In this paper, I present the data from a study on how the Spanish Parliament has dealt with a “minority” affected by one controversial issue such as same-sex marriage. By analysing mainly the minutes of the sessions in which homosexuality is discussed, or gays and lesbians are mentioned, I examine how these are represented (if they are) through the speeches delivered by politicians. As a conseq...

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that valuing conformity, security, and tradition over ...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization's publication, Developing sexual health programmes, states that the media is an important source of information about sexuality. Although the media can promote awareness of sexual health issues, it also acts as a vehicle for defining and regulating sex norms. In other words, the standards of 'normal' sex are in part defined by the media. Accordingly, it ...

Scholars have long focused on socio-psychological attachment, elite discourse and rational action to explain the nature and structure of ideologies. Recently genetic and neurobiological influences have also emerged as predictors of ideological preferences. So far however, there has been little synthesis of these findings into the larger discourse on the structures and manifestations of ideology...

The theoretical virtue of parsimony values the minimizing of theoretical commitments, but theoretical commitments come in two kinds: ontological and ideological. While the ontological commitments of a theory are the entities it posits, a theory’s ideological commitments are the primitive concepts it employs. Here, I show how we can extend the distinction between quantitative and qualitative par...

Within the theoretical and methodological framework based on the conceptual metaphor theory, the discourse-historical approach, and corpus linguistics, this article examines the various representations of Taiwan indigenous people’s name rectification movement in three major broadsheet newspapers, the United Daily News, the Liberty Times, and the Apple Daily in Taiwan. Using two-tier analysis, w...

A particular formation can be observed in the discourse of spiritual healing and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Explanations of the effectiveness of spiritual healing by medical doctors and psychologists sometimes include ideological and non-scientific conclusions and concepts, which are similar to but also different from New Age science on healing. With discourse analysis discur...

International environmental policy has failed to reverse climate change, resource depletion and the generalized decline of biodiversity and ecological life support systems. This paper traces economic roots of current environmental problems and examines the evolution of sustainability policy since the publication of Club of Rome’s report Limits to growth and the celebration of the first Earth su...

As the medicalization of criminal behaviour expands through forensic psychiatric practice it is reliant upon a therapeutic ideology based on clinical assessment and effective application of treatment strategies. When such criminal offenses are particularly heinous the perpetrators are often referred to as evil by non-professional accounts. However, the extent to which the concept of evil affect...

This paper seeks to clarify the distinction between positivist/scientific and interpretive approaches to public policy using the critical framework of Jacques Derrida. Derrida s deconstructive method helps to clarify the relationship among state power, public policy, and the cultural "text" of "subjectivity." It is asserted that the positivistic approaches to policy formation rely on a represen...