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Background: WISDOM is a large (target enrollment>40,000) healthy women preference-tolerant, pragmatic study comparing traditional annual screening to personalized risk-based breast screening. Cancer screening, routine health care, and elective procedures were disrupted due to attempts to manage resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding of the impact on COVID-19 on trial participants is important to gain a broader understanding of the effect of the pandemic on healthcare activities. Methods: Women aged 40-74 years with no history of breast cancer or DCIS, and no previous double mastectomy can join the WISDOM (NCT02620852) study online at wisdomstudy.org. A total of 28,600 women have consented to participate. As part of the trial, each patient completes a baseline and interval surveys through a Salesforce platform. In May, the study IRB was amended to add a COVID specific survey with questions related to participants COVID risk perceptions, coexisting conditions, and receipt of healthcare services in the 2 months prior to the survey. An initial survey was sent May 2020, with follow-up surveys planned every 2 months. In addition, national surveys on a population-based cross section of individuals across the nation will be performed in parallel. Data was collected, de-identified, and then analyzed using basic descriptive analysis, chi-2 analysis, and logit regression. Results: A total of 7,523 individuals in WISDOM responded to the survey (response rate 27%). Of those that responded, the average age at the time of the survey was 59 (range 40-79). The population was 87% Caucasian, 6% Hispanic, and 4% African-American. Only 3.6% of the sample felt they had COVID-19 either by symptoms or through testing. However, 10.0% felt they were at higher risk compared to similar individuals their age to get COVID-19. Of the sample, 29% had some form of high-risk coexisting condition that put them at higher risk for COVID-19. In terms of healthcare utilization in the prior 2 months, 43% had a routine medical visit cancelled by their primary care provider or health system, whereas 26% cancelled an appointment themselves. In terms of breast cancer screening, 16% had their screening visit either cancelled or delayed. Individuals who believed they were at higher risk (and more likely to have shorter interval screening recommendations on this trial) had a higher Odds Ratio (1.66) for a screening cancellation (p Citation Format: Arash Naeim, Neil Wenger, Karen Sepucha, Annette Stanton, Ryan Baxter-King, Leah Sabacan, Antonia Petruse, Patricia Choy, Susie Brain, Laura Esserman, Wisdom Study and Athena Breast Health Network Investigators and Advocate Partners, Lynn Vavreck. Health maintenance and breast cancer screening during the COVID-19 pandemic [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Virtual Symposium; 2020 Dec 8-11; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(4 Suppl):Abstract nr SS2-04.

We investigate trends in public opinion before and during the COVID-19 pandemic on concern about the virus, efforts to combat its spread, and support for various health care policy reforms. Using data from more than 400,000 interviews covering every state in the country over a 1-year period, we demonstrate initially high levels of concern about the virus and support for restrictions to combat it across geography and political party. Over time, however, these sentiments fade, and a partisan divide opens up as Republican concern and support drops more quickly. We find little evidence that the pandemic has shifted opinions on health care reforms such as Medicare-for-all. We argue that the differences in these trends have more to do with messages from party leaders about the pandemic and less to do with the virus’s state-level infection rates. While nearly everyone has been affected in some way by the pandemic, for most voters, the pandemic’s challenges have not translated into a desire for more sweeping change to the nation’s health care system.

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

Background With conflicting information about COVID-19, the general public may be uncertain about how to proceed in terms of precautionary behavior and decisions about whether to return to activity. Objective The aim of this study is to determine the factors associated with COVID-19–related concerns, precautionary behaviors, and willingness to return to activity. Methods National survey data were obtained from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project, an ongoing cross-sectional weekly survey. The sample was provided by Lucid, a web-based market research platform. Three outcomes were evaluated: (1) COVID-19–related concerns, (2) precautionary behaviors, and (3) willingness to return to activity. Key independent variables included age, gender, race or ethnicity, education, household income, political party support, religion, news consumption, number of medication prescriptions, perceived COVID-19 status, and timing of peak COVID-19 infections by state. Results The data included 125,508 responses from web-based surveys conducted over 20 consecutive weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic (comprising approximately 6250 adults per week), between March 19 and August 5, 2020, approved by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Institutional Review Board for analysis. A substantial number of participants were not willing to return to activity even after the restrictions were lifted. Weighted multivariate logistic regressions indicated the following groups had different outcomes (all P Conclusions Participants’ age, party affiliation, and perceived COVID-19 status were strongly associated with their COVID-19–related concerns, precautionary behaviors, and willingness to return to activity. Future studies need to develop and test targeted messaging approaches and consider political partisanship to encourage preventative behaviors and willingness to return to activities.

