deficient core knowledge, I propose that we turn an osten- sible weakness into a strength. We should identify our mission as bring- ing together insights and theories that would otherwise remain scattered in other disciplines. Because of the lack of interchange among the disci- plines, hypotheses thoroughly discredited in one field may receive wide acceptance in another. Potential research paradigms remain fractured, with pieces here and there but no comprehensive statement to guide re- search. By bringing ideas together in one location, communication can aspire to become a master discipline that synthesizes related theories and concepts and exposes them to the most rigorous, comprehensive state- ment and exploration. Reaching this goal would require a more self-con- scious determination by communication scholars to plumb other fields and feed back their studies to outside researchers. At the same time, such an enterprise would enhance the theoretical rigor of communication scholarship proper. The idea

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Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.

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Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

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.

This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how the value systems play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions - and that modernisation brings coherent cultural changes that are conducive to democratisation.

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Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

The newest “new institutionalism,” discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels—policies, programs, and philosophies—and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose “background ideational abilities” within a given “meanin...

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Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse

In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate, and presidential elections. The thoery is constructed from four basic premises. The first is that individuals differ substantially in their attention to politics and therefore in their exposure to elite sources of political information. The second is that people react critically to political communication only to the extent that they are knowledgeable about political affairs. The third is that people rarely have fixed attitudes on specific issues; rather, they construct 'preference statements' on the fly as they confront each issue raised. The fourth is that, in constructing these statements, people make the greatest use of ideas that are, for various reasons, the most immediately salient to them. Zaller emphasizes the role of political elites in establishing the terms of political discourse in the mass media and the powerful effect of this framing of issues on the dynamics of mass opinion on any given issue over time.

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion

Opinion research is beset by two major types of "artifactual" variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous ; error variance" into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people possess opinions at the level of specificity of typical survey items-and instead assumes that most people are internally conflicted over most political issues-and that most respond to survey questions on the basis of whatever ideas are at the top of their heads at the moment of answering. Numerous empirical regularities are shown to be consistent with these assumptions.

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A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences

This article investigates patterns in audience recep- tion of 16 news stories that received prominent media coverage in the summer and fall of 1989. Using a national sample of American adults, it compares education, self-reported rates of media use, interpersonal communication, and prior levels of general political knowledge as predictors of individual differences in recall of cur- rent news events. Results indicate that respondents' background level of political knowledge is the strongest and most consistent predictor of current news story recall across a wide range of topics, suggesting that there is indeed a general audience for news and that this audience is quite sharply stratified by preexisting levels of background knowledge. Thus, in survey research appli- cations that require estimates of individual differences in the re- ception of potentially influential political communications, a mea- sure of general prior knowledge-not a measure of news media use-is likely to be the most effective indicator. The article fur- ther concludes that the tendency of individuals to acquire news and information on a domain- or topic-specific basis fails to un- dermine the value of political knowledge as a general measure of propensity for news recall.

Who gets the news? alternative measures of news reception and their implications for research

Antiwelfare 74 47 23 45 76 56 29 58 Ambivalent 20 16 26 20 11 13 19 13 Prowelfare 06 37 51 35 13 31 52 29 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

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The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State

Covers Libertarianism, Egalitarianism, the relationship between capitalism and democracy, ideology, and social and political awareness among the American public.

John Zaller

Papers

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion

A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences

Who gets the news? alternative measures of news reception and their implications for research

The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State

The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy