Beyond issue diversification: N-VA and the communitarisation of political,economic and cultural conflicts in Belgium

Since the early 2000s, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) has experienced a burgeoning growth. Paradoxically, for a stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP), this performance has occurred without major changes in mass support for independence and only ambiguous ones for more regional autonomy, which suggests that the party appeals to different electoral subgroups through a vote-maximisation strategy of issue diversification. Providing an in-depth analysis of the multi-dimensional ideology of N-VA, this article contributes to the literature on SNRPs by arguing that N-VA has gone beyond issue diversification through a strategy of ‘issue communitarisation’ that consists not only in expanding its agenda beyond the centre–periphery cleavage, but rather in framing all other policy issues explicitly in (sub-state) nationalist terms. According to this strategy, all major conflicts on political power, social redistribution and cultural identity are systematically represented as being based on an unresolvable and overarching centre–periphery antagonism between Flanders and francophone Belgium.     

The Politics of Selectivity: Online Newspaper Coverage of Refugees Entering Canada and the United States

Abstract

While scholarly work on Europe’s latest “refugee crisis” has blossomed, less attention has focused on the United States and Canada. My research centers on newspaper coverage of refugees entering these two countries, before and after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015. I conduct a comparative, cultural sociological analysis of 318 online news articles, reconstructing a system of meaning I call the Politics of Selectivity, in which refugees are portrayed as deserving or undeserving of resettlement. A deep, interpretive reading of the data reveals three dimensions of this political arena in which explicit, implicit, and conditional criteria for accepting refugees are articulated.     

Exonerees in Black and White: the influence of race on perceptions of those who falsely confessed to a crime

ABSTRACT

Black Americans account for 61% of those who have been released from prison through DNA exoneration. In the present study, we explored the influence of race on perceptions of wrongfully convicted individuals who have been exonerated. Participants (N?=?121) were randomly assigned to read a fictional newspaper article about a Black or White individual who was wrongfully convicted due to a false confession and then report their perceptions of the exoneree’s guilt, warmth, competence and aggression, how deserving the exoneree was of government assistance and the likelihood that once released, the exoneree would commit a crime resulting in his reimprisonment. Results indicated that a Black exoneree was perceived as more aggressive (but not less competent or warm), less deserving of assistance, and more likely to commit a crime post exoneration resulting in his reimprisonment than a White exoneree. We also explored whether there were differences in terms of race on perceptions of mental illness for those wrongfully convicted due to falsely confessing to a crime and found that participants perceived a White exoneree as more mentally ill than a Black exoneree. The implications for the post-incarceration experiences and challenges faced by Black exonerees relative to White exonerees are discussed.     

Does Fairness Matter More to Some than to Others? The Moderating Role of Workplace Status on The Relationship Between Procedural Fairness Perceptions and Job Satisfaction

Three field studies explored the relations among status, procedural fairness, and job satisfaction in the workplace. Study 1 revealed that status differences moderated the relationship between procedural fairness and job satisfaction such that there was a stronger relationship between procedural fairness and job satisfaction for individuals with higher perceived status than for those with lower perceived status. Study 2 examined a possible underlying psychological mechanism for the moderating effect of perceived status—the importance of procedural fairness deservingness—and found that higher levels of perceived status were associated with a greater sense of deservingness for procedural fairness. Extending the results of the first two studies, Study 3 found that procedural fairness deservingness mediated the moderating effect of status on the relationship between procedural fairness and job satisfaction. This research contributes to theories of fairness by further illuminating the role of status in affecting reactions to procedural fairness. This research also contributes to our understanding of status in organizations and shows that perceived status can lead to an increased sense of deservingness.     

A ‘Road to Work’? The reworking of deservedness,social citizenship and public work programmes in rural Hungary

The paper discusses the effects of the ‘public work programme’ on social citizenship in remote rural localities in Hungary, where it has developed into an extreme form of workfare in lack of other employment options. Drawing on extensive empirical material from two rural localities, the paper shows that, due to decentralisation, large variations exist in the ways the programme is implemented locally. The practices and approach of local officials, who as key welfare workers in a highly decentralised state primarily determine its local implementation, are strongly linked to local social relations, as well as dominant notions of deservingness/undeservingness on which local claims and negotiations of belonging are based. The study concludes that, whilst the programme fails to address, and even upholds, structural inequalities, the ways in which the programme is organised can, nevertheless, fundamentally affect both the material welfare and the locally constituted social citizenship of its participants.     

