Stanley Feldman - US grants

The project will measure public support for foreign economic assistance programs directed toward humanitarian concerns, contrast this support with public support for domestic humanitarian aid, and to build a framework modeling the public's foreign policy beliefs in the Post-Cold War era. This is the first study to directly assess differences in public attitudes toward domestic and foreign assistance program. This study will move us toward a more solid understanding of how Americans think about foreign policy. A computer-assisted telephone survey of a representative cross section of 500 American adults will be conducted to empirically measure and test preliminary hypotheses. The survey will measure a range of specific values and beliefs including humanitarianism, ethnocentrism, and support for cooperative internationalism. * * *

With National Science Foundation support Dr. Leonie Huddy and his colleagues will establish a central multi-purpose experimental survey research laboratory that will serve as both a telephone survey laboratory and an experimental attitude research lab. The survey facility will allow access to random samples of adults interviewed using up-to-date technology that includes voice recording and analysis capabilities, software that builds randomized experiments into the survey, and response time measures. Voice recording capabilities will allow analysis of a respondent's linguistic and paralinguistic cues such as filled pauses and rising intonation that convey information about uncertainty. The laboratory will contain state-of-the-art software and hardware for collecting survey data over the phone and directly in the laboratory. Computers will be equipped with standard Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing software, response latency capabilities, voice recording and analysis equipment and programmable software that will allow for inclusion of subliminal primes that are essential to the measurement of automatic attitudes. The lab will contain twelve individual workstations equipped with head sets and separated by office panels. Each workstation will operate from a central server. Of the four projects which will provide the core for a first set of initiatives, two are directed by political scientists and concern the theory and measurement of political attitudes. One will focus on the predictive validity of various racial attitudes and touch on a set of central theoretical questions about the covert nature of "true" racial attitudes in contemporary US society. A second examines the notion than many, if not most, political attitudes are founded on ambivalence, an idea which poses serious challenge to contemporary theories of public opinion and attitude stability. Other projects address the uncertainty that is elicited by many factual survey questions, and on the nature of close relationships in adult pairs. The laboratory will play an integral role in both undergraduate and graduate research and teaching.

The nature and determinants of political tolerance have been a major focus of theory and research in political science for the last 50 years. Typically, empirical research on intolerance has examined peoples' willingness to deny civil liberties to particular groups. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was common to examine attitudes towards communists and other left-wing groups. By the 1970s, research was demonstrating that an exclusive focus on left-wing groups (or any other specific groups) underestimated intolerance for many people. A new methodology - the least-liked group approach - was developed to assess intolerance with dislike toward the group held (relatively) constant. This approach is used in much recent research. Whether all people react to the same group or to a disliked group of their choosing, this group-centered approach ignores the substantial, positive correlations of intolerance across groups. Although there is still a considerable group-specific component, there also is a strong tendency for those who are intolerant of one group to be intolerant of many others.
This inter-group consistency in intolerance is important because it provides another perspective on the phenomenon and its determinants. What accounts for these individual differences in intolerance? The answer to this question, I argue in this resarch, is a fundamental conflict between the values of social conformity and personal autonomy. This value conflict arises as people deal with the problem of how social order should be maintained. Does a stable social order emerge from the free interactions of autonomous individuals, or must we require people to conform to a common set of social values and conventions? This dimension of social conformity-autonomy is evident in major cross-national studies of values and should be a central component of peoples' beliefs about politics and the nature of political debate in society.
In addition to providing a theoretically based analysis of stable individual differences in intolerance, this approach yields new insights about the nature and impact of perceived threat. Recent research shows that perceived threat is one of the major predictors of intolerance but it is not entirely clear what perceived threat is. It is either measured very broadly (by a series of paired adjectives describing the group) or operationalized as threat or belligerence. I argue that another aspect of perceived threat is threat to the stability of the social and political order. Moreover, this dimension of threat should be particularly salient to those who value social conformity more than autonomy. There, thus, should be a strong statistical interaction between the social conformity-autonomy dimension and perceived threats to the social and political order.
The research proposed here tests the predictions of this new perspective in four experimental questionnaire studies, two with college students and two with non-random samples of adults from the New York metropolitan area. The two student studies concentrate on the measurement of the social conformity-autonomy dimension and demonstrations of its effects on a wide range of political beliefs and attitudes. The student studies also pretest experimental materials for the adult studies. The two adult studies further validate measures of social conformity-autonomy in more representative samples and test hypotheses about the effects of threat on intolerance. Using constructed news stories about political groups, the first study contrasts threats to the political order with threats of violence. The second study examines the joint effects of two types of threat to the political order: threats directly from a political group and more general threats from increasing social and cultural diversity. The two experimental studies provide a closer look at the nature of political threat and the role of social conformity-autonomy in moderating the perception and effects of threat.

