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Despite consensus regarding the civic shortcomings of American citizens, no such scholarly consensus exists regarding the effectiveness of civic education addressing political apathy and ignorance. Accordingly, we report the results of a detailed study of students enrolled in introductory American politics courses on the campuses of two large research universities. The study provides pre- and postmeasures for a broad range of political attitudes and behaviors and includes additional long-term observations in survey waves fielded 6, 12, and 18 months after the conclusion of the class. Long-term observation provides leverage absent in many prior studies and enables us to compare the changes we observe during the semester to those that take place beyond the confines of the classroom and during important political events, such as the 2012 presidential election. Also embedded in the study is an experiment designed to assess whether students’ enthusiasm for “new media” (e.g., blogs) can be harnessed in American...

We fielded an experiment in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study testing the theory that motivated reasoning governs reactions to news about misdeeds on the campaign trail. Treated subjects either encountered a fabricated news story involving phone calls with deceptive information about polling times or one involving disappearing yard signs (the offending party was varied at random). Control subjects received no treatment. We then inquired about how the treated subjects felt about dirty tricks in political campaigns and about all subjects’ trust in government. We find that partisans process information about dirty campaign tricks in a motivated way, expressing exceptional concern when the perpetrators are political opponents. However, there is almost no evidence that partisans’ evaluations of dirty political tricks in turn color other political attitudes, such as political trust.

Studies of issue publics suggest that widespread political ignorance does not matter because those affected by specific issues are involved and well informed, and can meaningfully shape policy in their policy area. However, research on civic participation raises important questions about whether the opinions of the active are representative of the less active. To examine whether meaningful differences in policy attitudes exist between the politically active and inactive within issue publics, we compare the policy attitudes of interest group members to nonmembers. Across ten interest groups we find uniformly consistent evidence of policy distinctiveness among group members and show that party identification and ideology largely account for the difference. We also find that the policy differences between members and nonmembers vary according to the primary incentive offered by an interest group. Groups primarily offering expressive benefits exhibit the greatest opin- ion differences within an issue public, whereas opinion differences are muted for groups emphasizing solidary or material incentives. Finally, we find evidence of attitude extremism among group members. Taken together, our study suggests that the voices of non-active citizens are not well represented within issue publics.

Many attribute George W. Bush's strong campaign performance to Republican efforts to increase turnout among evangelical Protestants by stressing issues that focus on “moral values.” However, most scholarly studies either focus on demonstrating that moral issues affected vote choice in recent elections or they focus on documenting longitudinal changes in party loyalty or political attitudes among Evangelicals. Our task is to add to this literature by examining long-term trends in participation among Evangelicals and comparing those trends to trends among other major religious denominations. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the increase in Evangelical turnout appears to have been driven by social and demographic changes among Evangelicals rather than by a political strategy. In fact, controlling for social and demographic changes, we find more impressive turnout gains among other groups, such as black Protestants and the nonreligious.

This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors examine how increasing clarity of party—policy linkages among political elites influences party—policy linkages in the mass public. The results show that only the well informed responded to the growing elite polarization by becoming more partisan in their opinions. Apparently, in the absence of the motivation to develop coherent opinions, even a simplification of the political environment does not close the gaps between those who are more and less aware about politics.

