How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey

Why do voters support executive aggrandizement? One possible answer is that they do so because they think this will ease their preferred leader’s hand in putting their partisan vision into action, provided that the leader will continue winning elections. We study this phenomenon through a survey experiment in Turkey, by manipulating voters’ perceptions about the potential results of the first presidential election after a constitutional referendum of executive aggrandizement. We find that voters from both sides display what we call “elastic support” for executive aggrandizement; that is, they change previously revealed constitutional preferences in response to varying winning chances. This elasticity increases not only when citizens feel greater social distance to perceived political “others” (i.e., affective polarization) but also when voters are concerned about economic management in a potential post-incumbent era. Our findings contribute to the literature on how polarization and economic anxiety contribute to executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding. 1

Leisure Agricultural Park Selection for Traveler Groups Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the widespread vaccination against COVID-19, people began to resume regional tourism. Outdoor attractions, such as leisure agricultural parks, are particularly attractive because they are well ventilated and can prevent the spread of COVID-19. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the considerations around choosing a leisure agricultural park are different from usual, and will be affected by uncertainty. Therefore, this research proposes a fuzzy collaborative intelligence (FCI) approach to help select leisure agricultural parks suitable for traveler groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed FCI approach combines asymmetrically calibrated fuzzy geometric mean (acFGM), fuzzy weighted intersection (FWI), and fuzzy Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (fuzzy VIKOR), which is a novel attempt in this field. The effectiveness of the proposed FCI approach has been verified by a case study in Taichung City, Taiwan. The results of the case study showed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, travelers (especially traveler groups) were very willing to go to leisure agricultural parks. In addition, the most important criterion for choosing a suitable leisure agricultural park was the ease of maintaining social distance, while the least important criterion was the distance from a leisure agricultural park. Further, the successful recommendation rate using the proposed methodology was as high as 90%.

The Effects of Political Attitudes on Affective Polarization: Survey Evidence from 165 Elections

How do individual-level political attitudes influence affective polarization on a global scale? This article contributes to the debate on the social distance of party affect by testing a set of hypotheses in 165 elections across the world. With a sample of over 170,000 voters, the results of multilevel mixed-effects regressions demonstrate that ideological radicalism, political knowledge, and external efficacy substantively affect how voters see the main political parties in electoral disputes taking place in 52 countries from 1996 to 2019. Satisfaction with democracy, however, is context-dependent; it positively influences affective polarization only when generalized democratic satisfaction is low. Furthermore, I show that these correlations remain stable regardless of the operationalization of affective polarization—that is, based on two dominant parties and weighted for multiparty competition. These findings provide robust inputs to the study of party preferences and social distance in a cross-national longitudinal perspective.

PAISAJE DESPUÉS DE LA PANDEMIA

La pandemia generada por la COVID-19 está teniendo una incidencia global inusitada, y se puede suponer que nada después de ella va a seguir siendo exactamente igual. La lengua está acogiendo nuevos términos para designarla, y revitalizando otros que estaban en desuso. Y en el lenguaje de los políticos se introducen términos bélicos inconfundibles para referirse a esta nueva peste. Las prácticas sociales utilizadas para expresar las relaciones humanas se están viendo extremadamente condicionadas. Y como emblema de la situación emerge la máscara, cuyos orígenes materiales están en el teatro griego y a partir de esta lengua dio lugar al concepto semióticamente muy interesante de persona. En cuanto a las bellas artes, la literatura no sufre el condicionamiento pandémico de la distancia social que perjudica la realización de las actividades teatrales y musicales. Si bien, lo que Benjamin denominaba “la época de la reproductibilidad técnica” ofrece algunas soluciones al respecto. Abstract: The pandemic generated by COVID-19 is having an unusual global incidence, and it can be assumed that nothing after it will remain exactly the same. The language is accepting new terms to designate it, and revitalizing others that were in disuse. And in the language of politicians, unmistakable warlike terms are introduced to refer to this new plague. The social practices used to express human relationships are being extremely conditioned. And as an emblem of the situation emerges the mask, whose material origins are in the Greek theater and from this language gave rise to the semiotically very interesting concept of person. As for the fine arts, literature does not suffer from the pandemic conditioning of social distance that impairs the performance of theatrical and musical activities. But what Benjamin called “the era of technical reproducibility” offers some solutions in this regard.

