Political ideology and pandemic lifestyles: the indirect effects of empathy, authoritarianism, and threat.

Background: In this paper, we integrate theory and research from sociology, psychology, and political science to develop and test a mediation model that helps to explain why political conservatism is often associated with pandemic behaviors and lifestyles that are inconsistent with public health recommendations for COVID-19. Methods: Using national data from the 2021 Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (n = 1743), we formally test the indirect effects of political conservatism (an index of Republican party identification, conservative political orientation, right-wing news media consumption, and 2020 Trump vote) on pandemic lifestyles (an index of social distancing, hand sanitizing, mask usage, and vaccination) through the mechanisms of empathy (concern about the welfare of others), authoritarian beliefs (authoritarian aggressiveness and acquiescence to authority), and pandemic threat perceptions (threats to self and to the broader society). Result: Our results confirm that political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles. We also find that this association is partially mediated by lower levels of empathy, higher levels of authoritarian beliefs, and lower levels of perceived pandemic threat. Conclusions: Understanding why political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles may eventually lead us to ways of identifying and overcoming widespread cultural barriers to critical pandemic responses.

Charismatic authority and fractured polities: A cross-national analysis.

Sociological research has overlooked the political consequences of charismatic leadership that arises in existing democratic political bureaucracies. In this article, we theorize the consequences of charismatic leadership in democratic nations by revisiting Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority. Our extension of Weber's theory of charismatic authority helps to address a gap in the political polarization literature concerning the role of charismatic leadership. This article provides a foundational link in the research on charismatic authority-bridging the literatures on charisma and cross-national comparative sociology. This bridging is enabled by advances in data collection that include information on charismatic authority in cross-national context. This article makes use of a Driscoll and Kraay fixed-effects analysis across 76 democracies from 1960 to 2009 to explore the relationship between charismatic leadership and political polarization. Our findings suggest that nations with higher levels of charismatic leadership tend to have higher levels of political polarization. These results contribute to both the literature on political polarization and charisma-as well as support our extension of Weber's theory of charismatic authority.

Employment insecurity and sleep disturbance: Evidence from 31 European countries.

For nearly half a century, jobs have become increasingly characterized by employment insecurity. We examined the implications for sleep disturbance with cross-sectional data from the European Working Conditions Survey (2010). A group of 24,553 workers between the ages of 25 and 65 years in 31 European countries were asked to indicate whether they suffered from "insomnia or general sleep difficulties" in the past 12 months. We employed logistic regression to model the association between employment insecurity and sleep disturbance for all countries combined and each individual country. For all countries combined, employment insecurity increased the odds of reporting insomnia or general sleep difficulties in the past 12 months. Each unit increase in employment insecurity elevated the odds of sleep disturbance by approximately 47%. This finding was remarkably consistent across 27 of 31 European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and UK. These results persisted with adjustments for age, gender, immigrant status, household size, partnership status, number of children, child care, elder care, education, earner status, precarious employment status, workplace sector, workplace tenure and workplace size. Employment insecurity was unrelated to sleep disturbance in four European countries: Malta, Poland, Portugal and Romania. Our research continues recent efforts to reveal the human costs associated with working in neoliberal postindustrial labour markets. Our analyses contribute to the external validity of previous research by exploring the impact of employment insecurity across European countries.