Journal articles on the topic 'Partisan Segregation'

The paper examines ideological segregation among Ukrainian users in online environments, using as a case study partisan news communities on Vkontakte, the largest online platform in post-communist states. Its findings suggest that despite their insignificant numbers, partisan news communities attract substantial attention from Ukrainian users and can encourage the formation of isolated ideological cliques – or ‘echo chambers’ – that increase societal polarisation. The paper also investigates factors that predict users’ interest in partisan content and establishes that the region of residence is the key predictor of selective consumption of pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian partisan news content.

Recent electoral research has claimed that individuals in the United States are self–segregating along political lines. In this paper, I use the Twin Cities, Minnesota, metropolitan area as a case study to test for the presence of political segregation through statistical and spatial analyses of electoral data from 1992 to 2012. I find that while segregation by partisan voting at the individual level is comparatively low, it has increased during the study period, and there exists substantial spatial clustering in voting patterns at aggregate levels. These distinct electoral divides between central city and exurb suggest spatial sorting of the electorate in the metropolitan area.

Political scientists have long examined the degree to which the American electorate exhibits partisan and ideological polarization and sought to explain the causal mechanism driving this phenomenon. Some scholars have argued that there is an increasing degree of geographic polarization of the electorate—that is, a large percentage of geographic units are becoming less politically heterogeneous. In this study, I argue that the two trends are related. Using individual-level data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, I examine the relationship between local partisan context and political attitudes using multilevel models. I find that, as the local political context becomes less competitive in national elections; those in the local political majority become more ideologically extreme, strengthen their partisan attachments, and hold more polarized attitudes toward the two major-party presidential candidates. These findings suggest that the growing geo- graphic partisan segregation of the electorate is an important source of ideological and partisan polarization.

The present work proposes social media as a tool to understand the relationship between journalists’ social networks and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask, “what is the association between the partisan nature of the accounts journalists follow on Twitter and the news content they produce?” Using standard text scaling techniques, we analyze partisanship in a novel dataset of more than 300,000 news articles produced by 644 journalists at 25 different US news outlets. We then develop a novel, semi-supervised model of partisanship of Twitter following relationships and show a modest correlation between the partisanship of whom a journalist follows on Twitter and the content she produces. The findings provide insight into the partisan dynamics that appear to characterize the US media ecosystem in its broad contours, dynamics that may be traceable from social media networks to published stories.

AbstractThis article empirically examines the “Big Sort hypothesis”—the notion that, in recent years, liberal and conservative Americans have become increasingly spatially isolated from one another. Using block group-, tract-, and county-level party registration data and presidential election returns, I construct two formal indices of segregation for 1992–2010 in California and evaluate those indices for evidence of growth in the segregation of Californians along ideological lines. Evidence of rising geographic segregation between Democrats and Republicans for measures generated from both party registration and presidential vote data is found. This growth is statistically significant for 10 of the 12 segregation measures analyzed. In addition, many of the increases are practically significant, with estimates of growth in segregation during the observation period ranging from 2% to 23%.

Online social platforms afford users vast digital spaces to share and discuss current events. However, scholars have concerns both over their role in segregating information exchange into ideological echo chambers, and over evidence that these echo chambers are nonetheless over-stated. In this work, we investigate news-sharing patterns across the entirety of Reddit and find that the platform appears polarized macroscopically, especially in politically right-leaning spaces. On closer examination, however, we observe that the majority of this effect originates from small, hyper-partisan segments of the platform accounting for a minority of news shared. We further map the temporal evolution of polarized news sharing and uncover evidence that, in addition to having grown drastically over time, polarization in hyper-partisan communities also began much earlier than 2016 and is resistant to Reddit's largest moderation event. Our results therefore suggest that social polarized news sharing runs narrow but deep online. Rather than being guided by the general prevalence or absence of echo chambers, we argue that platform policies are better served by measuring and targeting the communities in which ideological segregation is strongest.

This study examines the representation of women Members of Parliament on parliamentary committees in the German Bundestag since 1990. In line with theories on the social construction of gender, our descriptive analyses show that women Members of Parliament tend to be over-represented on committees handling issues such as health and family, and under-represented on committees handling issues such as foreign and legal affairs and defence. However, party differences in the over- and under-representation of women on certain committees occur. Gender segregation is strongest within the conservative parties, which also tend to have the lowest proportion of women, and weakest within the left-wing parties.

