Public opinion during a presidential campaign: Distinguishing the effects of environmental evolution and attitude change

This paper develops a spatial model which distinguishes between different sources of temporal variability in public opinion over the course of an election campaign. Candidates and citizens are shown as points within a space. The candidate points are fixed, but their relative positions can change as a result of change over time in the dimension weights. If this occurs, it represents environmental evolution. The individual citizens' points also can move within the space, independently of the external environment. To the extent this occurs, it represents attitude change. The model is tested with data from the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The empirical results show that much of the variability in public evaluations of the candidates is due to evolutionary changes in the electoral environment, rather than individual-level attitude changes. Furthermore, that attitudinal change which does occur is strongly delimited by factors like partisan strength, interest in the campaign, and political participation.     

Being Certain Versus Being Right: Citizen Certainty and Accuracy of House Candidates' Ideological Orientations

Research on voting behavior has been reinvigorated by focusing on citizens' certainty of candidates' issue positions and ideological orientations. According to this perspective, citizens are inclined to support candidates whom they are confident possess attributes they deem important. Analysis of citizens' perceptual certainty and perceptual accuracy of 1994, 1996, and 1998 House candidates' ideological orientations reveals that many candidate characteristics (incumbency, fiscal resources) that enhance certainty fail to improve perceptual accuracy. The electoral consequence of this fact is that candidates endowed with these resources benefit from the importance of certainty to citizens without paying the electoral costs of clarifying their issue positions and ideological orientations. Similarly, several characteristics of citizens that lead to certainty reduction—gender and caring about the outcome of the election, for example—fail to improve perceptual accuracy. The implications of the empirical findings for the role of citizens' assessments of certainty in the voting decision for producing an informed electorate are considered here.     

Primed by the Euro: The Impact of a Referendum Campaign on Public Opinion and Evaluations of Government and Political Leaders

The premise of political priming is that public evaluations of political leaders are made on the basis of issues that are on the top of citizens' minds. This study investigated the impact of a national referendum campaign about a European integration issue on the evaluation of the incumbent government, the prime minister, and the opposition leaders. Drawing on a content analysis of news media and a two-wave panel survey, the results showed that as the topic of the referendum (the introduction of the euro) became more visible in the media during the campaign the importance of the euro issue for formulating general evaluations of political leaders increased. The incumbent government that was seen to handle the referendum poorly was penalized by the referendum. Exposure to news media outlets that covered the referendum extensively and offered negative evaluations of political leaders boosted the decline in the overall performance rating of political leaders by politically less involved respondents. These results stress the necessity of considering the campaign and the specific content of the media to understand fluctuations in public opinion during a referendum campaign. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of a referendum campaign for political leaders.     

Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation .     

Priming Predispositions and Changing Policy Positions: An Account of When Mass Opinion Is Primed or Changed

Prior research provides limited insights into when political communications prime or change citizens’ underlying opinions. This article helps fill that void by putting forth an account of priming and opinion change. I argue that crystallized attitudes should often be primed by new information. An influx of attention to less crystallized preferences, however, should lead individuals to alter their underlying opinions in accordance with prior beliefs. Since predispositions acquired early in the life cycle—such as partisanship, religiosity, basic values, and group‐based affect/antagonisms—are more crystallized than mass opinion about public policy, media and campaign content will tend to prime citizens’ predispositions and change their policy positions. Both my review of previous priming research and original analyses presented in this study from five new cases strongly support the crystallization‐based account of when mass opinion is primed or changed. I conclude with a discussion of the article's potential political, methodological, and normative implications.     

City size and citizens' satisfaction: two competing theories revisited

Abstract. The Reform Theory and the Political Economy Theory postulate contradictory effects of government size on citizens' satisfaction with urban services. The former asserts that citizens' satisfaction increases with increasing size of urban governments because large units are more efficient and allows citizens to participate effectively in public policy-making. The latter postulates that citizens are more satisfied in the smaller jurisdictions because small units are more homogeneous, efficient and democratic. A series of tests performed in this study overwhelmingly supports the Political Economy Theory: citizens in small jurisdictions hold more favourable attitudes towards participation and democracy, and the smaller units are more homogeneous and more efficient in the provision of services. This in turn leads to more favourable evaluations of public services.     

Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming

According to many theoretical accounts of the vote choice, distal determinants (e.g., party identification) influence proximal determinants (e.g., perceptions of candidates), which in turn shape candidate preferences. Yet almost no research on voting has formally tested such mediational hypotheses. Using national survey data collected between February and September of 2004, this paper begins by illustrating how to conduct such investigations. We explored whether public approval of President Bush’s handling of a series of specific national problems (e.g., the Iraq war) influenced overall assessments of his job performance and evaluations of his likely future performance versus John Kerry’s, which in turn shaped vote choices. The results are consistent with the claim of mediation and shed additional light on the impact of various issues on the 2004 election outcome. We also tested what we term the “dosage hypothesis,” derived from news media priming theory, which posits that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign should precipitate changes in the weight citizens place on that issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among citizens most exposed to the news. Surprisingly, this analysis did not yield consistent support for the venerable dosage hypothesis, suggesting that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified much more precisely in future work.

