John Zaller
Biographic Data
| ID | 273598 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Zaller |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Zaller |
| SIGNATURE | ZALLER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2497 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Market Demand for Civic Affairs News
This paper uses time series methods to test the relationship between civic affairs content and audience share for the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news in the mid-1990s. Because these programs competed in the same market, but varied the amount of their civic affairs coverage, they present an excellent opportunity to analyze this relationship. The study uses hand-coded news abstracts and O.J. Simpson murder trial coverage as separate measures of news…
Ideologically Extreme Candidates in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1948–2012
Scholars routinely cite the landslide defeats of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern as evidence that American electorates punish extremism in presidential politics. Yet systematic evidence for this view is thin. In this article we use postwar election outcomes to assess the electoral effects of extremism. In testing ten models over the seventeen elections, we find scant evidence of extremism penalties that were either substantively large or clos…
Party Versus Faction in the Reformed Presidential Nominating System
Political scientists have devoted vastly more attention to general presidential elections than to party nominations for president. This emphasis might be reasonable if parties could be counted on to nominate generic representatives of their traditions. But it is clear that they cannot. Since the party reforms of the 1970s, regulars like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Al Gore have sometimes won fairly easy nominations, but outsider candidates like Ji…
How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication
Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential…
Committees of Apsa
The administrative committee consists of the president, president-elect, treasurer, and four other council members whose main duties include preparing agendas for council meetings and annual business meetings and acting on behalf of the council to dispose of policy issues deemed of insufficient weight to require decisions by the council
A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics
We propose a theory of political parties in which interest groups and activists are the key actors, and coalitions of groups develop common agendas and screen candidates for party nominations based on loyalty to their agendas. This theoretical stance contrasts with currently dominant theories, which view parties as controlled by election-minded politicians. The difference is normatively important because parties dominated by interest groups and a…
Whatnature and Originsleaves Out
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion synthesizes leading studies of public opinion from the late 1980s in a top-down model of opinion formation and change. The core feature of this synthesis, the Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model, remains sound, but the book overstates the importance of the form of public opinion that it explains—elite-induced survey statements of issue positions—and understates the force of opinions that elites cannot easily s…
The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform
Political Parties in Rough Weather
Though lightly regarded by many observers, political parties have been able to steer presidential nominations to insider favorites in all nine of the contested cases from 1980 to 2000. Democrats had more trouble in 2004, but still managed to avoid insurgent Howard Dean. This paper explains how today's presidential parties -- understood as coalitions of elected officials, interest and advocacy groups, and ideological activists -- have learned to w…
A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen
Scholarly evaluations of the quality of news are often negative, sometimes scathingly so. The rise of soft news and market-driven journalism in recent years has increased the intensity of this criticism. This article argues, however, that much criticism of news is based on an ideal of citizenship and a standard of quality that are neither realistic nor necessary for the functioning of democracy. The article therefore proposes a new, less demandin…
The statistical power of election studies to detect media exposure effects in political campaigns
Presidential Vote Models: A Recount
Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed
The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News
This article develops a model of the relationship between candidates, journalists, and citizens in the game of media politics. For politicians, the goal is to gain public support by using reporters to get their story out, while, for reporters, the goal is to do stories that increase market share while emphasizing the independent and significant voice of journalists. These goals conflict with one another, leading the two groups into a turf war for…
Monica Lewinsky's Contribution to Political Science
The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, …
Government's little helper: U.S. press coverage of foreign policy crises, 1945–1991
This article examines the implicit rules by which reporters determined the slant of news coverage of U.S. foreign policy crises from 1945 to 1991. The single most important rule was that reporters, as Lance Bennett has maintained, tended to "index" their coverage to reflect the range of views that exists within the government. A series of narrower and more situational rules also appeared to hold, such as a tendency of reporters to be more hawkish…
Endogeneity, Exogeneity, Time, and Space in Political Representation: A Review Article
The rise and fall of candidate Perot: The outsider versus the political system—part ii
This article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions—the conventional political press and the party system—mediate the effects of political communication. Reporters allocated positive and negative coverage to Perot according to the same rules that they normally follow, and voters were as responsive to this coverage as they were to media coverage of two earlier "outsider" candidates fo…
Public opinion paradigms: Positive constructs of public opinion
(1994). Public opinion paradigms. Critical Studies in Mass Communication: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 274-287
The rise and fall of candidate Perot: Unmediated versus mediated politics—Part I
