Stephen Earl Bennett
Biographic Data
| ID | 325508 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Earl Bennett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen Earl |
| FAMILY NAME | Bennett |
| SIGNATURE | BENNETT S E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cincinnati |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 518 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The Polls—Federal Government Power
The federal government's power has been an issue in American politics throughout the history of the United States. How the public views this issue is affected by the dimension of the government's power in question. On the general question of government power, a majority is wary of big government, and this percentage has been increasing in recent years. When the aspect of providing services is included, however, public opinion is more evenly divid…
An Experimental Study of Opinion on Climate Change: Labile Causalities and Stable Realities
Americans' Knowledge of U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq, April 2004 to April 2008
Americans allegedly have an aversion to battle-related military casualties. Their estimates of military deaths may have influenced support for past U.S. military efforts. But what affects accurate estimates of military deaths in wartime? We review the accuracy of estimates for Iraq and three twentieth-century conflicts, finding that the public's estimates were more likely to be on target for Iraq. Then using five polls from the Pew Research Cente…
Who Listens to Rush Limbaugh's Radio Program and the Relationship Between Listening to Limbaugh and Knowledge of Public Affairs, 1994–2006
What factors predict listening to Limbaugh's program? Previous studies, many more than a decade old, analyze his audience at one or two data-points. This study differs from earlier studies of Limbaugh's audience in two ways: (1) the data come from six Times Mirror/Pew Research Center polls between July, 1994 and April–May, 2006, and (2) the paper focuses on the relationship between listening to Limbaugh and knowledge of public affairs. Conservati…
Television “News Grazers: Who They Are and What They (Don’t) Know
Between 1998 and 2006, a new style of television news consumption was born: “news grazing.” With remote control devices in hand, “grazers” flip through TV news channels in order to find interesting news stories. Approximately three‐fifths of the public graze, and this group tends to be younger than non‐grazers. Grazers are less likely than the rest of the public to follow “hard” news about politics and economics, and, not surprisingly, they are e…
The Irrelevance of Economic Theory to Understanding Economic Ignorance
Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim …
Response to Kay Lehman Schlozman
Professor Schlozman feels that unless one also assesses three long memos that accompanied the report by the APSA's Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, one should refrain from commenting. She accuses me in my response to the Task Force reports (Bennett 2006) of “not bother[ing] to read the full materials on which ... [I comment]” (Schlozman 2006, 55). Schlozman indicates she'd be “interested in ... [my] reactions to the whole report i…
Democratic competence, before converse and after
The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm …
Populism, elitism, and the populist ideology of elites: The reception of the work of Murray Edelman
Over the course of his career, Murray Edelman made one of the few sustained attempts by a theoretically inclined political scientist to explore the effects of the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics. In his early work, he focused on political elites’ manipulation of an ignorant public through the deployment of symbolism. In his later work, however, he suggested that even elites are the puppets of their ideologies. His early work has been …
The Things They Cared About: Change and Continuity in Americans’ Attention to Different News Stories, 1989–2002
Pew Research Center polls in 1989, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002 show that Americans pay more attention to media accounts of nonpolitical stories than those about national, international, and local politics. Although Americans’ attentiveness to political news rose between 2000 and 2002, attention to media accounts of politics remained below where it had been in 1989. For the most part, the relative rankings of attentiveness to different kinds of new…
Turnout in European parliament elections: Towards a European‐centred model
With the 2004 European Parliament elections approaching, it is useful to consider what affects voting in these elections. This paper addresses the puzzle of declining turnout in European Parliament elections. After reviewing the influential “second order elections” explanation emphasizing domestic influences on turnout, especially Mark Franklin’s recent study stressing the importance of electoral salience factors, we develop a revised model to in…
Is the public's ignorance of politics trivial
Examination of a comprehensive database of political knowledge, constructed from pooled 1988 and 1992 National Election Studies, refutes criticisms that haue sometimes been lodged against standard tests that seem to reveal profound levels of public ignorance. Although most people know something about politics, the typical citizen is poorly informed, and only a small group is very knowledgeable about politics. Differentiating people according to t…
Feature Article: Predicting Americans’ Exposure to Political Talk Radio in 1996, 1998, and 2000
Predicting Americans' Exposure to Political Talk Radio in 1996, 1998, and 2000
