"That's Where I Draw the Line": How Issue-Publics can Overcome Partisan Tribalism

The primacy of partisanship over issue-attitudes is a foundational finding in political behavior. Yet, scholars find that not all issue-attitudes are created equal. Many citizens are members of issue-publics: groups of people that are passionate about a single or narrow subset of related issues. This raises the question: are issue-publics uniquely capable of shedding partisan tribalism in favor of issue-based concerns? I contend that issue-publics' policy preferences should change little when presented counter-attitudinal party cues. Additionally, issue-publics should vote for out-party candidates if both candidates adopt out-party stances. Otherwise, issue-publics should vote for their party's candidate. Other research that explored these questions had important limitations, which I resolve by coding an open-ended response in conjunction with an issue-ranking system. This allowed me to test the relative influence of partisanship against several issues of varying importance that were unique to each respondent. While the results regarding whether issue-publics resist partisan cues are unclear, I find strong support for my framework outlining the conditions under which people will vote for out-partisans.Master of Art

Issue Publics Gone Wild Or The End Of Narrow Interests

Issue public theory holds that individuals are more likely to base political judgments, such as the decision of who to vote for on election day, on issues that are particularly important to them. This subset of issues is presumed to be relatively small in quantity for most individuals, allowing them to specialize in information gathering and attention. There is reason to believe the nature of issue publics has significantly changed in recent years as a result of profound shifts in the information environment. Many of the traditional findings within the literature are reassessed using data primarily from the 2008 Presidential election. Though significant changes are found, they do not, as theorized, represent a strengthening of issue publics within society. If anything, people appear to emphasize a larger array of issues today than ever before and rely no more heavily upon important issues than unimportant ones in their voting decision. Evidence is found, though, for a mediating role of the particular form of media the individual engages in

Issue Publics in American Politics

This work examines the existence of heterogeneity in the impact of issues on vote choice in the American electorate. I begin by explaining the reasons for studying heterogeneity in issue weights from both a methodological and substantive perspective. In Chapter 2 I examine the aggregate effect of heterogeneity in costs of information on the measures of issue salience derived from spatial models of voting. I find some evidence that individuals who are uncertain about candidate issue positions do bias these estimates, but the resulting bias is slight in the aggregate. However, the results of this chapter are suggestive, indicating that different voters may use issues differently or not at all, depending on their costs of information. In order to examine this possibility further, individual measures of issue salience must be developed. Chapter 3 explores the utility of using survey questions about issue salience as the solution to this problem. Unfortunately, most of the survey questions currently employed do not prove to be useful in determining issue salience in spatial models of voting. Thus, Chapter 4 attempts to determine individual level issue salience indirectly, using a method that employs rank-ordered data to estimate separate issue weights for each individual on each issue. I find a clear relationship between issue salience and costs of information, with those individuals who face higher costs of information being less likely to place weight on any given issue or consider multiple issues when deciding who to vote for. Although I am able to employ this technique to learn a great deal about the relationship between issue salience and the costs of information, this technique is not suited for most datasets. Therefore, in Chapter 5 I develop a model that allows for heterogeneity in issue weights, but is more widely applicable to the kind of data generally available for studying American elections. I again find evidence of heterogeneity in the impact of issues on vote choice in the American electorate and the role that costs of information play in determining issue salience. Finally, I conclude, discussing my findings and the implications they have for the political process in the United States

Ready for the world? Measuring the (trans-)national quality of political issue publics on twitter

