Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the association between political party preference and trust in knowledge-based institutions, while also considering how political trust facilitates the association. The authors focus on the opinions of supporters of the six largest parliamentary political parties in Finland.

The data are based on a population level survey. First, the authors compared party supporters’ trust in universities and YLE media. Second, the authors analyzed how political trust contributes to party supporters’ trust in knowledge-based institutions by estimating predicted probabilities. Third, the authors derived the partial correlations from the non-linear probability models incorporated separately between trust in YLE, Universities and political trust, and compared the correlations across the parties. Finally, the authors conducted the logit models from which the authors post-estimated the predicted probabilities of having high trust in YLE and Universities according to the levels of political trust separately for each party.

The results showed a cumulation of trust, reflecting especially on the attitudes of the populist party supporters who tended to have lower trust in knowledge-based institutions and distrust was highly associated with low political trust. This cumulation of trust shows an interesting dynamic in how closely institutions are linked together in terms of attitudes on their legitimacy.

This study assesses the cumulation of distrust, while providing an alternative political spectrum to the US two party system that has been the major focus of past research. Furthermore, the study fills a gap in the research by being the first to assess the intersection of the trust dimensions.

This study aims to explore the potential that acting proenvironmentally protects adolescents from developing materialistic value.

Convenience sampling was adopted to collect data from two randomly selected secondary schools in central China. A total of 784 participants were included in the survey.

The mediation analysis revealed that adolescent proenvironmental behaviour was negatively associated with materialism. The results of the moderated mediation model showed that psychological entitlement mediates the association between adolescent proenvironmental behaviour and materialism, and that family socioeconomic status acts as a moderator in the association between proenvironmental behaviour and psychological entitlement.

The current results advise educational practitioners on alleviating adolescent materialism. Policy makers and schools can add more environmental practice to the curriculum and extracurricular activities. Moreover, identifying the personal benefits of proenvironmental behaviour can motivate young people to act proenvironmentally, which not only factually reduces over-consumption but also attracts more attention from young people to the environment.

Previous studies rarely explored the individual belief or perception accounting for the negative association between proenvironmental behaviour and materialism. Therefore, the authors adopt psychological entitlement, a belief reflecting the dark side of individual perception, to explain why proenvironmental behaviour reduces materialism.

The study utilises unique survey data gathered from 12,427 party members. The dependent variable measures party members’ in-party commitment and is based on willingness to donate money, to contribute effort, the feeling of belonging in the party network and social trust in the party network.

In this article, we study how different extra-parliamentary online and offline activities are associated with in-party commitment amongst political party members from the six largest Finnish parties. We especially delve into the differences between members of the Finnish parties.

We found that extra-parliamentary political activity, including connective action through social media networks and collective action through civic organisations, is highly associated with members’ in-party commitment. Additionally, members of the newer identity parties more effectively utilised social media networks, whilst the traditional interest parties were still more linked to traditional forms of extra-parliamentary political action.

By employing the sociological network theory perspective, the study contributes to ongoing discussions surrounding the impact of social media on political participation amongst party members, both within and beyond the confines of political parties.

This chapter examines the relationship between media consumption during COVID-19 and its effect on trust in experts. Successful crisis management requires risk assessment and rapid decisions, and decision-making in the crisis is often based on multidimensional and conflicting information, which highlights the importance of trust. Here, the aim is to examine how daily media consumption is associated with trust in experts and satisfaction with government response during the pandemic. Media consumption was defined by how many different media platforms respondents used daily, grouped into three broad categories: (1) broadcast media, including television and radio; (2) journalistic media, including newspapers and periodicals; and (3) social media, including social network sites and discussion forums. The results of the analyses show that trust in experts strengthened as the crisis progressed, but satisfaction with the government declined. Omnivorous media consumption – those who consumed several different forms of media – increased trust in experts as well as satisfaction with the government. Particularly, one-sided and social media-based media consumption was related to declined trust. That is, those who used only one form of media and those who relied heavily on social media alone expressed lower levels of trust in experts. The mediation analysis showed that the association between media consumption and government satisfaction was partly indirect through trust in experts. Overall, the study reinforces the importance of media as a moderator of messages during crisis management.

The chapter is theoretically framed using theories of risk perception and work on the risk society. We aim at answering two fundamental questions: which factors did Americans and Finns considered to be the main reasons for the pandemic spread and were there differences in the perceptions of Americans and Finns at different points in the early stages of the pandemic. We compare the perceptions of several implicit causes ranging from the immigrants and migration to business travel, lack of citizen responsibility, and ineffective political decisions. Since social response to the COVID-19 pandemic were highly politicized in Western countries, and especially in the United States, our primary focus is on the effects of political party preference. The findings show that the effects were strongest when analyzing the belief that migration and immigration played a role in the pandemic’s cause and spread. In the United States, supporters of Republican Party were more likely to perceive migrants and immigration as a cause for pandemic. In Finland, supporters of the coalition of parties in power at the time were less likely to do so. Temporal changes in the effects were also detected. Specifically, political preference was a weaker predictor of Americans’ perception in fall than it had been in the spring. Our findings highlight how citizens do not believe all news coverage and claims about the disease, but instead political beliefs and life experiences have an important filtering effect on their interpretations. These interpretations appear to be phenomena that can be controlled at the national level.