Demonstrating Power

2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruud Wouters ◽  
Stefaan Walgrave
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Television News ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Limited Knowledge ◽  
Representative Process ◽  
Do So

How do public opinion signals affect political representatives’ opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian national and regional politicians. Elected officials were exposed to manipulated television news items covering a protest demonstration. Following Tilly’s previously untested WUNC claim, four features of the event were manipulated: the demonstrators’ worthiness, unity, numerical strength, and commitment. We argue that these protest features present elected officials with useful cues about what (a segment of) the public wants. We find that these cues affect elected officials’ beliefs. The salience they attach to the protest issue, the position they take, and their intended actions all change as a consequence of exposure. The size of a protest event (numbers) and whether the protesters agree among themselves (unity) are the most persuasive protest factors. The effects of the protest signals come on top of strong receiver effects. We find no evidence that elected officials’ predispositions moderate the effects of the protest features.

scholarly journals Entre la tradición y la modernidad : las ceremonias públicas gallegas en el reinado de Fernando VII

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto J. López
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Economic Models ◽  
General Context ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Public

Se analizan en este trabajo las ceremonias públicas gallegas del reinado de Fernando VII, tratando de integrarlas en el contexto general de la formación de la opinión pública y en el particular de la situación social y económica de Galicia en la crisis del Antiguo Régimen. El estudio a partir de ambos criterios permite entender las ceremonias públicas del período 1808-1833 como la manifestación de una sociedad que se debate entre dos grandes modelos socioeconómicos, el absolutista y el liberal, y en el que el peso del primero es abrumador.Public ceremonies during the Fernando VII reign in Gallee are analyzed in this work trying to intégrate them into the general context of public opinión formation and the particular economic and social context in Gallee in that time. So, we can understand the public ceremonies of 1808-1833 as the expression of a society with a strong discussion inside between two great social and economic models, absolutist and liberal, and with a special predominance of the traditional principies.

The cooperative and competitive mechanisms of a leader’s opinion transmission

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (09) ◽  
pp. 2050127
Author(s):  
Adil Amirjanov
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Numerical Experiments ◽  
Continuous Model ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
The Public ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Cooperative Process ◽  
Competitive Mechanisms ◽  
The Individual

The paper modeled a leader’s opinion transmission in a population. The proposed model develops the cooperation agent-based continuous model in which the cooperation of individuals is based on the similarity of evolved “tags” which are relative to evolved tag-difference tolerances. In proposed model, an individual’s opinion and the individual’s tolerance are specified as variables in the model. During communication with each other and with a leader, the resources of individuals are incremented, if they are tolerable to the opinions of their opponents. An opinion formation in population is established by a cooperative process — changing individual’s opinion, if the individual is tolerable to the opinions of opponents, and by a competitive process — copying opinions and tolerances of successful individuals who have higher resource. Numerical experiments have proven that the public opinion reached a consensus followed the leader’s opinion.

Public Opinion and International Policy Choices: Global Commitments for Japan and Its Peers?

2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davis B. Bobrow ◽  
Mark A. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Global Order ◽  
International Policy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Political Incentives ◽  
International Public Goods ◽  
The Us ◽  
Actual Contribution ◽  
Do So

To understand the prospects for global order and progress in the coming years, we explore the joint implications of three premises: (1) states advantaged by the current international order have stakes in its regularity and predictability, and thus in moving to counter or prevent threats to those stakes; (2) along impure public and club goods lines, they are more likely to make efforts to do so when some private or club benefits result; and (3) public opinion provides a bounded policy acceptance envelope offering incentives and disincentives to national political elites to act as envisioned by the first two premises. We present a mosaic of public opinion in major OECD countries (the US, Japan, and major EU members) on three policy areas – foreign aid, UN peace-keeping operations, and environmental quality – that contain international public goods elements. Actual contribution tendencies in those areas found in our previous work largely conform to the public opinion patterns reported here. Within the limits of available data, domestic political incentives as represented by public opinion warrant neither extreme optimism nor pessimism about the prospects for continuing contributions by OECD states to sustaining orderly functioning of the current world system.

scholarly journals Content of Hindi and English Television News Channels: The Journalists’ Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Amit Kumar ◽  
Poonam Gaur
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Television News ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Common People ◽  
The Public

