More Than a Game: Football Fans and Marriage Equality

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (04) ◽  
pp. 782-787 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian F. Harrison ◽  
Melissa R. Michelson
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Professional Football ◽  
Marriage Equality ◽  
Football Fans ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Attitudes Toward Marriage ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Sports Fan

ABSTRACTPublic opinion tends to be stable. Once formed, attitudes are persistent and endure over time at both the individual and the aggregate levels. Attitudes toward marriage equality, however, have changed rapidly in recent years. This article posits that this is partly due to people learning that other members of their in-groups are supporters; they then alter their own opinions to be consistent with those of other in-group members. The authors tested this theory using a set of randomized survey experiments that shared identities as fans of professional football. When fans learn—sometimes unexpectedly—that other fans or athletes are supporters of marriage equality, they are motivated to agree in order to further normalize their membership in those sports-fan groups.

The SRC Panel Data and Mass Political Attitudes

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Erikson
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Panel Data ◽  
Survey Research ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Time Interval ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Survey Responses ◽  
Over Time

One of the richest data sources for the study of public opinion is the Survey Research Center's panel study conducted in the late 1950s. Because the SRC interviewed its national panel of Americans three times over a four-year period, the SRC panel data allows the analysis of changes in survey responses over time. The most remarkable discovery from the SRC panel was that panelists changed their reported opinions on policy issues with considerable frequency when asked the same policy questions in different years. Moreover, the amount of observed change in the individual responses varied little with the time interval between responses. That is, the correlations between responses to the same issue item in 1956 and 1958 or in 1958 and 1960 (two years apart) were almost as low as the correlations to the same issue item in 1956 and 1960 (four years apart).

Cows and the sharīʿah in the Abéché Customary Court (Eastern Chad)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Scheele
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Individual State ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Moral Personhood ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Customary Court ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time

The records of the sharīʿah court in Abéché in eastern Chad span the twentieth century. While the legal notion of property used by the court is Islamic and thus not seen to be problematic, the content of the property relations is fluid, and difficult to fix over time. In an inherently mobile society, and one that has long been open to trans-regional exchange, this is done through reliance on guarantors and witnesses. Property thus emerges as an inherently relational and unstable category; and while in Western legal systems, legal philosophers agonise about the individual ‘state of mind’ that defines property transactions, these questions are here a matter of public opinion. Suretyship and the preponderance of property as a precondition for moral personhood might hide a nuanced approach to the notion of ‘authority’, giving us insights into the peculiar functioning of the Chadian state (and similar political formations elsewhere).

scholarly journals Responsiveness and Unelected Leaders: Lessons from the Catholic Church

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ziegler
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Organizational Commitment ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Organizational Trust ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Representative Samples ◽  
Over Time

Are leaders responsive to their members’ preferences over time, even when formal accountability mechanisms such as elections are weak or absent? Unelected leaders, especially religious leaders, typically influence their supporters’ preferences, yet I suggest they should also have strong incentives to be responsive because they rely on dedicated, core members for legitimacy, volunteerism, and financial support. I test this argument by first analyzing over 10,000 papal messages to confirm the papacy is responsive to Catholic public opinion. I then conduct survey experiments using nationally representative samples of Catholics in Brazil and Mexico (N=5,006) to show that members increase their organizational trust and participation as a function of their existing organizational commitment, and the anticipated cost of support. The evidence suggests that leaders have incentives to be responsive besides elections, although there may be limits to the benefits that members provide in return.

On the Individual

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Magnusson
Keyword(s):  
School Psychologist ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Developmental Research ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time

A description of two cases from my time as a school psychologist in the middle of the 1950s forms the background to the following question: Has anything important happened since then in psychological research to help us to a better understanding of how and why individuals think, feel, act, and react as they do in real life and how they develop over time? The studies serve as a background for some general propositions about the nature of the phenomena that concerns us in developmental research, for a summary description of the developments in psychological research over the last 40 years as I see them, and for some suggestions about future directions.

Geographical aspects of the diffusion of passive houses

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Kozma ◽  
E. Molnár ◽  
K. Czimre ◽  
J. Pénzes
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Renewable Energy Resources ◽  
Passive House ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Passive Houses ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Geographical Locations ◽  
Over Time

Abstract In our days, energy issues belong to the most important problems facing the Earth and the solution may be expected partly from decreasing the amount of the energy used and partly from the increased utilisation of renewable energy resources. A substantial part of energy consumption is related to buildings and includes, inter alia, the use for cooling/heating, lighting and cooking purposes. In the view of the above, special attention has been paid to minimising the energy consumption of buildings since the late 1980s. Within the framework of that, the passive house was created, a building in which the thermal comfort can be achieved solely by postheating or postcooling of the fresh air mass without a need for recirculated air. The aim of the paper is to study the changes in the construction of passive houses over time. In addition, the differences between the geographical locations and the observable peculiarities with regard to the individual building types are also presented.

