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Role of Dialogue in Public Opinion Formation
Abstract
This chapter shows that the frames present in the dialogue in the news media are highly relevant for the vote outcome. We show a framing effect in two of the three cases. These frames remain important for the voting decision when controlling for and in comparison with partisan heuristic. We can state that the more important the topic for a person, the less polarized the context, and the less complex the topic, the more a person relies on the frame-based path (thus, on arguments and less on heuristics like partisan orientation or social identities in general). In this regard, the chapter gives empirical support to the realistic theory of democracy. We do not expect arguments to play a more important role in other types of campaigns or other contexts. What we find here is the most that can be expected from citizens.
... Nonparametric IRT (NIRT) models do not assume any parametric form for the IRFs but instead introduce order restrictions (Sijtsma, 2005). These models have been used to construct or evaluate scales that measure among others, internet gaming disorder (Finserås et al., 2019), pedal sensory loss (Rinkel et al., 2019), partisan political preferences (Hänggli, 2020), and relative exposure to soft versus hard news (Boukes and Boomgaarden, 2015). The first NIRT model was proposed by Mokken (1971) for monotone processes. ...
Die schweizerische Demokratie ist geprägt von starkem politischem Wandel. Das Parteiensystem hat sich mit dem Aufstieg der SVP und mit dem Zerfall des Bürgerblocks völlig verändert. Neue Kräfteverhältnisse führen zu wechselnden Mehrheiten im Parlament. Die politische Polarisierung teilt das Land und stellt die Konkordanz in Frage. Gesellschaftliche Spaltungen vertiefen sich. Ohne Mitglied der EU zu sein, europäisiert sich die Schweiz in raschem Tempo. Das alles hat tief greifende Folgen für die Institutionen, Prozesse und Perspektiven schweizerischer Politik.
Die neueste Auflage dieses Studienbuchs – aktualisiert, umfassend überarbeitet und in Teilen neu geschrieben – zeichnet diesen Wandel nach und bleibt damit für Studierende, Medienschaffende und politisch Interessierte ein Referenzwerk zur schweizerischen Demokratie.
The outcome of the British referendum on EU membership sent shockwaves through Europe. While Britain is an outlier when it comes to the strength of Euroscepticism, the anti-immigration and anti-establishment sentiments that produced the referendum outcome are gaining strength across Europe. Analysing campaign and survey data, this article shows that the divide between winners and losers of globalization was a key driver of the vote. Favouring British EU exit, or ‘Brexit’, was particularly common among less educated, poorer and older voters, and those who expressed concerns about immigration and multi-culturalism. While there is no evidence of a short-term contagion effect with similar membership referendums in other countries, the Brexit vote nonetheless poses a serious challenge to the political establishment across Europe.
This study breaks new ground in investigating candidate behavior in American electoral campaigns. It centers on a question of equal importance to citizens and scholars: how can we produce better political campaigns? The project takes an innovative approach to answering this question by bringing together critical and empirical methods as well as game theory in a sophisticated yet readable text. The answer comes in four parts. First, Simon develops the idea of dialogue as a standard for evaluating political campaigns. Second, he shows that candidates' self-interest in winning leads them to avoid dialogue, that is substantive campaign discourse. Third, he demonstrates the beneficial effects produced by the little dialogue that actually occurs. Fourth, he pinpoints the forces responsible for these rare occurrences. The major lesson of this work is that campaign reform under its present guise will not bring about the more substantive campaigns that the public desires.
Many social scientists want to explain why people do what they do. A barrier to constructing such explanations used to be a lack of information on the relationship between cognition and choice. Now, recent advances in cognitive science, economics, political science, and psychology have clarified this relationship. In Elements of Reason, eighteen scholars from across the social sciences use these advances to uncover the cognitive foundations of social decision making. They answer tough questions about how people see and process information and provide new explanations of how basic human needs, the environment, and past experiences combine to affect human choices. Elements of Reason is written for a broad audience and should be read by anyone for whom 'Why do people do what they do?' is an important question. It is the rare book that transforms abstract debates about rationality and reason into empirically relevant explanations of how people choose.
In 2008 the world experienced the Great Recession, a financial and economic crisis of enormous proportions and the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. In its wake, unemployment became a key preoccupation of West European publics and politicians. This comparative study considers the policy debates surrounding unemployment in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland since 2008. With an over-arching focus on drawing out cross-national commonalities and differences, the authors ask whether patterns of political communication vary across countries. Their analysis draws on interviews with labour market policy-makers in the six selected countries, and paints a revealing picture. Appealing to researchers in comparative politics, political communication and welfare state research, this book will also interest practitioners involved in labour market policy.
