Suchergebnisse

Despite its conceptual and empirical ambiguities, the Left-Right distinction of political preferences is a widely used tool in academic debates on voting and party behaviour, coalition formation and political culture. In a novel contribution to scholarship on the social construction of ideological identities, we investigate the context-dependent nature of the association between different conceptualizations of economic well-being and political orientations along a Left-Right scale. Our theoretical framework distinguishes economic well-being into a materialist and post-materialist dimension, and derives its hypotheses from Social Modernization Theory. Using multivariate analyses with original survey data from 3,449 undergraduate students in Bolivia, Brazil, Italy, Kenya, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, our results show clear patterns and large effect sizes in the association between respondents' macro-economic context and their micro-level ideological orientations. In non-high-income countries, respondents' Left-Right self-placements correlate with a materialist conceptualization of economic well-being, which centres on assessments of their family's real-life economic status. In high-income countries, by contrast, respondents' Left-Right self-placements are associated with a post-materialist conceptualization of economic well-being that is based on normative judgements about inequality aversion.

Using visual and oral approaches, this article presents new findings on the social construction of place and belonging in the aftermath of the UK's Brexit Referendum. Photographs by our British and non-British participants depict everyday life in a seaside town, with rare references to political aspects of migration. In their oral narratives, by contrast, the same participants emphasize the contested nature of belonging, which they associate with Brexit. We argue that the production of distinctly non-contentious photos is a strategy to deal with political uncertainty, reaffirm individuals' sense of place and belonging, and transform experiences of disruption into hope.

Feminist scholars have long debated quantification trends in the social sciences. Of particular concern has been the extent to which the prestige assigned to quantitative methods may reinforce 'malestream' dynamics in academic knowledge production. 'Malestream' dynamics include the (implicit or explicit) privileging of a male-centric lens in the research process and the association of 'hard' numerical data with notions of 'scientifically superior' masculinity. We build on these discussions by asking how the rise in quantitative writings may affect gender disparities in the civil war literature. Using descriptive data from a newly coded dataset that contains 1,851 articles published in high-ranking journals between 1998 and 2018, we, firstly, illustrate how – in the generally male-dominated field of civil war research – the author gender gap is particularly pronounced among quantitative writings. Secondly, we present an in-depth discussion of three articles that use statistical analysis to test the effects of violence on prospects of post-traumatic growth. A distinct difference between the three articles is that they tend to be more sceptical of arguments on 'positive change' following violence the more account they take of gender differentiation in their theoretical framing and/or empirical identification strategy. All in all, our arguments call for greater awareness of gender bias in quantitative research, and for more rigour in currently hegemonic standards of what 'counts' as reliable evidence.