Political Predispositions Research Articles

Government accountability and voting choice in Italy, 1990–2008

Between 1996 and 2008 Italy has experienced four government alternations in as many consecutive elections. It could be argued that after the dramatic party change that occurred in the early 90s the Italian system is in a state of constant flux and voters appear rather bewildered. This paper presents an opposite argument, showing that voters' choice reflects the greater importance of valence politics – performance, the economy – acting as a cue to voting behaviour, interacting with a long-term political predisposition. In turn, this promotes parties' responsiveness and accountability since the overall performance of a government – even of a coalition government – appears as a goal to be shared by all partners, under the threat of defeat for all. The analysis is carried out employing the Italian National Elections Studies series.

Climate on Cable

This study examines climate change coverage on the three major cable news channels and assesses the relationship between viewership of these channels and beliefs about global warming. Evidence from a content analysis of climate change coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC during 2007 and 2008 demonstrates that Fox takes a more dismissive tone toward climate change than CNN and MSNBC. Fox also interviews a greater ratio of climate change doubters to believers. An analysis of 2008 survey data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults finds a negative association between Fox News viewership and acceptance of global warming, even after controlling for numerous potential confounding factors. Conversely, viewing CNN and MSNBC is associated with greater acceptance of global warming. Further analyses reveal that the relationship between cable news viewership (both Fox and CNN/MSNBC) and global warming acceptance is stronger among Republicans than among Democrats. That is, the views of Republicans are strongly linked with the news outlet they watch, regardless of how well that outlet aligns with their political predispositions. In contrast, Democrats don’t vary much in their beliefs as a function of cable news use. This asymmetry suggests that some Republicans, who as a group tend to be predisposed toward global warming skepticism, are less skeptical when exposed to information on the reality and urgency of climate change.

The Friendly Media Phenomenon: A Cross-National Analysis of Cross-Cutting Exposure

We hypothesize that in the real world, as opposed to the lab, the norm is for people to experience friendly media that favor their political predispositions when political favoritism is perceived at all. For this reason, media are generally limited in their ability to create cross-cutting exposure. We test this hypothesis using representative survey data drawn from 11 different countries with varying media systems. We further hypothesize that television will contribute more to cross-cutting exposure than newspapers. Finally, and most importantly, we test the hypothesis that the more the structure of a country's media system parallels that of its political parties, the more that country's population will be dominated by exposure to like-minded views via mass media. We find confirmation for all 3 of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for the role of mass media in providing exposure to cross-cutting political perspectives.

Polarization and Issue Consistency Over Time

The polarization of the political and social environment over the past four decades has provided citizens with clearer cues about how their core political predispositions (e.g., group interests, core values, and party identification) relate to their issue opinions. A robust and ongoing scholarly debate has involved the different ways in which the more polarized environment affects mass opinion. Using heteroskedastic regression, this paper examines the effect of the increasingly polarized environment on the variability of citizens’ policy opinions. We find that citizens today base their policy preferences more closely upon their core political predispositions than in the past. In addition, the predicted error variances also allow us to directly compare two types of mass polarization—issue distance versus issue consistency—to determine the independent effects each has on changes in the distribution of mass opinion.

Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure

Today, people can easily select media outlets sharing their political predispositions, a behavior known as partisan selective exposure. Additional research is needed, however, to better understand the causes and consequences of partisan selective exposure. This study investigates the relationship between partisan selective exposure and political polarization using data from the National Annenberg Election Survey. Cross-sectional results show strong evidence that partisan selective exposure is related to polarization. Over-time analyses document that partisan selective exposure leads to polarization. Some evidence supports the reverse causal direction, namely that polarization leads to partisan selective exposure. Implications for the study of media effects and normative implications—both positive and negative—are discussed. La polarisation et l’exposition sélective partisane Natalie Jomini Stroud De nos jours, les gens peuvent aisément sélectionner les médias qui partagent leurs prédispositions politiques, un comportement connu sous le nom de l’exposition sélective partisane. Des études additionnelles sont toutefois nécessaires pour mieux comprendre les causes et les conséquences de l’exposition sélective partisane. Cette étude explore la relation entre l’exposition sélective partisane et la polarisation politique à partir de données du National Annenberg Election Survey. Les résultats en coupe transversale offrent des preuves solides à l’effet que l’exposition sélective partisane est liée à la polarisation. Des analyses au fil du temps documentent le fait que l’exposition sélective partisane mène à la polarisation. Certaines preuves soutiennent la direction causale inverse, à savoir que la polarisation mène à l’exposition sélective partisane. Les implications pour l’étude des effets médiatiques et les conséquences normatives (tant positives que négatives) sont discutées. Mots clés : exposition sélective, polarisation, effets médiatiques, communication politique Polarisierung und voreingenommene selektive Wahrnehmung Natalie Jomini Stroud Heutzutage können Menschen ohne Probleme Medienangebote auswählen, die ihre politischen Prädispositionen widerspiegeln - ein Verhalten, welches als voreingenommene selektive Wahrnehmung bezeichnet wird. Wir benötigen allerdings intensivere Forschung, um die Gründe und Konsequenzen dieser voreingenommenen selektiven Wahrnehmung besser zu verstehen. Die Studie untersucht die Beziehung zwischen voreingenommener selektiver Wahrnehmung und politischer Polarisierung mittels Daten der Nationalen Annenberg Wahlbefragung. Querschnittsanalysen geben deutliche Hinweise darauf, dass voreingenommene selektive Wahrnehmung in Zusammenhang mit Polarisierung steht. Analysen im Zeitverlauf dokumentieren, dass voreingenommene selektive Wahrnehmung zu Polarisierung führt. Einige Hinweise stützen auch die umgekehrte Kausalrichtung, nämlich dass Polarisierung zu voreingenommener selektiver Wahrnehmung führt. Implikationen für die Untersuchung von Medienwirkungen und normative Implikationen – positiv als auch negativ – werden diskutiert. Schlüsselbegriffe: selektive Wahrnehmung, Polarisierung, Medienwirkungen, politische Kommunikation

The Crystallization of Voter Preferences During the 2008 Presidential Campaign

While scholars disagree about whether and how much campaigns persuade voters, they increasingly agree that campaigns inform voters about the candidates and help voters bring their votes in line with their interests. Some argue that campaigns serve mostly to help voters bring their choices in line with preexisting political predispositions. This paper examines the crystallization of voter preferences during the 2008 presidential election campaign. The authors rely on polls from each month of the election year campaign to assess whether and how the structure of vote choice changed. The results show that certain election day predictors of the vote— especially party identification—became increasingly important predictors of preferences during the election cycle. Even the increase in party effects is mostly confined to the period leading up to the party conventions, well before the general election campaign even began. The structure of preferences evolved over the course of the long campaign. Even as the media dwell on—and speculate about the potential impact of—the many events that unfold daily during the course of presidential election campaigns, certain fundamental variables powerfully structure the election day vote. At the individual level, party identification is of great importance, increasingly so in recent years

Viewing Representative Behavior through the Lens of Social and Political Identity

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the representative activities of members of the national legislature. Equally important to representative democracy, however, are the perceptions and evaluations of these members by their constituents. Using the 2000 American National Election Studies survey, this article assesses the impact of social and political identity in the formation of constituency perceptions of members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Demographic characteristics and political predispositions affect the relevance of the four measures of legislator responsiveness--policy, casework, district service, and symbolic responsiveness--to each constituent's evaluation. Ethnicity, age, gender, and education affect the degree of importance of each measure to constituents; women, minorities, and older citizens are more concerned with symbolic actions on the part of their representatives. Furthermore, the descriptive composition of a representative's constituency has an influence not only with respect to policy choices the member may make, but also with regard to understanding how particular behaviors are successful in establishing a relationship between the representative and those represented.

Representative Reporters? Examining Journalists' Ideology in Context*

Objective. We investigate the ideological orientations of U.S. statehouse journalists, asking whether reporters hold similar political ideologies to their audiences, and under what conditions reporter ideology diverges from audience ideology.Methods. We use an original survey of statehouse journalists, and employ both traditional OLS regressions and a heteroskedastic regression.Results. We find that reporters tend to reflect the political leanings of their audiences. Considering reporters in the context of the states they serve, we find that journalists who are racially and economically dissimilar from their constituents have less representative political predispositions than journalists who have characteristics similar to their readers.Conclusions. In the case of statehouse reporters, descriptive representation leads to substantive representation.

Agenda Setting in Civic Development

This study examines the role of agenda setting in affecting voter turnout using panel data of adolescents in Arizona, Florida, and Colorado from 2002 and 2004. Specifically, a model is developed probing the multiple influences of interactive civic instruction, media attention, and discussion on the following sequence of outcomes: perceived issue importance, opinion strength, political ideology, and finally voter turnout. The results suggest that agenda setting serves as a critical intrinsic process in political socialization contributing to the crystallization of political predispositions, which lead to electoral participation. The implications of the findings are discussed.

