31 results
Bringing Converse Back In: Modeling Information Flow in Political Campaigns
- John Zaller
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- Journal:
- Political Analysis / Volume 1 / 1989
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 January 2017, pp. 181-234
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In his 1962 paper, “Information Flow and the Stability of Partisan Attitudes,” Converse explained why moderately sophisticated voters are sometimes most susceptible to persuasion in election campaigns. Such people, Converse argued, pay enough attention to campaigns to be fairly heavily exposed to persuasive messages but lack the sophistication to be able to resist. The present article extends this model in several ways, showing that it can yield important insights into House elections, presidential elections, presidential primary elections, and the dynamics of presidential popularity.
On the theoretical side, this article introduces the notion of differential information flow, which is the idea that campaigns consist of multiple messages that may penetrate differentially far into the mass electorate. It shows that differential information flow can help explain nonobvious but theoretically interesting patterns of attitude change in several areas.
On the substantive side, this article pays particular attention to the dynamics of incumbent advantage in House elections, showing among other things, why senior incumbents are typically able to build up huge winning margins in weakly contested elections but are unable to maintain this advantage under challenge.
Party Versus Faction in the Reformed Presidential Nominating System
- Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, John Zaller
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- Journal:
- PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 49 / Issue 4 / October 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 October 2016, pp. 701-708
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- October 2016
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Political scientists have devoted vastly more attention to general presidential elections than to party nominations for president. This emphasis might be reasonable if parties could be counted on to nominate generic representatives of their traditions. But it is clear that they cannot. Since the party reforms of the 1970s, regulars like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Al Gore have sometimes won fairly easy nominations, but outsider candidates like Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean have made strong runs or even won. 2016 has produced extremes of both types: ultimate regular Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side and far outsider Donald Trump on the Republican side. It seems, moreover, that party regulars are having more difficulty in recent cycles than they did in the 1980s and 1990s. There is therefore some urgency to the question: when and why do party regulars tend to win nominations?
We examine this question from the point of view of two well-known studies, Nelson Polsby’s Consequences of Party Reform and our own, The Party Decides. The former explains why incentives built into the reformed system of presidential nominations make outsider and factional candidates like Trump likely. The latter argues that, following the factional nominations of the 1970s, party leaders learned to steer nominations to insider favorites. This article uses the logic of these studies to argue that major trends over the past two decades – the rise of new political media, the flood of early money into presidential nominations, and the conflict among party factions – have made it easier for factional candidates and outsiders to challenge elite control of nominations.
A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics
- Kathleen Bawn, Martin Cohen, David Karol, Seth Masket, Hans Noel, John Zaller
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- Journal:
- Perspectives on Politics / Volume 10 / Issue 3 / September 2012
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 16 August 2012, pp. 571-597
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- September 2012
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We propose a theory of political parties in which interest groups and activists are the key actors, and coalitions of groups develop common agendas and screen candidates for party nominations based on loyalty to their agendas. This theoretical stance contrasts with currently dominant theories, which view parties as controlled by election-minded politicians. The difference is normatively important because parties dominated by interest groups and activists are less responsive to voter preferences, even to the point of taking advantage of lapses in voter attention to politics. Our view is consistent with evidence from the formation of national parties in the 1790s, party position change on civil rights and abortion, patterns of polarization in Congress, policy design and nominations for state legislatures, Congress, and the presidency.
