Political tolerance and stages of moral development: A conceptual and empirical alternative

The latest revisionism in the study of political tolerance has produced some of the most provocative well-designed research in the field of political science. In particular, the work by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus offers one of the most fully specified and rigorously executed models of public opinion formation. Yet this contemporary revisionism is flawed. This paper argues that these researchers misconceptualize tolerance, that this misconception contaminates their measurement process, that the resulting model is misspecified, and that the political conclusions offered are not supported in fact or principle. More generally this paper argues that the field of public opinion as a whole has been trapped by limited conceptions about the nature of cognitive constraint and by simplistic and inadequate methods for measuring and identifying this constraint. To remedy this, a developmental measure of cognitive moral stages is fashioned along lines suggested by Kohlberg. This measure satisfies a number of tests for both validity and reliability and appears to be one of the most powerful predictors of tolerance and intolerance — if not the most powerful single predictor.     

Who Toes the Party Line? Cues, Values, and Individual Differences

This article explores individual differences in citizens’ reliance on cues and values in political thinking. It uses experimental evidence to identify which citizens are likely to engage in heuristic processing and which citizens are likely to engage in systematic processing in developing opinions about a novel issue. The evidence suggests that political awareness crisply distinguishes between heuristic and systematic processors. The less politically aware rely on party cues and not on an issue-relevant value. As political awareness increases, reliance on party cues drops and reliance on an issue-relevant value rises. Need for cognition fails to yield clear results. The results suggest two routes to opinion formation: heuristic processing and systematic processing. Political awareness, not need for cognition, predicts which route citizens will take.     

Economic openness, policy uncertainty, and the dynamics of government support

Does globalization affect popular support for national governments? This article contends that exposure to the world economy obscures mass–elite linkages in developed democracies. Market interdependence, I argue, sends a signal to citizens that the policymaking environment has become more complex. As a consequence, publics are less certain of how to evaluate policymaker performance when exposure to the world economy increases. Informed by research on the role of uncertainty in public evaluations, I test this proposition by modeling the volatility of aggregate government popularity as a function of economic openness in four advanced industrial democracies. Results show that globalization increases the volatility—and, hence, the uncertainty—of public assessments of government performance. The implications for the political economy of advanced capitalist democracies and for models of collective public opinion are discussed.     

The Public Nature of Personal Opinion: The Impact of Collective Sentiment on Individual Appraisal

This paper examines the impact of the public on individual opinion. Employing survey-based experiments, I demonstrate public influence to be considerable, yet the magnitude, direction, and significance of effect depends critically on the target of public sentiment and the political predispositions of the perceiver. A theoretical model is developed to delineate and examine such effects, guiding the analyses throughout. Central to this framework is the interplay between opinion context and individual, reflecting the often fluid and complex relationship between aggregate and individual judgment. The specific findings that representations of public opinion can alter the distribution of opinion through assimilation, contrast, or reinforcement are emphasized and given context within the voting and public opinion literature.     

Deservingness versus values in public opinion on welfare: The automaticity of the deservingness heuristic

Public attitudes towards welfare policy are often explained by political values and perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients. This article addresses how the impact of values and perceptions varies depending on the contextual information that citizens have available when forming welfare opinions. It is argued that whenever citizens face deservingness‐relevant cues in public debate or the media, a psychological ‘deservingness heuristic’ is triggered prompting individuals spontaneously to think about welfare policy in terms of who deserves help. This is an automatic process, equally influential among the least and the most politically sophisticated. Moreover, when clear deservingness cues are present, the impact of values on opinions vanishes. These arguments are supported by data from two novel experimental studies embedded in separate nationwide opinion surveys. The findings revise conventional wisdom of how values and heuristics influence public opinion and have major implications for understanding dynamics in aggregate welfare opinion and attempts from political elites to manipulate public opinion.     

Small group decision making: The uncertain role of information in reducing uncertainty

Although decision-making analysis has been widely pursued in political science and other fields, most emphasize an outcome orientation, ignoring (or assuming away) the process by which decisions are made. This study treats the process of decision making at the small group level by applying the cognitive information processing model to the methods by which search behavior reduces uncertainty in the collective environment. After examining the theoretical constraints on search behavior, an experiment is performed on student subjects with two of the constraints—information level and decision rule—operationalized as treatment variables on the volume and type of search by individuals in a small group environment. The findings suggest that increasing information availability and requiring consensus decisions will increase search, but that subjects are easily overloaded with information, increasing—not reducing—their uncertainty about their decisions.     

