Suchergebnisse

Experimental research has yielded findings that are largely optimistic about the Court's powers to move public attitudes. But left largely unexplored is whether the Court's pronouncements simultaneously cause the Court to lose support among those who disagree with it. Here we explore these questions using a two-wave survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of Americans. We find that learning of the Court's rulings moves opinion toward the Court in an unmistakable fashion in only one out of six cases studied (the decriminalization of same-sex relations in Lawrence v. Texas). More significant, we find strong evidence that unpopular Court rulings result in a loss of legitimacy for the Court—but only among conservatives. Our findings suggest that in contemporary American politics, the persuasive powers of the Court are more limited and the institutional legitimacy of the Court more fragile than implied by previous work.

In this Top Twenty Commentaries section of the Centennial Issues of the journal, the author reviews the highly cited article Consensus & Ideology in American Politics (1964) by Herbert McClosky. A brief historical narrative traces McClosky's career focus on the ideological foundations of American mass & elite political attitudes & beliefs, & his work while at the University of Minnesota. His interest in the highly original work in social psychology by the creators of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is related to McClosky's philosophical foundations of human life, & his choice to engage a formal program of retooling with the Minnesota psychologists. The resultant grant enabled him to conduct the broad survey of American citizens along the style of the MMPI. Consensus & Ideology is concluded to reflect a marriage between two traditions of scholarship that is rarely at the hand of a single investigator. References. J. Harwell

Are Happy Days for government really here again? Recent polls suggest that the long slide in public confidence in America's political institutions and authorities has finally ended. Ronald Reagan, who came to Washington to bury government rather than praise it, ironically has presided over a restoration of trust in the competence of national leadership. We begin this article by charting the contours of the unanticipated improvement in the public's image of government, assessing the magnitude of the increase in confidence, identifying the social groups whose outlook has changed and specifying the institutions that have gained in popular esteem. Our main purpose, however, is to provide an explanation for the resurgence of trust in government that addresses persistent controversies about the theoretical and empirical status of this concept.

The public's outlook on government, 1980-84; based on National Election Studies conducted by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan.

Research has shown that political attitudes spring from diverse sources. This paper focuses on isolationism, a set of beliefs that can stem from social factors (e.g., economic deprivation, poor education, social or geographic isolation) and from psychological factors (e.g., n. aggression, inflexibility and low self-esteem). The purpose is not to demonstrate again that there is a connection between personality and political belief. Instead, the authors ask whether or not it matters if a political attitude—in the present case, isolationism—stems from personality influences rather than from some other sources, for example, education, group memberships, or ideology. Isolationists low in self-esteem are shown to differ from those high in self-esteem on a range of values and beliefs: liberalism-conservatism, extreme political values, and specific foreign policy questions. Thus, those who hold common beliefs on one set of issues are likely to differ in the opinions they hold on other political questions depending on whether they owe their convictions to their personality characteristics or to some other influence.