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A recent article has found nationalism to be negatively associated with government respect for several human rights. In this article, I replicate the original study’s findings, I demonstrate that these findings are robust to an alternate model specification, and I then extend the analysis to additional human rights not examined by the original author. Ultimately, I find that in comparison to when the chief executive is not nationalist, when the chief executive is highly nationalist, that state is less likely to be associated with high government respect for six ‘empowerment’ rights (i.e. the freedoms of assembly and association, electoral self-determination, speech, foreign movement, religion, and worker’s rights), and more likely to be associated with low government respect for these six empowerment rights. This study suggests that nationalism’s influence on human rights is greater than previous thought. [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]

This study assesses whether references to the ancient past in debates about political issues on social media over-represent negative and extreme views. Using precision-recall, we test the performance of three sentiment analysis methods (VADER, TextBlob and Flair Sentiment) on a corpus of 1,478,483 posts, comments and replies published on Brexit-themed Facebook pages between 2015 and 2017. Drawing on the results of VADER and manual coding, we demonstrate that: 1) texts not containing keywords relating to the Iron Age, Roman and medieval (IARM) past are mostly neutral and 2) texts with IARM keywords express more negative and extreme sentiment than those without keywords. Our findings show that mentions of the ancient past in political discourse on multi-sided issues on social media are likely to indicate the presence of hostile and polarised opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do national stories shape voter behavior? Do they affect all voters equally, or are some groups more influenced by these narratives? This article examines the impact of "boundary national stories," which highlight clear distinctions between "us" and "them" in national identity, on voting patterns for populist radical right parties (PRRPs). Using original representative election surveys conducted in four Western democracies, we find that voters who embrace a Boundary national story are more likely to vote for Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) than those who do not hold such stories, and that the electoral effect of such stories is more salient for marginalized groups in society. Our findings demonstrate that, while national stories can foster cohesion, they can also drive us apart and polarize our politics. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of these findings for the study of populism in political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prejudiced attitudes and political nationalism vary widely around the world, but there has been little research on what predicts this variation. Here we examine the ecological and cultural factors underlying the worldwide distribution of prejudice. We suggest that cultures grow more prejudiced when they tighten cultural norms in response to destabilizing ecological threats. A set of seven archival analyses, surveys, and experiments (∑N = 3,986,402) find that nations, American states, and pre-industrial societies with tighter cultural norms show the most prejudice based on skin color, religion, nationality, and sexuality, and that tightness predicts why prejudice is often highest in areas of the world with histories of ecological threat. People’s support for cultural tightness also mediates the link between perceived ecological threat and intentions to vote for nationalist politicians. Results replicate when controlling for economic development, inequality, conservatism, residential mobility, and shared cultural heritage. These findings offer a cultural evolutionary perspective on prejudice, with implications for immigration, intercultural conflict, and radicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of our research was to investigate the influence of the situational context of presenting contemporary critical artworks (in an art gallery vs in a laboratory setting) and the way in which one is acquainted with contextual information, i.e. a curatorial description (reading it on one's own vs listening to it vs a lack of curatorial information), on the reception of critical art. All experimental stimuli were exemplars of contemporary art which raise current controversial social and political issues. Non-experts in the field of art were asked to rate their emotional reactions on non-verbal scales and estimate their liking and understanding of the artworks. As predicted, the art gallery context increased both the experience of aesthetic emotions–in terms of valence, arousal, subjective significance, and dominance and aesthetic judgements–in terms of liking. Thus, for critical art (i.e. current artworks which critically address serious, up-to-date issues) the situational context of the gallery increased the aesthetic experience–which is in line with previous studies on the gallery (or museum) effect. Curatorial information increased understanding, so non-experts seem to need interpretative guidance in the reception of critical art. Subjective significance was higher in the reading of curatorial information condition than the listening to curatorial information condition or the control condition (a lack of curatorial information). It seems, therefore, that art non-experts have a better understanding of critical art after being exposed to the curatorial description, but this does not result in an increase in liking and aesthetic emotions. Probably this is because the curatorial description allows one to grasp the difficult, often unpleasant issue addressed by critical art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heavy geographic patterning to the 2016 Brexit vote in UK and Trump vote in US has resulted in numerous ecological analyses of variations in area-level voting behaviours. We extend this work by employing modelling approaches that permit regionally-specific associations between