Understanding Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh

Challenges from Islamist militants have been an integral part of Bangladesh’s political landscape since the 1980s. Islamist militancy has passed through different phases of silent and active forms, drawing inspiration from conflicts in Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. A vast literature has dealt with Islamist militancy in Bangladesh, but very few works have shed light on who the Bangladeshi Islamist militants are and how they radicalize youths, whom they target for their secret mission of killings, and finally why youths choose to be radicalized, especially with the arrival of Islamic State and Al Qaeda in Bangladesh in 2013. The author conducted nearly 50 in-depth interviews with experts in Bangladesh and reviewed newspaper reports to answer these questions. This paper argues that middle-class youths with urban and secular backgrounds are increasingly being radicalized through cyber space, and diverse groups of people are targeted to carry out killings owing to their perceived ideological divergence. The idea of an apocalyptic Caliphate, a feeling of victimization, a disillusionment with the state and society, and personal distresses are all found to act as catalysts for Islamist radicalization in Bangladesh.

Uncovering the Mitigating Psychological Response to Monitoring Technologies: Police Body Cameras Not Only Constrain but Also Depolarize

Despite organizational psychologists’ long-standing caution against monitoring (citing its reduction in employee autonomy and thus effectiveness), many organizations continue to use it, often with no detriment to performance and with strong support, not protest, from employees. We argue that a critical step to resolving this anomaly is revisiting researchers’ fundamental assumptions about access to gathered data. Whereas previous research assumes that access resides nearly exclusively with supervisors and other evaluators, technological advances have enabled employee access. We hypothesize that with employee access, the psychological effects of monitoring may be far more complex than previously acknowledged. Whereas multiparty access may still decrease employee autonomy, it may also trigger an important psychological benefit: alleviating employees’ perceptions of polarization—the increasing social and ideological divergence between themselves and their evaluators. Access gives employees unprecedented opportunities to use the “objective” footage to show others their perspective, address evaluators’ erroneous assumptions and stereotypes, and otherwise defuse ideological tensions. Lower perceived polarization, in turn, attenuates the negative effects that low autonomy would otherwise have on employee effectiveness. We find support for these hypotheses across three field studies conducted in the law enforcement context, which has been a trailblazer in using technological advances to grant broad access to multiple parties, including employees. Overall, our studies shed light on the conflicting (and ultimately more innocuous) impact of monitoring and encourage scholars to break from prior approaches to account for its increasing egalitarianism.

The ideological divide in confidence in science and participation in medical research

In the United States, the wide ideological divergence in public confidence in science poses a potentially significant problem for the scientific enterprise. We examine the behavioral consequences of this ideological divide for Americans’ contributions to medical research. Based on a mass survey of American adults, we find that engagement in a wide range of medical research activities is a function of a latent propensity to participate. The propensity is systematically higher among liberals than among conservatives. A substantial part of this ideological divide is due to conservative Americans’ lower confidence in science. These findings raise important issues for the recruitment of subjects for medical studies and the generalizability of results from such studies.

Owner–Resident Ideological Divergence and Firm Performance: Evidence From Major League Baseball

Stakeholder frameworks document the nature of sport franchise owners’ interactions with local residents, but there has been little attention on understanding why interactions develop a contentious or collaborative tenor. There has also been little emphasis on understanding whether and how interactions affect revenue-side outcomes. This paper uses the team identification literature to buttress the idea that owners are meaningful points of attachment for fans. It also uses consumer political ideology scholarship to explain that owners’ ideologies—never more visible than today—are important predictors of consumption. The paper proposes and tests a series of hypotheses about the effect of owners’ and residents’ ideological divergence on attendance and spending. Similar ideologies between residents and long-tenured owners were associated with about $8–$10 more spending per fan per game, as well as 2,400–3,950 more fans per game. Implications for academics and practitioners are provided.

