, rather than by more objective measures of policy success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines mass public opinion in three small states of the South Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, to understand why some individuals in these states prefer a pro-Western foreign policy orientation–pursuing membership in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), while others do not. We draw on social identity theory to hypothesize the potential affinity some individuals feel toward the West. Using public data from the South Caucasus region where Russia has strongly attempted to block Western penetration, the paper demonstrates that the commitment to democratic values is central to the understanding of mass opinion over foreign alliances in small states: individuals who demonstrate pro-democracy attitudes and support democratic values are more likely to approve of pro-Western foreign policy orientation. These findings suggest that the study of foreign policy preferences in small states is important for our understanding of great power politics and alliance competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Journal of Public Opinion Research has published a brief about the activities of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) and its members. The 76th WAPOR conference was held in Salzburg, Austria, with 306 participants from 63 countries. The conference featured workshops, panels, and keynote addresses on topics such as artificial intelligence, COVID and public opinion research, and sentiment and conspiracy. WAPOR also announced the election of new officers, awarded prizes for outstanding papers, released a report on the freedom to publish opinion polls, updated its constitution, and announced the 77th annual conference in Seoul, South Korea. Additionally, WAPOR conducted webinars on surveying hard-to-reach populations, gridded population sampling, and data visualization. [Extracted from the article]

Claims about the deterrent role of forward military deployments often depend on the argument that attacks on troops stationed abroad will activate a "tripwire effect." It is assumed that this effect would generate strong domestic pressure for further military intervention by the country whose troops have come under attack. In theory, the anticipation of a strong tripwire effect prospectively ties the hands of leaders, thereby bolstering the reliability of extended deterrent threats and promises. In this paper, we define the tripwire effect and use both conjoint and vignette survey experiments to evaluate its operation and magnitude among Americans. Results suggest that the tripwire effect is, at best, far weaker than many analysts and policymakers commonly assume. This finding raises serious questions about a core logic underpinning the United States' forward military posture and highlights the need for more research on the deterrent functions of forward deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the USA, politics often dominates the conversation surrounding science and related technologies. We also live in times of high political polarization, leading to political debate over scientific discoveries and subsequent policy implications. Given these dynamics, there is much to be learned about the politicization of science, individuals' policy views, and the public's relationship with the communication and interpretation of scientific findings. Agencies are often responsible for facilitating scientific research and framing its policy relevance for decision makers and the public. This paper uses data from a large national public opinion survey to investigate citizen attitudes about government science agencies. We theorize that disparities between objective and self-assessed scientific knowledge coupled with ideological cues help frame citizen evaluations of agencies. We find that individuals' political ideologies and disparities between knowledge types shape citizen assessments of energy-related scientific agencies. These findings have important implications for our understanding of public acceptance of the work of government science agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gregor Mendel is generally presented as the 'ignored and solitary founder of genetics'. This Moravian friar would have worked in strict isolation on the heredity of peas in the garden of his monastery, and his experiments would have been ignored by his contemporaries, before being 'rediscovered' independently by three botanists in 1900, 34 years after their publication. Historians have contributed to replace the genesis of Mendel's work in the context of his time, questioning the mythical image that prevailed in academic circles and the public perception. This paper recalls that Mendel benefitted from a very favourable context for the development of his experiments at St Thomas Monastery in Brno and was not isolated from the scientific community of his time. Although the notions on which his work was based were already present in scientific publications, this does not diminish the importance of Mendel's contribution to the development of modern biology. We provide a detailed analysis of the results of his experiments on the development of hybrid plants that he presented in two lectures at the Brno Society of Natural History in 1865, demonstrating that beyond his major contribution to the foundation of genetics, Mendel was one of the pioneers of systems biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past studies establish that general education and scientific knowledge foster more favorable public attitudes toward scientists and scientific research. They also highlight important attitudinal impacts of group identities, in particular, political ideology, party affiliation, religion, and race. The primary purpose of this paper is to determine whether and how these identities might moderate the effects of general education and scientific knowledge on public attitudes toward