While the online sphere is believed to expose individuals to a wider array of viewpoints, a worry about self-reinforcing political echo chambers also persists. We join this scholarly debate by focusing on individual motives for political discussion and dyadic- and structural-level mechanisms that can drive one’s message-selection decision in online discussion settings. Using unobtrusively logged behavioral data matched with panel survey responses, our temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM) analysis indicates that message selection in online discussion settings is largely driven by the similarity of one’s candidate evaluative criteria and various endogenous structural factors, whereas the impact of overt partisan preference in shaping message selection is much more limited than is often assumed.

With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence around the impact of such phenomenon, leading some to argue that partisan segregation across news audiences can- not be fully explained by online news consumption alone and that the role of traditional legacy media may be as salient in polarizing public discourse around current events. In this work, we expand the scope of analysis to include both online and more traditional media by investigating the relationship between broadcast news media language and social media discourse. By analyzing a decade’s worth of closed captions (2.1 million speaker turns) from CNN and Fox News along with topically corresponding discourse from Twitter, we pro- vide a novel framework for measuring semantic polarization between America’s two major broadcast networks to demonstrate how semantic polarization between these outlets has evolved (Study 1), peaked (Study 2) and influenced partisan discussions on Twitter (Study 3) across the last decade. Our results demonstrate a sharp increase in polarization in how topically important keywords are discussed between the two channels, especially after 2016, with overall highest peaks occurring in 2020. The two stations discuss identical topics in drastically distinct contexts in 2020, to the extent that there is barely any linguistic overlap in how identical keywords are contextually discussed. Further, we demonstrate at-scale, how such partisan division in broadcast media language significantly shapes semantic polarity trends on Twitter (and vice-versa), empirically linking for the first time, how online discussions are influenced by televised media. We show how the language characterizing opposing media narratives about similar news events on TV can increase levels of partisan dis- course online. To this end, our work has implications for how media polarization on TV plays a significant role in impeding rather than supporting online democratic discourse.

AbstractDuring the Obama presidency, Republicans made major gains in state legislative elections, especially in the South and the Midwest. Republicans’ control grew from 13 legislatures in 2009 to 32 in 2017. A major but largely unexamined consequence of this profound shift in state-level partisan control was the resurgence of efforts to re-segregate public education. We examine new re-segregation policies, especially school district secession and anti-busing laws, which have passed in these states. We argue that the marked reversal in desegregation patterns and upturn in re-segregated school education is part of the Republican Party's anti-civil rights and anti-federal strategies, dressed up in the ideological language of colour-blindness.

Framing pedestrian traffic fatalities episodically rather than thematically, attributing responsibility to pedestrians for their own deaths and non-agential descriptions of traffic crashes reflects windshield bias. Pedestrian traffic fatality rates increased dramatically in the U.S. over the previous decade. Findings from this content analysis of 2019 U.S. news coverage supports conclusions that windshield bias is national in scope, varies between cities in the Sun Belt and Frost Belt, and is associated with reduced walkability and greater partisan segregation of cities. The 2016 vote for Republican Donald Trump was also positively associated with episodic framing. An inverse association between word length and windshield bias was also established. The data set analyzed included 366 news articles drawn from 78 news sources in 74 cities located in 30 states.

In this study, we investigate how Twitter allows individuals in Hungary and Poland to experience different political views. To comprehend citizens’ exposure to political information, “who’s following who?” graphs of 455,912 users in Hungary (851,557 connections) and 1,803,837 users in Poland (10,124,501 connections) are examined. Our conceptual point of departure is that Twitter follower networks tell us whether individuals prefer to be members of a group that receives one-sided political messages, or whether they tend to form politically heterogeneous clusters that cut across ideological lines. Methodologically, such connections are best studied by means of computer-aided quantitative research complemented by the sociocentric approach of network analysis. Our data date from September 2018. The findings for Poland do not support the hypothesis of clusters emerging along partisan lines. Likewise, the Hungarian case reveals sharp group divisions on Twitter, the nodes however are diverse and overlapping in terms of political leaning. The data suggest that exposure and segregation in follower networks are not necessarily based on partisanship.

