Communication and trust in the bounded confidence model

The communication process in a situation of emergency is discussed within the Scheff theory of shame and pride. The communication involves messages from media and from other persons. Three strategies are considered: selfish (to contact friends), collective (to join other people) and passive (to do nothing). We show that the pure selfish strategy cannot be evolutionarily stable. The main result is that the community structure is statistically meaningful only if the interpersonal communication is weak.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, RevTeX, for ICCCI-201

Politieke kennis en effecten van nieuws

Welk nieuws doet ertoe en hoeveel nieuws doet ertoe, en in welke mate hangt dit af van de politieke kennis van de ontvanger? Dit artikel beschrijft een longitudinale studie naar de verkiezingsstrijd voor het Nederlandse parlement in 2006

Ticket-splitting and strategic voting under mixed electoral rules: Evidence from Germany

"There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one’s vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote.They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a wasted-vote or a coalition insurance strategy, but do not automatically cast their vote for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implications for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically." (author's abstract

Social Policy, Imperiled Communities, and HIV/AIDS Transmission in Prisons: A Call For Zero Tolerance

HIV/AIDS and African-American male imprisonment contribute to the destruction of African-American communities. African-American men and HIV/AIDS are disproportionately represented throughout all sectors of the criminal justice industry, including the juvenile justice system. The criminal justice system contributes to unacceptably high African-American male imprisonment rates and HIV prevalence directly via the ‘war on drugs’ and lax enforcement of institutional policy among other things, and indirectly through perpetuation of economic hardship which further exacerbates imprisonment rates, thus closing the loop of a vicious cycle of revolving prison doors and HIV contraction. This article briefly introduces surrounding socio-political issues that contextualizes the ensuing discussion. It then considers the State of Georgia to explore issues of incidence and how HIV transmission occurs in prisons, uses Prison Rape Elimination Act data to shed light on accountability issues and the degree to which the nature of sex in prisons is romantic or violent, and concludes by offering overarching solutions and encouraging action in response to the myriad associated problems

Reinforcement vs. change: The political influence of the media

The aim of this paper is to analyze competition between two ideological media outlets that want to influence their viewers so as to boot the number of votes for their preferred political party. We consider two ways of influencing viewers, which correspond to two prominent theories borrowed from the literature on Sociology: the “Reinforcement Approach” and the “Attitudinal Orientations Approach”. Our findings show that the aim of influencing viewers generally pushes media outlets to differentiate their opinions, and that the extend of this differentiation deeply depends on the viewers’ behavior. More precisely, we observe that if the viewers channel hop, media outlets end up differentiating their opinions more than if the viewers receive all their information from just one media. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Ideological media, Influence, Channel hopping,