Does Large Family Size Predict Political Centrism? Benjamin Schmidt

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Load more

Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies

Volume 33

2016

Article 8

Does Large Family Size Predict Political Centrism?

Benjamin Schmidt

Follow this and additional works at: htps://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sigma

Part of the International and Area Studies Commons, and the Political Science Commons

Recommended Citation

Schmidt, Benjamin (2016) "Does Large Family Size Predict Political Centrism?," Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies: Vol. 33 , Article 8.

Available at: htps://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sigma/vol33/iss1/8

is Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected],

[email protected].

Recommended publications
  • The Demise of the African American Baseball Player

    The Demise of the African American Baseball Player

    LCB_18_2_Art_4_Standen (Do Not Delete) 8/26/2014 6:33 AM THE DEMISE OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN BASEBALL PLAYER by Jeffrey Standen* Recently alarms were raised in the sports world over the revelation that baseball player agent Scott Boras and other American investors were providing large loans to young baseball players in the Dominican Republic. Although this practice does not violate any restrictions imposed by Major League Baseball or the MLB Players Association, many commentators have termed this funding practice of dubious ethical merit and at bottom exploitative. Yet it is difficult to distinguish exploitation from empowerment. Refusing to lend money to young Dominican players reduces the money invested in athletes. The rules of baseball and the requirements of amateurism preclude similar loans to American-born baseball players. Young ballplayers unlucky enough to be born in the United States cannot borrow their training expenses against their future earning potential. The same limitations apply in similar forms to athletes in other sports, yet baseball presents some unique problems. Success at the professional level in baseball involves a great deal of skill, attention to detail, and supervised training over a long period of time. Players from impoverished financial backgrounds, including predominately the African American baseball player, have been priced out of the game. American athletes in sports that, like baseball, require a significant commitment of money over time have not been able to fund their apprenticeships through self-generated lending markets. One notable example of self-generated funding is in the sport of golf. To fund their career goals, American golfers raise money through a combination of debt and equity financing.
  • PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY in a POST-RULE of LAW ERA David Barnhizer, Cleveland State University Daniel D

    PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY in a POST-RULE of LAW ERA David Barnhizer, Cleveland State University Daniel D

    Cleveland State University From the SelectedWorks of David Barnhizer 2019 PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY IN A POST-RULE OF LAW ERA David Barnhizer, Cleveland State University Daniel D. Barnhizer, Michigan State University College of Law Available at: https://works.bepress.com/david_barnhizer/128/ PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY IN A POST-RULE OF LAW ERA David Barnhizer and Daniel Barnhizer We are immersed in the ongoing transformation of a system that at best can be described as a pseudo-democracy in a Post-Rule of Law era in which formerly quasi-democratic systems— including the US--are devolving into unprincipled, fragmented and authoritarian surveillance societies. The challenge is how to inhibit what is occurring and protect and preserve the best of what we have had while shaping and incorporating the changes that must be accepted. The answer to our dilemma is far from clear. In using the term pseudo-democracy we are bringing to the surface the idea that we often use the language of democracy too loosely in arguing about the political system we tend to think, or at least assert, exists in the United States. The reality of what Aristotle and the Greek political philosophers meant when using that term bears no resemblance to the system under which we operate in America, a system roughly one thousand times larger than that of Athens and far more complex, diverse and territorially vast than Aristotle could have imagined. In The Politics, Aristotle warned against radical changes to a city-state that would result from growing beyond the size and composition needed for a dynamic but self-contained community.
  • Anti-Racism Topic Paper

    Anti-Racism Topic Paper

    CEDA Topic Paper Anti-Racism Proposal 2016-17 Policy Debate Claudette Colvin C.T. Vivian Chase Iron Eyes T. R. M. Howard Yuri Kochiyama Reies López Tijerina Daisy Lee Gatson Bates Anti-Racism Topic Paper April 2016 Janet Escobedo, Georgia State University; Samuel Hanks, Georgia State University; Nadia Hussein, Georgia State University; and Dr. Kevin Kuswa, Berkeley Preparatory in Tampa, Florida. —with advice and feedback from Rashad Evans, University of Puget Sound and Dr. Tim Barouch, Georgia State University Page 1 of 161 “Paradigms, however, are like frost crystals that disappear on exposure to the sun. As soon as one starts talking about a paradigm, its days are numbered,” R. Delgado, ’12 “We’re living in more chains today -- through lockdowns, ankle bracelets, halfway houses,… -- than we were in the early 1800’s. That’s something to think about.” Frank W. Wilderson, ‘14 CEDA Topic Paper Anti-Racism Proposal 2016-17 Policy Debate Table of Contents Anti-Racism Topic Area Proposal .................................................................................................................................................... 4 I. “Anti-Racial Exclusion” Phrasing ........................................................................................................................ 9 Racial Disparity ............................................................................................................................................................................... 18 Racial Inequality .............................................................................................................................................................................
  • By Ralph De Toledano the Last Published Work of the Late, Great Conservative Writer and Historian