This article presents a multi-method research design for measuring the (trans-)national quality of issue publics on Twitter. Online communication is widely perceived as having the potential to overcome nationally bound public spheres. Social media, in particular, are seen as platforms and drivers of transnational communication through which users can easily connect across borders. Transnational interactivity can be expected in particular for policy fields of global concern and elite or activist communication as practiced on Twitter. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of evidence for the enduring national structuration of political communication and publics as it results from a shared language (mostly), culturally defined media markets, established routines of social and political communication, and sociocultural stocks of knowledge. The study goes beyond measuring user interaction and also includes indicators of cross-referential cohesion. It applies a set of computational methods in network and discourse analysis and presents empirical evidence for Twitter communication on climate change being a prime issue of global concern and a globalized policy agenda. For empirical analysis, the study relies on a large Twitter dataset (N ≈ 6m tweets) with tweet messages and metadata collected between 2015 and 2018. Based on basic measurements such as geolocation and language use, the metrics allowed measurement of cross-national user interactions, user centrality in communicative networks, linking behaviour, and hashtag co-occurrences. The findings of the exploratory study suggest that a combined perspective on indicators of user interaction and cross-referential cohesion helps to develop a better and more nuanced understanding of online issue publics

Towards the Final Frontier: Using Strategic Communication Activities to Engage the Latent Public as a Key Stakeholder in a Corporate Mission

Private corporations that do not normally interact with, nor regularly communicate with, the public often do not perceive the public as a relevant or active stakeholder. The public may not view themselves as a stakeholder, particularly when they are unaware of, have no direct dealings with, or do not have any problems associated with such a corporation. The current study, utilizing a national survey of the United States public (N = 424) found that through directed strategic communication activities of a private spaceflight corporation, utilizing social and new media tools, a latent public can perceive a corporation and its mission in a positive manner, and transition it towards a status of an aware public and possible active public. Positive perceptions were found regarding corporate credibility, brand awareness, public engagement, communicating a corporate mission, educating the public, and influencing public opinion

Grounding the European public sphere: looking beyond the mass media to digitally mediated issue publics

The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide issues are replicated in the national media of EU countries, the discourses on those issues are dominated primarily by elites (with relatively few civil society voices included in the news), and public attention is seldom paid to EU issues beyond a select few (money, agriculture, political integration, scandals), creating a distant ‘gallery public.’ At the same time, many important political issues such as trade and economic justice, development policy, environment and climate change policy, human rights, and military interventions, among others, are being addressed more actively by networks of civil society actors both within and across EU national borders. These networks utilize the Internet and various interactive digital media to publicize their issues, engage active publics, and contest competing policy perspectives not only within specific issue networks, but across solidarity networks involving other policy issues, and with political targets at national and EU levels. This dimension of the EU public sphere has received relatively little attention from observers, and when it has been explored, it is often dismissed as less inclusive, and therefore less significant than the somewhat reified mass media model. This analysis compares networked, digitally mediated public issue spheres with the mass mediated model, points out ways in which the two types of public sphere are complementary, and also shows how networked issue spheres may be the sites of greater citizen and civil society engagement in keeping with more classical models of public spheres

Information Diffusion in a Cobweb World

Based on an assumption of one-way learning, Granato and Wong (2004) consider a framework with two groups of agents, Group L and Group H, where Group L is less attentive and uses the expectations of the more or highly attentive Group H to update their forecasts. The paper shows the boomerang effect, which is defined as a situation where the inaccurate forecasts of a less attentive group confound a more attentive group\u27s forecasts. This extended paper relaxes the one-way learning assumption and investigates the case that both groups are learning from each other, i.e., dual learning. Simulations suggest that a boomerang effect still exists. Surprisingly, although the highly attentive group has a full set of information to make forecasts, they still learn from Group L. The reason is that Group H adjusts their forecasts because there is available information in Group L\u27s forecast measurement error

Modeling the formation of attentive publics in social media: the case of Donald Trump

Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We situate our study in the context of current discussions of audience formation, attention flow, and hybridity in the United States’ political media system. From this we derive propositions concerning how attentive publics aggregate around a particular object, in this case Trump himself, which we test using time series modeling. We also present an exploration of the possible role of automated accounts in these processes. Our results reiterate the media hybridity described by others, while emphasizing the importance of news media coverage in building social media attentive publics.Accepted manuscrip