European Professors as Public Intellectuals

Historically, European economists, compared to their American counterpart, were more involved in public discussions of policy. In this paper it is argued that this has likely changed. The chief reasons seem to involve the European imitation of the academic ethos that is more prevalent in America. Features of this academic ethos include a more formalist orientation in graduate programs and an academic incentive system wherein professional journal publication is paramount and public discourse is relatively devalued. I suggest there is an inescapable ideological dilemma in addressing the costs and benefits of professors’ neglect of public discourse. The ideological character of academics compared with our own political sensibilities affect whether we want academics to influence public discourse or not. I use the history of academics as public intellectuals in Sweden to substantiate the change, and I use new data on Swedish social science academics to see whether those who participate in public discourse tend to have certain political and social views.

Public Law Litigation: Lessons and Questions

The practice of using courts to foster social change, once confined to the USA, has emerged as a worldwide phenomenon. Foreign practice reflects indigenous forms but faces criticisms similar to that in the USA: that it is ineffective, antidemocratic, and counterproductive. The essay meets these criticisms, first, by recasting US public law litigation as a form of politics that challenges the status quo by forging alliances, changing discursive frames, and disciplining private and public decision making. Looking abroad, the essay emphasizes public law litigation as a meditative institution that facilitates political action and aids in regulatory enforcement where administrative mechanisms are weak or regulation requires ongoing elaboration. Finally, the essay suggests that criticisms of public law litigation tend to neglect three factors: the actual and not assumed comparative advantages of different institutional actors, the role of temporal conditions in affecting social change, and the ubiquity of complex, not dichotomous, relations.

Intolerance Toward Gays and Lesbians in Poland

The protection of rights of freedom of speech and assembly for gays and lesbians in Poland has come under greater international scrutiny because of the mismanagement of peaceful demonstrations throughout Poland in 2005. An overview and context of the political, economic, and social transformation of Poland in the 1990s shows a flourish of activity among gays and lesbians as the economic and political spheres open, as well as weaker law enforcement during the rapid change to capitalism and democracy. Although society has opened dramatically and tolerance has grown recently, the concept of protecting minority rights for gays and lesbians in Poland continues to be weak in public opinion, laws, and the top sources of opinion.

---

Visions of National Service

While national service enjoys broad support across the political spectrum, the actual goals of programs such as AmeriCorps remain somewhat amorphous. Based on a set of interviews with both experienced. practitioners and key thought leaders in the field, four competing visions of national service are detailed. The article suggests that national service has alternatively been seen as a way to promote an active and engaged citizenship, accelerate the personal growth of the young people in the programs, build social capital in communities, and meet critical social needs through public work. These four competing visions can and do coexist in practice, which helps to explain the widespread and enduring popularity of the idea of national service in America.

Explaining Turnout Decline in Britain, 1964–2005: Party Identification and the Political Context

Turnout decline in Britain is greater than it first appears since changes in the social composition of the electorate have had a positive impact on turnout. This paper finds that whereas a weakening in the strength of party identification is associated with the long-term decline, the political context influences short-term variation. Partisan dealignment is also changing the dynamics of the determinants of turnout. Since non-identifiers are more strongly influenced by the political context than strong identifiers, and there are now more non-identifiers than previously, the political context is becoming a more important factor in determining whether people vote or not.

Bridging the Ideological Divide: Trust and Support for Social Security Privatization

Using a pair of national surveys, this article analyzes the individual-level sources of public support for Social Security privatization. Given the inherent risks associated with privatization, we argue that the political trust heuristic affords untapped theoretical leverage in explaining public attitudes toward privatization. We find that, among certain individuals, political trust plays an instrumental role in structuring privatization preferences. Political trust increases support for privatization, but only among liberals. This heterogeneity in trust’s impact is best explained, we argue, by the unbalanced ideological costs imposed by the potential privatization of Social Security. Among liberals, embracing privatization requires the sacrifice of core values, thereby making political trust a potent consideration. Political trust is inconsequential among conservatives because supporting privatization requires no comparable sacrifice for them.

The Death Penalty and the Peculiarity of American Political Institutions

This article examines distinctive American political institutions that contribute to explaining the continued use of the death penalty. In the light of wide popular support for capital punishment, strong political leadership is considered to be a principal channel for the abolition of capital punishment. The dilemma of the US death penalty, however, lies in populist features of political structures that greatly limit the political leverage and possibilities available to leaders. The institutional arrangements in the United States allow public support for the death penalty to influence political decision making more directly than it can in the European counterpart. A strong receptiveness of US political leaders to the public also implies that once public opinion changes, political leaders are likely to respond to the public’s new attitude. Unlike most countries, which abolished the death penalty through political initiatives that were counter-majoritarian, the United States may abolish it only after a change in public opinion.

---

Nonparticipation as Self-Censorship: Publicly Observable Political Activity in a Polarized Opinion Climate

In a polarized opinion climate, people may refrain from participating in publicly observable political activities that make them vulnerable to scrutiny and criticism by others who hold opinions that differ from their own. We took a dispositional approach to testing this claim by determining whether people who are relatively more influenced by the climate of opinion when choosing whether or not to voice an opinion, measured with the Willingness to Self-Censor scale [Hayes et al. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 17 (2005) 298], are also relatively less likely to engage in public political activities. In a poll of residents of the United States, we found that even after controlling for interest in politics, political ideology, ideological extremity, political efficacy, attention to political news, dispositional shyness, frequency of political discussion, and demographics, dispositional self-censors reported having engaged in relatively fewer public political activities over the prior 2 years compared to those less willing to censor their own opinion expression. These results are consistent with our interpretation of political participation as a social process that is governed in part by the social psychological implications of participation to the person. At a larger theoretical level, our findings connect the literature on opinion perceptions and opinion expression with research on political participation.

