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Public Opinion (public + opinion)
Kinds of Public Opinion Terms modified by Public Opinion Selected AbstractsCONGRESSIONAL PARTISANSHIP, BIPARTISANSHIP AND PUBLIC OPINION: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSISPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 1 2001Jonathan Morris There has been extensive research concerning Congress and how partisan attachments and attitudes affect views toward it. In addition, a burgeoning area of research has developed concerning how media influences a person's attitudes and beliefs. In our study we test three hypotheses: viewing partisan House rhetoric will increase partisanship, negative attitudes toward Congress, and negative attitudes toward the federal government as a whole. We test these hypotheses with an experimental design in which we manipulate the independent variable at two levels: viewing partisan speeches and viewing bipartisan speeches. We find that direct exposure to congressional partisan rhetoric leads to lower levels of support and increased partisan polarization. Surprisingly, we also find that exposure to bipartisan floor rhetoric, while decreasing party polarization fails to generate increased levels of support for Congress or the government as whole. [source] John F. Kennedy, USIA, and World Public OpinionDIPLOMATIC HISTORY, Issue 1 2001Mark Haefele First page of article [source] Public Opinion as a Constraint against War: Democracies' Responses to Operation Iraqi FreedomFOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2006STEVE CHAN A central logic of the democratic peace theory claims that public opinion acts as a powerful restraint against war. Democratic officials, unlike their autocratic counterparts, are wary of going to war because they expect to pay an electoral penalty for fighting even successful wars. Several democracies, however, recently joined Operation Iraqi Freedom despite substantial and even overwhelming domestic opposition. We argue that electoral institutions can heighten or lessen the impact of public opinion on democratic officials' concerns for their reelection prospects, thus pointing to an important dimension of variation that has been overlooked in the democratic peace literature. However, contrary to conventional attributions of a greater incentive motivating the parties and candidates in predominantly two-party systems with majority/plurality decision rules to respond to national public opinion, we suggest mitigating factors that tend to reduce such responsiveness. Conversely, we point out that multiparty competition in proportional representation systems can reduce electoral disproportionality without sacrificing responsiveness to public opinion. The pertinent electoral institutions therefore present varying opportunities (or, conversely, constraints) for democratic officials to override their constituents' sentiments when they are so inclined. [source] Opposition to the European Union in the UK: The Dilemma of Public Opinion and Party ManagementGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2002Simon Usherwood First page of article [source] Foreign Policy Analysis and Globalization: Public Opinion, World Opinion, and the Individual by Foyle,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2003Jean A. Garrison First page of article [source] Foreign Policy Analysis and Globalization: Public Opinion, World Opinion, and the IndividualINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2003Douglas Foyle First page of article [source] Building Publics, Shaping Public Opinion: Interanimating Registers in Malagasy Kabary Oratory and Political CartooningJOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2008Jennifer L. Jackson This article discusses socially productive aspects of register shifts in political oratory (kabary politika) and political cartoons of the urban capital province of Madagascar, Imerina. In their daily mediated interactions, politicians and cartoonists interanimate varying registers associated with different social fields, effectively framing and navigating particular publics for particular interests. In this context, the article will explore the semiotic process in which registers drawn from different speech contexts,the proverbs of kabary, Christian sermons, and Western political and international development rhetoric,discursively circulate to hearken toward or contest imaginaries of community belonging and solidarity undergirding these publics, the agency of participant roles they presuppose, and the public opinion they entail.,[Madagascar, oratory, political cartoons, linguistic variation, publics] [source] American Business and Political Power: Public Opinion, Elections and Democracy; Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital investment; Does Business Learn?JOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2001Graham K. Wilson [source] Homelessness in Europe and the United States: A Comparison of Prevalence and Public OpinionJOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 3 2007Paul A. Toro Random samples of 250,435 adults were interviewed by telephone in five different nations (N= 1,546): Belgium, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the United States. The interview included questions on respondent attitudes, knowledge, and opinions regarding homelessness; respondents' own personal experiences with homelessness and homeless people; and demographic characteristics of the respondents. The highest rates for lifetime literal homelessness were found in the UK (7.7%) and United States (6.2%), with the lowest rate in Germany (2.4%), and intermediate rates in Italy (4.0%) and Belgium (3.4%). Less compassionate attitudes toward the homeless were also found on many dimensions in the United States and the UK. Possible explanations of these findings, drawn from various theoretical perspectives, and policy implications are provided. [source] Public Opinion