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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]

Suggests that declines in newspaper penetration, lessened competition, or shifts toward getting news from television weakens people's understanding about partisan candidates. (RL)

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]

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]

This article reports data gathered from historical research and replies that 249 higher civil servants of Egypt gave in 1954 to a long questionnaire about their backgrounds, attitudes and opinions. It points out some ways in which the structure of Egyptian society and bureaucracy affect communication between the Egyptian public and government officials. Below the level of things all bureaucracies have in common, there are differences even in the intangible impressions they leave. These may be only stereotypes, but they may nevertheless embody a core of truth. The typical British civil servant, with bowler and tightly-rolled umbrella, is reserved, aloof and very correct. The typical French fonctionnaire sits among his papers, inaccessible, and never permits the public business to prevent him, every day at the same time, from reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk for his lunch wrapped in brown paper. Such stereotypes are akin to the public image of any bureaucracy and are just as unflattering. But to the Western visitor, the surface aspects of the Egyptian government office are considerably different from anything he has seen. The first thing he notices is the presence of men, rather than women, in the reception rooms.

A majority of Americans identify as sports fans, and sports broadcasts attract substantially larger audiences than news on both broadcast and cable television. But despite the outsize role of sports in American life, we know little about how--or whether--sports fandom is related to political attitudes. This paper draws on a representative survey to examine (1) the association between sports fandom and political opinions; and (2) opposition to the "politicization" of sports. Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to follow sports closely. However, sports fandom is positively associated with individualistic attributions for economic success and support for the US military. In addition, conservatives are more likely to resist the intrusion of partisan politics into sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what degree have generational differences contributed to partisan changes in the American electorate, and what role did they play in the emergence of the gender gap in party identification? This paper sheds light on parallel and contradicting partisan trends among subgroups of the American electorate that affected the partisan gender gap over the past decades. By unpacking the gap by region, race, and generations, the analysis reveals that the effect of generational replacement on the gender gap varied in terms of size and direction between different subgroups. While in the South newer generations of white women diverged from the New Deal generation, consequently having a greater effect on the gender gap, in the rest of the country shifts among white men affected the gap to a greater extent than shifts among white women. Among African Americans, a decline in Democratic support was shown among newer generations of men, but less so among women. The findings highlight the importance of such political and historical contexts, and raise questions about the future of the partisan gender gap as the New Deal generation is replaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) asserts that anxiety reduces the effect of party identification on candidate preferences (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000), but recent studies have raised doubts about this causal claim. Rather than functioning as a moderator of party identification, perhaps anxiety has a direct effect on preferences, or perhaps the relationship is reversed and preferences drive emotions (Ladd and Lenz 2008). Alternatively, Marcus et al.'s measure of anxiety may simply be capturing partisan ambivalence, so the posited relationship is spurious (Lavine, Johnston, and Steenbergen 2012). This paper addresses each of these questions by examining the effect of experimentally induced emotions on the types of considerations that came to mind when a national sample of adult Americans was asked what they liked and disliked about Barack Obama. By directly manipulating anxiety, this experiment avoids the causal ambiguity plaguing this debate and ascertains the true nature of the relationship between anxiety and ambivalence. Consistent with AIT, anxiety led respondents to recall more contemporary considerations, whereas enthusiasm brought to mind more long-standing considerations. Because the political context at the time of the study (fall 2013) was a very tumultuous time for the Obama administration, the increased accessibility of contemporary considerations led Democratic participants to experience more ambivalence in the anxiety condition. This effect was concentrated among those Democrats who were exposed to the most newspaper coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Social scientists have long recognized the importance of social groups in political life, exploring when and how they influence individuals' political attitudes and behaviors. But measuring group identities and psychological affiliations is problematic. Since 1972, the "group closeness" measure developed in the American National Election Studies (ANES) has been the most widely used indicator of group identification and affiliation, included in other surveys and incorporated into measures of group consciousness and community. Building on research on response effects, I develop and test hypotheses about how variations in survey methods-interview mode, presentation format of survey questions, response options, and question order-influence responses to group-closeness measures across a range of social groups. The analyses show that measurement differences generate significant response effects: Telephone interview mode and sequential format produce higher levels of reported closeness; response-option variations impair cross-survey and over-time comparisons; and question-order variation in telephone interviews generates effects consistent with satisficing, consistency bias, and social desirability. Replicating the findings from a recent publication about group closeness by re-analyzing data separately by mode and format demonstrates mode and format effects. Despite these challenges, the group-closeness measure has several measurement and substantive virtues, and should continue to be used in public-opinion surveys. The paper ends with a discussion of how best to move forward in research on group closeness: I recommend making sequential-format and scaled-response options universal to mitigate response effects in extant data and improve future measurement precision, and calibrating question order to minimize social desirability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Many