Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? The Impact of Information on Mass Attitudes toward Congress

Two features of citizen response to Congress can be taken as grounds for concern. First, Americans know relatively little about Congress, and especially about congressional procedures and policy output. Second, Congress typically emerges as the least respected political institution. Although these matters are troubling when viewed individually, more disturbing is the dilemma posed when knowledge and attitudes toward Congress are viewed in tandem. It appears that citizens who know Congress the best like Congress the least. Consequently, a sophisticated polity and a well-respected legislature seem fundamentally incompatible. This article seeks to resolve this dilemma, contending that there is nothing about knowledge per se that leads citizens to view Congress unfavorably. Rather, differences in knowledge levels alter the considerations citizens bring to bear when evaluating Congress, with the best-informed individuals constructing judgments on the basis of the most relevant Congress-specific criteria while less knowledgeable citizens employ readily available but more peripheral criteria.     

Unanimity, Discord, and the Communication of Public Opinion

This article is concerned with the political communication of opinion that occurs through networks of associated citizens. Its primary attention focuses on opinion variance within populations and networks and how such variance affects communication among and between individuals. Particularly in the context of ambiguous or infrequent communication, people may experience difficulty in forming judgments regarding the opinions of others. In such situations, environmental priors become useful devices for reaching these judgments, but a problem arises related to the utility of these environmental priors when discord rather than unanimity characterizes the contextual distribution of opinion. The article's argument is that dyadic discussions between two citizens are most enlightening, and environmental priors least enlightening, when surrounding opinion is marked by higher levels of disagreement. The analyses are based on data taken from the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis study .     

Political Communication and Disagreement Among Citizens in Japan and the United States

Patterns of interdependence among and between citizens add an additional level of complexity to a comparative analysis of democratic politics. In this article we examine communication and disagreement among citizens in Japan and the United States. We argue that a majoritarian bias in political communication operates in both settings, but it tends to perpetuate a system of one-party dominance in Japanese politics. Comparative studies of democratic citizenship have focused generally on the variation across national contexts in the political beliefs and values held by individuals. Our argument is that citizenship and the alternative cultures of democratic politics have less to do with the idiosyncratic beliefs and values that individuals carry with them and more to do with the contextually embedded nature of political communication. We address these issues using two community-based studies, one conducted in South Bend, Indiana, in 1984 and the other in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, in 1997.     

Spatially Dispersed Ties Among Interdependent Citizens: Connecting Individuals and Aggregates

A continuing tradition in contextual analysis locates individualcitizens within spatially defined, aggregate settings in aneffort to provide a more complete account of individual behavior.Given the increasing individual mobility within society, itis less than clear that geography continues to define the boundarieson meaningful aggregate contexts—people have become lesstied to their geographic contexts, and technology makes it possiblefor citizens to maintain relationships independently of space,distance, and location. In this paper we pursue an analysisand set of analytic techniques that are designed to connectindividual voters, their communication networks, and the geographythat surrounds them. The analytic techniques utilize a uniquedata set that captures spatial dispersion in an individual'ssocial and political network, and from these analyses we candraw two conclusions. First, spatial dispersion in a networkdoes have an effect on interaction within the network; the worldis not full of voters who operate independently of their geographiccontexts. Second, spatial dispersion provides opportunitiesto connect citizens living in different geographic contexts,thereby creating bridges for communication across differentcontexts. These findings suggest that scholars might profitablyincorporate geography as an important component of the complexrelationships among and between individual citizens in explainingthe role of the individual in modern democratic politics.     

Election Campaigns,Social Communication,and the Accessibility of Perceived Discussant Preference

This paper examines the communication of political preferences between citizens during the course of an election campaign. We are particularly concerned with the ability of individuals to make judgments regarding the likely votes of others within their networks of relationships. To this end, we employ the concept of accessibility and its measurement device—response latency or response time—in the context of a computer-assisted telephone interview. We argue that the accessibility of respondent perceptions regarding the voting preferences of their associates depends on a range of individual and contextual factors, and the analysis focuses on variation across individuals, across relationships, and across the temporal contexts of election campaigns.     

Expertise and Bias in Political Communication Networks

Citizens minimize information costs by obtaining political guidance from others who have already assumed the costs of acquiring and processing political information. A problem occurs because ideal informants, typically characterized by the joint presence of political expertise and shared viewpoints, are frequently unavailable or rare within the groups where individuals are located. Hence, individuals must often look beyond their own group boundaries to find such informants. The problem is that obtaining information from individuals located beyond their own groups produces additional costs. Moreover, the availability of ideal informants varies across groups and settings, with the potential to produce (1) context‐dependent patterns of informant centrality, which in turn generate (2) varying levels of polarization among groups and (3) biases in favor of some groups at the expense of others. The article's analysis is based on a series of small‐group experiments, with aggregate implications addressed using a simple agent‐based model.     

Patterns of Disagreement in Democratic Politics: Comparing Germany, Japan, and the United States

An important ingredient in democratic politics is the experience of disagreement through social communication and political discussion. If people fail to encounter contrary viewpoints, their own views are never challenged, they are never forced to reconsider initially held opinions, and they are effectively excluded from democratic deliberation. This article examines patterns of political agreement and disagreement within the communication networks of citizens in Germany, Japan, and the United States. Several questions are addressed. Are there cross‐national differences in patterns of agreement and disagreement among citizens? To what extent are these patterns subject to individual attitudes, to the structure of communication networks, and to levels of aggregate support for particular preferences and opinions? Finally, what are the implications of disagreement for civic capacity and political engagement? Empirical analyses are based on cooperative election surveys conducted in each country during the early 1990s.     

Variable responses to neighborhood social contexts: Assimilation,conflict, and tipping points

The social contexts of urban neighborhoods provide a dimension to urban politics which extends beyond the characteristics of discrete political actors. This article shows that the political effects of these spatially defined social environments depend upon individual characteristics, as well as neighborhood properties; the contextual effects are not constant across individual categories or within individual categories across context. Using Democratic identification as the dependent variable, two reactions to context are demonstrated: conflict and assimilation. The interdependency of individual characteristics and contextual properties determines (1) which reaction occurs where for which individuals, and (2) the extent of political differences between occupational classes.An earlier version of this article was presented at the meetings of the Southern Political Science Association, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, November 1979, as Working Paper Number 1 of the Institute of Government Research at Louisiana State University.