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This paper extends the concept of residential alienation to political activism in Hong Kong in the decade following the Global Financial Crisis. Young adults in Hong Kong have endured growing housing vulnerability with declining real wages, limited social benefits, and spiralling housing prices. Although university-educated, many have been excluded from the wealth accumulation of homeownership and entry to a middle-class asset society. Some have joined the waiting list for public housing. Using varied sources, the paper examines the objective and subjective status of young adults in Hong Kong as a disadvantaged housing class and how their status has corresponded with critical political attitudes. Without disputing the motivational goals of the democracy movement, the paper argues that residential alienation played a part in political mobilization. Economic justice, notably housing inclusion, required a political project to challenge the residential growth machine sanctioned by Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the role of Czech public service television in a polarized society. The research on public service media (PSM) is salient concerning their specific role; however, it is increasingly questioned in a fragmented and polarized environment. The paper builds on data from 27 semi-structured interviews and a survey conducted in 2019–2020 (N = 3,251). While for some audiences, Czech television is a trustworthy medium protecting exemplary sets of values, for others, it is biased and hostile. The study reveals the deeper interplay between political attitudes and media practices, potentially endangering PSM’s role and position in polarized settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study expands on game character perspective-taking effects on political opinions while controlling for players' social dominance orientation or inclination for inequality among social groups. Random assignment to play a game as an immigration inspector decreased intention, subjective norms, and self-efficacy to help immigrants relative to baseline scores. The scores of participants randomly assigned to play a game similar in style but instead featuring the role of a newspaper editor remained unchanged. Within-subjects effects implied that baseline reductions in intention, subjective norms, and self-efficacy to help immigrants were solely attributed to playing games as game immigration inspectors. The study provides initial evidence that taking on the perspective of game characters can influence players' opinions about political issues, such as immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts out with a summary of Weber's views on value freedom, by emphasizing: (1) that value freedom constitutes a special constellation of values; and (2) that value freedom makes it possible for the social scientist to theorize on the basis of new and more extensive knowledge than if she had simply stated her own values and focused the analysis around these. The latter point emerges most clearly in Weber's instructions for how a social scientist should proceed when carrying out an analysis of her own preferred social policy. After the section on Weber's views on value freedom, an attempt is made to update his views. This is done by arguing that the impact of values (and value freedom) differs, depending on where these can be found: on paper, in the head of the social scientist, or in her actions. 'Actions,' in the context of value freedom, refer to the research process and especially to the element of theorizing. Value freedom helps to guide the research into new and fruitful directions and to steer it clear of propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social identity is relevant to political attitudes. Recent studies show that perceived social positions particularly shape populist attitudes. Italy is an interesting test case that has been scarcely investigated by previous research. Thus, using original data collected in 2021, this paper analyses populist attitudes in Italy and the relationship between subjective social status, status mismatch, and social resentment. This study finds that subjective status matters more than objective conditions for populist attitudes. Those who perceive themselves as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy tend to have higher levels of populist attitudes than the rest of the population. However, low social resentment can partially absorb the effect of low status. The paper provides original data from which novel insights into the debate on populism are discernible, appearing to stem more from individual perceptions than objective positions. The results also suggest some possible remedies against rising populist attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persian poetry has profoundly affected all periods of Persian literature and the literature of other countries as well. It is a fundamental vehicle for expressing Persian culture and political opinion. This paper presents a corpus of Persian literary text mainly focusing on poetry, covering the ninth to twenty-first century annotated for century and style, with additional partial annotation of rhetorical figures. Our resource is the largest and the most diverse corpus available in Persian literary text, with a particularly broad temporal scope. This allows us to conduct several computational experiments to analyze poetic styles, authors and time periods, as well as context shifts over time, for which we rely both on supervised models and on Persian poetry-specific heuristics. The corpus, the tools, and experiments described in this paper can be used not only for digital humanities studies of Persian literature but also for processing Persian texts in general, as well as in other broader cross-linguistic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even when controlling for big versus small government philosophies, this paper reports quantitatively significant cleavages in the probabilities of supporting increased federal antipoverty efforts that persist between conservatives and liberals, and Republicans and Democrats. However, predicted conditional probabilities show that support for increased welfare spending or federal responsibility in raising the standard of living of the poor is not overwhelming, even among liberals and Democrats, although support for increased federal assistance to the poor is fairly strong, even