Search Results (18)

This study investigates how U.S. presidential political leadership affects financial market performance at the sector level, offering a novel contribution to the literature that has largely focused on aggregate market indices. While prior research documents partisan effects on overall stock returns, little is known about how different sectors respond to changes in political leadership. Using sector-specific exchange-traded funds (ETFs) categorized by the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), we examine sectoral return patterns and volatility under Republican and Democratic presidencies. This study contributes to the growing intersection of finance and political economy by providing a nuanced, empirical understanding of sectoral behavior across political cycles. The results offer valuable insights for investors, portfolio managers, and policymakers, enhancing their ability to anticipate sector-level risks and opportunities under changing political leadership. Full article

This study aims to evaluate the complex relationship between online media consumption, the quality of the digital landscape, and participatory democracy in EU member states. The research is focused on a long-term statistical series from 2000 to 2024. It evaluates the temporal dynamics and structural shifts in media consumption and democratic participation across EU member states. The paper evaluates the influence of social media usage, online media consumption, traditional media, and online media partisanship on different levels of democratic participation based on theoretical frameworks of liberal and deliberative democracy and networked political communication. The results show that the use of social media for offline political networks is positively associated with democratic participation across all quantiles. In contrast, online media consumption has a more pronounced impact among already active citizens. Online media bias is negatively correlated with participatory democracy, especially at high levels, suggesting that media partisanship could inhibit or demotivate civic participation. Traditional media, when consumed critically, remains an important vector of democratic engagement, especially for active citizens. The results exhibit the ambivalent role played by online media, which might stimulate or constrain democratic participation by the level of partisanship. Full article

Religion and partisanship remain deeply intertwined in contemporary American politics, especially in public debates on religious expression in state institutions. This study examined whether religious identity and behavior continue to influence public attitudes independently of party affiliation in a highly polarized environment. Drawing on the latest 2023–2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, the analysis examined support for teacher-led Christian prayer in public schools—a constitutionally contentious issue—through survey-weighted logistic regression models. The models included key religious predictors—tradition, born-again identity, and church attendance—alongside controls for political ideology and party identification. While Republican partisanship is the single strongest predictor of support, religious identity retains a significant and independent effect. Evangelical Protestants, as well as highly observant individuals across traditions, consistently show greater support for school prayer than their less religious or differently affiliated co-partisans. These residual effects point to the persistence of religious subcultures within each party coalition. By identifying such within-party variation, this study contributes to broader debates on the evolving boundaries of secular governance and the complex interplay between religion and partisan identity. Full article

Analysts of American politics have given only modest attention to the way religious factors shape public attitudes toward foreign policy, including the use of US military force. The Cooperative Election Studies from 2008 to 2022 provide an excellent data source for such analysis. Attitudes toward different uses of the military are well measured and the massive sample permits examination of even small ethnoreligious groups. We find that American religious groups vary greatly on overall willingness to use the military but also respond in distinctive—and predictable—ways to each type of intervention. Although religious influences differ somewhat by racial group and are partly mediated by ideology and partisanship, they often play an independent role, even under stringent statistical controls for other variables commonly found to influence public attitudes. Full article

This study aims to analyze the repercussions of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the health of male immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Brazil. A qualitative study involving 307 adult men living in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted. Data were collected between August 2021 and March 2022 and interpreted based on the Transcultural Nursing Theory. Cultural care repercussions were identified in various dimensions: technological: changes in daily life and disruptions in routine; religious, philosophical, social, and cultural values: changes stemming from disrupted social bonds, religious practices, and sociocultural isolation; political: experiences of political partisanship, conflicts, government mismanagement, a lack of immigration policies, human rights violations, and xenophobia; educational/economic: challenges arising from economic impoverishment, economic insecurity, unemployment, language difficulties, and challenges in academic and literacy development during the pandemic. The persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil had significant repercussions for the health of migrant men, resulting in a transcultural phenomenon that requires sensitive nursing care. Implications for nursing: the uniqueness of cultural care in nursing and health, as most of the repercussions found were mostly negative, contributed to the increase in social and health vulnerabilities. Full article

