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The article presents abstracts of various papers related to polls and the new politics. One of the paper discussed is "The Political Functions of Public Opinion Polls in the United States," by Irving Crespi. The dilemma of democratic societies that so concerned Tocqueville, how to free men from entrenched authority without subjecting them to a more arbitrary public opinion, is particularly relevant to the analysis of tile role of public opinion polls in the United States today. Another paper discussed is "The Changing Role of the American Political Parties," by Harry S. Aslimore. The upcoming election may be the one that will finally demonstrate the significance of the shifts in United States population, and most importantly the changes in communications that have affected the political process in this country. Some other papers discussed are "Polling: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Bandwagon Effect," by John L. Perry, "New Techniques for Measuring, Analyzing and Reporting Social Change," by Samuell Lubell and "Application of Q to the Assessment of Public Opinion," by William Stephenson.

This section presents abstracts of several public opinion research published in the U.S. in the 1970s.

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]

In the last two decades, competition agencies around the world have increasingly directed their attention to enforcement against cartels. With the encouragement of the antitrust authorities of the United States, and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, various countries have introduced leniency programs, and sanctions for individuals found guilty of colluding. Critics are concerned, however, that these measures are not backed by broad public support, which could jeopardize their enforcement. This paper explores public attitudes toward cartels in Chile, an emerging economy that introduced a leniency program in 2009 and criminal sanctions in 2016, by presenting the results of a public opinion survey conducted in this country in August–September 2019. The results of the survey show high awareness of cartels and the harm they cause, and high public disapproval of cartel conduct among the Chilean respondents. In particular, up to 70 percent of the respondents support prison sentences against individuals found guilty of colluding. Such strong public support for anti-cartel measures could be considered positive from the perspective of enforcement. The results also emphasize the importance of continued competition advocacy directed at the society to explain and gain public support for the anti-cartel agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past studies establish that general education and scientific knowledge foster more favorable public attitudes toward scientists and scientific research. They also highlight important attitudinal impacts of group identities, in particular, political ideology, party affiliation, religion, and race. The primary purpose of this paper is to determine whether and how these identities might moderate the effects of general education and scientific knowledge on public attitudes toward scientists and scientific research. Main findings include effects of education and scientific knowledge remain significant to varying degrees but are not uniformly generalizable across different group identities; attitudes toward scientists and scientific research have remained fairly stable since 2006; and to love science and hate scientists is not confined to political conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often look to the examples set by other countries when thinking about how to deal with problems at home. But what explains why some countries are more likely to serve as role models than others? Are people influenced mainly by the examples set by countries that are considered to be particularly successful in a given policy area? Or are they influenced to a greater extent by countries that are more familiar to them, or that appear more similar to their own? In this paper, we test these hypotheses using two large (n |$\ > {\rm{\ }}$| 2,000) survey-based experiments conducted in the United States. The first focuses on environmental issues, while the second focuses on human rights issues. In both studies, the respondents were presented with a randomly drawn list of countries and asked to indicate how relevant the examples that these countries set should be to policy discussions in the United States. Our results suggest that the US public's perception of the relevance of other countries' experiences is driven primarily by the extent to which the respondent perceives the other countries as familiar to them, or similar to the United States, rather than by more objective measures of policy success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims about the deterrent role of forward military deployments often depend on the argument that attacks on troops stationed abroad will activate a "tripwire effect." It is assumed that this effect would generate strong domestic pressure for further military intervention by the country whose troops have come under attack. In theory, the anticipation of a strong tripwire effect prospectively ties the hands of leaders, thereby bolstering the reliability of extended deterrent threats and promises. In this paper, we define the tripwire effect and use both conjoint and vignette survey experiments to evaluate its operation and magnitude among Americans. Results suggest that the tripwire effect is, at best, far weaker than many analysts and policymakers commonly assume. This finding raises serious questions about a core logic underpinning the United States' forward military posture and highlights the need for more research on the deterrent functions of forward deployment. [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.

