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The Politics of Speech on Campus 1
Abstract
This article is concerned with college‐aged activists’ discussions about provocative speakers invited to their campuses. Our research shows how the students on the front lines of debates over free expression and inclusion conceptualize the stakes and think about the consequences of their political involvement. Our analysis goes beyond simplistic portrayals of young people as being either “for” or “against” speech rights. Instead, we argue that conservative activists adopt an absolutist stance toward the First Amendment, which is encouraged by outside national organizations that regard free expression as a wedge issue in higher education. This contrasts with progressive activists, who struggle to weigh the value of individual freedoms against the potential harms caused by derogatory or hostile words and symbols. Ultimately, our semi‐structured interview data allow us to see the complex (and sometimes contradictory) reasoning behind students’ responses to contentious speaking events at colleges and universities
... Further analyses suggested that this decreased tolerance depended on whether Democrats expected harm to result from the presence of the extreme-right speaker. Similarly, Kidder and Binder (2021) investigated the views of students from four universities in the U.S. and found that those on the political left were more likely to prioritize balancing free speech rights against other factors, such as the harms of hate speech. Whereas those on the political right often rejected any form of censorship. ...
... Manning's The Rise of Victimhood Culture and Lukianoff and Haidt's book The Coddling of the American Mind argue that there is a cultural shift on college campuses that is challenging norms about what is considered offensive and how we manage these offenders (Campbell and Manning 2018;Lukianoff and Haidt 2018). Many have described these changes as a crisis, attributed to various factors such as external organizations, media, political polarization, and changes in parenting among Generation Z students (born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s) (Campbell and Manning 2018;Chemerinsky, Gillman, and Ben-Porath 2017;Cushman 2019;Kidder and Binder 2021;Lukianoff and Haidt 2018). ...
... This decrease may be driven by increased awareness of racial discrimination and its harms (Boch 2020a). Similarly, Kidder and Binder (2021) interviewed students at four U.S. universities. They found that students on the political left tend to be concerned about balancing free speech rights against other considerationssuch as the harms of hate speechwhile students on the political right tend to reject any form of censorship. ...
Freedom of speech has long been considered an essential value in democracies. However, its boundaries concerning hate speech continue to be contested across many social and political spheres, including governments, social media, and university campuses. Despite the potential of examining the social psychological dynamics of this debate for advancing theory on meaning-making, polarization, emotions, and social status, empirical research in this area is scarce. This dissertation aims to address this gap by examining first-hand perspectives and media frames on the free speech and hate speech debate using digital, archival, and interview data from an online forum and four university campuses.
The first empirical chapter focuses on the moral discourse of individuals within an online free speech community. I analyze 418 discussion posts on the r/FreeSpeech subreddit using a digital ethnographic approach and find that most users understand free speech in an absolutist sense but differ in their justifications for why hate speech should be allowed. The study highlights the variation in free speech discourse within online spaces.
The second empirical chapter explores campus culture and students’ meaning-making processes toward speech on campus at four large public universities in the U.S. and Canada. The chapter, which draws on data from 150 student newspaper articles and 55 semi-structured interviews with students, finds the culture on each of the four campuses to be polarized around free speech issues. However, interview participants express complex and sometimes conflicting meaning-making processes, particularly around the concept of “harm,” theories about speech and how it spreads, and the roles and responsibilities of universities in society. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that the campus free speech debate is neatly divided along ideological or moral lines.
The third empirical chapter investigates how social status shapes university students’ experiences of campus speech. I draw on the same interview data and find that lower-status students express a high degree of fear and anxiety about expressing themselves openly on a range of politicized topics, including free speech itself. This self-censorship negatively impacts lower-status students’ educational experiences, sense of belonging, and professional aspirations.
... This decrease may be driven by increased awareness of racial discrimination and its harms (Boch 2020a). Similarly, Kidder and Binder (2021) interviewed students at four U.S. universities. They found that students on the political left tend to be concerned about balancing free speech rights against other considerations-such as the harms of hate speech-while students on the political right tend to reject any form of censorship. ...
... Similarly, Kidder and Binder's (2021) study (described above) also found that university students on the political left appeared internally conflicted when discussing free speech issues, often contradicted themselves, and expressed uncertainty about how universities should regulate speech. The authors argue that unlike conservative students, whose views are influenced by the absolutist viewpoints endorsed by right-leaning organizations, students on the political left receive little institutional or external support to make sense of campus free speech (Kidder and Binder 2021). ...
