Jeffrey Lyons

The Roots of Citizens’ Knowledge of State Politics

Do citizens have the information they need to hold state politicians accountable? We consider what people know about state politics and whether knowledge of state government is rooted in the same factors that explain knowledge of national matters. We argue that while knowledge of national politics is rooted within individual dispositions like education and political interest, knowledge of state politics depends on the political climate of the state. When state political environments provide more information and greater incentives to become informed, people are more knowledgeable about state matters. Even if citizens are not always well versed in matters of state politics, they appear to monitor the business of the states. Citizens are most knowledgeable about state politics in the cases where information is arguably most important—when state governments are underperforming, when political competition is high, and when the political parties in the state are ideologically divided.

Where You Live and Who You Know Political Environments, Social Pressures, and Partisan Stability

Do the social pressures individuals encounter from the political environments they reside in affect the stability of their partisanship? Are some citizens able to insulate themselves from such pressure through the composition of their discussion networks? While partisanship is widely regarded as stable, I consider whether it is influenced by such factors. I use panel data from the 1992-1996 and 2000-2004 American National Election Studies to address this, constructing a measure of partisan context at the county level. I find that those residing in a partisan minority county are more likely to change their party identification and that as the degree of incongruence rises, individuals become increasingly likely to change their identification across panel waves. These findings demonstrate the powerful effect of contextual social forces on an otherwise stable and enduring attachment such as partisanship and suggest that partisan socialization is a process that extends beyond an individual’s childhood.

Emotion, Motivation, and Social Information Seeking About Politics

Do citizens engage in disagreeable discussion to acquire novel information about politics, or does such behavior reflect more social/expressive motives? In this article, we use emotion to illuminate why citizens would engage in political discussion across lines of difference. Advancing hypotheses informed by affective intelligence theory, we use two data sets from the American National Election Studies to examine the conditions under which disagreeable discussion is consistent with different models of political discussion. Our findings are twofold. First, overall we find mixed evidence to support information seeking motives. Disagreeable discussion—regardless of conceptualization and operationalization—is poorly predicted by emotions associated with information seeking (e.g., fear), while it is better structured by emotions associated with expression and participation (e.g., enthusiasm). Second, leveraging available temporal information, we find evidence that, although only suggestive, is consistent with emotion leading to disagreeable discussion (rather than disagreement leading to emotion). We discuss the utility and limitations of using emotion to examine interpersonal discussion networks, situating our effort in a broader research agenda on social influence.

Who Do Voters Blame for Policy Failure? Information and the Partisan Assignment of Blame

How do people assign blame in the wake of significant government failures? If the role of the citizenry in a representative democracy is to discipline elected officials for failing to meet collective expectations, then this question is of paramount importance. Much research suggests that the base tendency of citizens is to simply blame the other party—a normatively concerning outcome. However, some argue that information, especially that from expert and nonpartisan sources, may push citizens to overlook their party affiliation and assign blame in a more performance-based fashion. Using an experimental design, we test this possibility, manipulating whether there is unified or divided government, the partisanship of key actors, and the nature of expert information that participants receive during a hypothetical budget crisis at the state level. We find strong evidence that party weighs heavily on individuals’ minds when assigning blame, as expected. More importantly, we find that nonpartisan expert information about the situation does not live up to its potential to sway partisans from their priors. Rather, unbiased information appears to be used as a weapon—ignored when it challenges partisan expectations and used to magnify blame of the other party when it conforms with them.

Personality, Interpersonal Disagreement, and Electoral Information

Interpersonal disagreement has been linked to a variety of democratic outcomes, and classic theories of social influence place it at the heart of opinion formation. We examine the relationship between exposure to disagreement and information seeking during elections, while developing and testing a theory of heterogeneous effects based on recent work on personality and discussion (e.g., Gerber et al. 2012). Using a simulated campaign experiment (Lau and Redlawsk 2006) and data from the 2008–9 ANES panel study, we find consistent evidence that personality conditions responses to disagreement in expected ways—it enhances effects for those with certain traits, while suppressing it for those with others. We close by reflecting on this pattern of results, discussing broader implications while moving toward a more general theory of social influence.

Living With Inequality: Neighborhood Income Diversity and Perceptions of the Income Gap

This article explores whether the places where people live—and specifically the diversity of incomes where people live—influence views about income inequality. Using a unique survey of New York City that contains geographic identifiers and questions about attitudes toward inequality, coupled with a rich array of Census data, we assess the degree to which the income diversity within spatially customized neighborhood boundaries influences beliefs about inequality. We find consistent evidence that attitudes about inequality are influenced by the places where people live—those who are exposed to more income diversity near their homes perceive larger gaps between the rich and everybody else, and are more likely to believe that the gap should be smaller. Moreover, this effect appears to be especially pronounced among those with lower educational attainment and at either end of the income spectrum.

Political Knowledge and Policy Representation in the States

Political knowledge is central to the success of representative democracy. However, public policy has been shown to follow public opinion even despite low levels of political information in the electorate. Does this mean that political knowledge is irrelevant to policy representation? We consider whether knowledgeable electorates are better able to achieve representative policy outcomes. Using the heterogeneity in the responsiveness of government across the states, we consider how state political knowledge moderates the connection between citizen ideology and the policy outcomes of state government. Using national surveys and multilevel logit with post-stratification, we develop measures of collective political knowledge in the states. We test whether knowledgeable electorates are more likely to secure representative political outcomes than less politically informed constituencies. We find that as state political knowledge increases, so does the correspondence between the preferences of the public and the ideological tenor of state policy outcomes.

The Effect of Redistricting Commissions on District Bipartisanship and Member Ideology

Abstract Reformers advocate the use of commissions rather than legislatures to redistrict as a way of promoting less partisan districts and ideologically moderate congressional members. Much of the evidence in political science suggests that gerrymandering is not a cause of congressional polarization, but whether or not commissions produce different types of districts or members remains an important and unanswered question, especially now that many states have adopted reforms. This article examines whether commissions reduce district partisanship or ideological extremity using time-series-cross-sectional data. We find that bipartisan districts promote member moderation, but there is no evidence that commissions have distinct effects on districts or members as compared to districts drawn by legislatures, consistent with the notion that limiting gerrymandering is not a solution for polarization. These conclusions call into question the appropriateness of redistricting reform, especially when one considers the undemocratic nature of commissions.

Moral dialogs and public opinion research

Abstract Etzioni’s article is thought provoking, and contains a series of arguments that would be useful lines of inquiry for scholars of public opinion. In many ways, these ideas link to, and can enrich existing areas of research on opinion formation, opinion change, and political behavior more broadly. Specifically, the elite vs. mass nature of these dialogs, the extent to which they are actual political discussions, and the impact of polarization on them are avenues where these ideas can inform broader understandings of public opinion, and vice versa. Etzioni’s arguments about the role of morals in political discussion and as agents of opinion change warrant further inquiry.