Even after two decades of intense research, social scientists are still in disagreement over whether the American public is polarized. Starting from the premise that disagreement is multifaceted, this paper attempts to clarify how and which aspects of ideological disagreement have changed over the past few decades. Three major structural features of ideological disagreement that have been discussed under the umbrella term "polarization" are identified from the literature--polarization, partisan sorting, and dimensional alignment--and redefined into analytically distinct and non-overlapping concepts. Two different scaling methods are applied to the American National Election Studies from 1980 to 2012 in order to examine changes in how citizens organize their attitudes regarding concrete political and social issues (operational ideology) and their self-identifications with the ideological labels "liberal" and "conservative" (symbolic ideology). Results show at best mixed evidence of growing polarization. Partisan sorting has increased over time on both symbolic and operational ideology. However, it is mainly the symbolic side on which disagreement across partisan lines is most pronounced. Finally, contrary to the popular notion of a culture war dividing the United States, the public has become less polarized on moral issues, and the moral dimension of citizens' operational ideology has become dealigned from the economic and civil rights dimension over the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews papers that have recently published earlier in other journals and which relate to the field of public opinion research. The reviews are grouped according to the following six topics: politics, elections and social values; public opinion on current issues; public opinion theory; methodology of public opinion polling; polls as a social and political factor; and mass media and public opinion. The article "The 1992 Vote for President Clinton: Another Brittle Mandate," by Everett Ladd examines the 1992 U.S. presidential election. The basic argument is that U.S. President Bill Clinton's defeat of George W. Bush resulted from an unusual combination of short-term forces, rather than from shifts in the partisan attachments across the electorate or from changed views on the proper course of public policy. Another article "Voter Preference and Behavior in the Presidential Election of 1988," examines the relationship among voting-relevant feelings, beliefs, and actions in a meaningful and important social context.

This article focuses on the papers presented at the conference on communication agencies at the University of Chicago on August 4, 1941. These papers may be grouped under four categories: first, effects of communications on public opinions; second, implications of communications research for social science; third, implications of communications research for public institutions and fourth, governmental control of public communications. Under the first category, the papers reported on effects of print, radio, film and forum. Under the second category, sociologists and professors examined the implications of communications research for the science and practice of politics. Under the third category, papers were presented concerning implication for public institutions. The fourth category consists of generalizations supported both by examples and by frequencies with which typical themes occur in the news content.

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]

This article presents a study which determined whether the amount of media coverage concerning North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has any relationship to the absence or existence of public opinion about this issue. The review of the amount of newspaper coverage was the first performed. The author searched the Major Papers library of the Lexis/Nexis network. This gave access coverage of the topic gleaned from 26 major newspapers throughout the U.S. The search topic was free trade agreement and Mexico and U.S. and date. A magazine and journal search was also done on Nexis, utilizing the Magazines library and the same search topic. Based on the author's findings, it does appear that sharply increased media coverage of a complex issue of national importance did result in a dramatic decrease of those persons who were without opinion in regard to the issue, as demonstrated by public opinion surveys. Other studies of agenda-setting have suggested that increased media coverage of an issue is usually accompanied by an increase in the percentage of the public considering the issue important, but this study has also identified an aggregate decrease in the percentage of the public without an opinion on an issue after heavy media coverage of that issue.

