Multi-Investigator Study of the Dynamics of Political Preferences

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This project engages the study of the dynamics of political preferences through the vehicle of a large multi-investigator cooperative survey. Thirteen research teams and twenty investigators are drawn together under the umbrella of this "group" project to conduct a series of experiments within a single national probability survey. Experiments focus on uncertainty and ambivalence as sources of response variability; the role of issue salience in immunizing individuals against persuasive messages; judgments about the fairness of racial representation as a function of group conflict and racial attributions; the connection between preferences for policies to help disadvantaged groups and perceptions of the social conditions of those groups; the role of political institutions in shaping the dynamics of persuasion; the group specific character of political tolerance; the framing of issues by elites; the impact of public mood and emotional awareness of policy judgments; the dynamics of candidate credibility and persuasion in campaigns; the interplay of issue framing and deliberation; the connection between situational threats and tolerance; the interaction of social conditions, value priorities, and issue salience in conditioning egalitarian commitments; and the disentangling of opinion, non-opinion, and guessing. Each component study is independently conceived and executed. But the component studies all make contributions to the cumulative impact of the overall study. The multi-investigator survey provides a means for the cost-efficient implementation of a large number of research projects within the scope of a common survey instrument and serves as a model for collaboration among scholars.