Evidence from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. indicated that the virus had vastly different effects across races, with black Americans faring worse on dimensions including illness, hospitalization and death. New data suggests that our understanding of the pandemic’s racial inequities must be revised given the closing of the gap between black and white COVID-related mortality. Initial explanations for inequality in COVID-related outcomes concentrated on static factors—e.g., geography, urbanicity, segregation or age-structures—that are insufficient on their own to explain observed time-varying patterns in inequality. Drawing from a literature suggesting the relevance of political factors in explaining pandemic outcomes, we highlight the importance of political polarization—the partisan divide in pandemic-related policies and beliefs—that varies over time and across geographic units. Specifically, we investigate the role of polarization through two political factors, public opinion and state-level public health policies, using fine-grained data on disparities in public concern over COVID and in state containment/health policies to understand the changing pattern of inequality in mortality. We show that (1) apparent decreases in inequality are driven by increasing total deaths—mostly among white Americans—rather than decreasing mortality among black Americans (2) containment policies are associated with decreasing inequality, likely resulting from lower relative mortality among Blacks (3) as the partisan disparity in Americans who were “unconcerned” about COVID increased, racial inequality in COVID mortality decreased, generating the appearance of greater equality consistent with a “race to the bottom’’ explanation as overall deaths increased and substantively swamping the effects of containment policies.

Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on urban life rhythms is crucial for accelerating the return-to-normal progress and envisioning more resilient and inclusive cities. While previous studies either depended on small-scale surveys or focused on the response to initial lockdowns, this paper uses large-scale location service data to systematically analyze the urban mobility behavior changes across three distinct phases of the pandemic, i.e., pre-pandemic, lockdown, and reopen. Our analyses reveal two typical patterns that govern the mobility behavior changes in most urban venues: daily life-centered urban venues go through smaller mobility drops during the lockdown and more rapid recovery after reopening, while work-centered urban venues suffer from more significant mobility drops that are likely to persist even after reopening. Such mobility behavior changes exert deeper impacts on the underlying social fabric, where the level of mobility reduction is positively correlated with the experienced segregation at that urban venue. Therefore, urban venues undergoing more mobility reduction are also more filled with people from homogeneous socio-demographic backgrounds. Moreover, mobility behavior changes display significant heterogeneity across geographical regions, which can be largely explained by the partisan inclination at the state level. Our study shows the vast potential of location service data in deriving a timely and comprehensive understanding of the social dynamic in urban space, which is valuable for informing the gradual transition back to the normal lifestyle in a “post-pandemic era”.

Resumo O presente artigo analisa o deslocamento e o rearranjo espacial de áreas segregadas na Região Noroeste de Goiânia. Nessa região, esse movimento foi orquestrado por forças políticas-partidárias juntamente com agentes empresariais. Esses atores materializaram no interior dos espaços segregados infraestrutura viária, serviços públicos e privados que deram curso a centralidades forjadas. Essas centralidades alteraram o endereço de pessoas que habitavam bairros da Região Noroeste de Goiânia, produzindo uma nova espacialização da segregação e um novo sentido aos bairros agora servidos por serviços públicos e privados. A partir dessa premissa, a pesquisa analisou as ações desempenhadas pelos agentes produtores do espaço urbano que deram curso à mobilidade da segregação residencial na Região Noroeste de Goiânia. Palavras-chave: Segregação Residencial. Mobilidade da Segregação Residencial. Região Noroeste de Goiânia. Abstract The present article analyzes dislocation and spatial rearrangement in segregated areas in in the Northwest area in Goiânia. In this region, such movement stems to political and partisan powers along with businesspeople. Those agents materialized land transportation network, public and private services within segregated spaces which triggered forged centralization. Such centralization shifted people´s addresses, yielding a new specialization of segregation and a new meaning to neighborhoods with public and private services. With this premise, the research analyzed initiatives performed by urban space producing agents who enabled residential segregation mobility in the Northwest area in Goiânia. Keywords: Residential Segregation. Mobility of Residential Segregation. Northwest area in Goiânia. Resumen El presente trabajo analisa el desplazamiento y la nueva disposición espacial de areas segregadas en la Región Noroeste de Goiânia. En esa región, ese movimiento fue hecho por fuerzas político-partidarias, junto a agentes empresariales. Eses actores materializaron en interior de los espacios segregados infraestructura vial, servicios públicos y privados que dieron curso a centralidades forjadas. Esas centralidades alteraron la dirección de las personas que vivian en barrios de la Región Noroeste de Goiânia y producieron una nueva espacialización y un nuevo sentido a los barrios ahora servidos por servicios públicos y privados. Bajo esa premisa, la pesquisa analisó las acciones desarrolladas por los agentes productores del espacio urbano que oportunizaron la mobilidad de la segregación residencial en la Región Noroeste de Goiânia. Palabras clave: Segregación Residencial. Mobilidad de la Segregación Residencial. Región Noroeste de Goiânia.