The Limits of Political Citizenship

Policy makers tend to focus on the extension of citizenship as the primary means by which new populations become incorporated into a society. Although acquiring formal citizenship is necessary in order to participate in many aspects of a state's civic, social, and political life, the extension of legal citizenship is far from a guarantee for full membership. Instead of focusing exclusively on naturalizing immigrants, we need to consider T.H. Marshall's three spheres of citizenship—the civil, political, and social. By extending social elements of citizenship prior to or at the same time as we extend other benefits, we will move towards more complete citizenship for and greater civil and political engagement among all residents in our society—non-citizens, naturalized, and native-born, alike.

The Social Sciences and a New Administration

The policy issues confronting the new administration in 2009 can benefit greatly from the results of social, behavioral, and economic sciences research. Climate change, energy, human capital, social, capital, migration, public health, fairness, new technologies, and foreign and defense policy are all issues that the research has addressed. The participation of social scientists in the policy process will enhance the contributions of the research.

Political Disagreement in Context: The Conditional Effect of Neighborhood Context, Disagreement and Political Talk on Electoral Participation

Despite scholarly interest in determining how exposure to disagreeable political ideas influences political participation, existing research supports few firm conclusions. This paper argues that these varied findings stem from an implicit model of contextual influence that fails to account for the indirect effect of aggregate social contexts. A model of contextual influence is outlined which implies that the neighborhood partisan context moderates the effect of political disagreement in social networks on campaign participation. The evidence shows that network disagreement demobilizes people who are the political minority in their neighborhood, but has no influence on people in the majority. When viewed together, these findings indicate that a person’s relationship to the broader political environment sets distinctive network processes in motion.

The Weakness of Our Political Parties

Whatever else the 2008 presidential election may result in, we can be sure that it will only contribute further to the steadily declining role of political parties in American politics, and the myriad negative consequences arising from that decline.

Religion and National Identity in America and Europe

America and Europe have had very different religious experiences, and these differences have continuing consequences. In America, the preponderance of Reform Protestantism gave rise to religious and political pluralism, a religious marketplace, and the continuing vitality of the churches. In Europe, the dominance of state churches gave rise to the eventual rejection of these churches and religions when the traditional political and social authorities were rejected, particularly by the Generation of 1968. However, Europe’s extreme secularization has rendered it confused and ineffective in dealing with the new religious challenge posed by Muslim immigrant communities.

Issue Framing and Engagement: Rhetorical Strategy in Public Policy Debates

Conventional wisdom and scholarly research indicate that to win a policy debate political actors should frame the issue strategically—that is, selectively highlight considerations that mobilize public opinion behind their policy position. Engaging the opponent in a dialogue (i.e., focusing on the same considerations) is portrayed as a suboptimal strategy because political actors forfeit the ability to structure the debate. Using over 40 public opinion polls and a detailed content analysis of news stories, I examine the use of framing and engagement strategies during the 1993–94 debate over health care reform. The analysis shows that engagement was more effective at increasing support for reform than framing. This study is the first to document the role of engagement in a policy debate, and it extends work showing that this strategy is more common in election campaigns than scholars once suspected.

The Gender Gap in Ideology

Over the past few decades, a gender gap has emerged in the mass public in ideological self-placement. While most men and women moved in the conservative direction, another segment of women retained their liberal self-identifications. A gender gap also exists in how men and women define their ideology. Which issues are linked to ideological identities is conditioned by gender and time period. Finally, ideological identities are structure by nonpolitical values as well as political issues. Religiosity and religious beliefs have come to increasingly shape Americans’ ideological identities, with some differences across the two sexes.

Priming Presidential Approval: The Conditionality of Issue Effects

Variations in the effectiveness of media priming are traditionally attributed to individual differences in political sophistication and news exposure. We contribute to this literature by considering the degree to which the content of an issue prime drives its use in presidential approval. Using a macro level approach, we combine public opinion data on presidential approval from 1981 to 2000 with content analyses of presidential news coverage to see how media attention affects the way issues are weighted in presidential approval. We find that the effectiveness of issue primes depends on issue content, such that familiar and understandable issues are more likely to be primed than more complex and difficult issues.

Never Pick a Fight with an Ugly Person,They’ve Got Nothing to Lose

In the 1970s, social psychologists conducted numerous studies analyzing physical appearance as a social variable. More recent studies in the social sciences appear to have abandoned this topic as unimportant; in any case, very few social scientific studies have been found that incorporate a measure of attractiveness into their analyses. The present study seeks to revive the emphasis on physical attractiveness as a social variable by testing the relationship between crime severity and physical attractiveness, i.e., by presenting evidence to suggest that physically unattractive men commit more serious offenses.

Antwort auf die Replik von Marc Bühlmann,Wolfgang Merkel,Lisa Müller und Bernhard Weßels zum Forumsbeitrag von Thomas Müller und Susanne Pickel

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Wie lässt sich Demokratie am besten messen? Zum Forumsbeitrag von Thomas Müller und Susanne Pickel

Ohne Zusammenfassung * Die vier Autor(inn)en arbeiten in einem gemeinsamen Forschungsprojekt des NCCR Democracy (vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds finanziertes National Centre of Competence in Research: Challenges to Democracy in the 21^st Century) und des WZB an einem „Demokratiebarometer“ für die 30 OECD-Staaten, das die Ignoranz der 0-Varianz bei Polity und Freedom House aufkl?ren will.

---