Search Results (98)

This paper investigates the growing political alignment of Latino Evangelicals with the Republican Party, particularly their support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Historically, Latino political behavior has been studied with an assumption of religious homogeneity, largely focusing on the Catholic majority. However, the rise of the Latino Evangelical population has coincided with increasing Latino support for the GOP. Former President Obama attributed this shift in support to the growing Evangelical demographic. Building on Chaturvedi’s (2014) work, which found that Evangelical Latinos’ conservative views on issues like same-sex marriage vary by age, this study tests Obama’s assertion using data from the 2020 USC Dornsife Presidential Poll. Logistic regressions show that older Latino Evangelicals were significantly more likely to support Trump, driven by their desire to elect officials who align with their Evangelical policy preferences. The findings explain that the political behavior of older Latino Evangelicals is more strongly related to religious values compared to their younger counterparts. These results highlight the importance of considering religious diversity within Latino politics, pointing to religious identity as a key factor in shaping Latino political behavior and emphasizing the need for further exploration of religious variation in Latino voting patterns. Full article

Despite extensive scholarship on social media political party strategies or intra-party-political campaigns across digital platforms, it remains relatively unexplored how individual presidential candidates adopt social media to frame their messages on key political issues for voter engagement, especially in the West Africa region. To fill this gap, this study examines how the two major presidential candidates in Ghana, John Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Mahamudu Bawumia of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), use social media platforms to frame key political issues during the 2024 election campaign. Using framing theory and digital multimodal discourse analysis as the conceptual and methodological frameworks, the study examines content on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram, with a focus on issues related to the economy and education, while also assessing how platform-specific affordances shape the presentation and visibility of these frames. The findings of the study reveal three core dynamics in the framing strategies of both candidates: (1) contrasting economic narratives (‘Resetting Ghana’ vs. ‘It Is Possible’), (2) competing visions of education (reform vs. continuity), and (3) platform-specific engagement patterns. These findings offer insight into how political actors leverage digital affordances beyond simple messaging tools into structured framing mechanisms and strategically construct narratives to shape public discourse and influence voter engagement. Full article

This study analyzes the factors influencing the proportions of blank and null votes in Brazilian municipalities during the 2018 presidential elections. The behavior of the variable of interest is examined using unit regression models within the Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape (GAMLSS) framework. Specifically, five different unit regression models are explored, beta, simplex, Kumaraswamy, unit Weibull, and reflected unit Burr XII regressions, each incorporating submodels for both indexed distribution parameters. The beta regression model emerges as the best fit through rigorous model selection and diagnostic procedures. The findings reveal that the disaggregated municipal human development index (MHDI), particularly its income, longevity, and education dimensions, along with the municipality’s geographic region, significantly affect voting behavior. Notably, higher income and longevity values are linked to greater proportions of blank and null votes, whereas the educational level exhibits a negative relationship with the variable of interest. Additionally, municipalities in the Southeast region tend to have higher average proportions of blank and null votes. In terms of variability, the ability of a municipality’s population to acquire goods and services is shown to negatively influence the dispersion of vote proportions, while municipalities in the Northeast, North, and Southeast regions exhibit distinct patterns of variation compared to other regions. These results provide valuable insights into electoral participation’s socioeconomic and regional determinants, contributing to broader discussions on political engagement and democratic representation in Brazil. Full article

In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini spearheaded the Islamic Revolution, toppling the secular Shah regime, a move that resonated with millions of people. Fast-forward to 2025, there has been a notable rise in secularism in Iran, even among 1979’s religious clerics. Currently, 73% of Iranians support the idea of separating Islam from the state and advocating for a secular government. As a result, there have been widespread anti-Islamist regime and pro-democratic protests during different periods, such as 2009–2010, 2017–2018, 2019–2020, and 2022–2023. The most recent development in 2024 was the victory of reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian in the presidential elections, defeating conservative candidate Saeed Jalili. This study examines the factors driving the rise of secularism, namely globalization, the systemic issues within the Islamic regime, the significant influence of the Iranian diaspora, and the impact of rapid urbanization. Full article

This study aims to examine how religion in Türkiye, beyond having social value, has been instrumentalized by political parties into a power dynamic and explore the role of the media in this process. Adopting an inductive approach, the study first examines how the boundaries between religion and politics have changed over the years, despite the Republic of Türkiye being constitutionally defined as a secular state, using a qualitative historical method. Then, in order to explore the current reflections of this transformation, focus is placed on the most recent presidential election, held in 2023. News reports about a widely circulated photograph of opposition presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu “stepping/standing” on a prayer rug, used by Muslims for worship, during his campaign are analyzed using the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method. The findings reveal that religion has become a significant component of political strategies and propaganda tools in Türkiye. Religious values and symbols function as powerful instruments, shaping societal perceptions through political discourse. As a hegemonic apparatus, the media reproduces religious discourse in line with ideological tendencies and mediatizes religion as a political tool. Full article

