Search Results (118)

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia are growing global health challenges, yet public understanding of these conditions remains poorly characterized. Methods: This study analyzed 17,578 English-language tweets from Twitter/X collected throughout 2024 to characterize public discourse using dual sentiment analysis and topic modeling. Sentiment was assessed using two lexicon-based tools, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) and TextBlob, with inter-method agreement evaluated via Cohen’s Kappa and confusion matrix analysis. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with coherence-based model selection (c_v) identified latent discussion topics. Results: All reported sentiment proportions are tool-specific estimates rather than absolute characterisations of public discourse and should be interpreted in light of the fair inter-method agreement observed between VADER and TextBlob. VADER classified 43.3% of tweets as positive, 32.2% as negative, and 24.5% as neutral (mean compound score = 0.065, SD = 0.499; 95% CI: 0.058 to 0.073; note that the large SD relative to the mean reflects the broad, near-zero-centred distribution of compound scores). TextBlob produced a partially divergent distribution (45.9% positive, 36.2% neutral, 17.8% negative) with fair inter-method agreement (κ = 0.297), indicating that exact sentiment proportions depend meaningfully on the choice of classifier. Approximately 14% of tweets contained political content related to the U.S. presidential election cycle, which may represent an important source of noise in health discourse. LDA identified six optimal topics (c_v = 0.407): research studies, blood-based diagnostics, comorbidities and personal loss, research advocacy, clinical developments, and risk factors and treatment. Sentiment differed significantly across topics (Kruskal–Wallis H = 235.92, p < 0.001), with research and advocacy topics showing the most positive VADER-classified sentiment (50.0%) and comorbidity discussions showing the highest negative proportion (41.4%). Positive tweets received significantly higher engagement than negative tweets (Mann–Whitney p < 0.001), though follower count was the strongest predictor of engagement (β = 0.198). Conclusions: These findings, interpreted as tool-conditional estimates, have implications for health communication strategies, public education campaigns, stigma reduction, and the responsible design of social media-based health surveillance systems. Full article

Guided by the ideational theory of populism and Jowett and O’Donnell’s framework for propaganda analysis, this study examines Donald Trump’s usage of propagandistic language and emotional appeals. The study classifies his posts on Truth Social during the 2024 American presidential election into the seven categories of propaganda tactics outlined by the Institute of Propaganda Analysis. These techniques include name calling, glittering generalities, transfer methods, testimonials, plain folk appeals, card stacking and bandwagoning. A deductive content analysis was performed on a corpus of the text of 1319 Truth Social posts (“truths”) posted by Donald Trump during the election, excluding image- and video-based posts. This study found a vast majority contain at least one classic propaganda technique. A contribution of this study is that it determines not only which tactics he uses as a case study of a populist communicator but who he targets and with which tactics. The study found five main targets: political opponents, political allies, immigrants, institutions, and foreign leaders. Findings demonstrate Donald Trump does not use propaganda techniques monolithically but rather as dependent on his target and with distinct patterns, to produce and reinforce narratives about in- and out-group messaging. Full article

Latin America has experienced rapid evangelical growth, yet this expansion has not produced a stable religious cleavage comparable to those observed in Europe or the United States. This article examines Jair Bolsonaro’s relationship with evangelical electoral support in Brazil, asking how an evangelical voter base emerged around him during his seventh campaign for federal deputy and whether this support endured in the presidential election that brought him to office. It argues that Bolsonaro’s evangelical support should be understood not as the product of a unilateral electoral strategy, but as an adaptive alignment with a broader reconfiguration of Brazil’s political and religious environment. Combining quantitative and qualitative evidence, the study analyzes the territorial distribution of evangelicals and Bolsonaro’s legislative vote in Rio de Janeiro, identifies a shift in support in evangelical-rich municipalities beginning in 2014, examines individual-level voting-intention surveys from the 2018 presidential election, and analyzes Bolsonaro’s parliamentary speeches and social media discourse. The findings show that evangelical support developed through discursive repositioning, ties to religious leaders, moral appeals, and opportunities created by party-system crisis and religious brokerage. The article contributes to debates on cleavages, political incorporation, and conservative representation. Full article

