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Political Behavior

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01.03.2014 | Original Paper

Focusing Events and Public Opinion: Evidence from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

verfasst von: Bradford H. Bishop

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 1/2014

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Abstract

Scholarly research has found a weak and inconsistent role for self-interest in public opinion, and mixed evidence for a relationship between local pollution risks and support for environmental protection. In this study, I argue that focusing events can induce self-interested responses from people living in communities whose economies are implicated by the event. I leverage a unique 12-wave panel survey administered between 2008 and 2010 to analyze public opinion toward offshore oil drilling before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I find that residence in counties highly dependent upon the offshore drilling industry was predictive of pro-drilling attitudes following the spill, though not prior to the spill. In addition, there is no significant evidence that residence in a county afflicted by the spill influenced opinion. This study concludes that local support for drilling often arises only after focusing events make the issue salient.

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Figure taken from a CBS/NYT poll that was in the field between April 20 and 24, 2007. Results are weighted based on a national sample of 1,052 adults. Obtained from Roper iPoll on 12/31/2011.

Figure taken from a Gallup poll in the field between March 3 and 6, 2011. Results are weighted based on a national sample of 1,021 adults. Obtained from Roper iPoll on 12/31/2011.

This generalization about environmental opinion nicely complements Wlezien (1995), who argues mass opinion responds to policy changes in a “thermostatic” fashion. Enactment of liberal policies is associated with more conservative mood, and conservative policies are associated with more liberal mood. See also Erikson et al. (2002).

Examples of people fitting this category might include residents of New England who suffer from air pollution caused by coal-fired power plants operating in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The present study is unable to assess this residential proximity effect, as the Gulf spill affected a small geographic area where the offshore oil drilling industry does not exist. Consequently, the survey I examine below sampled only a few individuals who lived in counties affected by pollution but not industry—not enough to make valid inferences about this type of residential proximity effect. The influence of pollution on the policy attitudes of people whose economies are not dependent on the source of the pollution is an understudied area of public opinion and warrants future attention.

The full report is available at http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/final-report. The preceding quotations are drawn from Part II of the report.

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This plot relies on data obtained using the Google Insight service, http://www.google.com/insights/search/. I downloaded weekly data and generated monthly estimates before creating the plot shown in Fig. 1. Values have been suppressed on the Y-axis to avoid reader confusion, as Google Insight provides an index to measure search activity rather than a raw count of searches.

Survey marginals were obtained using Roper’s iPoll database, downloaded 1–4–12.

No single survey item was asked at frequent intervals through the Deepwater Horizon crisis, but different pollsters measured support for offshore oil drilling using items with slightly different question wordings. I collected responses to these items using Roper’s iPoll database, and then employed the dyadic ratios algorithm (Stimson 1999) to aggregate these survey responses into a monthly time series running between April 2009 and December 2011. The resulting measure can be roughly interpreted as the percent of the public reporting opposition to offshore oil drilling.

Recall that the survey item which serves as the dependent variable offered four response options. I also analyzed the dependent variable using an ordered logit model, and obtained analogous results to those reported here. However, proportional-odds tests indicated a violation of the parallel regression assumption, which could lead to inferential errors when interpreting the coefficients. I explored more flexible generalized linear models (e.g., multinomial logit) and reached conclusions analogous to those reported here. To simplify the discussion, I chose to recode the dependent variable as a two-category response, which captures the underlying logic of the survey item while (probably) suppressing some useful variation across the ordered categories. I include means and standard deviations for all variables in Appendix.

Residence in affected counties was coded “1,” and “0” otherwise.

This variable is coded in the same fashion as the preceding place variable. I include a list of such counties in the Appendix. Briefly, the offshore oil drilling industry exists in the Gulf of Mexico from the Alabama–Florida border extending west to the southern tip of Texas. Additional offshore drilling currently takes place on a limited basis in southern California (centered off Santa Barbara County) and on a widespread basis in several locations in Alaska. For practical and legal reasons, no drilling is currently done along the Florida coast, the eastern seaboard, or the west coast north of Santa Barbara. Drilling is not permitted in the Great Lakes states, though some directional drilling is currently legal in Michigan. Data is drawn from the Minerals Management Service, http://www.boemre.gov/mmshome.htm.

This data was released by the OES in May 2010.

This measure includes the following categories, contained within the major category “Construction and Extraction Occupations”: “Derrick Operators, Oil and Gas” (47-5012), “Rotary Drill Operators, Oil and Gas” (47-5013), and “Roustabouts, Oil and Gas” (47-5071). Several other occupations are related to the oil industry, such as “Service Unit Operators, Oil, Gas, and Mining” and “Helpers-Extraction Workers,” but these categories capture other extraction operations such as mining.

Summary statistics for all variables used in the analysis are presented in the Appendix.

A “latent” factor score of news exposure based upon these items was also generated and included in the models discussed below. The results were identical to those reported below.

Democrats are coded “1,” Independents “2,” and Republicans “3.”

“Very liberal” is coded “1,” while “Very conservative” is coded “5.” The middle category is “moderate,” which is coded “3.”

Question wordings and coding decisions for all variables included in the analysis are listed in the Appendix.

All analyses are conducted using survey items posed in an identical format.

Standard errors are clustered by state of residence.

More specifically, the simulations assume the following values: Party ID “Independent,” Ideology “Moderate,” Environment Importance roughly halfway between “Moderately Important” and “Very Important,” Economy Importance halfway between “Very Important” and “Extremely Important,” Gas Price Importance slightly above “Very Important,” Age 47, Sex “male,” Race “non-black,” Income “$40,000–$50,000,” Education “Some College,” non-resident of a spill county.

Result obtained at Roper’s iPoll databank. The Gallup Poll which asked this particular question was in the field between March 19-21, 1999.

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Titel: Focusing Events and Public Opinion: Evidence from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
verfasst von: Bradford H. Bishop
Publikationsdatum: 01.03.2014
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 1/2014
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9223-7

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