Reflective political reasoning: Political disagreement and empathy

As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait-level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern towards those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter-attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.     

Ideological Congruence: Illusion or Imperfection?

Paul Warwick ( 2016 ) argues that much of the research on ideological congruence leaves the erroneous impression that a close match of median left‐right voter opinions and government ideological positions usually emerges from elections. I propose further clarifications. I offer a “natural metric” based on the average distances from the median voter of the most distant and the closest parties competing in all these countries’ elections. I suggest that by these standards average ideological congruence in the Western liberal democracies in the last 20 years has been fairly successful, but not as successful as it could be.     

Interpreting “Cumulative Extremism”: Six Proposals for Enhancing Conceptual Clarity

The concept of “cumulative extremism”—described in 2006 by Roger Eatwell as “the way in which one form of extremism can feed off and magnify other forms [of extremism],” has recently gained considerable traction in academic, policy, and practitioner discourses about extremism. Yet in spite of the growing usage of the term, particularly in analyses of the dynamic between extreme Islamist and extreme Right-Wing or anti-Muslim protest groups, there has to date been scant interrogation of the concept itself or of its application. In this article, we make a series of six proposals as to how we might enhance the conceptual clarity of these conversations about “cumulative extremism.” Our aim in doing so is to increase the likelihood that the concept might become a useful addition to the debates on extremism rather than becoming, to borrow a term from John Horgan—something of an “explanatory fiction”—an idea that appears to enable us to explain a great deal, but whose explanatory value is largely lost because there is insufficient scrutiny of the claims that it is used to make and whose liberal application becomes increasingly conducive to poor science.     

State of the world 2018: democracy facing global challenges*

This article analyses the state of democracy in the world in 2018, and recent developments building on the 2019 release of the V-Dem dataset. First, the trend of autocratization continues and 24 countries are now affected by what is established as a “third wave of autocratization”. Second, despite the global challenge of gradual autocratization, democratic regimes prevail in a majority of countries in the world (99 countries, 55%) in 2018. Thus, the state of the world is unmistakably more democratic compared to any point during the last century. At the same time, the number of electoral authoritarian regimes had increased to 55, or 31% of all countries. Third, the autocratization wave is disproportionally affecting democratic countries in Europe and the Americas, but also India’s large population. Fourth, freedom of expression and the media, and the rule of law are the areas under attack in most countries undergoing autocratization, but toxic polarization of the public sphere is a threat to democracy spreading across regimes. Finally, we present the first model to predict autocratization (“adverse regime transitions”) pointing to the top-10 most at-risk countries in the world.     

Affective blocs: Understanding affective polarization in multiparty systems

Research has suggested that affective polarization (AP)—the extent to which partisans view each other as a disliked out-group—has increased, especially in two-party political systems such as in the US. The understanding of AP in multiparty systems remains limited. We study AP in Finland, characterized by a strong multiparty system and a low level of ideological polarization, between 2007 and 2019. We find that AP has increased, driven mainly by voters evaluating their least favorite party more negatively. We also propose an approach that goes beyond earlier literature, which has mostly used a single aggregate metric to measure AP. Using latent profile analysis, we find that voters are grouped into blocs that view some parties positively and others negatively. This suggests that the complex dynamics of AP in multiparty democracies involve relationships between not just individual parties but between what we call affective blocs that span across party lines.     

人工智能对就业的影响：创造还是破坏？

近年来人工智能迅速发展,但其对就业不仅会产生创造效应,也会产生破坏效应。研究利用2008—2016年中国省级面板数据,探索在智能物质资本投入影响下不同地区和不同技能水平劳动力的需求变化,分析人工智能通过创造效应和破坏效应对我国劳动力就业的影响和作用方向。研究发现：人工智能对不同技能水平劳动力的就业影响方向不同,存在“两极化”趋势;产业结构升级将在一定程度上进一步加剧人工智能对就业“两极化”发展的影响;人工智能对不同地区的不同技能水平的劳动力有差异性影响。研究建议,应进一步加强教育培训,优化产业结构,完善社会福利,以应对人工智能的破坏效应,促进劳动力市场的稳定。     

“一带一路”区域劳动关系风险状况与发展趋势

"一带一路"倡议提出以来,对国家贸易拉动效应明显,但中资企业劳动关系受区域风险因素影响逐步显现。各区域风险因素中,国家因素是首要原因,雇主和工程因素次之。在"一带一路"24个港口国家中有20个国家的劳动关系风险集中在中度风险,而阿尔及利亚与巴哈马的劳动关系风险等级是高度风险,安全度最低,加拿大与坦桑尼亚为一般风险,安全度最高。中资企业与当地的政治、经济、文化、社会环境产生互联融通,使中国劳动关系总体呈现"两极化"的发展态势:一极向微观网络延伸,伴随互联网+平台企业的崛起,劳动关系风险呈现网络化发展趋势;另一极向宏观区域延伸,伴随"一带一路"倡议的推进,劳动关系风险呈现区域化趋势。     

Overlapping polarization: On the contextual determinants of the interplay between ideological and affective polarization

Previous literature has distinguished two types of polarization: ideological and affective. However, little is known on how the interconnection of these two polarizations (which we call overlapping polarization) varies depending on the political context. Is affective polarization always associated with ideological polarization? What is the role of the institutional framework (i.e., democratic age and popular election of the head of state) and the party system (i.e., elite polarization and number of parties) in determining how wide this overlap is? This article examines the contextual determinants of overlapping polarization by using information from the four first CSES waves. According to our analyses, the individual-level positive effect of ideological polarization on affective polarization is stronger when the party system is ideologically polarized and in older democracies, and is weaker in presidential democracies and when the number of parties is higher.     

几种情况下的灰尘足迹静电提取方法比较

通过灰尘足迹静电提取方法的原理的阐述,结合具体实验,归纳了静电提取灰尘足迹的几种方法适用的客体,并总结了各种操作中的注意事项。