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The article discusses the paper on nonprobability sampling by authors David Dutwin and Trent Buskirk in the issue, commenting on the demographic bias, methodology and references surrounding the paper's research.Topics, including propensity score, the statistician Frederic (Fred) Mosteller's perspective on research bias and telephone survey response rates, are discussed.

It is well documented that survey overreporting of voter turnout due to social desirability bias threatens inference about political behavior. This paper reports four studies that contained question wording experiments to test questions designed to minimize that bias using a "pipeline" approach. The "pipeline" informs survey participants that researchers can perform vote validation to verify turnout self-reports. This approach reduced self-reported turnout by 5.7 points in the 2020 American National Election Study, which represents a majority of the estimated overreporting bias. It reduced reported turnout by 4 points in two nonprobability samples. No effect was found in a third nonprobability study with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Validated vote data also confirm that the pipeline approach reduced overreporting. We tested heterogeneous effects for sophistication and several other variables, but results were inconclusive. The pipeline approach reduces overreporting of voter turnout and produces more accurate estimates of voters' characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even amid the unprecedented public health challenges attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to vaccinating against the novel coronavirus has been both prevalent and politically contentious in American public life. In this paper, we theorize that attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination might "spill over" to shape attitudes toward "postpandemic" vaccination programs and policy mandates for years to come. We find this to be the case using evidence from a large, original panel study, as well as two observational surveys, conducted on American adults during the pandemic. Specifically, we observe evidence of COVID-19 vaccine spillover onto general vaccine skepticism, flu shot intention, and attitudes toward hypothetical vaccines (i.e. vaccines in development), which do not have preexisting attitudinal connotations. Further, these spillover effects vary by partisanship and COVID-19 vaccination status, with the political left and those who received two or more COVID-19 vaccine doses becoming more provaccine, while the political right and the unvaccinated became more anti-vaccine. Taken together, these results point to the salience and politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine impacting non-COVID vaccine attitudes. We end by discussing the implications of this study for effective health messaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discussion is offered on the article on causal inference and survey inference in nonprobability sampling by authors Mercer, Kreuter, Keeter and Stuart within the issue. Topics, including randomization, survey design, telephone surveys, survey response rates, variables, and total survey error (TSE), are discussed.

The 2000 presidential election focused attention on the problem of unrecorded votes, in which a person casts a ballot but fails to record a valid vote for a particular contest. Although much recent research has evaluated voting technologies and their effects on unrecorded votes, there has been little research on the effects of ballot design. We argue that the same theories used to design arid evaluate self-administered surveys can be used to analyze ballot features. We collect and code paper-based ballots used in the 2002 general election from 250 counties in 5 states. We code the ballots in terms of several graphic design elements, including the content and location of ballot instructions and the layout of candidate names and office titles. Our analysis suggests that several ballot features are associated with unrecorded votes (both overvotes and undervotes) in the gubernatorial contests. We also find that ballot design features exacerbate the racial disparity in unrecorded votes. Ballot design can be an important factor in determining whether voters are able to cast a ballot accurately, which can influence the legitimacy of elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares estimates of self-reported substance use and psychological well-being obtained in computer-assisted and paper-and-pencil self-administered surveys. We examine the extent to which mode effects on survey responses are moderated by respondent characteristics and respondent attitudes, including attitudes toward computers, attitudes about confidentiality and privacy, and their general mistrust of others. Respondents age 12-34 were selected through a multistage area probability sample of urban and suburban areas nationally and were randomly assigned to interview mode. There were few main effects of mode on self-reported substance use and well-being. Significant mode-by-age interaction terms revealed that adolescents were more sensitive to mode of administration than older respondents. Adolescents reported significantly higher levels of alcohol use, illicit drug use, and psychological distress in the computer mode than on paper self-administered questionnaires. Significant mode-by-mistrust interactions were also found. Respondents with higher levels of mistrust in others were less likely to report substance use in the computer mode than in the paper-and-pencil format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how an Asian candidate's national origin background affects their perceived ability to represent different constituents. Would Asian voters prefer any Asian candidate over someone who is non-Asian? Using a series of survey experiments that randomly emphasize the national origin backgrounds of two real politicians and a hypothetical politician, I find that politicians who are East or Southeast Asian are viewed as more representative of Asian American interests than those who are South Asian. Nonetheless, respondents agree that Asian politicians, regardless of national origin, will represent Asian Americans more than a non-Asian politician. While national origin background matters, there is still potential for an electoral advantage based on shared Asian panethnicity. These results contribute to our understanding of the salience of panethnic identities in electoral contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans' immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats' aggregate immigration