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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

What theories explain variation in public opinion toward asylum seekers? We implement a survey experiment in which a representative sample of German residents evaluates vignettes of asylum seekers, which randomly vary attributes that speak to deservingness, economic and religious threat, and gender considerations of attitude formation. We find strong support for deservingness theories. Economic and religious threat theories also receive empirical support. Gender plays a negligible role. Importantly, we also document that economic and—to a lesser extent—religious threat considerations only matter when respondents evaluate economic refugees. By contrast, political refugees are welcomed nearly unconditionally. Our paper thus replicates key findings from Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2016) and Czymara and Schmidt-Catran (2016) using a representative sample and points to an important interaction effect in public opinion formation toward asylum seekers: economic threat only gets activated when refugees' deservingness is in doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the influence of online news consumption on attitudes toward the European Union in a context of protracted economic crisis. Using data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study, we combine location-specific information on broadband availability with respondent geo-location data, which facilitates causal inference about the effects of online news consumption via instrumental variable models. Results show that Irish citizens who source political information online are more prone to blame the EU for the poor state of the economy than those who do not. There is evidence of preference reinforcement among those with negative predispositions toward the EU, but not among pro-EU citizens. We complement this analysis with a study of voting behavior in the European Fiscal Compact Referendum, employing a similar methodological approach. The results from this second survey confirm the anti-EU influence of online news consumption among Irish citizens, although evidence suggests a pro-EU effect among voters who browsed the website of the politically neutral Irish Referendum Commission. Our paper contributes to the literature on public opinion, the EU, and political attitudes in times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European migration and border control has occupied a prominent spot on the European political agenda. The news media present the topic in a polarized fashion and reports conflicting viewpoints on how the European Union (EU) and national governments should address the issue. We argue that this conflict in news messages can have a polarizing effect on public perceptions regarding the EU's performance on this topic, and that this effect can be moderated by the valence of news messages. A two-wave online panel survey experiment was conducted on a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 376). The results indicate that conflict reinforces and thus polarizes policy attitudes, whereas a message's valence can change people's attitudes, which reduces the attitudinal gap. The implications of these findings concerning European border control and migration are discussed in the final section of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens' chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by recent work in the political realm, influence their preferences for protectionism. Examining data from three different national surveys in the U.S. context, I find strong support for the role of these dispositions. In addition to extending our understanding of the antecedents of trade preferences, the present paper has implications for the study of personality and politics, suggesting heterogeneity in the relationship of dispositions to ideology across issue domains. I also discuss the broader implications for American politics, arguing that these findings suggest latent tensions within contemporary party coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author extends his sincere gratitude to the readers of the "Public Opinion Quarterly," and looks back on his achievements as the editor of the publication. Aside from this, he discusses the plans of expanding the magazine which he says, led him to gather data on the processing of methodological and nonmethological papers. He also stresses on the impact of technology on the journal over the past few years, allowing them to incorporate online-only material on a routine basis and publish papers to be used as educational tool and resources.

This article presents the proceedings of the fifty-ninth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). AAPOR focused on "The Image of Public Opinion Research" as a record-breaking 846 researchers gathered May 13-16, 2004 at its fifty-ninth annual conference at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix, Arizona. The call for papers, posters, roundtables, and panel sessions, issued in October 2003, yielded 390 abstracts for papers and poster presentations, 21 panel proposals, and 9 roundtable proposals. At least three members of the conference committee reviewed each proposal. The results of that review allowed a higher rejection rate than last year and a subsequent return to the format of earlier years, paper sessions, panels, roundtables, and posters. A number of events helped people attend to the conference theme, beginning with an invited session Friday morning dealing with issues of primary polling in the 2004 election. There were two sessions Friday afternoon dealing with the conference theme, both focusing on how people perceive polls and public opinion researchers.

