Democratic Assessment Colored by Understandings of Democracy

This chapter examines the attitudinal consequences of popular understandings of democracy. In particular, we focus on the influence of this critical mass opinion on how citizens assess democratic practices in both foreign countries and their own societies. Mixed-effect regressions confirm that, ceteris paribus, people who have embraced the procedural understanding of democracy by prioritizing its institutions and procedures in protecting basic rights and liberty are more critical of China’s democratic practice but more favorable to that in the United States. Similar mixed-effect regressions reveal that, again, people’s different understandings of democracy significantly shape how they assess their own societies’ democratic practices. On average, people who prioritize the intrinsic values of democracy are less satisfied with their regime’s democratic practices and more critical in assessing their regimes’ democratic nature. Furthermore, even a full democracy still needs to deliver to win over people’s hearts and minds, thereby fostering its popular support.

Blockchain oriented hyperledger based performance driven framework for mass e-voting

Voting is a process for making collective decisions or to express a mass opinion on list of options available. It is a most commonly used instrument to elect a political representative. It is apparent that the methodology currently followed for voting in India can be improved at many levels to make it more robust and efficient. Currently, the voting methodology followed in Indian political elections has two major issues, one is high cost per voter, and low voter turnout. There are many attempts by other democratic setups to tackle this problem by offering online method of voting, but the most trustworthy and promising solution is considered to be voting platform/infrastructure backed by Blockchain. Most of the currently existing Blockchain based voting solutions are computationally expensive, doesn’t provide a verifiable secret ballot, slow, and Byzantine Fault Tolerant Proof of Work algorithms run on a public Blockchain network. The work presented in this paper aims at addressing these issues by proposing Blockchain based framework that leverages Hyperledger Fabric for Scalable Voting System. The proposed method uses Aadhar number for authentication of voters. The proposed method can efficiently cater the secure, trustworthy, and promising to Indian scale. The proposed method offers a various solution, offline and online voting with features such as cost-effective deployments, instantaneous vote counting, Cast as Intended Verifiability, and an observable and auditable architecture. The proposed method has been tested on real time setup and the experimental results are promising.

The Organization of Political Belief Networks: A Cross-Country Analysis

Studies on mass opinion conceptualize political ideology as an interrelated network of attitudes, beliefs and values. Drawing from the emerging literature on belief network analysis, I formalize this conceptualization to investigate different ways of organizing political ideologies among 76 countries. Using the joint dataset of European Values Study and World Values Survey collected between 2017 and 2020, I construct networks of belief correlations and examine the variations in the organization of political beliefs in the cross-national context. Consistent with the theories of social constraint, I find that in countries with high institutionalization of political parties, the organization of political beliefs is more likely to be dense and consolidated. These patterns are robust to a variety of predictors between-countries, and the results are not sensitive to sampling variability, variable selection, or item properties.

The Opinion-Mobilizing Effect of Social Protest against Police Violence: Evidence from the 2020 George Floyd Protests

Does social protest following the police killing of unarmed Black civilians have a widespread “opinion-mobilizing” effect against the police? Or, does the racialized nature of these events polarize mass opinion based on standing racial and political orientations? To answer these questions, we use a large dataset comprised of weekly cross sections of the American public and employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach leveraging the random timing of the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing nationwide protests. We find that the Floyd protests swiftly decreased favorability toward the police and increased perceived anti-Black discrimination among low-prejudice and politically liberal Americans. However, attitudes among high-prejudice and politically conservative Americans either remained unchanged or evinced only small and ephemeral shifts. Our evidence suggests that the Floyd protests served to further racialize and politicize attitudes within the domain of race and law enforcement in the U.S.

A Growing Militarism? Changing Meanings of Russian Patriotism in 2011–2017

Since the early 2000s, the Kremlin has sought to make patriotism an overarching national ideology for Russia. In recent years, the state-promoted patriotism has become increasingly militaristic and the external threats have been more and more emphasized in the Kremlin’s discourse. At the same time, some streams of literature suggest that the majority of Russians have actually embraced the state’s vision of militaristic patriotism and the regime-promoted idea of strong political leadership over a democratic rule. Drawing on previous research and fresh and nationally representative survey data, we examine how public perceptions of patriotism relate to the state-promoted patriotism and preference for political authoritarian leadership in contemporary Russia. Our results indicate that while the Kremlin-promoted militaristic component of patriotism has slightly increased among the Russian public after the political events of 2014, it still differs from the state-imposed patriotism in many ways and remains more diverse across Russian society. Furthermore, the notion of patriotism in the mass opinion has remained by and large the same despite the ‘rallying around the flag’ after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The Ideological and Religious Bases of Attitudes Toward Pope Francis in the United States

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has achieved influence as a religious leader while also impacting political discussions through his teachings on social justice and environmental matters. In the United States, his teachings on these topics have generated some controversy among right-leaning figures. In the present study, I look at whether this controversy is reflected in mass opinion about Pope Francis. Using data from three national surveys of Americans, I find that individuals who identify with the political right evaluate Francis more negatively. Qualifying this, Catholic religious affiliation weakens the tendency for right-wing identifiers to evaluate Francis more negatively, while strengthening the tendency for those high in religiosity to evaluate the pope positively. Finally, consistent with the idea that politically-aware individuals are more likely to make ideologically-informed judgments, the relationship between identification with the political right and negative evaluations of Pope Francis was stronger among the politically engaged.