    By Ralph De Toledano the Last Published Work of the Late, Great Conservative Writer and Historian

    Election though all newborns look alike. Pictures of the new twins from the most cele- Maternal Flame brated breeding stock—Jolie and Brad Pitt—went for a reported $14 million. Sarah Palin’s family-friendly appeal. An obsession in politics with breeding is both very old (hereditary monarchy) By Steve Sailer and very contemporary. The main quali- fications of the current president and WHY, IN ONE UPROARIOUS week of with a broken arm after being thrown 70 this year’s Democratic runner-up are that American politicking that not even H.L. feet. Did I mention he’s part Eskimo? they are, respectively, the scion and con- Mencken would have expected, has the Mrs. Palin’s instant ascent to frontier sort of ex-presidents. More subtly, obscure governor of Alaska, Sarah folk hero explains some of the unhinged Obama launched himself at the 2004 Palin, outraged roughly one half of the hatred felt by Obama supporters. They’d Democratic convention by devoting the country and overjoyed the other? been fantasizing about their genetically first 380 words of his famous speech to What intrigues people about elections nuanced man of the future, their political detailing the two stocks from which he aren’t the platform planks. Deep down, Tiger Woods, when they were blindsided was crossbred. He implied that, like the political contests are about picking sym- by a figure out of America’s buried past, a heir to a dynastic merger of yore—think bolic champions. Just as Barack Obama, merrily comic Wild West character in the King Henry VIII, offspring of a Lancaster- recently of the Illinois legislature, has tradition of Annie Oakley and Calamity York marriage that ended the War of the excited tens of millions by his emphasis Jane.
  • Exploring Message-Induced Ambivalence and Its Correlates

    Exploring Message-Induced Ambivalence and Its Correlates

    Exploring Message-Induced Ambivalence and Its Correlates: A Focus on Message Environment, Issue Salience, and Framing Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jay D. Hmielowski, M.A. Graduate Program in Communication The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dave Ewoldsen R. Kelly Garrett R. Lance Holbert (Chair) Erik Nisbet 0 Copyright By Jay D. Hmielowski 2011 1 Abstract Scholars across the social sciences (psychology and political science) have recently started to broaden the approach to concept of attitudes. These scholars have focused on the concept of attitudinal ambivalence, which is defined as people holding both positive and negative attitudes toward attitude objects. However, communication scholars have generally ignored this concept. Recently, communication scholars have emphasized the importance of looking at the complementary effects of consuming divergent messages on people‘s attitudes and beliefs. Although studies have started to look at the complementary effects of media, it is necessary to examine the relationship between the complexity of a person‘s communication environment and the complexity of their attitudes. Therefore, this study begins the process connecting the complexity of people‘s communication environment and the complexity of their attitude structures. The major goal of this dissertation is to look at the generation of ambivalence by looking at four important factors: a) the relationship between specific media outlets relative to the generation of potential ambivalence, b) how different individual difference variables moderate the relationship between different media outlets and the generation of ambivalence, c) pinpointing the message variables that may lead people to the generation of ambivalence, and d) how media, ambivalence fit into a larger communication process focused on different political outcome variables.
  • Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists

    Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists

    Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists Meysam Alizadeh1,2, Ingmar Weber3, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla2, Santo Fortunato1, Michael Macy4 1 Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA 2 Computational Social Science Program, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA 3 Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar 4 Social Dynamics Laboratory, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Abstract Global recruitment into radical Islamic movements has spurred renewed interest in the appeal of political extremism. Is the appeal a rational response to material conditions or is it the expression of psychological and personality disorders associated with aggressive behavior, intolerance, conspiratorial imagination, and paranoia? Empirical answers using surveys have been limited by lack of access to extremist groups, while field studies have lacked psychological measures and failed to compare extremists with contrast groups. We revisit the debate over the appeal of extremism in the U.S. context by comparing publicly available Twitter messages written by over 355,000 political extremist followers with messages written by non-extremist U.S. users. Analysis of text-based psychological indicators supports the moral foundation theory which identifies emotion as a critical factor in determining political orientation of individuals. Extremist followers also differ from others in four of the Big
  • AMERICA's CHALLENGE: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties, and National Unity After September 11