On-line processing in candidate evaluation: The effects of issue order,issue importance,and sophistication

This article reports the results of a study that replicates and extends the impression-driven model of candidate evaluation reported in Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh (1989). This model holds that evaluations are formed and updated on-line as information is encountered, and that as a result, citizens need not rely on specific information available from memory to form their candidate evaluations. In the present work we explore whether the order in which information is encountered, as well as whether information that is personally important, influences the weight accorded to evidence in on-line processing. In addition, differences in information-processing strategies due to political sophistication are examined. The results indicate that important information receives more weight than unimportant information. In addition, the evidence suggests that political sophisticates are more efficient on-line processors than are less sophisticated individuals. The implications of these results for models of candidate evaluation are discussed.     

Sex and Race: Are Black Candidates More Likely to be Disadvantaged by Sex Scandals?

A growing body of work suggests that exposure to subtle racial cues prompts white voters to penalize black candidates, and that the effects of these cues may influence outcomes indirectly via perceptions of candidate ideology. We test hypotheses related to these ideas using two experiments based on national samples. In one experiment, we manipulated the race of a candidate (Barack Obama vs. John Edwards) accused of sexual impropriety. We found that while both candidates suffered from the accusation, the scandal led respondents to view Obama as more liberal than Edwards, especially among resentful and engaged whites. Second, overall evaluations of Obama declined more sharply than for Edwards. In the other experiment, we manipulated the explicitness of the scandal, and found that implicit cues were more damaging for Obama than explicit ones.     

Kandidatenorientierungen im Wahlkampf. Eine Analyse zu den Bundestagswahlkämpfen 1980–1998

This article analyses effects of German federal election campaigns on citizens’ orientations towards chancellor candidates. Three hypotheses are formulated; they refer to polarization, party politicization, and priming of candidate attitudes; additionally, it is argued that campaign context moderates the effects. The hypotheses are tested empirically using survey data conducted in the election campaigns 1980 to 1998. Empirically, campaign communication polarizes the perceptions of the chancellor candidates; additionally, the perceptions are brought into line with party preferences. Thirdly, priming effects are less common, but in some cases substantial candidate priming can be proved. Hence, election campaigns influence candidate orientations in Germany, and the effect varies according to the political context.     

Priming citizens to think about public participation initiatives: Does it impact their view of government?

Prior research has shown that public participation initiatives may have positive effects on how participating citizens view government. However, little is known about whether and how priming citizens to think about such initiatives influences the view of government among the larger public. Using a survey experiment, we find that the effect of priming citizens to think of a public participation initiative that includes a small group of citizens on their view of government is conditional on how proximate the service, which the initiative resolves around, is to citizens. Notably, across outcome measures we a find a negative priming effect among those for which the service is not proximate. These results are highly important, as they suggest that among the larger public, public participation initiatives—that involve few citizens—may have mixed results on the view of government, thus questioning the legitimacy of decisions reached by such initiatives.     

How campaigns promote the legitimacy of elections

Why do people see elections as fair or unfair? In prior accounts, evaluations of the election depend on people's candidate preferences, where supporters of the winning candidate tend to call the election fair while those on the losing side feel it was unfair. I argue that perceptions of election fairness reflect not just the election outcome, but also the campaign process. Using a set of multilevel models and data from the 1996–2004 American National Election Studies, I explore the consequences of campaign experiences in shaping people's evaluations of the fairness of a presidential election. I find that as campaign competition increases, people are less likely to translate their feelings about the candidates into their evaluations of the election. Rather than alienating citizens, competitive campaigns mitigate the effects of prior preferences in a way that promotes the legitimacy of elections.     

The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning

Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens' willingness to cede policy-making power to government. This article tests theories about political trust and citizen competence using the case of zoning. Trust in local government is found to be an important predictor of support for zoning, but trust in state government and trust in national government have no effect. These findings suggest that trust affects policy choice and helps determine how much power citizens grant to local administrators.     

From Responsiveness to Collaboration: Governance, Citizens, and the Next Generation of Public Administration

The evolution of the New Public Management movement has increased pressure on state bureaucracies to become more responsive to citizens as clients. Without a doubt, this is an important advance in contemporary public administration, which finds itself struggling in an ultradynamic marketplace. However, together with such a welcome change in theory building and in practical culture reconstruction, modern societies still confront a growth in citizens' passivism; they tend to favor the easy chair of the customer over the sweat and turmoil of participatory involvement. This article has two primary goals: First to establish a theoretically and empirically grounded criticism of the current state of new managerialism, which obscures the significance of citizen action and participation through overstressing the (important) idea of responsiveness. Second, the article proposes some guidelines for the future development of the discipline. This progress is toward enhanced collaboration and partnership among governance and public administration agencies, citizens, and other social players such as the media, academia, and the private and third sectors. The article concludes that, despite the fact that citizens are formal "owners" of the state, ownership will remain a symbolic banner for the governance and public administration–citizen relationship in a representative democracy. The alternative interaction of movement between responsiveness and collaboration is more realistic for the years ahead.     