Despite growing economic inequality in recent decades, public support for government intervention to address it has been stable. A substantial literature has documented the individual-level demographic, social, and political characteristics that are associated with the extent to which individuals favor government intervention to reduce inequality. However, less work has examined how the local social environments that individuals are embedded in shape attitudes regarding inequality remediation. Using data from the General Social Survey (2006–2012) and other data sources, the authors examine whether local economic and social characteristics are associated with individuals’ support for government intervention to address income inequality in the United States during the Great Recession. Specifically, the authors link restricted General Social Survey data with place-level identifiers to county-level data on local income inequality, racial segregation, and partisan leanings. Broadly, the authors find that although individual-level conditions and year fixed effects are strongly correlated with perceptions about inequality remediation, most local-level characteristics were not strongly nor significantly associated with individual attitudes regarding government intervention to address inequality. These findings suggest that individuals formulate policy stances regarding inequality on the basis of national messaging rather than on observations within their own communities.

Changing circumstances force planning to re-define its role as a driving function shaping our cities today. One of the significant challenges to the century-old tradition of planning comes from the ageing population. The demand to age in place and its associated conditions particularly require renewed attention. This is, however, not an isolated and partisan topic, but speaks to the changing circumstances and highlights the dramatic shortcoming of a performance-oriented and segregationof-function-driven approach; one that is remnant of the early days of the planning discipline, but is still very much alive today. What has the discussion around ageing and the city brought up, and where are we headed? Two significant aspects are the body and moving away from a performance-oriented interpretation thereof, as well as a rethinking of participation not just as an information exercise, but as a co-design practice.

The article addresses the presentation of the mass murder of Jews during WWII in the Soviet printed production. An overall trend of ignoring the topic of the Holocaust in the Soviet media discourse is unquestioned. Yet, (non)presentation of the mass destruction of Jews in the Soviet literature, which is commonly emphasized by the researches, needs clarification. If we look at the Soviet literature on the Great Patriotic War (including fiction prose), we can trace a phenomenon described in this article through war memoirs. Alongside official ignoring of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, the whole post-war period experienced mass publishing and re-publishing of memoir books which provided direct references to the murder of Jews by the Nazis during the war. Herewith, combatants’ memoirs would often touch very briefly on the murders of Jews, but give no explanations. Such reference style implies that the authors targeted the readers’ background awareness. Detailed descriptions of Jewish discrimination, segregation, getthoisation and murder are found in the memoirs of former prisoners of war and partisans. The account of Nazi persecution of the Jews is an integral part of the stories of everyday life in the occupied territory, which often represents the major piece of the narrative. Under certain ideology, the mention of the murders of Jews was intentionally instrumentalized by the Soviet memoir writers seeking to demonstrate a criminal nature of Nazi collaborators. As can be inferred from the Soviet war memoirs, we are not supposed to simplify a clear-cut attitude of ignoring and should conceptualize the phenomenon of «non-nipped memory» in semi-official narratives. Soviet narratives, particularly war memoirs, did not highlight Nazi persecution of the Jews as a separate phenomenon; although described in detail, it was seen only as a part of the «new order». In the Soviet setting, we do encounter ignoring of the Holocaust (as a separate phenomenon), but at the same time, although with certain limitations, the memory of the mass murder of the Soviet Jews was quite actively reflected in war memoirs.