    AMERICA's CHALLENGE: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties, and National Unity After September 11

    t I l AlLY r .... )k.fl ~FS A Ot:l ) lO~Ol R.. Muzaffar A. Chishti Doris Meissner Demetrios G. Papademetriou Jay Peterzell Michael J. Wishnie Stephen W. Yale-Loehr • M I GRAT i o~]~In AMERICA'S CHALLENGE: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties, and National Unity after September 11 .. AUTHORS Muzaffar A. Chishti Doris Meissner Demetrios G. Papademetriou Jay Peterzell Michael J. Wishnie Stephen W . Yale-Loehr MPI gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in the preparation of this report. Copyright © 2003 Migration Policy Institute All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the Migration Policy Institute. Migration Policy Institute Tel: 202-266-1940 1400 16th Street, NW, Suite 300 Fax:202-266-1900 Washington, DC 20036 USA www.migrationpolicy.org Printed in the United States of America Interior design by Creative Media Group at Corporate Press. Text set in Adobe Caslon Regular. "The very qualities that bring immigrants and refugees to this country in the thousands every day, made us vulnerable to the attack of September 11, but those are also the qualities that will make us victorious and unvanquished in the end." U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson Speech to the Federalist Society, Nov. 16, 2001. Mr. Olson's wife Barbara was one of the airplane passengers murdered on September 11. America's Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties, and National Unity After September 1 1 Table of Contents Foreword
  • Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: the Reemergence of Nativism and Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies

    Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: the Reemergence of Nativism and Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies

    \\server05\productn\H\HLP\2-2\HLP207.txt unknown Seq: 1 25-JUN-08 15:30 Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: The Reemergence of Nativism and Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies Priscilla Huang* INTRODUCTION At the start of 2008, news of a “baby boomlet” made headlines.1 For the first time in 35 years, the U.S. fertility rate, or average number of chil- dren born to each woman, reached 2.1 in 2006, the number statisticians say is needed for a population to replace itself.2 Demographers pointed to an increase in the number of immigrants as a main reason for the higher birth rate.3 Many economists welcomed the surge in population growth as a sign of the country’s likely future prosperity. While most industrialized nations struggle with shrinking populations due to low birth rates, the United States can look forward to a stable tax base and a steady workforce.4 However, not everyone greeted the news with enthusiasm. Many inter- preted the increased birth rate as an indication of the country’s failed immi- gration laws and turned a hostile eye toward immigrant women.5 For example, when asked to comment about the increased fertility rate, John Vinson, president of the conservative American Immigration Control Foun- dation claimed: “The [U.S.-born] child is an automatic American citizen, * Policy and Programs Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. Pris- cilla received her J.D. from American University, Washington College of Law in 2006, where she was a Public Interest/Public Service Scholar.
  • EXTREMISTS' NEGATIVE LANGUAGE 1 Extremists on The

    EXTREMISTS' NEGATIVE LANGUAGE 1 Extremists on The

    EXTREMISTS’ NEGATIVE LANGUAGE 1 Extremists on the Left and Right Use Angry, Negative Language Jeremy A. Frimer, Mark J. Brandt, Zachary Melton, and Matt Motyl in press Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin accepted October 1, 2018 Word count: 10,186 (abstract, main text, figures & tables, references, notes) Corresponding Author: Jeremy A. Frimer, Department of Psychology, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg MB, Canada, R3B 2E9, [email protected] Acknowledgements: This work was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to J. A. Frimer [grant number 435-2013-0589]. We thank James Pennebaker, Kurt Gray, Lee Jussim, Jonathan Haidt, Kristin Lindquist, and Morteza Dehghani for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. EXTREMISTS’ NEGATIVE LANGUAGE 2 Abstract We propose that political extremists use more negative language than moderates. Previous research found that conservatives report feeling happier than liberals and yet liberals “display greater happiness” in their language than do conservatives. However, some of the previous studies relied on questionable measures of political orientation and affective language; and no studies have examined whether political orientation and affective language are non-linearly related. Revisiting the same contexts (Twitter, U.S. Congress), and adding three new ones (political organizations, news media, crowdsourced Americans), we found that the language of liberal and conservative extremists’ was more negative and angry in its emotional tone than that of moderates. Contrary to previous research, we found that liberal extremists’ language was more negative than that of conservative extremists. Additional analyses supported the explanation that extremists feel threatened by the activities of political rivals, and their angry, negative language represents efforts to communicate as much to others.
  • Do Republican Presidential Candidates Benefit from High Birth Rates? Putting the "Fertility Gap" to the Test

