Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions correctly. Another was given extra time. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11–24%. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents' recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews. Our work also suggests that existing measures fail to capture relevant political search skills and, hence, provide unreliable assessments of what many citizens know when they make political decisions. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate people's capacities for informed decision making.     

The Trend in Housing Density Bonuses

A growing number of upper-income suburban communities are having trouble recruiting teachers, firemen, policemen, and postal employees because there is not enough low- and moderate-price housing. In these communities, workers employed in local retail trade, food and drink establishments, laundries, service stations, and other low-wage jobs suffer even more critical housing shortages. Manufacturing plants which could ease tax burdens won't move to a town if they have to pay premium wages to attract workers who live in distant communities.     

Weighted Content Analysis of Political Advertisements

This article proposes weighted content analysis as a methodological extension of traditional (unweighted) content analysis of political advertising. Weighted content analysis distinguishes between political ads that were produced but not aired and ads that actually aired in a particular media market. To illustrate the advantages of weighted content analysis, this article examines the 1996 presidential campaign in Columbus, Ohio. The tone of 132 presidential campaign ads produced by both candidates is compared with the tone of the 2,522 ads that aired on the three major network affiliates in Columbus. The price of the ad buy is used as an alternative weight that takes into account audience size and thus allows a further distinction between aired and watched ads. Both weighting procedures show that Republican advertising in 1996 in Columbus was more negative than Democratic advertising during the fall campaign, a result that remains undetected by unweighted content analysis. The article concludes by describing three different ways to obtain weighting data: political files kept by television stations and cable providers, commercial tracking data, and internal campaign records.     

The Challenge of Measuring Media Exposure: Reply to Dilliplane,Goldman, and Mutz

Political communication research has long been plagued by inaccurate self-reports of media exposure. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013) Dilliplane, S., Goldman, S. and Mutz, D. 2013. Televised exposure to politics: New measures for a fragmented media environment. American Journal of Political Science, 57: 236–248. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] propose a new survey-based measure of “televised exposure to politics” that avoids some of the features that lead to self-report error and that has already been adopted by the American National Election Study. Yet the validity of the new measure has not been independently tested. An analysis reveals several weaknesses. First, construct validity of the new measure is low because it does not attempt to measure the amount of exposure to news programs, news channels, or news overall. Second, its convergent validity is poor by several different criteria. For example, the new measure shows barely any increase in news exposure as the 2008 presidential election approached. Third, the authors' criterion for predictive validity is neither necessary nor sufficient. Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz are right that measuring the media exposure of survey respondents in a valid and reliable way is critical for progress in political communication research. But given the inability of many respondents to report their own exposure, it is necessary to monitor the media use of survey respondents automatically.     

Mentally disordered offenders and the European Court of Human Rights

Mentally disordered offenders find themselves at the intersection of the healthcare system and the criminal justice system in most European countries. Decisions on their care often involve lengthy discussions in relation to care versus control in society. In this article, the focus is on one aspect of this debate — that of human rights. An analysis of cases, taken to the European Court of Human Rights by mentally disordered offenders, demonstrates the difficulties inherent in ensuring appropriate care to individuals and safeguards to the public at the same time. The issues raised include the problems raised by indeterminate sentences, the use of detention for preventive purposes, and debates about treatment.The countries represented in this selection of cases are Belgium, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom.     

On the Determinants of Local Government Debt: Does One Size Fit All?

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the factors that directly influence levels of debt in Spanish local governments. Specifically, the main objective is to find out the extent to which indebtedness is originated by controllable factors that public managers can influence, or whether it hinges on other variables beyond managers’ control. The importance of this issue has intensified since the start of the crisis in 2008, due to the abrupt decline of revenues and, simultaneously, to the fact that the levels of costs these institutions face has remained the same or, in some cases, increased. Results can be explored from multiple perspectives, given that the set of explanatory factors is also multiple. However, the most interesting finding is the varying effect of each covariate depending on a municipality's specific debt level, which suggests that economic policy recommendations should not be homogeneous across local governments.     

News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout

Despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that greater media choice makes it easier for people to find their preferred content. People who like news take advantage of abundant political information to become more knowledgeable and more likely to turn out. In contrast, people who prefer entertainment abandon the news and become less likely to learn about politics and go to the polls. To test this proposition, I develop a measure of people's media content preference and include it in a representative opinion survey of 2,358 U.S. residents. Results show that content preference indeed becomes a better predictor of political knowledge and turnout as media choice increases. Cable TV and the Internet increase gaps in knowledge and turnout between people who prefer news and people who prefer entertainment.