scientists and scientific research. Main findings include effects of education and scientific knowledge remain significant to varying degrees but are not uniformly generalizable across different group identities; attitudes toward scientists and scientific research have remained fairly stable since 2006; and to love science and hate scientists is not confined to political conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research often identifies evangelical Christians based on a double-barreled, yes-or-no, question asking respondents whether they are an evangelical or born-again Christian. This paper uses a survey experiment to demonstrate the implications of this measurement strategy. Among White Americans, more than one-third of those whom researchers classify as evangelical using the standard double-barreled question actually eschew the evangelical label; the same is true for just under two-thirds of African Americans. Additionally, these born-again non -evangelical Christians hold less conservative political outlooks compared to the self-identified evangelicals with whom they are grouped, and, in fact, oftentimes more closely resemble those who reject both the evangelical and born-again labels. Despite this, the double-barreled identification question produces a White "evangelical or born-again" group that looks politically similar to a composite "evangelical" or "born-again" group based on two questions asking about each identity separately. Finally, important differences appear across race, suggesting that religious and political histories affect how people interpret and respond to double-barreled questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in one's fellow citizens and in politicians are both conducive to well-functioning government. Beyond their separate importance, it is a long-standing notion that generalized social trust and political trust are connected in a mutually reinforcing relationship that further undergirds democratic governance. While it is well established that social trust and political trust are robustly positively associated at the individual level, there is much less compelling evidence regarding the causal nature of this relationship. Previous analyses have been unable to adequately rule out confounding and correct for reverse causality. This paper tackles these challenges through data and a research design close to ideally suited for addressing the causal status of the relationship. Using a 20-wave individual-level panel survey from Sweden analyzed using a dynamic panel model, we find evidence for a relatively strong positive causal effect of political trust on social trust, but little evidence for the reverse relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how can researchers synthesize survey data with analyses of social media content to study public opinion, and when and how can social media data complement surveys to better inform researchers and policymakers? This paper explores how public opinions might differ between survey and social media platforms in terms of content and audience, focusing on the test case of opinions about autonomous vehicles. The paper first extends previous overviews comparing surveys and social media as measurement tools to include a broader range of survey types, including surveys that result from public deliberation, considering the dialogic characteristics of different social media, and the range of issue publics and marginalized voices that different surveys and social media forums can attract. It then compares findings and implications from analyses of public opinion about autonomous vehicles from traditional surveys, results of public deliberation, and analyses of Reddit posts, applying a newly developed computational text analysis tool. Findings demonstrate that social media analyses can both help researchers learn more about issues that are uncovered by surveys and also uncover opinions from subpopulations with specialized knowledge and unique orientations toward a subject. In light of these findings, we point to future directions on how researchers and policymakers can synthesize survey and social media data, and the corresponding data integration techniques, to study public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on voting behavior and political attitudes has established the relevance of anti-intellectual (Merkley, E. (2020). Anti-intellectualism, populism, and motivated resistance to expert consensus. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(1), 24–48. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfz053; Motta, M. (2018a). The dynamics and political implications of anti-intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 46(3), 465–498. doi: 10.1177/1532673X17719507; Motta, M. (2018b). The polarizing effect of the March for Science on attitudes toward scientists. PS, Political Science & Politics, 51(4), 782. doi: 10.1017/S1049096518000938), anti-science (Mede, N. G. & Schäfer, M. S. (2020). Science-related populism: Conceptualizing populist demands toward science. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 473–491. doi: 10.1177/0963662520924259; Rekker, R. (2021). The nature and origins of political polarization over science. Public Understanding of Science, 30(4), 352–368. doi: 10.1177%2F0963662521989193) and anti-expertise (Brewer, M. D. (2016). Populism in American politics. The Forum, 14, 249–264. doi: 10.1515/for-2016-0021; Oliver, J. E. & Rahn, W. M. (2016). Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189–206. doi: 10.1177/0002716216662639) attitudes in politics. However, the increasing relevance of anti-expertise attitudes raises a paradox, as one of the most well-established claims of the persuasion literature concerns the influence of expert sources on attitudes (O'Keefe, D. J. (2016). Persuasion: Theory and research. (3rd ed.) SAGE Publications, Inc.; Pornpitakpan, C. (2004). The persuasiveness of source credibility: A critical review of five decades' evidence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34, 243–281. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb02547.x). The current paper explores the influence of messages based on public and expert consensus, as well as the interaction of these messages with expressed mistrust of experts relative to the public. The issue we explore concerns environmental regulations relating to water, an issue on which partisan elites are divided, but one that has not played a highly salient role in recent political discourse. We find that mistrust of experts is negatively related to support for these regulations, as expected, but that, contrary to prior research, increases in mistrust of experts in fact enhanced the impact of the expert message. We discuss potential explanations for why this pattern of results differs from prior work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the migration of public opinion surveys to online platforms has often lowered costs and enhanced timeliness, it has also created new vulnerabilities. Respondents completing the same survey multiple times from different IP addresses, overseas workers posing as Americans, and algorithms designed to complete surveys are among the threats that have emerged in this new era. This paper is an attempt to measure the prevalence of such respondents and their impact on survey data quality, while demonstrating methodological approaches for doing so. Prior studies typically examine just one platform and rely on closed-ended questions and/or paradata (e.g. IP addresses) to identify untrustworthy interviews. This is problematic because such data are relatively easy for bad actors to fake. We carried out a large-scale study with an eye toward overcoming these limitations. This study examines the threat of insincere respondents using large samples from six online platforms: three opt-in survey panels, two address-recruited survey panels, and a crowdsourced sample. Rather than relying solely on closed-ended responses, we incorporated an analysis of 375,834 open-ended answers. By their very nature, open-ended questions offer a more sensitive indicator of whether a respondent is genuine or not. The study found that the incidence of insincere respondents varied significantly by the type of online sample. Critically, insincere respondents did not just answer at random, but rather they tended to select positive answer choices, introducing a small, systematic bias into estimates like presidential approval. Two common data-quality checks failed to detect most insincere respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the fact that the existing public opinion propagation aspects are mostly based on single-layer propagation network, these works rarely consider the double-layer network structure and the negative opinion evolution. This paper proposes a new susceptible-infected-vaccinated-susceptible negative opinion information propagation model with preventive vaccination by constructing double-layer network topology. Firstly, the continuous-time Markov chain is used to simulate the negative public opinion information propagation process and the nonlinear dynamic equation of the model is derived; secondly, the steady state condition of the virus propagation in the model is proposed and mathematically proved; finally, Monte Carlo method is applied in the proposed model. The parameters of simulation model have an effect on negative public opinion information propagation, the derivation results are verified by computer simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed model has a larger threshold of public opinion information propagation and has more effective control of the scale of negative public opinion; it also can reduce the density of negative public opinion information propagation and suppress negative public opinion information compared with the traditional susceptible infected susceptible model. It also can provide the scientific method and research approach based on probability statistics for the study of negative public opinion information propagation in complex networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of the impact assessment revolution, governments and public opinion have started to ask researchers to give evidence of their impact outside the traditional audiences, i.e. students and researchers. There is a mismatch between the request to demonstrate the impact and the current methodologies for impact assessment. This mismatch is particularly worrisome for the research in Social Sciences and Humanities. This paper gives a contribution by examining systematically a key element of impact, i.e. the social groups that are directly or indirectly affected by the results of research. We use a Text mining approach applied to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) collection of 6,637 impact case studies in order to identify social groups mentioned by researchers. Differently from previous studies, we employ a lexicon of user groups that includes 76,857 entries, which saturates the semantic field, permits the identification of all users and opens the way to normalization. We then develop three new metrics measuring Frequency, Diversity and Specificity of user expressions. We find that Social Sciences and Humanities exhibit a distinctive structure with respect to frequency and specificity of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do citizens know about state legislative salaries and how does correct information change opinions of legislators and what citizens believe to be their proper levels of compensation? Through an original experiment with more than 2,000 registered voters from four heterogeneous states, this paper provides evidence that the degree of innumeracy regarding state legislative salaries exceeds innumeracy regarding many other political facts. Further, providing participants with correct information can influence policy opinions directly related to legislative salary but has no effects on indirect policy opinions, such