Coming of Age in the Diaspora: Bollywood and the Representation of Second Generation British Indian Diaspora

Bollywood films are a unique visual repository of India’s public imaginings, and they can, therefore, serve as guides to how India sees its past, present, and aspirational future (Dwyer, 2010). Through close intertextual readings of three key popular films depicting British Indian youth, this article explores the ways in which the UK-born/raised second-generation Indian diaspora has come to be represented within Bollywood. We argue that inter-generational negotiations around long-distance nationalism, social reproduction, and marriage are pivotal to the articulation and regulation of diasporic youth subjectivities in Bollywood films. By foregrounding the interplay of gender, sexuality, and nation, our analysis illuminates the role of Bollywood in mediating a transnational Indian identity which is tethered simultaneously to economic neoliberalism and social conservatism.

Estonia will secularise faster than the other Baltics

Significance Lithuania is the most religious: the predominant Roman Catholic Church’s socio-political influence has been increasing regarding the still-sensitive issues of LGBT+ and women’s rights. Patriarchal values are helping traditional religious entities regain influence in Latvia. Estonia is the most successful in separating religion and politics. Impacts In Latvia and Lithuania, religious and social conservatism will together hinder gender equality. The outlook for gender equality and human rights is better in Estonia. The president’s Catholicism will align Lithuania’s EU stance more towards Poland, its larger Catholic neighbour. Vilnius’s Jewish heritage -- culture, festivals, food and drink, and the surviving synagogue-- will attract West European tourists.

Are Conservatives More Rigid Than Liberals? A Meta-Analytic Test of the Rigidity-of-the-Right Hypothesis

The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is the dominant psychological account of political ideology. Here, we conduct an extensive review of the RRH, using multilevel meta-analysis to examine relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, N = 187,612). Associations between conservatism and rigidity were enormously heterogeneous, such that broad theoretical accounts of left-right asymmetries in rigidity have masked complex—yet conceptually fertile—patterns of relations. Most notably, correlations between economic conservatism and rigidity constructs were almost uniformly not significant, whereas social conservatism and rigidity were significantly positively correlated. Further, leftists and rightists exhibited modestly asymmetrical motivations yet closely symmetrical thinking styles and cognitive architecture. Dogmatism was a special case, with rightists being clearly more dogmatic. Complicating this picture, moderator analyses revealed that the RRH may not generalize to key environmental/psychometric modalities. Thus, our work represents a crucial launch point for advancing a more accurate—but admittedly more nuanced—model of political social cognition. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving away from the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid, will amplify the explanatory power of political psychology.

Politics and Parenting

This chapter assesses how parenthood may functionally influence political attitudes. Becoming a parent is a keystone life event that has numerous psychological and physiological implications. There are several theoretical reasons to predict a functional relationship between parenthood (as well as individual differences in parenting motivation) and socially conservative attitudes, primarily related to an increased sensitivity to threat and a reduced interest in short-term mating. Moreover, initial work has found correlational, mediational, and experimental support for a functional and causal relationship between parenting and increased social conservatism and out-group prejudice. However, many unanswered questions remain, as do multiple fruitful avenues for future research.

The Revival of the Russian Idea Ethic and Aesthetic Traditions in the Anthropologic Social and Conservative Paradigm

Russian idea formation in the framework of mental and artistic forms largely determines its ethic and aesthetic trends. The following philosophic conceptualization of the Russian idea turned out to be connected not only with the empire project, but also with the expression of national traditions in the classic culture, from architecture to philosophy. Under the conditions of the global technological crisis of spiritual culture that has captured the quasi-westernized modern Russia, the conservative progress understanding implies in fact the integration of anthropological and social conservatism. Russian idea modernization as an important direction of the domestic philosophy renewal, implies the critical analysis of post-philosophic –suicidal in relation to man, national sovereignty, fundamental social institutions, - doctrines and substantiation of absolute importance of classic and national spiritual traditions, moral and aesthetic context of material and technical progress, cultural self-sufficiency and originality. The panhuman character of the Russian idea in the 21st century consists in the project of co-evolutionary preservation of man, philosophy and culture.

Of pathogens and party lines: Social conservatism positively associates with COVID-19 precautions among U.S. Democrats but not Republicans

Social liberals tend to be less pathogen-avoidant than social conservatives, a pattern consistent with a model wherein ideological differences stem from differences in threat reactivity. Here we investigate if and how individual responses to a shared threat reflect those patterns of ideological difference. In seeming contradiction to the general association between social conservatism and pathogen avoidance, the more socially conservative political party in the United States has more consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic. This puzzle offers an opportunity to examine the contributions of multiple factors to disease avoidance. We investigated the relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautionary behavior in light of the partisan landscape of the United States. We explored whether consumption of, and attitudes toward, different sources of information, as well as differential evaluation of various threats caused by the pandemic—such as direct health costs versus indirect harms to the economy and individual liberties—shape partisan differences in responses to the pandemic in ways that overwhelm the contributions of social conservatism. In two pre-registered studies, socially conservative attitudes correlate with self-reported COVID-19 prophylactic behaviors, but only among Democrats. Reflecting larger societal divisions, among Republicans and Independents, the absence of a positive relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautions appears driven by lower trust in scientists, lower trust in liberal and moderate sources, lesser consumption of liberal news media, and greater economic conservatism.

It doesn’t matter what you watch, but how much you watch: social attitudes, media objectivity, and frequency of informing as predictors of conspiracy beliefs

In this study, we hypothesized that traditionalist social attitudes (conservatism, religiousness, and authoritarianism) significantly predict COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, as well as conspiracy mentality in general. We also hypothesized that these relationships are mediated by the objectivity of the media individuals inform themselves from, and the frequency of informing. The sample consisted of 341 participants from Serbia (mean age 33.51 years), 40.5% women. We measured authoritarianism, social conservatism, religiousness, conspiracy mentality, media objectivity, frequency of informing, and two sets of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs: Harmless virus and Hiding information. The results revealed that conservatism predicts all three outcome variables, authoritarianism only COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, and religiousness only beliefs that the virus is harmless. Media objectivity does not mediate these relationships. Frequency of informing is a significant mediator only in a relationship between authoritarianism and all outcome variables, indicating that the role of seeking more information is in the function of reducing threat perceived by more authoritarian individuals. Additionally, the study reveals that media objectivity may not be important for reducing conspiracy beliefs, but rather media credibility. These potential explanations should be further explored.

Faraway, so close: a spatial account of the Conte I government formation in Italy, 2018

The formation of the ‘yellow-green’ government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners – the Five Star Movement and the League – appeared to be quite distant on the left–right continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing left–right scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition governments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001–18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the left–right dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic left–right and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left–right continuum.

Civil liberties at the crossroads: Libertarian and illiberal attitudes among politically charged online groups

Civil liberties and rights such as freedom of expression, press, thought, religion, association, lifestyle, and equality against the law are being subjected to fierce controversies within the socio-political landscape of Western developed countries. Based on a literature review, we develop two working hypotheses aimed at explaining divergent attitudes toward civil liberties among politically charged online communities on each side of the political spectrum. First, a “libertarian attitude” among rightist groups, in which economic conservatism suppresses the illiberal tendencies of social conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism. Second, a “illiberal attitude” among leftist groups, elicited by the rise of authoritarian forms of social justice-seeking within some influential left-wing ideologies. We report a correlational study using a cross-sectional sample (n = 902), whose results support both hypotheses. Lastly, we discuss these results in relation to polarization over civil liberties and perceived power imbalances between conservatives and liberals.