During the 2012 election, Americans were evenly divided over the question of whether Mormonism--the religion of one of the candidates--could legitimately be called a Christian religion. This has potentially serious consequences in an electorate with a large Christian majority, and in a country where religious and national identities are closely associated. This paper uses a framework from social identity theory and data from the 2012 ANES Time Series to explain this divide in opinion, which went far beyond traditional evangelical hostility to Mormons and crossed party lines. Because of their theological heterodoxy and cultural difference, Mormons are less likely to be regarded as Christians by other Christians who identify very strongly with their faith. Prototype theory suggests these strong identifiers are more concerned with maintaining strict requirements for group membership, while weaker identifiers are more likely to accept Mormons as Christians. In the context of an election campaign with a Mormon candidate, however, party identity also matters. Christians who identify strongly with the Republican Party are, all things being equal, more likely than weaker party identifiers or Democrats to regard Mormons as Christians, because they want "their" candidate to be part of the religious in-group. All else being equal, voters who did not regard Mormons as Christians were 18 percent less likely to vote for Romney. However, the electoral damage to Romney was mitigated by Republican Party identification, which led many Christian voters to identify Mormons as Christians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time response (RTR) measurement is an important technique for analyzing human processing of electronic media stimuli. Although it has been demonstrated that RTR data are reliable and internally valid, some argue that they lack external validity. The reason for this is that RTR measurement is restricted to a laboratory environment due to its technical requirements. This paper introduces a smartphone app that 1) captures real-time responses using the dial technique and 2) provides a solution for one of the most important problems in RTR measurement, the (automatic) synchronization of RTR data. In addition, it explores the reliability and validity of mobile RTR measurement by comparing the real-time reactions of two samples of young and welleducated voters to the 2013 German televised debate. Whereas the first sample participated in a classical laboratory study, the second sample was equipped with our mobile RTR system and watched the debate at home. Results indicate that the mobile RTR system yields similar results to the lab-based RTR measurement, providing evidence that laboratory studies using RTR are externally valid. In particular, the argument that the artificial reception situation creates artificial results has to be questioned. In addition, we conclude that RTR measurement outside the lab is possible. Hence, mobile RTR opens the door for large-scale studies to better understand the processing and impact of electronic media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the fifty-third annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference took place on May at the Marriott Pavilion Downtown in Saint Louis, Missouri. Official registration was 566, including 77 new members. mere were 159 first timers of which 72 were students. A breakdown of the registration revealed 44 percent affiliated with academic institutions, 37 percent commercial, 10 percent government, 6 percent nonprofit, and 3 percent other. A total of 460 people were listed as participants in a variety of roles: session organizers, plenary speakers, short-course instructors, panelists, chairs, discussants, authors, and presenters of papers. In keeping with the tradition for conferences held during even-numbered years, the conference site was shared by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), whose conference ran May 13-15. Joint AAPOR/WAPOR paper sessions included the themes of public opinion in developing countries, comparisons across cultures, and surveys and the courts.