as assessments of legislators themselves. These findings have important implications for scholars of public opinion, factual misperceptions, and state legislative representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the modern era, Internet usage has become a basic necessity in the lives of people. Nowadays, people can perform online shopping and check the customer's views about products that purchased online. Social networking services enable users to post opinions on public platforms. Analyzing people's opinions helps corporations to improve the quality of products and provide better customer service. However, analyzing this content manually is a daunting task. Therefore, we implemented sentiment analysis to make the process automatically. The entire process includes data collection, pre-processing, word embedding, sentiment detection and classification using deep learning techniques. Twitter was chosen as the source of data collection and tweets collected automatically by using Tweepy. In this paper, three deep learning techniques were implemented, which are CNN, Bi-LSTM and CNN-Bi-LSTM. Each of the models trained on three datasets consists of 50K, 100K and 200K tweets. The experimental result revealed that, with the increasing amount of training data size, the performance of the models improved, especially the performance of the Bi-LSTM model. When the model trained on the 200K dataset, it achieved about 3% higher accuracy than the 100K dataset and achieved about 7% higher accuracy than the 50K dataset. Finally, the Bi-LSTM model scored the highest performance in all metrics and achieved an accuracy of 95.35%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of physical inactivity in India is estimated to be at 34%, the highest among South Asian nations. Interventions, such as outdoor gymnasiums/gyms, aiming to promote physical activity, are becoming popular worldwide, including in India. This paper presents the first empirical evidence on outdoor gyms in India from a qualitative perspective. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews of 56 outdoor gym stakeholders—40 users, 10 non-users, 4 healthcare providers and 2 outdoor gym implementing municipality authorities were conducted in the National Capital Region of India. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed through the Framework Method. The qualitative findings present the perceived benefits, barriers/challenges to using and provide insights for further improving and scaling up outdoor gyms in India. Health enhancement in the form of improved general fitness, body weight control and diversification of physical exercise routines, social connectivity, easy accessibility, affordability, green outdoor surroundings, and a place of intrigue and attraction in respective parks were the major reported benefits of outdoor gyms. Low gym equipment to user ratio was one of the major challenges to gym use across the user group. Healthcare providers and non-users were majorly concerned about the potentially incorrect and unsupervised use of outdoor gym equipment. Major suggestions for improvement were increasing the number of equipment installed, regular equipment maintenance, and the presence of an on-site physical exercise trainer. Outdoor gymnasiums present as a viable option for promoting physical activity and should be scaled up systematically to improve the health of the populations across India and other similar nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do states' partnerships with foreign elites influence international public opinion? During Russia's annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin strengthened its ties with far-left and far-right European parties—leading some European elites to express more explicit pro-Russian positions. This paper analyzes how these elite-level ties influence ordinary individuals' foreign policy attitudes, offering insight into the conditions under which soft power "trickles down." By leveraging public opinion data before and after the conflict in Crimea (2012–2017), and employing an estimation strategy that follows the same logic as a standard differences-in-differences strategy, I demonstrate that Russia's linkages with anti-establishment parties led to greater confidence in Vladimir Putin over time, but had limited impact on favorability toward Russia, the United States, and NATO. These findings have important implications for autocratic public diplomacy, our conceptualization of soft power, and Russian foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gendered power imbalances have risen to prominence in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the rise of the #MeToo movement. This paper uses original panel and cross-sectional data to assess the degree to which levels of sexism have changed in response to current events, and finds very little change in levels of sexism from 2004 to 2018. The results also suggest that modern sexism significantly correlates with views undercutting the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct, purporting that #MeToo has gone too far, and opposing mandatory workplace harassment training, among other beliefs. Overall, the evidence suggests that modern sexism is firmly entrenched in the public mind and readily connected to public opinion in the wake of #MeToo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new information dissemination and opinion evolution IPNN (Information Propagation Neural Network) model based on artificial neural network. The feedforward network, feedback network and dynamic evolution algorithms are designed and implemented. Firstly, according to the 'six degrees separation' theory of information dissemination, a seven-layer neural network underlying framework with input layer, propagation layer and termination layer is constructed; secondly, the information sharing and information interaction evolution process between nodes are described by using the event information forward propagation