Contributors
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- By Rose Teteki Abbey, K. C. Abraham, David Tuesday Adamo, LeRoy H. Aden, Efrain Agosto, Victor Aguilan, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Charanjit Kaur AjitSingh, Dorothy B E A Akoto, Giuseppe Alberigo, Daniel E. Albrecht, Ruth Albrecht, Daniel O. Aleshire, Urs Altermatt, Anand Amaladass, Michael Amaladoss, James N. Amanze, Lesley G. Anderson, Thomas C. Anderson, Victor Anderson, Hope S. Antone, María Pilar Aquino, Paula Arai, Victorio Araya Guillén, S. Wesley Ariarajah, Ellen T. Armour, Brett Gregory Armstrong, Atsuhiro Asano, Naim Stifan Ateek, Mahmoud Ayoub, John Alembillah Azumah, Mercedes L. García Bachmann, Irena Backus, J. Wayne Baker, Mieke Bal, Lewis V. Baldwin, William Barbieri, António Barbosa da Silva, David Basinger, Bolaji Olukemi Bateye, Oswald Bayer, Daniel H. Bays, Rosalie Beck, Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Guy-Thomas Bedouelle, Chorbishop Seely Beggiani, Wolfgang Behringer, Christopher M. Bellitto, Byard Bennett, Harold V. Bennett, Teresa Berger, Miguel A. Bernad, Henley Bernard, Alan E. Bernstein, Jon L. Berquist, Johannes Beutler, Ana María Bidegain, Matthew P. Binkewicz, Jennifer Bird, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Dmytro Bondarenko, Paulo Bonfatti, Riet en Pim Bons-Storm, Jessica A. Boon, Marcus J. Borg, Mark Bosco, Peter C. Bouteneff, François Bovon, William D. Bowman, Paul S. Boyer, David Brakke, Richard E. Brantley, Marcus Braybrooke, Ian Breward, Ênio José da Costa Brito, Jewel Spears Brooker, Johannes Brosseder, Nicholas Canfield Read Brown, Robert F. Brown, Pamela K. Brubaker, Walter Brueggemann, Bishop Colin O. Buchanan, Stanley M. Burgess, Amy Nelson Burnett, J. Patout Burns, David B. Burrell, David Buttrick, James P. Byrd, Lavinia Byrne, Gerado Caetano, Marcos Caldas, Alkiviadis Calivas, William J. Callahan, Salvatore Calomino, Euan K. Cameron, William S. Campbell, Marcelo Ayres Camurça, Daniel F. Caner, Paul E. Capetz, Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, Patrick W. Carey, Barbara Carvill, Hal Cauthron, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Mark D. Chapman, James H. Charlesworth, Kenneth R. Chase, Chen Zemin, Luciano Chianeque, Philip Chia Phin Yin, Francisca H. Chimhanda, Daniel Chiquete, John T. Chirban, Soobin Choi, Robert Choquette, Mita Choudhury, Gerald Christianson, John Chryssavgis, Sejong Chun, Esther Chung-Kim, Charles M. A. Clark, Elizabeth A. Clark, Sathianathan Clarke, Fred Cloud, John B. Cobb, W. Owen Cole, John A Coleman, John J. Collins, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Paul K. Conkin, Beth A. Conklin, Sean Connolly, Demetrios J. Constantelos, Michael A. Conway, Paula M. Cooey, Austin Cooper, Michael L. Cooper-White, Pamela Cooper-White, L. William Countryman, Sérgio Coutinho, Pamela Couture, Shannon Craigo-Snell, James L. Crenshaw, David Crowner, Humberto Horacio Cucchetti, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Elizabeth Mason Currier, Emmanuel Cutrone, Mary L. Daniel, David D. Daniels, Robert Darden, Rolf Darge, Isaiah Dau, Jeffry C. Davis, Jane Dawson, Valentin Dedji, John W. de Gruchy, Paul DeHart, Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Miguel A. De La Torre, George E. Demacopoulos, Thomas de Mayo, Leah DeVun, Beatriz de Vasconcellos Dias, Dennis C. Dickerson, John M. Dillon, Luis Miguel Donatello, Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, Susanna Drake, Jonathan A. Draper, N. Dreher Martin, Otto Dreydoppel, Angelyn Dries, A. J. Droge, Francis X. D'Sa, Marilyn Dunn, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Rifaat Ebied, Mark J. Edwards, William H. Edwards, Leonard H. Ehrlich, Nancy L. Eiesland, Martin Elbel, J. Harold Ellens, Stephen Ellingson, Marvin M. Ellison, Robert Ellsberg, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Eldon Jay Epp, Peter C. Erb, Tassilo Erhardt, Maria Erling, Noel Leo Erskine, Gillian R. Evans, Virginia Fabella, Michael A. Fahey, Edward Farley, Margaret A. Farley, Wendy Farley, Robert Fastiggi, Seena Fazel, Duncan S. Ferguson, Helwar Figueroa, Paul