The formation of public opinion toward European integration: political rhetoric, party competition, and individual dispositions.

我建议进行一系列七项政治心理实验，以形成公众对欧洲一体化的看法。我的重点是精英们通过政治修辞和政党竞争对公民态度施加的影响。我还计划研究精英在个人倾向中的影响力如何变化，这些倾向被认为与欧盟相关的公众舆论密切相关，最重要的是国家认同和功利主义。我的实验发现将通过对大规模数据集的额外分析来扩展。现有的研究机构几乎完全依赖于来自民意调查、媒体内容分析和政党宣言编码的此类观察性数据。由于缺乏实验研究，无法得出有效的结论，即观察到的精英特征与大众层面意见之间的关联是自下而上过程(公民推动精英接受某些职位)的结果，还是自上而下的过程(精英操纵公民观点)的结果。一种实验方法允许对因果关系的方向做出有效的推断。一些先前的贡献强调了精英阶层影响公民观点的能力，而另一些则强调了态度稳定性的普遍存在。这个项目试图确定在什么条件下，关于欧盟的公众舆论要么是可塑性的，要么是牢固地植根于个人的处置。实验1和实验4研究了国家认同与不同的欧盟刻画方式之间的相互作用。实验7分析了功利主义对欧盟态度的影响是如何被不同的政党竞争结构所塑造的。实验6测试了功利主义和国家认同感在预测欧盟态度方面的相对显着性。整个项目的一个首要问题是，通过将欧盟态度形成与其他领域进行比较，比之前的工作更明确地对一般民意理论做出贡献。我的研究重点是精英影响力的一些方面，到目前为止，这些方面还没有受到或只有很少的关注。实验4和实验5将欧盟态度的认知加工作为一个完全未触及的话题进行研究。我还考察了以前工作中没有研究过的精英影响力的各种来源，如专家(实验1)、个别政治家(实验2和3)、领导者群体(实验3)和抽象机构(实验3)。在信息内容方面，我侧重于政治解释形式的政治修辞(实验1、2、4、5和6)。现有的绝大多数研究只关注媒体效应，如启动或框定。实验2、3、5和7涉及党派冲突的影响，其基础是对政党政治的更复杂的描述，而不是目前在大规模数据集中可用的那些。

I propose to conduct a series of seven political psychological experiments about the formation of public opinion toward European integration. My focus is on the influence that elites exercise on citizen attitudes through political rhetoric and party competition. I also plan to study how elite influence varies across individual dispositions that are known to be strongly associated with EU related public opinion, most importantly national identity and utilitarianism. My experimental findings will be extended through additional analyses of large scale data sets. The existing body of research relies almost exclusively on such observational data from public opinion surveys, media content analyses, and party manifesto codings. The shortage of experimental studies precludes valid conclusions about whether observed associations between elite characteristics and mass level opinion are the result of a bottom up process (citizens push elites to embrace certain positions) or a top down process (elites manipulate citizen views). An experimental approach allows for valid inferences about the direction of causality.Some prior contributions highlight the ability of elites to influence citizen views, while others emphasize the prevalence of attitudinal stability. This project attempts to determine the conditions under which public opinion about the EU is either malleable or securely rooted in individual dispositions. Experiments 1 and 4 study the interaction of national identity with different ways of portraying the EU. Experiment 7 analyzes how the effect of utilitarianism on EU attitudes is shaped by different configurations of party competition. Experiment 6 offers a test for the relative salience of utilitarianism and national identity in predicting EU attitudes. One overarching concern of the entire project, addressed directly in experiment 5, is to contribute more explicitly than prior work to general public opinion theories by comparing EU attitude formation to other domains. The emphasis of my research is on aspects of elite influence that have so far received no or only little attention. Experiments 4 and 5 study the cognitive processing of EU attitudes as an entirely untouched topic. I also examine various sources of elite influence that have not been studied in prior work, such as experts (experiment 1), individual politicians (experiments 2 and 3), groups of leaders (experiment 3), and abstract institutions (experiment 3). In terms of message content, I focus on political rhetoric in the form of political explanations (experiments 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6). The vast majority of existing research looks only at media effects such as priming or framing. Experiments 2, 3, 5, and 7 are concerned with the effects of partisan conflict, based on more sophisticated portrayals of party politics than those currently available in large scale data sets.