The News Media in Children's Political Socialization

The research reported examines the impact of the news mediaas an agent of political socialization on children's politicalknowledge, their attitudes toward political parties and electoralsystems, and their activities relative to politics. Childrennews media use and level of political knowledge function asprimary sources of causal effects for each other. They are consistentlymore important in their effects on the attitudes and types ofparticipation studied in this research than are the parentaland educational system socialization indicators or the structuralvariables of grade and gender.     

Mass media influences on sexuality

The mainstream mass media (television, magazines, movies, music, and the Internet) provide increasingly frequent portrayals of sexuality. We still know relatively little about how this content is used and how it affects sexual beliefs and behaviors. The few available studies suggest that the media do have an impact because the media keep sexual behavior on public and personal agendas, media portrayals reinforce a relatively consistent set of sexual and relationship norms, and the media rarely depict sexually responsible models. More longitudinal research, especially with early adolescents is needed to learn more about how media content is attended to, interpreted, and incorporated into developing sexual lives.     

Politics and Youth Gangs: a Follow-up Study*

Scholarly interest in the political relationships of youth gangs recently has revived, following mass media reports of the politicization of some gangs and federal and private funding in support of economic and socially constructive programs in which a few large gangs participated. Unlike earlier gang political activities (which supported entrenched political power) recent reports suggest that youth gangs and their young adult counterparts have become radicalized, alienated from traditional political approaches and ideologies. This paper focuses on the political attitudes and activities, especially with respect to civil rights programs of young men. now aged 21 to 35, who were members of black youth gangs studied initially between 1959 and 1962. Assimilationist organizations and approaches receive higher recognition and support than do protest, black nationalist, and other groups, and violent methods. Variations in response reflect gang and community differences. The crientation to politics reflected in the findings appears more pragmatic than ideological. The potential for effective organization is related to recent reports of militant organization within prisons, a common experience for gang members.     

Mass Communication and Political Socialization: Specifying the Effects

A survey investigation of teenagers examined differential socializationeffects of four news media on four types of political knowledgeand behavior among several categories of youth on the basisof abilities and predispositions. Regression analyses of questionnaireresponses from 280 seventh and tenth grade students show thatTV news exposure is the strongest predictor variable. The broadcastmedia have a greater impact on current events knowledge thanfundamental political knowledge, while a slight reversal occursfor the print media. Newspaper reading has the greatest effecton participation. There are predominantly uniform relationshipsacross subgroups, providing little evidence that the news mediaproduce knowledge or behavior gaps.     

Attitudes and Belief Systems Concerning Urban Services

Attitudes toward urban services cluster in ways indicating thewidespread presence of a variety of organizing abstractionsin mass political belief systems. Nonetheless, since the perceptualbasis of these attitudes is weak, they are not the result ofsophisticated cognitive processes of attitude formation. Thefindings do not show that attitudes toward urban services differdramatically, either in overall constraint or in degree of clustering,from attitudes about national political issues     

Passive Learning: When the Media Environment Is the Message

This article investigates the phenomenon of "passive learning,"or how people may acquire information from the mass media despitelacking the motivation to do so. A unique data source allowsus to overcome the "saturation effect" that generally makesthe study of this phenomenon difficult. Saturation conditionscommonly occur because exposure to political programming isvirtually universal. With interest controlled, two groups receivingdifferent media messages are compared over two elections. Thosewho had no interest in an election, but who lived in a media-richenvironment were 40 percentage points more likely to have acquiredinformation than their uninterested cohorts living in a media-poorenvironment.     

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND DEMOCRACY IN A NEW DEMOCRACY

Taiwan made the transition from political authoritarianism to democracy in the late 1980s. Data from representative samples of the Taiwan population in 1992 and 1997 show how, in the early phase of democratization, citizens varied in the extent of their democratic political behavior and attitudes. I attempt to explain these variations on the basis of variables drawn from social capital theory (participation in voluntary organizations and trust), controlling for the individual's position in the social structure (sex, age, ethnicity, marital status, socioeconomic status, and social class). The findings of the multivariate analysis support only one of the social capital hypotheses: The more organizations one participates in, the more one engages in various forms of democratic political behavior . However, organizational participation has no effect on democratic political attitudes . There is no positive reciprocal relationship between the two key social capital variables of organizational participation and trust. Trust, instead of having a positive effect, either has no net effect (on some forms of democratic political behavior) or a significant negative effect (on democratic political attitudes and petitioning a government agency). The political context of Taiwan may explain why people who distrusted Taiwan's political system were more democratic and more tolerant in their attitudes than those who had more political trust.     

