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This study examines how --accuracy'' and --partisan'' motives shape mass political perceptions. It proposes a model of --updating dynamics'' in which the effects of these motives are conditioned by the political environment. Scholars have overlooked the environment's role because their explanations rely on stable updating mechanisms like awareness and party identification. In this study, by contrast, perception updating is a process governed by motivation's moving parts. Systematic changes in the political environment, including changes in the valence of economic news, elite consensus about actual-world conditions, and the presence of national political campaigns, shift the across-time balance of accuracy- and partisan-motivated thinking. Under certain conditions the political environment reinforces objective learning and inference, but contextual changes also motivate people to --think like they feel." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., described the mood in Washington as being --not so much bipartisan but non-partisan." With elites unconstrained by party lines, thus, the post-9/11 period presented the nation's Op-Ed columnists with a unique opportunity to deliberate. But did their conversation resemble a deliberative discussion? What shaped columnists' use of rhetorical phrases and themes across time? How, if at all, did the dynamics of the debate affect ordinary people's opinions?Using data from an automated content analysis of all relevant Op-Ed columns, 2001â??2007, this study examines the nature and dynamics of the US Commentariat's debate. Preliminary tests suggest that the columnists' discussion falls short on several key tenets of deliberation. Additional analyses shed light on what factors drive the media conversation, and explore how elite-level information diffusion affects public response to events. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of mass behavior typically assume that what people think and believe about politics originates from fixed mental processes. This study argues that updating is a function of moving parts. A model of updating dynamics is developed, and tests of the model make two general contributions to scholars' understanding of political inference. First, the findings elucidate motivation's dual roles in perception formation---inclining people to update beliefs using actual-world information, on the one hand, and draw inferences that are consistent with preferred-world states, on the other. Second, they show that contextual conditions direct the balance of accuracy- and partisan-motivated thinking, which has implications for both individual- and collective-level citizen performance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we report on an information-class-structural analysis of opinion dynamics in the United States. We examine 30 years of different time series to assess the extent to which public opinion dynamics are more democratic or more elite in character, looking at the breadth of mass responsiveness to economic and political trends. Our results show that, for the most part, the information class structure is more egalitarian than much of current theory would suggest. With certain exceptions, broad-gauged political and economic trends and events get disseminated fairly widely in the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing literature on ambivalence has typically relied on theories about the survey response to understand ambivalence's effects. While valuable, we believe these theories fail to capture the motivational implications of ambivalence. In this paper, we propose and test a motivational theory of ambivalence. Drawing on extensive research in social and political psychology, we argue that ambivalent individuals are driven by accuracy goals while univalent individuals are driven by directional goals. One implication of this theory is that objective information should carry more weight for ambivalent than for univalent individuals. We test this implication by considering the impact of objective economic data on individuals with high versus low levels of ambivalence toward the Democratic and Republican parties. Consistent with our theory, we find that ambivalent individuals place greater weight on objective economic data when forming retrospective economic evaluations. We discuss the aggregate effect of this finding, as well as its normative implications. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the political implications of citizens' using an affect heuristic. When people attribute policy positions to the political parties, they use affect to make sense of the political world. The result is an attribution bias that has strong partisans overestimating the extremity of party stands. Moreover, an asymmetric usage of the affect heuristic leads to a Left Shift in American politics: Democrats are seen as more Leftist than they are while Republicans are perceived more or less correctly. The social psychological explanation of this phenomenon is important but not complete. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macro-level scholars show that collective public opinion is informed and responsive. At the micro-level, however, researchers find that citizens’ political perceptions are neither accurate nor impartial. To resolve this micro-macro paradox, I propose a novel theory of aggregation that predicts both systematic micro-level misperception and macro-level rationality. To test the theory, I examine partisans? and nonpartisans? perceptions of national economic conditions from 1980-2002. At the micro-level, I find that partisans ? especially those who pay careful attention to politics ? are more likely than nonpartisans to offer extreme evaluations of the economy. Next, moving to the macro-level, I show that this bias is persistent in the aggregate. Relative to actual economic conditions in each year, partisans? evaluations are biased in a manner that supports their partisan affiliation, whereas nonpartisans? evaluations are closely aligned with actual features of the economy. Finally, I show that even though they are biased, partisans? perceptions are surprisingly sensitive to perturbations in the economy. This occurs because the effects of partisan bias are approximately constant over time, making partisan bias a non-factor in longitudinal analysis. Altogether, my analyses show that economic reality drives partisans? dynamic perceptions in spite of severe systematic bias at the micro-level. . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After several decades' worth of work proclaiming that politicalcampaigns have --minimal effects,'' recent studies have begun togrant these events a central role in shaping voter behavior. Aleading impetus behind the shifting wisdom has been scholars'claim that campaigns --enlighten" voters. However, to date, thisburgeoning case for campaign learning has ignored a keydifficulty: campaigns reinforce partisanship. And thus, ascampaign intensity builds over an election cycle, voters shouldhave not only greater access to politically relevant information,but also greater motivation to resist it. This study exploresthis tension through the lens of partisan learning. Anincremental analysis of public perceptions of economics and warnot only shows how and when campaigns affect voter understanding,but also elucidates why scholars have heretofore drawncontradictory conclusions about the nature and quality of partisaninference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political affect, rooted in personality traits and information channels, shapes people's beliefs about political parties. Historical data confirm a powerful system of asymmetric attribution biases that yield the Left Shift in American politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the properties of aggregate public opinion. Simulation methodology connects complex micro theory to dynamic aggregation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]