among conservatives and Republicans. Hence, we consider assertions that conservatives and Republicans do not care about the poor to be extreme and unsupported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diplomacy is traditionally associated with politeness and civility. As a fundamental element of international relations, diplomacy is rooted in professional skills and codified practices. By moving diplomacy to online platforms, diplomatic statements have been accelerated, sometimes resulting in aggressiveness. The purpose of this paper is to identify outrage in diplomatic communication. Outrage can be defined as uncivil expressions evoking emotion in the audience. This concept is examined based on the tweets produced by the Russian Foreign Ministry account between 1 December 2021, and 24 April 2022 (total: 2485 tweets). Based on the framework proposed by Berry, Jeffrey M., and Sara Sobieraj (2014. The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and The New Incivility. Oxford: Oxford University Press), qualitative analysis identifies 370 outrageous tweets. Frame analysis shows how outrage acts as a narrative tool for activating (self-)representational devices. Moreover, outrage influences the diplomatic tone, international actors' characterisation, and international institutions' delegitimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has divided societies, especially regarding vaccine mandates. While research suggests that political ideology plays a crucial role in whether people support or oppose COVID‐19 countermeasures, the relationship between these attitudes and political ideology remains unclear, with varying results across different countries. The present research focuses on right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) in Germany, examining its role as a predictor. Prior studies highlight that, conservatives and right‐wing authoritarians, particularly in the USA, tend to hold more negative attitudes toward COVID‐19 countermeasures despite RWA's usual association with unwavering support for state authorities. Therefore, the present survey study (N = 1063) investigated whether trust in politics and science moderates this relationship. Contrary to expectations, the findings revealed that RWA consistently predicted support for vaccine mandates independent of trust levels. Results are discussed about the specifics of the German case and more general relationships between political ideology and the support of state authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic innovations aim to strengthen citizen participation in democratic decision‐making processes. Building on theories of deliberative democracy, participatory democracy and direct democracy, different types of democratic innovations have been developed, ranging from mini‐publics, to participatory processes and referendums and citizens’ initiatives. Over the last four decades, an expanding number of scholars have investigated the effects of these democratic innovations on citizens. However, even though a considerable amount of research has been done, there currently exists no overview of the effects of different types of democratic innovations on citizens’ attitudes, behaviour and capabilities. In addition, it is unclear which effects prove robust across studies, and which effects require more investigation.The aim of this paper is to systematically evaluate what we know and what we do not know yet about the effects of democratic innovations on citizens who participate in them. In order to do so, we conduct a meta‐analysis of 100 quantitative empirical studies published between 1980 and 2020. We find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that mini‐publics are widely researched for their effects on citizens, whereas studies into the effects of participatory processes and referendums and citizens’ initiatives on participating citizens are much less frequent. We also find that participation in mini‐publics changes citizens’ policy attitudes and positively affects citizens’ political attitudes, knowledge, internal efficacy and reasoning skills. For participatory processes, our analyses indicate that they appear to have a positive effect on participants’ political attitudes and knowledge and no effect on participants’ internal efficacy, but there are too few studies to draw robust conclusions. Participation in referendums and citizens’ initiatives appears to have a positive effect on participants’ knowledge and internal efficacy, even though these findings should also be considered preliminary due to the limited number of studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though political vlogging, largely understood as the production of online videos to demand accountability from the state, provides an avenue for netizens to express dissent, this form of civic engagement comes with drawbacks. Based on selective archiving of the political rhetoric of 12 disenfranchised Ghanaian migrants domiciled in the United States and Europe, I draw attention to four main epistemic complications inherent in the diasporians’ public opinions of a perceived political crisis in Ghana. The analysis shows that the migrants raise emotional arguments concerning such topoi as corruption and bad governance; poor social infrastructure; unemployment; a weak educational system; and the problem of religion and superstition. The study also reveals that the political messaging of the migrants is fundamentally premised on a Eurocentric view of governance which, on the contrary, glorifies Western imperialism, and reinforces Victorian narratives that depict postcolonial subjects as indolent, psychotic, and malevolent. The paper is situated at the intersection of political rhetoric and postcolonial theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One implication of the transition to high-choice media environments is that what information people are exposed to depend less on journalistic curation and more on social, algorithmic, and personal curation. This has sparked a renewed interest in the concept of political opinion leaders, who are often assumed to be more interested in and informed about politics and society. Theoretically, political opinion leaders could hence help disseminate information to less interested and informed. At the same time, there are theoretical reasons for why political opinion leaders may be more prone to politically motivated reasoning, which may lead them to believe in and disseminate