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What are the relative contributions of stereotypes about the race and deservingness of welfare recipients to Americans' opinions on welfare? A recent study employing a conjoint-experimental method finds that Americans' stereotypes of welfare recipients as undeserving drive negative attitudes toward welfare, while stereotypes of welfare recipients as Black have little effect. However, this finding may be produced by the measure of welfare attitudes that includes questions implicating deservingness. We implement a conceptual replication of that study using different measures of welfare policy opinions that directly ask respondents about spending, both on welfare generally and on specific welfare programs. We show that when support for welfare is measured using the spending questions, stereotypes about race are significantly associated with opposition to welfare. These results have important implications for the debate on Americans' opposition to welfare programs, as well as for the measurement of policy opinions in surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media scholars have long expressed concern that news outlets' tendency to frame policy debates in terms of partisan conflict or political gamesmanship politicizes and polarizes public opinion. This tendency may be particularly problematic with new, highly salient issues like the COVID-19 pandemic during its earliest stages. To evaluate the degree to which coverage of the pandemic in its first months was framed in partisan terms we analyze the content of COVID-19 related articles published on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a random sample of local newspapers between February 21 and May 15, 2020. Contrary to what existing work about the politicization of early-pandemic news coverage might lead us to expect, we find these newspapers employed partisan framings of the pandemic in only about one out of ten articles. However, these frequencies differ dramatically across the kind of newspaper, with the two national papers far more likely to employ partisan framings than the local newspapers, and lower-circulation local papers much less likely to employ partisan framing than higher-circulation local papers. These results suggest that the degree to which news consumers receive partisan-framed messages about the pandemic depends on whether they consume local or national media. Further, the collapse of local news outlets may have led news consumers to see more partisan-framed coverage in the early stages of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stereotypes of the two parties play an important role in political cognition, and a range of recent studies have examined the content and effects of partisan stereotypes. However, little work has studied change in partisan stereotypes over time. We address this question by comparing data on stereotypes of partisans collected before and after the Trump presidency, a time when we might expect individuals' images of the two parties to undergo significant change. Using a structural topic model, we compare responses to open-ended questions asking respondents to list words describing members of the two parties from 2016 and 2021. We find that partisan stereotypes in the 2021 sample are less group- and issue-based and focused more on personal traits. These results suggest that, during the Trump era, members of the mass public came to see the parties in more personalized, character-focused terms, potentially contributing to affective polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of decision-making with outcome uncertainty are common in political science and related fields. Recent work in flagship journals has challenged canonical work by modeling outcome uncertainty as Brownian motion. This theoretical innovation has resonated because it is highly tractable and captures intuitively important realities of many decisions in ways that earlier models cannot. As theoretically attractive as the new models are, they have not yet been evaluated empirically. This is especially important because Brownian motion models place actors in more cognitively demanding situations than previous models. We offer what we believe to be the first experimental test of actors’ ability to behave in ways consistent with the Brownian motion model by evaluating subjects’ ability to rationally learn from another actor’s experiences. We show that subjects adjust their actions in response to the Brownian motion uncertainty. However, they deviate from optimal behavior in important ways, particularly in more complex situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]