This project investigates the extent to which multiple understandings of political values present in American political culture influence the nature of mass public policy preferences. The objective of the project is to test a general theoretical framework grounded in both psychological and political science literatures. The project assesses specifically the availability of value meanings in American political culture, the relation of those meanings to individual-level characteristics and issue contexts, and their implications for the formation of policy preferences. This current work expands the literature in the realm of political values, public opinion, and political psychology by conceptualizing values as multidimensional in nature, the meaning of which is dependent on social, psychological, and contextual factors. The project uses survey and experimental methodologies in conjunction with student and community subject samples to examine the meanings of equality common to American citizens and their roles in forming the foundation for opinions regarding affirmative action, social welfare, and civil rights policies. The general theoretical orientation of the project provides potential for the advancement of scientific understanding of public opinion as it seeks to attain a more nuanced assessment of the foundations of public policy preferences.

Media often frame stories about public policies in a dramatic fashion. One popular form is the human-interest frame--a narrative of a situated actor. How these frames influence one's comprehension of public policies is explored through a series of experimental designs. The use of a set of novel cpolicies chosen from state ballot initiatives allows influences to be isolated in the laboratory while preserving validity. Content analysis gauges the prominence of human-interest frames in print media and interviews with journalists explore the logic behind their use.
The general hypotheses are that, as we focus on the person in the story -- a person who carries no political cue, ultimate understanding of the policy may be compromised. First, the person may distract our attention and, thus, lead to poor comprehension. Second, one's feelings about the person may shape opinon about the policy and, thus, lead to bias. The bases for these expectations lie in cognitive psychology and evolutionary theory.
The findings are considered in terms of democratic theory -- specifically, liberal theories of representation. The project provides a critical comment on the current role of media in American politics and the advisability of using human-interest dramas to frame public policies.

This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine public attitudes toward the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The researchers are undertaking telephone interviews with approximately 100 individuals each week for six months as part of a national rolling-cross section design. The research offers the opportunity to study public attitudes in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and assess the impact of threat on public opinion and its interaction with public policy decision making.

These data will be of value to scholars interested in the topic and also to decision-makers trying to differentiate among threats to physical safety, the American economy, and the American culture, status and way of life. The researchers will be able to gauge how public opinion changes over time on issues under debate in Washington in tandem with changes in perceived threat.

Conflict over racial issues has become one of the major political cleavages in American society and government attempts to eradicate racial differences in financial well being remained highly controversial. Busing, affirmative college admission programs, efforts to award government contracts to minority-owned businesses, the Head Start lunch program, and other racial programs have aroused heated opposition. To better understand the public controversy that currently surrounds government action on racial matters, the investigators examine two competing explanations for broad opposition to racial policies. The first examines opposition grounded in political ideology that stems from individualism and support for limited government; the second explores the role of racial prejudice. There is no consensus, as yet, on which of these two explanations best accounts for opposition to racial policies. The goal in this project is to resolve this controversy more fully than has been accomplished by past research.

