Public Opinion Scholars Research Articles

Misinformation and Motivated Reasoning: Responses to Economic News in a Politicized Environment

Public opinion scholars have recently focused on understanding why surveys report such high levels of misinformation among otherwise knowledgeable and engaged partisans. In this paper, we take advantage of a natural experiment involving the October 2012 jobs report announcement to gain a more complete understanding of how individuals’ beliefs are influenced by new salient information in a politicized environment. We examine reactions by Republicans and Democrats on a factual question about the unemployment rate immediately before and after the announcement that unemployment had fallen below 8 percent for the first time during the Obama presidency. Using a variety of techniques, including response latency measures, we conclude that partisans did react to the jobs report by engaging in motivated reasoning, providing a clearer understanding of why individuals respond to factual questions in vastly different ways.

The Effect of Gender Norms in Sitcoms on Support for Access to Abortion and Contraception

Can ostensibly nonpolitical television programming affect policy opinions? In this article, I use a laboratory experiment to test whether the gender norms portrayed on two primetime sitcoms can alter political attitudes on gender issues, specifically access to abortion, and contraception. Though the shows in the experiment did not explicitly discuss any policy, I find that sitcoms can influence policy opinions, particularly when the show conveys a “boys will be boys” mentality toward sexual behavior. This finding has important implications for public opinion scholars because it suggests that there may not be such a thing as apolitical programming, and pop culture may have a profound, overlooked effect on public opinion.

Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be: Partisan Polarization in Views on the Past*

ObjectiveIn this article, we seek to extend our understanding of the partisan lenses through which Americans view politics by investigating if there is partisan polarization in views of the past. Current political issues are frequently contextualized with references to the past. Despite these frequent evocations of the past, public opinion scholars’ knowledge of how citizens view earlier eras is incomplete.MethodsWe evaluate competing explanations of the effect of the past on present political attitudes: generational effects, partisanship, and ideology. To do this, we administered a novel battery of questions to a nationally representative sample drawn from the 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project.ResultsThe data show evidence of generational effects, but also of partisanship in the case of opinions of governmental performance, and of ideology in the case of evaluations of culture and quality of life.ConclusionThis study suggests that Americans are divided not just in their views of the present, but also in their views on the past. To the extent that peoples’ evaluations are shaped by how well government is performing relative to some past era of good performance, polarization in views of the past could have long‐lasting effects on how Americans evaluate the government.

White‐Collar Government in the United States

White‐Collar Government in the United States

Closeness Counts: Increasing Precision and Reducing Errors in Mass Election Predictions

Mass election predictions are increasingly used by election forecasters and public opinion scholars. While they are potentially powerful tools for answering a variety of social science questions, existing measures are limited in that they ask about victors rather than voteshares. We show that asking survey respondents to predict voteshares is a viable and superior alternative to asking them to predict winners. After showing respondents can make sensible quantitative predictions, we demonstrate how traditional qualitative forecasts lead to mistaken inferences. In particular, qualitative predictions vastly overstate the degree of partisan bias in election forecasts, and lead to wrong conclusions regarding how political knowledge exacerbates this bias. We also show how election predictions can aid in the use of elections as natural experiments, using the effect of the 2012 election on partisan economic perceptions as an example. Our results have implications for multiple constituencies, from methodologists and pollsters to political scientists and interdisciplinary scholars of collective intelligence.

Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes

Although classical international relations theorists largely agreed that public opinion about foreign policy is shaped by moral sentiments, public opinion scholars have yet to explore the content of these moral values, and American IR theorists have tended to exclusively associate morality with liberal idealism. Integrating the study of American foreign policy attitudes with Moral Foundations Theory from social psychology, we present original survey data showing that the five established moral values in psychology—harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity—are strongly and systematically associated with foreign policy attitudes. The “individualizing” foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity are particularly important drivers of cooperative internationalism and the “binding” foundations of authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity of militant internationalism. Hawks and hardliners have morals too, just a different set of moral values than...

