Browsing by Subject "Ideology"
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Item Open Access Follow and Tweet: The Partisan Tilt and Political Ideology Preferences of Army Officers on Social Media(2021) Kim, Eric Tae HyoungThis study seeks to describe the political profiles of Army officers through data scraping the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and LinkedIn platforms. After creating and analyzing a database of 500 Army officers, the thesis finds that (1) the majority of Army officers on Twitter are not partisan and are not extreme in its political views; (2) most Army officers on Twitter appear to tilt to the Republican Party over the Democratic Party; (3) a slight majority of field grade officers on Twitter, specifically majors and lieutenant colonels, appear to tilt to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party; (4) politically interested officers express more politically liberal sentiments than conservative sentiments; (5) female officers appear to tilt to the Democratic Party and express more liberal sentiments compared to male officers.
These findings were the result of data scraping the number of Democratic or Republican politicians each officer follows and the political content of what each officer tweets to determine partisan tilt and ideological preferences. These findings demonstrate little evidence of a politicized and partisan Army officer corps. Army officers are also unaware of how much political and personal information they expose on social media platforms. Army organizations and officers may benefit from reconsidering their use of social media as the information they provide may degrade the leadership of their units and bolster our adversaries’ information operations capabilities.
Item Open Access Ideological Segregation: Partisanship, Heterogeneity, and Polarization in the United States(2012) Sparks, David BruceI develop and justify a measure of polarization based on pairwise differences between and within groups, which improves on previous approaches in its ability to account for multiple dimensions and an arbitrary number of partitions. I apply this measure to a roll-call based ideological mapping of U.S. legislators to show that while the contemporary Congress is polarized relative to mid-century levels, the current state is not historically unprecedented.
I then estimate the ideology of public opinion using survey respondent thermometer evaluations of political elites and population subgroups. I find that party affiliation is polarizing in this space, but that alternate partitions of the electorate, along racial, educational, and other socio-demographic lines, are de-polarized.
Finally, I estimate a two-dimensional latent space based on social identity trait co-occurrence. I show that positions in this space are predictive of survey respondent ideology, partisanship, and voting behavior. Further, I show that when conceived in this way, we do observe a polarization of the social space over the last half-century of American politics.
Item Open Access The Islamic State: The Manifestation of a Violently Intimate Utopian Imaginary(2016-05-06) Gold, JessicaThis thesis seeks a complex understanding of the Islamic State through a multi-layered analysis of its territorial construction and physical form, its ideology, and its virtuality. By analyzing the way each of these aspects is constructed, influences, and in turn is influenced by the other aspects, I offer an integrative perspective on the Islamic State. Specific elements under consideration include the organizational structure, membership, tactics, and factors driving the territorial construction of the Islamic State, the religious concepts and socio-political narratives assimilated into its Salafi-jihadist ideology, and its use of violence and virtual networks. My research combines primary source analysis with theoretical analysis. Sources consulted include media output of the Islamic State itself, personal correspondence and writings of key IS and other Salafi-jihadist thinkers, and existing expert analysis of the Islamic State. My own analysis leads me to propose that the Islamic State, as seen through its physical and ideological forms, is actually the manifestation of an imagined utopic vision animated and spread through virtual networks and the threat and seduction of intimate violence. Thus, this thesis complicates existing understandings of the Islamic State, which tend to see it as a fundamentally physical threat, a combination of a pseudo-state and terrorist organization acting according to an extreme Salafi-jihadist ideology, which employs sophisticated virtual methods. While valuable in some regards, such an understanding misses the scope and power of the Islamic State as a virtual entity. Ultimately, static, rationalist frameworks, many of which developed out of the Cold War context and are tied to the nation-state system, are insufficient to provide a complete understanding of the Islamic State. New frameworks must be developed that can account for continual change, transformation, and the manifestation of the virtual forces of individual and collective imaginaries.Item Open Access The Lens of National Identity: Comparing the Structural Components of Muslim and Christian-Majority Countries(2013) Weimer, Laura ReneeIn the midst of revolutions, overthrown governments, civil wars, and large-scale migration, sociologists need to reassess the structural components of national identity. Previous research has analyzed internal dynamics of a few countries or differences between geographical regions or methods of state formation that rarely included Muslim countries in their cross-national comparisons. This paper takes a previously unaddressed approach by looking at nation-states' religious majority, comparing Muslim-majority and Christian-majority states with a large cross-national sample. My research aims to discover whether there are different sources of national identity in the two types of countries. Using multi-level models with both individual and country-level characteristics, I analyze a dichotomous measure of national pride - an indicator of shared connection to the people of the country and thus a measure of national identity - from 9 Muslim-majority and 32 Christian-majority countries in the two most recent waves of the World Values Survey (2000 and 2005). I find that while country-level heterogeneity of language, ethnicity, and religion do not seem to affect one's sense of national pride in either type of country, one's individual position within their country with respect to ethnic, religious, and language majority groups are each strong positive predictors of national pride in both types of countries. More importantly the effect of being in ethnic or religious majority groups has a significantly stronger effect in Muslim countries than in Christian countries. This multi-level cross-national approach comparing Muslim and Christian-majority countries challenges sociologists to further explore the structural meaning of this dichotomy and to pursue research including more Muslim countries.