studies in the African politics literature estimate the correlation between ethnicity and vote choice using reported vote intentions from public opinion surveys. Yet, though we know questions related to ethnicity are sensitive in other contexts, there has been little investigation into whether or how survey conditions affect African respondents' willingness to report a preference for candidates of their own ethnicities. Using a stated choice experiment to identify the characteristics that Ugandan voters value in presidential candidates, I show that ethnic voting is indeed sensitive: Respondents are less likely to report a preference for coethnic politicians when they report their preference publicly or when they have been made conscious of the ethnic connotations of their choice. Both public exposure and priming have larger effects when respondents interact with non-coethnics, but this is not because respondents are more willing to report ethnic preferences to members of their own group. Rather, it is because those interacting with non-coethnics hold stronger implicit ethnic preferences in the first place. These results echo a series of findings from the United States that the presence of outgroup members activates ingroup biases, even as respondents censor the preferences they report to others and to themselves. The study indicates that gathering unbiased electoral preferences from African survey respondents will require granting respondents privacy and avoiding priming, and that the researchers should record and control for the ethnicity of observers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative importance of ideological orientations and material self-interest as determinants of political attitudes is still discussed. Using a novel list experiment on opposition to progressive taxation embedded in a large representative Danish online survey (N  = 2,010), I study how social desirability concerns bias the conclusions survey researchers draw regarding the influence of self-interest (gauged by income) and ideology (measured by left-right self-identifications) on public opinion. I find that right-wingers are much less opposed to progressive taxation when attitudes are measured indirectly and unobtrusively by means of the list experiment relative to asking directly about their opinions. In fact, rightists are no more against progressive taxation than leftists and centrists. Furthermore, opposition to tax progressivity is considerably lower among low-income individuals when social desirability bias is addressed, thereby increasing the attitudinal gap between low- and high-income individuals. The implications of the findings are that survey research risks exaggerating the importance of ideological orientations and underestimating how much political views reflect material self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary voters frequently support the candidates they think have a greater chance of winning the general election over the candidates who most closely reflect their policy preferences—a perception referred to as "electability." While electability is typically taken to mean ideological moderation, recent research highlights the potential for candidates' demographic characteristics to affect such perceptions. Using a conjoint experiment conducted with a sample of nearly 3,000 likely Democratic primary voters in June 2019, we show that women and candidates of color were seen as less electable than their white, male counterparts despite being preferred more frequently, holding policy stances and general election strategies constant. These effects were independent of respondents' hostile sexism and racial resentment, and mediation analysis indicates that electability concerns reduced overall support for women and candidates of color. The results replicate and extend recent findings related to "strategic discrimination" in the US electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been increasing concern among commentators and scholars about polarization in Canada. This note uses the Canadian Election Study from 1993 to 2019 to measure trends in ideological divergence , ideological consistency , and partisan-ideological sorting in the Canadian mass public. It finds only mixed evidence that Canadians are diverging ideologically and becoming more polarized—ideological distributions are unimodal and trends toward more dispersion are slight and driven entirely by the last two election cycles. Canadians are, however, becoming modestly more ideologically consistent and much more sorted—that is, partisanship, ideological identification, and policy beliefs are increasingly interconnected. These findings call for additional research on the causes and consequences of mass polarization in Canada and further efforts to situate these results, along with findings from the United States, in a comparative context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a partisan gender gap in American politics: women are more likely than men to identify as Democrats. Relying on an experiment that randomly assigns measures of partisanship, Burden (2008) finds that part of this gap can be explained by question-wording effects: when partisanship measures prime affect—rather than cognition—women are significantly more likely to identify as Republicans, significantly decreasing the partisan gender gap. Given recent changes in the salience of both gender and partisanship in American politics, we revisit the possibility that measurement can affect the size of the partisan gender gap. Using a pre-registered replication of Burden (2008) , we do not find consistent evidence that changes in the wording of the partisanship question can significantly alter the size of the partisan gender gap. Contrary to Burden (2008) , our data show that measures of partisanship that prime affect do not lead women to be more likely to identify as Republicans. Rather, these measures lead women of both parties to be more likely to identify as independent—a pattern that leaves the partisan gender gap in place, but suggests that both parties may be losing women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the appropriateness of the eighteenth-century press as a source reflecting the political attitudes of colonial Americans, based on the assumption that content analysis is a useful tool for studying such attitudes. Newspapers are still the most important tools in expressing and shaping public opinion. Although it may be impossible to measure the influence of the colonial newspaper directly, the conclusion that it was an important means of communication in colonial American does not seem unwarranted. Its continuous publication at regular weekly intervals enabled the printers to expose the colonists to a certain body of news and opinion, as well as to certain patterns of symbol usage, over a long period of time. The life span of many newspapers is indirect evidence that the colonists were willing to accept or at least to read the news and opinions offered. Content-analysis research bases the size of samples upon the degree of sensitivity to trends needed for testing a set of hypotheses.

