To study the U.S. public's health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20-23, 2020).
We designed and fielded an original ...representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20-23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors, government policy preferences on COVID-19 response and worries about the pandemic. We test for partisan differences COVID-19 related policy attitudes and behaviors, measured in three different ways: party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning. Our multivariate approach adjusts for a wide range of individual demographic and geographic characteristics that might confound the relationship between partisanship and health behaviors, attitudes, and preferences.
We find that partisanship-measured as party identification, support for President Trump, or left-right ideological positioning-explains differences in Americans across a wide range of health behaviors and policy preferences. We find no consistent evidence that controlling for individual news consumption, the local policy environment, and local pandemic-related deaths erases the observed partisan differences in health behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. In further analyses, we use a LASSO regression approach to select predictors, and find that a partisanship indicator is the most commonly selected predictor across the 38 dependent variables that we study.
Our analysis of individual self-reported behavior, attitudes, and policy preferences in response to COVID-19 reveals that partisanship played a central role in shaping individual responses in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results indicate that partisan differences in responding to a national public health emergency were entrenched from the earliest days of the pandemic.
Over the last three decades, many countries across the world, including the United States, have experienced major increases in support for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) ...individuals and related issues. In partial relation to these changes, multiple studies have examined the factors shaping public opinion. In this review, we focus on four major areas of research on public opinion in this field of study. First, we assess the terms that scholars typically use when examining attitudes and highlight the areas of public opinion research that have received the most attention. Second, we focus on the data and measurement challenges related to examining attitudes in the United States and across many nations. Third, we consider how and why attitudes and related laws have changed over time and across nations. Finally, we discuss the major micro and macro empirical forces that influence and the theoretical explanations for why there are such differences in attitudes. We end by offering several suggestions for future research.
Does public opinion affect political speech? Of particular interest is whether public opinion affects (i) what topics politicians address and (ii) what positions they endorse. We present evidence ...from Germany where the government was recently forced to declassify its public opinion research, allowing us to link the content of the research to subsequent speeches. Our causal identification strategy exploits the exogenous timing of the research's dissemination to cabinet members within a window of a few days. We find that exposure to public opinion research leads politicians to markedly change their speech. First, we show that linguistic similarity between political speech and public opinion research increases significantly after reports are passed on to the cabinet, suggesting that politicians change the topics they address. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to public opinion research alters politicians' substantive positions in the direction of majority opinion.
This study presents a detailed investigation of public scepticism about climate change in Britain using the trend, attribution, and impact scepticism framework of Rahmstorf (2004). The study found ...that climate scepticism is currently not widespread in Britain. Although uncertainty and scepticism about the potential impacts of climate change were fairly common, both trend and attribution scepticism were far less prevalent. It further showed that the different types of scepticism are strongly interrelated. Although this may suggest that the general public does not clearly distinguish between the different aspects of the climate debate, there is a clear gradation in prevalence along the Rahmstorf typology. Climate scepticism appeared particularly common among older individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds who are politically conservative and hold traditional values; while it is less common among younger individuals from higher socio-economic backgrounds who hold self-transcendence and environmental values. The finding that climate scepticism is rooted in people's core values and worldviews may imply a coherent and encompassing sceptical outlook on climate change. However, attitudinal certainty appeared mainly concentrated in non-sceptical groups, suggesting that climate sceptical views are not held very firmly. Implications of the findings for climate change communication and engagement are discussed.
Americans are increasingly polarized by a variety of metrics. The dimensions, extent, causes, and consequences of that polarization have been the subject of much debate. Yet despite the centrality of ...religion to early discussions, the analytical focus on America's divides has largely shifted toward partisan identity, political ideology, race, and class interests. I show that religion remains powerfully implicated in all dimensions of American polarization, and sociologists must once again make religion more central to their analyses. After outlining research on American polarization, focusing on the role of religion, I survey findings within the burgeoning literatures on cultural transformation processes, (White) Christian nationalism, complex religion, and Americans' attitudes toward science in order to underscore the centrality of ethno-religious identities, religious demography, and religious institutions for both shaping and exacerbating various forms of polarization. Lastly, I propose an agenda for elucidating religion's ongoing role in understanding polarization beyond public opinion research at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. Though polarization research has been dominated by political scientists, leveraging religion in our analyses-not merely as a sui generis variable, but as a site of complex social behavior-facilitates novel sociological contributions to these literatures via our relative attention to multiple levels of analysis, theoretical eclecticism, and methodological fluidity.
Multilevel regression with poststratification (MrP) has quickly become the gold standard for small area estimation. While the first MrP models did not include context-level information, current ...applications almost always make use of such data. When using MrP, researchers are faced with three problems: how to select features, how to specify the functional form, and how to regularize the model parameters. These problems are especially important with regard to features included at the context level. We propose a systematic approach to estimating MrP models that addresses these issues by employing a number of machine learning techniques. We illustrate our approach using 89 items from public opinion surveys in the United States and demonstrate that our approach outperforms a standard MrP model in which the choice of context-level variables has been informed by a rich tradition of public opinion research.
For those of us who regularly conduct public opinion research outside of the United States and Europe, it is customary to have to explain whether our findings are "real," that is, generalizable ...relationships that advance theory, or some kind of contextual artifact. Infamous Reviewer 2 will ask for an explanation of how context might be affecting the relationships that we are describing, and while it might be irritating to do so, in this case, Reviewer 2 is right. The issue of course is not having to explain how contexts matter, but instead why scholarship examining the US, or certain western countries, is not consistently subject to the same task.
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 29(2), 189-213. doi:10.1093/ijpor/edw003 Het online medialandschap heeftervoor gezorgd dat mensen uit een veel groter media-aanbod dan ooit tevoren ...kunnen kiezen. Helaas is het vrij lastig om dit proces empirisch aan te tonen, waardoor gedegen onderzoek tot dusverre vaak uitbleef. Onderzoeksopzet Om te onderzoeken of mensen daadwerkelijk voor informatie kiezen die aansluit bij hun opvattingen en of dit ertoe leidt dat hun opvattingen extremer worden, hebben we een experiment (N = 501) doorgevoerd.
Polling has become a ubiquitous activity in modern societies. In its early years, pioneers in the field, such as Elmo Roper (1900-1971), praised it as the ‘greatest contribution to democracy since ...the introduction of the secret ballot’. George Gallup (1901-1984) saw it as a means to protect the common man or woman from the ‘tyranny of the majority’. It was seen as a means to grant political agency to those voices that might not otherwise be heard. The point being made here has to do with the logic of survey sampling. The principle is that it must not depend on the individual and on whether they enter the sample, but that, for each person belonging to the population for which poll results are to be generalised, the probability of the individual entering a sample must be equal; if unequal, it must still be calculable and accounted for. Polling, it seems, was and is viewed by many as an endeavour that gives everyone in the populace an equal say in matters of public concern. Drawing on work in the history and philosophy of statistics, political theory and sociology, this article further explores this claim regarding the relationship between probabilistic reasoning in survey statistics and political agency. At the core of the article lies an exploration of polling through the lens of the work of Jacques Rancière. Despite the understanding of public opinion research as a means to give equal voice and political agency to everybody, this article argues that polling removes the political sphere, which is needed for there to be political agency, for the appearance of politics. In substituting the always-partial representations of polls for the real, measured public opinion becomes identified with the actual body of the people and their opinions.
PDF
