Public Opinion Scholars Research Articles

COVID-19, Diffuse Anxiety, and Public (Mis)Trust in Government: Empirical Insights and Implications for Crime and Justice

Given that trust in government is a critical feature of a well-functioning democracy, research into its determinants has long been a priority among public opinion scholars. The consensus in the literature is that short-term factors drive the ebbs and flows of public trust, and a climate of mistrust has significant consequences on the government's ability to deliver on policies and enforce the law. Despite decades of extensive research on public trust, changing circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic support the need to investigate the factors shaping trust in this distinct period. This article, using data from the American National Election Study, explores how economic, social, and political anxieties pervasive throughout the pandemic influence trust in the United States government. Findings from ordered logistic regression analyses indicate that public trust in government is associated with views of the government's COVID-19 response, beliefs about the state of the country and government corruption, economic anxieties, and concerns about election fraud and the status of American democracy. Findings also reveal that sentiments toward institutions—including the police and the Center for Disease Control—contribute to variability in public trust. The implications of these findings for criminal justice research and policy are also considered.

Studying dimensions of representation: introducing the Belgian RepResent panel (2019–2021)

This research note presents the RepResent Belgian Panel (RBP). The RBP is a voter panel survey consisting of four waves fielded to a sample of voters in Belgium around the May 2019 federal, regional, and European elections in Belgium. It provides unique data on about 250 variables for a quota sample of the same respondents, pre-2019 elections (N = 7351), post-2019 elections (N = 3909), one year after the elections (N = 1996), and 2 years after the elections (N = 1119). The RBP panel dataset was designed to analyse voters’ political attitudes and behaviours, notably on different dimensions of democratic representation, and with a specific focus on democratic resentment (e.g. citizens’ attitudes towards democracy such as distrust and alienation, but also behaviours such as abstention, protest, or voting for anti-establishment parties). Its longitudinal structure allows to explore the political dynamics at play in Belgium throughout the lengthy government formation process. Finally, the last two waves of the RBP were fielded during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing to explore public opinion before and during this global crisis. The RBP should be of interest to scholars of public opinion and electoral studies.

Opting for Opt‐outs? National Identities and Support for a Differentiated EU

AbstractAn extensive literature investigates individual support for European integration. However, support for differentiated integration has only recently become an important topic of study for public opinion scholars. Previous literature on this issue has not probed how differentiated integration is shaped by exclusively national identities and whether the effect varies by how differentiation has been framed. Using survey data from 2020 to 2021, I show that exclusively national citizens are most likely to support differentiated integration that allows for greater national autonomy and may oppose differentiation whose primary goal is to facilitate further integration. However, I find no clear link between elite framing of differentiated integration and popular support for it. This raises important questions both about what kind of differentiated integration will enjoy public legitimacy and how cues shape support for European Union (EU) differentiation.

Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness, by Peter Jones and Steven King

