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Do people accurately perceive the Supreme Court's ideology in relation to their own positions? Which types of people are most likely to misperceive? Answering these questions is important for understanding the basis of public support for the Supreme Court. To do so requires placing the public and the Supreme Court on a common ideological scale. This study represents the first attempt to do so. We ask respondents how they would have voted on a set of cases recently decided by the Court, meaning that we can generate a comparable set of ideal points for both masses and elites in a common space. We find that the Court is generally representative of mass opinion and that most citizens have accurate perceptions of the Court. However, we also find that people are substantially more likely to misperceive the Court as being too liberal than too conservative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the appropriateness of the eighteenth-century press as a source reflecting the political attitudes of colonial Americans, based on the assumption that content analysis is a useful tool for studying such attitudes. Newspapers are still the most important tools in expressing and shaping public opinion. Although it may be impossible to measure the influence of the colonial newspaper directly, the conclusion that it was an important means of communication in colonial American does not seem unwarranted. Its continuous publication at regular weekly intervals enabled the printers to expose the colonists to a certain body of news and opinion, as well as to certain patterns of symbol usage, over a long period of time. The life span of many newspapers is indirect evidence that the colonists were willing to accept or at least to read the news and opinions offered. Content-analysis research bases the size of samples upon the degree of sensitivity to trends needed for testing a set of hypotheses.

The principal question to be examined herein is, "What attitudes do people have toward questionnaires and the interviewing process"? A secondary problem is, "Do people have any stereotyped impressions of the role of the interviewer?" Finally, "Do divergent social groups within a community respond differently with regard to these matters?" For the purpose of seeking out suggestive answers to the foregoing questions two census tracts in the city of Austin, Texas, were surveyed by members of the writer's class on research methods. The tracts were chosen with a view to certain socio-economic differences. One had the highest median income and, aside from the university residential area, ranked first in median years of school completed. The other was one of the lowest in terms of education and had a relatively low income according to the 1950 Census. It was selected over still lower socio-economic tracts because its composition was predominantly "Anglo-American" rather than "Latin-American" or Negro; the ethnic variable was therefore minimized.