Beliefs About Corporate America and the Structure of Opinions Toward Privatization

This research analyzes the individual-level factors associated with public support for the private provision of public goods and services. Given that privatization requires the transfer of authority from public to private entities, we argue that beliefs about private companies are an important and overlooked source of heterogeneity in explaining public policy preferences toward privatization. We test this expectation using survey data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that support for privatization is associated with positive beliefs about the motivation of private companies and with favorable views about corporate accountability relative to the accountability of government. Opposition to privatization is associated with beliefs about corporate influence in politics. Preferences for limited government are also associated with support for privatization. These results highlight the potential for beliefs about private companies to serve as a group heuristic in political reasoning and the ability of citizens to make reasoned choices on complex public policy issues.     

The Cognitive Foundations of Humanistic Governance

ABSTRACT

The debate about the kind of knowledge needed for intelligent governance is an old one, but a new perspective based on cognitive psychology has recently emerged. This perspective emphasizes evidence about the heuristics and biases that distort human judgment, particularly the so-called “availability heuristic,” in which vivid imagery leads us to overestimate the probability that a risk will actually materialize. I argue that this perspective neglects the constructive role that “availability” plays in rationality. Research in cognitive science suggests that without close attention to exactly the kind of vivid imagery that distorts probability judgments, experts may rely on an inaccurate representation of the nature of the event whose probability they seek to estimate. This essential ingredient of intelligent decision making is especially precarious in government, since public officials regularly make decisions that will affect people whose experiences they do not share. I discuss how participatory democracy and humanistic research can help counteract this bias in public decision making.     

Conceptual Foundations of Citizen Competence

This article considers some of the challenges that attend efforts to assess citizen performance. We begin by demonstrating the often- unarticulated complexity of evaluating performance in any domain. To do this, we identify four distinct conceptual elements that comprise an evaluation—identification of task, selection of criterion, choice of empirical indicator, and explication of standard—and illustrate with an example that is relatively free of ambiguity: performance in basketball. Using this framework, we then review research in three general areas of study: mass belief systems and issue consistency, political knowledge, and the use of political heuristics. We find that no study articulates all four elements (or adequate substitutes associated with an alternative framework). As a result, problems arise. Most significantly, any particular study is likely to use criteria that are unsatisfactory in important respects or to employ empirical indicators that do not validly measure the criteria. Across studies, conclusions often vary as a function of unarticulated differences in assumptions, definitions, and measures. We conclude by drawing a few lessons for future research, while also recognizing the impressive progress that the study of public opinion and citizen competence has made over the last 40 years.     

Identities, Interests, and Imports

There is increasing attention to the mass public in the politics of trade debate, yet we still know little about how Americans formulate opinion on trade. Scholars are puzzled by the ineffectiveness of traditional dispositional beliefs to account for trade policy judgment, while an emerging economic self-interest perspective contends that opinion on trade is based on material concerns. This article demonstrates how symbolic predispositions provide critical information shortcuts for Americans on trade in which the relationship between trade policy and economic self-interest may be unclear. Symbolic politics theory explains how citizens can rely on accessible symbolic predispositions, including conceptions of national identity, in an unfamiliar and evolving trade policy environment often subject to multiple and conflicting cues, limited political information, and changing economic circumstances.     

Trade Winds: NAFTA and the Rational Public

The sharp increase in suppport for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) poses a challenge to many of our conceptions of public opinion. Most large shifts in public opinion follow major events. Based on models estimated from the September to November NBC News/ Wall Street Journal surveys, I show this was not the case with respect to public opinion on NAFTA. Instead, the increase in support for the pact reflected a slower response to a public debate over the merits of free trade versus protectionism. As the debate proceeded, large segments of the public— including the least interested—developed more highly constrained belief systems. By the end of the public discourse, the most and least interested citizens both linked attitudes on the merits of trade to their positions on NAFTA and to their evaluations of the elites on each side of the issue. People made up their minds on NAFTA on the basis of arguments about trade, not about their own self-interest. The NAFTA case suggests that there may be a rational public at the individual level after all, even among people who may not usually be interested in public affairs.     

Determinants of political judgments: The joint influence of normative and heuristic rules of inference

Prior research on political judgment has been polarized, with one group emphasizing normative models of political inference and the other emphasizing heuristic models of political inference. In accordance with recent findings in psychology, this article is rooted in the assumption that both normative and heuristic criteria simultaneously influence political judgments. Furthermore, differences in the relative extent to which these two processes serve to determine political judgments are hypothesized to depend on the nature of the judgment task. Two kinds of political judgments are considered: judgments reflecting beliefs about the candidates' stands on the issues and judgments reflecting global evaluations of the candidates. The reported results confirm that (1) voters rely on both normative- and heuristic-based considerations when forming these judgments, and (2) the relative extent to which these criteria influence these judgments depends on the complexity of the judgment task.     

