Online discussion forums are a popular platform for people to voice their opinions on any subject matter and to discuss or debate any issue of interest. In forums where users discuss social, political, or religious issues, there are often heated debates among users or participants. Existing research has studied mining of user stances or camps on certain issues, opposing perspectives, and conten...

The gay rights movement is one of the major social changes of the last twenty years, drawing comparisons to the movements for women and African Americans in the 1960’s. Changes in laws enacted by the legislature and the judiciary followed a massive shift in public opinion on gay issues, most notably marriage. This paper utilizes an experimental method to determine which of three arguments, focu...

Scholars have argued that online social networks and personalized web search increase ideological segregation. We investigate the impact of these potentially polarizing channels on news consumption by examining web browsing histories for 50,000 U.S.-located users who regularly read online news. We find that individuals indeed exhibit substantially higher segregation when reading articles shared...

The issue of educational evaluation has long been a research hotspot. Using big data analysis method to conduct educational evaluation can improve the pertinence and effectiveness of education. Conventional Apriori algorithm has certain limitations in the application of educational evaluation. This paper introduces an improved Apriori-Gen algorithm and describes its application in evaluation of...

A major goal of ideological education in China is to promote loyalty to the party-state and to instill atheism among the people. How effective is this ideological education? This article examines the relationship between education and trust in government and trust in religion using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey. We find that education is negatively associated with trust in go...

We present a formal model explaining that US presidents strategically unionize federal employees to reduce bureaucratic turnover and ‘anchor’ the ideological composition of like-minded agency workforces. To test our model’s predictions, we advance a method of estimating bureaucratic ideology via the campaign contributions of federal employees; we then use these bureaucratic ideal point estimate...

Assuming strict two-party competition, policy balancing models of the US senate imply that senators from the same state will often be from opposite parties and have great ideological divergence. We analyze the effect of independent candidates on these implications. Our theoretical model implies the two state senators will generally not be from opposite parties and will be closer in ideological ...

Thomas Sowell has achieved an enviable reputation in many different areas of economics. His many works on the economics of immigration, culminating in Ethnic America, have won him an eminent place in this field. His Knowledge and Decisions applies in a comprehensive way the insights of Friedrich A. Hayek to a vast number of social phenomena. As if this were not enough, Sowell has also published...

We examine whether two general dimensions of sociopolitical belief—right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO)—are rooted in insecure psychological attachment. Based on an undergraduate sample (N = 255), we model the relations among attachment styles, general worldviews, RWA, and SDO. A structural equation model indicated that anxious attachment led to RWA but not S...