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Research has shown that exposure to political satire elicits negative emotions, which in turn mobilize political participation. We conducted an experiment to extend this line of research by examining the type of exposure (i.e., exposure to counter- and proattitudinal political views) and investigating a specific negative emotion—anger—in influencing political participation. Although the literature has suggested that counterattitudinal exposure is likely to discourage political behaviors, results from this study document that exposure to counterattitudinal political satire is more likely than proattitudinal exposure to increase participation in issue-related activities through evoking one's anger about the political issue. More importantly, this indirect effect functions under the condition when people consider the issue to be personally important. We discuss the implications for the development of deliberative and participatory democracy in media genres that are emotionally provocative.

Past research has shown that issues vary significantly in their salience across citizens, explaining key outcomes in political behavior. Yet it remains unclear how individual-level differences in issue salience affect the measurement of latent constructs in public opinion, namely political ideology. In this paper, we test whether scaling approaches that fail to incorporate individual-level differences in issue salience could understate the predictive power of ideology in public opinion research. To systematically examine this assertion, we employ a series of latent variable models which incorporate both issue importance and issue position. We compare the results of these different and diverse scaling approaches to two survey data sets, investigating the implications of accounting for issue salience in constructing latent measures of ideology. Ultimately, we find that accounting for issue importance adds little information to a more basic approach that uses only issue positions, suggesting ideological signals for measurement models reside most prominently in the issue positions of individuals rather than the importance of those issues to the individual.

Adopting a people-centered approach to building a shared future with Timor-Leste is in Australia's national interest. Developing platforms for enhancing literacy, job growth, health, and agriculture are just some of the ways Australia can build lasting relationships with its closest neighbours.

Abstract
A long-standing argument is that policy voting is more likely on issues the voter considers subjectively important. However, existing evidence is highly mixed. We leverage panel data from the 2008–2009 ANES Panel to investigate the relationship between subjective issue importance and a key mechanism thought to link it and policy voting: candidate knowledge. Using both lagged dependent variable and fixed-effect models, we find little evidence that subjective issue importance predicts candidate knowledge or learning. Our results suggest that one reason for lack of consensus about whether subjective issue importance moderates policy voting is the lack of a clear connection between it and this important mediator. Our results point to the need for stronger measures of subjective issue importance.

Based on their different conceptualizations of the processes evoked by role playing and issue importance in the induction of attitude change, cognitive dissonance, incentive, and social judgment theories make competing predictions on the relative effectiveness of role playing and passive exposure as a junction of issue importance. The experiment utilized a 3 × 2 design having control, passive-exposure, and role-playing conditions with low and high levels of issue importance. Planned comparisons of means in the cells expected to register maximal and minimal changes in attitudes under each theory provided little support for the dissonance position and fairly credible, though somewhat overlapping, evidence for incentive and social judgment theories. Other comparisons indicated that improvised role playing produced more change than did passive exposure only for the high- importance issue.

AbstractAre cues from party leaders so important that they can cause individuals to change their own issue positions to align with the party's position? Recent work on the importance of party cues suggests they do, especially given the literature on partisanship as a strong and persistent group identity. However, in this paper we test the limits of those partisan cues. Using a unique two-wave panel survey design we find that the effect of party cues is moderated by the prior level of importance individuals place on an issue. We find that when a person believes an issue area to be more important, party cues are less likely to move that citizen's position, particularly when the cue goes against partisan ideological norms. Our results show evidence that an individual's own issue positions—at least the important ones—can be resilient in the face of party cues.