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Research has identified differences in partisan communication styles, cognitive processing, values, and cultures. This article assesses if there are also differences in how Democrats and Republicans conceive of electoral participation. We... more
Research has identified differences in partisan communication styles, cognitive processing, values, and cultures. This article assesses if there are also differences in how Democrats and Republicans conceive of electoral participation. We submitted 1,730 open-ended responses from a 2016 survey prompt soliciting thoughts and feelings about voting to computerized content analysis. Findings show that Republicans employed more confident and less negative language than Democrats in their responses. Additionally, a close read of the Republican statements reveals how they expressed that their electoral participation matters. Our conclusion addresses how the traditional ideals often associated with the Grand Old Party may make them a more duty-based constituency valuing voting more than their less conservative peers.
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Killings of civilians by police officers have become a matter of intense public concern in the United States. High‐profile deaths, especially those of black citizens, have caused outrage and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement with... more
Killings of civilians by police officers have become a matter of intense public concern in the United States. High‐profile deaths, especially those of black citizens, have caused outrage and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement with calls for dramatic changes in how police agencies operate. However, little systematic research exists to answer questions about which policies should be ended or put in place to reduce these deaths. The authors leverage a large data set of gun deaths by police officers in the United States, combined with agency‐level policy data and community demographic data, to examine whether certain policies are associated with lower or higher rates of officer‐involved gun deaths. Findings show that one policy—the requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fire—is associated with significantly lower rates of gun deaths.
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Given that approximately half of Internet users use Facebook to access news, it is no surprise that social media are increasingly seen as a viable source of political information. Despite the fact that the average social media user only... more
Given that approximately half of Internet users use Facebook to access news, it is no surprise that social media are increasingly seen as a viable source of political information. Despite the fact that the average social media user only clicks on a small fraction of political content available in their News Feed, social media use correlates with political knowledge. From where, then, does this knowledge come? We argue that Facebook’s News Feed itself, with its short article previews, provides enough political information for learning to occur. However, this learning comes with an additional consequence: audiences who only read article previews think they know more than they actually do, especially individuals who are motivated to seek emotions. While we are agnostic to the normative implications of such overconfidence, it is worth noting that similar behaviors are associated with political efficacy, knowledge, and participation.
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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-nms-10.1177_14614448211021720 for Asymmetric adjustment: Partisanship and correcting misinformation on Facebook by Jay Jennings and Natalie Jomini Stroud in New Media & Society
The Pennsylvania Policy Database Project is the first sub-national digital archive within the Comparative Agendas Project. It provides a wide range of government documents, public opinion records, and media data going back as far as 1979.... more
The Pennsylvania Policy Database Project is the first sub-national digital archive within the Comparative Agendas Project. It provides a wide range of government documents, public opinion records, and media data going back as far as 1979. This chapter provides a historical overview and the general political context to the government system of Pennsylvania. In addition to the information available at the Comparative Agendas Project websites, the Pennsylvania Policy Database Project website maintains further extensive supplementary datasets on Pennsylvania. To provide an example of how this data can be used, the chapter concludes with an analysis of drinking water safety records and how this policy area relates to natural gas fracking policies in Pennsylvania.
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There is a long standing paradox within the study of religion and prejudice: religions that teach love and acceptance tend to produce followers who are more prejudice and intolerant than the non-religious (Allport and Ross 1967;... more
There is a long standing paradox within the study of religion and prejudice: religions that teach love and acceptance tend to produce followers who are more prejudice and intolerant than the non-religious (Allport and Ross 1967; Hunsberger 1995; Rokeach 1965). This paper will examine this paradox by investigating how religious motivation can affect how religion interacts with racial prejudice. In order to do this Gordon Allport’s Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) will be employed as a measure of religious motivation in two separate studies, one consisting of a nationally representative survey, and another using a religious prime through an online survey experiment.
