Volume 13, Issue 3

Social media platforms constitute an indispensable tool for social movements to mobilise public opinion to promote social change. To date, however, little is known about the extent to which activist and political claims formulated on social media echo what the general public thinks about gender equality. This is especially important given that social movements often use social media to develop their actions and to build long-standing support around particular claims. Our data collection is based on relevant actor groups and keywords surrounding the women’s strike that took place in Switzerland in June 2019. We investigate which actor groups were involved in gender equality discussions online, what were the prominent and polarising ideologies, and what were the main framings of the debate. Findings indicate that organizational committees and their followers were the most active, followed by political actors. We also observed a polarisation effect on social media between left and right-wing oriented actors, which is more pronounced than trends drawn from opinion surveys. We further find that social media discussions were organised along a continuum, which ranges between calling for attention and discussing concrete policy measures.

More than a year after the introduction of vaccines against COVID-19, inoculation remains inconsistent and variable across countries. In this paper, we introduce a multi-item scale of COVID-19 related misinformation, skepticism, and conspiracy theories and investigate the effects of these beliefs on vaccine hesitancy. We report findings from a survey in Greece where participants were recruited via paid advertising on Facebook and the study sample was adjusted for demographic variables using a nationally representative reference sample. We show that the endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs is the primary factor driving vaccine hesitancy, far exceeding the effect of all other demographic and attitudinal variables, including health status. Furthermore, a pre-registered randomized survey experiment showed that the effect cannot be attributed to respondents’ exposure to the COVID-19 conspiracy theory questions of the survey. The paper concludes by discussing potential public policy implications for combating misinformation and promoting health literacy among social media users.

In this paper, we investigated the utility of data mining to classify individuals into predefined categories of a target variable, based on their social and political attitude. Data collected for a social psychology study conducted in Greece in 1994 were used for this purpose. We established the theoretical background of our analysis through explanatory factor analysis. We ran the decision tree algorithm CHAID in order to build a predictive model that classifies the study participants in terms of their attitude toward physical and symbolic violence. The CHAID algorithm provided a decision tree that was easily interpreted, and which revealed meaningful predictive patterns. CHAID algorithm showed satisfactory predictive ability and promising alternatives to social psychology data analysis. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other evidence in the literature that the decision tree algorithms can be used to identify latent variables.

The standard method of poverty estimation uses unadjusted per capita income or expenditure to calculate population below the poverty line. However, recent empirical advancements have validated this method to be essentially flawed in nature. It does not take into consideration nor allows for household composition and economies of scale. Empirical investigations have confirmed the facts that the measures of poverty and inequality are sensitive to various choices of equivalence scales. Therefore, standard measures provide mostly overestimated poverty and inequality estimates. Further, poverty measurement across groups or overtime is sensitive to different poverty lines and measures. Any alteration in these can reverse the ranking. The current research attempts to test adult equivalence and scale economies in Jammu and Kashmir region to validate whether poverty estimates are sensitive to these scales or not. It also employs stochastic dominance technique to check whether poverty reduction is robust through time over a wide range of poverty lines and measures. The paper does so by employing three waves of monthly consumption expenditure rounds conducted by National Sample Survey Organization. For sensitivity analysis, the paper estimates FGT, Gini and Atkinson indices. Despite being industrially backward and politically fragile, J&K has shown better economic indicators than most other Indian states. The findings of the current study validate lower poverty in the region and at the same time discover a growth in inequality over time. While a mixed result is derived for adult equivalence, the economies of scale highlight the fact that standard measures are overstated and welfare rank reversal ensues when household size and gender of household is tested for. Further, stochastic dominance results show that poverty reduction is only robust during 61st and 66th round, and not during 66th and 68th rounds.

The article aims to analyze the geopolitical, conflict-related, and strategic interests of Ukraine realized within the framework of the South vector of the state geopolitics through rational and pragmatic cooperation with the trans-regional leader of the region – Turkey. The study aims to identify priority areas of cooperation between Ukraine and Turkey in the Black Sea region for the effective implementation of geostrategic interests of Ukraine and the regularity of development of political defense systems during crises and modern military-political conflicts. The interdisciplinary approach and methods of analytical and comparative analysis made it possible to study and examine the evolution of the value-ideological loads which dominate the implementation of Eastern or Western geopolitical vectors. The necessity to consider political, social, and conflict-related imbalances and integration constraints revealed the pragmatic direction of equidistant foreign policy implementation in a three-dimensional format. This format involves an alternative vector of bilateral cooperation with Turkey and a joint position, which will ensure accelerated development of Ukraine and help avoid pressure from the European Union and the Russian Federation. The defensive type of geostrategy serves as a common denominator in cooperation between countries, providing more substantial interaction at the level of experience exchange on military operations, military-political conflicts in Syria and the Eastern regions of Ukraine, solving problems with separatist regions, implementing programs for refugees and internally displaced persons, developing a parity promotion of integration of Turkey and Ukraine into the EU.