Turkey's bid for EU membership, contrasting views of public opinion, and vote choice. Evidence from the 2005 German federal election

This paper examines the effects of attitudes toward Turkey's entry into the European Union on vote choice in the 2005 federal election in Germany. Building on prior research, the paper contrasts the elitist and the policy voting view. The evidence shows that citizens' opinions about Turkey's accession to the European Union do not merely reflect group-memberships and political predispositions. They also play a role in influencing voting behaviour with support of Turkey's entry raising the likelihood to vote for the SPD or the Greens while reducing the probability to cast a vote for right-wing parties, the CDU/CSU and the FDP. Finally, low educated voters are disproportionately susceptible to rely on their attitudes toward enlarging the European Union to contain Turkey. In sum, the evidence contradicts the elitist view and lends support the policy voting view implying that there is an electoral incentive for political elites to respond to public opinion on the Turkey issue.

Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure

Today, people have ample opportunity to engage in selective exposure, the selection of information matching their beliefs. Whether this is occurring, however, is a matter of debate. While some worry that people increasingly are seeking out likeminded views, others propose that newer media provide an increased opportunity for exposure to diverse views. In returning to the concept of selective exposure, this article argues that certain topics, such as politics, are more likely to inspire selective exposure and that research should investigate habitual media exposure patterns, as opposed to single exposure decisions. This study investigates whether different media types (newspapers, political talk radio, cable news, and Internet) are more likely to inspire selective exposure. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, evidence supports the idea that people’s political beliefs are related to their media exposure—a pattern that persists across media types. Over-time analyses suggest that people’s political beliefs motivate their media use patterns and that cable news audiences became increasingly politically divided over the course of the 2004 election.

A Prejudice for the Thinking Classes

Research on attitudes toward Christian fundamentalists shows that antagonism toward this group has become a significant factor since the early 1990s in structuring candidate preferences and issue positions. This article explores how information conveyed in news media helped inform popular evaluations of fundamentalists and instruct antifundamentalists on how to make use of these judgments politically in the culture wars. Our thesis is that attitudes toward Christian fundamentalists can be considered in large measure as a reaction to messages about this group carried in media, filtered through individual differences in political attentiveness and predispositions. Data from the 1988—2004 American National Election Studies show significant media effects, which increased over time, particularly among the sophisticated segment of the public. Our findings illuminate how variation in media attentiveness and individual differences in political and cultural predispositions conjoin to determine whether and the degree to which nonfundamentalists feel antagonistically toward Christian fundamentalists.

Conflict and Identity: Explaining Turnout and Anti‐integrationist Voting in the Danish 2004 Elections for the European Parliament

This article investigates electoral participation and the antecedents of anti‐integrationist voting (AIV) in the Danish 2004 European parliamentary elections. First, it focuses on the effects of the campaign and assesses the importance of social demographics and political predispositions vis‐à‐vis mediated and interpersonal communication on turnout. Second, it investigates AIV, focusing on ‘hard’ utilitarian predictors and ‘soft’ cultural predictors. It draws on the European Election Study (EES) post‐electoral voter survey and a media content analysis of the most important news media outlets. Its findings corroborate previous research on political participation and shows significant positive effects of interpersonal political discussion and exposure to news media that portrayed the European elections as a conflict‐laden contest on turnout. The analysis of AIV highlights the importance of proxies (lack of trust and dissatisfaction with the incumbent government) and political ideology, but also feelings of identity. The latter provides evidence from the Danish context in support of an emerging body of literature emphasizing ‘soft’ explanations of euroscepticism.

Irish Electoral Politics

Why might South and Southern Africans find the Irish electoral experience especially relevant and instructive? Firstly, they may identify parallels with their own recent political history. Ireland's political institutions are the result of a post-colonial settlement and were designed to accommodate an ethnic minority. They survived a long period of one-party rule. Historically they were specially suited to the political predispositions of a mainly rural society. Secondly, Irish electoral arrangements offer to Southern Africans useful lessons for any effort to make political representatives more accountable to citizens. For better or for worse downwards accountability is an especially pronounced feature of Irish politics. This paper will explore Irish electoral experience and the insights it offers to advocates of electoral reform in Southern Africa.