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The political preferences of those with high and low incomes are highly correlated, and both groups become less supportive of redistributive spending as economic inequality increases. This article looks for a source of these interincome... more
The political preferences of those with high and low incomes are highly correlated, and both groups become less supportive of redistributive spending as economic inequality increases. This article looks for a source of these interincome group correlations by examining trends in media coverage. We find that during periods of higher inequality, media coverage is more likely to focus on the personal characteristics of welfare recipients rather than the social consequences and causes of poverty. Observational and experimental data indicate that this shift in media frames can predict declining support for welfare spending, even for those with lower incomes who might benefit from redistribution. These findings help explain the reactions of the American public to rising inequality.
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Across two studies, we test two of Facebook’s attempts to fight misinformation: labeling misinformation as disputed or false and including fact checks as related articles. We propose hypotheses based on a two-step model of motivated... more
Across two studies, we test two of Facebook’s attempts to fight misinformation: labeling misinformation as disputed or false and including fact checks as related articles. We propose hypotheses based on a two-step model of motivated reasoning, which provides insight into how misinformation is corrected. For study 1 ( n = 1,262) and study 2 ( n = 1,586), we created a mock Facebook News Feed consisting of five different articles—four were actual news stories and the fifth was misinformation. Both studies tested (a) the effect of misinformation without correction, (b) Facebook’s changes to its platform, and (c) an alternative we theorized could be more effective. The findings, in line with the two-step model of motivated reasoning, provide evidence of symmetric party effects for the belief in misinformation. In both studies, we find partisan differences in responses to fact checking. We find modest evidence that our improvements to Facebook’s attempts at correcting misinformation reduc...
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Religion is the frequent recipient of both blame and praise for its role in shaping democracy. Although views on how it affects the political system are varied, there is a general consensus that religion alters the way democracy... more
Religion is the frequent recipient of both blame and praise for its role in shaping democracy. Although views on how it affects the political system are varied, there is a general consensus that religion alters the way democracy functions. From a distance it appears that religion offers a mixed bag for democracy. It provides moral structure, civic engagement and interpersonal trust, but also creates intolerance, intergroup conflict and dogmatic beliefs. This paper proposes that religion’s relationship with democracy depends on the religious experience of the individual citizen. In addition to the level of religiosity and religious tradition, there is also a variance in the individual’s psychological relationship with religion. Religion can be used as an internal belief structure, as a set of norms that connect a community, or simply as a spiritual experience. These varying attachments to religion affect the type of democratic citizen one will be, and can partially account for the apparent disparate affect religion has on citizenship. This paper will discuss the use of the religious orientation scale, originally used by psychologist Gordon Allport, in order to test the relationship between an individual’s psychological attachment to religion and their interaction with a democratic society.
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Abstract will be provided by author.
Temple University led a six-university effort that built a comprehensive public policy database for Pennsylvania, modeled on the national Policy Agendas Project created by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993). The Pennsylvania... more
Temple University led a six-university effort that built a comprehensive public policy database for Pennsylvania, modeled on the national Policy Agendas Project created by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993). The Pennsylvania database (www.temple.edu/papolicy) enables users to integrate data from all three branches of government and the news media organized into 20 major and 249 minor policy topics since 1979. This article discusses the value of these data, their potential uses in state policy research, and the lessons learned over the four years invested in building the database. Our hope is that interested readers might undertake similar projects in their states to create a standardized national network of state policy databases.
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Newspapers have faced extreme challenges in recent years due to declining circulation and advertising revenue. This has resulted in newspaper closures, staff cuts, and dramatic changes to the ways many newspapers cover local government,... more
Newspapers have faced extreme challenges in recent years due to declining circulation and advertising revenue. This has resulted in newspaper closures, staff cuts, and dramatic changes to the ways many newspapers cover local government, among other topics. This article argues that the loss of professional expertise in coverage of local government has negative consequences for the quality of city politics because citizens become less informed about local policies and elections. We test our theory using an original data set that matches 11 local newspapers in California to the municipalities they cover. The data show that cities served by newspapers with relatively sharp declines in newsroom staffing had, on average, significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races. We also find suggestive evidence that lower staffing levels are associated with lower voter turnout.