Social media platforms such as Twitter/X are increasingly important for political communication but the empirical question as to whether such communication enhances democratic consensus building (the ideal of deliberative democracy) or instead contributes to societal polarisation via fostering of hate speech and “information disorders” such as echo chambers is worth exploring. Political deliberation involves reciprocal communication between users, but much of the recent research into politics on social media has focused on one-to-many communication, in particular the sharing and diffusion of information on Twitter via retweets. This paper presents a new approach to studying reciprocal political communication on Twitter, with a focus on extending network-analytic indicators of deliberation. We use the Twitter v2 API to collect a new dataset (#debatenight2020) of reciprocal communication on Twitter during the first debate of the 2020 US presidential election and show that a hashtag-based collection alone would have collected only 1% of the debate-related communication. Previous work into using social network analysis to measure deliberation has involved using discussion tree networks to quantify the extent of argumentation (maximum depth) and representation (maximum width); we extend these measures by explicitly incorporating reciprocal communication (via triad census) and the political partisanship of users (inferred via usage of partisan hashtags). Using these methods, we find evidence for reciprocal communication among partisan actors, but also point to a need for further research to understand what forms this communication takes. Full article

Party leaders are increasingly relevant to voters’ choices in parliamentary systems. However, most studies addressing the electoral impact of leaders have largely ignored voters’ emotional responses to party leaders. Additionally, little is known about the effect of party leaders in subnational or regional elections. Using data from a specific election survey, this article examines the effect of emotions towards party leaders on regional voting. It assesses whether emotional responses to party leaders not only have direct effects, but whether they also have indirect effects through partisanship on voting. We found evidence that emotions towards party leaders have both direct and indirect effects through partisanship on vote choice. Full article

Public trust in medical institutions is essential for ensuring compliance with medical directives. However, the politicization of public health issues and the polarized nature of major news outlets suggest that partisanship and news consumption habits can influence medical trust. This study employed a survey with 858 participants and used regression analysis to assesses how news consumption habits and information assessment traits (IATs) influence trust in medical scientists. IATs included were conscientiousness, openness, need for cognitive closure (NFCC), and cognitive reflective thinking (CRT). News sources were classified on the basis of factuality and political bias. Initially, readership of liberally biased news was positively associated with medical trust (p < 0.05). However, this association disappeared when controlling for the news source’s factuality (p = 0.28), while CRT (p < 0.05) was positively associated with medical trust. When controlling for conservatively biased news sources, factuality of the news source (p < 0.05) and NFCC (p < 0.05) were positively associated with medical trust. While partisan media bias may influence medical trust, these results suggest that those who have higher abilities to assess information and who prefer more credible news sources have a greater trust in medical scientists. Full article

From the systemic issues of race and class division to political partisanship and religious identity, the pandemic has affected many aspects of American social and political life. I interrogate the role that religions have played in communal identity-making during the pandemic, and how such identities shaped ideological responses, particularly in the US, stymying public health efforts to stop, or at least significantly slow, the spread of COVID-19. Drawing from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as a historical case study, I use Garcia Marquez’s depiction of religion’s identity-making power during the cholera pandemic depicted in the novel as a comparison by which to understand current experiences of white Evangelical Christians in America during the current COVID-19 pandemic, particularly those who reject risk-minimizing practices such as mask wearing, quarantining, and vaccination. Drawing both from representations of Roberto Esposito’s theory of immunity and community, and from Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism”, as well as sociological understandings of religion and identity, I argue that the boundary-making practices of religion and of communal and national identity are related to the complex and often contradictory set of moral practices that led many white Evangelicals to disregard public health policies surrounding COVID-19. A concurrent analysis of Garcia Marquez’s novel and of current events will allow me to explore this phenomenon, as Lauren Berlant would put it, both through the historically affective aesthetic and through the affective present. Full article

The distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine represents a path towards global health after a worldwide pandemic. Yet, the U.S. response to the vaccination rollout has been politically polarized. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the contextual factors that influence parents’ attitudes towards health officials and their intention to vaccinate children, focusing on communication behaviors, personal factors, and geographic locations. We use Bandura’s triadic reciprocal determinism (TRD) model which posits reciprocal influence between personal factors, environmental factors, and behaviors. We found that personal factors (having younger children and identifying as Republican partisans), and the behavioral factor of conservative news use were significantly related to more negative attitudes towards health officials and lower vaccination intentions. Conversely, Democrats and liberal news use were significantly related to warmer attitudes and greater vaccination intentions. The environmental factor of geographic location across four states with different partisan dynamics was not significantly related to attitudes and behavioral intentions. Results from a post-hoc analysis show that news media use and partisanship were the strongest correlates of parents’ attitudes towards health officials. This evidence points to the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine being a key consideration regarding vaccine uptake. Full article

