Using decades of public opinion data from the US, UK, Australia, Germany and Canada, and distinguishing between three concepts - issue ownership, performance and generalised competence - Green and Jennings show how political parties come to gain or lose 'ownership' of issues, how they are judged on their performance in government across policy issues and how they develop a reputation for competence (or incompetence) over a period in office. Their analysis tracks the major events causing people to re-evaluate party reputations and the costs of governing which cause electorates to punish parties in power. They reveal why, when and how these movements in public opinion matter to elections. The implications are important for long-standing debates about performance and partisanship, and reveal that public opinion about party and governing competence is, to a great extent, the product of major shocks and predictable dynamics.

When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Regrettably, the reality hasn't lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans' political beliefs have become significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Obama's presidency--in spite of his administration's considerable efforts to neutralize the political impact of race. Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election--a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times--racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people's evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama's dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics. One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what has happened in the United States during Obama's presidency and how it might shape the country long after he leaves office.

Money is essential to the functioning of electoral politics, yet regulating its appropriate use raises complex and controversial challenges in countries around the world. Both long-established democracies and emerging economies have been continually plagued by problems of financial malfeasance, graft, corruption, and cronyism. To throw new light on these important challenges, this book addresses three related questions: (1) what types of public policies are commonly used in attempts to regulate the role of money in politics?, (2) what triggers landmark finance reforms? and, (3) above all, what works, what fails, and why - when countries implement reforms? Checkbook Elections? presents an original theory for understanding policies regulating political finance, reflecting the degree to which laws are laissez-faire or guided by state intervention. Each chapter is written by an area specialist and collectively cover long-established democracies as well as hybrid regimes, affluent post-industrial societies (Sweden, the United States, Britain, and Japan), major emerging economies (Russia, Brazil, and South Africa) and developing societies (India and Indonesia).

Politics is a trial in which those in government - and those who aspire to serve - make proposals, debate alternatives, and pass laws. Then the jury of public opinion decides. It likes the proposals or actions or it does not. It trusts the actors or it does not. It moves, always at the margin, and then those who benefit from the movement are declared winners. This book is about that public opinion response. Its most basic premise is that although public opinion rarely matters in a democracy, public opinion change is the exception. Public opinion rarely matters because the public rarely cares enough to act on its concerns or preferences. Change happens only when the threshold of normal public inattention is crossed. When public opinion changes, governments rise or fall, elections are won or lost, and old realities give way to new demands.

Party identification may be the single most powerful predictor of voting behavior, yet scholars continue to disagree on whether this is good or bad for democracy. Some argue that party identification functions as a highly efficient information shortcut, guiding voters to candidates that represent their interests. Others argue that party identification biases voters' perceptions, thereby undermining accountability. Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which each of the characterizations is most apt. The answer hinges on whether a person has sufficient motivation and ability to defend her party identity or whether norms of good citizenship motivate her to adjust her party identity to reflect her disagreements. A series of surveys and experiments provide a window into the partisan mind during times of conflict between party identity and political attitudes. These studies show that individuals devote cognitive resources to defending their party identities against dissonant thoughts, often resorting to elaborate justifications. However, when cognitive resources are insufficient, these defenses break down and partisans are forced to adjust their identities to reflect disagreements. In addition, thoughts of civic duty can stimulate responsiveness motivation to the point that it overwhelms partisan motivation, leading individuals to adjust their identities to reflect their disagreements. In demonstrating the influence of competing motives, this book reconciles the two dominant theories of party identification. Rather than characterizing party identification as either a highly stable affective attachment or a running tally of political evaluations, it suggests that the nature of party identification hinges on the interplay between the motivations that underlie it. Perhaps even more importantly, this book shifts the discussion away from partisan change versus stability to the normative implications of party identification. While the polarization of American politics may be exacerbating partisan biases, there is plenty of reason for hope. By simply making citizens' widespread feelings of civic duty salient to them, these biases may be overcome.

