Do Social Movements Encourage Young People to Run for Office? Evidence from the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan

The 2014 Sunflower Movement led to rising political participation among young Taiwanese. Hence, opposition parties and civic groups created programs to support young candidates running in the village chief elections. Compared with the 2010 election, however, fewer young challengers ran in 2014, and they received fewer votes and won fewer seats. Propensity score matching shows that the presence of young candidates on ballots did not increase turnout. However, young candidates affected the election indirectly: young, new candidates attracted more votes from incumbents than from challengers and therefore decreased the incumbent re-election rate

Extreme Candidates as the Beneficent Spoiler? Range Effect in the Plurality Voting System

How does the entrance of radical candidates influence election results? Conventional wisdom suggests that extreme candidates merely split the votes. Based on the range effect theory in cognitive psychology, we hypothesize that the entrance of an extreme candidate reframes the endpoints of the ideological spectrum among available candidates, which makes the moderate one on the same side to be perceived by the voters as even more moderate. Through two survey experiments in the United States and Taiwan, we provide empirical support for range effect in the vote choice in the plurality system. The results imply that a mainstream party can, even without changing its own manifesto, benefit from the entrance of its radical counterpart; it explains why the mainstream party may choose cooperation strategically. Our findings also challenge the assumption in regression models that the perceived ideological positions of candidates are independent of each other

PM Me the Truth? The Conditional Effectiveness of Fact-Checks Across Social Media Sites

People use multiple social media daily. Some platforms feature public interactions like Facebook, others emphasize private communications such as Line. Although misinformation is rampant on all platforms, literature on fact-checks (FC) focuses primarily on public ones. This article provides an integrated psychological model and argues that FC is less effective on private platforms. People expect to encounter “unwelcome” FCs (incongruent with their beliefs) on public platforms, but selectively approach the “welcome” FC on private platforms. An experiment (n = 601) and a national survey (n = 1060) were implemented to test these hypotheses in the 2020 Taiwan Presidential Election. The experiment shows that respondents prefer FC on Line, which helps their party, but prefer FC on Facebook which disadvantages their party. The survey shows that consuming FC with more private platform usage has lower media literacy, while is the opposite on public platforms. Future work should focus on both FC and how it is consumed

Out-of-Control COVID-19 Pandemic Hampers the Nationalism

© The Author(s) 2020. Early studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic causes the rally-around-the-flag effect and increases the level of nationalism among the voters after the outbreak. However, how long does this boost last? Voters may cognitively withdraw their identification to the beloved country if the pandemic is rampant in where they live as well as when the government fails to address it thoroughly. We conducted a pre-registered MTurk experiment (n = 606) on 20 April 2020, in the United States—3 months after the first confirmed case and weeks after the large-scale lockdown. Results show that US subjects who were primed of the COVID-19 in the United States significantly decreased their level of nationalism, especially among Democrats. In contrast, the priming of “COVID-19 in the world” has no effect. The negative impact of COVID-19 on nationalism could be explained by enough time as people could observe and evaluate the government’s performance after the outbreak through the partisan lens

Measuring ‘Closeness’ in 3-Candidate Elections: Methodology and an Application to Strategic Voting

Past research suggests that voter behavior is influenced by perceptions of electoral competitiveness. For example, when an election is perceived to be close, voters will be more likely to turnout and/or cast strategic votes for their second-most preferred candidate. Operationalizing electoral competitiveness in three-candidate elections presents previously unrecognized methodological challenges. This paper first shows that many past strategies for measuring ‘closeness’ in three-candidate contests have violated at least one of three basic properties that any such measure should satisfy. We then propose a new measurement grounded in probability ratios, and prove formally that ratio-indices satisfy these axiomatic criteria. Empirical analyses using this new index provide novel and nuanced findings on the extent and causes of strategic voting in the 2010 British general election. The paper\u27s operational strategy should be generally applicable to research on voting in elections, legislatures, and organizations

The Non-Consensus 1992 Consensus

The 1992 Consensus is perhaps the most crucial political term for cross-strait relations. Surveys show that the public consistently supports it in Taiwan. Despite the alleged broad support, there has not been an academic study examining if Taiwanese people understand the content of the 1992 Consensus. Such an inquiry is important as the administration in Taiwan has yet accepted the Consensus in its interactions with Beijing. A nearly representative online survey was conducted in July 2018, and 1001 Taiwanese respondents were recruited to choose among different “definitions” of the 1992 Consensus. Results show that only one-third of the respondents chose the version that Kuomintang agreed on, while another one-third misperceived the 1992 Consensus as a country-to-country agreement. Taiwanese people might have supported the Consensus for content that it is not. We then discuss the policy implications of our study for both China and Taiwan and provide future research orientations

COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey dataset on psychological and behavioural consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak

This N = 173,426 social science dataset was collected through the collaborative COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey - an open science effort to improve understanding of the human experiences of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic between 30th March and 30th May, 2020. The dataset allows a cross-cultural study of psychological and behavioural responses to the Coronavirus pandemic and associated government measures like cancellation of public functions and stay at home orders implemented in many countries. The dataset contains demographic background variables as well as measures of Asian Disease Problem, perceived stress (PSS-10), availability of social provisions (SPS-10), trust in various authorities, trust in governmental measures to contain the virus (OECD trust), personality traits (BFF-15), information behaviours, agreement with the level of government intervention, and compliance with preventive measures, along with a rich pool of exploratory variables and written experiences. A global consortium from 39 countries and regions worked together to build and translate a survey with variables of shared interests, and recruited participants in 47 languages and dialects. Raw plus cleaned data and dynamic visualizations are available.Measurement(s) psychological measurement center dot anxiety-related behavior trait center dot Stress center dot response to center dot Isolation center dot loneliness measurement center dot Emotional Distress Technology Type(s) Survey Factor Type(s) geographic location center dot language center dot age of participant center dot responses to the Coronavirus pandemic Sample Characteristic - Organism Homo sapiens Sample Characteristic - Location global Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data:Peer reviewe

Stress and worry in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic: Relationships to trust and compliance with preventive measures across 48 countries in the COVIDiSTRESS global survey

The COVIDiSTRESS global survey collects data on early human responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic from 173 429 respondents in 48 countries. The open science study was co-designed by an international consortium of researchers to investigate how psychological responses differ across countries and cultures, and how this has impacted behaviour, coping and trust in government efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Starting in March 2020, COVIDiSTRESS leveraged the convenience of unpaid online recruitment to generate public data. The objective of the present analysis is to understand relationships between psychological responses in the early months of global coronavirus restrictions and help understand how different government measures succeed or fail in changing public behaviour. There were variations between and within countries. Although Western Europeans registered as more concerned over COVID-19, more stressed, and having slightly more trust in the governments' efforts, there was no clear geographical pattern in compliance with behavioural measures. Detailed plots illustrating between-countries differences are provided. Using both traditional and Bayesian analyses, we found that individuals who worried about getting sick worked harder to protect themselves and others. However, concern about the coronavirus itself did not account for all of the variances in experienced stress during the early months of COVID-19 restrictions. More alarmingly, such stress was associated with less compliance. Further, those most concerned over the coronavirus trusted in government measures primarily where policies were strict. While concern over a disease is a source of mental distress, other factors including strictness of protective measures, social support and personal lockdown conditions must also be taken into consideration to fully appreciate the psychological impact of COVID-19 and to understand why some people fail to follow behavioural guidelines intended to protect themselves and others from infection. The Stage 1 manuscript associated with this submission received in-principle acceptance (IPA) on 18 May 2020. Following IPA, the accepted Stage 1 version of the manuscript was preregistered on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/g2t3b. This preregistration was performed prior to data analysis

Stress and worry in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic : relationships to trust and compliance with preventive measures across 48 countries in the COVIDiSTRESS global survey

The COVIDiSTRESS global survey collects data on early human responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic from 173 429 respondents in 48 countries. The open science study was co-designed by an international consortium of researchers to investigate how psychological responses differ across countries and cultures, and how this has impacted behaviour, coping and trust in government efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Starting in March 2020, COVIDiSTRESS leveraged the convenience of unpaid online recruitment to generate public data. The objective of the present analysis is to understand relationships between psychological responses in the early months of global coronavirus restrictions and help understand how different government measures succeed or fail in changing public behaviour. There were variations between and within countries. Although Western Europeans registered as more concerned over COVID-19, more stressed, and having slightly more trust in the governments' efforts, there was no clear geographical pattern in compliance with behavioural measures. Detailed plots illustrating between-countries differences are provided. Using both traditional and Bayesian analyses, we found that individuals who worried about getting sick worked harder to protect themselves and others. However, concern about the coronavirus itself did not account for all of the variances in experienced stress during the early months of COVID-19 restrictions. More alarmingly, such stress was associated with less compliance. Further, those most concerned over the coronavirus trusted in government measures primarily where policies were strict. While concern over a disease is a source of mental distress, other factors including strictness of protective measures, social support and personal lockdown conditions must also be taken into consideration to fully appreciate the psychological impact of COVID-19 and to understand why some people fail to follow behavioural guidelines intended to protect themselves and others from infection. The Stage 1 manuscript associated with this submission received in-principle acceptance (IPA) on 18 May 2020. Following IPA, the accepted Stage 1 version of the manuscript was preregistered on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/g2t3b. This preregistration was performed prior to data analysis.Peer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe