scholarly journals From Violence to Voting: War and Political Participation in Uganda

2009 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER BLATTMAN
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Community Leadership ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Differential Costs

What is the political legacy of violent conflict? I present evidence for a link from past violence to increased political engagement among excombatants. The evidence comes from northern Uganda, where rebel recruitment generated quasiexperimental variation in who was conscripted by abduction. Survey data suggest that abduction leads to substantial increases in voting and community leadership, largely due to elevated levels of violence witnessed. Meanwhile, abduction and violence do not appear to affect nonpolitical participation. These patterns are not easily explained by conventional theories of participation, including mobilization by elites, differential costs, and altruistic preferences. Qualitative interviews suggest that violence may lead to personal growth and political activation, a possibility supported by psychological research on the positive effects of traumatic events. Although the generalizability of these results requires more evidence to judge, the findings challenge our understanding of political behavior and point to important new avenues of research.

The emergence of personal growth amongst healthcare professionals who care for dying children

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Beaune ◽  
Barbara Muskat ◽  
Samantha J. Anthony
Keyword(s):  
Compassion Fatigue ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Secondary Analysis ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Dying Children ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACTObjective:Compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious traumatization are prominent topics in the current literature on the impact of the rewarding but challenging work of healthcare professionals who care for patients with life-limiting illnesses. The positive effects of caregiving constitute a newly emerging outcome that has been relatively unexplored in the pediatric literature, and yet they may play an important role in contributing to the satisfaction and well-being of the healthcare professionals who care for children who have a life-limiting illness.Method:This paper reports the results of a secondary analysis of qualitative interview transcripts that explored the experiences of hospital-based pediatric healthcare providers caring for children with varied life-limiting illnesses. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 25 healthcare professionals (9 social workers, 8 nurses, and 8 physicians). The majority of participants were women (80%), with an age range between 20 and 60 years, and most (84%) had the experience of caring for more than 15 dying children. Thematic analysis was conducted using interpretive description and constant comparison.Results:Every healthcare professional interviewed experienced personal growth as a result of their providing care for dying children. Three dimensions of personal growth were most consistently reported: (1) new or altered life perspectives, (2) enhanced personal resources, and (3) benevolence.Significance of results:A deeper understanding of the phenomenon of personal growth could help healthcare organizations to implement innovative approaches that would counterbalance compassion fatigue, and thereby enhance both healthcare provider well-being and child and family outcomes.

scholarly journals What can reparations do? The political consequences of compensation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsa Voytas
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Lasting Peace ◽  
Multi Method Approach ◽  
Method Approach ◽  
Consequences Of Violence

After political violence, many states compensate victims as part of their approach to transitional justice. Do material reparations change political participation? I argue that receiving material reparations can increase political engagement. I use a multi-method approach to show that surviving victims of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile who receive a material reparation are more likely to register to vote after being compensated. I substantiate this claim through content analysis of victim testimonies, qualitative interviews, and causal estimates that exploit exogenous variation in the timing of reparations. I find that reparations are capable of persuading resistant populations to engage in politics. Additionally, my results suggest that the noneconomic component of reparations payments is particularly valued by recipients, as victims use this transitional justice experience to update their views about the state. In particular, victims value the acknowledgment attached to compensation and the consistency with which their payments are received. These findings suggest that analyses of the consequences of violence should account for experiences with transitional justice policies. From a policy perspective, the results are important for societies implementing transitional justice policies in the hopes of achieving long-lasting peace and preventing reversions to violence.

scholarly journals Conceptualizing motivational pathways to political engagement: A test of self-determination theory in the political domain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wuttke
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Self Determination Theory ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Web Surveys ◽  
Political Motivation

Why do citizens engage with politics and how can we systemize the various motivational pathways to political engagement? A prominent line of psychological research considers human motivation as structured by the degree of perceived self-determination. Importing this seminal motivation theory into political science, this study tests whether motivation to engage with politics can be represented as a multi-dimensional construct where each type of motivation is ordered on a continuum of self-determination and has distinct ramifications for whether and how a person engages with politics. Importantly, both controlled and autonomous types of political motivation are theorized to energize people into action. Yet, whereas controlled motivation is considered to elicit short-lived and superficial behavior only political engagement that is self-endorsed or perceived as inherently valuable should lead to deep and self-sustained forms of political action. Although self-determination theory been proven useful to assess reasons for action in various life domains, using multiple, large web surveys from Germany empirical support for it is weak when applied to the political domain. Employing various model specifications on two iteratively revised measures of political motivation revealed that the four theorized dimensions of political motivation could not be clearly distinguished from each other. Moreover, despite some evidence for the functional significance of perceived self-determination in the political domain the theory’s predictions received no consistent empirical support. This study therefore informs scholars of self-determination theory about the framework’s boundary conditions and scholars of political participation about theoretical dead-ends and potential avenues of further research.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Materialities of Political Commitment?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fearn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

