Suchergebnisse

Scholars have made little progress in exploring the degree to which research on belief structures among Americans may be generalizable to other political systems and geopolitical contexts. The distribution and structure of mass beliefs related to nuclear security, missile defenses, and nuclear energy issues in the United States and Great Britain are analyzed using data from telephone surveys simultaneously administered in both countries. In foreign and domestic areas, the British and American belief systems vary chiefly in the central tendencies of the beliefs held but not in the structural relationships among those beliefs. Findings provide evidence for a hierarchical model of policy beliefs with differential adjustments based on situational conditions, but also raise questions about the kinds of conditions—geopolitical and institutional—that give rise to these similarities.

Do elites with scientific expertise hold similar policy preferences in technical policy areas irrespective of their ideological and national background? It is expected that elite beliefs will exhibit a higher level of ideological constraint than mass beliefs do, yet we do not know much about the role of ideology and national context in shaping more specific policy preferences. In this research note, we report the findings of an analysis of the influence of ideology and national context on the policy beliefs of scientific elites in the member countries of the European Union and in the United States.Recent research on epistemic communities, or 'networks of knowledge-based experts', suggests that scientific elites will achieve transnational convergence on policy positions, particularly over complex and technical policy questions: 'to the extent that epistemic communities make some of the world's problems more amenable to human reason and intervention, they can curb some of the international system's anarchic tendencies, temper some of the excesses of a purely state-centric order, and perhaps even help bring about a better international order'. Nuclear security issues and environmental issues are policy areas identified as amenable to an epistemic communities approach. Earlier research is divided over the degree to which ideology influences scientists' policy beliefs. But there have been no systematic cross-national analyses of the influence of scientific training in suppressing 'state-centric' and ideological concerns in the determination of policy preferences.With a substantive focus on scientific elites' beliefs and preferences on security and energy policy issues, our aim is to extend this research to a comparative setting and provide a preliminary understanding of the extent to which knowledge and scientific training provide insulation from ideology, patriotism and 'state-centric' concerns.

Theory and conventional wisdom suggest that errors undermine the credibility of tornado warning systems and thus decrease the probability that individuals will comply (i.e., engage in protective action) when future warnings are issued. Unfortunately, empirical research on the influence of warning system accuracy on public responses to tornado warnings is incomplete and inconclusive. This study adds to existing research by analyzing two sets of relationships. First, we assess the relationship between perceptions of accuracy, credibility, and warning response. Using data collected via a large regional survey, we find that trust in the National Weather Service (NWS; the agency responsible for issuing tornado warnings) increases the likelihood that an individual will opt for protective action when responding to a hypothetical warning. More importantly, we find that subjective perceptions of warning system accuracy are, as theory suggests, systematically related to trust in the NWS and (by extension) stated responses to future warnings. The second half of the study matches survey data against NWS warning and event archives to investigate a critical follow‐up question—Why do some people perceive that their warning system is accurate, whereas others perceive that their system is error prone? We find that subjective perceptions are—in part—a function of objective experience, knowledge, and demographic characteristics. When considered in tandem, these findings support the proposition that errors influence perceptions about the accuracy of warning systems, which in turn impact the credibility that people assign to information provided by systems and, ultimately, public decisions about how to respond when warnings are issued.