AbstractPartisan sorting in residential environments is an enduring feature of contemporary American politics, but little research has examined partisan segregation individuals experience in activity spaces through their daily activities. Relying on advances in spatial computation and global positioning system data on everyday mobility flows collected from smartphones, we measure experienced partisan segregation in two ways: place-level partisan segregation based on the partisan composition of its daily visitors and community-level experienced partisan segregation based on the segregation level of places visited by its residents. We find that partisan segregation experienced in places varies across different geographic areas, location types, and time periods. Moreover, partisan segregation is distinct from experienced segregation by race and income. We also find that partisan segregation individuals experience is relatively lower when they visit places beyond their residential areas, but partisan segregation in residential space and activity space is strongly correlated. Residents living in predominantly black, liberal, low-income, non-immigrant, more public transit-dependent, and central city communities tend to experience a higher level of partisan segregation.

Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels’ audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.

AbstractHow does the ideological segregation of online networks impact the spread of misinformation? Past studies have found that homophily generally increases diffusion, suggesting that partisan news, whether true or false, will spread farther in ideologically segregated networks. We argue that network segregation disproportionately aids messages that are otherwise too implausible to diffuse, thus favoring false over true news. To test this argument, we seeded true and false informational messages in experimental networks in which subjects were either ideologically integrated or segregated, yielding 512 controlled propagation histories in 16 independent information systems. Experimental results reveal that the fraction of false information circulating was systematically greater in ideologically segregated networks. Agent-based models show robustness of this finding across different network topologies and sizes. We conclude that partisan sorting undermines the veracity of information circulating on the Internet by increasing exposure to content that would otherwise not manage to diffuse.

AbstractThe past decade has witnessed profound changes in the tenor of American party politics. These changes, in tandem with growing affective polarization and residential segregation by party, raise the question of whether party identification is itself changing. Using three multi-wave panel surveys that stretch from the first Obama Administration through the Trump Administration, this paper takes a fresh look at the stability of party identification, using several different statistical approaches to differentiate true partisan change from response error. Perhaps surprisingly, the pace of partisan change observed between 2011 and 2020 is quite similar to the apparent rates of change in panel surveys dating back to the 1950s. Few respondents experience appreciable change in party identification in the short run, but the pace at which partisanship changes implies that substantial changes are relatively common over a voter’s lifespan.

Abstract Numerous studies have shown that individuals’ belief sensitivity—their ability to discriminate between true and false political statements—varies according to psychological and demographic characteristics. We argue that sensitivity also varies with the political and social communication contexts in which they live. Both battleground state status of the state in which individuals live and the level of partisan segregation in a state are associated with Americans’ belief sensitivity. We leverage panel data collected from two samples of Americans, one collected in the first half of 2019 and the other during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign season. Results indicate that the relationship between living in battleground states and belief sensitivity is contingent on political ideology: living in battleground states, versus in Democratic-leaning states, is associated with lower belief sensitivity among conservatives and higher belief sensitivity among liberals. Moreover, living in a less politically segregated state is associated with greater belief sensitivity. These relationships were only in evidence in the election year.

The notion that mobility weakens collective norms and increases tolerance has a long pedigree in sociology. In this article, we examine the association of migration with partisan identification as British Unionists or Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland, a region where the overlap of opposing religious and national identities is reflected in the residential segregation of its population. In representative samples of the population, we find that Irish Nationalist identification among Catholics and British Unionist identification among Protestants was lower among people not born in Northern Ireland and return migrants from beyond the British Isles. Having lived in the Republic was associated with more Nationalist identification among Catholics but less Unionist identification among Protestants and others. Moreover, having lapsed from the family religion is associated with decreased partisan identification. While international migration has in many countries led to increased tensions, conflict and the ascendance of exclusionary national populist movements, our results thus suggest that mobility beyond the British Isles has contributed to less nation–state conflict in Northern Ireland.