The article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions, the conventional political press and the party system, mediate the effects of political communication. From an analysis of events in both the spring of 1992 and the general election, the Texan was highly effective when he could appeal to voters in an essentially unmediated fashion. His candidacy failed, however, because it could not…
Who Gets the News? Alternative Measures of News Reception and Their Implications for Research
This article investigates patterns in audience reception of 16 news stories that received prominent media coverage in the summer and fall of 1989. Using a national sample of American adults, it compares education, self-reported rates of media use, interpersonal communication, and prior levels of general political knowledge as predictors of individual differences in recall of current news events. Results indicate that respondents' background level…
The converse‐McGuire model of attitude change and the gulf war opinion rally
This article uses the Converse‐McGuire model of attitude change to analyze the surge in public support for national leaders and their policies at the start of the Gulf War. From data collected just before and just after fighting began, the article finds substantial support for the basic tenets of the model, namely that attitude change depended on a two‐step process in which the most aware citizens were most likely to receive change‐inducing messa…
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.…
Westlye, Mark C. Senate Elections and Campaign Intensity
Westlye, Mark C. Senate Elections and Campaign Intensity.." Congress & the Presidency, 19(1), pp. 92–93
The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State
Antiwelfare 74 47 23 45 76 56 29 58 Ambivalent 20 16 26 20 11 13 19 13 Prowelfare 06 37 51 35 13 31 52 29 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences
Opinion research is beset by two major types of artifactual variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous ; error variance into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people …
A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences
Opinion research is beset by two major types of artifactual variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous ; error variance into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people …
The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State
Antiwelfare 74 47 23 45 76 56 29 58 Ambivalent 20 16 26 20 11 13 19 13 Prowelfare 06 37 51 35 13 31 52 29 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics
We propose a theory of political parties in which interest groups and activists are the key actors, and coalitions of groups develop common agendas and screen candidates for party nominations based on loyalty to their agendas. This theoretical stance contrasts with currently dominant theories, which view parties as controlled by election-minded politicians. The difference is normatively important because parties dominated by interest groups and a…
Who Gets the News? Alternative Measures of News Reception and Their Implications for Research
This article investigates patterns in audience reception of 16 news stories that received prominent media coverage in the summer and fall of 1989. Using a national sample of American adults, it compares education, self-reported rates of media use, interpersonal communication, and prior levels of general political knowledge as predictors of individual differences in recall of current news events. Results indicate that respondents' background level…
Sources of Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes
All authoritarian governments attempt to control the flow of news and information to the public-but with what effect? To answer this question, we adapt an existing model of opinion formation to conditions in authoritarian countries, validate that model on opinion data collected in Brazil during its authoritarian period, and, finally, use the model to derive expectatipns about patterns of regime support that exist in different kinds of authoritari…
A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen
Scholarly evaluations of the quality of news are often negative, sometimes scathingly so. The rise of soft news and market-driven journalism in recent years has increased the intensity of this criticism. This article argues, however, that much criticism of news is based on an ideal of citizenship and a standard of quality that are neither realistic nor necessary for the functioning of democracy. The article therefore proposes a new, less demandin…
Information, Values, and Opinion
Past research has modeled mass opinion change as a two-step process involving reception of political communication and acceptance or rejection of that communication. I propose a two-message version of the reception-acceptance model, in which citizens are exposed to two opposing communication flows, either or both of which may affect their opinions. Variation over time in the relative intensity of the opposing communications, along with citizen di…
How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication
Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential…
Government's little helper: U.S. press coverage of foreign policy crises, 1945–1991
This article examines the implicit rules by which reporters determined the slant of news coverage of U.S. foreign policy crises from 1945 to 1991. The single most important rule was that reporters, as Lance Bennett has maintained, tended to "index" their coverage to reflect the range of views that exists within the government. A series of narrower and more situational rules also appeared to hold, such as a tendency of reporters to be more hawkish…
The statistical power of election studies to detect media exposure effects in political campaigns
Whatnature and Originsleaves Out
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion synthesizes leading studies of public opinion from the late 1980s in a top-down model of opinion formation and change. The core feature of this synthesis, the Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model, remains sound, but the book overstates the importance of the form of public opinion that it explains—elite-induced survey statements of issue positions—and understates the force of opinions that elites cannot easily s…
Presidential Vote Models: A Recount
Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed
Bringing Converse Back In: Modeling Information Flow in Political Campaigns
