Jennifer Jerit

Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship

Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, wide-spread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.

Are Survey Experiments Externally Valid

Researchers use survey experiments to establish causal effects in descriptively representative samples, but concerns remain regarding the strength of the stimuli and the lack of realism in experimental settings. We explore these issues by comparing three national survey experiments on Medicare and immigration with contemporaneous natural experiments on the same topics. The survey experiments reveal that providing information increases political knowledge and alters attitudes. In contrast, two real-world government announcements had no discernable effects, except among people who were exposed to the same facts publicized in the mass media. Even among this exposed subsample, treatment effects were smaller and sometimes pointed in the opposite direction. Methodologically, our results suggest the need for caution when extrapolating from survey experiments. Substantively, we find that many citizens are able to recall factual information appearing in the news but may not adjust their beliefs and opinions in response to this information.

The Political Environment and Citizen Competence

care reform, we find that performance depends heavily on environmental conditions. A combination of general information with increased motivation to act responsibly improves aggregate performance. An extremely favorable informational environment not only enhances performance, but it even eliminates the effects of individual differences in education and political sophistication. The analysis points toward reforming structures that shape the political environment as the most plausible route to improved democratic governance. rom the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, the study of citizen decision making focused almost exclusively on the individual citizens cognitive capabilities and political knowledge. With few exceptions, this research reached the familiar verdict that most citizens know little about politics, do not care to know much about it, and often make ill-considered and superficial judgments (Converse 1964;Sniderman 1993). An important corollary was that the well educated and politically sophisticated-the cognitively engaged, to use Zallers (1992) term-outperform other citizens on judgment tasks (see Luskin 1987 for an excellent review). More recently, some scholars have argued that the political environment serves as an informational crutch that assists citizens when they are making political judgments (Lupia 2000). The optimistic outlook of the political-heuristics literature, in particular, rests on the view that the environment gives people simple judgment tasks to perform and generally provides reliable cues to help citizens perform them (Carmines and Kuklinski 1990; Lupia 1994; Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Mondak 1993; Popkin 1991; Sniderman 2000; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; Wittman 1995). From this perspective, the cognitively highly engaged still outperform the less engaged, but even the latter usually make reasonable choices. Critics contend that the environment of contemporary American politics provides considerably less assistance than champions of heuristics have portrayed (see Bartels 1996; Kuklinski and Quirk 2000; and Luskin 2000 for critiques). Nevertheless, the idea that political environments might enhance citizen performance is an important advance in public opinion research.

Partisan Perceptual Bias and the Information Environment

Perceptual bias occurs when beliefs deviate from reality. Democrats and Republicans are thought to be especially susceptible to this type of biased-information processing. And yet we know little about the pervasiveness of perceptual bias outside the domain of ‘‘performance issues’’ (e.g., unemployment, inflation) or how individuallevel partisan motivation interacts with the information environment. We investigate these issues in two studies that examine perceptual bias on a wide range of political topics spanning two decades. Using survey data as well as an experiment with diverse subjects, we demonstrate that people perceive the world in a manner consistent with their political views. The result is a selective pattern of learning in which partisans have higher levels of knowledge for facts that confirm their world view and lower levels of knowledge for facts that challenge them. This basic relationship is exaggerated on topics receiving high levels of media coverage.

How Words Do the Work of Politics: Moral Foundations Theory and the Debate over Stem Cell Research

Moral considerations underlie partisan and ideological identification along with a variety of political attitudes, yet we know little about how elites strategically appeal to the public’s moral intuitions. Building on Moral Foundations Theory, we investigate the causes and consequences of elite moral rhetoric in the debate over stem cell research. Through content analysis of 12 years of coverage in the New York Times, we find that proponents and opponents of stem cell research engage in distinctive patterns of moral rhetoric and place different weight on the foundations. We also demonstrate that the prevalence of moral rhetoric increases during periods of legislative activity, and we find some evidence that moral rhetoric increases in response to the opposing side’s use of moral language. Merging our content analysis with seven national surveys, the analysis shows that moral rhetoric has had a substantial effect on public attitudes regarding the fundamental considerations underpinning the debate.

The Question(s) of Political Knowledge

Political knowledge is a central concept in the study of public opinion and political behavior. Yet what the field collectively believes about this construct is based on dozens of studies using different indicators of knowledge. We identify two theoretically relevant dimensions: a temporal dimension that corresponds to the time when a fact was established and a topical dimension that relates to whether the fact is policy-specific or general. The resulting typology yields four types of knowledge questions. In an analysis of more than 300 knowledge items from late in the first decade of the 2000s, we examine whether classic findings regarding the predictors of knowledge withstand differences across types of questions. In the case of education and the mass media, the mechanisms for becoming informed operate differently across question types. However, differences in the levels of knowledge between men and women are robust, reinforcing the importance of including gender-relevant items in knowledge batteries.

Internet News: Is It a Replacement for Traditional Media Outlets?

The Internet has changed the political world, but its effect on media usage patterns is not well understood. In particular, previous research suggests no clear answer to the question of whether the Internet is a substitute for or a complement to traditional media outlets. We contribute to this literature by applying theories from ecology—namely, the theory of the niche—to examine competition between new and older media. Our study is the first to test hypotheses derived from this theory on a large, national sample. The analysis indicates that people are replacing traditional outlets, especially newspapers, with the Internet. At the same time, however, replacement is not a widespread phenomenon as yet. We find important replacement differences across newspapers and radio on the one hand and television on the other. We also report some of the first evidence regarding the attitudinal consequences of replacement behavior.

Understanding the Knowledge Gap: The Role of Experts and Journalists

Decades of research attest to the strong positive association between an individuals socioeconomic status (SES) and his or her level of political knowledge. This study shows that differences in how the media cover political issues influence the distribution of knowledge in society by altering the strength of that relationship. I combine individual-level survey data with media content analysis to examine the variation in knowledge across more than four dozen issues. In a series of three studies, I show that higher levels of expert commentary in news stories reinforce SES-based differences in political knowledge. By contrast, greater levels of contextual coverage diminish those differences. These findings have important implications for how the mass media report on political developments and how they might better encourage citizen engagement with the political world.

Reform, Rescue, or Run Out of Money? Problem Definition in the Social Security Reform Debate

This study examines the extent and consequences of press independence in the realm of problem definition. Beginning with an experiment, the analysis shows that many of the words and phrases used in the 1998 to 1999 Social Security reform debate were misleading in the sense that they caused citizens to draw incorrect inferences about the financial problems facing Social Security. Next, the study compares the prevalence of these same expressions in the mass media and in transcripts of political speeches and press releases. Contrary to theories of indexing, reporters and journalists exhibited considerable independence in how they described Social Security’s financial problems. Ironically, however, this meant that media accounts had more misleading rhetoric than the actual statements of government officials.

Redistricting Principles and Racial Representation

How do traditional redistricting principles—contiguity, communities of interest, political subdivisions, incumbent protection, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, preservation of district core, and compactness—affect racial minority representation in congressional districts? Using data from the 2001–02 redistricting process, we find that compactness is the only principle that significantly affects minority representation, both in terms of majority-minority districts and minority influence districts, but these effects are contingent on the size of the minority community and extent of racial segregation in a state. Two other principles, Section 5 pre-clearance and protecting political subdivisions, improve minority representation in a more limited way. Thus, race-neutral redistricting criteria like the compactness principle, can dramatically affect the racial composition of the resulting districts and, thereby, affect minority representation.