scholarly journals Abdication of Responsibility or Justifiable Fear of Illegitimacy? The Death Penalty, Gay Rights, and the Role of Public Opinion in Judicial Determinations in Africa

2012 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 603-628
Author(s):  
Adem Abebe
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Judicial Determinations

scholarly journals Support for the Death Penalty in Taiwan?: a Study of Value Conflict and Ambivalence

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susyan Jou ◽  
Bill Hebenton
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Value Conflict ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

AbstractWhile a substantial number of studies have examined public opinion on the death penalty in the USA, and more recently parts of Asia, including China, very few empirical studies have considered support for the death penalty in Taiwan. This paper examines public attitudes in Taiwan and the role of ‘value conflict’ in attitudes to both death penalty abolition and in the context of alternatives. Using the results of 1016 respondents drawn from a national face-to-face sample (n = 2039) survey conducted by the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) in 2014, we demonstrate that public attitudes in Taiwan are simultaneously committed to many underlying values in conflict. The results also indicate that value conflict exists among the majority of the sample (more than 60 per cent) who are prepared to accept alternatives to abolition, and whom we can describe as ambivalent. Recognition of value conflict, ambivalence and the moral psychology underpinning public attitudes to the death penalty is essential, not only conceptually but to allow for a more appropriate and nuanced understanding of the abolitionist/retentionist debate.

Public Opinion on the Web: The Arab Listeners of the BBC

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haidar Moukdad
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Discussion Forum ◽  
The Web

Sample contributions by Arab contributors to a discussion forum were analyzed to study the role of the Web in promoting free speech and demystifying long held views of Arab public opinion. The findings of the study highlight the importance of the role played by the Web in promoting free speech among traditionally repressed populations, and provide insights that will help in correcting misconceptions about Arab public opinion.Un échantillonnage d’interventions par des participants arabes à un forum de discussion a été analysé afin d’étudier le rôle du Web dans le développement de la liberté de parole et la démystification des préjugés concernant l’opinion publique arabe. Les résultats de l’étude mettent en lumière l’importance du rôle joué par le Web dans le développement de la liberté de parole parmi les populations traditionnellement réprimées et offrent des idées qui aideront à corriger les idées préconçues concernant l’opinion publique arabe. 

Abolitionism and the Social Conscience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. M. Ditchfield
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Triangular Trade ◽  
Reform Needs

Explanations of the abolition of the slave trade have been the subject of intense historical debate. Earlier accounts tended to play up the role of individual, heroic abolitionists and their religious, particularly evangelical, motivation. Eric Williams argued that the decline in profitability of the ‘Triangular trade’ was important in persuading people that the slave trade hindered, rather than helped, economic progress. More recent work has rehabilitated the role of some abolitionists but has set this alongside the importance of campaigning and petitioning in shifting public opinion. The role that the slaves themselves played in bringing attention to their plight is also now recognized. Consequently, the importance of abolitionism for a sense of Dissenting self-identity and as part of broader attempts to influence social reform needs to be reconsidered.

Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. De Vries
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
Novel Theory ◽  
The Eu

The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. At no time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so insecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault by Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. This book examines the role of public opinion in the European integration process. It develops a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather that it consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referendums. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states have diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems have also grown further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences that this book has uncovered makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.

scholarly journals Negativity and Political Behavior: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Negative Voting in Contemporary Democracies

2021 ◽  
pp. 147892992110001
Author(s):  
Diego Garzia ◽  
Frederico Ferreira da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Affective Component ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Rational Component

Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental–rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. By blueprinting the systematic relationships between negative voting and each of these components in turn, and suggesting multiple research paths, this article aims to stimulate future studies on negative voting in multi-party parliamentary systems to motivate a better understanding of the implications of negativity in voting behavior in contemporary democracies.

Deep Structured Learning for Natural Language Processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Yong Li ◽  
Xiaojun Yang ◽  
Min Zuo ◽  
Qingyu Jin ◽  
Haisheng Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Food Safety ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Early Warning ◽  
Conditional Random Field ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Related Sequence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Network Public Opinion

The real-time and dissemination characteristics of network information make net-mediated public opinion become more and more important food safety early warning resources, but the data of petabyte (PB) scale growth also bring great difficulties to the research and judgment of network public opinion, especially how to extract the event role of network public opinion from these data and analyze the sentiment tendency of public opinion comment. First, this article takes the public opinion of food safety network as the research point, and a BLSTM-CRF model for automatically marking the role of event is proposed by combining BLSTM and conditional random field organically. Second, the Attention mechanism based on vocabulary in the field of food safety is introduced, the distance-related sequence semantic features are extracted by BLSTM, and the emotional classification of sequence semantic features is realized by using CNN. A kind of Att-BLSTM-CNN model for the analysis of public opinion and emotional tendency in the field of food safety is proposed. Finally, based on the time series, this article combines the role extraction of food safety events and the analysis of emotional tendency and constructs a net-mediated public opinion early warning model in the field of food safety according to the heat of the event and the emotional intensity of the public to food safety public opinion events.

Military Alliances and Public Support for War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomz ◽  
Jessica L P Weeks
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Military Alliances ◽  
Audience Costs ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Willingness To Intervene ◽  
Reputational Costs

Abstract How do military alliances affect public support for war to defend victims of aggression? We offer the first experimental evidence on this fundamental question. Our experiments revealed that alliance commitments greatly increased the American public's willingness to intervene abroad. Alliances shaped public opinion by increasing public fears about the reputational costs of nonintervention and by heightening the perceived moral obligation to intervene out of concerns for fairness and loyalty. Finally, although alliances swayed public opinion across a wide range of circumstances, they made the biggest difference when the costs of intervention were high, the stakes of intervention were low, and the country needing aid was not a democracy. Thus, alliances can create pressure for war even when honoring the commitment would be extremely inconvenient, which could help explain why democratic allies tend to be so reliable. These findings shed new light on the consequences of alliances and other international legal commitments, the role of morality in foreign policy, and ongoing debates about domestic audience costs.

Ethics, National Sovereignty and the Control of Immigration

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron Weiner
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Human Right ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Migration Policies ◽  
Open Borders ◽  
The Relationship

This paper examines the debate as to whether migration is a basic human right or if the claims of outsiders are superseded by the principle of national sovereignty – the moral obligation of states to do the best for their own citizens. In evaluating migration and refugees it focuses on issues of open borders, migration selectivity, the capacity of sovereign states to control entry, the claims of refugees, the relationship between sovereignty and justifiable intervention, and the role of public opinion and morals throughout migration policies.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue: Soft Power of Civil Society in International Relations

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
TAKASHI INOGUCHI
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Policy Makers

This special issue focuses on the role of civil society in international relations. It highlights the dynamics and impacts of public opinion on international relations (Zaller, 1992). Until recently, it was usual to consider public opinion in terms of its influence on policy makers and in terms of moulding public opinion in the broad frame of the policy makers in one's country. Given that public opinion in the United States was assessed and judged so frequently and diffused so globally, it was natural to frame questions guided by those concepts which pertained to the global and domestic context of the United States.

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