Personality change and environmental concerns

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher James Hopwood ◽  
Ted Schwaba ◽  
Wiebke Bleidorn
Keyword(s):  
Personality Traits ◽  
Personality Change ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Big Five Personality ◽  
German Population ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Sustainable Behavior ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time

Personal concerns about climate change and the environment are a powerful motivator of sustainable behavior. People’s level of concern varies as a function of a variety of social and individual factors. Using data from 58,748 participants from a nationally representative German sample, we tested preregistered hypotheses about factors that impact concerns about the environment over time. We found that environmental concerns increased modestly from 2009-2017 in the German population. However, individuals in middle adulthood tended to be more concerned and showed more consistent increases in concern over time than younger or older people. Consistent with previous research, Big Five personality traits were correlated with environmental concerns. We present novel evidence that increases in concern were related to increases in the personality traits neuroticism and openness to experience. Indeed, changes in openness explained roughly 50% of the variance in changes in environmental concerns. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the individual level factors associated with changes in environmental concerns over time, towards the promotion of more sustainable behavior at the individual level.

In or Out?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. De Vries
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Alternative State ◽  
Empirical Measurement ◽  
The Status ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Eu

This chapter introduces a benchmark theory of public opinion towards European integration. Rather than relying on generic labels like support or scepticism, the chapter suggests that public opinion towards the EU is both multidimensional and multilevel in nature. People’s attitudes towards Europe are essentially based on a comparison between the benefits of the status quo of membership and those associated with an alternative state, namely one’s country being outside the EU. This comparison is coined the ‘EU differential’. When comparing these benefits, people rely on both their evaluations of the outcomes (policy evaluations) and the system that produces them (regime evaluations). This chapter presents a fine-grained conceptualization of what it means to be an EU supporter or Eurosceptic; it also designs a careful empirical measurement strategy to capture variation, both cross-nationally and over time. The chapter cross-validates these measures against a variety of existing and newly developed data sources.

The Epistemology of Groups

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Group Level ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Individual Group ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Normative Requirements ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Belief Justification ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Trump Administration

Groups are often said to bear responsibility for their actions, many of which have enormous moral, legal, and social significance. The Trump Administration, for instance, is said to be responsible for the U.S.’s inept and deceptive handling of COVID-19 and the harms that American citizens have suffered as a result. But are groups subject to normative assessment simply in virtue of their individual members being so, or are they somehow agents in their own right? Answering this question depends on understanding key concepts in the epistemology of groups, as we cannot hold the Trump Administration responsible without first determining what it believed, knew, and said. Deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. Inflationary theorists maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that neither approach is satisfactory. Groups are more than their members, but not because they have “minds of their own,” as the inflationists hold. Instead, this book shows how group phenomena—like belief, justification, and knowledge—depend on what the individual group members do or are capable of doing while being subject to group-level normative requirements. This framework, it is argued, allows for the correct distribution of responsibility across groups and their individual members.

ExpanDrogram: Dynamic Visualization of Big Data Segmentation over Time

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
A. Khalemsky ◽  
R. Gelbard
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Trend Detection ◽  
Dynamic Visualization ◽  
Segmentation Process ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time

In dynamic and big data environments the visualization of a segmentation process over time often does not enable the user to simultaneously track entire pieces. The key points are sometimes incomparable, and the user is limited to a static visual presentation of a certain point. The proposed visualization concept, called ExpanDrogram, is designed to support dynamic classifiers that run in a big data environment subject to changes in data characteristics. It offers a wide range of features that seek to maximize the customization of a segmentation problem. The main goal of the ExpanDrogram visualization is to improve comprehensiveness by combining both the individual and segment levels, illustrating the dynamics of the segmentation process over time, providing “version control” that enables the user to observe the history of changes, and more. The method is illustrated using different datasets, with which we demonstrate multiple segmentation parameters, as well as multiple display layers, to highlight points such as new trend detection, outlier detection, tracking changes in original segments, and zoom in/out for more/less detail. The datasets vary in size from a small one to one of more than 12 million records.

Geography and the Gerrymander

1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. O. Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Major Part ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Adequate Knowledge ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Partial Suppression ◽  
Historical Basis ◽  
The Individual

The gerrymander is an American name for a political abuse, which, though by no means exclusively American, has been most widely practiced and generally tolerated in this country. It is a device for the partial suppression of public opinion that simulates agreement with democratic institutions. The subterfuge, therefore, has no place in countries in which oligarchic control is legitimized. Nor is it suited to European conditions, because it is difficult there to shift electoral boundaries. European electoral units in large part have a clearly defined historical basis, which in turn rests upon geographic coherence. This solidarity is commonly so great that it cannot be disregarded. American political divisions on the other hand show in major part very imperfect adjustment to economic and historic conditions, largely, because many of the divisions were created in advance of such conditions. They are, in the main, not gradual growths, but deliberate and arbitrary legislative creations, made without adequate knowledge of the conditions that make for unity or disunity of population within an area. Political divisions tend, therefore, to be less significant than in European countries and to be regarded more lightly. It is in particular the smaller unit, such as the county, that has been manipulated for electoral purposes. In spite of their poorly drawn individual boundaries, groups of counties can be organized into larger electoral units in such a manner as to represent a common body of interests predominating. On the other hand they can be so arranged as to mask these interests. The lack of proper coherence in the individual county may be rectified in large measure in the group, or it may be intensified. Gerrymandering accomplishes the latter result.

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