outcome and explanatory variables. We do so by generating a large number of regional models using penalised regression for variable selection and coefficient evaluation. The results reinforce those already published in that we find associations in support of a 'left-behind' reading. Multivariate models are dominated by a single variable—levels of degree-education. Net of this effect, 'secondary' variables help explain the vote, but do so differently for different regions. For Brexit, variables relating to material disadvantage, and to a lesser extent structural-economic circumstances, are more important for regions with a strong industrial history than for regions that do not share such a history. For Trump, increased material disadvantage reduces the vote both in global models and models built mostly for Southern states, thereby undermining the 'left-behind' reading. The reverse is nevertheless true for many other states, particularly those in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, where comparatively high levels of disadvantage assist the Trump vote and where model outputs are more consistent with the UK, especially so for regions with closer economic histories. This pattern of associations is exposed via our regional modelling approach, application of penalised regression and use of carefully designed visualization to reason over 100+ model outputs located within their spatial context. Our analysis, documented in an accompanying github repository, is in response to recent calls in empirical Social and Political Science for fuller exploration of subnational contexts that are often controlled out of analyses, for use of modelling techniques more robust to replication and for greater transparency in research design and methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does economic globalization influence the positioning of parties and, as a consequence, the ideological characteristics of party systems? Answering this question is important because we need to understand the constraints that parties face in formulating policies from which voters have to choose. In our paper, we take a systemic perspective and conceptualize a party system’s ideological center of gravity as the outcome of interest. We define the center of gravity as the weighted mean position of all parliamentary parties in a country that represents the position to which parties gravitate. We start by formulating static hypotheses on the effect of imports and exports on the center of gravity and derive their underlying mechanisms. We further derive dynamic hypotheses stipulating varying effects over time based on the premise that partisan attitudes toward globalization have undergone multiple changes over the last decades. A time-series cross-section analysis of 129 elections in 15 Western European countries from 1974 to 2015 finds evidence for opposite effects of exports and imports in the pooled data. Additionally, a moving-window analysis indicates that the relationship between globalization and the center of gravity varies over time. This is a significant finding because it suggests that economic globalization has an influence on party systems and that it is important to test for time-varying effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a truism across Northern democracies. Left unquestioned, this geography plays a central role in shaping electoral and referendum campaigns. In Europe and North America, observers identify recurring patterns dividing local populations during national votes. While much research describes those patterns in relation to ethnicity, religious affiliation, historic legacy and party affiliation, current approaches in political research lack the capacity to measure their evolution over time or other vote subsets. This article introduces “Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM), a transdisciplinary method to assess the evolution of geographic cleavages in vote outcomes by implementing a metric of agreement/disagreement through Network Analysis. Unlike existing approaches, DyAM offers a stable measure for political agreement and disagreement—accounting for chance, statistically robust and remaining structurally independent from the number of entries and missing data. The method opens up to a range of statistical, structural and visual tools specific to Network Analysis and its usage across disciplines. In order to illustrate DyAM, I use more than 680,000 municipal outcomes from Swiss federal popular votes and assess the evolution of political cleavages across local populations since 1981. Results suggest that political congruence between Swiss local populations increased in the last forty years, while regional political factions and linguistic alignments have lost their salience to new divides. I discuss how choices about input parameters and data subsets nuance findings, and consider confounding factors that may influence conclusions over the dynamic equilibrium of national politics and the strengthening effect of globalization on democratic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral expansiveness refers to the range of entities (human and non-human) deemed worthy of moral concern and treatment. Previous research has established that the Moral Expansiveness Scale (MES) is a powerful predictor of altruistic moral decision-making and captures a unique dimension of moral cognition. However, the length of the full MES may be restrictive for some researchers. Here we establish the reliability and validity of a reduced moral expansiveness scale, the MESx. Consistent with the full version, the MESx is strongly associated with (but not reducible to) theoretically related constructs, such as endorsement of universalism values, identification with all humanity, and connectedness to nature. The MESx also predicted measures of altruistic moral decision-making to the same degree as the full MES. Further, the MESx passed tests of discriminant validity, was unrelated to political conservatism (unlike the full MES), only mildly associated with the tendency to provide socially desirable responses, and produced moderate reliability over time. We conclude that the MESx is a psychometrically valid alternative for researchers requiring a