In his 1962 paper, “Information Flow and the Stability of Partisan Attitudes,” Converse explained why moderately sophisticated voters are sometimes most susceptible to persuasion in election campaigns. Such people, Converse argued, pay enough attention to campaigns to be fairly heavily exposed to persuasive messages but lack the sophistication to be able to resist. The present article extends this model in several ways, showing that it can yield …
Patterns of Support for Democratic and Capitalist Values in the United States
Two major traditions of belief, democracy and capitalism, have dominated American public life from its inception. Although they have not always coexisted in perfect harmony – indeed their union has often been torn by conflict – they have managed to accommodate to each other with sufficient flexibility to have forged a viable political culture
The rise and fall of candidate Perot: The outsider versus the political system—part ii
This article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions—the conventional political press and the party system—mediate the effects of political communication. Reporters allocated positive and negative coverage to Perot according to the same rules that they normally follow, and voters were as responsive to this coverage as they were to media coverage of two earlier "outsider" candidates fo…
The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News
This article develops a model of the relationship between candidates, journalists, and citizens in the game of media politics. For politicians, the goal is to gain public support by using reporters to get their story out, while, for reporters, the goal is to do stories that increase market share while emphasizing the independent and significant voice of journalists. These goals conflict with one another, leading the two groups into a turf war for…
Monica Lewinsky's Contribution to Political Science
The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, …
The rise and fall of candidate Perot: Unmediated versus mediated politics—Part I
The article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions, the conventional political press and the party system, mediate the effects of political communication. From an analysis of events in both the spring of 1992 and the general election, the Texan was highly effective when he could appeal to voters in an essentially unmediated fashion. His candidacy failed, however, because it could not…
The converse‐McGuire model of attitude change and the gulf war opinion rally
This article uses the Converse‐McGuire model of attitude change to analyze the surge in public support for national leaders and their policies at the start of the Gulf War. From data collected just before and just after fighting began, the article finds substantial support for the basic tenets of the model, namely that attitude change depended on a two‐step process in which the most aware citizens were most likely to receive change‐inducing messa…
Diffusion of political attitudes
Ideologically Extreme Candidates in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1948–2012
Scholars routinely cite the landslide defeats of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern as evidence that American electorates punish extremism in presidential politics. Yet systematic evidence for this view is thin. In this article we use postwar election outcomes to assess the electoral effects of extremism. In testing ten models over the seventeen elections, we find scant evidence of extremism penalties that were either substantively large or clos…
Party Versus Faction in the Reformed Presidential Nominating System
Political scientists have devoted vastly more attention to general presidential elections than to party nominations for president. This emphasis might be reasonable if parties could be counted on to nominate generic representatives of their traditions. But it is clear that they cannot. Since the party reforms of the 1970s, regulars like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Al Gore have sometimes won fairly easy nominations, but outsider candidates like Ji…
Market Demand for Civic Affairs News
This paper uses time series methods to test the relationship between civic affairs content and audience share for the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news in the mid-1990s. Because these programs competed in the same market, but varied the amount of their civic affairs coverage, they present an excellent opportunity to analyze this relationship. The study uses hand-coded news abstracts and O.J. Simpson murder trial coverage as separate measures of news…
Political Parties in Rough Weather
Though lightly regarded by many observers, political parties have been able to steer presidential nominations to insider favorites in all nine of the contested cases from 1980 to 2000. Democrats had more trouble in 2004, but still managed to avoid insurgent Howard Dean. This paper explains how today's presidential parties -- understood as coalitions of elected officials, interest and advocacy groups, and ideological activists -- have learned to w…
Committees of Apsa
The administrative committee consists of the president, president-elect, treasurer, and four other council members whose main duties include preparing agendas for council meetings and annual business meetings and acting on behalf of the council to dispose of policy issues deemed of insufficient weight to require decisions by the council
The 1896 Election and Congressional Modernization: An Appraisal of the Evidence
Joel Budgor, Elizabeth A. Capell, David A. Flanders, Nelson W. Polsby, Mark C. Westlye, John Zaller, The 1896 Election and Congressional Modernization: An Appraisal of the Evidence, Social Science History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), pp. 53-90
Patterns of Support for Democratic and Capitalist Values in the United States
Two major traditions of belief, democracy and capitalism, have dominated American public life from its inception. Although they have not always coexisted in perfect harmony – indeed their union has often been torn by conflict – they have managed to accommodate to each other with sufficient flexibility to have forged a viable political culture
The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy
Covers Libertarianism, Egalitarianism, the relationship between capitalism and democracy, ideology, and social and political awareness among the American public
Diffusion of political attitudes
Elites and the Idea of Equality: A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and The United States, by Sidney Verba
Bringing Converse Back In: Modeling Information Flow in Political Campaigns
