scholarly journals Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Karlan ◽  
Sneha Stephen ◽  
Keesler Welch ◽  
Shammi Quddus
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiment ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Opinions

scholarly journals Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan S Gerber ◽  
Dean Karlan ◽  
Daniel Bergan
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiment ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Control Treatment ◽  
Washington Post ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Slant ◽  
Gubernatorial Election ◽  
Political Opinions

We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or a control treatment. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data. However, receiving either paper led to more support for the Democratic candidate, suggesting that media slant mattered less in this case than media exposure. Some evidence from voting records also suggests that receiving either paper led to increased 2006 voter turnout. (JEL D72, L82)

Party Messaging in the U.S. House of Representatives

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110297
Author(s):  
Tyler Hughes ◽  
Gregory Koger
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Substantive Content ◽  
Legislative Agenda ◽  
The Media ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The U.S

Both Congressional parties compete to promote their own reputations while damaging the opposition party’s brand. This behavior affects both policy-making agendas and the party members’ communications with the media and constituents. While there has been ample study of partisan influence on legislative agenda-setting and roll call voting behavior, much less is known about the parties’ efforts to shape the public debate. This paper analyzes two strategic decisions of parties: the timing of collective efforts to influence the public policy debate and the substantive content of these “party messaging” events. These dynamics are analyzed using a unique dataset of 50,195 one-minute speeches delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2016. We find a pattern of strategic matching—both parties are more likely to engage in concurrent messaging efforts, often on the same issue.

Coup Research

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton L. Thyne ◽  
Jonathan Powell
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Arab Spring

With 28 coup attempts from 2008 through 2017, the previous decade saw the fewest coup attempts in any ten-year period since at least as far back as 1960. Though coups may well be on the decline, research on coups has burgeoned since the early 2000s. The increased scholarly interest in coups can likely be attributed to a number of factors. First, high-profile coups like the 2011 ouster of President Mubarak in Egypt during the Arab Spring uprisings and the more recent autocratic deepening after the 2016 failed coup in Turkey highlight the importance of coups in shaping global politics. Increased attention from the media and policymakers has been coupled with the rise in studies that examine the causes and consequences of coups. Second, while past research largely focused on particular cases, the introduction of new datasets has allowed scholars to examine coups across time and space to reveal more generalizable patterns. Finally, unlike topics like war, democratization, and voting behavior, coup researchers have only begun to tackle even the most basic research questions when it comes to coups. The bulk of coup literature attempts to explain why coups come about. Studies focused on predicting coups often focus on factors like coup-proofing, domestic protests and instability, and how international actors can either foment or stymie coup attempts. A smaller and growing literature considers how coups influence other processes, often focusing on outcomes like democracy, economic development, and interstate disputes.

Political Psychology, Cognition, and Foreign Policy Analysis

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerel Rosati ◽  
Colleen E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Foreign Policy Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
The Media

Cognitive psychology highlights the constraints that prevent individuals from acting as utility-maximizing, fully rational decision-makers. These constraints lead people to rely on a regularly occurring set of cognitive mechanisms to simplify the decision-making process. Scholars of foreign policy have drawn from several prominent areas of cognitive psychology to inform their research. One such area looks at the beliefs and belief systems that are the building blocks for most judgments. Researchers have also examined how actors use cognitive biases and heuristics to cope with uncertainty, which is abundant in foreign policy settings. An important set of cognitive mechanisms examined in foreign policy analysis (FPA) relates to judgments about policy risks and costs. In order to make inferences and predictions about behavior concerning voting decision, certain key public influences must be considered. These influences include the role of emotions, political socialization, political sophistication, tolerance of diversity of political views, and the media. The effect of these influences on voting behavior is best understood through theories on the formation of attitudes, beliefs, schema, knowledge structures, and the practice of information processing. The degree to which voting decision is affected by internal processing systems of political information alters the quality of making truly democratic decisions.

Patrimonial Economic Voting and Asset Value – New Evidence from Taxation Register Data

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 825-842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikael Persson ◽  
Johan Martinsson
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Economic Voting ◽  
Register Data ◽  
National Election Study ◽  
Asset Value ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
Data Files ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Opinions

Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the importance of a surprisingly neglected aspect: the value of assets. It uses official register data files from the Swedish Tax Agency on the value of individuals’ assets merged with survey data from the 2006 Swedish National Election Study. The study finds that the relationship between patrimony and voting behavior in Sweden is similar to that found in other countries, but only when it is tested in a similar way as in these studies – that is, only when it is coded as whether voters own different assets. This study brings three important contributions to the debate. First, it offers a new empirically based categorization of the dimensionality of asset ownership and shows that the previous distinction between low- and high-risk assets is insufficient. Secondly, it shows that merely having assets or not, which is what previous studies have measured, is not what primarily matters; the relevant factor is the value of the assets. And thirdly, it demonstrates that only the value of some kinds of assets matters (especially stocks and real estate properties), while other assets (savings in bonds and funds) do not affect voting behavior or political opinions.

scholarly journals The Loss of the Popular: Reconstructing Fifty Years of Studying Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 228-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joke Hermes ◽  
Jan Teurlings
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
The Media ◽  
Filter Bubbles ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

This article starts from the observation that popular culture resides in a contradictory space. On the one hand it seems to be thriving, in that the range of media objects that were previously studied under the rubric of popular culture has certainly expanded. Yet, cultural studies scholars rarely study these media objects <em>as</em> popular culture. Instead, concerns about immaterial labor, about the manipulation of voting behavior and public opinion, about filter bubbles and societal polarization, and about populist authoritarianism, determine the dominant frames with which the contemporary media environment is approached. This article aims to trace how this change has come to pass over the last 50 years. It argues that changes in the media environment are important, but also that cultural studies as an institutionalizing interdisciplinary project has changed. It identifies “the moment of popular culture” as a relatively short-lived but epoch-defining moment in cultural studies. This moment was subsequently displaced by a set of related yet different theoretical problematics that gradually moved the study of popular culture away from the popular. These displacements are: the hollowing out of the notion of the popular, as signaled early on by Meaghan Morris’ article “The Banality of Cultural Studies” in 1988; the institutionalization of cultural studies; the rise of the governmentality approach and a growing engagement with affect theory.

Media Framing and Partisan Identity: The Case of Immigration Coverage and White Macropartisanship

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa A. Abrajano ◽  
Zoltan Hajnal ◽  
Hans J. G. Hassell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real World ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Media Framing ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Opinions ◽  
Competitive Nature

AbstractLaboratory studies frequently find that framing changes individual issue positions. But few real-world studies have demonstrated framing induced shifts in aggregate political opinions, let alone political identities. One explanation for these divergent findings is that the competitive nature of most real-world political debates presents multiple frames that cancel each other out. We assess this proposition and the extent of real-world framing by focusing on the issue of immigration, which has been framed in largely negative terms by the media. Specifically, we assess the connection between New York Times coverage of immigration and aggregate white partisanship over the last three decades. We find that negative framing on immigration is associated with shifts toward the Republican Party—the Party linked with anti-immigrant positions. This suggests that under the right circumstances, framing can alter core political predispositions and shape the partisan balance of power.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document