Roderik Rekker

Bio: Roderik Rekker is an academic researcher from University of Amsterdam. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Authoritarianism. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 19 publications receiving 185 citations. Previous affiliations of Roderik Rekker include Utrecht University & University of Gothenburg.

The nature and origins of political polarization over science.

Abstract: People have a tendency to disregard information that contradicts their partisan or ideological identity. This inclination can become especially striking when citizens reject notions that scientists...

Moving in and out of Poverty: The Within-Individual Association between Socioeconomic Status and Juvenile Delinquency.

Abstract: A family's SES can be changeable over time. This study was the first to investigate if such within-individual changes in family SES are associated with parallel fluctuations in boys' delinquent behavior from childhood to adolescence. Participants were a community sample of boys and their caregivers (N = 503) who were assessed annually for ten consecutive years spanning ages 7-18. Fixed effects models revealed that changes in familial SES were related to changes in delinquency: Youths were more likely to offend during years in which their parents' SES was lower than during years in which their parents' SES was higher. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence that this association was accounted for by families moving to different neighborhoods or by changes in parenting. Since within-individual models provide a stricter test of causality than between-individual models, these findings support claims that impacting familial SES may have a direct effect on youths' delinquency.

The Press and Foreign Policy

Abstract: THE PRESS AND FOREIGN POLICY' IT IS a defect of some of the studies of the diplomatic background of the Great War that they tend to ignore the influence on pre-war diplomacy of public opinion in general and of the press in particular. Based primarily on official documents such studies unconsciously tend to overemphasize the parts played by the leaders with whose activities the documents are so largely concerned and to neglect some of the less obvious forces that affected the course of events. The influence of the press, it is true, can never be measured accurately. \"No diviniiig rod can locate it,\" says Miss Salmon, \"no plummet sound its depth, no instrument of precision measure it, no astronomer compute its orbit.\"2 And yet that influence in pre-war Europe was very real and very considerable. Professor Fay goes so far as to list \"the poisoning of public opinion by the newspaper press in all the great countries\"3 as one of the chief underlying causes of the war. If the influence of the press cannot be exactly determined, however, it can at least be roughly estimated; and even where no attempt is made to estimate influence, a kniowledge of newspaper views on questions of foreign policy is of assistance in clarifying the atmosphere out of which the Great WYar came.

How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation (WP-12-14)

Abstract: Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.

How Democracies Die

Abstract: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both comparative politics professors at Harvard University, have written a valuable, high-profile book that provides several useful insights into the current sta...