What's Up With Cognitive Mobilization?

Scholarly research has its fads, just like music or fashion.  Often, research chases the money -- grant money, that is.  Other times it chases the new hot thing, like Twitter or The Daily Show.  But I'm baffled by my blog statistics that consistently show people searching for cognitive mobilization.

Yes, I've written about it here and here, and yes, my first ever published piece was on cognitive mobilization (in a forgettable academic journal that doesn't really exist any more, called Mass Comm Review.  But now it seems the topic has, if not exploded on the scene, at least generated some new interest.

There are recent pieces in:

• Electoral Studies (link here)
• Communication Research (link here)
• Political Science Review (link here)
• The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (link here)
• The International Journal of Public Opinion Research (link here)

And those are just the first ones from 2009 I happened to find in a quick-and-dirty search.  I'm sure I could have kept going with cute little dots and journal titles and links that may or may not be helpful, but you get the point.  Cognitive mobilization is one of the theories designed to explain partisan dealignment, the detachment of political party affiliations.  It's tied to changing values.  As information costs decline, so goes the theory, people will be less likely to follow simple rules of thumb, like party identification, and consider messages and politicians more carefully.

So goes the theory.

It's an odd increase -- or seemingly an increase -- given people at least in the U.S. seem be growing ever more partisan, dragged kicking and screaming by a fragmented partisan cable news environment, but we can't forget that a whole bunch of other people have grown apolitical.  This group doesn't fit the the theory.  They're not carefully considering messages and dealigning themselves, they're simply opting out of the political process.  So I'm a bit baffled by this, at least from a U.S. perspective, but it's nice to see as well since that old Mass Comm Review article of mine from 1991 or so looks prescient now.

Two Ways to Feel Neutral

Now here's a clever idea, looking at neutrality.  The idea of feeling neutral about political candidates or parties or whatever.  What's clever is the author argues there are two kinds of neutrality, and that the differences really matter.  There is:

• ambivalence, which is basically a balance between positive and negative attitudes about some object (a political actor or institution or issue)
• indifference, a complete lack of affect but apparently not brain-dead
  

So what?  There's a cool angle here, because one is truly different from the other, and the political ramifications are potentially significant.  This study in the latest issue of The Journal of Politics explores the two and why they matter in political participation.  One of the major findings is a duh moment, that ambivalent people are more likely to participate than indifferent ones.  At least they have some affect, even if by some magical algebraic formula it more or less comes out a tie.  While this is not surprising, the argument that neutrality is more than a single concept has theoretical merit and may explain other findings.

The real question for me is not who are the indifferent -- they resemble the apolitical or chronic know-nothings -- but who are the ambivalent.  The author here uses the traditional like/dislike questions from the American National Election Studies to measure this, but I have some concerns.  Often respondents pony up likes and dislikes in odd ways and I'm not completely comfortable with calling a raw count ambivalence.  Unfortunately I don't have a better solution, and it's not my study, so let's go with it for now.  Maybe buried in the text I missed an explanation of who is indifferent versus ambivalent.  If someone finds it, let me know, but I'd love a breakdown by SES and political factors, including knowledge.

How People Know about Local Stuff

When it comes to covering local, that bad old MSM (mainstream media) remains a force.  Most local news continues to originate with the traditional media, according to this new report that closely examines the "news ecosystem" of one market -- Baltimore.

According to the report:

And of the stories that did contain new information nearly all, 95%, came from traditional media—most of them newspapers. These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.

Where the hell are the bloggers? 

Knowledge Gap Research

The knowledge gap has been one of those long-standing mass comm research areas, not unlike agenda-setting, that refuses to die (and I wish agenda-setting would, but that's a different issue).

The knowledge gap hypothesis "proposes that the media can increase gaps in knowledge" and as information increases, those of higher SES tend to acquire information more than those lower in SES.  A meta-analysis published in the latest issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (volume 66, #3, Autumn, 2009, 515-532, for the citationally inclined) confirms the existence of a knowledge gap and reports a consistent moderate correlation between education and level of knowledge.

A meta-analysis is basically a test of lots of tests.  In this study, it's 71 effect sizes published in 46 studies.  I did a meta-analysis once for a book chapter.  I'll never do another.  It's statistical hell.

So knowledge levels differ across "social strata," as the study reports.  But the study failed to find changes over time, even in increases of publicity, which is rather interesting and "does not offer strong support for the knowledge gap hypothesis," which rests solidly on the idea of changes as time progresses and information becomes more available. 

Now for a cool methodological moment.

A smaller gap was found when studies used "belief-type" measures, as "compared to awareness-type and factual-type measures."  Fact-based questions are harder, thus increasing the knowledge gap that exists between those of lower and higher SES.  This makes sense.  "Belief-type" measures are apparently when respondents were asked to list arguments and these were simply counted, regardless of the quality of those responses.  "Awareness-type" measures seem to be the ability to answer questions, even evaluations of candidates.  If an answer is provides, then you are "aware" of that person regardless of the quality of that response.  It's an interesting approach and one necessary given the wide number of studies examined in the meta-analysis.  So when people can just say stuff, SES matters less.  When they have to be accurate, SES matters more.

Was It That Bad?

The 2000s were the worst decade in 50 years?  Apparently so, according to a Pew report, which states that "By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years."

Now that I look back, I'd have to agree.  Just look at the table below, from the report.  You've got 9/11, you've got Katrina, and you've got The Great Recession.  Good riddance, indeed.

If We Just Ask More Questions . . .

A study in the latest issue of Public Opinion Quarterly examines the nature of political ideology, throwing at the reader a mix of cool advanced statistical methods to come to a simple conclusion -- for a lot of folks the standard single-item ideology question on a traditional 7-point scale, from liberal to conservative, just doesn't work.

Yes, the political elite have become more partisan and ideological.  And yes, they've dragged a lot of the chattering class and even everyday people farther to the left or the right.  What this study finds is a whole lot of people still answer liberal on some policy questions and conservative on other policy questions, so for them the single-item ideological placement question fails to capture who they really are, what they really think.

Or, as the authors note in their conclusions:

Our results show that failing to account for the multidimensional nature of ideological preferences can produce inaccurate predictions of voting behavior for the plurality of Americans who do not call themselves liberal or conservative.

Their recommendation?  Ask more questions.  Don't rely only on that good old fashioned liberal-to-conservative question to classify people, because for those in the middle, it fails to capture what people really think and believe.  Add policy questions since people can sometimes be fiscal conservatives and social liberals, or some other mix.

What's the media angle here?  I think the fragmentation of the news media (see Fox vs MSNBC) is dragging a lot of people, kicking and screaming, into the same partisan divide elites began sharing many years ago.  Listen to Sean Hannity, for example, and you'll hear him push for a whole slate of consistent ideological beliefs across the spectrum.  I'd love to know if "talk radio conservatives" are more consistent in their ideological beliefs than "non-talk radio conservatives."  Ooooh, future study. 

Study specs: Clarke, H.D. & McCutcheon, A.L. (2009).  The nature of political ideology in the contemporary electorate.  Public Opinion Quarterly, 73, 679-703.

Why Question Order Matters

In a case of studies I wish I had done, the latest Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly includes a research paper that finds that question order can influence how interested survey respondents say they are -- the good old political interest variable.

What decreases political interest?  Asking them political knowledge questions beforehand.

That seems kinda obvious, now that I see it on paper in a major journal, but I'd never given it much thought until now.  The study, by Dominic Lasorsa, is a nice and tight study that examines not only how asking political knowledge questions might affect political interest, but also neatly examines the placement of questions that might excuse one for not being very knowledgeable.  It all boils down to priming and context effects. 

The placement of political knowledge items in a survey before a political interest question had its greatest impact among women, the less educated, those of lower income, and younger respondents.  These are folks who typically, for various reasons, do less well on political knowledge tests.  So being hit by questions that make you feel less knowledgeable leads to you saying you're less interested in politics.  There's some priming going on, but also probably some self-esteem.  Blowing some knowledge questions makes you a little more likely, I'd think, to then say politics doesn't really matter to you.  Ace 'em, and sure, politics matters.

This latest issue of JMCQ (Autumn 2009, Volume 86, Number 3) includes "Political Knowledge" on the cover six studies inside that touch on some way political knowledge.  I'll try to discuss them as the week progresses, assuming I actually get prepared for my Spring Semester classes.