Elite Editorial Favorability and American Public Opinion: A Case Study of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 303-313
Author(s):  
Neil J. Kressel
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Time Trend ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Common Time ◽  
Significant Relationships ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Arab Israeli Conflict ◽  
College Educated

The correspondence between trends in the mass media and trends in public opinion has important practical, theoretical, and methodological implications—even if we cannot untangle the causal relationships involved. The present study attempts to clarify empirically the aggregate-level mass media—public opinion connection for one major political issue, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mass media data came from a content analysis of 867 elite newspaper editorials on the dispute (1972–1982); public opinion data came from the frequently asked Middle East “sympathy” question. Favorability measures for editorials, mass public opinion, and college-educated public opinion were highly intercorrelated, in part as a result of a common time trend. When this time trend was partialled out, significant relationships remained between editorial opinion and public opinion. In addition, events heavily covered in mass media tended to crystallize opinion among the college educated but not among the mass public.

The Mass Media and the Policy Process

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelise Russell ◽  
Maraam Dwidar ◽  
Bryan D. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Mass Media

Scholars across politics and communication have wrangled with questions aimed at better understanding issue salience and attention. For media scholars, they found that mass attention across issues was a function the news media’s power to set the nation’s agenda by focusing attention on a few key public issues. Policy scholars often ignored the media’s role in their effort to understand how and why issues make it onto a limited political agenda. What we have is two disparate definitions describing, on the one hand, media effects on individuals’ issue priorities, and on the other, how the dynamics of attention perpetuate across the political system. We are left with two notions of agenda setting developed independently of one another to describe media and political systems that are anything but independent of one another. The collective effects of the media on our formal institutions and the mass public are ripe for further, collaborative research. Communications scholars have long understood the agenda setting potential of the news media, but have neglected to extend that understanding beyond its effects on mass public. The link between public opinion and policy is “awesome” and scholarship would benefit from exploring the implications for policy, media, and public opinion. Both policy and communication studies would benefit from a broadened perspective of media influence. Political communication should consider the role of the mass media beyond just the formation of public opinion. The media as an institution is not effectively captured in a linear model of information signaling because the public agenda cannot be complete without an understanding of the policymaking agenda and the role of political elites. And policy scholars can no longer describe policy process without considering the media as a source of disproportionate allocation of attention and information. The positive and negative feedback cycles that spark or stabilize the political system are intimately connected to policy frames and signals produced by the media.

scholarly journals Attitudinal and Behavioral Consequences of Published Opinion Polls

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Moy ◽  
Eike Mark Rinke
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Policy Maker ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Local Newspaper ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls ◽  
Normative Role

It is a truism to speak of the key normative role that public opinion polls play in contemporary democratic societies. Theorists and practitioners have long extolled how polls inextricably link citizens to their elected officials. Indeed, public opinion polls not only offer citizens a mechanism with which to express their sentiment on key issues of the day but also provide policy makers with information about what their constituents might or might not desire. Citizens may be able to express their views on a particular issue through individual acts such as donating money to a cause or writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, but along with voting polls are one of the few opportunities that offer the mass public equal voice. Moreover, the role that polls play in the citizen–policy maker relationship hinges upon their dissemination by the mass media.

scholarly journals Foreign policy fatigue? Russian mass media agenda setting strategies and public opinion on the 2018 pension reforms

Slovo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen N. Leafstedt
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Pension Reform ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Pension Reforms ◽  
Media Agenda ◽  
News Events

The scholarship on Russian media is beset with the assumption that the Russian public is unable to ‘vote with their remote’ in a homogenously pro-regime media environment and instead passively accepts messaging from the official mass media. This assumption is assessed here in a case study using quantitative content methods to examine the discrepancies between official mass media agenda-setting and public opinion during the period of salience of the news event of the 2018 pension reforms. The pension reform, as an obtrusive domestic political issue in contrast to the unobtrusive international news events which dominate Russian news coverage, stood out asone of the major events of the year in the view of the Russian public. This article finds that official mass media undertook agenda-setting measures to de-emphasize negative aspects of the pension reform news events, emphasize positive aspects, and distract public attention towards more sensationalist foreign policy news items. However, it also finds that public opinion priorities on news issues were incongruent with media agenda-setting, indicating that official mass media messages are not accepted uncritically by the Russian public. 

Who Are Vera and Tatiana? The Female Russian Nihilist in the Fin de Siècle Imagination

2020 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Abby Holekamp
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Real ◽  
European Public ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Focusing on a close, contextualized reading of a single case of invented identity from 1906, this article illustrates how, in fin de siècle Europe, a mutually generative relationship between the real, the imagined, and the rapidly proliferating mass media transformed the female “nihilist” from an apocryphal Russian figure into a durable Russian archetype—an archetype that had significant consequences in the shaping of European public opinion about Russia.

scholarly journals A Method for Assessing Threats to the Economic Security of a Region: A Case Study of Public Procurement in Russia

Risks ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Valentina Kravchenko ◽  
Tatiana Kudryavtseva ◽  
Yuriy Kuporov
Keyword(s):  
Regression Models ◽  
Public Procurement ◽  
Ordinary Least Squares ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Government Procurement ◽  
Security Monitoring ◽  
Significant Relationships ◽  
Monitoring Tools ◽  
Russian Region

The issue of economic security is becoming an increasingly urgent one. The purpose of this article is to develop a method for assessing threats to the economic security of the Russian region. This method is based on step-by-step actions: first of all, choosing an element of the region’s economic security system and collecting its descriptive indicators; then grouping indicators by admittance-process-result categories and building hypotheses about their influence; testing hypotheses using a statistical package and choosing the most significant connections, which can pose a threat to the economic security of the region; thereafter ranking regions by the level of threats and developing further recommendations. The importance of this method is that with the help of grouping regions (territory of a country) based on proposed method, it is possible to develop individual economic security monitoring tools. As a result, the efficiency of that country’s region can be higher. In this work, the proposed method was tested in the framework of public procurement in Russia. A total of 14 indicators of procurement activity were collected for each region of the Russian Federation for the period from 2014 to 2018. Regression models were built on the basis of the grouped indicators. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Estimation was used. As a result of pairwise regression models analysis, we have defined four significant relationships between public procurement indicators. There are positive connections between contracts that require collateral and the percentage of tolerances, between the number of bidders and the number of regular suppliers, between the number of bidders and the average price drop, and between the number of purchases made from a single supplier and the number of contracts concluded without reduction. It was determined that the greatest risks for the system were associated with the connection between competition and budget savings. It was proposed to rank analyzed regions into four groups: ineffective government procurement, effective government procurement, and government procurement that threatens the system of economic security of the region, that is, high competition with low savings and low competition with high savings. Based on these groups, individual economic security monitoring tools can be developed for each region.

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1047
Author(s):  
Neil A. O’Brian
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

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