This Time it’s Ideological!

This Time of Dying

A must-read for those who think fl u pandemic preparedness is much ado about nothing, this fi rst novel by Reina James brings home the severity and plausibility of a fl u disaster. And without data, statistics, or comment, it makes a compelling case for progress on the matter of infl uenza, to ease suffering, prevent spread, and possibly eliminate the scourge. A series of journal entries beginn...

Why are You Taking this Stance? Identifying and Classifying Reasons in Ideological Debates

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in stance classification in online debates. Oftentimes, however, it is important to determine not only the stance expressed by an author in her debate posts, but also the reasons behind her supporting or opposing the issue under debate. We therefore examine the new task of reason classification in this paper. Given the close interplay between stance cl...

Ideological Strategy

Ideological parsimony

The theoretical virtue of parsimony values the minimizing of theoretical commitments, but theoretical commitments come in two kinds: ontological and ideological. While the ontological commitments of a theory are the entities it posits, a theory’s ideological commitments are the primitive concepts it employs. Here, I show how we can extend the distinction between quantitative and qualitative par...

Predicting Ideological Prejudice

A major shortcoming of current models of ideological prejudice is that although they can anticipate the direction of the association between participants' ideology and their prejudice against a range of target groups, they cannot predict the size of this association. I developed and tested models that can make specific size predictions for this association. A quantitative model that used the pe...