Mexico’s Pivotal Democratic Election

The Laws of War and Public Opinion: An Experimental Study

PurposeThe outbreak and continuation of COVID-19 have spawned the transformation of traditional teaching models to a certain extent. The Chinese Ministry of Education’s guidance on “keep learning and teaching during class suspension” has made OTC and learning (OTC) become routinized, and the public’s emotional attitudes toward OTC have also evolved over time. The purpose of this study is to segment the emotional text data and introduce it into the topic model to reveal the evolution process and stage characteristics of public emotional polarity and public opinion of OTC topics during public health emergencies in the context of social media participation. The research has important guiding significance for the development of OTC and can influence and improve the efficiency and effect of OTC to a certain extent. The analysis of online public opinion can provide suggestions for the government and media to guide the trend of public opinion and optimize the OTC model.Design/methodology/approachThis paper takes the topic of “OTC” on Zhihu during the COVID-19 epidemic as an example, combined with the characteristics of public opinion changes, chooses Boson emotional dictionary and time series analysis method to build an OTC network public opinion theme evolution analysis framework that integrates emotional analysis and topic mining. Finally, an empirical analysis of the dynamic evolution of the communication network for each stage of the life cycle of a specific topic is realized.FindingsThis paper draws the following conclusions: (1) Through the emotional value table and the change trend chart of the number of comments, the analysis found that the number of positive comments is greater than the number of negative comments, which can be inferred that the public gradually accepts “OTC” and presents a positive emotional state. (2) By observing the changing trend of the average daily emotional value of the public, it is found that the overall emotional value shows a stable development trend after a large fluctuation. From the actual emotional value and the fitted emotional value curve, it can be seen that the overall curve fit is good, so ARIMA (12, 1, 6) can accurately predict the dynamic trend of the daily average emotional value in this paper. Therefore, based on the above-mentioned public opinion, emotional analysis research, relevant countermeasures and suggestions are put forward, which is conducive to guiding the development direction of public opinion in a positive way.Originality/valueTaking the topic of “OTC” in Zhihu as an example, this paper combines Boson emotional dictionary and time series to conduct a series of research analyses. Boson emotional dictionary can analyze the public’s emotional tendency, and time series can well analyze the intrinsic structure and complex features of the data to predict the future values. The combination of the two research methods allows for an adequate and unique study of public emotional polarization and the evolution of public opinion.

The political economy transformations of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have received a great deal of attention over the past decade. The focus of much research has been to examine the internal national reorientations of the countries with regard to the changes in political and economic conditions. The importance of the international reorientation of these countries toward Western Europe in general and the European Union in particular has been generally overlooked. This dissertation examines public opinion on the political and economic transformations within the framework of the direction of the international reorientations of the countries. The countries were divided into three categories, those that can be expected to be invited to join the European Union in the next enlargement, those that can be expected to join the European Union in a subsequent enlargement, and the countries not seeking European Union membership. Public opinion on democracy and the market economy and attitudinal factors that influence these opinions are compared in 16 countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The data are from the Central and East European Barometers 3-7 (1992 - 1996). The findings suggest that general opinions regarding satisfaction with democracy are not related to the status of the country seeking membership in the European Union while support from the market economy does differ. When examining attitudinal factors that are related to satisfaction with democracy and support for the market economy, differences emerged between the three categories of countries. These findings suggest that public opinion is in part shaped by the international orientations of the country and that changes in public opinion are important in understanding the political and economic transformation processes.

This chapter examines changes in public opinion on Supreme Court nominees over time. It shows that polling on nominees did not become a regular occurrence until the 1980s. When polling did exist, nominees generally had high approval among opinion-holders, unless they suffered some sort of personal scandal. Today, public opinion on nominees is sharply polarized by party, with members of the public from the president’s party likely to support a nominee and members of the opposite party likely to favor rejection of a nominee. The chapter also examines so-called ‘campaign effects”—e.g. did hearings and scandals impact public opinion? Excepting the Bork nomination, campaign effects were usually modest. However, scandal did have a palpable impact in the Kavanaugh and Thomas nominations, but mediated by citizens’ party affiliation. All told, the chapter provides the most comprehensive look at public opinion on Supreme Court nominees to date.

Cycles in Public Opinion and the Dynamics of Stable Party Systems

Increasing public support for stem cell researchers may increase their influence over science policy decisions and lead to more favorable policies regarding stem cell research. Yet, until recently there was little scholarship on public opinion about the roles stem cell researchers should play in crafting science policy. A national survey of US adults found that Americans are generally supportive of stem cell researchers as policy advisers but that support is uneven throughout the public. Specifically, attitudes about stem cell researchers as policy advisers depend on gender, political beliefs, age and religiosity. Surprisingly, familiarity with science has a negative effect on attitudes about stem cell researchers as policy makers. This suggests that rather than simply “teaching” the public more scientific facts, science outreach and communication may be most effective when it is narrowly tailored to the match the interests of specific social groups. It also suggests that attitudes about stem cell researchers are rooted in deeply-held cultural dispositions and that widespread changes in public opinion are likely to occur slowly.

