The Internet offers a number of advantages as a survey mode: low marginal cost per completed response, capabilities for providing respondents with large quantities of information, speed, and elimination of interviewer bias. Those seeking these advantages confront the problem of representativeness both in terms of coverage of the population and capabilities for drawing random samples. Two major strategies have been pursued commercially to develop the Internet as a survey mode. One strategy, used by Harris Interactive, involves assembling a large panel of willing respondents who can be sampled. Another strategy, used by Knowledge Networks, involves using random digit dialing (RDD) telephone methods to recruit households to a panel of Web-TV enabled respondents. Do these panels adequately deal with the problem of representativeness to be useful in political science research? The authors address this question with results from parallel surveys on global climate change and the Kyoto Protocol administered by telephone to a national probability sample and by Internet to samples of the Harris Interactive and Knowledge Networks panels. Knowledge and opinion questions generally show statistically significant but substantively modest difference across the modes. With inclusion of standard demographic controls, typical relational models of interest to political scientists produce similar estimates of parameters across modes. It thus appears that, with appropriate weighting, samples from these panels are sufficiently representative of the U.S. population to be reasonable alternatives in many applications to samples gathered through RDD telephone surveys.

This paper evaluates the prospects for application of the "grid/group" cultural theory (CT), as advanced by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, to the Advocacy Coalition Theory (ACF). CT would seem to be relevant to several key aspects of the ACF: the content of the core beliefs that provide the "glue" that binds coalitions; the resilience of core beliefs and associated implications for belief change and learning; and the structure of coalitions and the mechanisms for coordination and control within them. The paper considers the compatibility of the ACF's account of deep core beliefs and coalition structure with that of CT; surveys an array of empirical studies based on variations of CT; and extends accounts of change in cultural identities from CT to the ACF. In addition, we highlight some of the ways in which the ACF may offer important theoretical insights for scholars of CT, potentially clarifying hypotheses concerning the relationships among basic worldviews, more specific beliefs, and behaviors.

Deep core beliefs represent an important yet theoretically underspecified concept within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This underspecification can (in part) be attributed to the ad hoc way in which ACF scholars have defined and measured the concept over time. To overcome this, we advocate the development and future use of a standardized metric for measuring deep core beliefs in ACF studies. Such a measure, we contend, should be multidimensional, generalizable, measurable using multiple techniques, and broad enough in scope to operate across virtually all policy domains. Using these criteria as our benchmark, we evaluate the viability of cultural theory (CT) as one such metric. In short, we find that CT meets all of these criteria, and therefore provides ACF scholars with a way to measure deep core beliefs across enduring public policy disputes that are demarcated by conflicting belief systems. Accordingly, we advocate its use in future studies.

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This paper analyzes the changes Americans perceive to be taking place in their local weather and tests a series of hypotheses about why they hold these perceptions. Using data from annual nationwide surveys of the American public taken from 2008 to 2011, coupled with geographically specific measures of temperature and precipitation changes over that same period, the authors evaluate the relationship between perceptions of weather changes and actual changes in local weather. In addition, the survey data include measures of individual-level characteristics (age, education level, gender, and income) as well as cultural worldview and political ideology. Rival hypotheses about the origins of Americans' perceptions of weather change are tested, and it is found that actual weather changes are less predictive of perceived changes in local temperatures, but better predictors of perceived flooding and droughts. Cultural biases and political ideology also shape perceptions of changes in local weather. Overall, the analysis herein indicates that beliefs about changes in local temperatures have been more heavily politicized than is true for beliefs about local precipitation patterns. Therefore, risk communications linking changes in local patterns of precipitation to broader changes in the climate are more likely to penetrate identity-protective cognitions about climate.

Nuclear facilities have long been seen as the top of the list of locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), with nuclear waste repositories generating the greatest opposition. Focusing on the case of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southern New Mexico, we test competing hypotheses concerning the sources of opposition and support for siting the facility, including demographics, proximity, political ideology, and partisanship, and the unfolding policy process over time. This study tracks the changes of risk perception and acceptance of WIPP over a decade, using measures taken from 35 statewide surveys of New Mexico citizens spanning an 11-year period from fall 1990 to summer 2001. This time span includes periods before and after WIPP became operational. We find that acceptance of WIPP is greater among those whose residences are closest to the WIPP facility. Surprisingly, and contrary to expectations drawn from the broader literature, acceptance is also greater among those who live closest to the nuclear waste transportation route. We also find that ideology, partisanship, government approval, and broader environmental concerns influence support for WIPP acceptance. Finally, the sequence of procedural steps taken toward formal approval of WIPP by government agencies proved to be important to gaining public acceptance, the most significant being the opening of the WIPP facility itself.

The Central Region Headquarters of the National Weather Service (NWS) recently launched an experimental product that supplements traditional tornado and severe thunderstorm warning products with information about the potential impact of warned storms. As yet, however, we know relatively little about the influence of consequence-based messages on warning responsiveness. To address this gap, we fielded two surveys of U.S. residents that live in tornado-prone regions of the country. Both surveys contained an experiment wherein participants were randomly assigned a consequence-based tornado warning message and asked to indicate how they would respond if they were to receive such a warning. Respondents that were assigned to higher-impact categories were more likely choose protective action than respondents assigned to lower-impact categories. There was, however, a threshold beyond which escalating the projected consequences of the storm no longer increased the probability of protective action. To account for this, we show that the relationship between consequence-based messages and protective action depends on the type of action being considered. At lower levels of projected impact, increasing the expected consequences of the storm simultaneously increased the probability that respondents selected a “shelter in place” or “leave residence” option. At higher levels of projected impact, this relationship changed—increasing the projected consequences of the storm decreased the probability that respondents would shelter in place and increased the probability that they would leave their residence for what they perceived to be a safer location. In some severe storm situations, this behavior may increase rather than decrease the risks.

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