Surveys often ask respondents how information or events changed their attitudes. Does [information X] make you more or less supportive of [policy Y]? Does [scandal X] make you more or less likely to vote for [politician Y]? We show that this type of question (the change format) exhibits poor measurement properties, in large part because subjects engage in response substitution. When asked how their attitudes changed, people often report the level of their attitudes rather than the change in them. As an alternative, we propose the counterfactual format , which asks subjects what their attitude would have been in the counterfactual world in which they did not know the treatment information. Using a series of experiments embedded in four studies, we show that the counterfactual format greatly reduces bias relative to the change format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Identity Theory suggests that individuals are motivated to support/oppose policies and politicians that benefit/harm members of their ingroup as a means of protecting their social status. Since the Republican Party's rhetoric against immigrants in recent decades has often been viewed as an assault upon those of Latinx descent, it is not surprising that strong majorities oppose restrictionist immigration policies and support the Democratic Party. However, the existing literature has overlooked why a sizeable minority of Latinx voters express support for restrictionist immigration policies and the politicians who espouse them. Our analysis of Latinx voters with the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) demonstrates that the degree to which individuals prioritize their US American identity over their Latinx identity has a significant influence over support for conservative immigration policies and GOP candidates. This relationship emerges above and beyond partisanship, ideology, and other key explanatory factors. Such attitudes likely represent an individual social mobility strategy in which members of a social group attempt to "pass" as a member of a higher-status group. Prioritizing a US American identity, supporting the Republican Party, and expressing hostility toward the interests of undocumented immigrants are a means of distinguishing themselves from a social group that has become increasingly associated with negative stereotypes. In contrast, those who are unwilling or unable to make this transition are likely pursuing a collective social mobility strategy (e.g. linked fate) whereby they attempt to enhance their individual status by elevating that of the entire social group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the antecedents of public support for government surveillance of the private electronic communications and internet browsing of American citizens. The National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, famously hoped that uncovering surveillance by the state would create awareness of those practices that would be sufficient to induce public opposition. Other theories suggest that support for these policies might be driven by perceptions of terrorist threat or personal risk of surveillance. We suspect, however, that most citizens do not imagine their own privacy rights to be at risk due to government surveillance, but instead believe members of other groups will be targeted. Therefore, we hypothesize that empathy toward vulnerable outgroups should strongly dampen enthusiasm for surveillance, above and beyond awareness and personal concerns and interests. A nationally representative survey finds knowledge about government surveillance to be higher than many presume, but variation in knowledge or personal interests are largely uncorrelated with support. As hypothesized, empathy for outgroups strongly predicts opposition to these policies, above and beyond a host of other factors. Two experiments further corroborate the result: Outgroup empathy, not exposure to information about actual surveillance practices, boosts public opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent Public Opinion Quarterly article argued that men whose first children were girls rather than boys—daughters rather than sons—were more likely to support gender-inequality policies. This note reexamines the coding and model specification of that analysis, focusing on the definition of "first daughters" and on the inclusion, perilously for causal inference, of control variables that are more probably consequences than causes of the independent variable of interest. In the tested alternative specifications, the predicted effect of first-child sex diminishes, usually falling short of standard benchmarks for statistical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 professionals from 2016 US presidential campaigns details how they use social media to understand and represent public opinion. I map these uses of social media onto a theoretical model, accounting for quantitative and qualitative measurement, for instrumental and symbolic purposes. Campaigns' use of social media data to infer and symbolize public opinion is a new development in the relationship between campaigns and supporters. These new tools and symbols of public opinion are shaped by campaigns and drive press coverage (McGregor 2019), highlighting the hybrid logic of the political media system (Chadwick 2017). The model I present brings much-needed attention to qualitative data, a novel aspect of social media in understanding public opinion. The use of social media data to understand the public, for all its problems of representativeness, may provide a retort to long-standing criticisms of surveys—specifically that surveys do not reveal hierarchical, social, or public aspects of opinion formation (Blumer 1948 ; Herbst 1998 ; Cramer 2016). This model highlights a need to explicate what can—and cannot—be understood about public opinion via social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens when news aggregators tailor their newsfeeds to include partisan news aimed at users with a known party preference? Relying on a custom-made news portal featuring real, timely articles, this study examines the influence of partisan news sources on participant headline exposure, clicks on news stories to read, and perceptions about the portal's ability to reliably and comprehensively provide the most important news of the