Aristotle's political imagination capitalizes on the virtues of a middle-class republic. America's experiment in republican liberty bears striking similarities to Aristotle's best political regime-especially at the point of the middling class and its public role. Author Leslie Rubin, by holding America up to the mirror of Aristotle, explores these correspondences and their many implications for contemporary political life. Rubin begins with the Politics, in which Aristotle asserts the best political regime maintains stability by balancing oligarchic and democratic tendencies, and by treating free and relatively equal people as capable of a good life within a law-governed community that practices modest virtues. The second part of the book focuses upon America, showing how its founding opinion leaders prioritized the virtues of the middle in myriad ways. Rubin uncovers a surprising range of evidence, from moderate property holding by a large majority of the populace to citizen experience of both ruling and being ruled. She singles out the importance of the respect for the middle-class virtues of industriousness, sobriety, frugality, honesty, public spirit, and reasonable compromise. Rubin also highlights the educational institutions that foster the middle class-public education affords literacy, numeracy, and job skills, while civic education provides the history and principles of the nation as well as the rights and duties of all its citizens. Wise voices from the past, both of ancient Greece and postcolonial America, commend the middle class. The erosion of a middle class and the descent of political debate into polarized hysteria threaten a democratic republic. If the rule of the people is not to fall into demagoguery, then the body politic must remind itself of the requirements-both political and personal-of free, stable, and fair political life.
Current and authoritative, from a top scholar in the field.Media Politics encourages students to take a critical look at the relationship between media and politics by analyzing how the media influences American politics and how politicians use the media to get elected, stay in power, and achieve policy goals. Drawing on recent research on topics students care about―including new digital and social media and the polarization of politics―and the author’s specially curated online video archive, Media Politics remains the most current text for the course.
In diesem Lehrbuch werden zunächst die unterschiedlichen theoretischen Ansätze diskutiert, mit deren Hilfe man Politische Kommunikation analysieren und verstehen kann. Danach werden mit dem politischen System der Rahmen und mit Öffentlichkeit der Raum vorgestellt, in denen politische Kommunikation stattfindet. Weitere Themen sind die Medien und Medienstrukturen als Handlungsrahmen, die beteiligten Akteure und die politischen Prozesse, sowie die systematische Darstellung der Strategien, Instrumente und Formen der politischen PR. Abschließend werden zentrale Befunde zur Politk der Medien vorgestellt und politische Medieninhalte dabei als Handlungs- und Strukturergebnis begriffen.
Public opinion research demonstrates that citizens' opinions depend on elite rhetoric and interpersonal conversations. Yet, we continue to have little idea about how these two forces interact with one another. In this article, we address this issue by experimentally examining how interpersonal conversations affect (prior) elite framing effects. We find that conversations that include only common perspectives have no effect on elite framing, but conversations that include conflicting perspectives eliminate elite framing effects. We also introduce a new individual level moderator of framing effects-called "need to evaluate"-and we show that framing effects, in general, tend to be short-lived phenomena. In the end, we clarify when elites can and cannot use framing to influence public opinion and how interpersonal conversations affect this process.
A widely noted and oft-decried characteristic of campaigns in the United States is the tendency of the competing sides to talk past each other-to avoid engaging with one another on the same issues. We bring a massive database on statements by the major-party presidential candidates and other campaign spokespersons in the 1960 through 2000 elections to bear on the question of issue convergence. Far from the exception, a high degree of similarity in the issue emphases of the two sides appears to have been the norm in these campaigns. This result suggests the need to rethink some influential empirical, formal, and normative perspectives on campaigns.
A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.
How do party cues and policy information affect citizens’ political opinions? In direct democratic settings, this question is particularly relevant. Direct democratic campaigns are information-rich events which offer citizens the opportunity to learn detailed information about a policy. At the same time parties try to influence citizens’ decision procedure by publishing their own positions on the issue. The current debate on whether “party” or “policy” has more impact on political opinions has not yet yielded conclusive results. We examine the effect of policy arguments and party cues on vote intention in two Swiss referendum votes using panel survey data. To the simple dichotomous question of “party cues or policy information” we add an additional twist in asking how party cues affect the processing of policy information through processes of motivated reasoning. We find first that both, policy arguments and party cues, have an independent effect on vote intention. However, in a second part of the analysis, we find strong evidence for partisan-biased processing of policy arguments – that is, voters tend to align their arguments with their preferred party’s position. Our conclusions with regard to the democratic quality of these vote decisions are therefore ambivalent.
This article investigates the impact of the deliberative quality of online news items on argument repertoire. Participants in an online experiment (N = 557) read a news item that covers a local debate on underground CO2 storage. Two dimensions of deliberative quality are manipulated: justification, or the extent to which arguments in the news item are substantiated, and constructive debate climate, that is, the extent to which stakeholders are reported to work together toward a solution. The findings suggest that public opinion quality would be higher, if news media would better meet deliberative standards.
As pointed out in the introduction to this volume, Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet’s (1968 [1944]: 74) The People’s Choice has already pointed to significant campaign effects in that ‘political campaigns are important primarily because they activate latent predispositions’. More recently, the idea that campaigns help voters make decisions that are in line with their pre-existing predispositions has been picked up by other scholars, who provide considerable evidence that activation effects actually do occur during the course of campaigns. According to the activation model, during the campaign the citizens’ attention becomes more generally focused on politics and on the specific political issues highlighted, and the citizens learn a lot about the choices they have to make. How the context of the voters’ choice influences the activation process is, however, still a very open question.
The criticism that ordinary voters lack the necessary competence to make policy decisions persists despite the growth, popularity and implementation of direct democratic instruments throughout the democratic world. This article presents a novel measure of voters’ levels of justification as a possible, policy-specific, conceptualization of citizen competence in direct democracy. Using a unique dataset based on thirty-four ballot decisions in Switzerland, the study analyses the levels and correlates of citizen competence. The main findings are, first, that most voters do understand arguments about policies. Secondly, the political context
as well as
individual resources are important in determining voters’ competence. Finally, with regard to individual resources, motivation is strongly associated with justification levels, while the effect of ability is smaller than expected.
Mediensysteme können mit systemtheoretischen, ökonomischen und politökonomi-schen Ansätzen analysiert werden (vgl. Blum 2001: 8–9; Haas 1990: 1). Für die Schweiz hat Ulrich Saxer den systemtheoretischen Ansatz gewählt und jeweils untersucht, welche spezifischen leistungen das Mediensystem für das Gesamtsystem erbringt (vgl. Saxer 1990a, 1990b, 1993). Florian Fleck hat den ökonomischen Ansatz verwendet und wirtschaftliche Gesetzmäßigkeiten deutlich gemacht (vgl. Fleck 1987). Und Werner Meier hat mit dem Ansatz der politischen Ökonomie die Kosten der durch Globalisierung vorangetriebenen Kommerzialisierung und Medienkonzentration aufgezeigt (vgl. Meier 1997a, 1997b). Die Erforschung des schweizerischen Mediensystems leidet vor allem darunter, dass es bislang keine kontinuierliche offizielle Medienstatistik gibt (vgl. Rathgeb 1999: 163). Erst 2001 hat das Bundesamt für Statistik einen ersten Anlauf für eine Pressestatistik unternommen (vgl. Modetta 2001). Daten beschaffen daher einerseits die Werbewirtschaft für ihre eigenen Zwecke, anderseits die Wissenschaft, die aber teilweise vor schier unüberwindlichen Hürden steht, da viele Zahlen als „geheim“gelten (vgl. Bellwald/Hätten-schwiler/Würsch 1991; Rathgeb 1999). Die Strukturmerkmale und Strukturprobleme sind indessen mehrfach erforscht und dargestellt worden (vgl. Saxer 1990b; Bonfa-delli/Meier 1994; Marr u.a. 2001: 275–286; Blum 2001: 25–68). Zunehmend wendet sich die Forschung auch Problemen der Regulierung zu.
During the waning years of the 1950s, the Soviet Union repeatedly charged that American spyplanes were overflying their country. American spokesmen, including President Eisenhower, publicly denied the charges. On May 6, 1960, President Krushchev angrily announced that an American U2 spyplane had been shot down near Sverdlosk, 1,200 miles within Soviet borders. The U.S. State Department denied ever having ordered overflights; a NASA official reported that a U2 being used for high altitude atmospheric research may have encountered an oxygen failure and drifted across the Soviet border accidentally. On the following day the Kremlin published photographs of the wrecked plane with its surveillance equipment, and the State Department admitted that the U2 “probably” had been spying. NASA found that none of their planes were missing after all. The U2 affair became a major international incident and figured prominently in the early collapse of a four-power summit conference that summer.
Firmly rooting its argument in democratic and economic theory, the book argues that a more democratic distribution of communicative power within the public sphere and a structure that provides safeguards against abuse of media power provide two of three primary arguments for ownership dispersal. It also shows that dispersal is likely to result in more owners who will reasonably pursue socially valuable journalistic or creative objectives rather than a socially dysfunctional focus on the 'bottom line'. The middle chapters answer those agents, including the Federal Communication Commission, who favor 'deregulation' and who argue that existing or foreseeable ownership concentration is not a problem. The final chapter evaluates the constitutionality and desirability of various policy responses to concentration, including strict limits on media mergers.
This chapter pinpoints the most pressing problems in research on the effect of elite rhetoric on public opinion. It discusses the empirical and theoretical issues in four particular realms, namely the elite strategies of communications, the implications of political communications research on democratic theory, the conceptualization of communication effects, and the conditions that guide elite influence. The chapter offers a personal perspective on each of these realms, as well as examples and key questions that deserve further study.