Movie Ratings and Third-Person Perception

Students enrolled in an undergraduate mass communication course were asked to estimate self and third-person effects on learning, attitudes, and behavior after reading a movie plot synopsis that contained 6 versions of a rating, ranging from PG-13 to R, with varying degrees of sexual content. This study introduces media content that is neither harmful nor persuasive, as is often the case in third-person effect research, and this study also incorporates an age-based media rating system into a third-person framework. Respondents in this study considered others to be more affected by media messages along cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions; however, contrary to other third-person studies, we found perceived social distance to outweigh perceived likelihood of exposure.     

Youth political involvement update: measuring the role of cause-oriented political interest in young people's activism

In recent decades, a series of transformations have occurred that have changed young people's relationships with politics. In most Western countries, young people vote less and protest more. Survey research has detected this two-fold process in participation behaviour, but has failed to detect this same process in the field of political attitudes. In particular, the emergence of a specific dimension of psychological political involvement with a special impact on youth has gone unnoticed in survey-based research. Based on some recent qualitative studies, this research tries to identify and measure a specific dimension of interest in politics using a new question in a survey carried out in Catalonia in 2011. An interest directly oriented to political issues and causes – particularly those relevant in young people's everyday lives – is identified. The article also evaluates how traditional survey indicators of political involvement do capture, or not, this particular dimension of interest in politics. Finally, the new cause-oriented interest indicator is tested to analyse its impact on different types of participation in order to better understand patterns of activism in young people.     

Face-to-Face Interaction with Government Officials and Its Effects on the Political Attitudes on the Civil Society Organizational Members: The Study from Japan

This study attempts to answer the question: When do civil society organizations (CSOs) function as a bridge between the informal political sphere and the formal political sphere by changing the political attitudes of their members? To answer this question, I used the Japanese General Social Survey 2003 (JGSS 2003). My main findings involve the effect of the face-to-face interactions that the CSO members have with government officials. The findings suggest that while CSO members without such interactions are no more psychologically politically engaged than non-members, the members with such interactions are. The findings have an empirical importance to those who study Japan since the country is currently undergoing CSO–government relationship reform and the number of CSOs is growing rapidly in the recent years. The study also has a theoretical importance to civil society scholars since this study attempts to unfold the mechanism in which CSOs’ positive effects on the members’ political attitudes are produced.     

Nichts genaues weiss man nicht!?

What do voters really know about party platforms and how do they perceive the contents? Are there any relationships between party election platforms and electoral behavior? Despite of much research on parties, there are hardly any answers to these questions. If political parties devise programmes in order to influence political attitudes or electoral behavior, it will be necessary that these programmes are read by people. But it seems to be unclear if and how people do so. This article shows clearly that voters don’t know much about party manifestoes. Still, programmes are more important for voters than many people believe. Programmes are also an important factor for electoral behavior. But there is still a lack of data to get evident results.     

THE SHORT-TERM EFFECT OF ELECTION POLLS ON FOREIGN EXCHANGE RATES: THE 1988 CANCDIAN FEDERAL ELECTION

Polls do not simply measure public opinion; they also providevital information that the public can use to form opinions andto make decisions. Using multiple regression analysis, the authorsfound that published polls had a powerful impact on the valueof the Canadian dollar during the 1988 Canadian federal election.This appears to have been due to the unprecedented importanceof economic issues in the federal campaign, the distinctivepositions taken by the major political parties with respectto the U.S.-Canadian Free Trade Agreement, and to the proliferationof "horse-race" polls in the media. These results have implicationsfor understanding the behavior of other elite groups, such asfinancial contributors and volunteer campaign workers, who mayalso use published horse-race polls to handicap election outcomes.     

Bringing the Media in: Newspaper Readership and Human Rights*

Cross‐national studies examining human rights outcomes have seldom considered the role of the news media. This is unfortunate, as a large body of work in media studies suggests that the news industry effectively educates citizens, shapes public attitudes, and stimulates political action. I juxtapose these two literatures in a cross‐national context to examine the print media’s impact on a state’s human rights performance. First, examining micro‐level evidence from the World Values Survey, I show that an individual’s level of media consumption, including newspaper readership, is positively associated with participation in human rights organizations. Next, I present macro‐level evidence regarding the aggregate effect of a society’s newspaper readership on its human rights record. Analyzing an unbalanced dataset with a maximum of 459 observations across 138 countries covering four waves during the 1980–2000 period, I use ordered probit regression to examine the relationship between a state’s newspaper readership and its Amnesty International rating. I find that newspaper readership exerts strong, positive effects on a state’s human rights practices net of other standard predictors and temporal/regional controls. Moreover, the effect of readership is robust to a number of alternative specifications that address concerns with ceiling effects, measurement bias, influential observations, sample composition, mediation, endogeneity, and the impact of alternative forms of media consumption (i.e., the Internet and television).     

