Daniel E Bergan
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 940195 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Daniel E Bergan |
| PRENOMES | Daniel E |
| SOBRENOME | Bergan |
| ASSINATURA | BERGAN D E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2564-385X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 224 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Evidence about racial discrimination and White Republicans’ beliefs and attitudes
OBJECTIVE: We explore whether people's beliefs and attitudes about race are responsive to evidence about the prevalence of discrimination. Partisan polarization in recent years around racial issues, as well as ego- and system-defensive motivations, may prevent people from accepting even strong, easily communicated evidence about discrimination. METHOD: This article replicates earlier work (Bergan et al., 2025) communicating evidence about discrim…
Persuasion and ideological voting in legislatures
American legislators are generally thought to be ideologues who take consistently partisan positions, but recent research suggests they are also pliant targets of persuasion campaigns by special interests, lobbyists, fellow legislators and even academics. This paper explores this seeming discrepancy. First, we revisit the credibility of findings of legislative persuasion to determine whether legislators’ positions can be changed and, if so, wheth…
Are Policymakers Persuaded in Parallel
Policymakers are highly involved with political issues, politically polarized, and knowledgeable about politics, all traits that could contribute to biased reasoning about policy evidence. In this paper, we explore whether policymakers are influenced by compelling policy evidence from ideologically disparate viewpoints, or whether they respond to evidence in an ideologically biased fashion. We conduct an experiment in which we randomly assign a s…
Political Effects of Exposure to Evidence about Racial Discrimination
Framing and Policymaker Evaluations of the Opioid Crisis
Several extremely influential theories, including the multiple streams approach and punctuated equilibrium theory, predict that dramatic policy change occurs when problems are reframed. However, there is little direct evidence of how framing messages influence policymaker attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. In an online survey of local policymakers in Illinois, we find that different media frames of the opiate epidemic influence policymaker at…
Political expertise, ecological rationality and party cues
Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of part…
Can People Use Party Cues to Assess Policymaker Positions? Ecological Rationality and Political Heuristics
Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield …
Discounting constituent attitudes
In experimental work, researchers have found that policymakers discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree. We build on these results with a national sample of local policymakers in the United States, exploring whether communicators can prevent policymakers from discounting their opinions by providing evidence of their own knowledge about a topic. We find that policymakers discount the opinions of hypothetical constituents with …
Fact-checking as a deterrent? A conceptual replication of the influence of fact-checking on the sharing of misinformation by political elites
In a field experiment conducted during the 2012 general elections in the U.S., Nyhan and Reifler found that the threat of fact-checking deterred state legislators from making false or misleading statements. The current study presents a conceptual replication and extension of this influential study by utilizing a similar treatment that leverages a recent partnership between local media outlets and fact-checking organizations, assessing the effects…
What should I believe? A conjoint analysis of the influence of message characteristics on belief in, perceived credibility of, and intent to share political posts
Research on misinformation and misperceptions often investigates claims that have already reached a critical mass, resulting in little understanding of why certain claims gain widespread belief while others fall into obscurity. Here we consider how various message features factor into why certain claims are more likely to be believed, perceived as credible, and shared with others. Using a conjoint experiment, we randomly assigned participants (N …
Assessing the Potential of Partisan Group Cues in Promoting Accurate Beliefs
Recent work on misinformation has indicated a role for social and group-based factors in shaping people’s beliefs on factual matters, suggesting that communicators might be able to leverage social cues in messages aimed at promoting more accurate beliefs. To test this possibility, we conducted an online experiment (N = 605) to assess whether partisan in-group cues across several factual claims are effective in either promoting more accurate belie…
Correcting the Misinformed
While research consistently shows that fact-checking improves belief accuracy, debates persist about how to best measure and interpret expressions of factual beliefs. We argue that this has led to ambiguity in interpreting the results of studies on fact-checking, including whether fact-checking effects in fact decrease confidently held false beliefs. In a two-wave, nationally representative online experiment on beliefs about immigration, we use a…
Promoting the Youth Vote
Does Ability Contribute to Partisan Bias