opinions liberalized considerably. We observed increasingly liberal immigration preferences among Democrats of all racial and ethnic backgrounds after 2016, but this trend was especially pronounced among white Democrats. Among Republicans, opinion on immigration remained mostly stable over this period, although in some cases it became more conservative (e.g. border security) and more liberal on others (e.g. amnesty). The marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring immigration opinion in the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What policy changes do people expect from elections, and how do these expectations influence the decision to vote? This paper seeks to understand the relationship between people's expectations and their subsequent voting behavior by examining beliefs about what candidates would actually do if given political power. I start with a survey of political scientists and compare their forecasts about what presidential candidates will accomplish to those of the general population. Public respondents expected much more legislation to result from the 2020 election. This comparison suggests an underestimation by the public of the impediments that the separation of powers poses to passing legislation. The study further reveals that voters expected much more policy change than nonvoters did, with high expectations serving as a strong predictor of validated voter turnout. These results support explanations for the decision to vote that center on the policy benefits that people believe their preferred candidate will deliver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity—or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations of LGBT individuals. Rural identifiers are also less likely to support pro-LGBT policy measures than nonrural identifiers. Nevertheless, I find the magnitude of the effects of rural identity on anti-LGBT views to be surprisingly small. It is also the case that, on average, rural identifiers exhibit net-positive estimations of LGBT individuals and are broadly supportive of LGBT rights, suggesting that elected officials enacting anti-LGBT legislation in rural areas of the United States are potentially out of step with the preferences of their electorate. These findings also have implications for what it means to hold a rural identity beyond a generalized animosity toward urban areas, and for understanding urban-rural divergences in US public opinion on issues such as LGBT rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When individuals picture the two parties, what do they think of? Given the dominant understanding of partisanship as a social identity, understanding the content of these mental images—individuals' stereotypes of the two parties—is essential, as stereotypes play an important role in how identity affects attitudes and behaviors, perceptions of others, and inter-group relations. The existing literature offers three answers to this question: one that claims that people picture the two parties in terms of their constituent social groups, a second that claims that people picture the two parties in terms of policy positions, and a third that claims that people view the two parties in terms of individual traits they associate with partisans. While not mutually exclusive, these theories have different implications for the effects of partisanship and the roots of partisan animosity. This paper adjudicates between these theories by employing a new method that measures stereotype content at the collective and individual level using a conjoint experiment. An important advantage of the conjoint measure is that it allows for the direct comparison of the importance of different attributes, and different kinds of attributes, to the stereotype. Using a pre-registered 2,909-person survey, I evaluate the relative importance of issues, groups, and traits to stereotypes of partisans. I find strong evidence that issue positions and ideological labels are the central elements of partisan stereotypes. I also find that individuals who hold issue- or ideology-based stereotypes are more affectively polarized than those whose stereotypes are rooted in groups or traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don't Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these personality dimensions on the propensity to satisfice in both face-to-face and self-administration modes and in probability and nonprobability samples. People who score high on Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were less likely to be in the top decile of straightlining and midpoint distributions. The findings for Don't Know responding were weaker and only significant for Conscientiousness in the nonprobability sample. We also find large effects across all satisficing indicators for a direct measure of cognitive ability, where existing studies have mostly relied on proxy measures of ability such as educational attainment. Sensitivity analysis suggests the personality effects are likely to be causal in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do elections increase responsiveness of legislators to their constituents? Previous studies that examine the effect of electoral proximity have been unable to hold the roll-call agenda constant and control for differences in unobserved covariates between legislators. This paper utilizes a natural experiment in four state legislatures—Arkansas, Illinois, Florida, and Texas—where term length was randomly assigned. This design compares the responsiveness to constituency opinion of those randomly assigned to a two-year term to those assigned a four-year term on different issue areas, like the economy, environment, and crime. I find no evidence for an electoral proximity effect on responsiveness. In addition, in the Illinois State Senate, the causal effect of electoral proximity on responsiveness is measured on several individual roll-call votes, including the legalization of medical marijuana and gay marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage habits exert particularly detrimental effects in regions with wider and faster internet connections. In such high-information environments, those who more frequently use online social networks, tend to trust those networks, and receive information on EU affairs from these networks have less faith in the EU compared to those in regions with lower-quality internet access. In contrast, in regions with lower broadband access, receiving EU information from social media fosters political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists, party elites, and journalists agree that affective polarization and negative partisanship are serious problems in