Levels Of Political Information Research Articles

The Effects of Information and Social Cleavages: Explaining Issue Attitudes and Vote Choice in Canada

This paper examines the relationship between social group identity and the level of political information in explaining Canadians' issue attitudes and vote choices. Traditional accounts of Canadians' partisan political leanings have placed a great deal of emphasis on social group identity in explaining attitudes. However based on data from the Canadian Election Studies from 1988–2004, it is argued that both social group identity and information influence the nature of vote choice and public opinion in Canada. In fact, the level of voter information has two contradictory effects on the political attitudes of different social groups. In some cases voters' level of information reduces the role of social group identity in explaining attitudes and vote choices; information acts to bridge the differences between different social groups (for example Catholics/non-Catholics and urban/rural Canadians). In other cases, voters' level of information acts to amplify the importance of social group identity in predicting attitudes (for example women/men and religious/nonreligious). These findings suggest that not only is social group identity a less effective predictor of attitudes than has traditionally been thought but that there are also significant underlying differences between the so-called “old” and “new” cleavages in Canada when it comes to understanding their impact on political values.

On the Margins of Democratic Life

The authors surveyed Anglo, African American, Latino, and Native American eighth-grade students in six middle schools from one U.S. county in 2003 and 2004. The goal of the project was to compare the attitudes of young people about politics and government at an early age to determine whether differences existed before high school. The authors found that minority and Anglo children differ dramatically in their skills and information levels about politics and government. Anglo adolescents are more likely to have rudimentary information about politics and government, practice democratic skills in school and at home, and hold positive attitudes toward politics and government. Among minority students, Native Americans have the least information, fewest opportunities to practice democratic skills, and most negative attitudes toward the political system. The authors also found that children's political experiences, captured by their ethnicity and race, affect their levels of political information and attitudes about government, after controlling for students' family and school resources.

Political Knowledge and Issue Voting Among the Latino Electorate

How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters with varying levels of political information. Using the 2000 Tomás Rivera Policy Institute pre-election poll, we explore the degree to which Latino voters relied on issue-positions to judge the two major party candidates and compare the effect of such considerations with symbolic and candidate-specific appeals. We find that policy issues played an important role in shaping voting preferences, but only among politically knowledgeable voters, while among uninformed voters, symbolism and long-standing partisan preferences matter most. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for political representation and Latino politics.

Does Policy Debate Reduce Information Effects in Public Opinion? Analyzing the Evolution of Public Opinion on Health Care

Because most citizens fall short of the normative ideal of being politically knowledgeable, it is important to assess the nature of information effects in public opinion. This paper identifies policy debate as a means by which information effects may be reduced. To test this notion, we analyze public opinion on health care before, during, and after the heated policy debate of the 1990s. The results show that information effects in public opinion were exacerbated during the time of greatest public discourse, which provides little to reassure those who are concerned about citizens' low and uneven levels of political information. Policy debate does not appear to compensate for political ignorance and enable the uninformed to behave “as if” they were better informed.

Campaign Advertising and Democratic Citizenship

Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre‐existing levels of political information.

Disengaged and Uninformed: 2000 Presidential Election Coverage in Consumer Magazines Popular with Young Adults

This study examines content and tone of political information in five leading general interest and lifestyle magazines from December 1999 through November 2000. The analysis revealed a low level of political information in the selected magazines. With the exception of Rolling Stone and Glamour, the nature of coverage was strategy oriented and superficial, while the tone was mostly cynical in men's magazines, yet favorable toward Gore. The results provide a glimpse of the political information available for typical young adults and insight into the apathetic attitudes of young adults toward the American political system.

Fear and Loathing in California: Contextual Threat and Political Sophistication Among Latino Voters

Environments having candidates or policies deemed threatening to an individual or group have previously been found to trigger feelings of anxiety that in turn motivate people to closely monitor political affairs. Racially charged ballot propositions, and the strong feelings they evoked, made California in the mid-1990s just such an environment for Latino citizens—resulting, we believe, in higher levels of political information. Using the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute's 1997 postelection survey of Hispanic citizens, we compare levels of political knowledge between naturalized and native-born Latino citizens in California and similarly situated Latino citizens in Texas. We find that, as a result of these highly publicized and controversial initiatives, Latino immigrants in California (a) are more likely than native-born Latinos and Latinos outside California to perceive racial issues as most important, and (b) manifest higher levels of political information than their fellow native-born Latinos and Latino citizens outside of California, controlling for other well-recognized predictors of political information levels.

Local Economies, Local Policy Impacts and Federal Electoral Behaviour in Canada

The fortunes of local, regional and provincial economies have often been linked to geographical variation in electoral outcomes, and nowhere more so than in Canada. This article examines economic localism in Canadian voting behaviour by estimating a model of voters' decisions in the 1993 and 1997 federal elections. Individual-specific determinants of the vote measured in the Canadian Election Study are supplemented by measures of voters' local economies and of the local impacts of policy changes. Voters punish the federal government for bad times in their locale and for policy changes that hurt the local economy. This effect is independent of what voters think about their own finances and about the provincial and national economies. The electoral impact of the local economy does not depend on whether government is acknowledged as a potent economic actor, or on the voter's level of political information. However, the relevance of the local economy for national-level electoral behaviour can be "primed" by campaign events, just like any other criterion of voting choice. The response to local economic conditions is part of a broader explanation for geographic patterns of electoral support in Canada.

