Suchergebnisse

Food embedded with symbolic meaning has power in politics. Food as political communication is extensively studied as a nation branding and public diplomacy tool. However, academic studies seem to overlook the role that food plays in populism and political polarization. Pointing out a gap in the field, I explore the role of culinary culture in Turkish politics between 2013 and 2019 to demonstrate its polarizing effect and its role in social engineering. I argue that social engineering as part of constructing native/national culinary items, efforts to polarize people through an AKP-sanctioned culinary tradition, and the particulars of the palace menu, are at once contradictory and consistent. Despite government efforts to appeal to average people and to polarize the public both by replacing alcohol with native/national and familiar ayran and grape juice, and by distributing aşure to the people, branded with the symbol of the presidency, the palace kitchen has also invoked the neo-Ottoman exotic by serving dragon fruit smoothie and chia seeds.

An analysis of county-level data from the 2004 election shows only slight increases in geographic polarization and political segregation. In addition, there is no evidence that strongly partisan counties became more so between 2000 and 2004.

Polarization hallmarks contemporary Washington's political landscape. While an increasing literature examines the factors propelling this schism, theoretical work investigating its consequences has just begun. Building from a simple bargaining model in which an exogenous actor (e.g. the president) strategically allocates scarce `political capital' to induce changes in legislators' preferences, we examine how varying the chamber's preference distribution affects the policies that result. Instead of miring presidents' preferred policies in gridlock, the model shows that ideological polarization — in the form of a bimodal distribution — can actually enable a president to pass policies closer to his ideal than would have been possible under greater ideological homogeneity.

A growing literature finds that social identity attachments to ideological and partisan groups often generate mistrust, hostility, and prejudice toward opposition groups. Yet, there are no studies of whether attachments to ideological groups (i.e., left, right, liberal, and conservative) contribute to political intolerance—defined as an unwillingness to extend basic liberties to groups one opposes—a widely studied and politically consequential form of outgroup hostility. Using both observational and experimental data, we examine how social identity attachments to left–right groups in Israel influence Jewish Israelis' political intolerance of disliked domestic groups, that is, least-liked groups and Arab citizens. In contrast to other studies—mostly in the US—that find roughly parallel levels of political and social prejudice toward opposition groups, we theorize and find that more strongly attached rightists and leftists in Israel become more polarized in their levels of political tolerance toward disliked groups. Among rightists, stronger identities decrease tolerance, whereas among leftists, political tolerance increases. Thus, outside the US, identity strength can actually be a protector of democratic values, leading some groups (i.e., Jewish leftists) to become more tolerant.

Empathic ability is the ability to interpret the emotional state of others. In today's highly partisan and polarized environment, empathic ability may play a key role in determining how partisans respond emotionally to changes in public policy and those helped or harmed by the policy. Utilizing Baron‐Cohen et al.'s (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241–251, 2001) "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test to measure empathic ability, we conduct a survey experiment where we asked participants to read about a partisan individual who may lose their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act were to be repealed. We show that empathic ability shapes attitudes about people and policies, but that the effects are contingent upon the respondent's partisanship, the target's partisanship, and an interaction of the two. Empathic ability produces more positive affect and policy support among Democrats but reduces positive affect among Republicans. The divergent effects of empathic ability on Democrats and Republicans are further exacerbated when the target is an out‐partisan.

Measuring the extent to which distribution is polarized has recently attracted some attention from economists. Polarization, though related to inequality, is a different concept and implies a tendency towards clustering of observations into groups. It is of interest because it may be related to the generation of tensions and social unrest.

In independent studies, Esteban and Ray (1994) and Wolfson (1994) conceptualized the notion of polarization and developed the corresponding measures. Since their papers, many other indices have been proposed. Particularly, in a recent paper in this journal, Grad´ın (2002) uses an extension of the Esteban and Ray measure.

In this paper we point out some problems with this extended measure of polarization and explore an alternative formulation for the extension so as to solve the problem identified. An illustration of the use of these tools taking data from 22 Latin American countries shows the possibilities of this new measure and how polarization and inequality can often differ in practice.

Measuring the polarization of legislators and parties is a key step in understanding how politics develops over time. But in parliamentary systems—where ideological positions estimated from roll calls may not be informative—producing valid estimates is extremely challenging. We suggest a new measurement strategy that makes innovative use of the "accuracy" of machine classifiers, i.e., the number of correct predictions made as a proportion of all predictions. In our case, the "labels" are the party identifications of the members of parliament, predicted from their speeches along with some information on debate subjects. Intuitively, when the learner is able to discriminate members in the two main Westminster parties well, we claim we are in a period of "high" polarization. By contrast, when the classifier has low accuracy—and makes a relatively large number of mistakes in terms of allocating members to parties based on the data—we argue parliament is in an era of "low" polarization. This approach is fast and substantively valid, and we demonstrate its merits with simulations, and by comparing the estimates from 78 years of House of Commons speeches with qualitative and quantitative historical accounts of the same. As a headline finding, we note that contemporary British politics is approximately as polarized as it was in the mid-1960s—that is, in the middle of the "postwar consensus". More broadly, we show that the technical performance of supervised learning algorithms can be directly informative about substantive matters in social science.

The main objective of this paper is to empirically examine the dynamics of income distribution in Spain between 2008 and 2018 using SILC data. We consider the concepts of polarization and inequality as different aspects of the income distribution. To compute both aspects, we use the measures of Palacios-González and García-Fernández (2012) and the Gini index respectively. Findings indicate that polarization and inequality fluctuate around an upward trend during these years in Spain. Furthermore, the lower and middle income households have been more adversely affected than those with higher incomes, and the middle class has not benefited from the economic growth in Spain.