Ambivalence and the Structure of Political Opinion

Ambivalence and the Structure of Political Opinion
Author: S. Craig
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2005-01-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 140397909X

This book represents an important step in bringing together various strands of research about attitudinal ambivalence and public opinion. Essays by a distinguished group of political scientists and social psychologists provide a conceptual framework for understanding how ambivalence is currently understood and measured, as well as its relevance to the mass public's beliefs about our political institutions and national identity. The theoretical insights, methodological innovations, and empirical analyses will add substantially to our knowledge about the nature of ambivalence in particular, and the structure and evolution of political attitudes in general.

Hard Choices, Easy Answers

Hard Choices, Easy Answers
Author: R. Michael Alvarez
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 8
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691220190

Those who seek to accurately gauge public opinion must first ask themselves: Why are certain opinions highly volatile while others are relatively fixed? Why are some surveys affected by question wording or communicative medium (e.g., telephone) while others seem immune? In Hard Choices, Easy Answers, R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm develop a new theory of response variability that, by reconciling the strengths and weaknesses of the standard approaches, will help pollsters and scholars alike better resolve such perennial problems. Working within the context of U.S. public opinion, they contend that the answers Americans give rest on a variegated structure of political predispositions--diverse but widely shared values, beliefs, expectations, and evaluations. Alvarez and Brehm argue that respondents deploy what they know about politics (often little) to think in terms of what they value and believe. Working with sophisticated statistical models, they offer a unique analysis of not just what a respondent is likely to choose, but also how variable those choices would be under differing circumstances. American public opinion can be characterized in one of three forms of variability, conclude the authors: ambivalence, equivocation, and uncertainty. Respondents are sometimes ambivalent, as in attitudes toward abortion or euthanasia. They are often equivocal, as in views about the scope of government. But most often, they are uncertain, sure of what they value, but unsure how to use those values in political choices.

Ambivalence, Politics and Public Policy

Ambivalence, Politics and Public Policy
Author: S. Craig
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137077824

Exploring the extent and nature of attitudinal ambivalence on public policy issue, these essays by distinguished scholars of public opinion examine citizens' conflicting attitudes about abortion, gay rights, environmental protection and property rights, crime and the police and church-state relations. Linking ambivalence with a complex structure of belief, the contributors link the effects of ambivalence on information processing, the formation of policy preferences, and the impact of those policy preferences on voters' decisons. Using multiple approaches to measurement and research design, this volume helps build a sturdy foundation of knowledge about the phonomenon of ambivalence and its effects on politics. The concluding chapter provides an overview of our progress in understanding the effects of ambivalence on public opinion.

Reading Mixed Signals

Reading Mixed Signals
Author: Albert H. Cantril
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1999-09-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780943875927

The public policy overviews by Brookings are always among the best, and they are even more valuable this year when several think tanks appear to have defaulted on their traditional role in offering up reviews for consideration by the transition team. Across the various issue areas, including international, social, domestic, and governance policy domains, they present thoughtful recommendations.

Studies in Public Opinion

Studies in Public Opinion
Author: Willem E. Saris
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2004
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780691119038

Building on and reaching beyond themes in the work of Philip Converse, one of the pioneers in the study of public opinion, Studies in Public Opinion brings together a group of leading American and European social scientists to explore a number of new factors, with a particular emphasis on the structure of political choices. In twelve chapters that reflect different perspectives on how people form political opinions and how these opinions are manipulated, this book offers an unparalleled view of the state-of-the-art research on these important questions as it has developed on two continents.

Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Neither Liberal nor Conservative
Author: Donald R. Kinder
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2017-05-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022645259X

Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage. Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all. If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life.

Tempered Radicals

Tempered Radicals
Author: Debra Meyerson
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781591393252

This text explores the experiences of tempered radicals. These are people who want to become valued and successful members of their organisations without selling out on who they are and what they believe in.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication

The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication
Author: Kate Kenski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 977
Release: 2017-06-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199793484

Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together leading scholars, including founders of the field of political communication Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, Doris Graber, Max McCombs, and Thomas Paterson,to review the major findings about subjects ranging from the effects of political advertising and debates and understandings and misunderstandings of agenda setting, framing, and cultivation to the changing contours of social media use in politics and the functions of the press in a democratic system. The essays in this volume reveal that political communication is a hybrid field with complex ancestry, permeable boundaries, and interests that overlap with those of related fields such as political sociology, public opinion, rhetoric, neuroscience, and the new hybrid on the quad, media psychology. This comprehensive review of the political communication literature is an indispensible reference for scholars and students interested in the study of how, why, when, and with what effect humans make sense of symbolic exchanges about sharing and shared power. The sixty-two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication contain an overview of past scholarship while providing critical reflection of its relevance in a changing media landscape and offering agendas for future research and innovation.

Passion and Ambivalence

Passion and Ambivalence
Author: Nathaniel Berman
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2011-12-23
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9004210245

Tracing our current preoccupation with nationalist, ethnic, and religious conflict to the “cultural Modernist” revolutions of the early twentieth century, this volume draws on cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis to offer a radical reinterpretation of contemporary international law’s origins.