Suchergebnisse

Case studies and correlational evidence suggest that celebrity political advocacy leads to media coverage and public attention. With a new dataset of celebrity witnesses at congressional hearings, we develop a systematic analysis that allows us to estimate whether celebrities increase media coverage of the issues they advocate in official government venues. We also use this dataset to measure how much celebrity advocacy efforts increase public engagement with policy issues—a necessary condition for the expansion of issue publics. We find that the issues addressed in congressional hearings featuring celebrity witnesses are about three times more likely to be the subject of the New York Times reporting, but the average celebrity witness has no discernible effect on public issue attention, as measured by Wikipedia page views. We conclude that while the Internet vastly expands the opportunities for political communication, it is difficult to appropriate non-political social network infrastructures to promote policy change.

ABSTRACT
Academic and popular accounts hold that celebrity activists command the attention of political elites. One manifestation of this idea is that celebrities garner greater congressional attention at committee hearings than the substantive experts who typically serve as witnesses. This implies that Members of Congress do not value interaction with experts and are willing to forego those interactions to allocate time to activities with low opportunity costs—activities unimportant enough that they can be passed up for a celebrity encounter. To evaluate these claims, we examined hearing attendance during a 20-year period. We found that celebrity witnesses have little effect on member attendance rates, which suggests that celebrities are a less efficacious route to congressional attention than is commonly believed.

In this manuscript, we introduce a new measure of political influence in California. Leveraging a new dataset of candidate rankings of their own endorsements, we use the Bradley-Terry model to estimate influence for a broad array of officeholders, interest groups, and endorsing organizations who participate in California politics. We call this new measure of influence Clout scores. Our measure of a person's clout is based on how much candidates for office desire that individual's endorsement. Specifically, we measure a political actor's clout by estimating the extent to which that actor's endorsement is preferred to a baseline endorsement group. Our estimates provide an original, empirically-grounded portrait of the distribution of political capital in California and highlight which political elites have the greatest capacity to swing election outcomes.

Social capital and community activity are thought to increase voter turnout, but reverse causation and omitted variables may bias the results of previous studies. This article exploits saint's day fiestas in Mexico as a natural experiment to test this causal relationship. Saint's day fiestas provide temporary but large shocks to the connectedness and trust within a community, and the timing of these fiestas is quasi-random. For both cross-municipality and within-municipality estimates, saint's day fiestas occurring near an election decrease turnout by 2.5 to 3.5 percentage points. So community activities that generate social capital can inhibit political participation. These findings may give pause to scholars and policy makers who assume that such community activity and social capital will improve the performance of democracy. Adapted from the source document.

Social capital and community activity are thought to increase voter turnout, but reverse causation and omitted variables may bias the results of previous studies. This article exploits saint's day fiestas in Mexico as a natural experiment to test this causal relationship. Saint's day fiestas provide temporary but large shocks to the connectedness and trust within a community, and the timing of these fiestas is quasi-random. For both cross-municipality and within-municipality estimates, saint's day fiestas occurring near an election decrease turnout by 2.5 to 3.5 percentage points. So community activities that generate social capital can inhibit political participation. These findings may give pause to scholars and policy makers who assume that such community activity and social capital will improve the performance of democracy.

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This study breaks from much previous research and attempts to explain conspiratorial beliefs with traditional theories of opinion formation. Specifically, we focus on the reception of informational cues given a set of predispositions (political and conspiratorial). We begin with observational survey data to show that there exists a unique predisposition that drives individuals to one degree or another to believe in conspiracy theories. This predisposition appears orthogonal to partisanship and predicts political behaviors including voter participation. Then a national survey experiment is used to test the effect of an informational cue on belief in a conspiracy theory while accounting for both conspiratorial predispositions and partisanship. Our results provide an explanation for individual-level heterogeneity in the holding of conspiratorial beliefs and also indicate the conditions under which information can drive conspiratorial beliefs.

ABSTRACTJournalists consider the importance of events and the audience's interest in them when deciding on which events to report. Events most likely to be reported are those that are both important and can capture the audience's interest. In turn, the public is most likely to become aware of important news when some aspect of the story piques their interest. We suggest an efficacious means of drawing public attention to important news stories: dogs. Examining the national news agenda of 10 regional newspapers relative to that of theNew York Times, we evaluated the effect of having a dog in a news event on the likelihood that the event is reported in regional newspapers. The "dog effect" is approximately equivalent to the effect of whether a story warrants front- or back-page national news coverage in theNew York Times. Thus, we conclude that dogs are an important factor in news decisions.