Browsing by Subject "Public Opinion"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    21st Century media effects: choice, predispositions, and their impact on agenda setting and priming.
    (2009-12) Holmes, Justin Whitely
    In the past 25 years, we have seen a massive shift to communication technologies that allow increased choice of content for citizens. Using an experiment, this study explores the relationship between individual differences, increased choice, and media effects such as agenda setting and priming. It finds that increased choice greatly attenuates both attention to political news and subsequent priming and framing effects.
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    The battleground effect: how the Electoral College shapes post-election political attitudes and behavior.
    (2009-08) Hendriks, Henriët
    Every four years, Americans elect a president through the curious institution called the Electoral College. As a result of its structure, which prioritizes states over individual votes, presidential candidates focus on only a handful of states, the so-called battleground states, while virtually ignoring the rest of the country. In this dissertation, I examine the consequences of this campaign strategy for voters' post-election attitudes toward politics and U.S. senators' voting behavior immediately after the election. Using public opinion data from the National Election Studies and the National Annenberg Election Survey, I find that the differences in levels of trust, efficacy, and interest between safe and battleground state residents are minimal. However, when accounting for differences in states' political cultures, I detect battleground effects. Voters living in states with more traditional political cultures are hardly affected by candidates' battleground strategies whereas voters in states with moralistic political cultures are more efficacious, trusting, and interested in politics when their state is also a battleground state. The particulars of presidential campaign strategies also subtly affect senators' roll call voting. Senators who share the president's party and represent battleground states are slightly more supportive of presidential policy positions than those representing safe states. I propose that these senators returned favors they enjoyed during the campaign season. Moreover, if they ran for reelection themselves, they are even more supportive. This dissertation shows candidates' battleground strategies have effects that extend beyond Election Day at both the elite and mass levels, thereby expanding our conception and understanding of the role of presidential elections and campaign effects in American politics.
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    No Church in the Wild: The Politics of American Nonreligion
    (2019-07) Stewart, Evan
    The number of Americans with no religious identification has grown to nearly a quarter of the population in 2018. What are the political implications of this cultural change? Current research views religious disaffiliation as an example of either backlash to the religious right (expecting the unaffiliated to be engaged partisans) or drift from institutions (expecting them to be disengaged from politics). I address this debate with three studies that examine political engagement, opinion formation, and organized advocacy among the nonreligious. Across all three studies, theories from cultural sociology suggest that simple categorical measures of nonreligious identity hide substantive differences in how people engage nonreligion in their personal lives (through low religious practice, non-belief, and nonreligious identification) and in public life (through opposition to religious authority in the public sphere). For engagement, new analysis with existing survey data with validated voter turnout shows that classic measures of low church attendance associate with higher odds of turnout among unaffiliated respondents. For opinion, analysis of original survey data shows that measures of public nonreligion are more closely associated with progressive political views than measures of personal nonreligion. For advocacy, analysis of tax and lobbying records of forty nonreligious organizations shows how a focus on personal nonreligious identities creates a closed network of groups with a more narrow agenda than organizations lobbying for the separation of church and state. By focusing on the substantive differences between cultural repertoires of personal and public nonreligion, I highlight how public religious considerations are an important explanatory factor in political life. Slippage between these repertoires can explain why the nonreligious appear to have large political potential, but limited political impact.
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    The Politics of Palin: gender in the 2008 presidential election.
    (2009-10) Burns, Melanie Faith
    Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for Vice President in the 2008 election, was only the second major party female nominee for the office of vice president in U.S. history and the first for the Republican Party. While criticized extensively by the left and the conservative intellectual elite, Palin's conservative credentials were never questioned and she was embraced by many grass-roots conservatives. Palin's strong conservatism and Republican partisan credentials stand in stark contrast to most female politicians, who overwhelmingly and increasingly hail from the Democratic Party in both state and national politics. The central puzzle of this project is to determine how voters react to the competing stereotypes that conservative female Republican candidates, like Sarah Palin, must endure. The gender stereotype - that females are considered to be more empathetic, caring, and compassionate - is in conflict with the partisan stereotype - that Republicans are believed to possess more strength and leadership. Which stereotypes do voters apply, and how does that differ based on their own gender or partisan identity? Specifically, how do voters' own gender and party identification shape ratings of a conservative female candidate's traits and ideology, as well as the impact of each on vote choice and candidate evaluation? Two public opinion surveys are utilized to answer these questions - a survey of Minnesotans and a national survey of women. The Minnesota data revealed that a citizen's gender and party identification shape their perceptions of Sarah Palin's traits, ideology, and overall evaluations. While party identification is the strongest predictor, gender did have some impact. Furthermore, the differences in how Palin is rated on her traits and ideology had significant impacts on overall evaluations of her, as measured by presidential vote choice and evaluations of her performance in the vice presidential debate. Nationally, women's party identification shape their perceptions of Sarah Palin's traits and policy issue agreement. In addition, there is a strong relationship between party identification and overall evaluations, but this relationship is overshadowed when trait ratings or policy position agreement are included in the model. The strong, significant effects of party identification on overall evaluations disappear on measures of Palin's favorability measure and opinions of McCain's choice of Palin, but remain significant on vote for McCain. Both traits and policy position agreement have a significant impact on overall evaluations of Palin. And while the effects of party remain directly significant on vote for McCain in the presence of these variables, it appears they are indirectly significant for evaluations of McCain's choice of Palin as his vice presidential running mate on issue positions, and, to a lesser extent, trait ratings. Different traits and policy issues have significant impacts on McCain's choice of Palin for Republicans and Democrats.
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    Warring opinions: an investigation into the sublime aesthetic narratives of contemporary warfare.
    (2010-08) Licht, Melissa Vera
    This project uses aesthetic concepts of the sublime as critical categories for exploring opinions and subjective responses to war as they are presented in selected soldiers' memoirs, literary theory, films, and public affairs-from World War I to the (ongoing) Gulf War. Representations of sublime force as well as sublime sacrifice and idealism permeate even "objective" journalistic accounts of warfare and inform the perspectives through which we engage with war in thought and feeling. The project argues that "opinion" is not merely a rationally measurable statistical phenomenon but an aesthetic problematic through which we experience ourselves in relation to the world. Soldiers' memoirs and public discourses narrate the trauma of war and express opinions that swing between and simultaneously uphold radically different positions: war as a sublime communal endeavor versus war as the destruction of social meaning. These opposing opinions reflect different aesthetic and narrative strategies: different ways of representing one's position in the world and of managing overpowering forces and emotions. Opinion itself is built and supported through our emotional narratives of sublime antagonism and/or sublime interest in the social world. The critical thought of Hannah Arendt, J. Glenn Gray, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Immanuel Kant are central to the analysis of sources throughout the project.