Suchergebnisse

Recently, there has been a focus on religion as an essential catalyst for political participation & renewed civic engagement. Various claims share the common assumption that religion promotes the essential components of political participation including motivation, recruitment, & ability. Using survey data from the 2000 National Election Study, we examine the processes that link the structural & cognitive dimensions of religion with political discussion networks, mass media use, & various indicators of democratic citizenship, including political participation. Our results show that current claims related to religion may be oversold. Specifically, we find that the cognitive dimension of religion leads to several negative effects on aspects of democratic citizenship. Our results also indicate that the structural effects of religion are limited, compared to secular networks, which provide an ideal setting for citizens to gain & exchange information, increase feelings of efficacy, & -- most importantly -- engage in various forms of participation. 2 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 65 References. Adapted from the source document.

This study examines sources of variation in political participation and cognition, testing the effects of several factors on individuals' engagement in the local political process including, as dependent variables, local political involvement, local issue awareness, and attitude strength. Our study highlights the importance of discussion networks and mass media for local political involvement, issue awareness, and attitude strength. In other words, the idea—vocalized by many political scientists—that demographic variables and ideological differences explain most of the variance in people's involvement in politics and attitudes was not supported by our data. Ties to the community, social networks, and other communication variables also played a key role. Both the direction and the extremity of ideological beliefs were related to the strength with which respondents held their attitudes on a local issue. Even when these more stable predictors were controlled for, we again found strong influences of heterogeneous discussion networks, local newspaper use, and local political involvement.

This study examined the attribute agenda-setting function of the media, which refers to significant correspondence between prominent issue attributes in the media and the agenda of attributes among audiences. An opinion survey on a local issue and a content analysis of a local newspaper revealed that, by covering certain issue aspects more prominently, the media increase the salience of these aspects among audience members. We also found an important outcome of attribute agenda setting, attribute priming effects. Findings indicated that issue attributes salient in the media were functioning as significant dimensions of issue evaluation among audience members. This study concluded that the media, by emphasizing certain attributes of an issue, tell us "how to think about" this issue as well as "what to think about."

Living in an age of big data, this study explores (a) how much certain online information is shared by media users and (b) what sentiments do social media users predominantly express on Twitter. Quantitative findings indicate that after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Japan, the amount of nuclear energy–related tweets that were linked to outside information far outnumbered tweets containing no external link. Results also indicate that the predominant tone in these tweets was one of pessimism about nuclear energy.