The influence of goals unrelated to accuracy – such as maintaining beliefs and attitudes consistent with one’s political identity – may undermine objective processing, enabling people to construct defenses for their own predispositions. A two-wave study is employed involving undergraduates who experienced gains in scientific reasoning ability to explore the influence of ability on reasoning about social scientific messages that reflects positivel…
Policymaker perceptions of citizen needs
Do policymaker perceptions reflect actual citizen needs? A vast literature has explored the extent to which policy is responsive to public opinion, but there is little systematic work on policymaker perceptions of social problems . We quantify social problems with a unique dataset of the number of phone calls placed by citizens to a free service that connects Michigan residents to service providers. We combine these data with a survey of local po…
Out-Party Cues and Factual Beliefs in an Era of Negative Partisanship
The rise of negative partisanship raises the possibility that perceptions of what the partisan out-group believes on a factual matter could serve as a cue for one’s own factual beliefs. In the current paper, we present the results of an online experiment using a sample of self-identified conservatives and liberals on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Across several statements on various political issues, participants were randomly assigned to re…
Introduction
It is a pleasure to introduce this special issue on the role of norms in the 2020 election. Social norms are unwritten rules that guide behavior (Chung and Rimal 2016). Democratic norms refer speci
Reinforcement in the Aggregate
While generally understood as an individual-level effect, we argue that reinforcement effects—or the strengthening of existing party loyalties through media exposure—might also play a role in shaping aggregate-level outcomes. Looking across eight presidential elections from 1900 to 1928, this study provides evidence that partisan newspaper circulation was significantly linked to two-party vote share at the county level. Counties with higher circu…
Flooding the Zone
Much scholarly attention has been paid to the effects of misinformation on beliefs and attitudes, but rarely have studies investigated potential downstream effects of misinformation exposure on belief judgments involving subsequent factual statements. Drawing from work on anchoring-and-adjustment and defensive reasoning, this study examines how exposure to initial falsehoods that vary in terms of their plausibility shapes subsequent belief judgme…
Do Corrective Effects Last? Results from a Longitudinal Experiment on Beliefs Toward Immigration in the U.S
Assessing the Effects of Partisan Bias at the Group Level of Analysis
Although there is some evidence in the political arena that pooling information can overcome individual biases to improve decision-making accuracy, research from the group communication and psychology arenas suggests otherwise. Specifically, research on the hidden profile, a group-level decision-making problem, suggests that groups are decidedly biased when making decisions. This laboratory experiment tested whether or not partisan biases manifes…
Call Your Legislator
Say It With Candy
Framing tax increases as frequent purchases appears to be a popular message strategy to generate donations and elicit support for policies. We test whether this strategy is effective at obtaining support for tax increases through two survey experiments. Results demonstrate that this message strategy—framing tax increases in terms of items—is more effective than stating the increase in terms of a yearly or weekly amount. This strategy appears to b…
Partisan Stereotypes and Policy Attitudes
Drawing from the literature on expectancy violations (A. H. Eagly, W. Wood, & S. Chaiken, 1978) and recent work on stereotypes (J. T. Crawford, L. Jussim, S. Madon, T. R. Cain, & S. T. Stevens, 2011), we predict that party labels influence attitudes when they provide unexpected information. We predict that party labels will increase support for the relevant policy when attached to unexpected policies and will have no effect when attached to polic…
Issue Ads and the Health Reform Debate
The public debate over health care reform in 2009 was carried out partly through issue advertisements aired online and on television. Did these advertisements alter the course of the debate over health care reform? While millions of dollars are spent each year on issue ads, little is known about their effects. Results from a naturalistic online experiment on the effects of issue ads suggest that they can influence the perceived importance of an i…
Does Grassroots Lobbying Work
There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition of groups lobbying a state legislature. The results sh…
Grassroots Mobilization and Voter Turnout in 2004
Voter turnout increased sharply in 2004. At the same time, 2004 marked a change in campaign strategy, as both presidential campaigns and allied organizations placed unprecedented emphasis on voter mobilization. This article attempts to assess the degree to which grassroots mobilization efforts contributed to the surge in voter turnout. We conclude that although grassroots efforts generated millions of additional votes, they probably account for l…
Does Knowledge of Constitutional Principles Increase Support for Civil Liberties? Results from a Randomized Field Experiment
For decades, scholars have argued that education causes greater support for civil liberties by increasing students’ exposure to political knowledge and constitutional norms, such as due process and freedom of expression. Support for this claim comes exclusively from observational evidence, principally from cross-sectional surveys. This paper presents the first large-scale experimental test of this proposition. More than 1000 students in 59 high s…
Call Your Legislator