of Teen, Classroom, and Formal Court StylesJUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL, Issue 2 2003MARK G. HARMON B.A. ABSTRACT The present research examined the views of a community sample regarding teen court, classroom court, and formal/traditional court. Participants read vignettes of teen offenders who had committed crimes of high or low severity and were given relatively severe or mild sentences through one of the three courts. Results revealed stronger support for teen court than the other courts, a general preference for harsh sentences, and a preference for match between crime and punishment. The results of this study indicate that teen courts are seen as providing an appropriate means to sentence juvenile offenders and are likely to receive public support for their continued operation. [source] Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court.LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2009By Thomas R. Marshall No abstract is available for this article. [source] Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave TradePARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 2007SEYMOUR DRESCHER First page of article [source] Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in the Later Hanoverian EraPARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 1 2006Karl W. Schweizer First page of article [source] The 1656 Election, Polling and Public Opinion: A Warwickshire Case StudyPARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 3 2004Stephen K. Roberts First page of article [source] The Power of Public Opinion: Palmerston and the Crisis of December 1851*PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 3 2001DAVID BROWN First page of article [source] Research Note: The Influence of the Press in Shaping Public Opinion towards the European Union in BritainPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2004Sean Carey Existing research finds that European citizens evaluate the EU according to the perceived costs and benefits of integration. Instead of assuming that cue-givers provide an informational role in this process, we investigate the direct effects of positive and negative EU messages from prominent cue-givers, including political parties and the media. Using the 2001 British Election Study, we examine the impact of the main political parties and newspapers on public attitudes towards membership of the EU and the prospect of joining the single European currency. During the 2001 British General Election campaign, the media and the main political parties had small independent effects on attitudes towards EU membership and the potential adoption of the single European currency. When voters receive the same messages from both their party and their newspaper, these effects are considerable. [source] Changing Public Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage: The Case of CaliforniaPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 1 2008Gregory B. Lewis Though public opposition to same-sex marriage seems reasonably stable nationally, support in California has grown substantially in the past two decades. Using data from six Field Polls of Californians since 1985, we explore the roots of that growth in individual attitude change and population changes. Cohort replacement can explain half the growth. Although all groups of Californians say that they have become more accepting of homosexual relations since they turned 18, the pattern is strongest for liberals, Democrats, and the less religious. These groups have also become much more supportive of same-sex marriage, while conservatives, Republicans, Protestants, and African-Americans appear at least as opposed today as they were two decades ago. [source] Another Lesson about Public Opinion during the Clinton-Lewinsky ScandalPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2002Stephen Earl Bennett Data from Pew Research Center polls from early February 1998 through late February 1999 show that only about a third of the American public followed media accounts of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal "very closely," which is a facet of public reaction that has been largely neglected. Levels of heed paid to media stories about the scandal affected knowledge about key personalities and facets of the imbroglio. In addition, data show that the amount of attention paid to the news about the scandal resonated with opinions about diverse aspects of the scandal. Students of public opinion need to take the public's relative inattention to the scandal into account. [source] Gauging Public Opinion in the Hoover White House: Understanding the Roots of Presidential PollingPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2000ROBERT M. EISINGER Contemporary research often ignores early presidential attempts to measure public opinion, focusing instead on the use of polls by modern presidents. The Hoover presidency precedes the invention of modern surveys and provides a rich theoretical and empirical context for analyzing the early institutionalization of political polling. President Herbert Hoover sought to assess public opinion independent of his party and Congress, in large part because of the contentious relations these institutions shared with his administration. He did so under the guise of scientific legitimacy,quantifying newspaper editorials and undertaking a scholarly survey of American life. Although he was not the first president to use media reports to measure public opinion, Hoover's systematic quantification marks a significant change in how presidents assessed citizens' views and used those assessments to gain power and independence with respect to Congress and political parties. [source] Public Opinion and the Contradictions of Jimmy Carter's Foreign PolicyPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2000ANDREW Z. KATZ President Jimmy Carter's failure to achieve popular support for his foreign policy is commonly attributed to his disregard of public opinion. The author evaluates this perception by examining the Carter administration's use of polls in the areas of human rights and U.S.