... As noted earlier, the subreddit also appears to be increasingly dominated by individuals on the political right, and there were several posts expressing resentment about this right-wing dominance (e.g., "A sub about 'free speech' hates those with left views") or seeking to connect with others on the left (e.g., "Are there any free speech absolutists on the left here?"). It could be that this right-wing bias is mainly driven by U.S. users and not those from other countries, given increasingly popular messaging in U.S. right-wing media about free speech issues, cancel culture, and a politics of grievance (see Hochschild 2016;Kidder and Binder 2021;Maratea 2008;Marcus 2021). Increasing polarization on this subreddit also coincides with growing extremism and polarization-as well as a pervasive culture of "victimhood"-across the political spectrum both online and offline (Lerner 2022;Rozado and Kaufmann 2022). ...
Freedom of speech has long been considered an essential value in democracies. However, its boundaries concerning hate speech continue to be contested across many social and political spheres, including governments, social media websites, and university campuses. Despite the recent growth of so-called free speech communities online and offline, little empirical research has examined how individuals embedded in these communities make moral sense of free speech and its limits. Examining these perspectives is important for understanding the growing involvement and polarization around this issue. Using a digital ethnographic approach, I address this gap by analyzing discussions in a rapidly growing online forum dedicated to free speech (r/FreeSpeech subreddit). I find that most users on the forum understand free speech in an absolutist sense (i.e., it should be free from legal, institutional, material, and even social censorship or consequences), but that users differ in their arguments and justifications concerning hate speech. Some downplay the harms of hate speech, while others acknowledge its harms but either focus on its epistemic subjectivity or on the moral threats of censorship and authoritarianism. Further, the forum appears to have become more polarized and right-wing-dominated over time, rife with ideological tensions between members and between moderators and members. Overall, this study highlights the variation in free speech discourse within online spaces and calls for further research on free speech that focuses on first-hand perspectives.
... Some scholarship has shown that a school's public (or private) status and elite (or non-elite) status shapes the form activist groups take. Due to court interpretations of the First Amendment, public colleges and universities may be more reticent to place restrictions on the types of activities that student groups can engage in as compared to private colleges and universities (Kidder and Binder 2021). Conversely, at elite private institutions in particular, students are frequently socialized to view participation in student groups as a way to build their resumes and hopefully land elite jobs after graduation (Thornton Forthcoming); so, student activist groups at such schools may prefer more conciliatory, institutionalized approaches to organizing (Binder and Wood 2014). ...
... Illustrating these points, Binder and Wood (2014) contrasted conservative student organizing at a public flagship research university to student organizing at an elite private college. They showed that conservative students at a public university were more likely to participate in contentious forms of protest, such as by organizing a "Second Amendment Day" or inviting conservative political commentators like Ann Coulter as guest speakers (see also Kidder and Binder 2021). By contrast, conservative students at an elite private college engaged in "civilized discourse" when discussing political topics with their peers. ...
How do characteristics of colleges and universities shape campus activism? In this review article, we provide an overview of the growing body of sociological research on educational opportunity structures at U.S. colleges and universities. Specifically, we synthesize research that discusses how various characteristics of U.S. colleges and universities—including their public or private status, their secular or religious identity, their wealth, their prestige, their residential character, their bureaucratic rules, and their administrators’ openness to campus activism—influence whether student activist groups emerge, adopt different forms, and achieve their goals. We conclude by discussing remaining gaps in our knowledge and highlighting several potential lines for future research.
... Religion in U.K. universities became a hot topic in the twenty-first century, as the government's Equality Act 2010 positioned "religion or belief" as one of nine "protected characteristics" (others include race, disability and age), making it a legal duty for universities to promote equality and diversity and counter discrimination on the basis of any of these characteristics. Religious students are also central to debates about freedom of speech, "safe spaces" and extremism (Kidder & Binder, 2021;Scott-Baumann & Perfect, 2021). Debates between advocates of maximal free speech, including the freedom to criticize religion, and advocates of protecting minority groups from harassment, are particularly focused on universities. ...