Do Corrective Effects Last? Results from a Longitudinal Experiment on Beliefs Toward Immigration in the U.S
The Draft Lottery and Attitudes Towards the Vietnam War
Journal Article The Draft Lottery and Attitudes Towards the Vietnam War Get access Daniel E. Bergan Daniel E. Bergan Address correspondence to Daniel E. Bergan; e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 73, Issue 2, Summer 2009, Pages 379–384, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfp024 Published: 02 June 2009
The Politics of Requesting Appointments
There is persistent debate about who most influences the federal appointment process, especially whether the executive branch staffs the federal bureaucracy with individuals loyal to the White House or relies on the process as an accommodation to important political players, especially members of Congress. Yet, people still know little about the role members of Congress play in the process of shaping the prenomination environment. In this article…
Correcting the Misinformed
While research consistently shows that fact-checking improves belief accuracy, debates persist about how to best measure and interpret expressions of factual beliefs. We argue that this has led to ambiguity in interpreting the results of studies on fact-checking, including whether fact-checking effects in fact decrease confidently held false beliefs. In a two-wave, nationally representative online experiment on beliefs about immigration, we use a…
Promoting the Youth Vote
Issue Ads and the Health Reform Debate
The public debate over health care reform in 2009 was carried out partly through issue advertisements aired online and on television. Did these advertisements alter the course of the debate over health care reform? While millions of dollars are spent each year on issue ads, little is known about their effects. Results from a naturalistic online experiment on the effects of issue ads suggest that they can influence the perceived importance of an i…
Discounting constituent attitudes
In experimental work, researchers have found that policymakers discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree. We build on these results with a national sample of local policymakers in the United States, exploring whether communicators can prevent policymakers from discounting their opinions by providing evidence of their own knowledge about a topic. We find that policymakers discount the opinions of hypothetical constituents with …
Estimating the Effect of Tobacco Contributions on Legislative Behavior Using Panel Data
Objective. This article uses a data set of California State legislators to determine the effect of tobacco contributions on legislative behavior. Methods. Although many previous studies have analyzed the effect of campaign contributions on legislative behavior, this study makes a number of improvements to previous studies, including the use of panel data and improved instruments. Results. I find that contrary to prior research on tobacco industry…
New Data and New Directions in Interbranch Lobbying
This article analyzes a unique new set of data (compiled originally by the Bush White House) using mail written to President Bush from members of Congress during the 101st and 102nd Congresses to explore interbranch lobbying. We argue that these data illuminate the relationship between the president and Congress in a new and informative way. We use this data to inform our view of the shared power arrangements (identified as "tandem institutions")…
Policymaker perceptions of citizen needs
Do policymaker perceptions reflect actual citizen needs? A vast literature has explored the extent to which policy is responsive to public opinion, but there is little systematic work on policymaker perceptions of social problems . We quantify social problems with a unique dataset of the number of phone calls placed by citizens to a free service that connects Michigan residents to service providers. We combine these data with a survey of local po…
Flooding the Zone
Much scholarly attention has been paid to the effects of misinformation on beliefs and attitudes, but rarely have studies investigated potential downstream effects of misinformation exposure on belief judgments involving subsequent factual statements. Drawing from work on anchoring-and-adjustment and defensive reasoning, this study examines how exposure to initial falsehoods that vary in terms of their plausibility shapes subsequent belief judgme…
Can Online Videos Increase Turnout? A Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Peer-Created Online Videos on Youth Turnout
Previous field experimental studies of the effects of e-mails on turnout show that e-mails are not effective at boosting turnout, even among populations that frequently use e-mail. However, these studies have primarily relied on text-only e-mails. The authors attempt to increase registration and turnout among university undergraduates by sending them videos created by fellow students encouraging students to register and vote. These videos are cre…
Fact-checking as a deterrent? A conceptual replication of the influence of fact-checking on the sharing of misinformation by political elites
In a field experiment conducted during the 2012 general elections in the U.S., Nyhan and Reifler found that the threat of fact-checking deterred state legislators from making false or misleading statements. The current study presents a conceptual replication and extension of this influential study by utilizing a similar treatment that leverages a recent partnership between local media outlets and fact-checking organizations, assessing the effects…
Out-Party Cues and Factual Beliefs in an Era of Negative Partisanship