The debate on mass polarization is itself polarized. Some argue that the United States is in the midst of a culture war; others argue that the claims are exaggerated. As polarization is a multifaceted concept, both sides can be correct. I review four distinct manifestations of polarization that have appeared in the public opinion literature--ideological consistency, ideological divergence, perceived polarization, and affective polarization--and discuss ways in which each has been measured. Then, using longitudinal data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), I update past analyses in order to more clearly show the ways in which Americans have or have not polarized: Americans at the mass level have not diverged, nor have they become more consistent ideologically, but partisans have; perceptions of polarization have increased, but this change is driven by partisans, who increasingly dislike one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education and general intelligence both serve to inform opinions, but do they lead to greater attitude extremity? The potential civic returns to education include not only the sophistication of citizen opinions, but also their moderation. We use questions on economic policy, social issues, and environmental issues from the General Social Survey to test the impact of education on attitude extremity, as measured by deviation from centrist or neutral positions, while controlling for intelligence. We use quantile regression modeling to identify effects on both the most extreme beliefs as well as the most ambivalent. We find that intelligence is a moderating force across the entire distribution in economic, social, and environmental policy beliefs. Completing high school strongly correlates to reduced extremity, particularly in the upper quantiles. College education increases attitude extremity in the lower tail, while postgraduate education increases extremity in the upper tail. Results are discussed in the context of enlightenment and motivated-reasoning theories of beliefs and education. The relevance to political party core and swing voters is briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political ideology is not always best measured along a unidimensional spectrum. With a multidimensional construct, we are better able to understand the complexities of Americans’ ideological views. This research note presents new survey data from a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 Americans. The survey asks respondents to place themselves on distinct ideological scales regarding social and economic issues, then to prioritize the importance of these issues. The first of its kind to include both ideological preferences and attitude importance, this survey contributes new insights into the complex dimensionality of ideology. Results reveal a plurality of individuals identifying as conservative on both social and economic issues, and a smaller group that is consistently liberal on both policy spectrums. Eleven percent of respondents self-identify as liberal on one scale and conservative on the other, yet choose to identify as “moderate” on the traditional unidimensional scale. By analyzing an extensive set of attitudinal and behavioral measures—including vote choice in the 2012 presidential election—this research demonstrates that true moderates are substantially different from those who mix both social and economic beliefs. It further shows that the vast majority of Americans place more importance on economic issues than on social issues, which has greater influence over respondents’ unidimensional ideological placement as well as their presidential vote choice. This study reveals important consequences of the multidimensional nature of ideology at the mass level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While various scholars of public opinion in the United States explain that the ideology of partisan legislators influences the preferences of partisan voters, the literature within the paradigm of representational politics maintains the reverse--that partisan voters' ideology affects legislators' voting preferences. By employing Vector Autoregression analysis, this article examines whether changes in the preferences of US Congress members lead to changes in the ideology of partisan voters, or vice versa. The findings indicate that the legislators' ideology in the House or Senate has no impact on the preferences of partisan voters as measured by the ANES seven-point ideology scale. Rather, Democratic voters' ideological shift influences the change in Democratic members' preferences in both the Senate and the House. However, Republican vot-ers do not exert equivalent influence on GOP legislators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite pundits and scholars suggesting that racial appeals play to voters' emotions, very little is known about the emotional impact of these appeals. Most of the research on racial priming seems to conflate the effect of negative emotions. Our theory suggests that anger and fear, in the context of an implicit racial appeal, influence whites' views about race differently. We suspect this effect occurs because anger and whites' negative racial attitudes are tightly linked in memory. Using an experiment over two waves, we induce anger and fear from an implicit racialized campaign ad and find that anger uniquely boosts opposition to racial policies among white racial conservatives. We also find that anger from an implicit racial appeal motivates racial liberals to be more supportive of racial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideology is a central concept in research on American public opinion, yet it continues to be used in crude ways. Recognizing both the widespread use of the seven-point scale, and its numerous problems, we provide new findings on how ideology is used by survey respondents, the attitudinal correlates of ideological self-assignment, and the impact of education on ideological constraint. From these findings, we propose an alternative coding strategy that uses dummy variables for each ideological pole, which are then interacted with a three-point educational scale. Replicating past research on vote choice, racial attitudes, and respect for gay rights, we show that this new scheme generates more precise statistical estimates and offers new substantive insights into the relationship between ideology and a host of political outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Researchers often measure attitudes and beliefs using “some/other” questions (“Some people think that … but other people think that …”) instead of asking simpler “direct” questions. This article reports studies testing the hypothesis that the some/other question form yields improved response validity. Eight experiments embedded in national surveys provided no evidence in support of this hypothesis. Instead, validity was found to be greatest when employing the direct question format presenting response options in an order that did not violate conversational conventions. Furthermore, some/other questions take longer to ask and answer and, because they involve more words, require greater cognitive effort from respondents. Therefore, the some/other format seems best avoided; direct questions that avoid unconventional response option ordering are preferable to maximize data quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data from the World Values Surveys, we explore trends in tolerance of homosexuality in Canada and the United States from 1981 to 2000. Particular attention is given to the effects of birth cohort. Consistent with previous research, we find that younger cohorts are typically the most tolerant of homosexuality. We also find that Canadians are more liberal than Americans. Most interesting, however, is the remarkable degree of change over time within cohorts, especially in Canada. These findings suggest that attitudes toward homosexuality during this period were an exception to the age-stability hypothesis, which claims that opinions on controversial social issues are formed by early adulthood, and change little with age. We speculate that differing political climate across country and time is responsible for the significant differences in public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As many readers already know, Columbia University Press has phased out publication of all its academic journals as of December 1977. Starting with this issue, Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ) is being published by Elsevier North-Holland, a prestigious publisher in the Netherlands and the United States of scholarly books and journals. The 33rd Annual Conference of the "American Association for Public Opinion Research" will be held from June1, 1978 to June 4, 1978 at the Hotel Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia. The "Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan" has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to provide long-term funding for its National Election Studies program. Since the inception of that program, the Center has carried out biennial investigations of voters' attitudes and political participation in all national elections since 1952. The John and Mary R. Markie Foundation has awarded a grant of $360,000 for support of a nationwide survey investigating relationships between Americans' interest patterns and their use of television and other mass media.