Religion is increasingly being understood as an equality and diversity issue in universities, and religious students are central to debates in U.K. universities about freedom of speech and extremism. Yet, there is little qualitative or U.K.-based research on the primary institutional expression of student religiosity, student religious organizations. This study fills the gap. It explores what these organizations do, whether they are public- or private-facing, and what role they play in students’ lives. It uses theories of social capital and thematic analysis to analyze data from semistructured interviews with 68 students in six U.K. universities. The article explores tensions between the organizations’ focus on building community among members and on building bridges to people outside. It argues that student religious organizations are primarily sources of bonding (intracommunity) social capital; they play important roles in helping students feel at home on campus, creating friendships and strengthening religious identity, especially for minoritized students. To a lesser extent, the societies are also sources of bridging social capital (creating relationships with people outside the group), through volunteering and interfaith work. We argue that faith-sharing can also be considered a form of bridging as much as bonding social capital, challenging previous interpretations which see proselytism primarily as strengthening relationships within the group. The findings highlight the contribution of these organizations and the need for universities to be concerned with their flourishing.
... The "Engaged Schools, Unengaged Schools" Approach Although much conservative commentary and some scholarship suggests that College Republicans might be less common than College Democrats groups and may more commonly be located at "red schools," there are reasons to be skeptical of this approach. For example, the presence of College Republicans on stereotypically liberal campuses, such as the University of California, Berkeley, has been a source of fascination for the media (e.g., Fuller 2017; Khan 2020; see also discussion in Kidder and Binder 2021). Additionally, although scholarship has shown that many conservative-leaning groups are more likely to be found in red states or counties and many liberal-leaning groups are more likely to be found in blue states or counties, effect sizes associated with sociopolitical context are usually small and pale in comparison to the significance of institutional and student body characteristics (e.g., Coley and Das 2020;McElroy and Coley 2021;Van Dyke et al. 2007). ...
How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at “red schools” (rather than “blue schools”) in Republican‐leaning areas of the country. However, other scholars argue that both Republican and Democratic student groups should be similar in their overall prevalence and located at a similar set of “engaged schools” (as opposed to “unengaged schools”). Analyzing our original database of Republican and Democratic student organizations across 1,953 four‐year, not‐for‐profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that Republican student groups are nearly as common as Democratic student groups: Republican student groups can be found at 39% of campuses, while Democratic student groups are present on 40% of campuses. Employing binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then show that Republican and Democratic student groups tend to be located at the same types of schools, that is, larger, wealthier, public schools that offer political science majors. Our article holds significant implications for theorizing on student organization presence more generally.
Recent protests on university campuses have inspired conservative claims that liberals allow partisanship to color their judgement of disorderly activists. Prior research suggests, however, that both ideologies are prone to political bias. Furthermore, because conservatives are typically more concerned with orderliness and authority, there are theoretical reasons to expect conservatives to respond more forcefully to protests than liberals, especially when those protesters are political opponents. Using an experimental design with two samples, one with Mechanical Turk participants and the other with current college students, the study finds support for the hypotheses that (1) conservatives are more punitive towards protesters than liberals, (2) both ideologies are more likely to punish when protesters are their political opponents, and (3) conservatives’ responses to protesters are more sensitive to their ideology than liberals’. These results support recent studies of the psychology of political ideology and punitiveness.
How the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can coexist on campus.
Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, demands to rename campus landmarks—debate over these issues began in lecture halls and on college quads but ended up on op-ed pages in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on cable news, and on social media. Some of these critiques had merit, but others took a series of cheap shots at “crybullies” who needed to be coddled and protected from the real world. Few questioned the assumption that colleges must choose between free expression and diversity. In Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, John Palfrey argues that the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can, and should, coexist on campus.
Palfrey, currently Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and formerly Professor and Vice Dean at Harvard Law School, writes that free expression and diversity are more compatible than opposed. Free expression can serve everyone—even if it has at times been dominated by white, male, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied citizens. Diversity is about self-expression, learning from one another, and working together across differences; it can encompass academic freedom without condoning hate speech.
Palfrey proposes an innovative way to support both diversity and free expression on campus: creating safe spaces and brave spaces. In safe spaces, students can explore ideas and express themselves with without feeling marginalized. In brave spaces—classrooms, lecture halls, public forums—the search for knowledge is paramount, even if some discussions may make certain students uncomfortable. The strength of our democracy, says Palfrey, depends on a commitment to upholding both diversity and free expression, especially when it is hardest to do so.