    Do Republican Presidential Candidates Benefit from High Birth Rates? Putting the "Fertility Gap" to the Test

    Do Republican Presidential Candidates Benefit from High Birth Rates? Putting the "Fertility Gap" to the Test The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Raley, Billy Gage. 2020. Do Republican Presidential Candidates Benefit from High Birth Rates? Putting the "Fertility Gap" to the Test. Master's thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37367668 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Do Republican Presidential Candidates Benefit from High Birth Rates? Putting the “Fertility Gap” to the Test Billy Gage Raley A Thesis in the Field of Government for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies Harvard University March 2021 Copyright © 2020 Billy Gage Raley Abstract During the 2004 election cycle, journalists discovered a correlation between state fertility rates and presidential election results. The media observed that states with high fertility rates tended to support Bush, and states with low fertility rates tended to support Gore and Kerry. This phenomenon came to be known as the “Fertility Gap.” After political pundits started discussing the Fertility Gap, a few scholars also picked up on the topic. To date, discussion of the Fertility Gap has been limited to elections between 2000 to 2012. A longitudinal study of the Fertility Gap has never been conducted.
  • Reading Professor Obama: Race and the American Constitutional Tradition

    Reading Professor Obama: Race and the American Constitutional Tradition

    UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH LAW REVIEW Vol. 75 ● Summer 2014 READING PROFESSOR OBAMA: RACE AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL TRADITION Stacey Marlise Gahagan and Alfred L. Brophy ISSN 0041-9915 (print) 1942-8405 (online) ● DOI 10.5195/lawreview.2014.342 http://lawreview.law.pitt.edu This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This site is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D- Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. READING PROFESSOR OBAMA: RACE AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL TRADITION Stacey Marlise Gahagan* and Alfred L. Brophy** ABSTRACT Reading Professor Obama mines Barack Obama’s syllabus on “Current Issues in Racism and the Law” for evidence of his beliefs about race, law, and jurisprudence. The syllabus for the 1994 seminar at the University of Chicago, which provides the reading assignments and structure for the course, has been available on the New York Times website since July 2008. Other than a few responses solicited by the New York Times when it published the syllabus, however, there has been little attention to the material Obama assigned or to what it suggests about Obama’s approach to the law and race. The class began with four weeks of foundational readings followed by four weeks of student-led class discussions. The readings started by discussing the malleability of racial categories and progressed to cases from the nineteenth century on Native Americans and on slavery. The second day’s readings shifted to the Reconstruction era and changes in the Constitution and statutory law, as well as the rise of the “Jim Crow” system of segregation and the response of African American intellectuals.
  • THE MIDDLE CHILD: WHAT DOES MODERATE MEAN? Lucie House a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the University of North Carolina At

    THE MIDDLE CHILD: WHAT DOES MODERATE MEAN? Lucie House a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the University of North Carolina At

    THE MIDDLE CHILD: WHAT DOES MODERATE MEAN? Lucie House A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Political Science. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Pamela J. Conover Michael B. MacKuen James A. Stimson © 2015 Lucie House ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT LUCIE HOUSE: The Middle Child: What Does Moderate Mean? (Under the direction of Pamela J. Conover.) While research demonstrates liberal/conservative self-identification to be a meaningful identity, moderate self-identification is viewed as relatively meaningless. This description is more likely the result of lack of study of moderates, rather than a careful study of the meaning of \moderate." The focus of the present study is to determine whether or not identification with the label \moderate" represents a group identification. This project represents the first formal exploration into the psychological foundations of moderate self- identification. This project asks the following very basic question: To what extent does self-categorization as a moderate represent psychological meaningful group identification? In order to answer this question, I use social identity theory to study moderate self- categorization. This paper also uses original measures to study the content of the meaning of \moderate." I find that moderate does represent a self-identification, and that there is a distinct pattern of meaning for the category. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Pam Conover, for her tremendous support and counsel during this project. Also, I would like to thank Mark Yacoub who helped with formatting the work.