Framing and Deliberation: How Citizens' Conversations Limit Elite Influence

Public opinion research demonstrates that citizens' opinions depend on elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations. Yet, we continue to have little idea about how these two forces interact with one another. In this article, we address this issue by experimentally examining how interpersonal conversations affect (prior) elite framing effects. We find that conversations that include only common perspectives have no effect on elite framing, but conversations that include conflicting perspectives eliminate elite framing effects. We also introduce a new individual level moderator of framing effects—called "need to evaluate"—and we show that framing effects, in general, tend to be short-lived phenomena. In the end, we clarify when elites can and cannot use framing to influence public opinion and how interpersonal conversations affect this process .     

Ein Bericht von der Heimatfront

For a considerable period, the ISAF mission of the German army to Afghanistan has been opposed by a majority of German citizens. This discrepancy between elite decisions and public opinion suggests that the process of political representation does not work smoothly. This paper shows that political elites hardly engaged in political leadership concerning this issue. Moreover, voters did not give strong incentives for elite responsiveness by casting policy votes on the Afghanistan issue. Even in the 2009 election, the Afghanistan issue did not play a major role in voting choice. At the same time, public opinion appears to have affected elite decisions. Accordingly, the process of political representation appears to work more smoothly than suggested at a first glance.     

Public opinion polarisation and protest behaviour

Does an increasing divide in normative notions within a population influence citizens’ political protest behaviour? This article explores whether public opinion polarisation stimulates individuals to attend lawful demonstrations. In line with relative deprivation theory, it is argued that in an environment of polarisation, individuals’ normative notions are threatened, increasing the probability that they will actively participate in the political decision‐making process. Using the European Social Survey from the period 2002–2014 and focusing on subnational regions, multilevel analyses are conducted. Thereby a new index to measure public opinion polarisation is introduced. Depending on the issue, empirical results confirm the effect of polarisation. While average citizens are not motivated to demonstrate over the issue of whether people from other countries are a cultural threat, they are motivated by the issues of reducing inequality and of homosexuality. The article goes on to examine in a second step whether ideological extremism makes individuals more susceptible to environmental opinion polarisation. Findings show that members of the far left are more likely to protest when their social environment is divided over the issue of income inequality. In contrast, members of the far right are motivated by rising polarisation regarding homosexuality. In sum, citizens become mobilised as their beliefs and values are threatened by public opinion polarisation.     

Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables

A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinion about policy shapes public opinion. Estimating the impact of elites on mass opinion is difficult because of endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement error. This article proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing changes in political institutions as instrumental variables. We find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by 50%. We also find no evidence that this effect varies for more politically aware individuals, and our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration.     

Turf wars: Using social media network analysis to examine the suspected astroturfing campaign for the Adani Carmichael Coal mine on Twitter

This article uses social media network analysis (SMNA) to examine whether there was an astroturfing campaign on Twitter in support of the Adani Carmichael coal mine in 2017. It shows that SMNA can be used to visualize and analyze outsider lobbying activity in issue arenas and is capable of identifying networks of fake opinion. This study found that in April 2017, there was a small network of accounts that made a series of suspiciously similar pro‐Adani tweets that could be considered a form of duplicitous lobbying. However, this study concludes that these posts were likely a weak influence on public opinion in Australia and largely ineffectual as a lobbying tactic. Nevertheless, this analysis shows how communitas public interests can be subverted by covert social media campaigns used in support of corporatas goals, as well as the role digital research methods can play in protecting the integrity on public debates by exposing disingenuous actors.     

How political and social change will transform the EU public affairs industry

The EU public affairs industry is failing to recognise that political and social change is rendering its traditional approach to lobbying redundant. The key change is the growing importance of public opinion. Politicians are tending to follow rather than lead public opinion. The public is becoming more individualistic and more prone to emotional appeals. Pressure groups are increasingly setting the political agenda. The Internet is reinforcing all these trends and multiplying the number of political actors. To survive and prosper, public affairs practitioners need to adopt a strategic view of public affairs, which is aligned with companies' brand strategies. This view must be based on a holistic view of politics and recognition that winning public trust, acceptance and support is the prerequisite of successful lobbying. The emphasis will therefore shift away from traditional elite lobbying towards NGO‐style campaigning and mobilisation of public support. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Presidents Shaping Public Opinion in Parliamentary Democracies: A Survey Experiment in Turkey

Many parliamentary democracies feature a president alongside a prime minister. While these presidents have a nonpartisan status as head of state, they often have had long political careers with partisan affiliations before assuming office. How do voters react when such actors make issue statements to shape public opinion? Are such statements filtered through voters’ partisan lenses, provoked by the partisan background of these actors? Or perhaps partisan reactions are not invoked, owing to the nonpartisan status of the office? We argue that voters’ reactions depend on the issue domain. Partisan reactions will be invoked only when the statements are about issues outside the president’s prerogatives. We provide evidence for our argument from a population-based survey experiment in Turkey.     

