Political Talk Over Here, Over There, Over Time

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN E. BENNETT ◽  
RICHARD S. FLICKINGER ◽  
STACI L. RHINE

Data from Great Britain and the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s show relatively little change in the frequency with which citizens engage in political discussions, with whom they are likely to speak, and the variables that shape their propensity to engage in political talk. In addition, analyses of the data show that discussing politics enhances citizens' knowledge of public affairs, even net of other variables known to affect political knowledge. Students of political behaviour and those interested in strengthening democracy need to treat political discussions as an important form of political participation.

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (5) ◽  
pp. 2021-2040 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hout ◽  
Avery M Guest

We reanalyze Long and Ferrie's data. We find that the association of occupational status across generations was quite similar over time and place. Two significant differences were: (i) American farms in 1880 were far more open to men who had nonfarm backgrounds than were American farms in 1973 or British farms in either century; (ii) of the four cases, the intergenerational correlation was strongest in Britain in 1881. Structural mobility related to, among other things, economic growth and occupational differentiation, affected mobility most in 1970s America. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)


1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Welch ◽  
Donley T. Studlar

In contrast to the United States, where analyses of the political behaviour of blacks number in the hundreds, if not more, substantial studies of the political attitudes and behaviour of Britain's non-white minority are fairly scarce. As non-whites have become more visible in the political arena, however, attention by academics has increased. But as yet there have been few countrywide, empirical, and systematic investigations of the political behaviour and attitudes of this population. Our Note uses multivariate methods to investigate the extent of political participation of Britain's non-white minorities in the 1979 election. We focus on a wide variety of political activities and a few selected issue concerns. We attempt to place our findings in the context of some theories of ethnic politics that have developed to explain black political behaviour in Britain and in the United States.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205704732110632
Author(s):  
Jiyoun Suk ◽  
David Coppini ◽  
Carlos Muñiz ◽  
Hernando Rojas

The contemporary communication ecology contributes to affective polarization by presenting us with extreme exemplars of disliked groups. News exposure that is associated with political discussion networks is related to greater political knowledge, yet unlike previous eras where political knowledge and tolerance went hand in hand, this is no longer the case. We employ a comparative design to examine this idea among two democracies with differing levels of journalistic professionalism and political system: Mexico and the United States. Results show that greater political knowledge is associated with affective polarization, especially for the United States. Furthermore, there was a significant indirect path between media use and affective polarization, mediated through homogeneous political talk and political knowledge, but not in Mexico.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan J. Nyhan ◽  
John Michael Carey ◽  
Andrew Markus Guess ◽  
Joseph B Phillips ◽  
Peter John Loewen ◽  
...  

Widespread misperceptions about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus threaten to exacerbate the severity of the pandemic. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada examining the effectiveness of fact-checks that seek to correct these false or unsupported misperceptions. Across three countries with differing levels of political conflict over the COVID-19 response, we demonstrate that fact-checks reduce targeted misperceptions, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims, and have minimal spillover effects on the accuracy of other beliefs about COVID-19. However, the positive effects of fact-checks on the accuracy of respondents' beliefs fail to persist over time in panel data even after repeated exposure. These results suggest that fact-checks can successfully change the beliefs of the people who would benefit from them most but that their effects are disappointingly ephemeral.


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