short measure of moral expansiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a Schelling model in which people are modelled as agents following simple behavioural rules which dictate their tolerance to others, their corresponding preference for particular locations, and in turn their movement through a geographic or social space. Our innovation over previous work is to allow agents to adapt their tolerance to others in response to their local environment, in line with contemporary theories from social psychology. We show that adaptive tolerance leads to a polarization in tolerance levels, with distinct modes at either extreme of the distribution. Moreover, agents self-organize into communities of like-tolerance, just as they congregate with those of same colour. Our results are robust not only to variations in free parameters, but also experimental treatments in which migrants are dynamically introduced into the native population. We argue that this model provides one possible parsimonious explanation of the political landscape circa 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we study the coupled dynamics of social balance and opinion formation. We propose a model where agents form opinions under bounded confidence, but only considering the opinions of their friends. The signs of social ties -friendships and enmities- evolve seeking for social balance, taking into account how similar agents’ opinions are. We consider both the case where opinions have one and two dimensions. We find that our dynamics produces the segregation of agents into two cliques, with the opinions of agents in one clique differing from those in the other. Depending on the level of bounded confidence, the dynamics can produce either consensus of opinions within each clique or the coexistence of several opinion clusters in a clique. For the uni-dimensional case, the opinions in one clique are all below the opinions in the other clique, hence defining a “left clique” and a “right clique”. In the two-dimensional case, our numerical results suggest that the two cliques are separated by a hyperplane in the opinion space. We also show that the phenomenon of unidimensional opinions identified by DeMarzo, Vayanos and Zwiebel (Q J Econ 2003) extends partially to our dynamics. Finally, in the context of politics, we comment about the possible relation of our results to the fragmentation of an ideology and the emergence of new political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a connected world where people influence each other, what can cause a globalized monoculture, and which measures help to preserve the coexistence of cultures? Previous research has shown that factors such as homophily, population size, geography, mass media, and type of social influence play important roles. In the present paper, we investigate for the first time the impact that institutions have on cultural diversity. In our first three studies, we extend existing agent-based models and explore the effects of institutional influence and agent loyalty. We find that higher institutional influence increases cultural diversity, while individuals' loyalty to their institutions has a small, preserving effect. In three further studies, we test how bottom-up and top-down processes of institutional influence impact our model. We find that bottom-up democratic practices, such as referenda, tend to produce convergence towards homogeneity, while top-down information dissemination practices, such as propaganda, further increase diversity. In our last model—an integration of bottom-up and top-down processes into a feedback loop of information—we find that when democratic processes are rare, the effects of propaganda are amplified, i.e., more diversity emerges; however, when democratic processes are common, they are able to neutralize or reverse this propaganda effect. Importantly, our models allow for control over the full spectrum of diversity, so that a manipulation of our parameters can result in preferred levels of diversity, which will be useful for the study of other factors in the future. We discuss possible mechanisms behind our results, applications, and implications for political and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the West, anti-Muslim sentiments are widespread. It has been theorized that inter-religious tensions fuel anti-Muslim prejudice, yet previous attempts to isolate sectarian motives have been inconclusive. Factors contributing to ambiguous results are: (1) failures to assess and adjust for multi-level denomination effects; (2) inattention to demographic covariates; (3) inadequate methods for comparing anti-Muslim prejudice relative to other minority group prejudices; and (4) ad hoc theories for the mechanisms that underpin prejudice and tolerance. Here we investigate anti-Muslim prejudice using a large national sample of non-Muslim New Zealanders (N = 13,955) who responded to the 2013 New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. We address previous shortcomings by: (1) building Bayesian multivariate, multi-level regression models with denominations modeled as random effects; (2) including high-resolution demographic information that adjusts for factors known to influence prejudice; (3) simultaneously evaluating the relative strength of anti-Muslim prejudice by comparing it to anti-Arab prejudice and anti-immigrant prejudice within the same statistical model; and (4) testing predictions derived from the Evolutionary Lag Theory of religious prejudice and tolerance. This theory predicts that in countries such as New Zealand, with historically low levels of conflict, religion will tend to increase tolerance generally, and extend to minority religious groups. Results show that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments are confounded, widespread, and substantially higher than anti-immigrant sentiments. In support of the theory, the intensity of religious commitments was associated with a general increase in tolerance toward minority groups, including a poorly tolerated religious minority group: Muslims. Results clarify religion’s power to enhance tolerance in peaceful societies that are nevertheless afflicted by prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]