-Soviet relations. Archival material confirms that Carter did not ignore public opinion; rather, his polling operation did not provide the White House with a complete and objective portrait of public attitudes. Carter's team assumed that public opinion on foreign policy was malleable and lacked structure. Thus, no effort was made to determine whether the contradictions pollsters found on the surface were actually held together by an underlying structure. Therefore, the Carter White House had neither an accurate gauge of public attitudes nor an understanding of those attitudes sufficient to build support for its policies. [source] The Terror that Failed: Public Opinion in the Aftermath of the Bombing in Oklahoma CityPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 3 2000Carol W. Lewis Did the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City affect the public's perception of terrorism as a political issue and their perceptions of individual risk and personal vulnerability? The author finds that the bombing in Oklahoma City altered neither the public's assessment of personal risk nor its reported behavior. Public opinion on terrorism and crime share three patterns: (1) perceived risk of victimization and the likely consequences affect public apprehension; (2) the voiced sense of personal security bears a direct relationship to the relative familiarity of the setting; and (3) the public shows resistance to the media's portrayal of risk. Opinion data indicate that domestic terrorism is likely to be seen as important in general and in the abstract, but with low personal risk, little impact on individuals' routine behavior, and, consequently, low political salience. In light of terrorism's purpose of inducing fear and the public's generally placid response on a personal level, the author concludes that the bombing failed as an act of domestic terrorism. [source] The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen's Speech in the United KingdomAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2009Will Jennings This article represents the effect of public opinion on government attention in the form of an error-correction model where public opinion and policymaking attention coexist in a long-run equilibrium state that is subject to short-run corrections. The coexistence of policy-opinion responsiveness and punctuations in political attention is attributed to differences in theoretical conceptions of negative and positive feedback, differences in the use of time series and distributional methods, and differences in empirical responsiveness of government to public attention relative to responsiveness to public preferences. This analysis considers time-series data for the United Kingdom over the period between 1960 and 2001 on the content of the executive and legislative agenda presented at the start of each parliamentary session in the Queen's Speech coded according to the policy content framework of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and a reconstituted public opinion dataset on Gallup's "most important problem" question. The results show short-run responsiveness of government attention to public opinion for macroeconomics, health, and labor and employment topics and long-run responsiveness for macroeconomics, health, labor and employment, education, law and order, housing, and defense. [source] How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2009Jeffrey R. Lax We compare two approaches for estimating state-level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original data set of over 100 surveys on gay rights issues as well as 1988 presidential election data. Under optimal conditions, both methods work well, but multilevel modeling performs better generally. Compared to baseline opinion measures, it yields smaller errors, higher correlations, and more reliable estimates. Multilevel modeling is clearly superior when samples are smaller,indeed, one can accurately estimate state opinion using only a single large national survey. This greatly expands the scope of issues for which researchers can study subnational opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking. [source] Value Choices and American Public OpinionAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2006William G. Jacoby Individual preferences among core values are widely believed to be an important determinant of political attitudes. However, several theoretical perspectives suggest that people experience difficulties making choices among values. This article uses data from the 1994 Multi-Investigator Study to test for hierarchical structure in citizens' value preferences. The empirical results show that most people make transitive choices among values and that their value preferences have an impact on subsequent issue attitudes. To the extent that citizens exhibit intransitive value choices and/or apparent difficulties in the "translation process" from value preferences to issue attitudes, it is due more to low levels of political sophistication than to the existence of value conflict. [source] A Decision Theoretic Model of Public Opinion: Guns, Butter, and European Common DefenseAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2004Clifford J. Carrubba Why do individuals support the public policies they do? We argue that individuals can have quite sophisticated policy preferences and that not correctly modeling those preferences can lead to critically misspecified empirical models. To substantiate this position we derive and test a decision-theoretic model that relies upon three critical assumptions: (1) policies affect the provision of multiple goods about which individuals care; (2) individuals have diminishing returns to scale in those goods; and (3) preferences over at least some subset of those goods are