scholarly journals Prejudice, Bigotry, and Support for Compensatory Interventions to Address Black-White Inequalities: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 2006-2020

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Morgan

The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to group-identity interpretations of these patterns, the increase in predictive power since 2012 is attributable to a positive development: above and beyond the effects of cohort replacement, support for compensatory interventions to address black-white inequalities has increased substantially, while prejudice and bigotry have decreased slightly. Because these changes have been larger on the political left than on the political right, the attitudes have gained in overall predictive power.

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Willem van Prooijen ◽  
André P. M. Krouwel

Dogmatic intolerance—defined as a tendency to reject, and consider as inferior, any ideological belief that differs from one’s own—is often assumed to be more prominent at the political right than at the political left. In the present study, we make two novel contributions to this perspective. First, we show that dogmatic intolerance is stronger among left- and right-wing extremists than moderates in both the European Union (Study 1) as well as the United States (Study 2). Second, in Study 3, participants were randomly assigned to describe a strong or a weak political belief that they hold. Results revealed that compared to weak beliefs, strong beliefs elicited stronger dogmatic intolerance, which in turn was associated with willingness to protest, denial of free speech, and support for antisocial behavior. We conclude that independent of content, extreme political beliefs predict dogmatic intolerance.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-370
Author(s):  
Matti Peltonen

Sweden and Finland reviewed their alcohol control policies in the 1950s at more or less the same time. Sweden abolished its ration book system and lifted restrictions on the sale of medium strength beer, Finland in turn revised its mechanisms for controlling the purchase of alcohol, a version of the Bratt system. In Sweden, alcohol consumption increased sharply and the number of drunkenness offences doubled. In Finland, by contrast, nothing happened. Why? History provides one possible source of explanation. The Swedish version of the Bratt system was much stricter (with monthly rations allocated on the basis of social class and sex) and therefore there was greater pressure towards a liberalisation of alcohol policy than was the case in Finland. During the war and in the post-war years Finland had a strong labour movement, which was keen to underline and demonstrate that the working class were in every respect decent and upright people. The debate that was touched off by the General Strike in 1956 is particularly interesting. On the political right, workers were frequently portrayed as heavy drinkers; the political left worked hard to fend off this propaganda attack. In this kind of atmosphere it was impossible to seriously call for a liberalisation of alcohol control policy in Finland.


Author(s):  
Eric M Aldrich ◽  
Peter S. Arcidiacono ◽  
Jacob L Vigdor

AbstractNielsen ratings for ABC's Monday Night Football are significantly higher when the game involves a black quarterback. In this paper, we consider competing explanations for this effect. First, quarterback race might proxy for other player or team attributes. Second, black viewership patterns might be sensitive to quarterback race. Third, viewers of all races might be exhibiting a taste for diversity. We use both ratings data and evidence on racial attitudes from the General Social Survey to test these hypotheses empirically. The evidence strongly supports the taste-for-diversity hypothesis, while suggesting some role for black own-race preferences as well.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Zimmerman

Universities are usually considered bastions of the free exchange of ideas, but a recent tide of demonstrations across college campuses has called this belief into question, and with serious consequences. Such a wave of protests hasn't been seen since the campus free speech demonstrations of the 1960s, yet this time it is the political Left, rather than the political Right, calling for restrictions on campus speech and freedom. And, as Jonathan Zimmerman suggests, recent campus controversies have pitted free speech against social justice ideals. The language of trauma--and, more generally, of psychology--has come to dominate campus politics, marking another important departure from prior eras. This trend reflects an increased awareness of mental health in American society writ large. But it has also tended to dampen exchange and discussion on our campuses, where faculty and students self-censor for fear of insulting or offending someone else. Or they attack each other in periodic bursts of invective, which run counter to the “civility” promised by new speech and conduct codes. In Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jonathan Zimmerman breaks down the dynamics of what is actually driving this recent wave of discontent. After setting recent events in the context of the last half-century of free speech campus movements, Zimmerman looks at the political beliefs of the US professorate and students. He follows this with chapters on political correctness; debates over the contested curriculum; admissions, faculty hires, and affirmative action; policing students; academic freedom and censorship; in loco parentis administration; and the psychology behind demands for "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces." He concludes with the question of how to best balance the goals of social and racial justice with the commitment to free speech.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Adam Wielomski

DIALECTICS ‘WE’–‘ALIENS’ IN RIGHT-WING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 1789–1945 The aim of the author of this text is to polemicize with the stereotype according to which nationalism is a synonym of the “extreme right.” For this purpose the method of historical exemplification was used. Part I of this text is devoted to defining the concept of the “right” and to present the supporters of the French Revolution and other 19th-century revolutions, their idea of nationalism, the nation-state and sovereignty of the nation. This presentation shows that up to 1890 nationalism is located in the revolutionary left. The first nationalists are Jacobins. The counter-revolutionary right is opposed to nationalism. For this right, nationalism is combined with the idea of empowering nations to the rights of self-determination, which is closely connected with the idea of people’s sovereignty. This situation persists until 1870–1914, when the ideas of national sovereignty are implemented in the politics of the modern states. However, the liberal state does not meet the expectations of nationalists, because it neglects the interests of the nation as the highest value. That is the cause for them moving from the political left to the right part of the political scene, replacing the legitimist right. The latter is annihilated with the decline of aristocracy. In the 19th century, the left is nationalistic and xenophobic. We find clear racist sympathies on the left. The political right does not recognize the right of nations to self-determination, the idea of ethnic boundaries. It is cosmopolitan.