European integration has generated a wide array of economic, political, and social opportunities beyond the nation state. European citizens are free to obtain their academic degree in Germany, earn their money in London, invest it in Luxembourg, and retire to Spain. An early theorist of European integration, Karl Deutsch expected this development to promote a collective identity and public support for European integration: by interacting across borders, Europeans would become aware of their shared values and beliefs, and eventually acquire a common 'we feeling'. Experiencing European Integration puts these expectations under scrutiny by developing a comprehensive theoretical model that helps us understand how transnational interactions relate to orientations towards European integration. An extensive analysis of survey data covering the 27 EU member states provides a thorough empirical test of transactionalist hypotheses. Findings show that individual transnationalism indeed strongly and positively influences EU support, but that only a young, wealthy, and highly educated minority take part in cross-border interactions. The book further shows that the effectiveness of transnational interactions in generating EU support is contingent on a number of factors such as their purpose and scope. Importantly, increased transnational interactions result in negative externalities among those who do not become transnationally active themselves. By discussing the implications of transnationalism for the theoretical debate and current policy, this volume will provide a unique analysis of a key dynamic of European integration.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump invoked a time for reflection about the state of American politics and its deep ideological, cultural, racial, regional, and economic divisions. But one aspect that the contemporary discussions often miss is that these fissures have been opening over several decades and are deeply rooted in the structure of American politics and society. Nolan McCarty's Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) is an accessible introduction to polarization in America. McCarty takes readers through what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of our rising political conflicts, delving into social, economic, and geographic determinants of polarization in the United States. While the current political climate makes it clear that extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also argues that, contrary to popular belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, instead of a significant break with the past. He explains the factors that have created this state of affairs, including gerrymandered legislative districts, partisan primary nomination systems, and our private campaign finance system. He also considers the potential of major reforms such as instating proportional representation or single-transferable voting to remedy extreme polarization. A concise overview of a complex and crucial topic in US politics, this book is for anyone wanting to understand how to repair the cracks in our system.

Can we talk about 'the people' as an agent with its own morally important integrity? How should we understand ownership of public property by 'the people'? Nili develops philosophical answers to both of these questions, arguing that we should see the core project of a liberal legal system - realizing equal rights - as an identity-grounding project of the sovereign people, and thus as essential to the people's integrity. He also suggests that there are proprietary claims that are intertwined in the sovereign people's moral power to create property rights through the legal system. The practical value of these ideas is illustrated through a variety of real-world policy problems, ranging from the domestic and international dimensions of corruption and abuse of power, through transitional justice issues, to the ethnic and religious divides that threaten liberal democracy. This book will appeal to political theorists as well as readers in public policy, area studies, law, and across the social sciences.

Between one election and the next, members of Congress introduce thousands of bills. What determines which become law? Is it the public? Do we have government 'of the people, by the people, for the people?' Or is it those who have the resources to organize and pressure government who get what they want? In the first study ever of a random sample of policy proposals, Paul Burstein finds that the public can get what it wants - but mainly on the few issues that attract its attention. Does this mean organized interests get what they want? Not necessarily - on most issues there is so little political activity that it hardly matters. Politics may be less of a battle between the public and organized interests than a struggle for attention. American society is so much more complex than it was when the Constitution was written that we may need to reconsider what it means, in fact, to be a democracy.

Although 'populism' has become something of a buzzword in discussions about politics, it tends to be studied by country or region. This is the first book to offer a genuine cross-regional perspective on populism and its impact on democracy. By analyzing current experiences of populism in Europe and the Americas, this edited volume convincingly demonstrates that populism can be both a threat and a corrective to democracy. The contributors also demonstrate the interesting similarities between right-wing and left-wing populism: both types of populism are prone to defend a political model that is not against democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Populism in Europe and the Americas offers new insights into the current state of democracy from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view.