This paper is in the tradition of social analysis aimed at creating frameworks to join mass media and public opinion processes (e.g. Clarke and Evans, 1983; Gamson, 1975; Gitlin, 1980; Hall, 1977; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Lang and Lang, 1968, 1983; Lippman, igzz; Mollotch and Lester, 1974; Noelle-Neuman, 1974; Paletz and Entman, 1981; Shaw and McCombs, 1977; Turner and Paz, 1986). After a brief review of media system dependency (MSD) theory, we illustrate how it may apply to public opinion processes that entail contested issue `value-frames' (Ball-Rokeach and Rokeach, 1987). In such cases, the media system is directly implicated in the negotiation of legitimacy of opposing positions on an issue. Our illustrative case is the abortion issue as it has been played out in the United States over recent decades (Luker, 1984). We focus upon the respective capacities of pro- and anti-abortion movements to control the value-frame of media coverage of the issue (Guthrie, 1989). A value-frame may be conceived as'... the main substantive theme of a morality play' (Ball-Rokeach and Tallman, 1979) wherein the distinction between `good' and `bad' hangs in the balance; in this case, between positions on abortion. We suggest that change in the value-frame of media coverage and public discourse may be understood, at least in part, as an outcome of change in contestants' MSD relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a content analysis of two newspapers that is designed to reveal the extent of bias in reporting the investigation of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight has presented an opportunity to test news bias in newspapers. The investigation facilitated testable hypotheses, even at its inception, since, with one notable exception which will be dealt with later in this study, the trend of the investigation was predictable from the moment the "leaks" occurred that were attributed to the then committee counsel, Bernard Schwartz. Content analysis was employed to discover "bias" in the news presentations of a Republican and an Independent-Democratic newspaper. The Republican newspaper was disposed to favor the FCC and the Independent-Democratic newspaper to be hostile to it. A substantial amount of relative bias was found in the news presentation, in relation to both "attention-space" categories and news content.

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.

Introduction: Research attention on smokeless tobacco (SLT) has focused on SLT use, health risks, harm-reduction potential, and risk perceptions, but few studies have examined mediated communications about SLT. This study aims to contribute to the literature by providing the first description of SLT coverage in the news, an important communication channel given its ability to educate and shape public opinion about tobacco issues. Methods: A content analysis was conducted on SLT-related news and opinion articles between 2006 and 2010 from top circulating national and state newspapers and select news wires. Articles were coded for the main SLT topic, SLT risk references, and slant of opinion articles. Results: SLT was discussed in news/feature articles (n = 677) in terms of business (28%), new products, product regulation and harm reduction (19%), prevention/cessation (11.4%), taxation (10.2%), profiles/trends in use (9%), bans (8.1%), and tobacco industry promotional activities (4.9%). Health risk references (i.e., addictiveness, carcinogenicity, and specific health effects including oral cancer) were found in 40% of articles, though frequency differed by article topic. Although the majority of opinion articles (n = 176) conveyed an anti-SLT slant (64%), 25.6% were pro-SLT. Conclusions: SLT topics of both national and local importance are covered in the news. Public health professionals can participate in SLT coverage by sending in press releases about new study findings, events, or resources and by submitting opinion pieces to share views or respond to previous coverage. Research on SLT news should continue given its potential to shape the public’s SLT knowledge and opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American reaction to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 is always portrayed as one of shock and horror. Yet there has been no systematic study of the subject. This article examines American public at the time from the outbreak of war in August 1914 through the congressional elections of November 1914, through the medium of newspaper and journal writing. The picture that emerges is that the American population, far from being shocked and horrified, was excited and fascinated by the idea of a war in Europe. Moreover, the most widely shared sentiment was one of satisfaction at the economic opportunity presented by the war, as it was seen as being very much in American economic interest. This article also includes the present discussion among political scientists and strategic thinkers about the American public and its reaction to war in general, to provide different models by which to examine American behavior in 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about several articles related to the field of public opinion, published in the various journals is presented. The paper "Framing science: The stem cell controversy in an age of press/politics," by Matthew C. Nisbet and coworkers published in "The Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics" focuses on the controversy arose over human embryonic stem cell research in the United States and the role of mass media in the dispute. In the paper "Restricting the broadcast and publication of pre-election and exit polls: Some selected examples," Tim Bale studies the impact of legal restrictions on the publication of election polls. The paper "'Exit' and 'Voice' in the Japanese general elections," by Takahiro Kimura explores the cause of non-voting in Japan.

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.

This is a report on how often the British express opinions in terms of the United Nations. It is drawn from a content analysis of the whole of Britain's daily national press during the period from the end of 1945 to the beginning of 1950. The method used was a form of content analysis, theme analysis. Press opinions about the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics amounted to more than 40,000 spread across the four years, that elaborate pretest of the data made possible a "code" of 72 themes, the only politically meaningful assertions made about the two countries by British newspapers or by Britons in their newspapers in any recurrence whatever. In 1954, when, in preparation for the world organization's tenth anniversary and possible revision of the Charter, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is attempting to report on what the peoples of more than 20 countries say and feel about the United Nations, it may be useful to record the inescapable conclusion that to one of the world's most literate peoples, the British, United Nations almost never did and most probably almost never does matter.

