Suchergebnisse

ObjectivesWe examine how prior experience with government agencies shapes citizens' assessments of government performance. In Louisiana, two extreme weather events, 11 years apart, required intervention from the state and federal government: Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2016 floods. Were Louisianans' attitudes toward government response shaped by their prior experiences during a natural disaster?MethodsWe use an original survey of Louisianans to assess the role of Katrina experience in performance assessments of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Louisiana state government in 2016.ResultsWe find a significant negative relationship: flood aid applicants in 2016 rated state government much lower, but only if they also applied for Katrina aid.ConclusionsThose with personal experience with FEMA hold lower expectations of state government performance, which deteriorated under the Jindal Administration, and look to the federal government for support. Prior experience with government agencies establishes expectations of responsibility that endure years later.

This volume of The ANNALS revisits and updates a call made by scholars in the early 2010s for public policy to respond to the market failure of local news. Organized into four parts—policy, supply, demand, and adaptation—this volume is committed to the proposition that people need information about their communities in order to navigate everyday life, and that those information needs are inextricably intertwined with other basic necessities like sustenance, transportation, housing, health, and safety. However, local and regional newspapers face an existential threat to their continued economic survival that undermines their ability to do even basic, routine coverage of civic institutions and communities. This volume demonstrates that professional journalism is one of many ways to support communities' information needs. We consider how new sources of news and information might fill contemporary information needs and how media policy, broadly understood, could help create a more equitable, tolerant, and just multiracial democracy.

AbstractPrevious study demonstrates that partisans perceive in-party news outlets as fair, and out-party news outlets as unfair. However, much of this study relies on one-shot designs. We create an ecologically valid design that randomly assigns participants to news feeds within a week-long online news portal where the balance of in-party and out-party news outlets has been manipulated. We find that sustained exposure to a feed that features out-party news media attenuates Democrats' beliefs that Fox News is unfair, but the same is not true for Republican's perceptions of MSNBC's fairness. Unexpectedly, repeated exposure to in-party news did increase Republicans' beliefs that Fox News is unfair. This study updates our understanding of partisan news effects in a fragmented online news environment.

Abstract
Publics hold chief executives uniquely responsible for national well-being, and they learn about national conditions through news. But when news disproportionately covers problems, what happens to democratic accountability? Here, we experimentally test how leader approval changes when crime loses prominence in news for a sustained period. We create an online news environment coding real news in real time, then experimentally filter news for nationally diverse U.S. panelists over 1 week. We find causal evidence that reducing crime news raises presidential approval and depresses problem importance evaluations for crime. No other leaders are credited, and reducing all problems produces no further gains. These effects persist well after exposure but dissipate within a week. We conclude with broad implications for journalism and democratic judgment.

President Donald Trump faced substantial scandal coverage early in his presidency. Can these stories about presidential controversies change the opinions of Trump's fellow Republicans, or are the efforts of the news media to inform partisans about prominent issues futile? Past research on partisan reactions to major political scandals were confounded by problems with self-reported media use and single-shot experimental treatments. We address these concerns using a unique, repeated-exposure experimental design that either randomly supplied participants with news about the Trump-Russia scandal, or removed most of those stories from view, over the course of one week in June 2017. This design mimics sustained media attention to a political scandal and disentangles the effects of media coverage from selection in the context of a high-choice media environment. We find that Republicans randomly assigned to see more Trump-Russia headlines reacted more negatively than Democrats or Independents, rating Trump's performance lower and expressing more negative emotions about him. Republicans' perceptions of media bias were not affected by Trump-Russia stories, and effects were not contingent upon clicking the articles. Intense media focus on a story can alter partisans' evaluations of politicians by shifting the balance of headlines.