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How do citizens perceive the use of Artificial Intelligence in public sector decisions?
In: Government information quarterly: an international journal of policies, resources, services and practices, Volume 41, Issue 1, p. 101906
ISSN: 0740-624X
Towards a multifaceted measure of perceived legitimacy of participatory governance
In: Governance: an international journal of policy and administration, Volume 37, Issue 3, p. 711-728
ISSN: 1468-0491
AbstractPolicy decision‐making modes in governance contexts have become increasingly participatory. This raises questions about legitimacy, and how to measure this concept. The current article advances a multifaceted measurement of perceived legitimacy of policy decision‐making modes in participatory governance, capturing the three components of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output) with two items each. This six‐item measure was tested in a vignette survey (total N = 4583), which was administered among four types of democratic stakeholders: politicians, civil servants, civil society, and citizens. Respondents completed the scale for four different policy decision‐making modes (representative, consultative, co‐decisive, and decisive). Our six‐item scale shows excellent internal consistency as an encompassing measure, while at the same time also allowing for fine‐grained analyses on difference patterns in the input, throughput, and output components of legitimacy. As such, it provides a relevant and parsimonious tool for future research that requires a multifaceted measurement of the perceived legitimacy of participatory governance.
Diverse Reactions to Ethnic Diversity: The Role of Individual Differences in Authoritarianism
Issues related to ethnic-cultural diversity often make the news headlines in popular media and have attracted extensive attention in the political arena, as well as in academic research in psychology, political sciences, and sociology. Political scientist Robert Putnam reported that increased diversity is associated with a range of negative outcomes, including less trust, a decreased sense of community, more prejudice, and more cynicism and mistrust toward politics and politicians. Yet given that follow-up studies have often revealed mixed results, a novel approach to understanding the effects of diversity is needed. Here, we address the impact of diversity from a Person × Context interaction perspective, demonstrating that diversity aggravates the negative attitudes that already exist among certain individuals. Specifically, we review the accumulated evidence showing that people high in authoritarian attitudes are particularly sensitive to diversity and prone to react with increased negativity to out-groups, politicians, the political system, and democracy. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published
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Ethnic Diversity and Support for Populist Parties: The "Right" Road Through Political Cynicism and Lack of Trust
In: Social psychology, Volume 49, Issue 3, p. 182-189
ISSN: 2151-2590
Abstract. Putnam's (2007) constrict claim states that ethnic diversity has serious consequences for social cohesion, making people distrustful and leery. The present contribution extends this claim by including political cynicism and trust as side effects of diversity. Moreover, we nuance this claim by considering citizens' social-ideological attitudes as moderators of diversity effects. Using a Dutch nationally stratified sample (N = 628), we showed that both objective and perceived diversity were associated with more political cynicism and less trust, but only for those high in right-wing attitudes (i.e., social dominance orientation and particularly authoritarianism). Furthermore, only political cynicism was a unique predictor of greater populist party support. Implications for the ongoing debates on the rise in diversity and populist parties are discussed.