American politics, but is it possible to reverse this trend and decrease negative outparty affect? Using two original survey experiments that manipulate partisans to think of the Republican and Democratic parties in either expressive or instrumental terms, I find that providing policy information about the parties decreases Republicans' negative affect toward Democrats, while providing party coalition information decreases Democrats' negative affect toward Republicans. Neither type of information, however, causes a significant change in inparty affect. This paper provides evidence, therefore, that an asymmetric informational intervention can decrease negative outparty affect, with important implications for an affectively polarized America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retrospective vote choice is a critical question asked in political science surveys. Yet, this question suffers from persistently high item nonresponse rates, which can bias estimates and limit scholars' ability to make sound inferences. In this paper, we develop a sensitive survey technique to decrease nonresponse to the vote-choice question in a representative, face-to-face survey in Mexico City and Mexico State in 2018–2019. Respondents received different iterations of three treatments: an anonymity guarantee, a confidentiality reminder, and audio-assisted interviewing technology. The use of audio technology combined with a credible anonymity guarantee significantly improved item response. Both anonymity and confidentiality assurances improved the accuracy of response, which more closely resembled official results in the treatment conditions. We then evaluate two non-rival mechanisms that might drive our findings: beliefs about response anonymity and re-engagement with the survey. We find that increased perceptions of response anonymity are associated with improved item response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this era of hyper-polarization and partisan animosity, do people incorporate the viewpoints of their political opponents? Perhaps not. An important body of research, in fact, finds that the provision of information about opponents' policy views leads survey respondents to reflexively adopt the opposite position. In this paper, we demonstrate that such findings arise from incomplete experimental designs and a particular measurement strategy. In a series of experiments that vary information about both parties' positions simultaneously and that solicit continuous, rather than discrete, policy positions, we find that partisans update their beliefs in accordance with the positions of Republican and Democratic leaders alike. Partisans are not perennially determined to disagree. Rather, they are often willing to incorporate opposing viewpoints about a wide range of policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rival partisans tend to perceive ostensibly balanced news coverage as biased against their respective sides; this is known as the "hostile media phenomenon" (HMP). Yet complaints of hostile bias are common in contexts besides the media (e.g. law enforcement and academia). Does a process similar to the HMP occur outside the context of news coverage? And do perceptions of political bias in different contexts share certain similarities? This paper proposes that the HMP is a specific case of a more general hostile mediator phenomenon , where rival partisans perceive various public institutions and organizations that are expected to be neutral as biased against their respective sides. The paper starts by presenting a theoretical framework according to which partisans' bias perceptions are affected by the threat to the power and status of their ingroup posed by a mediator's actions. Evidence from three studies (total N  =   4,164) shows that members of rival ideological camps in Israel perceived the Israeli attorney general and the Israeli police to be biased against their respective camps. An additional study (N  =   2,172) shows that both Democrats and Republicans perceived the social network Facebook to be biased against their side. Moreover, an embedded, pre-registered survey experiment buttresses the causal claim that ingroup-threatening information increases perceptions of hostile bias. The implications of these findings for our understanding of people's bias perceptions, as well as for citizens' trust in public institutions and democratic stability more generally, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party elite cues are among the most well-established influences on citizens' political opinions. Yet, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, constraining the generalizability and theoretical development of party elite cues research. Understanding the causes of variation in party elite cue effects is thus a priority for advancing the field. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues being examined, through a reanalysis of data from existing research combined with an original survey experiment comprising 34 contemporary American policy issues. My estimate of the between-issue variation in effects is substantively large, plausibly equal to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds the size of the between- study variation observed in the existing literature. This result has important implications for our understanding of party elite influence on public opinion and for the methodological practices of party elite cues research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research often identifies evangelical Christians based on a double-barreled, yes-or-no, question asking respondents whether they are an evangelical or born-again Christian. This paper uses a survey experiment to demonstrate the implications of this measurement strategy. Among White Americans, more than one-third of those whom researchers classify as evangelical using the standard double-barreled question actually eschew the evangelical label; the same is true for just under two-thirds of African Americans. Additionally, these born-again non -evangelical Christians hold less conservative political outlooks compared to the self-identified evangelicals with whom they are grouped, and, in fact, oftentimes more closely resemble those who reject both the evangelical and born-again labels. Despite this, the double-barreled identification question produces a White "evangelical or born-again" group that looks politically similar to a composite "evangelical" or "born-again" group based on two questions asking about each identity separately. Finally, important differences appear across race, suggesting that religious and political histories affect how people interpret and respond