Predicting Americans’ Exposure to Political Talk Radio in 1996, 1998, and 2000
This article draws on the 1996-2000 National Election Studies to look at the size of political talk radio’s audience and to identify the factors predicting exposure. Interest in politics and distrust of mainstream media predict listening in every year. Other factors such as age, gender, race, partisanship, and ideology are significant predictors in one or two years but not others. Exposure to mainstream media outlets, education, and income are no…
Another Lesson about Public Opinion during the Clinton‐Lewinsky Scandal
Data from Pew Research Center polls from early February 1998 through late February 1999 show that only about a third of the American public followed media accounts of the Clinton‐Lewinsky scandal “very closely,” which is a facet of public reaction that has been largely neglected. Levels of heed paid to media stories about the scandal affected knowledge about key personalities and facets of the imbroglio. In addition, data show that the amount of …
Response to Libby and Kremer
My assertion that the “Perestroikans” offend some who might favor disciplinary change has upset some folks
Perestroika” Lost: Why the Latest “Reform” Movement in Political Science Should Fail
Having been a political scientist since the mid-1960s, I have seen calls for disciplinary change come and go. The latest “revolution” is particularly disappointing. Dubbed the “Perestroika movement,” after the nom de plume of the “revolt's” conjurer, supporters of this latest “protest” often make sweeping claims, couched in apocalyptic imagery. Ultimately, Perestroikans alienate some who favor disciplinary changes. Those who rail against the prof…
Gaps in Americans' Knowledge About the Bosnian Civil War
This study applies the knowledge gap theory to the American public's knowledge of the Bosnian civil war between September 1992—when the conflict was in its early days—through June 1995. Our goal was to determine if a knowledge gap existed in the case of the Bosnian civil war, and if so, whether it increased or decreased over time. Times Mirror Center polls clearly establish that the better educated knew more about Bosnia from September 1992 throu…
What Political Scientists Should Know about the Survey of First-Year Students in 2000
The report by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles on college or university first-year students in 2000 contains information that is important to political scientists (Kellogg 2001; Sax et al. 2000). As did Sheilah Mann's (1999) analysis of the 1998 survey, we summarize those facets of the data about freshmen in 2000 that ought to interest members of the discipline
Reading's Impact on Democratic Citizenship in America
Political Talk Over Here, Over There, Over Time
Data from Great Britain and the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s show relatively little change in the frequency with which citizens engage in political discussions, with whom they are likely to speak, and the variables that shape their propensity to engage in political talk. In addition, analyses of the data show that discussing politics enhances citizens' knowledge of public affairs, even net of other variables known to affec…
"Video Malaise" Revisited: Public Trust in the Media and Government
This article explores the "video-malaise" thesis, which asserts that a combination of negative political coverage by the press and exposure to the media lead to political cynicism at the grass roots. Data from the 1996 National Election Study and a 1997 Pew Research Center poll show that the traditional video-malaise notion needs to be revised. Jaundiced views of government and of the media co-vary, raising the possibility that the public views b…
Rebuttal to Response by Stephen Leonard
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The Past Need Not Be Prologue: Why Pessimism about Civic Education Is Premature
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The Implications of Nonvoting for Democracy in the United States
This paper reconsiders several of the arguments normative theorists have constructed about political participation's impact on the democratic polity. Two key arguments are addressed in the context of the United States today: (1) does nonvoting pose a threat to democracy; and (2) does nonvoting cause skewed public policies? CPS's National Election Studies, NORC's 1985 General Social Survey, and Gallup's 1987 The People, Press, and Politics poll in…
Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs
This article reports on the often suspected but rarely researched tendency of survey respondents to give opinions on topics to which they have given little or no thought. The findings, based on a question about a fictitious public affairs issue, do show that the magnitude of the problem is substantial. But the data also demonstrate that this phenomenon does not represent simple random error, reflecting instead basic social-psychological dispositi…
Political Talk Over Here, Over There, Over Time
Data from Great Britain and the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s show relatively little change in the frequency with which citizens engage in political discussions, with whom they are likely to speak, and the variables that shape their propensity to engage in political talk. In addition, analyses of the data show that discussing politics enhances citizens' knowledge of public affairs, even net of other variables known to affec…
"Video Malaise" Revisited: Public Trust in the Media and Government
