Suchergebnisse

What is the effect of providing personally tailored budgetary information on public attitudes to tax and spending? We address this question with a survey experiment based on the annual tax summaries introduced by the UK tax authorities in 2014. By subtly manipulating the categories of state spending – in particular, the controversial category of 'welfare' – to invoke a sense of unfairness, we show how budget information in general and the United Kingdom's annual tax summaries in particular impact support for state spending. Though the stated aim of providing personalised tax receipts to income taxpayers is to enhance fiscal transparency, doing so may also damage support for state spending if the information provides a sense that existing redistribution is unfair. The article contributes to political science debates about public attitudes to tax and spending, the character and trade-offs of fiscal transparency, and the framing effects of welfare.

The recent spate of mass public shootings in the United States raises important questions about how these tragic events might impact mass opinion and public policy. Integrating research on focusing events, contextual effects and perceived threat, this article stipulates that residing near a mass shooting should increase support for gun control by making the threat of gun violence more salient. Drawing upon multiple data sources on mass public shootings paired with large-N survey data, it demonstrates that increased proximity to a mass shooting is associated with heightened public support for stricter gun control. Importantly, the results show that this effect does not vary by partisanship, but does vary as a function of salience-related event factors, such as repetition, magnitude and recency. Critically, the core result is replicated using panel data. Together, these results suggest a process of context-driven policy feedback between existing gun laws, egregious gun violence and demand for policy change.

AbstractRecent polls reveal that between 20% and 25% of Americans erroneously indicate that President Obama is a Muslim. In this article, we compare individuals' explicit responses on a survey about religion and politics with reaction time data from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate whether individuals truly associate Obama with Islam or are motivated reasoners who simply express negativity about the president when given the opportunity. Our results suggest that predispositions such as ideology, partisanship, and race affect how citizens feel about Obama, which in turn motivates them to accept misinformation about the president. We also find that these implicit associations increase the probability of stating that Obama is likely a Muslim. Interestingly, political sophistication does not appear to inoculate citizens from exposure to misinformation, as they exhibit the same IAT effect as less knowledgeable individuals.

Political scientists often debate how much information people have and deploy when making electoral decisions. Some scholars suggest that voters are aware of which party is likely to win in their local constituency at British general elections; however, this might not be the case in situations when there is substantial and spatially varying change in the relative fortunes of two or more parties between elections. That argument is evaluated here using as a case study the 2015 and 2017 general elections in Scotland: at the first, the SNP's vote share more than doubled, and it won 56 of the country's 59 seats, having won just six at the previous contest; at the second, its vote share fell by about a third, and it lost 21 of those 56 seats. Analysis of British Election Survey data collected before and during the campaigns preceding those elections shows that most respondents were aware of the SNP's surge in 2015 and expected their victory in every constituency. In 2017, most voters were aware which of the SNP's three competitors was the biggest threat in each constituency, and that awareness became clearer during the campaign; yet, voters – especially those who identified with the SNP and were contacted by it during the campaign – still (incorrectly) anticipated a local SNP victory.

We argue that conflict over immigration largely concerns who bears the burden of cultural transaction costs, which we define as the costs associated with overcoming cultural barriers (e.g., language) to social exchange. Our framework suggests that the ability of native-born citizens to push cultural transaction costs onto immigrant out-groups serves as an important expression of social dominance. In two novel studies, we demonstrate that social dominance motives condition emotional responses to encountering cultural transaction costs, shape engagement in cultural accommodation behavior toward immigrants, and affect immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Adapted from the source document.