Suchergebnisse

As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behaviour. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variables, political preferences etc.) that shape the level of internal and external dimensions of political efficacy. However, while it is widely demonstrated that media consumption influences the level of political efficacy, the country-level media context factors affecting it have rarely been studied. This paper reports the findings of extensive research on how two crucial features of the media context, the political significance of the media and the level of political parallelism in the media system, shape the level of external and internal political efficacy. The investigation draws upon the dataset of the seventh round (2014 – 2015) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and includes more than twenty-two thousand respondents from nineteen European democracies. The research hypothesizes that in countries where the media play a more important role, people have lower levels of external and higher levels of internal political efficacy. Political parallelism, which shows the extent to which media outlets are driven by distinct political orientations and interests within a particular media system, is expected to directly increase both external and internal political efficacy. Its indirect effect is also hypothesized, arguing that partisan media amplifies the winner-loser gap in political efficacy as a kind of "echo chamber". The findings show that in countries where the media play a major role in shaping political discourse, people have lower levels of external political efficacy, while the political parallelism of the media system indirectly affects the external dimensions of political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is, however, not related to these context-level factors.

This research investigates the interaction between the effects of wording and other elements of framing on public attitudes toward asylum policies. In particular, we focus on the labels of asylum-seekers and the discourse about the recent refugee crisis in Europe. In 2015 and 2016, we conducted two survey-experiments in Hungary where mass migration was the major issue on the political agenda at the time of the surveys. The salience of the issue was manipulated in both studies. Earlier findings have indicated that even words with the same meaning could prompt different interpretations in specific contexts. In contrast, we show that even large effects of wording, even if they are driven by differential meaning, can be suppressed by other elements of framing. The paper with the scientific results of this collection are currently under anonymous review. After the review process, the author of this collection will be revealed.

Baruch Kimmerling (1939-2007) was one of Israel's outstanding critical sociologists. In this volume dedicated to his memory, Israeli and Palestinian scholars of several disciplines and generations offer a series of studies on Israel and Palestine, past and present, in dialogue with the research agenda Kimmerling has advanced. Essays discuss Zionism and militarism, frontier and colonization, social protest and the limits of democracy, the sociology of fear and the politics of home -- and Kimmerling's own trajectory