There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. At the individual level, evaluations of the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer study, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology and a range of...

Migration is a controversial issue. Reading of the popular media in virtually any country, alongside an array of opinion polls suggest that residents see controls on immigration as essential and that people would prefer to see existing rules on entry tightened rather than relaxed. This stands in...

This paper proposes a central idea in diffusion research is that influential –a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers- are important to formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influential hypothesis”, using the...

This paper is an investigation into the relative importance of a wide variety of factors in influencing whether members of the American public support or oppose the use of biotechnology in agriculture and food production. To accomplish this end, as well as to facilitate the examination of a...

In this article we proposes the mathematical model for revelation of deliberate unfriendly information impacts which are fulfilled by means of specially prepared information messages (news, reviews and others) in mass-media. The model calculates the quantitative measure for fact determination of...

Why even after the dramatic increase in inequality in the 1990s and after the emergence and enrichment of “oligarchs”, the alternative (leftist, social democratic) economic policies that could have improved material and social wellbeing of the majority of the population is not supported by...

Italian Abstract: Con questo saggio intendo fare luce sulla presenza e la rilevanza teoretica dell’idea del buongoverno nel pensiero di Einaudi, attraverso un confronto con il pensiero di Mosca basato su identità e differenze tra le loro concezioni del governo della legge, l'opinione...

Support for genetic modification in agriculture mainly stems from approval of food and agricultural goals. It is facilitated by trust in the judgment of scientific authorities and undermined by anxiety about the risks involved. But there are symptoms of danger: Any public opinion data that show...

This paper exposes a formal model of the spiral of silence theory. It is based on game theoy. The game consists on three players: players 1 and two have two strategies, to speak (s) or not (~s); the third player is Nature, which decides whether players 1 and 2 agree in their opinion or not. If...