Corby Finney, Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, Thomas E. FitzGerald, John R. Fitzmier, Marie Therese Flanagan, Sabina Flanagan, Claude Flipo, Ronald B. Flowers, Carole Fontaine, David Ford, Mary Ford, Stephanie A. Ford, Jim Forest, William Franke, Robert M. Franklin, Ruth Franzén, Edward H. Friedman, Samuel Frouisou, Lorelei F. Fuchs, Jojo M. Fung, Inger Furseth, Richard R. Gaillardetz, Brandon Gallaher, China Galland, Mark Galli, Ismael García, Tharscisse Gatwa, Jean-Marie Gaudeul, Luis María Gavilanes del Castillo, Pavel L. Gavrilyuk, Volney P. Gay, Metropolitan Athanasios Geevargis, Kondothra M. George, Mary Gerhart, Simon Gikandi, Maurice Gilbert, Michael J. Gillgannon, Verónica Giménez Beliveau, Terryl Givens, Beth Glazier-McDonald, Philip Gleason, Menghun Goh, Brian Golding, Bishop Hilario M. Gomez, Michelle A. Gonzalez, Donald K. Gorrell, Roy Gottfried, Tamara Grdzelidze, Joel B. Green, Niels Henrik Gregersen, Cristina Grenholm, Herbert Griffiths, Eric W. Gritsch, Erich S. Gruen, Christoffer H. Grundmann, Paul H. Gundani, Jon P. Gunnemann, Petre Guran, Vidar L. Haanes, Jeremiah M. Hackett, Getatchew Haile, Douglas John Hall, Nicholas Hammond, Daphne Hampson, Jehu J. Hanciles, Barry Hankins, Jennifer Haraguchi, Stanley S. Harakas, Anthony John Harding, Conrad L. Harkins, J. William Harmless, Marjory Harper, Amir Harrak, Joel F. Harrington, Mark W. Harris, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Van A. Harvey, R. Chris Hassel, Jione Havea, Daniel Hawk, Diana L. Hayes, Leslie Hayes, Priscilla Hayner, S. Mark Heim, Simo Heininen, Richard P. Heitzenrater, Eila Helander, David Hempton, Scott H. Hendrix, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Gina Hens-Piazza, Carter Heyward, Nicholas J. Higham, David Hilliard, Norman A. Hjelm, Peter C. Hodgson, Arthur Holder, M. Jan Holton, Dwight N. Hopkins, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Po-Ho Huang, James Hudnut-Beumler, Jennifer S. Hughes, Leonard M. Hummel, Mary E. Hunt, Laennec Hurbon, Mark Hutchinson, Susan E. Hylen, Mary Beth Ingham, H. Larry Ingle, Dale T. Irvin, Jon Isaak, Paul John Isaak, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Hans Raun Iversen, Margaret C. Jacob, Arthur James, Maria Jansdotter-Samuelsson, David Jasper, Werner G. Jeanrond, Renée Jeffery, David Lyle Jeffrey, Theodore W. Jennings, David H. Jensen, Robin Margaret Jensen, David Jobling, Dale A. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Maxwell E. Johnson, Sarah Johnson, Mark D. Johnston, F. Stanley Jones, James William Jones, John R. Jones, Alissa Jones Nelson, Inge Jonsson, Jan Joosten, Elizabeth Judd, Mulambya Peggy Kabonde, Robert Kaggwa, Sylvester Kahakwa, Isaac Kalimi, Ogbu U. Kalu, Eunice Kamaara, Wayne C. Kannaday, Musimbi Kanyoro, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Frank Kaufmann, Léon Nguapitshi Kayongo, Richard Kearney, Alice A. Keefe, Ralph Keen, Catherine Keller, Anthony J. Kelly, Karen Kennelly, Kathi Lynn Kern, Fergus Kerr, Edward Kessler, George Kilcourse, Heup Young Kim, Kim Sung-Hae, Kim Yong-Bock, Kim Yung Suk, Richard King, Thomas M. King, Robert M. Kingdon, Ross Kinsler, Hans G. Kippenberg, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Clifton Kirkpatrick, Leonid Kishkovsky, Nadieszda Kizenko, Jeffrey Klaiber, Hans-Josef Klauck, Sidney Knight, Samuel Kobia, Robert Kolb, Karla Ann Koll, Heikki Kotila, Donald Kraybill, Philip D. W. Krey, Yves Krumenacker, Jeffrey Kah-Jin Kuan, Simanga R. Kumalo, Peter Kuzmic, Simon Shui-Man Kwan, Kwok Pui-lan, André LaCocque, Stephen E. Lahey, John Tsz Pang Lai, Emiel Lamberts, Armando Lampe, Craig Lampe, Beverly J. Lanzetta, Eve LaPlante, Lizette Larson-Miller, Ariel Bybee Laughton, Leonard Lawlor, Bentley Layton, Robin A. Leaver, Karen Lebacqz, Archie Chi Chung Lee, Marilyn J. Legge, Hervé LeGrand, D. L. LeMahieu, Raymond Lemieux, Bill J. Leonard, Ellen M. Leonard, Outi Leppä, Jean Lesaulnier, Nantawan Boonprasat Lewis, Henrietta Leyser, Alexei Lidov, Bernard Lightman, Paul Chang-Ha Lim, Carter Lindberg, Mark R. Lindsay, James R. Linville, James C. Livingston, Ann Loades, David