Search

The relationship between ethnic diversity and social solidarity has become increasingly tenuous with the advance of globalization. Immigrant access to the welfare state has been a salient issue throughout the West recently, most especially in Europe after the enlargement of the European Union eastwards in 2004 and the migration crisis of 2015 (Reeskens and van der Meer 2018). Migration and diversity have been attributed with stimulating welfare chauvinism, which has led to a burgeoning body of research into this line of political inquiry (Kitschelt 1997). Previous research has largely focused on the national identity of the majority population by measuring the nature of their identification with the nation. However, this focus is inadequate because it leaves out how the majority population perceives the relationship of immigrants to the nation. If immigrants are perceived by the majority as being less committed to the national community, they are likely to suffer from “membership penalties” (Banting et al. 2022; Harell et al. 2021). When immigrants are perceived as less deserving, then their claims-making can be seen as less legitimate than native-born citizens. Although immigrants are less likely today to be formally excluded from the nation as pathways to citizenship are available, they continue to be subject to a form of hierarchical inclusion between an ethno-national core and penalized outsider minority (Antonsich and Petrillo 2019), at least in some cases and by some native-born citizens. Membership penalties imposed by the majority are likely to surface over support for redistribution. This is because welfare state support relies on a sense of community membership, which typically has been tied to notions of nationhood (Marshall 1950). Recent research shows that people are more willing to redistribute benefits when they perceive others in society as equally committed to the national community (Harell et al. 2021). Despite a large experimental literature that shows that immigrants and racialized minorities are less likely to be seen as deserving of welfare (Ford and Koostra 2017; Harell, Soroka and Iyengar, 2016) little work looks at how cues of membership influence attitudes toward redistribution. The aim of this project is to better understand how individual behavior by immigrants can influence perceptions of commitment to the national community, to test the extent they matter for support for redistribution compared to common indicators in the literature, such as economic situation and racial prejudice. To do so, we draw on a unique cross-national survey, with an embedded social media experiment that manipulates cues about commitment to the host society, the immigrant's racial background, and their employment status. This preregistration plan only focuses on the social media experiment embedded within the larger study.

A simple dictionary that captures mentions of anger, anxiety, optimism and sadness in news content.

Our project seeks to understand the power of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) in current popular debate and primary election campaigns to mobilize and divide public opinion. The strength of “CRT” derives, we believe, not simply from a lack of knowledge about what CRT actually is. We suspect its political strength lies in the fact that CRT as a term is ambiguously related to racism. “CRT” as a phrase allows for the expression of what might for some people be otherwise unpalatable attitudes. Our logic is motivated in part by the suspicion that the phrase “critical race theory” is especially powerful in activating not only racial biases, but also partisan identity, independent of racial biases. Our interest is accordingly not so much on the direct impact of issue framing, but rather on the ways in which partisanship and racism are activated using “CRT” versus other alternative frames.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-psx-10.1177_00323217221105170 for Revisiting Elite Perceptions as Mediator of Elite Responsiveness to Public Opinion by Stefaan Walgrave, Stuart Soroka, Peter Loewen, Tamir Sheafer and Karolin Soontjens in Political Studies

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211008430 for Migrants, Caravans, and the Impact of News Photos on Immigration Attitudes by Guadalupe Madrigal and Stuart Soroka in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211008430 for Migrants, Caravans, and the Impact of News Photos on Immigration Attitudes by Guadalupe Madrigal and Stuart Soroka in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-psx-10.1177_00323217221105170 for Revisiting Elite Perceptions as Mediator of Elite Responsiveness to Public Opinion by Stefaan Walgrave, Stuart Soroka, Peter Loewen, Tamir Sheafer and Karolin Soontjens in Political Studies

Supplemental material, SC900290_Supplemental_Figs_01-02_CLN for Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017 by Sedona Chinn, P. Sol Hart and Stuart Soroka in Science Communication

Supplemental material, Online_Appendices_CPS for Asymmetric Accountability: An Experimental Investigation of Biases in Evaluations of Governments’ Election Pledges by Elin Naurin, Stuart Soroka and Niels Markwat in Comparative Political Studies

Supplemental material, Supplemental_Material_Updated for Mass Media as a Source of Public Responsiveness by Fabian G. Neuner, Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, like-minded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans.