algorithm, opinion difference reverse propagation algorithm; finally, the external factors of online social network information dissemination is considered, the impact of external behavior patterns is measured by media public opinion guidance and network structure dynamic update operations. Simulation results show that the proposed new mathematical model reveals the relationship between the state of micro-network nodes and the evolution of macro-network public opinion. It accurately depicts the internal information interaction mechanism and diffusion mechanism in online social network. Furthermore, it reveals the process of network public opinion formation and the nature of public opinion explosion in online social network. It provides a new scientific method and research approach for the study of social network public opinion evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political understanding. The current paper introduces the method of cognitive mapping to measure cognitive complexity regarding citizens' understanding of the financial crisis, one of the most pressing political issues of the past decades. Linking content-analytic data to panel-survey data, we examine how exposure to news about the crisis relates to cognitive complexity. A wide variety of news sources (print, television, and online) were analyzed to take the high-choice media environment into account. Results show that news consumption generally is related to a less cognitively complex understanding of the financial crisis. However, actual exposure to news about the crisis (combined measurement of content analysis and survey data) is positively related to cognitive complexity, particularly among less-educated citizens. In addition, the most prominent topics in news coverage were more frequently associated with the financial crisis, as reflected in the cognitive maps of less-educated citizens exposed to more crisis news. These findings demonstrate the potential of news media to increase citizens' complexity of understanding, especially among the less educated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few social problems engender as much public and political debate as the alleged link between immigration and crime. Contrary to the findings of much empirical literature, the majority of the public believe that immigration increases crime and that the foreign born are especially prone to offending. Among many factors, the way prominent news media describe the immigration-crime link may help explain the disconnectedness of scholarship and public opinion over the past several decades. Using a unique database of over 2,200 news stories drawn from among the highest circulation national papers for 1990 through 2013, the current study employs time-series trend analyses to examine the prevalence of different media frames used to explain the immigration-crime link and whether those frames have changed systematically over time. Our results reveal that most immigration-crime news stories describe immigrants as especially crime-prone or as increasing aggregate crime rates. Moreover, this framing has increased in prevalence over time, as have narratives inaccurately describing undocumented immigration as a crime itself, while framing immigrants as victims of crime has declined significantly over the 1990–2013 period. These changes occurred systematically in only some newspapers. We discuss implications for research, policy, and the public engagement of scientific evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online surveys, particularly those that draw samples from online panels of experienced respondents, now comprise a large segment of the academic and commercial opinion research markets due to their low cost and flexibility. A growing literature examines the implications of online surveys for data quality, most commonly by comparing demographic and political characteristics of different samples. In this paper, we explore the possibility that personality may differentially influence the likelihood of participation in online and face-to-face surveys. We argue that individuals high in extraversion and openness to experience may be underrepresented, and those low in these traits overrepresented, in professionalized online panels given the solitary nature of repeated survey-taking. Since openness to experience in particular is associated with liberal policy positions, differences in this trait may bias estimates of public opinion derived from professionalized online panels. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 dual-mode American National Election Studies, we compare political preferences and personality traits across parallel face-to-face and online samples. Respondents in the online samples were, on average, less open to experience and more politically conservative on a variety of issues compared to their face-to-face counterparts. This was true especially in 2012, when online respondents were drawn from a large panel of experienced respondents. We also find openness to be negatively related to the number of surveys completed by these respondents. These results suggest that reliance on professionalized survey respondents, who comprise the vast majority of online survey samples, can bias estimates of many quantities of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How citizens hold government accountable in democratic systems is one of the fundamental questions of political science and has long been of interest to scholars of public opinion. Accountability for the performance of government requires individuals to make accurate evaluations of the effects of policy decisions, and to trace responsibility for policy decisions to the appropriate politician or political party. In this paper, we study the question of democratic accountability in the context of the health insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act. Not surprisingly, how citizens evaluate the state of the world and locate responsibility has less to do with