Measuring Political Legitimacy

1992 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Stephen Weatherford
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
System Support ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Measurement Issues ◽  
Measurement Models ◽  
Item Wording ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Questionnaire Construction

Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an enumeration of the informational requirements for assessing legitimacy in hopes of finding a conceptualization that better utilizes available survey indicators to tap relevant macro dimensions. I specify formal measurement models for both conventional and revised conceptualizations of legitimacy orientations and compare the fit of the two models systematically on data from the U.S. electorate. The revised model appears preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Metonymy in Dance: Ballet Bunheads Take a Cognitive Turn

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34
Author(s):  
Edward C. Warburton
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Level I ◽  
Dance Educators ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Metaphor And Metonymy

This essay considers metonymy in dance from the perspective of cognitive science. My goal is to unpack the roles of metaphor and metonymy in dance thought and action: how do they arise, how are they understood, how are they to be explained, and in what ways do they determine a person's doing of dance? The premise of this essay is that language matters at the cultural level and can be determinative at the individual level. I contend that some figures of speech, especially metonymic labels like ‘bunhead’, can not only discourage but dehumanize young dancers, treating them not as subjects who dance but as objects to be danced. The use of metonymy to sort young dancers may undermine the development of healthy self-image, impede strong identity formation, and retard creative-artistic development. The paper concludes with a discussion of the influence of metonymy in dance and implications for dance educators.

Effects of collectivism and individualism on performance: Dynamic collectivism in Korean firms

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Moonjoo Kim
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Commitment ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Organizational Dynamics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Individual

In order to understand cultural value orientations of Korean employees, in the study I adopted the concept of dynamic collectivism, defined as the tendency of showing high on both collectivism and individualism at the individual level. I hypothesized that employees with collective dynamism would show organizational commitment and creativity in performance. I tested the hypothesis with 384 employees of Korean firms representing different industries. As predicted, dynamic collectivism increased both organizational commitment and creativity in performance. Beyond this finding, the results indicated that collectivism increased organizational commitment but decreased creativity, and individualism dampened organizational commitment and increased creativity. I concluded that dynamic collectivism is key to understanding organizational dynamics and employees' orientations in Korean firms.

Political Ideology and Issue Importance

2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292096774
Author(s):  
Douglas Rice ◽  
Brian F. Schaffner ◽  
David J. Barney
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Latent Variable ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Measurement Models ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Issue Importance

Past research has shown that issues vary significantly in their salience across citizens, explaining key outcomes in political behavior. Yet it remains unclear how individual-level differences in issue salience affect the measurement of latent constructs in public opinion, namely political ideology. In this paper, we test whether scaling approaches that fail to incorporate individual-level differences in issue salience could understate the predictive power of ideology in public opinion research. To systematically examine this assertion, we employ a series of latent variable models which incorporate both issue importance and issue position. We compare the results of these different and diverse scaling approaches to two survey data sets, investigating the implications of accounting for issue salience in constructing latent measures of ideology. Ultimately, we find that accounting for issue importance adds little information to a more basic approach that uses only issue positions, suggesting ideological signals for measurement models reside most prominently in the issue positions of individuals rather than the importance of those issues to the individual.

scholarly journals Probabilistic tools to gauge 6-month infants' ability to detect contingency

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Dauphin ◽  
J. Kevin O'Regan
Keyword(s):  
Motor Skills ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Fine Motor ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Group I ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Analytical Tools

Adults are capable of very fine motor skills whereas newborn babies’ motions are less accurately adjusted to the environment. It has been suggested that babies are sensitive to sensorimotor contingencies so they can acquire their body knowhow by gradually linking each body movement to its perceptual consequences. The research we pursued in the team is part of this theoretical framework. We use behavioural measurements to study how babies refine their body knowhow over time.During my internship, we studied arm differentiation in infants of age 6 months. An artificial contingency was established between the movements of one of the babies’ arms and the appearance of visual and auditory stimuli on both of their arms. My goal was to develop analytical tools to assess if babies detect the contingency (i.e. if they realize that they caused the occurrence of the stimuli). I tried to reproduce the probabilistic methodology developed by J. Watson in his experiments with 4month old babies. I could not obtain reliable results and so pursued my investigations. I adapted Watson’s analytical tools to create a binary indicator measuring the success of babies at the individual level. I showed that babies can differentiate between a situation where without doubt they have no control and a situation where they could be the cause of the stimulus. However, because babies who tried to test the contingency behaved similarly in both the test and the control group I can not ascertain that babies from the contingent group understood that they triggered the contingency.

scholarly journals Comparing Political Polarization in Political and Cultural Preferences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Cultural Preferences ◽  
Cultural Preference ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Survey Responses

The popular press has given substantial attention to the notion that Democrats and Republicans hold diverging cultural and lifestyle preferences that manifest in the TV shows they watch, the music they listen to, and the clothes they buy. The academic research in this area is split, though, with some suggesting that such divisions exist and others arguing that they ultimately fail to materialize in real-world behavior. In this study, I use network methods to evaluate whether such partisan cultural polarization exists at the individual-level. I do so by constructing networks of shared cultural preferences and networks of shared political beliefs based on closed-ended survey responses. For each network, I calculate the assortativity (correlation) between linked respondents' partisan identity, ideology, age, gender, race, and education level. I show that the assortativity for the political identity measures is low across the cultural-preference networks compared to the political-belief networks. These results suggest that cultural preferences are not associated with partisan or ideological identities.

