Politics

Since the 1980s, the mass media have changed the way they cover major political stories, like foreign policy crises, and, as a consequence, in what the public learns and believes about these events. More media outlets cover major political events than in...

Democracy requires that citizens’ opinions play some role in shaping policy outcomes, including in foreign policy. Yet, while the literature on public opinion and foreign policy has made great progress over the past several decades, scholars have reached...

Research has shown that human beings are biased information processors. This study investigates an important potential example of biased information processing: when ex ante assessments of a media outlet’s ideological orientation “cause” individual’s to...

Scholars have long recognized that public support for presidential uses of military force depends critically on elite support. Similarly, scholars have argued that the media “index” their coverage of foreign policy to reflect the responses of partisan...

Research has shown that messages of intra-party harmony tend to be ignored by the news media, while internal disputes, especially within the governing party, generally receive prominent coverage. We examine how messages of party conflict and cooperation...

For leaders to generate credibility through audience costs, there must be mechanisms in place that enable citizens to learn about foreign policy failures. However, scholars have paid relatively little attention to variations among democracies in the...

Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? War and Democratic Constraint shows...