1,721,065 research outputs found
L'immagine del leader. Quanto conta per gli elettori?
No full textThis book analyzes how the images of political leaders are constructed, what they consist of, and how, when and why they influence electoral outcomes. The book is divided into six chapters, each examining the issue of leader images from different perspectives and offering a wide range of examples from politics in Italy, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, which complement the theoretical considerations. As a conclusion, the book suggests that in non-presidential systems, image does matter, but probably a lot less than conventional wisdom would suggest. Where voters locate themselves on a ‘Left–Right’ spectrum, for example, is often a better predictor of voting behaviour. Rather, therefore, than being obsessed with trying to establish how much image matters, the book suggests it may be better first to consider when, where and how it matters. However, while warning against overestimating the importance of the leader’s image in deciding elections one way or another, the author also says that we should not deny its importance, particularly in a country such as Italy where parties (particularly those on the centre-right) appear to owe a significant part of their political capital to their leaders
Albertazzi & McDonnell, Twenty-First Century Populism : the Spectre of Western European Democracy
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Forme contemporanee dell’opinione pubblica : fra contro-potere, legittimazione e consenso
No full textR. Sciarrone, N. Bosco, A. Meo, L. Storti, La costruzione del ceto medio : immagini sulla stampa e in politica
No full textReconceptualising Contemporary Public Opinion : Competing Perspectives and Operational Types
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Opinioni pubbliche. Tradizioni teoriche e forme empiriche dell’opinione pubblica contemporanea
No full textPublic opinion is a central concept in political sociology, since it represents the main informal route to democratic legitimacy, both through the social processes of consensus building, and the exercise of a critical function – of an informal but politically influential counter-power. Various competing perspectives on the concept of public opinion have successively emerged since the eighteenth century. However, none of these were discarded once for all, or, conversely, supplanted the others. In the categorisation proposed in this paper, these concurrent perspectives define public opinion, respectively, as: (a) Social court, (b) Public discussion, (c) Collective action, (d) Majority opinion, (e) Public emotion, (f) Multidimensional process. In order to disentangle this enduring theoretical ambiguity, the second part of this article presents a typology of the main contemporary forms of expression of public opinion: (1) Collective attitude, (2) Aggregate opinion, (3) Current of opinion, (4) Movement of opinion. Each of these theoretical and research-oriented types of public opinion combines different elements of the previous perspectives, and identifies various processes that tend to coexist in the contemporary public sphere. Each type is defined on the basis of a different combination of the following criteria: stages of public thematisation; levels of “processuality”; types of publics involved; principles of effectiveness; political function; related theoretical concepts; main research instruments and techniques. An inclusive definition for the four types will complete this attempt at a sociological re-conceptualization of the contemporary forms of public opinion
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