to double-barreled questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarization and participation are often connected in the political science literature, though sometimes the causality runs participation to polarization and sometimes the causality runs in the reverse direction. In some accounts there is an expectation that increasing participation and increasing polarization generate an ongoing spiral effect. In this paper we evaluate the over-time relationships between polarization and participation by assessing evidence in existing panel and aggregate data. We find that people with more extreme attitudes are more likely to participate in politics. However, only one particular form of participation—persuading others—appears to predict later levels of polarization. Therefore, only persuasion has the necessary correlation and temporal ordering for a feedback loop with more extreme ideology. The implication is that the discipline should pay more attention to interpersonal persuasion as a form of participation in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in one's fellow citizens and in politicians are both conducive to well-functioning government. Beyond their separate importance, it is a long-standing notion that generalized social trust and political trust are connected in a mutually reinforcing relationship that further undergirds democratic governance. While it is well established that social trust and political trust are robustly positively associated at the individual level, there is much less compelling evidence regarding the causal nature of this relationship. Previous analyses have been unable to adequately rule out confounding and correct for reverse causality. This paper tackles these challenges through data and a research design close to ideally suited for addressing the causal status of the relationship. Using a 20-wave individual-level panel survey from Sweden analyzed using a dynamic panel model, we find evidence for a relatively strong positive causal effect of political trust on social trust, but little evidence for the reverse relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how can researchers synthesize survey data with analyses of social media content to study public opinion, and when and how can social media data complement surveys to better inform researchers and policymakers? This paper explores how public opinions might differ between survey and social media platforms in terms of content and audience, focusing on the test case of opinions about autonomous vehicles. The paper first extends previous overviews comparing surveys and social media as measurement tools to include a broader range of survey types, including surveys that result from public deliberation, considering the dialogic characteristics of different social media, and the range of issue publics and marginalized voices that different surveys and social media forums can attract. It then compares findings and implications from analyses of public opinion about autonomous vehicles from traditional surveys, results of public deliberation, and analyses of Reddit posts, applying a newly developed computational text analysis tool. Findings demonstrate that social media analyses can both help researchers learn more about issues that are uncovered by surveys and also uncover opinions from subpopulations with specialized knowledge and unique orientations toward a subject. In light of these findings, we point to future directions on how researchers and policymakers can synthesize survey and social media data, and the corresponding data integration techniques, to study public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, sexism has played an increasingly pivotal role in American politics, and scholarship examining the importance of gender attitudes for political behavior has surged. Researchers have largely relied on the hostile sexism scale to measure prejudice against women, and this scale seems particularly relevant to political science research. However, this scale measures attitudes with an agree-disagree response format, which has long been recognized as a source of substantial measurement error. In this paper, we introduce a revised version of the hostile sexism scale that instead relies on an item-specific question format. Across three studies, we show that the item-specific scale is strongly related to the agree-disagree scale, but that the item-specific version reduces problems with truncation and tends to improve discriminant and predictive validity. Given these advantages, we conclude by recommending that researchers adopt the item-specific hostile sexism scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the migration of public opinion surveys to online platforms has often lowered costs and enhanced timeliness, it has also created new vulnerabilities. Respondents completing the same survey multiple times from different IP addresses, overseas workers posing as Americans, and algorithms designed to complete surveys are among the threats that have emerged in this new era. This paper is an attempt to measure the prevalence of such respondents and their impact on survey data quality, while demonstrating methodological approaches for doing so. Prior studies typically examine just one platform and rely on closed-ended questions and/or paradata (e.g. IP addresses) to identify untrustworthy interviews. This is problematic because such data are relatively easy for bad actors to fake. We carried out a large-scale study with an eye toward overcoming these limitations. This study examines the threat of insincere respondents using large samples from six online platforms: three opt-in survey panels, two address-recruited survey panels, and a crowdsourced sample. Rather than relying solely on closed-ended responses, we incorporated an analysis of 375,834 open-ended answers. By their very nature, open-ended questions offer a more sensitive indicator of whether a respondent is genuine or not. The study found that the incidence of insincere respondents varied significantly by the type of online sample. Critically, insincere respondents did not just answer at random, but rather they tended to select positive answer choices, introducing a small, systematic bias into estimates like presidential approval. Two common data-quality checks failed to detect most insincere respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 presidential election was a jarring event for polling in the United States. Preelection polls fueled high-profile predictions that Hillary Clinton's likelihood of winning the presidency was about 90 percent, with estimates ranging from 71 to over 99 percent. When Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidency, there