Suchergebnisse

How do regular people define the term "political"? This original study gives Americans and Canadians an opportunity to express their interpretations of the concept. It identifies a great deal of inter-personal variation in terms of how many and what kinds of topics people perceive as the stuff of politics. And this variation comes in predictable patterns: the findings reveal correlations between socio-political attributes (such as gender, nationality and ideology) and the boundaries people draw around the political domain. The study also provides insight into the ways people distinguish the political from the non-political in their minds. And importantly, individuals' interpretations of the term "politics" relate systematically to other measures of self-reported political behavior including political interest and frequency of political discussion. These results can be used to refine survey analysis and to broaden knowledge of day-to-day citizen politics. Adapted from the source document.

This article asks how social engagement influences individuals' immigration concerns. Rates of volunteering, churchgoing, socializing, and helping others are used to predict anti-immigration sentiments. Panel survey data from Germany makes a dynamic "conditional change" modeling strategy possible; lagged immigration views are included in models to reveal the predictors of over time developments. The most robust findings signal that frequent church attendance reduces immigration concerns; routinely helping others enhances them. And in both instances, these relationships are conditioned by the presence of immigrants in the residential area. Overall, the results position social participation in certain activities as important factors that shape people's views on immigration.

Decades of evidence point to the vital role of parents in shaping their children's partisan leanings, particularly concerning mainstream parties. And yet the contours of intergenerational influence remain quite obscured. For instance, scholars disagree on when social learning in the household occurs (childhood vs adolescence) and about who is the dominant socializer (mother vs father). Data from a long-term German household panel survey allow for a fine-grained examination of intergenerational influence processes over time. We model the partisan preferences of 18-year-olds as a function of their mothers' and fathers' own contemporaneous and past partisan preferences. Our intergenerational inquiry reveals that mothers dominate socialization during childhood while influence in late adolescence is more evenly distributed between mothers and fathers. We also find that mothers have an advantage over fathers in communicating center-left party preferences. These findings have implications for our understanding of socialization, partisanship, and democratic stability.

When people say that they trust local authorities, is it simply because they have generalized trust in national government? Or is trust in local government rooted in distinctive considerations, connected to the character of local communities and the balance of power across levels of government? We explore how trust in local and national government differs across individuals and across countries in western Europe. We find that people trust local government for different reasons than those that drive trust in national government. Cross-national differences in levels of trust in government reflect the character of national institutions. While both proportional representation systems and federal systems are power-sharing designs, each has distinctive consequences for trust. When opportunities for voice in local government are high, as in decentralized systems, people report greater trust in local government. When opportunities for voice in national government are limited, as in majoritarian systems, people report lower trust for national government and higher trust in local government.