day. Over a period of 12 days, participants preferring either the Republican or Democratic party were randomly assigned to newsfeeds containing increased dosages of real news articles from sources supportive of the participant's preferred party. Results demonstrate that partisan personalization can benefit a news aggregator by increasing usage and perceptions of its quality, while potentially harming society by decreasing attention to high-quality mainstream sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies examined the role of language difficulty in public opinion questions. Guided by feelings-as-information theory (FIT; Schwarz 2011), the first study presents an experiment (N = 1,018) in which the language difficulty of public opinion questions was varied. Findings suggest that language difficulty affected metacognitive experiences, which in turn affected reports of political interest, political efficacy, don't know responding, and ideological constraint. Study 2 (N = 1,817) presents cross-sectional evidence from publicly available data that also indicates question-language difficulty influences don't know responding. Given these findings, study 3 (N = 8,090) presents a content analysis that reveals significant systematic variability in language difficulty within polling questions across 10 polling firms in 2016. Contextualizing these findings within a FIT framework, we contend that variability in language difficulty differentially and systematically affects participants' metacognitive experiences while responding to public opinion questions. Given that metacognitive experiences affect survey response, language difficulty ought to be more carefully considered when drafting opinion questions. To this end, the data presented in these studies can be used to aid question construction by providing numeric guidelines, using widely available measures that contextualize the relative difficulty of survey language. It is also recommended that items assessing metacognitive experiences be included in survey research to account for variance in this measure. At a time when polling data are ubiquitous yet polling accuracy is being called into question, it is critical to identify sources of unmeasured error within polling data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has identified nonmaterial considerations as especially important in shaping the political views of affluent Americans. While other scholars have focused on social issues like abortion or gay rights, or on collective goods like environmental protection, we explore the role of altruism in shaping the economic policy preferences and partisan identification of high-income Americans. We argue that altruistic concern for the well-being of the less well-off leads many affluent Americans to support antipoverty policies and the Democratic Party. Using measures based on actual giving behavior, we document that altruism matters little for low-income Americans' preferences and partisanship, but has substantively large effects on the affluent, leading altruistic high-income Americans to be substantially more supportive of antipoverty policy and the Democratic Party than their less altruistically inclined high-income peers. These findings help explain why a government that responds primarily to the wishes of the well-off may still pursue policies designed to help the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recently argued that prime ministers reshuffle their cabinets strategically. Although some scholars assume that cabinet reshuffles help prime ministers increase their government's popularity, this assumption has not been tested formally because of the endogeneity problem. In Japan, polling firms sometimes provide respondents with cues about a reshuffle when asking about cabinet approval following reshuffles, while others do not. I utilized this convention in the Japanese media to test the assumption that reshuffles increase cabinet approval ratings. Applying a dynamic linear model to pooled poll data from 2001 to 2015, I achieved high internal, external, and ecological validity. The analyses show that cues about reshuffles increase cabinet approval ratings by 2.4 percentage points on average, and the credible interval of the effect does not include zero. This result reinforces the findings of previous research on the theory of cabinet management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists and political pundits have characterized the 2016 presidential campaign as one featuring unusually high levels of political involvement among the mass public. This article subjects such claims to more systematic assessment, by comparing levels of political involvement in the 2016 presidential election campaign to those of previous election cycles. Through analyses of turnout statistics, survey questions by the Pew Research Center and the American National Election Studies measuring political interest, and Nielsen audience estimates of television viewing, the article finds that the public's interest and engagement in the fall of 2016 were actually quite similar to those of other recent elections. (It was during the primaries that political involvement in 2016 stood out more.) Acknowledging that aggregate analyses may obscure countervailing subgroup changes, the article examines subgroups that figured prominently in accounts of the 2016 campaign or were thought to have been particularly energized by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012: men without a college education, African Americans, and young people. Those analyses turn up limited evidence for differential political interest trends. African Americans' campaign interest and turnout did drop compared to 2008 and 2012. But in the opposite direction of the prevailing narrative, young people showed relatively high political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although political science has advanced the study of voter decision-making, the discipline still understands very little about how citizens go about reaching those decisions. In this article, we introduce a five-factor self-report scale of political decision-making (PolDec-5) administered to six different samples with more than 6,500 respondents over the past four years. Analyses illustrate that our five subscales—Rational Choice, Confirmatory, Fast and Frugal, Heuristic-Based, and Going