Multiple meanings? The link between partisanship and definitions of voter fraud

Research on public perceptions of voter fraud often relies on items that gauge the frequency of noncitizen voting, double voting, and posing as someone else. Few studies explore the underlying sentiments that structure the concept of voter fraud and its meaning to people. Further, no study has examined whether these dominant survey items fully capture the ways in which people understand and articulate their views about voter fraud. We use original surveys with open-ended questions to explore public perceptions of voter fraud. With a combination of in-depth content analysis and text analysis, we find that individuals think of voter fraud as consisting of a wide array of actions being undertaken by a diverse set of actors. We also find substantial differences in the ways that Democrats and Republicans think about this issue. Our study provides important contributions to a growing literature on election administration and public opinion toward voter fraud.     

The Democratic Deficit in the States

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state‐level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy‐specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.     

The conditional party mandate: A model for the study of mass and elite opinion patterns

Abstract.  This article explores the pattern of opinions within political parties. What is the level of issue congruence between voters and elected leaders? The article introduces two ideas for the analysis of mass and elite opinion patterns. First, the authors challenge the unidimensional conception of mass-elite linkages, and argue that the opinion structure of political parties may best be understood in the context of a multidimensional policy space. Second, they contest the proximity logic of the traditional party mandate model. In so doing, they propose the 'conditional party mandate model', arguing that 'direction' rather than 'proximity' attracts voters' interest and attention. The authors contend that in issues of principle significance for a particular party (so-called 'core issues'), the party's voters and representatives will proceed in the same direction, but the representatives will stress their position more strongly than the voters. In issues that are less significant to the parties, the relationship between the two levels will be fortuitous and less clear. The analyses, which are based on elite and mass survey data from the Norwegian political system, support the authors' hypotheses concerning positional issues. When the direction of an issue is given, representatives are more extreme than voters.     

Taking official positions: How public policy preferences influence the platforms of parties in the United States

Do political parties in the United States respond to public opinion when writing their official party platforms? Current research suggests a clear linkage between public opinion and party positions, with parties responding to public preferences, and public opinion responding to party messages. Drawing on existing research regarding the saliency/issue competition model of party position-taking, this study examines the specific effect of public opinion on party positions, positing that when a larger percentage of the public views a particular issue area as important, political parties will discuss that issue area to a greater degree in their official election platforms. To test this theoretical construct, we rely on public opinion data collected by Gallup, and normalized by the Policy Agendas Project, from 1947 through 2011, combined with content analyzed data regarding both the Republican and Democratic platforms from 1948 through 2012. Using OLS regression with a Prais-Winsten transformation and panel-corrected standard errors, we find support for the hypothesis that political parties discuss, in their platforms, issue areas that the public views as more important. Further, we find that this responsiveness does not appear to vary across political parties. These findings have important implications for our understandings of both political party dynamics and party representation in the United States. Moreover, these findings allow us to assess the health of American democracy.     

Who inhabits the European public sphere? Winners and losers, supporters and opponents in Europeanised political debates

Abstract.  European integration shifts the distribution of political opportunities to influence public debates, improving the relative influence of some collective actors, and weakening that of others. This article investigates which actors profit from and which actors stand to lose from the Europeanisation of political communication in mass-mediated public spheres. Furthermore, it asks to what extent these effects of Europeanisation can help one to understand collective actors' evaluation of European institutions and the integration process. Data is analysed on some 20,000 political claims by a variety of collective actors, drawn from 28 newspapers in seven European countries in the period 1990–2002, across seven different issue fields with varying degrees of EU policy-making power. The results show that government and executive actors are by far the most important beneficiaries of the Europeanisation of public debates compared to legislative and party actors, and even more so compared to civil society actors, who are extremely weakly represented in Europeanised public debates. The stronger is the type of Europeanisation that is considered, the stronger are these biases. For most actors, a close correspondence is found between how Europeanisation affects their influence in the public debate, on the one hand, and their public support for, or opposition to, European institutions and the integration process, on the other.     

How news content influences anti-immigration attitudes: Germany, 1993–2005

Immigration is an increasingly important political issue in Western democracies and a crucial question relates to the antecedents of public attitudes towards immigrants. It is generally acknowledged that information relayed through the mass media plays a role in the formation of anti-immigration attitudes. This study considers whether news coverage of immigrants and immigration issues relates to macro-level dynamics of anti-immigration attitudes. It further explores whether this relationship depends on variation in relevant real world contexts. The models simultaneously control for the effects of established contextual explanatory variables. Drawing on German monthly time-series data and on ARIMA time-series modeling techniques, it is shown that both the frequency and the tone of coverage of immigrant actors in the news significantly influence dynamics in anti-immigration attitudes. The strength of the effect of the news, however, depends on contextual variation in immigration levels and the number of asylum seekers. Implications of these findings are discussed in the light of the increasing success of extreme right parties and growing opposition to further European integration.     

