Joseph T. Ripberger

How Cultural Orientations Create Shifting National Security Coalitions on Nuclear Weapons and Terrorist Threats in the American Public

Scholars have used cultural theory (CT) to explain risk perceptions and opinion formation across an impressive array of public issues, ranging from environmental, regulatory, and energy policy to public health and economics. Although disparate, all these issues concern domestic policies. This article breaks with this trend by exploring the extent to which CT can help scholars better understand public beliefs about national security. Of critical importance in debates about national security are perceptions of individual versus collective threat and the appropriate role of authoritative institutions in protecting society from these threats. Because CT provides a framework that explicitly addresses these dimensions, national security issues provide an illuminating canvas for evaluating the theorys explanatory utility.

The Influence of Consequence-Based Messages on Public Responses to Tornado Warnings

AbstractThe Central Region Headquarters of the National Weather Service (NWS) recently launched an experimental product that supplements traditional tornado and severe thunderstorm warning products with information about the potential impact of warned storms. As yet, however, we know relatively little about the influence of consequence-based messages on warning responsiveness. To address this gap, we fielded two surveys of U.S. residents that live in tornado-prone regions of the country. Both surveys contained an experiment wherein participants were randomly assigned a consequence-based tornado warning message and asked to indicate how they would respond if they were to receive such a warning. Respondents that were assigned to higher-impact categories were more likely choose protective action than respondents assigned to lower-impact categories. There was, however, a threshold beyond which escalating the projected consequences of the storm no longer increased the probability of protective action. To accou...

Social Media and Severe Weather: Do Tweets Provide a Valid Indicator of Public Attention to Severe Weather Risk Communication?

AbstractEffective communication about severe weather requires that providers of weather information disseminate accurate and timely messages and that the intended recipients (i.e., the population at risk) receive and react to these messages. This article contributes to extant research on the second half of this equation by introducing a “real time” measure of public attention to severe weather risk communication based on the growing stream of data that individuals publish on social media platforms, in this case, Twitter. The authors develop a metric that tracks temporal fluctuations in tornado-related Twitter activity between 25 April 2012 and 11 November 2012 and assess the validity of the metric by systematically comparing fluctuations in Twitter activity to the issuance of tornado watches and warnings, which represent basic but important forms of communication designed to elicit, and therefore correlate with, public attention. The assessment finds that the measure demonstrates a high degree of converge...

The Strategic Use of Policy Narratives: Jaitapur and the Politics of Siting a Nuclear Power Plant in India

Policy theorists have long argued that policy making occurs within “subsystems” or “issue networks” wherein competing groups fight with one another to enact their preferred solutions to a given problem (e.g., Heclo 1978; Kingdon 1984; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Baumgartner and Jones 1993). For example, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) contends that policy making is the end result of a long struggle between conflicting groups (coalitions) that are trying to advance their beliefs about how the world should work (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). The coalition that is able to amass the maximum amount of resources (i.e., legal authority, public opinion, information, financial resources, skillful leadership, and mobilizable troops) will be the most successful in achieving their preferred outcomes (Sabatier and Weible 2007). As a result, coalitions are constantly pursuing strategies that are designed to maximize the amount of resources they have vis-a-vis their opponents. If and when the balance of power (resources) within a subsystem is altered, policy change is likely to follow.

Inclusive non-market valuation in Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS): a motivating theory

ABSTRACT Selectively focusing non-market valuation studies for operational changes in singular stretches or components of complex, coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) ignores important social and cultural dimensions of value. If economists pursue measurement of non-market values in CHANS, then an inclusive approach is required that is not biased towards one value frame (e.g. environmental amenities in one stretch or area) in contested, multi-dimensional policy domains. Ignoring social and cultural value dimensions, or environmental effects or trade-offs in other areas or dimensions, can lead to biased willingness to pay estimates for proposed operational changes, biased benefit-cost analyses, and hence misinformed or inefficient policy outcomes. This analysis provides a conceptual approach for elicitation of non-market values in CHANS using hydroelectric dams on interconnected river systems as an archetypical coupled system. A motivating theory for CHANS valuation and how it compares to traditional, singular measurements of environmental and resource values is provided. Lessons learned from the hydropower context are generalisable to other CHANS where contested environmental, social and cultural dimensions of value exist. This work has important policy implications for measuring a broader, more inclusive range of non-market values and public preferences.

The Oklahoma Warning Awareness Scale: A Psychometric Analysis of a Brief Self-Report Survey Instrument

Natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, tornadoes, floods) pose many risk communication challenges for emergency managers and policy makers. Critical obstacles to risk readiness are often attributed to differences in (a) warning awareness, (b) risk understanding, and (c) behavioral responses. Although a considerable body of research has focused on risk understanding (see www.RiskLiteracy.org) there is relatively less research mapping individual differences in warning awareness and related vulnerabilities. Here, we present a psychometric study (n=254) with cross-validation, testing a two parameter polytomous logistic model of subjective warning awareness (i.e., people’s assessment of how likely they are to receive risk and hazard warnings from trusted sources). The final instrument included four items and one criterion that may be related to other important natural hazard response behaviors, providing a foundation for continuing exploration of warning awareness. Discussion focuses on potential applications of the Oklahoma Warning Awareness Scale as it pertains to natural hazards and other risks more broadly.