Loades, Jean-Claude Loba-Mkole, Lo Lung Kwong, Wati Longchar, Eleazar López, David W. Lotz, Andrew Louth, Robin W. Lovin, William Luis, Frank D. Macchia, Diarmaid N. J. MacCulloch, Kirk R. MacGregor, Marjory A. MacLean, Donald MacLeod, Tomas S. Maddela, Inge Mager, Laurenti Magesa, David G. Maillu, Fortunato Mallimaci, Philip Mamalakis, Kä Mana, Ukachukwu Chris Manus, Herbert Robinson Marbury, Reuel Norman Marigza, Jacqueline Mariña, Antti Marjanen, Luiz C. L. Marques, Madipoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele), Caleb J. D. Maskell, Steve Mason, Thomas Massaro, Fernando Matamoros Ponce, András Máté-Tóth, Odair Pedroso Mateus, Dinis Matsolo, Fumitaka Matsuoka, John D'Arcy May, Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, Theodore Mbazumutima, John S. McClure, Christian McConnell, Lee Martin McDonald, Gary B. McGee, Thomas McGowan, Alister E. McGrath, Richard J. McGregor, John A. McGuckin, Maud Burnett McInerney, Elsie Anne McKee, Mary B. McKinley, James F. McMillan, Ernan McMullin, Kathleen E. McVey, M. Douglas Meeks, Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon, Ilie Melniciuc-Puica, Everett Mendoza, Raymond A. Mentzer, William W. Menzies, Ina Merdjanova, Franziska Metzger, Constant J. Mews, Marvin Meyer, Carol Meyers, Vasile Mihoc, Gunner Bjerg Mikkelsen, Maria Inêz de Castro Millen, Clyde Lee Miller, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Alexander Mirkovic, Paul Misner, Nozomu Miyahira, R. W. L. Moberly, Gerald Moede, Aloo Osotsi Mojola, Sunanda Mongia, Rebeca Montemayor, James Moore, Roger E. Moore, Craig E. Morrison O.Carm, Jeffry H. Morrison, Keith Morrison, Wilson J. Moses, Tefetso Henry Mothibe, Mokgethi Motlhabi, Fulata Moyo, Henry Mugabe, Jesse Ndwiga Kanyua Mugambi, Peggy Mulambya-Kabonde, Robert Bruce Mullin, Pamela Mullins Reaves, Saskia Murk Jansen, Heleen L. Murre-Van den Berg, Augustine Musopole, Isaac M. T. Mwase, Philomena Mwaura, Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Anne Nasimiyu Wasike, Carmiña Navia Velasco, Thulani Ndlazi, Alexander Negrov, James B. Nelson, David G. Newcombe, Carol Newsom, Helen J. Nicholson, George W. E. Nickelsburg, Tatyana Nikolskaya, Damayanthi M. A. Niles, Bertil Nilsson, Nyambura Njoroge, Fidelis Nkomazana, Mary Beth Norton, Christian Nottmeier, Sonene Nyawo, Anthère Nzabatsinda, Edward T. Oakes, Gerald O'Collins, Daniel O'Connell, David W. Odell-Scott, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Kathleen O'Grady, Oyeronke Olajubu, Thomas O'Loughlin, Dennis T. Olson, J. Steven O'Malley, Cephas N. Omenyo, Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro, César Augusto Ornellas Ramos, Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, Kenan B. Osborne, Carolyn Osiek, Javier Otaola Montagne, Douglas F. Ottati, Anna May Say Pa, Irina Paert, Jerry G. Pankhurst, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Samuele F. Pardini, Stefano Parenti, Peter Paris, Sung Bae Park, Cristián G. Parker, Raquel Pastor, Joseph Pathrapankal, Daniel Patte, W. Brown Patterson, Clive Pearson, Keith F. Pecklers, Nancy Cardoso Pereira, David Horace Perkins, Pheme Perkins, Edward N. Peters, Rebecca Todd Peters, Bishop Yeznik Petrossian, Raymond Pfister, Peter C. Phan, Isabel Apawo Phiri, William S. F. Pickering, Derrick G. Pitard, William Elvis Plata, Zlatko Plese, John Plummer, James Newton Poling, Ronald Popivchak, Andrew Porter, Ute Possekel, James M. Powell, Enos Das Pradhan, Devadasan Premnath, Jaime Adrían Prieto Valladares, Anne Primavesi, Randall Prior, María Alicia Puente Lutteroth, Eduardo Guzmão Quadros, Albert Rabil, Laurent William Ramambason, Apolonio M. Ranche, Vololona Randriamanantena Andriamitandrina, Lawrence R. Rast, Paul L. Redditt, Adele Reinhartz, Rolf Rendtorff, Pål Repstad, James N. Rhodes, John K. Riches, Joerg Rieger, Sharon H. Ringe, Sandra Rios, Tyler Roberts, David M. Robinson, James M. Robinson, Joanne Maguire Robinson, Richard A. H. Robinson, Roy R. Robson, Jack B. Rogers, Maria Roginska, Sidney Rooy, Rev. Garnett Roper, Maria José Fontelas Rosado-Nunes, Andrew C. Ross, Stefan Rossbach, François Rossier, John D. Roth, John