Cognitive Biases and the Strength of Political Arguments

Competition in political debate is not always sufficient to neutralize the effects of political rhetoric on public opinion. Yet little is known about the factors that shape the persuasiveness of political arguments. In this article, I consider whether cognitive biases influence the perceived strength of political arguments, making some arguments more persuasive than others. Lessons from neurobiology and recent political psychology research on emotion lead to the expectation that individuals are more likely to be persuaded by political arguments that evoke loss aversion via a fearful response—even in the face of a counterargument. Evidence from two experiments corroborates this expectation. I consider the normative implications of these empirical findings and potential avenues for future research.     

Motivated Reasoning and Political Parties: Evidence for Increased Processing in the Face of Party Cues

Extant research in political science has demonstrated that citizens’ opinions on policies are influenced by their attachment to the party sponsoring them. At the same time, little evidence exists illuminating the psychological processes through which such party cues are filtered. From the psychological literature on source cues, we derive two possible hypotheses: (1) party cues activate heuristic processing aimed at minimizing the processing effort during opinion formation, and (2) party cues activate group motivational processes that compel citizens to support the position of their party. As part of the latter processes, the presence of party cues would make individuals engage in effortful motivated reasoning to produce arguments for the correctness of their party’s position. Following psychological research, we use response latency to measure processing effort and, in support of the motivated reasoning hypothesis, demonstrate that across student and nationally representative samples, the presence of party cues increases processing effort.     

Present at creation: Italian mass support for European integration in the formative years

Abstract.  This article analyzes a period usually neglected in empirical studies of public opinion and European integration: the formative years between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. The analysis is based on one country – Italy – in which the European process was a source of deep political cleavage in the formative phase. The study of the sources and dynamics of support in these years sheds a different light on the determinants of support. More specifically, a pooled multivariate logistic analysis of six surveys conducted between 1952 and 1970 shows two things. First, it shows that public support in Italy was driven mostly by considerations that were affective and political rather than economic and utilitarian. Second, it explains under which conditions the political factors behind support (and opposition) for European integration in the 1950s and 1960s changed over time, mostly in reactions to international events and to developments in European institutionalization. The article points to the bottom-up nature of change in public support for European integration; changes in public opinion affected party positions, rather than vice versa.     

Does Public Opinion Affect Political Speech?

Does public opinion affect political speech? Of particular interest is whether public opinion affects (i) what topics politicians address and (ii) what positions they endorse. We present evidence from Germany where the government was recently forced to declassify its public opinion research, allowing us to link the content of the research to subsequent speeches. Our causal identification strategy exploits the exogenous timing of the research's dissemination to cabinet members within a window of a few days. We find that exposure to public opinion research leads politicians to markedly change their speech. First, we show that linguistic similarity between political speech and public opinion research increases significantly after reports are passed on to the cabinet, suggesting that politicians change the topics they address. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to public opinion research alters politicians' substantive positions in the direction of majority opinion.     

Evaluative bias and issue proximity

This study identifies two forms of evaluative bias toward political objects — positivity and negativity — in addition to the familiar one of partisanship. Bias is measured, predominantly, using open-ended responses to questions on political parties in the NES studies. The incidence of varieties of evaluative orientation toward the parties over time, beginning in 1952, is reported; so also are demographic and cognitive correlates of evaluative bias. Finally, hypotheses on differential assimilation and contrast effects in candidate perception are tested.     

Parties are always right: the effects of party cues and policy information on attitudes towards EU issues

Abstract

This article analyses the influence that political parties exert upon citizens’ opinions about European Union issues. By measuring at the same time the content and source effects on political attitudes, the article considers the possibility that voters pay less attention to the arguments used in a political message than to its source. Results from an online survey experiment in Spain show that partisan voters use a heuristic model of processing when taking positions on an unfamiliar EU issue, even though the prevalence of the source effect is moderated by the respondent’s political sophistication and party attachment. The results also indicate that some respondents tend to pay less attention to a message’s content when the message comes from their preferred party. Such findings raise concerns about the possibility for EU issue voting to guarantee the accountability of political elites and party–voter linkages.     

When marketing models clash with democracy

The application of marketing models in political and public sector contexts is examined. The assumptions in marketing of positive outcomes of (i) rapid responses to consumer concerns, (ii) the extension of choice and customisation in product development, and (iii) the application of market research techniques are considered in turn. This analysis suggests that in the political context, responding rapidly to public opinion is not necessarily a sound reaction; extending choice and customisation of products may not best serve public welfare, and applying market research techniques may not provide for the best system for policy decisions. The features of liberal representative democracy, particularly the role of deliberation, informed assent and accountability, have been neglected. Speed of response has been emphasised to the cost of democratic filters and checks on public opinion; enhanced choice, enabled by mass customisation, presents problems of social fragmentation; and the application of market research is no substitute for political discourse and engagement. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications