Lost autonomy triggers and the rise of secessionism

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that, in addition to policy positions, parties’ electoral support is also affected by their character-based valence attributes such as competence, integrity, and unity. Thus far, however, research into the effects of parties’ character-based valence attributes has not examined how such party attributes affect public opinion. The article examines whether changes in parties’ character-based valence attributes motivate shifts in public opinion – specifically, whether public opinion shifts leftwards when right-wing parties’ character-based valence attributes suffer relative to leftist parties, and vice versa. It presents the results of pooled time-series analyses of the relationship between parties’ valence attributes and shifts in public opinion for nine European polities. The findings suggest that changes in parties’ character-based valence attributes do motivate shifts in public opinion as hypothesised, and the effects are substantively large. These findings have implications for party strategies and for our understanding of the factors which shape public opinion.

Finland's decision to apply for membership in NATO is a case of bottom‐up driven foreign policy. Public opinion had been rather stable for more than 25 years in the NATO issue with less than 30 per cent of the people supporting Finland's membership in NATO but almost overnight during the week when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a majority of Finns were in favour of it. Only after that shift in public opinion did the decision‐makers support the idea of joining NATO. How was the bottom‐up driven change possible? First, the resistance to NATO membership in Finland was common but not deep. Second, in the run‐up to the war, Russia had demanded that NATO put a stop to its open door policy not only with regard to Ukraine but also for Finland. Third, Russia's unprovoked war on Ukraine constituted a particular frame in Finland, because the 1939 Winter War analogy was a key part of the collective memory. Finally, due to a strong tradition of national consensus in foreign and security policy, the shift in the public opinion became overwhelming: when the tide had turned, only very few resisted. In sum, four factors enabled the public opinion change: a rational basis for opinion change, a sense of urgency, an emotional push and the consensus effect. Although public opinion is often seen as stabilising and retardant force particularly in foreign and security policy, it can also be a driver for change when suitable conditions such as those in Finland exist.

The violent conclusion of Trump's 2017–21 presidency has produced sobering reassessments of American democracy. Elected officials' actions necessarily implicate public opinion, but to what extent did Trump's presidency and its anti-democratic efforts reflect shifts in public opinion in prior years? Were there attitudinal changes that served as early-warning signs? We answer those questions via a fifteen-wave, population-based panel spanning 2007 to 2020. Specifically, we track attitudes on system legitimacy and election fairness, assessments of Trump and other politicians, and open-ended explanations of vote choice and party perceptions. Across measures, there was little movement in public opinion foreshadowing Trump's norm-upending presidency, though levels of out-party animus were consistently high. Recent shifts in public opinion were thus not a primary engine of the Trump presidency's anti-democratic efforts or their violent culmination. Such stability suggests that understanding the precipitating causes of those efforts requires attention to other actors, including activists and elites.

This study involves an in-depth analysis of Cultural Communication and Public Opinion Transformation through a case study of the hashtag #FreePalestine on social media. The Israeli-Palestinian controversy sparked a significant shift in public opinion, and these hashtags became an important instrument in weaving complex online narratives. This research aims to understand the impact of Cultural Communication through the hashtag #FreePalestine in transforming public opinion. Her focus includes online mobilization, influence on policy, changing international perceptions, and the formation of activist movements. This research method uses a mixed approach, namely combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. Data collection was carried out on 6 – 25 December 2023. Social media analysis was carried out to track trends, sentiment and relationship networks, while interviews and surveys were used to gain a deeper understanding of the influence of opinion transformation in the real world. This research shows that the hashtag #FreePalestine not only creates changes in online opinion but also mobilizes real action and shapes global narratives that influence policy and business. Cultural communication on social media is key to understanding further impact, with image visualization and visual solidarity being key elements in changing public opinion. The real-world implication of these findings is the importance of understanding the role of social media in shaping public perceptions and opinions regarding global conflict. In the future, this can serve as a guide for policy makers, activists and researchers to design more effective communication strategies in addressing sensitive issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Previous research explains the evolution of parties' ideological positions in terms of decision rules that stress the uncertainty of the political environment. The authors extend this research by examining whether parties adjust their ideologies in response to two possible influences: shifts in public opinion, and past election results. Their empirical analyses, which are based on the Comparative Manifesto Project's codings of parties' post-war programmes in eight West European nations, suggest that parties respond to shifts in public opinion, but that these effects are only significant in situations where public opinion is clearly shifting away from the party's policy positions. By contrast, no evidence is found here that parties adjust their ideologies in response to past election results. These findings have important implications for parties' election strategies and for models of political representation.

