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.

Authoritarian Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Bell ◽  
Kai Quek
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Mass Publics ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
Western Democracies

AbstractThe “democratic peace”—the regularity that democracies rarely (if ever) fight with other democracies but do fight with nondemocracies—is one of the most famous findings in international relations scholarship. There is little agreement, however, about the mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Recently, scholars have shown that mass publics in liberal democracies are less supportive of using military force against other democracies. This finding has been taken to support the idea that the content of public opinion may provide one mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Using a large-scale survey experiment, we show that mass publics in an authoritarian regime—China—show the same reluctance to use force against democracies as is found in western democracies. Our findings expand the empirical scope of the claim that mass publics are reluctant to use force against democracies, but force us to rethink how public opinion operates as a causal mechanism underpinning the democratic peace.

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.

scholarly journals Correcting Citizens’ Misperceptions about non-Western Immigrants: Corrective Information, Interpretations, and Policy Opinions

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederik Juhl Jørgensen ◽  
Mathias Osmundsen
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Correct Information ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Information Change ◽  
Corrective Information

Abstract Can corrective information change citizens’ misperceptions about immigrants and subsequently lead to favorable immigration opinions? While prior studies from the USA document how corrections about the size of minority populations fail to change citizens’ immigration-related opinions, they do not examine how other facts that speak to immigrants’ cultural or economic dependency rates can influence immigration policy opinions. To extend earlier work, we conducted a large-scale survey experiment fielded to a nationally representative sample of Danes. We randomly expose participants to information about non-Western immigrants’ (1) welfare dependency rate, (2) crime rate, and (3) proportion of the total population. We find that participants update their factual beliefs in light of correct information, but reinterpret the information in a highly selective fashion, ultimately failing to change their policy preferences.

scholarly journals Identifying and Measuring Conditional Policy Preferences: The Case of Opening Schools During a Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Green ◽  
Matthew Baum ◽  
James Druckman ◽  
David Lazer ◽  
Katherine Ognyanova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Survey Research ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
The Status ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
Conditional Preferences

An individual’s issue preferences are non-separable when they depend on other issue outcomes (Lacy 2001a), presenting measurement challenges for traditional survey research. We extend this logic to the broader case of conditional preferences, in which policy preferences depend on the status of conditions with inherent levels of uncertainty -- and are not necessarily policies themselves. We demonstrate new approaches for measuring conditional preferences in two large-scale survey experiments regarding the conditions under which citizens would support reopening schools in their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. By drawing on recently-developed methods at the intersection of machine learning and causal inference, we identify which citizens are most likely to have school reopening preferences that depend on additional considerations. The results highlight the advantages of using such approaches to measure conditional preferences, which represent an underappreciated and general phenomenon in public opinion.

scholarly journals How Simple Messages Affect Voters' Knowledge and Their Perceptions of Politicians - Evidence From a Large-Scale Survey Experiment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bischof ◽  
Roman Senninger
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The People ◽  
Simple Language ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
New Generation

Public discourse is increasingly concerned with the way that politicians communicate. This is fuelled by a new generation of politicians, such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and representatives of populist parties, who evidently communicate less sophisticated than mainstream politicians. However, the question of whether and how linguistic styles affect citizens is largely unexplored. We argue that both citizens and politicians might benefit from simple political communication. First, mechanically, citizens should have a better chance to understand political positions if political discourse is less sophisticated. Second, linguistic simplicity can function as a heuristic for citizens by signaling that politicians are among the "people" instead of being part of the "elites". We test our arguments using a pre-registered three-wave vignette survey experiment in Germany (N = 5,800). Our findings show that simple messages (as compared to sophisticated messages) indeed increase citizens' comprehension of political positions. Moreover, we find that citizens use language sophistication as a heuristic to fill informational gaps about politicians. Politicians who communicate less sophisticated are perceived to have rather modest socioeconomic backgrounds. As a result, the use of simple language can benefit politicians' claims to belong to the people instead of the elite. Our findings add important new insights to our understanding of the effects of political communication in contemporary democracies.

scholarly journals Backlash to policy decisions: how citizens react to immigrants' rights to demonstrate

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Richard Traunmüller ◽  
Marc Helbling
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Political Sources ◽  
Large Scale Survey ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Political Right

Abstract Focusing on one specific aspect of immigrant political integration—how authorities deal with their political right to demonstrate—we show in a large-scale survey experiment that liberal policy decisions permitting demonstrations lead to a polarization in attitudes: citizens who agree with a permission become more sympathetic, while those in favor of banning become more critical of immigrants. This notion of opinion backlash to policy decisions adds a new perspective to the literature on immigration attitudes which has either assumed a congruence between public opinion and policy or ignored political sources of anti-immigrant sentiment altogether. By exploring the unintended consequences of policy decisions, we provide an alternative view and demonstrate the inherent dilemma of balancing citizen opinion and minority rights.

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