marketplace performance, and much more to do with political allegiance. However, we theorize and find evidence that supports two substantial exceptions to the overwhelming role of partisan identification: Both political independents and those with personal policy experience are capable of linking objective conditions with broader political assessments. These findings have important implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and for the design of public policies in a federal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze citizens' attitudes toward regional leadership, employing two sets of survey experiments. Using Brazil as a case study, we analyze the first set of experiments with two types of regional leadership—structural and institutional—across three different regional issues—economic integration, regime change, and regional conflict. We found that Brazilians do not support either type of leadership, whether in regional conflict or in regime change issues, but support institutional leadership in economic integration scenarios. In the second set, we included specific South American countries both in regional conflict and in regime change scenarios. We found that Brazilians prefer Brazil to stay away from acting as a leader once neighboring countries are named in the experiment. Our findings indicate that the literature on regional leadership should incorporate the level of domestic support to understand its implications to the exercise of regional leadership. We embedded our experiments within the project "The Americas and the World: Public Opinion and International Politics, 2014–2015." We used a nationally representative sample of eighteen hundred respondents undertaken in 2014. Video Abstract Video Abstract Close [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petitions, as one of the most popular forms of political participation, offer citizens a bottom-up, comparatively low effort means to communicate their wishes to politicians and the public. This article analyses all steps of the petitions process to assess whether it provides all citizens with equal opportunities for participation as well as for realising political voice, with a particular focus on the role of online petitions and the German Bundestag. By surveying hundreds of petitioners--both those using traditional paper petitions and those who use the Internet to submit a petition--along with a representative survey of the population, this study confirms the traditional sociodemographic biases in participation. Online petitions attract younger people and support realising voice through recruiting supporters but do not offer more equality in participation. While the Petition Committee of the Bundestag does not treat certain groups of petitioners preferentially, those submitting petitions on paper have better chances for realising political voice. Overall only a few citizens feel they have realised political voice through their petition, resulting in widespread dissatisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do protest actions succeed in winning public support? In this paper, I theorize how features of protest can persuade citizens to support demonstrators. In particular, I argue that broadcasting an attractive collective identity by means of diverse, worthy, united, numerous and committed participants (dWUNC) triggers supportive reactions of observers through increasing identification with protesters. I test this argument by exposing respondents to manipulated television news items of a protest event in two video vignette experiments. Study 1 scrutinizes the effect of dWUNC displays in an asylum seeker demonstration on a sample of Belgian citizens. Study 2 replicates this design in the US for the Black Lives Matter issue of police brutality. Both studies show predispositions of citizens to strongly affect favorability towards protesters. On top of these potent receiver effects, however, also the dWUNC features prove persuasive. In both experiments, a consistent pattern of feature effects is found: demonstrations that mobilized more diverse participants, who behaved worthy and acted in unison, elicited more supportive reactions. Study 2 adds that these protest feature effects are in part mediated by increasing identification with the demonstrators. The heterogeneity of protest feature effects is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What theories explain variation in public opinion toward asylum seekers? We implement a survey experiment in which a representative sample of German residents evaluates vignettes of asylum seekers, which randomly vary attributes that speak to deservingness, economic and religious threat, and gender considerations of attitude formation. We find strong support for deservingness theories. Economic and religious threat theories also receive empirical support. Gender plays a negligible role. Importantly, we also document that economic and—to a lesser extent—religious threat considerations only matter when respondents evaluate economic refugees. By contrast, political refugees are welcomed nearly unconditionally. Our paper thus replicates key findings from Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2016) and Czymara and Schmidt-Catran (2016) using a representative sample and points to an important interaction effect in public opinion formation toward asylum seekers: economic threat only gets activated when refugees' deservingness is in doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim This paper briefly reviews the history of alcohol policy development in Europe leading to the current consensus in the health field on strategic priorities. There is a review of recent policy developments in selected European countries, both EU and non-EU members. Methods Narrative review of published journal articles, publications from WHO, and other health organisations and government publications. Results The implementation of the WHO policy priorities has been variable across Europe. At