Browsing by Author "Hillygus, D Sunshine"

Scholars often recognize public opinion as a valuable metric of the collective will to compare against decisions of political leaders, but the value of public opinion also lies in its ability to serve as a ‘collective mirror.’ Measuring public opinion provides us the ability to examine our collective attitudes and beliefs; assess whether they are blemished by misinformation; and examine whether our divisions are rooted in deep-seated principles or simply superficial efforts to maintain a partisan appearance. This image that is reflected back at us can have deep implications for the conclusions we draw and the subsequent actions that we take. However, that image of public opinion will never be completely accurate. Respondents motivations and considerations, our measurement strategy, as well as the broader social and political context will influence the beliefs and attitudes expressed in survey responses. This dissertation presents a series of studies that examine how each of these challenges can present themselves and impact our understanding of public opinion. Presented together these results serve as a reminder that researchers, policy-makers, and the public themselves need to exercise caution and make sure to keep these factors in mind when interpreting findings from surveys and polls.

Scholars often recognize public opinion as a valuable metric of the collective will to compare against decisions of political leaders, but the value of public opinion also lies in its ability to serve as a ‘collective mirror.’ Measuring public opinion provides us the ability to examine our collective attitudes and beliefs; assess whether they are blemished by misinformation; and examine whether our divisions are rooted in deep-seated principles or simply superficial efforts to maintain a partisan appearance. This image that is reflected back at us can have deep implications for the conclusions we draw and the subsequent actions that we take. However, that image of public opinion will never be completely accurate. Respondents motivations and considerations, our measurement strategy, as well as the broader social and political context will influence the beliefs and attitudes expressed in survey responses. This dissertation presents a series of studies that examine how each of these challenges can present themselves and impact our understanding of public opinion. Presented together these results serve as a reminder that researchers, policy-makers, and the public themselves need to exercise caution and make sure to keep these factors in mind when interpreting findings from surveys and polls.

Issue voting, where citizens select candidates based on their own policy preferences, exists as an ideal form of candidate selection in a representative democracy, with politicians being elected because they match the policy preferences of their constituencies. But, in practice, how much of voter decision-making is driven by political issue information? Much of the literature on this topic has narrowly debated whether the mass public uses issues at all, with influential work concluding that citizens seem largely unable or unwilling to do so. If true, this has important implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and the design of institutions. In this dissertation, I argue the debate of how voters decide is a false dichotomy and that pitting issue voting against non-issue voting has limited our understanding of political decision-making. Through a series of original survey experiments and analysis of multiple panel datasets, I show that voters, hindered by the same cognitive and motivational constraints used by critics to argue against the existence of issue voting, can and do use policy information to inform their vote choice. The results of this dissertation imply that the American voter falls between the ideal issue voter from classical theories of voting and the non-issue voter of recent work in political psychology, promoting guarded optimism toward the public’s ability to maintain ideal democratic principles.

In this dissertation, I explore the impact of several public policies on civic participation. Using a unique combination of school administrative and public–use voter files and methods for causal inference, I evaluate the impact of three new, as of yet unexplored, policies: one informational, one institutional, and one skill–based. Chapter 2 examines the causal effect of No Child Left Behind’s performance-based accountability school failure signals on turnout in school board elections and on individuals’ use of exit. I find that failure signals mobilize citizens both at the ballot box and by encouraging them to vote with their feet. However, these increases in voice and exit come primarily from citizens who already active—thus exacerbating inequalities in both forms of participation. Chapter 3 examines the causal effect of preregistration—an electoral reform that allows young citizens to enroll in the electoral system before turning 18, while also providing them with various in-school supports. Using data from the Current Population Survey and Florida Voter Files and multiple methods for causal inference, I (with my coauthor listed below) show that preregistration mobilizes and does so for a diverse set of citizens. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the impact of psychosocial or so called non-cognitive skills on voter turnout. Using information from the Fast Track intervention, I show that early– childhood investments in psychosocial skills have large, long-run spillovers on civic participation. These gains are widely distributed, being especially large for those least likely to participate. These chapters provide clear insights that reach across disciplinary boundaries and speak to current policy debates. In placing specific attention not only on whether these programs mobilize, but also on who they mobilize, I provide scholars and practitioners with new ways of thinking about how to address stubbornly low and unequal rates of citizen engagement.