Abstract Low political support for religious minority groups in the United States is often explained as a matter of social distance or unfamiliarity between religious traditions. Observable differences between beliefs and behaviors of religious minority groups and the cultural mainstream are thought to demarcate group boundaries. However, little scholarship has examined why some practices become symbolic boundaries that reduce support for religious accommodation in public policy, while nearly identical practices are tolerated. We hypothesize that politics is an important component of the process by which some religious practices are transformed into demarcations between “us” and “them.” We conduct an original survey experiment in which people are exposed to an identical policy demand—women-only swim times at a local public pool—attributed to three different religious denominations (Muslim, Jewish, and Pentecostal). We find that people are less supportive of women-only swim times when the requesting religion is not a part of their partisan coalition.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, school district politics rose to prominence on the nation's political agenda, as school boards grappled with controversial decisions about reopening schools and implementing mask mandates. A growing number of political scientists are using newly available data and innovative research strategies to examine policy responsiveness, elections, segregation and inequality, state takeovers, interest groups, democratic deliberation, and public opinion—all while focusing on the unique context of education politics. We illuminate the distinctive institutional and policy context of US education politics and review new research in the field, including growing evidence of partisan polarization and the continuing significance of race for influencing power and decision making about schools in the United States. The field has made great strides in the last decade; we highlight the emerging themes from that already rapidly growing literature, while pointing out areas for future research.

Abstract Largely overlooked in research on criminal legal expansion is the rise of political polarization and its attendant consequences for crime policy. Drawing on theories of intergroup collaboration and policymaking research, I argue that network polarization—low frequencies of collaborative relations between lawmakers belonging to distinct political groups—negatively affects crime legislation passage by reducing information flows, increasing intergroup hostility, and creating opportunities for political attacks. To evaluate this perspective, I recreate dynamic legislative networks between 1979 and 2005 using data on 1,897,019 cosponsorship relationships between 1537 federal lawmakers and the outcomes of 5950 federal crime bills. Results illustrate that increases in partisan network segregation and the number of densely clustered subgroups both have negative effects on bill passage. These relationships are not moderated by majority party status and peak during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when prison growth showed its first signs of slowing. These findings provide new insight to the relationship between polarization and policy and suggest that increases in network polarization may be partly responsible for declines in crime policy adoption observed in recent decades.

Large-scale data from private companies offer new opportunities to examine topics of scientific and social significance, such as racial inequality, partisan polarization, and activity-based segregation. However, because such data are often generated through automated processes, their accuracy and reliability for social science research remain unclear. The present study examines how quality issues in large-scale data from private companies can afflict the reporting of even ostensibly uncomplicated values. We assess the reliability with which an often-used device tracking data source, SafeGraph, sorted data it acquired on financial institutions into categories, such as banks and payday lenders, based on a standard classification system. We find major classification problems that vary by type of institution, and remarkably high rates of unidentified closures and duplicate records. We suggest that classification problems can affect research based on large-scale private data in four ways: detection, efficiency, validity, and bias. We discuss the implications of our findings, and list a set of problems researchers should consider when using large-scale data from companies.

Research on ideological biases and polarization on social media platforms primarilyfocuses on news and political content. Non-political content, which isvastly more popular, is often overlooked. Because partisanship is correlatedwith citizens’ non-political attitudes and non-political content can carry politicalcues, we explore whether ideological biases and partisan segregation extendto users’ non-political exposures online. We focus on YouTube, one of the mostpopular platforms. We rely online data from American adults (N = 2,237).From over 129 million visits to over 37 million URLs, we analyze 1,037,392visits to YouTube videos from 1,874 participants. We identify YouTube channelsof 942 news domains, utilize a BERT-based classifier to identify politicalvideos outside news channels, and estimate the ideology of all the videos inour data. We compare ideological biases in exposure to (a) news, (b) political,and (c) non-political content. We examine both exposure congeniality (i.e., areusers consuming like-minded content?) and polarization (i.e. are there overlapsbetween Democrats and Republicans in the content they consume?). Wefind substantial congeniality in the consumption of news and political videos,especially among Republicans, and high levels of polarization in this exposure(i.e., limited overlaps between Democrats and Republicans). We also showthat both exposure congeniality and polarization are significantly lower fornon-political content, in that non-political videos are less likely to be ideologicallylike-minded and both Democrats and Republicans consume similarnon-political content. Theoretical and practical implications of these findingsare discussed.

