Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook

The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site – Facebook – and Polish users’ activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on ‘echo chambers’ presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign.     

Consistency of the kernel density estimator: a survey

Various consistency proofs for the kernel density estimator have been developed over the last few decades. Important milestones are the pointwise consistency and almost sure uniform convergence with a fixed bandwidth on the one hand and the rate of convergence with a fixed or even a variable bandwidth on the other hand. While considering global properties of the empirical distribution functions is sufficient for strong consistency, proofs of exact convergence rates use deeper information about the underlying empirical processes. A unifying character, however, is that earlier and more recent proofs use bounds on the probability that a sum of random variables deviates from its mean.     

From Consultancy to Critique: The ‘Success Story’ of Globalized Zakat Management in Malaysia and its Normative Ambiguities

The administration of Islamic alms (zakat) funds in Malaysia underwent spectacular transformations since the 1990s, shaped by the appropriation of marketized forms of management and a skyrocketing growth of collection and distribution rates. Simultaneously, local zakat funds are increasingly used to pursue targets of sustainable poverty reduction, such as the empowerment of micro-entrepreneurship. This globally inspired ‘success story’ is referred to by various international observers, including development organizations, as a ‘role model’ for other countries to learn from. After illustrating what makes the Malaysian case so particularly attractive, this article develops a critique of international perceptions of this ‘success story’ by making explicit some of its underlying ambiguities. Instead of narrowly celebrating instrumental aspects of business-style organizational innovation and calling for their globalization, a deeper understanding of the discursive embeddedness of Malaysian zakat management would reveal significant normative tensions with secular humanitarian ethics and human rights law, with implications beyond the Malaysian case.     

Self-Reported Capabilities Among Young Male Adults in Switzerland: Translation and Psychometric Evaluation of a German, French and Italian Version of a Closed Survey Instrument

There is a shortage of empirical applications of the capability approach that employ closed survey instruments to assess self-reported capabilities. However, for those few instruments that have been designed and administered through surveys until now, no psychometric properties (reliability, validity, and factor structure) were reported. The purpose of this study is the assessment of the psychometric properties of three new language versions (German, French, and Italian) of an established (English) set of eight self-reported capability items. The set of items is taken from a previously published British study by Anand and van Hees (J Soc Econ 35(2):268–284, 2006). Our sample consists of 17,152 young male adults aged 18–25 years from the three major language regions in Switzerland. The results indicate good reliability of the three language versions. The results from the exploratory factor analyses suggest a one-dimensional factor structure for seven domain specific items. Furthermore, the results from multiple regression analyses suggest that a global summary item on overall capabilities represents a measurement alternative to the set of seven domain specific capability items. Finally, the results confirm the applicability of the closed capability instrument in a large scale survey questionnaire and represent the first attempt to measure self-reported capabilities in Switzerland.