How government-controlled media shifts policy attitudes through framing

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jennifer Pan ◽  
Zijie Shao ◽  
Yiqing Xu
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Composite Measures ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Tv News

Abstract Research shows that government-controlled media is an effective tool for authoritarian regimes to shape public opinion. Does government-controlled media remain effective when it is required to support changes in positions that autocrats take on issues? Existing theories do not provide a clear answer to this question, but we often observe authoritarian governments using government media to frame policies in new ways when significant changes in policy positions are required. By conducting an experiment that exposes respondents to government-controlled media—in the form of TV news segments—on issues where the regime substantially changed its policy positions, we find that by framing the same issue differently, government-controlled media moves respondents to adopt policy positions closer to the ones espoused by the regime regardless of individual predisposition. This result holds for domestic and foreign policy issues, for direct and composite measures of attitudes, and persists up to 48 hours after exposure.

Partisanship and Policy Choice: Issue Preferences in the British Electorate, February 1974

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Alt ◽  
Bo Särlvik ◽  
Ivor Crewe
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Perceptions And Attitudes ◽  
Electoral Behaviour ◽  
Issue Knowledge ◽  
New Literature ◽  
Party Policy Positions

Inherent in many models of voting, as well as in defences of representative democracy, is the assumption that the voting public has knowledge of and opinions about public policy issues. In recent years in the United States a stream of scholarly articles has been devoted to assessing not just the extent to which issue knowledge and opinions exist but also the extent to which they influence electoral decisions. This new literature suggests that issue-related perceptions and attitudes are rather more important in the electoral process than earlier studies had suggested. This increased focus on issues appears to reflect both methodological changes in the analysis of them and also real changes in the importance of policy issues in American electoral politics. By contrast, students of British electoral behaviour have made few systematic attempts to assess the fit between popular attitudes and knowledge of party policy positions on issues. Instead, the conventional wisdom is repeated which holds that ‘a majority of people are either ignorant of, or disagree with, the specific policies of the party they support’. The implication of this seems to be that electors' familiarity with issues is so low, and the holding of policy attitudes by them so uncommon, that rigorous analysis of issues in the context of electoral politics is unnecessary.

scholarly journals Yes, But Did They Learn Anything? An Experimental Investigation of Voter Decision Making on Foreign Policy Issues

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (04) ◽  
pp. 880-884
Author(s):  
Jacqueline M. Sievert ◽  
Michael K. McDonald ◽  
Charles J. Fagan ◽  
Niall Michelsen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Young Voters ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
American Elections ◽  
Voter Decision Making

ABSTRACTDo non-graded, one-time, short presentations by a panel of professors on foreign policy issues affect voting behavior among students? Did the panel itself contribute to students’ understanding of the importance of foreign policy in evaluating candidates? Did presentations lead to changes in students’ candidate preferences? And, finally, did the event lead to sustained changes in students’ preferences? We find that even though issues of foreign policy tend not to be front and center in American elections, when young voters are presented with information about candidate’s foreign policy positions, as we did in this study, it does seem to have an impact on which candidate they plan on voting for.

Foreign Policy Problems in the Mirror of Public Opinion (2000s)

2010 ◽  
pp. 62-76
Author(s):  
Z. Kuzina
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Implementation Process ◽  
Time Factors ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Real ◽  
Policy Problems

The article aims to outline a concept of public opinion on foreign policy issues, which is forming in contemporary Russia within society as a whole, resting upon the data resulting from the sociological study of 2000s in comparison to 1990s surveys. At the same time, factors which determined and determine the Russians' perceptions of foreign policy problems are analyzed, and an attempt to apprehend the degree of the real public opinion influence on Russia's foreign policy development and implementation process is made.

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D. Kertzer
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
And Gender

How does the public think about foreign affairs, and how do these public preferences shape foreign policymaking? Over the past several decades, scholarship on public opinion and foreign policy has proliferated, partially due to a growing interest in the “first image” and the ways in which individuals matter in international relations, partially due to an experimental revolution that gave political scientists new methods they could use to study public opinion, and partially due to a range of searing debates—on topics ranging from the Iraq War to globalization—whose fault lines political scientists attempted to map. Scholarship in this area is thus so vast that it is impossible to comprehensively capture in an annotated bibliography of this length. Instead, the discussion that follows focuses on a curated sampling of the field, focusing, in particular, on six sets of substantive questions, drawing on a mix of classic and contemporary scholarship. It begins by reviewing what we know about how foreign policy attitudes are structured, before focusing on public opinion about two different areas of foreign policy: the use of force, and foreign economic issues like trade and investment. It then turns to the effects of sex and gender, along with the role of cue givers in shaping foreign policy preferences—whether partisan elites, international organizations, or social peers. It concludes by reviewing the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy, whether in democracies (as in theories of democratic constraint and accountability), transnational public opinion (as in theories of soft power and anti-Americanism), or in nondemocratic regimes, a relatively new area of research.

Public Opinion

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devesh Kapur
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Issue Area ◽  
Indian Foreign Policy ◽  
Over Time

This chapter examines the role of public opinion on Indian foreign policy and focuses on four principal questions: One, how informed is the Indian public about foreign policy issues and how have its views been measured? Two, what shapes public opinion on foreign policy issues in India? Who are the key actors and how have they changed over time and issue area? Three, what are the mechanisms that link public opinion to public policy in foreign policy and on what issues has public opinion mattered? And four, what is public opinion about India in other major countries and what does it reveal? Finally the chapter concludes with some observations on public opinion’s interactions with changes in other variables shaping foreign policy, such as the rise of business and a more federal polity.

scholarly journals The ‘ultimate insurance’ or an ‘irrelevance’ for national security needs? Partisanship, foreign policy attitudes, and the gender gap in British public opinion towards nuclear weapons

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Ben Clements ◽  
Catarina P. Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Only two European countries – France and the UK, both NATO members – have nuclear weapons, and leading politicians have called for the UK and EU to maintain close military and security links post-Brexit. In the context of the Trident renewal debate and the UK government's recently published integrated defence and security review, this article uses data from the new UK Security Survey to analyse attitudes towards the possession of nuclear weapons among the British public. It assesses three key theorical strands in the wider scholarly literature on public opinion and states’ use of military force: domestic political attitudes, foreign policy predispositions, and the ‘gender gap’. We find that all three theoretical perspectives contribute to the underpinnings of contemporary public opinion towards nuclear weapons. Support for the retention of Britain's nuclear deterrent is associated with being a Conservative Party supporter, favouring Brexit, endorsing superior military power worldwide as an important foreign policy goal, wanting to protect the transatlantic relationship, and with being male. The article makes a distinctive contribution to the growing subfield of research on public opinion and foreign policy, while the findings advance wider empirical understanding of contemporary citizen engagement in a key dimension of security policy.

scholarly journals Exposure to Arguments and Evidence Changes Partisan Attitudes Even in the Face of Countervailing Leader Cues

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben M Tappin
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Policy Positions ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
The Face ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
Demographic Subgroups

Patterns of public opinion recently observed in American politics tempt the conclusion that substantive arguments and evidence are less effective, or ineffective, at changing partisan minds when they overtly contradict cues from in-party leaders. This conclusion follows naturally from theories of partisan motivated reasoning. However, observations of public opinion do not provide the counterfactual outcomes required to draw this conclusion. Here we report a large-scale survey experiment in which we randomized exposure to the policy positions of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as information that overtly contradicts their positions. Our design incorporates 24 policy issues and 48 information treatments. We find that the information does persuade partisans on average, and, critically, fully retains its persuasive force even when paired with countervailing cues from in-party leaders. This result holds across policy issues, demographic subgroups, and one- and two-sided cue environments, and is puzzling for partisan motivated reasoning theory.

scholarly journals Public Opinion toward Foreign Policy in a Developing World Democracy: Evidence from Indian Views of China

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Milliff ◽  
Paul Staniland
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
International System ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Sentiment ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
International Issues ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Research And Policy

India is the world’s largest democracy and is growing steadily more important in the international system, yet we know very little about how India’s public thinks about international issues. This has become even more important as India-China relations have declined dramatically in recent years. This paper explores public opinion toward China by leveraging both historical survey data since the 1960s, and modern, scientific surveys from the 2000s onward. This is a unique compilation of survey evidence that allows for the study of both trends and rigorous individual-level analyses. We put it into dialogue with general disciplinary questions about the dynamics of public opinion toward foreign policy, focusing on China. Two main findings emerge. First, aggregate trends in views of China broadly track the general political situation between the two countries. We do not see clear evidence one way or another of whether the public is simply following leaders: in the 1960s, there is circumstantial evidence of elite-led opinion, but in the last decade, elite efforts to maintain a cordial relationship with China coexisted with increasingly hostile public sentiment. Second, we delve within these aggregate trends find systematic sub-national variation in attitudes. Foreign policy attitudes have fairly stable regional differences, and poorer and less educated respondents are systematically more likely to not respond when asked about foreign policy and world affairs. While there are aggregate trends that track broader geopolitical tides, there remains important heterogeneity within Indian opinion that requires further analysis. We conclude with implications for research and policy.

scholarly journals Structuring Public Opinion on Foreign Policy Issues: The Case of Brazil

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 557
Author(s):  
Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida ◽  
Ivan Filipe Fernandes ◽  
Feliciano de Sá Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Issues
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