With enough women, majority based decision making rules can help foster communication processes that support women’s authority

Recent years have seen growing calls for the greater representation of women in political bodies and corporate boards. But does greater representation for women lead to more power in decision making? Using data from an empirical study of group interaction around deliberation, J. Baxter Oliphant, Tali Mendelberg, and Christopher F. Karpowitz find that the rules around how decisions are made matter; when decisions are majority-based, and there are enough women to control the decision, then men begin to treat women with more respect. When decisions need to be unanimous, minority men are empowered and do not modify their behavior towards women

Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa

This paper draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in twenty-two public opinion surveys in ten countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power

Emotional Substrates of White Racial Attitudes

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91203/1/j.1540-5907.2011.00561.x.pd

Immigration Opposition Among U.S. Whites: General Ethnocentrism or Media Priming of Attitudes About Latinos?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97221/1/pops928.pd

Conceptualizing a Social Sustainability Framework for Energy Infrastructure Decisions

The concept of social sustainability is discussed in a wide range of literatures, from urban planning to international development. Authors agree a notion of social sustainability is difficult to define, comprising numerous component parts (criteria), such as community cohesion, human wellbeing, effective dialogue and the access that citizens have to those that make important decisions on their behalf. The definition and measurement of these criteria and the role of social sustainability in energy decision making is a contentious issue. We argue that a community led, asset based approach is required to achieve any sense of how social sustainability can be defined in a community setting within the context of energy developments. We propose a conceptual framework based on a process of community group prioritization and visioning. Our earlier research on public participation and the role of dialogue for nuclear energy development in the UK, US and Japan is used to demonstrate barriers to be overcome if our systemic model of social sustainability is to become a reality. We highlight the importance of fairness and justice, place based approaches and socio-energy systems, concluding that these are necessary to promote a community and institutional awareness of social sustainability for large energy developments

Equal Partners in Dialogue? Participation Equality in a Transnational Deliberative Poll (Europolis)

By gathering a representative sample of citizens from all 27 EU Member States, the deliberative poll Europolis created the opportunity for the inclusion of a wide variety of European voices. Taking up claims of difference democrats who argue that informal hurdles to participation can endure even after individuals gain formal access to the floor, this article argues for an extended approach to evaluate equality in deliberative minipublics. Specifically, it assesses whether participants contributed in roughly equal measures to the discussion and whether their discussion partners considered their contributions on equal merits. In doing so, the article adds to the small but growing literature on deliberation that expresses reservations about taking the willingness to engage with others' claims for granted. In order to account for the intrinsically relational aspect of interpersonal communication, measures of social network analysis are introduced as possible tools to evaluate participation equality in deliberative encounters

Documenting the Unauthorized: Political Responses to Unauthorized Immigration

Cultural prejudice rather than self interest is the conventional wisdom for why voters respond negatively to immigration. Using a new measure of unauthorized immigrants based on self-reported invalid social security numbers, we show that voters' responses are more nuanced than mere prejudice against minorities. Using county level data from the U.S. state of Georgia, we find that voters in counties with above median levels of unauthorized workers are more likely to support the Republican party. We also find that wealthier counties and wealthier voters are most likely to respond negatively to the unauthorized. Our evidence warns against arguments that depict opposition to immigration as motivated solely by xenophobia and cultural fears among lower income whites