scholarly journals No Common Ground? Public Knowledge about Welfare Spending in Turkey and its Social Divisions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Volkan Yilmaz ◽  
Anil Gurbuzturk

Social policy research examining citizens’ welfare knowledge, which offers a gateway to their understanding of the policy context, has remained limited. Adapting the opportunity–motivation–ability framework borrowed from the literature on political knowledge to welfare knowledge, this article offers an analysis of new data from a nationwide survey to explore Turkish society’s knowledge of the composition of public social spending. Corroborating earlier findings in the literature, the article maintains that most people in Turkey overestimate the relative size of social assistance spending for the poor. However, different from previous findings, the majority and most pensioners are also ill-informed about the rank of public spending on old-age pensions, the most widely used social benefit absorbing the largest share of welfare spending. The article provides evidence of the social division of welfare knowledge in Turkish society based mostly on three opportunity-related variables: city of residence, gender and income.

1992 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 658-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Hicks ◽  
Duane H. Swank

We examine the roles of democratic politics and political institutions in shaping social welfare spending in 18 contemporary capitalist democracies. We explore the social spending consequences of government partisanship, electoral competition and turnout, and the self-interested behaviors of politicians and bureaucrats, as well as such relatively durable facets of political institutions as neocorporatism, state centralization, and traditionalist policy legacies. Pooled time series analyses of welfare effort in 18 nations during the 1960–82 period show that electoral turnout, as well as left and center governments increase welfare effort; that the welfare efforts of governments led by particular types of parties show significant differences and vary notably with the strength of oppositional (and junior coalitional) parties; and that relatively neocorporatist, centralized, and traditionalistic polities are high on welfare effort. Overall, our findings suggest that contrary to many claims, both partisan and nonpartisan facets of democratic politics and political institutions shape contemporary social welfare effort.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel ◽  
Elizabeth Ann Harris ◽  
Philip Pärnamets ◽  
Steve Rathje ◽  
Kimberly Doell ◽  
...  

The spread of misinformation, including “fake news,” propaganda, and conspiracy theories, represents a serious threat to society, as it has the potential to alter beliefs, behavior, and policy. Research is beginning to disentangle how and why misinformation is spread and identify processes that contribute to this social problem. We propose an integrative model to understand the social, political, and cognitive psychology risk factors that underlie the spread of misinformation and highlight strategies that might be effective in mitigating this problem. However, the spread of misinformation is a rapidly growing and evolving problem; thus scholars need to identify and test novel solutions, and work with policy makers to evaluate and deploy these solutions. Hence, we provide a roadmap for future research to identify where scholars should invest their energy in order to have the greatest overall impact.


Author(s):  
David Dwan

Orwell’s writings repeatedly extol the virtues of solidarity, or what he liked to call brotherhood. But brotherhood was often something of an ordeal for Orwell as much as it was a coveted value and practice. The issue may be partly a question of character, but it also had a conceptual element: a) the compatibility of solidarity with other values, b) its internal coherence, as it sometimes re-enlists the social divisions it seeks to transcend, c) its problematic scope given its seemingly partisan nature, and d) its practicality in a modern social setting. This chapter examines these four issues in detail, showing how they contribute to the particular heft of Orwell’s writing—its angular sympathies and superbly uneven tone.


Author(s):  
Stephanie L. Derrick

The emphasis of this monograph has been on the historical, cultural, religious, and social factors that shaped C. S. Lewis and his reception. Until recently those who have considered the subject have attributed his popularity to virtues of the man himself. The fact that Lewis, in effect, was an image, a mitigated commercial product, a platform, has largely been overlooked. A critical component of Lewis’s reception is the opportunities that education provided the middle classes for social mobility in the twentieth century and the social divisions and anxieties attendant upon those evolutions. Of equal importance is the timing of Lewis’s life and publications with print history and the rise of mass media and entertainment. Lewis’s platform as a contrarian Christian resisting modernity and his reactions to the intellectual, social, and religious changes of his day made the critical difference to his transatlantic receptions.


Author(s):  
Sharon D. Welch

Assaults on truth and divisions about the nature of wise governance are not momentary political challenges, unique to particular moments in history. Rather, they demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in human reasoning and core dangers in ways of construing both individual freedom and cohesive communities. It will remain an ongoing challenge to learn to deal rationally with what is an intrinsic irrationality in human cognition and with what is an intrinsic tendency toward domination and violence in human collectivities. In times of intense social divisions, it is vital to consider the ways in which humanism might function as the social norm by, paradoxically, functioning in a way different from other social norms. Humanism is not the declaration that a certain set of values or norms are universally valid. At its best and most creative, humanism is not limited to a particular set of norms, but is, rather, the commitment to a certain process in which norms are continuously created, critically evaluated, implemented, sustained or revised. Humanism is a process of connection, perception, implementation, and critique, and it applies this process as much to itself as to other traditions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102831532199849
Author(s):  
Nafsika Alexiadou ◽  
Zoi Kefala ◽  
Linda Rönnberg

This article focuses on “internationalization at home” (IaH) for education students in Swedish Universities and its significance for their professional formation and future practice. We draw on research in two large institutions and explore the perceptions and experiences of internationalization of home students in education. We find that while the “intercultural” understanding of students is well developed, the international and intercultural dimensions of experiencing IaH are limited, due to several institutional and learning environment contexts. This has consequences for the social dimensions of future teaching practice. In addition, the perception of the discipline as “national” is significant in shaping the outlook of students toward international questions and their own future personal and professional mobility. We contextualize these findings using documentary analysis and staff interviews, and argue that to achieve intercultural and international learning environments of quality, social relevance, and long-term social benefit, we need to rethink how internationalization perspectives are integrated in teacher education courses.


Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492095858
Author(s):  
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The author uses methods of intellectual history to construct the concept of the public from Addams’s books: Democracy and Social Ethics and The Newer Ideals of Peace, showing that all three authors, Lippmann, Dewey and Addams, discuss the same topic of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life. Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism. Her argument regarding the public, as constructed by the author, consists of two premises. First, public engagement is a method of democratic inclusion as well as social and political inquiry for Addams. She sees the extension of relationality across social divisions as a necessary method to understand society and materialise democracy. Second, Addams emphasises cooperative and reflexive involvement especially in the characteristic developments of a time. She considers industrialisation and cosmopolitanism as characteristic developments of her own era. Addams suggests an in-principle cosmopolitan concept of the public that includes marginalised persons and groups. Compared to Lippmann’s and Dewey’s accounts of the public, Jane Addams’s argument is more radical and far more sensitive to the social inequality and plurality of a drastically morphing society.


1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (02) ◽  
pp. 262-263
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Mann

By now most of you are aware of the severe cuts in federal funding for the social and behavioral sciences and for the humanities proposed by the Reagan Administration.At the National Science Foundation, while support for the natural sciences is slated to increase, the proposed budget for the social and economic sciences calls for a 65 percent reduction.At the National Institute of Mental Health (ADAMHA), the Administration proposes toeliminateall social research, which is expected to include research on the family, socialization of children, effects of separation and divorce, evaluation of prevention efforts with children, effects of mass media on behavior of children. In addition, the definition probably will include social policy research, research on race and ethnic relations, studies of community structure and change and studies of social institutions.


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