Kevin Arceneaux

Public Opinion in the American States: New Perspectives Using National Survey Data

General measures of ideology and partisanship derived from national survey data concatenated to the state level have been extremely important in understanding policy and political processes in the states. However, due to the lack of uniform survey data covering a broad array of survey questions, we know little about how specific state-level opinion relates to specific policies or processes. Using the General Social Survey (GSS) disaggregated to the state level, we develop and rigorously test specific measures of state-level opinion on tolerance, racial integration, abortion, religiosity, homosexuality, feminism, capital punishment, welfare, and the environment. To illustrate the utility of these measures, we compare the explanatory power of each to that of a general ideology measure. We use a simulation to clarify conditions under which a national sample frame can produce representative state samples. We offer these measures to advance the study of the role public opinion plays in state politics and policy. The public opinion-policy linkage is a crucial topic for democratic theorists and has preoccupied students of state government and politics for years. Without survey data at the state level, pioneering studies employed surrogates derived from demographic variables or simu? lations to judge the responsiveness of state policymaking to public prefer? ences (Plotnick and Winters 1985; Weber and Shaffer 1972). Some ingenious studies also explore the causes and consequences of public opinion using national survey data disaggregated to subnational units (Gibson 1989,1992,1995; Miller and Stokes 1963; Norrander 2000). Wright, Erikson, and Mclvers research (1985) significantly advanced our understanding of the state public opinion and policy linkage by pooling 1976 through 1988 CBS/New York Times polls and disaggregating them to the state level to create reliable, stable, and valid measures of state ideology and partisanship (Erikson, Wright, and Mclver 1993). A host of influential studies employ these measures (e.g., Hill and Hinton-Anderson 1995) to illustrate fundamental linkages between general mass political at? titudes and the general choices of state policy makers. Yet, they represent only a first step in gauging the effects of opinion on state policy. The gen? eral nature of the ideology measure developed by Erikson, Wright, and Mclver leaves open many remaining questions about how specific attitudes may influence specific political outcomes and processes in the states.

Changing minds or changing channels? : partisan news in an age of choice

We live in an age of media saturation, where with a few clicks of the remote - or mouse - we can tune in to programming where the facts fit our ideological predispositions. But what are the political consequences of this vast landscape of media choice? Partisan news has been roundly castigated for reinforcing prior beliefs and contributing to the highly polarized political environment we have today, but there is little evidence to support this claim, and much of what we know about the impact of news media come from studies that were conducted at a time when viewers chose from among six channels rather than scores. Through a series of innovative experiments, Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson show that such criticism is unfounded. Americans who watch cable news are already polarized, and their exposure to partisan programming of their choice does not significantly change their initial position. In fact, the opposite is true: viewers become more polarized when forced to watch programming that opposes their beliefs. A much more troubling consequence of the ever-expanding media environment, the authors show, is that it has allowed people to tune out the news: the four top-rated partisan news programs draw a mere three percent of the total number of people watching television. Overturning much of the conventional wisdom, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? demonstrates that the strong effects of media exposure found in past research are simply not applicable in todays more saturated media landscape.

Polarized Political Communication, Oppositional Media Hostility, and Selective Exposure

Previous research has consistently documented a hostile media effect in which people see bias in balanced reporting on political controversies. In the contemporary fragmented media environment, partisan news outlets intentionally report political news from ideological perspectives, raising the possibility that ideologically biased news may cause viewers to become increasingly suspicious of and antagonistic toward news media—which we call oppositional media hostility. However, the fragmented media environment also gives television viewers ample opportunities to tune out news outlets with which they disagree as well as the news altogether, and this should moderate oppositional media hostility. We investigate the effects of partisan news shows on media perceptions across six laboratory-based experiments. We find that counterattitudinal news programming is more likely to induce hostile media perceptions than proattitudinal programming, but that the presence of choice blunts oppositional media hostility. We ex...

Who is Held Responsible When Disaster Strikes? The Attribution of Responsibility for a Natural Disaster in an Urban Election

ABSTRACT: When do voters hold politicians accountable for events outside their control? In this article, we take advantage of a rare situation in which a prominent election in a large city followed a devastating flood. We find that voters are willing to punish the incumbent mayor for the flood if they believed the city was responsible for flood preparation. Moreover, we find that the attributions of responsibility for flood preparation are shaped by whether respondents lived in a neighborhood hard hit by the flood and the degree of knowledge they possessed about local, rather than national, politics. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the psychology of attribution for voting behavior and electoral outcomes.

