Browsing by Subject "Public Opinion"
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Item Covering Congress: Media Effects on Evaluations of the Legislative Branch(2010-01-16) Johnson, TylerThis project takes an in-depth look at the role that media coverage of both individual members of Congress and Congress as a whole plays in shaping approval of legislators and the legislative branch. I argue that by examining what the media choose to cover and how the media cover it, we can learn more about the standards by which judgments of political performance take place. As such, I also contend that differences between the tone and substance in which the media cover individual legislators compared to how they cover the legislative branch go a long way to explaining why Americans cast favor upon those they send to Congress and cast doubt on Congress itself. The essential dichotomy examined in the project, based on Thomas Patterson's (1993) assessment of the changing nature of how the mass media cover campaigning, splits reporting on Congress into governing coverage and game coverage. Governing coverage deals more with substantive issues, policy problems, and signals that business is taking place. Game coverage, on the other hand, is more concerned with the parliamentary struggles between actors and parties to pass legislation and accrue power; it treats politicians as strategic actors always competing for advantages. Game coverage also focuses heavily on winning and losing. I argue that the over time focus on either game or governing aspects of legislating and representing will drive assessments of members of Congress and Congress itself. More specifically, I analyze how game frame coverage is likely to spur negative job approval, while governing frame coverage drives positive assessments of job performance.Item Public Support for Military Interventions across Levels of Political Information and Phases of Intervention(2010-07-14) Sirin Villalobos, CigdemScholars widely acknowledge that democratic political leaders seek public support for their policy endeavors, particularly when conducting costly policies as in the case of military interventions. A deeper understanding of the factors that affect public support for military interventions is crucial to explaining more definitively the determinants of foreign policy decisions regarding military interventions. However, most studies in this area of research examine the public as an undifferentiated mass that reacts uniformly to changes in the course of an intervention. In addition, scholars often overlook the varying dynamics of public support across different phases of a military intervention. Given these shortcomings in the literature, the objective of this dissertation is to examine the formation of public support as a function of political information levels and intervention stages. This dissertation is important in both methodological and theoretical terms. Methodologically, the major contribution of my dissertation is the adoption of a multimethod approach that is almost non-existent in this line of research. By bringing together a formal framework, experimentation, and statistical analyses of public opinion survey data, I develop a more refined theory and attain more robust empirical results. Theoretically, the study challenges the dominant mode of research on military interventions in which public opinion is treated as a homogenous mass. Specifically, I explore how major factors related to public support for military interventions (such as casualty rates) play different roles and weigh differently in their impact on the opinions of politically informed versus less informed individuals across stages of an intervention. The results of the experiments and survey data analyses demonstrate that politically informed individuals express less support for a military intervention at the starting (rally) phase of that intervention compared to the less informed. That said, as the intervention proceeds and casualties are incurred, support of politically uninformed individuals decreases at higher rates than does support of politically informed ones. In other words, politically informed individuals demonstrate more stable levels of support across intervention stages. In addition, both experimental and survey data analyses show that policy-specific information is generally a more influential factor on public support for military interventions compared to general political information.Item The Strategic Nature of Politics(2011-02-22) Ramirez, Mark DanielScholarship shows that the social construction of crime is responsible for the public?s demand for tougher criminal justice policies. Yet, there remains disagreement over several key issues regarding the relationship between strategic communication and the punitiveness of the mass public. Little is known about the magnitude and direction of changes in punitive sentiment over the last 50 years. Moreover, there is disagreement over when the public began to demand punitive solutions to crime over alternative policies. Many scholars point the racial turmoil of the 1960s, but none have shown conclusive evidence of any fundamental change in punitive sentiment. Finally, there is disagreement over what type of strategic appeal is most effective at shaping public opinion. The argument of this research is that the democratic nature of American pol- itics creates an environment where the competition of ideas flourish. Political ac- tors can use several types of strategic communication (agenda-setting, persuasion, priming, framing) to shape political outcomes. The effectiveness of an appeal does not remain constant over time, but should evolve around systematic social changes? environmental conditions and social norms. Thus, there is a time varying relationship between various appeals and public opinion. A content analysis of crime news in the New York Times provides measures of four types of strategic messages. Instrumental factors such as the economy and public policy are also shown to influence the public?s desire for punitive criminal justice policies. A Bayesian changepoint model provides a means to test when, if any,fundamental change occurred in the public?s punitive sentiment. Contrary to most accounts, the changepoint model identifies 1972 as having the highest probability of a breakpoint suggesting a public backlash against the Supreme Court?s Furman vs. Georgia decision to abolish the death penalty. Estimates from a state-space model show that different types of messages in the media shape punitive sentiment and that the effectiveness of racial primes and presidential attention to crime changes over time. Moreover, these changes are shown to be a function of changes in social context and norms suggesting ways to improve political communication.Item The Turning Point: Perceptions and Policies Concerning Communist China during the Kennedy Years(2012-11-13) Crean, Jeffrey 1977-When analyzing the policies of the John F. Kennedy administration towards the People?s Republic of China, previous historians have focused on the lack of substantive change, emphasizing the continuity of action with the prior polices of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. At the same time, a number of historians have noted that it was during the years Kennedy was in office that a majority of the American people began viewing communist China as a greater threat to world peace than the Soviet Union. However, none have sought to explain this sizeable shift in public opinion, or analyze its potential impact on policy. This thesis incorporates archival materials with contemporary print and visual media to make a connection between the sources of public opinion shifts and a change in the assumptions upon which U.S. China policy was based. Almost from the moment the new president assumed office, Robert Komer at the National Security Council and Chester Bowles at the State Department began pushing for changes in China policy based on the assumptions that the communist regime was not a ?passing phase,? would only become more powerful and over time constitute an inexorable greater threat to U.S. interests in Asia, and that rapprochement, rather than isolation, was the best means of ameliorating this threat. Together with James Thomson, Roger Hilsman, and eventually Walt Rostow, they pushed for the adoption of what A. Doak Barnett would later term ?Containment Without Isolation.? While the Sino-Soviet split accentuated charges of Chinese anti-white racism and the Great Leap Forward reinforced the sense of Mao?s irrationality, the Sino-Indian War confirmed both rising Chinese power and their leadership?s capacity for rational calculation. Meanwhile, in the popular culture, particularly motion pictures, the Yellow Peril enjoyed a revival as Chinese villains stepped to the fore, beginning to free themselves of their Soviet masters. However, while foreign Chinese were feared as never before, Chinese in America gained new acceptance. Laying the groundwork for the next five decades of China policy and enemy images, Kennedy?s Thousand Days constituted a turning point.