misinformation. Thus far, there is only limited research on whether political opinion leaders are more informed than others that also takes into consideration that some facts are contested, whereas other facts are uncontested. Hence, this paper seeks to investigate the relationship between political opinion leadership and knowledge, distinguishing between (a) uncontested and (b) contested facts. Among other things, findings show that those who score high in political opinion leadership traits in general are not more knowledgeable about contested and uncontested facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do democratization processes affect voter turnout in new democracies? Existing work points to an expected boost in electoral turnout after democratization as newly democratic citizens are euphoric to exert newly democratic freedoms or because they developed new political attitudes and behaviours by mobilizing for democracy. While intuitive and normatively appealing, these explanations have not been theoretically nor empirically scrutinized within the literature. This paper develops and tests novel theoretical expectations on the processes and legacies of democratization that impact voter turnout in new democracies. Using electoral turnout data from 1086 national elections between 1946 and 2015, and turnout survey data of over 1 million respondents between 1982 and 2015, we find that the boost in voter turnout (1) exists only for the first election after transition, (2) its effect depends on the life cycle during which individuals experienced the transition and (3) it is less dependent on transition type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, radical right-wing parties have gained significant prominence in Europe, attracting considerable academic attention. The electoral support for these parties has been linked to ideological principles such as nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. However, the connection between populist attitudes and voting for the radical right has been insufficiently addressed, either due to the lack of available empirical material or because populism has been taken for granted within this party family. To fill this gap this paper analyses the role of populist attitudes in the electoral support for the radical right in five West European countries (France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Germany). The results reveal that, with the exception of Italy, populist attitudes play a significant role in the explanation of voting for the radical right. They also confirm the importance of nationalism in general and nativist attitudes in particular. By contrast, other orientations play a minor and often inconsistent across-countries role in the decision to vote for the radical right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Fast online surveys without sampling frames are becoming increasingly important in survey research. Their recruitment methods result in non‐probability samples. As the mechanism of data generation is always unknown in such samples, the problem of non‐ignorability arises making vgeneralisation of calculated statistics to the population of interest highly questionable. Sensitivity analyses provide a valuable tool to deal with non‐ignorability. They capture the impact of different sample selection mechanisms on target statistics. In 2019, Andridge and colleagues proposed an index to quantify potential (non‐ignorable) selection bias in proportions that combines the effects of different selection mechanisms. In this paper, we validate this index with an artificial non‐probability sample generated from a large empirical data set and additionally applied it to proportions estimated from data on current political attitudes arising from a real non‐probability sample selected via River sampling. We find a number of conditions that must be met for the index to perform meaningfully. When these requirements are fulfilled, the index shows an overall good performance in both of our applications in detecting and correcting present selection bias in estimated proportions. Thus, it provides a powerful measure for evaluating the robustness of results obtained from non‐probability samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does perceived discrimination and exclusion promote or hinder support for democracy among immigrants? While many studies investigate the drivers of prejudice and discrimination toward immigrants, relatively less is known about the impact of discrimination on immigrants' political attitudes. In this paper, we assess whether perceived discrimination is associated with higher levels of support for democracy among Muslim immigrants using the EURISLAM survey dataset, which includes data from immigrants from Muslim-majority countries residing in four European countries. We find that in particular, perceived discrimination toward the ethnic or religious in-group is associated with increased support for democracy. These results are robust to alternative control variables, model specification, matching procedures and coefficient stability analysis. Our findings make an important contribution to understanding the implications of discriminatory experiences for immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a summary of a conference organized by ISSEI and the Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora that took place in Berlin in July 2023. The conference focused on the crisis of democratic institutions in Europe and the search for solutions. The article includes seven articles based on papers presented at the conference, covering topics such as the role of intellectuals in public debates, the history of Zionism, the life of Czechoslovak public intellectual Antonín J. Liehm, the disappointment with European integration in Romania, transcultural theater productions, the capacity of human brains to absorb information, and the history of Western liberalism. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of good public debate. [Extracted from the article]

