Browsing by Subject "Public opinion"

In a democratic society, does the electorate approve of truth and disapprove of deception, do opinion patterns exclusively mimic partisan elite views, or do opinion patterns react exclusively to successful or failed outcomes? Do citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived truthfulness of foreign policy claims or do they only evaluate whether or not the policies were successful? The existing literature on public opinion and foreign policy calls the accountability role for the public "audience costs," and specifies that concerns about audience costs constrain leaders. However, the literature is not clear on what role normative issues may play in generating audience costs. This gap in the literature is notable because so much of the debate surrounding significant policy issues, especially war-making and military action, is couched in retrospective, normative, moralizing language. These debates make no sense if the pragmatic, forward-looking dimensions of audience costs - reliability and success - are all that exist. Through a survey experiment and four historical case studies developed with primary and secondary historical sources, news articles, and polling data, I find that there is a complex dynamic at work between the public's desire for successful outcomes and the high value placed upon truth-telling and transparency within a democracy. Studying justifications for military action and war, I find that the public will be motivated to punish leaders perceived as deceptive, but that imposition of audience costs will be moderated by factors including partisanship, degree of elite unity, and the leader's damage control strategy in response to disapproval.

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.

Environmental attitudes have interested scholars for decades, but researchers have insufficiently appreciated the low salience of the environment, and the enormous complexity of this issue area. In this dissertation, I investigate how these features influence the way ordinary citizens think about the environment.

Research into the dynamics of public opinion has found a generic relationship between policy change and public demands for activist government. Yet, less is known about the relationship between policy and attitudes in individual issue areas. In the first chapter, I investigate the influence of a variety of factors on public opinion in a particularly complex policy area---the environment. To study the short-run and long term dynamics of environmental public opinion, I generate an annual metric of environmental attitudes running from 1974 to 2011. Consistent with prior research, I find the economy and major environmental disasters play an important role in aggregate environmental opinion. However, actual policy innovations are found to play only a limited role in attitude formation. Instead, the party label of the president appears to affect demand for environmental activism, when other factors are held constant.

Scholarly research has found a weak and inconsistent role for self-interest in public opinion, and mixed evidence for a relationship between local pollution risks and support for environmental protection. In the second chapter, I argue that focusing events can induce self-interested responses from people living in communities whose economies are implicated by the event. I leverage a unique 12-wave panel survey administered between 2008 and 2010 to analyze public opinion toward offshore oil drilling before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I find that residence in counties highly dependent upon the offshore drilling industry was predictive of pro-drilling attitudes following the spill, though not prior to the spill. In addition, there is no significant evidence that residence in a county afflicted by the spill influenced opinion. This chapter concludes that local support for drilling often arises only after focusing events make the issue salient.

Previous research into place effects has provided mixed evidence about the effect of geography on public opinion. Much of the work finding a relationship is susceptible to methodological criticisms of spuriouness or endogeneity. In the third chapter, I leverage a unique research design to examine the influence of residential setting on environmental attitudes regarding water use. The findings indicate that local drought conditions increase individuals' level of concern about the nation's water supply. In addition, drought conditions are related to public attitudes towards water use regulation, with those living in drought-afflicted counties more likely to support government regulation. This chapter provides a firm foundation for research attempting to demonstrate that local conditions have a causal effect on public opinion.

High levels of partisan polarization on environmental policies, and on climate change in particular, have led to policy gridlock in the United States. While most Americans rely on their partisan identities to guide their policy preferences on highly polarizing issues, other non-partisan identities may also be relevant in informing environmental policy attitudes. This dissertation investigates the role that partisan and non-partisan identities play in driving attitudes on climate change and environmental policies broadly. In a first paper, I use a survey experiment to test how identity salience influences the effectiveness of a persuasive message about climate change. I find that priming a non-partisan (parental) identity decreases partisan polarization on climate change policy support, while priming a partisan identity increases polarization. In a second paper, I use focus groups, participant observation, and interviews to identify four strategies that individuals use to reconcile conflicting identities and form attitudes on climate change. In a third paper, I use focus groups with rural voters in North Carolina to understand how rural identities inform unique environmental policy preferences. Each of these studies contributes to the broader understanding of the role that non-partisan identities play in driving environmental attitudes and offers a potential way to build more bipartisan agreement in this policy area.