Reviewed by: Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness by Peter Jones and Steven King Marjorie Levine-Clark (bio) Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness, by Peter Jones and Steven King; pp. ix + 136. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $69.99, $54.99 ebook. Peter Jones and Steven King’s little book, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England, explores demands for workhouse reform during the nineteenth century. It stands out as truly innovative in poor law literature while also engaging scholars of journalism and public opinion. The authors make three significant interventions (and several smaller ones) into poor law historiography, each introduced in the three main chapters of the book. Chapter 1 shows that historians need to reconsider the chronology and content of the resistance to deterrent workhouses. Chapter 2 introduces readers to Joseph Rowntree, an influential “amateur workhouse inspector and journalist,” “entirely neglected” in histories of the poor law (4). Most importantly, perhaps, the authors demonstrate in chapter 3 that (male) paupers inserted themselves in debates about workhouse reform. The study is deeply archival, analyzing sources from the massive MH 12 series of thousands of volumes in the National Archives in London. MH 12 has routinely been mined by historians to find correspondence between local poor law officials and central poor law authorities to tell stories of specific poor law unions. Jones and King use the collection differently. As principal members of the larger project “In Their Own Write: The Lives and Letters of the Poor 1834–c.1900,” they systematically scoured the MH 12 series to locate the letters of paupers across the volumes. (They expect to find 20,000 to 30,000 letters when the project is complete.) This broad look at the series also unearthed the prolific record of a man like Rowntree. In addition to their close archival readings, the authors employed digital searching of the online British Library Newspaper Archive to study the ways that the language relating to poor law reform changed over time. These two approaches to text prove richly rewarding in complicating our received historical narratives. Parts of this research have been introduced and published previously, most notably in the authors’ own edited volume Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws (2015), which underscores the agency of the poor. Pulling the research together in one book, however, allows Jones and King to address more substantively continuities across the Old Poor Law and the New and when significant changes occurred, as well as to investigate more thoroughly the specifically Victorian aspects of their material and arguments. Chapter 1 tells the fascinating story of rhetorical and thematic shifts in criticisms of the workhouse from the Old Poor Law through the end of the nineteenth century. The authors convincingly show that both the idea of the deterrent workhouse and opposition to that idea existed long before the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. It was the New Poor Law, however, that galvanized resistance and regular attacks in the local and national press. Using the results of digital newspaper searching, the authors illustrate that a language of “abuse” and “cruelty” that followed the establishment of the work-house system changed in the second half of the century to a language of “scandal” (1). While scandal certainly encompassed distinct workhouse abuses, it more importantly came to stand for a general critique of the workhouse that came to dominate [End Page 727] the pages of newspapers. Jones and King insist that “something clearly happened in the 1860s” to shift the public discourse to emphasize the need to hold poor law officials accountable to those for whom they were responsible: the poor themselves (23). This is a persuasive new way of understanding workhouse scandal. As Jones and King note, scholars have tended to use scandal narrowly to focus on individual horrors at single workhouses. The authors’ revisioning of scandal as a broad public concern with the management of workhouses and the care of the poor transforms the story of the Victorian Poor Law in creative ways. In chapter 2 the authors add more to this story by examining the...

Whose lives matter? Race, public opinion, and military conflict

ABSTRACT This paper examines how race affects attitudes towards conflict beyond the water’s edge. While prior literature largely assumes that all casualties affect voters’ attitudes similarly, we argue that attitudes toward casualties are importantly shaped by racial-group identities. More specifically, we argue that domestic responses to international events – namely American casualties in military conflict – are conditioned by individuals’ attitudes and biases toward the race of fallen soldiers. Using a novel survey experiment, we find that while people become more supportive of conflict when informed of any soldier’s death, support for escalating conflict only increases when the fallen soldiers have Pakistani and African American names. Our results suggest that people are more resistant to conflict when casualties of the war effort are perceived as belonging to their racial in-group, and less averse to those perceived as belonging to their racial out-group. This research is theoretically significant as it speaks to the fields of American politics; public opinion; international relations; and race, ethnicity, and politics. Further, this study demonstrates the need for scholars of public opinion and foreign policy to pay greater attention to race in future research, and highlights the importance of taking heterogeneity of racial-group identities seriously in social science.

“I Will Bless Those Who Bless You”: Evangelicalism and Support for Israel in Latin America

AbstractThe relations of the Evangelical movement and Israel have drawn the attention of many scholars of religion, public opinion, and political science in the last two decades. This study examines the influence of Evangelicals on their country's policy toward Israel. I conduct the first quantitative, cross-national research, investigating the links between the size of the Evangelical population of a country and its support for Israel. Analyzing 198 UN General Assembly votes of 18 Latin American countries from 2009 to 2019, my results show that as the Evangelical population in a country grows, so does its support for Israel. Unpredictably, I also find that a state of armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians does not decrease the support for Israel.