The 2024 US presidential campaign was dubbed the ‘podcast election’, with Donald Trump’s appearances on shows targeting young male audiences hailed for securing victory with this demographic. However, limited attention has been paid to how the specific affordances of audio media are leveraged to engage voters with appeals to hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of counterpublics, this study applies an innovative close analytical listening method and critical discourse analysis to five long-form podcast interviews with Trump. It finds that intimacy, authenticity, and convivial, free-wheeling conversation were key elements of Trump’s political communication—reaching mass audiences while bypassing the scrutiny of professional journalism. Furthermore, these shows celebrated men’s superiority while largely excluding women from public discourse. These findings are important for understanding the implications of an increasingly masculine, right-wing podcast scene, which we theorize as the brosphere. Ultimately, we argue that the brosphere is distinct from—but related to—the overtly misogynistic manosphere. Full article

In 1999, 107,493 juveniles were in residential placements; by 2023 this number declined to 29,314, a decrease of 73%. This extraordinary decline in juvenile incarceration—which we refer to as juvenile decarceration—has been reported primarily by justice advocacy groups without rigorous explanation or exploration. In this paper, we provide a state-level exploration in which we consider how relevant characteristics of states relate to their levels of decarceration. We analyze data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and several publicly available sources and find correlations between the extent of a state’s rate of decarceration and that state’s poverty rate, high school dropout rate, adult incarceration rate, and voting results in the 2020 presidential election. Most striking, however, is the relative consistency of decarceration across states, and the absence of more robust patterns. Full article

This study investigates whether stock market volatility of the Indonesian Composite Index (IHSG) during presidential elections is predominantly driven by global or domestic factors. Using an event study framework covering four election cycles (2009, 2014, 2019, and 2024), we examine three transmission channels, macroeconomic conditions (interest rate, inflation, exchange rate), trading activity (volume, frequency, traded value), and global risk sentiment (VIX), across a five-month pre- and post-election window, with the election month excluded to avoid short-term shock distortion. Channel variables are constructed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and tested through multiple linear regression with dummy interaction terms. To address autocorrelation in the initial OLS model (Durbin–Watson = 1.189), the Cochrane–Orcutt procedure is applied, which resolves the issue (Durbin–Watson = 1.990) and yields the primary results. The corrected model explains 55.8% of variation in IHSG volatility (Adjusted R² = 0.558, F = 7.862, p < 0.001). Results consistently show that global risk sentiment (VIX) is the only significant positive driver of volatility (β = 0.003, p < 0.001), while macroeconomic and trading activity channels show no robust significance. No significant interaction effects are found, indicating that the influence of these channels does not differ statistically between pre- and post-election periods. We conclude that stock market volatility around Indonesian presidential elections is more strongly associated with global risk sentiment than with domestic macroeconomic or trading activity factors. The VIX consistently emerges as the dominant explanatory variable in the estimated model. Full article

Background/Objectives: In a context characterized by persistent vaccine hesitancy, shifting mandates, and stagnating immunization coverage rates, novel policy tools may be required to bolster immunization coverage in the United States. We conducted a national survey to characterize public support for a new tax policy that would require parents to prove that their children are age-appropriately immunized against polio to be eligible for the federal child tax credit. Methods: The survey was conducted in November 2025. Respondents were asked to provide demographic information and use a Likert-scale to indicate their support for the proposed policy. Chi-squared tests and ordinal logistic regression models were used to compare support for the proposed policy across subpopulations. Results: 980 individuals were included in the analysis. 55.8% of respondents supported adding age-appropriate polio immunization to the child tax credit eligibility criteria. 20.9% of respondents opposed the policy proposal. Relative levels of support for the policy differed according to respondent gender, age, 2024 presidential election behavior, and geographic region. However, support did not differ significantly according to race, ethnicity, educational attainment, income, or partisanship. Conclusions: Results show that most survey respondents would support a policy that would add polio immunization status to the eligibility criteria for the federal child tax credit. Further, support did not differ across key demographic and political subgroups. Larger surveys should validate these findings and investigate support for adding additional vaccines to the eligibility criteria. Full article

Objectives: Government surveillance of American Muslims has grown following 9/11, yet little scholarship has analyzed how this activity impacts political participation. We examine racial and ethnic variation in American Muslims’ experiences of state surveillance, as well as the connection between those experiences and voter turnout. Methods: Using a survey of 1000 American Muslims, we identify racial and ethnic patterns in being singled out in airports and by the police. We then analyze how being stopped in these venues shaped turnout behavior in the 2016 presidential election. Results: Black Muslims are more likely to encounter surveillance from the police, while Muslims who identify as Asian report the highest degree of monitoring in airports. We find that police encounters are linked to decreased electoral participation, but being singled out by airport security is not tied to a change in turnout. Conclusions: These findings provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of who is impacted by surveillance in the US and how that surveillance shapes American democracy. Full article

