Levels Of Political Information Research Articles

Estimating public opinion from surveys: the impact of including a “don't know” response option in policy preference questions

Abstract What are the consequences of including a “don't know” (DK) response option to attitudinal survey questions? Existing research, based on traditional survey modes, argues that it reduces the effective sample size without improving the quality of responses. We contend that it can have important effects not only on estimates of aggregate public opinion, but also on estimates of opinion differences between subgroups of the population who have different levels of political information. Through a pre-registered online survey experiment conducted in the United States, we find that the DK response option has consequences for opinion estimates in the present day, where most organizations rely on online panels, but mainly for respondents with low levels of political information and on low salience issues. These findings imply that the exclusion of a DK option can matter, with implications for assessments of preference differences and our understanding of their impacts on politics and policy.

National Pride or Economic Utility? Attitudes towards Science in the Light of Political Polarisation 1

Abstract The paper deals with the political aspects of the perception of science. The relevance of the topic is underpinned, among other things, by the public policy significance of trust in science and the links between national science and national identity. The literature relates the perception of science to ideological positions on the one hand, and to partisan bias on the other. The research underlying the study investigated the relationship between respondents’ attitudes towards science and their political preferences using a representative questionnaire sample of 1000 Hungarian respondents. In Hungary, characterised by a high degree of partisan polarisation, we expected the influence of party preference rather than ideological position on the perception of science. A detailed exploration of attitudes yielded more nuanced results than assumed: those who identified themselves as right-wing were less pro-science in general, but the utilitarian perception of science was influenced by party preference in addition to education, i.e. voters of the current government expected more utility and economic returns from science. The perception of science was also influenced by the level of political information. The study also relates the impact of partisan bias to the reception of science policy measures of the Orbán governments.

Financial constraints and political catering disclosures of non‐state‐owned firms: Evidence from textual analysis

AbstractUsing textual analysis techniques, we construct a novel measure to quantify the level of political information in forward‐looking disclosures of privately controlled firms. Our results show that private firms with serious financial constraints are more likely to reveal more political information in forward‐looking disclosures. Plausible mechanisms driving our findings are firms' high growth, under‐investment, and weaker political connections, suggesting that firms cater to governments in the expectation of more financing resources. Finally, we show the economic consequences of political catering strategy on corporate performance.

How does news exposure shape citizens' perceptions of and behavioral responses toward corruption?: information acquisition, blame attribution, and behavioral response

AbstractThis paper mainly deals with the relationship between citizens' levels of news exposure and their behaviors toward the president's corruption scandal in South Korea. In particular, we examine how an individual's level of news exposure affected his/her level of political information about the corruption scandal, perception of then President Park Geun-hye's responsibility for corruption, and participation in anti-Park protests or counter-protests. In this paper, we argue that more exposure to consistent news reports of the president's corruption increases the amount of information citizens with different political dispositions have in common. The more their sets of political information overlap, the closer their perceptions and behavioral choices regarding a corruption scandal are likely to be.

Party cues and incumbent assessments under multilevel governance

Abstract Politicians' party membership allows voters to overcome incomplete information issues. In this article, we maintain that such ‘party cues’ in multilevel governance structures also induce voters to incorporate their assessment of incumbents at one level of government into their assessment of incumbents at other levels of government. Moreover, we argue that these assessment ‘spillovers’ increase in magnitude with voters' level of political information. They become particularly prominent for voters with higher levels of political knowledge and interest as well as during election periods (when information is less costly and more readily available). Empirical analyses using survey data from Germany covering the period 1990 to 2018 corroborate our theoretical propositions.

The role of affective orientations in promoting perceived polarization

AbstractRecent work on political divisions in the mass public has identified several manifestations of polarization linked to different types of attitudes, orientations, and behaviors. Of these, affective polarization and perceived polarization have attracted increasing attention, though we still know fairly little of the links between these variants of polarization. In this paper, we examine the association between affective and perceived polarization, with an aim toward disentangling any potential causal relationship between the two processes. Using two sets of nationally representative panel data from 1992 to 1996 and 2008 to 2009, we find evidence that affective polarization causes perceived polarization, and that perceived polarization is not related to future affective polarization. Stratifying the models by level of political information, we find that the strength and statistical significance of the relationships between past and future values of affective and perceived polarization are conditional on political sophistication: more sophisticated individuals exhibit stronger relationships.