Despite their unmistakable advantages, the use of voting machines in elections is a topic of vivid debates. This article focuses on the experiences of voters using three types of voting equipment: (a) a paper ballot, (b) a voting machine, and (c) a voting machine with paper audit trail. An independent-groups experiment was conducted in which voters had to cast a vote for a donation to a charity organization and afterwards filled out a questionnaire about their voting experiences. The paper ballot was considered to be the most anonymous way of voting, especially by female voters. The voting machine (with or without paper trail), on the other hand, was considered to be more user-friendly than the paper ballot and gave the voters more confidence that their votes would actually be processed correctly. No differences were found between the voting machine with and without paper audit trail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and research aims. Considering the high prevalence of conspiracy theories and misinformation, there is an urgent need to explain the tendency to adopt a conspiracy mentality and identify behavioural (including voting) outcomes of a high conspiracy mentality. The aims of the present paper are 1) the examination of populist attitudes dimensions, relative deprivation and mistrust of expertise as predictors of conspiracy mentality and 2) proposal of comprehensive models, that combine predictors of conspiracy mentality and its voting consequences. Methodology. Studies utilised OSL regression and structural equation modelling. Results. The overall regression was statistically significant. It was found that dimensions of populist attitudes (anti-elitism, sovereignty), relative deprivation and mistrust of expertise were significant predictors of conspiracy mentality. In line with the second research aim, the fitness of models was confirmed and results suggest mistrust of expertise is also a significant predictor of far-right voting. Discussion. The contribution of the paper lies in connecting conspiracy mentality with not only attitudes but also with important behaviour outcome - voting behaviour. We propose future research should experimentally examine whether the reduction of some of the identified predictors could possibly lower levels of conspiracy mentality and whether this reduction translates into voting behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wartime violence and authoritarian repression against civilians take various forms. Past research has explored the causes and consequences of violence, but no previous work simultaneously assessed the long-term effects of different types of violence on political identities. This paper contends that indiscriminate attacks can reinforce ingroup identity, whereas the role of civilian agency in selective violence may have a detrimental impact. Equipped with original data capturing municipality-level exposure to both selective and indiscriminate violence during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) in Biscay (Basque Country), this study examines its legacy on voting behavior (1983–2015). Results indicate that fascist airstrikes increased Basque nationalism while selective violence diminished the popularity of Basque parties. Individual and community-level evidence suggests that airstrikes fostered the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes. Violence can boost national identities, but it can also erode them: it depends on the type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the longer-term consequences of premigratory experiences on the political attitudes of those who migrate out of extremely authoritarian regimes? In this paper, using data from an original survey of North Korean defectors in South Korea conducted in 2022, we examine whether attitudes on executive power, self-sacrifice for the sake of the national community (postmigration), state ownership, and the duty to participate politically, vary among North Korean defectors, and whether those attitudes are based on their individual experiences in North Korea. Although we find little evidence that defectors express a greater willingness to sacrifice for the nation, former members (especially male members) of the Workers' Party of Korea are significantly more likely than nonparty members to express support for a strong unchecked leader. Some other indicators of elite status (such as higher education and organizational leadership) also suggest that defectors who were elites are more likely than defectors with less elite backgrounds to retain elements of the authoritarian socialization they experienced in North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While affective polarization has been shown to have serious social consequences, there is little evidence regarding its effects on political attitudes and behavior such as policy preferences, voting, or political information accrual. This paper provides evidence that affective polarization impacts misinformation belief, arguing that citizens with higher levels of affective polarization are more likely to believe in-party-congruent misinformation and less likely to believe out-party-congruent misinformation. The argument is supported by data from the ANES 2020 Social Media Study and the ANES 2020 Time Series Study, which speaks to the generalizability of the relationship. Additionally, a survey experiment provides evidence that the relationship is causal. The results hold among Democrats and Republicans and are independent of the effects of partisan strength and ideological extremity. Furthermore, the relationship between affective polarization and misinformation belief is exacerbated by political sophistication rather than tempered by it, implying that education will not solve the issue. The results speak to the need for work on reducing affective polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influenced by a harm reduction philosophy, the then Victorian Labor Government announced the establishment of the state's first medically supervised injecting room (MSIR) in North Richmond in late 2017. But, public and political opinion remains sharply divided as to the merits of the MSIR. One influence on policy development appears to be media commentary on the MSIR and the wider illicit drugs policy debate. This paper compares the official editorials of the two daily Melbourne newspapers, the Herald Sun and The Age regarding the MSIR, from November 2017 until November 2022. Based on 33 articles (Herald Sun, N = 28; The Age, N = 5), our findings identify philosophical differences between the two newspapers as reflected in their sources of information, language and highlighted issues. The Age was mostly supportive of both the introduction of the North Richmond MSIR and proposals for a second site. The Herald Sun's position was more ambiguous, ranging from qualified support for the North