Mark Peffley

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Kentucky

Given the rise of populism around the globe, do populist citizens support the exceptional authority of national constitutional courts to make decisions on controversial issues? Or do these individuals view constitutional courts just like any other political institution? To investigate this question, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in...

A growing literature finds that social identity attachments to ideological and partisan groups often generate mistrust, hostility, and prejudice toward opposition groups. Yet, there are no studies of whether attachments to ideological groups (i.e., left, right, liberal, and conservative) contribute to political intolerance—defined as an unwillingne...

Der vorliegende Band ist dem Verhältnis von Informationen, Wahlen und Demokratie gewidmet. Deutschland, aber auch andere Länder in den Blick nehmend, widmen sich die Autor:innen vor allem den Bürger:innen, ihren Einstellungen, Interessen und Wahlentscheidungen. Auch die Rolle von Kontexten wird beleuchtet, insbesondere von Informationskontexten: Wi...

Preprint of chapter in Handbook on Politics and Public Opinion, Thomas Rudoph (Ed.)

How does terrorism influence citizens’ willingness to deny basic liberties to domestic groups alleged to be “fellow travelers” of the perpetrators of terrorism? Based on intergroup threat theory and social identity theory, we hypothesize that political intolerance toward fellow traveler groups is determined by three factors: (1) the level of terror...

How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Weste...

Profound differences exist in how Americans from various racial and ethnic groups view police and court officials. We argue that vicarious experiences contribute to this racial and ethnic divide. Drawing on research on social communication, social network composition, and negativity biases in perception and judgment, we devise a theoretical framewo...

How do members of racial groups explain the large disparity in the way Blacks and Whites are treated by the criminal justice system in the United States? And how do such explanations (attributions) influence support for punitive crime control policies in America, as well as arguments against such policies? Our study of the structure, sources, and c...

How do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one’s enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist atta...

Studies focusing on black–Latino intergroup perceptions in zero-sum environments (e.g., jobs) have found little perceived outgroup discrimination or a tendency for each group to perceive the injustices faced by the other group. In contrast, we examine the non-zero-sum criminal justice domain. Although we find some asymmetry—that is, blacks are some...

Across the world, environmental concerns deepen. Citizens across a broad swath of nations-from affluent Germany and the Netherlands to publics in lesser affluent countries like Ghana and Vietnam-express unease about pollution problems. What explains this global concern wiThenvironmental issues? We hope to contribute an answer to this question by ex...

Criminal justice policy in the US has long been exceedingly responsive to public opinion. Unfortunately, public attitudes towards justice in the US are severely bifurcated along racial lines, such that Whites see a system that is “colour-blind” and Blacks perceive one that is severely biased against them. In this paper, we explore the magnitude of...

As reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict, the Rodney King beating, and the Amadou Diallo killing make clear, whites and African Americans in the United States inhabit two different perceptual worlds, with the former seeing the justice system as largely fair and color blind and the latter believing it to be replete with bias and discrimination. The...

While political science has made effective use of research on the psychology of stereotyping, psychology has not benefited from political science in the same way. This chapter argues that the study of racial stereotypes can be improved by a mutual effort on the part of political scientists and psychologists alike to better understand and apply the...

Using panel data and matching techniques, we exploit a rare change in communication flows—the endorsement switch by several prominent British newspapers to the Labour Party before the 1997 election—to estimate media persuasion effects. This unusual event provides an opportunity to test for such effects while avoiding methodological pitfalls that ha...

This article discusses the empirical evidence of four of the more controversial pillars of the democratic elitism thesis that has been defined by early studies. The review in this article further supports the survey studies that compare the elite and mass opinions in cross-national contexts. An assessment of the elitists' claims is conducted; the e...

Although there exists a large and well-documented “race gap” between whites and blacks in their support for the death penalty, we know relatively little about the nature of these differences and how the races respond to various arguments against the penalty. To explore such differences, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in which respon...

We examine the huge racial divide in citizens' general beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system, focusing on the political consequences of these beliefs for shaping diverging interpretations of police behavior. Predictably, most blacks believe the system to be unfair and most whites believe the opposite. More importantly, these bel...

