A modified form of the Attitudes Toward Censorship Questionnaire (Hense & Wright, 1992) was developed to assess the degree to which that scale measures attitudes toward censorship in general as opposed to censorship of material representing particular sociopolitical values. The revised form characterized the potentially censorable materials as racist, sexist, or violent. University student respondents who showed high acceptance of censorship in this context scored high on measures of authoritarianism, political conservatism, and conventional family ideology (as had procensorship respondents on the Hense and Wright scale), but low on a scale of economic conservatism. Women were more favorably inclined toward censorship than men. Supporters of Canada's most left‐wing (social democratic) major federal party were most favorable to censorship. Factor analysis showed that most of the variance could be explained by a cluster that we have labeled “Politically Correct Puritanism”: support for censoring racist and sexist materials and depictions of sexual violence. The second major factor was related to commercial availability of such materials. Content‐specific items on both the original and our modified scales may establish a context that guides the interpretation of nonspecific items, so that both the original Attitudes Toward Censorship Questionnaire and our modified version may be measuring attitudes toward censorship of materials violating a particular view of morality, rather than toward censorship in principle.
Executive SummaryThis article provides an overview and critique of US immigration and asylum policies from the perspective of the author's 46 years as a public servant. The article offers a taxonomy of the US immigration system by positing different categories of membership: full members of the "club" (US citizens), associate members (lawful permanent residents, refugees, and "asylees"), friends (nonimmigrants and holders of temporary status), and persons outside the club (the undocumented). It describes the legal framework that applies to these distinct populations and recent developments in federal law and policy that relate to them. It also identifies a series of cross-cutting issues that affect these populations, including immigrant detention, immigration court backlogs, state and local immigration policies, and constitutional rights that extend to noncitizens. It ends with a series of recommendations for reform of the US asylum system, and a short conclusion.
The left-right political auto-identification has been used widely in the socio-political research for interpreting and organizing political attitudes and opinions. In this paper we analyse whether the meaning of the left-right orientation is the same in Eastern and Western Europe after the transformation in 1989. Using data from two big European survey programmes – European Social Survey & European Values Study – we show that while citizens’ support for economic liberalism is positively related to their left-right political auto-identification, citizens’ support for cultural liberalism is negatively related to it. Importantly, however, we also found evidence for the regional diversity hypothesis, which shows this pattern was more prominent among the citizens of Western European countries than among the citizens of Eastern European countries. Presented results confirm the specificity of Eastern Europe when it comes to relations between political auto-identification and other beliefs linked to it traditionally and imply that the concept of left-right political auto-identification cannot be transferred mechanically between Eastern and Western Europe.
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