Citizens' opinions in authoritarian countries are overlooked in the current research on authoritarian regimes. It is also hard to get the true opinions from the citizens. Because they might fear the consequences of disclosure and they might be unwilling to report socially undesired opinions. Researchers question the survey conducted in authoritarian countries, and worry about the possible "self-censorship" in those countries. In this paper, I applied a survey technique named list experiment to answer whether citizens in authoritarian countries censor their opinions towards sensitive questions, what kind of issue could be more sensitive and what kind of people tend to self-censor more. Based on my experiment in the capital of China, people do censor themselves, especially in political fundamental issue. People are more willing to tell true opinion towards economic issue. Among different subgroups, old people, probationary CCP members and government employees tend to censor themselves more.

Public opinion tools are used to look at voter motivations to engage in clientelistic practices and their variation across structures of competition.

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.

The previous literature fails to reach consensus on the role of media in the foreign aid allocation. My paper attempts to answer following questions by examining Muslim countries: Are there any media effects on the pattern of aid giving? If the media influence the amount of aid, then how does it play its role? In addition, although previous studies show that different donors have prioritized specific groups, no study systemically shows the reason why a donor prioritizes certain recipients. Examining all recipients and donors cannot control the circumstantial factors generated by different regions and ethnicities. In other words, donors allocate international aid to different group of countries for various reasons and much of the research fails to examine the reasons that cannot be generalized.

This paper conducts the OLS time series regression analysis with robust standard errors for U.S. foreign aid allocations, specifically for 46 Muslim/Arab countries. The results of my empirical analysis are threefold. First, Muslim/Arab related factors such as oil reserves, Millennium Challenge Account, and the existence of terrorist groups affect aid variation. Second, the more media attention a country acquires, the more it is likely to receive more generous allocations of aid. Finally, and most importantly, there is a negative interaction effect between the level of media coverage and the number of U.S. soldiers present in that country on aid allocation. When a Muslim recipient maintains more number of U.S. soldiers than the yearly mean U.S. troop level of Muslim countries, the media effect on aid volume decreases. This finding provides guideline for the plausible links around the public, media and governing bodies.

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.

Intelligence is an integral part of states’ foreign policy formation and implementation. In the American context, the intelligence community is involved in essentially every national security discussion occurring in government, yet it remains relatively obscure to academia and the broader public. The inherently secretive nature of intelligence impedes the collection and analysis of reliable and representative data. Consequently, broad generalities and sensational accounts pervade public discussions and even academic research. We can have little confidence that we have a complete picture of how these clandestine organizations operate, their success as instruments of policy, or their effectiveness in warning.

Congress is nominally endowed with the primary responsibility for piercing this curtain of secrecy and ensuring the community’s primary goals are pursued efficiently and lawfully. Unfortunately, the secrecy that makes congressional oversight necessary also perversely disincentivize it. These efforts largely occur in private, taking members away from electorally beneficial activities. Inattentive voters, few interest groups, incomplete control of intelligence budgets, and no natural voting constituency exacerbate this problem. Despite these shortcomings, intelligence committee service has been highly coveted in recent years.

I argue that Congress members see other electoral benefits to intelligence committee service. At the institutional level, party and committee leadership see opportunities to search for failures or executive malfeasance in closed hearings and to bring salient issues to public attention in open sessions. At the individual level, committee members perceive that service bolsters foreign policy credentials and provides regular opportunities to take critical policy positions. Finally, while the public may be uninformed and inattentive on intelligence, they do pay attention to salient crises or alleged malfeasance, providing an electoral connection to the above partisan motivations.

I provide evidence of these incentives in a quantitative analysis of oversight hearing data, natural language processing of committee member communications on Twitter, and a national online survey with two survey experiments. I find that partisan political factors like divided government, election cycles, and party identity can influence patterns of committee and individual behavior, as well as the beliefs held by the public. In short, for intelligence oversight its politics as usual.

