Social Belief System

• This reaction paper is for class 29 April: Beliefs & attitudes. I choose the following three papers to cover: 1) Public attitudes toward biofuels, MA Cacciatore - ‎2012, 2) What Moves Public Opinion? , GR DEMPSEY - ‎1987, 3) Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities, JT Jost - ‎2009.

Paper1: Public attitudes toward biofuels

Main Argument: This research used telephone survey data of 593 adults in Wisconsin state, in which the respondents were asked to questions on their demographic information, party identification, media (TV or newspaper) attention (political or science), biofuels knowledge, also their perception on the environmental, economic, ethical/social, political effect of biofuels. Demographic, party, media attention and knowledge, which were constructed in n-point scale, served as the independent variable. The four dimension of perception towards biofuels, which are the dependent variables, are constructed by net benefit method (benefit minus risk). The result is mainly reflected in the following regression table, which shows: 1) the older, the less benefit the respondent would perceive towards biofuels, 2) the more Democrat the respondent claimed himself to be, the greater benefit the respondent would perceive, 3) the more knowledges the respondent has towards biofuels, the less benefit the respondent would perceive, 4) motivated reasoning process exist within partisan groups when they form the opinion of biofuels (see the interaction term).

Paper1. Biofuels Attitude.png

Strength:

• This paper choose a relatively small topic to study what influences the social opinion, which makes the analysis more specific and factors more easy to capture.
• Also, when doing the regression, the analysis use interaction term to take the cognitive heuristics into account.

Weakness:
The analysis relies mainly on telephone survey, there are some parts where I find maybe problematic.

• A main finding of the paper is, the increase in biofuel knowledge does not increase the support of biofuel, but the questions they use to construct the knowledge are problematic.

1. To some extend, the questions are examining respondents reasoning ability, but not the knowledge of biofuel, like question "Using biofuels in cars does not create air pollution".
2. Also, questions like "Government subsidies of biofuel mainly goes to oil companies" are more related to one`s political attitude, rather than scientific knowledge.
3. 4 out of 9 questions are related to Wisconsin state biofuel production--if one fails to answer such state specific questions, it does not necessarily means he does not know much on biofuel.

• Problem in the Age. Page 40 shows the average of age is 57.4. Thus, the research is surveying on an group which is old, rather than a group which is representative of all ages. This bias may come from the telephone survey approach they use. Because respondents who answering the telephone tend to be those who does not work or go to school. This leads to the weak side of telephone survey approach--too much factors can affect the result, even the time you make the telephone would cause some kind of differences.
• An important part I would suggest telephone survey approach paper to include is an appendix of how the research trains the interviewer--the standards they use to avoid interviewer bias. I have experience of being a telephone interviewer, I feel it will cause a big bias if the interviews are not well trained by an unified standard.
• The partisanship variable in Page 40 would suffer from self report bias.
• In page 42, the question "biofuels production will increase the price of food" is used to access the economic risk perception of biofuels. However, it neglects Wisconsin is a big state producing agriculture food, thus the respondents may take price increase to be a benefit.

Paper2: What moves public opinion

Main Argument: This research is on how the TV news content would affect public opinion. The main finding of the paper is: 1) the TV news content before T1 is negatively correlated to opinions in T2; 2) among the many sources, news commentaries during T1 to T2 have the most dramatic effect on public opinion; 3) popular presidents tend to have positive effects, while unpopular presidents do not.

Strength:

• This paper is very serious in avoiding the bias in content analysis.
• This paper dig into the cause of the negative relation between pre-T1 content and T2 opinion by exploring the development of public debate: topic being raised up, hot discussion and then become neutral.

Weakness:

• They use summarize and average to construct the opinion variable, this approach can be improved. Different media have different scale of audience. For example, two media (one is with large audience, the other with no audience) have opposite opinion, if using the approach in the paper, their opinion index averages to 0, which is obviously not the case. Thus, one approach to improve this index is weighting each opinion score by audience rating point, which would give us better proxy of media content.
• The opinion index may have endogenous problem. In other word, public opinion may affect the media commentaries or opinions. This would cause statistical problem. However, on the other hand, it would be another interesting topic to research on.

Paper3: Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities

Main point: This paper is about the structure, contents, and functions of ideological belief systems. They argues: 1) liberalism and conservatism are not orthogonal; 2) ideology has psychological bases from the bottom up, while it is also top down by elite construction; 3) it also talks about the psychological bases and functions of ideology.

Inspirations:

• This paper is based on a western context, especially for the multiparty countries. It would be interesting to research on the one party countries--what is the ideology they take, how do the ideologies compete with each other (the main one rules out the other, or they fiercely compete).
• With the social media develop, traditional media no longer plays the dominant role in public communication. Is the construction of ideology takes new patterns? Does the elites still control the source of explaining public events? These are questions worth research on.

CLASS NOTE:

• People may only care about some aspects of ideology, rather than all of them.
• The role of education is a bit stochastic.