Numerous studies in the past decade have suggested that the American voter has become increasingly sophisticated, ideologically, and that this is due largely to the separate or combined impact of the growing educational attainments of the U.S. public and the greater salience of politics in the 1960s and 1970s. This study, however, hypothesizes that much of the change might be due to a simple methodological artifact-changes in question wording and format-and reports data from a recent national experiment which strongly supports such an interpretation. The generalizations derived from The American Voter may, therefore, not be quite as "time-bound" as the current literature would lead us to believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes African Americans' perceptions of whites' stereotypes of African Americans. Social, ethnic, and racial stereotypes that members of one group form of other groups are often uncomplimentary, for, in addition to their purely cognitive function, they are motivated by an ethnocentric bias to enhance one's own group and to disparage out-groups. Variously defined as exaggerated beliefs about the characteristics of a group, character profiles attributed to in-groups and out-groups, or a special language that functions both to reinforce the beliefs and disbelief of its users and to provide solidarity for the prejudiced, stereotypes typically reflect the disparaging views of others. The result is the ultimate attribution error, which is the tendency to attribute negative acts by members of out-groups to innate characteristics while discounting positive traits as exceptional. Supported by cultural and psychological, as well as cognitive, inputs, stereotypes are simplistic, resist discomforting evidence, and create self-fulfilling prophecies when mutually stereotyping groups interact. Stereotypes also contribute to the development of ideologies that justify discrimination behavior against out-groups.

Public assistance programs for the poor are the most controversial social welfare issues in the U.S. In contrast to Social Security and medical care, many Americans associate these policies with "welfare" fraud and tangled bureaucracies and feel that these programs provide disincentives for employment. They perceive that many single-parent families, blacks, and other minorities are perennially on the welfare rolls. The American public has at best held mixed or ambivalent attitudes toward income assistance, even as the government has done more for the poor. The public has been very uneasy toward the terms "welfare" or "relief," in contrast to "assistance for the poor" or similar phrases used in survey questions. In principle, the public is ready to help those in need and would like to see the gap reduced between the rich and the poor, but in practice they weigh both the pros and the cons of welfare. As a result, the public, for example, has preferred programs such as food stamps to broader policies such as a guaranteed annual income.

The extent to which fundamentalist religious beliefs influence political attitudes and behavior among whites is explored using data from the University of Michigan 1980 National Election Study. The analysis reveals that strong fundamentalists are particularly conservative and hold distinct attitudes on various issues of public concern, especially those dealing with questions of morality and lifestyle. New Christian right supporters also participated at a higher rate in the 1980 election and voted more heavily for Republican candidates. Contrary to earlier studies, our findings show that conservative religious groups played a noteworthy role in the defeat of Democratic congressional candidates in 1980. The study suggests that the new Christian right may have a greater impact on the outcome of low turnout contests such as congressional elections than on presidential elections.
Arthur H. Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science at The University of Michigan. Martin P. Wattenberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Irvine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two questions concerning enjoyment of work asked on a 1955 American Gallup Poll were asked on a 1980 United States national survey to gauge the net change during a quarter of a century. Only the responses of persons employed full-time were used for this study. Indicated enjoyment of work was substantially lower in 1980 than in 1955. The difference was especially great for manual workers, Protestants, and older persons. A tentative conclusion drawn from examining trend data for one birth cohort is that the change resulted from cohort succession and from orientations and attitudes members of younger cohorts brought to their work rather than from changes in work conditions which affected workers of all ages and in all birth cohorts. Some implications of the findings are disscussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the selective exposure hypothesis and media campaign effects in the U.S. The importance of supplementing a media campaign with personal contact and of working to increase knowledge prior to changing attitudes is indicated. The research arguing that mass media campaigns will produce no attitude or behavior change has been hampered by various methodological problems. To assess the relationship between exposure to the media campaign, knowledge of factors related to heart disease and attitudes toward the behaviors associated with the risk of heart disease, two different procedures are employed, namely, crosslag panel correlation analysis and the more traditional estimation of partial regression coefficients. These two procedures test different models of the relationships between exposure, knowledge and attitudes and provide different perspectives on the data. The relevant literature suggests that conclusions about the ineffectiveness of media campaigns in changing attitudes may be unwarranted. Further, the results presented in this article support a model of media campaign effectiveness that exposure to the campaign increased knowledge, which in turn resulted in attitude change. However, this conclusion cannot be stated without qualification.