with Your Gut—have high internal consistency, relatively high discriminant validity (as they are largely distinct from existing measures of decision-making style), and significantly high predictive validity, as established by process tracing studies where actual decision strategies of voters can be observed directly. Finally, we discuss how these new measures can help predict important political outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explaining support for Donald Trump's presidential candidacy has become a key social-science challenge. An emerging literature highlights several important individual-level precursors of Trump support, including racial attitudes, sexism, and authoritarianism. In this report, we provide evidence for the role of a novel psychological factor: collective narcissism, an inflated, unrealistic view of the national in group's greatness contingent on external recognition. Using data from a recent national survey, we demonstrate that collective narcissism is a powerful predictor of 2016 presidential votes and evaluations of Trump, even after controlling for other variables known to predict candidate preferences in general and Trump support in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note considers how to track long-term trajectories of political discontent in Britain. Many accounts are confined to using either survey data drawn from recent decades or imperfect behavioral measures such as voting or party membership as indicators of political disengagement. We instead develop an approach that provides the long view on political disaffection. We first consider time-series data available from repeated survey measures. We next replicate historic survey questions to observe change in public opinion relative to earlier points in time. Finally, we use Stimson's (1991) dyad-ratios algorithm to construct an over-time index of political discontent that combines data from multiple poll series. This reveals rising levels of political discontent for both specific and diffuse measures of mass opinion. Our method and findings offer insights into the rising tide of disillusionment afflicting many contemporary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical and empirical models describing how voters form perceptions of political candidates assume that such perceptions are independent of each other, even though decades of evidence in cognitive science have shown that context influences the perceptions of various stimuli. In this research note, we argue that such perceptions depend on the full range of available ideological platforms. Data from three survey experiments in Israel provide strong support for the hypothesis that voters consistently view candidates as more centrist when a more extreme candidate appears next to them on the ideological spectrum. Our results imply that voters consider the full spectrum of political actors when they form opinions about the ideological stance of any candidate, and the same pattern holds for the perception of the ideological position of parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of minority voters in the United States continues to rise, and politicians must increasingly appeal to a diverse electorate. Are ethnic cues effective with different groups of minority voters? In this article, we investigate this question across the two largest minority groups in the United States: Blacks and Latinos. Drawing on American politics research, we propose that Black respondents will react positively to coethnic and cominority cues, while Latinos will be less receptive to such cues, and that this difference will be due at least in part to varying perceptions of discrimination across the two groups. We test this argument with an experimental design that leverages Congressman Charles Rangel's mixed heritage as Black and Latino. Our results confirm that Black participants respond positively to both coethnic and cominority cues about Rangel, while Latino participants do not. Reactions to ethnic cues in turn correspond to differences in perceptions of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numeric political appeals represent a prevalent but overlooked domain of public opinion research. When can quantitative information change political attitudes, and is this change trumped by partisan effects? We analyze how numeracy--or individual differences in citizens' ability to process and apply numeric policy information--moderates the effectiveness of numeric political appeals on a moderately salient policy issue. Results show that those low in numeracy exhibit a strong party-cue effect, treating numeric information in a superficial and heuristic fashion. Conversely, those high in numeracy are persuaded by numeric information, even when it is sponsored by the opposing party, overcoming the party-cue effect. Our results make clear that overlooking numeric ability when analyzing quantitative political appeals can mask significant persuasion effects, and we build on recent work advancing the understanding of individual differences in public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A good deal of scholarship examines the effects of prejudice against blacks on public opinion and vote choice in the United States. Despite producing valuable insights, this research largely ignores the attitudes of Latinos--a critical omission, since Latinos constitute a rapidly growing share of the population. Using two nationally representative survey data sets, we find that the level of racial prejudice is comparable for Latinos and non-Hispanic whites. Equally comparable are associations between prejudice and political preferences: policy opinion and support for Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Our findings suggest that despite demographic changes, efforts to enact policies intended to assist blacks and elect black candidates will continue to be undermined by prejudice. That said, Latinos are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to support policies intended to assist blacks, because Latinos are more Democratic than non-Hispanic whites, more egalitarian, and less committed to the value of limited government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiments afford respondents an anonymity that allows them to provide more truthful answers to potentially sensitive survey items. Our experiment