Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study content analyzed a leading Korean newspaper to examine the different framing of the 14th and 16th presidents. The news stories of the presidents were analyzed in terms of topics, sources, title of the presidents, and the content of presidential quotations. The results were compared with two polls. As a result, the 16th president, represented more with the politics frame, had a lower approval rating in terms of his negative personal characteristics as a politician, while the 14th president with the policy frame was evaluated in light of his policies. The study discusses the idea that media framing effect occurs when its framing devices are primed in the public’s political judgment.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study aims to explore second-level agenda setting at the state level. In particular, it examines the relationships among media bias of local newspapers, state-level public opinion and state policies, in order to better understand mass media’s role in state policymaking. It is found that local media’s tendency to cite liberal think tanks correlates to policy priorities, while its endorsement of Democratic candidates correlates to liberal public opinion and liberal policies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This experimental study assesses the roles of race and party identification as moderators of the impact of media frames of diabetes on public opinion toward health policies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The challenges in isolating the substantive conflict in American politics as it actually moves the mass public are truly daunting. Two such challenges dominate all others, however. First, it is necessary to have consistent measures of the main domains of policy conflict across the postwar years, itself a demanding challenge. But second, it is necessary to combine these into a consistent issue structure across that same period, else good individual measures will mislead as much as they help, by masking and distorting the mix of available policy concerns.

This paper builds on previous APSA papers aimed at eliciting this issue structure, and moves on to its impact on voting behavior from 1952 through 2000. A set of measures for the policy domains of social welfare, foreign affairs, civil rights, and cultural values are developed, with much confirmation of an existing literature specialized to these domains, plus some twists that arrive with the ability to address them in an extended time-frame. These individual measures are then combined into a more comprehensive picture, an ‘issue structure’, so that their influence within a richer issue context can be examined.

What results is a picture of postwar American politics at the mass level, confirmed in many familiar ways but, we hope, nuanced in many others and actually disconfirmed in a few. Said differently, what results is a picture of social welfare as the dominating issue concern in this politics among the general public, with foreign affairs as an important—and frequently cross-cutting—secondary concern. Civil rights changes its partisan direction as the postwar years pass. And cultural values does the same, while exploding to prominence in recent years.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether newspaper accounts are really policy narratives. While many studies have examined the various ways media influences public opinion, the policy change literature is contradictory with what the role of the media is in policy change: a conduit, reflecting the various perspectives in the policy system or a conductor, purporting policy beliefs. To address these questions, one hundred seventy five national and local articles were content analyzed using a mixed methodology informed by narrative policy analysis. The articles covered one of two contentious policy issues in the Greater Yellowstone Area between 1986—2006, that of snowmobile access or wolf reintroduction. The articles were content analyzed for policy beliefs, framing strategies, and problem definition. The results indicate that there are statistical differences between local and national media coverage for six of the eight hypotheses. Media accounts are policy stories and a part of advocacy coalitions.