This article assesses the apparent effect of political multiculturalism on tolerance of Muslim accommodation among native-born majority members. Our principle goal is in understanding how public opinion on religious accommodation varies as a function of both federal multicultural policy, on one hand, and more deeply rooted notions of political culture, on the other. We do so by examining responses to a pair of survey experiments embedded in surveys conducted in Canada and the United States. The experiments allow us to convincingly demonstrate “Muslim exceptionalism.” Contextual comparisons across multicultural policy regimes (Canada and the United States) and within them but across distinct political cultures (Quebec vs. English Canada) lend credence to a fairly subdued role for policy and a much larger one for political culture. These effects are, we argue and show, strongly moderated by support for multiculturalism at the individual-level.

Recent decades have been marked by increasingly divided partisan opinion in the US. This study investigates whether a similar trend might be occurring in Canada. It does so by examining redistributive preferences, using Canadian Election Studies data from every election since 1992. Results suggest that Canada has experienced a surge in partisan sorting that is comparable to that in the US. Over time, like-minded citizens have increasingly clustered into parties, with increasingly stark divisions between partisans.

Other yes

Support for welfare in the US is heavily influenced by citizens’ racial attitudes, especially citizens’ attitudes toward Blacks. Indeed, the fact that many Americans think of welfare recipients as poor Blacks (and especially poor Black women) is a common explanation for Americans’ comparatively low support for redistribution cross-nationally. In this study, we extend existing work on how racialized portrayals of recipients affect attitudes toward redistribution. The data for the analysis are drawn from a new and unique online survey experiment, implemented by YouGov with representative samples (n=1200) in each of the US, UK and Canada. Relying on a series of survey vignettes, we manipulate program type (welfare vs. unemployment insurance) as well as the ethno-racial background of recipients (through morphed photos and common ethnicized names). In doing so, we seek to make three specific contributions. First, we test whether support for a means-tested program like welfare is lower than support for contribution-based program like unemployment insurance. Second, we extend the American literature to explore whether there is an anti-Black bias in other countries. Third, we examine whether citizens respond to other minority groups (Asians and Southeast Asians) in a similar manner. Parallel survey designs allows for an unprecedented comparative analysis of the underlying political-psychological sources of support (or lack of support) for redistributive policies across Anglo-Saxon democracies. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this study in light of growing immigrant-driven diversity in North America and Europe.

This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to redistribution among high-income earners and reduce any corroding effects of ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. We test these propositions with Canadian data from the Equality, Security and Community survey. We conclude that national identity does increase support for the welfare state among affluent majority Canadians, and that it helps to protect the welfare state from toxic effects of cultural suspicion. However, we also find that identity plays a narrower role than existing theories of liberal nationalism suggest, and that the mechanisms through which it works are different. This leads us to suggest an alternative theory of the relationship between national identity and the welfare state, one that suggests that the relationship is highly contingent,reflecting distinctive features of the history and national narratives of each country. National identity may not have any general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, but it may do so for those aspects of the welfare state seen as having played a particularly important role in building the nation, or in enabling it to overcome particular challenges or crises.

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political systemparliamentary or presidentialand for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific.

Agenda-setting hypotheses inform political communications studies of media influence (public agenda-setting), as well as examinations of the policymaking process (policy agenda-setting). In both cases, studies concentrate on the salience of issues on actors' agendas, and the dynamic process through which these agendas change and effect each other. The results, narrowly conceived, offer a means of observing media effects or the policy process. Broadly conceived, agenda-setting analyses speak to the nature of relationships between major actors in a political system. This study differs from most past agenda-setting research in several ways. First, this project draws together public and policy agenda-setting work to build a more comprehensive model of the expanded agenda-setting process. Secondly, the modeling makes no assumptions about the directions of causal influence - econometric methods are used to establish causality, allowing for a more nuanced and accurate model of issue dynamics. Quantitative evidence is derived from a longitudinal dataset (1985-1995) including the following: a content analysis of Canadian newspapers (media agenda), 'most important problem' results from all available commercial polls (public agenda), and measures of attention to issues in Question Period, committees, Throne Speeches, government spending, and legislative initiatives (policy agenda). Data is collected for eight issues: AIDS, crime, debt/deficit, environment, inflation, national unity, taxation, and unemployment. The present study, then, is well situated to add unique information to several ongoing debates in agenda-setting studies, and provide a bird's eye view of the media-public-policy dynamics in Canadian politics. Many hypotheses are introduced and tested. Major findings include: (1) there is a Canadian national media agenda; (2) the salience of issues tends to rise and fall simultaneously across Canada, although regional variation exists based on audience attributes and issue obtrusiveness; (3) there is no adequate single measure of the policy agenda - government attention to issues must be measured at several points, and these tend to be only loosely related; (4) the agenda-setting dynamics of individual issues are directly and systematically related to attributes such as prominence and duration; (5) Canadian media and public agendas can be affected by the US media agenda.