This article explores the "video-malaise" thesis, which asserts that a combination of negative political coverage by the press and exposure to the media lead to political cynicism at the grass roots. Data from the 1996 National Election Study and a 1997 Pew Research Center poll show that the traditional video-malaise notion needs to be revised. Jaundiced views of government and of the media co-vary, raising the possibility that the public views b…
Know-nothings? revisited again
Citizens' Knowledge of Foreign Affairs
Although scholars have long known that most Americans are woefully ignorant of foreign affairs (Almond 1960; Kriesberg 1949), they are uncertain about how the U.S. public's knowledge of international politics compares to that of people in other countries. We address this uncertainty with a study of citizens' knowledge of foreign affairs in five western democracies: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. The focus is on the roles…
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Americans' Knowledge of Party Control of the House of Representatives, 1960-1984
What affects Americans knowledge of the partisan makeup of the House of Representatives? Using National Election Studies from 1960 to 1984, we find that two sets of factors help explain what people know about party control of the lower chamber of the national legislature. The first reflects personal variables usually used to account for levels of political knowledge: education, gender, race, strength of partisanship, political interest, and media…
Consistency Among the Public's Social Welfare Policy Attitudes in the 1960s
Cognitive consistency theorists postulate that most people seek to maintain congruence their beliefs and attitudes. However, many political scientists point to evidence from social surveys which indicate that the mass public lacks the cognitive capabilities necessary to achieve stable and coherent political belief systems. This study attempts to resolve the differences between these two schools of thought about the nature of the populace's politi…
Comparing Americans' Political Information in 1988 and 1992
Although Americans were more active in the 1992 campaign and felt they were better informed than they had been in 1988, National Election Studies (NES) data from both years show that Americans were not substantially more knowledgeable. Two-stage-least-squares equations estimated on the 1988 and 1992 NES show that the processes of becoming informed were the same in both years. These analyses show, once again, the intractability of political ignora…
The Irrelevance of Economic Theory to Understanding Economic Ignorance
Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim …
Is the public's ignorance of politics trivial
Examination of a comprehensive database of political knowledge, constructed from pooled 1988 and 1992 National Election Studies, refutes criticisms that haue sometimes been lodged against standard tests that seem to reveal profound levels of public ignorance. Although most people know something about politics, the typical citizen is poorly informed, and only a small group is very knowledgeable about politics. Differentiating people according to t…
The Persian Gulf War's impact on Americans' political information
The Changing Structure of Mass Belief Systems: Fact or Artifact
Turnout in European parliament elections: Towards a European‐centred model
With the 2004 European Parliament elections approaching, it is useful to consider what affects voting in these elections. This paper addresses the puzzle of declining turnout in European Parliament elections. After reviewing the influential “second order elections” explanation emphasizing domestic influences on turnout, especially Mark Franklin’s recent study stressing the importance of electoral salience factors, we develop a revised model to in…
Democratic competence, before converse and after
The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm …
From Traditional To Modern Conceptions of Gender Equality in Politics: Gradual Change and Lingering Doubts
A n important development in American politics during the 1980s was the disappearance of gender differences in turnout. The Center for Political Studies (CPS) conducted voter validation studies for each of its National Election Studies (NES) during the last decade except 1982. On each of the four NESs, the difference between women's and men's validated rates of turnout was statistically insignificant. The CPS found, for example, that 56 percent o…
Changing levels of political information in 1988 and 1990
Questions about Question Wording: A Rejoinder to Revisting Mass Belief Systems Revisited
Let us start with the argument about why the NORC split-ballot experiment (which we have also analyzed [Bishop et al., 1978a]), and the one by Sullivan and his colleagues (1978) in Minneapolis cannot be used to test the artifact thesis: the problem of extreme marginality, or as Nie and Rabjohn (1979) call it-degenerate variance. Here they make the case that, because of considerable skewing in the marginal distributions of the Likert forms replica…
The Social-Structural Sources of Cleavage on Law and Order Policies
Using data from the CPS's 1970 and 1972 election surveys, this paper employs Multiple Classification Analysis to investigate the social-structural sources of popular division on the law and order issue. A major finding is the gulf between the races. The elderly, farmers, the lesser educated, Republicans, white southerners, and fundamentalist Protestants tend to be hard-liners. Surprisingly, the widely accepted notion that working-class whites are…
Reading's Impact on Democratic Citizenship in America
Young Americans' Indifference to Media Coverage of Public Affairs