EXPRESS: The Upside of Negative: Social Distance in Online Reviews of Identity-Relevant Brands

Conventional wisdom in marketing emphasizes the detrimental effects of negative online reviews for brands. An important question is whether some firms could more effectively manage negative reviews to improve brand preference and outcomes. To address this question, our research examines how customers respond to online reviews of identity-relevant brands in particular, which have been overlooked in the online reviews literature. Eight studies (field data and experiments featuring consequential and hypothetical behaviors) show that negative online reviews may not be so detrimental for identity-relevant brands, especially when those reviews originate from socially distant (but not socially close) reviewers. This occurs because a negative review of an identity-relevant brand can pose a threat to a customer’s identity, prompting the customer to strengthen their relationship with the identity-relevant brand. To document the underlying process, we show that this effect does not emerge when the review is positive or the brand is identity-irrelevant. Importantly, we identify circumstances when negative reviews can actually produce positive outcomes (higher preference) for identity-relevant brands over no reviews or even positive reviews. By demonstrating the upside of negative reviews for identity-relevant brands, our findings have important implications for marketing theory and practice.

A Social Distance Estimation and Crowd Monitoring System for Surveillance Cameras

Social distancing is crucial to restrain the spread of diseases such as COVID-19, but complete adherence to safety guidelines is not guaranteed. Monitoring social distancing through mass surveillance is paramount to develop appropriate mitigation plans and exit strategies. Nevertheless, it is a labor-intensive task that is prone to human error and tainted with plausible breaches of privacy. This paper presents a privacy-preserving adaptive social distance estimation and crowd monitoring solution for camera surveillance systems. We develop a novel person localization strategy through pose estimation, build a privacy-preserving adaptive smoothing and tracking model to mitigate occlusions and noisy/missing measurements, compute inter-personal distances in the real-world coordinates, detect social distance infractions, and identify overcrowded regions in a scene. Performance evaluation is carried out by testing the system’s ability in person detection, localization, density estimation, anomaly recognition, and high-risk areas identification. We compare the proposed system to the latest techniques and examine the performance gain delivered by the localization and smoothing/tracking algorithms. Experimental results indicate a considerable improvement, across different metrics, when utilizing the developed system. In addition, they show its potential and functionality for applications other than social distancing.

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Video Game Consumption in Turkey

Different precautions such as quarantine, social distance, and hygiene applications have been taken around the world to prevent the spreading of the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these precautions brought many sectors to a halt, digital-based platforms have been used more actively. The pandemic changed daily work, leisure, education, and the time spent with families and how people distribute their time on these items. The interest toward digital games increased as the result of COVID-19 quarantine. As people spent more time at home, they tended to play games to socialize. This study aims to evaluate the changes and tendencies in the consumption of video games during the pandemic period in Turkey. Accordingly, the consumption of online video games in 2020 was analyzed through comparing with 2019. As a result, it was detected that more time and money was spent during the pandemic period on the digital game sector which was also important before.

Hand-to-Mouth Survival in an Extended Pandemic

In a time of a pandemic, people withdraw in order to social distance to protect themselves against infection. The industries that rely on people interacting in close proximity—the service industries, air travel, and other fields—lose their customers almost overnight, and then they lose their employees. Money and jobs become much more scarce almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, saddled with debt and scarce emergency savings, with a pandemic dragging on now for over a year, with dysfunctional government and little stimulus, many Americans are struggling with debt, homelessness, hunger, pressured social relationships, and other challenges. This work explores some available and recent peer-to-peer personal finance advice on the Social Web (in English) on several social platforms to assess their applicability in a challenging historical moment.