Suchergebnisse

Contemporary discussions of political forms exhibit a concern with constitutional procedures and values seldom encountered in the history of political thought. The search for a parallel development would require a turning to the classical period of Greek and Roman philosophy and politics. In the light of contemporary constitutional self-consciousness, as well as of the sustained inquiry of the ancient world into the various forms of polity, pure and degraded, ideal and historical, the political analyses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume the character of politico-ideological crystallizations of the breakdown of theancien regime. There are, of course, fundamental underlying differences between these three periods of political reflection. The ancient Greek analyses, although centering on Greek realities and problems, bear,prima facie, a style of detached theory intended to be taken as philosophy, no more, no less.

BACKGROUND: Americans' confidence in science varies based on their political ideology. This ideological divide has potentially important effects on citizens' engagement with and participation in clinical studies of Alzheimer Disease (AD). METHODS: A probability sample of 1583 Americans was surveyed about their willingness to participate in longitudinal AD research and about their political attitudes. These survey results were compared with a survey of 382 participants in a longitudinal AD study at the Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center (Knight ADRC). RESULTS: Among Americans, more conservative ideology decreases willingness to participate in a hypothetical longitudinal cohort study of AD both directly and through its negative effect on confidence in science. The Knight ADRC study participants expressed more liberal ideology and greater confidence in science than Americans in general. Of the survey respondents opposed to participation, over a quarter changed to neutral or positive if the study returned their research results to them. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Clinical studies of AD are likely biased toward participants who are more liberal and have higher confidence in science than the general population. This recruitment bias may be reduced by lowering the trust demanded of participants through measures such as returning research results to participants.

Abstract
Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.

Conventional wisdom holds that municipal politics is nonideological. Recent scholarship challenges this perspective, finding representation on a liberal–conservative dimension in municipal politics. This article re-evaluates these findings using a set of questions that includes questions on land use. Evidence is shown for a multidimensional municipal ideological space with a liberal–conservative dimension and another dimension that corresponds to citizens' preferences for balancing community needs with individual rights on land use. The results support a characterization of municipal politics as being ideological but also show that a single liberal–conservative dimension is inadequate for characterizing the municipal ideological space.