Spending and cutting are two different worlds: experimental evidence from Danish local councils

This article investigates politicians’ preferences for cutting and spending. The research questions are where do politicians prefer to cut, where do they prefer to spend and how is this influenced by political ideology? These questions are investigated in a large-scale survey experiment fielded to Danish local councillors, who are randomly assigned to a decision-making situation, where the block grant provided to their municipality is either increased or reduced. The results show that the politicians’ preferences for cutting and spending are asymmetric, in the sense that the policy areas, which are assigned the least cuts when the grant is reduced, are rarely the ones which are assigned extra money when the grant is increased. Areas with well-organised interests and a target group which is perceived as deserving are granted more money, whereas policy areas where the target group is perceived as less deserving receive the highest cuts. Ideology matters as left-wing councillors prefer more vague categories when cutting and prioritise childcare and unemployment policies when increasing spending. In contrast, right-wing councillors prefer to cut administration and increase spending on roads.     

Why People are Committed to Human Rights and Still Tolerate Their Violation: A Contextual Analysis of the Principle–Application Gap

We report results from two experimental studies that show a large gap between support for general principles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and denunciation of concrete violations of these principles. Participants in both studies read different scenarios involving human rights violations committed by various authorities in Western contexts. In all situations, attributes or actions of the victims could be used to justify the violations. Participants indicated their level of support for each human right and the unacceptability of violations of it. A dual principle was found to organize positioning towards the violations: participants with a rights-based orientation denounced the violation independently of the victims attributes, whereas context-oriented respondents relied on the perceived deservingness of victims and considered the violation a just sanction of an unacceptable act. Judgmental differences were moderated by the situational context and participants extent of agreement with human rights.     

Reactions to incongruous negative life events

We hypothesized that incongruous misfortunes generate stronger affective reactions and perceptions of injustice than do equally severe and equally probable congruous misfortunes. Incongruous misfortunes are defined as ones that bring to mind thoughts or images of the misfortune either happening to a different person or happening to the same person by a different means. In a series of studies, victims of incongruous negative life events (e.g., wartime casualties of “friendly” five) were expected to experience stronger reactions of regret, shock, outrage, and perceived injustice than victims of more congruous versions of the same events. Differences between reactions to incongruous misfortunes and subjectively improbable misfortunes are explored.     

Victims' Responses to traumatic life events: An unjust world or an uncaring world?

Although the psychological literature has generally equated deservingness and justice, victims' responses suggest the need to disentangle the two concepts. Victims usually feel their traumatic experience was undeserved but typically do not consider the outcome in terms of justice or fairness. Rather, their feelings about not deserving the victimization derive from a second type of moral judgment involving caring rather than justice. These two orientations are discussed in light of recent developments in work on moral reasoning. A framework for understanding the trauma of victimization is presented; the shattering of assumptions related to a caring world—in which people are protected from harm—is highlighted in this model. The crucialrole of social support and specific cognitive strategies used by victims in the aftermath of their victimization are discussed in terms of survivors' efforts to rebuild their assumptions about a caring world. Although concerns about justice are less common among survivors, an effort is made to discuss when these isues are most apt to arise.     

When Bad (Good) Things Happen to Good (Bad) People: The Impact of Character Appraisal and Perceived Controllability on Judgments of Deservingness

When third parties judge the deservingness of outcomes experienced by others, what role does their appraisal of others' character play in their judgments? Two experiments examined this question by locating it within the framework of Feather's (1994a) theoretical analysis of deservingness. In both experiments, participants read 16 stories in which (a) people of good or bad character (b) experienced positive or negative outcomes in events (c) over which they had high or low control, then rated the extent to which each outcome was deserved. All three factors were found to affect ratings of deservingness, but the dominant influence was the Valence of Character × Valence of Outcome interaction. Outcomes were judged to be deserved when the valences attached to actors' character and their outcomes were congruent (either ++ or ??) and undeserved when the valences were incongruent (either +? or ?+). Most of the results supported Feather's formulations and, in addition, suggested how people integrate several perceptions into a composite judgment of deservingness.