Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and ‘socio-psychological’ sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: “attribute-based” judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants’ desirability based on individual characteristics—human capital, race, language ability, and so on—and “categorical” judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries’ individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants’ attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.     

Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment

In a democracy, knowledge is power. Research explaining the determinants of knowledge focuses on unchanging demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. This study combines data on the public's knowledge of nearly 50 political issues with media coverage of those topics. In a two-part analysis, we demonstrate how education, the strongest and most consistent predictor of political knowledge, has a more nuanced connection to learning than is commonly recognized. Sometimes education is positively related to knowledge. In other instances its effect is negligible. A substantial part of the variation in the education-knowledge relationship is due to the amount of information available in the mass media. This study is among the first to distinguish the short-term, aggregate-level influences on political knowledge from the largely static individual-level predictors and to empirically demonstrate the importance of the information environment .     

Citizens,denizens and exiles

The New Diaspora: The mass exodus, dispersal and regrouping of migrant communities. Nicholas Van Hear, London, UCL Press, 1998, ISBN 1–85728–837–6

The Citizenship Debates: A Reader. Gershon Shafir (Ed.) Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, ISBN 0–8166–2881–5     

Citizens, Consumers and Courts

Address by the Honourable JJ Spigelman AC, Chief Justice of New South Wales, to the International Conference on Regulation Reform Management and Scrutiny of Legislation, New South Wales State Parliament House, Sydney, on 9 July 2001.     

Politicians,the Representativeness Heuristic and Decision-Making Biases

Political Behavior - Do politicians use the representativeness heuristic when making judgements, that is, when they appraise the likelihood or frequency of an outcome that is unknown or unknowable?...     

Deliberation,Democratic Decision-Making and Internal Political Efficacy

Empirical research into the possible positive consequences of deliberation increasingly reveals that there is a complex relationship between deliberation and its effects on citizens. In this experimental study I examine the relationship between internal political efficacy and one type of deliberation: deliberative decision-making. I also test whether different structures of decision-making mediate between deliberation and internal political efficacy. The data suggest that deliberative decision-making had no direct effect on a global measure of internal political efficacy. Participants in face-to-face deliberative decision-making, though, had higher scores on a situation-specific measure of internal political efficacy than participants who only voted. The structures of decision-making had no effect on either measure of internal political efficacy. These results support claims that deliberation will not necessarily lead to direct, positive effects on citizens internal political efficacy, but they also highlight the likelihood that face-to-face deliberation can lead citizens to feel more competent in their deliberative abilities.     

Myth and American politics

Accumulating tensions call into question the sustainability of the American political system, which ultimately depends on public faith in the justifying myth. This article takes sustainability as a policy problem, and attempts to reconstruct the significance of recent, scattered events in American politics from the standpoint of central theory in the policy sciences. The resulting construct emphasizes the significance of intellectuals in the decision processes of modern society and the continuing task of the policy sciences.