was a widespread perception that the polls failed. But did the polls fail? And if so, why? Those are among the central questions addressed by an American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) ad hoc committee. This paper presents the committee's analysis of the performance of preelection polls in 2016, how that performance compares to polling in prior elections, and the extent to which performance varied by poll design. In addition, the committee examined several theories as to why many polls, particularly in the Upper Midwest, underestimated support for Trump. The explanations for which the most evidence exists are a late swing in vote preference toward Trump and a pervasive failure to adjust for overrepresentation of college graduates (who favored Clinton). In addition, there is clear evidence that voter turnout changed from 2012 to 2016 in ways that favored Trump, though there is only mixed evidence that misspecified likely voter models were a major cause of the systematic polling error. Finally, there is little evidence that socially desirable (Shy Trump) responding was an important contributor to poll error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents state-level estimates of the 2016 presidential election using data from the ABC News/ Washington Post tracking poll and multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP). While previous implementations of MRP for election forecasting have relied on data from prior elections to establish poststratification targets for the composition of the electorate, in this paper we estimate both turnout and vote preference from the same preelection poll. Through Bayesian estimation we are also able to capture uncertainty in both estimated turnout and vote preferences. This approach correctly predicts 50 of 51 contests, showing greater accuracy than comparison models that rely on the 2012 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement for turnout. While the model does not perfectly estimate turnout as a share of the voting age population, popular vote shares, or vote margins in each state, it is more accurate than predictions published by polling aggregators or other published MRP estimators. The paper also reports how vote preferences changed over the course of the 18-day tracking period, compares subgroup-level estimates of turnout and vote preferences with the 2016 CPS Survey and National Election Pool exit poll, and summarizes the accuracy of the approach applied to the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. The paper concludes by discussing how researchers can make use of this method as an alternative approach to survey weighting and likely voter modeling as well as in forecasting future elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do citizens know about state legislative salaries and how does correct information change opinions of legislators and what citizens believe to be their proper levels of compensation? Through an original experiment with more than 2,000 registered voters from four heterogeneous states, this paper provides evidence that the degree of innumeracy regarding state legislative salaries exceeds innumeracy regarding many other political facts. Further, providing participants with correct information can influence policy opinions directly related to legislative salary but has no effects on indirect policy opinions, such as assessments of legislators themselves. These findings have important implications for scholars of public opinion, factual misperceptions, and state legislative representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how does state indoctrination work? Building upon research on motivated reasoning and family socialization, I argue that only those individuals whose parents have connections to political patronage are subject to state indoctrination because their pro-regime biases transmitted from parents induce higher receptivity prior to government messages. Focusing on political education in China, I conduct a quasi-experimental analysis exploiting the sharp variation in textbook content generated by China's most recent curriculum reform. Results based on a national survey show that the new politics textbooks successfully affected only those individuals whose parents had worked for the government. The finding survives extensive robustness checks and falsification tests. I also consider several alternative explanations of the effects: preference falsification, selective attention, parental indoctrination, and educational quality. This paper not only highlights the role of intergenerational transmission in moderating the effectiveness of state indoctrination but also casts doubt on the actual degree to which regimes can change minds by changing educational content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gendered power imbalances have risen to prominence in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the rise of the #MeToo movement. This paper uses original panel and cross-sectional data to assess the degree to which levels of sexism have changed in response to current events, and finds very little change in levels of sexism from 2004 to 2018. The results also suggest that modern sexism significantly correlates with views undercutting the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct, purporting that #MeToo has gone too far, and opposing mandatory workplace harassment training, among other beliefs. Overall, the evidence suggests that modern sexism is firmly entrenched in the public mind and readily connected to public opinion in the wake of #MeToo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives affective polarization in American politics? One common argument is that Democrats and Republicans are deeply polarized today because they are psychologically different--motivated by diametrically opposed and clashing worldviews. This paper argues that the same psychological motivation--authoritarianism--is positively related to partisan extremism among both Republicans and Democrats. Across four studies, this paper shows that authoritarianism is associated with strong partisanship and heightened affective polarization among both Republicans and Democrats. Thus, strong Republicans and Democrats are psychologically similar, at least with respect to authoritarianism. As authoritarianism provides an indicator of underlying needs to belong, these findings support a view of mass polarization as nonsubstantive and group-centric, not driven by competing ideological values or clashing psychological worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political understanding. The current paper introduces