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 ...

We examined the degree to which cognitive style, cultural worldview, conspiracy ideation, and religious and political demographic variables correspond to agreement with scientific claims across four domains. Participants rated their level of agreement with scientific statements in four domains (evolution, GMOs, vaccinations, climate change) along with open-ended questions to investigate partici...

Polarizing discussions on political and social issues are common in mass and user-generated media. However, computer-based understanding of ideological discourse has been considered too difficult to undertake. In this paper we propose a statistical model for ideology discourse. By ideology we mean “a set of general beliefs socially shared by a group of people.” For example, Democratic and Repub...

The present study investigated the relationship between cognitive development and political and religious ideology, and whether there are gender differences in formal thinking which may be related to right-wing authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism. The conceptual and empirical literature suggests that many aspects of cognition which play a role in the formation of conservative politica...

The irrepressible Bernard E. Rollin has written a lively, provocative, and scholarly book on several pivotal bioethical issues in nonhuman animal research. Professor Rollin of Colorado State University asksand answers whether nonhuman animals think, feel, and suffer. Rollin asks whether the prevailing scientific justification for banning nonhuman animals is based on rational assessment of the i...

Research on adult populations has widely investigated the deep differences that characterize individuals who embrace either conservative or liberal views of the world. More recently, research has started to investigate these differences at very early stages of life. One major goal is to explore how parental political ideology may influence children's characteristics that are known to be associa...

This paper empirically evaluates whether government ideology and electoral motives influenced the growth of public health expenditures in 18 OECD countries over the 1971-2004 period. The results suggest that incumbents behaved opportunistically and increased the growth of public health expenditures in election years. Government ideology did not have an influence. These findings indicate (1) the...