Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

For more than two decades political scientists have discussed rising elite polarization in the United States, but the study of mass polarization did not receive comparable attention until fairly recently. This article surveys the literature on mass polarization. It begins with a discussion of the concept of polarization, then moves to a critical consideration of different kinds of evidence that have been used to study polarization, concluding that much of the evidence presents problems of inference that render conclusions problematic. The most direct evidence—citizens' positions on public policy issues—shows little or no indication of increased mass polarization over the past two to three decades. Party sorting—an increased correlation between policy views and partisan identification—clearly has occurred, although the extent has sometimes been exaggerated. Geographic polarization—the hypothesized tendency of like-minded people to cluster together—remains an open question. To date, there is no conclusive e...

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Political Polarization in the American Public

Incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from academic and popular commentators in recent years. In an effort to better understand the nature and determinants of such incivility, this study examined a 3-week census of articles and comments posted to a local newspaper’s website—totaling more than 300 articles and 6,400 comments. The results of the content analysis show that incivility occurs frequently and is associated with key contextual factors, such as the topic of the article and the sources quoted within the article. We also find that, contrary to popular perceptions, frequent commenters are more civil than are infrequent commenters, and uncivil commenters are no less likely than civil commenters to use evidence in support of their claims.

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Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments

The conventional wisdom about negative political campaigning holds that it works, i.e., it has the consequences its practitioners intend. Many observers also fear that negative campaigning has unintended but detrimental effects on the political system itself. An earlier meta-analytic assessment of the relevant literature found no reliable evidence for these claims, but since then the research literature has more than doubled in size and has greatly improved in quality. We reexamine this literature and find that the major conclusions from the earlier meta-analysis still hold. All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and possibly overall public mood.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00618.x

The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta‐Analytic Reassessment

1. Personality and politics 2. The Big Five approach 3. Measuring the Big Five 4. Personality and political information 5. Personality, attitudes, and political predispositions 6. Personality and political participation 7. The multiple bases of political behavior.

Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior

There is much concern among pundits and political observers that incivility undermines our electoral process. Yet we have little evidence that actually documents whether incivility has such pernicious effects. This article seeks to advance our understanding of the influence of incivility on the electorate. We argue that three dimensions are central to understanding both the perceptions and effects of different types of campaign messages: tone (negative versus positive); civility (civil versus uncivil); and focus (issue versus trait-based message content). Using an experimental manipulation on a large national sample that examines these three dimensions, we find that uncivil attacks in campaigns do not appear to be as worrisome as its detractors fear. While uncivil messages in general—and uncivil trait-based messages in particular—are usually seen by the public as being less fair, less informative, and less important than both their civil negative and positive counterparts, they are no more likely to lead to detrimental effects among the public. In fact, incivility appears to have some modest positive consequences for the political engagement of the electorate. These findings are important, since attacks and counterattacks will continue to shape the American political landscape.

Beyond Negativity: The Effects of Incivility on the Electorate

Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Theoretical Foundations 15 Chapter 3 How to Study Gender Stereotype Usage and Double Standards in Campaigns 39 Chapter 4 Descriptive Candidate Gender Stereotypes and the Role of Candidate Experience 59 Chapter 5 Tears and Anger on the Campaign Trail 82 Chapter 6 Unbinding the Double Bind 110 Chapter 7 Knowledge Gaffes 132 Chapter 8 Reassessing the Parity Problem 143 Chapter 9 A Bright Future for Women in Politics 163 Appendix 1 Text of Newspaper Treatments 177 Appendix 2 Questionnaire 185 Appendix 3 How the Public Responds to Each Behavior 188 Appendix 4 How the Public Responds to Candidate Experience 191 Appendix 5 Results for Candidate Experience * Candidate Gender 192 Appendix 6 Results for Candidate Gender (Control Group only) 194 Appendix 7 Results for Crying * Candidate Gender 195 Appendix 8 Results for Anger * Candidate Gender 196 Appendix 9 Results for Toughness * Candidate Gender 197 Appendix 10 Results for Lack of Empathy * Candidate Gender 198 Appendix 11 Results for Knowledge Gaffe * Candidate Gender 199 References 201 Index 217

He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates

The gender gap in support for war represents the largest and most consistent policy gender gap in public opinion polling. We know little about the causes of this gap, however, because scholars have not effectively isolated how or why the gender gap changes in response to the characteristics of different wars. We conducted two controlled experiments on demographically representative samples of U.S. adults to see if systematically varying the stakes of war (economic/strategic vs. humanitarian) or multilateral support for the action (U.N. approval vs. U.N. rejection) affects the size of the gender gap. We propose an interactive theoretical perspective that explicitly links these characteristics with key individual-level characteristics that might be driving the gender gap. Our findings indicate that the gender gap is strongly dependent on the specific context of the war. In fact, we find that the gender gap reverses when the war has U.N. approval or if the stakes of the war are humanitarian.

A War of One's Own: Understanding the Gender Gap in Support for War

The effect of negative campaigning on voter turnout has been a major focus of research in recent years. In a path-breaking analysis, Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar found that negative campaigning by Senate candidates significantly depresses turnout. Subsequent studies that emerged to challenge their analysis reached more optimistic findings. Determining who is right is difficult to establish because the methodology of these later studies differs so dramatically from the original study and because a strong theoretical case can be made for each type of finding. Through a careful examination and improvement of Ansolabehere and Iyengar's aggregate analysis of Senate campaigns, this article shows that their initial conclusions regarding the demobilizing effect of campaign attacks were premature. Even using Ansolabehere and Iyengar's own data, it appears that citizens are resilient to the onslaught of negative campaigning. This paper shows that the findings in the literature are not as contradictory as...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00454.x

The Resilient Voter: Moving Toward Closure in the Debate over Negative Campaigning and Turnout

Greatly increased advertising spending by independent groups represents one of the most dramatic recent changes in U.S. elections. This article moves forward our theoretical and empirical understanding of how the public responds to ads sponsored by candidates as compared to ads sponsored by unknown Super PACs and similar independent groups. In the theoretical section of the article, we establish why it is necessary to measure both backlash and ad persuasiveness to understand overall ad effectiveness and then we develop a series of hypotheses about the likely influence of ad sponsorship. In the empirical section, we undertake the first analysis to date of how the public responds to attack television ads sponsored by unknown independent groups. Using a large-N, geographically representative sample of U.S. adults, we conduct an experiment to assess how sponsorship influences ad effectiveness. We find that attack ads sponsored by unknown independent groups are more effective, on net, than ads sponsored by can...

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Deborah Jordan Brooks

Papers

Beyond Negativity: The Effects of Incivility on the Electorate

He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates

A War of One's Own: Understanding the Gender Gap in Support for War

The Resilient Voter: Moving Toward Closure in the Debate over Negative Campaigning and Turnout

Assessing Accountability in a Post-Citizens United Era The Effects of Attack Ad Sponsorship by Unknown Independent Groups