Eschewing historicist certainties, this chapter reassesses the political salience of Alcaeus’ lyric poetry by investigating his literary contribution to sympotic culture. Placing Alcaeus’ politically engaged voices within recent theoretical perspectives on deixis, ecphrasis, and the distinctiveness of lyric as a literary mode, the chapter argues that Alcaeus makes a systematic issue of the question of the accessibility of the contexts gestured towards, and in so doing opens up as an alluring prospect the idea of political engagement through literature. The literary and cultural significance of proverbial statements in Alcaeus is also discussed. Alcaeus’ lyric claims are felt across time and space via their special foregrounding of both material culture and political engagement, through performance and reception.

History of Sexual Orientation and Mental Health

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Kristin A. Hancock ◽  
Douglas C. Haldeman
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
International Policy ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Bisexual ◽  
The Impact

Psychology’s understanding of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people has evolved, become more refined, and impacted the lives of LGB people in profound ways. This chapter traces the history of LGB psychology from the nineteenth century to the present and focuses on major events and the intersections of theory, psychological science, politics, and activism in the history of this field. It explores various facets of cultural and psychological history that include the pathologizing of homosexuality, the rise of psychological science and the political movements in the mid-twentieth century, and the major shifts in policy that ensued. The toll of the AIDS epidemic on the field is discussed as is the impact of psychological research on national and international policy and legislation.

Is political engagement by constitutional monarchs compatible with democracy?

2021 ◽  
pp. 205789112199169
Author(s):  
Kana Inata
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Public Approval ◽  
Do So

Constitutional monarchies have proved to be resilient, and some have made substantive political interventions even though their positions are mostly hereditary, without granted constitutional channels to do so. This article examines how constitutional monarchs can influence political affairs and what impact royal intervention can have on politics. I argue that constitutional monarchs affect politics indirectly by influencing the preferences of the public who have de jure power to influence political leaders. The analyses herein show that constitutional monarchs do not indiscriminately intervene in politics, but their decisions to intervene reflect the public’s preferences. First, constitutional monarchs with little public approval become self-restraining and do not attempt to assert their political preferences. Second, they are more likely to intervene in politics when the public is less satisfied about the incumbent government. These findings are illustrated with historical narratives regarding the political involvement of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand in the 2000s.

scholarly journals Citizenship Education for Political Engagement: A Systematic Review of Controlled Trials

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Steven Donbavand ◽  
Bryony Hoskins
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Behavioral Change ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Controlled Trials ◽  
Participatory Methods ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Whole School ◽  
Online Engagement

Citizenship Education could play a pivotal role in creating a fairer society in which all groups participate equally in the political progress. But strong causal evidence of which educational techniques work best to create political engagement is lacking. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of controlled trials within the field based on transparent search protocols. It finds 25 studies which use controlled trials to test causal claims between Citizenship Education programs and political engagement outcomes. The studies identified largely confirm accepted ideas, such as the importance of participatory methods, whole school approaches, teacher training, and doubts over whether knowledge alone or online engagement necessarily translate into behavioral change. But the paucity of identified studies also points both to the difficulties of attracting funding for controlled trials which investigate Citizenship Education as a tool for political engagement and real epistemological tensions within the discipline itself.

scholarly journals The Experiences of Grief and Personal Growth in University Students: A Qualitative Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1899
Author(s):  
Jovita Tan ◽  
Karl Andriessen
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Emerging Adults ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Continuing Bonds ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Supportive Services ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Formal Services

Background: Experiencing the death of a close person, especially in emerging adults and students, can have profound effects on the bereaved individual’s life. As most research in this field has focused on negative effects of a loss, little is known about potential positive effects experienced by bereaved university students. This study investigated the experience of grief and personal growth in a sample of students from The University of Melbourne, Australia. Methods: Semi-structured interviews via Zoom/telephone with bereaved students (n = 14), who were invited to reflect on their loss and any personal growth potentially experienced. Thematic analysis of the data was based on a deductive and inductive approach. Results: The analysis identified four themes: (i) sharing of grief as a coping mechanism, (ii) balance between grief reactions and moving forward in life, (iii) lessons learned and personal growth, and (iv) adopting values from the deceased person and continuing bonds. Conclusions: Participants emphasized personal growth regarding self-perception and philosophical views on life. Following the loss, they preferred peer support, and used formal services only when they had a specific need. The findings indicate the importance of social support for bereaved students, and the complimentary role of peer and professional support. Hence, academic institutions should offer supportive services tailored to both students and professionals to help bereaved students.

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