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Martin Johnson |
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Associate Professor |
2222 Watkins Hall Tel 951.827.4612, Fax 951.827.3933 e-mail: martin.johnson@ucr.edu |
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Political Behavior
Structural Access to Local News and Civic Engagement (with Jackie A. Filla) Political observers lament the apparent decline of political news – from shrinking sound bites to the perception that the soft news of today is less informative than the hard news of yesteryear. Independent of concerns about content, many voters structurally have little or no access to information about their local government because they lack a news outlet focused on their community. The resident of one political jurisdiction is often served by news media focused on events and issues important in another political jurisdiction. Scholars have examined the effects of broadcast media market structure on voter knowledge, particularly in the context of Congressional elections and state politics. What are the implications of similar gaps in the availability or attention of news providers on engagement of voters in local politics? We examine this question using survey data collected in the Los Angeles Designated Market Area by the Public Policy Institute of California. “It’s Not the Voting that’s Democracy, It’s the Counting” Public Attitudes towards the Electoral Process in the Wake of HAVA (with Chad Murphy and Shaun Bowler) The Help America Vote Act is aimed at improving electoral practices and educating voters about changes in voting technology and procedures. A major consequence of this legislation has been the replacement of punchcard and mechanical lever voting machines with computer-based voting in more than one-third of U.S. counties since 2004 (Brace, 2006). We ask how voters react to these changes, focusing on preferences over types of voting technology and confidence in U.S. elections among voters in California. We are particularly interested in how the effort of local election officials affects these judgments in the face of change. Our findings suggest that spending aimed at educating voters is associated with confidence in U.S. elections but has little relationship with enthusiasm for technology used locally. Partisanship is strongly associated with both judgments about the electoral system and voting technology. |
Last updated April 10, 2008.