Television journalism can produce significant changes in opinions about basic American institutions and may also foster political malaise. Laboratory investigation revealed that the CBS documentary, “The Selling of the Pentagon,” convinced viewers that the military participated more in national politics and misled the public more about Vietnam than these viewers had previously believed. The program also caused a significant decrease in political efficacy among all our groups. This finding led to correlational research to determine if exposure to television news is also associated with lower levels of efficacy.

SRC survey data suggest that reliance upon television news programs is associated with feelings of inefficacy and political self-doubt. These data also indicate that reliance upon television news fosters political cynicism and distrust, political instability, and frustration with civil rights. Holding constant the level of education or income of these respondents does not appreciably alter these relationships.

In short, the two sets of data imply that the networks helped to create Scammon's Social Issue and that video journalism fostered public support for George Wallace.

The European Parliament under the current cooperation procedure has an important power: it can make proposals that, if accepted by the Commission of the European Communities, are easier for the Council of Ministers to accept than to modify, since only qualified majority is required for acceptance, whereas full unanimity for modification. The importance of this power, which I call the power of the conditional agenda setter, has not been recognized in previous scholarly work. For structural reasons explained in the text, this power is likely to increase in the future. I conclude by arguing that the conditional delegation of power to international actors (the European Parliament, Commission, and the Court of Justice) is a frequent phenomenon in European institutions. This delegation presents three important advantages: it makes possible the selection of one among many possible equilibria, it accelerates European integration, and it diffuses responsibility for politically unpopular measures.

Political scientists have conducted only limited systematic research on the consequences of war for civilian populations. Here we argue that the civilian suffering caused by civil war extends well beyond the period of active warfare. We examine these longer-term effects in a cross-national (1999) analysis of World Health Organization new fine-grained data on death and disability broken down by age, gender, and type of disease or condition. We test hypotheses about the impact of civil wars and find substantial long-term effects, even after controlling for several other factors. We estimate that the additional burden of death and disability incurred in 1999, from the indirect and lingering effects of civil wars in the years 1991–97, was approximately equal to that incurred directly and immediately from all wars in 1999. This impact works its way through specific diseases and conditions and disproportionately affects women and children.We thank the Weatherhead Initiative on Military Conflict as a Public Health Problem, the Ford Foundation, and the World Health Organization, NIA (P01 17625-01), for financial support and Gary King, Thomas Gariepy, Melvin Hinich, Kosuke Imai, Roy Licklider, Jennifer Leaning, Greg Huber, Lisa Martin, Christopher Murray, Joshua Salomon, and Nicholas Sambanis for comments. Our data are available at http://www.yale.edu/unsy/civilwars/data.htm and at the Virtual Data Center web site, http://TheData.org, when it becomes operative.

Over the past four decades, violence against women (VAW) has come to be seen as a violation of human rights and an important concern for social policy. Yet government action remains uneven. Some countries have adopted comprehensive policies to combat VAW, whereas others have been slow to address the problem. Using an original dataset of social movements and VAW policies in 70 countries over four decades, we show that feminist mobilization in civil society—not intra-legislative political phenomena such as leftist parties or women in government or economic factors like national wealth—accounts for variation in policy development. In addition, we demonstrate that autonomous movements produce an enduring impact on VAW policy through the institutionalization of feminist ideas in international norms. This study brings national and global civil society into large-n explanations of social policy, arguing that analysis of civil society in general—and of social movements in particular—is critical to understanding progressive social policy change.

Students of public opinion research have argued that voters show very little consistency and structure in their political attitudes. A model of the survey response is proposed which takes account of the vagueness in opinion survey questions and in response categories. When estimates are made of this vagueness or “measurement error” and the estimates applied to the principal previous study, nearly all the inconsistency is shown to be the result of the vagueness of the questions rather than of any failure by the respondents.

We address the effects of negative campaign advertising on turnout. Using a unique experimental design in which advertising tone is manipulated within the identical audiovisual context, we find that exposure to negative advertisements dropped intentions to vote by 5%. We then replicate this result through an aggregate-level analysis of turnout and campaign tone in the 1992 Senate elections. Finally, we show that the demobilizing effects of negative campaigns are accompanied by a weakened sense of political efficacy. Voters who watch negative advertisements become more cynical about the responsiveness of public officials and the electoral process.

