Public Opinion and Democracy Authors

All the Best Polls Agree with Me: Madson and Hillygus

Motivated reasoning: people are more likely to believe things

that they agree with already.

In surveys, this would imply that people are more likely to

view a poll as ’credible’ if the results confirm their pre-existing

political preferences

James Fowler

Found a strong correlation between social networks and BMIs, wanted to measure if health outcomes spread through networks.

Sinclair - The Social Citizen 2012

Political networks are extremely prevalent within households, and voter patterns of one member influences other members.

Local canvassers are also important.

Bond

The “I Voted” sticker on Facebook generated significant turnout, but Bond found that it was only most impactful on people who were tagged in photos with each other.

Brookman and Kalla: Reducing Transphobia

A single 10-minute conversation encouraging actively taking the perspective of others can markedly reduce prejudice for at least 3 months. Increased positivity by 10 percentage points, larger than the increase for gays between 1998 and 2012.

Enos

Put Spanish-speaking confederates at train stations and took surveys on experimental group, found an increase in exclusionary attitudes.

Gerber, Green and Larime

Used the creepy postcards that Sinclair used, but this time said that your neighbors would also recieve your voting record. Resulted in 8.1% more turnout.

Nickerson - Households Vote Together

Went door-to-door to talk about importance of voting, measures other household member turnout to see if there’s spillover, turnout increased 9.8% from direct treatment and 6% from indirect treatment.

Zaller

Most people don’t care about politics. So, when surveyed, they are just trying to figure out the right answer based on the little amounts of details that they already know.

Attitude change results from a change in the mix of ideas to which people are exposed, and it may take a long, long time.

Harrison - A Change is Gonna Come 2020

Message, Tone, and setting. There must be some motivation to process information present in order for this to work.

Sokhey - Politics on Display 2019

Yard signs are not just messages, but reflections of the messengers. Two ways of viewing the act of displaying a yard sign. One is to treat the act as a typical act of political participation. Conversely, we might view the displaying of signs as an act that toes the line between participation and communication.

Sampled Franklin County, Ohio, Upper Arlington, Ohio, and Broomfield, Colorado

Sinclair 2026 - Prebunking Election Rumors

How can AI chatbots partake in the process of training people to have a little bit of misinformation but then informing them that this information is not true, so that when they see misinformation naturally they recognize it as untrue?

Michael Alvarez et. al 2020 - Securing American Elections

Election fraud can be directly monitored through then-Twitter search tracking accusations of election fraud and social media auditing, then use post-election auditing.

“checking paper ballots or records against the results produced by the voting system to ensure accuracy”

“by identifying increased numbers of conversations about specific topics and concerns during an active election, our method can discover problems with the voting process as voting unfolds”

Micheal Alvarez and Andrew Sinclair 2015 - Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief

The two authors examine California’s 2012 top-two primary system in attempt to understand if alternate primary systems will ultimately lead to the electoral success of moderate candidates.

Made elections more competitive, moderates had some success, latino voters highly supported it, “the more voters knew, the more the result resembled the spatial expectation”

AD5, AD8, AD41, AD47, and AD50 selected as districts. Difference in geographical, political, and racial demographics.

Oliver and Wood 2014 - “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion”

Half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory,

Two reasons people are more predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories: belief in paranormal/abstract forces as a way to explain strange things and have control in a situation, and as a narrative framing as good versus evil - Manichean Worldview structuring.

Lazer 2018 - “The science of fake news: Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort”

People PREFER information that confirms preexisting attitudes.

Fact-checking could then do more harm than good, because it is repeating false claims, which individuals may see and incorporate into their beliefs, regardless of context, because it agrees with them.

Nickerson and Rogers 2014

The main innovation of this campaign looked at the impact of volunteer work for the Obama campaign, and found that "using unpaid supporters, as opposed to hired call centers, could have accounted for swinging 57,000 votes in Ohio—nearly one-half of the final margin separating the candidates in the state on which the national outcome had depended" (Issenberg 2014).

Nickerson and Rogers 2014 - Why do Campaigns Need Data?

The ultimate goal of campaigns is to maximize the probability of victory, but it is hard to do so. Behavior scores, support scores, and responsiveness scores can all determine who will be the most open to being campaigned and likely to show up to the polls, as opposed to actually deterring them from voting.

STEVEN W. WEBSTER 2020 - American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics

Negative partisanship on the rise, partisan sorting, had subjects write about a moment that made them angry compared to unrelated prompt - it appears as though politics and anger are, to a certain extent, inseparable.

Two effects: first, higher levels of anger are likely to lead to a further erosion in support for programs that seek to make society more egalitarian; and, second, higher levels of anger should cause Americans to increasingly perceive their government to be both unaccountable and unresponsive.

Why is American Anger on the Rise? Webster 2020

Partisan sorting: partisan identities have become closely aligned with racial, cultural, and ideological identities.

“Post-broadcast" media environment: news outlets offer ideologically friendly viewpoints (Prior 2007).

Rapid technological growth of the 21st century and the increasing relevance of Internet-based news outlets has also helped to perpetuate the primacy of anger in modern American politics

Lowry - Repairing Paradise

• Define the issue

• Present economic arguments

• Present scientific evidence

• Elicit agency commitment