Workshop Examines Political and Social Behavior

Fall, 2008, Volume 30, Number 2

Claudine Gay talks about neighborhood effects on voting.

More than 70 social scientists and graduate students from across the Midwest came to discuss innovative research on political participation, public opinion, and public policy in May. Political scientist and IPR Faculty Fellow James Druckman, with graduate student Cari Hennessy, organized the second Chicago Area Political and Social Behavior Workshop, which included the presentations below. IPR was a co-sponsor.

Political Participation and Housing Mobility
Scholars have long questioned whether poor neighborhoods lack the institutions and social networks that encourage and enable voter registration and turnout. Claudine Gay of Harvard University challenged this assumption. Using data from the Moving
to Opportunity (MTO) study—a national randomized housing mobility experiment—she was able to isolate neighborhood effects on voting. She found that—contrary to popular wisdom—voter participation actually decreased among low-income families who moved to wealthier areas with MTO vouchers. “Being poor in a neighborhood of plenty can be a demobilizing experience,” she noted.

Political Ads and Online Discursive Participation
There is a perception that the media exert a power influence on civic engagement and participation, and “attack ads” can turn off voters. But research by Dhavan Shah of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues find that people reflect on information, whether from traditional or online sources, before restructuring their attitudes and opinions. In addition, online messaging seems to provide a promising new outlet for citizen deliberation. The researchers have created a new model, O-S-R-O-R (orientations-stimuli-reasoning-orientations-responses), as an alternative to the longstanding O-S-O-R communication model.

War Reporting and Censorship
Does the tone of news about America’s wars respond more to government spin or battleground events? Political scientist Scott Althaus and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign examined war reporting in The New York Times from World War I to the Iraq War. They find that neither a high number of casualties nor dissensus among elites significantly influenced coverage. These results suggest that government censorship in wartime might have less impact on the tone of coverage than is commonly supposed.

For more information, see www.northwestern.edu/ipr/events/workshops/cabmay08.htm.