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The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks impacted the United States as a nation, but also had implications for local government. In an earlier paper, I analyzed the impact of the terrorist attacks on the 2001 New York City Mayoral election. While proximity to the terrorist attacks increased the probability of voters expressing uneasiness about new mayoral leadership, voters were not willing to overturn term-limits and continue with Giuliani as mayor. Partisan identification remained an important indicator analyzing favorability for Giuliani and the new mayoral candidates. Many questions remain to be answered in the realm of public opinion on local government, particularly during a time of crisis. In 2001, despite heavy Democratic Party identification in New York City, the Republican candidate for mayor, Michael Bloomberg won with just over 50 percent of the vote. Public support for Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was very high following the September 11 terrorist attacks. As a co-partisan of Giuliani, did Bloomberg benefit from the rally of support for the Republican incumbent? In this paper, I ask did the September 11 terrorist attacks increase the probability of cross-over voting in the 2001 New York City mayoral election? Alternately, did individual-level perceptions of the ideological positions of the candidates influence cross-over? Are Democratic Party identifiers who perceive Bloomberg as a moderate more likely to offer him their vote? Are candidate-specific characteristics, such as a “business” versus “political” background important in the analysis of cross-over? To study cross-over voting and the impact of the terrorist attacks on local elections, New York Times survey data on deposit with the ICPSR will be used. A poll of New York City residents conducted from October 27 through 31, 2001 provides the data necessary for this inquiry. I anticipate that concern about terrorist attacks and security will have a positive impact on the probability of voting for Bloomberg. Democratic voters impacted by the terrorist attacks will have a higher probability of issuing a cross-over vote. Further, Democratic Party identifiers with a history of voting support for Mayor Giuliani will also be more likely to support Bloomberg. In other words, in the context of a large city local election, cross-over should be a function of prior cross-over voting behavior. The presence of crisis should have an added effect. The co-partisan of the incumbent mayor will gain support from those impacted by crisis and by those concerned about additional attacks. This study will advance our understanding of how crisis impacts public opinion about local government and how local electorates behave immediately following a terrorist attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes people care about issues? Why do some issues act as agents of change in the electorate while many others are swallowed up by existing cleavages or just fade away altogether? Is there any way to predict which issues will stick, which will die, and which might instigate gradual, mass partisan transformation? In their model of partisan change, Carmines and Stimson (1989) note that elites establish and shape the reputation of political parties on issues. But what mechanisms do elites use to do that? A great deal of work has established the media’s role as an agenda setter (Iyengar and Kinder 1987), but less is known about the impact of second level agenda-setting, or framing (Nelson and Kinder 1996, McCombs, Weaver, and Shaw 1997). I demonstrate that the framing of issues impacts the public’s belief that an issue is important. Additionally, partisan framing appears to impact opinion formation and change on political issues. After analyzing coverage of President Bush’s tax cut, the California energy crisis, and coverage preceding the latest war in Iraq, this paper demonstrates that one answer to the question of what mechanisms do elites use to shape the reputation of political parties on issues lies in the way that political issues are framed in mass media coverage. This paper uses content analysis of four major newspapers to show that at times of low mass salience, issues receive coverage that include several, often disparate frames. As the number of frames for issues are winnowed down in mass media coverage, the salience of the issue increases. Further, opinion change appears to be linked to the winnowing down of frames into two dominant, partisan ways of characterizing a particular issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do relatively low-income rural people tend to vote Republican? Why do some people who call themselves conservatives vote Democrat? In this paper, I investigate these mysteries by analyzing the conversations from a series of listening investigations I conducted in 23 communities throughout a Midwestern state. I examine how groups of people conceptualize their partisanship while talking within one another in informal groups in which they regularly meet in settings in their communities. I find that geographic considerations of urban versus rural are central to their partisanship, as are attitudes toward government spending, to particular policies, as well as to social groups. The most striking categorization, however, is not Republican vs. Democrat, or urban vs. rural, but the people versus their government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on how candidates choose which issues to emphasize has largely ignored questions of policy positions. Instead, an alternative theory of issue ownership has arisen, which posits that the typical voter "lacks a clear preference about social and policy issues." (Petrocik 1996) These voters simply care about each party's reputation for being able to "handle" particular issues, and in turn, candidates choose to emphasize the issues on which their party holds the greatest advantage. This paper looks to bring the idea that issue positions matter back into the study of issue emphasis, by comparing three alternative hypotheses of whom candidates choose to cater to. Do candidates seek to capture the center, as the traditional spatial literature would suggest, by appealing to independent voters? Do they instead focus on satisfying their base, in order to maximize resources and turnout? Or do they attempt to poach voters from the other party who hold heretical views on particular policy issues?To find out, I create positional measures for respondents in the 2000 National Annenberg Election Surveys on a variety of issues, using a range of question responses for each issue to construct a single variable. I then aggregate these responses by partisan group in each state, and use the distribution of opinions within these groups to explain issue emphasis in US Senate campaigns' television advertising, as recorded in the CMAG dataset. I find significant support for all three hypotheses, with the critical intervening variable being the size of each group. US Senate candidates tailor their issue emphasis strategies to