scholarly journals In your face

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnathan Caleb Peterson ◽  
Carly Jacobs ◽  
John Hibbing ◽  
Kevin Smith

Research suggests that people can accurately predict the political affiliations of others using only information extracted from the face. It is less clear from this research, however, what particular facial physiological processes or features communicate such information. Using a model of emotion developed in psychology that treats emotional expressivity as an individual-level trait, this article provides a theoretical account of why emotional expressivity may provide reliable signals of political orientation, and it tests the theory in four empirical studies. We find statistically significant liberal/conservative differences in self-reported emotional expressivity, in facial emotional expressivity measured physiologically, in the perceived emotional expressivity and ideology of political elites, and in an experiment that finds that more emotionally expressive faces are perceived as more liberal.

2021 ◽  

Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilience brings together a distinguished group of specialists to examine how polarization affects the performance of institutional checks and balances as well as the political behavior of voters, civil society actors, and political elites. The volume bridges the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics and incorporates historical and comparative insights to explain the nature of contemporary challenges to democracy. It also breaks new ground to identify the institutional and societal sources of democratic resilience.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Pyszczynski ◽  
Pelin Kesebir ◽  
Matt Motyl ◽  
Andrea Yetzer ◽  
Jacqueline M. Anson

We conceptualized ideological consistency as the extent to which an individual’s attitudes toward diverse political issues are coherent among themselves from an ideological standpoint. Four studies compared the ideological consistency of self-identified liberals and conservatives. Across diverse samples, attitudes, and consistency measures, liberals were more ideologically consistent than conservatives. In other words, conservatives’ individual-level attitudes toward diverse political issues (e.g., abortion, gun control, welfare) were more dispersed across the political spectrum than were liberals’ attitudes. Study 4 demonstrated that variability across commitments to different moral foundations predicted ideological consistency and mediated the relationship between political orientation and ideological consistency.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 600-616
Author(s):  
Eva van der Heijden ◽  
Maykel Verkuyten

Among a national sample of Dutch respondents (N = 1,155), this study examined whether the belief configuration of personal political orientation differs for individual level of education, and how it is related to negative attitudes toward immigrant-origin groups and refugee policies. In agreement with the ideological sophistication perspective, the endorsement of social conformity and the acceptance of group-based inequality were found to be more strongly part of the political orientation of higher compared to the lower educated participants. Furthermore, the endorsement of social conformity and acceptance of group-based inequality were associated with more negative feelings toward immigrants and more negative attitudes toward policies in relation to refugees. These findings add to the existing literature that has predominantly examined education and political orientation as two independent correlates of anti-immigrant and refugee attitudes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-59
Author(s):  
Omololu Fagbadebo

This article interrogates the effectiveness of the requisites for constitutional provisions in respect of the promotion of accountability and good governance in South Africa and Nigeria. The article notes that the drafters of the Constitutions of the two countries made sufficient provisions for the regulation and control of the executive and legislative activities in a manner that could guarantee effective service delivery. These constitutional provisions, in line with the practices of their respective governing systems of the two countries, empower the legislature to hold the executive accountable. The article discovers that the lawmakers in the two countries lacked the capacity to harness the provisions for intended purposes. Using the elite theory for its analysis, the article argues that legislative oversight in South Africa and Nigeria is not as effective as envisaged in the constitutional provisions envisaged. This weakness has given rise to the worsening governance crises in the two countries in spite of their abundant economic and human resources. The article opines that the institutional structures of the political systems of the two countries, especially the dominant party phenomenon, coupled with the personal disposition of the political elites incapacitate the effective exercise of the oversight powers of legislatures in the two countries. The article, therefore, submits that the people of the two countries have to devise another means of holding their leaders accountable in the face of collaboration between the executive and the legislature to perpetuate impunity in the public space. Independent agencies should be more active in the exposure of unethical behaviours of the political elites, while the judiciary should be more independent in the dispensation of justice.


2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 101-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Raúl Cámara Fuertes

AbstractThe postmaterialist thesis has spurred a large body of literature and debates, yet postmaterialism has not been studied among political elites. Empirical studies of the legislatures and legislators of Latin American nations in general and Puerto Rico in particular, moreover, are sorely lacking. This article examines postmaterialist values among Puerto Rican legislators. It finds that Puerto Rican legislators have high levels of postmaterialism and that they order the components of the postmaterialism scale in ways similar to those of the mass publics of other countries, including those of Latin America. More important, the postmaterialist scale proves of little use in explaining the positions legislators take on a host of issues, many of which are closely associated with postmaterialism. An alternative explanation is that the scale really measures attachment to democratic norms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Grünhage ◽  
Martin Reuter

Blatantly observable in the U.S. currently, the political chasm grows, representing a prototype of political polarization in most if not all western democratic political systems. Differential political psychology strives to trace back increasingly polarized political convictions to differences on the individual level. Recent evolutionary informed approaches suggest that interindividual differences in political orientation reflect differences in group-mindedness and cooperativeness. Contrarily, the existence of meaningful associations between political orientation, personality traits, and interpersonal behavior has been questioned critically. Here, we shortly review evidence showing that these relationships do exist, which supports the assumption that political orientation is deeply rooted in the human condition. Potential reasons for the premature rejection of these relationships and directions for future research are outlined and implications for refinements and extensions of evolutionary informed approaches are derived.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedek Kurdi ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji

In this chapter, we review implicit person memory: studies using implicit measures to examine how evaluations of and beliefs about individual human targets are acquired and how they shift in the face of new information. In doing so we distinguish between papers that have (a) used implicit person memory as a case study of relatively domain-general processes in the acquisition and change of implicit evaluations and beliefs vs. (b) investigated implicit person memory by attempting to identify processes specific to learning about social targets. The former subset of implicit person memory work emphasizes questions about the inputs to implicit attitude acquisition and change (e.g., approach/avoidance training, evaluative conditioning, and verbal statements) and the features of such inputs relevant to updating (e.g., co-occurrence vs. relational information). By contrast, the themes emerging from the second, more uniquely social, subset of implicit person memory work include the interplay between individual-level and category-level information, the role of facial cues, diagnostic narrative information, and the reinterpretation of previously encountered behavioral evidence about a person. Against this general theoretical backdrop as well as the apparent contradiction between the two sets of empirical studies, we ask whether a domain-specific account of implicit person memory is worth proposing and defending. We also address other topics that are yet to be settled in this area. These topics include differing definitions of what it means for a learning process to be effective, conditions of encoding, and probably the thorniest issue of all: the content and format of the mental representations mediating implicit person memory and, more generally, implicit social cognition.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0250778
Author(s):  
Heather Hufstedler ◽  
Ellicott C. Matthay ◽  
Sabahat Rahman ◽  
Valentijn M. T. de Jong ◽  
Harlan Campbell ◽  
...  

Introduction Pooling (or combining) and analysing observational, longitudinal data at the individual level facilitates inference through increased sample sizes, allowing for joint estimation of study- and individual-level exposure variables, and better enabling the assessment of rare exposures and diseases. Empirical studies leveraging such methods when randomization is unethical or impractical have grown in the health sciences in recent years. The adoption of so-called “causal” methods to account for both/either measured and/or unmeasured confounders is an important addition to the methodological toolkit for understanding the distribution, progression, and consequences of infectious diseases (IDs) and interventions on IDs. In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the absence of systematic randomization of exposures or interventions, the value of these methods is even more apparent. Yet to our knowledge, no studies have assessed how causal methods involving pooling individual-level, observational, longitudinal data are being applied in ID-related research. In this systematic review, we assess how these methods are used and reported in ID-related research over the last 10 years. Findings will facilitate evaluation of trends of causal methods for ID research and lead to concrete recommendations for how to apply these methods where gaps in methodological rigor are identified. Methods and analysis We will apply MeSH and text terms to identify relevant studies from EBSCO (Academic Search Complete, Business Source Premier, CINAHL, EconLit with Full Text, PsychINFO), EMBASE, PubMed, and Web of Science. Eligible studies are those that apply causal methods to account for confounding when assessing the effects of an intervention or exposure on an ID-related outcome using pooled, individual-level data from 2 or more longitudinal, observational studies. Titles, abstracts, and full-text articles, will be independently screened by two reviewers using Covidence software. Discrepancies will be resolved by a third reviewer. This systematic review protocol has been registered with PROSPERO (CRD42020204104).


2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nasiwan Nasiwan

Before the General Election to choose the legislative members, that is held on April 5, 2005 and President General Election, that is held on June 5 and September 20, 2004, there was a political phenomenon, which then popularly said "a political contract. " The political contract was initiated by some elements of 'the civil society', which were the important components of the political power of pro-reform community. Looking at the cultural side, the existence of the political contract in the development of Indonesian politics implied that there was a change in cognitive, affective and evaluation  orientation of some of Indonesian people in their attitudes and political habits to be more rational.  The emergence of the more-rational political orientation was also pushed by the previous political experience of ''being betrayed by the political elite ', just like in 1999 General Election at the reform era. The chance also rose after the changes in the system of General Election that introduced the district and proportional system, and the direct president election that rose up the important of people's vote and aspiration. The changes had pushed the political elites to approach the people, fit themselves with the people's rhythm and dynamism, including the aspiration for political transparency and political accountability by willing to sign the political contract. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Grekul

The overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian criminal justice system is an enduring and systemic issue that must be addressed. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of women behind bars has increased by almost 30 percent; for Indigenous women, this number is 60 percent (Office of the Correctional Investigator 2017). Using a critical feminist criminological lens, this paper explores the ways in which colonial legacies, patriarchy, trauma, and systemic victimization inside and outside the criminal justice system contribute to the criminalization and (over)prisoning of Indigenous women and questions the practice of prisoning an already marginalized and oppressed group of people. Drawing on critical feminist criminological research and empirical studies, I theorize a victimization–criminalization–incarceration cycle concept to explain the ways in which societal- , institutional- , and individual-level factors intersect and impact Indigenous women’s journeys through the criminal justice system in tangled and complicated ways. Future research could provide additional insights into the potential value of this concept for policy and practice.


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