Political orientation influences support for free speech, with liberals often reporting greater support for free speech than conservatives. We hypothesized that this effect should be moderated by cultural context: individualist cultures value individual self-expression and self-determination, and collectivist cultures value group harmony and conformity. These different foci should differently influence liberals and conservatives’ support for free speech within these cultures. Two studies evaluated the joint influence of political orientation and cultural context on support for free speech. Study 1, using a multilevel analysis of data from 37 U.S. states (n = 1,001), showed that conservatives report stronger support for free speech in collectivist states, whereas there were no differences between conservatives and liberals in support for free speech in individualist states. Study 2 (n = 90) confirmed this pattern by priming independent and interdependent self-construals in liberals and conservatives. Results demonstrate the importance of cultural context for free speech. Findings suggest that in the U.S. support for free speech might be embraced for different reasons: conservatives’ support for free speech appears to be motivated by a focus on collectively held values favoring free speech, while liberals’ support for free speech might be motivated by a focus on individualist self-expression.
In debates about campus speech, there are arguments from the left and from the right that the community function of a college and the intellectual functions of a college can’t both be maximized. Improving the community role necessarily entails placing limits on the intellectual roles, and improving the intellectual role necessarily entails placing limits on the community roles. Where these arguments disagree is in the valuation of the tradeoffs between these roles. I argue that the apparent tension between the community role and intellectual role of colleges can be resolved, or at least mitigated, if we make a clearer distinction between speech and community endorsement of speech. What’s more, if we understand speech to be exploratory in nature rather than declaratory, we may remove some of the status competition between different groups that characterizes the dispute. This can allow for potential complementarities to emerge from the community support role of a college and the intellectual role. The core idea that I wish to explore is the notion of discovery that is embedded in Mill’s defense of free speech and in his conception of experiments in living. This approach depends on the idea that we can abandon the goal of defeating our opponents, and instead embrace the goal of accommodating one another.
In this essay, I argue that it is a mistake to deny the existence of psychological harms or that such harms may justify limiting certain sorts of speech acts in certain sorts of circumstances, but that suchcircumstances are not part of the paradigmatic college environment. I begin by providing examples of recent inappropriate limits to speech on college campuses and explaining Frank Furedi’s 2011 analysis of the situation. Partially in contrast to Furedi, I indicate that while demands to prohibit all speech acts that bother listeners must be rejected, some speech causes real psychological harm and can be rightly limited. I proceed to argue that harm—physical, psychological, or other—is the only thing we should accept as justifying interference with individual behavior, invoking John Stuart Mill’s famous harm principle as well as analysis by Joel Feinberg. I show that speech can be harmful in various ways and discuss when and why certain speech acts might reasonably be prohibited if we take Mill’s principle seriously. In the final sections, I indicate why extensive free speech is essential to college environments and show that some speech that might be harmful elsewhere will not be harmful on college campuses. Even when there are some, fairly minimal, harms due to speech on campus, prohibition will often not be permissible. Finally, I address a real concern that college students, like the rest of us, are entitled to their own home spaces safe from speech they find hurtful, but indicate that those spaces are their dorm rooms.
The ways in which targeted communities experience hate speech is an important, but often neglected, component of the debate over the legitimacy of hate speech laws. This article reports on data drawn from interviews conducted with 101 members of Indigenous and minority ethnic communities in Australia regarding their experiences of hate speech. We give voice to targets’ experiences of face-to-face and more widely broadcast hate speech, and outline the constitutive and consequential harms they claim to have suffered. We assess these against the alleged harms of hate speech in the literature, finding a close correlation between targets’ reports and the literature.
"Conservative pundits allege that the pervasive liberalism of America's colleges and universities has detrimental effects on undergraduates, most particularly right-leaning ones. Yet not enough attention has actually been paid to young conservatives to test these claims--until now. In Becoming Right, Amy Binder and Kate Wood carefully explore who conservative students are, and how their beliefs and political activism relate to their university experiences. Which parts of conservatism do these students identify with? How do their political identities evolve on campus? And what do their educational experiences portend for their own futures--and for the future of American conservatism? Becoming Right demonstrates the power that campus culture has in developing students' conservative political styles and shows that young conservatives are made, not born. Focusing on two universities--"Eastern Elite" and "Western Public"--Binder and Wood discover that what is acceptable, or even celebrated, political speech and action on one campus might be unthinkable on another. Right-leaning students quickly learn the styles of conservatism that are appropriate for their schools. Though they might be expected to simply plug into the national conservative narrative--via media from Fox News to Facebook--college conservatives actually enact their politics in starkly different ways. Rich in interviews and insight, Becoming Right illustrates that the diverse conservative movement evolving among today's college students holds important implications for the direction of American politics."--Publisher's website.
