The Effect of Personal Idealism,Relativism, and Machiavellianism on Voting Tendency: A Turkish Study

This study examined the relationship between Turkish voters’ ethical characteristics and voting tendencies to the political left, right, or center by applying the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) and Mach IV to the collection of data for analysis from 500 voters in a national election in Turkey. The most significant finding is that there was no statistically meaningful relationship among levels of idealism, relativism, or Machiavellianism and voting tendencies to the political left, right, and center. However, results generated by EPQ and Mach IV questionnaire found that voting tendencies were affected by personal relativism (0.10), followed by Machiavellianism (?0.03) and idealism (?0.03). Results show that respondents’ voting tendency was most affected by the level of their personal relativism, but the magnitude of the effect was not statistically significant. The mean scores for Machiavellianism and relativism attributes were on average in the mid-range of the scale, while mean scores for idealism show that the participating voters agreed most strongly with the statements relating to the idealism and could be characterized as absolutist by their low relativism and high idealism. The results demonstrate a positive linear relationship, linking both idealism and relativism to Machiavellianism and indicate statistically significant positive correlations among the three variables.     

Let's get real: a critical semiotic analysis of Irish print media discourses

In what follows, I critically assess the merits of the relativist and realist positions in the social and human sciences, and argue that the relativisation of truth claims operates to mask relations of power and inequality, and also offers impunity to discursive mystifications denying the existence of both. Alternatively, I argue that the Critical Realist position, with its realist ontology and relativist epistemology, allows for the identification of such structures, and as a consequence of its emphasis on the materiality of discourse, for the identification of mystificatory meaning-making. And I operationalise my argument through critical analysis and commentary on four texts drawn from newspapers across the range for such in Ireland on the related issues of wealth and welfare.