Values and Voting

We examined relations of the 10 types of values in Schwartz's (1992) theory of voting. Hypotheses were generated by relating the core motivations of each value type to the ideological messages conveyed by party policies and symbols. Eight parties that ran in the 1988 Israeli elections were arrayed by judges on three ideological dimensions: classical liberalism, economic egalitarianism, state and religion. Discriminant analyses yielded a function whose coefficients for value types corresponded to hypotheses for the state and religion dimension and ordered party supporters on this dimension. After dropping religious parties, another value-based function ordered party supporters on the classical liberalism dimension, as predicted. Both functions significantly improved the party classification of voters in a representative national sample (N=769). Economic egalitarianism, a nonsalient dimension in Israeli politics, was unrelated to values. Results suggest that all types of values may be politically relevant depending on context.     

Feminists, Islamists, and Political Change in Turkey

This paper examines how some feminist and Islamist women in Turkey helped bring about change in political values during the past decade. The traditional political culture upheld statist, corporatist (as opposed to liberal, individualist) norms. The state controlled religion in the name of secularism and limited democracy within the confines of formal equality. Both feminists and Islamists contested traditional political values by insisting on their own definition of their interests, as opposed to those that were state-enforced. The feminists questioned the justice of formal equality as they sought substantive equality; Islamist women challenged the secular concept of equality as they insisted on the justice of male-female complementarity. Both groups engaged in active politics and expanded the parameters of democratic participation as they sought substantive equality beyond formal equality. Yet the patriarchal heritage of Islam defined the limits of Islamist women's search for liberation within the confines of religion.     

Authoritarianism and Economic Threat: Implications for Political Behavior

This study examined whether authoritarians experiencing economic threat are more likely than other authoritarians to support social policy and political agendas that restrict benefits or curtail rights for disadvantaged groups. A sample of 131 college students completed questionnaires that measured authoritarianism, degree of economic and societal insecurity, and attitudes toward eight political issues. Economic and social insecurity were indexed to perceptions of whether one's standard of livingg had declined, whether incom inequality had grown among social classes, and whether crime, race relations, environmental quality, and governmental services had worsened. The political scales reflected issues currently debated in public forums; they included funding mechanisms for social security and health care, the state's role in regulating abortion, government services for illegal immigrants, terminating welfare for unemployed women with children, and regulation of sexual conduct. A logistic model found that, relative to non-threatened authoritarians or nonauthoritarians, threatened authoritarians were six times as likely to favor restricting benefits to powerless groups and eight times as likely to support the state's preventing women from securing anabortion. These results are discussed in terms of systemic changes in the economy that have resulted in declines in real income and increasing income inequality.     

Political Participation and Feminist Consciousness Among Women Activists of the 1960s

This paper examined the hypothesis that women who took part in student movements of the 1960s would be distinguishable from their contemporaries in terms of political ideology, political behavior, and feminism in middle age. Women who had been identified as student activists in public records during the late 1960s and early 1970s were compared to a sample of nonactivist peers. Although the two groups scored similarly on variables related to work and family arrangements, former activists scored higher on measures of leftist political orientation and political efficacy, reported greater political salience and collectivism, and reported greater current political participation. Although both groups reported high levels of feminist consciousness and identity, activists scored significantly higher. The difficulty of politically mobilizing women to combat gender discrimination is discussed in light of the discrepancy between consciousness and activism in the comparison group.     

2017: The Quincentennial Celebration of the Reformation in an Age of Secularization and Religious Pluralism

In the last days of October 1517 Martin Luther finished a series of theological theses in which he argued that selling indulgences was theologically wrong; in fact, untenable. Protestants consider Luther's initiative the beginning of the Reformation. But how should we celebrate the memory of these events that took place 500 years ago? What is the lasting value of Luther's message in our time, in an age of secularization and religious pluralism?     

God Versus Party: Competing Effects on Attitudes Concerning Criminal Punishment,National Security,and Military Service

We explore how images of God interact with political party to predict attitudes concerning the appropriate role of government in both criminal punishment and national security. Using the second wave of the Baylor Religion Survey (2007), we analyze the extent to which beliefs regarding God's moral judgment moderate the influence of party affiliation on opinions about the death penalty, fighting terrorism, punishing criminals, serving in the military, and U.S. involvement in the Iraq War. Specifically, we find that Democrats who believe in a judgmental God tend to support more conservative policies. In fact, attitudes converge such that the effects of party membership are erased if rival partisans both believe in a judgmental moral authority.     

Psychological variables underlying political orientations in an old and a new democracy: A comparative study between Sweden and Latvia

This study examines in detail the psychological variables underlying ideological political orientation, and structure and contents of this orientation, in Sweden and Latvia. Individual political orientation is conceptualized on two dimensions: acceptance vs. rejection of social change and acceptance vs. rejection of inequality. Swedish (N = 320) and Latvian (N = 264) participants completed measures of political orientation, Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), self vs. other orientation, tolerance for ambiguity, humanism and normativism, core political values, system justification, as well as moral foundations questionnaire and portrait values questionnaire. The results showed that the relation among the measured variables was similar in both samples. Swedish participants showed stronger endorsement of egalitarian attitudes and social values, whereas we found more self‐enhancing and socially conservative values and attitudes among the Latvian participants.     

Conscious inhibitions: Freud,anti-Semitism,and Hobbesian imagination

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about anti-Semitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.     

On the Grammar of Politics—or Why Conservatives Prefer Nouns

Previous research indicates that political conservatism is associated with epistemic needs for structure and certainty (Jost et al., 2003) and that nouns elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech (Carnaghi et al., 2008). We therefore hypothesized that conservatives would exhibit preferences for nouns (vs. verbs and adjectives), insofar as nouns are better suited to satisfy epistemic needs. In Study 1, we observed that social conservatism was associated with noun preferences in Polish and that personal need for structure accounted for the association between ideology and grammatical preferences. In Study 2, conducted in Arabic, social conservatism was associated with a preference for the use of nominal sentences (composed of nouns only) over verbal sentences (which included verbs and adjectives). In Study 3, we found that more conservative U.S. presidents used greater proportions of nouns in major speeches, and this effect was related to integrative complexity. We discuss the possibility that conservative ideology is linked to grammatical preferences that foster feelings of stability and predictability.