Richard Forgette

High-Conflict Television News and Public Opinion

This research assesses whether conflict-laden news coverage affects public perceptions of political institutions and political elites in general. Particularly, is conflict-oriented television news coverage of politics contributing to negative evaluations of political institutions and their leaders? We present evidence from an experiment designed to address this question. Our experiment is constructed around media coverage of the State of the Union Address. We control for the source of news (CNN), and examine how CNN’s Crossfire and Inside Politics’ coverage and analyses of the State of the Union Address influenced the attitudes and perceptions of viewers. We find that conflict-laden television coverage decreases public evaluations of political institutions, trust in leadership, and overall support for political parties and the system as a whole. Our findings have implications for public opinion in an era of increased abundance of high-conflict cable news talk shows that turn the political process into a contact sport.

News Grazers, Television News, Political Knowledge, and Engagement

This study examines the modern-day television “news grazer” in American politics. We define news grazers as those individuals who watch television news with remote control in hand and switch to another channel when an uninteresting topic comes up. Using survey data from the Pew Research Center, we find that news grazers differ significantly from nongrazers in news-gathering habits, political knowledge, and behavior. These effects remain significant even when controlling for other factors associated with news-grazing frequency, such as age and gender. The implications for the present and future of democratic political engagement are discussed.

Do Redistricting Principles and Practices Affect U.S. State Legislative Electoral Competition

Critics of U.S. congressional and state legislative redistricting have argued that gerrymandering severely undermines electoral competitiveness to the point of violating constitutional equal protection standards. In this article, we evaluate whether redistricting principles and processes have any measurable consequence on state legislative electoral competition. In addition to their substantive importance, state legislative general election contests provide greater variance than congressional data for empirically assessing theoretical propositions regarding redistricting principles and processes. We find that electoral competitiveness in state legislative races declined throughout the 1990s, even after term limit reforms were implemented. The proportion of uncontested state legislative seats has doubled since the 1970s, and there has also been a slight increase in average margin of election district victory. Our results show that political principles and some traditional, “politically-neutral” redistricting principles significantly decrease the probability of uncontested state legislative elections. In contrast, independent redistricting commissions did not appear to affect state legislative competition. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings relate to the redistricting reform debate.

The Demographic Effects of Katrina: An Impact Analysis Perspective

This paper examines the effect of Hurricane Katrina on the populations of 79 ZIP code areas in Louisiana (55) and Mississippi (24) devastated by the hurricane. We compare pre-Katrina population projections for 2007 with post- Katrina projections for 2007 and 2010 and estimate that Katrina reduced the areas population by 311,150 people (21.2%) from the 1,464,280 expected in the absence of Katrina. We also find a striking difference between Louisiana and Missis- sippi. In the 55 Louisiana ZIP codes, the black population was reduced both absolutely and relatively more than the white population (loss of 150,032 blacks v. 107,845 whites, or 32.7% v. 19.8%). In contrast, the white population in the 24 Mis- sissippi ZIP codes was reduced both absolutely and relatively more than the black population (28,812 whites or 10.3% v. 5,003 blacks or 6.3%). Our analysis suggests that Katrinas demographic effects are profound, and may persist well be- yond the 2010 U.S. Census.