K. Roth, Phillip Rothwell, Richard E. Rubenstein, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Markku Ruotsila, John E. Rybolt, Risto Saarinen, John Saillant, Juan Sanchez, Wagner Lopes Sanchez, Hugo N. Santos, Gerhard Sauter, Gloria L. Schaab, Sandra M. Schneiders, Quentin J. Schultze, Fernando F. Segovia, Turid Karlsen Seim, Carsten Selch Jensen, Alan P. F. Sell, Frank C. Senn, Kent Davis Sensenig, Damían Setton, Bal Krishna Sharma, Carolyn J. Sharp, Thomas Sheehan, N. Gerald Shenk, Christian Sheppard, Charles Sherlock, Tabona Shoko, Walter B. Shurden, Marguerite Shuster, B. Mark Sietsema, Batara Sihombing, Neil Silberman, Clodomiro Siller, Samuel Silva-Gotay, Heikki Silvet, John K. Simmons, Hagith Sivan, James C. Skedros, Abraham Smith, Ashley A. Smith, Ted A. Smith, Daud Soesilo, Pia Søltoft, Choan-Seng (C. S.) Song, Kathryn Spink, Bryan Spinks, Eric O. Springsted, Nicolas Standaert, Brian Stanley, Glen H. Stassen, Karel Steenbrink, Stephen J. Stein, Andrea Sterk, Gregory E. Sterling, Columba Stewart, Jacques Stewart, Robert B. Stewart, Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ken Stone, Anne Stott, Elizabeth Stuart, Monya Stubbs, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, David Kwang-sun Suh, Scott W. Sunquist, Keith Suter, Douglas Sweeney, Charles H. Talbert, Shawqi N. Talia, Elsa Tamez, Joseph B. Tamney, Jonathan Y. Tan, Yak-Hwee Tan, Kathryn Tanner, Feiya Tao, Elizabeth S. Tapia, Aquiline Tarimo, Claire Taylor, Mark Lewis Taylor, Bishop Abba Samuel Wolde Tekestebirhan, Eugene TeSelle, M. Thomas Thangaraj, David R. Thomas, Andrew Thornley, Scott Thumma, Marcelo Timotheo da Costa, George E. “Tink” Tinker, Ola Tjørhom, Karen Jo Torjesen, Iain R. Torrance, Fernando Torres-Londoño, Archbishop Demetrios [Trakatellis], Marit Trelstad, Christine Trevett, Phyllis Trible, Johannes Tromp, Paul Turner, Robert G. Tuttle, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Peter Tyler, Anders Tyrberg, Justin Ukpong, Javier Ulloa, Camillus Umoh, Kristi Upson-Saia, Martina Urban, Monica Uribe, Elochukwu Eugene Uzukwu, Richard Vaggione, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Valliere, T. J. Van Bavel, Steven Vanderputten, Peter Van der Veer, Huub Van de Sandt, Louis Van Tongeren, Luke A. Veronis, Noel Villalba, Ramón Vinke, Tim Vivian, David Voas, Elena Volkova, Katharina von Kellenbach, Elina Vuola, Timothy Wadkins, Elaine M. Wainwright, Randi Jones Walker, Dewey D. Wallace, Jerry Walls, Michael J. Walsh, Philip Walters, Janet Walton, Jonathan L. Walton, Wang Xiaochao, Patricia A. Ward, David Harrington Watt, Herold D. Weiss, Laurence L. Welborn, Sharon D. Welch, Timothy Wengert, Traci C. West, Merold Westphal, David Wetherell, Barbara Wheeler, Carolinne White, Jean-Paul Wiest, Frans Wijsen, Terry L. Wilder, Felix Wilfred, Rebecca Wilkin, Daniel H. Williams, D. Newell Williams, Michael A. Williams, Vincent L. Wimbush, Gabriele Winkler, Anders Winroth, Lauri Emílio Wirth, James A. Wiseman, Ebba Witt-Brattström, Teofil Wojciechowski, John Wolffe, Kenman L. Wong, Wong Wai Ching, Linda Woodhead, Wendy M. Wright, Rose Wu, Keith E. Yandell, Gale A. Yee, Viktor Yelensky, Yeo Khiok-Khng, Gustav K. K. Yeung, Angela Yiu, Amos Yong, Yong Ting Jin, You Bin, Youhanna Nessim Youssef, Eliana Yunes, Robert Michael Zaller, Valarie H. Ziegler, Barbara Brown Zikmund, Joyce Ann Zimmerman, Aurora Zlotnik, Zhuo Xinping
- Edited by Daniel Patte, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
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- 05 August 2012
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- 20 September 2010, pp xi-xliv
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Presidential Vote Models: A Recount
- Larry M. Bartels, John Zaller
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- PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 34 / Issue 1 / March 2001
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 16 May 2002, pp. 9-20
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- March 2001
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Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed.
