Legislative design was a critical question at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The peculiar compromise that was struck-featuring proportional and republican elements-defies the logic of the Convention's majority rule. We investigate how in establishing the new national legislature, small state delegates were able to prevail over the large state majority and secure the Connecticut Compromise. We argue that the small state coalition's victory owes to their strategy at a critical juncture: the Gerry Committee. The Gerry Committee amplified the contours of the debate over legislative design and the careful curation of its participants precipitated a shift of structural and creative freedom allowing for the consideration of alternative solutions. The Committee produced an environment favorable to a compromise on legislative structure and power by manipulating the policy dimensions connecting representation, taxation, and slavery. Participant curation was essential in allowing political opponents-the small states-to overcome unfavorable conditions, maximize utility, and craft a proposal capable of approval by delegates and eventual constitutional ratification.
In 2012, a survey research was publicized suggesting that Fox News viewers were not only less informed than consumers of other news media but also less informed than people abstaining from news media entirely. Many have taken this to be unequivocally true and the study remains popular among political discussants to this day. However, virtually all of the investigations used to advance the argument focus on current events type knowledge and neglect important controls that could influence both political knowledge and Fox News consumption. Furthermore, no research to date has investigated any effects stemming from consuming the network’s online content (i.e., from foxnews.com ). This article aims to contribute these gaps. Using the 2016 American National Election Survey (ANES), I investigate whether consuming content from foxnews.com is associated with decreased political knowledge. I find no differences in knowledge concerning how the U.S. political system works (what I call process-related knowledge) but do find a significant, negative relationship between visiting foxnews.com and facts about society writ large (what I call society-oriented knowledge). These effects persist even when controlling for party, ideology, and conservative-group affinity and in the preponderance of matching procedures employed to reduce concerns of self-selection. Implications and avenues of future research are also discussed.
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