Personal Experience and Public Opinion: A Theory and Test of Conditional Policy Feedback

2017 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 624-641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy E. Lerman ◽  
Katherine T. McCabe
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Kathrin Fischer

Many societal risks are beyond the scope of personal experience. Thus, people are increasingly dependent on third-party information to assess risks. This study examines the dynamics of public risk perception by focusing on the role of media coverage. It does so by comparing public opinion on selected societal risks, namely climate change, terrorism and demographic change over a 25-year period (1990–2015). The analysis examines risk perception in the US and Germany and provides valuable insights into how and why the public's assessment of risks differs in these countries.


Author(s):  
Soetkin Verhaegen ◽  
Claire Dupuy ◽  
Virginie Van Ingelgom

AbstractRegionalization has been a defining feature of European politics since the 1970s. Previous work has studied political drivers of the movements of competences to the subnational level, including the role of citizens’ preferences. Yet, we still know little about how these new divisions of competences between government levels have impacted the development of public opinion about this division. The article builds on the literature on policy feedback and argues that institutional regionalization may both directly and indirectly affect support for regionalization through normative and interpretive effects. To empirically qualify these expectations, the article uses eight cross sections of the Flemish and Walloon populations in Belgium (1991–2019). This approach explains differences in support for regionalization between citizens that were socialized in different institutional and regional contexts. The analyses show that Walloons who came of age in the context of more institutional regionalization tend to be more supportive of regionalization. In Flanders, in contrast, support for regionalization is most consistently and substantially explained by regional and Belgian identification. However, our analyses show no support for the expectation that coming of age in a more regionalized Belgium is associated with a greater sense of regional identification.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence R. Jacobs ◽  
Suzanne Mettler

Following E. E. Schattschneider’s observation that “a new policy creates a new politics,” scholars of “policy feedback” have theorized that policies influence subsequent political behavior and public opinion. Recent studies observe, however, that policy feedback does not always occur and the form it takes varies considerably. To explain such variation, we call for policy feedback studies to draw more thoroughly on public opinion research. We theorize that: (1) feedback effects are not ubiquitous and may in some instances be offset by political factors, such as partisanship and trust in government; (2) policy design may generate self-interested or sociotropic motivations, and (3) feedback effects result not only from policy benefits but also from burdens. We test these expectations by drawing on a unique panel study of Americans’ responses to the Affordable Care Act. We find competing policy and political pathways, which produce variations in policy feedback.


Author(s):  
Marius R Busemeyer ◽  
Aurélien Abrassart ◽  
Roula Nezi

Abstract The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction between positive and negative feedback, this article develops and proposes a more fine-grained typology of feedback effects that distinguishes between accelerating, self-reinforcing and self-undermining, specific and general, as well as long- and short-term dynamic feedback. The authors apply this typology in an analysis of public opinion on government spending in different areas of the welfare state for twenty-one OECD countries, employing a pseudo-panel approach. The empirical analysis confirms the usefulness of this typology since it shows that different types of feedback effects can be observed empirically.


2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 674-693 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEVIN CAUGHEY ◽  
TOM O’GRADY ◽  
CHRISTOPHER WARSHAW

Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservatism, relative economic conservatism, social conservatism, and immigration conservatism of men and women in three age categories in each country. Aggregating the group-level estimates yields estimates of the average conservatism in national publics in each biennium between 1981–82 and 2015–16. The four measures exhibit contrasting cross-sectional cleavages and distinct temporal dynamics, illustrating the multidimensionality of mass ideology in Europe. Subjecting our measures to a series of validation tests, we show that the constructs they measure are distinct and substantively important and that they perform as well as or better than one-dimensional proxies for mass conservatism (left–right self-placement and median voter scores). We foresee many uses for these scores by scholars of public opinion, electoral behavior, representation, and policy feedback.


