This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental byproduct of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to a series of recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs, and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high profile political issues across different segments of the public.

Replication datasets for this article are available for download as zipped Excel files here. 

Scholars have repeatedly confirmed the phenomenon of relatively short-lived spikes in presidential approval ratings immediately following the occurrence of sudden, high profile foreign policy crisis events.  Despite the massive attention heaped upon the rally phenomenon, relatively little attention has been paid to its constituent elements. Yet, recent research has found that different groups of Americans respond differently to presidents’ activities according to their interests and attentiveness.  In this study, I disaggregate public opinion along two dimensions: political party and political sophistication. I argue that, in responding to presidential activities, particularly such high profile activities as the use of force abroad, different groups of Americans weigh various individual, contextual and situational factors differently.  I investigate all major U.S. uses of force between 1953 and 1998 and find that the propensity of different groups to "rally" does indeed vary according to individual circumstances.  Moreover, these differences are refracted through variations in the external environment.  To explain these differences, I employ two models of public opinion change.  The first emphasizes the importance of threshold effects in explaining opinion change.  That is, individuals who are closest to the point of ambivalence between approval and disapproval are most likely to change their opinion in response to external circumstances. The second emphasizes both the propensities of different types of individuals to be exposed to a given piece of information, and their susceptibility to having their opinion influenced by any additional information.  My results offer a more nuanced picture of the nature and extent of the rally phenomenon than has been available in previous studies.  My findings hold important implications for other, related, scholarly debates, such whether, and under what circumstances, the use of force can successfully divert public attention from a president's domestic political difficulties.

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(Note: This is an electronic version of an article published in International Studies Quarterly. Complete citation information for the final version of the paper, as published in the print edition of International Studies Quarterly  is available on the Blackwell Synergy online delivery service, accessible via the journal's website at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journals/ISQ or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com.)

Presidential popularity research has treated public opinion as a monolithic entity. Yet research in economics suggests that different sectors of society may respond differently to external events. History has judged FDR as one of America's greatest leaders in large part because he maintained his popularity throughout the Depression and World War II. During this era, the primary explanatory variables in presidential popularity scholarship ? the economy and war ? assumed their most extreme values of the twentieth century. Yet FDR’s public support has received little systematic attention. Compiling partially disaggregated time-series data from 1937 to 1943, we investigate FDR’s popular support among different economic classes during both national crises. We find that Roosevelt's peacetime support divided along class lines; while during the war class divisions blurred. Roosevelt's popular support was indeed conditioned by external events, refracted through the interests of different societal groups. We conclude that public support for modern presidents should be similarly studied as the sum of opinions among heterogeneous constituencies.

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The time-series data for this article is available for download as an Excel file here .

Attention has recently focused on the distinctive foreign policies of democracies. We examine the domestic policy consequences of democracy. Building upon a model of the state as a monopoly provider of public services, we hypothesize that democratic states will seek fewer monopoly rents and produce a higher level of public services than autocracies. We also hypothesize that changes in regime type will produce fairly rapid and disproportionate effects on the level of public service provision. We test these hypotheses both cross-sectionally and over time for a variety of public service indicators. The statistical results strongly support our expectations. Democracies indeed provide significantly higher levels of public services, substantial changes in regime type appear to produce disproportionately large effects on public service provision, and the lag between changes in the level of democracy and in the level of public goods appears quite short, suggesting that periods of "democratic transition" may be more rapid than commonly supposed.

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The time-series data for this article is available for download as a zipped Excel file here .

Live televised images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, wounded American prisoners of war paraded in front of video cameras in Iraq, Somalia and Kosovo, while their families were interviewed simultaneously on live television at home and scud missile attacks in Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War have brought foreign policy directly into America's living rooms.  By transforming complex, distant events into entertaining and compelling human dramas, these images have captured the American public's attention to a far greater extent than printed reports, photographs and tape-delayed videos ever could.   The immediate, vivid and sometimes bloody images that can now be transmitted in real time to the American people as a war unfolds make it far more difficult for the public to ignore the very real costs of war.   Scholars and journalists have documented the urgency placed by the Bush Administration during the Gulf War on achieving a quick, decisive victory, lest images of bloody American soldiers, broadcast live into America’s living rooms, erode domestic support for the war.   Simply stated, massive, real-time media coverage of U.S. military actions has become ubiquitous in the 1990s and will likely be factored into all future presidential decisions concerning the use of force.

My project addresses the evolving relationship between the mass media, public opinion and presidential decisionmaking regarding the use of force abroad.   I focus upon a key domestic political variable -- public opinion -- and the media’s role as an intervening variable between public opinion and policy decisionmaking in foreign crises.

Much of the contemporary literature holds that the media does significantly influence public opinion, and public opinion does, at least sometimes, influence policy outcomes.   Yet no theory adequately explains how changes in the media might alter public perceptions of foreign policy, nor how public opinion influences policy decisionmaking.   Have modern media technologies and practices affected Americans' fascination with and tolerance for war?   And will their reactions reduce the willingness of America's leaders to employ military force as a policy tool in the future?   These are the primary questions this dissertation ultimately seeks to answer.

The dissertation is divided into two sections.   In the first section, I challenge the conventional wisdom of an unchanging public.   I argue that past empirical findings that the political awareness of the mass public has been unaffected by the media revolution have failed to capture meaningful changes which have, in fact, occurred and which, by adjusting one’s analytical focus, can be measured.   I attempt to demonstrate that the relationship between the media and the mass public has evolved in the post-World War II era, resulting in an evolution in mass opinion concerning certain high profile political issues — most notably foreign military crises.   Simply stated, I argue that, even as the American public declares itself, in countless opinion polls, to be less concerned with foreign affairs in the Post-Cold War era, the public is nonetheless becoming more attentive to foreign policy crises.  To test my theory, I employ content analyses of media coverage of various military conflicts and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys, using nine distinct data sets, including both cross-sectional and time-series data, to demonstrate trends in public opinion and to relate increases in public attentiveness to foreign crises to the growth and diversification of the mass media.

In the second section, I turn to the implications of this trend for the future management of foreign crises by U.S. Presidents.  I argue that presidents are becoming increasingly constrained by a crisis-galvanized public.   I employ a formal model to develop hypotheses concerning how, and under what circumstances, public attentiveness will influence presidential decisionmaking during foreign crises.   I then, in subsequent chapters, conduct various tests of the model’s predictions, including statistical analyses of all U.S. foreign crises since World War II and a case study of the 1992-94 U.S. humanitarian intervention in Somalia.

For the past 30 years, presidents have enlisted prime-time television to promote their policies to the American people. For most of this era, they have been able to commandeer the national airwaves and speak to "captive" viewers. Recently, however, presidents appear to be losing their audiences. Two leading explanations are the rise of political disaffection and the growth of cable. We investigate both by developing and testing a model of the individual’s viewing decision using both cross-sectional (1996 NES survey) and time-series (128 Nielsen audience ratings for presidential appearances between 1969 and 1998) data. We find that cable television but not political disaffection has ended the golden age of presidential television. Moreover, we uncover evidence that both presidents and the broadcast networks have begun adapting strategically to this new reality in scheduling presidential appearances.

The time-series data for this article is available for download as an Excel file here.