Doing what others do: norms, science, and collective action on global warming

Does rhetoric highlighting social norms or mentioning science in a communication affect individuals’ beliefs about global warming and/or willingness to take action? We draw from framing theory and collective-interest models of action to motivate hypotheses that are tested in two large web-based survey-experiments using convenience samples. Our results show that attitudes about global warming, support for policies that would reduce carbon emissions, and behavioral intentions to take voluntary action are strongly affected by norm- and science-based interventions. This has implications for information campaigns targeting voluntary efforts to promote lifestyle changes that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Political talk on mobile instant messaging services:a comparative analysis of Germany, Italy, and the UK

Mobile instant messaging services (MIMS) are emerging as important digital environments in citizens’ everyday lives. We explore the use of MIMS for talking about politics with unique survey data on samples representative of Internet users in Germany, Italy, and the UK. First, we show that robust percentages of our respondents who use MIMS employ them for posting political messages and discussing politics. Second, we demonstrate that political talk on MIMS is positively associated with users’ tendency to censor themselves politically on social networking sites (SNS) and, to a lesser extent, with ideological extremism. Third, we find that the association between self-censorship on SNS and the likelihood of publishing political contents on MIMS is stronger for individuals living in former East Germany where, due to historical reasons, large segments of the population are reluctant to talk about politics in public. Our findings suggest that MIMS make a distinctive contribution to contemporary repertoires of political talk, with important implications for the quality and inclusiveness of interpersonal political discussion

Asking about social circles improves election predictions

Election outcomes can be difficult to predict. A recent example is the 2016 US presidential election, in which Hillary Clinton lost five states that had been predicted to go for her, and with them the White House. Most election polls ask people about their own voting intentions: whether they will vote and, if so, for which candidate. We show that, compared with own-intention questions, social-circle questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts improved predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections. Responses to social-circle questions predicted election outcomes on national, state and individual levels, helped to explain last-minute changes in people’s voting intentions and provided information about the dynamics of echo chambers among supporters of different candidates

Opinion climates and immigrant political action: a cross-national study of 25 European democracies

We develop a model of immigrant political action that connects individual motivations to become politically involved with the context in which participation takes place. The article posits that opinion climates in the form of hostility or openness toward immigrants shape the opportunity structure for immigrant political engagement by contributing to the social costs and political benefits of participation. We argue that friendly opinion climates toward immigrants enable political action among immigrants, and facilitate the politicization of political discontent. Using survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002 to 2010 in 25 European democracies, our analyses reveal that more positive opinion climates-at the level of countries and regions-increase immigrant political engagement, especially among immigrants dissatisfied with the political system. However, this effect is limited to uninstitutionalized political action, as opinion climates have no observable impact on participation in institutionalized politics

Communications and Transport: The mobility of information, people and commodities

In a context where the study of communications tends to focus only on the mobility of information, to the neglect of that of people and commodities, this article explores the potential for a closer integration between the fields of communications and transport studies. Against the presumption that the emergence of virtuality means that material geographies are no longer of consequence, the role of mediated ‘technologies of distance’ is considered here in the broader contexts of the construction (and regulation) of a variety of physical forms of mobility and the changing modes of articulation of the virtual and material worlds