This study is based on network public opinion of the case - ”Nankai Buick Affair”. The daily number of posts as the variable, quantitative research is carried out on the law of change in network public opinion, which provides the scientific basis for managers to choose the best time to intervene. This article first begins from the three aspects: a number of changes in daily posts over time, the constitute of main topics and statistical analysis, and then gives a in-depth analysis of the law of change in network public opinion. After the emergency, performed by the number of posts, the shape of the rise and fall in network public opinion has three categories: sharp peak, severe right-skewed and fat tail. On this basis, then we study the changes of major issues in network public opinion in different stages: In the two periods: “Start- Peak” and “Peak-End”, not only the number of posts in BBS is not the same, but also the main topics in the BBS articles are different for the network public opinion of emergency. Finally, points out, If the managers issue truth of the incident in the prime time through the channels of authority, we can reduce the distance between the peak and the state of equilibrium for the network public opinion system, which is conducive to a smooth landing public opinion and social harmony.KeywordsNetwork Public OpinionSkewnessKurtosisThe Best Time to Intervene

This paper presents and tests a theory of how negative political advertising affects individuals in US elections. The theory begins with the claim that negative advertising depresses public mood. Mood is then used as information in judgments, it is argued, but more by low than by high political sophisticates: high sophisticates recognize and discount the effects of the advertisements, low sophisticates do not, instead attributing their depressed mood to their own inability to understand politics, to the political system, or to an aspect of the election such as an unappealing choice of candidates. These judgments may then affect behavior, implying that negative advertising campaigns may alter the composition of the electorate in US elections. The theory is tested in a survey experiment on a national sample. Analysis confirms the impact of negative advertising on public mood, and some relationship from mood to judgments for low sophisticates.

Cohort replacement - the replacement in a population of older cohorts by their successors who developed under different conditions - is an important process behind cultural change. Research on public opinion indicates that a large proportion of aggregate change is the result of cohort replacement rather than of individuals changing their minds. However, some publicly salient issues, like gay rights, appear to be exceptions. Why different issues show different patterns of change is not well understood. In this paper, we investigate whether opinions on sensitive - that is, hard to discuss - issues might change differently than opinions on less sensitive issues. We use data from the 1981-2020 World Values Surveys and newly collected data on the sensitivity of survey items to compare aggregate changes in public opinion on 56 survey items in eight countries. Our key finding is that survey items on more sensitive issues seem to change more through cohort replacement.

In this article, we further the understanding of both changes in public opinion on capital punishment in the United States and changes in the factors associated with public opinion on the death penalty. Support for the death penalty may be motivated by events happening during specific time periods, and it can vary across birth cohorts as a result of cohort‐specific socialization processes, demographic changes, and formative events that are specific to each generation. An explication of the sources of and variation in death penalty attitudes over time would benefit from the accounting for the age of the respondent, the year of the survey response, and the birth cohort of the respondent. We improve on previous research by using multiple approaches including hierarchical age–period–cohort models and data from the General Social Survey (N = 41,474) to examine changes in death penalty attitudes over time and across birth cohorts. The results showed curvilinear age effects, strong period effects, and weak cohort effects on death penalty support. The violent crime rate explained much of the variation in support for the death penalty across periods. The examination of subgroup differences suggests that support for the death penalty is becoming concentrated among Whites, Protestants, and Republicans.

This article seeks to outline how public opinion changed over the course of the government's announcement of 2nd Gulf War in Iraq until the scandal over the alleged ‘sexed-up’ Downing Street intelligence dossier. Using quantitative analysis of opinion poll data, together with in-depth interviews with journalists to show how the media were complicit in providing a positive spin for the government's stance on war, the authors conclude that the positive change in public opinion once the British soldiers were deployed occurred through one of the following mechanisms: 1) a patriotic effect, 2) government communication expertise and the management of a complicit news media, 3) the public basked in the reflected glory of the initially successful military or 4) some combination of the above. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook have been hailed as politically transformative communications technologies, on the level of previous politically significant technological innovations, such as radio and television. In this paper we estimate the impact of the use of the social media tool 'Twitter' by American politicians on changes in public opinion of those politicians over time, and we find little evidence that the political use of Twitter has eitther a positive or negative impact on public opinion. We run simple regressions of changes in widely used U. S. public opinion polls, estimating the association between favorable impressions of selected politicians and the social media usage levels (number of 'Tweets') of those politicians. In order to get a reliable estimate, we ran the same regressions for public opinion polls conducted by three different companies (CNN/Opinion Research, Gallup, and ABC/Washington Post) and we find that the estimated coefficients are not significant for any of the tested opinion polls.

How do citizens respond to political violence during election campaigns? Previous research suggests such events can increase support for the victim's party through a “rally ‘round the flag” effect, where the public unites against perceived threats, or an “empathy effect,” where individuals sympathize with the victim. Yet it remains unclear whether these effects vary across contexts. This study examines regional variation in public opinion following the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which occurred two days before the national election. Using over 640,000 daily responses from a Voting Advice Application (VAA), we estimate changes in support for Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Applying the generalized synthetic control method (GSCM), we find no significant change in public opinion in the area surrounding the assassination site. By contrast, in Abe's home region, support for the LDP temporarily increased and support for rights restrictions declined, suggesting that psychological proximity to the victim briefly influenced public opinion. However, surveys conducted 8 to 9 months later reveal no persistent regional effects, suggesting that neither physical nor psychological proximity to the victim produced lasting changes in political attitudes.

Space policy responsiveness: The relationship between public opinion and NASA funding

Research has begun to explore the effects of Sinclair ownership on news content and on public opinion. However, research has not yet linked changes in news content to changes in public opinion. Using computational textual analysis, this study finds that once a station is purchased by Sinclair, its volume of climate change reporting drops; the remaining climate change reporting de-emphasizes climate science, and the public becomes less aware climate change is happening.