The received wisdom in the scholarly literature on the US Supreme Court is that the perceived legitimacy of the institution is largely independent of the Court's policy output. Legitimacy is thought to be rooted in more stable factors, such as support for democratic values, and thus to be immune from ideological discontent with any particular decision. While recent research has demonstrated a general association between political predispositions and legitimacy, questions remain about the extent to which the specific decisions of the Court might shape legitimacy judgments in the mass public. In this paper, we examine the relationship between ideology, political sophistication, and evaluations of Supreme Court legitimacy in the aftermath of the recent decision on the Affordable Care Act. Our findings suggest a substantial role for Court policymaking in shaping perceptions of legitimacy in the mass public, but the nature of the relationship is conditional on political sophistication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research examining partisan media effects uses individual differences in exposure to news sources to predict attitude change. In this paper, we improve upon this approach by using variations in cable news coverage to predict subsequent changes in viewer impressions of the candidates. This approach allows us to examine the distinct effects of in-party and out-party candidate coverage. Content analyses and survey data show that partisan media effects result from coverage of the opposition candidate, and not from coverage of the like-minded candidate. Specifically, during the 2008 presidential election, increased coverage of Obama (McCain) on Fox News (MSNBC) made viewers less favorable toward Obama (McCain). Meanwhile, coverage of McCain (Obama) on Fox News (MSNBC) had minimal effects on viewer impressions. These results suggest that media effects persist even during an era dominated by selective exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If nothing else, democratic politics requires compromise. Mass polarization, where citizens disagree strongly and those disagreements magnify over time, presents obvious threats to democratic well-being. The overwhelming presumption is that if polarization is occurring, a substantial portion of it is attributable to the fragmentation attendant an increasingly choice-laden media environment where individuals expose themselves only to opinion-reinforcing information. Under what conditions does mass opinion polarization occur? Through two over-time laboratory experiments involving information choice behavior, this paper considers, first, the effects of slant in one’s information environment on over-time opinion dynamics and, second, the moderating role of attitude importance on those effects. The experiments reveal that, despite similar information search behavior, those with strong attitudes are dogmatic, resisting even substantial contrary evidence; those with weak attitudes, by contrast, hear opposing arguments and develop moderate opinions regardless of the prevalence of those arguments in their environment. Evaluations of information, rather than information search behavior per se, explain why individuals with strong attitudes polarize and those with weak attitudes do not. Polarization therefore seems to require more than media fragmentation and, in fact, a more important factor may be the strength of citizens’ prior attitudes on particular issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research into place effects has provided mixed evi-dence about the effect of geography on public opinion. Much of the work finding a relationship is susceptible to methodological criticisms of spuriousness or endogeneity. In this paper, I leverage a unique research design to examine the influence of residential setting on environmental attitudes regarding water use. The findings indicate that local drought conditions increase individuals' level of concern about the nation's water supply. In addition, drought conditions are related to public atti-tudes toward water use regulation, with those living in drought-afflicted counties more likely to support government regulation. This study pro-vides a firm foundation for research attempting to demonstrate that local conditions have a causal effect on public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should people discuss their vote choices with others? On one hand, many people argue that openly deliberating with others can lead to better decision-making. On the other hand, institutions like the secret ballot imply that keeping these choices secret has value, perhaps as a means of insulating people from unwanted social pressures. This paper examines public attitudes about whether it is best to discuss one's choices with others or to treat them as personal matters. We find that the American public is evenly divided on this issue. We also find that those who are least confident in their political capabilities--those who arguably could benefit most from deliberating about their vote choices--are most likely to say that choices should be treated as personal matters. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of political deliberation in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should people discuss their vote choices with others? On one hand, many people argue that openly deliberating with others can lead to better decision-making. On the other hand, institutions like the secret ballot imply that keeping these choices secret has value, perhaps as a means of insulating people from unwanted social pressures. This paper examines public attitudes about whether it is best to discuss one’s choices with others or to treat them as personal matters. We find that the American public is evenly divided on this issue. We also find that those who are least confident in their political capabilities—those who arguably could benefit most from deliberating about their vote choices—are most likely to say that choices should be treated as personal matters. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of political deliberation in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how well interviewers can judge which cases are likely to cooperate with a survey request and which are unlikely. Interviewers in a telephone survey rated the response likelihood of each case after every call they placed on a scale from zero to 100, where zero meant that the case would never cooperate and 100 meant that the case certainly would. Analyses of the ratings reveal that they do correlate with the cooperation rate among the cases, and that the likelihood ratings are influenced in the expected directions by case- and call-level attributes. However, there are also strong interviewer effects. The ratings show promise for use in responsive design procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades, numerous surveys have asked Americans the “Most Important Problem” (MIP) question: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Global warming and the environment have rarely been cited by more than a small number of respondents in these surveys in recent years, which might seem to suggest that these have not been the most important issues to Americans. This paper explores the possibility that an additional method of assessing the public's priorities might support a different conclusion. Three experiments embedded in national surveys (two done via the Internet, the other done by telephone) show that when asked the traditional MIP question, respondents rarely mentioned global warming or the environment, but when other respondents were asked to identify the most serious problem that will face the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it, global