the policy preferences of the most prominent groups in the electorate, even after controlling for issue ownership. This finding gives strong support to the idea that policy positions really do matter in crafting issue agendas, and shows that there is a role for spatial considerations in the study of issue emphasis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I show how a theory of collective political rationality can be formulated using a Bayesian updating model. With this model, it is possible to examine more fully the nature of collective political rationality by looking at the effects of random error and partisanship in macro-level public opinion. I begin by describing the Bayesian updating model and show the logic of the model is consistent with political rationality-- that is updating is the byproduct of citizens who vary in their knowledge and attention to politics and in their partisan allegiances. In order to assess the utility of this model, I examine the extent to which aggregate opinion is influenced by random error, information (using education as a proxy), and the interaction of information and partisanship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I test whether treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and media trust moderates the persuasive impact of positive news about the UN, and different media sources reporting that information, on subjects' UN policy preferences. Of particular interest is whether subjects' level of trust in the news media moderates the impact of the treatments on subjects' stated UN policy preferences. Building on the Reception-Acceptance-Sample model's theoretical axioms (Zaller 1992), this paper hypothesizes that media trust plays a central role in moderating the persuasive impact of political messages shaping political opinions. OLS regression results suggest that treatment group subjects' policy preferences were generally more positive compared to the control group, taking into consideration the relevant moderators. The strongest positive policy preferences were associated with strong Democratic treatment group subjects with high political awareness and high general media trust. OLS regression analysis did not indicate any statistically significant interaction effect among treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and trust in specific media sources that they were exposed to in the experiment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the partisan divide on issues relating to torture and the War on terror using public opinion data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs data gathered in a 2006 national survey to study how the American electorate evaluates a tradeoff between competitive elections and winning to implement preferred policies. The results show that voters do not share in the prevailing elite consensus about the overriding virtues of competition. Analyses of a multilevel model of preferences for winning versus competition indicate that ideological extremism, partisanship, social trust and several other individual-level variables have predictable relationships with these preferences. Also, a contextual variable -- electoral margin in the 2006 congressional district election -- interacts with support for winning or losing candidates. Voters supporting candidates who lose big tend to take refuge in competition, whereas those who support big winners are prone to view victory as a means of implementing policy preferences. By emphasizing public involvement in policymaking, these voters are effectively echoing earlier "responsible party government" arguments that once were central features of democratic critiques of the American political system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use the public's approval of the president in managing the economy as a context for testing therole of partisanship in aggregate opinion. Drawing on Bartels' (2002) notion of biased partisan updating andGerber and Green's (1999) model of unbiased Bayesian updating, we find consistent (although not uniform) evidence of partisan bias in aggregate opinion. These findings in support of partisan bias lead us to consider how partisanship can be incorporated into models of aggregate public opinion. Drawing on the work of Mankiw and Reis (2002,2006) and Carroll (2003), we develop a model of economic approval that takes seriously the role of partisanship--namely, the influence of partisanship is likely to create a public that respondsmore slowly and heterogenously to changes in the economic environment than one that updates in a --rational" and --unbiased" way. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much literature as of late has noted the growing frequency with which “Third Wave” African democracies operate under dominant party systems (Boggards 2004; Manning 2005; Mozaffar and Scarritt 2005; Mylonas and Roussias 2007). African democracies, thus, offer us a perfect “laboratory” to test how partisan competition, and more specifically partisan dominance, affects how individuals relate to governing regimes, opposition parties, and democratic institutions. I propose to examine district level data from Botswana to analyze the ways in which partisan competition affects public perceptions and attitudes toward government and democracy. More specifically, I will be examining constituency level election returns from the 1999 and 2004 elections and analyzing the way in which they are related to Afrobarometer responses from the 2003 and 2005 surveys. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent research on mass public opinion has focused on identifying how messages with ideological cues affect individuals' attitudes regarding politics. But citizens also receive politically relevant information—including facts about the state of the world and their own personal experiences—that does not come with an ideological label attached. Who uses this information, and to what extent? It is difficult to explore these questions using observational data, because individuals may be exposed to such information in a selective fashion, and self-reports of exposure may not be reliable. In this study, we identify one piece of information that is devoid of ideological content and to which Americans are exposed at random—their local weather—and show that it leads a significant share of the public to reassess its beliefs about the evidence for global warming. This effect is much stronger for the less educated and those with weak partisan ties, and virtually non-existent for the most educated and most partisan citizens. Our results suggest that when politically relevant information is conveyed without ideological cues, political sophistication may prohibit the integration of this information into political beliefs regardless of the direction of one's predispositions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine military opinion in the wake of the Iraq war to answer two main questions. First, has partisan moderation occurred in the military community? Second, how have patterns of opinion response in the military compared to those in the mass public? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the sources of ambivalence toward parties? While the role of values and one's need for cognition has been examined, up to this point little attention has been paid how one's issue opinions might influence partisan ambivalence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finds that Republican partisans are more likely to share the political outlook of their party than Democratic partisans. Traces implications for theories of party policy reputations, party signals, and the dimensional structure of public opinion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the current administration the United States had shown unequivocal support towards Israel and its position in the Israeli-Arab conflict. At the same time, the American public has increased its favorability of the state of Israel and has consistently sided with Israel when asked about the conflict in the Middle East.We argue that this consistent view of Israel has broad effects on the American public's foreign policy attitudes. More specifically, because people use feelings and emotions about political actors or groups to sum up various judgments and beliefs that are logically relevant to their evaluations of specific policies, the strong feelings towards Israel stands out as an important factor in explaining preferences of foreign policy goals. Using a path analysis method we analyze the 2004 American National Election Study (NES) and show that partisanship, education, religious behavior and opinions on military intervention have, to a varying degree, an indirect effect on foreign policy opinions through attitudes towards Israel. In other words, the effect of these variables on foreign policy opinions is at least partly causedâ??or mediated byâ??beliefs about the state of Israel. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A close look at the Jeffersonian opposition movement's rationale for connecting with public opinion reveals important precursors to the development of presidential partisanship and popular rhetorical leadership. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisan differences in support for the war in Iraq are now greater than for any previous war for which we have data. I explain why party divisions on the war have grown so wide and how this has affected the public?s response to the Bush presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological identification is a fixture in studies of voting and public opinion. Our paper takes a fresh look at the conceptualization of ideological identification and tests the assumptions that have grown up around its habitual use. What do Americans mean when they claim to be a conservative or a liberal or when they reject these identities altogether? Under what conditions do Americans abandon one ideological identity for another? When do Americans act on their ideological identity? For comparison, we ask these same questions for partisan identification â€" where evidence is more abundant and theory is more elaborately developed. Finally, we draw out the implications of our findings for the great debate over ideology set in motion by Converse some forty years ago. Converse’s conclusion â€" that most citizens are ideologically innocent provoked a strong reaction, but one that did not fully account for the empirical results on ideological identification, a literature that did not exist when Converse’s critics were firing back. What does the evidence on ideological identification, properly understood, say to the thesis of ideological innocence? Together, these interrogations give rise to a new theory of ideological identification. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that partisan differences affect whether leaders view international conflict as a reasonable policy position, particularly as a reaction to domestic problems. I argue that partisanship is channeled into conflict propensity through two mechanisms: first, by altering the public's perception of leader competence in foreign affairs, and second, by determining which foreign policies various constituencies support. These mechanisms also structure the viability of international force as a response to domestic conditions. Moreover, I address whether the left-right dimension is truly the most important dimension in the study of international conflict, or if a more salient dimension includes dovish or pro-social welfare pronouncements. To test these hypotheses I produce various measurements of government ideology from the Comparative Manifesto Project and use these to estimate the effects of partisanship on both violent and non-violent conflict propensity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the increase in polarization of President Bush's evaluations by the public (2000-2004). Approval and other more affective evaluations of Bush have become much more polarized along the party line since he took office in 2001. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the values underlying opinions about gay rights, abortion, school prayer, and gender roles. Cultural issue opinions are treated as discrete constructs that spring from different core values and have different partisan implications. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an experimental design (N=133) to demonstrate the conditions under which competitive partisan issue framing can affect public opinion and party identification. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who do Mexicans trust the most to guide their political actions: opinion leaders or their own predispositions? While opinion leaders “filter” information and guide media debates, political party identification is the perceptual screen through which individuals assess new information and understand politics. Thus, when retrieving new information, individuals face two strong opposite forces: leaders’ opinion and their own biases. Using the 4th National Survey of Political Culture and Civic Practices (ENCUP) 2008, carried out by Mexico’s Secretary of Interior, I will observe which one of these two forces shapes individuals’ political and civic attitudes the most. Moreover, it will show which opinion leaders are preferred by each group of partisans and independents, as well as their political and civic attitudes. My research will not only uncover opinion leaders’ traits regarding political and civic cultures, but by explaining the determinants of both partisans and independents’ sources of political and civic attitudes in Mexico, it will suggest possible lines of action to design public policies that may help to strengthen Mexican’s political culture and civic practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do foreign policy events, specifically costly inter-state conflicts, alter parties’ policy position from one election to another? While research suggests that conflicts and casualties affect public opinion do parties also respond to these stimuli and change their policy positions. Furthermore, do the same events affect parties similarly or do they have differential effects depending on the current positions that parties hold? Building from theories of issue ownership and political accountability I develop a framework that explains under what conditions parties are likely to alter their positions in response to external conflicts. I use the MRG party data and the PRIO conflict data across 20 countries between 1950 and 1998 to test my theoretical expectations. The results suggest that conflict events affect parties’ overall left-right policy positions. However the change in position is conditioned by whether the party is of the left or right and whether the party is in or out of government. I also test along which dimensions parties do and do not shift their positions to see whether conflicts force parties to shift multiple dimensions rather than just those related to security. