This text examines what, precisely, is the clash over race in America in the 1990s and whether it supports the charge of a new racism. It provides an articulation of what has happened and of how racial issues have become entangled with politics - the process of negotiating who gets what through government action - resulting in a politics of race.
How does a personality characteristic such as self-esteem become translated into political convictions? How do individual differences in self-esteem affect who becomes a politcal activist and a political leader? These are among the major questions addressed in this study, the first of its kind to be based on large-scale samples of both political laders and ordinary citizens. Drawing on the voluminous research of social psychologists on self-esteem and integrating the dynamic theories of Freud and his followers with the functional and social learning approaches, Professor Sniderman advances new theories to account for the complex connections between personality, political beliefs, and political leadership. In 1972, the American Political Science Association gave Professor Sniderman's original work in this field, on which this book is based, the E. E. Schattschneider Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government and politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.
The study of prejudice has been stimulated, but also limited, by the development of competing partial theories. Prejudice and group conflict are said to be rooted in the psychological makeup of individuals, or alternatively, to spring from real competition over material goods or social status, or yet again, to follow in the wake of a quest for identity. But the principal proponents of each theory have insisted that just so far as their approach is right, then at least one of the others must be wrong, or at most of marginal importance. It is the distinctive effort of The Outsider to develop a unified theory of prejudice integrating personality, realistic conflict, and social identity approaches."--BOOK JACKET.
Can the citizens of a democracy be trusted to run it properly? Modern political science has concentrated on cataloguing voters’ failings—their lack of knowledge, tolerance, or consistency in political thinking. While it would be a mistake to think this portrait of citizens is simply wrong, it is a deeper mistake to accept it as a satisfactory likeness. In this book, Paul Sniderman demonstrates that a concentration on the pathologies of citizens’ political thinking has obscured the intense clash of opposing belief systems in the electorate. He shows how a concentration on racism has distorted understanding of the politics of race by keeping out of sight those who think well of black Americans. And he exposes the fallacy of spotlighting the dangers of mass politics while ignoring those of elite politics.
Europe has struggled with Muslim immigration. While opposition to such immigration has become increasingly vocal, in many places efforts have been made to help these immigrants integrate into society. In The Struggle for Inclusion: Muslim Immigrants and the Democratic Ethos, Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Paul M. Sniderman shift the focus of scholarly work from those who are intolerant of immigrants to those who are tolerant and accept Muslim immigrants. The challenge is how do the tolerant reconcile their often liberal values with the conservative values held by many among the more conservative Muslim immigrants? How do liberal Europeans reconcile their values about, for example, the rights of women, with the conservative values on these issues held by many in the Muslim community? They find that a minority of Europeans are prejudiced against all Muslims, but many hold different feelings about conservative Muslims and their leadership because of conflicts with specific liberal values"--
Why do citizens in pluralist democracies disagree collectively about the very values they agree on individually? This provocative book highlights the inescapable conflicts of rights and values at the heart of democratic politics. Based on interviews with thousands of citizens and political decision makers, the book focuses on modern Canadian politics, investigating why a country so fortunate in its history and circumstances is on the brink of dissolution. Taking advantage of new techniques of computer-assisted interviewing, the authors explore the politics of a wide array of issues, from freedom of expression to public funding of religious schools to government wiretapping to antihate legislation, analyzing not only why citizens take the positions they do but also how easily they can be talked out of them. In the process, the authors challenge a number of commonly held assumptions about democratic politics. They show, for example, that political elites do not constitute a special bulwark protecting civil liberties; that arguments over political rights are as deeply driven by commitment to the master values of democratic politics as by failure to understand them; and that consensus on the rights of groups is inherently more fragile than on the rights of individuals.
In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on a busy Amsterdam street. His killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan offended by van Gogh's controversial film about Muslim suppression of women. The Dutch government had funded separate schools, housing projects, broadcast media, and community organizations for Muslim immigrants, all under the umbrella of multiculturalism. But the reality of terrorism and radicalization of Muslim immigrants has shattered that dream. In this arresting book, Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn demonstrate that there are deep conflicts of values in the Netherlands. In the eyes of the Dutch, for example, Muslims oppress women, treating them as inferior to men. In the eyes of Muslim immigrants, Western Europeans deny women the respect they deserve. Western Europe has become a cultural conflict zone. Two ways of life are colliding. Sniderman and Hagendoorn show how identity politics contributed to this crisis. The very policies meant to persuade majority and minority that they are part of the same society strengthened their view that they belong to different societies. At the deepest level, the authors' findings suggest, the issue that government and citizens need to be concerned about is not a conflict of values but a clash of fundamental loyalties.
What, precisely, is the clash over race in the 1990s, and does it support the charge of a new racism? Here is a brilliant articulation of what has happened, of how racial issues have become entangled with politics--the process of negotiating who gets what through government action. We now have to understand and cope with a politics of race.
The politics of inclusion is about more than hate, exclusion, and discrimination. It is a window into the moral character of contemporary liberal democracies. The Struggle for Inclusion introduces a new method to the study of public opinion: to probe, step by step, how far non-Muslim majorities are willing to be inclusive, where they draw the line, and why they draw it there and not elsewhere. Those committed to liberal democratic values and their concerns are the focus, not those advocating exclusion and intolerance. Notwithstanding the turbulence and violence of the last decade over issues of immigration and of Muslims in the West, the results of this study demonstrate that the largest number of citizens in contemporary liberal democracies are more open to inclusion of Muslims than has been recognized. Not less important, the book reveals limits on inclusion that follow from the friction between liberal democratic values. This pioneering work thus brings to light both pathways to progress and polarization traps.
This volume presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the idea that voters identify with a political party out of emotional attachment, this work explains why party identification in contemporary American politics enables voters to make coherent policy choices.
One of the most wide-ranging studies of prejudice undertaken in a decade, The Outsider combines new research methods and rich analysis to upend many of our assumptions about prejudice. Noting that hostility toward immigrants has been on the rise throughout Western Europe, Paul Sniderman and his team conduct the first study of prejudice in Italy and offer insights applicable to nearly all countries worldwide. The study of prejudice, they argue, has been both stimulated and limited by tensions among partial theories. Prejudice and group conflict are said to be rooted in the psychological makeup of individuals, or alternatively, to spring from real competition over material goods or social status, or yet again, to follow in the wake of a quest for identity. It is the distinctive effort of The Outsider to develop a unified theory of prejudice integrating personality, realistic conflict, and social identity approaches. Drawing on computer-assisted interviewing, this book focuses on Italy partly because it has experienced two different waves of immigration, from Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, and thus allows one to consider to what extent the color of immigrants' skin imposes a special burden of prejudice. Italy is also an apt site for the study of intolerance because of long-standing prejudices that have existed internally, between Northern and Southern Italians. The book's findings show that any point of difference--color, nationality, or language--marks the immigrant as an outsider. The fact of difference, not the particular mode of difference, is crucial. Moreover, the general election of 1994 provided a rare opportunity to investigate the political impact of prejudice when the party system was itself in the process of transformation. The authors uncover a potential line of cleavage: rather than prejudice being concentrated on the political right, it has a wide following among the less educated of the political left. Analyzing the contributions of personality, social-structural factors, and political orientation to the wave of intolerance toward immigrants, The Outsider offers unprecedented insights into the phenomenon of prejudice and its link to politics.
Can the citizens of a democracy be trusted to run it properly? Modern political science has concentrated on cataloguing voters' failings--their lack of knowledge, tolerance, or consistency in political thinking. While it would be a mistake to think this portrait of citizens is simply wrong, it is a deeper mistake to accept it as a satisfactory likeness. In this book, Paul Sniderman demonstrates that a concentration on the pathologies of citizens' political thinking has obscured the intense clash of opposing belief systems in the electorate. He shows how a concentration on racism has distorted understanding of the politics of race by keeping out of sight those who think well of black Americans. And he exposes the fallacy of spotlighting the dangers of mass politics while ignoring those of elite politics.
If white Americans could reveal what they really think about race, without the risk of appearing racist, what would they say? In this elegantly written and innovative book, Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines illuminate aspects of white Americans' thinking about the politics of race previously hidden from sight. And in a thoughtful follow-up analysis, they point the way toward public policies that could gain wide support and reduce the gap between black and white Americans. Their discoveries will surprise pollsters and policymakers alike. The authors show that prejudice, although by no means gone, has lost its power to dominate the political thinking of white Americans. Concentrating on the new race-conscious agenda, they introduce a method of hidden measurement which reveals that liberals are just as angry over affirmative action as conservatives and that racial prejudice, while more common among conservatives, is more powerful in shaping the political thinking of liberals. They also find that the good will many whites express for blacks is not feigned but represents a genuine regard for blacks, which they will stand by even when given a perfectly acceptable excuse to respond negatively to blacks. More crucially, Sniderman and Carmines show that the current impasse over race can be overcome if we remember what we once knew. The strongest arguments in behalf of equality for black Americans reach beyond race to the moral principles that give the issue of race itself a moral claim on us.