Richmond MSIR to strong opposition to further sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the rural-urban divide has not only made its way back into political science, but has also been given an entirely new angle by investigating place of living as its own social identity. However, research is still in its early stages and studies so far focus on linear explanations of place-based resentment. This paper studies place in the light of social identity theory and investigates how place of living and place-based identity interact in shaping place-based resentment. Original survey data on around 4000 respondents from Switzerland from 2022 with a novel measure of place-based identity and resentment is used. A distinction is made not only between rural and urban residents, but also between the suburbanites. Results show that rural residents hold the highest levels of identity and resentment, while suburban residents hold higher levels of resentment than urban ones do. Findings show that there is a moderating effect, whereby the rural-urban divide in resentment increases with place-based identity, while the suburban-urban gap diminishes with increasing place-based identity. These differences in place-based identity and resentment could explain the rural-urban divide in political attitudes and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces three new scales to measure left- and right-wing radical as well as general extremist attitudes that can be applied across Western European countries. We therefore propose a thorough conceptualization of extremist attitudes that consists of two dimensions: general extremism, by which we understand attitudes that oppose the constitutional democratic state, and another dimension that differentiates between right- and left-wing radicalism by which we understand people who take far-reaching but often one-sided positions on political issues (e.g., on nationalism or anti-imperialism) by advocating fundamental socio-political change. Based on data from Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands (n = 6,201) we created short indices for general extremism and left- and right-wing radicalism. We check for convergence validity by assessing the psychometric properties of the extracted indices, i.e. their internal coherence and the degree to which a scale is able to distinguish strongly extremist and non-extremist individuals. Finally, we correlate the scales with various constructs that are likely related to extremist attitudes in order to assure external or construct validity. The results indicate that the three scales are highly valid and applicable across three Western European countries. Overall, we find that about two to four percent of citizens in each country hold left-wing or right-wing extremist attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are political attitudes a stable feature of individuals or a rational response to changing circumstances and contexts? This question has long been a feature of political science and underpins our theories of how political attitudes are formed and what their consequences might be. In this paper, we explore this perennial question with a focus on the case of political trust, a fundamental indicator of democratic legitimacy and a long-standing topic of debate. Theoretically, we devise a framework that highlights how different theories of political trust assume different levels of stability or volatility and the implications that this has for those theories and their normative consequences. Empirically, we study within-individual stability of political trust using six panel studies that cover five countries between 1965 and 2020. Our results consistently point to trust being stable in the long term, with potential for short-term volatility in response to changing political contexts, and for substantial changes between people’s formative years and their adulthood. Even over a period of 19 years, most people’s responses to trust questions are remarkably similar between surveys and significant life events such as unemployment and going to University do not significantly influence trust. Changes in the political environment, like incumbent government turnover, have larger effects but these appear to return to equilibrium in a few years. The exception to this general finding is individuals who are first surveyed when they are under the age of 18, who appear much more likely to change their trust levels in subsequent waves. Overall, our results complement previous research on attitude stability, indicating that trust is approximately as stable as other attitudes, such as towards immigration and redistribution. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of the nature of political trust and attitude formation more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how relative policy performance against the spread of COVID-19 corresponds to citizens' political support. We argue that citizens form political attitude using relative COVID-19 assessments with other governments. We also examine the extent to which relative comparative assessments are likely among sophisticated voters. Using original survey data from South Korea in April 2020, we found that a relatively positive evaluation of incumbent performance corresponds to higher political support. This paper is well situated in the existing literature as it shows that voters who benchmark the performance of other countries make an informed decision regarding their political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ignorance about political related issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin's book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters' ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, Moral Foundation Theory suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people's political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experience of higher education (HE) has come to characterise many contemporary political divisions, including those related to Brexit, Trump and coronavirus policy. However, the academic literature is unclear whether HE plays a causal role in changing peoples' political attitudes or is simply a proxy. Furthermore, in many contexts, there is limited descriptive evidence on whether students' political attitudes change during HE. This paper focuses on the UK, using data from the British Election Study, to make a twofold contribution. Firstly, the paper introduces recent political