This article assesses the influence of material interests and cultural identities on European opinion about immigration. Analysis of respondents in twenty countries sampled in the 2002–03 European Social Survey demonstrates that they are unenthusiastic about high levels of immigration and typically overestimate the actual number of immigrants living in their country. At the individual level, cultural and national identity, economic interests and the level of information about immigration are all important predictors of attitudes. ‘Symbolic’ predispositions, such as preferences for cultural unity, have a stronger statistical effect than economic dissatisfaction. Variation across countries in both the level and the predictors of opposition to immigration are mostly unrelated to contextual factors cited in previous research, notably the amount of immigration into a country and the overall state of its economy. The ramifications of these findings for policy makers are discussed in the context of current debates about immigration and European integration.

Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration.We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower levels of immigration. The underpinnings of individual attitudes are similar in all countries and immigration attitudes are surprisingly unrelated to country-level differences in GDP, unemployment and the number and composition of the foreign born. An implication of these findings is that acceptance of higher levels of immigration, deemed by many to be an economic need, will require both more selective immigration policies and an emphasis on the cultural assimilation of newcomers.

Theories of candidate agendas suggest two potentially conflicting imperatives for candidates: focus on issues that their party "owns" or on issues that are salient to the public. The implication is that candidates may ultimately lose votes for ignoring either or both of these imperatives. However, no systematic test of either theory exists. This article provides a fuller test using candidate advertising data from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 House and Senate elections and finds that neither theory is supported. Candidates did not consistently emphasize owned or salient issues in any of these elections. Moreover, candidate agendas have little effect on electoral outcomes. These results highlight the need for more nuanced theories of candidate strategy.

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers. We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than non-blog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Previous research shows that people commonly exaggerate the size of minority populations. Moreover, as theories of inter-group threat would predict, the larger people perceive minority groups to be, the less favorably they feel toward these groups. Here, we investigate whether correcting Americans' misperceptions of one such population -immigrants -affects attitudes toward this group. We confirm that non-Hispanic Americans over-estimate the percentage of the population that is foreign-born or that is in the U.S. without authorization. However, in four separate survey experiments, we find that providing accurate information does little to affect attitudes toward immigration. This is true even when people's misperceptions are explicitly corrected. These results call into question a potential cognitive mechanism that could underpin inter-group threat theory. Misperceptions of the size of minority groups may be a consequence, rather than cause, of attitudes toward those groups. * The 2008 survey experiment was conducted via Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. The authors thank Elena Zhou for research assistance.

We investigate Americans' stereotypes of Muslims. We distinguish specific dimensions of stereotypes and find that negative stereotypes relating to violence and trustworthiness are commonplace. Furthermore, these stereotypes have consequences: those with less favorable views of Muslims, especially in terms of violence and trustworthiness, are more likely to support several aspects of the War on Terror. Our findings contrast with some previous research that emphasizes the role of a generalized ethnocentrism, rather than specific stereotypes of Muslims, in explaining public opinion in this domain. We argue that citizens do use specific stereotypes when there is a close correspondence between the dimension of the stereotype and the policy in question.Since September 11, 2001, much of American politics and governance has centered on the "War on Political issues often have a group-centric basis, whereby the group implicated by an issue is central to the politics of that issue and to attitudes about that issue. Scholars have known this for a long time, at least since Converse's (1964) seminal work, and have identified group-centrism in attitudes about many domestic policies, such as welfare, and attitudes about foreign policy during World War II and the Cold War. However, very few studies have examined the War on Terror, even though the "enemy" in this war has been repeatedly identified by its religious identity. Of course it is clear, both in reality and often in the rhetoric of political leaders, that the War on Terror implicates a small subset of Muslims. But despite attempts to differentiate groups like al-Qaeda from Islam writ large, group-centrism may affect public opinion about the War on Terror, with those having derogatory attitudes about Muslims more likely to support this war.Extant research has uncovered unfavorable attitudes toward Muslims, Muslim-Americans, and Islam generally (Davis 2007; Panagopolous 2006; Traugott et al. 2002) and found that those attitudes originate in broader concerns about terrorism (Huddy et al. 2005), evaluations of racial and cultural outgroups (Kalkan, Layman and Uslaner 2009), and authoritarianism (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior 2004). However, this research does not delve deeply into the specific content of attitudes toward Muslims and Muslim-Americans.The first contribution of this study is to identify in American public opinion the specific stereotypes of both Muslims and Muslim-Americans that are most prevalent. We draw on theories of stereotype content to identify two distinct dimensions of stereotypes-warmth and competence-and show that, while on average Americans evaluate Muslims less favorably overall than they do many other social groups, these evaluations not uniformly unfavorable. Negative warmth stereotypes of Muslims and Muslim-Americans-i.e., as violent and untrustworthy-are particularly common.The second contribution of this study is to delineate how stereotypes of Muslims and MuslimAmericans structure support for the War on Terror. Previous studies...

The conventional wisdom among journalists and politicians is that higher turnout would benefit

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