Stephen P. Nicholson

The Political Environment and Ballot Proposition Awareness

Studies that examine whether voters make informed decisions on direct legislation and whether direct legislation enhances civic engagement presume a basic awareness of ballot propositions, yet little is known about why some ballot propositions are more widely known than others. Despite the fact that research on awareness of ballot propositions and political awareness focus on individual factors, the political environment plays a vital role. This study seeks to advance our understanding of environmental factors in explaining awareness of ballot propositions. Using data on California ballot elections between the years 1956 and 2000, I find that the political environment has a substantial effect on voter awareness. Specifically, I find that the electoral cycle, media coverage, campaign spending, voter fatigue, the number of days before an election, and issues that concern morality, civil liberties, and civil rights contribute to ballot proposition awareness.

Presidential Approval and the Mixed Blessing of Divided Government

Divided government provides ambiguous and conflicting information about which branch of government to hold accountable for government performance. The implication for presidents, who are easy targets of blame, is that they are less likely to be held accountable for governments failures during periods of divided government because the public has a plausible alternative for affixing responsibility: the U.S. Congress. Because presidents are punished more heavily for negative outcomes than they are rewarded for favorable ones, we argue that a divided government context has the effect of increasing presidential approval relative to periods of unified government. At the individual level, using data from the 1972-1994 National Election Studies we show that divided government increases the probability that respondents approve of a presidents job performance. This effect is even stronger among citizens who are knowledgeable about control of government. Examining approval at the aggregate level from 1949 to 1996, we find further evidence that divided government boosts presidential approval ratings.

Dominating Cues and the Limits of Elite Influence

Scholars have found source cues—the political actors behind a policy issue—to be a potent cause of opinion change. The implication is an easily persuaded public. I advance the argument that the public is not so easily persuaded. A policy featuring group beneficiaries provides a highly informative cue, one that is likely to dominate source cues. This insight is based on research demonstrating that people ignore source cues if they engage the subject matter at hand. Using a variety of experiments, I find that group beneficiary cues often dominate source cues. However, I also find that source cues affect opinion if they provide unexpected information about (1) an endorsement that is contrary to the source’s beliefs or (2) feature an extreme, disliked outgroup.

Political Knowledge and Issue Voting Among the Latino Electorate

How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters with varying levels of political information. Using the 2000 Tomás Rivera Policy Institute pre-election poll, we explore the degree to which Latino voters relied on issue-positions to judge the two major party candidates and compare the effect of such considerations with symbolic and candidate-specific appeals. We find that policy issues played an important role in shaping voting preferences, but only among politically knowledgeable voters, while among uninformed voters, symbolism and long-standing partisan preferences matter most. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for political representation and Latino politics.

The Opposite of Republican: Polarization and Political Categorization

Two experiments examined the typicality structure of contrasting political categories. In Experiment 1, two separate groups of participants rated the typicality of 15 individuals, including political figures and media personalities, with respect to the categories Democrat or Republican. The relation between the two sets of ratings was negative, linear, and extremely strong, r = -.9957. Essentially, one category was treated as a mirror image of the other. Experiment 2 replicated this result, showing some boundary conditions, and extending the result to liberal and conservative categories. The same method was applied to two other pairs of contrasting categories, healthy and junk foods, and male and female jobs. For those categories, the relation between contrasting pairs was weaker and there was less of a direct trade-off between typicality in one category versus typicality in its opposite. The results are discussed in terms of implications for political decision making and reasoning, and conceptual representation.

Agenda Setting by Direct Democracy: Comparing the Initiative and the Referendum

Using research on the initiative as a point of comparison, we consider how frequently and for what ends state legislators use the referendum. Akin to initiative use, we find that legislators are constrained by procedural hurdles in their ability to place referendums on the ballot. However, in contrast to research on the initiative, which emphasizes the role of interest groups as the drivers of initiatives, our analysis suggests that referendum use is motivated by partisan legislative majorities seeking to achieve a mix of political and policy goals.

Direct Democracy and the Public Agenda: Ballot Initiatives and Public Beliefs about Important Problems

Scholars and pundits alike have begun to recognize that initiatives and referenda do not simply “keep to themselves.” On the contrary, scholars have found that direct legislation meaningfully shapes the political lives of citizens. Not only do initiatives and referenda influence public policy (Boehmke 2005; Gerber 1999; Glazer and McGann, this volume; Matsusaka 2004) and governance (see Boehmke, Dalton, and Matsusaka, this volume) but they also shape the political behavior and attitudes of citizens (Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura 2006; Nicholson 2005; Smith 2001; Smith and Tolbert 2004). Direct legislation boosts the civic life of states by increasing political interest (Tolbert and Bowen, this volume), participation (Smith 2001; Smith and Tolbert 2004), political knowledge (Pantoja and Segura 2003; Smith 2002), and political efficacy (Bowler and Donovan 2002).

My Trust in Government Is Implicit: Automatic Trust in Government and System Support

How distrustful are people of government? Although large majorities of Americans express distrust in government, we propose that most of these same individuals also possess an implicit, gut-level trust in government. Using a common method to measure attitudes that people are either unwilling or unable to self-report, we found that most respondents implicitly trust government and that implicit trust is largely unrelated to explicit trust (as self-reported in surveys) and does not meaningfully vary by party identification or demographic characteristics. We also found that implicit trust is politically consequential, helping illuminate why a distrustful public nevertheless exhibits diffuse support and trust in the government to address crisis events, both foreign and domestic. We conclude that most Americans are of two minds about government, possessing both a positive, implicit trust and negative, explicit trust, and that each type matters in explaining orientations toward government.

The Paradoxical Effect of Speech-Suppressing Appeals to the First Amendment

While the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment prohibits government from imposing adverse consequences for speech it dislikes, in popular discourse this part of the Constitution is often referenced in an attempt to suppress nongovernmental criticism of controversial statements. To assess whether inappropriate, speech-suppressing appeals to the First Amendment cause intolerance of criticism or, unintentionally, promote tolerance of adverse responses to controversial statements, we employ a survey experiment and find evidence of the latter effect. Appeals to the Free Speech Clause that seek to suppress speech have the unintended consequence of increasing public tolerance for speech. Invoking freedom of speech is what matters, not the specific direction of the appeal.

The Physiology of Framing Effects: Threat Sensitivity and the Persuasiveness of Political Arguments

Framing effects are among the most commonly studied type of political information that shapes public opinion. We advance research on differences in susceptibility to framing effects by exploring whether, and how, physiological traits condition responses to messages in the political environment. In particular, we propose that the effectiveness of a frame depends on how well that frame’s argument matches the physiological predisposition or “outlook” of the recipient. We hypothesize that individuals who possess particular traits (we focus on physiological threat sensitivity) are more likely to be persuaded by frames that trigger those predispositions. To test this claim, we replicate and extend Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley’s (1997) landmark framing experiment about political tolerance in response to a Ku Klux Klan rally. We find that participants high in threat sensitivity are more susceptible to frames that invoke physical danger, suggesting that physiological predispositions can help explain the influence of framing effects.