Political Context, Issue Salience, and Selective Attentiveness: Constituent Knowledge of the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Vote

According to the issue salience hypothesis, citizens tend to acquire information on subjects they perceive as important. However, past efforts to demonstrate this have been mixed. I argue that this is because scholars often fail to recognize the importance of overlapping group memberships. I maintain that different group memberships-a traditional proxy for issue salience-can cancel out effects if they are in conflict. Some research has also shown that cues in the political environment increase levels of political information. Extending this line of research, I hypothesize that the interaction of salience with environmental cues influences both information and participation levels. I find that an examination of the confirmation vote for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas largely confirms these hypotheses.

A Theory of Nonseparable Preferences in Survey Responses

A person has nonseparable preferences when her preferences for the outcome of one issue or set of issues depend on the outcome of other issues. A model of individual-level responses to issue questions in public opinion surveys implies that when people have nonseparable preferences, their responses will change depending on the order of questions. An individual's responses may also vary over as her perception of the status quo changes. A telephone survey of a random sample of residents of Franklin County, Ohio, reveals that much of the public has nonseparable preferences on a wide range of issues. Results from a survey experiment confirm that aggregate-level question-order effects occur on issues for which people have nonseparable preferences, and order effects do not occur on issues for which most people have separable preferences. At the individual level, people with nonseparable preferences display greater response instability across question orders than people with separable preferences, and a respondent's level of political information has little impact on response instability. ince Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964), students of public opinion have argued that most people lack well-defined or stable opinions on important political issues. Converse concluded large portions of an electorate simply do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time (1964, 245). Several empirical puzzles in opinion research appear to result from the public's lack of meaningful beliefs. First, most people hold opinions on issues independently of their opinions on other issues, without ideological connections across them. Second, individuals' responses to survey questions are often unstable. Converse's original findings of response instability applied to over-time changes in an individual's responses to issue questions, but response instability also results from seemingly trivial changes in the order or wording of questions. Evidence in favor of Converse's thesis comes from surveys in which researchers ask respondents their opinions on one issue after another without explicit links across the issues. For example, the American National Election Studies (ANES) ask respondents their opinions on the level of taxation and on the level of defense spending and on the level of welfare spending; but respondents are rarely, if ever, asked how their opinion on one issue might change given changes in policy on another issue. Although most public policy debates in Congress and in the media involve actors expressing contingent, conditional, or constrained preferences, survey researchers rely on survey instruments that presume the public's preferences on the same issues are isolated, unconditional, and unconstrained. In this article, I argue that many people's preferences on political issues are not isolated, unconditional, and unconstrained; instead, their preferences on multiple issues are often nonseparable. A person has nonseparable

Nonseparable Preferences, Measurement Error, and Unstable Survey Responses

A person has nonseparable preferences when her preference on an issue depends on the outcome of other issues. A model of survey responses in which preferences are measured with error implies that responses will change depending on the order of questions and vary over time when respondents have nonseparable preferences. Results from two survey experiments confirm that changes in survey responses due to question order are explained by nonseparable preferences but not by the respondent's level of political information, partisanship, or ideology.

Estimation and Inference Are Missing Data Problems: Unifying Social Science Statistics via Bayesian Simulation

Bayesian simulation is increasingly exploited in the social sciences for estimation and inference of model parameters. But an especially useful (if often overlooked) feature of Bayesian simulation is that it can be used to estimate any function of model parameters, including “auxiliary” quantities such as goodness-of-fit statistics, predicted values, and residuals. Bayesian simulation treats these quantities as if they were missing data, sampling from their implied posterior densities. Exploiting this principle also lets researchers estimate models via Bayesian simulation where maximum-likelihood estimation would be intractable. Bayesian simulation thus provides a unified solution for quantitative social science. I elaborate these ideas in a variety of contexts: these include generalized linear models for binary responses using data on bill cosponsorship recently reanalyzed in Political Analysis, item—response models for the measurement of respondent's levels of political information in public opinion surveys, the estimation and analysis of legislators' ideal points from roll-call data, and outlier-resistant regression estimates of incumbency advantage in U.S. Congressional elections

Survey Bias on the Front Porch

We examine whether survey interviewers are biased in their views of certain classes of respondents, thereby introducing unobserved bias into survey results. There has been a great deal of previous research on how racial and gender dynamics affect the responses given by respondents during face-to-face surveys. In this article, we turn this issue around and ask whether human interaction affects how the interviewer views the respondents, and if so, how this may systematically bias surveys. If interviewers are biased, this may impede their ability to conduct interviews in a consistent, nonjudgmental, and unbiased manner. Using three surveys that required the interviewer to evaluate how informed and intelligent the respondents appeared, we found that interviewers were more likely to evaluate respondents of lower socioeconomic status as less informed and less intelligent, even after controlling for objective levels of political information. There is also evidence that Blacks may be negatively evaluated.