science theorising on the nature of contemporary political divisions, which has remained largely outside the HE literature to date. This theorising is illustrated through a cross-sectional analysis, comparing the political attitudes of those with and without experience of HE, showing that the former tend to be more left-leaning and less ethnocentric. Secondly, a longitudinal analysis is performed to assess how students' political attitudes change during their time in HE. While in HE, students tend to make small movements to the left and become less ethnocentric, representing approximately 20–33% of the overall division between those with and without experience of HE. These findings are interpreted through a critical realist lens—they evidence that HE could have a causal role to play in creating contemporary political divisions. However, to establish whether HE does play a causal role, further intensive research is needed to explore how particular aspects of HE might bring about these changes and how this varies for different students in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent spread of Euroscepticism has largely been limited to criticism of the actions, inefficiencies, or credibility of EU institutions, while the issue of leaving or not joining the EU is still out of focus for the vast majority of the European population. With the exception of the United Kingdom, which withdrew from the EU, Serbia is the only country where the majority of the population does not want to join the bloc. This paper is dedicated to researching the causes of this phenomenon and measuring their impact on the current additional increase in resistance to the EU among the population of Serbia. This paper presents the results of a survey organised by the authors in Serbia in 2020. MANOVA and the Generalised Linear Model (GLM) were used to analyse the impact of different demographic and socio-economic characteristics, as well as the influence of the national attachment of respondents to their attitude towards EU membership. The results showed that Euroscepticism was on the rise due to a weakening expectation of economic benefits of EU membership and a strengthening of national attachment, including concerns over the loss of national sovereignty, under increased EU pressure on Serbia to give up disputed Kosovo territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That parties fulfil their pre‐election pledges once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether the government/opposition status of their party affects how much citizens want governments to fulfil their promises. We hypothesize that interest‐driven, rational voters are more likely to prefer their own party to keep its promises and investigate whether this rationale is impacted by public opinion and expert views. The analysis is based on a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that voters broadly adhere to the democratic principle of expecting pledge fulfilment but, at the same time, some take a rational approach to government promises. The opinions of the public and experts mitigate but do not change this effect. Another key finding is the significant difference in the preference for promise keeping versus promise breaking between government and opposition voters in the Austrian case, the country with the more heterogeneous and polarized political system. This paper contributes to the literature on voters' attitudes on democracy and pledge fulfilment by showing that voters are normatively driven but a significant number of voters deviate and instead follow the rational voter logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research mainly analyzes mass attitudes towards the European Union (EU) from the national and individual‐level perspective. This paper adds to this literature by focusing on the relationship between EU support and subnational economic conditions, using harmonized survey data covering 40 years and 1.1 million respondents in 197 European regions. We first describe Europe's changing subnational conditions in terms of catch‐up, wealthy, declining and glass‐ceiling regions. The paper then develops and tests a set of hypotheses regarding the temporally dynamic relationship between EU attitudes and regions' long‐ and short‐term economic conditions. Our analyses reveal important longitudinal variations in this relationship with low levels of geographic differentiation in public opinion giving way to clear spatial differences in recent years. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the Great Recession and Brexit have generated a new geography of both Euroscepticism in Europe's declining regions and EU support in its wealthy and catch‐up regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how individual-level partisanship and state-level factors affect perceptions of electoral integrity in the United States. We find that evaluations of the integrity of the 2020 US presidential election national outcome were only modestly conditioned by the quality of election administration in a person's state. Perceptions of electoral legitimacy were much more substantially conditioned by motivated reasoning associated with a person's partisanship, the partisan context Republicans resided in, and Republican partisans' residence in a swing-state where final results from 2020 were delayed due to late-counted ballots. Overall, estimated effects of the quality of election administration on confidence in elections are null or modest. Partisan factors associated with Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about the 2020 US presidential election were the strongest forces predicting lack of confidence in US elections and perceptions that election officials were altering results. These factors were not evident in 2016. We discuss how these findings may reflect a fundamental alteration of attitudes among Republican voters and elites about the legitimacy of democratic elections in the US, rather than reflecting cyclical variation in partisan confidence associated with which party won the past election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) established in 2015 has developed an institutional framework that on the paper largely mimics the European Union's. The article suggests that a closer examination of the economic interdependence in the region adds valuable knowledge regarding the development of the organization. The analysis follows a (post)-functionalist model and highlights how the