This dissertation addresses measurement issues underlying our understanding of the capacity of citizens to hold elected representatives accountable. A growing body of work documents the many misperceptions---or inaccurate beliefs---people hold about politics, and the prevailing narrative in the literature suggests that the public is highly misinformed. In Chapter 2, I argue that past work exaggerates the degree to which the public is misinformed by relying on methods that cannot meaningfully distinguish between inaccurate beliefs held with certainty and incorrect guesses. I adjust for differential item functioning (i.e., differences in how respondents use response scales) in an alternative measure of certainty and show that being misinformed is surprisingly rare. I find that misperceptions reported on surveys are four times more likely to represent uncertain guesses than firmly held beliefs. Chapter 3 examines how guessing under uncertainty gives the false impression of being misinformed. I show that when people are uncertain, they engage in a Bayesian process by which they systematically overestimate the size of smaller quantities and underestimate the size of larger ones. I show that this Bayesian model compares favorably to existing explanations of misperceptions about the size of minority racial groups using a large collection of data from estimates of the size of 42 demographic groups from 35,000 survey respondents in 22 countries. The findings presented in Chapter 3 raise questions about the common practice of measuring political misperceptions by asking survey respondents to estimate the size of politically relevant quantities. Chapter 4 examines how people interact with theses quantities, specifically with respect to attempts to change attitudes by correcting misperceptions. I focus on individual differences in numeracy (i.e., quantitative literacy) and show that people often lack the necessary skills required to estimate the size of political quantities and incorporate correct information into their attitudes. Together, these findings challenge the prevailing narrative that much of the public is highly misinformed about politics and suggests that much of what is known about the capacity of citizens to meaningfully engage in politics is a product of the types of questions used to measure political misperceptions.

In the study of politics and campaigns, scholars have focused on television as the primary medium for advertising. But recent years have seen political candidates turn to internet and social media platforms, which offer different opportunities and constraints for their campaigns. How do candidates communicate with voters in social media ads? In this dissertation, I explore the nature and dynamics of digital campaign rhetoric. I construct a large-scale dataset of all Congressional campaign ads run on Facebook during two recent U.S. elections. Using computational text analysis, I show that ads distributed by candidates are frequently polarizing — they attack members of the opposing party and convey loyalty to their own party using identity-driven rhetoric. Yet candidates are strategic in their use of this rhetoric. They avoid using polarizing language when targeting voter networks but deploy it at high rates when targeting partisan donor networks outside their constituency. I argue that social media platforms incentivize candidates to adopt such a strategy by making it easy to narrowcast polarizing messages only to audiences most likely to be responsive. The result, however, is candidates displaying different “faces” to different groups of the American public. Overall, my findings have important implications for the asymmetric distribution of polarizing speech around virtual spaces. With this dissertation, I offer a framework for understanding how Congressional candidates, internet technology, and the quest for political power come together, contributing to broader trends of polarization in the U.S.

This paper analyzes the influence of political selective exposure to cable news stations on mass-polarization, operationalized as radicalization in issue attitudes during the 2004 Presidential campaign. Various studies have demonstrated at length how political predispositions guide news media choices, which holds especially true for TV news. In contrast, my empirical analyses focus on the effects of exposure to congenial news sources. Using panel data, I show that, first, selective exposure to ideologically leaning cable news has a radicalizing effect on issue attitudes salient in the presidential campaign, even in states where intense campaigning was absent. Second, I demonstrate that the effect of selective exposure on economic attitudes is much more powerful then its effect on social issues. I conclude by discussing the relevance of the findings as well as its long-term implications.

This manuscript is comprised of three papers that examine the far-reaching and often invisible political outcomes of gender role socialization in the United States. These papers focus primarily on two areas: political confidence amongst girls and women, and the effects of gender on survey measurement and data quality.

Chapter one focuses on political confidence, and the likelihood that women will run for political office. Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership, and their lack of political ambition, relative to men, has been identified as a primary cause. In this paper, I explore the relationship between an individual's masculinity and femininity and her development of political ambition. Using original survey data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), I first empirically demonstrate that gender (masculinity/femininity) and sex (male/female) are unique elements of identity and, moreover, are both independently related to political ambition. I then explore the relevance of gender for the study of candidate emergence, testing whether and how masculinity and femininity might be related to political ambition are supported empirically. While the results suggest that masculinity is positively associated with the development of political ambition, the relationship between femininity and candidate emergence seems to be more complicated and not what prevailing stereotypes might lead us to expect. Moreover, while the relationship between masculinity and political ambition is the same for men and women, the relationship between femininity and political ambition is very different for women than it is for men. This study suggests that gender role socialization is highly related with both men's and women's desire to seek positions of political leadership.

