John Sides

European Opinion About Immigration: The Role of Identities, Interests and Information

This article assesses the influence of material interests and cultural identities on European opinion about immigration. Analysis of respondents in twenty countries sampled in the 2002–03 European Social Survey demonstrates that they are unenthusiastic about high levels of immigration and typically overestimate the actual number of immigrants living in their country. At the individual level, cultural and national identity, economic interests and the level of information about immigration are all important predictors of attitudes. ‘Symbolic’ predispositions, such as preferences for cultural unity, have a stronger statistical effect than economic dissatisfaction. Variation across countries in both the level and the predictors of opposition to immigration are mostly unrelated to contextual factors cited in previous research, notably the amount of immigration into a country and the overall state of its economy. The ramifications of these findings for policy makers are discussed in the context of current debates about immigration and European integration.

What if Everyone Voted? Simulating the Impact of Increased Turnout in Senate Elections

The conventional wisdom among journalists and politicians is that higher turnout would benefit Democrats, although extant scholarly research suggests otherwise. We adopt a new approach to assessing the partisan impact of higher turnout. We use state-level exit polls and Census data to estimate the partisan preferences of nonvoters in Senate elections and then simulate the outcome of these elections under universal turnout. While nonvoters are generally more Democratic than voters, the dearth of close races means that very few election outcomes would have changed had everyone voted. Other scenarios—full turnout among registered voters, equal turnout rates for whites and African-Americans, and equal turnout rates across income groups—generate similar results: although Democrats fare better in each scenario, few outcomes would have changed. However, the gap between voters and nonvoters’ partisan preference varies considerably across states and across years, suggesting that this “partisan differential” warrants further examination.

The Origins of Campaign Agendas

Why and how do candidates choose the issues on which their campaigns are based? Drawing on a large database of candidate advertisements from the 1998 House and Senate campaigns, extant theories of issue emphasis, which focus on factors such as party ownership and candidate record, are tested here and these theories are expanded by examining in more detail the role of constituency characteristics. Most notably, party ownership’s impact is demonstrated to be weak: candidates are more willing to ‘trespass’ or talk about the other party’s issues than previous literature has found. Also ‘trespassing’ is shown to be facilitated by framing the other party’s issues in certain ways. The results have implications for theories of candidate strategy and for normative questions, such as how much ‘dialogue’ occurs in campaigns. One chief function of electoral campaigns is to place issues before voters. Given that most voters are relatively inattentive to politics, campaigns provide a crucial arena for candidates to discuss their views on specific issues. Commentators in turn refer to the agendas that candidates formulate as ‘what this election is about’. Campaign agendas also resonate beyond the campaign as elected officials arrive in various capitals and draw on these agendas to guide policy making. Campaign agendas take on even greater import because there are electoral benefits to agenda setting. Candidates can win votes by emphasizing issues where they perceive an advantage, thereby making these issues prominent in voters’ minds. This strategy is an appealing alternative to other, arguably more difficult tactics, such as shifting one’s own position as a candidate to match the voters’ or persuading voters to adopt a specific position on an issue. As candidates begin to formulate agendas, salient political events and public opinion are very much on their minds. For example, events such as a war or an economic recession often figure prominently in campaign agendas. Candidates also consult the electorate; answers to a polling question like ‘What do you think is the most important problem facing our country?’ may lead candidates to profess similar concerns. These kinds of factors undoubtedly contribute to variation in campaign agendas across election years. However, these factors may not fully explain variation among candidates within any given election. Salient events and the public’s agenda are often national in scope and should

Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States

Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration. We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower levels of immigration. The underpinnings of individual attitudes are similar in all countries and immigration attitudes are surprisingly unrelated to country-level differences in GDP, unemployment and the number and composition of the foreign born. An implication of these findings is that acceptance of higher levels of immigration, deemed by many to be an economic need, will require both more selective immigration policies and an emphasis on the cultural assimilation of newcomers.

Can Institutions Build Unity in Multiethnic States

We investigate whether political institutions can promote attachment to the state in multiethnic societies. Building on literatures on nationalism, democratization, and conflict resolution, we discuss the importance of attachment, understood as a psychological identification with, and pride in, the state. We construct a model of state attachment, specifying the individual-, group-, and state-level conditions that foster it. Then, using cross-national survey data from 51 multiethnic states, we show that, in general, ethnic minorities manifest less attachment to the states in which they reside than do majorities. Combining the survey data with minority group attributes and country-level attributes, we show that the attachment of minorities varies importantly across groups and countries. Our central finding is that federalism and proportional electoral systems—two highly touted solutions to ethnic divisions—have at best mixed effects. These results have implications for state-building and democratic consolidation in ethnically heterogeneous states.

Stereotypes of Muslims and Support for the War on Terror

We investigate Americans’ stereotypes of Muslims. We distinguish specific dimensions of stereotypes and find that negative stereotypes relating to violence and trustworthiness are commonplace. Furthermore, these stereotypes have consequences: those with less favorable views of Muslims, especially in terms of violence and trustworthiness, are more likely to support several aspects of the War on Terror. Our findings contrast with some previous research that emphasizes the role of a generalized ethnocentrism, rather than specific stereotypes of Muslims, in explaining public opinion in this domain. We argue that citizens do use specific stereotypes when there is a close correspondence between the dimension of the stereotype and the policy in question.

One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election

We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case, more liberal), which in turn was associated with lower support for those incumbents. Our analyses show that this perceived ideological difference mediates most of the apparent impact of support for health care reform on both individual-level vote choice and aggregate-level vote share. We conclude by simulating counterfactuals that suggest health care reform may have cost Democrats their House majority.

The Consequences of Campaign Agendas

Theories of candidate agendas suggest two potentially conflicting imperatives for candidates: focus on issues that their party “owns” or on issues that are salient to the public. The implication is that candidates may ultimately lose votes for ignoring either or both of these imperatives. However, no systematic test of either theory exists. This article provides a fuller test using candidate advertising data from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 House and Senate elections and finds that neither theory is supported. Candidates did not consistently emphasize owned or salient issues in any of these elections. Moreover, candidate agendas have little effect on electoral outcomes. These results highlight the need for more nuanced theories of candidate strategy.

What voters want from political campaign communication

Conventional wisdom holds that the public dislikes campaigns for their negativity and superficiality, preferring a cleaner, substantive, and more deliberative process. By contrast, the implication of Hibbing and Theiss-Morses (2002) Stealth Democracy is that, while citizens will indeed dislike campaigns, they do not necessarily desire more deliberation, debate, and discussion of issues. Instead they want simple cues that allow them to size up candidates with minimal effort. In this article, we test these theories with survey and focus group data collected during the 2002 California gubernatorial race. Ultimately, the ideal campaign envisioned by the public falls somewhere between the substantive and participatory campaign envisioned by reformers and what we call an “undemanding campaign.” We also find that attitudes toward campaigns vary substantially based on political involvement and demographic attributes. Most important, politically involved citizens desire the more substantive campaigns envisioned by reformers, but less involved citizens want less demanding campaigns. This finding suggests not only that any generalizations about what the public wants from campaigns must be cautious, but also that reformers may need to tailor their proposals to the tastes of different groups of citizens if these proposals are to be effective.

Watching From Afar: Media Consumption Patterns Around the Arab Spring

Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring- related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the worlds attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring–related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the world’s attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.