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed a partisan segregation of beliefs toward the global health crisis and its management. Politically motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret information in accordance with individual motives to protect valued beliefs rather than objectively considering the facts, could represent a key process involved in the polarization of attitudes. The objective of this study was to explore politically motivated reasoning when participants assess information regarding COVID-19. Design We carried out a preregistered online experiment using a diverse sample ( N = 1500) from the United States. Both Republicans and Democrats assessed the same COVID-19–related information about the health effects of lockdowns, social distancing, vaccination, hydroxychloroquine, and wearing face masks. Results At odds with our prestated hypothesis, we found no evidence in line with politically motivated reasoning when interpreting numerical information about COVID-19. Moreover, we found no evidence supporting the idea that numeric ability or cognitive sophistication bolster politically motivated reasoning in the case of COVID-19. Instead, our findings suggest that participants base their assessment on prior beliefs of the matter. Conclusions Our findings suggest that politically polarized attitudes toward COVID-19 are more likely to be driven by lack of reasoning than politically motivated reasoning—a finding that opens potential avenues for combating political polarization about important health care topics. Highlights Participants assessed numerical information regarding the effect of different COVID-19 policies. We found no evidence in line with politically motivated reasoning when interpreting numerical information about COVID-19. Participants tend to base their assessment of COVID-19–related facts on prior beliefs of the matter. Politically polarized attitudes toward COVID-19 are more a result of lack of thinking than partisanship.

Abstract This article examines the relationship between Politics and Law in U.S. Supreme Court decision-making. It argues that three major developments in recent decades have combined to undermine the Court’s status as a legal and judicial institution, and instead define it as political actor, motivated by ideology and the personal policy predilections of the Court’s Justices. The first of these elements is the increasingly political and partisan nature of the Supreme Court appointment process, as witnessed by the recent Gorsuch and Kavanaugh nominations. The behaviour of the President and Senators in these controversial appointments conclusively demonstrates that the country’s leading politicians view the Court as primarily a political body rather than a legal one. The second element of the assault on the Court’s status as a judicial institution is the rise in influence of the behaviouralist school of Supreme Court analysis. Beginning with the work of academics such as Glendon Schubert, the behaviouralists employed new methods and theories in an attempt to debunk the Legal Model of Supreme Court decision-making and to replace it with what is known today as the Attitudinal Model. It forcibly argues that Supreme Court Justices are political in intent and decision, with legal language and arguments being no more than judicial camouflage to disguise their true nature. This applies equally to both conservative and liberal justices. The article identifies the third element of the assault on the status of the Court as a legal institution as coming from Originalist scholars, activists and judges who accuse liberal Justices of having abandoned traditional interpretive methods in favour of redefining the language of the Constitution to suit their progressive political agenda. Originalists acknowledge that their own interpretive methods may lead to results deemed unacceptable to contemporary Americans, but argue that it the duty of the political branches of government, not the courts, to modernise policy and practice. This article concludes that while Originalism has genuine appeal as a theory of interpretation, it is nevertheless both impractical and undesirable. Moreover, rather than returning the Court to the Legal Model, the Originalist campaign has only served to persuade many that the Attitudinal Model is an accurate one. However, the article also argues that the break with Originalism by the Warren Court over segregation has developed into a wholesale change in the Court’s role in American government, one that ill-becomes the unelected judiciary in a representative democracy. It is argued here that the best way to restore the legal and judicial identity of the Court would be a return to the emphasis on ‘judicial role’, once championed by great jurists such as Learned Hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis and John Harlan II. Judicial modesty and restraint would distinguish the Court from the political branches of American government. The Court should decide less and only where the case for a decision of unconstitutionality is very clear and very compelling.

Politicians have discovered Twitter as a tool for political communication. If information provided by politicians is circulated in ideologically segregated user networks, political polarization may be fostered. Using network information on all 1.78 million unique followers of German Members of Parliament by October 2018, follower homogeneity across politicians and parties is measured. While the overall homogeneity is low, politicians of the AfD—a right-wing populist party—stand out with very homogeneous follower networks. These are largely driven by a small group of strongly committed partisans that make up around 7% of the party’s but around 55–75% of the average AfD politician’s followers. The findings add to the literature by showing potentially unequal distributions of network segregation on Twitter. Furthermore, they suggest that small groups of active users can multiply their influence online, which has important implications for future research on echo chambers and other online phenomena.

The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. 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"At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.