Understanding public attitudes towards Social Security

There has been very little research on why individuals hold different attitudes toward Social Security. In this article we integrate social location theory and political predisposition theory to provide a framework of explanation and test these theories using a unique sample from the 1998 General Social Survey. Our multivariate results reveal that social structural positions along the lines of race, gender, class and age play a more important role than political predispositions in explain‐ing individual differences in support for the current Social Security system against privatisation. Political party affiliation also partly contributes to variation in support for Social Security, but political ideology does not have a significant effect. Our results suggest that with regard to support for Social Security, primary consideration must rest on social structural positions. Racial minorities, women, the poor and the elderly tend to dislike a drastic change in the current Social Security system, and Social Security reform ought to pay attention to their concerns. Our robust finding of a positive relationship between age and support for Social Security also challenges much of the established knowledge, pointing to an intergenerational discord over Social Security. It is also important to differentiate among social welfare programmes in order to uncover the real determinants of public attitudes towards them.

Unifying or Polarizing? Short-Term Effects and Postdebate Consequences of Different Rhetorical Strategies in Televised Debates

Despite a large body of research, little is known about the ways in which viewers react to different kinds of statements during televised debates nor about the degree to which these short-term reactions influence postdebate opinions. Taking the second televised debate in the 2002 German national election as an example, we address both of these questions. We identify the most unifying and polarizing statements and connect immediate reactions during the debate to postdebate verdicts on an individual level of analysis. Our results show that commonplaces and acclaims met unanimous support among audience members with different political predispositions. Attacks and statements in which the candidates presented factual evidence or specified their political plans tended to polarize supporters of the respective candidates. Moreover, short-term reactions had an independent impact on postdebate verdicts even when political predispositions and expectations were controlled.

The Genesis of Civic Awareness: Agenda Setting in Political Socialization

Agenda-setting theory, a conceptual framework used to trace how issue salience is established among policy makers, media, and the public, has yet to be applied to political socialization. This study extends agenda-setting theory by conceptualizing it as a process of political development. In an analysis of adolescent involvement during the 2002 U.S. elections, data are reported from a quasi-experimental field study of the effects of the Kids Voting USA campaign intervention on students in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. A model of agenda setting among adolescents is built by investigating the influence of school intervention exposure, news attention, discussion, and information integration on salience, opinion strength, and finally strengthened political predispositions (partisanship and ideology). Findings suggest that agenda setting provides a valuable perspective for understanding how adolescents come to decide what issues are important to them.

The Genesis of Civic Awareness: Agenda Setting in Political Socialization

Agenda-setting theory, a conceptual framework used to trace how issue salience is established among policy makers, media, and the public, has yet to be applied to political socialization. This study extends agenda-setting theory by conceptualizing it as a process of political development. In an analysis of adolescent involvement during the 2002 U.S. elections, data are reported from a quasi-experimental field study of the effects of the Kids Voting USA campaign intervention on students in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. A model of agenda setting among adolescents is built by investigating the influence of school intervention exposure, news attention, discussion, and information integration on salience, opinion strength, and finally strengthened political predispositions (partisanship and ideology). Findings suggest that agenda setting provides a valuable perspective for understanding how adolescents come to decide what issues are important to them.

Effects of Intergroup Contact and Political Predispositions on Prejudice: Role of Intergroup Emotions

Two broad distal causes of prejudice are past history of intergroup contact and general political predispositions. Two studies investigate the extent to which these effects are mediated by emotions directed at the outgroup, as proposed by Intergroup Emotions Theory (Smith, 1993). In both studies, past intergroup contact and Social Dominance Orientation predict prejudice. as measured either by a feeling thermometer or the Modern Racism Scale. Furthermore, for both studies these effects are significantly mediated by intergroup emotions, above and beyond measures of stereotypes (stereotype endorsement in Study 1 and stereotype knowledge in Study 2) that were entered as alternative potential mediators. Stereotype endorsement also plays a significant mediational role in one case. Increased attention to the role of emotions in intergroup relations, including in the mediation of such powerful and well-known effects as those of intergroup contact and political predispositions, appears to be warranted.

Choosing the West? Referendum choices on EU membership in east-central Europe

This study examines the determinants of mass preferences for membership in the European Union among citizens in applicant states of Central and Eastern Europe. We hypothesize that citizens in these countries evaluate prospective membership in the EU on the basis of collective and individual cost-benefit calculi. Moreover, we posit that attitudes toward EU membership reflect people’s underlying political predispositions, such as support for political parties, the political and economic transition, as well as ties with the West. Using data collected in six East European states in 1996, we find that citizens who think they or their country will benefit from EU membership are more likely to say they would vote for it in a referendum. Moreover, citizens who support the free market economy and express positive views about ties with other countries are more supportive of EU membership. However, in contrast to expectations, support for membership in the EU is not a clear-cut preference in favor of the West and for what it stands. Instead, preferences for membership are based on a mix of utilitarian considerations and an internationalist outlook.