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sweden changed its historic position of non-alignment and applied for membership in the NATO military alliance. This decision coincided with a shift in public opinion in favor of NATO membership, in what has been described as the largest and fastest shift in public opinion that has ever been measured in Swedish history. We examine two aspects of this “rally around the flag effect” to explain this change, the effect of the crisis event itself and the effect of political elite influence by analyzing within-individual changes of a Swedish university student population at three different time points. We find that after the Russian invasion but before the decision was made to join NATO, public opinion was still split with roughly 40% still opposed. However, after the decision was made to apply for membership to the alliance many people changed their position (32%), either making up their minds or switching position entirely. We show that these changes were likely in response to the decision to join, and that they were moderated by individuals’ previously established political preferences.

Sudden, broad-scale shifts in public opinion about social problems are relatively rare. Until recently, social scientists were forced to conduct post-hoc case studies of such unusual events that ignore the broader universe of possible shifts in public opinion that do not materialize. The vast amount of data that has recently become available via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter—as well as the mass-digitization of qualitative archives provide an unprecedented opportunity for scholars to avoid such selection on the dependent variable. Yet the sheer scale of these new data creates a new set of methodological challenges. Conventional linear models, for example, minimize the influence of rare events as “outliers”—especially within analyses of large samples. While more advanced regression models exist to analyze outliers, they suffer from an even more daunting challenge: equifinality, or the likelihood that rare events may occur via different causal pathways. I discuss a variety of possible solutions to these problems—including recent advances in fuzzy set theory and machine learning—but ultimately advocate an ecumenical approach that combines multiple techniques in iterative fashion.

Do “niche” parties—such as Communist, Green, and extreme nationalist parties—adjust their policies in response to shifts in public opinion? Would such policy responsiveness enhance these parties' electoral support? We report the results of statistical analyses of the relationship between parties' policy positions, voters' policy preferences, and election outcomes in eight Western European democracies from 1976 to 1998 that suggest that the answer to both questions isno. Specifically, we find no evidence that niche parties responded to shifts in public opinion, while mainstream parties displayed consistent tendencies to respond to public opinion shifts. Furthermore, we find that in situations where niche parties moderated their policy positions they were systematically punished at the polls (a result consistent with the hypothesis that such parties represent extreme or noncentrist ideological clienteles), while mainstream parties did not pay similar electoral penalties. Our findings have important implications for political representation, for spatial models of elections, and for political parties' election strategies.

How does the government decide what's a problem and what isn't? Like individuals, Congress is subject to the paradox of search. If policy makers don't look for problems, they won't find those that need to be addressed. But if they carry out a thorough search, they will almost certainly find new problems-and with the definition of each new problem comes the possibility of creating a program to address it. With The Politics of Attention, leading policy scholars Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones demonstrated the central role attention plays in how governments prioritize problems. Now, with The Politics of Information, they turn the focus to the problem-detection process itself, showing how the growth or contraction of government is closely related to how it searches for information and how, as an organization, it analyzes its findings. Better search processes that incorporate more diverse viewpoints lead to more intensive policy-making activity. Similarly, limiting search processes leads to declines in policy-making. At the same time, the authors find little evidence that the factors usually thought to be responsible for government expansion - partisan control, changes in presidential leadership, and shifts in public opinion - can be systematically related to the patterns they observe.

This study involves an in-depth analysis of Cultural Communication and Public Opinion Transformation through a case study of the hashtag #FreePalestine on social media. The Israeli-Palestinian controversy set the stage for a significant shift in public opinion, and these hashtags became an important instrument in weaving complex online narratives. The aim of this research is to understand the impact of Cultural Communication through the hashtag #FreePalestine in transforming public opinion. Her focus includes online mobilization, influence on policy, changing international perceptions, and the formation of activist movements. This research method uses a mixed approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. Social media analysis is conducted to track trends, sentiment, and networks of relationships, while interviews and surveys are used to gain a deeper understanding of the influence of these opinion transformations in the real world. This research shows that the hashtag #FreePalestine not only creates change in online opinion, but also mobilizes real action and shapes global narratives that influence policy and business. Cultural communication on social media is key to understanding further impact, with image visualization and visual solidarity being key elements in changing public opinion.