integration process responds to economic interdependence, and that the integration process has the potential of generating spillovers. The Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) has initiated work targeting the removal of non-tariff barriers, and business associations in the region are paying attention to the organization. Yet, there are also several constraints to integration in the region linked to the member states' reluctance to delegate substantial powers to the EEC, and their insistence on the cooperation as being merely economic. These limitations are in line with previous suggestions in the literature regarding non-democratic regional organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into the heteronormative regimes of sexual morality, focusing on the experiences of gay and queer men within the locus of family. Drawing upon a phenomenological ethnography involving interviews with the Indian gay community, this study demonstrates the disciplinary power of sexual morality over queer lives. It examines the varied strategies of moral regimentation within the locus of family, including regimenting through silencing, moral dictation, and penalizing. These strategies reflect the prevailing conservative and sex-negative attitudes in Indian society, particularly patriarchal expectations toward men and the pressure for marriage, which augments familial and social burdens on gay men, resulting in emotional distress. The cumulative effects lead to gay men living double lives, presenting a socially accepted façade while repressing their authentic queer selves, indicating a guilty conscience and internalized homophobia. These experiences correlate with risky sexual behavior, substance abuse, and overall compromised mental health. This phenomenological inquiry highlights the role of the family as a locus of moral control of queer individuals and contributes to the sociological understanding of morality as a power-relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many news outlets aim for impartiality, 67% of Americans perceive their news sources as partisan, often presenting only one side of the story. This paper tests whether exposing individuals to news stories their political adversaries focus on can mitigate political polarization. In an experiment involving a real-world political newsletter—sent to participants who had opted to receive news that uncovers media biases—exposure to a specific story about refugee policy led respondents to reassess their positions. This reevaluation changed their stances on the issue and reduced the ideological distinctions they made between Democrats and Republicans. These findings underscore the need for future studies to untangle the specific circumstances where cross-partisan exposure can alter political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents' satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last years saw the release of several cross-country data sets generated by Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) - websites that "match" a respondent's position on various political attitudes with those of political parties or candidates. As they hold the information of a high number of respondents on a large number of political attitudes, these datasets are promising sources of data for political and social scientists. Yet, as with all cross-country data, we should first establish if they meet the requirements of good data quality and construct equivalence. Using data from the 2019 euandi VAA, I employ Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to study the behavior of 6 items that form an economic left-right scale. Doing so for 28 countries, I find that not only the quality of the data differs between countries, but the underlying structure as well. This means that for some countries the data is of too low a quality and thus not useful for cross-country analysis. While this does not invalidate VAA data in general, it does limit it. In addition, this paper illustrates the use of MCA as a pre-processing technique for establishing the quality of both VAA data and cross-country data in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media users are not just potential consumers of political content they are also potential producers and distributors. In this paper, we test whether political predispositions or the popularity of posts best explains users' engagement with political content on Facebook. Using a large-scale survey deployed in Denmark, we utilize a 2 × 2 × 3 survey experiment that manipulates the partisan sponsor of a political message, the number of likes attributed to that message, and the nature of the comments attached to that post. Our findings indicate that individuals are most likely to like, comment, and share political content that aligns with their political predispositions, as the choice to like, share and comment political content on Facebook is largely unaffected by likes and comments from other users. Though we recognize the dangers of obstinacy in democratic discourse, we are somewhat assured by these findings, as it shows that those who engage with political content do not follow a blind herd mentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the prevailing outcomes-based education and the instrumentalization of education, a movement has arisen towards holistic education. This aims to go beyond objective measurement of the outcomes of education in order to treat the student as a whole person. In this paper, we shall examine some strands of education in Japan which in some way or another feature the idea of the whole person. This includes the tradition of clinical pedagogy, which originated in Kyoto University, Yukichi Shitahodo's educational anthropology (Kyoiku-Ningengaku), Kuniyoshi Obara's Zenjin Education (the education of the whole person) and holistic education. Notwithstanding the fact that such education is benevolent in intention, it can be miseducative in some respects. In the light of this, and with some reference to criticism of the idea of the whole person, we shall point to an alternative vision of education of the whole person following Cavell's Emersonian moral perfectionism – a perfectionism that is thoroughly anti-foundationalist and that transcends self-entrapment in circulatory discourse on the whole. In critical dialogue between the rich traditions of Japanese thought and the critical voice of liberalism raised from within the West, we hope to find a more