Hoe kan het onderwijs worden vormgegeven zodat mbo-jongeren worden gestimuleerd om te gaan stemmen? In dit onderzoek laten we de resultaten zien van een exploratieve evaluatie van drie sets met evidence-informed leermiddelen met als doel de stemintentie van jongeren te verhogen. De leermiddelen richten zich op (1) informatie over het stemproces, (2) in gesprek gaan over wel of niet stemmen en (3) gesprekken over maatschappelijke onderwerpen in combinatie met het invullen van een stemadviesapplicatie. De leermiddelen zijn gegeven door negen docenten en geëvalueerd door middel van docentinterviews en studentvragenlijsten (N = 172). Uit de resultaten kan worden opgemaakt dat docenten en studenten positief zijn over de praktische benadering in de leermiddelen. Tevens blijkt uit de resultaten dat de leermiddelen studenten inzicht geven in hun politieke voorkeur en dat zij leren het gesprek over stemmen met elkaar aan te gaan. Dit stimuleert mogelijk politiek zelfvertrouwen. Deze resultaten scheppen positieve verwachtingen voor de mogelijke effectiviteit van de lessen die kan worden getoetst in vervolgonderzoek.--How can education be designed to encourage students in vocational education to vote? We present the results of an explorative evaluation of three evidence-informed lessons aimed at increasing young people’s intention to vote. The three lessons focus on (1) information about the voting process, (2) engaging in discussions about whether or not to vote, and (3) discussions about socio-political issues combined with the use of a voting advice application. The lessons were taught by nine teachers and evaluated through teacher interviews and student questionnaires (N = 172). The results indicate that both teachers and students responded positively to the practical approach of the teaching materials. Additionally, the materials provided students with insight into their political preferences and helped them engage in discussions about voting. This potentially fosters political self-efficacy. These findings create positive expectations regarding the lessons’ potential effectiveness, which can be examined in follow-up research.
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Nixon and Metiary argue that the notion of protest needs to be included in the global education system as a distinct activity. It needs to take its place alongside other social sciences and humanities courses in the school curricula. They stress that the ability to impact society, to incite societal change, to participate through more means than voting, needs to be taught. It needs to be implemented into the global education system.
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Research on the spatial variation in ‘populist’ and ‘anti-establishment’ voting focuses on the role of ‘left behind places’, where these parties are particularly successful in regions that have been left behind economically or culturally. Applying this perspective to the German case, this paper examines the spatial distribution of ‘populist’ and ‘anti-establishment’ voting. Using micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and official regional statistics at NUTS 3 level, we construct a multilevel model to investigates the roles of socio-economic and demographic contextual and individual level determinants with the intention to vote for AfD, die Linke, and radical right or ‘anti-establishment’ parties in general in the 2017 federal election. Specifically, we explore how social capital – encompassing interpersonal relations and civic engagement – affects the likelihood of voting for these parties. Although social capital is commonly thought of as a shielding effect against ‘populist’ and ‘anti-establishment’ voting and strengthening political representation, its influence on anti-establishment voting remains vague. Based on original survey data from 2017, the results show that indicators of interpersonal relations and civic engagement in networks of civil society, specific forms of social capital, seem to play an important role in affecting voting behaviour, revealing that civically involved individuals are more likely to support established democratic parties, rather than voting for a ‘populist’ or ‘anti-establishment’ party.