The rise of negative partisanship raises the possibility that perceptions of what the partisan out-group believes on a factual matter could serve as a cue for one’s own factual beliefs. In the current paper, we present the results of an online experiment using a sample of self-identified conservatives and liberals on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Across several statements on various political issues, participants were randomly assigned to re…
Say It With Candy
Framing tax increases as frequent purchases appears to be a popular message strategy to generate donations and elicit support for policies. We test whether this strategy is effective at obtaining support for tax increases through two survey experiments. Results demonstrate that this message strategy—framing tax increases in terms of items—is more effective than stating the increase in terms of a yearly or weekly amount. This strategy appears to b…
Grassroots Mobilization and Voter Turnout in 2004
Voter turnout increased sharply in 2004. At the same time, 2004 marked a change in campaign strategy, as both presidential campaigns and allied organizations placed unprecedented emphasis on voter mobilization. This article attempts to assess the degree to which grassroots mobilization efforts contributed to the surge in voter turnout. We conclude that although grassroots efforts generated millions of additional votes, they probably account for l…
New Data and New Directions in Interbranch Lobbying
This article analyzes a unique new set of data (compiled originally by the Bush White House) using mail written to President Bush from members of Congress during the 101st and 102nd Congresses to explore interbranch lobbying. We argue that these data illuminate the relationship between the president and Congress in a new and informative way. We use this data to inform our view of the shared power arrangements (identified as "tandem institutions")…
Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions
We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or a control treatment. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data. Howev…
The Draft Lottery and Attitudes Towards the Vietnam War
Journal Article The Draft Lottery and Attitudes Towards the Vietnam War Get access Daniel E. Bergan Daniel E. Bergan Address correspondence to Daniel E. Bergan; e-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 73, Issue 2, Summer 2009, Pages 379–384, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfp024 Published: 02 June 2009
Does Grassroots Lobbying Work
There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition of groups lobbying a state legislature. The results sh…
Estimating the Effect of Tobacco Contributions on Legislative Behavior Using Panel Data
Objective. This article uses a data set of California State legislators to determine the effect of tobacco contributions on legislative behavior. Methods. Although many previous studies have analyzed the effect of campaign contributions on legislative behavior, this study makes a number of improvements to previous studies, including the use of panel data and improved instruments. Results. I find that contrary to prior research on tobacco industry…
Can Online Videos Increase Turnout? A Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Peer-Created Online Videos on Youth Turnout
Previous field experimental studies of the effects of e-mails on turnout show that e-mails are not effective at boosting turnout, even among populations that frequently use e-mail. However, these studies have primarily relied on text-only e-mails. The authors attempt to increase registration and turnout among university undergraduates by sending them videos created by fellow students encouraging students to register and vote. These videos are cre…
Does Knowledge of Constitutional Principles Increase Support for Civil Liberties? Results from a Randomized Field Experiment
For decades, scholars have argued that education causes greater support for civil liberties by increasing students’ exposure to political knowledge and constitutional norms, such as due process and freedom of expression. Support for this claim comes exclusively from observational evidence, principally from cross-sectional surveys. This paper presents the first large-scale experimental test of this proposition. More than 1000 students in 59 high s…
The Politics of Requesting Appointments
There is persistent debate about who most influences the federal appointment process, especially whether the executive branch staffs the federal bureaucracy with individuals loyal to the White House or relies on the process as an accommodation to important political players, especially members of Congress. Yet, people still know little about the role members of Congress play in the process of shaping the prenomination environment. In this article…
Partisan Stereotypes and Policy Attitudes
Drawing from the literature on expectancy violations (A. H. Eagly, W. Wood, & S. Chaiken, 1978) and recent work on stereotypes (J. T. Crawford, L. Jussim, S. Madon, T. R. Cain, & S. T. Stevens, 2011), we predict that party labels influence attitudes when they provide unexpected information. We predict that party labels will increase support for the relevant policy when attached to unexpected policies and will have no effect when attached to polic…
Issue Ads and the Health Reform Debate
The public debate over health care reform in 2009 was carried out partly through issue advertisements aired online and on television. Did these advertisements alter the course of the debate over health care reform? While millions of dollars are spent each year on issue ads, little is known about their effects. Results from a naturalistic online experiment on the effects of issue ads suggest that they can influence the perceived importance of an i…