Community Attitudes Towards' School Closings in Chicago: A Policy Feedback Approach

My paper seeks to address the question of how educational policies, specifically school closings, influence patterns of political opinion. Generally, when political scientists are interested in examining attitudes towards a particular policy, they defer to the literature on public opinion. Yet, public opinion scholars primarily examine attitudes as shaping policies, thereby excluding the ways in which policies themselves are shaping attitudes. Recognizing this, an emerging literature within political science, policy feedback, has sought to address this gap in the current way opinion is studied. Broadly speaking, proponents of policy feedback identify the ways in which the design, framing, and discourse around policies can structure individuals’ experience with the political process. These experiences then shape citizen’s interpretation of their life circumstances, the state and world around them. Using this approach, my research seeks to demonstrate how experiences with policies feedback to attitudes. As it relates to the specific case of school closings, I argue that community members’ encounters with the various and multiple manifestations of education policy over the past decade (as implemented by Chicago Public Schools) contribute to general suspicion of the real objectives behind the current school closing policy. These negative interpretations, thus directly shape parents’ oppositional attitudes towards the policy and it's implementors. These findings have serious implications for understanding how encounters with public policies can have consequences for how citizens think about their local government apparatus and democracy, at large.

Gay Bullying and Online Opinion Expression

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn have recently attracted the attention of public opinion scholars. However, research testing existing public opinion theories in a social media context is scarce. This study represents arguably the first empirical examination of the spiral of silence theory in the social media environment. Through an experimental manipulation embedded in an Internet survey, respondents ( N = 760) were presented with a hypothetical scenario (i.e., friendly or hostile) concerning gay bullying, an issue suited for investigation due to its moral components. Willingness to self-censor and to some extent, congruency with the national opinion climate were significant predictors of various online opinion response strategies, indicating the presence of the spiral of silence phenomenon in the social media environment. However, individual characteristics such as issue importance were related to willingness to communicate about the issue, suggesting a liberating effect on opinion expression.

Perceptions vs. Actual Exposure to Electoral Competition and Effects on Political Participation

Few scholars have examined perceptions of electoral competition, and those who have (Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974) find no link between perceptions and voting behavior. We find that individuals’ perceptions of electoral competition are related to exposure to a close race in their U.S. House district but do not match reality. This is because perceptions are colored by “wishful thinking” in that individuals believe their favored candidate will win a close election (Uhlaner and Grofman 1986). Once we control for wishful thinking, we find that perceptions of electoral competition are associated with political participation, while actual levels of competition in one’s House district are not. Although numerous studies find that higher levels of actual electoral competition are associated with increased turnout, this is the first to find evidence of links between actual electoral competition, perceived electoral competition, and voting behavior. Measuring perceptions—and understanding how they differ from reality—may be important for scholars of public opinion and political behavior.

Backlash and Legitimation: Macro Political Responses to the Supreme Court

Despite evidence of thermostatic public responsiveness to policies created by the elected branches of American government, scholars of public opinion have not generally applied this same model of public opinion to represent the relationship between the Supreme Court and public opinion. Instead, a discreet theory addressing the public’s responses to the Court’s decisions has developed. This theory of legitimation predicts that the Court’s association with powerful symbols of institutional legitimacy will pull Americans’ attitudes toward positions adopted by the Court. This paper develops these theories’ competing predictions about the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and public mood. I assess these rival expectations by modeling the dynamic relationship between mood and cumulative judicial liberalism. The model estimates indicate a complex interaction between the Court and the mass public characterized by short-term backlash against Supreme Court decisions in public mood followed by long-run movement toward the ideological positions taken by the Court.