Breaking Through the Information Blockade: Election and Revolution in Ukraine 2004

The mass media are an important part of modern elections and revolutions. This was certainly the case in Ukraine in 2004 when a key Presidential election erupted into the Orange Revolution and resulted in a change in the country’s ruling political elite. This paper looks at the impact of the mass media on political events in Ukraine during the 2004 presidential election campaign, and suggests that television in particular played a central role in the events which led to the Orange Revolution and its aftermath. It looks at how both the establishment and the opposition used the media to try and achieve their political goals, whether they were successful, and what the implications are.     

THE IMPACT OF RACE ON DENOMINATIONAL VARIATIONS IN SOCIAL ATTITUDES: THE ISSUE AND ITS DIMENSIONS

Although the impact of religious affiliation on social attitudes is a popular research topic in the sociology of religion, few scholars have examined the role that race plays in this relationship. Moreover, studies that do explore the interplay of race and religious affiliation seldom move beyond the general categories of conservative, moderate, and liberal denominational families. Our research uses recent data from the General Social Surveys to compare the social attitudes of African Americans and their white counterparts within established designations of religious affiliation. Along with control variables, we include attitude measures for political tolerance, legalized abortion, gender equality, premarital sex, homosexual lifestyles, and extramarital sexual relations. Our analysis isolates levels of support for these attitudes within categories of race and religious affiliation to determine whether variations emerge and whether they are nested within specific issues, religious denominations, or reflect more general patterns of race differences.     

Too Hard to Shout Over the Loudest Frame: Effects of Competing Frames in the Context of the Crystallized Media Coverage on Offshore Outsourcing

This study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshore outsourcing, an issue that is characterized by a predominantly negative, unemployment-focused media framing. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N = 152) demonstrate that conventional framing effects do hold for this issue and for this media context by moving recipients’ attitudes in the direction consistent with the valence of the frame. However, they also show the backfire effect of the positively valenced frame among recipients with greater interest in political and economic news, who become less supportive of outsourcing if they read a story framing outsourcing from a consumer-oriented perspective. Our results contribute to the ongoing debate about the limits of framing effects on forming opinion about contentious policy issues and demonstrate the challenges for nondominant perspectives to make their way to news-savvy audiences even when the nature of the issue in question necessitates considering them.     

Community mental health and mass media preventive education: the alternatives project.

An innovative mental health preventive education and public information program employing mass media was conducted in the Louisville, Kentucky, metropolitan area. Social work and mental health concepts of prevention were applied as a framework for developing project goals. Systematic evaluation, based on data from client-initiated telephone contacts and surveys of the community, demonstrated project success in increasing awareness and utilization of community mental health resources. The overall impact on assessment attitudes was positive; changes in resolution attitudes were not statistically significant. Implications for mass media utilization in mental health prevention are discussed.     

The Influence of Gender Roles on Political Socialization:

This paper reports on an experimental study investigating the relationship between gender role stereotyping and political learning among Mexican-American children. In addition to the pre-test and post-test administered to the entire sample, 15 of the children were exposed to a treatment emphasizing a flexible definition of the female role. The children did stereotype behavior assigning some activities to men and others to women. Further, this stereotyping affected their attitudes toward female political participation. Comparison of pre-test and post-test suggests that the treatment had some effect on gender role attitudes, particularly concerning the female role. In addition, on several questions there appeared to be an interaction between gender and the experimental treatment, sugguesting possible differences between the political socialization of boys and girls.     

Political Beliefs in an Era of Economic Decline: Farmers' Attitudes Toward State Economic Intervention,Trade, and Food Security1

Abstract The effects of the economy on political attitudes is a longstanding sociological issue that is receiving renewed attention in the face of recent U.S. economic downturns. While the impacts of the farm crisis on financial and household well-being of farm operators have been addressed by a number of studies, few have explored its political outcomes. Four perspectives that consider how economic forces translate into political beliefs are outlined, two reflecting objective economic position (class location and financial pressure) and two indicating subjective appraisals (feelings of economic uncertainty and subjective deprivation). Data from a sample of Ohio farm operators for 1987 are used to analyze how the perspectives are related to progressive beliefs about farming, the domestic nonfarm economy, and third-world food production. Indicators of objective economic position and subjective appraisals have relatively limited impact on farmers' political attitudes. Of these indicators, subjective appraisals were more closely related to attitudes. In addition, operators' stances on farm political issues also affect their views on domestic nonfarm and third-world policy agendas. Implications were found for studies of farmers' political attitudes as well as for broader sociological theory regarding the development of progressive attitudes during periods of economic decline.