12 - Monica Lewinsky and the Mainsprings of American Politics
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- By John Zaller
- Edited by W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Robert M. Entman, North Carolina State University
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- Mediated Politics
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- 05 June 2012
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- 20 November 2000, pp 252-278
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Summary
Just before news of a sexual relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky became the talk of the nation, the president's job approval rating stood at 60 percent. Ten days later, following intense media coverage of the affair, Clinton's approval ratings, as measured by the same polling organizations, had risen to about 70 percent. Thus, the president not only survived the first round of Monicagate; he seemed to prosper.
Several months later, Clinton pulled off another miracle. One of the most enduring regularities of American politics is that the president's party loses seats in the House of Representatives in midterm elections. In the 1998 midterms, with the Congress threatening to impeach the president for lying to cover up his sexual misbehavior, a big loss for Clinton's party seemed especially likely. But when the votes were counted, the Democrats had actually gained seats in Congress, thereby surprising political scientists and maddening Clinton's enemies.
If anyone had previously doubted it, these two occurrences should be taken as final evidence that media frenzies over personal shortcomings are not the driving force of American politics. Stories of personal scandal can sell newspapers and provide opposition politicians with ammunition for rhetorical attack, but they do not in the end seem to make much difference for public opinion or national politics.
What, then, does move public opinion? What forces do drive American politics?
The argument of this chapter – hardly novel but sufficiently under appreciated that it bears making – is that presidents and their parties rise and fall in the public's esteem mainly according to how effectively they govern.
Monica Lewinsky's Contribution to Political Science
- John R. Zaller
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- Journal:
- PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 31 / Issue 2 / June 1998
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 September 2013, pp. 182-189
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- June 1998
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The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, public opinion is initially responsive to media reports of scandal, the public's concern with actual political achievement reasserts itself. This lesson, which was not nearly so clear before the Lewinsky matter as it is now, not only deepens our understanding of American politics. It also tends, as I argue in the second half of this article, to undermine the importance of one large branch of public opinion research, buttress the importance of another, and point toward some new research questions.
Whatever else may have transpired by the time this article gets into print, the Lewinsky poll bounce is something worth pondering. In a half-dozen commercial polls taken in the period just before the story broke, Clinton's job approval rating averaged about 60%. Ten days later, following intensive coverage of the story and Clinton's State of the Union address, presidential support was about 10 percentage points higher.
Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology. By Paul M. Sniderman, Richard A. Brody, and Philip E. Tetlock. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 304p. $47.95.
- John Zaller
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- Journal:
- American Political Science Review / Volume 86 / Issue 4 / December 1992
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 September 2013, pp. 1073-1074
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- December 1992
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List of tables and figures
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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- 05 June 2012
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- 28 August 1992, pp viii-x
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8 - Tests of the one-message model
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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- 05 June 2012
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- 28 August 1992, pp 151-184
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Summary
The purpose of Chapter 7 was to familiarize the reader with the basic logic of the reception-acceptance process and to develop a model capable of capturing the essentials of the process as it manifests itself in the limited attitude change data that are available in typical surveys. The present chapter develops and tests the model's deductive implications, including some nonintuitive ones. The aim is to convince the reader that the success of the model in its initial tests was not merely fortuitous but arises from a significant congruence between its structure and the actual dynamics of mass opinion.
The chapter has three parts. The first analyzes two message-level determinants of attitude change: the intensity of the change-inducing messages, and whether the messages deal with a familiar or unfamiliar issue. These factors create predictably different patterns of opinion change. The second part examines the dynamics of resistance to persuasion at the level of the RAS model's primitive term, considerations. Finally, the chapter uses the model to shed light on a classic problem of opinion research, generational differences in receptivity to new ideas.
I should warn that, in the course of developing these diverse tests of the reception-acceptance model, the chapter skips from one empirical example to another – from public support for foreign wars to presidential approval ratings to racial attitudes – without developing a comprehensive picture of opinion in any single domain.
7 - Basic processes of “attitude change”
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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- 05 June 2012
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- 28 August 1992, pp 118-150
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Summary
Within the RAS model, “attitudes,” in the conventional sense of the term, do not exist. Rather, people make “attitude reports” or “survey responses” on the basis of momentarily salient considerations. Attitude change, then, cannot be understood within the RAS model as a conversion experience, the replacement of one crystallized opinion structure by another. It must instead be understood as a change in the balance of positive and negative considerations relating to a given issue. To model it, one must represent the process by which new considerations are added to the pool of existing considerations in the person's mind, thereby permanently altering long-term response probabilities on the issue. Permanent alterations in long-term response probabilities are the RAS model's equivalent of attitude change. Since this phrase is a cumbersome one, my discussion of the phenomenon will retain the more standard locution, attitude change. However, the reader should keep in mind that I am using it as a phrase of convenience, and am actually referring to an alteration in long-term response probabilities that has been brought about by the acquisition of new considerations.