the method of cognitive mapping to measure cognitive complexity regarding citizens' understanding of the financial crisis, one of the most pressing political issues of the past decades. Linking content-analytic data to panel-survey data, we examine how exposure to news about the crisis relates to cognitive complexity. A wide variety of news sources (print, television, and online) were analyzed to take the high-choice media environment into account. Results show that news consumption generally is related to a less cognitively complex understanding of the financial crisis. However, actual exposure to news about the crisis (combined measurement of content analysis and survey data) is positively related to cognitive complexity, particularly among less-educated citizens. In addition, the most prominent topics in news coverage were more frequently associated with the financial crisis, as reflected in the cognitive maps of less-educated citizens exposed to more crisis news. These findings demonstrate the potential of news media to increase citizens' complexity of understanding, especially among the less educated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online surveys, particularly those that draw samples from online panels of experienced respondents, now comprise a large segment of the academic and commercial opinion research markets due to their low cost and flexibility. A growing literature examines the implications of online surveys for data quality, most commonly by comparing demographic and political characteristics of different samples. In this paper, we explore the possibility that personality may differentially influence the likelihood of participation in online and face-to-face surveys. We argue that individuals high in extraversion and openness to experience may be underrepresented, and those low in these traits overrepresented, in professionalized online panels given the solitary nature of repeated survey-taking. Since openness to experience in particular is associated with liberal policy positions, differences in this trait may bias estimates of public opinion derived from professionalized online panels. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 dual-mode American National Election Studies, we compare political preferences and personality traits across parallel face-to-face and online samples. Respondents in the online samples were, on average, less open to experience and more politically conservative on a variety of issues compared to their face-to-face counterparts. This was true especially in 2012, when online respondents were drawn from a large panel of experienced respondents. We also find openness to be negatively related to the number of surveys completed by these respondents. These results suggest that reliance on professionalized survey respondents, who comprise the vast majority of online survey samples, can bias estimates of many quantities of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is reason to believe that an increasing proportion of the news consumers receive is not from news producers directly but is recirculated through social network sites and email by ordinary citizens. This may produce some fundamental changes in the information environment, but the data to examine this possibility have thus far been relatively limited. In the current paper, we examine the changing information environment by leveraging a body of data on the frequency of (a) views, and recirculations through (b) Twitter, (c) Facebook, and (d) email of New York Times stories. We expect that the distribution of sentiment (positive-negative) in news stories will shift in a positive direction as we move from (a) to (d), based in large part on the literatures on self-presentation and imagined audiences. Our findings support this expectation and have important implications for the information contexts increasingly shaping public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many in the survey research community have expressed concern at the growing popularity of nonprobability surveys. The absence of random selection prompts justified concerns about self-selection producing biased results and means that traditional, design-based estimation is inappropriate. This paper seeks to provide insight into the conditions under which nonprobability surveys can be expected to provide estimates free of selection bias. In fields such as epidemiology and economics that routinely work with observational data, researchers have identified the necessary conditions for unbiased estimation of causal effects when treatments are not assigned randomly. Similar conditions apply to survey estimates when respondents are not randomly selected. Drawing on this body of research, we propose a framework composed of three elements that determine the level of selection bias in survey estimates. In this paper, we first provide a general overview of these components and demonstrate the link between causal inference and survey inference in the probability-based setting. Second, we give simplified examples to demonstrate how each of the components can contribute to bias in survey estimates. Finally, we review current practices in the area of nonprobability data collection and estimation, and specify how these methods relate to the elements identified here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of administrative records--data collected by governmental agencies or commercial businesses in the course of administering a program or service--for household enumeration may be one way to significantly reduce Decennial Census costs, particularly in nonresponse follow-up (NRFU). Administrative records suffer the complications of big data in that they are collected for purposes not related to Census enumeration, yet contain a wealth of information relevant to Census enumeration. This paper describes a modeling approach to determine which administrative data are sufficiently reliable to proxy for a field response in a way that reduces costs and balances quality. Specifically, the approach is to (1) develop and assess models to determine characteristics of good-quality administrative records via a retrospective study of linked field and administrative data; and (2) choose a quality threshold, in a statistically defensible way, at which administrative records take the place of field responses. This paper presents empirical results illustrating the cost-quality trade-off of this approach applied to Census enumeration. We assess three classification techniques to further detail the cost-quality trade-off and allow flexibility in balancing predictive power and implementation complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]