Laboratory studies have demonstrated the ability of names to prime stereotypes. To apply these theories and test the effect of name‐based ethnic stereotypes on housing discrimination, 1,115 inquiry e‐mail messages were sent to landlords advertising apartment vacancies in Los Angeles County over 10 weeks (6 weeks before the conflict with Iraq began in March 2003 and 4 weeks during the conflict). One of three names that implied either Arab, African American, or White ethnicity was randomly assigned to each of the messages sent. African American and Arab names received significantly fewer positive responses than the White name, and the African American name fared worst of all. This pattern held true in all rent categories, in corporate and privately owned apartment complexes, and before and during the war in Iraq.
Newspaper readership often has been studied with the aim of developing demographic profiles of readers. This paper considers thegoals readers are pursuing and the importance of media system dependency relations in explaining the amount of time spent reading newspapers. In a regression analysis, wefind that dependency relations for social and selfunderstanding explain a considerable amount of variance in readership beyond the variance explained by demographic variables. Diferences in the dependency relations between more and less affluent readers, as well as between male and female readers, are noted as well.The social forces that shape a media system and its audiences have produced social relationships between newspapers, readers, and other political and economic institutions (e.g., governments at all levels and advertisers) that are instrumental in determining patterns of media use at the individual level and patterns of media production at the structural level.Ball-Rokeach has identified these relations as media system dependency relations.' A media system dependency relation is defined as:The extent to which attainment of an individual's, group's, organization's, or system's goals is contingent upon access to the information resources of the media system, relative to the extent to which attainment of media system goals is contingent upon the resources controlled by individuals, groups, organizations, or systems, respectively.* The essential argument of this paper is that a dependency relation between newspaper readers and the newspaper as a social and economic institution significantly affects the amount of time a reader devotes to the paper and guides the reader's selective exposure to certain types of information? The social situation of the reader affects the nature of the dependency relation. This argument does not contradict the observations of a generation of research studies which explains readership per se in terms of demographics; the theory of dependency relations enriches these explanations by identifying intervening variables which significantly influence the behavior of readers.~o~i m aumtnly
This article applies network theory to consider the effects of neighborhood council reform on city governance in Los Angeles. The authors argue that neighborhood councils have the potential to change elite-dominated governance through several network effects: development of bridging social capital—network relationships that cross-cut traditional community cleavages, broadening of horizontal networks that improve information required for collective action, and creation of newties that elevate previously peripheral groups in the system of political communication. Based on field research and a network survey of neighborhood council board members, the authors find that although bonding ties help facilitate collective action, they also maintain social stratification because they develop between similar groups and involve status seeking. The development of weaker bridging ties among more diverse groups appears to promote mobilization through information sharing. Thus, bonding and bridging ties appear to play complementary roles in promoting information dissemination and mobilization among neighborhood councils.
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