This year's conference, May 19-22, was the second held at "The Inn" at Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, and the first under the new management of the inn. Attendance was large and, as usual for American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conferences, the attendees were argumentative. It was a good and useful conference highlighted by three major sessions, the Paul Lazarsfeld Memorial Lecture given by Peter Rossi, the plenary session on the 1976 election, and the return of "The Author Meets the Critics" in honor of Shirley Star. The conference chair, Howard Freeman, and his able committee put together an outstanding program. An innovation this year was the introduction of two sessions of contributed papers. The growth in the number of papers that did not fit any particular session but were of high quality led to this departure. The large number of such papers is a healthy sign for the field as a whole. A strong effort to circulate campuses by Nelson Foote and his committee also led to a set of high quality submissions for the student award. As usual, Joe Klapper did yeoman work in planning and arranging the physical facilities.

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]

This article attempts to analyze American public opinion on the Far East. According to the author's research, among American newspapers there is very little interest in news coming from the Far East. This situation accounts for the fact that the American press does not follow developments in the Far East as closely as those in Europe. There have been times, however, when three-inch headlines referring to events in the Far East have aroused a very considerable amount of interest in the U.S. During the Manchurian crisis of 1930-31, when the threat of a great Pacific war with the United States as a party was imminent, the American public necessarily became interested in what was going on. When the crisis downed and the situation became quiet again, the interest waned. Further the research indicates that apart from the general interest of the newspaper reading public there is the special interest of several political or professional groups whose knowledge is fed by special newspapers.

This paper is the Presidential Address which was delivered before the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Public Opinion Research in Chicago, Illinois, on May 10, 1958. The original, written and spoken with frequent resort to the first person pleural, loses something of its earnest tone when translated into a more conventional style for publication but it still calls for constructive criticism of current opinion research and effect the preparation to meet the increasingly exacting standards of the future. Frederick F. Stephan was President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research for the 1957-1959 term. He is Professor of Social Statistics at Princeton University. The central principle of the Conference is to take a broad look at what is being done in opinion research and to think more deeply about its meaning for clients, the public at large, and researchers themselves. In furtherance of this purpose the author chose as the title of the address on which this paper is based, a simple but serious question.

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]

A large body of work points to diverging civil-military views on the initial decision to use force, yet there is little sense if similar differences hold over appropriate conduct in the midst of armed conflict. The rise of international laws governing behavior during war has similarly raised the question of whether these rules can shape the beliefs of various domestic actors. This paper seeks to address both gaps in the literature by leveraging the use of experiments embedded in a pair of US national surveys to examine the impact of international law and military experience on individual attitudes toward torture. The results show veterans are significantly more likely to support torture compared to civilians without any prior military background. International law further reduces civilian support for torture, while veterans are largely unaffected by general legal appeals. However, when facing highly precise rules, or where the threat of punishment is delegated to third parties, more legalized agreements can significantly reduce veteran support for torture. The results have implications for the study of institutional design, the differential effects of legal norms on nonstate actors, and the potential for greater awareness of the laws of war to influence attitudes toward wartime violence. [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]

Communications from scientists and engineers indicate concern about the potential for public aversion to nanotechnologies. Recommendations that policy dialogues occur early and often as public perceptions emerge have followed, and multiple surveys indicate high benefit ratings. This paper explores instead the mobile and conditional quality of current perceptions of the risks and benefits of nanotechnologies, and of judgments of trust in regulation. Drawing from a nationally representative phone survey of 1,100 US residents, we found that presenting risk information after benefit information had a significant impact on acceptability ratings as compared to the reverse order. Trust judgments were also mobile, and interacted with affective predispositions towards nanotechnologies. Overall, for policy purposes and dialogues, we find high attitudinal uncertainty suggesting considerable openness to context-specific considerations as linked to acceptability of new technologies. We also caution against over promotion of benefits and an avoidance of appropriate risk discussions in the short term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how motivations that drive news use affect the process of learning political information from the news. A model that traces the influence of motivational factors on following news about general public affairs is proposed. Tests conducted with nationally representative surveys revealed that motivations for following general public affairs in the news are conceptually and empirically distinct. Results showed that certain psychological needs drive motivations toward following general news, and that various types of motives have independent effects on exposure and attention to news. Finally, we found that motivations have significant indirect effects on knowledge about politics. Implications on theoretical developments in political knowledge and learning are discussed. [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]

