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The Global Crisis of Trust in Elections Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Nicholas Kerr, Bridgett A King, Michael Wahman
This article introduces a special issue on trust in elections. While the number of electoral democracies has grown globally, we are currently experiencing a crisis of electoral trust. Political polarization, social divisions, and the rapid spread of misinformation have all been related to enhanced widespread skepticism about the quality of national elections. The special issue is focused on two central
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The Electoral Misinformation Nexus: How News Consumption, Platform Use, and Trust in News Influence Belief in Electoral Misinformation. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-22 Camila Mont'Alverne,Amy Ross Arguedas,Sayan Banerjee,Benjamin Toff,Richard Fletcher,Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Electoral misinformation, where citizens believe false or misleading claims about the electoral process and electoral institutions-sometimes actively and strategically spread by political actors-is a challenge to public confidence in elections specifically and democracy more broadly. In this article, we analyze a combination of 42 million clicks in links and apps from behavioral tracking data of 2
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The Trump Effect? Right-Wing Populism and Distrust in Voting by Mail in Canada. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-16 Cary Wu,Andrew Dawson
Do Donald Trump's attacks on voting by mail influence how some Canadians view mail-in ballots? The Trump effect on views and behaviors surrounding voting by mail has been well documented in the United States. North of the border, more Canadians than ever voted by mail in the last general election. In this study, we consider how right-wing populism is associated with trust in voting by mail among Canadians
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Where Are the Sore Losers? Competitive Authoritarianism, Incumbent Defeat, and Electoral Trust in Zambia's 2021 Election. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-16 Nicholas Kerr,Matthias Krönke,Michael Wahman
How do electoral turnovers shape citizen perceptions of election quality in competitive authoritarian regimes? We argue that electoral outcomes are crucial for determining perceptions of electoral quality. While detailed evaluation of electoral trust is complex in competitive autocracies with institutional uncertainty and polarized electoral environments, turnovers send strong and unequivocal signals
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Distrusting the Process: Electoral Trust, Operational Ideology, and Nonvoting Political Participation in the 2020 American Electorate Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-16 Erin B Fitz, Kyle L Saunders
This article explores the relationships between electoral trust, operational ideology, and nonvoting political participation (NVP) during the 2020 US presidential election cycle. We hypothesize that: (1) more liberal operational ideology is associated with more NVP, (2) less electoral trust is associated with more NVP, and (3) operational ideology moderates the negative relationship between electoral
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A Matter of Misunderstanding? Explaining (Mis)Perceptions of Electoral Integrity across 25 Different Nations Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-16 Rens Vliegenthart, Carolien Van Ham, Sanne Kruikemeier, Kristof Jacobs
In this paper, we investigate how trust in traditional and social media correlate with misperceptions of electoral integrity. Relying on insights from political communication research on exposure to misinformation and selective exposure mechanisms, as well as insights on the different roles of traditional and social media in different regime types, we argue that misperceptions of election integrity
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Trust in the Count: Improving Voter Confidence with Post-election Audits Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Jacob Jaffe, Joseph R Loffredo, Samuel Baltz, Alejandro Flores, Charles Stewart
Post-election audits are thought to bolster voter confidence in elections, but it is unclear which aspects of audits drive public trust. Using preregistered vignette and conjoint survey experiments administered by YouGov on a sample of 2,000 American respondents, we find that how an audit is conducted is more important than what an audit finds. Structural features of audits, like who conducts it and
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The Dynamics of Electoral Manipulation and Institutional Trust in Democracies: Election Timing, Blatant Fraud, and the Legitimacy of Governance Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Masaaki Higashijima, Hisashi Kadoya, Yuki Yanai
This paper explores the dynamic relationship between electoral manipulation and popular trust in political institutions. Governments often manipulate election results by resorting to electoral fraud. They also tilt the electoral field by opportunistically deciding when to hold elections, in other words, election timing maneuvering. How do these two different types of electoral manipulation affect citizens’
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Your Typical Criminal: Why White Americans Hate Voter Fraud Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-28 Adriano Udani, Anita Manion, David Kimball
Public concerns about voter fraud are widespread and are frequently cited to justify new voting restrictions and harsh punishment for violators. But to what extent do beliefs about a perpetrator’s identity shape public support for efforts to prevent and punish voter fraud? Antipathy toward racial and ethnic groups is a strong predictor of public beliefs about voter fraud. Yet, prior studies have only