Ethnic Diversity and Support for Populist Parties
Abstract. Putnam's (2007) constrict claim states that ethnic diversity has serious consequences for social cohesion, making people distrustful and leery. The present contribution extends this claim by including political cynicism and trust as side effects of diversity. Moreover, we nuance this claim by considering citizens' social-ideological attitudes as moderators of diversity effects. Using a Dutch nationally stratified sample (N = 628), we showed that both objective and perceived diversity were associated with more political cynicism and less trust, but only for those high in right-wing attitudes (i.e. social dominance orientation and particularly authoritarianism). Furthermore, only political cynicism was a unique predictor of greater populist party support. Implications for the ongoing debates on the rise in diversity and populist parties are discussed. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published
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Diversity and Out-Group Attitudes in the Netherlands: The Role of Authoritarianism and Social Threat in the Neighbourhood
In: Journal of ethnic and migration studies: JEMS, Volume 40, Issue 9, p. 1414-1430
ISSN: 1469-9451
Diversity and Out-Group Attitudes in the Netherlands: The Role of Authoritarianism and Social Threat in the Neighbourhood
In: Journal of ethnic and migration studies: JEMS, Volume 40, Issue 9/10, p. 1414-1430
ISSN: 1369-183X
The Mobilizing Effect of Right‐Wing Ideological Climates: Cross‐Level Interaction Effects on Different Types of Outgroup Attitudes
In: Political psychology: journal of the International Society of Political Psychology, Volume 38, Issue 5, p. 757-776
ISSN: 1467-9221
The present research investigated a multilevel person‐context interactionist framework for the relationship between right‐wing ideologies and prejudice across two large, representative samples (Study 1: European Social Survey: N = 56,752; Study 2: World Values Survey: N = 74,042). Across three different operationalizations of right‐wing ideology, two contextual levels (regional and national) of right‐wing climate, and three types of outgroup attitudes (i.e., age‐, ethnicity‐, and gender‐based), the analyses consistently revealed cross‐level interactions, showing a strong association between right‐wing attitudes and negative outgroup attitudes at the individual level in contexts with a low right‐wing climate, whereas this relationship is weaker and often even absent in contexts with a high right‐wing climate. These cross‐level interactions remained significant after controlling for statistical artefacts (i.e., restriction of range and outliers). The authors propose norm setting as the mobilizing mechanism through which a right‐wing climate develops and curbs the influence of individual right‐wing social‐ideological attitudes on outgroup attitudes.
The Mobilizing Effect of Right-Wing Ideological Climates: Cross-Level Interaction Effects on Different Types of Outgroup Attitudes
In: Political psychology: journal of the International Society of Political Psychology
ISSN: 0162-895X
SSRN
Working paper
Democratic and Authoritarian Government Preferences in Times of Crisis: An Experimental Investigation
In: Social psychology, Volume 55, Issue 1, p. 37-50
ISSN: 2151-2590
Abstract: Prior studies have linked societal threats to a surge in conservative attitudes. We conducted three studies ( N = 1,021) to investigate whether hypothetical threat situations impact peoples' attitudes toward democracy or alternative systems. Study 1 shows that individuals under threat devaluate representative and participatory government types and show relatively stronger endorsement of less democratic alternatives. Study 2 clarifies that extranational threats elicit a greater shift toward nondemocratic 'solutions' than intranational threats and that citizens generally find a just process less important in times of crisis. Study 3 shows that the effect of threat on support for technocracy can be explained by heightened anticipated anxiety. We find no evidence that anticipated emotions consistently account for the observed shifts in government preferences under threat.
Analysing policy actors' preferences for different modes of governing in local government
In: Policy & politics, p. 1-22
ISSN: 1470-8442
Effective citizen participation in policy decision making depends on the support of all democratic actors involved: citizens, but also politicians and civil servants. Drawing on data from over 4,000 respondents, we explore the existence of so-called 'multi-actor clusters', that is, groups of people who are characterised by a positive (or negative) stance towards different modes of local policy decision making, irrespective of their formal-institutional role (politician, civil servant or citizen). Cluster analysis shows two large clusters of respondents that clearly prefer participatory over representative policy decision making. The analysis also highlights a substantial cluster of respondents who clearly prefer representative policy decision making modes over participatory ones. Further analysis shows that a democratic actor's cluster membership is better predicted by individual (ideological) variables (such as left-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), compared to contextual variables (like governing capacity, democratic quality, and social capital of the municipality in which the actors work and/or live). This research is important because it challenges the assumption that citizen participation is to be considered primarily as (part of) the solution for local governance problems like a lack of governing capacity, low social capital or decreased democratic quality in/of specific local communities. In this way, it contributes to our understanding of participatory forms of governance.
Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty
In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Volume 119, Issue 44, p. 1-8
This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers' expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team's workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers' results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.