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How much of what kinds of campaign information citizens can recollect about parties, candidates, and issues at the time a decision is called for is the keystone of virtually all [...]

We explore the impact of prosocial orientations on a domain of American public opinion that has puzzled many--attitudes toward social welfare policies. We focus on the orientation of humanitarianism, i.e., a sense of obligation to help those in need, and find that this value can explain support for a wide variety of social welfare policies. We argue that humanitarianism is an important element of the American sociopolitical ethos, although it has received little attention in the public opinion literature. We contrast humanitarianism with egalitarianism and show that these dispositions lead people to support distinctive sets of policies that constitute different types of welfare state. While egalitarianism causes people to embrace policies that mandate an extensive economic role for the government, humanitarianism is associated with more modest policies that seek to address the problems of the needy. Support for these more modest policies has generally been much greater in the United States than support for more invasive policies that seek to tinker with the free market. Thus, we argue that humanitarianism provides a better explanation for public opinion toward welfare in the United States than egalitarianism. We discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion research.

The article organizes the diversity in deliberative democracy theory. Two ideal-types are distinguished. Type one deliberation is founded upon the Habermasian logic of communicative action and focuses upon rationality and deliberative intent, distinguishes communicative and strategic action, and has a procedural component. Type one deliberation seeks to obtain understanding or consensus. Type two deliberation focuses on flexibility in discourse, emphasizes outcomes versus process, and focuses on eliminating constraints on normative ideals.

Although expert surveys have gained a prominent place in comparative studies of party positions on issues, their validity has been called into question. In this article, some of the validity concerns are evaluated in the context of the authors' own expert survey on national party positions vis-à-vis European integration. One goal of the article is to demonstrate that this expert survey produces valid measures of party positions. An equally important goal, however, is to suggest some methods that can help in assessing the quality of expert survey data. These methods, which are rooted in psychometric theory, are applicable in a variety of contexts and are easily implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]