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INTRODUCTION JUUL is a high-nicotine pod-based vaping device that is popular among adolescents and young adults. On 23 June 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) denied authorization to market JUUL, and ordered JUUL Labs to remove products from the US market. The next day, a US federal appeals court temporarily suspended the ban. The mixed public discourse surrounding the FDA ban warrants further investigation. METHODS This study examined Twitter data to describe public reaction to these announcements. Posts containing terms 'JUUL' and/or '#JUUL' (N=97548 unique tweets) were collected from 23 June to 3 July 2022, from Twitter's Streaming Application Programming Interface (API). After removing retweets, we used an inductive approach to become familiar with the data, generated a codebook, and conducted a content analysis on a random sample of n=4000 tweets. RESULTS A total of 2755 (68.9%) tweets discussed JUUL in the context of the FDA ban. News (n=1425/2755; 51.7%) about the JUUL ban, government distrust (n=588; 21.3%), and individual rights (n=253; 9.2%) were the most prevalent themes. Less commonly discussed themes included inconsistencies between policies (n=174; 6.3%), mentions of switching to other products (n=162; 5.9%), smoking cessation (n=99; 3.6%), and craving for JUUL (n=94; 3.4%). Sentiment analysis of JUUL ban-related posts (n=2755) demonstrated that 1989 (72.2%) tweets were categorized as neutral, while anti-ban posts (n=566; 20.5%) were more prevalent than pro-ban posts (n=200; 7.3%). CONCLUSIONS Besides straightforward announcements of the JUUL ban and its suspension, Twitter posts discussed government distrust, individual rights, and policy inconsistencies. While most posts conveyed neutral sentiments, anti-ban posts were almost three times more prevalent than pro-ban posts. Our findings suggest that text-based social media platforms like Twitter may be an effective instrument to understand opinions, attitudes, and beliefs regarding the FDA's JUUL ban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the leader of the largest economy, President of the United States has substantive influence on addressing climate change problems. However, a presidential election is often dominated by issues other than energy problems. This paper focuses on the 2016 presidential election, and examines the energy plans proposed by the leading Democrat and Republican candidates. Our data from the Iowa caucus survey in January 2016 suggests that voters were more concerned about terrorism and economic issues than environmental issues. We then compare the Democratic and Republican candidate's view of America's energy future, and evaluate their proposed renewable energy targets. We find that the view on renewable energy is polarized between Democratic and Republican candidates, while candidates from both parties agree on the need for energy efficiency. Results from our ordinal least squares regression models suggests that Democratic candidates have moderate to ambitious goals for developing solar and other renewables. The Republican candidates favor fossil fuels and they choose not to provide any specific target for developing renewable energy. In addition, this trend of party polarization has grown more significant when compared with the past three presidential elections. Our observation suggests that energy policies need to be discussed more often regarding the diversification and decarbonization of the nation's energy system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the military policy public in the United States--those attentive to and interested in military issues of foreign policy--similar to or different from the foreign policy public generally? This paper identifies this military policy public, specifies some of its demographic characteristics, and compares it with the American foreign policy public and the attentive public policy public. It adds a significant refinement to the understanding of public opinion and public policy relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associated with right-wing political identification and cultural values and policy preferences, particularly among politically engaged citizens. In the economic domain, however, we find that needs for certainty and security are typically associated with left -wing values and policy preferences among politically unengaged citizens. It is only among politically engaged citizens that such needs are associated with right-wing economic values and policy preferences. Our findings confirm the importance of heterogeneity across both ideological domain and political engagement for how psychological needs translate into political ideology in the American mass public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Frank Newport, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), delivered at the AAPOR's 66th annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona, May 13, 2011, in which he discussed the measurement of public opinion as a primary focus of AAPOR, the significance of public opinion in political discourse, and how public opinion impacts government policy.