Although young Americans are normally less engaged in politics than their elders (Converse with Niemi 1971), today's youth are more withdrawn from public affairs than earlier birth cohorts were when they were young (Bennett 1997). One indicator of youthful disregard for politics is their avoidance of exposure to mass media coverage of public affairs (Pew Center 1996, 1997; Times Mirror Center 1990). Polls conducted during the 1990s indicate that …
American Public Opinion and the Civil War in Bosnia: Attention, Knowledge, and the Media
The Bosnian civil war offers an opportunity to examine the American public's attitudes toward foreign policy problems in the post-cold war era. We use polls conducted for the Times Mirror/Pew Research Center for the People and the Press from 1992 to 1996 and indicators of media coverage of Bosnia to analyze trends in public attention to and knowledge of the conflict. As expected, events, media coverage, public attention to that coverage, and know…
Television “News Grazers: Who They Are and What They (Don’t) Know
Between 1998 and 2006, a new style of television news consumption was born: “news grazing.” With remote control devices in hand, “grazers” flip through TV news channels in order to find interesting news stories. Approximately three‐fifths of the public graze, and this group tends to be younger than non‐grazers. Grazers are less likely than the rest of the public to follow “hard” news about politics and economics, and, not surprisingly, they are e…
Why Young Americans Hate Politics, and What We Should Do about It
On the final day of her American Government class last spring, one of my wife's students approached her and said, “You're a really great teacher. It's too bad you're teaching this subject. I hate politics.” The young man had begun the course getting D's and F's, but gradually raised his grades to B's. Clearly he was diving into the work, but the dislike of politics that he brought into the course remained. Professor Linda Bennett's experience at …
The Things They Cared About: Change and Continuity in Americans’ Attention to Different News Stories, 1989–2002
Pew Research Center polls in 1989, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002 show that Americans pay more attention to media accounts of nonpolitical stories than those about national, international, and local politics. Although Americans’ attentiveness to political news rose between 2000 and 2002, attention to media accounts of politics remained below where it had been in 1989. For the most part, the relative rankings of attentiveness to different kinds of new…
Modes of Resolution of a "Belief Dilemma" in the Ideology of the John Birch Society
Consistency Among the Public's Social Welfare Policy Attitudes in the 1960s
Cognitive consistency theorists postulate that most people seek to maintain congruence their beliefs and attitudes. However, many political scientists point to evidence from social surveys which indicate that the mass public lacks the cognitive capabilities necessary to achieve stable and coherent political belief systems. This study attempts to resolve the differences between these two schools of thought about the nature of the populace's politi…
The Social-Structural Sources of Cleavage on Law and Order Policies
Using data from the CPS's 1970 and 1972 election surveys, this paper employs Multiple Classification Analysis to investigate the social-structural sources of popular division on the law and order issue. A major finding is the gulf between the races. The elderly, farmers, the lesser educated, Republicans, white southerners, and fundamentalist Protestants tend to be hard-liners. Surprisingly, the widely accepted notion that working-class whites are…
The Changing Structure of Mass Belief Systems: Fact or Artifact
Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions
Questions about Question Wording: A Rejoinder to Revisting Mass Belief Systems Revisited
Let us start with the argument about why the NORC split-ballot experiment (which we have also analyzed [Bishop et al., 1978a]), and the one by Sullivan and his colleagues (1978) in Minneapolis cannot be used to test the artifact thesis: the problem of extreme marginality, or as Nie and Rabjohn (1979) call it-degenerate variance. Here they make the case that, because of considerable skewing in the marginal distributions of the Likert forms replica…
Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs
This article reports on the often suspected but rarely researched tendency of survey respondents to give opinions on topics to which they have given little or no thought. The findings, based on a question about a fictitious public affairs issue, do show that the magnitude of the problem is substantial. But the data also demonstrate that this phenomenon does not represent simple random error, reflecting instead basic social-psychological dispositi…
Enduring Gender Differences in Political Interest: The Impact of Socialization and Political Dispositions
Although women now vote in national elections at the same rate as men, they are still less politically interested. Using regression analysis and two new scales to tap an orientation toward women's place in the public arena (Traditional Feminine Role Scale) and political interest (Political Apathy Scale), this article seeks to test the utility of the three standard explanations for women's political orientations (situational, structural, and sex-r…
Interest in American Presidential Election Campaigns
Rejoinder to Piven and Cloward
Piven and Cloward are right. Someone is confused. Readers of PS can decide who. Piven and Cloward claim they have been misunderstood. They say their goal, particularly in Why Americans Don't Vote , was to highlight the inadequacies of three “schools” of turnout studies, “party behavior,” “legal-institutional,” and “social-psychological,” and to suggest a “synthesis” of those approaches. “Misunderstanding,” it seems, is widespread. At least two re…