Attitude change, understood in this way, makes an enormously more interesting subject of study than cross-sectional opinion. When adequate opinion data are available, as they are in a handful of cases, the analyst is no longer forced to infer a dynamic process from a static distribution of opinion, as was done in Chapter 6, but can directly observe the processes that are shaping opinion.
10 - Information flow and electoral choice
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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- 05 June 2012
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- 28 August 1992, pp 216-264
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Summary
Election campaigns are attempts by competing partisan elites to reach citizens with political communications and persuade them to a point of view. In this essential respect, election campaigns resemble the ongoing campaigns to shape public opinion that we have examined in previous chapters. One may therefore suspect that the dynamics of contested elections are much like those we have already seen. One may suspect, that is, that citizens vary in their susceptibility to influence according to their general levels of political awareness and their predispositions to accept the campaign messages they receive.
The aim of this chapter is to test this suspicion. I will examine four types of contested elections: elections for the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, general presidential elections, and presidential primary elections. In so doing, I will try to shed light afresh on the question of how citizens choose their elected representatives. No attempt will be made, however, to develop a comprehensive account of electoral behavior in these four types of elections. Rather, my primary effort will be to use systematic differences that exist among them to increase understanding of how, in general, mass attitudes form and change in response to competing flows of political information. Capitalizing on the fact that most congressional campaigns are dominated by incumbent officeholders, I shall be especially interested in the process by which citizens resist dominant campaign messages.
11 - Evaluating the model and looking toward future research
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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Summary
“If the public had an opinion and there was no pollster around to measure it, would public opinion exist?” Like the old conundrum about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, this question is not completely vacuous. The answer depends on what one means by public opinion. If by public opinion one means the hopes, fears, feelings, and reactions to events of ordinary citizens as they go about their private lives, then certainly there is public opinion whether or not there is a pollster to measure it. But if by public opinion one means ordinary citizens walking around saying to themselves things like “I strongly approve of the way George Bush is doing his job as president” or “I think we should take a stronger stand, even if it means invading North Vietnam,” then most of what gets measured as public opinion does not exist except in the presence of a pollster.
The RAS model has been about both kinds of public opinion, the “considerations” that people form in response to the flow of political communications, and the process by which they translate typically disorganized considerations into the survey responses that virtually everyone now takes as constituting public opinion.
To the extent one evaluates the RAS model on the conventional criteria of empirical breadth and theoretical parsimony, it looks quite good.
Frontmatter
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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9 - Two-sided information flows
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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Until this chapter, I have modeled attitude change as a response to a one-sided stream of communications – for example, the negative effects of Iran–Contra on presidential popularity, or the argument for liberal internationalism in the post–World War II era. Much has been learned about the dynamics of attitude change from this approach because, in many cases, the flow of political communications really is, at least for a time, heavily one-sided. Yet it is rarely completely one-sided over any appreciable length of time. Even amid the Iran–Contra scandal, for example, some Republican senators defended the president, and their remarks may have had some effect in preventing even greater damage to President Reagan's approval ratings.
The burden of this chapter is to develop a model that is capable of capturing the effects of two-sided information flows which change public opinion – that is, information flows that consist of both a dominant message pushing much of public opinion in one direction, and a less intense, countervalent message that partly counteracts the effects of the dominant message. Such a model is possible because, as will be shown, dominant and countervalent messages can have different effects in different segments of the population, depending on citizens' political awareness and ideological orientations and on the relative intensities of the two messages.
But the larger purpose of this chapter is to integrate the work of earlier chapters into a general statement of the effect on mass opinion of two-sided information flows.
4 - Coming to terms with response instability
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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Respondents to the 1987 NES pilot study were asked to answer what academic analysts of public opinion will recognize as an entirely standard question:
Some people think the government in Washington should cut government services, even in areas such as education and health care, in order to reduce the deficit. Others think government services should be increased.
In an unusual twist, however, respondents to this survey were not permitted to give an immediate answer to the question. Instead, the interviewer continued:
Before telling me how you feel about this, could you tell me what kinds of things come to mind when you think about cutting government services? (Any others?)
The interviewer wrote down respondents' remarks verbatim, and then asked:
Now, what comes to mind when you think about increases in government services? (Any others?)