The article presents the findings of a survey which determines the attitudes of U.S. college professors towards the Vietnam war. Under the survey, professors from seventeen colleges in Boston, Massachusetts were asked to give their opinions on the matter. The data for each professor were collected during an interview, using a structured questionnaire of a 100 items. The interview were carried out during the end of April and the beginning of May 1966. Nearly 80% respondents said that they were highly or very highly interested in the war.

The article is a contribution based on an intensive study of a small sample of German exchange students. There are many intriguing problems connected with studying the effect of visiting a foreign country on the attitudes of the visitors, especially when their residence in the country they are visiting extends over a substantial period of time. One would like to know which experiences produce what changes in attitude and also to what extent the modified attitudes resist further change when the visitor returns to his own country. One might also ask to what extent the decision to make the trip predisposed the visitor to modify the attitudes he held.

The article analyzes public attitudes toward conflicting political institutions of U.S. In the Spring of 1950, the Washington Public Opinion Laboratory in co-operation with the Department of History and Political Science conducted a survey at the State College of Washington. Five hundred and fifteen permanent adult residents of the this state were interviewed in order to study their attitudes toward selected aspects of Washington's state government. The article answers one of the survey questions whether attitudes towards the state legislature, political party, initiative, and blanket primary tend to reflect the idealized objectives of these political mechanisms or they tend to reflect their actual roles in state government. It is stated that since the initiative and the state legislature are mutually conflicting mechanisms for initiating and evaluating public policy, it was hypothesized that individuals holding favorable attitudes towards one should hold unfavorable attitudes towards the other. The survey results indicate that the attitudes of people toward these four political mechanisms only partially reflect their idealized and contradictory objectives.

The article reports on findings of the study related to attitudes of college men toward the social issue of non-segregation in schools of Texas. The study was conducted upon a random sample of undergraduate men at the University of Texas and used a specially devised Tolerance of Non-Segregation Scale for the study. The analysis was done using tolerance of non-segregation as functions of geographical region, church affiliation, field of study and year in college. It also correlated racial attitudes and church attendance; tolerance of non-segregation and personal concept of God. It is found that among college students the most tolerant individuals are those who have rebelled against traditional cultural mores. The issue of abolishing segregation was more likely favored by an individual who deviated from the dominant mores of culture than the one who conformed to the traditional values of his family and community. More likely than not, the student who was not a member of a social fraternity, who did not hold orthodox views concerning the nature of God, who never attended church, or who had already worked or studied under non-segregated conditions, was highly tolerant of the Negro.

Though there have been many studies of attitude change through communication, little experimentation has been done on variables controlling the attitude change of a given communication. In this article, the author investigated effects on the amount of change of the original attitudes of the audience. He demonstrates that attitudes toward source and concept affect the amount of change and describes the nature of the functions of these factors in the communication situation. The simplest and most typical communication message is one in which an identifiable source makes a favorable or unfavorable assertion about a particular object or concept. In most cases, a person exposed to a message brings into the communication situation his original attitudes toward both the source and object mentioned. A problem for research may then be: What effect is exercised by these original attitudes of the recipient of the communication on determining the attitude change toward the source and the object.

The intellectual world has always assumed that merit alone determines whether an idea gains acceptance. It is not that easy. Merit is important in the life or death of an idea, but its acceptance in the market place depends upon many other things. Even after an idea has been accepted intellectually, there is normally a long period of time before it is incorporated into the thinking of the person who has accepted it and ready for his use. This time lag, which holds for the individual, is even more pronounced for groups. After twenty years of polling the American public on issues of every type, it should be possible to draw conclusions as to some of the basic theories of democracy. The quality of public opinion can thus be tested against a varied background of problems. One may criticize the people for being uninformed in many matters pertaining to foreign affairs, but the main argument that the public has imposed a mass veto at critical junctures when their elected officials knew what policy to follow, just does not square with the facts.

For the study of legislation and representation in the U.S., roll call votes have unique attractions. They provide large quantities of data that may be treated statistically, and thus make possible the test of hypotheses about the legislative process in a way which is relatively independent of biases of the investigator. At the same time they reveal only a small part of the legislative process, and even within that part they reflect a complex combination of the legislator's true attitudes and the attitudes which he feels it proper to display. The difficulties of analyzing such data are well known to those familiar with legislative bodies; but the potential rewards of such research, including the clarification of party history as well as the testing of general hypotheses, make the effort seem worth while. The purpose of this article is to illustrate some of the ways in which roll call votes can be studied with the aid of indices and scales. The effort to obtain relatively pure dimensions or variables in roll call analysis involves some of the same problems as does the analysis of questionnaire or interview material, but there are important differences as well.

