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While a sense of civic duty has long been perceived as important for political participation, little is known about its implications for political preference formation. I argue that civic duty has salubrious effects for opinion formation by dampening partisan distortions in decision making. I theorize that a heightened sense of civic duty stimulates a motivation to form "accurate" opinions and, in doing so, diminishes the effects of partisan motivated reasoning. Using survey experiments focused on tax and education policies, I provide evidence that when civic norms are accentuated, at times, people shirk party endorsements and incorporate substantive policy information in preference formation. The implications for citizen competence and public opinion in democratic politics are discussed.

AbstractThis article leverages a phenomenon of racial reclassification in Brazil to shed new light on the processes of identity politicization. Conventional wisdom tells us that race mixture, fluid racial boundaries, and stigmatized blackness lead Brazilians to change their racial identifications—to reclassify—toward whiteness. But in recent years, Brazilians have demonstrated a newfound tendency to reclassify toward blackness. The author argues that this sudden reversal is the unintended consequence of state-led educational expansion for the lower classes. Educational expansion has increased the exposure of newly mobile citizens to information, social networks, and the labor market, leading many to develop racialized political identities and choose blackness. The author develops and tests this argument by drawing on in-depth interview data, systematic analyses of national survey and longitudinal census data, and original survey experiments. This article contributes a novel account of identity politicization and emphasizes the interaction between social structures and citizenship institutions in these processes.

The political parties were formed in Iran following western countries, after the constitutional revolution and second parliament in 1909, and since then they have witnessed rise and falls. The analytical study and an accurate knowledge of the main movements forming the political parties of the last century that is essential for the development of a democratic society in Iranian society. Based on an analytical and accurate study, from the very beginning of political party formation to the present, three forces are distinguishable in Iranian Society and the partial activities during the past 100 years can be framed in three movements: The Religious Movement, the National Movement, and the Left Movement to be the major causes for political party formation in Iran in the last century. In this article, the author has tried to explain these major movements and political parties that emerged from these movements using the library sources.

The political systems of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are again based on traditional democratic institutions: representative bodies and political parties. One obvious conclusion is that the democratic evolution of party systems in Central Europe opened to the people a new range of political choices. Yet while the structure of choices offered by the party systems has been radically transformed, it is not clear whether the structure of the political preferences of the society has been affected. Another question is the influence of the population's political choices upon the composition and attitudes of political elites. These questions are analyzed using data from Poland and other Central European countries. Results of elections in Poland in 1984-93 are presented and related to differences between Polish provinces. The characteristics of voters and political leaders in 100 local communities in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are analyzed. The conclusion of the article is that party formation at the local level has not yet become crystallized in Central Europe. Voter preferences, however, seem to be stabilizing, a necessary component of democratic party systems.

A "neutron star" : marriage equality and created rights episodes -- "Show me your papers!" : SB 1070 and defensive rights episodes -- Unity and division : paradoxes in the formation of political movement coalitions -- Thwarting division through intersectional translation.

The role of public opinion in the political process is more often justified than explained by political theorists. Insofar as contemporary theory offers an explanation, it replaces the primitive democratic notion of "The People as Legislator" with a neo-idealistic conception of public opinion as the "sense of the community" (A. D. Lindsay), an emergent product of the process of public discussion that enfolds the struggle of private group leaders, public administrators, and political representatives to influence the substance and direction of governmental policy.However, this is not the meaning of the term as used either by the man in the street or by the social scientist. In both popular and scientific language "public opinion" has come to refer to a sort of secular idol, and is a "god-term" to which citizens, scientists, and office-holders alike pay allegiance, partly as an act of faith, partly as a matter of observation, partly as a condition of sanity. The public opinion idol has its high priests, claiming to be expert translators of the oracles of the personified deity. The idol aIso has its heretics, divided like all protestants into many denominations. The least heretical sect, perhaps, consists of those who postulate a conceptual fiction somewhat resembling the legal relation of "principal-and-agent," except that they recognize that political representatives possess the power to act as trustees as well as agents of their amorphous principal.

Political preferences are multi-dimensional, covering topics like redistribution, immigration, and abortion. But what accounts for people's political preferences? We argue that an individual's work experiences on the job play an important part in shaping attitudes. In a process of generalization and transposition, people apply the kinds of reasoning, heuristics, and problem-solving techniques they learn and use at work in all realms of life. In this article, we briefly discuss the dimensionality of the political preference space and then explicate our account that links work experiences with attitudes. We use European Social Survey data to establish correlations between work experiences and attitudes and find evidence that is consistent with our account.

After Nazism and Communism new forms of totalitarianism fostered by religious fundamentalism have arisen at the turn of the present century. In view of this fact we present a parsimonious quantitative model designed to shed some light on the dynamics of the formation of totalitarian systems. The model is constructed according to the principles of "sociodynamics" that belongs to the broad field of nonlinear dynamic systems theory (NDS). It comprises two order parameters and four trend parameters. All of them are socio-politically interpreted. Stationary, stagnant and revolutionary system-phases are exhibited in 10 scenarios. The relation to catastrophe theory is discussed.

The article analyzes the essential content of the category "technology", highlights the main approaches to its semantic content, and identifies its key characteristics. The paper substantiates possibility of using technologies to form political culture of young people. Technologies that influence both the formation of youth culture in general and political culture in particular are highlighted; technologies that manifest themselves within the analysis of youth political culture and correlate with the structure of the main institutions that influence the construction of political culture are also considered.