The Implications of Nonvoting for Democracy in the United States
This paper reconsiders several of the arguments normative theorists have constructed about political participation's impact on the democratic polity. Two key arguments are addressed in the context of the United States today: (1) does nonvoting pose a threat to democracy; and (2) does nonvoting cause skewed public policies? CPS's National Election Studies, NORC's 1985 General Social Survey, and Gallup's 1987 The People, Press, and Politics poll in…
The Uses and Abuses of Registration and Turnout Data: An Analysis of Piven and Cloward's Studies of Nonvoting in America
A large corpus exists detailing the reasons for low turnout in American elections. It is not surprising that scholars disagree over the factors responsible. What should concern us is the extent to which single-factor explanations lead to serious misunderstanding of this phenomenon. Piven and Cloward recently continued their crusade to relax registration statutes (1989: see also 1988a, 1988b). They contend that the most important causes of low tur…
The education-turnout 'puzzle' in recent US national elections
From Traditional To Modern Conceptions of Gender Equality in Politics: Gradual Change and Lingering Doubts
A n important development in American politics during the 1980s was the disappearance of gender differences in turnout. The Center for Political Studies (CPS) conducted voter validation studies for each of its National Election Studies (NES) during the last decade except 1982. On each of the four NESs, the difference between women's and men's validated rates of turnout was statistically insignificant. The CPS found, for example, that 56 percent o…
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Americans' Knowledge of Party Control of the House of Representatives, 1960-1984
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Americans' Knowledge of Party Control of the House of Representatives, 1960-1984
What affects Americans knowledge of the partisan makeup of the House of Representatives? Using National Election Studies from 1960 to 1984, we find that two sets of factors help explain what people know about party control of the lower chamber of the national legislature. The first reflects personal variables usually used to account for levels of political knowledge: education, gender, race, strength of partisanship, political interest, and media…
The Persian Gulf War's impact on Americans' political information
Changing levels of political information in 1988 and 1990
Comparing Americans' Political Information in 1988 and 1992
Although Americans were more active in the 1992 campaign and felt they were better informed than they had been in 1988, National Election Studies (NES) data from both years show that Americans were not substantially more knowledgeable. Two-stage-least-squares equations estimated on the 1988 and 1992 NES show that the processes of becoming informed were the same in both years. These analyses show, once again, the intractability of political ignora…
The Republican Tidal Wave of 1994: Testing Hypotheses About Realignment, Restructuring, and Rebellion
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Citizens' Knowledge of Foreign Affairs
Although scholars have long known that most Americans are woefully ignorant of foreign affairs (Almond 1960; Kriesberg 1949), they are uncertain about how the U.S. public's knowledge of international politics compares to that of people in other countries. We address this uncertainty with a study of citizens' knowledge of foreign affairs in five western democracies: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. The focus is on the roles…
Know-nothings? revisited again
Citizens’ knowledge and perceptions of legislatures in Canada, Britain and the United States
This study has two major parts. The first uses survey data to reveal what citizens in Britain, Canada and the United States know about their national legislatures and what factors ‐ including cognitive ability, opportunity, motivation and media exposure ‐ affect that knowledge. We find that US citizens are the least knowledgeable. The second part of the study looks at whether the level of knowledge in each country has any importance for understan…
American Public Opinion and the Civil War in Bosnia: Attention, Knowledge, and the Media
The Bosnian civil war offers an opportunity to examine the American public's attitudes toward foreign policy problems in the post-cold war era. We use polls conducted for the Times Mirror/Pew Research Center for the People and the Press from 1992 to 1996 and indicators of media coverage of Bosnia to analyze trends in public attention to and knowledge of the conflict. As expected, events, media coverage, public attention to that coverage, and know…
Why Young Americans Hate Politics, and What We Should Do about It
On the final day of her American Government class last spring, one of my wife's students approached her and said, “You're a really great teacher. It's too bad you're teaching this subject. I hate politics.” The young man had begun the course getting D's and F's, but gradually raised his grades to B's. Clearly he was diving into the work, but the dislike of politics that he brought into the course remained. Professor Linda Bennett's experience at …
Political science (48 works) · Law (43 works) · Politics (41 works) · Law (38 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (33 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Social Media and Politics (27 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works) · Public Administration (12 works)