Stanley Feldman

Concerns about political polarization and threats to democratic ideals are on the rise in the US. The Authoritarian Divide takes on both of these issues by showing how authoritarian predispositions--desires for social conformity and in-group conformity--have influenced American political preferences, voting, and partisanship in recent decades. Voters have increasingly sorted into political parties based on their levels of authoritarianism, with higher levels tending toward the Republican Party and lower levels to Democratic. The authors reveal complexities in this trend, including the outsized effect on White Americans, the dependence on parties offering certain types of choices, and the different ways education level factors into the sorting process. Drawing from nationally representative samples, panel data, and experiments, the book demonstrates that authoritarianism has increasingly structured a wide range of attitudes and has become a growing influence on vote choice. The analysis carries crucial implications for partisan conflict and the future of American democracy.

How was the Bush administration able to convince both Congress and the American public to support the plan to go to war against Iraq in spite of poorly supported claims about the danger Saddam Hussein posed? Conventional wisdom holds that, because neither party voiced strong opposition, the press in turn failed to adequately scrutinize the administration's arguments, and public opinion passively followed. Drawing on the most comprehensive survey of public reactions to the war, Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus revisit this critical period and come back with a different story. Not only did the Bush administration's carefully orchestrated campaign fail to raise Republican support for the war, opposition by Democrats and political independents actually increased with exposure to the news. But how we get our news matters: People who read the newspaper were more likely to engage critically with what was coming out of Washington, especially when exposed to the sort of high-quality investigative journalism still being written at traditional newspapers-and in short supply across other forms of media. Making a case for the crucial role of a press that lives up to the best norms and practices of print journalism, the book lays bare what is at stake for the functioning of democracy-especially in times of crisis-as newspapers increasingly become an endangered species.

How was the Bush administration able to convince both Congress and the American public to support the plan to go to war against Iraq in spite of poorly supported claims about the danger Saddam Hussein posed? Conventional wisdom holds that, because neither party voiced strong opposition, the press in turn failed to adequately scrutinize the administration's arguments, and public opinion passively followed. Drawing on the most comprehensive survey of public reactions to the war, Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus revisit this critical period and come back with a different story. Not only did the Bush administration's carefully orchestrated campaign fail to raise Republican support for the war, opposition by Democrats and political independents actually increased with exposure to the news. But how we get our news matters: People who read the newspaper were more likely to engage critically with what was coming out of Washington, especially when exposed to the sort of high-quality investigative journalism still being written at traditional newspapers-and in short supply across other forms of media. Making a case for the crucial role of a press that lives up to the best norms and practices of print journalism, the book lays bare what is at stake for the functioning of democracy-especially in times of crisis-as newspapers increasingly become an endangered species.

The idea that we are one step from calamity is as old as history itself. Every step on the road of progress has been countered by those who think that we should keep to a primitive lifestyle. But despite the fact that they've been proved wrong, the pessimists are undeterred by their abysmal record. Today, industrialisation, GM crops, scientific medicine, nuclear power and the car are held up as harbingers of doom. But will pesticides kill off life in our oceans? Will chemicals in food poison us all and invisible rays from power cables give us cancer? Stanley Feldman, a professor at Imperial College of Medicine, and Vincent Marks, editor of Panic Nation and an expert on diabetes, examine the evidence.

The authors provide a systematic treatment of the major problems involved in using regression analysis. They clearly and concisely discuss the consequences of violating the assumptions of the regression model, procedures for detecting violations, and strategies for dealing with these problems.

A presentation and critique of the use of multiple measures of theoretical concepts to assess both validity, using the multirait-multimethod matrix, and reliablity, using multiple indicators with a path analytic framework.