The impact of scandal on candidate evaluations: An experimental test of the role of candidate traits

Correlational studies have found candidate traits to be an important determinant of vote preferences but cannot rule out reverse causality processes in explaining these findings. The present study demonstrates the independent impact of trait inferences on candidate evaluations using experimentally controlled candidate profiles of hypothetical U.S. congressmen. Using the scandal situation as a testing ground, this experiment examines whether task-relevant, competence traits actually have greater impact on political judgments than the more general, warmth-related trait qualities. Two types of scandals are considered (marital infidelity and tax evasion), both implying negative trustworthiness characteristics of the officeholder. Results demonstrate that trait inferences do have a causal impact on global evaluations. Consistent with past survey studies, competence qualities appear to be more important than warmth qualities but only for those with greater political information levels.

The Persian Gulf War's impact on Americans' political information

Does war increase Americans' normally low levels of political information? Data from the Center for Political Studies' Political Consequences of War Study, which plumbed Americans' information about the Persian Gulf War, suggest it does, albeit slightly. Criticisms of mass public competence to influence foreign policy lose some of their sting, but there remain grounds for concern about the quality of public opinion. Old knowledge aids in the acquisition of new, and most people were too uninformed to benefit much from intensive media coverage of the Gulf crisis.

Changing levels of political information in 1988 and 1990

The 1988 and 1990 National Election Studies indicate that the public is less politically informed in a low-stimulus election year than after a high-stimulus campaign. Although the same factors are responsible for what people know in each year, the process of becoming informed in an information-poor environment is slightly different than in an information-rich atmosphere. The data also show that, just as Angus Campbell's surge and decline theory predicts, “core” voters are slightly more knowledgeable than “peripheral” voters.

Measuring Political Knowledge: Putting First Things First

Research in political behavior has increasingly turned to the cognitions underlying attitudes. The simplest of these cognitions are political facts-the bits of information about politics that citizens hold. While other key concepts in political science-partisanship, trust, tolerance-have widely used (if still controversial) measures that facilitate comparisons across time and among studies, the discipline has no generally accepted measure of the public's level of political information. This paper describes the development and testing of survey-based measures of political knowledge, with special attention to the existing items on the National Election Study surveys. In so doing, it illustrates the use of a variety of techniques for item analysis and scale construction. We also present a recommended fiveitem knowledge index.

Un réexamen de la loi de Converse sur le lien entre le degré d'information politique et la mobilité de court terme de l'opinion

AbstractThis study proposes an empirical test of a classical hypothesis formulated by Philip Converse about the link between political information and opinion change. The study departs from previous ones on three aspects: (1) it is conducted outside the electoral field; (2) political information—the key variable of the analysis—is directly measured and is issue specific, and (3) the test of Converse hypothesis is carried through the utilization of a quasi-experimental design. The results—based on a sample of students expressing opinions about the Canada-USA free trade agreement—exhibit the expected non-linear relation between the individual's level of political information and his propensity to change opinion. This conclusion suggests that particular groups could be more sensitive to political information flows.

Voters and Nonvoters: The Problem of Turnout in the Nineteenth Century: Southwestern Ontario as a Case Study

Canadian Political Analysts generally agree that nonvoters have played a decisive role in determining the outcome of elections in the twentieth century. Political scientists have identified categories of nonvoters with some degree of precision. They tell us that in twentieth-century Canada nonvoting is often related to such socioeconomic factors as education, occupation, and income. These ‘class’ indicators are, in turn, often associated with a low level of political information and a low sense of political efficacy. Age and sex have also been associated with nonvoting in the twentieth century. The very young and the very old are less likely to vote. And women are slightly less likely to vote than men. Some Canadian analysts have argued that Catholics, and, more specifically, French Canadian Catholics, vote less often than Protestants, and that farmers vote more consistently than do urban dwellers.

Education, Ethnicity, and Political Socialization In Kenya

This study of a purposively selected cohort group of 525 Kenyan adolescents at varying levels of education (no education, primary education only, and secondary education) attempts to shed light on the role of education in the political socialization of youth in Africa. Hypotheses relating to the effects of education and selected demographic variables on the level of political information and interest, value orientations, and the level of diffuse support found among the members of this cohort group are tested. Employing cross tabulation, bivariate analysis, and regression analysis, it is found that education has an extremely important effect on the levels of political interest and knowledge of individuals. Findings with respect to values are less convincing, but education does appear to be closely related to support for the political system. Of the demographic variables, ethnic identity explains the most variance in levels of diffuse support, but this effect diminished when education was controlled. Given the volatile nature of ethnically based political competition in Africa, the primary implications of this study relate to conditions under which the level of education becomes a less significant influence on level of diffuse support and ethnicity becomes more important, as well as the content and context of education.