nuanced answer to the question of how being a whole might make sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media plays a vital role in shaping public opinion and influencing political outcomes. This review of literature critically examines the relationship between media, politics, and public opinion. The paper discusses how the media's portrayal of political events can shape the public's perception and opinion of political issues, and how the media's agenda-setting function can determine which issues are salient in the public discourse. The paper also highlights the role of media bias in shaping public opinion and influencing political outcomes. Drawing on recent research and relevant literature, this paper discusses the implications of media, politics, and public opinion for democracy and citizenship. The review highlights the need for media literacy and critical thinking to navigate the complex relationship between media, politics, and public opinion in a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Established in March 2020, the C19PRC Study monitors the psychological and socio‐economic impact of the pandemic in the UK and other countries. This paper describes the protocol for Wave 6 (August–September 2021). Methods: The survey assessed: COVID‐19 related experiences; experiences of common mental health disorders; psychological characteristics; and social and political attitudes. Adult participants from any previous wave (N = 3170) were re‐invited, and sample replenishment procedures helped manage attrition. Weights were calculated using a survey raking algorithm to ensure the on‐going original panel (from baseline) was nationally representative in terms of gender, age, and household income, amongst other factors. Results: 1643 adults were re‐interviewed at Wave 6 (51.8% retention rate). Non‐participation was higher younger adults, those born outside UK, and adults living in cities. Of the adults recruited at baseline, 54.3% (N = 1100) participated in Wave 6. New respondent (N = 415) entered the panel at this wave, resulting in cross‐sectional sample for Wave 6 of 2058 adults. The raking procedure re‐balanced the longitudinal panel to within 1.3% of population estimates for selected socio‐demographic characteristics. Conclusions: This paper outlines the growing strength of the publicly available C19PRC Study data for COVID‐19‐related interdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of an Islamist party (PAS) in the 2022 general election caused concern that a massive shift towards an ethno-religious backlash was under way in Malaysia. This paper argues that this is not necessarily the case. First, the number of PAS's seats was inflated by malapportionment. More important, analyses of original surveys reveal that PAS benefitted from the last-minute, pro-PN swing of undecided voters, who were mainly motivated by economic concerns. This paper illustrates how economic, distributive, and governance grievances affected voting behaviour and discusses how to balance competing demands after the collapse of a dominant party regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's certain writings. and if he had studied and pondered writings of other such thinkers. Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology--he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s--nor was he ignorant of the contributions of other social thinkers. In the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, research is all too often associated with the transmogrification of knowledge into numbers and the reification of the latter into the simulacra of theory. Park's career as an academician was confounded by this disciplinary hubris. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as sociology emerged from its immersion in German romantic philosophy, its academicians still clung to its baptism in American Protestant thought, seeking to infuse the latter with the trappings of positive science. In any event, a transvalued and secularizing sociology would have to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world.

The essay discusses the cultural criticism of Frederic Jameson in the book "The Modernist Papers." Central to the book, it notes, is the conflict between being and meaning. Whereas classically, meaning was inherent in objects, it states, the world now seems to be split between matter and abstract schemas. Jameson is seen as valuing the absolute unity of form and content, which cannot be achieved through the lens of modernism. He sees emancipation in writing as a form of non-alienated labor.

Concern over democratic erosion has led to a proliferation of proposed interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes in the United States. Resource constraints, however, prevent implementing all proposed interventions. One approach to identify promising interventions entails leveraging domain experts, who have knowledge regarding a given field, to forecast the effectiveness of candidate interventions. We recruit experts who develop general knowledge about a social problem (academics), experts who directly intervene on the problem (practitioners), and nonexperts from the public to forecast the effectiveness of interventions to reduce partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, and support for partisan violence. Comparing 14,076 forecasts submitted by 1,181 forecasters against the results of a megaexperiment (n = 32,059) that tested 75 hypothesized effects of interventions, we find that both types of experts outperformed members of the public, though experts differed in how they were accurate. While academics' predictions were more specific (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of ineffective interventions and had fewer false-positive forecasts), practitioners' predictions were more sensitive (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of effective interventions and had fewer false-negative forecasts). Consistent with this, practitioners were better at predicting best-performing interventions, while academics were superior in predicting which interventions performed worst. Our paper highlights the importance of differentiating types of experts and types of accuracy. We conclude by discussing factors that affect whether sensitive or specific forecasters are preferable, such as the relative cost of false positives and negatives and the expected rate of intervention success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]