Suchergebnisse

THE THEME I PROPOSE TO TREAT HERE RUNS LIKE A PARALLEL tributary to the mainstream of Giovanni Sartori's theme: 'We are living above and beyond our intelligence'. But while Sartori concentrates his attention on the pros and cons of 'political engineering' in the modern society, its feasibility and cost benefits, I concentrate on the question which can be summarily formulated as follows: 'can modern political judgment itself, i.e. before it sets political engineering, or indeed policy-making, in motion, comprehend (in the double meaning of the expression) the issues upon which it should be exerted in their individual esotericism and in their collective array?' But before starting to examine this question, I must make a few caveats.

This study theorizes that news coverage of political issues not only influences people's thinking about the issues but also activates associated racial or ethnic stereotypes held by individuals and influences whether these perceptions are applied in politically meaningful ways, such as in the formation of issue positions or evaluations about whether certain political, economic, or legal outcomes are positive for U.S. society. To test these ideas, an experiment was conducted in which the news frame of immigration was systematically altered—as either material or ethical in nature—within controlled political information environments to examine how individuals process, interpret, and use issue information in forming political judgments. The findings provide strong support for the perspective that news coverage of issues, by priming subjects to focus on some considerations and relationships and not others, influences the strength of the associations between individuals' racial cognitions and their political evaluations.

Within a framework of reasoning voters who use various cognitive shortcuts -- heuristics -- to arrive at decision, we classify Italian voters on the basis of the information they possess, how information & judgment are organized & whether preferences match actual vote. By using only two sets of variables present in nearly all election surveys, we distinguish four types of voters: Utilius, a sort of Downsian voter that uses the left-right dimension in order to reduce the complexity of politics to a unidimensional space; Amicus, who conceives politics as an arena in which two main coalitions fight; Aliens, a detached voter that is strongly disinterested in -- or even disappointed by -- politics & its protagonists; & Medians, who belongs to a residual category. By distinguishing voters according to their actual knowledge & style of political reasoning, we provide a classification that is both able to grasp actual differences in the level of political cognition & sophistication, & suggestive with respect to the kind of information that are pertinent for the task at hand. We demonstrate that people follow multiple strategies & rely selectively on different kind of available information. It follows that parties, leaders, coalitions & media affect voter behavior, but they have different leverage on different types of voters. We conclude that a proper account of voter behavior needs to move from the search of the determinants of vote to the search of multiple mechanisms through which voters perceive, represent & evaluate the political landscape. Tables, Figures, References. [Copyright 2005 Elsevier Ltd.]

Although men and women often differ in political attitudes and behavior, there is no widely accepted scientific explanation of such phenomena. After surveying evidence concerning gender differences in the fields of social psychology, ethology, neurology, cultural anthropology, and political science, five hypotheses concerning the way males and females respond to social cues are derived from the neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection. The predicted differences in the mode of political cognition are then shown to be consistent with findings from experimental studies of emotional and cognitive reactions to televised facial displays of political leaders.

Research on metaphor's role in politics has thus far focused predominately on metaphors used by the political elite. While these metaphors are important, they provide limited insight on metaphor's capacity as a reasoning tool for citizens. Metaphor as a cognitive mechanism enables citizens to make sense of the political world by drawing from previous knowledge and experience in nonpolitical domains. Because metaphors shape and constrain understanding by framing it within existing knowledge structures, they generate important predispositions. As a result, the study of metaphor offers an opportunity to enrich our descriptive understanding of the political cognition of citizens. The implicit nature of metaphorical reasoning means that empirical investigation will be a challenge for future research, but previous studies on metaphor suggest some productive avenues. Metaphor offers not only the chance to better explain how citizens view the political world and why they hold the preferences they do, but its criteria and processes also hold wider relevance for political psychology research.

AbstractMany Americans associate themselves with their political party in a deep, visceral way. Voter identification with a political party has powerful implications for not just how voters behave, but how there are exposed to and receive information about the world. We describe how this tying of one's self-concept to a party, which can be analogous to die-hard sports fandom, plays a central role in political cognition. It leads voters identifying with the two parties to perceive the political (and even seemingly apolitical) world in dramatically different ways. We detail the psychological mechanisms by which this party identity produces these distortions and offer examples of the bias that emerges. We conclude by discussing the implications of these phenomena for perpetuating our current hyper-polarized political discourse.

Political discourse is a recent but increasingly exciting field of study. The political discourse offers much scope for interdisciplinary research. This current study is a stylistic analysis of the Inaugural speech delivered by Nigerian President Muhammadu Bukhari in Abuja on 29th May 2015. The current study aims to signify the role of Stylistics in CDA to unleash socio-political cognition in speeches. This qualitative research owing to its interdisciplinary nature draws on stylistics and critical discourse analysis as well. Teun A. Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach is used to analyze the mental models underlying linguistic structures made explicit through stylistic analysis. The stylistic analysis is conducted on lexical and grammatical levels, but cohesion and speech acts have also been highlighted in the findings and discussion part. The study explores how stylistic devices are used to create a rhetorical effect and how this effect qualifies for being persuasive. The stylistic analysis reconnoiters the linguistic patterns, and CDA leads to the ideologies that shape these patterns. This study strengthens the belief that both stylistics and critical discourse analysis have great scope and power in revealing discursive practices of hegemony and persuasion.