Assesses the efforts of the administration of United States president Harry Truman to convince the public of the merits of NSC-68, or the draft plan for national security in the early 1950s. Employment of simplistic and exaggerated arguments in the information campaign; Role of the Korean War in validating Cold War rhetoric in American public opinion.

Differences between the general public's positive economic views and economists' resemble other judgemental anomalies: Laypeople and experts systematically disagree. I analyse this puzzle using data from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. The paper first tests and decisively rejects the hypothesis that the differences solely reflect economists' selfserving bias. Then it examines whether economists' political ideology and party loyalties explain the disagreement; if anything, this slightly increases their magnitude. The effect of economic training clearly falls but remains large after adding education to the set of control variables. Apparent biases' robustness suggests that the anomaly is real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article details the proceedings of the 55th Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) at the Doubletree Hotel Jantzen Beach, Portland, Oregon, from May 18-20, 2000. The conference had a record 68 sessions reviewing the impact and challenges of the e-revolution on research and society, methodological issues, questionnaire design, the 2000 Census, elections, global public opinion and other issues. Nine of the sessions were jointly sponsored by World APOR, with another nine jointly sponsored by the International Field Directors/Technologies Association. Over 650 people contributed to the 2000 AAPOR conference program, including invited speakers, presenters, coauthors, session chairs/moderators and discussants. The theme of the 2000 onference was Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium. These challenges include the impact of technology and the Internet on society, on politics and on survey research. The program featured eight panels devoted to technology issues, including The Impact of Internet Usage, Improving Internet Response Rates, Examination of Web TV for Internet Data Collection, The Internet's Impact on Society and Internet Survey Format and Design Issues. Representatives from virtually every major Internet research company participated in these sessions. Several panel discussants questioned if Internet penetration was sufficient at this point to conduct cross-section samples of the public.

