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This paper contributes to the growing literature on how "new media" is influencing "old media" by tracking references to an extensive list of political blogs in stories run by seventeen prominent print media outlets during the last ten years. The findings presented here show that although journalists frequently use political bloggers as sources in their news coverage, they only reference certain blogs in certain ways at certain times. To be precise, journalists turn to political blogs primarily during national election campaigns and this turn is commonly in the direction of a relatively small group of interactive, liberal blogs.

AbstractThis paper asks: what is the relationship between the mainstream media and blog agendas? To be more precise, this paper tracks media coverage and blog discussion of 35 issues during the 2004 presidential campaign to test the hypothesis that the mainstream media agenda exerts a substantial impact on the blog agenda against the increasingly popular hypothesis that the blog agenda exerts a strong influence on the mainstream media agenda. Using a computer‐assisted, quantitative content analysis of ten randomly selected A‐list political blogs and 50 randomly selected, less popular political blogs over the five‐month period from July 1 to November 30, 2004, the author finds that on the vast majority of issues there was a complex, bidirectional relationship between mainstream media coverage and blog discussion rather than a unidirectional media or blog agenda‐setting effect.

This work assesses the impact of gender in shaping debates over birth control in the United States. While situating itself in the appropriate historical context, this text's primary focus is on the controversies surrounding insurance coverage of contraception between Congress's 2009 deliberations over the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court's 2016 ruling in Zubik v. Burwell. Specifically, the volume addresses three interrelated questions about the politics of the pill during this often contentious seven-year period: Who spoke? What did they say? Did it matter? In answering these questions, the text casts a wide net, examining legislative floor debates, committee hearings, statutory wording, amicus briefs, media coverage, Supreme Court rulings, and public opinion polls.

AbstractRecently, a number of influential clergy leaders have declared their support for liberal immigration reforms. Do the pronouncements of religious leaders influence public opinion on immigration? Using data from a survey experiment embedded in the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that exposure to the arguments from high profile religious leaders can compel some individuals to reconsider their views on the immigration. To be more precise, we find that Methodists, Southern Baptists, and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America leaders successfully persuaded respondents who identify with these religious denominations to think differently about a path to citizenship and about the plight of undocumented immigrants. Interestingly, we also uncovered that religiosity matters in different ways for how parishioners from different religious faiths react to messages from their leaders. These findings force us to reconsider the impact that an increasingly strident clergy may be having on public opinion in general and on support for immigration reform in particular.

California faced a tremendous fiscal challenge in the wake of the 2008recession. With high political hurdles to raising taxes, the state and local governmentswereforced to appeal directly to voters through ballot initiatives. Debatesover these ballot initiatives, however, took place against the backdrop of increassinglyacrimonious disagreements about taxation at the federal level. Unfortunately,researchers have little idea about how the dynamics of public opinion ontax issues operate across these various levels of government. This article asks: dothe factors that shape attitudes towards taxation in California vary depending onthe level of government levying those taxes? Analyzing results from a 2012 poll,this article finds some differences and some commonalities in the determinantsof tax attitudes at the federal, state and local level. More specifically, we find that:(1) attitudes toward taxes are more politicized at the federal level than at the stateor local level; (2) confidence in government has a strong effect on tax attitudesbut citizens draw clear distinctions between levels of government; (3) perceivedself-interest does not influence tax attitudes at any level; and (4) there is a gendergap in attitudes toward taxation at the federal, state and local levels.