Why do citizens in pluralist democracies disagree collectively about the very values they agree on individually? This provocative book highlights the inescapable conflicts of rights and values at the heart of democratic politics. Based on interviews with thousands of citizens and political decision makers, the book focuses on modern Canadian politics, investigating why a country so fortunate in its history and circumstances is on the brink of dissolution. Taking advantage of new techniques of computer-assisted interviewing, the authors explore the politics of a wide array of issues, from freedom of expression to public funding of religious schools to government wiretapping to antihate legislation, analyzing not only why citizens take the positions they do but also how easily they can be talked out of them. In the process, the authors challenge a number of commonly held assumptions about democratic politics. They show, for example, that political elites do not constitute a special bulwark protecting civil liberties; that arguments over political rights are as deeply driven by commitment to the master values of democratic politics as by failure to understand them; and that consensus on the rights of groups is inherently more fragile than on the rights of individuals.
It has been half a century since the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work on race in America. The cleavage between the politics of race of the 1940s and the 1990s is that race has become a greater dilemma than ever before. This book is an attempt to contribute to a fresh understanding of prejudice, politics, and the American dilemma. It presents new lines of questions by deliberately inter-weaving two perspectives, the first taking up issues of race focusing on whites, the second on blacks. The contributors are drawn from several disciplines in the social sciences, sociologists, psychometricians, social and personality psychologists, demographers and political scientists of several persuasions. The book represents an important shift in perspectives, both theoretical and methodological, in the study of race and American politics.
New edition providing an introduction to the scientific study of politics, refined discussions of concepts and a chapter on writing about an original research project.
In 2005, twelve cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, igniting a political firestorm over demands by some Muslims that the claims of their religious faith take precedence over freedom of expression. Given the explosive reaction from Middle Eastern governments, Muslim clerics, and some Danish politicians, the stage was set for a backlash against Muslims in Denmark. But no such backlash occurred. Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy shows how the majority of ordinary Danish citizens provided a solid wall of support for the rights of their country's growing Muslim minority, drawing a sharp distinction between Muslim immigrants and Islamic fundamentalists and supporting the civil rights of Muslim immigrants as fully as those of fellow Danes—for example, Christian fundamentalists. Building on randomized experiments conducted as part of large, nationally representative opinion surveys, Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy also demonstrates how the moral covenant underpinning the welfare state simultaneously promotes equal treatment for some Muslim immigrants and opens the door to discrimination against others. Revealing the strength of Denmark’s commitment to democratic values, Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy underlines the challenges of inclusion but offers hope to those seeking to reconcile the secular values of liberal democracy and the religious faith of Muslim immigrants in Europe.
How does a personality characteristic such as self-esteem become translated into political convictions? How do individual differences in self-esteem affect who becomes a politcal activist and a political leader? These are among the major questions addressed in this study, the first of its kind to be based on large-scale samples of both political laders and ordinary citizens. Drawing on the voluminous research of social psychologists on self-esteem and integrating the dynamic theories of Freud and his followers with the functional and social learning approaches, Professor Sniderman advances new theories to account for the complex connections between personality, political beliefs, and political leadership. In 1972, the American Political Science Association gave Professor Sniderman's original work in this field, on which this book is based, the E. E. Schattschneider Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government and politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.
Do "black pride" and "black prejudice" come hand in hand? Does taking pride in being black encourage the rejection of a common bond with other Americans? In this groundbreaking study, two leading social scientists mount a challenge to those who would answer "yes." Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza probe these questions in the only way possible--asking black Americans themselves to share their thoughts about each other, America, and other Americans. Writing in a strikingly transparent style, they open a new window on the ideas and values of real individuals who make up the black community in America today. Contrary to the rhetoric of some black leaders, Sniderman and Piazza show that African Americans overwhelmingly reject racial separatism and embrace a common framework, culture, and identity with other Americans. Although the authors find that levels of anti-Semitism are notably higher among black Americans than among white Americans, they demonstrate that taking pride in being black does not encourage blacks to be more suspicious or intolerant of others who are not black. The higher levels of anti-Semitism are instead associated with a gallery of oversimplified and accusatory ideas, including a popularized Afrocentrism and charges of vast conspiracies, that have won substantial support in the black community. Readers of this book will come away with an understanding of how African Americans, while insistent on winning racial justice, are deeply committed to the values of the American ethos and their identity as Americans.
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