Many factors affect responsiveness of elected policy makers to public opinion. While a full understanding of this topic is not possible without decades of careful research, this dissertation examines a few important areas. In particular, I look at the effects of party competition on legislator responsiveness, the dynamics of interest group politics and the ability of some voters to obtain disproportionate representation, and the nuances of how to interpret public opinion itself for a specific policy.

The first two chapters, on party competition and interest groups, make use of secondary data generated by the government, other scholars, and various relevant organizations. The chapters employ data on the behaviors and characteristics of members of Congress, election results, campaign finance data, and population and demographic information. Using appropriate econometric models, I find in chapter 1 that significant competition between the two major parties does serve to increase responsiveness to the public at the level of the individual legislator, with effects at the aggregate level being somewhat weaker. In recent years, it is difficult to estimate these effects because of the generally high levels of party competition and low variance across district.

Using similar data and methods, the exploratory analysis in chapter 2 suggests a relationship between unorganized groups of voters and the positions their elected officials take, independent of party, district average public opinion, and organized interest group contributions. The results also suggest that context matters a great deal in determining which groups will be influential.

Chapter 3 examines the nature of public opinion itself, using the Affordable Care Act as a case study. I conducted a survey experiment to assess how the distribution of opinions on the Affordable Care Act might change in response to priming different design features of the law. My findings indicate that opinion on the ACA is malleable and depends on what pieces of the law people think about at the time of response. In the real world, this implies that which parts of the ACA are highlighted and how it is discussed publicly will affect its future. Policy pork, as defined in the chapter, can build up support, but wedge provisions in the law can serve to entrench the opposition further. These implications can also be applied to other complex, highly visible reform bills.

A final concluding chapter attempts to apply these findings, as well as other political science research, to the case of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). Based on my assessment of the political context of this act, which was hailed as a permanent resolution to a longstanding debate over Medicare provider payments, I argue that the debate is not actually over, and that group interests, the design of the law, and broader contextual factors will ensure the debate continues.

A commonly accepted model of public attitudes toward election rules assumes that citizens follow the cues of their preferred party’s elites and support rules that would benefit that party in elections. However, a separate literature on procedural fairness suggests that the public places a high priority on the fairness of democratic institutions. This dissertation tests which model predominates in the public’s decisions on election rules across a variety of policies and political contexts. It finds that most citizens prefer fair electoral institutions at the expense of partisan interest when that choice is made explicit, and a minority of committed partisans are driven by partisanship. While most partisans are unwilling to manipulate election rules to benefit their own party, they react negatively to attempts at manipulation by the other party. Citizens are susceptible to influence from elite messaging on election law issues but are resistant to attempts to influence their core democratic principles.

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.

This dissertation uses the lens of cultural sociology to understand variance in people’s attitude reports over time. Across three studies, I use a variety of panel surveys and statistical approaches to understand how and why people change their attitudes and adjudicate theories of culture. Study 1 uses data from the 2006 to 2014 rotating panels of the General Social Survey to adjudicate between a settled dispositions model, in which changes in attitudes are temporary and people return to a settled baseline, and an active updating model, where changes persist. Study 2 explores heterogeneity within the settled dispositions group, asking whether people’s attitude reports should be thought of as temporary constructs drawn from stored considerations or whether they represent durable opinions. It quantifies the prevalence of these opinion behaviors for 544 items from 10 panel data sets. Study 3 seeks to predict variance in attitude responses over time. Using data on religious, moral, and family structure beliefs in the National Study of Youth and Religion, I use Latent Class Analysis to deduce a set of constraints that should shape people’s response patterns over time. I test these constraints on people’s subsequent attitude reports. Taken together, results of these studies suggest 1) people’s attitudes are stable, on average, over the long term; 2) this average stability often masks high levels of instability in the short term, though some proportion of the population is stable on any issue; and 3) both this stability and instability are somewhat predictable based on a person’s pattern of beliefs. Findings suggest a model of culture where people internalize a diverse set of considerations when they are young and are shaped, in the short-term, by environmental influences. But durable cognitive structures, likely formed when people are young, limit the power of changing social circumstances to induce durable change.