Media
When is media LEAST likely to affect public opinion?
- Change vote preference in partisan elections
- Change opinions deeply rooted in partisanship or group identification
- Individual attributes: High sophistication or low interest
- People who are unaware or unable to accept message from media
Bonus:
- Net influence of the media is slight because it represents balance among conflicting points of view (Zaller 1992).
What is the "normal vote"?
Election that is decided on a party-line basis. Assume there is a 50-50 split of the Independents and a balanced switch rate for partisans (10 percent on each side).
What is the IRB and why is it important?
Institutional Review Board (IRB): Responsible for overseeing research involving human subjects. Researchers must submit their proposals to the IRB for review before beginning data collection. Designed to protect subjects, researchers, and institutions.
What are heuristics? Provide two examples.
Cognitive shortcuts -- allow people to make judgements with less cognitive energy.
Examples: Party ID, other stereotypes like candidate race.
List the primary independent and dependent variables from Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995).
IV: negative campaign ads
DV: turnout, political cynicism, efficacy
What are the three types of media effects? Define them and give an example of each. Bonus: cite readings in your examples
1) Agenda setting: Influences the issues citizens think are most important. When news coverage of an event leads to public concern about the event.
--> Example: show audiences different versions of the news, content affected answers about "nation’s most important problem"
2) Priming: Influences how citizens use these issues to evaluate political figures. Directing individuals to consider certain aspects of one or more issues and not others as important when they make political evaluations.
--> Mechanisms: increase accessibility of information or communicate importance of something.
--> Example: if coverage of Hilary Clinton's emails in 2016 made voters believe that they were very important or made voters consider them when voting because they were at the top of their minds.
3) Framing: Influences opinion by the way issues are presented to the public. Media frame provides meaning to unfolding events by emphasizing or deemphasizing certain facets of an event.
--> Example: Frames of Klan rally (Nelson et al 1997)
Why is it difficult to determine the casual relationship between policy/ideological positions and vote choice?
Follow-the-leader
Categories:
1) Not ascertained information: information was not obtained as a result of imperfect interviewer or respondent performance (not asked).
2) Inapplicable information: information does not apply to a particular respondent because of previous answers.
3) Refused: respondent refusal to answer a specific question.
Coping with Item Nonresponse:
- Drop
- Impute
- (if categorical IV) code as distinct category
When is the public most likely to get policy that coincides with public opinion?
When the public favors the status quo.
Why might we be skeptical of the results in Baumgartner and Morris (2006)?
Sample composition: Volunteers from introductory-level courses in political at a medium-sized public university.
Control: No video stimulus
Limitations of laboratory experiments
Prior exposure to Daily Show
How has the way that Americans consumed campaign news changed over the past 30 years? What are the consequences?
Internet dramatically gone up. Increase in radio since 2012. Slow decline in Newspapers and Magazines. TV remained relatively stable.
Consequences include...
- Politically interested individuals seek out news
- People who get info from the internet or newspapers know more factual info than people who get info from TV
What are floating voters? How are they related to short-term partisan forces?
Election outcomes: result of normal vote + short-term partisan forces of the campaign.
--> Short-term partisan forces: difference between the actual vote and the normal vote.
--> Less important for Congressional elections, more important for Presidential Elections
--> In local elections, break down short-term forces into two categories: ones that carry over from national politics, forces generated by local candidates and campaigns.
Floating voters: voters whose choice is determined by the campaign rather than a long-term partisan commitment.
What is a conjoint experiment and why is it useful?
See Topic 22.
Example 1: Embed vignette with multiple experimentally manipulated attributed. E.g. show news article and manipulate source, author, photo, and name of people featured.
Example 2: Embed table with multiple candidate attributes. Randomize the content of the attributes (e.g. gender, age, political experience, policy positions, etc.)
Advantages:
--> Randomly vary multiple traits at one time
--> Efficient (minimize time required for survey)
--> Reduce social desirability bias
When might partisans punish candidates from breaking with the party's position? Why do we care?
According to Arceneaux (2008)...
Normatively importance:
--> Uninformed citizens can use partisan cues to make the same decision they would have if they were actually informed BUT ONLY if candidates do not take counter-stereotypical positions.
Confirmed Hypotheses:
--> H1: Individuals are more likely to negatively evaluate their party’s candidate when the candidate makes a counter-stereotypical statement on a salient issue than on a less salient issue.
--> H4: Across levels of political awareness, subjects did not appear to punish the candidate form their party for taking a counter-stereotypical position on the low-salience issue.
Partial support for:
--> H2: The negative effects of counter-stereotypical statements should be stronger among ideological partisans relative to all partisans.
--> H3: Individuals are more likely to push partisan elites for making counter-stereotypical statements as their level of political awareness increases.
According to Fiorina (1978), why might the economy affect presidential election outcomes?
Simple retrospective voting model (Kramer 1971): so long as economic conditions stay good, incumbents thrive, while they suffer when conditions turn bad.
"The basic question posed by the economic retrospective voting model is the following: whether responsible or not, does the administration pros-per in good times and suffer in bad times? In essence, such a model presumes that the citizen looks at results rather than the policies and events which produce them." (p. 430)
What are the primary consequences of political advertising?
Possible negative consequences for cynicism, efficacy, and turnout (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995).
(Negative) ads provide more info about policy positions. Leads public to focus more on policy issues and vote on policy if candidates have different policy positions.
Key limitation: short-term impact on opinion and behavior.
What does the Downs (1958) model predict about election outcomes?
Convergence towards moderate positions.
What is weighting? What is the primary criticism of survey weighting?
Weighting: adjusting the sample data to look more like the population as a whole.
Critical (untestable) assumption: those responding from a particular subgroup are about the same as those not responding on the variables that the survey is trying to estimate.
How might we explain public apathy? Which is correct?
1) Public may not be capable of participation in all government decisions, especially those that require advanced technical knowledge.
2) People only have limited time to take from their personal affairs to participate in politics.
3) People may decide not to participate because they feel they can trust their political leaders.
4) People may not participate in politics because they have no grievances.
Each of the four explanations has some truth to it.
Consider Arceneaux (2008). What is Hypothesis 2 and does he find support for this hypothesis?
Hypothesis 2: The negative effects of counter-stereotypical statements should be stronger among ideological partisans relative to all partisans.
Partial support for Hypothesis 2: In the high-salience condition, liberal Democrats rated the counter-stereotypical democrat more negatively than all Democrats did as a group. This is not the case for conservative Republicans.