Political Distinctiveness and Diversity Among LGBT Americans

AbstractAt least partly due to data limitations, academic analyses of public opinion rarely acknowledge lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities. Our models of political attitudes almost always overlook respondents’ sexual orientation and gender identities, and targeted research on the views of LGBT people is uncommon. This omission has obscured both the distinctiveness of LGBT Americans and the diversity within the group. Using recent large-N surveys, this article shows that LGBT Americans are distinctively liberal compared to otherwise similar straight and cisgender respondents—in their general political predispositions, electoral choices, and attitudes on a wide range of policy matters. At the same time, there is substantial diversity within the community—bisexual and transgender respondents are frequently less liberal than lesbians and gay men. Analysis of intersecting identities reveals substantial differences between bisexual men and bisexual women, but little evidence of diversity based on gender within lesbian/gay and transgender subgroups. Given these findings, public opinion scholars should routinely incorporate measures of LGBT identities in their analyses, alongside race, gender, class, and other politically salient respondent characteristics.

“We are Propagandists for Democracy”: The Institute for Propaganda Analysis’ Pioneering Media Literacy Efforts to Fight Disinformation (1937–1942)

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) advocated for “propaganda literacy” against the backdrop of rising nationalism before and during World War II (1937–1942). Through a historical analysis of unpublished archival papers, notes, correspondence, newspaper articles, and the Institute’s publications, this article shows how the IPA raised awareness and highlighted the need for information literacy during a time that precedes modern attempts to promote critical thinking and counter one-sided views. Supported by a network of public opinion scholars, educators, and editors, these anti-propaganda efforts gained momentum. Initially, the IPA’s monthly newsletter Propaganda Analysis and its educational programs, specialized leaflets, and publicity campaigns were received favorably by the public. But critics in government and the press attacked the IPA’s platform. By early 1942, the IPA could neither overcome its financial struggles nor thwart social and political pressures to cede its work, perceived as “un-American” in light of the US’s war mobilization.

Where Policies and Politics Diverge

AbstractHow citizens hold government accountable in democratic systems is one of the fundamental questions of political science and has long been of interest to scholars of public opinion. Accountability for the performance of government requires individuals to make accurate evaluations of the effects of policy decisions, and to trace responsibility for policy decisions to the appropriate politician or political party. In this paper, we study the question of democratic accountability in the context of the health insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act. Not surprisingly, how citizens evaluate the state of the world and locate responsibility has less to do with marketplace performance, and much more to do with political allegiance. However, we theorize and find evidence that supports two substantial exceptions to the overwhelming role of partisan identification: Both political independents and those with personal policy experience are capable of linking objective conditions with broader political assessments. These findings have important implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and for the design of public policies in a federal system.

Us Over Here Versus Them Over There…Literally: Measuring Place Resentment in American Politics

Political scientists are accustomed to imagining electoral politics in geographical terms. For instance, there is a “red America” that largely covers the country’s expansive heartland and there is a “blue America” mostly confined to the coasts. Until recently, however, public opinion scholars had largely lost sight of the fact that the places where people live, and people’s identification with those places, shape public opinion and political behavior. This paper develops and validates a flexible psychometric scale measure of a key political psychological dimension of place: place resentment. Place resentment is hostility toward place-based outgroups perceived as enjoying undeserved benefits beyond those enjoyed by one’s place-based ingroup. Regression results indicate that males, ruralites, younger Americans, those high in place identity, and those high in racial resentment are more likely to harbor higher levels of place resentment.

Was There a Culture War? Partisan Polarization and Secular Trends in US Public Opinion

According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divides between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades have taken place on moral issues. We find that the process...

Combat Experience and the Foreign Policy Positions of Veterans

ObjectivePrior work on the effect of combat on veterans typically measures combat experience as a dichotomous event. I extend work in this area by theorizing and empirically accounting for the number of unique combat experiences a veteran endures and how that associates with the veteran's outlook on foreign policy.MethodsI utilize an original survey that asks for multiple types of military combat experience, as well as foreign policy positions.FindingsConsistent with previous research, I find that veterans tend to be more hawkish than civilians. When I account for veterans’ number of unique combat experiences, however, I find that the more combat experiences that veterans endure, the less hawkish their foreign policy positions are. Moreover, consistent with literature from military psychology, this association only holds for veterans who express more regret about their time in the military.ConclusionsThe results should encourage public opinion scholars to consider the effects that the number of individual combat event experiences and regret have on veterans' issue positions more broadly.

