Do disagreeable political discussion networks undermine attitude strength?

How attitudes change and affect behavior depends, in large part, on their strength. Strong attitudes are more resistant to persuasion and are more likely to produce attitude-consistent behavior. But what influences attitude strength? In this paper, we explore a widely discussed, but rarely investigated, factor: an individual’s political discussion network. What prior work exists offers a somewhat mixed picture, finding sometimes that disagreeable networks weaken attitudes and other times that they strengthen attitudes. We use a novel national representative dataset to explore the relationship between disagreeable networks and attitude strength. We find, perhaps surprisingly, no evidence that disagreements in networks affect political attitude strength. We conclude by discussing likely reasons for our findings, which, in turn, provide a research agenda for the study of networks and attitude strength

Americans don’t think both parties are ‘too extreme'

An apparent deepening in the polarization of American politics has encouraged researchers to consider whether the Democratic and Republican parties are too extreme for the political tastes of a population who consider largely consider themselves to be moderate. Using national surveys on American perception of the two main parties Joshua Robison explores this question, finding that even as more Americans have started to view both parties as too extreme, most still only consider the party they don’t support as extreme. A lack of public knowledge about parties’ political and ideological positions, he writes, means that party elites can continue to push for measures that “moderates” consider extreme without great pushback from the electorate

An Audit of Political Behavior Research

What are the most important concepts in the political behavior literature? Have experiments supplanted surveys as the dominant method in political behavior research? What role does the American National Election Studies (ANES) play in this literature? We utilize a content analysis of over 1,100 quantitative articles on American mass political behavior published between 1980 and 2009 to address these questions. We then supplement this with a second sample of articles published between 2010 and 2018. Four key takeaways are apparent. First, the agenda of this literature is heavily skewed toward understanding voting to a relative lack of attention to specific policy attitudes and other topics. Second, experiments are ascendant, but are far from displacing surveys, and particularly the ANES. Third, while important changes to this agenda have occurred over time, it remains much the same in 2018 as it was in 1980. Fourth, the centrality of the ANES seems to stem from its time-series component. In the end, we conclude that the ANES is a critical investment for the scientific community and a main driver of political behavior research

Valuing Politics: Explaining Citizen’s Normative Conceptions of Citizenship

Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviou

In the eye of the beholder: What determines how people sort others into social classes?

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define classes and they do so mainly in terms of job and income. Even though people in the two countries classify others using somewhat different class labels – with working class labels being used more frequently in Britain than in Denmark – we find a common underlying pattern to the classification. This indicates that class categorization takes place according to a strong underlying mental schema

Comparison of A-mode and B-mode Ultrasound for Measurement of Subcutaneous Fat

With lower-cost devices and technologic advancements, ultrasound has been undergoing a resurgence as a method to measure subcutaneous adipose tissue. We aimed to determine whether a low-cost, 2.5-MHz amplitude (A-mode) ultrasound, designed specifically for body composition assessment, could produce subcutaneous fat thickness measurements comparable to an expensive, 12-MHz brightness (B-mode) device. Fat thickness was measured on 40 participants (20 female, 20 male; 29.7 ± 11.1 y of age; body mass index 24.9 ± 4.5 kg/m2) at 7 sites (chest, subscapula, mid-axilla, triceps, abdomen, suprailiac and thigh) with both devices. Intraclass correlations exceeded 0.75 at all measurement sites. Mean differences in fat thickness were not significantly different (p \u3e 0.05) and within ± 1.0 mm. Variability between devices was greatest at the abdomen, the site with the greatest thickness. The low-cost, low-resolution A-mode ultrasound provides subcutaneous fat thickness measurements similar to the more expensive, high-resolution B-mode ultrasound

2012-2013 The Antique Club: Pictures at an Exhibition

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_otherseasonalconcerts/1015/thumbnail.jp