In his 1962 paper, “Information Flow and the Stability of Partisan Attitudes,” Converse explained why moderately sophisticated voters are sometimes most susceptible to persuasion in election campaigns. Such people, Converse argued, pay enough attention to campaigns to be fairly heavily exposed to persuasive messages but lack the sophistication to be able to resist. The present article extends this model in several ways, showing that it can yield …
Sources of Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes
All authoritarian governments attempt to control the flow of news and information to the public-but with what effect? To answer this question, we adapt an existing model of opinion formation to conditions in authoritarian countries, validate that model on opinion data collected in Brazil during its authoritarian period, and, finally, use the model to derive expectatipns about patterns of regime support that exist in different kinds of authoritari…
Political Awareness, Elite Opinion Leadership, and the Mass Survey Response
Political awareness affects virtually every aspect of citizens' political attitudes and voting behavior. Among its effects are greater attitude stability, greater ideological consistency, and greater support for a nation's “mainstream” values. Yet there exists no comprehensive explanation of why political awareness has the pervasive effects that it has. Nor is there agreement on how the concept of political awareness should be conceptualized and …
Information, Values, and Opinion
Past research has modeled mass opinion change as a two-step process involving reception of political communication and acceptance or rejection of that communication. I propose a two-message version of the reception-acceptance model, in which citizens are exposed to two opposing communication flows, either or both of which may affect their opinions. Variation over time in the relative intensity of the opposing communications, along with citizen di…
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.…
Westlye, Mark C. Senate Elections and Campaign Intensity
Westlye, Mark C. Senate Elections and Campaign Intensity.." Congress & the Presidency, 19(1), pp. 92–93
The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State
Antiwelfare 74 47 23 45 76 56 29 58 Ambivalent 20 16 26 20 11 13 19 13 Prowelfare 06 37 51 35 13 31 52 29 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences
Opinion research is beset by two major types of artifactual variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous ; error variance into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people …
Who Gets the News? Alternative Measures of News Reception and Their Implications for Research
This article investigates patterns in audience reception of 16 news stories that received prominent media coverage in the summer and fall of 1989. Using a national sample of American adults, it compares education, self-reported rates of media use, interpersonal communication, and prior levels of general political knowledge as predictors of individual differences in recall of current news events. Results indicate that respondents' background level…
The converse‐McGuire model of attitude change and the gulf war opinion rally
This article uses the Converse‐McGuire model of attitude change to analyze the surge in public support for national leaders and their policies at the start of the Gulf War. From data collected just before and just after fighting began, the article finds substantial support for the basic tenets of the model, namely that attitude change depended on a two‐step process in which the most aware citizens were most likely to receive change‐inducing messa…
Public opinion paradigms: Positive constructs of public opinion
(1994). Public opinion paradigms. Critical Studies in Mass Communication: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 274-287
The rise and fall of candidate Perot: Unmediated versus mediated politics—Part I
The article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions, the conventional political press and the party system, mediate the effects of political communication. From an analysis of events in both the spring of 1992 and the general election, the Texan was highly effective when he could appeal to voters in an essentially unmediated fashion. His candidacy failed, however, because it could not…
Endogeneity, Exogeneity, Time, and Space in Political Representation: A Review Article
The rise and fall of candidate Perot: The outsider versus the political system—part ii
This article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions—the conventional political press and the party system—mediate the effects of political communication. Reporters allocated positive and negative coverage to Perot according to the same rules that they normally follow, and voters were as responsive to this coverage as they were to media coverage of two earlier "outsider" candidates fo…
Government's little helper: U.S. press coverage of foreign policy crises, 1945–1991
This article examines the implicit rules by which reporters determined the slant of news coverage of U.S. foreign policy crises from 1945 to 1991. The single most important rule was that reporters, as Lance Bennett has maintained, tended to "index" their coverage to reflect the range of views that exists within the government. A series of narrower and more situational rules also appeared to hold, such as a tendency of reporters to be more hawkish…
The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News
This article develops a model of the relationship between candidates, journalists, and citizens in the game of media politics. For politicians, the goal is to gain public support by using reporters to get their story out, while, for reporters, the goal is to do stories that increase market share while emphasizing the independent and significant voice of journalists. These goals conflict with one another, leading the two groups into a turf war for…
Monica Lewinsky's Contribution to Political Science
The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, …
Presidential Vote Models: A Recount
Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed
The statistical power of election studies to detect media exposure effects in political campaigns
A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen
Scholarly evaluations of the quality of news are often negative, sometimes scathingly so. The rise of soft news and market-driven journalism in recent years has increased the intensity of this criticism. This article argues, however, that much criticism of news is based on an ideal of citizenship and a standard of quality that are neither realistic nor necessary for the functioning of democracy. The article therefore proposes a new, less demandin…
Political science (33 works) · Politics (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Economics (13 works) · Presidential system (10 works)