Fay Lomax Cook

Media and Agenda Setting: Effects on the Public, Interest Group Leaders, Policy Makers, and Policy

Using an experimental design built around a single media event, the authors explored the impact of the media upon the general public, policy makers, interest group leaders, and public policy. The results suggested that the media influenced views about issue importance among the general public and government policy makers. The study suggests, however, that it was not this change in public opinion which led to subsequent policy changes. Instead, policy change resulted from collaboration between journalists and government staff members.

A Democratic Polity?: Three Views of Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion in the United States

The capacity of a politicalsystem to respond to the preferences of its citizens is centralto democratic theory and practice. Research and theory about the impact of public opinion on policy making in the United States, however, have produced decidedly mixed views. A number of analysts find a strong and persisting impact of public opinion on public policy. Others reject the idea that the public has consistent views at all or, even if it does, that those views exercise much influence over policy making. In this article, we evaluate the state of the art in the debates over the opinion-policy link in the rapidly growing body of research on public opinion and policy making. After an extensive review and critique of the theoretical and empirical research developing “strong” and “weak” effect views of the impact of opinion on policy, we conclude that a third “contingent” view, highlighting the historical, institutional, and political contingencies, provides the best understanding of the impact of opinion on policy.

THE IMPACT OF INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING ON PUBLIC OPINION AND POLICYMAKING TARGETING TOXIC WASTE

This article reports the fourth in a continuing series of case studies that explore the impact of news media investigative journalism on the general public, policymakers, and public pol- icy. The media disclosures in this field experiment had limited effects on the general public but were influential in changing the attitudes of policymakers. The study describes how changes in public policymaking resulted from collaboration between journal- ists and government officials. The authors develop a model that is a beginning step toward specifying the conditions under which media investigations influence public attitudes and agendas. This article reports the fourth in a series of field experiments that test the agenda-setting hypothesis (McCombs and Shaw, 1972) for news

Trusting What You Know: Information, Knowledge, and Confidence in Social Security

Can public trust in government be increased by expanding knowledge of the activities government already performs? This study takes advantage of a naturally occurring experiment—the distribution of personal statements by the Social Security Administration— to examine the impact of increased domain-specific information on the public’s knowledge and confidence. Analysis of a large Gallup survey of attitudes toward Social Security finds that recipients of personal Social Security Statements gained more knowledge of, and confidence in, Social Security than nonrecipients after controlling for individual differences. These results suggest that citizens’ evaluations of government institutions echo, in part, the quality and quantity of information distributed to them. The implication for future research on political trust and confidence is to confirm the importance of expanding analysis from global to specific objects of evaluation.

Citizens’, Scientists’, and Policy Advisors’ Beliefs about Global Warming:

Numerous factors shape citizens’ beliefs about global warming, but there is very little research that compares the views of the public with key actors in the policymaking process. We analyze data from simultaneous and parallel surveys of (1) the U.S. public, (2) scientists who actively publish research on energy technologies in the United States, and (3) congressional policy advisors and find that beliefs about global warming vary markedly among them. Scientists and policy advisors are more likely than the public to express a belief in the existence and anthropogenic nature of global warming. We also find ideological polarization about global warming in all three groups, although scientists are less polarized than the public and policy advisors over whether global warming is actually occurring. Alarmingly, there is evidence that the ideological divide about global warming gets significantly larger according to respondents’ knowledge about politics, energy, and science.

Evaluating the Rhetoric of Crisis: A Case Study of Criminal Victimization of the Elderly

This article begins by documenting claims that victimization of the elderly has recently reached crisis proportions. Four definitions of crisis are offered, and the social science evidence relating victimization to each of these definitions is presented. It does not seem (1) that the elderly are victimized more often than persons in other age groups, (2) that the rate of increase in their victimization is greater than for other age groups, or (3) that they suffer more often than other age groups from violent crimes, though it is not yet known whether they suffer more physical or financial harm when they are victimized. It does seem (4) that the elderly fear crime more than younger persons and may be at home more often. Thus, the data that are presently available suggest that the victimization problem of elderly Americans can be more properly identified as a problem of fear rather than of actual victimization. The policy implications of this particular diagnosis of the problem are briefly discussed.

Who Deliberates? Discursive Participation in America

Much contemporary analysis of American democracy sounds the alarm that citizens are retreating from the political process. Voter turnout appears to have declined over the past thirty years, with this trend most notable among the young. Many public attitudes and opinions about candidates, parties, elected officials, and the campaign and policy processes, more generally, all show disturbing signs of decay (Texiera, 1992; Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993; Patterson, 2002). Similar trends can be seen in several measures of citizens’ cognitive and affective engagement in politics and government, as well as their sense of government officials’ responsiveness to their wants and wishes (Texiera, 1992; Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993; Erikson and Tedin, 2001; Patterson, 2002). More ominously, many observers of American public life conclude that low or declining participation in the electoral process reflects a broader civic disengagement that is rooted in the erosion of community networks and the decline in “social capital” (Rahn and Transue, 1998; Putnam, 2000), or new elite strategies geared toward the affluent and professionals (Skocpol, 2003).

Agenda Setting and the Rise and Fall of Policy Issues: The Case of Criminal Victimization of the Elderly

In nearly all studies of federal agenda-setting processes, the focus is on how issues achieve prominence on policy agendas. Seldom dealt with is how some of those issues then disappear, without any substantial action being taken on them. In this paper the life course of a single policy issue—criminal victimization of the elderly—is examined, and the forces that caused this issue to rise and fall on the Congressional policy agenda are analyzed. Abstracted models of those processes—entitled the convergent-voice and the divergent-voice models of issue ascendence and decline—may prove fruitful for understanding the complete life course of many similar issues.

Public support for social security

Abstract This article reports the results of a nationally representative survey of 1,209 Americans that examines their support for Social Security and six other major social welfare programs. It probes the extent to which members of the public are willing to demonstrate their support, the differences in support among population subgroups, and the extent to which perceptions of Social Security and Social Security recipients predict overall support for Social Security. The authors find high levels of support among members of the public, including a willingness both to write letters to congress members and to pay higher taxes. Some groups of citizens—especially blacks and those who classify themselves as liberals—are more supportive than others, but the differences are not great and contribute little toward explaining the variance in support. The perceptions that the program makes a worthwhile contribution to society and that recipients have no alternative sources of income other than Social Security contribute the most toward predicting overall support for Social Security.

Support for the American Welfare State: The Views of Congress and the Public.

What is the state of the American welfare state? After half a century of growth and development, social welfare programs came under attack during the 1980s, generating widespread uncertainty about their future. Yet the welfare state weathered the assault. Cook and Barrett argue that social welfare in America is firmly rooted and that the American welfare state is here to stay. They attribute this to a strong reservoir of support on the part of both policymakers and the general public. Support for the American Welfare State asks how much support there is, who is most supportive, and why there are differences in levels of support. The authors report the results of a survey of attitudes of both the general public and members of the U.S. House of Representatives about Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamps, and Unemployment Compensation-seven of the largest programs in the American welfare state.