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Autocratization Spillover: When Electing an Authoritarian Erodes Election Trust across Borders Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-27 Ka Ming Chan
The rich literature on election trust predominantly uses domestic determinants as explanatory factors. But given the international nature of the autocratization wave, can an autocratization event across borders erode election trust? This article argues that an authoritarian’s electoral success in a neighboring country can shatter democratic norms and demonstrate the viability of authoritarians. This
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Validating the “Genuine Pipeline” to Limit Social Desirability Bias in Survey Estimates of Voter Turnout Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Matthew DeBell, D Sunshine Hillygus, Daron R Shaw, Nicholas A Valentino
It is well documented that survey overreporting of voter turnout due to social desirability bias threatens inference about political behavior. This paper reports four studies that contained question wording experiments to test questions designed to minimize that bias using a “pipeline” approach. The “pipeline” informs survey participants that researchers can perform vote validation to verify turnout
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Misleading Polls in the Media: Does Survey Clickbait Have Social Consequences? Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Matthew H Graham, D Sunshine Hillygus, Andrew Trexler
In today’s competitive information environment, clicks are the currency of the digital media landscape. Clickbait journalism attempts to entice attention with provocative and sensational headlines, but what are the implications when public opinion polls are the hook? Does the use of survey clickbait—news stories that make misleading claims about public opinion—have implications for perceptions of the
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Fear and Loathing: How Demographic Change Affects Support for Christian Nationalism Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Brooklyn Walker, Donald P Haider-Markel
Christian nationalism, the fusion of religious and national identities, has emerged as an important factor shaping public opinion on a range of issues. However, debates in the existing literature on the motivations behind support for Christian nationalism remain unresolved: Is Christian nationalism a response to secularization and/or a cover for discomfort with racial diversity and equality? Is Christian
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Using Machine Translation and Post-Editing in the TRAPD Approach: Effects on the Quality of Translated Survey Texts Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Diana Zavala-Rojas, Dorothée Behr, Brita Dorer, Danielly Sorato, Veronika Keck
A highly controlled experimental setting using a sample of questions from the European Social Survey (ESS) and European Values Study (EVS) was used to test the effects of integrating machine translation and post-editing into the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretesting, and Documentation (TRAPD) approach in survey translation. Four experiments were conducted in total, two concerning the language
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Attitudes toward Police and Police Spending Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Michael W Sances
The Black Lives Matter movement focused scholarly and public attention on the politics of policing, but little is known about long-term trends in public opinion toward the police. I analyze three time series of attitudes toward police and police spending dating back as far as the 1960s: Gallup’s confidence in police question, the American National Election Studies’ feeling thermometer toward police
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Political Alienation and the Trump Vote in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Elections Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Maxwell B Allamong
Following Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US presidential election, some popular and scholarly sources suggested that Trump’s candidacy may have been bolstered, in part, by the mobilization of “politically alienated” voters. This argument is puzzling, however, as certain forms of political alienation are often negatively related to political participation, making it unclear whether or
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Measuring Attentiveness in Self-Administered Surveys Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Adam J Berinsky, Alejandro Frydman, Michele F Margolis, Michael W Sances, Diana Camilla Valerio
The surge in online self-administered surveys has given rise to an extensive body of literature on respondent inattention, also known as careless or insufficient effort responding. This burgeoning literature has outlined the consequences of inattention and made important strides in developing effective methods to identify inattentive respondents. However, differences in terminology, as well as a multiplicity
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Social Mobility through Immigrant Resentment: Explaining Latinx Support for Restrictive Immigration Policies and Anti-immigrant Candidates Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Flavio Rogerio Hickel, Kassra A R Oskooii, Loren Collingwood
Various polls suggest that Donald Trump has enjoyed the support of a sizable minority of the Latinx electorate despite his racially offensive rhetoric and support for some of the most restrictive immigration policies in recent memory. Building on Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorization Theory, we contend that some Latinxs harbor negative stereotypes about immigrants, blame them for the status
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Measuring Implicit Political Extremism through Implicit Association Tests Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Sebastian Jungkunz, Marc Helbling, Mujtaba Isani