<p>The news is not just an ordinary media product, especially in a democracy. It plays a very crucial role in engaging common people in democratic processes. Television news media plays a vital role in shaping the public opinion which is very important in any democracy. As a result, the content of television news channels has been the topic of serious discussion and research among journalists and academics. This study employed a qualitative approach to reveal the perspectives of working journalists on the different aspects of the content of Hindi and English television news channels.</p><p><strong> </strong></p>

PUBLIC OPINION FORMATION MODEL BASED ON OPINION ENTROPY

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (11) ◽  
pp. 1350080 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUE WU ◽  
YONG HU ◽  
XIAO-HAI HE
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Shannon Entropy ◽  
Quantitative Measurement ◽  
Formation Model ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Simulation Results ◽  
High Control ◽  
Short Time

In this paper, we introduce the concept of opinion entropy based on Shannon entropy, which is used to describe the uncertainty of opinions. With opinion entropy, we further present a public opinion formation model, and simulate the process of public opinion formation under various controlled conditions. Simulation results on the Holme–Kim network show that the opinion entropy will reduce to zero, and all individuals will hold the opinion of agreeing with the topic, only by adjusting the cons' opinions with a high control intensity. Controlling the individuals with big degree can bring down the opinion entropy in a short time. Besides, extremists do not easily change their opinion entropy. Compared with previous opinion clusters, opinion entropy provides a quantitative measurement for the uncertainty of opinions. Moreover, the model can be helpful for understanding the dynamics of opinion entropy, and controlling the public opinion.

scholarly journals Using public opinion to serve journalistic narratives: Rethinking vox pops and live two-way reporting in five UK election campaigns (2009–2017)

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 639-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Cushion
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Television News ◽  
Qualitative Assessment ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Election Coverage

The news media are often accused of reporting politics in a too narrow and consensual way, excluding certain perspectives and issues that might better reflect the public’s agenda. This study lends weight to this argument by not only demonstrating the party political focus of UK election coverage but also in the misleading way public opinion was, at times, represented. Analysing 6647 items and/or stories in the largest ever content analysis study of 4613 sources across five first- and second-order election campaigns in the United Kingdom, it comprehensively tracks how citizens and journalists appear in television news, as well as developing a finely grained, qualitative assessment of how public opinion was represented during the 2017 election campaign. Overall, the study found that political parties received the most amount of airtime, but in some election campaigns members of the public appeared in coverage more often than politicians. However, they were mostly granted limited airtime to articulate their views in vox pops. During the 2017 election campaign, the study found the editorial construction of public opinion in vox pops and live journalistic two-ways was shaped by a relatively narrow set of assumptions made by political journalists about the public’s ideological views rather than consulting more objective measures of public opinion. So, for example, voters were portrayed as favouring more right- than left-wing policies despite evidence to the contrary. The use of citizens as sources is theorised as serving the pre-conceived narratives of journalists rather than reflecting a representative picture of public opinion. The study reinforces and advances academic debates about journalists and citizen-source interactions. More accurately engaging with people’s concerns, it is concluded, will help move broadcasters beyond the narrow set of assumptions that typically serve their narratives of political coverage.

Notes on the Theory of Political Opinion Formation

1953 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avery Leiserson
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Scientific Language ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Group Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Legal Relation ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social

The role of public opinion in the political process is more often justified than explained by political theorists. Insofar as contemporary theory offers an explanation, it replaces the primitive democratic notion of “The People as Legislator” with a neo-idealistic conception of public opinion as the “sense of the community” (A. D. Lindsay), an emergent product of the process of public discussion that enfolds the struggle of private group leaders, public administrators, and political representatives to influence the substance and direction of governmental policy.However, this is not the meaning of the term as used either by the man in the street or by the social scientist. In both popular and scientific language “public opinion” has come to refer to a sort of secular idol, and is a “god-term” to which citizens, scientists, and office-holders alike pay allegiance, partly as an act of faith, partly as a matter of observation, partly as a condition of sanity. The public opinion idol has its high priests, claiming to be expert translators of the oracles of the personified deity. The idol aIso has its heretics, divided like all protestants into many denominations. The least heretical sect, perhaps, consists of those who postulate a conceptual fiction somewhat resembling the legal relation of “principal-and-agent,” except that they recognize that political representatives possess the power to act as trustees as well as agents of their amorphous principal.

scholarly journals How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation

2013 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES N. DRUCKMAN ◽  
ERIK PETERSON ◽  
RUNE SLOTHUUS
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.

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