The Public’s Anger: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions Toward Health Care Reform

Pundits and politicians debated whether race was implicated in the rancorous public forums and demonstrations over health care reform. Research suggests that for many white Americans, racial predispositions play a greater role in their opinions on health care than non-racial predispositions. Building on this work, I examine the extent to which anger uniquely activates white racial attitudes and increases their effect on preferences for health care reform. My theory suggests this effect occurs because anger and thoughts about race are tightly linked in memory. Using a nationally representative experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, enthusiasm, or relaxation. The results show that anger uniquely pushes racial conservatives to be more opposing of health care reform while it triggers more support among racial liberals. On the other hand, anger does not enhance the effect of race-neutral principles on health care reform.     

Conformity in Groups: The Effects of Others’ Views on Expressed Attitudes and Attitude Change

Two experiments demonstrate the powerful influence of others’ views on individual attitudes and attitude expression. Those around us can influence our views through persuasion and information exchange, but the current research hypothesizes that exposure to alternate views even without discussion or exchange of persuasive arguments can also alter what attitudes are expressed, and even generate long term shifts in attitudes. In an initial study, naïve participants were asked their attitudes on a range of standard survey items privately, publicly in a group with trained confederates, and again privately following the group setting. Findings indicate significant attitudinal conformity, which was most pronounced when participants were faced with a unanimous (versus non-unanimous) group. The group experience continued to influence participants’ views when they were again asked their views in private. A second experiment varied whether participants heard views from live confederates or via computer, demonstrating that these effects could not be attributed only to issue-relevant information provided by or inferred from group members, and that attitude change persisted long after participants had left the laboratory. In summary, when people are asked their attitudes publicly, they adjust their responses to conform to those around them, and this attitude change persists privately, even weeks later. Accordingly, such purely social processes of attitude change may be every bit as important as more traditional cognitive informational processes in understanding where people’s political attitudes come from, and how they may be changed.     

Correction to: Economic Self-Interest and Americans’ Redistributive,Class, and Racial Attitudes: The Case of Economic Insecurity

Political Behavior - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09702-0     

Counterterrorism Policies and Attitudes Towards Out-Groups: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Citizens’ Attitudes Towards Wiretapping

Political Behavior - Terrorism often leads to increased stigmatization of groups perceived as “out-groups”. We test two versions of out-group theory and ask whether citizens clearly...     

Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants

Political Behavior - We examine the extent to which relevant social identity traits shared between two individuals—what we term “attribute affinity”—can moderate out-group...     

The Winner Takes It All: Revisiting the Effect of Direct Democracy on Citizens’ Political Support

Despite the strong theoretical expectations about the beneficial effect of direct democratic instruments on citizens’ political support, the empirical evidence is scarce and inconsistent. We add to this literature by studying the effect of the use of a direct democratic process on citizens’ political support and its underlying causal mechanism. Using a unique research design that combines a strong test of causality with a high level of ecological validity, we surveyed inhabitants of a Belgian neighborhood that held a local referendum and a comparison group (i.e. inhabitants of a comparable neighborhood without referendum) before and after the referendum (n = 1049). Using difference-in-differences analysis and first difference regression analysis, we show that in line with our expectations the increase in political support following the referendum is not driven by involvement or procedural fairness perceptions but by an increase in support levels among the winners of the decision. Moreover, despite the contested nature of the issue, losers’ level of political support did not decrease significantly after the result of the referendum was announced.     

Weapon of Mass Distraction: New Zealand’s National Security System

The New Zealand’s National Security System (NSS) document is presented as the central framework for New Zealand’s whole of government approach to national security and crisis management. This article asserts that the NSS fails to be the central framework it purports to be and proposes the true objective of the NSS is to establish clear lines of authority within New Zealand’s national security architecture. The New Zealand government’s exercise of political authority within the security sector aligns with Weber’s theory of “charisma of office” for public acceptance. Using the legitimacy of charisma of office, the New Zealand prime minister can exert significant influence over New Zealand’s national security discourse and blur the lines of it liberal democratic institutions.     

The Philippines: Duterte’s wilful start

A hundred days into his single six-year term, President Rodrigo Duterte has already asserted his powerful political position by undertaking a brutal campaign on drugs, weakening the Philippines' longstanding alliance with the United States and warming to China. These pronounced shifts in policy, however, have drawn considerable criticism from influential figures and groups inside as well as outside the Philippines. Duterte may find it difficult to maintain such controversial policies throughout his presidency.     

Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That: The Effect of Personalized Appeals on Marriage Equality Campaigns

An increasingly predominant strategy used by organizations seeking to increase support for gay marriage is to personalize the issue by focusing on individuals in the LGBT community. However, competing theoretical traditions (e.g., Allport??s contact theory, group threat, implicit bias) raise questions about whether this strategy has the desired effect. This paper presents results from an original field experiment conducted in coordination with a marriage equality organization. Callers who self-identified as a member of the LGBT community were less effective in soliciting donations compared to callers who did not self-identify, suggesting that personalization has a negative effect on persuasion efforts. The findings cut against the grain of the Allport (The nature of prejudice, 1954) hypothesis and have important implications for social advocacy organizations in terms of rhetorical and message strategy.     