Author(s):  
Βασίλης Παυλόπουλος ◽  
Michele Vecchione

individual differences in politics are usually studied through the bipolar “left/right” or “liberal/conservative” axis. Traditionally, political preferences are examined in relation to socio-demographic factors. More recently, personal values have been shown to constitute a useful framework for understanding political attitudes. This study attempted to explore emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of individual variation in political behavior on the basis of Schwartz’s value theory. The sample consisted of 304 adults (51% male), aged 21-65 years (M = 39,1), residing in various regions across Greece (55% in the Athens metropolitan area). Participants completed the Portrait Values Questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001); they also responded on items regarding their core political values (Schwartz et al., 2010), political self-placement, political participation, and socio-demographic profile. overall, results are consistent with research hypotheses. Personal values emerged as significant predictors of political values and political self-placement. Specifically, tradition, security and achievement were associated with the political right and universalism with the left, as well as with unconventional forms of political participation. The above findings are being discussed with regard to the existing models of values and political behavior, along with the multi-faceted crisis that the Greek society is undergoing.


Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin

"Every year Malthus is proven wrong and is buried—only to spring to life again before the year is out. If he is so wrong, why can't we forget him? If he is right, how does he happen to be so fertile a subject for criticism?" I wrote those words in the 1960s in an introduction to an anthology of essays on population. How naive I was! I supposed that the voices that were then sounding the alarm about population growth would at last get the public's attention. And so they did for about a decade during which environmentalists made common cause with populationists. But some of the most influential of the environmental activists viewed population as a dangerous and unwanted diversion from what they conceived to be humanity's true problems. Their stifling of public concern for population problems was reinforced during the Reagan years by self-styled "supply-side economists." Soon the predominent population message broadcast by both the political left and the political right was "Not to worry!" In 1968 ZPG, Inc., was founded to promote zero population growth as an ideal both for the United States and for the world. Its membership was confined mostly to 350 chapters on college campuses. Twenty-one years later, in 1989, the number had shrunk to just nine. Though Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was a bestseller in 1968, worrying about population growth did not become a growth industry. Malthusians saw population growth as a "root cause" of inflation, unemployment, pollution, congestion, unwanted immigration, influxes of heartrending refugees, trade wars, drug wars, and terrorism. Each of these pathologies has many causes; anti-Malthusians belittled population. Common economic experience made it hard to believe that a population gain of 2 to 4 percent per year (which characterizes poor countries) could be serious; the less than one percent annual growth rate found in rich countries seemed even more trifling. Students of population, however, pointed out that the average gain in world population during the past million years has been less than 0.002 percent per year. That "small" rate of increase, operating over a million years, has produced our present five billion people, not a "small" number by any standard. When it comes to rates of increase that are continued indefinitely, no rate that exceeds zero by the most minute amount can be regarded as small.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deva Woodly

There have been many retrospective analyses written about the marriage-equality movement since the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that made marriages between people of the same sex legal in all 50 states. Most attribute that triumph to a stunningly swift turnaround in public comfort with and approval of same-sex relationships. However, public opinion data indicates that this narrative is inaccurate. In 2015, 51% of General Social Survey respondents declared that they found sexual relationships between people of the same sex to be “wrong” at least “some of the time.” Nevertheless, at the same time, 56% of respondents affirmed that people of the same sex ought to have the legal right to marry. This dissonance suggests that the most common narrative about the success of the movement misses something crucial about how political persuasion happened in this case, as well as the way that political persuasion happens in general. In this article, I show that the massive shift in support for same-sex marriage was likely not the result of large majorities changing their underlying attitudes regarding gay sexual relationships, but was instead the result of activists inserting new criteria for evaluating same-sex marriage into popular political discourse by consistently using resonant arguments. These arguments reframed the political stakes, changed the public meaning of the marriage debate, and altered the decisional context in which people determine their policy preferences.


Author(s):  
Jill Stockwell

Since the return to democratic rule in Argentina in 1983, competing claims about how the period of political and state violence of the 1970s and 1980s might be collectively remembered by the nation have caused deep political and societal divisions. This paper explores the personal memories of Argentine women from two ideologically-opposed groups—those on the political Left affected by military repression during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship and those on the political Right affected by the armed guerrilla violence predominantly in the years leading up to the 1976 military coup. In contemporary Argentina, the memories of enduring personal trauma which both groups of women carry are commonly perceived as unable to co-exist in a shared mnemonic space – as if remembering one history of violence is seen as an attempt to forget or violate the other history of violence and trauma.


Author(s):  
Leticia Bode ◽  
Alexander Hanna ◽  
Junghwan Yang ◽  
Dhavan V. Shah

Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 million tweets produced by more than 23,000 randomly selected followers of candidates for the U.S. House and Senate and governorships in 2010. We find that Twitter users in that election cycle did not align in a simple Right-Left division; rather, five unique clusters emerged within Twitter networks, three of them representing different conservative groupings. Going beyond discourses of fragmentation and polarization, certain clusters engaged in strategic expression such as “retweeting” (i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet with one’s followers) and “hashjacking” (i.e., co-opting the hashtags preferred by political adversaries). We find the Twitter alignments in the political Right were more nuanced than those on the political Left and discuss implications of this behavior in relation to the rise of the Tea Party during the 2010 elections.


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