The article presents survey of opinions regarding the U.S. policy toward Soviet Union held by a group of union members exposed to both Communist and Roman Catholic influences suggests a number of effects which cross-pressures have on opinions. The majority of workers interviewed were not clearly aware of the conflicting propaganda to which they were exposed. Some of those who were aware of the cross-pressures tended to hold confused or conflicting opinions, and others tended toward well-structured but moderate attitudes. The study has wide implications for those working for an informed public opinion. The author, formerly survey director of Conference Research and lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, is now associate director of the Illinois Poll. The article also presents conclusions to following study designed to investigate attitudes towards American foreign policy. These conclusions include that an environment where people are exposed to contending propaganda regarding issues of foreign policy, relatively few individuals are aware of the conflicting interpretations to which they are exposed.

The article argues that word association can be used fruitfully as an aid in penetrating further and in gaining a deeper insight into attitudes than is afforded by other opinion poll. If researchers could find a standard method of measuring the content, emotion and stability of words as symbols, they could more clearly understand the meaning of answers to poll questions and the motivations of people in the selection of words to express their thoughts in open interviews. It presents an experiment in which, 162 New York City respondents, selected at random in public places, were asked to write down the first four words or phrases which came to mind for each of a dozen words. The sample consisted of 68 percent males and 32 percent females; 47 percent had attended college, 43 percent high school and the remainder had less schooling or provided no information; the average age of respondents was 26 years. Given the same dozen words in slightly revised order to camouflage the purpose of the experiment, they were asked to go through virtually the same experiment a second time without consulting their first results.

This article reports on the issue of question bias. In a continuing survey of attitudes and opinions of men in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, it was found that differently worded questions dealing with the same issue produced different percentages of the population as apparently "favorable." Slight changes in phrasing, in the order of presentation of answer categories, in the position of the question in the questionnaire, and other variations yielded apparently different polling results. The analysts of the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division of the War Department, which conducted these surveys, had considerable practical experience in the construction and analysis of questionnaire studies. These analysts planned a way out of this problem of question wording. The desired goal was an objective method of dividing respondents into those pro and those con on the issue, such that this division would not vary with question wording. The theoretical basis was worked out which predicted that certain practical procedures should do the job, and then the procedures were tested and found really to work.

This article discusses the perception of Russians about the U.S. If people were to ask Ivan Petrov, Moscow, the Soviet Union's mythical man in the street, what he knows about the United States, people would be amazed, startled, and undoubtedly worried by his reply. This man is a constant reader of "Pravda," the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Soviet Union; once in a while he takes a look into some other Soviet publication. Since he can not afford to buy a radio, he and his wife get all their information from their newspaper. Some fellow-worker has told him there is an American magazine, "Amerika," being published in Moscow in the Russian language, but Ivan has never seen it; besides, he doesn't think the party official who, with his wife, shares the Petrov's room would approve of the idea of reading a foreign newspaper. Petrov may not know it, but the picture of America he gets day after day follows a consistent pattern that is the result of careful planning and propaganda, officially termed "guidance," at the top levels of the Pravda offices and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The foreign news always appears on the back pages of his newspaper, whose size varies between four and six pages.

This article attempts to study the relationship between magazine reading and attitudes, which begins with the environmental factors underlying the formation of opinions. Such an analysis of basic factors is the objective of this study. The study originated from efforts to compare the cultural picture of New York City with other cities in the United States, and reveals many surprising relationships between magazine reading habits and the character of urban populations. The first step of the study was to examine the magazine reading habits of the ninety U.S. cities of more than 100,000 population. Circulation figures for both subscription and newsstand sales were computed for a somewhat comparable period for twenty-five magazines selected because they gave the best representation obtainable. The circulation of each magazine per 1,000 families was computed for the ninety cities. Possibilities of a more complex factor analysis of these dais, of a comparison of the attitudes of certain groups of people and the thoughts expressed in the magazines one read, challenge further research and interest in this field of magazine reading.