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Political Opinions (political + opinion)
Selected AbstractsThe Court in England, 1714,1760: A Declining Political Institution?HISTORY, Issue 297 2005HANNAH SMITH Although recent studies of eighteenth-century English politics have moved beyond viewing political activity solely in parliamentary terms and consider the extra-parliamentary dimensions to political life, the royal court has not been included in this development. This article seeks to reassess the political purpose of the court of George I, and particularly that of George II, by analysing how the court functioned both as an institution and as a venue. Although the court was losing ground as an institution, with the royal household declining in political importance, the article argues that the household should not be the only means of measuring the court's political role. Through analysing the court's function as a venue for political brokerage and as a type of political theatre, it is argued that the court retained a political significance throughout the period from 1714 to 1760. The article examines the importance of the court as a place where certain forms of patronage might be obtained, and as a location for political negotiation by ministers and lower-ranking politicians. Moreover, it also analyses how the court was employed as a stage for signalling political opinion through attendance, ceremony, gesture, and costume. [source] Abuse, Torture, Frames, and the Washington PostJOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2010Douglas V. Porpora W. Bennett, R. Lawrence, and S. Livingston (2006, 2007) argue that the press,and the Washington Post in particular,acquiesced to Bush administration framing of the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The administration, they say, framed the events as the isolated abuse of prisoners by "a few bad apples" unreflective of higher responsibility or administration policy. Absent,or near absent, Bennett et al. maintain, was a Post counterframe of the mistreatment as a systematic effect of high level policy, better captured by the word torture. Such pattern of framing, Bennett et al. conclude, supports the Indexing model of U.S. press behavior. This article shows that Bennett et al. understate the strength and consistency of Post counterframing. When articles in the Post are searched not for individual words but for more extended frames, it becomes clear that the Post did in fact engage in considerable counterframing even in the absence of elite political opposition. This case, it is therefore concluded, does not in fact support the Indexing model as Bennett et al. maintain but is rather the kind of case described by R. M. Entman (2004) in which the press exercises greater independence of elite political opinion than the Indexing model admits. W. Bennett, R. Lawrence et S. Livingston (2006, 2007) soutiennent que la presse , et en particulier le Washington Post, ont accepté le cadrage qu'a offert l'administration Bush des mauvais traitements infligés aux prisonniers d'Abou Ghraib. L'administration, disent-ils, a cadré les événements comme étant des actes isolés d'abus de prisonniers par quelques « pommes pourries », sans engager la responsabilité d'instances plus élevées ou de politiques administratives. Ce qui était absent (ou presque absent) des reportages, soutiennent Bennett et al., était un contre-cadrage par le Post des mauvais traitements comme étant plutôt un effet systématique des politiques de haut niveau, ce qui se reflète mieux dans le terme « torture ». Un tel cadrage, concluent Bennett et al., soutient le modèle d'indexation du comportement de la presse américaine. Cet article montre que Bennett et al. sous-estiment la force et la cohérence du contre-cadrage du Post. Lorsque l'on cherche, dans les articles du Post, des cadres plus étendus que des mots individuels, il devient clair que le Post a en fait réalisé un contre-cadrage considérable, même en l'absence d'opposition de la part de l'élite politique. Nous concluons donc que ce cas ne soutient pas le modèle d'indexation, comme Bennett et al. l'affirment, mais qu'il est plutôt du type de cas décrit par R. M. Entman (2004), un cas où la presse exerce une plus grande indépendance par rapport à l'opinion de l'élite politique que ne l'admet le modèle d'indexation. W. Bennett, R. Lawrence und S. Livingston (2006, 2007) argumentieren, dass die Presse , und insbesondere die Washington Post , das Framing der Bush-Regierung bezüglich der Misshandlung von Gefangenen in Abu Ghraib duldete. Die Regierung, so die Autoren, framte die Ereignisse als den isolierten Missbrauch von Gefangenen durch einige wenige und reflektierte dabei eben nicht die übergeordneten Verantwortlichkeiten oder die Verwaltungspolitik. Gänzlich oder fast gefehlt hat laut Bennett et al. ein Gegenframe der Post zum Missbrauch als ein systematischer Effekt übergeordneter Politik, welcher besser mit dem Wort Folter gefasst wäre. Derartige Framing-Muster, so Bennett et al., stützen das Indexing-Modell des Verhaltens der amerikanischen Presse. Vorliegender Artikel zeigt, dass Bennett et al. das Ausmaß und die Kontinuität des Gegenframings durch die Post unterbewerten. Durchsucht man die Artikel der Post nicht nur nach Einzelwörtern sondern nach erweiterten Frames, zeigt sich deutlich, dass die Post sehr wohl Counterframing betrieben hat, und das obwohl eine politische Elite-Opposition gefehlt hat. Dieser Fall stützt also das Indexing-Modell wie Bennett et al. es darstellen gerade nicht, sondern ist eher ein Fall wie R.M. Entman (2004) ihn beschreibt, in dem die Presse größere Unabhängigkeit von der politischen Elitemeinung äußert als das Indexing-Modell zulässt. Resumen W. Bennett, R. Lawrence, y S. Livingston (2006, 2007) sostienen que la prensa,y el Washington Post en particular,acordaron con la administración de Bush en el encuadre sobre el maltrato de los prisioneros de Abu Ghraib. La administración, dicen, encuadró los eventos como abusos aislados de los prisioneros por parte de ,,un par de manzanas podridas" acríticos de la responsabilidad superior o de las políticas de la administración. La ausencia,o casi ausencia, Bennett et al. sostienen, fue el contra-encuadre del Post sobre el maltrato como un efecto sistemático de las políticas de alto nivel, mejor capturado por la palabra tortura. Esa pauta de encuadre, Bennett et al. concluyen, apoya al modelo de Indexación del comportamiento de la prensa de los EE.UU. Este