Paul Goren

Political expertise and issue voting in presidential elections

Recent research on political expertise indicates that what citizens know and how much they think about politics affect the political choices they make. So it would seem for issue voting in presidential elections. Unfor tunately, prior work has yielded such conflicting results that we lack a clear understanding of how expertise affects the vote. Drawing on re search from social and political psychology, I argue that the accessibility of policy attitudes from memory depends on political expertise. Given greater accessibility of policy attitudes, issue voting should be more pro nounced at higher levels of expertise. In contrast to most previous work, this research measures expertise with interval-level knowledge scales and employs formal interaction tests. Data from the 1984 and 1988 National Election Study surveys are used to test my hypotheses. Results show that increasing expertise results in higher levels of sociotropic, ideological, and policy voting.

Core Principles and Policy Reasoning in Mass Publics: A Test of Two Theories

Political scientists have debated whether citizens can use core principles in lieu of ideological orientations to deduce their policy preferences. The ‘General Use’ model of public opinion holds that everyone draws equally on core principles to determine their preferences. The ‘Expertise Interaction’ model holds that the extent to which core principles influence policy preferences is a function of political expertise. Unfortunately, research design and measurement problems in extant work preclude a resolution of this debate. Here I account for these problems, test the predictions of both models, and find empirical support for each. The results demonstrate that while there is a moderate tendency for political expertise to strengthen the relationship between core beliefs and policy preferences, virtually all citizens use core beliefs to deduce preferences. Virtually all variants of democratic theory emphasize the importance of communication between citizens and their elected representatives. Most political philosophers and political scientists believe that citizens should send clear policy signals to their representatives. Policy signals provide general guidance about what citizens want their representatives to accomplish in office and serve as benchmarks by which citizens hold them accountable for their performance in office. If people send clear policy messages to elected officials, the behaviour of the latter will be constrained by the preferences of the former. Given the normative importance of this topic, public opinion specialists have exhaustively studied how citizens make political judgements. While it is now widely accepted that political expertise promotes ideological reasoning, 1 the extent to which citizens use core beliefs and values to deduce issue preferences is an open and contentious question. This is a critical research question because if most people can use core beliefs and values, then the possibility of meaningful mass-elite communication is within reach. Numerous public opinion specialists hold that most citizens use their core beliefs and values to deduce preferences on social and political issues. 2 The ‘General Use’ model

On Voter Competence

Chapter 1: The Indictment of the American Voter Chapter 2: Policy Cleavages in Historical Context Chapter 3: Policy Attitudes and Political Sophistication Chapter 4: The Three Faces of Policy Voting Chapter 5: The Availability of Policy Principles Chapter 6: The Centrality of Policy Principles Chapter 7: The Origins of Policy Principles Chapter 8: The Electoral Consequences of Policy Principles Chapter 9: The Exoneration of the American Voter? Appendix: Measurement of Key Variables References

RACE, SOPHISTICATION, AND WHITE OPINION ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING

The conventional wisdom in public opinion research suggests that the white public views government spending as a single race-coded issue. This article develops an alternative theory that rests on two propositions. First, the white public sees government spending not as a single issue, but rather, as two distinct issues: spending on the deserving poor and spending on the undeserving poor. Second, political sophistication strengthens the impact racial stereotypes have on attitudes toward spending on the undeserving poor, and it does not affect the relationship between stereotypes and attitudes toward spending on the deserving poor. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1996 and 1992 NES surveys. The empirical results provide strong support for both propositions.

Data, Data, and More Data—What’s an Educator to Do?