finds no evidence that social desirability is affecting overall survey results. If there is social desirability in polling on same-sex marriage, it pushes in both directions. Indeed, our efforts provide new evidence that a national opinion majority favors same-sex marriage. To evaluate the robustness of our findings, we analyze a second list experiment, this one focusing on the inclusion of sexual orientation in employment nondiscrimination laws. Again, we find no overall evidence of bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic responsiveness concerns the degree to which government policies match public preferences. Responsiveness studies typically use national surveys to characterize public opinion, but whether poll questions overlap with the policy agenda is unknown. The first of two empirical analyses presented here, with hundreds of issues on the national agenda in the United States from 1947 to 2000, reveals that public opinion is mostly unrelated to policy outcomes. The picture appears to be even more ominous--that is, opinion and policy are negatively related--on highly salient issues that attract media attention. A second study revisiting published work confirms that responsiveness patterns look different depending upon whether studies of opinionpolicy connections (a) begin with survey data and then examine policy developments, or (b) begin with national legislative agenda issues and then examine survey data. Thus, conclusions about democratic responsiveness depend upon the issues that are examined, and often opinion surveys do not include questions about tangible public policy options. In that sense, future changes in democratic responsiveness might go undetected because scholars often lack data on what goes into the denominator of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on mass polarization is itself polarized. Some argue that the United States is in the midst of a culture war; others argue that the claims are exaggerated. As polarization is a multifaceted concept, both sides can be correct. I review four distinct manifestations of polarization that have appeared in the public opinion literature--ideological consistency, ideological divergence, perceived polarization, and affective polarization--and discuss ways in which each has been measured. Then, using longitudinal data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), I update past analyses in order to more clearly show the ways in which Americans have or have not polarized: Americans at the mass level have not diverged, nor have they become more consistent ideologically, but partisans have; perceptions of polarization have increased, but this change is driven by partisans, who increasingly dislike one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few topics in public opinion research have attracted as much attention in recent years as partisan polarization in the American mass public. Yet, there has been considerably less investigation into whether people perceive the electorate to be polarized and the patterns of these perceptions. Building on work in social psychology, we argue that Americans perceive more polarization with respect to policy issues than actually exists, a phenomenon known as false polarization. Data from a nationally representative probability sample and a novel estimation strategy to make inferences about false polarization show that people significantly misperceive the public to be more divided along partisan lines than it is in reality. Also, people's misperceptions of opposing partisans are larger than those about their own party. We discuss the implications of these empirical patterns for American electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online publishing, social networks, and web search have dramatically lowered the costs of producing, distributing, and discovering news articles. Some scholars argue that such technological changes increase exposure to diverse perspectives, while others worry that they increase ideological segregation. We address the issue by examining webbrowsing histories for 50,000 US-located users who regularly read online news. We find that social networks and search engines are associated with an increase in the mean ideological distance between individuals. However, somewhat counterintuitively, these same channels also are associated with an increase in an individual's exposure to material from his or her less preferred side of the political spectrum. Finally, the vast majority of online news consumption is accounted for by individuals simply visiting the home pages of their favorite, typically mainstream, news outlets, tempering the consequences--both positive and negative--of recent technological changes. We thus uncover evidence for both sides of the debate, while also finding that the magnitude of the effects is relatively modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on the paper by Louis Bolce and Gerald DeMaio, Religious Outlook, Culture War Politics and Antipathy toward Christian Fundamentalists, in the Spring 1999 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. The evidence itself seems fairly straightforward which include the claims that Christian fundamentalists are rated more negatively than other religious groups they are rated as negatively as political groups on both sides of the ideological spectrum, factor analysis of the feeling thermometer scores for 20 different groups shows that the public associated Christian fundamentalists with cultural and political rather than religious groups or categories in all 3 years analyzed liberal religious, cultural and political attitudes are negatively correlated with positive attitudes toward Christian fundamentalists. But the conclusion that negative feelings toward Christian fundamentalists represent religious intolerance or prejudice, is based on the assumption that the public defines this category in the same way the authors do, namely, as consisting of certain religious denominations characterized by particular religious beliefs. In fact, the factor analysis results suggest that the public defines fundamentalists in terms of their cultural and political, not religious, positions. And nowhere in the article do the authors attend to what people actually have in mind when they answer the feeling thermometer question about Christian fundamentalists.