We develop the first implicit association test (IAT) to measure general implicit extremist attitudes in Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. We find that implicit extremist attitudes are positively but weakly correlated with existing explicit measures. This indicates that implicit measures capture different parts of the population, for example, cases in which associations are based on automated
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Political Self-Confidence and Affective Polarization Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Carey E Stapleton, Jennifer Wolak
Even among those who share the same partisan commitments, some people say they despise the opposing party while others report far less animosity. Why are some people more likely to express hostility toward the opposing political party? We explore how individual-level differences in feelings of self-confidence fuel out-party animosities. Drawing on responses to a module of the 2020 Cooperative Election
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Trump Support Explains COVID-19 Health Behaviors in the United States Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, Thomas B Pepinsky
A wide range of empirical scholarship has documented a partisan gap in health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, but the political foundations and temporal dynamics of these partisan gaps remain poorly understood. Using an original six-wave individual panel study (n = 3,000) of Americans throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that at the individual level,
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The Crucial Role of Race in Twenty-First Century US Political Realignment Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Michael Barber, Jeremy C Pope
Traditional realignment theory has fallen out of fashion among political scientists, yet the popular press talk about political realignments with great regularity. However, in this research note we show that political science should reconsider realignment theory because over the last decade American politics has dramatically realigned—but only for white Americans. Specifically, we demonstrate that
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COVID-19 Spillover Effects onto General Vaccine Attitudes Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Kristin Lunz Trujillo, Jon Green, Alauna Safarpour, David Lazer, Jennifer Lin, Matthew Motta
Even amid the unprecedented public health challenges attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to vaccinating against the novel coronavirus has been both prevalent and politically contentious in American public life. In this paper, we theorize that attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination might “spill over” to shape attitudes toward “postpandemic” vaccination programs and policy mandates for years
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Social Desirability and Affective Polarization Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Elizabeth C Connors
Media coverage of affective polarization—partisans disliking and distrusting out-partisans while liking and trusting in-partisans—is abundant, both creating and reflecting a belief among the public that partisans are more affectively polarized than they are. These trends suggest that affective polarization among partisans could be viewed as socially desirable, which may then shape partisans’ expressed
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Expectations for Policy Change and Participation Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Curtis Bram
What policy changes do people expect from elections, and how do these expectations influence the decision to vote? This paper seeks to understand the relationship between people’s expectations and their subsequent voting behavior by examining beliefs about what candidates would actually do if given political power. I start with a survey of political scientists and compare their forecasts about what
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The Reverse Backlash: How the Success of Populist Radical Right Parties Relates to More Positive Immigration Attitudes Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 James Dennison, Alexander Kustov
What is the relationship between the electoral success of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) and public attitudes toward immigration? Previous research suggests that PRRP success can lead to more negative attitudes due to the breaking down of antiprejudice norms and more prominent anti-immigration party cues. However, we argue that greater PRRP success could have a positive relationship with immigration
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Autocratic Legalism, Partisanship, and Popular Legitimation in Authoritarian Cameroon Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Natalie Wenzell Letsa, Yonatan L Morse
Authoritarian regimes regularly turn to the law to justify repression. This article examines whether invoking legal institutions has a persuasive effect on public perceptions of repression, and whether that effect is shaped by partisanship. The article uses the case of Cameroon’s Special Criminal Tribunal, created in 2011 to prosecute high-profile corruption cases. A survey experiment was designed
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National Origin Identity and Descriptive Representativeness: Understanding Preferences for Asian Candidates and Representation Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Jennifer D Wu
This paper examines how an Asian candidate’s national origin background affects their perceived ability to represent different constituents. Would Asian voters prefer any Asian candidate over someone who is non-Asian? Using a series of survey experiments that randomly emphasize the national origin backgrounds of two real politicians and a hypothetical politician, I find that politicians who are East