At this point, the original question was repeated and the respondents were, at last, permitted to render a simple dichotomous judgment on the matter of government services. But in the meantime, each individual had revealed what the issue of government services meant to him or her at the moment of answering a standard closed-ended question about it. Because every respondent was asked the same questions again four weeks later, these probes make it possible to see how their thinking on the issue might have changed over time. The openended comments elicited by these probes constitute some of the best evidence currently available on what citizens' survey responses mean and why they are so beset by vagaries.
12 - Epilogue: The question of elite domination of public opinion
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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The voice of the people is but an echo. The output of an echo chamber bears an inevitable and invariable relation to the input. As candidates and parties clamor for attention and vie for popular support, the people's verdict can be no more than a selective reflection from the alternatives and outlooks presented to them (p. 2).
–V. O. Key, Jr., The Responsible ElectorateIn the 1930s and 1940s, many observers feared that the rise of the modern mass media would bring a new era of totalitarian domination. Mass circulation newspapers, the newly invented radio, and motion pictures seemed ideal tools for playing upon the fears of the new mass societies, and the great though temporary success of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Stalin in the Soviet Union seemed to confirm everyone's worst fears.
George Orwell's famous novel 1984 is perhaps the best-known expression of this foreboding over the dark potential of the mass media, but many social scientists shared Orwell's apprehension. As a result, attempts to measure the effects of the mass media on public opinion were a staple of early opinion research.
This early research turned out to be reassuring, however. Compared to what many feared the media might be able to accomplish, surveys found media effects to be relatively small (Klapper, 1960).
6 - The mainstream and polarization effects
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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Summary
With the national inflation rate approaching the then-startling level of 7 percent, President Nixon went on television in late summer 1971 to announce a surprise decision to impose wage and price controls on the economy. Although such controls were a major departure from administration policy, the decision was immediately hailed by commentators across the political spectrum as a necessary step in the battle against inflation.
By good luck, there exist excellent data on the effect of Nixon's speech on public attitudes. A Columbia University survey of political activists happened to be in the field at the time of Nixon's announcement, and Gallup surveys on price controls bracketed the speech. The Columbia study found, first of all, that the speech had little effect on Democratic activists, who tended to favor wage and price controls even before Nixon spoke. But the effect of the speech on Republican activists was dramatic. Virtually overnight, support for controls among Republican activists shot up from 37 percent to 82 percent, a rise of some 45 percentage points (Barton, 1974–5). The Gallup surveys, meanwhile, showed that the public as a whole became about 10 percentage points more favorable toward price controls in the weeks following the Nixon speech.
This case suggests that a popular president backed by a unified Washington community can have a powerful effect on public opinion, especially that part of the public that is most attentive to politics.
Measures appendix
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE
Since political awareness is the key independent variable in this study, I have extensively investigated how it may be most effectively measured (Zaller, 1985, 1986, 1990; Price and Zaller, 1990). Although some of this work has involved conceptual clarification, most of it has been mundanely empirical, as I have painstakingly tested alternative measures across a variety of datasets and issues. The routine empirical work, however, has paid a useful dividend: It has shown that the effects one attributes to political awareness can depend greatly on how one goes about measuring it.
How to measure political awareness
The surveys of the National Election Studies (NES), which provide the data for almost all of the new analyses reported in this book, contain numerous measures that would seem suitable as measures of political awareness. These include level of political participation (such as engaging in political discussions with friends, giving money to candidates), level of political interest, level of media use, educational attainment, and neutral factual knowledge about politics.
There is no agreement in the existing scholarly literature about which of these measures is best. Even Converse has given mixed signals on this question. In his classic 1964 study of mass belief systems, he made clear that there is a cluster of variables – information, activity, sophistication, education, status as a member of the political elite, and political interest – that are associated with constrained belief systems; of these, the latter two, and especially the last, seem most central to his argument.
3 - How citizens acquire information and convert it into public opinion
- John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
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- The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
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The comprehensive analysis of public opinion requires attention to two phenomena: how citizens learn about matters that are for the most part beyond their immediate experience, and how they convert the information they acquire into opinions.
This chapter proposes a model of both phenomena. The model does not provide a fully accurate account of how people process information and form attitude statements. No model that is both parsimonious and testable on typical mass opinion data – the two most important constraints on my enterprise – could possibly do so. But the proposed model, as I hope to persuade the reader, does a plausible job of approximating what must actually occur, and a quite excellent job of accounting for the available survey evidence across a wide range of phenomena.
Having stated a model of the opinionation process in this chapter, I proceed in the rest of the book to test a series of propositions derived from the model. Some additional ideas will be needed to accomplish this, but they are few and incidental. All of the important features of my analysis derive from the model that is presented here.
SOME DEFINITIONS
I begin the statement of the model with definitions of primitive terms. The first is consideration, which is defined as any reason that might induce an individual to decide a political issue one way or the other.