Political Endorsements by Scientific Organizations Reduce Trust in Scientific Expertise During COVID-19

High-profile political endorsements by scientific organizations and publications have been common in recent years, which raises concerns about political backlash against the endorsing organization in particular and scientific expertise in general. In a pre-registered large-sample online controlled experiment, I randomly assign subjects to receive information about Nature's endorsement of Joe Biden for the 2020 U.S. presidential election in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing the endorsement message leads to large reductions in self-reported trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust translates into lower demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy and emerging COVID variants when offered. The endorsement also reduces Trump supporters' stated trust in scientists in general, suggesting "reputational externalities" on the scientific community. Treatment effect estimates for Biden supporters are positive but small and often statistically insignificant across outcomes. Finally, I find little evidence that the endorsement is successful at changing subjects' views about Biden and Trump. These results show political endorsement by scientific organizations can undermine public confidence in the endorsing organization and in the scientific community.

US Supreme Court will generate greater controversy

Significance The decision to hold a hearing on this issue, rather than simply issue a decision, reflects a degree of concern about perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy following the transfer of the country’s currently polarised politics onto the Court through recent appointments. Impacts The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is so dominant that no liberal decisions are likely in the foreseeable future. Chief Justice Roberts will try on occasion to moderate the Court’s conservative decision-making but mostly without effect. The recent report from President Joe Biden’s commission on the Supreme Court will prove ineffectual. Upcoming cases will provoke a political backlash among voters and make Court reform a central preoccupation for some Democrats.

A Theory of Political Backlash: Assessing the Religious Right’s Effects on the Religious Field

A growing body of evidence suggests that the rise in religious disaffiliation can be partly attributed to a political backlash against the Religious Right. Yet the concept of “political backlash” remains undertheorized, limiting our ability to evaluate how backlash against the Religious Right has impacted the religious field as a whole. This article develops a general account of how political backlash against a radical actor can impact participants within a given field, distinguishing between broad backlash, narrow backlash, and counter backlash. It then applies this framework to the case of the religious field. An analysis of available evidence suggests that backlash against the Religious Right has had ripple effects beyond the rise of the “nones,” including a rise in “spiritual” identification, positive attention to the “Religious Left,” depoliticization of liberal religion, and purification and radicalization within the Religious Right itself. This article encourages religion scholars to connect dots between trends that have not been understood as related, and deepens our understanding of the relational nature of religious change. More generally, it offers a framework for understanding how backlash against radical actors can shape entire fields.

Divine Warning or Prelude to Secularization? Religion, Politics, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkey

Religion was a major pillar in the government’s pandemic management and featured centrally in a string of public controversies in the course of the coronavirus crisis in Turkey. This article analyzes the role of Islam in the political and social responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey, with a focus on four dimensions: (1) religion as a tool of governance, (2) the regulation of collective religious practices, (3) religious interpretations of the pandemic, and (4) predictions about the future impact of the coronavirus crisis on religion. Based on this analysis, the study concludes that the salience and political function of religion in the course of pandemics are contingent upon the place of religious mobilization in the political repertoire of the ruling party and the balance of power between the government and the religious field, respectively. The government's extensive instrumentalization of religion in pandemic management, on the other hand, is likely to give rise to a political backlash against organized religion.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the concept of financialization, surveys the scholarly literature on this topic, and makes the case for this book’s novel contribution to these debates. It is widely recognized that the world economy has become financialized, yet the role of states in furthering this process has been underexamined. While many accounts point out that states were crucial in propelling financialization through policies of financial liberalization, these accounts tend to argue that the state did so either due to the lobbying power of financial elites and the influence of neoliberal norms or because policymakers were seeking to construct an alternative growth model based on financial accumulation. These two accounts of the role of states in spurring financialization—which can be termed interest-based and ideational explanations and functionalist explanations—fail to capture the reactive and ad hoc nature of the policymaking that resulted in financial liberalization. In the case of Britain, the agenda of financial liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s that propelled the City of London’s ascent was not chiefly driven by lobbying or ideology, nor was it intended to inaugurate a financialized growth model. Instead, by analysing declassified state archives, this book shows that policymakers pursued such policies as short-term measures to navigate through the stagflation crisis of that era. Financial liberalization was deployed in a messy fashion, either to postpone the worst effects of the crisis so as to maintain governing legitimacy, or to enact painful economic restructuring in a manner that shielded the state from political backlash.

‘An Eye for an Aye’: linguistic and political backlash and conformity in eighteenth-century Scots

This study examines the effect of political change on the use of written Scots during the eighteenth century. In particular, it compares a cross-section of texts from literate Scottish society, with works from certain politically-active authors, who identified strongly as pro- or anti-Union following the creation of the British state in 1707. The proportion of Scots to English lexemes in their writing is explored using conditional inference trees and random forests, in a small, purpose-built corpus. Use of Scots is shown to differ between the two groups, with specific extralinguistic factors encouraging or suppressing the presence of written Scots. Frequency of Scots is also found to be influenced by the political ideology of the politicised authors. These results are linked to the Scottish political scene during the eighteenth century, as well as general processes of change over time.

Rethinking Value Chains

Today, production processes have become fragmented with a range of activities divided among firms and workers across borders. These global value chains are being strongly promoted by international organizations, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, but social and political backlash is mounting in a growing variety of forms. This original volume brings together academics and activists from Europe to think creatively about the social and environmental imbalances of global production and how to reform the current economic system.

House prices threaten political backlash in Europe

The growing challenge in accessing affordable and secure housing could spiral into a political crisis if left unresolved

Open Economy Politics Revisited

Scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) working in the open economy politics (OEP) tradition use interests, institutions and international bargaining to explain economic policies, as well as international economic relations. A large amount of research in IPE today fits squarely within the OEP paradigm, which makes OEP itself an expedient subject for investigation. This chapter describes the OEP framework and discusses recent developments that have challenged it, including the behavioral revolution and the growing importance of economic geography. An evaluation of how the paradigm has evolved in response to these challenges is undertaken. The chapter concludes with a discussion of emerging issues that confront the OEP paradigm going forward, including the rise of China and the growing political backlash against globalization and the liberal international order.