The debate between which model, directional or proximity, better describes citizens' political behavior engages scholars because the former constitutes a serious challenge to long-standing, Downsian, spatial logic. Despite an engaging series of empirical tests, scholars comparing the two models continue to disagree about which model performs better. Noting experimental methods remain conspicuously absent from methods deployed to date, the author describes an experiment designed to settle key assumption debates and measure subjects' reactions to candidates in contexts in which the models make very different predictions. The author reports results vindicating Downs's assertion that proximity matters and direction does not. Keywords: proximity model; directional model; spatial model; candidate evaluation; experimental research; extremism; ideology (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes formulae omitted.) The body of literature attempting to distinguish proximity vs. directional voting ... has been confined to a relatively narrow methodological tradition, and scholars have analyzed only a few types of data sets. Unfortunately there exists essentially no evidence within this tradition and these data to distinguish between the two models. -Lewis and King (1999, 32) The debate over whether a directional or proximity model better describes mass-elite policy preference linkages remains unresolved. At stake are basic questions about the very nature of citizens' issue positions. For example, the proximity model suggests citizens arrive at issue preferences by selecting a position from an ordered set of policy alternatives. The directional model, in contrast, suggests citizens arrive at issue positions by selecting one of two sides in a simple, dichotomous, policy space. Also at stake are fundamental questions about democratic representation. For decades, the Downsian spatial model has defined the way political scientists conceive of democratic politics.1 Downs (1957, 99) argued citizens rationally compare their ideologies to those of parties contesting elections and support "the one most like [their] own." In other words proximity matters; and indeed, the Downsian spatial model has come to be known as the proximity model. The notion that elections validate the policy proposals of successful candidates depends upon the theory that citizens support likeminded candidates. In contrast, the directional model maintains that "the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed" (Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989, 93). The directional model draws on theories of symbolic politics claiming citizens prefer candidates who represent their side of political issues with stronger preferences for candidates who trigger stronger emotional reactions. If the directional model better represents citizens' political behavior, elections do not validate candidates' policy positions. Rather, the directional model posits elections provide only diffuse information about which side was more popular or, at least, better able to trigger the emotions of voters. Because the debate between the proximity model and the directional model is central to understanding elections and democratic politics, it occupies a prominent place in the literature. As a rough indicator of scholarly attention, consider that since its publication Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) has been cited more than 139 times, according to the Social Science Citation Index. Yet no scholarly consensus about which model better describes the way citizens evaluate political candidates has emerged. Among recent contributions to the debate are studies demonstrating the empirical superiority of the directional model (Adams, Bishin, and Dow 2004; Macdonald, Listhaug, and Rabinowitz 1991; Macdonald and Rabinowitz 1993, 1998; Macdonald, Rabinowitz, and Listhaug 1995,1998, 2004; Todosijevic 2005), studies demonstrating the empirical superiority of the proximity model (Biais et al. …

Many studies document positive relationships between political information and campaign participation, but none investigates the relationship between information and interelection change in campaign participation. While studies of “floating voters” document negative relationships between information and floating, the author notes that activists are better informed than voters and investigates the relationship between knowledge and change in participation, comparing the process among voters and activists. The author shows low-information citizens enter and exit the electorate, while high-information citizens enter and exit the activist pool. The author concludes with an optimistic assessment of democratic change based on the theory that well-informed activists influence floating voters.

The scholarly roots of a partisan God gap are relatively recent (Green 2007; 2010a; 2010b; Green and Silk 2004; Olson and Green 2006; Olson and Warber 2008; Smidt et al. 2010). Initially, culture war scholarship highlighted new political divisions among religious people, not a divide between the religious and the nonreligious. Wuthnow (1988) and Hunter (1991) pitted the Christian left against the Christian right in a “culture war.” Interdenominational political differences had given way to differences within religious traditions over orthodoxy. Political differences between Protestants and Catholics were becoming smaller while a widening political gulf divided the progressive and orthodox wings within each religious tradition, according to the culture war theory. However, subsequent work exploring the culture war thesis shifted from an investigation of rising intradenominational differences to comparisons of the political attitudes and behaviors of religious persons and Secular persons (Bolce and De Maio 1999a; 1999b; 2002; Putnam and Campbell 2010; Green 2007; Hansen 2011; Kellstedt 2011; Olson and Green 2006; Olson and Warber 2008; Norris and Inglehart 2004). The shift in focus began as scholars challenged Hunter's premise that religious orthodoxy made common cause for conservative elements in different denominations (Brooks 2002; Brooks and Manza 1997, 2004; Manza and Brooks 1997). Responding to this challenge, scholars sought to identify rifts within religious traditions. Fundamentalist religious beliefs (e.g., belief that the Bible is the literal word of God) and religiosity (e.g., frequency of attendance at religious services) emerged as key divisions between more orthodox or traditional adherents and more progressive ones (see Green 2007, Chapter 3). Additional interest in religiosity was fueled by the rise of the “nones,” a trend the United States appeared to be resisting at the dawn of the culture war literature. As the rising tide of “nones” contributed to a growing political divide between frequent and infrequent attenders, worship attendance eventually came to dominate reporting on the God gap to the near total exclusion of other aspects of religious orthodoxy or traditionalism.