Polarization Eh? Ideological Divergence and Partisan Sorting in the Canadian Mass Public

There has be increasing concern among commentators and scholars about a possible polarization of the Canadian public that resembles what we have seen in the United States. There are, however, multiple competing conceptual definitions and perspectives on polarization, and we do not yet have a full and complete picture on which dimensions Canadians have or have not polarized, nor on the magnitudes of any patterns. This paper uses the 1993-2019 cumulative file of the Canadian Election Study (CES) to measure trends in ideological divergence, ideological consistency, and partisan sorting in the Canadian mass public. It finds little evidence that Canadians are becoming more ideologically polarized. They are, however, becoming modestly more ideologically consistent and much more sorted – that is, partisanship, ideological identification, and policy beliefs are increasingly interconnected, particularly among those with high levels of political interest. This paper also provides some evidence as to the mechanism undergirding partisan sorting using the 2004-2008 CES panel. Partisan sorting appears to be driven by people switching their partisanship into closer alignment with their beliefs rather than vice versa. These findings call for additional research on the causes and consequences of partisan sorting in Canada and further efforts to situate these results in a comparative context.

Moral “foundations” as the product of motivated social cognition: Empathy and other psychological underpinnings of ideological divergence in “individualizing” and “binding” concerns

According to moral foundations theory, there are five distinct sources of moral intuition on which political liberals and conservatives differ. The present research program seeks to contextualize this taxonomy within the broader research literature on political ideology as motivated social cognition, including the observation that conservative judgments often serve system-justifying functions. In two studies, a combination of regression and path modeling techniques were used to explore the motivational underpinnings of ideological differences in moral intuitions. Consistent with our integrative model, the “binding” foundations (in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity) were associated with epistemic and existential needs to reduce uncertainty and threat and system justification tendencies, whereas the so-called “individualizing” foundations (fairness and avoidance of harm) were generally unrelated to epistemic and existential motives and were instead linked to empathic motivation. Taken as a whole, these results are consistent with the position taken by Hatemi, Crabtree, and Smith that moral “foundations” are themselves the product of motivated social cognition.

Lexical Gaps and Ideological Shift in the Translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as “Le Monde S’effondrein French”

In translating Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart, Michel Ligny translates directly Igbo terminologies, realities and beliefs into the French language. This has contributed greatly in the preservation of the beauty and authenticity of the original text. However, the title of the novel is domesticated by Michel Ligny to present a different ideology. Within the framework of Lawrence Venuti (2004) theory of domestication and foreignization of translation, this paper examines the ideological divergence between the title of the original text and the title of the translation. The paper concludes that the ideology that the translated title projects to the French-reader is totally different from the ideology that the original title projects to the English-reader.

Selecting Chief Justices by Peer Vote

What characteristics do state supreme court justices prioritize when choosing leaders? At the federal level, collegial court leaders are appointed or rotated by seniority. A plurality of states permit peer-vote selection, but the consequences of employing this mechanism are not well known. We develop a theory of chief justice selection emphasizing experience, bias, and politics. Leveraging within-contest variation and more than a half century’s worth of original contest data, we find that chief justice peer votes often default to seniority rotation. Ideological divergence from the court median, governor, and legislature is largely unassociated with selection. Justices who dissent more than their peers are, however, disadvantaged. We find no evidence of discrimination against women or people of color. The results have implications for policy debates about political leader selection.

Unstable politics may make trade deals uncertain

Subject Politics and trade talks. Significance Understanding the factors that determine how long trade negotiations take will help businesses navigate the uncertainty, as the UK government prepares to negotiate trade agreements once it leaves the EU. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the EU took seven years to finalise. Less comprehensive renegotiations of international agreements can be shorter, including the US-Mexico-Canada agreement, which took less than two years. Impacts UK sectors highly exposed to the EU or United States, including automotive and financial services, face prolonged investment uncertainty. Timing of national elections, lobbying and the ideological divergence between trade partners will determine post-Brexit trade deal talks. Continued polarisation of major economies' electorates will delay or stop other global deals, including on foreign aid and climate change.