How interest groups influence public opinion: Arguments matter more than the sources

Through what mechanism do interest groups shape public opinion on concrete policies? In this article, three hypotheses are proposed that distinguish between the effect of the arguments conveyed by interest groups and the effect of interest groups as source cues. Two survey experiments on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TIPP) and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change allow the testing of these hypotheses. The resulting evidence from several countries shows that, with respect to interest groups’ attempts at shaping public opinion, arguments matter more than their sources. This is so even when accounting for people's trust in the interest groups that serve as source cues and for people's level of information about a policy. The finding that interest groups affect public opinion via arguments rather than as source cues has implications for the literature on elite influence on public opinion and the normative evaluation of interest group activities.     

Elite-public interaction on twitter: EU issue expansion in the campaign

Why do some issues receive more interest from the public, while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We rely on data collected from Twitter and use a combination of human coding and machine learning to analyse what facilitates interactions from the public. We find that most political actors did not try to engage with the public about EU issues, and lack of engagement results in less interactions from the general public. Our findings contribute to understanding why EU issues still play a secondary role in European politics, but at the same time highlight what low-cost communicational tools might be useful to overcome this expansion deficit.     

What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety,Group Cues,and Immigration Threat

We examine whether and how elite discourse shapes mass opinion and action on immigration policy. One popular but untested suspicion is that reactions to news about the costs of immigration depend upon who the immigrants are. We confirm this suspicion in a nationally representative experiment: news about the costs of immigration boosts white opposition far more when Latino immigrants, rather than European immigrants, are featured. We find these group cues influence opinion and political action by triggering emotions—in particular, anxiety—not simply by changing beliefs about the severity of the immigration problem. A second experiment replicates these findings but also confirms their sensitivity to the stereotypic consistency of group cues and their context. While these results echo recent insights about the power of anxiety, they also suggest the public is susceptible to error and manipulation when group cues trigger anxiety independently of the actual threat posed by the group.     

A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy

If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top‐down models claim.     

Who talks about what? Issue strategies across the party hierarchy

We combine the recent literature on issue competition with work on intra-party heterogeneity to advance a novel theoretical argument. Starting from the premise that party leaders and non-leaders have different motivations and incentives, we conjecture that issue strategies should vary across the party hierarchy. We, therefore, expect systematic intra-party differences in the use of riding the wave and issue ownership strategies. We test this claim by linking public opinion data to manually coded information on over 3600 press releases issued by over 500 party actors across five election campaigns in Austria between 2006 and 2019. We account for self-selection into leadership roles by exploiting transitions into and out of leadership status over time. The results show that party leaders are more likely than non-leaders to respond to the public's issue priorities, but not more or less likely to pursue issue-ownership strategies.     

Creating critical citizens? Anti-austerity protests and public opinion

Following the Great Recession, many countries witnessed large protests against the austerity policies their governments implemented. What was their effect on public opinion? I argue that these protests can make citizens more critical of elite performance, but not more disaffected or undemocratic. Anti-austerity protests voice civil society actors instead of elites in the public debate, making that debate more relatable. Such increased relatability can make individuals more comfortable expressing their own dissatisfaction, and it can make them perceive that their voice is more valued. Taking advantage of a demonstration happening during the fieldwork of the fifth wave of the European Social Survey in Portugal, I find exposure to the protest decreased satisfaction and trust in elites. I find no evidence that the protest made individuals more disaffected from politics or more undemocratic. Supporting the argument regarding the mechanism, the protest increased the number of claims by civil society actors reported in the press and its effect was stronger for individuals worse represented by institutionalized elites. These findings highlight the democratic importance of unconventional forms of participation, and deepen our understanding of their interplay with conventional politics.     

News matters: Influences on the vote in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign

Abstract.  This study investigates how the information environment in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign served to crystallize opinion on the issue within the context of a number of other hypothesized influences on the vote, based on previous studies of referendum voting. Our data include a nationally representative two-wave panel survey and a content analysis of news coverage during the referendum campaign. We develop a weighted measure of exposure to news on public and private television channels, that takes into account the volume and tone of the coverage towards the YES and NO campaigns, and using this we find that exposure to public television news significantly influences vote choice when controlling for other predictors. We also find varied levels of support for hypotheses concerning the influence of other key variables such as ideology, economic evaluations, government approval and issue-specific contextual variables. The findings emphasize the importance of considering the information environment during referendum campaigns.