Digital media have reshaped electoral communication, yet official campaign websites, owned and strategically controlled media spaces, remain underexamined within hybrid media systems. This study investigates how these websites function in Portugal’s 2026 presidential election, focusing on the tension between participatory affordances and strategic control. A qualitative-dominant comparative content analysis of all eleven candidate websites is conducted using an integrated multi-model framework combining interactivity, web campaigning, functional analysis, digital sophistication, and political framing. The findings reveal a stratified digital landscape in which most websites operate as unidirectional communication hubs prioritizing narrative coherence and mobilization over deliberative interaction. Rather than functioning as democratic equalizers, campaign websites reproduce and amplify pre-existing strategic and organizational asymmetries. A key contribution of the study is the identification of a systematic association between the strength of campaign framing and the level of digital infrastructural investment. The study contributes by conceptualizing campaign websites as central media infrastructures and by reframing digital campaigning as a strategy-driven, rather than technology-driven, process. Full article

Exogenous shocks can affect equity markets by changing volatility and cross-market co-movement. This study examines how two U.S.-centred events, treated as different shock types, influence time-varying conditional correlations between the U.S. stock market and other G7 markets. The uncertainty shock is proxied by the U.S. presidential election of 5 November 2024, while the action shock is proxied by President Trump’s 2 April 2025 announcement of reciprocal tariffs. Using daily log returns for the S&P 500 and leading indices for Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, we cover January 2010 to July 2025 and assess event effects using correlation paths for June 2024–June 2025 and symmetric ±30-day windows. We employ a DCC-GARCH model to jointly estimate conditional variances and dynamic correlations for six USA-G7 pairs. The results indicate persistent correlation dynamics, with Canada/USA the highest and Japan/USA the lowest. Election-related uncertainty is associated with declines in correlation for European pairs, suggesting temporary decoupling, while Canada and Japan show only small changes. By contrast, the tariff action shock significantly increases conditional correlations across all country/USA pairs, implying stronger market synchronisation, with the largest increases in North America and parts of Europe, and the smallest adjustment in Japan. Full article

Inclusion and preference relations are fundamental comparison tools in intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) theory and play an important role in decision analysis under uncertainty. In IFS representations, the hesitation degree reflects information that is not captured by membership and non-membership values alone. This study investigates the structural relationship between hesitation and the inclusion and preference relations of IFSs. A proposed interpretation of membership and non-membership degrees is employed to provide a geometric perspective on hesitation. Within this framework, analytical relations between hesitation inequalities and preference conditions are derived. In particular, it is shown that the hesitation inequality constitutes a necessary condition for preference, whereas inclusion relations remain compatible with a wider range of hesitation configurations. The theoretical observations are illustrated using electoral datasets from the 2002 South Korean presidential election and the 2000 United States presidential election in Florida. Regional vote shares are transformed into intuitionistic fuzzy representations to analyze the distribution of hesitation across regions. The examples demonstrate how hesitation may influence the stability of preference relations while inclusion relations remain structurally preserved. Full article

This study empirically investigates how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) discourses among major Korean Business-to-Business (B2B) corporations (POSCO, LG Chem, and HD Hyundai) were reconfigured in the context of former President Trump’s re-election campaign and the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The observation periods were divided into the Pre-Trump period (1 May 2023 to 30 April 2024) and the Post-Trump period (1 May 2024 to 30 April 2025). External discourses were examined using social media, news, and blog posts, while internal discourses were analyzed through the CEO’s New Year addresses from 2021 to 2025. Keyword frequency analysis and co-occurrence network analysis, conducted via the ‘Sometrend’ platform, were combined to trace structural transitions in corporate discourses. The results show that: (1) the relative share and network centrality of environmental (E) keywords declined in the Post-Trump period, with several environmental terms losing core positions and becoming peripheral or bridging nodes, while policy- and economic-related terms increased; (2) social (S) and governance (G) keywords appeared only sporadically and remained peripheral across periods; (3) temporal concentrations of policy–economic keywords coincided with significant political and market-related events, such as financial volatility in 2023 and the tariff policy announcement in February 2025, indicating temporal alignment rather than deterministic causality; (4) firm-level differences were evident: POSCO exhibited the most pronounced structural shift, LG Chem’s discourses increasingly emphasized supply chain and investment-related terms alongside environmental keywords, and HD Hyundai showed a shift toward more risk- and operation-oriented keywords in the later period; and (5) CEO New Year addresses displayed directionally consistent patterns with external discourse, supporting cross-textual alignment. These findings demonstrate that ESG discourse is not a fixed normative language but a strategically adaptive frame that varies according to political–economic contexts and industrial conditions. The relative weakening of the environmental frame in terms of discourse centrality, alongside the strengthening of the policy–economic frame, differed by industry, reflecting variations in regulatory exposure and operational characteristics. By observing ESG discourses longitudinally and comparatively, this study provides empirical evidence of how political and industrial dynamics reshape corporate discourses and CEO communication. Moreover, keyword frequency and co-occurrence network analysis are validated as effective methods for identifying discourse shifts, offering both academic contributions and practical implications for corporate communication analysis. Full article