The "Gender Gap" in State Legislative Representation: New Data to Tackle an Old Question

Explanations regarding the gender gap in state legislative representation have centered on attitudinal, institutional, and situational characteristics of states (e.g., Carroll 1994; Nechemias 1987; Norrander and Wilcox 1998; Rule 1981, 1990; Welch 1977). In regard to attitudinal characteristics, researchers have primarily focused on the impact political culture and ideology have on female representation. Less attention has been paid to specific gender-role attitudes due to the lack of a state-level gender-role attitudes measure. Consequently, little is understood about how culture, ideology, and gender-role attitudes relate to one another or female representation in the states. Recently, a cross-sectional measure of state-level gender-role attitudes constructed from the General Social Survey (GSS), 1974-1996 by Brace et al. (1999) has become available. A cross-sectional analysis of 38 states reveals that gender-role attitudes affect the level of state legislative female representation independent of political culture and ideology. Thoughts on why this is the case are discussed, suggesting future lines of research made possible by this new measure.

Do Campaigns Help Voters Learn? A Cross-National Analysis

Recent empirical studies on American elections suggest that campaigns provide voters with the necessary information to make reasoned voting decisions. Specifically, campaigns help voters learn about the electoral relevance of ‘fundamental variables’, such as the economy and party stances, that have been consistently shown to predict electoral outcomes. Do these findings generalize beyond the American case? This article uses cross-national survey data in order to subject this thesis to a more comprehensive test. The analysis provides further support for the hypothesis that campaigns ‘enlighten’ voters as the election draws near. Moreover, the article shows that some voters learn more from campaigns than others. Campaign effects are more pronounced among individuals with low political sophistication and those living in party list systems. Implications for future research are explored, suggesting a ripe research agenda using under-tapped cross-national data.

Direct Democracy and the Link between Public Opinion and State Abortion Policy

Is public policy in states that allow initiatives and referenda more responsive to public opinion than in states that do not? Political science theory provides conflicting answers to this question. On one hand, these direct democracy mechanisms give citizens a direct voice in public policy, which may directly and indirectly shape policy to their wishes. On the other hand, formal theories of collective choice call into question the ability of direct democracy to produce policy that reflects the underlying distribution of mass preferences. This study tests these competing hypotheses by assessing the impact of public opinion on abortion policy using a new survey-based measure of state-level abortion attitudes (Brace et al. 2002). The empirical findings indicate that states with initiatives and referenda are more responsive to public opinion on abortion policy.

Using Cluster Randomized Field Experiments to Study Voting Behavior

Voter mobilization experiments are often conducted using individual-level randomization, which can be difficult to implement. A simpler approach is to randomly assign voting precincts, rather than individuals nested within them, to treatment and control groups. Not only is it easier and potentially less expensive to implement, it may allow researchers to study vote preference effects without collecting survey data. This article explores various methodological concerns that researchers should consider when designing and analyzing precinct-level experiments. These concerns are illustrated using data from a precinct-level randomized field experiment conducted in Kansas City, Missouri.

The Conditional Impact of Blame Attribution on the Relationship Between Economic Adversity and Turnout

Previous research has found that those facing economic adversity are less likely to vote. This has serious implications for the nature of democratic accountability, since those who are less likely to vote in an economic downturn may also be the ones most likely to punish the incumbent party. In fact, some have used aggregated electoral data to justify such a claim (Radcliff 1994). However, such conclusions are premature. Once the intervening effects of blame attribution are taken into consideration, there are conditions under which economic adversity actually enhances turnout. Data from the American National Election Studies (1990-98) demonstrate that those facing economic adversity are more likely to vote when they blame the government for economic outcomes. These are the same people who have been shown in numerous economic voting studies to be much less supportive of the in-party. These findings suggest that economic adversity does not necessarily constrain democratic accountability and highlight the perils associated with making inferences about individual-level behavior with aggregate data.

Does State Political Ideology Change over Time

Students of politics in the American states agree that political ideology varies significantly between the states. Due to the path-breaking work of Wright, Erikson and McIver (1985) and their subsequent research, there is consensus that interstate differences in public ideology are important in accounting for notable differences among the states in the policies they adopt. Despite this consensus, however, there remains a fundamental debate among state politics researchers regarding whether public ideology changes within the states in the post-WW II era. Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) contend that state-level ideology is mostly stable, with over-time variations representing “noise.” Alternatively, Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (1998) argue that meaningful ideological change occurs within states over time. We test the hypothesis that ideology is stable at the state level. In addition to using the data developed by these teams of researchers, we construct an alternative data set to provide an out-of-sample test of their conflicting expectations. The results have significant implications for the study of state political processes. Systematic analysis underscores the stability and relative dominance of between-state differences indicating that the effects of ideology commonly observed in many state policy studies are due to interstate variation rather than temporal change. However, we also find note-worthy longitudinal ideological variation within selected states during the last three decades. Scholars interested in studying the causes and consequences of state-level political ideology—particularly their implications for public policy adoption and change—might profitably focus on the handful of states where survey-based measures indicate the presence of ideological change.