In this paper, we applied an explainable AI model (SHAP feature importance measures) to study the dynamic relationship between stock market returns and the US presidential election outcomes. More specifically, we wanted to study how the market would react the day after the election. AI models have been criticized as black-box models and lack the clarity needed for decision-making by different stakeholders. The explainable AI model we utilized in this model provides more clarity for the outcomes of the model. Using features commonly used by previous studies related to this topic, we find that the previous market direction leading up to the election and the incumbency information combined with the political affiliation are larger drivers for a 1-day post-election market return than sentiment and which party wins the election. Full article

Forecasting election outcomes is a complex scientific challenge with notable societal implications. Existing approaches often combine statistical analysis, machine learning, and economic indicators. However, research in network science has emphasized the importance of temporal factors in the dissemination of opinions. This study presents a macro-scale temporal attenuation (TA) model, which integrates micro-scale opinion dynamics and temporal epidemic theories to enhance forecasting accuracy using pre-election poll data. The findings suggest that the timing of opinion polls significantly influences opinion fluctuations, particularly as election dates approach. Opinion “pulse” is modeled as a temporal function that increases with new poll inputs and declines during stable periods. Two practical variants of the TA model, ETA and PTA, were tested on datasets from ten elections held between 2020 and 2024 around the world. The results indicate that the TA model outperformed several statistical methods, ARIMA models, and best pollster predictions (BPPs) in six out of ten elections. The two TA implementations achieved an average forecasting error of 6.92–6.95 percentage points across all datasets, compared to 7.65 points for BPP and 14.42 points for other statistical methods, demonstrating a performance improvement of 10–83%. Additionally, the TA methods maintained robust performance even with limited poll availability. As global pre-election survey data become more accessible, the TA model is expected to serve as a valuable complement to advanced election-forecasting techniques. Full article

The Trump era marked a turning point for political satire, where The Daily Show’s coverage of the last two election cycles reveals a dynamic interplay between satire, ideology, and democratic processes. This study examines how The Daily Show has progressively altered its satirical voice and multimodal strategies to capture the changing landscape of U.S. presidential elections, spotlighting the different eras of Trevor Noah in 2020 and Jon Stewart in 2024. It decodes how news satire along with visuals reflect political and cultural moments, and the way social and political representations are depicted in this show. To achieve these aims, a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) approach is used to analyze the semiotic and multimodal features of four episodes of The Daily Show, ranging from Noah’s pandemic-era coverage of the 2020 elections to Stewart’s live studio format in 2024. This article reveals both hosts’ role in social and political representation by different means of satirical and multimodal techniques. It highlights how The Daily Show has remained a cultural touchstone, adapting its style and substance to meet the demands of its time. Full article

One of the United States’ two dominant political parties resembles global political parties favoring authoritarianism. Such directives are expressed through the transformed Republican party’s authoritarian messaging, policies, and many of its member’s behavior. The devastating impact of an energized U.S. authoritarian political party and the narrow narrative of who is and should be in the United States and a U.S. citizen is a necessary discussion following the U.S. 2024 Presidential election. It is foreseeable that an autocratic leader of the U.S. will be catastrophic for refugees, particularly refugees of color and especially refugees in the U.S. South, as the liberal ideals of democracy that undergird the institutions and policies that support U.S. refugee admissions and resettlement are attacked. Full article

After his questionable re-election in 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros (NMM) began a campaign to attract the attention of evangelical leaders, apostles, prophets, pastors, and church members to secure their votes for the 2024 campaign. The main reason for this move was the surprising growth of the evangelical population in the country, which reached almost 30% by the end of 2023. Several independent churches and denominations accepted NMM’s invitation to meet and participate in government programs specifically targeted at evangelical churches. Despite allegations of human rights abuses, corruption, and violations of the Venezuelan constitution, some evangelicals created a narrative about NMM as the “protector of families” and as God’s chosen one to usher in a new era of prosperity for the nation. Through acts of “identificational” repentance staged at the Miraflores Palace, a contrite NMM received prophetic declarations and prayers from apostles and pastors, and the country was cleansed of curses and satanic influences. This article seeks to document, analyze, and situate these discourses in relation to contemporary theological trends, as an important case of evangelical alignment with left-wing politics in Latin America. Moreover, the article also seeks to show how these events relate to the evolution of Venezuelan evangelical involvement in national politics, particularly under 25 years of socialist governments of Hugo Chávez Frías and Nicolás Maduro Moros. Full article