A broad approach to the problem is developed that builds on past empirical studies, but widens the scope of research considerably. Two analytic methods are melded that have been used in past research to disentangle the origins of racial attitudes: multivariate analyses of cross-sectional data, and experimental designs typically embedded within a survey instrument. Multivariate methods attempt to statistically distinguish between the effects of prejudice and principles on racial policy preferences, although the success of the technique depends heavily on the conceptual status of the measures used to assess a concept. The measurement of racial attitudes has been especially controversial, undermining broad acceptance of evidence that racial resentment and other measures of the "new" racism predict racial policy opposition. In contrast, experimental methods have typically varied the nature and qualities of racial program beneficiaries, but can lead to differences in interpretation of key findings. The investigators build on the strengths of both approaches by relying on a combined experimental-multivariate approach in which they vary a set of racial programs experimentally and analyze the results using multivariate tests. This means, for example, that they infer the existence of prejudicial opposition only when scales of racial prejudice result in opposition to programs that benefit blacks but not whites or members of other groups. The current study draws on this combined experimental -multivariate approach to assess the ideological and prejudicial basis of support for a diverse set of racial polices within the context of a two-wave national telephone survey. The sample is based on interviews with 1,400 white and 400 black respondents in the first wave; re-interviews will be attempted with all initial respondents in the second wave. The first wave of data collection will assess reactions to a series of racial policy experiments and include a set of questions that tap various ideological principles. The second wave will focus on replication of the same policy experiments for different racial groups to provide powerful within-subjects data that will complement reactions to the policy experiments in wave 1. Within the experiments, they manipulate a series of political principles, and examine support for the programs when targeted at blacks, whites, and members of other groups. Moreover, they explore the impact of political principles across the full range of target groups to assess their respective effects.

From a broader perspective, this research will extend policy makers' understanding of racial policy attitudes - a potentially divisive factor within contemporary society that may deepen as the United States becomes increasingly diverse over the next several decades. The exploration in this research of a broad variety of racial policy alternatives will provide clear insight into the kinds of racial policies that garner most support from Americans.

Objectives and Intellectual Merit: This study examines the political consequences of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. With estimates of disaster relief and rebuilding costs mounting to over $200 billion, only strong and sustained public support for disaster victims and the government will provide the necessary political capital to ensure funds needed for the restoration effort. However, in the aftermath of the hurricane, Americans report diminished trust in government, especially in the ability of government to deal with natural disasters and possible future terrorism. And there is increasing debate about the best way for the government to pay for reconstruction efforts.

Ultimately, Katrina's long-term political consequences will depend to a large degree on the underpinnings of public reactions to the disaster and its victims, views which are currently far from uniform. Some Americans continue to trust the government while others do not. Some wish to see foreign and domestic spending reduced while others want to postpone tax cuts. Some view race and class as defining factors in the human and social disaster in New Orleans, others reject such reasoning.

The investigators focus specifically on Americans' beliefs about race as a possible defining factor in understanding public reactions to the government's obligation to disaster victims and its performance in handling relief efforts. A great deal of research has shown that divergent beliefs about race and the origins of racial inequities are a powerful source of division among Americans concerning government social welfare policy, anti-poverty programs, and an array of government assistance programs very generally. News media coverage of the Katrina disaster has made clear that poor, African-Americans dominated the ranks of those initially left behind in New Orleans.

To more fully assess the possibly divisive role of racial attitudes in conditioning responses to government relief efforts in response to Katrina, the researchers extend an ongoing NSF-funded research project into Americans' racial attitudes. Specifically, they re-interview respondents included in the American Racial Opinion Survey (AROS). The survey is based on a national telephone sample conducted initially in late 2003 and early 2004, funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-030318800). The first wave of the interview was conducted with 1,583 individuals. They then attempted re-interviews with all whites in the study (N=1,229) in early 2004 (February till June), and obtained completed interviews with 868 non-Hispanic, non-Asian whites. The second wave interview focused exclusively on whites in order to obtain very detailed assessment of their racial attitudes. The two interviews provide a detailed understanding of the respondents' ideological values, views of government, and, most importantly, a number of measures of their racial attitudes and beliefs. In the new interviews they will focus on responses to the Katrina disaster: attitudes toward the victims, assessments of the government's performance, and support for policies to assist the victims and rebuild New Orleans. The research design makes possible a more subtle exploration of the political effects of racial attitudes than in the typical cross-sectional public opinion survey. As a consequence, the researchers are well positioned to assess both overt and more subtle political effects of racial attitudes in accounting for American responses to the disaster.

Broader Impact: From a broader perspective, this research will extend policy makers' understanding of how the public responds to disasters and government efforts to deal with such events. The study will also provide evidence on the extent to which victims' race and class shapes public support for government efforts to respond to various kinds of disasters. Efforts to rebuild New Orleans and assist its residents may be seriously undermined by any negative reactions to the hurricane's predominantly poor and black victims. Views of the hurricane's victims may also affect the degree to which trust in government has been undermined by the relief effort in New Orleans. A number of polls have reported some mistrust in government's future ability to handle disasters in the aftermath of the hurricane. The extent to which any given disaster undermines faith in government may also depend on perceptions of the class and racial background of affected citizens.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Moral judgment has always been a central component of social and political inquiry. Political philosophers have argued that attitudes guided by moral principles are intrinsically good and obligatory. But despite the vast literature on morality, empirical political scientists have shied away from studying the extent to which people use moral judgment in forming political attitudes. This project?s contribution is to develop a theory and methodology for identifying moral issues, observing moral judgments, and connecting moral judgment to political attitudes.

The general question of the moral public is addressed by answering three more specific questions: First, what criteria make political issues moral and to whom? Second, what underlies moral judgment and how does the moral mindset affect political attitudes? Third, what is the role of moral judgment in the formation of political attitudes? This study uses diverse samples, a matching-based nationally representative sample, alternative measures for moral judgment, and experimental as well as correlational designs.

The chief intellectual merit of this project lies in applying seminal theories from political philosophy as well as up-to-date theories in the social and life sciences to establish the theoretical and methodological foundations upon which morality can be integrated in subsequent political behavior research. The study has implications for key contemporary questions in political behavior and public opinion research, such as voting behavior, public opinion mobilization, campaign efficacy, and the functioning of democracies. For instance, if people use intuitive or emotions-based moral judgment, then they may form reasonable and efficient morally based political attitudes despite being ideologically unsophisticated and politically unknowledgeable.

This project has broader implications as well. First, the measures validated in this research program are applicable across various branches of political science, psychology, and empirical philosophy. By building on interdisciplinary research, this study advances a key scientific goal of increasing the consistency of that knowledge across scientific fields. Second, the validated scales and data will be made available on the co-PI's website for other researchers to further research into the important role played by morality and values in the American society. Finally, this project benefits society by identifying differences in the understanding of morality, and offering ways to a more productive and tolerant public discussion of politics.

This project integrates two literatures within political science which seek to explain the policy preferences of the mass public. The first, a psychological approach, argues that preferences are a function of relatively stable dispositions, such as differences in motivation, needs and values. In other words, citizens match their own priorities to the content of specific policy options. The second, a sociological approach, suggests that opinion formation is a product of interaction with political elites, whereby citizens turn to trusted others for information relevant to making a judgment, and thus obtain their opinions second hand. The theory tested in this project argues that each literature has made important contributions, but a more complete understanding of public opinion requires their simultaneous consideration.

More specifically, the investigators argue that citizens form their opinions through two distinct paths, and that the operative path is determined by the complexity of the issue itself. When issues are "easy" (i.e., non-technical, symbolic) individual differences in psychological dispositions directly constrain preferences, as argued with the former literature. However, when issues are "hard" (i.e., technical, new on agenda), citizens must turn to trusted elites for guidance. Importantly, however, this model posits that elite trust itself is judged on the basis of the perception of shared dispositions between citizen and elite. In essence, dispositional similarities serve as cues, or heuristics, for delegation. Citizens trust those they consider to be most like themselves. Such dispositions can thus have both direct effects on preferences, as well as indirect effect through elite cue-taking. The theory and its implications are tested using diverse empirical methods.

While this is a meaningful theoretical contribution in its own right, the model developed herein also has important implications for contemporary American politics. Some of the most consequential issues currently being debated at the elite level are prototypic "hard" issues. In such cases, as argued above, citizens will turn to trusted elites. This project suggests that citizens do not necessarily generate trust assessments on the basis of criteria most relevant to the judgement at hand, but rather on the broader dispostional characteristics of the elites. Thus, dimensions of evalution irrelevant to a given policy judgment may indirectly influence citizen opion through cue-taking.