Say It With Candy
Framing tax increases as frequent purchases appears to be a popular message strategy to generate donations and elicit support for policies. We test whether this strategy is effective at obtaining support for tax increases through two survey experiments. Results demonstrate that this message strategy—framing tax increases in terms of items—is more effective than stating the increase in terms of a yearly or weekly amount. This strategy appears to b…
Call Your Legislator
Assessing the Effects of Partisan Bias at the Group Level of Analysis
Although there is some evidence in the political arena that pooling information can overcome individual biases to improve decision-making accuracy, research from the group communication and psychology arenas suggests otherwise. Specifically, research on the hidden profile, a group-level decision-making problem, suggests that groups are decidedly biased when making decisions. This laboratory experiment tested whether or not partisan biases manifes…
Do Corrective Effects Last? Results from a Longitudinal Experiment on Beliefs Toward Immigration in the U.S
Does Ability Contribute to Partisan Bias
The influence of goals unrelated to accuracy – such as maintaining beliefs and attitudes consistent with one’s political identity – may undermine objective processing, enabling people to construct defenses for their own predispositions. A two-wave study is employed involving undergraduates who experienced gains in scientific reasoning ability to explore the influence of ability on reasoning about social scientific messages that reflects positivel…
Policymaker perceptions of citizen needs
Do policymaker perceptions reflect actual citizen needs? A vast literature has explored the extent to which policy is responsive to public opinion, but there is little systematic work on policymaker perceptions of social problems . We quantify social problems with a unique dataset of the number of phone calls placed by citizens to a free service that connects Michigan residents to service providers. We combine these data with a survey of local po…
Out-Party Cues and Factual Beliefs in an Era of Negative Partisanship
The rise of negative partisanship raises the possibility that perceptions of what the partisan out-group believes on a factual matter could serve as a cue for one’s own factual beliefs. In the current paper, we present the results of an online experiment using a sample of self-identified conservatives and liberals on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Across several statements on various political issues, participants were randomly assigned to re…
Introduction
It is a pleasure to introduce this special issue on the role of norms in the 2020 election. Social norms are unwritten rules that guide behavior (Chung and Rimal 2016). Democratic norms refer speci
Reinforcement in the Aggregate
While generally understood as an individual-level effect, we argue that reinforcement effects—or the strengthening of existing party loyalties through media exposure—might also play a role in shaping aggregate-level outcomes. Looking across eight presidential elections from 1900 to 1928, this study provides evidence that partisan newspaper circulation was significantly linked to two-party vote share at the county level. Counties with higher circu…
Flooding the Zone
Much scholarly attention has been paid to the effects of misinformation on beliefs and attitudes, but rarely have studies investigated potential downstream effects of misinformation exposure on belief judgments involving subsequent factual statements. Drawing from work on anchoring-and-adjustment and defensive reasoning, this study examines how exposure to initial falsehoods that vary in terms of their plausibility shapes subsequent belief judgme…
What should I believe? A conjoint analysis of the influence of message characteristics on belief in, perceived credibility of, and intent to share political posts
Research on misinformation and misperceptions often investigates claims that have already reached a critical mass, resulting in little understanding of why certain claims gain widespread belief while others fall into obscurity. Here we consider how various message features factor into why certain claims are more likely to be believed, perceived as credible, and shared with others. Using a conjoint experiment, we randomly assigned participants (N …
Assessing the Potential of Partisan Group Cues in Promoting Accurate Beliefs
Recent work on misinformation has indicated a role for social and group-based factors in shaping people’s beliefs on factual matters, suggesting that communicators might be able to leverage social cues in messages aimed at promoting more accurate beliefs. To test this possibility, we conducted an online experiment (N = 605) to assess whether partisan in-group cues across several factual claims are effective in either promoting more accurate belie…
Correcting the Misinformed
While research consistently shows that fact-checking improves belief accuracy, debates persist about how to best measure and interpret expressions of factual beliefs. We argue that this has led to ambiguity in interpreting the results of studies on fact-checking, including whether fact-checking effects in fact decrease confidently held false beliefs. In a two-wave, nationally representative online experiment on beliefs about immigration, we use a…
Promoting the Youth Vote
Political science (29 obras) · Politics (25 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 obras) · Psychology (22 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Economics (17 obras) · Social Psychology (17 obras) · Social Psychology (16 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras)