Suchergebnisse

"This book presents a comprehensive examination of public opinion in the democratic world. Built around chapters that highlight key explanatory frameworks used in understanding public opinion, the book presents a coherent study of the subject in a comparative perspective, emphasizing and interrogating immigration as a key issue of high concern to most mass publics in the democratic world. Key features of the book include: covers several theoretical issues and determinants of opinion such as the effects of personality, age and life cycle, ideology, social class, partisanship, gender, religion, ethnicity, language, and media, highlighting over time the effects of political, social, and economic contexts; each chapter explores the theoretical rationale, mechanisms of effect, and use in the scholarly literature on public opinion before applying these to the issue of immigration comparatively and in specific places or regions; widely comparative using a nine-country sample (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States of America) in the analysis of individual-level determinants of public opinion about immigration and extending to other countries like Belgium, Brazil and Japan when evaluating contextual factors. This edited volume will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in public opinion, political behaviour, voting behaviour, politics of the media, immigration, political communication, and, more generally, democracy and comparative politics"--

This book develops and tests a 'thermostatic' model of public opinion and policy. The representation of opinion in policy is central to democratic theory and everyday politics. So too is the extent to which public preferences are informed and responsive to changes in policy. The coexistence of both 'public responsiveness' and 'policy representation' is thus a defining characteristic of successful democratic governance, and the subject of this book. The authors examine both responsiveness and representation across a range of policy domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The story that emerges is one in which representative democratic government functions surprisingly well, though there are important differences in the details. Variations in public responsiveness and policy representation responsiveness are found to reflect the 'salience' of the different domains and governing institutions - specifically, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government)

AbstractThe use of public opinion polling in American politics has exploded in recent years. National candidates spend thousands of valuable campaign dollars on their own polls. Newspapers and television stations regularly conduct polls, as do networks and news magazines. The proliferation of polling raises fundamental questions about the role of the elected representative in democracy. But it also offers exciting opportunities for engaging American voters in direct debates on policy priorities and directions.