Research recently published in Political Psychology suggested that political intolerance is more strongly predicted by political conservatism than liberalism. Our findings challenge that conclusion. Participants provided intolerance judgments of several targets and the political objective of these targets (left-wing vs. right-wing) was varied between subjects. Across seven judgments, conservatism predicted intolerance of left-wing targets, while liberalism predicted intolerance of right-wing targets. These relationships were fully mediated by perceived threat from targets. Moreover, participants were biased against directly opposing political targets: conservatives were more intolerant of a left-wing target than the opposing right-wing target (e.g., pro-gay vs. anti-gay rights activists), while liberals were more intolerant of a right-wing target than the opposing left-wing target. These findings are discussed within the context of the existing political intolerance and motivated reasoning literatures.
Conservatives tend to make dispositional whereas liberals make situational attributions for social problems and alleged misconduct (the "ideo-attribution effect"). Three studies demonstrated a reversal of the ideo-attribution effect. Conservatives made stronger situational attributions than liberals for the behavior of Marines accused of killing Iraqi civilians (Studies 1 and 2) and police officers accused of wrongly killing a cougar running loose in a Chicago neighborhood (Study 3). Reversals of the ideo-attribution effect occurred because conservative values were more consistent with excusing the Marines' and police officers' behavior, whereas liberal values were more consistent with blaming the Marines and police officers. These results suggest that the ideo-attribution effect-and attributions more generally-are shaped by whether people's attributional conclusions are consistent or inconsistent with their salient values.
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), "sacredness" reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American "culture war."
It is proposed that motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes--that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion. There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions. These ideas can account for a wide variety of research concerned with motivated reasoning.
Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people's blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy's objective content and participants' ideological beliefs (Studies 1-3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.
Hardly a week goes by without another controversy over free speech on college campuses. On one side, there are increased demands to censor hateful, disrespectful, and bullying expression and to ensure an inclusive and nondiscriminatory learning environment. On the other side are traditional free speech advocates who charge that recent demands for censorship coddle students and threaten free inquiry. In this clear and carefully reasoned book, a university chancellor and a law school dean-both constitutional scholars who teach a course in free speech to undergraduates-argue that campuses must provide supportive learning environments for an increasingly diverse student body but can never restrict the expression of ideas. This book provides the background necessary to understanding the importance of free speech on campus and offers clear prescriptions for what colleges can and can't do when dealing with free speech controversies. © 2017 by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman. All rights reserved.
In this paper, I argue that one way of explaining what is wrong with hate speech is by critically assessing what kind of freedom free speech involves and, relatedly, what kind of freedom hate speech undermines. More specifically, I argue that the main arguments for freedom of speech (e.g. from truth, autonomy and democracy) rely on a ‘positive’ conception of freedom intended as autonomy and self-mastery or as collective self-government, and can only partially help us to understand what is wrong with hate speech. In order to fully grasp the wrongness of hate speech and to justify hate speech legislation, I claim, we need to rely instead on the republican idea of freedom as ‘non-domination’. I conclude that the hate speech used by religious citizens, even though it is a manifestation of their religious freedom, should be subject to the same restrictions that apply to other citizens’ hate speech, because republicans should be concerned with the undominated (i.e. robustly secured) religious freedom of all religious citizens and, more generally, with the undominated freedoms of all citizens, including those who are victims of religious hate speech.
Recent research identifies politically motivated reasoning as the source of persistent public conflict over policy-relevant facts. This essay, the first in a two-part set, presents a basic conceptual model—the Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm—and an experimental setup—the PMRP design—geared to distinguishing the influence of PMRP from a truth-seeking Bayesian process of information processing and from recurring biases understood to be inimical to the same. It also discusses alternative schemes for operationalizing “motivating” group predispositions and the characteristics of valid study samples for examining this phenomenon.
Offensive street speech--racist and sexist remarks that can make its targets feel both psychologically and physically threatened--is surprisingly common in our society. Many argue that this speech is so detestable that it should be banned under law. But is this an area covered by the First Amendment right to free speech? Or should it be banned? In this elegantly written book, Laura Beth Nielsen pursues the answers by probing the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens. Using a combination of field observations and in-depth, semistructured interviews, she surveys one hundred men and women, some of whom are routine targets of offensive speech, about how such speech affects their lives. Drawing on these interviews as well as an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, Nielsen argues that racist and sexist speech creates, reproduces, and reinforces existing systems of hierarchy in public places. The law works to normalize and justify offensive public interactions, she concludes, offering, in essence, a "license to harass." Nielsen relates the results of her interviews to statistical surveys that measure the impact of offensive speech on the public. Rather than arguing whether law is the appropriate remedy for offensive speech, she allows that the benefits to democracy, to community, and to society of allowing such speech may very well outweigh the burdens imposed. Nonetheless, these burdens, and the stories of the people who bear them, should not remain invisible and outside the debate.