If you visit a district central office or a state department of education or a principal’s office these days, you will hear the current rhetoric about data use for school improvement. Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, data on school performance, disaggregated by racial/ethnic groups, special education and language status, and gender, are widely available, open to public consumption, and intended to lead to improvement. The disaggregation of these performance data is significant: pushing schools, school practitioners, and education policy makers to understand the performance of all students and not the average performance of students at any given school. Yet the ubiquitous nature of data now available in the public domain runs the risk of every other education fad that has preceded it: significant rhetoric that yields false promises about improving schools and the life chances of young people. Data-driven decision making. Performance management metrics. School indicator and warning systems. School climate measures. Formative assessments. Summative assessments. Administrative data. Graduation rates. Attendance patterns. Dropout metrics. Test scores. Value-added assessments. High-stakes evidence-driven reform. The implicit and explicit assumption is that if these data exist, improvement will soon be evident. It reminds me of the old quip about the American who goes to France and speaks English louder. Here are the data. . . . Improve. The articles in this issue call for a deeper and better understanding of data, their use, the conditions that are most conducive for using data well, how individuals and groups of practitioners make sense of the data before them, and the intended and unintended consequences of data use for school improvement. The authors together craft important messages about what type of research must be done to address these concerns. But perhaps even more important, the authors offer a clarion call to education policy makers and

Political expertise and principled political thought

Many public opinion theories suggest that all citizens rely on core beliefs and values to guide their preferences on social and political issues. The “Expertise Interaction” model of public opinion challenges this postion by arguing that the ability to use core principles in this manner is a function of political expertise. However, there is very little direct evdence that measures of expertise strengthen the relationship between measures of core beliefs and policy preferences. This article analyzes the effects of expertise on principled political thought across several issues with data from the 1990 and 1992 National Election Study surveys. The results demonstrate that the expertise effect is surprisingly limited. These findings call into question the presumed ascendancy of the expertise interaction model.

Ideological Structure and Consistency in the Age of Polarization

Decades of research establish that political elites hold more ideologically consistent and structured policy preferences than ordinary citizens. Since the late 1970s, American politics, at the elite level, has become increasingly polarized and changes in the news media have made it easier for citizens to find news catering to their ideological tastes. We capitalize on these developments to examine whether ideologically engaged citizens–those who hold strong ideological identities, who are politically informed, and who participate actively in public affairs–match elites in ideological consistency and structure during the age of polarization. We test this hypothesis by applying correlation and measurement modeling techniques to data from multiple National Election Study and Convention Delegate Study surveys. We find that (a) ideologically engaged masses hold more tightly organized opinions than the less engaged every year, but lagged elites by a wide margin in 1980; (b) convention delegates manifest impressive levels of consistency every year; (c) by 1992 engaged citizens had caught up to political elites; and (d) ideological consistency increased substantially over time in the mass public, but only among the most ideologically engaged.

Interim Assessments as a Strategy for Improvement: Easier Said than Done.

This essay provides an overview of the papers contained in this issue of the Peabody Journal of Education. In it, the author notes for policymakers especially issues and concerns that emerge from the use of formative assessments geared towards education improvement. While the intent of such assessments is lead to improved overall instruction and improved outcomes, he stresses that this is not a passive act that rests solely on testing children, providing their teachers and school leaders with data, and then hoping improvement will occur.

Gut-level emotions and the presidential vote

Over the past decade, political scientists have with increasing frequency demonstrated that emotions strongly influence mass political behavior. One shortcoming of this research has been the failure to distinguish between fundamentally different sources of emotional response. In this article, I draw on theories of emotional response developed in social psychology to argue that emotional reactions to presidential candidates are partly rooted in what people know about the political world (cognitively mediated emotion) and partly independent of political cognition (gut-level emotion). Using data from the 1984 and 1988 National Election Studies, I develop instruments of gut-level positivity and negativity and show that these factors strongly influence the presidential vote.

Moral Power: How Public Opinion on Culture War Issues Shapes Partisan Predispositions and Religious Orientations

Party-driven and religion-driven models of opinion change posit that individuals revise their positions on culture war issues to ensure consonance with political and religious predispositions. By contrast, models of issue-driven change propose that public opinion on cultural controversies lead people to revise their partisan and religious orientations. Using data from four panel studies covering the period 1992–2012, we pit the party- and religion-based theories of opinion change against the issue-based model of change. Consistent with the standard view, party and religion constrain culture war opinion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, but consistent with our novel theory, opinions on culture war issues lead people to revise their partisan affinities and religious orientations. Our results imply that culture war attitudes function as foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems of ordinary citizens that match and sometimes exceed partisan and religious predispositions in terms of motivating power.