Although the field of deliberative civic engagement is growing rapidly around the world, our knowledge and understanding of its practice and impacts remain highly fragmented. Democracy in Motion represents the first comprehensive attempt to assess the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement. Organized in a series of chapters that address the big questions of deliberative civic engagement, it uses theory, research, and practice from around the world to explore what we know about, how we know it, and what remains to be understood. More than a simple summary of research, the book is designed to be accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, from scholars and practitioners working in numerous disciplines and fields, to public officials, activists, and average citizens who are seeking to utilize deliberative civic engagement in their communities. The book significantly enhances current scholarship, serving as a guide to existing research and identifying useful future research. It also has promise for enhancing practice, for example by helping practitioners, public officials, and others better think through and articulate issues of design and outcomes, thus enabling them to garner more support for public deliberation activities. In addition, by identifying what remains to be learned about public deliberation, practitioners and public officials may be inspired to connect with scholars to conduct research and evaluations of their efforts.

Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans' attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.

In this fresh and provocative book, Anthony DiMaggio uses the war in Iraq and the United States confrontations with Iran as his touchstones to probe the sometimes fine line between news and propaganda. Using Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony and drawing upon the seminal works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, and Robert McChesney, DiMaggio combines a rigorousempirical analysis and clear, lucid prose to enlighten readers about issues essential to the struggle for a critical media and a functioning democracy. If, as DiMaggio shows, our newspapers and television news programs play a decisive role in determining what we think, and if, as he demonstrates convincingly, what the media give us is largely propaganda that supports an oppressive and undemocratic status quo, then it is incumbent upon us to make sure that they are responsive to the majority and not just the powerful and privileged few.

In 2015, Nigeria's voters cast out the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). Here, A. Carl LeVan traces the political vulnerability of Africa's largest party in the face of elite bargains that facilitated a democratic transition in 1999. These 'pacts' enabled electoral competition but ultimately undermined the party's coherence. LeVan also crucially examines the four critical barriers to Nigeria's democratic consolidation: the terrorism of Boko Haram in the northeast, threats of Igbo secession in the southeast, lingering ethnic resentments and rebellions in the Niger Delta, and farmer-pastoralist conflicts. While the PDP unsuccessfully stoked fears about the opposition's ability to stop Boko Haram's terrorism, the opposition built a winning electoral coalition on economic growth, anti-corruption, and electoral integrity. Drawing on extensive interviews with a number of politicians and generals and civilians and voters, he argues that electoral accountability is essential but insufficient for resolving the representational, distributional, and cultural components of these challenges.

Originally published in 1988, this book asks the question, how does the political system affect the behaviour of individuals? Donald Granberg and Soeren Holmberg use long-term cross-sectional and panel national surveys of electorates in two very different democratic systems - Sweden and the United States - to examine an issue that has implications for our understanding of both social and psychological processes and also political systems in general. Their interdisciplinary and comparative survey considers such topics as ideological perception of abstract and concrete issues at the party and individual level; the polarisation, interrelation and transitivity of attitudes; the relationship between intention and behaviour; and the ways in which behaviour may be predicted. The book offers a detailed and convincing analysis of the interaction of political context with social psychological processes. It will be of interest not only to social, political and comparative psychologists, but also to all researchers with an interest in electoral behaviour.

Originally published in 1991, this study examines the views of politics presented by young people in contemporary Britain. Bhavnani argues that previous studies of youth and youth culture were limited by too great a reliance on simple survey techniques, and by lack of attention to conceptions of politics amongst young people, and to politics as a series of lived relationships rather than a set of external objects. Instead, she uses ethnographic approaches and open-response interviewing within the broad theoretical framework of social representations. The political is taken to refer to the ways in which people regulate, and attempt to regulate with a view to challenging, unequal social relationships. Within this the specific issues examined are employment, unemployment, youth training schemes, democracy and voting, racism, and marriage. Bhavnani's analysis, organised by themes such as disposable income and social and personal control, tackles questions of power in the research process; and a notion of discursive configurations as distinct from social representations.