2019 ◽  
pp. 69-73
Author(s):  
O.A. Vertiyevets

Социальное конструирование в информационно-коммуникативной сфере является важнейшим элементом современного информационно-коммуникативного пространства. Лавинообразное увеличение объемов информации и коммуникативных взаимодействий сформировало информационно-коммуникативные потоки, захлестнувшие человека. Это расширило рамки используемых им социокультурных паттернов. Включенность в потоковые информационно-коммуникативные структуры значительно сократило возможности рефлексивного осмысления и переработки получаемой информации, внедрив в современные информационно-коммуникативные практики пассивно-созерцательные схемы восприятия. В статье раскрываются и анализируются модели социального конструирования в информационно-коммуникативном поле стратегии и технологии мифологизации и симулякризации информации, направленной на управляющее ментальное воздействие в сфере индивидуального сознания отдельных людей, образующих целевые аудитории, и на общественное сознание выделенных сообществ со сходными идентификационными признаками целевых групп.Modern people, immersed in intensive information and communication flows, do not perceive the surrounding world on the basis of personal experience, subordinated to the algorithmized authorized requirements of the normative value system of the society. They perceive it through these flows determination by protocols and algorithms of everyday sociocultural practices and mental schemes frames, focused on maintaining social consensus. The actualization of the mental algorithms and schemes, sanctioned in the community and integrated in the common information and communication field in the context of information redundancy, has led to the predominance of subconscious immediate reactions to what is happening in the environment of the event thus, the choice of social actions becomes an instant reaction based on the choice of a particular model of social action, and this choice is actually prescribed by the collective unconscious. Under these conditions, the more communicative support in the form of repetitions, judgments of various experts and analysts such information receives (public response), the more active people and social institutions act in the given vector of social activity. The preservation and deepening of the asymmetry of distribution and interpretation of information in society results in the homogenization of meanings. The perception of the outside world based on personal experience is replaced by a visually illustrated description of events and life conflicts in the media that generate mediareality, including in social networks in the Internet space. Social roleplaying narratives are common there. The result is a sociocommunicative field with high emotional stress, which produces an emotional echo in the public opinion of the target group emotional ressponse based, on the one hand, on the averaging of public opinion and, on the other hand, on the multiple strengthening of emotional impact and empathy to the interpretation, perceived as normative and acceptable, of a social and communicative construct that is designed to integrate the target audience of the information and communicative impact. Therefore, peoples modern perception of reality in the information and communication field is constructed on the schemes that adapt people to a collective average public opinion and partially design and supplement the image of the world around with the use of factoids taking into account peoples personal experience and conditions of their rootedness in community to which they belongs, according to the Veblen effect.


2007 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOE SOSS ◽  
SANFORD F. SCHRAM

This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. In the 1990s, “progressive revisionists” argued that, by reforming welfare, liberals could free the Democratic Party of a significant electoral liability, reduce the race-coding of poverty politics, and produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts. Connecting this argument to recent scholarship on policy feedback, we pursue a quantitative case study of the potential for new policies to move public opinion. Our analysis reveals that welfare reform in the 1990s produced few changes in mass opinion. To explain this result, we propose a general framework for the analysis of mass feedback effects. After locating welfare as a “distant-visible” case in this framework, we advance four general propositions that shed light on our case-specific findings as well as the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.


Author(s):  
Suzanne Mettler

Public policies sometimes generate “policy feedback effects,” reshaping public opinion and political participation among beneficiaries or the public generally, often with the effects of generating supportive constituencies that help to sustain the program. Yet such effects do not always occur; in fact, despite that Americans use more social policies than ever, antipathy to government runs high—evidence of a seeming “government-citizen disconnect.” Policy design and delivery matters for policy feedback, as policies that make government’s role more visible may make more of an impression on beneficiaries; yet political polarization and distrust in government can interfere with such effects. In addition, those who are most aware of the government’s role in social provision often participate least in politics, and vice versa. This article considers strategies that public officials and other civic and political leaders can use to facilitate policy feedback effects.


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