This study measured the individual and conjoint effects of Argentina’s primaries and first- and second-voting presidential election results, as well as their post-election comparative effects, on the stock market performance of its most relevant economic sectors. Within four different estimation methods, the state-space specification outperformed the rest. The findings suggest that investors can under/overreact compared to post-election sectors performance, the public services sector being the exception. Therefore, those investors who anticipated the election results by liquidating positions in companies in the materials sector and investing more in companies in the energy and other industrial sectors achieved a superior performance. Full article

Presidential elections are an important political event that often trigger intense debate. With more than 139 million users, YouTube serves as a significant platform for understanding public opinion through sentiment analysis. This study aimed to implement deep learning techniques for a multi-label sentiment analysis of comments on YouTube videos related to the 2024 Indonesian presidential election. Offering a fresh perspective compared to previous research that primarily employed traditional classification methods, this study classifies comments into eight emotional labels: anger, anticipation, disgust, joy, fear, sadness, surprise, and trust. By focusing on the emotional spectrum, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of public sentiment towards presidential candidates. The CRISP-DM method is applied, encompassing stages of business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment, ensuring a systematic and comprehensive approach. This study employs a dataset comprising 32,000 comments, obtained via YouTube Data API, from the KPU and Najwa Shihab channels. The analysis is specifically centered on comments related to presidential candidate debates. Three deep learning models—Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), and a hybrid model combining CNN and Bi-LSTM—are assessed using confusion matrix, Area Under the Curve (AUC), and Hamming loss metrics. The evaluation results demonstrate that the Bi-LSTM model achieved the highest accuracy with an AUC value of 0.91 and a Hamming loss of 0.08, indicating an excellent ability to classify sentiment with high precision and a low error rate. This innovative approach to multi-label sentiment analysis in the context of the 2024 Indonesian presidential election expands the insights into public sentiment towards candidates, offering valuable implications for political campaign strategies. Additionally, this research contributes to the fields of natural language processing and data mining by addressing the challenges associated with multi-label sentiment analysis. Full article

This study seeks to understand the political discourse of Javier Milei and to determine which concept of populism best captures his approach. Although perceived by many as a populist, Milei is unusual in that he sees himself as a liberal libertarian and defender of the West against collectivist policies. To this end, this study analyzes selected speeches by Milei from three different periods during and after the 2024 presidential election campaign and applies a deductive coding scheme designed to identify ideational populism, populist discursive framing, populism as strategy, and populism as crisis performance. The analysis confirms that Milei is at best a partial populist, as he fails to define the core populist concept of “the people”. It concludes that the concept of crisis performance emerges as the most apt theoretical framework to classify Milei’s type of populism. By rhetorically transforming the crisis not only into an existential economic issue but also into a moral tale of corruption and failure at the highest levels, he can appeal for radical change and offer himself as the national political savior. Milei’s discourse also illustrates that, unlike ideological populism or discursive populist framing, in the performative turn, the victims of the crisis, the people, often remain a vague signifier defined by their suffering at the hands of elites. Full article

Despite leading a violent insurrection to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, dozens of pending felony counts against him, and massive civil fines leveled against him, Donald Trump is poised to not only be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024; but rather, he stands a very plausible chance of being re-elected. This is true, despite the increasingly authoritarian tone of his rhetoric of late and concrete plans that he and those allied with him have openly espoused that, if implemented, will fundamentally dismember the tenets of American democracy. Yet, many Americans appear to be “sleepwalking toward dictatorship”. This essay argues that Donald Trump represents a singularly unique, existential threat to American democracy and outlines specifically how a second Trump administration will destroy American democracy as we have previously known it. Full article

Background/Objectives: Teen birth rates remain a pressing public health issue in the United States, with significant long-term health risks for both mothers and children. Previous research has primarily focused on the impact of women in elected office on reproductive health outcomes, but less is known about the influence of women candidates. This study explores the relationship between the number of women candidates in county-level elections and county-level teen birth rates, highlighting the role of women candidates as visible role models and agents of potential policy change. Methods: We utilized a dataset covering county-level elections from 2010 to 2020, along with teen birth rate data from the CDC. We employed a multilevel model to analyze the relationship between the cumulative number of women candidates and teen birth rates, controlling for socioeconomic and health-related factors, such as insurance coverage and social vulnerability. Results: The findings indicate that as the number of women candidates increased, the estimated county-level teen birth rate declined. This effect was observed across different election years, with more substantial impacts in midterm and presidential elections. The analysis also confirmed that socioeconomic conditions, such as a lack of health insurance, contribute to higher teen birth rates. Conclusions: Women candidates, even when not elected, serve as important role models and influence reproductive health outcomes in their communities. Increasing the number of women candidates at the local level may be an effective strategy for reducing teen birth rates and improving public health outcomes. Full article