Suchergebnisse

How does intergroup inequality, specifically minority experiences of persecution, affect contributions to local public goods? Based on an original survey experiment and qualitative research in slums in Delhi, we examine how Hindus and Muslims respond to social norms around promoting cooperation on community sanitation. Mainstream theories of development predict greater willingness to contribute to public goods in more homogeneous areas. In contrast to the "diversity-deficit hypothesis," however, we find that social accountability mechanisms are more effective among Muslims, a group that routinely faces discrimination and violence in India. We propose that this reflects "defensive cooperation," or a set of coping strategies developed by minorities to navigate a hostile sociopolitical environment. Our findings point to a new mechanism that helps to enforce prosocial norms and, hence, public goods provision in multiethnic contexts.

In political science, research using computer-assisted text analysis techniques has exploded in the last fifteen years. This scholarship spans work studying political ideology,1 congres-sional speech,2 representational style,3 American foreign policy,4 climate change attitudes,5 media,6 Islamic clerics,7 and treaty making,8 to name but a few. As these examples illustrate, com-puter-assisted text analysis—a prime example of mixed-meth-ods research—allows gaining new insights from long-familiar political texts, like parliamentary debates, and altogether en-ables the analysis to new forms of political communication, such as those happening on social media.

AbstractDo exclusionary policies mobilize minority political participation? We theorize that the threat of exclusionary policies creates and resurfaces grievances that facilitate mobilization. To test our theory, we leverage Donald Trump's announcement of a peace plan for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which posed a threat to the citizenship status of Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in the Triangle area adjacent to the West Bank. First, using more than 170,000 posts from public Facebook groups and pages, we show that Trump's announcement was indeed a more salient political event for Triangle residents. Then, employing locality‐level election data as well as records detailing the origin of citizens' joining a Jewish‐Arab social movement, we use a difference‐in‐difference design to demonstrate that the threat to citizenship imposed by Trump's plan increased mobilization in the Triangle area. Our evidence from three distinct data sources suggests that threats of exclusion can mobilize minority political behavior.

Abstract
A counter-intuitive finding emerges from an analysis of Arabic Twitter posts from 2014 to 2015: Twitter participants who are negative toward the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) are also more likely to hold negative views of the United States. This surprising correlation is due to the interpretations of two sets of users. One set of users views the United States and ISIS negatively as independent interventionist powers in the region. The other set of users negatively links the United States with ISIS, often asserting a secretive conspiracy between the two. The intense negativity toward the United States in the Middle East seems conducive to views that, in one way or another, cause citizens to link the United States and ISIS in a conspiratorial manner.

Systematic investigation of attitudes expressed in Arabic on Twitter towards the United States and Iran during 2012–13 shows how the analysis of social media can illuminate the politics of contemporary political discourses and generates an informative analysis of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. We not only analyze overall attitudes, but using a novel events-based analytical strategy, we examine reactions to specific events, including the removal of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, theInnocence of Muslimsvideo, and reactions to possible U.S. intervention in Syria. We also examine the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013, in which the United States suffered damage from human beings, and Hurricane Sandy, in which it suffered damage from nature. Our findings reinforce evidence from polling that anti-Americanism is pervasive and intense, but they also suggest that this animus is directed less toward American society than toward the impingement of the United States on other countries. Arabic Twitter discourses about Iran are at least as negative as discourses about the United States, and less ambivalent. Anti-Americanism may be a specific manifestation of a more general phenomenon: resentment toward powerful countries perceived as interfering in national and regional affairs.

Of critical importance in the applications of quality of life theory and measurement to clinical situations is the need to know how the different components of quality of life relate to each other and what these relationships mean. To answer this question, the present study reanalyzes data collected 6 months after surgery on 469 patients with cardiovascular problems. The data were factor analyzed and five factors were extracted, namely, Symptoms of Illness, Neurological Dysfunction, Interpersonal Relationships, Morale, and Socioeconomic Status. Because the factor scores derived from these five factors intercorrelated, we were able to hypothesize causal models suggesting how the factors might affect each other. Two competing models were tested against the data using LISREL. A crucial difference between the two models was that in one, Symptoms lowered Morale whereas in the other, low Morale aggravated Symptoms, i.e., a psychosomatic effect. The first model fitted the data very well in contrast to the second model which did not fit the data at all. The authors consider the implications of the first model for improving quality of life in cardiac patients.

We study Chinese attitudes toward the United States, and secondarily toward Japan, Russia, and Vietnam, by analyzing social media discourse on the Chinese social media site, Weibo. We focus separately on a general analysis of attitudes and on Chinese responses to specific international events involving the United States. In general, we find that Chinese netizens are much more interested in US politics than US society. Their views of the United States are characterized by deep ambivalence; they have remarkably favorable attitudes toward many aspects of US influence, whether economic, political, intellectual, or cultural. Attitudes toward the United States become negative when the focus turns to US foreign policy – actions that Chinese netizens view as antithetical to Chinese interests. On the contrary, attitudes toward Japan, Russia, and Vietnam vary a great deal from one another. The contrast between these differentiated Chinese views toward the United States and other countries, on the one hand, and the predominant anti-Americanism in the Middle East, on the other, is striking.