EU level, there has been a recent pattern of trade considerations taking priority over health and a disinvestment in alcohol research and advocacy. Among EU member states new implementation of WHO strategies have been limited to a few smaller countries and regions. In Russia, there have been considerable falls in mortality following the introduction of controls on price, availability and marketing. Conclusion The implementation of WHO strategy at national level in Europe is highly dependent on the local political circumstances. Where there is concern about alcohol harm and political will, the WHO strategic priorities have been highly influential. In order to build public and political support for prevention, alcohol policy advocates should ensure that there is good data on trends within age, gender, and income groups and develops policies to respond to these trends. The concept of proportionate universalism, where interventions are understood to have a broad population effect but the effect is greater on the groups most in need, may be more useful than the traditional alcohol policy field conceptualisations of whole population and targeted measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the influence of online news consumption on attitudes toward the European Union in a context of protracted economic crisis. Using data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study, we combine location-specific information on broadband availability with respondent geo-location data, which facilitates causal inference about the effects of online news consumption via instrumental variable models. Results show that Irish citizens who source political information online are more prone to blame the EU for the poor state of the economy than those who do not. There is evidence of preference reinforcement among those with negative predispositions toward the EU, but not among pro-EU citizens. We complement this analysis with a study of voting behavior in the European Fiscal Compact Referendum, employing a similar methodological approach. The results from this second survey confirm the anti-EU influence of online news consumption among Irish citizens, although evidence suggests a pro-EU effect among voters who browsed the website of the politically neutral Irish Referendum Commission. Our paper contributes to the literature on public opinion, the EU, and political attitudes in times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses public support and argues that supply does not match demand in terms of the support needs of different types of new technology-based firms (NTBFs). The demand side of public support to NTBFs is analysed by developing a typology of NTBFs, based on venture origin and degree of innovativeness. Each type's characteristics, challenges and support needs are identified. The supply side is analysed in terms of the goals, instruments and level of aggregation of the two main policy areas that provide support for NTBFs: small and medium-sized enterprise policy and science, technology and innovation policy. Finally, the demand and supply sides are compared and three main shortcomings of existing public support to NTBFs are identified. This paper makes a twofold contribution: first, the typology gives guidelines for policy-makers with respect to the support needs of the NTBFs. Second, it identifies shortcomings in existing public support and recommends improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a phenomenon known as spiritual health. Although the scientific literature defines the concept of this health component (in relation to other dimensions, i.e. physical, mental and social health), there is no agreement concerning its relation to religiousness. The aim of this research is to find out the views of citizens (n  = 1810) and physicians (n  = 1200) in the Czech Republic on the potential dimension of health in its spiritual mode, and on the understanding of its content by those who acknowledge its existence. One of the main research findings is that physicians in the Czech Republic acknowledge the existence of spiritual health (47.0%) to a significantly greater extent than citizens of the country (26.4%). In both groups of respondents, the understanding varies in the discourse of psychology (psychiatry), theology, in the preference for harmony, and in medical care. The acknowledgement of spiritual health depends strongly on gender (women acknowledge the existence of this phenomenon more than men), religious belief (religious physicians, as well as religious citizens and members and non-members of churches and religious societies, acknowledge the existence of spiritual health significantly more compared with atheists) and education (with increasing education the proportion of citizens who acknowledge the existence of spiritual health rises considerably—the highest proportion is found in university graduates). Spiritual health is shown to be an important public health issue, even in a strongly secularized society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends existing world society literature on the international diffusion of norms by examining divergence in world society. First, we identify polarizing trends in national regulation of homosexuality. Since 2005, the dominant post-WWII global trend toward liberalization has been challenged by a countervailing trend in which some countries have adopted more repressive laws regulating homosexuality. Second, we seek to identify whether states' alignment with either liberal or conservative world models influences public opinion. Analyzing three waves of data on public acceptance of homosexuality from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey between 2002 and 2013, we find that world public opinion concerning homosexuality has become increasingly polarized and that public opinion is embedded in broader institutional structures. Characteristics including education, age, and religious affiliation (and the lack of thereof) also affect