Search

Relative to the well-developed theory and extensive survey batteries on people's preferences for substantive policy solutions, scholarly understanding of people's preferences for the mechanisms by which policies should be adopted is disappointing. Theory rarely goes beyond the assumption that people would prefer to rule themselves rather than leave decisions up to elites and measurement rests largely on four items that are not up to the task. In this article, we seek to provide a firmer footing for "process" research by 1) offering an alternative theory holding that people actually want elites to continue to make important political decisions but want them to do so only after acquiring a deep appreciation for the real-world problems facing regular people, and 2) developing and testing a battery of over 50 survey items, appropriate for cross-national research, that extend understanding of how the people want political decisions to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anyone familiar with American communities knows that they vary significantly in terms of their physical attractiveness. In this study, the authors explore the community-level correlates of attractiveness using data from all of Iowa's 954 cities and towns. Each of the communities was visited by a researcher who scored it in terms of its attractiveness. The authors correlate these ratings with a variety of community-level sociodemographic, economic, and attitudinal indicators. The results show that attractive communities tend to be larger, wealthier, and more civic-minded than other communities. Attractive communities also tend to have a higher percentage of elderly and college-educated residents. Further analysis revealed that population, wealth, and education are correlated less strongly with attractiveness as community size increases, whereas civic mindedness is correlated more strongly with attractiveness as community size increases. The authors discuss what their findings mean for communities trying to become more attractive. Keywords: community; urban planning; beautification; urban design; community attractiveness

We argue that Americans' policy attitudes on firearm availability are influenced by the identity of the prospective owner. We use an experiment to demonstrate that attitudes towards gun control/availability are influenced by both race and gender; whether subjects are primed to think of African-Americans versus whites or men versus women has a substantial impact on the degree to which they support firearm access. We find that for many white Americans, Black men and white women stand on opposite poles – priming white Americans with the thought of a Black man decreases support for gun availability, whereas priming the thought of a white woman increases support for gun availability. Further, the magnitude of this effect is quite large – comparable to the difference between Democrats and Republicans. These findings underscore the importance of thinking about the complicated role identity groups play in understanding Americans' preferences for government (in)action, even in policy areas with explicit Constitutional mandates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of choice and self-selection are central features of politics but absent from most experimental designs. We show how designs that incorporate choice, by allowing some subjects the option to receive or avoid treatment, can be extended by randomizing conditional on subjects' treatment choices to answer further questions of interest while preserving statistical power. We apply this design to study how the gender of messengers for the #MeToo social movement conditions who receives the movement's message and how they respond. Our results, from both convenience and nationally representative samples, suggest that #MeToo movement's message reaches a wide audience with the intended effect. The potential for backlash in response to the message appears limited but more likely when this message is delivered by a woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the research on relationship between personality and response patterns on public opinion surveys. Topics discussed include views on two response styles that involves extreme response style (ERS) and acquiescence response style (ARS); influence of response tendencies on validity of survey data; and relationship between a response style and the item in question.

The degree to which people desire policy change is a function of two factors: preferences for future policies and perceptions of current policies. Political scientists, pollsters, and pundits know a good deal about people’s policy preferences but surprisingly little about the distance of those preferences from policy perceptions. In this article, we assess the distance between policy perceptions and policy preferences to calculate the amount of policy change desired. The data come from an original survey tapping respondents’ preferred and perceived policies and from those few National Election Surveys where parallel items on policy preferences and perceptions were posed. By incorporating policy perceptions alongside of preferences, our findings provide a better indication of the gulf between the policy change desired by liberals and the policy change desired by conservatives. The findings help explain polarization in the United States where differences in policy preferences alone often do not indicate extreme diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]