warming and the environment were the most frequently mentioned problems. Furthermore, a large majority of Americans indicated that they wanted the federal government to devote substantial effort to combating problems that the world will face in the future if nothing is done to stop them. Thus, future surveys might include both versions of the MIP question to more fully document Americans’ priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While a great deal of research has focused on understanding the foundations of public support for American courts, scant attention has been paid to the role of the media for such attitudes. Given the media’s demonstrated ability to influence public opinion, this remains a substantial gap in the literature. In the present paper we examine how different types of media—sensationalist (i.e., political radio and cable news) or sober (i.e., newspapers and network news) —influence individuals’ attitudes toward both the U.S. Supreme Court and courts at the state level. In line with our predictions, we find that sensationalist media exposure depresses both diffuse and specific support for American courts. Additionally, our results call into question the unconditional nature of the ubiquitous sophistication-approval relationship. We find that sophistication’s positive effect on court attitudes is conditional on an individual’s particular source of political information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The presidential nomination calendar has become increasingly front loaded in recent years as more and more states try to squeeze into the earliest possible dates. This front loading has produced conflict between the national parties and the states and culminated in a nomination calendar with little rhyme or reason to its schedule. Thus, various reform proposals have been suggested. This paper reviews public opinion on two avenues. First, it reports on public evaluations of the current system, which is lukewarm, but public dissatisfaction tends to focus on elements other than the calendar. Second, public support for regional primaries, population-based groupings of primaries and a single-day national primary are examined in polls from 1968 to 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survey research has been frequently criticized for reflecting hastily drawn and poorly formed responses as opposed to more deeply held attitudes or opinions. James Fishkin (1991 ), for example, has argued that public opinion surveys miss the normatively and substantively important deliberative component of public opinion formation. In this paper, we consider two questions relative to deliberative public opinion. First, who shows up for deliberative opinion forums? And second, what difference does their participation make in terms of their general attitudes toward the political process? To answer these questions, we make use of a unique set of data collected as part of a series of monthly television programs, Louisiana Public Square, which aired on Louisiana Public Broadcasting from June 2004 to March 2005. These programs covered a range of issues (e.g., public education, roads and transportation, health care, religion, and public life) and included participants selected using random digit dialing. Each month, participants learned about the issues, discussed the issues with a trained moderator, and directed questions to relevant state policy makers. Data were collected on relevant attitudes both before and after the program, allowing us to (1) compare attitudinal and demographic differences among participants (preshow and postshow) and nonparticipants (preshow only), and (2) analyze attitude change among participants particularly with respect to levels of trust in government and perceptions of the responsiveness of the political process to public concerns. According to our results, the socioeconomic biases that predict other forms of participation are equally present when considering participation in a deliberative forum. Unlike other forms of participation, however, the deliberative forums considered in the present analysis attracted more ideologically moderate participants who valued the role of discussion in democratic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the surge and decline of presidential approval following rally events. We develop a theoretical framework grounded in psychology and political entrepreneurship to explain not only who joins and leaves the rally, but why. We argue that threatening events such as 9/11 heighten the link between national identity and presidential approval, but this link fades as political entrepreneurs make partisan identities more salient. We find support for these propositions using analysis of pooled cross-sectional survey datasets and content analysis of elite discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web surveys are becoming increasingly popular, as reflected in the growing research on web survey methodology (e.g., Couper 2000; Couper, Traugott, and Lamias 2001; Crawford, Couper, and Lamias 2001; Dillman and Bowker 2001; Dillman et al. 1998; Tourangeau, Couper, and Steiger 2001). Despite this spate of recent research, it is still not entirely clear if the techniques used to increase response rates in paper and telephone surveys will directly translate to web surveys. Yet understanding which techniques increase response rates in web surveys is increasingly important. Researchers are faced with decreasing response rates in surveys (Smith 1995; Steeh 1981), as well as increased competition with marketers and spammers on the Internet, for the cooperation of respondents (one recent study predicts that by 2006 e-mail users will receive over 1,400 spam messages per year [Tynan 2002]). Without such knowledge, web surveys may become less useful as a tool for survey research. Previous research on web surveys has focused on such areas as coverage and sampling error, effects of multiple follow-ups, controlling survey access, and survey appearance. Very little research has been conducted on how the process by which members of the sample are contacted affects the probability of response. In our review of the literature, we did not discover any studies examining aspects of the e-mail contact, with the exception of a study by Cook, Heath, and Thompson (2000). The meta-analysis of 68 web surveys by those researchers indicates that personalized contacts have a positive impact on response rates... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the 2002 annual membership meeting called to order by outgoing American Association for Public Opinion Research president Don Dillman at Saint Pete Beach, Florida in May. Secretary-treasurer Rob Santos reported that the financial status is good. The association has a surplus of $40,000. In the membership committee report, Dawn Nelson reported that the association have 1,378 members. A variety of outreach efforts were made, including sending e-mails and letters and making phone calls to lapsed members. Scott Keeter reported that the Standards Committee was enlarged to include members from each chapter and Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics and Consortium of Social Science Associations representatives. Diane O'Rourke, chair of the Endowment Committee, asked the members present to review the conference program booklet. They show the goals of the endowment, the status of the funds and the names of the members and organizations who have contributed since the inception of the fund in October 2000. Dick Kulta, reported that despite concerns about attendance after September 11, 2001, numbers were fine. He received 332 submissions resulting in 229 papers, 59 sessions, 10 roundtable discussions and 3 poster sessions.