individual acceptance of homosexuality, whereas the influence of age and education has diminished over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even after two decades of intense research, social scientists are still in disagreement over whether the American public is polarized. Starting from the premise that disagreement is multifaceted, this paper attempts to clarify how and which aspects of ideological disagreement have changed over the past few decades. Three major structural features of ideological disagreement that have been discussed under the umbrella term "polarization" are identified from the literature--polarization, partisan sorting, and dimensional alignment--and redefined into analytically distinct and non-overlapping concepts. Two different scaling methods are applied to the American National Election Studies from 1980 to 2012 in order to examine changes in how citizens organize their attitudes regarding concrete political and social issues (operational ideology) and their self-identifications with the ideological labels "liberal" and "conservative" (symbolic ideology). Results show at best mixed evidence of growing polarization. Partisan sorting has increased over time on both symbolic and operational ideology. However, it is mainly the symbolic side on which disagreement across partisan lines is most pronounced. Finally, contrary to the popular notion of a culture war dividing the United States, the public has become less polarized on moral issues, and the moral dimension of citizens' operational ideology has become dealigned from the economic and civil rights dimension over the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a global and preventable public health problem. Public attitudes, such as victim-blaming, are important for our understanding of differences in the occurrence of IPVAW, as they contribute to its justification. In this paper, we focus on victim-blaming attitudes regarding IPVAW within the EU and we apply multilevel analyses to identify contextual determinants of victim-blaming attitudes. We investigate both the general contextual effect of the country and the specific association between country level of gender equality and individual victim-blaming attitudes, as well as to what extend a possible general contextual effect was explained by county level gender equality. Methods: We analyzed data from 26 800 respondents from 27 member states of the European Union who responded to a survey on public perceptions of domestic violence. We applied multilevel logistic regression analysis and measures of variance (intra-class correlation (ICC)) were calculated, as well as the discriminatory accuracy by calculating the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve. Results: Over and above individual characteristics, about 15% of the individual variance in the propensity for having victim-blaming attitudes was found at the country level, and country level of gender equality did not affect the general contextual effect (i.e. ICC) of the country on individual victim-blaming attitudes. Conclusion: The present study shows that there are important between-country differences in victim-blaming attitudes that cannot be explained by differences in individual-level demographics or in gender equality at the country level. More research on attitudes towards IPVAW is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part of the rationale for introducing elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) was a suggestion that the police and public needed to be 'reconnected', with the public more readily able to shape the type of policing they wished to receive. Apparently underpinning this intention was a perception that a single public view about policing priorities could, and would, make itself apparent to PCCs. This paper considers how PCCs assess their public mandate by focusing on an often contested policing activity--roads policing. It considers why this particular issue is particularly likely to be understood by PCCs as a contested topic and, furthermore, how PCCs go about accessing and representing diverse views within this 'consumer-led' approach to the provision of policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health impact assessment (HIA) researchers regularly use community input in their investigations to help them better understand local health issues. Community data is commonly associated with the lived experiences of local impacted residents known as 'emic' data. It is becoming more common practice for HIA researchers to access outside experts and stakeholders ('etic' data) during the community input phase of their investigations. Utilizing published international HIA data, I look at who HIA researchers invite when they seek to get 'community input' in their HIA investigations. The HIA database was generated from an internet investigation of published HIAs (in English) from 1999 to 2011 and focused particularly on single authored assessments that were conducted by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or universities. HIA researchers access a wide range of emic and etic community perspectives in their search for the 'community's view'. Government, NGO and university investigators access community perspectives differently, with university HIA researchers inviting more emic-oriented community vistas than both government and NGO researchers. University and government HIA investigators are more likely to invite multiple emic and etic community perspectives during their community participation projects than NGO researchers. NGO HIA investigators tend to either invite emic perspectives or etic perspectives for their community input with less mixing of the two views in a single project. The paper concludes with a discussion on how HIA researchers can frame the 'community's perspective' in their HIA investigations through a combination of both 'insider' and 'outsider' community input sampling strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]