For decades, political scientists have argued about whether political polarization is occurring in the United States. Yet there has been no common definition of what polarization is and no agreement as to what might cause it. This project aims to change the terms of this debate, both by defining the concept of polarization clearly and consistently and by identifying the reasons for the existence of polarization and for its increase over the last fifty years.

The project defines political polarization as a process by which citizens move from centrist, moderate political beliefs or behavior to more extreme beliefs or behavior. The project suggests that US citizens can be polarized over issue positions or in their behavior, and that these two things need not happen at the same time. Hence, while levels of issue position polarization may be low, behavioral polarization--characterized by increased levels of activism, intolerance and anger--can be and is today undeniably on the rise. This increased behavioral polarization has been fueled by the gradual alignment of party and ideological identities over the last few decades. US citizens are more politically active, intolerant and angry because party identities have come into alignment with other political identities (ideology, religion, and race). Other studies have shown that when multiple identities come into alignment, citizens become less tolerant of others. This project further contends that when political identities come into alignment, party identities are strengthened. Studies have also shown that those with stronger identities are more intolerant, and take more actions on behalf of the group to which they belong. This project argues that this psychological reaction is emotional in nature and is unrelated to measured considerations of issues. If this argument holds, then partisans have deep psychological motivations to be uncivil, and the strength of these motivations has increased since the 1960s.

The research examines its arguments by collecting data from a nationally representative sample of adult Americans. Specifically, a web-based survey will be used to assess the relationships among an array of political identities (partisan, ideological, religious, racial, and issue-based), and the effect of these identities on political behavior. In addition, the survey will be used to examine the role of issue position extremity on political behavior. If the reasoning here is right, issue position extremity should play a smaller role in motivating political activism, intolerance, and anger than does political identity strength. Furthermore, and most importantly, individuals with high levels of alignment among their political identities should be more active, intolerant and angry than those whose political identities are not in alignment.

This project will provide crucial insight in two arenas. First, it will move forward a long-standing academic debate, by introducing a precise definition and identifying causal mechanisms at work. Second, the project will shed light on the psychological motivations of polarized and intolerant partisan debate.

Governments are frequently asked to provide humanitarian assistance to people who are victims of natural disasters, civil wars, ethnic conflict, poverty, and violence. Public opinion can be a major factor in the willingness of politicians to use public funds for this purpose. This project examines how people respond to the needs of those who are victims of humanitarian crises. One major factor that has not been adequately studied is empathy - the ability to understand and feel what others experience emotionally. Research in psychology has shown that people differ in their ability to empathize and this should affect how they respond in these situations. But sympathy for those in need can conflict with other beliefs and values like limited government and belief in legal procedures. This project uses the situation brought about by the large number of children from Central America arriving at the U.S. border to study the ways in which empathy and values influence responses to humanitarian crises. Different news stories about the situation are used to alter the values that people apply to the problem and determine how this changes the impact of empathy on their opinions. This research will shed light on the factors that influence people's attitudes toward those in need in a number of political situations.

How the public responds to people in need is an important factor in many domains of politics. In this research project the focus is on the dynamics of opinion formation in cases of humanitarian crises. A novel theoretical framework involving the interaction between individual differences in empathy and the frames used by politicians, the media, and religious leaders to shape public opinion and influence government policy is developed and tested. The consequences of individual differences in empathy for public opinion have not been adequately explored in political science. A measure developed in the study of Autism Spectrum Disorder, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test," will be used to measure individual differences in empathic ability. The researchers then draw on a modern version of cognitive dissonance theory to specify the conditions under which empathy may conflict with other values and political principles. Such dissonance can result in people high in empathy not feeling compassion for people in need but, instead, bolstering these conflicting principles and values. Using a media framing experiment that activates different values and principles, the investigators explore how empathic ability affects reactions to the Central American children who have been coming to the U.S. seeking refugee status. The study will demonstrate the utility of the proposed theoretical framework for understanding more broadly the impact of empathy on public support for a range of programs designed to assist those in need.