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Cover; Dedication; Title page; Copyright page; Boxes; Preface; 1: Influencing Public Opinion; Our pictures of the world; Contemporary empirical evidence; The accumulated evidence; Cause and effect; A new communication landscape; Summing up; 2: Reality and the News; Idiosyncratic pictures; Perspectives on agenda-setting effects; Content versus exposure; Agenda-setting in past centuries; Summing up; 3: The Pictures in our Heads; Pictures of political candidates; Candidate images in national elections; Candidate images in local elections; Media influence on candidate images; Attributes of issues

The question of how Americans interpret international news stories is addressed by examining three key dimensions of international stories: (1) media intensity, the magnitude of the story's visibility; (2) thematic affinity, the degree of congruence with public values toward international affairs; & (3) image continuity, the extent of consistency with existing information about international actors & activities. Interactions among these three dimensions can help explain differences in PO reactions to various stories. These factors are used to propose a typology of international news stories. 2 Figures. AA

Examines the results of 48 national public opinion polls measuring support for George Bush and Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign, conducted or reported by five major media polling organizations.

The authors examine the results of 48 national public opinion polls measuring support for George Bush and Michael Dukakis throughout the 1988 presidential campaign conducted or reported by five major media polling organizations. Polling trends are discussed, and the consistency of estimates across polls are assessed, across seven distinct time periods defined by key events during the 1988 election year, while accuracy is assessed by comparing final pre-election polls against election results. Time series transfer function methods are employed to assess the short-term and long-term effects of the two major national party conventions, the two Bush-Dukakis debates, and the Ouayle-Bentsen debate on candidate support. Statistically significant positive effects on Bush support are obtained for the Republican convention and for the second presidential debate, while support for Dukakis was affected significantly, and in opposite directions, by the two party conventions. The results are discussed in the context of recent research conducted by Crespi and others.

Do judicial dissents affect mass politics? Many people, including judges, scholars, political commentators, and public officials claim that they do. The conventional wisdom is that unanimous rulings boost support for court decisions, while judicial division fuels popular opposition. As such, it has been suggested that courts present a united front on controversial cases as a strategy for garnering support and quelling resistance. However, empirical analysis of the public perception of judicial unanimity and dissent is sparse, incomplete, and inconsistent.This dissertation is broadly guided by the question of whether unity/division among judges can in fact influence media coverage of and popular attitudes toward court decisions. In doing so, I consider both the role of the news media as an intermediary between the courts and the public and direct public reaction to information about court unity. Using a combination of existing and original data, I analyze newspaper coverage patterns to determine if judicial consensus has an independent effect on the visibility and favorability of Supreme Court coverage. While previous work has assumed that the correlation between coverage and division is the result of the most newsworthy cases producing the most divided outcomes, I find that dissent on the Supreme Court generates press coverage independent of other factors associated with a case's newsworthiness. Moreover, this dissertation is the first study to find that narrower Supreme Court majorities attract more critical coverage. In addition, using a series of original survey experiments from a nationally representative sample, I expand and improve upon existing research of the direct popular reaction to judicial unanimity and dissent. Though most previous work on this subject had found no link between judicial consensus and public opinion, recently published findings have suggested that unanimity does indeed boost agreement with Supreme Court decisions across a variety of issue areas. Breaking with this, I find that popular reaction to judicial consensus is highly dependent on the ideological salience of the issue involved and that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, dissent can actually foster acceptance of rulings among the Court's opponents by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. However, this effect of majority size on public opinion appears limited to the Supreme Court: I find no evidence of a similar effect at the lower court level.This dissertation improves upon the existing body of knowledge regarding the judiciary's role in the political world. Not only does it reveal potential evidence of a news media bias toward judicial conflict, its public opinion findings buck both the conventional wisdom and the extant literature. Rather than suggesting that unanimity generally leads to a more supportive populace, as the conventional wisdom argues, or that there is no connection at all, as much of the scholarly literature claims, my findings show that the relationship between judicial consensus is more nuanced and is frequently the opposite of what the conventional wisdom suggests.