Paying Attention to Foreign Affairs: How Public Opinion Affects Presidential Decision Making by Thomas Knecht

Despite increased attention to the linkages between domestic politics and international relations in political science literature over the last 20 years, considerable debate remains about how well equipped citizens are to act as informed constraints on governments or how attentive and responsive government actors are to public opinion. Debates about citizens' ability to act as a check on government behavior are not new, of course, and have a long tradition in political philosophy and in public discourse. Yet the proliferation of theories of domestic–international linkages in contemporary IR scholarship has unfortunately been accompanied by incomplete dialogue between public opinion and IR scholars and often by claims of unidirectional or unconditional causality regarding domestic constraints, elite framing and opinion leadership, citizens' informational capacities, and the role of the media. The relationship among these factors in shaping foreign policy is quite complex, however, and fortunately Thomas Knecht acknowledges this complexity and advances a conditional argument about the relationship between public attitudes and presidential decision making.

Use of Bellwether Samples to Enhance Pre-Election Poll Predictions: Science and Art

In this article, the authors document a new pre-election polling method that combines traditional probability sampling in statewide polls with sampling of bellwether districts. Against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential primary in New Hampshire, the authors explain how the Suffolk University/WHDH predictions, using additional bellwether tests, were closer than most other polls in correctly calling the Democratic primary race. Thus, the contributions in this article are twofold. The authors offer information that provides advances to the field of opinion research by describing the nature of electoral bellwether districts, a topic of recurring interest to public opinion scholars and practitioners. Second, they describe a process for selecting electoral bellwether districts. The authors explore the validity of their ideas by comparing pre-election poll data with bellwether tests to election outcomes for additional races in the state primaries and general election. They offer conclusions about the value and use of bellwether tests in the spirit of an open-source methodology to the opinion research community.

How we talk when we talk about nano: The future in laypeople's talk

Nanotechnology is an example of postnormal technoscience ‘in the making’: its concrete products and applications are currently only starting to trickle into the marketplace. In this paper I use nanotechnology as a case to examine how uncertain technoscientific futures are represented in lay talk. I engage with this question through a close analysis of focus group discussion around nanotechnology, describing the cultural and linguistic resources that participants draw upon in doing this, including personal experience and expertise, analogies and comparisons, and fiction and popular culture. These are, I suggest, the key discursive tools with which laypeople can weigh up and evaluate emerging technologies. However, I also argue that these are used flexibly to create different kinds of arguments in different conversational contexts, and use the example of nanotechnology as ‘the same’/’different’ to illustrate this. In concluding I reflect on the implications of these findings for scholars of public opinion and attitude and for those who frame policy on emerging and uncertain science and technology.

Revisiting the self-interest versus values debate: The role of temporal perspective

Scholars of public opinion have struggled to explain why people often vote against their economic self-interest in favor of a value-based rationale. Based on Construal Level Theory (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007), we argue that both values and material self-interest affect social and political attitudes, but in different temporal contexts. Specifically, because material self-interest is more concrete and applicable to everyday concerns, we predict that it should carry more weight with regard to judgments made in the context of the near future. In contrast, values, which are more abstract by nature, should carry greater weight for judgments made in the distant future. In an experimental test of this hypothesis, we presented participants with a fictitious policy that affected their pocketbooks in an otherwise value-laden domain. We found that people's financial self-interest more strongly predicted attitudes toward a proposal to increase tuition in the near condition, whereas antiegalitarian values more strongly predicted attitudes in the far condition. These findings offer new insights into the symbolic politics debate.

Race-Matching: Interviewers’ Reactions to the Race-matching Process

Although there has been widespread attention among public opinion scholars to problems of data quality when dealing with racially sensitive items, there is little empirical evidence of how interviewers’ understand their work on survey projects that deal with racially sensitive questions and use race-matching protocols. For this exploratory study, we asked thirteen telephone interviewers involved in a racial attitudes survey to help us understand their experiences with that project and particularly with the race-matching process. Public opinion scholars have established that the social environment matters, affording the characteristics of interviewers and perceptions of respondents weighting equivalent to the content itself (Anderson et al. 1988; Davis 1997b; Hatchett and Schuman 1975; Schuman and Converse 1971). Repeated studies have generated considerable knowledge about how interviewers affect data quality, but little is known about interviewers’ understandings of the process and its implications (1).

The State of State Polls: Old Challenges, New Opportunities

AbstractThe prospect of a full complement of regularly-conducted, publicly-released state-level polls has both excited and eluded scholars of state politics and public opinion for decades. Here, we examine the current status of state-level polling in the U.S. Specifically, we rely on interviews with 51 state poll directors to investigate the location, frequency, scope, budget, purpose, content, and perceived policy impact of such projects. We also explore the still challenging prospect of greater state-to-state collaboration. We conclude that while current state polling is a robust industry, calls for greater collaboration remain unheeded largely because of limited resources and the incompatible reward structures of project directors. Still, improved data-archiving together with regional polling projects on hot-button topics would serve to diminish such challenges.

Why welfare states persist: the importance of public opinion in democracies

The world's richer democracies all provide such public benefits as pensions and health care, but why are some far more generous than others? And why, in the face of globalization and fiscal pressures, has the welfare state not been replaced by another model? Reconsidering the myriad issues raised by such pressing questions, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza contend here that public opinion has been an important, yet neglected, factor in shaping welfare states in recent decades. Analyzing data on sixteen countries, Brooks and Manza find that the preferences of citizens profoundly influence the welfare policies of their governments and the behavior of politicians in office. Shaped by slow-moving forces such as social institutions and collective memories, these preferences have counteracted global pressures that many commentators assumed would lead to the welfare state's demise. Moreover, Brooks and Manza show that cross-national differences in popular support help explain why Scandinavian social democracies offer so much more than liberal democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Significantly expanding our understanding of both public opinion and social policy in the world's most developed countries, this landmark study will be essential reading for scholars of political economy, public opinion, and democratic theory.

WHEN THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS, HOW DO THE PEOPLE RESPOND?

ABSTRACT Tulis’s critique of popular presidential leadership raises several questions about public opinion: Do modern, rhetorically inclined presidents influence the public? What types of presidential rhetoric might, in principle, mislead or manipulate the public? And is the net result that the people are led into error and distortion in their policy opinions? The public‐opinion literature, which has assiduously documented the public’s ignorance about politics and policy, might seem, at first glance, to offer grounds for an unequivocal “yes” to the third question. But most scholars of public opinion discount public ignorance and defend an optimistic view of the citizenry’s political competence. The more convincing arguments and evidence, however, support more critical views. There is ample reason to worry about the consequences of policy making driven by popular rhetoric, and thus to consider whether any remedies for plebiscitary democracy might be found.

Learning about Power through Service: Qualitative and Quantitative Assessments of a Service-Learning Approach to American Government

Scholars of public opinion and socialization have documented extensively the declining levels of political knowledge and the increasing levels of political apathy and individualism among young people. The purpose of this paper is to assess an American Government course's ability to affect young people's perceptions of power in the political system and their role as citizens through the use of service-learning. The analysis includes qualitative data collected from students as well as from the community organization involved. Additionally, the results of a quasi-experiment conducted during one semester are presented. The results raise interesting questions not only about service-learning and its impact but also about how we should assess such programs.

The Horse Race: What Polls Reveal as the Election Campaign Unfolds

The horse race of election campaigns is of great interest to scholars of public opinion and the public itself (Iyengar, Norpoth, and Hahn, 2004). In the modern day, in most every democratic country, we have a stream of polls registering electoral preferences during campaigns. In some countries, not a day goes by without a new poll release from one survey house or another. We thus have a lot of data at hand to assess the evolution of preferences over time. The problem is that the different survey houses use different methodologies and these differences matter for the results they report. In the presence of such “house effects,” how can we tell what is happening as the campaign unfolds? That is, how can we tell whether differences in poll results capture real change in electoral preferences and not differences in survey practices themselves? In this manuscript, the authors offer an approach for disentangling house effects from poll results during the course of the election campaign. Using the approach, we can effectively watch the horse race as it actually happens, which the authors demonstrate with pre-election polls from the 2000 US presidential race.