Past scholars find that there is a public consensus in the United States on the traits of ideal immigrants. Nevertheless, is there also a consensus on the perceived traits of actual immigrants living in the country? Further, are these perceptions attitudinally consequential? We find no consensus among whites on the composition of the immigrant population in the United States. Further, the immigrant traits they perceive are correlated in specific stereotypical patterns we label "immigrant archetypes." Using latent class analysis, we find five archetypes. Two of them are extreme—one represents a high-status, documented non-Latino immigrant, which is associated with the most positive immigration attitudes. The other extreme represents a low-status, undocumented Latino man, which is associated with the most restrictionist immigration views. Nevertheless, a second Latino archetype, a better-educated and documented Latina woman working to support her family, is correlated with more positive attitudes than her male counterpart. Archetypes do not seem entirely rooted in objective reality and are stronger predictors of immigration attitudes than most other independent variables. Their existence has significant implications for public opinion dynamics. When researchers, politicians, or journalists reference a single immigrant trait, they may knowingly or unknowingly conjure up entire archetypes in people's minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into cyber-conflict, public opinion, and international security is burgeoning, yet the field suffers from an absence of conceptual agreement about key terms. For instance, every time a cyberattack takes place, a public debate erupts as to whether it constitutes cyberterrorism. This debate bears significant consequences, seeing as the ascription of a "terrorism" label enables the application of heavy-handed counterterrorism powers and heightens the level of perceived threat among the public. In light of widespread conceptual disagreement in cyberspace, we assert that public opinion plays a heightened role in understanding the nature of cyber threats. We construct a typological framework to illuminate the attributes that drive the public classification of an attack as cyberterrorism, which we test through a ratings-based conjoint experiment in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel (N = 21,238 observations). We find that the public (1) refrains from labeling attacks by unknown actors or hacker collectives as cyberterrorism; and (2) classifies attacks that disseminate sensitive data as terrorism to a greater extent even than physically explosive attacks. Importantly, the uniform public perspectives across the three countries challenge a foundational tenet of public opinion and international relations scholarship that divided views among elites on foreign policy matters will be reflected by a divided public. This study concludes by providing a definitive conceptual baseline to support future research on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study measures a spiral of silence in the context of actual opinion change during President George Bush's polarity decline in one of his political strongholds. Willingness of voters to publicly express their inions about Bush were analyzed over three pre-election surveys(N = I,800) sponsored by a prominent local newspaper in Orange County, California. Respondents were asked whether or not they would be willing to be reinterviewed by a reporter and have their names and views published in the paper. The hypothesis that Bush supporters would be less willing than others to agree to be reinterviewed during the period in which the president's ratings were dropping sharply is supported. This trend was most in evidence at the beginning of the presidential campaign, when Bush's ratings were in the steepest decline. These findings indicate the importance of actual opinion shifts in spiral of silence research, and suggest several issues for future research on opinion change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, part of a larger effort to explicate the nature of American exceptionalism, is based on an assumption recently enunciated by Kazuo Ogura: 'To define the "other" is to know one's nation' (Lokker, I992, p- 2). A person who knows only one country basically knows no country well. Comparing the United States or Japan with other nations is the best way to learn about each. In a previous work, I dealt with Canada, and argued that 'it is precisely because the two North American democracies have so much in common that they permit students of each to gain insights into the factors that cause variations' (Lipset, 1990). Here, I shift to looking at the two outliers, the two developed nations which are most different from each other. They clearly haste distinct organizing principles. And their values, institutions and behaviors fit into sharply different functional wholes. These variations, of course, have been written about in myriad comparative scholarly, business and journalistic works. Given my limited contact with Japan (five visits covering a total of six mouths oster 30 years), I cannot add to them observationally. This article, however, seeks to elaborate and test the validity of the qualitative analyses by a comprehensive examination of the comparative data on opinions, values and behavior, collected by public opinion agencies (Glazer, 1976). As will be evident, there are astonishingly large differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the attitudes of Canadians and Americans toward their governments and selected aspects of the private enterprise system. It examines some of the historical differences between the two countries and hypothesized that these differences will be reflected in current attitudes. Further, it hypothesizes that Canada's two main linguistic groups -- the English and the French -- will be closer in attitude to each other than either will be to the American sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we employ a method of examining the misreporting of year-round forms of political activity at the local level, activity other than registration and voting. Our focus is on three forms of political participation directed toward local officials: signing petitions, participating in public hearings before the city council, and contacting elected officials through the mayor and council answering service. The research site is a southwestern urban community of 300,000 and a metropolitan population of over 500,000.
The paper provides a method for examining the differences between people who actively participate in politics as contrasted with those who are not participants, and those who misreport their level of participation. Application of this method shows that the participants and the misreporters share numerous characteristics that set them apart from nonparticipants. The main distinguishing characteristic of the misreporters is their significantly higher exposure to television. The results lend support to the theory that one effect of television is to depress routine forms of political participation, while simultaneously distorting people's perception of their actual participation in political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the problem of multi-dimensionality in building an opinionnaire to scale the friendliness or unfriendliness of certain experiences which white people have toward African Americans. These so-called experience scales are tools created for the purpose of analyzing more objectively the background of this large something which sociologists are calling social attitude. In this case, social attitude of whites toward African Americans has been specified. The article proceeds upon the theory, made explicit elsewhere, that attitude may best be conceived as a high-level abstraction containing many aspects or dimensions. As a parallel case, the author mentions the contemporary efforts of psychologists in breaking the lump-mass "intelligence" into primary abilities or parts. In the case of attitude toward the African Americans, or tendency to act toward the African Americans, it is hypothesized that a person's paper-and-pencil reaction to an opinionnaire may not be closely related to other overt manifestations of his attitude toward that object, nor to his past experiences with the African Americans, either actually or as revealed by a paper-and-pencil test of experience.