The Priming Effect of Corruption and Bureaucracy Bashing on Citizens’ Perceptions of an Agency’s Performance

Priming theories suggest that negative stories or events can affect how citizens feel about public organizations. However, research concerning the priming impact of both corruption and bureaucracy bashing—two relevant topics today—on how citizens perceive the performance of agencies is lacking. To close this lacuna in the literature, an experimental survey was conducted where respondents in the United States were randomly assigned to one of five performance vignettes. The results demonstrate that when participants were assigned to the vignettes containing the corruption and bureaucracy bashing cues, perceptions of performance were lower. This finding is consistent with priming theories. Moreover, differences within the corruption and bureaucracy bashing vignettes as well as between the corruption and bureaucracy bashing vignettes were not found. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the article.     

The Effect of Associative Issue Ownership on Parties’ Presence in the News Media

Some studies suggest that challenger parties push new issues onto the agenda, especially when they ‘own’ these issues. Others claim that established parties largely determine how prominent issues appear on the agenda. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on an issue on which challenger parties have most ‘ownership’: immigration. Political claims on this issue made by political parties in newspapers in seven West European countries after three events that could potentially trigger attention to immigration were studied. Large and government parties appear most prominent in the news. However, findings show a significant, positive effect of associative issue ownership on claims-making in the news, while controlling for party size and government status. So, when challengers have issue ownership they appear as claim-makers on the issue. These results paint a balanced picture of the role that challenger and established parties have in setting the agenda.     

The charm offensive: The ‘coming out’ of MI5

MI5: The First Ten Years, 1909–1919 CD Rom (Kew: Public Record Office,1998) £99 + VAT individual, £150 + VAT institutional. ISBN 1–873162 ‐1–0.

MI5: The First Ten Years, 1909–1919 (Kew: Public Record Office,1997). Pp.iv + 35. £3.99 ISBN 1–873162–52–9.

I.C. Curry, The Security Service (Kew: Public Record Office, 1999). Pp.442, illus., bibliog., index. £50. ISBN 1–873162–79–0.     

No Sex Scandals Please,We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct

The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicians’ private affairs, but there has been little empirical evidence for this proposition. Drawing on original survey data, this paper demonstrates clearly that French citizens draw a sharp distinction between politicians’ public and private transgressions, and are more tolerant of the latter.     

(The) Erasure – Mass Human Rights Violation and Denial of Responsibility: The Case of Independent Slovenia

The case of the erased residents of Slovenia – when approximately 18,000 people who were mostly of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ethnicity, were erased from the permanent residence registry of the Republic of Slovenia – represents one of the most severe cases of administrative ethnic/racial discrimination and human rights violations in the post-communist East and Central Europe outside the conflict area. The erasure caused “civil death” of the people who were affected by the measure, depriving them of civil, political, social, and economic rights. In 2007, 4 years after the 2003 Constitutional Court decision, declaring the 1992 erasure an unconstitutional act of the state and requiring the legislator to adopt measures to reinstate the statuses of the erased people, the problem remains unsolved and unaddressed both systemically and individually, and the situation of erasure persists. This article presents the case and analyses of the framework that made the erasure possible in terms of the preparation of the majority of Slovenes to accept and even support the violations and politicians to renounce their political responsibility to those who have lost the right to have rights. This article is based on the insights of the research project Contemporary Citizenship: Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion (2000–2003) led by Vlasta Jalušič. The analysis of the case of erased was published in Jasminka Dedić, Vlasta Jalušič, and Jelka Zorn (eds.), The Erased: Organized Innocence and the Politics of Exclusion, translated from Slovenian by Olga Vuković and Marjana Karer (Ljubljana: Peace Institute, 2003), at . The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for the extensive and most helpful comments.

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Trump’s Impact: The End of Sameness

In his startling run for president, Donald Trump dared to question the official orthodoxy that all races and ethic groups are the same. He is correct in that most seriously poor, many immigrants, and the radicals we face overeas all come from outside the West. Thus, according to world cultures research, they are much less individualist and more conformist than most Americans. This cultural difference goes far to explain the major challenges the United States faces both at home and abroad. But Trump’s bold challenge offers no easy solutions.     

How Terrorism Does (and Does Not) Affect Citizens’ Political Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis

How does terrorism affect citizens’ political attitudes? Over the years, many scholars have tried to answer this question. This article performs a meta-analysis on this literature, reviewing about 325 studies conducted between 1985 and 2020 on more than 400,000 respondents. The findings confirm that terrorism is associated—to a small but significant extent—with outgroup hostility, political conservatism and rally-‘round-the-flag effects. At the same time, the effects of terrorism vary widely, with studies on Islamist violence, conducted in the United States or Israel, and using cross-sectional data yielding stronger results on average. Finally, the review reveals remaining gaps in this field of study, including a lack of research on non-Islamist violence or conducted in non-Western contexts. Taken together, this meta-analysis consolidates existing evidence, determines which results hold across contexts, and identifies key gaps in our current knowledge. Its data can also be accessed interactively via a Shiny App .     

Race, “Deservingness,” and Social Spending Attitudes: The Role of Policy Delivery Mechanism

This paper examines how the means through which social benefits are delivered—either through a direct government program, or through a tax expenditure program—affects how citizens view social welfare programs and their beneficiaries. Attitudes toward social spending in the United States are strongly conditioned by both racial considerations and perceptions of the deservingness of recipients. We argue that the political cues given by spending conducted through the tax code differ from those given by direct spending in a way that both de-racializes spending attitudes and changes the lens through which citizens evaluate the deservingness of beneficiaries. Through a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that social benefits delivered through the tax code are less likely to activate racialized thinking than similar or identical benefits delivered directly. This is true, at least in part, because recipients of tax expenditures are perceived as more deserving than recipients of otherwise identical direct spending.