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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- 1 Political Attitudes in Venezuela: Problems and Prospects -- 2 The Social Context of Political Opinion -- 3 The Social Context of Political Experience -- 4 Cultural Diversity and Political Cleavages, I: The Community Context -- 5 Cultural Diversity and Political Cleavages, II: The Ideological Connection -- 6 Partisanship in Venezuelan Politics -- 7 Summary and Conclusions -- Appendix A. The Research Design -- Appendix B. The Questionnaire -- Appendix C. Estimation of Social Class Status -- Appendix D. Note on the Use of Regression Analysis -- Appendix E. Note on Inference Making from Multiple-Range (one-way analysis of variance) Tests -- Appendix F. Scales and Indices -- Appendix G. Note on the Use of Multidimensional Scaling -- Notes -- Subject Index -- Author Index

Does public opinion affect political speech? Of particular interest is whether public opinion affects (i) what topics politicians address and (ii) what positions they endorse. We present evidence from Germany where the government was recently forced to declassify its public opinion research, allowing us to link the content of the research to subsequent speeches. Our causal identification strategy exploits the exogenous timing of the research's dissemination to cabinet members within a window of a few days. We find that exposure to public opinion research leads politicians to markedly change their speech. First, we show that linguistic similarity between political speech and public opinion research increases significantly after reports are passed on to the cabinet, suggesting that politicians change the topics they address. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to public opinion research alters politicians' substantive positions in the direction of majority opinion.

Cultural segmentation is seen as one possible source of political cleavages. Based on this assumption, the influence of regionalism on political opinions in Venezuela is studied. Besides regionalism, the literature suggests as other sources of political cleavages: ideology, religion, & modernity. In 1973, a random sample of 1,521 Venezuelan voters was interviewed. The questionnaire included 113 different items requiring 145 responses. The results suggest that regional differences seem to be the weakest factor in political cleavages; ideology appears to be the most resilient source of cleavages. Among the territorial sources of cleavages, urbanism has become more important than regionalism. Political differences are not the result of the SE characteristics of the individuals who live in the areas. A residual element related to the ethos or normative idiosyncrasies is still a factor in Venezuelan politics. 1 Figure, 7 Tables. Modified HA.

The advent of scientific PO polling gave democratic governance a new dimension; representatives could discern people's views on virtually any public issue. However, three important questions remain. Are people adequately informed to consider the complex problems of modern government? Do they answer honestly? Should representatives be bound by PO? It is argued that modern PO analysts tend to ignore these questions & instead focus on patterns of attitudes among various population subgroups. Before scientific polling became common, those who studied PO directed their efforts to the connection between behavioral manifestations of PO & the development of public policy. Much of the PO literature preceding scientific polling remains relevant & should not be ignored. Modified HA.

[EN] In the last decade, social media gained a very significant role in public debates, and despite the many intrinsic difficulties of analyzing data streaming from on-line platforms that are poisoned by bots, trolls, and low-quality information, it is undeniable that such data can still be used to test the public opinion and overall mood and to investigate how individuals communicate with each other. With the aim of analyzing the debate in Twitter on the 2016 referendum on the reform of the Italian Constitution, we created an Italian annotated corpus for stance detection for automatically estimating the stance of a relevant number of users. We take into account a diachronic perspective to shed lights on users' opinion dynamics. Furthermore, different types of social network communities, based on friendships, retweets, quotes, and replies were investigated, in order to analyze the communication among users with similar and divergent viewpoints. We observe particular aspects of users' behavior. First, our analysis suggests that users tend to be less explicit in expressing their stances after the outcome of the vote; simultaneously, users who exhibit a high number of cross-stance relations tend to become less polarized or to adopt a more neutral style in the following phase of the debate. Second, despite social media networks are generally aggregated in homogeneous communities, we highlight that the structure of the network can strongly change when different types of social relations are considered. In particular, networks defined by means of reply-to messages exhibit inverse homophily by stance, and users use more often replies for expressing diverging opinions, instead of other forms of communication. Interestingly, we also observe that the political polarization increases forthcoming the election and decreases after the election day. ; The work of Viviana Patti and Giancarlo Ruffo was partially funded by the Fondazione CRT under research project the Hate Speech and Social Media (2016.0688), and the "Progetto di ...

This article was written in response to the attacks on Annie Ernaux following the announcement by the Swedish Academy of its decision to award her the Nobel Prize in Literature on 6 October 2022. In particular, it discusses the accusation of anti-Zionism, more or less explicitly conflated with antisemitism. Through the analysis of texts signed by Ernaux, the article demonstrates that this accusation is a baseless attempt to discredit the Nobel Prize laureate in public opinion. The article also calls into question other accusations made against the writer during the programme 'Répliques' by Alain Finkielkraut, on 26 November 2022, on the France Culture radio station.