Erik Peterson

How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation

Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.

How Content Preferences Limit the Reach of Voting Aids

Voters are often uninformed about the political candidates they choose between. Governments, media outlets, and civic organizations devote substantial resources to correcting these knowledge deficits by creating tools to provide candidate information to voters. Despite the widespread production of these aids, it remains unclear who they reach. We collect validated measures of online voter guide use for more than 40,000 newspaper readers during a state primary election. We show this newspaper-produced voter guide was primarily used by individuals with high levels of political interest and knowledge, a finding in contrast to earlier hypotheses that providing guides directly to voters online would reduce disparities in use based on political interest. A field experiment promoting the voter guide failed to diminish these consumption gaps. These results show that the same content preferences that contribute to an unequal distribution of political knowledge also impede the effectiveness of subsequent efforts to close knowledge gaps.

The Electoral Consequences of Issue Frames

What happens after issue frames shape public opinion? We offer an account of the downstream effects of issue frames on candidate choice. We then use three studies combining issue framing experiments with conjoint candidate choice experiments to directly assess these downstream effects. Despite an ideal setting for elite influence on public opinion, we find that frames ultimately have modest effects on how the public later evaluates politicians. Our theoretical framework highlights two sources of this disconnect. Frame-induced opinion change is only one component, often outweighed by other factors, in candidate choice, and the issues most amenable to framing are the least relevant for evaluating candidates. This introduces a new consideration into debates about the political consequences of issue frames. Even after they change the public’s policy opinions, issue frames may still have limited implications for other political outcomes.

Costly Values: The Limited Benefits and Potential Costs of Targeted Policy Justifications

Can politicians use targeted messages to offset position taking that would otherwise reduce their public support? We examine the effect of a politician’s justification for their tax policy stance on public opinion and identify limits on the ability of justifications to generate leeway for incongruent position taking on this issue. We draw on political communication research to establish expectations about the heterogeneous effects of justifications that employ either evidence or values based on whether or not constituents agree with the position a politician takes. In two survey experiments, we find small changes in support in response to these types of messages among targeted groups, but rule out large benefits for politicians to selectively target policy justifications toward subsets of the public. We also highlight a potential cost to selective messaging by showing that when these targeted messages reach unintended audiences they can backfire and reduce a candidate’s support.

Evaluating the Substantive Significance of Linear Fixed Effects Regression Results

The counterfactuals researchers commonly use to assess the substantive significance of linear fixed effects regression results do not account for the manner in which these models are estimated. Importantly, including fixed effects in a regression means that the model is estimated based on the often narrow within-unit distribution of an independent variable. Despite this, counterfactuals are often motivated with features of an independent variables overall distribution (e.g., its range or standard deviation). Using simulated data and two case studies, we show this approach has two consequences. First, it inflates the substantive significance of any variables assessed in this way. Second, these counterfactuals are unreliable and exhibit a high degree of model dependence. We recommend instead that researchers assess the substantive significance of fixed effects regression results with counterfactuals based on the within-unit distribution of an independent variable. We provide an R function to implement this recommendation.

U.S. National Security Policy and the Soviet Union: Persistent Regularities and Extreme Contingencies. By Stoll Richard J.. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. 256p.

Foreword Political Change and Participation in the Gulf Cooperation Council States Kuwait Bahrain The Consultative Councils of the Lower Gulf Changing Expectations and the Role of the National Councils Index