Matters of Opinion offers an interesting insight into 'public opinion' as reported in the media, asking where these opinions actually come from, and how they have their effects. Drawing on the analysis of conversations from focus groups, phone-ins and broadcast interviews with members of the public, Greg Myers argues that we must go back to these encounters, asking questions such as what members of the public thought they were being asked, who they were talking as, and whom they were talking to. He reveals that people don't carry a store of opinions, ready to tell strangers; they use opinions in order to get along with other people, and how they say things is as important as what they say. Engaging and informative, this book illuminates debates on research methods, the public sphere and deliberative democracy, on broadcast talk, and on what it means to participate in public life.

Thinking About Political Reform is the only genuinely comprehensive book on reforming American government and politics available to students and instructors. Covering elections, institutions, political processes, and behavior, it invites readers to go beyond the "what" of government and politics that typically is covered in both introductory and advanced American government courses to consider "what's wrong", "why", "so what", and "what if" questions, encouraging them to examine the failures and flaws of the governing process and to ponder potential solutions and their likely consequences. In addressing issues from the role of citizens to elections to the three branches of government, it treats both the causes and consequences of structural, procedural, and behavioral problems, offering a variety of common and sometimes not so common reform proposals that are assessed from the perspectives of political science, economics, law, journalism, and politics. The book asks readers to ground their thinking about reform in seven criteria or standards that should characterize sound democratic government in the United States, pointing out that such criteria are not always compatible and urging readers to prioritize their values before attacking reform issues. Throughout, it applies those standards and an up-to-date review of the scholarly literature and current events to the reform agenda, suggesting several approaches to evaluate, for example, the tensions between Congress and the presidency, election systems, or political parties. Each chapter offers readers specific questions to help them formulate their own views on reform and reminds them that reforms are linked; what is done to one process or institution has consequences for others. The final chapter suggests how reform might occur but cautions that ad hoc reforms are unlikely to solve underlying problems - or could make them worse - and that, ultimately, reformers have to know which values and criteria they think are most important and then ask two questions: which of the two elective institutions - Congress or the presidency - should be dominant, and what sort of political party and electoral system best fits that choice? Unlike other reform books that focus on selected political institutions or the electoral process, Thinking About Reform covers American government from soup to nuts, providing in one highly readable volume the most complete, integrated, and current analysis of reform proposals and their consequences available today. The book complements all standard textbook treatments of American politics and can stand alone as the core for a course on political reform.

Much of public opinion research over the past several decades suggests that the American voters are woefully uninformed about politics and thus unable to fulfill their democratic obligations. Arguing that this perception is faulty, Vincent Hutchings shows that, under the right political conditions, voters are surprisingly well informed on the issues that they care about and use their knowledge to hold politicians accountable.

Though Hutchings is not the first political scientist to contend that the American public is more politically engaged than it is often given credit for, previous scholarship--which has typically examined individual and environmental factors in isolation--has produced only limited evidence of an attentive electorate. Analyzing broad survey data as well as the content of numerous Senate and gubernatorial campaigns involving such issues as race, labor, abortion, and defense, Hutchings demonstrates that voters are politically engaged when politicians and the media discuss the issues that the voters perceive as important. Hutchings finds that the media--while far from ideal--do provide the populace with information regarding the responsiveness of elected representatives and that groups of voters do monitor this information when "their" issues receive attention. Thus, while the electorate may be generally uninformed about and uninterested in public policy, a complex interaction of individual motivation, group identification, and political circumstance leads citizens concerned about particular issues to obtain knowledge about their political leaders and use that information at the ballot box.

Political Obligations provides a full defense of a theory of political obligation based on the principle of fairness (or fair play), which is widely viewed as the strongest theory of obligation currently available. The work responds to the most important objections to the principle of fairness, and extends a theory based on fairness into a developed 'multiple principle' theory of obligation. In order to establish the need for such a theory, Political Obligations criticizes alternative theories of obligation based on a natural duty of justice and 'reformist' consent, and critically examines the non-state theories of libertarian and philosophical anarchists. The work breaks new ground by providing the first in-depth study of popular attitudes towards political obligations and how the state itself views them. The attitudes of ordinary citizens are explored through small focus groups, while the 'self image of the state' in regard to the obligations of its citizens is studied through examination of judicial decisions in three different democratic countries.

