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"This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the factors affecting U.S. public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2010. Utilizing Stimson’s method of constructing aggregate opinion measures, data from 74 separate surveys over a 9-year period are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. We examine five factors that should account for changes in levels of concern: 1) extreme weather events, 2) public access to accurate scientific information, 3) media coverage, 4) elite cues, and 5) movement/countermovement advocacy. A time-series analysis indicates that elite cues and structural economic factors have the largest effect on the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, this coverage is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Weather extremes have no effect on aggregate public opinion. Promulgation of scientific information to the public on climate change has a minimal effect. The implication would seem to be that information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern. "
"Following stable, tepid concern from 2002 to 2005, apprehension began to climb in 2006, peaked in late 2007, and then fell back to where it was in 2002. But the team of three sociologists, led by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, wanted to know why, so they gathered data on five likely influences: extreme weather events, scientific information, media coverage, congressional attention, and advocacy groups on both sides of issue. They also looked at four control variables: unemployment, gross domestic product, war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the price of oil. The team then compared that data to changes in the Climate Change Threat Index.
They found the most important factors that influenced public concern were public statements by Democrats in support of addressing climate change; anti-environmental votes by Republicans; unemployment; GDP; and the number of times The New York Times mentioned the film, An Inconvenient Truth."
A communication-centered explanation of the difficulty to reform Wall Street so far would depend largely on which view of public opinion and the nature of the public sphere (indeed, which view of democracy) you adopt. University of Pennsylvania Provost and communication researcher Vincent Price (2008) usefully describes four models of the public sphere that could potentially apply to the U.S. at various points in the debate over financial reform and other issues:
"This article assesses the influence of income inequality on the public's policy mood. Recent work has produced divergent perspectives on the relationship between inequality, public opinion, and government redistribution. One group of scholars suggests that unequal representation of different income groups reproduces inequality as politicians respond to the preferences of the rich. Another group of scholars pays relatively little attention to distributional outcomes but shows that government is generally just as responsive to the poor as to the rich. Utilizing theoretical insights from comparative political economy and time-series data from 1952 to 2006, supplemented with cross-sectional analysis where appropriate, we show that economic inequality is, in fact, self-reinforcing, but that this is fully consistent with the idea that government tends to respond equally to rich and poor in its policy enactments."
"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs.
News tends to move quickly through the public consciousness, noted physicist Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna and colleagues in a paper posted on arXiv.org. Readers usually absorb a story, discuss it with their friends, and then forget it. But some events send lasting reverberations through society, changing opinions and even governments."
"Drawing on more than 5,300 surveys the authors conducted with people attending antiwar rallies in recent years, the paper is the latest in a series of studies of the relationship between social movements and political institutions -- in particular, American political parties, major and otherwise."
" In the U.S., public interest in and awareness of climate change lags well behind the severity of the issues at stake and policy on a national level seems to be following this trend. Dan Kelemen and David Vogel have tracked this decline in U.S. support for international environmental policy following the golden years of U.S. leadership in this field. While Kelemen and Vogel argue that the potentially harmful effects from international environmental regulations on domestic producers were the cause for this shift, I am inclined to agree with Michael Pulia who in a paper argues that public opinion is responsible."
"The purpose was to create a barometer of American values, and the target population was randomly-selected adults, 18 or older, living in the U.S.
These are guiding principles that are strongly and widely held, shared across demographic lines, and stable over time. Here we outline the Top 8 core values that Americans share:"
"The key questions are, of course, why is it so hard to inform the public that intellectual elites disagree with them on such issues, and if being informed of this fact would be enough to change their minds."
"The favorability ratings for labor unions remain at nearly their lowest level in a quarter century with 45% expressing a positive view. Yet the public expresses similar opinions about business corporations -- 47% have a favorable impression -- and this rating is also near a historic low."
This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public...
Yet you would be hard pressed to find this type of rhetoric in the peer-reviewed literature examining public opinion about science, the role of scientific expertise in policymaking, or the relationship between science and other social institutions.
Now, I don’t mean to disrepect the JRF’s research here. All I’m saying is that there’s no reason to suppose that public opinion about justice should coincide with what is actually just. After all, if it did we could ditch 2500 years of political philosophy and use opinion polls instead.
The Gallup Brain is a searchable, living record of more than 70 years of public opinion. Inside, you'll find answers to hundreds of thousands of questions, and responses from millions of people interviewed by The Gallup Poll since 1935.
in list: Information Overload
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That's according to research firm Basex, which chose "information overload" as its 2008 "Problem of the Year." Failure to solve the problem will lead to "reduced productivity and throttled innovation."
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The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece on the false promise of multitasking in its November edition (subscribers only), using as one of its epigraphs a line by Publilius Syrus: "To do two things at once is to do neither."
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in list: Information Overload
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Web 2.0 may look set to conquer the world, but it has yet to win over the 69 percent of Americans who failed to qualify as "elite tech users." That's the message from a Pew Internet & American Life report that came out today and provides a glimpse at how people in the US—not just techies—use and feel about the technology in their lives.
The report, titled "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users" (PDF), breaks Americans into three general categories: elite tech users (31 percent of adults), middle-of-the-road tech users (20 percent of adults), and those with few tech assets (49 percent of adults). Pay particular attention to that last number; though technology marches on, half of all Americans use it only lightly or not at all. When the numbers are broken down further, a full 15 percent of all US adults have neither cell phones nor Internet connectivity.
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Those with "few tech assets" make up 49 percent of the US adult population. Many of them have some form of access to the Internet, and most have cell phones, but technology "does not play a central role in their daily lives." Instead of being liberating, constant connectivity is "annoying," and many older users have trouble even navigating the Internet. The 15 percent of Americans who don't use cell phones or the Internet tend to be in their mid-60s with lower levels of income and education, according to the report.
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