This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. In the 1990s, “progressive revisionists” argued that, by reforming welfare, liberals could free the Democratic Party of a significant electoral liability, reduce the race-coding of poverty politics, and produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts. Connecting this argument to recent scholarship on policy feedback, we pursue a quantitative case study of the potential for new policies to move public opinion. Our analysis reveals that welfare reform in the 1990s produced few changes in mass opinion. To explain this result, we propose a general framework for the analysis of mass feedback effects. After locating welfare as a “distant-visible” case in this framework, we advance four general propositions that shed light on our case-specific findings as well as the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.

It is argued that Rawls does not offer a viable alternative to utilitarian morality. It is shown that the maximin principle would lead to absurd decisions. Thus, it is unfortunate that Rawls bases his theory on the assumption that the maximin principle would serve as decision rule in the original position. The present writer has shown (prior to Rawls's first paper on this subject) that we can obtain a highly satisfactory theory of morality, one in the utilitarian tradition, if we assume that in the original position expected-utility maximization would be used as a decision rule. Rawls's theory is unacceptable because it would force us to discriminate against the legitimate human needs of all individuals enjoying good fortune in any way— whether by being relatively well-to-do, or by being in reasonably good health, or by having good intellectual ability or artistic talent, etc.

Rather than striving to measure the influence of groups in the policy-making process this article concentrates instead on the ways in which interest groups are created and the means by which they remain in existence. A survey by mail was conducted during 1980-1981 of all voluntary associations that are open to membership and concerned with some aspects of public policy at the national level. The sample of groups was chosen from the Congressional Quarterly's Washington Information Directory. Questionnaires were delivered to 913 interest groups, and usable responses were received from 564, yielding a response rate of 64.8%.

Most studies of groups have concerned the tactics employed by group leaders in attracting and holding their members. This study demonstrates that the origins and maintenance of groups depends even more upon the success of group leaders in securing funds from outside their membership which are needed to keep their groups in operation. Estimates of patronage from different sources are provided as well as data on the congruence between the policy goals of groups and their patrons.

The average voter falls far short of the prescriptions of classic democratic theory in terms of interest, knowledge, and participation in politics. We suggest a more realistic standard: Citizens fulfill their democratic duties if, most of the time, they vote “correctly.” Relying on an operationalization of correct voting based on fully informed interests, we present experimental data showing that, most of the time, people do indeed manage to vote correctly. We also show that voters' determinations of their correct vote choices can be predicted reasonably well with widely available survey data. We illustrate how this measure can be used to determine the proportion of the electorate voting correctly, which we calculate at about 75% for the five American presidential elections between 1972 and 1988. With a standard for correct vote decisions, political science can turn to exploring the factors that make it more likely that people will vote correctly.

This article describes some results of a successful attempt to assess and refine a causal model of the general conditions of several forms of civil strife, using cross-sectional analyses of data collected for 114 polities. The theoretical argument, which is discussed in detail elsewhere, stipulates a set of variables said to determine the likelihood and magnitude of civil strife. Considerable effort was given here to devising indices that represent the theoretical variables more closely than the readily-available aggregate indices often used in quantitative cross-national research. One consequence is an unusually high degree of statistical explanation: measures of five independent variables jointly account for two-thirds of the variance among nations in magnitude of civil strife (R = .80, R2 = .64).

It should be noted at the outset that this study does not attempt to isolate the set of conditions that leads specifically to “revolution,” nor to assess the social or political impact of any given act of strife except as that impact is reflected in measures of “magnitude” of strife. The relevance of this kind of research to the classic concern of political scholarship with revolution is its attempt at identification and systematic analysis of conditions that dispose men to strife generally, revolution included.

I present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies. Informed voters, however, vote based on those policies, so candidates face a trade-off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote. Electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies: particularistic and collective. In the case of particularistic policies, the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high, and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion. The model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages. For the case of collective policies, the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters, and contributions are zero.