Chapter two continues this exploration of gendered differences in the development of political ambition, this time exploring how social attractiveness and gendered perceptions of political leadership impact the desire to hold political office.Women are persistently underrepresented as candidates for public office and remain underrepresented at all levels of government in the United States. Previous literature suggests that the gendered ambition gap, gender socialization, insufficient recruitment, media scrutiny, family responsibilities, modern campaign strategies, and political opportunity structures all contribute to the gender imbalance in pools of officeholders and candidates. To explain women's reticence to run, scholars have offered explanations addressing structural, institutional, and individual-level factors that deter women from becoming candidates, especially for high positions in the U.S. government. This paper examines a previously unexplored factor: how dating and socialized norms of sexual attraction affect political ambition. This study investigates whether young, single, and heterosexual women's desire for male attention and fear of being perceived as unattractive or "too ambitious" present obstacles to running for office. The results of these experiments suggest that social expectations about gender, attraction and sexuality, and political office-holding may contribute to women's reticence to pursue political leadership. Chapter two is a co-authored work and represents the joint efforts of Laura Lazarus Frankel, Shauna Shames, and Nadia Farjood.

Chapter 3 bridges survey methodology and gender socialization, focusing on how interviewer sex affects survey measurement and data quality. Specifically, this paper examines whether and how matching interviewer and respondent sex affects panel attrition--respondents dropping out of the study after participating in the first wave. While the majority of research on interviewer effects suggests that matching interviewer and respondent characteristics (homophily) yields higher quality data, little work has examined whether this pattern holds true in the area of panel attrition. Using paradata from the General Social Survey (GSS), I explore this question. My analysis reveals that, despite its broader positive effects on data quality, matching interviewer and respondent sex increases likelihood to attrit. Interestingly, this phenomenon only emerges amongst male respondents. However, while assigning female interviewers to male respondents decreases their propensity to attrit, it also increases the likelihood of biased responses on gender related items. These conflicting outcomes represent a tradeoff for scholars and survey researchers, requiring careful consideration of mode, content, and study goals when designing surveys and/or analyzing survey data. The implications of these patterns and areas for further research are discussed.

Together, these papers illustrate two ways that gender norms are related to political outcomes: they contribute to patterns of candidate emergence and affect the measurement of political attitudes and behaviors.

For students of color, how do school experiences early in life affect adult political participation later on? Political scientists have long understood that race plays a critical role in political behavior; however, scholars rarely investigate the features of American society that drive racial inequalities in outcomes like voting, volunteering for campaigns, and other forms of political participation. This study explores an important and underexamined source of long-term differences in political behavior: childhood experiences in schools. Using observational analysis of longitudinal datasets, I examine the relationship between public schools and political participation among students of color. My research highlights the important fact that public schools can influence both the resources students of color have later in life and the feelings they have toward government and politics—sometimes in opposing ways that ultimately leave students of color better-resourced but less confident in government and less likely to participate.

Political persuasion research has long focused on the various factors of persuasion – source, message, audience, and medium – with partisan identity inevitably being considered the dominant predictor of whether persuasion occurs. However, in studying these factors of persuasion, the existing literature has considered them in isolation from each other rather than in interaction. Ignoring the ways in which these factors may interact – and the implications these interactions may have for how persuasion occurs – results in an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the ways in which individuals receive and process political information. Through a series of original survey experiments conducted on various survey platforms, this dissertation develops an interactive framework of political persuasion, using the communication strategy of unexpected messaging as an example. The results illustrate (1) unexpected messaging can lead to a significant increase in the evaluations of perceived trustworthiness and expertise of political speakers and sources of political information, and that these evaluations can even lead to shifts in policy opinions, a particularly critical finding in today’s polarized political environment; (2) unexpected messaging breaks through the partisanship barrier, causing respondents of both political parties to more positively evaluate speakers, and to vote across party lines; and (3) when partisan and policy cues are salient, the partisanship of the audience receiving an unexpected message determines how the message will be interpreted.