Too Pacifist in Peace, Too Bellicose in War: Political Information and Foreign Policy Opinion

Scholars of public opinion and foreign policy recognize that the general public is poorly informed about international affairs, but they disagree about whether and how this fact affects the policies that it will support. Some argue that the lack of information has little effect, at least in the aggregate, while others hold that political information mediates attention to elite cues. We investigate a third line of argument in which political information has a direct effect on the policy options individuals support. Low levels of political information give rise to a pattern of complacency toward likely international threats in times of relative peace and a contrasting tendency to support violent and aggressive policy options during war or acute crises. We test this argument using survey data from two relevant historical settings: the American entry into World War II and the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Political information and retrospective voting

This study aims to provide a comprehensive view of the role of political information in retrospective voting by simultaneously investigating the effects of levels of information on the individual level and the availability of information on the contextual level. It is argued that the sophistication-gap in retrospective voting is confined to those contexts in which it is hard for voters to assign responsibility for the country’s state of affairs to the correct political party/-ies. Contrary to this expectation, analyses using the CSES data show that there is a larger difference in retrospective voting between voters with different levels of political information in high-clarity contexts, while voters do not seem to hold incumbent parties to account at the polls in low-clarity contexts – irrespective of their level of political knowledge. However, additional analyses show variation in this result depending on the data and measures used.

Political Knowledge and Policy Representation in the States

Political knowledge is central to the success of representative democracy. However, public policy has been shown to follow public opinion even despite low levels of political information in the electorate. Does this mean that political knowledge is irrelevant to policy representation? We consider whether knowledgeable electorates are better able to achieve representative policy outcomes. Using the heterogeneity in the responsiveness of government across the states, we consider how state political knowledge moderates the connection between citizen ideology and the policy outcomes of state government. Using national surveys and multilevel logit with post-stratification, we develop measures of collective political knowledge in the states. We test whether knowledgeable electorates are more likely to secure representative political outcomes than less politically informed constituencies. We find that as state political knowledge increases, so does the correspondence between the preferences of the public and the ideological tenor of state policy outcomes.

The Media as a Window on the Past? The Impact of Television and Newspaper Consumption on Knowledge of the Democratic Transition in Portugal

This study seeks to expand our understanding of how the media increase the level of political information, by focusing on an understudied yet important learning outcome: knowledge of the political past. The article explores the factors underlying variation in the recognition of the leading actors in the transitional process in Portugal. The results show that television news and newspaper exposure foster recognition of these actors, but that media use interacts with personal experience of the transition (stronger effects among younger cohorts) and party identification (stronger impact on those who do not feel close to a political party).

Does Inattention to Political Debate Explain the Polarization Gap between the U.S. Congress and Public?

Recent studies of the U.S. Congress have demonstrated a substantial difference in partisan polarization between legislators' votes and citizens' survey responses about those votes. But perhaps public polarization would increase if citizens were more atten- tive to political debates in Congress? Using matching techniques on natural variation in citizens' political information levels, I show that citizens who are informed about the partisan alignment of issues have a similar preference distribution to Congress, even after the former are re-weighted to resemble the entire public along salient political, social, and demographic dimensions. In contrast, using a survey experiment, I show that cue and argument treatments only partially reduce the discrepancy between the views expressed by the public and the voting behavior of Congress on the same issues. Both experimental and observational studies have significant limitations for measuring counterfactuals involving public opinion, and so our understanding of the polarization gap remains unfortunately limited.

Information and Heterogeneity in Issue Voting: Evidence from the 2008 Presidential Election in Taiwan

A voter's capacity to acquire and retain information moderates the relationship between issues and the vote. Issues differ in their distance from the voter's personal experience. Proximate issues, such as personal economic conditions, affect the vote decisions of highly informed and less informed voters equally. Distant issues, such as national economic conditions and foreign affairs, affect the vote of highly informed voters but not less informed voters. The 2008 presidential election on Taiwan provides a critical test of the effect of information on issue voting. Unification with mainland China versus Taiwan independence is the most important issue in the 2008 election, and voters with higher levels of political information show a larger effect of the issue on their vote. The national economy is also a significant predictor of vote choice, but only for highly informed voters. Personal economic conditions and other proximate issues are not significant predictors of the vote at any information level.

Public Support for Military Interventions across Levels of Political Information and Stages of Intervention: The Case of the Iraq War

This study examines the effect of political information levels and intervention stages on the formation and continuity of public support for military interventions by analyzing survey data pertaining to the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. The results show that before and immediately after the launch of the intervention, politically uninformed individuals expressed higher support for the war compared to politically informed ones. However, as the intervention proceeded and casualties were incurred, higher rates of decrease in support were observed among the politically uninformed. Politically informed individuals, on the other hand, demonstrated more stable levels of support throughout the course of the intervention.