We examine the huge racial divide in citizens’ general beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system, focusing on the political consequences of these beliefs for shaping diverging interpretations of police behavior. Predictably, most blacks believe the system to be unfair and most whites believe the opposite. More importantly, these bel...

The 1990s saw some of the most dramatic changes in the American social welfare system in recent decades at both the national and state levels. In particular, states were granted, and took advantage of, much wider latitude in deciding who is eligible to receive welfare benefits. To what extent did the composition of a state's electorate influence th...

Research on mass support for democracies shows that popular support for democratic norms is at an historic high. At the same time, research on political tolerance draws considerably bleaker conclusions about the democratic capacity of mass publics. We attempt to synthesize the essential lessons of these two literatures into a general model of democ...

Past studies have found evidence of a connection between race and crime in the minds of many white Americans, but several gaps remain in our knowledge of this association. Here, a multimethod approach was used to examine more closely the racial component of whites’ support for ostensibly race-neutral crime policies. Conventional correlational analy...

While students of political tolerance often view tolerance decisions as a trade-off between opposing values (civil liberties versus other values), there have been few explicit attempts to formulate and test such a multiple-values model. With rare exception, researchers typically examine linkages between tolerance judgments and a single value conste...

In the preceding argument, Miller and his colleagues leveled strong charges against our multiple values approach to the study of political intolerance. Distilled to its essence, their critique focused on three elements our study: (1) they claimed an inability to replicate our results; (2) they challenged the appropriateness of our measurement proto...

Our investigation of the antecedents and consequences of citizens' beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system among blacks and whites is motivated by three related concerns: 1) research showing that beliefs about procedural fairness (even more than assessments of outcomes) play a crucial role in shaping political attitudes and behavi...

Research on mass support for democracies shows that popular support for democratic norms is at an historic high. At the same time, research on political tolerance draws considerably bleaker conclusions about the democratic capacity of mass publics. We attempt to synthesize the essential lessons of these two literatures into a general model of democ...

Contemporary political science research into the effects of the mass media has focused largely on either priming theory or Receive, Accept, and Sample (RAS) models but rarely on both simultaneously. The separation of the two approaches is unfortunate because the predictions generated by the two theoretical perspectives are not mutually exclusive, a...

Social psychological theories of social stereotyping are used to generate a series of predictions about the conditions under which whites' stereotypes of African-Americans are likely to bias their evaluations of blacks in the context of crime. Stereotypes of African-Americans should influence attitudes on crime policy primarily when criminals are b...

Theory: Social psychological theories of social stereotyping are used to generate a series of predictions about how and when whites' stereotypes of African-Americans are likely to bias their evaluations of blacks in the areas of welfare and crime. Hypotheses: The degree to which whites endorse negative stereotypes of blacks not only tends to bias t...

Studies of media content consistently find that black criminal suspects are portrayed more frequently and more menacingly than white suspects in television news stories of violent crime. Here we investigate the impact of such portrayals on white viewers’ attitudes by means of a video experiment in which we manipulate only the visual image of the ra...

How do citizens respond to dramatic uses of military force? While we know a great deal about the conditions that driveaggregate changes in presidential popularity in response to a president's use of military force, we know surprisingly little about howindividuals respond to such events. What types of individuals operating under what types of condit...

The hierarchical model of foreign policy belief systems (Hurwitz and Peffley, 1987) stipulates that attitudes toward specific foreign policies (e.g., defense spending or support for new weapon systems) are constrained by more general foreign policy beliefs (postures and images of other nations) which, in turn, are constrained by even more general c...

A relatively recent innovation in research on attitude constraint is the specification of hierarchical models of mass belief systems, where general orientations are assumed to determine or constrain more specific policy attitudes. But while this research has been able to demonstrate a strong correlation between general and specific idea elements, t...

Recent studies of racial attitudes have focused on traditional values, such as individualism, as important antecedents of Americans'' opinions on racial issues, with mixed results. We focus on another set of values that has its roots in an older research tradition examining the psychological sources of racial prejudice, which suggests that prejudic...