Fear, Institutionalized Racism, and Empathy: The Underlying Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Attitudes

ABSTRACTFor nearly 75 years, scholars of American public opinion have sought to measure whites’ attitudes toward blacks: social scientists have invented and revised ways to measure what we could refer to as “racial prejudice.” With each revision, scholars who believe they have captured new forms of racial animus are met with opposition from those who believe that old-fashioned anti-black affect is a thing of the past. We directly answer these claims by collecting a surfeit of attitudinal measures to simultaneously estimate the relationship between cognitive beliefs about the racial status quo and emotional reactions to racism. First, we uncover that two higher-order dimensions undergird whites’ racial attitudes. Second, we validate a four-item version of our new battery using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

Evidence of Partisan Agenda Fragmentation in the American Public, 1959–2015

Abstract This research examines the extent to which partisan agenda fragmentation is occurring within the American public. Though numerous scholars of public opinion and political communication have warned of the deleterious effects of agenda fragmentation, to this point such fragmentation has been demonstrated only across a small number of issues over short periods of time. This research is the first to utilize both a large set of issues and a long time frame to assess the state of partisan agendas from 1959 to 2015 through the use of individual-level Gallup’s “Most Important Problem” polls. Findings show that the public agenda has fragmented on a large number of issues, in terms of both the level of and shifts in attention that partisans accord to issues of the day. Additionally, this research highlights the importance of recent increases in agenda diversity and carrying capacity to fragmentation, demonstrating that while the presence of large, obtrusive issues tends to be associated with correspondence in partisan agendas, the ordering of partisan issue agendas has decoupled substantially in recent decades.

Who Wants to Make America Great Again? Understanding Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

AbstractWhite evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, producing extensive debate as to who evangelicals are, what it means to be an evangelical in the United States today, and whether the electoral results are surprising or not. This paper offers empirical clarity to this protracted discussion by asking and answering a series of questions related to Trump's victory in general and his support from white evangelicals in particular. In doing so, the analyses show that the term “evangelical” has not become a synonym for conservative politics and that white evangelical support for Trump would behigherif public opinion scholars used a belief-centered definition of evangelicalism rather than relying on the more common classification strategies based on self-identification or religious denomination. These findings go against claims thatnominalevangelicals, those who call themselves evangelicals but are not religious, make up the core of Trump's support base. Moreover, strong electoral support among devout evangelicals is not unique to the 2016 election but rather is part of a broader trend of evangelical electoral behavior, even when faced with non-traditional Republican candidates. Finally, the paper explores why white evangelicals might support a candidate like Trump. The paper presents evidence that negative partisanship helps explain why devout evangelicals—despite Trump's background and behaviors being cause for concern—coalesced around his presidential bid. Together, the findings from this paper help make sense of both the 2016 presidential election and evangelical public opinion, both separately and together.

Cognitive Shortcuts and Public Support for Intervention

Scholars of public opinion on military intervention agree that survey respondents make judgments from limited information. Yet researchers still question whether ordinary Americans reflect elite attitudes or instead reach their own “pretty prudent” conclusions from the stated principal policy objective (PPO). This article adjudicates the debate while incorporating lessons from the study of bounded rationality. Evidence comes from an original data set of aggregate US public opinion, covering 1,080 nationally representative survey items about launching operations, across thirty-five countries, during 1981 to 2016. Tests show that PPO matters: pursuing “internal policy change” is less popular than restraining international aggression. However, language reflecting White House cues and one prominent cognitive shortcut (the “availability heuristic”) statistically and substantively outperforms PPO at predicting intervention support. The results indicate that when ordinary Americans are polled about using force against salient foes (Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), elements of bounded rationality can overtake the prudence expressed toward less vivid problems.

Policy Ideology in European Mass Publics, 1981–2016

Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservatism, relative economic conservatism, social conservatism, and immigration conservatism of men and women in three age categories in each country. Aggregating the group-level estimates yields estimates of the average conservatism in national publics in each biennium between 1981–82 and 2015–16. The four measures exhibit contrasting cross-sectional cleavages and distinct temporal dynamics, illustrating the multidimensionality of mass ideology in Europe. Subjecting our measures to a series of validation tests, we show that the constructs they measure are distinct and substantively important and that they perform as well as or better than one-dimensional proxies for mass conservatism (left–right self-placement and median voter scores). We foresee many uses for these scores by scholars of public opinion, electoral behavior, representation, and policy feedback.

The Rise and Decline of “Gender Gaps” in Support for Military Action: United States, 1986–2011

In the past several decades, many scholars of public opinion in the United States have argued that American women are less likely than American men to endorse military action as a means to deal with international problems. Evidence for this “gender gap” has been found in studies of public opinion during major international conflicts (Bendyna et al. 1996; Wilcox, Ferrara, and Allsop 1993), as well as studies of longitudinal trends that examined pooled data sets from multiple conflict periods (Berinsky 2009; Burris 2008; Fite, Genest, and Wilcox 1990; Shapiro and Mahajan 1986). Researchers sometimes view men's generally greater rates of support for military actions as part of a more general “gender gap” phenomenon in U.S. politics, but the cumulative evidence has suggested that foreign policy issues and questions of peace/war generate the widest and most consistent gender gaps (see Holsti 2004, 209–10 for a review).

Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction

In Invisible Sovereign Mark G. Schmeller notes that although historians have not ignored public opinion, no book-length studies and few scholarly articles on the subject exist. Historians who study the topic often complain that nonspecialists do not use the concept carefully and precisely and therefore fail to learn from the methods and ideas of public opinion scholars. Schmeller's observations prompted me to recall my book Beware the People Weeping (1982), to which I blithely appended the subtitle “Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.” While the book generally received positive reviews as the first work about Abraham Lincoln's death by an academic historian, several critics asked what I meant by the term public opinion and how I had measured it. Just because I had utilized a large number of newspapers, could I really claim to understand how public opinion affected the pursuit, trial, and punishment of the Lincoln assassins?

Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy since 9/11. By Anthony R.DiMaggio. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. 432 pp.

Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy since 9/11. By Anthony R. DiMaggio. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. 432 pp. The president of the United States has an integral role in shaping public opinion on American foreign policy issues via major news media sources. In supporting this point, Anthony R. DiMaggio's Selling War, Selling Hope weaves a compelling narrative about America's foreign policy since September 11, 2001. The narrative includes as its primary set of agents Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, major news outlets, and the American public. It focuses on the presidential framing of fear, the communication of terrorist threats, and the hope of defeating terrorists and instilling democratic processes globally. Journalists, in deference to news practices of objectivity and sourcing, often reproduce these presidential messages for the public. The book's case studies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Arab Spring, Benghazi, Syria, and the Islamic State are replete with multiple forms of data (i.e., content analyses and text searches of presidential communications and news stories, public opinion surveys, experiments, government documents, and secondary foreign policy sources) to support arguments about the mediated influence of political elites on foreign policy-related public opinion. DiMaggio's ambitious use of data makes his findings relevant to scholars of public opinion, journalism, international relations, and presidential communication and rhetoric. The book focuses on the president and his communication as the crucial elements in understanding the relationship among elite leadership, news media, and the public. DiMaggio tracks key word usage in presidential communications along with their appearance in subsequent news accounts to illustrate the (in)effectiveness of executive appeals. This approach has considerable merit while simultaneously introducing areas of inquiry for future research. For instance, is there a pattern in presidential uses of the rhetoric of fear and the rhetoric of hope? Here, the author illustrates how both Bush and Obama shifted between the language of hope and fear within and across foreign policy cases. Exploring the factors behind these communicative shifts (e.g., presidential approval, divided government) could unearth patterns in how presidents communicatively construct their powers as Commander in Chief. The political-media discourse (p. 7) that DiMaggio focuses on also includes the coverage granted in major news outlets to presidential messages and administration officials, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, CBS, NBC, Fox News, and MSNBC. Building on previous research related to the indexing of foreign policy opinions (e.g., W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, When The Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007]), the author documents how media deference to official sources privileges administration officials on foreign policy. …