Search results

Although researchers have explored policy attitudes in domains that require expertise (e.g., medicine), less research has explored policy attitudes related to economic policies that also require expertise to understand. This paper examines public opinion about a balanced budget amendment (BBA) to the U.S. Constitution. Using data from 38 national public opinion polls conducted over 36 years, we find that support for a BBA is related to respondent and contextual factors. Support for a BBA has become more polarized along party and ideological lines over time, and implications of a BBA for other policies affect people's support for an amendment.

This study reveals the existence of a paradox in how the public views polling within the democratic process. Specifically, even though the public believes that it can influence poli­cymaking, it considers public opinion polls not as useful as other, less representative forms of public input, such as comments at town hall meetings. Analyzing data from multiple surveys conducted in the United States of America, we find no evidence for the demo­cratic representation hypothesis with respect to polling. Comparisons across stakeholders (public, journalists, and politicians) demonstrate that general perceptions of inputs into the democratic process are similar, which confirms the citizen-elite congruence hypothesis. However, unlike members of the public, experts are more likely to believe that public opin­ion polls are the optimal method by which the public can successfully inform policymak­ing, a finding consistent with the legitimization hypothesis. With respect to perceptions of politicians, we found substantial differences regarding party registration with Democrats and Independents favoring public opinion polling and Republicans preferring alternative methods (e.g., town hall meetings) of informing policymakers.

Social media technologies have been widely adopted by governments to increase civic engagement, promote openness, and extend services. Previous research finds that public managers' attitudes are important predictors of social media adoption and successful implementation. Managers' attitudes may vary due to different organizational structures, functions, and operations based on department type or because departments vary along with key dimensions. This research investigates the following questions: (1) Does department type significantly predict public managers' attitudes toward social media, (2) does department type moderate the effect of predictors of managers' attitudes toward social media found in previous research, and (3) do the predictors of managers' attitudes toward social media found in previous research mediate attitude differences observed across different kinds of departments. Using data collected from a 2014 national web survey in the United States on technology in city government, we find department type is an important predictor of managers' attitudes toward social media use. The effects of other predictors of attitudes toward social media use were not moderated by department type. Instead, those predictors had similar effects regardless of department type. Some of the variables related to organizational characteristics and culture (e.g., social media use, innovativeness, and use of e-services) helped to explain differences between the attitudes of managers from different departments. Our findings are important for developing strategies to target managers' negative attitudes toward using social media, thus removing one of the barriers to successful technology implementation.