John G. Geer

DO OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS MEASURE “SALIENT” ISSUES?

Closed-ended questions dominate most interview schedules. Yet the almost exclusive use of this form did not arise because open-ended questions, its major competitor, proved to be weak indicators of public opinion. Instead, responses from open-ended questions proved more difficult and expensive to code and analyze than those from closed-ended questions. Al- though such practical concerns are important, the real task of survey researchers is to measure public opinion accurately. Us- ing an experimental design, this article tests whether open-ended questions measure the important concerns of respondents-one of the long-claimed advantages of this format. The results, on balance, show that open-ended comments reflect such concerns, suggesting that pollsters may want to include more of these ques- tions in their surveys of public opinion.

WHAT DO OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS MEASURE?

Open-ended questions are frequently used by survey researchers to measure public opinion. Some scholars, however, have doubts about how accurately these kinds of questions measure the views of the public. A chief concern is that the questions tap, in part, peoples ability to articulate a response, not their underlying attitudes. This paper tests whether this concern is warranted. Using open-ended questions from the Center for Political Studies, I show that almost all people respond to open-ended questions. The few individuals who do not respond appear uninterested in the specific question posed, not unable to answer such questions in general. These findings should increase our confidence in work of scholars who have relied on open-ended questions. Different methods have been used by survey researchers to measure the political attitudes of the American public. One commonly used method is the open-ended question, which allows individuals to respond to the query in their own words. Many scholars contend that by allowing citizens to respond freely to the inquiry, the question is better able to measure their salient concerns than the close-ended format that forces people to choose among a fixed set of responses (see, for instance, RePass, 1971; Kelley, 1983; Wattenberg, 1984).1 While there are advantages to the open-ended format, criticisms have also been made against it. Among these is the belief that some citizens fail to JOHN G. GEER teaches at Arizona State University. The author thanks Pat Kenney and Tom Rochon for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Data used in this article were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The author bears sole responsibility for the analyses and interpretations

Creating impressions: An experimental investigation of political advertising on television

Using an experimental design, this paper addresses a few basic, but important, questions about the influence of televised political advertising. How effective are different kinds of political spots in creating impressions of a candidate among viewers? Do negative ads work better than positive ads in creating favorable impressions? Do spots that focus on issues create more favorable impressions that spots that stress the traits of a candidate? Do two ads work better than one ad in creating impressions? Can the effects of a spot be undercut by a follow-up advertisement from the opposition? This paper offers some tentative answers to these questions.

The News Media and the Rise of Negativity in Presidential Campaigns

Negative ads have become increasingly common in presidential campaigns. Figure 1 well illustrates this point (see also West 2009). The upcoming 2012 elections will almost surely augment this upward trend of more and more negativity. In fact, with the emergence of Super Pacs, the share of attack ads in 2012 will likely be significantly higher than in 2008, which in and of itself was the high-water mark for attack ads in the modern era. The harsh tone of the battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination certainly points toward an exceptionally nasty fall campaign.

Polling to Govern: Public Opinion and Presidential Leadership

Reagan’s court appointments moved the federal judiciary “in a decidedly conservative direction” (350). Other contributors point to a less positive answer, none more directly than James Patterson. Patterson ands the argument on behalf of a Reagan Revolution excessive. He notes, for example, that welfare spending was higher in 1989 than in 1981 and that the number of federal employees increased more rapidly under Reagan than Jimmy Carter. Social Security and Medicare remained intact, and federal-government spending “as a percentage of the gross domestic product was slightly higher under Reagan than it was to become under Bill Clinton” (368). Also, deacits swelled and economic growth was no better than in Carter’s worse years. However, Patterson also observes that Reagan’s legacies on the issues that meant the most to him, such as tax rates and Soviet–American relations, “have been durable as well as signiacant” (371). All in all, concludes Patterson, Reagan’s shadow remains “large” (371).

Filling in the Blanks: A New Method for Estimating Campaign Effects

Scholars have invested a great deal of effort in trying to estimate the impact of political campaigns on the public. While progress has been made, one fundamental problem continues to plague our attempts to study campaigns: the lack of good, detailed data about the behaviour of candidates. In the United States, for instance, the presidential battle is a national struggle that unfolds locally on the stages of fifty states, yet most data collection efforts have treated presidential elections as if they were national contests, conducted (implicitly) in an identical manner across the entire country. Using available (national) data as a baseline and theory to predict plausible variations from that baseline, the authors devise a method for simulating variation in presidential campaigns across states and over election years--one of the crucial missing pieces of the puzzle. Their method generates a range of plausible effects, which is often narrow enough to shed light on important hypotheses. It can be employed whenever data are available at a more aggregate level than is desirable. This method is then applied to assess the debate over the impact of attack advertising on turnout. This approach suggests that campaign negativism stimulated (rather than demobilized) turnout in presidential elections from 1980 through 2000.

Party Competition and the Prisoner's Dilemma: An Argument for the Direct Primary

A commonly held belief among students of American politics is that competition within political parties undermines the ability of parties to foster the democratic control of government. This essay questions this view. Relying on the logic of the Prisoners Dilemma, we argue that intraparty competition is an important ingredient for parties to be responsive to the wishes of voters. This argument is unorthodox, since most scholars think intraparty competition inhibits the ability of parties to meet the demands of the electorate. Intraparty competition does have costs, but the benefits, we believe, outweigh those costs. This argument is important in that primaries, one form of intraparty competition, dominate the nominating processes in the United States. While this essay does not comment on the specific arrangements for selecting nominees, it does provide theoretical justification for devices, such as the direct primary, that promote intraparty competition.

Negativity, Information, and Candidate Position-Taking

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of how negativity affects voters’ assessments of the positions candidates take on issues. We argue that the inferences people make about candidates’ positions on issues differ depending on whether the information they encounter comes from attack or self-promotional statements. Specifically, we posit that attacks offer two pieces of information to voters—insight into the positions of the target and the sponsor—whereas, positive information only affects perceptions of the sponsor. Further, we contend that attacks offer important correctives to candidates’ often misleading self-promotional claims. By drawing attention to the differences between the informational content of negative and positive appeals, we offer new insights into the inferences voters make about candidates’ positions on issues. We support these claims using data from an internet-based experiment employing a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 people. The paper concludes by teasing out a series of implications that arise from these insights.

Voting and the Social Environment

This article develops a model of voting. A central tenet of this piece is that voting is a simple decision for most voters, and thus should be modeled simply. Working within the Kelley (1983) framework, I argue that to improve existing explanations of voting, we need to take account of the voters social environment, that is, the views of friends and family. This new model better captures the process through which the voter decides and increases the explanatory power of the Kelley model. My model predicts 90.9% of the votes correctly—a 6.4% increase over the Kelley approach. The Center for Political Studies (CPS), however, only asked the appropriate questions in 1952. The lack of data shows the failure of students of voting to include the immediate social environment in their models.

New Deal Issues and the American Electorate, 1952-1988

As each presidential election passes into the history books, debate renews over the status of the New Deal Party System. This article addresses part of that debate by examining changes in the electorates assessment of New Deal issues. Despite the vast literature on realignment, there have been few efforts to see whether issues associated with the New Deal still shape the political attitudes of the American electorate. Using the NESs openended like/dislike questions on parties and candidates from 1952 to 1988, I show that New Deal issues remain central to the partisan attitudes of the public. These findings show that the agenda of the New Deal remains an integral part of how the American public thinks about their candidates and parties. There, of course, has been much change over the last four decades, but these results suggest, in general, that at least parts of the New Deal Party System remain intact.