Readers can hear the data in respondents' own voices by listening to online audio recordings of the lengthy quotations. There are a few ways to listen to the 22 audio clips while reading the article. Those who are reading the digital version of the article will see that the name of each person quoted is hyperlinked. After clicking on a hyperlink, readers will be directed to a Web page containing just the audio recording for the appropriate bs_bs_banner
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.
White working-class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that ''moral values'' played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans' policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is extremely resonant to this set of voters, and we use in-depth interviews to uncover this framework. A key feature of this framework, on which in the 2004 presidential election George W. Bush scored high and John Kerry scored low, is the appropriate attitude to wealth, which serves as an indicator for a candidate's general moral philosophy and as a heuristic about whether the candidate will govern with working-class voters' interests in mind. National Election Studies data support the argument that this was a key influence on the voting decision in 2004, even controlling for voters' partisan identification.
Over the last three decades, scientists at research universities have responded in a wide variety of ways to the pressures of academic capitalism. Institutional research has under theorised this trend by assuming entrepreneurialism passively follows formal organisational change. In contrast, I treat academic capitalism not as a fait accompli but as a complex field characterised by contested knowledge production. An increased emphasis on knowledge capitalisation does not necessarily displace traditional academic values, although it may, but it has facilitated the diffusion of conceptual vocabularies that are retooling scientific culture and practice at the centre and margins. These vocabularies are (1) market‐oriented entrepreneurialism, (2) external consulting work, (3) consumer‐oriented research, and (4) interdisciplinarity. Their impact is diffuse across units, but involves processes of group and individual adoption, adaptation or resistance, as the case may be. Their local flavour varies by research domain, level and type of university embeddedness, and epistemic identity.
Scientific expertise and the free press have come under sustained partisan attack with the political ascendance of right-wing nationalism. This has put some science and technology studies (STS) scholars in the difficult position of defending the legitimacy of science while maintaining a characteristic agnosticism toward “the facts.” In this essay, inspired by a reading of Noortje Marres’s (2018) critique of fact-checking services, I seek to relieve some of the background anxiety I sense that perhaps STS research paved a path for the rise of right wing authoritarianism and “post-truth” politics. We are not dealing with a process of fact making in this environment, at least not of the scientific variety. Instead, we are dealing with political demagoguery. As scholars, we should therefore equip ourselves with the appropriate analytic and technological tools, and as many as possible, for engaging this political moment.
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