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Municipalities increasingly seek to include citizens in decision-making processes regarding local issues, such as urban planning. This paper presents a case study on using Virtual Reality (VR) in a process of civic participation in the redesign of a public park. The municipality included citizens in intensive co-design activities to create three designs for the park and engaged the neighbourhood community in co-decision, in the form of a ballot. Through the civic participatory process, we studied the effectiveness of using VR technology to engage the community in participating in the co-decision process. The three designs were presented using highly realistic 360˚ visualisations and the effects on engagement were compared between various devices: VR headsets, smartphones, tablets, and computers. Viewing the designs in 2D paper plans was also included in the comparison. The study included over 1300 respondents that participated in the ballot. A statistical analysis of the collected data shows that participants viewing the 360˚ rendered images with VR technology expressed a significantly higher engagement in the co-decision process than those using their computer at home or viewing 2D paper plans. The paper describes the complete participatory design process and the impact of the e-governance used on the target group as well as on the actors organizing the e-governance process. We discuss how the use of new technology and active presence of a voting-support team inspired citizens to participate in the co-creation process and how the investment in this procedure helped the local authorities to generate support for the plans and strengthen its relationship with the community. The use of realistic visualisations that can be easily assessed by citizens through user-friendly technology, enabled a large and diverse audience to participate. This resulted in greater visibility of municipal efforts to enhance the living environment of citizens and is therefore an important step in increased civic engagement in municipal policy-making and implementation.
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Democracy is still organized according to an ancient model. Democracy has become a tradition where populists feel at home. Real politicians (game changers) must also dress up as puppets, so that they too can enter the populist political puppet show with one-liners and clinchers during election time. Technology could help liberate democracy from tradition and thus from populism: digital voting per theme. In the Netherlands almost all have one or more themes that are important for the future of our country, our continent and / or our planet. Or maybe a combination: digital voting on themes and 1 vote for or against a profiled politician?
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This article starts from the observation that popular culture resides in a contradictory space. On the one hand it seems to be thriving, in that the range of media objects that were previously studied under the rubric of popular culture has certainly expanded. Yet, cultural studies scholars rarely study these media objects as popular culture. Instead, concerns about immaterial labor, about the manipulation of voting behavior and public opinion, about filter bubbles and societal polarization, and about populist authoritarianism, determine the dominant frames with which the contemporary media environment is approached. This article aims to trace how this change has come to pass over the last 50 years. It argues that changes in the media environment are important, but also that cultural studies as an institutionalizing interdisciplinary project has changed. It identifies “the moment of popular culture” as a relatively short-lived but epoch-defining moment in cultural studies. This moment was subsequently displaced by a set of related yet different theoretical problematics that gradually moved the study of popular culture away from the popular. These displacements are: the hollowing out of the notion of the popular, as signaled early on by Meaghan Morris’ article “The Banality of Cultural Studies” in 1988; the institutionalization of cultural studies; the rise of the governmentality approach and a growing engagement with affect theory.
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This article demonstrates ‘the stemfie’ to be an interesting current example of the enactment of liveness within media practices. The photo taken of oneself while (or just after) voting and consequently shared with others via online social networks, connects us to an event that is important to us as it unfolds, enacting the two core features of liveness: immediacy and affinity.
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In urban planning, 3D modeling and virtual reality (VR) provide new means for involving citizens in the planning process. For municipal government, it is essential to know how effective these means are, to justify investments. In this study, we present a case of using VR in a municipal process of civic participation concerning the redesign of a public park. The process included codesign activities and involved citizens in decision-making through a ballot, using 3D-rendered versions of competing designs. In codesign, 3D-modeling tools were instrumental in empowering citizens to negotiate design decisions, to discuss the quality of designs with experts, and to collectively take decisions. This paper demonstrates that, in a ballot on competing designs with 1302 citizens, VR headsets proved to be equally effective compared to other display technologies in informing citizens during decision making. The results of an additional, controlled experiment indicate that VR headsets provide higher engagement and more vivid memories than viewing the designs on non-immersive displays. By integrating research into a municipal process, we contribute evidence of cognitive and engagement effects of using 3D modeling and immersive VR technologies to empower citizens in participatory urban planning. The case described in the paper concerns a public park; a similar approach could be applied to the design of public installations including media architecture.
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A common strategy to assign keywords to documents is to select the most appropriate words from the document text. One of the most important criteria for a word to be selected as keyword is its relevance for the text. The tf.idf score of a term is a widely used relevance measure. While easy to compute and giving quite satisfactory results, this measure does not take (semantic) relations between words into account.
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