Recent literature establishes that ethnicity needs to be politically relevant to have a negative effect on a country’s development process. Yet, an understanding of the factors that cause ethnicity to be a political salient factor is still limited. This paper compares the development of the high politicization of ethnicity in Kenya to the low politicization in Tanzania by tracing the impact of ...

Few trends in science have generated as much discussion as its politicization. This occurs when an actor emphasizes the inherent uncertainty of science by casting doubt on the existence of scientific consensus. In this paper, we offer a framework that generates predictions about when communications can be used to counteract politicization efforts aimed at novel energy technologies. We then pres...

Does the politicization of science influence support for emergent technologies? Can it render appeals to evidence impotent? The authors study these questions by focusing on public support for an emergent energy technology, i.e., nuclear power. Using an experiment embedded within a large survey, they explore how exposure to information that primes the politicization of science affects support fo...

Health issues are increasingly becoming politicized, but little is known about how politicization takes shape in the news and its effect on the public. We analyze the evolution of politicization in news coverage of two health controversies: the uproar over the 2009 mammography screening guidelines and the 2006–2007 debate over mandating the HPV vaccine as a requirement for middle school–aged gi...

This article explores the merits of foregrounding the dichotomy of politicization vs de-politicization for our understanding of bio-objects in order to study their production, circulation, and governance in European societies. By asking how bio-objects are configured in science, policy, public, and media discourses and practices, we focus on the role of socio-technical configurations in generat...

Many commentators today lament the politicization of bioethics, but some suggest distinguishing among different kinds of politicization. This essay pursues that idea with reference to three traditions of political thought: liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism. After briefly discussing the concept of politicization itself, the essay examines how each of these political traditions mani...

Scholars of science and society have long understood that in all but the most trivial of cases science cannot compel specific political outcomes. Rather, scientific understandings are frequently either intrinsically uncertain or diverse enough to be used to justify a range of competing political agendas. This paper argues that despite these understandings the use of science by scientists as a m...

Even though having some credibility in trans-disciplinary research (see e.g., Stehr and von Storch 1995, Bray and von Storch 1999, von Storch 2009, Bray and von Storch 2009 or Stehr and von Storch 2010), we may not have fully grasped the conceptions and arguments of S. Keller. What stuck to us was the complaint that the IPCC, mainly under the influence of Bert Bolin, would have failed to issue ...

At the 2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference at Yale University, anthropologist Didier Fassin discussed social inequality and the politicization of health in the context of global public health.