What are the most important concepts in the political behavior literature? Have experiments supplanted surveys as the dominant method in political behavior research? What role does the American National Election Studies (ANES) play in this literature? We utilize a content analysis of over 1,100 quantitative articles on American mass political behavior published between 1980 and 2009 to address these questions. We then supplement this with a second sample of articles published between 2010 and 2018. Four key takeaways are apparent. First, the agenda of this literature is heavily skewed toward understanding voting to a relative lack of attention to specific policy attitudes and other topics. Second, experiments are ascendant, but are far from displacing surveys, and particularly the ANES. Third, while important changes to this agenda have occurred over time, it remains much the same in 2018 as it was in 1980. Fourth, the centrality of the ANES seems to stem from its time-series component. In the end, we conclude that the ANES is a critical investment for the scientific community and a main driver of political behavior research.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of how negativity affects voters’ assessments of the positions candidates take on issues. We argue that the inferences people make about candidates’ positions on issues differ depending on whether the information they encounter comes from attack or self-promotional statements. Specifically, we posit that attacks offer two pieces of information to voters—insight into the positions of the target and the sponsor—whereas, positive information only affects perceptions of the sponsor. Further, we contend that attacks offer important correctives to candidates’ often misleading self-promotional claims. By drawing attention to the differences between the informational content of negative and positive appeals, we offer new insights into the inferences voters make about candidates’ positions on issues. We support these claims using data from an internet-based experiment employing a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 people. The paper concludes b...

In 2006 Polimetrix, Inc. of Palo Alto, CA. fielded the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the largest study of Congressional elections ever fielded in the US. The project was a joint venture of 38 universities and over 100 political scientists. In this paper, we detail the design and execution of the project, with special attention to the method by which the sample was generated. We show that the estimates from the Common Content of CCES outperform conventional estimates based on RDD phone surveys. We also argue that opt‐in panels, internet surveys, and cooperative ventures like CCES provide cost‐effective alternatives for social scientists under certain conditions. These types of surveys can provide reductions in RMSE over conventional methods when sample matching is used to ameliorate the biases that come with sampling from an opt‐in panel.

Media critics blame contemporary news for increasing levels of apathy and ignorance among the electorate. We agree that the amount of policy-oriented information in news coverage of presidential campaigns has declined and the level of news consumption has fallen. Yet, based on 50 years of data on media content and public attitudes, we find that over this period of time Americans have just as much to say about the major-party presidential candidates, what they have to say is more policy oriented, the association of vote choice with policy considerations has strengthened while the association with character considerations has weakened, and factual knowledge about the presidential candidates' issue positions has not declined. We assess the role of education, party polarization, and paid advertising in explaining trends in Americans' political knowledge and engagement. We show that the public's steady level of information and increased focus on policy in presidential politics reflects the high level of policy...

To what extent are television viewers affected by the behaviors and decisions they see modeled by characters in television soap operas? Collaborating with scriptwriters for three prime-time nationally-broadcast Spanish-language telenovelas, we embedded scenes about topics such as drunk driving or saving money at randomly assigned periods during the broadcast season. Outcomes were measured unobtrusively by aggregate city- and nation-wide time series, such as the number of Hispanic motorists arrested daily for drunk driving or the number of accounts opened in banks located in Hispanic neighborhoods. Results indicate that while two of the treatment effects are statistically significant, none are substantively large or long-lasting. Actions that could be taken during the immediate viewing session, like online searching, and those that were relatively more integrated into the telenovela storyline, specifically reducing cholesterol, were briefly affected, but not behaviors requiring sustained efforts, like opening a bank account or registering to vote.

Theories of voting suggest voters use shortcuts to minimize the costs associated with becoming informed about candidates' policy positions. Although there is much theorizing about how voters use cues, there is little empirical work on whether candidates send them. Data from advertisements run during the 1998 elections show that candidates do not often send obvious kinds of policy relevant cues—information about party and ideology. This analysis of advertising suggests that candidates send signals in strategic ways. They obfuscate to avoid being labeled a partisan of the less popular party, but they know when they are not well known enough (being a challenger) such that party may help people learn about them. In open primaries, candidates attempt to steal voters away from the opposing party by not explicitly mentioning their party or ideology but by talking about specific issue positions in hopes of attracting independent voters.

This chapter discusses the benefits of experimentation and looks at the future of political communication research, emphasizing the previous experimental work, as well as the creative manipulations, that have been conducted using online panels. It then studies two online election studies from 2008 in order to show the properties of the data and the samples, and, finally, reveals that Internet technology is currently redefining the methodology of political communication research and improving some of the basic weaknesses of the previous methods.

tablishing contact with voters through direct mail, telephone banks, rallies and face-to-face campaigning, yet there is little systematic research about the impact of such retail poli? tics on voters. The New Hampshrre primary provides an optimal context for examining the consequences of campaign contacts because of its strong tradition of interaction between candidates and voters. Using a unique data set drawn from five surveys conducted during the 1996 New Hampshire primary, we show that candidate contact influences voters' abilities to rate candidates, as well as their information about and favor