Political participation in Pakistan was expected to rise because of the enormous democratic potential of social media; nevertheless, a drop has been observed following an initial increase. This scenario encourages investigation of the decisive factors that might draw disengaged citizens into participatory politics. Therefore, this study illustrates the results of a Pakistani sample (n = 410) regarding the role of social media in influencing political participation in online and offline platforms. Five variables were examined using partial least squares (PLS) to see how they influenced online and offline political participation. The OSOR model of communication mediation was used for this purpose. Its implications were extended by simultaneously incorporating three outcome orientations—political expression, political efficacy, and partisanship—as mediators. In addition, we included political interest as an antecedent orientation and social media use as stimuli. Online and offline political participation were placed under response as endogenous variables. Our findings acknowledged nine direct and five indirect correlations out of ten direct and six indirect relationships. Political efficacy neither influenced offline political participation nor proved to be a mediator between social media use and offline political participation. We conclude with study implications, limitations, and recommendations for future scholars. Full article

In an era of rising inequality, the U.S. public’s relatively modest support for redistributive policies has been a puzzle for scholars. Deepening the paradox is recent evidence that presenting information about inequality increases subjects’ support for redistributive policies by only a small amount. What explains inequality information’s limited effects? We extend partisan motivated reasoning scholarship to investigate whether political party identification confounds individuals’ processing of inequality information. Our study considers a much larger number of redistribution preference measures (12) than past scholarship. We offer a second novelty by bringing the dimension of historical time into hypothesis testing. Analyzing high-quality data from four American National Election Studies surveys, we find new evidence that partisanship confounds the interrelationship of inequality information and redistribution preferences. Further, our analyses find the effects of partisanship on redistribution preferences grew in magnitude from 2004 through 2016. We discuss implications for scholarship on information, motivated reasoning, and attitudes towards redistribution. Full article

Successful responses to societal challenges require sustained behavioral change. However, as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US showed, political partisanship and mistrust of science can reduce public willingness to adopt recommended behaviors such as wearing a mask or receiving a vaccination. To better understand this phenomenon, we explored attitudes toward science using social media posts (tweets) that were linked to counties in the US through their locations. The data allowed us to study how attitudes towards science relate to the socioeconomic characteristics of communities in places from which people tweet. Our analysis revealed three types of communities with distinct behaviors: those in large metro centers, smaller urban places, and rural areas. While partisanship and race are strongly associated with the share of anti-science users across all communities, income was negatively and positively associated with anti-science attitudes in suburban and rural areas, respectively. We observed that emotions in tweets, specifically negative high arousal emotions, are expressed among suburban and rural communities by many anti-science users, but not in communities in large urban places. These trends were not apparent when pooled across all counties. In addition, we found that anti-science attitudes expressed five years earlier were significantly associated with lower COVID-19 vaccination rates. Our analysis demonstrates the feasibility of using spatially resolved social media data to monitor public attitudes on issues of social importance. Full article

In the weeks before the 2019 federal election, climate change strikes occurred in Canada and across the globe, which may have increased the salience of this policy issue. We use two data sources to examine the role of climate change in the 2019 federal election: a representative survey of 1500 Canadians and 2109 Facebook posts from the five major party leaders. After accounting for political ideology and region, we find that concern about climate change was a strong positive predictor of liberal support. We triangulate these findings by analyzing Facebook posts. We find that left-wing politicians were more likely to post about climate change and that posts about climate change received more likes, comments, and shares than other posts. This higher level of user engagement did not differ depending on which political party posted the climate change message. The combination of sources offers news insights into citizen-elite interactions and electoral outcomes. Climate change was important in the election, whether this importance was measured through survey data or user engagement with leaders’ climate change posts. Full article

In the northeastern corner of Minnesota, two of the state’s most iconic symbols, mining and pristine wilderness, are on a collision course. The Duluth Complex, considered by many to be the world’s largest undeveloped deposit of copper-nickel and precious metals, is the site of mining proposals for several controversial mines. Proponents suggest that mining can be accomplished in an environmentally benign manner, and in the process create nearly 1000 jobs and $500 million in economic benefits annually. Opponents counter that the tourism and recreation industries already provide nearly 18,000 jobs and bring over $900 million in economic benefits annually, and that mining will permanently impair the regions environment. Thus, the copper-nickel and precious metal mining debate has become highly polarized, and serves as an ideal example of how people address national and global sustainability issues at local and regional scales. This study examines this polarization through a Q-sort analysis of subjectivities of residents of the state of Minnesota. Results suggest that partisanship is a strong predictor of attitudes towards mining, and that the strongest differences between respondents were not based on perceptions comparing jobs and the environment, the typical partisan divide, but rather on respondents’ perceived identity with relation to the mining industry or water resources. Full article