artículo muestra que Bennett et al. subestimaron la fuerza y la consistencia del contra-encuadre del Post. Cuando los artículos en el Post son buscados no por las palabras individuales sino por los encuadres más extendidos, resulta claro que el Post en realidad participa en contra-encuadres considerables aún en la ausencia de la oposición política de elite. Este caso, por lo tanto se concluye, que en realidad no apoya al modelo de Indexación que Bennett et al. sostienen pero es el tipo de caso descrito por R.M. Entman (2004) en el cual la prensa ejercita una gran independencia de la opinión política de elite que lo que admite el modelo de la Indexación. [source] UNCONDITIONAL HOSPITALITY: HIV, ETHICS AND THE REFUGEE ,PROBLEM'BIOETHICS, Issue 5 2006HEATHER WORTH ABSTRACT Refugees, as forced migrants, have suffered displacement under conditions not of their own choosing. In 2000 there were thought to be 22 million refugees of whom 6 million were HIV positive. While the New Zealand government has accepted a number of HIV positive refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, this hospitality is under threat due to negative public and political opinion. Epidemic conditions raise the social stakes attached to sexual exchanges, contagion becomes a major figure in social relationships and social production, and the fears of the contagious nature of those ,just off the plane' connect refugees to an equally deep-seated fear of racial miscegenation. Jacques Derrida's notion of unconditional hospitality is a dream of a democracy which would have a cosmopolitan form. This means that one cannot decide in advance which refugees one might choose to resettle. This paper will use Derrida's notion of unconditional hospitality to emphasise the fragility of HIV positive refugees' position, caught between becoming newly made New Zealand subjects while at the same time having that subjecthood threatened. For Derrida, both ethics and politics demand both an action and a need for a thoughtful response (a questioning without limit). [source] Press Advertising and the Political Differentiation of NewspapersJOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 3 2002Jean J. Gabszewicz The press industry depends in a crucial way on the possibility of financing an important fraction of its activities by advertising receipts. We show that this may induce the editors of the newspapers to moderate the political message they display to their readers, compared with the political opinions they would have expressed otherwise. [source] Automating survey coding by multiclass text categorization techniquesJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 14 2003Daniela Giorgetti Survey coding is the task of assigning a symbolic code from a predefined set of such codes to the answer given in response to an open-ended question in a questionnaire (aka survey). This task is usually carried out to group respondents according to a predefined scheme based on their answers. Survey coding has several applications, especially in the social sciences, ranging from the simple classification of respondents to the extraction of statistics on political opinions, health and lifestyle habits, customer satisfaction, brand fidelity, and patient satisfaction. Survey coding is a difficult task, because the code that should be attributed to a respondent based on the answer she has given is a matter of subjective judgment, and thus requires expertise. It is thus unsurprising that this task has traditionally been performed manually, by trained coders. Some attempts have been made at automating this task, most of them based on detecting the similarity between the answer and textual descriptions of the meanings of the candidate codes. We take a radically new stand, and formulate the problem of automated survey coding as a text categorization problem, that is, as the problem of learning, by means of supervised machine learning techniques, a model of the association between answers and codes from a training set of precoded answers, and applying the resulting model to the classification of new answers. In this article we experiment with two different learning techniques: one based on naive Bayesian classification, and the other one based on multiclass support vector machines, and test the resulting framework on a corpus of social surveys. The results we have obtained significantly outperform the results achieved by previous automated survey coding approaches. [source] More Than Weighting Cognitive Importance: A Dual-Process Model of Issue Framing EffectsPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2008Rune Slothuus Issue frames in policy discourse and news reporting regularly influence citizens' political opinions. Yet, we only have a limited understanding of how and among whom these framing effects occur. I propose a dual-process model of issue framing effects arguing that we must understand mediators of framing (the how question) in connection with individual-level moderators of framing (the whom question). Experimental results show that issue framing affects opinion through different psychological processes depending on who the receiver of the frame is. Among the moderately politically aware or those having weak political values, framing effects were mediated through processes of changing importance of considerations as well as changing content of considerations. Among the highly aware, only the importance change process mediated framing effects, while there were no framing effects among those least aware or those having strong values. [source] Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and ExperienceAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2007Robert Mattes Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans' political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and their perceived supply of democracy (institutionalization) with data from 12 Afrobarometer attitude surveys conducted between 1999 and 2001. A multilevel model that specifies and estimates the impacts of both individual- and national-level factors provides evidence of learning from three different sources. First, people learn about the content of democracy through cognitive awareness of public affairs. Second, people learn about the consequences of democracy through direct experience of the performance of governments and (to a lesser extent) the economy. Finally, people draw lessons about democracy from national political legacies. [source] | ||||||||||