This paper presents the preliminary findings of research into the disengagement from highly entitative and ideological social groups, such as one percent motorcycle clubs, military special forces and fundamental ideological groups. Using a grounded theory approach, the discourse of 25 former members identified the discrepancy between group membership and the self-concept as the core theme in th...

Conventional wisdom, buttressed by numerous empirical studies, has questioned the importance of both class and ideological factors on voting behavior in Canada. However, two recent studies of the 1997 Canadian national election [Gidengil et al., Canadian J. Political Sci. 32 (1999) 247; Nevitte et al., Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election, Oxford University Press, Ontario, 2000] i...

The American judiciary, like other branches of government, has increasingly come under attack as both ideologically driven and polarized. At the same time, scholars have limited understanding of the extent to which politicization has shaped the courts or how its influence varies among tiers of the judiciary and across states. We present a simple theory of judicial politicization that models the...

this research, relying on critical discourse analysis(cda), has proceed to analyze ten novels of modern iranian men and women writers.in the field of lexicon, using marked lexicon and metaphor, and in the section of syntax, using syntactic non – norm in the texts, it has compared active vs. passive sentences, long vs. short sentences, and direct vs. indirect speech with regard to gender of the ...

Many empirical works have been devoted to analysing the factors explaining local privatisation. Overall, most of the empirical analyses have low explanatory power due to the methodological difficulties in capturing the dynamic nature of the privatisation decision. The variables most often considered are those related to fiscal stress and cost reduction and political processes and ideological at...

We investigate the influence o f institutional arrangements on inflation in 18 OECD countries. The factors considered are, on the on hand institutional constraints on monetary policy such as the independence o f the Central Bank and commitment to fixed exchange rates and on the other political factors such as ideological and re-election motives. We find that an independent Central Bank has a di...

A large percentage of the public believes that the news media are biased, and the majority of these individuals consider the direction of bias to be against their own viewpoints. Past research has examined how individual factors such as strength of partisanship or extent of political involvement heighten bias perceptions, but little attention has been paid to interpersonal factors such as the i...

Polarizing opinions about political and social controversies take place commonly in mass and more recently user-generated media. A functional democratic society builds on civic discussions among people holding different beliefs on an issue. However, so far, few computer technologies have been devoted to facilitate mutual understanding, and arguably could have worsened the situation. We envision...