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After several decades' worth of work proclaiming that politicalcampaigns have --minimal effects,'' recent studies have begun togrant these events a central role in shaping voter behavior. Aleading impetus behind the shifting wisdom has been scholars'claim that campaigns --enlighten" voters. However, to date, thisburgeoning case for campaign learning has ignored a keydifficulty: campaigns reinforce partisanship. And thus, ascampaign intensity builds over an election cycle, voters shouldhave not only greater access to politically relevant information,but also greater motivation to resist it. This study exploresthis tension through the lens of partisan learning. Anincremental analysis of public perceptions of economics and warnot only shows how and when campaigns affect voter understanding,but also elucidates why scholars have heretofore drawncontradictory conclusions about the nature and quality of partisaninference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A unique Condorcet winning alternative exists when voting is over a single dimension and the voter's preferences are single-peaked. The generality of voting through binary agendas can be tested directly to determine the frequency a Condorcet winning alternative is chosen when voting is by pure majority rule. In this setting, voters were given single peaked preferences and a binary agenda to compare a sequence of proposals. The sample consists of 1358 votes on a public good dimension, modeling whenever the electorate has a quasi-transitive ordering over the alternatives. The findings reveal the voter's understate their support for preferred alternatives, while voting consistently over these alternatives. The results simulate public opinion data examining the effects on support for candidates and political parties on the division of votes, partisan bloc voting, and the distribution of political views in Presidential elections from 1968 to 2004. The findings strongly indicate the robustness of the median voter's theorem for explaining what happens in national general elections. Because the findings are explaining divisions of votes and predict bloc voting, the results estimated for voter preference revelation are consistent with polling data on self-reported ideology more so than partisanship. However, the evenness of the divisions of the votes and replication of both partisanship and partisan competition demonstrate the implications of a model of pure majority rule with fixed voter preferences, varying small numbers of alternatives, and voting through a binary agenda. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares panel data (1992-1996) on the nature of mass and elite belief systems, including the constraint and stability of issue opinions, ideology and partisan identification. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I use data from the 1990-1996 NES surveys to analyze how partisan and ideological identities shape the core political values of equal opportunity, limited government, trditional family values, and moral tolerance. I further explore the degree to which sop ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new set of multiple, state-level surveys is used to examine the sources of variation across states and offices in the magnitude of partisan differences in the job approval ratings of the president, each of the senators, and the governor. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a number public opinion surveys and the Manifestos Research Group (MRG) project data, this study examines the role of partisanship for system legitimacy in established and newer democracies across Europe. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing data and methods are insufficient to arbitrate between directional and proximity theories of voting. To advance the debate we conduct a set of survey experiments using a nationally representative sample (N=3259). We ask respondents to locate themselves on an issue scale and then invite them to choose between two candidates on the same scale. In the experiments, we systematically assign candidates to locations that allow critical tests—situations in which directional and proximity theory predict different behavior. We find that voters prefer the nearer candidate at least twice as often as the directional favorite. We further demonstrate that voter uncertainty artificially inflates the observed rate of directional voting. Controlling for uncertainty, proximity voting is roughly five times more prevalent than directional voting. Finally, much of what appears to be directional voting in partisan elections is better explained by partisan bias than by a directional logic. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation of young adults' attitudes in 2 middle Georgia institutions of their perceived homosexual's rights. Significant differences were found by gender and partisan membership. Religious affiliation did not produce as many significant differences ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results from 25 exploratory interviews with House legislative staffers are presented. Staffers share opinions about the Democratic and Republican parties, and whether or not "parties matter." ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party Identification looms large in the debates on public opinion and voting behavior in the United States. Most attempts to export this concept to similar studies in Western Europe have found this concept dead on arrival across the Atlantic. We believe that Western European electorates do have varying degrees of partisan identification that act much like party identification and attribute the failures of previous studies to find such effects on flawed measurement techniques. We begin with a detailed discussion of how we believe this identification works in Western Europe and propose a new method of operationalizing this concept with survey data from a variety of sources. We then test a set of hypotheses about how the resulting new partisan identification variables influence both party mobilization and electoral support. These hypotheses are tested with data from surveys administered at the time of national and European parliamentary elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]