|
Martin Johnson |
|
|
Associate Professor |
2222 Watkins Hall Tel 951.827.4612, Fax 951.827.3933 e-mail: martin.johnson@ucr.edu |
|
Public Opinion
Channel Surfing: Does Choice Reduce Videomalaise? (with Kevin Arceneaux) Political communication researchers study message effects, given exposure. They rarely investigate how reception conditions this process. We consider the hypothesis that televised incivility reduces political trust (Mutz and Reeves 2005), but in a choice environment: Individuals who select political talk shows may be unaffected by uncivil exchanges, while those who dislike them turn away. An experiment allows us to compare participants forced to watch incivility with those permitted to change channels. The negative effects of televised incivility on trust vanish when people can easily avoid it. However, rancorous political programming reduces internal efficacy, even among people who choose it. Social Sanctions and Stylized Political Conversation: Do Interviewers Penalize Deviant Survey Respondents? (with Byran Martin) Prior research on the context of survey interviews has focused on adjustments respondents make in their answers to questions, constrained by expectations of what they might expect an interviewer to consider socially desirable. Perhaps the best known of these social desirability effects involve vote over-reporting in post-election surveys, but there are also convincing demonstrations of race-of-interviewer and gender-of-interviewer effects. We investigate a potential mechanism underlying social desirability effects – social sanctions exacted by survey interviewers: Do interviewers penalize respondents for their answers to survey questions? While interviewers have little opportunity to exact serious, lasting sanctions, they do rate the attentiveness, intelligence, and honesty of survey respondents. In fact, these intelligence and interest ratings have been used as an operationalization of political sophistication. Using interviewer ratings from the 2004 American National Elections Study, we find interviewers do penalize respondents who deviate from political participation norms. Our findings have methodological consequences – specifically with regard to interviewer ratings as a surrogate for political knowledge – but have more important implications for recent discussions of social sanctions in political discussions and the coercion model of social influence. Representation and Local Policy: Relating County-Level Public Opinion to Policy Outputs (with Garrick Percival and Max Neiman) Students of local politics have argued that American federalism implies little for local tastes in subnational policy making. Peterson (1979) is most closely associated with the expectation that the need for a productive tax base will drive down social service spending at the local level, while promoting developmental expenditures. In this research we create and audit a reliable measure of county political ideology and investigate the role public opinion plays in redistributive, developmental, and allocational public spending choices at the county level in California. Our findings challenge previous assumptions connected to local policy making that suggests that local governments should be uniformly biased against redistributive policies. Instead we find that redistributive spending varies across local governments as a function of local ideological orientations. More liberal/conservative counties produce more liberal/conservative policy outputs across a wide rage of redistributive policy areas including public health and welfare services. Importantly, on issues that bring higher levels of political conflict – like redistributive policies – local policy outputs match the political interests of diverse, localized populations. Our findings highlight the multi-level nesting within which policy making occurs in the U.S. and also recommends the continuing importance of examining the local origins of public policy. |
Last updated October 19, 2007.