We examine the extent to which domestic political developments can be understood through a US–China great power lens. Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favor China? While we find some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, we also show that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China.

The mp3 linked above is to a Talking Thai Politics conversation between the article’s first two co-authors discussing their paper and its implications.

An increase in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) by 10 μg/m³ reduces the vote share of incumbent parties by two percentage points

Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change.

How economic incentives drive the political emotions of American homeowners.

The political problem to which the social contract must be able to provide a solution is the following: to imagine a form of association that protects the person, the goods, and the privacy of each partner, and promotes conviviality and justice conceived as the sharing of nourishment.

Preregistered analyses reveal a notable increase in biological stress levels among both LGBTIQ+ individuals as well as those close to them during the campaign.

These effects were, however, moderated by exposure to the campaign for marriage equality (i.e., yes-campaign), indicating the powerful buffering effects of the yes-campaign on the impact of discrimination on individuals’ health.

If a real democracy is going to thrive, if the real values of human nature are to flourish, it’s an absolute necessity that groups form in which people can join together, share their concerns, articulate their hopes, and discover what they think, what their values really are. This can’t be imposed on you from above: you have to discover it yourself

Part two can be seen here.

This four-minute clip from the podcast captures its most important insight. For the full interview, see Writ Large on the NBN.

Anchored in sociological and political theory, this comprehensive volume provides hard data and empirical research that traces the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry through economics, politics, media, and higher education. Contributors demonstrate how corporations secure popular consent, and coopt, disorganize, or marginalize dissenting perspectives to position the fossil fuel industry as a national public good.

To make an idea system pristine you have to contain the contradictions. One way to minimize the contradictions is to build a filtering system so that people don’t get the ‘wrong’ ideas. But if you can relate all the different ideas out there to a framework, that creates a much more resilient idea system because you can account for all the, say, scandals.

A sociology professor talks about his monograph on how ideologies function in society.

Eight thousand years of human civilization and here we are: still trying to bring the rain back with an animal sacrifice.

On the fake, and real, causes of California’s water crisis.

A lot more subtle stuff changed during that election too: stuff that’s been forgotten because now it’s everywhere.

How the first televised presidential election (of 1952) forever changed politics.

Beliefs can be highly resilient in the sense that they are not easily abandoned in the face of counterevidence. This has the advantage of guiding consistent behavior and judgments but may also have destructive consequences for individuals, nature, and society. For instance, pathological beliefs can sustain psychiatric disorders, the belief that rhinoceros horn is an aphrodisiac may drive a species extinct, beliefs about gender or race may fuel discrimination, and belief in conspiracy theories can undermine democracy. Here, we present a unifying framework of how self-amplifying feedbacks shape the inertia of beliefs on levels ranging from neuronal networks to social systems.

Sustained exposure to counterevidence can destabilize rigid beliefs but requires organized rational override as in cognitive behavioral therapy for pathological beliefs or institutional control of discrimination to reduce racial biases. Black-and-white thinking is a major risk factor for the formation of resilient beliefs associated with psychiatric disorders as well as prejudices and conspiracy thinking. Such dichotomous thinking is characteristic of a lack of cognitive resources, which may be exacerbated by stress. This could help explain why conspiracy thinking and psychiatric disorders tend to peak during crises. A corollary is that addressing social factors such as poverty, social cleavage, and lack of education may be the most effective way to prevent the emergence of rigid beliefs, and thus of problems ranging from psychiatric disorders to prejudices, conspiracy theories, and posttruth politics.

In this video, we’re going to look at some prominent climate deniers, what they have to say, why what they say is clearly wrong, [and] why they seem to believe it anyway

People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes.

How public opinion in the United States has actually shifted over the last few decades, and how well (or not) those shifts correlate with mass discourse.

… feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness; however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them.

… ways of understanding their [group’s] distinctiveness which challenge dominant characterizations with the goal of greater self-determination

A definitive introduction to the subject.

General Gutiérrez Mellado pulls his arm violently out of the Prime Minister’s grip; then the burst of gunfire erupts.

The history of the 1981 failed Spanish coup and of the gestures that saved democracy.

You never begin by saying, “I’m going to be a tyrannist dictator, and I’m going to ruin your life.” You don’t start out that way. You start out by saying, “I’m going to make things so much better. And you want that, don’t you, Ezra?”

Since July 20, 1985, a new higher ordination (upasampadā) movement has emerged at the Dambulla Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka. The architect of this movement, a Sinhala Buddhist monk named Inamaluwe Sumangala, challenges the contemporary Buddhist monastic practice of ordaining monks on the basis of their castes

On the face of it, the movement seems to involve a debate about the irrelevance of caste to higher ordination between Sumangala and the monks of the Asgiriya temple, one of several chapters of the Siyam Nikāya that ordains only high-caste Buddhist males. However, the challenge constituted by the new ordination can be seen as part of a broader attempt on Sumangala’s part to redefine monastic identity