Between Evidence And Ideology

The essays in this volume deal with the (re)construction of the history of Ancient Israel and how that historywriting is influenced by ideology and informed by the evidence.

Associated with an important epistemological shift from language proficiency to language criticality in applied linguistic research, this book provides a sociological perspective on foreign language education in Japan. By employing ethnographic methods to investigate the relationship between three core analytical elements – foreign language education geared towards the development of learners’ intercultural communicative competence; nihonjinron and native-speakerism as potentially constraining ideological forces; and EFL practices observed at four Japanese junior high schools – the author not only shares valuable insights into how English is taught and learned in a stratum of the Japanese EFL system which has received limited attention from researchers over the years, but also clarifies the fundamental and complex changes currently taking place in the Japanese EFL landscape. This multi-faceted book also calls for greater consideration in postmodern ideology critique for the stratified nature of social processes as well as the material conditions and underlying generative mechanisms involved in the production and consumption of (including resistance to) ideological discourse. Accordingly, it outlines several challenges shaping ideology research in educational settings, and responds by developing a realist-oriented theoretical and methodological approach to address these challenges. This book serves as a unique point of reference for the study of parallel nationalist discourses embedded in foreign language education systems around the world.

"The central feature of democracy is that the will of the people determines the policies enacted by the government. In representative democracies such as the United States, citizens influence the government primarily through voting in elections. The success of democratic governance, therefore, rests in large part on the ability of citizens to select leaders who will act in accordance with their policy preferences. In the end, a government lives up to this democratic ideal (or doesn't) through the enactment of specific policies. How, then, do citizens' votes relate to their preferences over government policy outputs? What intervening factors either assist or interfere with voters' selection of candidates who espouse views closest to their own? Understanding the relationship between citizens' policy views and their voting behavior is central to the evaluation of elections and of democratic governance more generally. This book studies the opinions of ordinary citizens on specific policies and the relationships between these policy views and people's vote choices in presidential elections. Specifically, I focus on testing the empirical implications of spatial theories of voting, which, in their simplest form, assume that each citizen's policy views can be represented by a location on some liberal-conservative policy spectrum, with candidates in a given election each taking a position on this same dimension. Each voter then casts his or her ballot for the candidate whose position is closest to the voter's own ideological location"-- Provided by publisher.

Features the groundbreaking law-related research of political psychologists. Includes leading legal scholars' commentary and analysis of political psychologists' work. The first book to bring together experts to discuss the interaction between psychology, ideology, and law.

As Russia and China leave communism behind, they struggle to forge a new political ideology for a new era

How should one write a history of Ancient Israel? In the last few decades, a lively discussion has taken place on the historiography of ancient Israel. Minimalists such as Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson, and Niels Peter Lemche challenged the usefulness of the Hebrew Bible as a source for constructing Israel's past. Maximalists like Baruch Halpern and William Dever argued instead that the data from the Hebrew Bible should be trusted until otherwise proven. Others – among whom we can name Hans Barstad, Rainer Albertz, and Lester Grabbe – took a third road. The essays in this volume follow that third road by applying insights from the field of philosophy of history. A dozen case studies from David to the earliest Samaritans demonstrate how difficult it is to write a history of ancient Israel without falling in the abyss of an ideology in one direction or another. The matrix designed by Manfred Weippert to look at the past through five windows (landscape, climate, archaeology, epigraphy and only at the end the Hebrew Bible) turned out to be more helpful. The conclusion of this research is that there are some stable pillars in the swamp of the past, but it comes with the warning that the space between these pillars is large and cannot easily be filled.

The definition of ideology continues to occupy scholars across a wide range of disciplines. In this book, Teun A van Dijk sketches a challenging new multidisciplinary framework for theorizing ideology. He defines ideology as the basis of the social representations of a group, its functions in terms of social relations between groups, and its reproduction as enacted by discourse. Contemporary racist discourse is examined to illustrate these ideological relations between cognition, society and discourse.

The authors use confidential interviews with Supreme Court justices, analysis of their rulings from 1970 to 2005, and measures that tap their perceived ideological tendencies to provide a critical examination of the ideological roots of judicial decision making, uncovering the complexity of contemporary judicial behaviour. Examining judicial behaviour through the lens of three different research strategies grounded in qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Law, Ideology, and Collegiality presents compelling evidence that political ideology is a key factor in decision making and a prominent source of conflict in the Supreme Court of Canada.