The expression of opinions in ordinary political discussions between citizens is essential to public opinion dynamics such as opinion leadership, false consensus, or pluralistic ignorance. One of the main predictors of expressiveness in citizens' discussions is gender. Although research documents consistent gaps between men's and women's expressiveness through political discussion, most insights are based on the United States. Absent a comparative perspective, little consideration has been given to major differences across countries in men's and women's access to various institutions, and whether this access correlates with gender gaps in discursive expression. Access affects opportunities of women and men to encounter politically relevant information and connect with potential discussants. The present article tests whether greater egalitarianism in political representation, education, and workforce participation reduces gender gaps in political discussion. Multilevel analyses of the International Social Survey Program data set (approximately N = 36,600; 33 countries) show that several country-level features affect the contribution of gender to political discussion, but in ways that suggest a trade-off between gender equality and opinion expressiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International survey data sets are analyzed with increasing frequency to investigate and compare attitudes toward immigration and to examine the contextual factors that shape these attitudes. However, international comparisons of abstract, psychological constructs require the measurements to be equivalent; that is, they should measure the same concept on the same measurement scale. Traditional approaches to assessing measurement equivalence quite often lead to the conclusion that measurements are cross-nationally incomparable, but they have been criticized for being overly strict. In the current study, we present an alternative Bayesian approach that assesses whether measurements are approximately (rather than exactly) equivalent. This approach allows small variations in measurement parameters across groups. Taking a multiple group confirmatory factor analysis framework as a starting point, this study applies approximate and exact equivalence tests to the anti-immigration attitudes scale that was implemented in the European Social Survey (ESS). Measurement equivalence is tested across the full set of 271,220 individuals in 35 ESS countries over six rounds. The results of the exact and the approximate approaches are quite different. Approximate scalar measurement equivalence is established in all ESS rounds, thus allowing researchers to meaningfully compare these mean scores and their relationships with other theoretical constructs of interest. The exact approach, however, eventually proves to be overly strict and leads to the conclusion that measurements are incomparable for a large number of countries and time points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on public attitudes toward political decision-making has typically focused on politics in general. This study attends to issue-level as well as individual-level factors that can explain political process preferences. First, drawing on the classic distinction between easy and hard political issues, this study differentiates between preferences for participatory versus representative processes as related to politics, abortion, immigration, and the economy. Second, this study considers citizens as pluralistic issue publics, testing whether personal investment in an issue is related to process preferences and whether issue importance or attitude extremity better structure issue publics in this context. Relying on representative survey data from Spain (N = 2,450), the results show first that process preferences are issue specific: respondents favor more citizen voice for abortion, a symbolic "easy" issue, and more representative processes for the "harder" economic policies. Second, attitude extremity more strongly influences preferences for direct citizen engagement than attitude importance. This study offers comparative evidence on citizens' preferences for political decision-making, and its theoretical, practical, and methodological implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Poll Trends study, 13 different sources are used to document public opinion toward homosexuality and gay rights in Great Britain in the postwar period. Three broad sets of indicators are examined: general attitudes toward homosexuality; acceptability of homosexuals in particular roles; and attitudes toward homosexual rights. Opinion was overwhelmingly negative in the 1940s and 1950s but started to liberalize following the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. Attitudes suffered a temporary setback with the advent of AIDS in the mid-1980s, but the thaw resumed from the early 1990s and accelerated following the millennium, especially during the second half of the first decade of the 2000s, culminating in the successful campaign for legalization of same-sex marriage in England and Wales. This trend toward liberalization has direct parallels in growing public support for several other facets of equality in Britain, notably gender, race, and religion. It also coincides with a significant reduction in religious allegiance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]