Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate

Bullock, John G.

doi:10.1017/s0003055411000165

Cited by 536 publications

(504 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(135 reference statements)

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“…The notion that such position adoption can describe public opinion even some of the time has been understandably controversial (for a review, see Bullock 2011), but it is consistent with a number of broader theories. On the one hand, democratic theory suggests citizens may believe elites have superior policy information, expertise, or judgment (Burke 1774; see also Bianco 1994;Fox and Shotts 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 80%

The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication

Broockman¹,

Butler

2015

American J Political Sci

198

124

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mentioning

confidence: 80%

The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication

Broockman¹,

Butler

2015

American J Political Sci

198

124

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“…In recent decades, political scientists have put the second claim to test and found significant partisan bias in both factual and normative matters (for overviews, ! 10 see Bullock, 2011;Leeper & Slothuus, 2014). In particular, both observational and experimental studies have shown that supporters of a party support new policies from that party somewhat independently of content of those policies (e.g., Cohen, 2003;Rahn, 1993).…”

Section: The Psychology Of Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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!Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants' categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target's race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race-such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support-categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind's systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race.!

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“…Recent studies in the U.S. show that a voter's partisan biases affect their willingness to internalize new information (e.g. Jerit and Barabas 2012; Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014;Bullock 2011;Gerber and Huber 2010), while European studies have indicated that poorly informed voters are most sensitive to new information (e.g. Duch 2001).…”

Section: Voter Sophisticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Credible Sources and Sophisticated Voters: When Does New Information Induce Economic Voting?

Alt¹,

Marshall²,

Lassen³

2016

The Journal of Politics

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When does new economic information cause voters to re-evaluate the government's competence, and ultimately vote economically? Since politically-relevant information is often conveyed by actors with incentives to influence voter perceptions, the credibility of information sources can vary significantly. This article randomly varies whether voters receive an aggregate unemployment forecast from the central bank, government or main opposition party using a survey experiment in Denmark with access to detailed panel data. We find that politically sophisticated voters discern differences in institutional credibility and the political cost of the signal, and update their unemployment expectations accordingly. Despite failing to differentiate political costs, unsophisticated voters still substantially update their expectations. However, while sophisticated voters intend to engage in substantial prospective economic voting, unsophisticated voters do not link their new unemployment expectations to their vote intention. These findings suggest that economic information supports economic voting most when it is credible and reaches sophisticated voters.

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Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate

Cited by 536 publications

References 57 publications

The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication

The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

Credible Sources and Sophisticated Voters: When Does New Information Induce Economic Voting?

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