The fifty-sixth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) was held at the Hilton Montreal Bonaventure in Montreal, Quebec on May 17 to 20, 2001. The conference theme was Making Connections. Some eight hundred public opinion researchers accepted the invitation to meet colleagues and friends and to participate in the interdisciplinary program. The special character of the annual conference clearly distinguishes it from other professional meetings. Despite steady growth in attendance over recent years, it is a relatively small conference. Its limited duration, its submission review process and its carefully variegated slate of paper session topics constrain the number of opportunities for being on the program. With the traditional meals and social events, the AAPOR conference presents a higher quality, more intimate and more interdisciplinary experience than can be found at many academic, governmental, or commercial meetings. The structure of the meeting limits, among other things, opportunities to attract new AAPOR members, the willingness of exhibitors and publishers to display their wares, the range of topics covered in the program and the conference revenue that AAPOR could employ for worthwhile purposes.

Although Combs and Welch reported a trend of decreasing racial differences in abortion attitudes, Hall and Ferree used data from the 1982 General Social Survey to argue that racial differences were not declining This paper updates this debate through the 1988 General Social Survey and concludes that racial differences have indeed declined over time. Moreover, when new religious items introduced in the 1984 survey are included in the multivariate analysts, blacks are not significantly different from whites in their support of legal abortion This finding obscures a more interesting pattern, however, of offsetting, statistically significant racial differences among respondents of the same gender--black men are significantly less supportive of abortion than white men, and black women are significantly more supportive than white women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Findings from analyses presented in this paper, using data from a Roper survey, suggest that the role of attitudes toward homosexuals should be at the center of future explorations of the relationship between the media coverage of AIDS and public opinion. While the available data are limited, our analyses raise the possibility that anti-gay attitudes constrain the ability of the media to effectively communicate information about risk factors and how the disease is transmitted. Researchers need to explore the possibility that anti-gay attitudes stand between media information and public knowledge and public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A burgeoning literature suggests that self-interest has little influence on policy preferences. In sharp contrast are the findings discussed in this paper: we show that self-interest plays a decisive role in shaping attitudes toward smoking restrictions and cigarette taxes. Data from two random samples of California adults collected by the Field Institute in April 1987 and February 1984 indicate that nonsmokers are far more enthusiastic about tightening smoking restrictions and increasing cigarette taxes than smokers, particularly heavy smokers. We conclude by discussing several explanations for the apparent discrepancy between these results and the pattern of null findings characteristic of the self-interest literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open-ended questions are frequently used by survey researchers to measure public opinion. Some scholars, however, have doubts about how accurately these kinds of questions measure the views of the public. A chief concern is that the questions tap, in part, people's ability to articulate a response, not their underlying attitudes. This paper tests whether this concern is warranted. Using open-ended questions from the Center for Political Studies, I show that almost all people respond to open-ended questions. The few individuals who do not respond appear uninterested in the specific question posed, not unable to answer such questions in general. These findings should increase our confidence in work of scholars who have relied on open-ended questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information the sixtieth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The 2005 conference of the AAPOR was held during May 12-15 at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, and set records in several categories. First, there were 913 registrants, easily topping last year's record attendance of 843 in Phoenix, Arizona. Among these attendees were five Burns "Bud" Roper Fellows, whose expenses were covered by AAPOR member Elmo Burns Roper's generous endowment to AAPOR. Second, there was also a record number of papers and authors--a total of 318 oral presentations and 75 posters with about 1,450 authors. Third, another record was surpassed with 25 exhibitors participating. Likewise, the AAPOR book exhibit, organized by Patricia Moy, associate conference chair-elect, had volumes from 12 publishers. Fourth, Karl Feld, member of conference operations committee at AAPOR, led the effort in recruiting nearly double the level of sponsorships of last year's conference.

This article informs about the 1991 Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) which was held in Phoenix, Arizona on May 16-19, at the Pointe at Squaw Peak. The 3-day conference consisted of 3 plenary sessions, 1 didactic seminar, 31 regular paper sessions, 10 roundtables, and 4 scheduled meetings. The tally of all names listed in the program-including session chairpersons, discussants, roundtable panelists, paper givers and coauthors, committee members, AAPOR secretariat, and student helpers, indicates that approximately three hundred fifty different people contributed to the intellectual content and smooth conduct of the conference program. The AAPOR Award for exceptionally distinguished achievement was presented to Joe Belden. The AAPOR Student Paper Award went to Martin Gilens of the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, Diana Druker and Toby Goldberg, of Rosenberg and Druker, were honored with special plaques for their long years of service as the AAPOR secretariat.

This article reports on the proceedings of the forty-fifth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), held in May 1989, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The four-day Conference consisted of 27 AAPOR paper panels, 5 WAPOR paper panels, 15 roundtables, two plenaries, and one didactic session. Together, these sessions included over 175 different presentations. The tally of all names listed in the program-including session chairpersons, discussants, roundtable panelists, paper givers and coauthors-indicates that 280 different persons contributed to the intellectual content of the conference program in some direct fashion. The two, evening plenary sessions focused on "Perestroika, Glasnost, and Public Opinion in the Soviet Union" and "Newspapers and Television as Election Pollsters: Do They Do Anything Right?" The didactic session was on "Designing Good Graphs." The AAPOR Award for exceptionally distinguished achievement was presented to Herbert E. Krugman.

This article presents a note from the editor about what is included in the fall edition of this journal. The American Association for Public Opinion Research is included, with the conference proceedings and presentations and papers appearing on the online edition only. Awards, the presidential address and minutes of annual business are presented in both the online and print versions.