Does Television Personalise Voting Behaviour? Studying the Effects of Media Exposure on Voting for Candidates or Parties

Scholars have long argued that politics has become personalised throughout the post Second World War era. Increasingly, focus shifts from policy to politicians' personal traits. The media – particularly television, it is argued – is the driving force in the process by focusing more on individual politicians and their personal traits than parties and their policy proposals. Empirically, it is not known whether the personalisation of media content affects the political behaviour of voters. Based on survey data from the 2009 Danish local elections (N = 3,336), this article explores the determinants of preferential voting – that is, voting for a specific candidate rather than a party. The findings show that institutional factors and individual characteristics are far better predictors of personalised voting behaviour than any measure of media exposure – and that viewing the main national news bulletins, as well as reading regional newspapers, have a similar positive effect. Thus, the study provides answers to the highly debated but rarely studied question of whether and how the media possibly personalise politics with regard to voting behaviour.     

The Post-Modern Self: A Retrospective

This paper examines the idea that the self is now post-modern, meaning fragmented, fluid, boundaryless, defenseless and lacking identity. This idea was popular a while back, but it now looks faddish and out-dated. The pomo self theorists over-emphasized some things and under-emphasized others, i.e. they engaged in the fallacy of reduction. They mistook minor changes in the self for major ones. They overlooked the power of the primary group. And they under-rated the self??s defenses, especially inner speech as a device for protecting the self and agency as a weapon for managing one??s environment.     

Psychometric validation of the Brief Symptom Inventory 25 Forensic (BSI-25-F)

The Brief Symptom Inventory 25 Forensic (BSI-25-F) is a screening instrument for measuring the psychophysical distress of prisoners and forensic patients. The aim of the study was to validate the instrument. For this purpose, 165 forensic patients, 312 general psychiatric patients, and 1359 people from the general population completed the BSI-25-F. In addition, the data of the long-term prisoners who were studied when the instrument was originally developed were used for comparison. The item analyses revealed acceptable to very good item characteristics within the target samples of the prisoners and the forensic patients for the majority of the items. Reliability tests also showed acceptable to good values for the target samples. The differential validity but not the factorial validity could be proved. To conclude, the new BSI-25-F represents an economic, practicable, and reliable screening instrument for identifying prisoners who are in a need of treatment.     

Laboratory simulation and bias in the study of juror behavior

Theoretical speculation and meta-analysis suggest that the strength of treatment effects (e.g., defendant attractiveness) may become weaker as the experimental simulation becomes more realistic and complex. In order to test this hypothesis, various levels of biasing pretrial publicity were combined with both a short and a long trial. Results provided no support for the contention that treatment effects act differently as a function of the length of the stimulus trial in which they are embedded. Rather, it is suggested that treatments used in simplified jury simulations may often show similar effects when examined in more realistic, complex settingsif the treatments are comparable.This research was supported by NSF Research grant No. SES 8419944 to the second author, John Carroll, and James Alfini. Portions were presented at the Midwestern Psychological Association Convention, Chicago, May 7–9, 1987.     

Concentrated bleach burns in a child

After a review of the literature on inflicted burns in children, we present a case of caustic burns in a child aged 6 months. Its interest lies in the causative agent (concentrated bleach) and in discussion of the intentional nature of the burn.     

Bases of political judgments: The role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic information

Three experiments investigated the role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic criteria in judgments of political candidates. The effects of physical attractiveness, political party, and stands on specific issues on both absolute and comparative judgments of political candidates were examined to evaluate three hypotheses about stereotype and attribute use. In the absence of other information, candidates' physical attractiveness (conveyed through photographs) had a substantial influence on subjects' global evaluations of them and inferences of both their personal qualities and their political ideology. When other information about the candidates' party membership and stands on specific issues was available, however, the candidates' attractiveness had no effect on the evaluations of them. When subjects made judgments of only one candidate, subjects relied exclusively on the candidate's voting record. When subjects were asked to make comparative judgments of two candidates, however, they based their judgments on each candidate's party membership and not on their respective voting records. Implications of these results for the processes that underlie political judgments and decisions are evaluated.     

Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party

This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the basis of ethnicity. Indirect welfare chauvinism is the result of policy measures that apply to both natives and immigrants, but which deliberately negatively affect immigrants the most. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of labour market reforms in Denmark, where one of the most successful populist right‐wing parties in Europe – the Danish People's Party – held a pivotal position in the period 2001–11, the article traces the intentions and deliberate policy‐making strategies of the party. It shows that the distinction between direct and indirect chauvinism is a useful theoretical tool for understanding how the Danish People's Party can fulfill the expectations of both its electorate and its coalition partners, even if they point in different directions.