Examining the effects of political information and intervention stages on public support for military interventions: A panel experiment

This study examines the formation and continuity of public support for military interventions as a function of political information levels and intervention stages using a panel experiment. The results demonstrate that politically informed individuals express less support for a military intervention at the beginning of that intervention compared to uninformed ones. However, as the intervention proceeds and casualties are incurred, the support of politically uninformed people decreases at a higher rate than does the support of the politically informed. As such, politically informed individuals demonstrate more stable levels of support across intervention stages. In addition, success or failure of an intervention at a certain stage interacts with the level of political information. Most notably, a decrease in support is significantly more pronounced among politically uninformed individuals compared to informed ones under deteriorating intervention conditions. Nevertheless, as the duration of the intervention gets longer, the level of support drops even with improving prospects while the impact of political information disappears. I also find that policy-specific information has a greater effect on public support for military interventions compared to general political information.

Campaign Persuasion and Nascent Partisanship in Mexico's New Democracy

Despite ample evidence of preelection volatility in vote intentions in new democracies, scholars of comparative politics remain skeptical that campaigns affect election outcomes. Research on the United States provides a theoretical rationale for campaign effects, but shows little of it in practice in presidential elections because candidates’ media investments are about equal and voters’ accumulated political knowledge and partisan attachments make them resistant to persuasive messages. I vary these parameters by examining a new democracy where voters’ weaker partisan attachments and lower levels of political information magnify the effects of candidates’ asymmetric media investments to create large persuasion effects. The findings have implications for the generalizability of campaign effects theory to new democracies, the development of mass partisanship, candidate advertising strategies, and the specific outcome of Mexico's hotly contested 2006 presidential election. Data come primarily from the Mexico 2006 Panel Study.

Individual and contextual variation in EU issue voting: The role of political information

Increasing politicization in EU member states about European issues can be expected to strengthen the impact of attitudes towards Europe on vote choice in European Parliament (EP) elections. At the same time this impact is likely to vary between voters and contexts as a function of political information. This study explores the role of political information in explaining individual and contextual heterogeneity in the degree of EU issue voting. Using a two-step hierarchical estimation procedure to explore both individual and contextual variation, we show that while EU issue voting in the 2009 EP elections is only slightly more pronounced among the politically sophisticated, it is clearly more extensive in contexts that provide higher levels of political information on European matters.

Partisan Bias, Political Information and Spatial Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election

This article provides direct estimates of the parameters of spatial utility models of voting using data from the 2008 presidential election. By measuring citizens’ views on issues for which candidates' stances are known, I estimate voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. Using these estimates, I demonstrate that policy exerts a strong influence on vote choice for most voters. While independents appear to cast their ballots in accordance with the assumptions of unbiased spatial voting, partisans are strongly biased toward their party’s nominee by spatial standards. At lower levels of political information, voters are influenced primarily by their party identification, with policy views having little impact on vote choice. More highly informed citizens, by contrast, show strong relationships between policy views and vote choice. As information levels increase, the spatial biases exhibited by partisan voters decreases, but even among the most informed citizens, significant partisan biases re...

Policy Polarization among Party Elites and the Significance of Political Awareness in the Mass Public

This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors examine how increasing clarity of party—policy linkages among political elites influences party—policy linkages in the mass public. The results show that only the well informed responded to the growing elite polarization by becoming more partisan in their opinions. Apparently, in the absence of the motivation to develop coherent opinions, even a simplification of the political environment does not close the gaps between those who are more and less aware about politics.

The Psychological and Institutional Determinants of Early Voting

This article examines early voting, an institutional innovation whereby citizens can cast their ballots a time and location other than on election day and at the precinct place. Early voting has been proposed as way to expand the franchise, by making voting more convenient, and extend the franchise, by encouraging turnout among those segments of the population who are unable or unwilling to vote using traditional methods. The article draws on models of voter decision making that conceptualize voting as a choice reached under uncertainty. Voters vary by (a) their willingness to accept uncertainty, (b) their cognitive engagement with the campaign, and (c) their location in an institutional environment that makes early voting possible. We propose a multivariate model of early voting, contingent on a voter's prior levels of political information, level of fixed political beliefs, and political information activity. These are also interacted with the institutional context (laws and procedures that allow early voting). At the descriptive level, we find most of the expected demographic and attitudinal patterns: early voters are older, better educated, and more cognitively engaged in the campaign and in politics. Because national surveys are ill equipped to capture nuanced campaign dynamics, many of the statistically significant relationships disappear in multivariate analyses. Regardless, revealing differences emerge between midterm and presidential election years that allow us to make important inferences about the demographic and participatory characteristics of early voters.

Stealth soapboxes: political information efficacy, cynicism and uses of celebrity weblogs among readers

This study tests the effects of personalized and `stealth' political discourse on weblogs (or blogs) and the repercussions on levels of political trust, information efficacy and political uses/gratifications. By surveying readers of three different blogs (N=1838), this study identified significant effects as a result of exposure to political statements on blogs. Indeed, there were differences in the levels of political cynicism depending on how political statements were communicated. Readers of non-political blogs were more confident in their level of political information and their ability to participate in politics. Finally, political uses/approaches and avoidances were examined, as were differences based on gender and age.