Donald R. Kinder

Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy

Black and white Americans disagree consistently and often substantially in their views on national policy. This racial divide is most pronounced on policies that intrude conspicuously on the fortunes of blacks and whites, but it is also apparent on a wide array of social welfare issues where race is less obviously in play. Our analysis takes up the question of why blacks and whites differ so markedly, distin- guishing among four alternative inter- pretations: one centers attention on underlying differences of class, an- other on political principles, a third on social identity, and the fourth on audi- ence. Our results are complicated but coherent. We discuss their implica- tions for the meaning of group inter- est, speculate on the conditions un- der which the racial divide might close (or widen) in the foreseeable future, and suggest why we should not wish racial differences in opinion to disappear.

Making Sense of Issues Through Media Frames: Understanding the Kosovo Crisis

How do people make sense of politics? Integrating empirical results in communication studies on framing with models of comprehension in cognitive psychology, we argue that people understand complicated event sequences by organizing information in a manner that conforms to the structure of a good story. To test this claim, we carried out a pair of experiments. In each, we presented people with news reports on the 1999 Kosovo crisis that were framed in story form, either to promote or prevent U.S. intervention. Consistent with expectations, we found that framing news about the crisis as a story affected what people remembered, how they structured what they remembered, and the opinions they expressed on the actions government should take.

Terror and Ethnocentrism: Foundations of American Support for the War on Terrorism

The events of 9/11 set in motion a massive reordering of U.S. policy. We propose that the American publics response to this redirection in policy derives, in part, from ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism—“prejudice, broadly conceived”—refers to the commonplace human tendency to partition the social world into virtuous ingroups and nefarious outgroups. Support for the war on terrorism, undertaken against a strange and shadowy enemy, should hold special appeal for Americans with an ethnocentric turn of mind. To see if this is so, we analyze the panel component of the 2000–2002 National Election Study. We find that ethnocentrism powerfully underwrites support for the war on terrorism, across a variety of tests and specifications, and the strength of the relationship between ethnocentrism and opinion is influenced in part by the extraordinary events of 9/11. Ethnocentrism is easily found among Americans, but its relevance and potency for politics depends, we suggest, upon circumstance.

Presidents, Prosperity, and Public Opinion

A president skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to preside over a healthy economy is rewarded with public support. This paper examines two conceptions of the individual citizen that might underlie this relationship. A presidents popularity might decline when economic times are bad because citizens in effect blame him for their personal hardships-the pocketbook citizen hypothesis-or because they see the president as failing to cope adequately with national economic problems, quite apart from the economic dislocations of private life-the sociotropic citizen hypothesis. Across a variety of tests, results from national surveys covering the Nixon, Ford, and Carter presidencies consistently supported the sociotropic hypothesis. The paper concludes by suggesting several promising explanations for the findings, and by exploring their normative implications. Donald R. Kinder is Associate Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Psychology, Yale University. Data for this paper were provided principally by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, University of Michigan. The consortium, of course, bears no responsibility for the interpretations or conclusions here. For their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript the author would like to thank Richard Brody, Morris Fiorina, W. Russell Neuman, Laurie Rhodebeck, Janet A. Weiss, and particularly D. Roderick Kiewiet and an anonymous referee. Public Opimon Quarterly Vol. 45:1-21 ? 1981 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/81/0045-1/

Belief systems today

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Politics and the Life Cycle

Abstract My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converses “Belief Systems” by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converses notion of “nonattitudes,” and suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of Converses analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the “average voter” is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converses time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converses analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens’ capacity and interest, they might fall back on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call “group‐centrism.” And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well.

Interviewing Changes Attitudes—Sometimes

The study of politics and the life cycle began with a rather single-minded focus on childhood and the family—on the idea, as Tocqueville famously put it, that the entire person could be “seen in the cradle of the child.” Politics does begin in childhood, and parents do influence their offspring, but change takes place over the entire span of life. I take up the early emergence of partisanship and essentialism, the formation of generations, politically consequential transitions in adulthood, and the rising of politics and its final decline.

Ethnic Differences in Beliefs About Control.

DOES THE MERE asking of questions motivate a respondent to form attitudes which were previously absent or to change the direction or intensity of extant attitudes? The answer to this question is important in many applications of the survey method, but particularly in panel surveys in which respondents are asked the same questions on two or more occasions (waves). If interview effects exist, they pose important ethical and methodological problems for survey researchers. If, under certain conditions, interviewing changes attitudes and the behavior they mediate, the survey researcher assumes the role of an agent, as well as a reporter, of social change. For example, in the course of studying racial or intergroup attitudes, the researcher may make certain issues salient or may polarize socially undesirable attitudes merely by asking race-related questions.

A Collision of Principles? Free Expression, Racial Equality and the Prohibition of Racist Speech

A set of widely used measures of personal control taken from Rotters (1966) internal-external scale failed to demonstrate an adequate degree of internal consistency for the Black subsample of a survey of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The unreliability of the personal control dimension among Blacks was pervasive: it was present within tall ge and educational groupings; it occurred regardless of the particular interviewer involved; it was equally prominent in both sexes; and, finally, it recurred in most respects in a comparable survey. Such unreliability was specific to Blacks: the personal control dimension did show satisfactory internal consistency for corresponding subsamples of Anglos and Chlcanos. The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed, and their ramifications for social indicator research noted.

Books of the Month

Freedom of expression is celebrated as one of the glories of the American political system. But does all speech deserve immunity? In particular, should speech designed to vilify or degrade on the basis of race be protected? Opinions on racist speech are complicated because they must accommodate two fundamental democratic principles that operate at cross purposes: freedom of expression, which implies support for racist speech, and racial equality, which implies the opposite. Using data from the 1990 General Social Survey, we examine how Americans resolve this conflict. Our major finding is that the principle of free expression dominates the principle of racial equality. What contemporary legal scholars regard as a hard case entailing a collision of democratic principles, ordinary Americans seem to interpret as a straightforward application of just a single principle. This result mirrors and perhaps reflects a nearly century-long and mostly lop-sided debate favouring free speech among American elites.