ISTPP Director Vedlitz, along with ISTPP Fellows B. Dan Woods and Douglas Oxley, have published their article, “The Effect of Persuasive Messages on Policy Problem Recognition,” in Policy Studies Journal. In this manuscript, the authors extend current theories about how individual behavior leads to policy recognition through an embedded experiment in a national survey. Specifically, they investigate how positive and negative messages about climate change from sources of different credibility influence concern for global warming. They find that people become more concerned about global warming both from receiving negative message and from receiving that message from a source they consider credible. The person’s political ideology affects their perception of credibility of the source. The authors conclude that policy problem recognition has an attitudinal evaluation process component.
This article was based on a research project conducted by ISTPP under a grant awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Douglas R. Oxely, Arnold Vedlitz, and B. Dan Wood. 2014. “The Effect of Persuasive Messages on Policy Problem Recognition.” Policy Studies Journal 42(2): 252–268.. Available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/psj.12058.
