Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America

Notes

Notes Chapter 3 1. Before the September 11 attacks, my frame of reference for the clash of rights centered on public housing residents in Chicago, who were forced to sacri- fice certain liberties for greater security from violent drug gangs. This has certainly shaped how I think about the trade-off decision, but more fundamentally , it shows that such values do not only clash in national crises. 2. What we later learned from Jackman (1972) was that the main difference between civic leaders over individual citizens was higher levels of education. Besides this, there was nothing intrinsically different about civic leaders. Sniderman and colleagues (1991) shows that while political elites were not protectors of democracy, as they were more likely than individual citizens to suspend civil liberties on several key issues (see also the work by Gibson and Bingham 1985). 3. This runs counter to research by James Kuklinski and his colleagues (1991) showing that greater reasoning and deliberation does not always produce greater tolerance. 4. However, not all trade-offs are equal, and may involve extremely difficult decisions. Fiske and Tetlock (1997) suggest that taboo trade-offs are very difficult, requiring mental operations that are unfamiliar or violate deeply held emotions. 5. An important distinction in my approach, compared to previous support for abstract democratic principles, is that my abstract support for civil liberties is phrased as tradeoff and value conflict as opposed to support for the specific principle (that is, support for freedom of speech, freedom of religion ), which would elicit greater support. 6. An argument can be made that becauses they were not very useful in helping individuals structure their beliefs about civil liberties the three items that do not load highly on the first factor should be dropped from the index. Although I am sympathetic to such a viewpoint and doing so would result in a single factor with a higher explained variance and scale reliability, the correlation is quite high between an index using the full items and the reduced number of items (r = .96). 7. Respondents had to give valid responses to at least five of the eight civil liberties questions to be included. Lack of response was limited overall, in part 245 because of built-in probes. However, on the last three questions, a series of follow-up experiments led to somewhat larger numbers of respondents electing not to answer. 8. Race and ethnicity were measured with two questions. Ethnicity came first: “Are you of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” Following this came race: “What is your race?” Respondents could have said they were white or Caucasian ,AfricanAmerican or black,Arab or Middle Eastern, Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Asian or Asian American, or American Indian or Alaska Native . Because of the very small number of respondents, the analyses to follow rely on the whites, African Americans, and Latinos. For comparability across groups, only native-born Latinos are used in analyses. In several instances (chapter 4) Latino respondents are excluded from analysis because the smaller number of respondents would produce unreliable estimates. Chapter 4 1. Portions of this chapter appeared in Darren Davis and Brian Silver (2004a). 2. A notable exception is Antonio Damasio (1994), who finds that threat does not interfere with cognitive processing; emotions are considered to help the decision-making process rather than hinder it. Likewise, research by Marcus and MacKuen (1993, 2001) suggest that a heightened level of anxiety is said to improve the quality of decisions by resulting in a more complete search for information. However, the context in which these studies were conducted—regarding presidential candidates that might appear as threatening—seem to tap into a different sense of anxiety than previous studies do. 3. A factor analysis of the personal threat items resulted in a single factor with an eigenvalue of 2.97. Each variable loaded very high on the first factor, with no loading below .72. Cronbach’s alpha is .82. Instead of factor scores, I relied on an additive scale. 4. These data come from a survey that is part of the quarterly State of the State Surveys series in Michigan. The Office of Survey Research at Michigan State University conducted this survey from May 2005 to July 2005. The total number of respondents is 949 with a response rate of 46.4 percent, but the openended threat question was administered to a random half of respondents. 5. Seattle’s Space Needle was speculated to be a target...