In 2009, Maruna and King presented results from a British survey showing that the public's belief in the redeemability of people who committed offenses curbed their level of punitiveness. Based on a 2017 national survey in the United States (n = 1,000), the current study confirms that redeemability is negatively related to punitive attitudes. In addition, the analyses reveal that this belief predicts support for rehabilitation and specific inclusionary policies (i.e., ban-the-box in employment, expungement of criminal records, and voting rights for people with a felony conviction). Findings regarding measures for punishment and rehabilitation were confirmed by a 2019 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey. These results suggest that beliefs about capacity for change among people who committed offenses are key to understanding crime-control public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study documents the fragmentation of the American public's agenda. Updating work by McCombs and Zhu (1995), it measures the carrying capacity of the public agenda, the degree of diversity, and the rate of turnover in issues named by Gallup survey respondents asked Gallup's classic question, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?," from 1975 through 2014. Assuming the public agenda's capacity to be relatively fixed, scholars have argued that increasing agenda diversity must exert upward pressure on volatility, generating issue competition. This study reveals that the public agenda has continued to diversify, but volatility has changed little; indeed, the agenda was less volatile in 2014 than it had been in decades. Moreover, issue-carrying capacity has grown, raising questions about the traditionally posited limits of the public agenda's issue-carrying capacity. Issue-carrying capacity is positively related to agenda diversity and negatively related to volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on issues related to the military use of nuclear power in the United States. With the emergence of atomic power for military use in 1954, the U.S. Congress witnessed an increasing public awareness of the dangers of radiation. Congress admitted that development of the new power source could only be possible if there was public acceptance. The debate over civilian nuclear power has dates back to the 1940s when American public became aware of the biological impact of nuclear radiation.

The article discusses the survey regarding the public policy and the opinion of public people in the U.S. Surveys of public opinion seems to indicate that American complacency has been slightly touched. It is hard for the people to imagine the extent of the willingness of people to forget, to fail to register, to distort, and to overlook what all mass media will say. It has been said it is seldom that one must ask why congressmen or any elected officials in the country to try to get on what they consider the popular side of an issue.

Most research into the connections between water and energy, water and food, and food and energy has been scientific and technical; little research has examined the public’s understandings of these connections. This article studies these understandings and awareness of nexus issues using a 2015 national public opinion survey on the water–energy–food nexus. Responses from this representative sample of U.S. adults are used to create “awareness measures” for elements of the nexus—water and energy, water and food, and energy and food—which are then used as independent variables to investigate the extent to which awareness is associated with support for public policies designed to address these nexus interconnections. All three measures are significantly correlated to support for policy options. Results suggest that awareness of the water–energy–food nexus may represent conditions necessary for supporting policies and that building such awareness could represent an important pathway for increasing support for policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public majorities have supported several gay rights policies for some time, yet Congress's response has been limited. We document and analyze this tension through dyadic analysis of the opinion-vote relationship on 23 roll calls between 1993 and 2010, revealing a nuanced picture of responsiveness and incongruence. While constituent preferences influence white male Democrats, black lawmakers and white female Democratic lawmakers generally support gay rights and Republicans consistently oppose them, regardless of constituent preferences. Moreover, changes in constituent opinion typically fail to engender vote changes. In sum, despite a degree of responsiveness to opinion, we find there is a persistent bias against constituent will on LGB rights. [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]