To comply with ideals of multiculturalism and diversity, postsecondary institutions incorporate Latino students into distinct campus cultures. These cultures influence how students interact with one another, the university community at large, and communities outside of campus, ultimately shaping how students inhabit Latino politics. Drawing on data from 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork with six student organizations and 60 in-depth interviews, I compare Latino student organizations in a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university. Building on inhabited institutional theory, I identify dimensions of campus cultures that work in interaction with students to produce three divergent forms of ethnic political expression: deliberative, divisive, and contentious. Inhabited institutionalism helps explain why Latino politics takes distinct forms in specific academic contexts and suggests that strong collegiate incorporation may paradoxically serve to suppress Latino student engagement in political activism outside the campus gates.
Taber and Lodge offer a powerful case for the prevalence of directional reasoning that aims not at truth, but at the vindication of prior opinions. Taber and Lodge's results have far-reaching implications for empirical scholarship and normative theory; indeed, the very citizens often seen as performing “best” on tests of political knowledge, sophistication, and ideological constraint appear to be the ones who are the most susceptible to directional reasoning. However, Taber and Lodge's study, while internally beyond reproach, may substantially overstate the presence of motivated reasoning in political settings. That said, focusing on the accuracy motivation has the potential to bring together two models of opinion formation that many treat as competitors, and to offer a basis for assessing citizen competence.
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
Freedom of speech long has been regarded as one of the “preferred freedoms” in the United States: one of the freedoms the U.S. Supreme Court deems “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” However, what freedom of speech does—and should—mean is a highly charged question in American constitutional law. I will explore this question by examining how several prominent constitutional theorists have proposed particular approaches to free speech law in order to further their political objectives. I will examine the free speech theories of the nation's leading feminist legal theorist (regarding pornography), critical race theorists (regarding hate speech), libertarian (regarding commercial speech), and legal republican (regarding deliberative democracy). I also will discuss the principal criticisms of each of these theories, whether the courts have been influenced by any of them, and, in conclusion, whether it is possible to advance a nonpolitical (i.e., a purely law-based or value-free) theory of free speech.
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.
“Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’ group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We conducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unprotected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration. Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion outside of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a campus recruitment facility. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and who thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts” – including whether the protesters obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the “speech”-“conduct” distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.
The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity,1 but Civil, or Social Liberty: the na¬ture and limits of the power which can be legitimately ex¬ercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself rec¬ognized as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and re¬quires a different and more fundamental treatment.
The nature of social cognition—how we “know about” the social world—is one of the most deceptively obvious problems for sociology. Because we know what we know, we often think that we know how or why we know it. Here, we investigate one particular aspect of social cognition, namely, what we will call “political ideology”—that is, people’s self-placement on a dimension on which persons can be arrayed from left to right. We focus on that understanding that is in some ways the “ur-form” of social cognition—our sense of how we stand by others in an implicit social formation whose meaning is totally relational. At the same time, these self-conceptions seem to be of the greatest importance for the development of the polity and of civil society itself. Our question is, when citizens develop such a “political ideology,” what does this mean, and what do they do with it? We examine what citizens gain from their subjective placement on the dimension from liberalism to conservatism by using the results of a survey experiment that alters aspects of a hypothetical policy.
There’s a Well-Funded Campus Industry Behind the Ann Coulter Incident
- J Binder Amy
- Cohen Robert
Professor Loses Job over Iran Joke.”Inside Higher Ed
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An Interview with the Most Hated Man on the Internet
- D D Guttenplan
Leaked Documents Suggest Secretive Billionaire Trump Donors Are Milo’s Patrons
- Bernstein Joseph
Berkeley Cancels Milo Yiannopoulos Speech and Donald Trump Tweets Outrage
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Addressing the Real Crisis of Free Expression on Campus
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How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley into a Free-Speech Circus
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California Today: Price Tag to Protect Speech at Berkeley: $600 000
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Just How Offensive Did Milo Yiannopoulos Have to Be to Get Banned from Twitter?”The Washington Post
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How the Middlebury Riot Really Went Down
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How Did Sebastian Gorka Go from the Anti-Muslim Fringe to White House Aide?
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Sam Harris Charles Murray and the Allure of Race Science
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Far-Right Trump Advisor Tied to Anti-Semitic Paramilitary Group
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