Because most citizens fall short of the normative ideal of being politically knowledgeable, it is important to assess the nature of information effects in public opinion. This paper identifies policy debate as a means by which information effects may be reduced. To test this notion, we analyze public opinion on health care before, during, and after the heated policy debate of the 1990s. The results show that information effects in public opinion were exacerbated during the time of greatest public discourse, which provides little to reassure those who are concerned about citizens' low and uneven levels of political information. Policy debate does not appear to compensate for political ignorance and enable the uninformed to behave “as if” they were better informed.

It is appropriate that Paul Goren bookends this exciting new look at voter competence by indicting and then exonerating the American voter�yes, the play on the title of the seminal �Michigan model� book appears to be intentional. Few argue that many Americans fall short of the perfectly informed democrats upon whose shoulders political accountability rests in prominent theories of democratic government. The debate is not so much about whether voters are competent as much as it is about whether variation in competence matters. On one side are scholars who worry that many in American society know so little about the political world they inhabit that they fail to matter�or worse still they fall prey to deception and behave in ways that run counter to their best political interests. If the incompetents cannot bring policy to bear on their political behavior, then The American Voter and the subsequent �sophistication interaction account� (Goren�s label) indict many voters as incompetent to hold elected officials accountable democratically. On the other side are scholars who worry that the worriers have fundamentally misunderstood the way in which some citizens approach their democratic duties. While On Voter Competence probably rests more comfortably in the latter camp�thus exonerating the American voter and indicting The American Voter�Goren�s work is unique for having identified several important reasons that good scholars in each camp have arrived at different answers to similar questions about voter competence. Goren finds important differences when he compares well-informed citizens to poorly informed ones. Consistent with The American Voter �

Political apathy and ignorance are endemic among young people and many agree that improving civic education is tantamount to improving public awareness. How to go about inspiring engagement among young people, however, remains a topic of debate. For example, students who report on surveys that they were encouraged to express their political views in the classroom were also more politically engaged. But this might occur because students who were already engaged reported more opportunities to express political views. Spurious relationships could also occur because educators are more likely to undertake service learning, for example, when their students come from higher SES backgrounds. Experiments and long-term observation that could provide greater certainty about causal links have been rare. This paper presents results of a classroom-based experiment designed to assess whether students’ enthusiasm for “new media” (e.g. blogs) can be harnessed in American politics courses to stimulate long lasting political engagement.

Despite a proliferation of research treating Hispanics as a homogeneous political group, important questions regarding the nature and structure of Hispanic public opinion remain unanswered. Are Hispanic self-identifiers similar enough in their political preferences to be analyzed as a political group? As a group, are Hispanic preferences distinctive enough to be distinguished empirically from other racial and ethnic constituencies? Using National Election Studies data I evaluate intra-group similarity and inter-group differences. I find evidence of strikingly similar intra-group opinion, and I find Hispanic preferences are distinctive, relative to Anglos and blacks, even after controlling for socioeconomic status (SES). Moreover, SES variables impact Hispanic opinion and Anglo opinion differently. By exploring the statistical interactions between Hispanic ethnicity and the SES variables I am able to illustrate ways in which Hispanics’ shared experiences differ from those of Anglos and lead to distinctive political views.