Reassessing Issue Publics with a New Method: Individual Tendency toward Specialist and its Relationships with Media Type.

This paper proposed a new method that estimates the degree to which an individual is a specialist-type or a generalist-type citizen. Employing the 2008 ANES data, the study demonstrated that the proposed method can significantly extend the scope of research on issue publics in a number of ways. Beyond the long pending question of which type of citizen prevails in society, the new method allows us to examine various antecedents or consequences of specialists and generalists. For example, the study found that new media were associated with specialist-type citizens, whereas traditional media, such as television, newspaper, and radio, fostered generalist-type individuals. Moreover, the author argued that although the issue public is a two-dimensional concept in nature, previous research has largely overlooked it. Therefore, by combining the proposed method with previous issue public measures, the study identified four types of citizens within each issue and compared their levels of issue knowledge and attitude extremity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]