Exploring the direct and indirect effects of elite influence on public opinion

Political elites both respond to public opinion and influence it. Elite policy messages can shape individual policy attitudes, but the extent to which they do is difficult to measure in a dynamic information environment. Furthermore, policy messages are not absorbed in isolation, but spread through the social networks in which individuals are embedded, and their effects must be evaluated in light of how they spread across social environments. Using a sample of 358 participants across thirty student organizations at a large Midwestern research university, we experimentally investigate how real social groups consume and share elite information when evaluating a relatively unfamiliar policy area. We find a significant, direct effect of elite policy messages on individuals’ policy attitudes. However, we find no evidence that policy attitudes are impacted indirectly by elite messages filtered through individuals’ social networks. Results illustrate the power of elite influence over public opinion.

Pandemics and Political Development

ABSTRACT Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

How Bad Is It? Elite Influence and the Perceived Seriousness of the Coronavirus Pandemic

In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump has largely downplayed and but sometimes hyped the severity of the virus’s toll on American lives. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had already crystallized their views on the virus’s seriousness, the president’s performance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.

Authoritarian populism in the US: context and continuity in a post-truth era

An enduring theme in US politics is tension between people on the right who favour limited government that serves individual and elite interests and people on the left who prefer active government with emphasis on a broader public interest. Recently, the political landscape has shifted from the dominant ideology of neoliberalism toward a far-right authoritarian populism with parallels to mid-20th century fascism. This shift appears in regressive societal characteristics - such as xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and misogyny - that were thought to have diminished in an increasingly progressive 21 st century. An argument can be made that authoritarian populism is a continuation of longstanding patterns of elite influence, in which regressive elements serve as techniques to distract the public from the governing economic agenda. The essay examines this phenomenon and explores potential future effects on US society.

Estimating the between-issue variation in party elite cue effects

Influential models and studies of public opinion formation identify party elite cues as prominent drivers of public policy opinion. However, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, and this variation is a barrier to the generalizability, theoretical development and practical utility of party elite cues research. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues studied. I analyze three datasets from party elite cue experiments that contain between 10 and 34 U.S. policy issues each. I estimate the variance across the unobserved population of policy issues in both (i) the basic party elite cue effect and (ii) its relationship with the putative moderators of political sophistication and need for cognition. My estimates of between-issue variation in the basic and moderator effects equate to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the between-study variation previously observed in the literature. This highlights that a majority of existing between-study variation in party elite cue effects could simply be caused by the studies’ limited sampling of policy issues. I conclude that sampling a larger number of policy issues would substantially improve the generalizability of studies’ estimates of party elite cue effects, thereby providing a firmer empirical foundation for theory building, testing, and for applying the results to predict future cases of party elite influence.

Real, but Limited: A Meta-Analytic Assessment of Framing Effects in the Political Domain

In the past three decades, scholars have frequently used the concept of framing effects to assess the competence of citizens' political judgments and how susceptible they are to elite influence. Yet prior framing studies have reached mixed conclusions, and few have provided systematic cumulative evidence. This study evaluates the overall efficacy of different types of framing effects in the political domain by systematically meta-analyzing this large and diverse literature. A combined analysis of 138 experiments reveals that when examined across contexts, framing exerts medium-sized effects on citizens' political attitudes and emotions. However, framing effects on behavior are negligible, and small effects are also found in more realistic studies employing frame competition. These findings suggest that although elites can influence citizens by framing issues, their capacity to do so is constrained. Overall, citizens appear to be more competent than some scholars envision them to be.