Suchergebnisse

If you could start a political science program from scratch, how
would you do it? Given no institutional history, how would you
design graduate and undergraduate programs? How would you grow your
faculty? How would you attempt to build a reputation in the absence
of a reputation at time t-1? In an
interdisciplinary environment, with which disciplines would you work
most closely? For most political science professors, these might be
interesting hypothetical questions to consider. For the two of us,
these questions are very real and have dominated our recent work
lives as we have just finished our first year as the founding
political science faculty at the brand new University of California
campus, UC Merced. We thank Carissa
Hansford, Shawn Kantor, and Jennifer Nicholson for helpful
comments and suggestions.

Authoritarian governments heavily rely on propaganda as a means of maintaining rule. Although scholars have examined the effects of propaganda exposure, much less is known about attitudes toward propaganda messages. In this study, we explore the foundations underlying propaganda support in China by examining the role of political trust, a primary ingredient for explaining public support for government actions and compliance. Using a survey with a broad sample of Chinese internet users and taking measures to address endogeneity, we found that trust in government, whether measured indirectly (implicitly) or directly (explicitly), is a vital source of positive attitudes toward propaganda and hence its potential effects. Our results have important implications for understanding the foundations of propaganda support, the scope of political trust, and the value of indirect measures for gauging public opinion in authoritarian contexts. They also suggest that propaganda may lose its bite under certain conditions.

High levels of self-reported trust in government found in China has invited skepticism about the authenticity of survey results. To address this question, we examine implicit political trust, an automatic, intuitive orientation toward government. Using the Single-Target Implicit Association Test, we found that the Chinese public holds an implicit trust in government that is unrelated to self-reported, explicit trust. Whereas early political socialization processes, represented by education and urban residency, increase implicit trust they also decrease explicit trust suggesting that agents of socialization have differential effects. Furthermore, performance evaluations, income, and social desirability affect explicit trust but have no effect on implicit trust. Controlling for explicit trust, we found that implicit trust matters for understanding various types of regime support including system justification, the social credit system, and government's ability to handle crises. Our results have important implications for understanding regime support in the world's largest authoritarian country.

How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters with varying levels of political information. Using the 2000 Tomás Rivera Policy Institute pre-election poll, we explore the degree to which Latino voters relied on issue-positions to judge the two major party candidates and compare the effect of such considerations with symbolic and candidate-specific appeals. We find that policy issues played an important role in shaping voting preferences, but only among politically knowledgeable voters, while among uninformed voters, symbolism and long-standing partisan preferences matter most. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for political representation and Latino politics.