Group Belief

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Domingos Faria ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Group Belief ◽  
Level I ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Group Acceptance

Beliefs are commonly attributed to groups or collective entities. But what is the nature of group belief? Summativism and nonsummativism are two main rival views regarding the nature of group belief. On the one hand, summativism holds that, necessarily, a group g has a belief B only if at least one individual i is both a member of g and has B. On the other hand, non-summativism holds that it is possible for a group g to have a belief B even if no member of g has B. My aim in this paper is to consider whether divergence arguments for non-summativism and against summativism about group belief are sound. Such divergence arguments aim to show that there can be a divergence between belief at the group level and the corresponding belief at the individual level. I will argue that these divergence arguments do not decisively defeat a minimal version of summativism. In order to accomplish this goal, I have the following plan: In section 2, I will analyze the structure of two important counterexamples against the summativist view, which are based on divergence arguments. Such counterexamples are based on the idea that a group decides to adopt a particular group belief, even if none of its members holds the belief in question. However, in section 3, I will show that these counterexamples fail, because they can be explained without the need to posit group beliefs. More specifically, I argue that in these apparent counterexamples, we have only a ‘group acceptance’ phenomenon and not a ‘group belief’ phenomenon. For this conclusion, I advance two arguments: in subsection 3.1, I formulate an argument from doxastic involuntarism, and in subsection 3.2, I develop an argument from truth connection. Thus, summativism is not defeated by divergence arguments. Lastly, in section 4, I will conclude with some advantages of summativism.

A Spatial Analysis of Male and Female Unemployment in the USA

2015 ◽  
pp. 1797-1809
Author(s):  
Edmund J. Zolnik
Keyword(s):  
Multilevel Models ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The U.S

An analysis of male and female unemployment in the U.S. explores how gender affects spatial variation in unemployment. The effects of spatially-unlagged and spatially-lagged unemployment rates on the likelihood that individual men and women are unemployed are also explored. Using a recent tabulation of microdata from the American Community Survey, multilevel models of male and female unemployment are fit. Results indicate that age and occupation at the individual-level and a right-to-work dummy at the PUMA-level are the variables that best distinguish unemployed men and women. Results also indicate that unemployment for men is more clustered in space than unemployment for women. Finally, results indicate that the vast majority of the variation in unemployment for individuals in the U.S. is attributable to the personal characteristics of unemployed men and women, not the locational characteristics of high-unemployment places. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the latter result.

Mass Incarceration, Penal Moderation, and Black Prisoners Serving Very Long Sentences

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-688
Author(s):  
Antje du Bois-Pedain
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The U.S

The prevalent criminal justice practices in the U.S. have produced levels and patterns of incarceration that fewer and fewer politicians, scholars, and citizens care to support. There seems to be widespread consensus that the system is indicted as unjust by its outcomes no matter how these outcomes came about. But if that is so, how can it be turned back? Who should be eligible for release, and on what grounds? This article addresses the position of black prisoners serving very long sentences. Many of these prisoners are at risk of missing out under current legislative and administrative proposals designed to reduce overall levels of imprisonment. Partly this is due to the fact that the wrong of mass incarceration is often understood as a wrong suffered at the collective level by what has come to be referred to as “overpunished communities.” It is unclear how the existence of that collective wrong affects the permissibility of continued punishment at the individual level. This article develops an argument that, at the individual level, being a black prisoner serving a very long sentence gives rise to a moral entitlement for a review of the need and justification for continued incarceration. The article outlines the basic shape of a clemency scheme devised especially for these prisoners as a moral imperative for a reform process intended to remedy penal injustice.

scholarly journals How Elections Change the Way Citizens View the Political System: Campaigns, Media Effects and Electoral Outcomes in Comparative Perspective

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN A. BANDUCCI ◽  
JEFFREY A. KARP
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political System ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
System Support ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Campaign Activity ◽  
The Individual

Attitudes towards the political system have often been assumed to be stable attributes that are not easily influenced by short-term forces. We examine the extent to which attention to media coverage, campaign activity and electoral outcomes can mobilize support for the political system in the context of an election campaign. Using pre-election and post-election survey panels from the United States, Britain and New Zealand, we find only small shifts in aggregate measures of system support. However, we find that there are significant shifts in system support at the individual level that can be explained by status as election winners, attention to the media, particularly serious news coverage and economic perceptions. The results have implications for the debate over measures of system support such as trust, cynicism and efficacy.

American Voter Turnout

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Daron R. Shaw ◽  
John R. Petrocik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
First Century ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voting Requirements ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The U.S

This chapter provides a brief history of voter turnout in the U.S. It documents growth from a small electorate to one that mobilized some 80 percent of eligible voters by the middle of the nineteenth century, and a decline to lower turnout through much of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century despite repeated extensions of the franchise and less restrictive registration and voting requirements. Variation in contemporary turnout is examined in some detail in order to clarify the individual-level relationships that lead to the conventional wisdom concerning a partisan bias to turnout. Differences in turnout and party dynamics with otherwise comparable countries are also assessed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document