maaliskuu 2021

Johanna Kallio, Hannu Lahtinen & Hanna Wass

A Tale of Two Professions in Elections: Party Choice Among Diaconal and Social Workers

Published 18.3.2021

Diaconal and social workers spend their days implementing social policy and exercising discretional power while being regularly exposed to social inequalities. As an occupational group, they are heavily influenced by official government decisions, which might be expected to shape their political preferences. Our analyses, based on the Street-Level Bureaucrats Survey 2011 (n = 1,237) and the Finnish National Election Study 2011 (n = 1,298) reveal that more than half of diaconal workers voted for conservative centrist parties – the Christian Democrats and the Centre Party – in the 2011 parliamentary elections, whereas two-thirds of social workers supported leftist or green parties. The work context – the municipality/parish, length of work experience, and primary work duties – also influenced voting behavior. The professional identities and work environments of diaconal and social workers thus differentiate them not only from other members of the same social class, but also from each other in terms of partisanship.

get the Article here

Hanna Wass & Elisabeth Gidengil

Editorial: “Health and Political Behavior”: Towards an Integrative Approach

Published 12.3.2021

Editorial on the Research Topic: Health and Political Behavior (Open Access)

Nearly ten years of intense study has established that health affects political behavior. It has become increasingly clear that “health and illness shape who we are politically” (Carpenter 2012, 303). Physical and mental health influence people’s political interest and their sense of efficacy, electoral and other forms of political participation, ideological orientations, issue preferences and vote choice, and ultimately political representation and policy responsiveness. We have also learnt a lot about the complex cognitive, psychological, financial and social mechanisms that moderate and mediate these relationships, as well as how these relationships vary across countries and welfare regimes.

get the Article here

Sigurd Allern, Mark Blach-Ørsten, Anu Kantola & Ester Pollack

Development trends and challenges in Nordic political journalism

Published 11.3.2021

In Eli Skogerbø, E., Øyvind Ihlen, Nete Noorgaard Kristensen & Lars Nord (toim.) Power, Communication, and Politics in the Nordic Countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2021, p. 135-154.

The objective of this chapter is to describe and discuss some important political journalism development trends in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The term political journalism traditionally refers to news, commentaries, and other genres related to the coverage of political processes, institutions, and policy questions. It is, however, difficult to draw a clear dividing line between political news and other types of current affairs coverage. While political logic once dominated the discourses of political journalism, the emergence of the news media as an independent institution gave journalists a substantial definitional power and an ability to define the communicative rules of the game, but professional political sources quickly learned to exploit news media logics for their own aims and objectives. During the last decade, the growth of social media networks and the relative weakening of the legacy media has created a less stable situation for the negotiation of control between journalists and their sources.

get the Article here

Hanna Kuusela & Anu Kantola

The role of the owner in new capitalist accumulation processes: the case of Finland

Julkaistu 11.3.2021

In Marlène Benquet ja Théo Bourgeron (toim.) Accumulating Capital Today Contemporary Strategies of Profit and Dispossessive Policies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, s. 181-195.

This book explores the renewal of forms of capital accumulation and the institutions that shape it. It focuses on three main sources of accumulation: the extraction of profit through labor and the commodification of nature, financial speculation and the ways in which profit is converted into wealth. It thus offers a new understanding of the economic and political logics of capital accumulation within capitalism in the 21st century. It shows the recomposition of the sources of profit, from the traditional mechanisms of labor exploitation to the contemporary logics of speculation and dispossession. Bringing together the work of scholars who study the social fabric of capitalist accumulation, Accumulating Capital Today goes beyond disciplinary frontiers to describe how capital is accumulating in a world threatened by social and environmental collapse. This book heralds the emergence of "accumulation studies" and will be of interest to researchers in sociology, anthropology, politics, political economy, geography and economics.

Order book here