correlated. Using this model, we demonstrate that arbitrarily small secondary policy effects can confound predictions over primary policy effects. Thus, not considering even arbitrarily small policy effects can cause one to conclude that evidence is consistent with one's theory when in fact it is inconsistent or vice versa. Testing this theory on support for forming a European common defense, we find evidence consistent with our model. [source] "A Speedy Release to Our Suffering Captive Brethren in Algiers": Captives, Debate, and Public Opinion in the Early American RepublicTHE HISTORIAN, Issue 4 2009David Dzurec First page of article [source] Individual Differences in Public Opinion about Youth Crime and Justice in SwanseaTHE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 4 2007KEVIN HAINES Gender and age differences in estimations of youth crime were compared to official and self-reported youth offending statistics nationally and locally. Attitudes to sentencing and preventative measures were evaluated with reference to Swansea's positive, inclusionary approach to young people. Findings indicate that the Swansea public overestimates the extent of youth crime locally, yet it remains ambivalent about appropriate sentencing responses, favouring both punitive and preventative measures. This suggests that local public opinion is shaped by national media and political rhetoric, rather than the local realities of youth offending. [source] Obesity Metaphors: How Beliefs about the Causes of Obesity Affect Support for Public PolicyTHE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2009COLLEEN L. BARRY Context: Relatively little is known about the factors shaping public attitudes toward obesity as a policy concern. This study examines whether individuals' beliefs about the causes of obesity affect their support for policies aimed at stemming obesity rates. This article identifies a unique role of metaphor-based beliefs, as distinct from conventional political attitudes, in explaining support for obesity policies. Methods: This article used the Yale Rudd Center Public Opinion on Obesity Survey, a nationally representative web sample surveyed from the Knowledge Networks panel in 2006/07 (N = 1,009). The study examines how respondents' demographic and health characteristics, political attitudes, and agreement with seven obesity metaphors affect support for sixteen policies to reduce obesity rates. Findings: Including obesity metaphors in regression models helps explain public support for policies to curb obesity beyond levels attributable solely to demographic, health, and political characteristics. The metaphors that people use to understand rising obesity rates are strong predictors of support for public policy, and their influence varies across different types of policy interventions. Conclusions: Over the last five years, the United States has begun to grapple with the implications of dramatically escalating rates of obesity. Individuals use metaphors to better understand increasing rates of obesity, and obesity metaphors are independent and powerful predictors of support for public policies to curb obesity. Metaphorical reasoning also offers a potential framework for using strategic issue framing to shift support for obesity policies. [source] Vernacular Discourse and the Epistemic Dimension of Public OpinionCOMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 4 2007Gerard A. Hauser Habermas argues that the epistemic dimension of a democracy resides in public opinion. This paper argues that a deliberative model of public opinion needs to take into account exchanges among ordinary citizens that underwrite public opinion and are a major source of the political public sphere's unruliness. Second, it argues that when we examine how ordinary citizens make arguments about public problems that intersect their lives, there is evidence that their norms of reasoning, standards of evidence, and modes of argumentation challenge the presuppositions and rationality of authority. Finally, it argues that although the power of media moguls is not to be discounted, the clock is ticking. Internet communication has opened new avenues for information and participation that can elude corporate power's capacity to control the game. [source] Public opinion on needle and syringe programmes: avoiding assumptions for policy and practiceDRUG AND ALCOHOL REVIEW, Issue 4 2007CARLA TRELOAR Abstract Despite evidence for their effectiveness, harm reduction services such as needle and syringe programmes (NSPs) are highly vulnerable to perceptions of community disapproval. This paper reviews Australian research on community attitudes to harm reduction services and its impact on research, policy and practice. The literature on community attitudes to NSPs in Australia comprises a small number of representative national samples and surveys of local communities affected by specific services. Despite these extremely limited data, negative community attitudes are often cited by policy-makers and health professionals as a primary constraint on policy-making. The main finding of this literature review is that community perceptions of NSPs are largely positive. Also, support for NSPs was not synonymous with condoning drug use. The failure of policy-makers and politicians to recognise positive community attitudes to NSPs has led in some instances to hasty political responses to adverse media reports, including the closure of services. This literature review showing positive community attitudes to harm reduction services should embolden researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to challenge such reactionary responses. Further, this evidence should be used in countering negative publicity surrounding these services. [Treloar C, Fraser S. Public opinion on needle and syringe programmes: avoiding assumptions for policy and practice. Drug Alcohol Rev 2007;26:355,361] [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||