This article develops a simultaneous equation model of the voting decision in a form thought to mirror the main lines of cognitive decision-making processes of individual voters. The model goes beyond earlier efforts in two respects. First, it explicitly represents the causal interdependence of voter assessments in the election situation, permitting such estimations as the degree to which correlations between voter issue positions and issue positions ascribed to preferred candidates arise because of projection onto the candidate or persuasion by the candidate. Secondly, the model is truly dynamic, in the sense that it is dependent on longitudinal data for its proper estimation. The utility of the model is certified by the goodness of fit achieved when applied to 1972–76 panel data for a sample of the national electorate.

Why do sovereign governments make international legal commitments, and what effect does international law have on state behavior? Very little empirical research tries to answer these questions in a systematic way. This article examines patterns of commitment to and compliance with international monetary law. I consider the signal governments try to send by committing themselves through international legal commitments, and I argue that reputational concerns explain patterns of compliance. One of the most important findings is that governments commit to and comply with legal obligations if other countries in their region do so. Competitive market forces, rather than overt policy pressure from the International Monetary Fund, are the most likely “enforcement” mechanism. Legal commitment has an extremely positive effect on governments that have recently removed restrictive policies, which indicates a desire to reestablish a reputation for compliance.

Why would government officials in authoritarian and transitional systems where formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are often weak ever provide more than the minimum level of public goods needed to maintain social stability? Findings from a unique combination of in-depth case study research and an original survey of 316 villages in rural China indicate that even when formal accountability is weak, local officials can be subject to unofficial rules and norms that establish and enforce their public obligations. These informal institutions of accountability can be provided by encompassing and embedding solidary groups. Villages where these types of groups exist are more likely to have better local governmental public goods provision than villages without these solidary groups, all other things being equal.

Two experiments sustain Lippmann's suspicion, advanced a half century ago, that media provide compelling descriptions of a public world that people cannot directly experience. More precisely, the experiments show that television news programs profoundly affect which problems viewers take to be important. The experiments also demonstrate that those problems promimently positioned in the evening news are accorded greater weight in viewers' evaluations of presidential performance. We note the political implications of these results, suggest their psychological foundations, and argue for a revival of experimentation in the study of political communication.

We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events. Over time people forget most of the campaign information they are exposed to but are nonetheless able to later recollect their summary affective evaluation of candidates which they then use to inform their preferences and vote choice. These findings have substantive, methodological, and normative implications for the study of electoral behavior. Substantively, we show how campaign information affects voting behavior. Methodologically, we demonstrate the need to measure directly what campaign information people actually attend to over the course of a campaign and show that after controling for the individual's on-line assessment of campaign messages, National Election Study-type recall measures prove to be spurious as explanatory variables. Finally, we draw normative implications for democratic theory of on-line processing, concluding that citizens appear to be far more responsive to campaign messages than conventional recall models suggest.

Students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout. This may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters, but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation. Another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization. We explore the latter possibility by using FEC and state data on campaign expenditures in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. Our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels. We also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of Senate and gubernatorial expenditure on House turnout.

That many different officials contribute in many different ways to decisions and policies in the modern state makes it difficult to ascribe moral responsibility to any official. The usual responses to this problem—based on concepts of hierarchical and collective responsibility—distort the notion of responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility—based on causal and volitional criteria—constitutes a better approach to the problem of ascribing responsibility to public officials. Corresponding to each of these criteria are types of excuses that officials use in defending the decisions they make. An analysis of the conditions under which the excuses eliminate or mitigate responsibility provides a foundation for accountability in a democracy.

We examine the effects of individual political preferences and the distribution of such preferences on the social transmission of political information. Our data base combines a 1984 election survey of citizens in South Bend, Indiana with a subsequent survey of people with whom these citizens discuss politics. Several findings emerge from the effort. First, individuals do purposefully construct informational networks corresponding to their own political preferences, and they also selectively misperceive socially supplied political information. More important, both of these individual-level processes are shown to be conditioned by constraints imposed due to the distribution of political preferences in the social context. Thus, individual control over socially supplied political information is partial and incomplete. Finally, these information-transmitting processes interact with the social context in a manner that favors partisan majorities while undermining political minorities.