The impact of scandal on candidate evaluations: An experimental test of the role of candidate traits

Correlational studies have found candidate traits to be an important determinant of vote preferences but cannot rule out reverse causality processes in explaining these findings. The present study demonstrates the independent impact of trait inferences on candidate evaluations using experimentally controlled candidate profiles of hypothetical U.S. congressmen. Using the scandal situation as a testing ground, this experiment examines whether task-relevant, competence traits actually have greater impact on political judgments than the more general, warmth-related trait qualities. Two types of scandals are considered (marital infidelity and tax evasion), both implying negative trustworthiness characteristics of the officeholder. Results demonstrate that trait inferences do have a causal impact on global evaluations. Consistent with past survey studies, competence qualities appear to be more important than warmth qualities but only for those with greater political information levels.     

The Context of Priming

The existence of priming (i.e. the fact that the standards people use to make political evaluations shift in response to changes in media coverage of political issues) has become generally accepted. However, most of the evidence for the priming mechanism comes from experiments or analyses of certain specific events. This article presents evidence of priming from a longitudinal study of the Danish population's evaluation of the Danish government. The study consists of 12 measurements over four years from 1999 to 2003. The analysis indicates that priming effects are often moderated by political knowledge, but that the effect changes from case to case. The article shows that both the overall priming effects and the effect of the moderator are contingent on the political context of the priming situation. Important aspects of the moderating context are message intensity, the easiness of the issue, the politicisation of the issue, the assessment of the government's issue responsibility and the timing of the evaluation.     

Accountability from the perspective of the forum: citizens’ attitudes towards accountability in Europe

The aim of this article is to analyse citizens’ attitudes towards governmental accountability in 24 European countries and to examine the influence of contextual and individual factors on perceptions of accountability. Using as a dataset the 2012 European Social Survey, the results show that citizens respond positively when the media provides reliable information on which to judge the government, when individuals perceive that governments perform well, when individuals live in more extensive and generous welfare states and when they live in countries where the rule of law is firmly established. In addition, the findings also provide evidence that compared to politically left-wing citizens, right-wing supporters have, on average, a higher perception of governmental accountability. In particular, the findings show strong positive evaluations of right-wing governments by right-wing voters in comparison with left-wing governments by left-wing voters.     

How political malpractice affects trust in EU institutions

Abstract

Political misconduct is known to harm the politicians involved. Yet, we know less about how such events affect trust in political institutions. We study a real-world political malpractice affair in the European Commission, using a three-wave panel design to investigate how information about the affair influences trust in EU institutions. This enables us, first, to isolate the impact of new information on political trust, remedying endogeneity issues common in political trust research. Second, we assess which institutions are affected most (specificity) and whether effects depend upon citizens’ sophistication levels (conditionality). Finally, we assess the durability of effects over time. Our findings demonstrate that citizens obtain knowledge about EU affairs through the media, and use this knowledge in their trust evaluations. In doing so, citizens differentiate between EU and national institutions, with trust in the European Commission affected most. This suggests a sophisticated process and highlights the evaluative nature of political trust.     

Tell Me Who Is Your Leader,and I Will Tell You Who You Are: Foreign Leaders’ Perceived Personality and Public Attitudes toward Their Countries and Citizenry

The increasing visibility of prominent political leaders in news media is well documented in political science literature. The main concern that has been raised in this connection is that the complexity of political processes is being reduced to achievements and standpoints of individual politicians, and the importance of rational opinion building is discounted. The results of the current study provide the first empirical evidence to account for the misgivings about emotional effects of personalized political information on media audiences. Using data from an online experiment, this study shows that news coverage regarding behaviors and personal characteristics of a foreign leader influences (a) evaluations of personal characteristics typical of his or her nation's citizens and (b) emotional perceptions of that leader's country (sentiment and respect). This effect is shown to reflect a psychological phenomenon whereby people project their emotions and perceptions regarding a leader's personal characteristics onto his or her country and people.     

Coercion versus Choice: Citizen Evaluations of Public Service Quality across Methods of Consumption

Treating all respondents to citizen satisfaction surveys as "customers" risks misinterpreting the findings and misguiding managerial decision making. Citizen evaluations of the quality of public services are likely to vary based on whether citizens have a direct or indirect relationship to the service. Furthermore, citizens are likely to rate services differently based on whether they consume the services as a result of coercion or choice, although the quality of the interaction shapes the impact of the type of interaction. Based on a series of empirical analyses, this paper demonstrates that recipients who have superior-quality interactions with providers are likely to report high ratings for elective services, whereas citizens who have poor-quality interactions are likely to report low ratings for coercive services. In this way, the quality of the interaction influences citizens' predispositions to rate services high or low based on whether they consume the service by choice or coercion.