Christopher A. Cooper

MONEY WELL SPENT? An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Advertorials on Citizen Opinion

Organized interests employ a number of tactics to get what they want. One of the least understood of these tactics is running advertorials—issue advocacy advertisements that are designed to influence citizen opinion. Using a pretest-posttest control group experimental design, the authors examine the effects of advertorials on individual opinions. The authors find that advertorials have an effect on individual opinions but that their effects are different than those of traditional advertisements. Specifically, after examining the effects of an actualExxonMobil advertorial that appeared on the pages of The New York Times, the authors find that advertorials substantially affect levels of individual issue salience but do not affect individual perceptions of the organized interests that run them. The authors also find that those with relatively high levels of trust in the media are more likely than those with lower levels of trust to be influenced by advertorials.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the M5-50: An Implementation of the International Personality Item Pool Item Set

Goldbergs International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999) provides researchers with public-domain, free-access personality measurement scales that are proxies of well-established published scales. One of the more commonly used IPIP sets employs 50 items to measure the 5 broad domains of the 5-factor model, with 10 items per factor. The M5-50 (McCord, 2002) is a specific ordering and presentation of this 50-item set. Using data from a sample of 760 faculty, staff, and students at a midsized university, the authors assessed the reliability and construct validity of the M5-50. Cronbachs alphas on the 5 scales ranged from acceptable to excellent. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated reasonably good model fit. Researchers who wish to measure personality would be well advised to consider using the M5-50.

Evaluating the College Sophomore Problem: The Case of Personality and Politics

ABSTRACT College sophomores feature prominently in social scientific research but are frequently criticized for providing unrepresentative, invalid, and unreliable data. Using the case of personality and politics, the present authors evaluated those critiques, concluding that college sophomores are not representative of the general adult population on all 5 factors of personality. Despite this limitation, analyses show that the relationship between personality and political opinions is virtually identical for college students and a comparison group of adults. Further, a range of reliability statistics suggests that college students provide reliable data on personality. College students are not a panacea for the problems of participant recruiting, but they should not be discounted as unreliable and invalid, either. In many cases, the so-called “college-sophomore problem” is not a problem.

Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions - Toward a New Measure

Judicial behavior is contingent on case salience. Unfortunately, existing measures of case salience have met with some skepticism. After discussing the characteristics of an ideal measure of salience, the authors construct a new measure of case salience. This new measure expands on prior studies by examining coverage in four diverse newspapers and includes coverage anywhere in the paper, instead of concentrating on front-page coverage only. By developing this new measure, the authors uncover patterns about national media coverage of the Court and provide a potentially more useful measure of case salience.

Legislative Representation in a Single-Member versus Multiple-Member District System: The Arizona State Legislature

Most research on legislative decisionmaking has focused on legislatures with single-member district systems, but much less is known about legislatures with multiple-member district systems. This study compares a multiple-member legislative chamber, the Arizona House of Representatives, to a single-member system, the Arizona Senate. First, we examine the ideological preferences across the two chambers, and we find that the House system produces more ideological extremism than the Senate. Second, we test a model of legislative decisionmaking that employs constituency variables, legislator attributes and ideology. We find that constituency characteristics are significant in the Senate, but in the House ideology dominates. The combination of ideological extremism and its greater importance in decisionmaking in the House suggests powerful effects of the multiple-member district system.

Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South

We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed’s classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence of the words “Dixie” and “Southern” in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of “Dixie” have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word “Southern” has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative number of blacks in the population provides the most consistent explanation of regional identity. Population density has also emerged as a significant predictor of regional identification in more recent time periods. These findings contribute to the literature on regional identification, the politics of naming and the sociology of the South.

Taking Personality Seriously: The Five-Factor Model and Public Management

This study documents the use of personality assessment in public administration and examines the relationship between personality and job outcomes among public managers. The limitations and problems with the most popular personality assessment framework, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, are discussed. The authors then present the five-factor model of personality as an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is widely accepted within the field of psychology. Using a survey of public administrators in three states, it is demonstrated that public managers are aware of personality assessment, use it in their jobs, and are generally convinced of its efficacy. The authors also present the results of personality profiles of public managers demonstrating the usefulness of all five domains of the five-factor model of personality for understanding key outcome measures such as job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviors.

The Content of Political Participation: Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them

rrEi Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information con tained in a state voterfile.

Media Tactics in the State Legislature

Do state legislators use media tactics in policy-making? If so, which legislators, how often, and to what ends? Despite a number of recent studies asserting the importance of the media in American politics, we still have not answered these basic questions. Using a survey of state legislators from California, Georgia, and Iowa, I find that state legislators frequently use media tactics in policy-making, although they still prefer traditional forms of legislating. While the bulk of their media tactics is aimed at constituents, state legislators also target policy elites. This suggests that state legislators use the media for more than just aiding in their re-election. Finally, my analyses suggest that the frequency with which legislators use media tactics is largely a function of the resources at their disposal.

Personality and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from a Sample of Street-Level Bureaucrats

Job satisfaction is an important component of bureaucratic success. In this article, we build on the emerging literature on the five-factor model of personality and argue that basic personality characteristics can help us understand why certain employees are more satisfied with their jobs than others. Multivariate analysis of personality and job satisfaction data from over 1,000 public servants supports this argument. We conclude with a discussion about how personality can add to our theoretical understanding of public personnel management, and help public managers identify applicants who are likely to be satisfied with work in the public sector.