William A. Gamson

Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach

Media discourse and public opinion are treated as two parallel systems of constructing meaning. This paper explores their relationship by analyzing the discourse on nuclear power in four general audience media: television news coverage, newsmagazine accounts, editorial cartoons, and syndicated opinion columns. The analysis traces the careers of different interpretive packages on nuclear power from 1945 to the present. This media discourse, it is argued, is an essential context for understanding the formation of public opinion on nuclear power. More specifically, it helps to account for such survey results as the decline in support for nuclear power before Three Mile Island, a rebound after a burst of media publicity has died out, the gap between general support for nuclear power and support for a plant in ones own community, and the changed relationship of age to support for nuclear power from 1950 to the present.

A theory of coalition formation

Coalition formation is a pervasive aspect of social life. This paper presents a theory of coalition formation with a statement of conditions and assumptions. While applicable to groups of varying sizes, it is shown to be consistent with Caplows theory of coalitions in the triad. It successfully handles the experimental results of Vinacke and Arkoff. Finally, the applicability of various work in n-person game theory is discussed with the conclusion that, in its present state, it fails to provide a basis for a descriptive theory of coalitions.

Movements and Media as Interacting Systems

In this article, some organizing principles and hypotheses are offered concerning the ways in which social movements interact with the news media and the outcomes for both parties. The structural part of the analysis focuses attention on the power and dependency aspects of the relationship and the consequences of the asymmetries. The cultural part focuses attention on the more subtle contest over meaning. Hypotheses on how social movement characteristics affect media coverage focus on movement standing, preferred framing, and sympathy. The authors argue for the importance of organization, professionalism, and strategic planning and for the benefits of a division of labor among movement actors. Hypotheses on how media characteristics affect movement outcomes focus on leadership, action strategy, and framing strategy. The authors argue for audience size, emphasis on the visual, and emphasis on entertainment values as influencing movements.

Commitment and agency in social movements

Any movement that hopes to sustain commitment over a period of time must make the construction of a collective identity one of its most central tasks. Social relationships that embody values of participation and community in their concrete practices contribute to empowering people. But such arguments need additional specification before their theoretical potential can be realized. I have taken the coincidence of this talk with the anniversary of the first teach-in against the war in Vietnam and the assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador as a directive for examining these two cases—with an eye toward learning more about how identity building and social relationships in social movement practice foster long-term commitment and agency.

Experimental Studies of Coalition Formation

Publisher Summary A coalition is the joint use of resources to determine the outcome of a decision, which must take place in a situation that has elements of both coordination and conflict. This chapter discusses the coalition situation, theoretical alternatives, experimental evidence, and ideal conditions for the theories. Different theories, each with a specific set of assumptions about norms and motives, are available to explain the experimental results. The minimum resource theory emphasizes the initial resources, which the players bring to the situation. Minimum power theory focuses on strategic position in bargaining; while, anticompetitive theory focuses on the potentially disruptive aspects of bargaining. Utter confusion theory emphasizes the importance of a large number of fortuitous factors, which have nothing to do with the resources, pivotal power, or stable social relationships of the players. Each theory finds some support in experimental evidence. However, the coalitions predicted by minimum resource theory are confirmed in a number of experiments. Although, there is some support for each theory, one could, if so inclined, create experimental conditions that would support any of them.

Assessment in Simulation and Gaming

This article examines the state of assessment in simulation and gaming over the past 40 years. While assessment has come slowly to many disciplines, members of the simulation and gaming community have been assessing the educational effectiveness of their experiential activities for years, in part because of skepticism from more traditional quarters that gaming and simulation are appropriate techniques to use in the classroom. These past efforts to demonstrate educational value usually went by names other than “assessment.” This article reviews research published in this journal using the keyword “assessment” plus a sample of pre-1990 meta-studies on evidence of educational effectiveness. The authors conclude with a discussion of two games, one familiar (SIMSOC) and one new (GLOBAL JUSTICE GAME) that may assist the reader in thinking about assessment strategies and related issues that need to be considered, in particular the role of agency versus structure.

Media discourse as a symbolic contest: The bomb in political cartoons

The mass media provide a series of arenas in which symbolic contests are carried out among competing sponsors of meaning. Measuring the display of competing interpretations is a way of assessing relative success. The Cold War period involved a long competition within the United States between two competing advocacy networks, each offering a general package on issues of nuclear war and Soviet-American relations. This paper examines how this contest was played out in one particular arena—that of editorial cartoons. Our results suggest certain dilemmas and vulnerabilities in Cold War packages and the strong cultural appeal of Common Security packages in spite of the access and resource handicaps of their sponsors.

Stable Unrepresentation in American Society

0 A democratic political system must be able to handle two great problems if it is to be maintained successfully: the danger of tyranny or domination by a minority, and the problem of responsiveness to unmet or changing needs among its citizens. The theory of pluralist democracy has the virtue of explaining how a political system can handle both of these problems simultaneously. It is an elegant model of a political system, and it has provided, for a number of years, an influential and even dominant interpretation of American politics. To the extent that the American political system approxi-

Reputation and Resources in Community Politics

This paper focuses on the role of reputational leaders in influencing the outcome of issues in eighteen New England communities. When such leaders are both active and united, they are on the winning side three-fourths of the time. This is not merely a function of their participation on the more active side, for they have as high a proportion of victories when they support the less active side. Furthermore, the side supporting change wins only 30 per cent of the time without the united support of reputational leaders but two-thirds of the time with it. There seems to be some reality to reputation, and this reality is consistent with a theoretical interpretation of reputation as a resource.

Police Violence and Its Public Support

The paper analyzes two models of social support for totalitarian social movements, the mass society model, and the class conflict or interest group model. Using national sur vey data, the authors formulate and test the implications of each of these models in terms of generating support for police vio lence among the mass public. With the exception of a positive relationship between education and rejection of police violence, the mass society model is not well supported by the data exam ined by the authors. Generally strong support is present for the class conflict model.