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The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Trent Ollerenshaw, Ashley Jardina
In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans’ immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats’
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News from Home: How Local Media Shapes Climate Change Attitudes Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-05 Talbot M Andrews, Cana Kim, Jeong Hyun Kim
Highlighting the local impacts of climate change has the potential to increase the public’s awareness of and engagement with climate change. However, information about local impacts is only effective when delivered by trusted sources such as copartisan political leaders. Is information about climate change conveyed by local media sources similarly beneficial? We argue that local media are well positioned
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Bias and Variance in Multiparty Election Polls Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Peter Selb, Sina Chen, John Körtner, Philipp Bosch
Recent polling failures highlight that election polls are prone to biases that the margin of error customarily reported with polls does not capture. However, such systematic errors are difficult to assess against the background noise of sampling variance. Shirani-Mehr et al. (2018) developed a hierarchical Bayesian model to disentangle random and systematic errors in poll estimates of two-party vote
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Rural Identity and LGBT Public Opinion in the United States. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Jack Thompson
Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity-or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations
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Personality and Survey Satisficing Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-17 Patrick Sturgis, Ian Brunton-Smith
In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don’t Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response
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The Effects of Elite Attacks on Copartisan Media: Evidence from Trump and Fox News Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-17 Allison M N Archer
Individuals seeking news content face a variety of options in the current media landscape, yet scholarly research provides little evidence regarding the conditions under which they might become more or less open to different partisan news outlets. Drawing on the case of Donald Trump’s critiques of Fox News, I argue that elite rhetoric plays an important role in this process for members of both parties
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Public Support for Democracy in the United States Has Declined Generationally. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Christopher Claassen,Pedro C Magalhães
Support for democracy in the United States, once thought to be solid, has now been shown to be somewhat shaky. One of the most concerning aspects of this declining attachment to democracy is a marked age gap, with younger Americans less supportive of democracy than their older compatriots. Using age-period-cohort analysis of 12 national surveys collected between 1995 and 2019, we show that this age
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Privacy Attitudes toward Mouse-Tracking Paradata Collection Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Felix Henninger, Pascal J Kieslich, Amanda Fernández-Fontelo, Sonja Greven, Frauke Kreuter
Survey participants’ mouse movements provide a rich, unobtrusive source of paradata, offering insight into the response process beyond the observed answers. However, the use of mouse tracking may require participants’ explicit consent for their movements to be recorded and analyzed. Thus, the question arises of how its presence affects the willingness of participants to take part in a survey at all—if
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Income Source Confusion Using the SILC Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Christopher Robert Bollinger, Iva Valentinova Tasseva
We use a unique panel of household survey data—the Austrian version of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) for 2008–2011—which have been linked to individual administrative records on both state unemployment benefits and earnings. We assess the extent and structure of misreporting across similar benefits and between benefits and earnings. We document that many respondents
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Social Media Effects on Public Trust in the European Union. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Osman Sabri Kiratli
This paper scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage
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Factors Associated with Interviewers' Evaluations of Respondents' Performance in Telephone Interviews: Behavior, Response Quality Indicators, and Characteristics of Respondents and Interviewers. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Dana Garbarski,Jennifer Dykema,Nora Cate Schaeffer,Cameron P Jones,Tiffany S Neman,Dorothy Farrar Edwards
Interviewers' postinterview evaluations of respondents' performance (IEPs) are paradata, used to describe the quality of the data obtained from respondents. IEPs are driven by a combination of factors, including respondents' and interviewers' sociodemographic characteristics and what actually transpires during the interview. However, relatively few studies examine how IEPs are associated with features
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Ethical Considerations for Augmenting Surveys with Auxiliary Data Sources Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Bella Struminskaya, Joseph W Sakshaug
Survey researchers frequently use supplementary data sources, such as paradata, administrative data, and contextual data to augment surveys and enhance substantive and methodological research capabilities. While these data sources can be beneficial, integrating them with surveys can give rise to ethical and data privacy issues that have not been completely resolved. In this research synthesis, we review
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Disagreement Does Not Always Mean Division: Evidence from Five Decades of American Public Opinion Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Stuart Perrett
Are those things on which Americans most disagree the same things that divide liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans? How has this changed over time? To answer these questions, I use 350 subjective items from five decades of the General Social Survey. Estimating disagreement with ordinal dispersion and using a novel measure of sorting by party and ideological identification, I find
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Increasing the Acceptance of Smartphone-Based Data Collection Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Alexander Wenz, Florian Keusch
To study human behavior, social scientists are increasingly collecting data from mobile apps and sensors embedded in smartphones. A major challenge of studies implemented on general population samples, however, is that participation rates are rather low. While previous research has started to investigate the factors affecting individuals’ decision to participate in such studies, less is known about
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Augmenting Surveys with Paradata, Administrative Data, and Contextual Data. Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-10 Joseph W Sakshaug,Bella Struminskaya
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Evaluating Pre-election Polling Estimates Using a New Measure of Non-ignorable Selection Bias Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Brady T West, Rebecca R Andridge
Among the numerous explanations that have been offered for recent errors in pre-election polls, selection bias due to non-ignorable partisan nonresponse bias, where the probability of responding to a poll is a function of the candidate preference that a poll is attempting to measure (even after conditioning on other relevant covariates used for weighting adjustments), has received relatively less focus
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The Effects of Polarized Evaluations on Political Participation: Does Hating the Other Side Motivate Voters? Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Chloe Ahn, Diana C Mutz
This study examines whether rising polarization in Americans’ partisan judgments has positive implications for political participation. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel survey data, we find evidence that polarized judgments are related to pre-election intent to vote, as well as to post-election self-reported voter turnout. Polarized evaluations also predict greater reporting of participation in
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Trends in Abortion Attitudes: From Roe to Dobbs Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Barbara Norrander, Clyde Wilcox
American public opinion on abortion has been investigated a multitude of times since the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. In this trends article, we review public attitudes in five areas: (1) support or opposition to Roe v. Wade, (2) basic attitudes toward abortion, (3) attitudes toward abortion under different conditions, (4) attachments to the pro-choice versus pro-life labels, and (5)
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What They Have but Also Who They Are: Avarice, Elitism, and Public Support for Taxing the Rich Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 John V Kane, Benjamin J Newman
Scholarship evaluating public support for redistribution has emphasized that stereotypical perceptions of low-income people inform citizens’ willingness to redistribute wealth to the poor. Less understood, however, is the extent to which stereotypical perceptions of high-income people lead to greater willingness to raise taxes on high-income individuals. These perceptions likely involve resource-based
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Women Experts and Gender Bias in Political Media Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Adam L Ozer
Widely held gender stereotypes present obstacles for women experts, who are generally evaluated less positively than equally qualified men across a range of fields. While audiences may view women as better equipped to handle certain feminine-stereotyped issues, Role Congruency Theory suggests that expert authority in politics may be incongruent with traditional feminine gender roles, leading to a subsequent
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The Impact of Racial Descriptive Norms on Vaccination against COVID-19 Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Marzia Oceno, Wei-Ting Yen
Racial disparities have persisted in COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death rates in the United States. Differences in vaccination hesitancy have also emerged by race: communities of color and, particularly, African Americans have been more reluctant to get a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. Can racial descriptive norms provide a tool to increase confidence and reduce hesitancy within the US public
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Television, Authoritarianism, and Support for Trump: A Replication Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-29 Erik Hermann, Michael Morgan, James Shanahan, Harry Yaojun Yan
Many factors contributed to support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, among them media influences. Morgan and Shanahan (2017) found that television viewing was associated with support for Trump, mediated through authoritarianism. In light of the changes in the political and media environments during Trump’s presidency, our study examined whether Morgan and Shanahan’s (2017) findings
