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The misuse of genomic information has generated considerable concern in American Indian and Alaska Native communities. To understand how issues of genomic research misuse are understood by the public this article focuses on the case brought against Arizona State University by the Havasupai Indian Tribe. To understand how the Havasupai was being framed in the print media, this article examines newspaper articles (N=59) from when the story broke in 2004 until 2019. Our findings suggest that news media rarely engaged the concept of sovereignty and framed the story as an issue of research and scientific ethics.

The covid-19 pandemic has revived a longstanding, and understudied, trope in American politics: the association of immigrants with disease. There has been a great deal of scholarship on the economic, cultural, and criminal threat frames attached to immigrant groups in media coverage, but little to date has specifically examined how national and local sources have framed covid-19 in the context of immigrant communities. In this paper we analyze the prevalence of two different framings of the pandemic in national and local online news outlets over the first year of the pandemic: immigration as a public health threat to the nation, and covid-19 as a threat to immigrant communities within the nation. We find significant differences between national and local coverage, with the former more likely to frame immigration as a covid-19 threat, while local news outlets were more likely to discuss the threat the virus posed to already marginalized immigrant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberative democracy has increasingly been used as a form of citizen engagement and involvement in risk-related and environmental domains. However, there is much to learn about how citizens talk about and understand risks related to climate change in the context of community deliberative forums, and how deliberation might contribute to productive climate policy solutions. To contribute to this growing body of work, we use the lens of Construal Level Theory (CLT) to analyze transcripts from a large community forum held in the US state of South Carolina. Our analysis reveals a broad range of risk construal from deliberative participants, with many people discussing climate risks as psychologically near despite the longer horizon often associated with climate change. The results suggest that deliberative forums can be useful venues for helping citizens grapple with the myriad risks and construal levels associated with climate change. Rather than simply helping move climate risks 'closer' to people, deliberation might be more useful in allowing people to understand climate risks at multiple levels of psychological distance and leveraging this nuanced understanding to develop potential solutions and mitigation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends a model of political knowledge distortion by tracing the influence of cultural orientations, information exposure, and prior beliefs on changes in knowledge distortion and issue attitudes during the 2010 Oregon general election. Results show strong associations between voters' cultural orientations and their knowledge distortion in the first survey wave and over time. As hypothesized, orientations had stronger effects on the issues that showed greater cultural divergence. Self-reported exposure to issue-relevant information during the campaign, however, had no direct or interactive effects on voters' changing factual beliefs. Changes in issue attitudes were associated with voters' changing factual beliefs and their orientations, with the level of cultural divergence having no consistent influence on the strength of those associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) distinguishes itself by linking a small deliberative body to the larger electoral process. Since 2010, CIR citizen panels have been a legislatively authorized part of Oregon general elections to promote a more informed electorate. The CIR gathers a representative cross-section of two dozen voters for 5 days of deliberation on a single ballot measure. The process culminates in the citizen panelists writing a Citizens’ Statement that the secretary of state inserts into the official Voters’ Pamphlet sent to each registered voter. This study analyzes the effect of one such Citizens’ Statement from the 2010 general election. In Study 1, an online survey experiment found that reading this Statement influenced Oregon voters’ values trade-offs, issue knowledge, and vote intentions. In Study 2, regression analysis of a cross-sectional phone survey found a parallel association between the Statement’s use and voting choices but yielded some mixed findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable research on political discussion has focused on identifying its antecedents and outcomes. The rise of voting by mail provides an opportunity to examine the subject in a new context-one in which voters discuss their views and electoral choices with others while filling out their ballots. We explored the possibility that conventional predictors of political engagement would predict who partakes in such discussions. Past research also suggested that those voters most likely to report changing their minds as a result of discussion would perceive their discussants as holding contrary views and higher levels of political sophistication. We further hypothesized that less politically engaged voters would seek out discussants they rated as more knowledgeable than themselves, whereas the more politically sophisticated voters would seek out like-minded discussants. Past research also suggested that the least partisan voters would be those most likely to report disagreement in their absentee discussions. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed telephone survey data from two elections conducted in Washington State. Results showed that the factors that predict traditional forms of political participation and discussion do not explain who engages in discussion during vote-by-mail elections. We also found that independent voters were more likely to talk with ideologically divergent discussants, whereas less knowledgeable citizens sought discussants who knew more about politics than they did. Many voters reported that these discussions shaped their vote choices, with the highest rates of perceived influence coming from those who viewed their discussion partners as more knowledgeable and more ideologically divergent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]