How Motivation Influences Political Decision Making

Author(s):  
Brian J. Gaines ◽  
Benjamin R. Kantack

Although motivation undergirds virtually all aspects of political decision making, its influence is often unacknowledged, or taken for granted, in behavioral political science. Motivations are inevitably important in generic models of decision theory. In real-world politics, two crucially important venues for motivational effects are the decision of whether or not to vote, and how (or, whether) partisanship and other policy views color information-collection, so that people choose and then justify, rather than studying options before choosing. For researchers, motivations of survey respondents and experimental subjects are deeply important, but only just beginning to garner the attention they deserve.

Author(s):  
Asmus Olsen

Politics is increasingly reliant on numerical descriptions of the world. Numbers are relied upon for their ability to communicate some unambiguous facts of life. Equivalence frames are equivalent descriptions of the same quantity and they help us understand how different ways of presenting the objectively same piece of numerical information affect political behavior. Equivalence framing effects denote that these different presentation of the fundamentally same fact have very profound effects on preferences. However, most research in political behavior have relied on other forms of framing and largely regarded equivalence framing as a well-defined concept without much relevance to real-world politics. The standard form of equivalence framing changes the valence of a label which describes the same numerical fact. This form of negative and positive framing of the same metric will often elicit very different responses for the recipient of the information. A less studied type of equivalence framing in political behavior manipulates the same numerical fact but with a different metric or scale. These have often not been explicitly recognized as equivalence frames but are clearly an important example in a world of numbers. As for valence manipulation, changing the metric can also have profound effects. Moving forward studies of equivalence framing must both gain a better descriptive understanding of the actual use and abuse of equivalence frames in observational setting and at the same time aim to understand the causal properties of equivalence frames in the field—outside the controlled environment of the survey or lab where they most often are studied.


2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-259
Author(s):  
Etienne Verhoeyen

Met dit boek levert Frank Seberechts een nagenoeg volledige studie af van een van de minder fraai kanten van de Belgische samenleving in 1940: de administratieve arrestatie en de wegvoering naar Frankrijk van enkele duizenden personen (de ‘verdachten’), Belgen of in België verblijvende vreemdelingen. De extreem-rechtse en pro-Duitse arrestanten hebben na hun vrijlating dit feit politiek in hun voordeel uitgebaat, waardoor volledig in de schaduw kwam te staan dat de overgrote meerderheid van de weggevoerden joodse mensen waren die in de jaren voor de oorlog naar België waren gevlucht. Dat het beeld van de wegvoeringen niet volledig is, is grotendeels te wijten aan het feit dat de meeste archieven die hierop betrekking hebben tijdens de meidagen van 1940 vernietigd werden. Met name de politieke besluitvorming over de wegvoeringen vertoont nog steeds schemerzones, zodat het vastleggen van verantwoordelijkheden ook vandaag nog een gewaagde onderneming is.________Deportations and the deported during the Maydays in 1940 By means of this book Frank Seberechts provides an almost complete study of one of the less admirable sides of Belgian society in 1940: the administrative arrest and the deportation to France of some thousands of people (‘the suspects’), Belgians or foreigners residing in Belgium. The extreme-right and pro-German detainees politically exploited this fact after they had been freed, but this completely overshadowed the point that the large majority of the deported people were Jews who had fled to Belgium during the years preceding the war. This incomplete portrayal of the deportations is mainly due to the fact that most of the archives relating to the events had been destroyed during the Maydays of 1940. The history of the political decision-making about the deportations in particular still shows many grey areas and it is therefore still a risky business even today to determine which people should be held accountable.


Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano

AbstractPublic participation has become increasingly necessary to connect a wide range of knowledge and various values to agenda setting, decision-making and policymaking. In this context, deliberative democratic concepts, especially “mini-publics,” are gaining attention. Generally, mini-publics are conducted with randomly selected lay citizens who provide sufficient information to deliberate on issues and form final recommendations. Evaluations are conducted by practitioner researchers and independent researchers, but the results are not standardized. In this study, a systematic review of existing research regarding practices and outcomes of mini-publics was conducted. To analyze 29 papers, the evaluation methodologies were divided into 4 categories of a matrix between the evaluator and evaluated data. The evaluated cases mainly focused on the following two points: (1) how to maintain deliberation quality, and (2) the feasibility of mini-publics. To create a new path to the political decision-making process through mini-publics, it must be demonstrated that mini-publics can contribute to the decision-making process and good-quality deliberations are of concern to policy-makers and experts. Mini-publics are feasible if they can contribute to the political decision-making process and practitioners can evaluate and understand the advantages of mini-publics for each case. For future research, it is important to combine practical case studies and academic research, because few studies have been evaluated by independent researchers.


1976 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel A. Kirkpatrick ◽  
Dwight F. Davis ◽  
Roby D. Robertson

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sheagley

Party identification provides citizens with an anchor from which they derive many of their political attitudes and issue preferences. But what happens when people encounter political debates that place their partisan identities and policy attitudes into conflict with one another? This article draws on an original experiment designed to study the effect of debates that cut across people’s partisan identities and policy attitudes. The results show that cross-cutting debates make people less likely to engage in selective exposure, more likely to feel ambivalent toward their political party, and less likely to rely on party cues when rendering a judgment.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (S1) ◽  
pp. S7-S23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adolf Stepan ◽  
Margit Sommersguter-Reichmann

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