This book is about the political views of the 'classic' poor of London's East End in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The residents of this area have been historically characterized as abjectly poor, casually employed, slum dwellers with a poverty-induced apathy toward political solutions interspersed with occasional violent displays of support for populist calls for protectionism, imperialism, or anti-alien agitation. These factors, in combination, have been thought to have allowed the Conservative Party to politically dominate the East End in this period. This study demonstrates that many of these images are wrong. Economic conditions in the East End were not as uniformly bleak as often portrayed. The workings of the franchise laws also meant that those who possessed the vote in the East End were generally the most prosperous and regularly employed of their occupational group. Conservative electoral victories in the East End were not the result of poverty. Political attitudes in the East End were determined to a far greater extent by issues concerning the 'personal' in a number of senses. The importance given to individual character in the political judgements of the East End working class was greatly increased by a number specific local factors. These included the prevalence of particular forms of workplace structure, and the generally somewhat shorter length of time on the electoral register of voters in the area. Also important was a continuing attachment to the Church of England amongst a number of the more prosperous working class. In the place of many 'myths' about the people of the East End and their politics, this study provides a model that does not seek to explain the politics of the area in full, but suggests the point strongly that we can understand politics, and the formation of political attitudes, in the East End or any other area, only through a detailed examination of very specific localized community and workplace structures. This book challenges the idea that a 'Conservatism of the slums' existed in London's East End in the Victorian and Edwardian period. It argues that images of abjectly poor residents who supported Conservative appeals about protectionism, imperialism, and anti-immigration are largely wrong. Instead, it was the support of better-off workers, combined with a general importance in the area of the 'personal' in politics emphasized by local social and workplace structures, which delivered the limited successes that the Conservatives did enjoy.

Since Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, almost all U.S. presidents have employed private polls in some capacity. This book attempts to explain how presidential polling evolved from a rarely conducted secretive enterprise to a commonplace event that is now considered an integral part of the presidency. Robert Eisinger contends that presidents opt to gain autonomy by conducting private polls. They do not trust institutions such as Congress, the media and political parties, and their measurements of opinion.

Do politicians listen to the public? How often and when? Or are the views of the public manipulated or used strategically by political and economic elites? Navigating Public Opinion brings together leading scholars of American politics to assess and debate these questions. It describes how the relationship between opinion and policy has changed over time; how key political actors use public opinion to formulate domestic and foreign policy; and how new measurement techniques might improve our understanding of public opinion in contemporary polling and survey research.

The distinguished contributors shed new light on several long-standing controversies over policy responsiveness to public opinion. Featuring a new analysis by Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson that builds from their pathbreaking work on how public mood moves policy in a macro-model of policymaking, the volume also includes several critiques of this model by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, another critique by G. William Domhoff, and a rejoinder by Erikson and his coauthors. Other highlights include discussions of how political elites, including state-level policymakers, presidents, and makers of foreign policy, use (or shape) public opinion; and analyses of new methods for measuring public opinion such as survey-based experiments, probabilistic polling methods, non-survey-based measures of public opinion, and the potential and limitations of Internet polls and surveys. Introductory and concluding essays provide useful background context and offer an authoritative summary of what is known about how public opinion influences public policy.

A must-have for all students of American politics, public opinion, and polling, this state-of-the-art collection addresses issues that lie at the heart of democratic governance today.

Is polling a process that brings "science" into the study of society? Or are polls crude instruments that tell us little about the way people actually think? The role of public opinion polls in government and mass media has gained increasing importance with each new election or poll taken.

Here Lewis presents a new look at an old tradition, the first study of opinion polls using an interdisciplinary approach combining cultural studies, sociology, political science, and mass communication. Rather than dismissing polls, he considers them to be a significant form of representation in contemporary culture; he explores how the media report on polls and, in turn, how publicized results influence the way people respond to polls. Lewis argues that the media tend to exclude the more progressive side of popular opinion from public debate. While the media's influence is limited, it works strategically to maintain the power of pro-corporate political elites.

The book offers a comparative analysis of policy representation in five Western Democracies: France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the USA.