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Truth and Bias, Left and Right: Testing Ideological Asymmetries with a Realistic News Supply Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-29 Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg
The debate around “fake news” has raised the question of whether liberals and conservatives differ, first, in their ability to discern true from false information, and second, in their tendency to give more credit to information that is ideologically congruent. Typical designs to measure these asymmetries select, often arbitrarily, a small set of news items as experimental stimuli without clear reference
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Public Opinion and Cyberterrorism Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Ryan Shandler, Nadiya Kostyuk, Harry Oppenheimer
Research into cyber-conflict, public opinion, and international security is burgeoning, yet the field suffers from an absence of conceptual agreement about key terms. For instance, every time a cyberattack takes place, a public debate erupts as to whether it constitutes cyberterrorism. This debate bears significant consequences, seeing as the ascription of a “terrorism” label enables the application
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“Deservingness” and Public Support for Universal Public Goods: A Survey Experiment Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Thomas Gift, Carlos X Lastra-Anadón
Voters support less spending on means-tested entitlements when they perceive beneficiaries as lacking motivation to work and pay taxes. Yet do concerns about the motivations of “undeserving” beneficiaries also extend to universal public goods (UPGs) that are free and available to all citizens? Lower spending on UPGs poses a particular trade-off: it lessens subsidization of “unmotivated” beneficiaries
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Weaving It In: How Political Radio Reacts to Events Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Clara Vandeweerdt
How do ideologically slanted media outlets react to politically relevant events? Previous research suggests that partisan media trumpet ideologically congenial events, such as opposing-party scandals, while ignoring bad news for their own side. Looking at reactions to newsworthy events on political radio—an often-partisan medium that reaches more Americans than Twitter—I find a different pattern. Based
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Satisfaction with Democracy: A Review of a Major Public Opinion Indicator Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Shane P Singh, Quinton Mayne
Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is one of the most commonly studied topics in the fields of political behavior and public opinion. Gauged with a survey question that asks respondents whether they are satisfied with the way democracy works, SWD has featured as an independent or dependent variable in more than 400 publications. In this Synthesis, we review the evolution and findings of this nearly
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The Devil No More? Decreasing Negative Outparty Affect through Asymmetric Partisan Thinking Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Wayde Z C Marsh
Political scientists, party elites, and journalists agree that affective polarization and negative partisanship are serious problems in American politics, but is it possible to reverse this trend and decrease negative outparty affect? Using two original survey experiments that manipulate partisans to think of the Republican and Democratic parties in either expressive or instrumental terms, I find that
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Affective Polarization in Comparative and Longitudinal Perspective Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-24 Diego Garzia, Frederico Ferreira da Silva, Simon Maye
Existent research shows that affective polarization has been intensifying in some publics, diminishing in others, and remaining stable in most. We contribute to this debate by providing the most encompassing comparative and longitudinal account of affective polarization so far. We resort to a newly assembled dataset able to track partisan affect, with varying time series, in eighteen democracies over
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Emotionally Coping with Terrorism Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Antoine J Banks, Heather M Hicks, Jennifer L Merolla
Individuals often experience anger after exposure to news about a terrorist attack. Are the coping strategies available to them effective in reducing anger, and with what consequences for policy attitudes? We argue that because terrorism is a complex problem, people should feel better distancing themselves from the threat than engaging in confrontive strategies against it, and this should lead to less
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Survey Attention and Self-Reported Political Behavior Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 R Michael Alvarez, Yimeng Li
Survey research methodology is evolving rapidly, as new technologies provide new opportunities. One of the areas of innovation regards the development of online interview best practices and the advancement of methods that allow researchers to measure the attention that respondents are devoting to the survey task. Reliable measurement of respondent attention can yield important information about the
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Lying for Trump? Elite Cue-Taking and Expressive Responding on Vote Method Public Opinion Quarterly (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Enrijeta Shino, Daniel A Smith, Laura Uribe
Might elite cues affect how we vote? Extant literature focuses on effects of elite cues on candidate evaluation or policy preference, but we know little about how they might affect vote method preferences. Drawing on a large survey of validated Florida voters, including those who regularly vote by mail, we find that retrospective and prospective misreporting of vote method prior to the 2020 General