How do citizens respond to dramatic foreign policy events, such as the recent changes in Soviet U.S. relations, when a traditional foe exhibits strong signs of conciliatory behavior? Using panel data collected before and after the nuclear arms summits of 1987 and 1988, we explore both the consequences and antecedents of changing images of the Sovie...

This study uses data from Stouffer's mass survey of attitudes toward communists to (1) test to determine whether Sullivan et al.'s causal model of generic tolerance can profitably be employed as a generic model of specific intolerance; (2) to shed new light on sources of McCarthyism during the "red scare" of the 1950s; and (3) to examine various co...

How do citizens organize, and make sense of, a complex policy domain such as foreign policy? To a large extent, Americans base their policy choices on fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of the main U.S. postwar adversary—the Soviet Union. Our purpose in this paper is to examine both the antecedents and the consequences of these Soviet im...

How do people form and revise their images of the president's personal characteristics? While analysts have made considerable progress in uncovering the content, structure, and political impact of images of political figures—especially presidential candidates—we know very little about how these beliefs develop and change over time. This study of ch...

The great majority of analyses of presidential support utilize aggregate data and, consequently, are not appropriate for the analysis of individual-level changes in support in response to events within an administration. Using National Election Studies panel data, we investigate presidential support both before and after the major revelations of th...

The great majority of analyses of presidential support utilize aggregate data and, consequently, are not appropriate for the analysis of individual-level changes in support in response to events within an administration. Using National Election Studies panel data, we investigate presidential support both before and after the major revelations of th...

It has long been assumed that foreign-policy attitudes of the mass public are random, disorganized, and unconstrained if they exist at all. Further, foreign-policy thinking has not been found to be structured along standard ideological (liberal-conservative) lines, partisan lines, or class lines. We attempt to move the discussion from a question of...

Previous research has not found foreign policy attitudes to be an important determinant of political evaluations (such as voting or presidential evaluation). Such findings, though, may have underestimated the importance of foreign policy because they are based on aggregate data and because they measure such attitudes at a level which is much too sp...

This paper focuses on the processes by which people revise their beliefs about the abilities of political parties to handle national economic problems. According to the “intuitive statistician” model, such beliefs are highly responsive to new information. However, the “cognitive miser” model views beliefs as highly resistant to change. We attempt t...

A central question to students of mass behavior is the degree to which citizens are capable of abstract ideological thought. This question has been structured, for the past two decades, by the debate between Converse, who found very little evidence of constrained belief systems, and revisionists, who criticize his measures and assumption of unidime...

Several recent studies of economic voting have challenged a central assumption of the reward-punishment theory of retrospective voting, that voters hold the incumbent party responsible for all manner of economic fluctuations. Our research expands on prior work in several ways by specifying and testing a model of the way people attribute responsibil...

One assumption of Key''s reward-punishment theory that has attracted comparatively little attention is that voters hold the incumbent party responsible for all manner of economic fluctuations. A brief review of the survey literature in economic voting indicates that this assumption is in need of revision. The handful of existing studies in politica...

The 1990s played host to the most significant changes in the American welfare system in the last fifty years—in particular, states were granted much wider latitude in deciding who is eligible to receive welfare. Taking advantage of these changes, we examine the linkage between lower class turnout and state adoption of restrictive welfare eligibilit...

Introduction By virtually all accounts, the mass media play a vital role in American politics. For most citizens, the news media --particularly television and the press – are the chief purveyors of political information. Increasingly, however, the public has become disenchanted with its news source. A variety of studies document plummeting ratings...

Introduction Since the passage of national welfare reform legislation in 1996, media coverage of welfare has been remarkable in at least two respects. First, given the usual tendency for the media to give short shrift to public policy, news coverage of welfare reform policy has been comparatively intense (e.g., Clawson and Trice 2000). Second, and...

Note: Not for citation without the authors' permission. Prepared for presentation at the 2000 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois, April 27-30. The authors would like to thank Steven Voss and Ellen Riggle for a variety of helpful comments throughout the project.