Political events in major economies generate uncertainty that can propagate through global financial markets, influencing investor behaviour and asset prices. The 2024–2025 U.S. presidential election cycle, including presidential debates, assassination attempts, the election outcome, the inauguration, and major policy announcements, such as liberation day tariffs, provides a unique setting to examine these effects. This study investigates how international stock markets responded to these sequential political events, focusing on abnormal returns (ARs) and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) across G20 countries. Using both mean-adjusted and market models, complemented by cross-sectional regressions, the analysis captures heterogeneous market reactions while accounting for the role of market fundamentals. The results indicate that markets often anticipate events, react strongly to new information, and gradually adjust as uncertainty dissipates. Emerging markets generally exhibited positive reactions, whereas developed markets responded more cautiously or negatively to political shocks. Cross-sectional regression analysis further shows that market fundamentals have a limited influence on ARs but significantly shape CARs, consistent with overreaction and uncertain information hypotheses. Overall, these findings provide evidence on how global financial markets process political uncertainty and underscore the importance of sequential political events for investors, portfolio managers, and policymakers. Full article

Social media platforms have become central arenas for political communication, electoral mobilization, and institutional contestation. This study examines how TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram were used during and after the 2025 Romanian presidential elections to circulate populist, sovereignist, and anti-institutional narratives. Drawing on a mixed-method content analysis of 764 public posts and over 2000 associated comments collected between 1 April and 30 June 2025, the study identifies dominant themes, discursive frames, and forms of user participation across platforms. The findings reveal marked platform-specific differences. TikTok emerges as the primary space for emotionally charged, visually oriented political communication and post-electoral contestation, while Facebook facilitates more argumentative and institution-focused discourse. Instagram plays a marginal role in political communication within the analyzed context. The results further indicate that content challenging the legitimacy of electoral institutions persists beyond the electoral moment and is amplified through coordinated dissemination patterns and interactive forms of participation, including AI-modified visual materials. By integrating thematic, discursive, and participatory analysis in a comparative platform framework, this study contributes to the literature on digital political communication and online populism. It highlights the role of social media platforms as amplifiers of symbolic conflict in democracies undergoing processes of institutional consolidation. Full article

Background/Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately impacted rural areas across the United States, including rural North Carolina (NC). Consistent with national patterns, COVID-19 vaccination coverage as of December 2022 was higher for non-rural (72%) than rural (58%) NC counties. The role of trusted sources of vaccine information used by rural and non-rural residents is unknown. Methods: Using data from two surveys distributed by the COVID-19 Community Research Partnership from 8 June 2021 through 21 December 2021, we compared self-reported sources of trusted COVID-19 vaccine information by non-rural and rural counties and by county-level predominant political vote in the 2020 Presidential election. Results: While NC respondents were highly vaccinated (94%), fewer residents from rural counties self-reported COVID-19 vaccination than those from non-rural counties (91% versus 95%). The most common reported source of trusted vaccine information was federal health agencies. The proportion citing a federal health agency was higher for respondents from non-rural (80%) than rural (72%) counties and was higher for vaccinated (75%) than unvaccinated (42%) rural respondents. The next two most trusted sources of vaccine information were state/local health officials (48%) and health care providers (42%). Among trusted resources reported by 10–15% of respondents, those from rural counties were less likely to use hospital websites, employers, or news sources than those from non-rural counties. More respondents from counties with >60% vote for the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate cited federal health agencies, state and local officials, and new sources than respondents from counties with >60% vote for the 2020 Republican Presidential candidate. Conclusions: By identifying the trusted sources of vaccine information for residents in non-rural and rural NC counties, future vaccine implementation efforts can tailor communication efforts to increase vaccine uptake and potentially reduce the rates of hospitalizations and death from vaccine-preventable diseases such as COVID-19 or other future pandemics. Full article