Numerous prominent theories have relied on the concept of "audience costs" as a central causal mechanism in their arguments about international conflict, but scholars have had greater difficulty in demonstrating the efficacy and even the existence of such costs outside the bounds of game theory and the political psychology laboratory. We suggest that the audience costs argument focuses too narrowly on the likelihood that leaders will be removed from office by domestic constituencies for failing to make good on threats. Instead, we argue that scholars should ground these arguments on Alastair Smith's (1998) broader concept of "competency costs." Our analysis of presidential legislative success from 1953 to 2001 demonstrates the existence of foreign policy competency costs by showing that public disapproval of presidential handling of militarized interstate disputes has a significant and substantial negative impact on the president's ability to move legislation on domestic issues through Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, ANES included for the first time-along with standard explicit measures of old-fashioned and symbolic racism-the Affect Misattribution Procedure ( AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public opinion during and after the 2008 election, including Americans' views towards several racial policy issues, their evaluations of, and feelings toward, Barack Obama, and their attitudes toward a Black president in general. Oversamples of African American and Latino respondents in the 2008 ANES enable us to broaden our tests of these measures beyond traditional White samples. We find that racial prejudice played an important role for all racial/ethnic groups but that the traditional explicit measures of racism are by far the stronger predictors for all of our dependent variables (compared to the new implicit measure) for both White and Black respondents. Surprisingly, the AMP adds clear explanatory power only to models in the Latino sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether a structural or a neo-institutionalist approach best explains cross-national variations in the retiree/nonretiree cleavage regarding pension policy preferences. Prior research on welfare policy attitudes shows that in European countries retirees are more likely to support intensive public pension provision than are nonretirees, while in the United States both groups are as likely to support it. As an alternative to the increasingly predominant, neo-institutionalist approach, I propose a structural explanation that focuses on the role of elderly poverty. I argue that higher levels of elderly poverty induce nonretirees to establish their pension policy preferences based on a principle of broad reciprocity. First, in a context of high elderly poverty, nonretirees react to the demand for reciprocity by their impoverished elderly parents by supporting improvements in public pension protection. Second, in the same context, due to perceptions of retirees as highly deserving of public support, nonretirees feel more compelled to demand more public pension protection that improves the economic well-being of retirees. The results are consistent with this expectation. Using a sample of 30 OECD country years and multilevel models, countries with higher levels of elderly poverty present smaller retiree/nonretiree divides in support of public pension provision and pension spending increases [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has significant implications for state governments and its passage presents an opportunity to contribute to inquiries into ways that state officials wield influence in the national legislative process. State officials were occasionally influential when they drew on state experience and expertise and congress members were willing to benefit from this knowledge. State officials were also influential when a member of their congressional delegation was in a position to cast a pivotal vote on the bill and willing to withhold support unless state interests were addressed. State officials were also influential when they elevated their concerns in the public consciousness to the point that the bill’s supporters were forced to accommodate them or risk the bill’s defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As state policy activism has flourished in recent years, increasingly that activism has taken place through the direct democracy process. While winning ballot measures often have implications for federal-state relations, federalism issues have largely been ignored in the direct democracy literature. I address this oversight by investigating how the outcomes of direct democracy politics affect the relationships among citizens, states, and the federal government. My analysis focuses on measures proposed over the last decade that represent either a response to perceived federal inaction or a challenge to federal policy. The findings suggest that initiatives have different effects on federal-state relations depending on the form they take. When ballot measures seeking to fill a policy void lead to federal action, they promote intergovernmental policy consensus and narrow the distance between public opinion and federal policy; if the federal government fails to address the issue at stake, additional state innovation will result and voter preferences and federal policy outcomes will move farther apart. Meanwhile, initiatives that challenge federal law create conflict and polarization between states and the federal government and widen the distance between public opinion and federal policy. The passage of initiatives in both categories heightens opinion-policy congruence at the state level as officials are often eager to publicly support and implement the results of successful ballot measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents trend data collected from the 1970s to 2001 on the confidence of U.S. citizens in different levels of government and their opinions about policy-making devolution. The data suggest that U.S. citizens have more confidence in state and local governments than in the federal government on many, though not all, issues. The precipitous decline in public confidence in the federal government through the 1960s and 1970s has been well documented. The 1990s, however, marked a period of diminished public confidence, with the low point occurring in 1993 and 1994. Despite the recovery of public confidence at decade's end to levels seen in the late 1970s, a small but enduring minority seems to have emerged at the bottom of the confidence scale since 1993. This small section of the public volunteers that it has no confidence in the federal government. Given U.S. Congress's track record of preemption of state authority through the 1990s on such issues as crime and environmental law. alongside devolution in other policy areas, such as welfare and Medicaid, the U.S.. Supreme Court will likely continue to be the ultimate arbiter of the boundaries between federal and state power. Ultimately, majority public opinion on federalism, given its mixed quality as well, seems unlikely to offer U.S. Congress and the states any clear guidance or check.

