			Home About us Contact

Political Choices (political + choice)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	77%

Selected Abstracts

Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Gian Vittorio Caprara
Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality. [source]

Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2005
Nathan J. Kelly
I address the functioning of the U.S. governing system by analyzing distributional outcomes from 1947 to 2000. The key question is whether public policy influences distributional outcomes. The macropolitics model and power resource theory suggest that left policies should equalize the distribution of income. I utilize single equation error correction models to assess the impact of policy on income inequality through two mechanisms,market conditioning and redistribution. Since nearly every government action influences markets in some way, I examine policy in the aggregate rather than focusing only on policies explicitly designed to redistribute income. The analysis indicates that policy influences inequality through both mechanisms, with left policy producing more equality. The results are consistent with power resource theory and strongly support the macropolitics model. Furthermore, I find that market conditioning is as important as, and works in tandem with, explicit redistribution. [source]

Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice

Feminisms, Islamophobia and Identities

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2005
Haleh Afshar
There has been a tendency of late to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation and aspiring to a single political aim. This effect has been achieved by some authors so as to accommodate Islamophobia, but by others to generate a sense of inclusive unity that encloses all Muslims. We contend that in the post 9/11 climate of Islamophobia women wearing the scarf, the mohajabehs, are making a political choice. They are publicly branding themselves as Muslims at a time when such a label carries the potential fear of making them vulnerable to open hostility. But the Islam that they embody is distinct and different from the stark, gendered divides envisaged by protagonists on both side of the Islamophobic divide. The unity demanded by some of the highly vocal and visible Islamic groups marginalises the contestations posed within these groups by women who may be described as feminists. The specificities demanded by those who envisage Islam primarily as an antagonistic political force in the UK are very different from the flexibility that many women envisage. They aspire to belong to the Umma or people of Islam, conceptualised as crossing ethnic, racial, geographical and political boundaries, an identity that is primarily inclusive rather than exclusive. The multiplicities of identities of many mohajabehs sit more easily within the permeable unbounded umma than the constrained gendered boundaries of the combative male political Islamism. [source]

Ideational Origins of Progressive Judicial Activism: The Colombian Constitutional Court and the Right to Health

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2010
Rodrigo M. Nunes
ABSTRACT Why do some constitutional transitions trigger the emergence of progressive judicial activism? This article addresses this question through an analysis of the creation of the Colombian Constitutional Court and its subsequent activism toward rights in general and the right to health in particular. This research suggests that ideational variables are crucial to explain this outcome. On the one hand, the Constitutional Court's behavior reflects the dominance of the institutional conception that it is the judiciary's role to help fulfill the promises of the constitutional text. On the other, programmatic beliefs about the relationship between the rule of law and market-driven economic growth led powerholders to create the court and appoint judges with this orientation. The emergence of progressive judicial activism in Colombia, this analysis suggests, was the unexpected outcome of purposeful political choices made by proponents of neoliberal economics. [source]

Contextual Sources of Ambivalence

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 5 2008
Luke Keele
When will people become ambivalent about politics? One possibility is that the roots of ambivalence lie within the individual, with differences in political knowledge and attitude strength predicting whether a person internalizes the conflicts of politics. Alternately, attitudinal ambivalence could result from structural differences in the way political choices are presented in the wider political environment. We explore the degree to which different environments promote or limit ambivalence using a matching approach in conjunction with a set of multilevel models. We find that campaign environments can induce candidate ambivalence. In presidential elections, campaign efforts promote ambivalence most when competition between partisan campaign efforts is high. In House elections, campaign spending has a direct effect on levels of candidate ambivalence, where a candidate's spending decreases ambivalence about that candidate and increases ambivalence about opponents. [source]

Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice

The Mythology of Human Rights

RATIO JURIS, Issue 3 2008
GUNNAR BECK
The underlying assumption,the idea that there are some human values that deserve special protection,implies the need for both a normative and a conceptual justification. This paper claims that neither can be provided. The normative justification is needed to support the priority of human rights over other human goods and to rank and balance conflicting human rights, but it can't be provided because of the fact of pervasive value pluralism, the fact that human values are many, incompatible and incommensurable. The conceptual justification is needed to avoid arbitrariness in the interpretation of human rights at the adjudication stage. Such a justification is impossible, however, as the concept of human rights, and the concepts used to justify them and to solve their conflicts are "essentially contested concepts." The paper concludes that, provided that the interpretation of human rights presupposes value judgements and political choices, the special legal status accorded to human rights is not justified. [source]

Better to shop than to vote?

BUSINESS ETHICS: A EUROPEAN REVIEW, Issue 3 2001
Noreena Hertz
This paper begins by reflecting on the current generalised political apathy signalled by low voter turnout and falling party membership. It would appear that people are exercising political choices not at the ballot box but by means of consumer activism. Corporations respond to consumer pressure in a way that governments do not, and are gradually assuming the role of global political actors. But this is a dangerous state of affairs for several reasons. In the first place, social welfare can never be the core activity of corporations. Corporate social motives are commercial, and there is a danger that their social policy decisions will be driven by the logic of the market place rather than social need. Recession, for instance, will curtail their social responsiveness, as will decisions to relocate. It is also the case that partnerships between governments and corporates run the risk of removing checks on the growth and abuse of corporate power. And finally, what price does society have to pay for the growth of corporate benevolence? [source]