Vaccines are promising tools to control the spread of COVID-19. An effective vaccination campaign requires government policies and community engagement, sharing experiences for social support, and voicing concerns about vaccine safety and efficiency. The increasing use of online social platforms allows us to trace large-scale communication and infer public opinion in real time. This study aimed to identify the main themes in COVID-19 vaccine-related discussions on Twitter in Japan and track how the popularity of the tweeted themes evolved during the vaccination campaign. Furthermore, we aimed to understand the impact of critical social events on the popularity of the themes. We collected more than 100 million vaccine-related tweets written in Japanese and posted by 8 million users (approximately 6.4% of the Japanese population) from January 1 to October 31, 2021. We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation to perform automated topic modeling of tweet text during the vaccination campaign. In addition, we performed an interrupted time series regression analysis to evaluate the impact of 4 critical social events on public opinion. We identified 15 topics grouped into the following 4 themes: (1) personal issue, (2) breaking news, (3) politics, and (4) conspiracy and humor. The evolution of the popularity of themes revealed a shift in public opinion, with initial sharing of attention over personal issues (individual aspect), collecting information from news (knowledge acquisition), and government criticism to focusing on personal issues. Our analysis showed that the Tokyo Olympic Games affected public opinion more than other critical events but not the course of vaccination. Public opinion about politics was significantly affected by various social events, positively shifting attention in the early stages of the vaccination campaign and negatively shifting attention later. This study showed a striking shift in public interest in Japan, with users splitting their attention over various themes early in the vaccination campaign and then focusing only on personal issues, as trust in vaccines and policies increased. An interrupted time series regression analysis showed that the vaccination rollout to the general population (under 65 years) increased the popularity of tweets about practical advice and personal vaccination experience, and the Tokyo Olympic Games disrupted public opinion but not the course of the vaccination campaign. The methodology developed here allowed us to monitor the evolution of public opinion and evaluate the impact of social events on public opinion, using large-scale Twitter data.

In Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics James Stimson attempts to explain to a politically interested but not necessarily expert audience how public opinion affects American politics. The result is an impressive success. In some ways Tides of Consent is like a compilation of “Stimson’s Greatest Hits.” It is not that material is in any way repeated, but rather that many of the primary arguments and findings from his previous work are brought together here in an examination of public opinion as a whole. The bottom line of this book is that public opinion, specifically, public opinion change, is the most important factor in American politics. Political conflicts and strategies are dictated in good measure by its shapes and contours. Political elites (at least astute ones) are attentive of it and responsive to it. Policy formation is dependent on it, and policy outputs are ultimately reflective of it. In short, Stimson argues that public opinion drives American politics, and that political change is the result of shifts in public opinion.

Narratives about broken promises following the First World War continued to inform public perceptions of politicians and political parties during the fervour of debate about reconstruction in the 1940s. This chapter offers an interpretation of the political culture of Britain in the Second World War. Rather than focusing on the much-discussed ‘leftward’ shift in public opinion and the specific areas of policy that shaped the platform for the Labour party’s victory at the 1945 general election, it considers the ways in which reconstruction was framed as a political programme. This was a period in which trust in politicians needed to be re-established, amidst arguments not just about what the ‘new Britain’ might look like, but about when and whether it would be delivered as promised.

Narratives about broken promises following the First World War continued to inform public perceptions of politicians and political parties during the fervour of debate about reconstruction in the 1940s. This chapter offers an interpretation of the political culture of Britain in the Second World War. Rather than focusing on the much-discussed ‘leftward’ shift in public opinion and the specific areas of policy that shaped the platform for the Labour party’s victory at the 1945 general election, it considers the ways in which reconstruction was framed as a political programme. This was a period in which trust in politicians needed to be re-established, amidst arguments not just about what the ‘new Britain’ might look like, but about when and whether it would be delivered as promised.

The gradual transformation of Australia's relationship with Asia over the past half century has been accompanied by major shifts in public opinion. These changes have been prompted by numerous changes in the social composition of the electorate, by globalisation which has brought many foreign firms to Australia, and by the political elite's changing approach to engagement with Asia. There is, however, considerable elite anxiety concerning the economic and military rise of China, and these concerns are expressed in public debate and attitudes. Using opinion surveys collected over half a century, the first part of this article examines the trends emerging from debates over Australia's economic and political relationship with China. In the second part, we use the 2018 and 2020 Lowy Polls to explain who changed their views of China and why. The results suggest that the dramatic shift in attitudes towards China between 2018 and 2020 was mainly driven by concerns about foreign influence in Australian politics. Overall, public opinion towards China has become more polarised, between economic opportunity on the one hand and fear of an authoritarian neighbour on the other.