The article develops a model of public opinion on government spending for childcare in the U.S. Most individuals have general political values and attitudes towards government involvement in family matters. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that childcare is an issue on which the public might express its general political attitudes. Moreover, one might expect public opinions on child-care issues to have some impact on the decisions of policy makers, although the general impact of public opinion on policy outcomes is open to debate. Insofar as public opinion is expected to have at least some impact on the decisions of policy makers, public opinion on government involvement in childcare is a phenomenon worthy of explanation. Under self-interest theory, individuals develop policy attitudes that reinforce their perceptions of the benefits and costs associated with policy alternatives. Self-interest theory would predict that individuals will adopt policy attitudes that maximize benefits and minimize costs to themselves, and that the intensity of these policy views is a function of the magnitude of benefits and costs.

To what extent have the policy decisions of the U.S. government been consistent with the preferences of the public? Using results of national surveys, public opinion was compared with actual policy outcomes on over 500 issues from 1980 through 1993. Overall, policy outcomes were consistent with the preferences of public majorities on 55 percent of the cases, representing a decline from 63 percent during the 1960-79 period. While this decline ex- tended to almost all substantive policy topic categories analyzed, foreign policy decisions tended to be among the most consistent (67 percent), as in the previous two decades. Similar to the analysis of the earlier period, it appeared that a key reason for policy not being more consistent with public opinion was an inherent bias against change in the U.S. political process, a tendency that has increased over time. The reasons for this increase in bias against change, and the corresponding decline in consistency, are not entirely clear, but may be rooted in divided control of government combined with increased ideological conflict. It is interesting that when issues were categorized in terms of their salience to the public, it appeared that opinion/policy consistency was greater (and bias against change less) on those issues of highest public salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any relatively stable polity must possess means for converting many, if not most, demands made on political authorities into satisfying outputs, whether material or symbolic. Failure to cope with pressing demands might lead to a severely dysfunctional loss of public support for particular officials as well as for the regime itself. On the other hand, efforts to meet demands through blatant violations of accepted rules can also cause great loss in public support. Sometimes governmental officials can meet public demands only if certain changes are made in the rules under which politics is traditionally conducted. Furthermore, the boundaries separating constitutionally permissible and impermissible behavior are typically vague. Thus, important and controversial government policies are likely to engender disputes not only about their merits but also about whether the government, or a particular set of officials, can legitimately undertake a given course of action. Because of the emotional nature of much political rhetoric, these two kinds of controversy are usually difficult to untangle. Yet it is important that they be kept separate for purposes of analysis.

Background: Renewable energy development is a necessary step toward climate change mitigation, so these topics have often been linked. In US public discourse, however, they have somewhat different profiles—climate change views are tied closely to partisan identity, whereas renewable energy exhibits more cross-cutting appeal, and sometimes more cross-cutting opposition as well. To what extent are such differences reflected in survey data tracking rates of change, respondent characteristics, and local or regional variations in public opinion on renewable energy and climate?Methods: We explore similarities and differences in views of renewable energy and climate change using a unique collection of 18 US national or regional surveys totaling more than 14,000 interviews, conducted between 2011 and 2017. Individual surveys varied in context, content, and goals, but all asked two common energy and climate questions, which yield comparable and strikingly consistent results.Results: Public support for renewable energy appears broader than acceptance of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), especially in a more conservative region. Despite local controversies, support for renewable energy in recent years rose faster than ACC acceptance on two regional surveys. Political divisions remain wide on both topics, but wider regarding climate change—particularly among college-educated respondents. Renewable energy views in counties with proposed or operating wind farms are not systematically different from those in other counties.Conclusions: Overall, these results provide encouragement for promoting renewable energy in terms of its economic benefits, working around some of the political identity-based resistance to climate change mitigation. That approach could be most important in politically conservative regions where such resistance is strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]