This paper asks: what is the relationship between the mainstream media and blog agendas? To be more precise, this paper tracks media coverage and blog discussion of 35 issues during the 2004 presidential campaign to test the hypothesis that the mainstream media agenda exerts a substantial impact on the blog agenda against the increasingly popular hypothesis that the blog agenda exerts a strong influence on the mainstream media agenda. Using a computer-assisted, quantitative content analysis of ten randomly selected A-list political blogs and 50 randomly selected, less popular political blogs over the five-month period from July 1 to November 30, 2004, the author finds that on the vast majority of issues there was a complex, bidirectional relationship between mainstream media coverage and blog discussion rather than a unidirectional media or blog agenda-setting effect. Copyright 2007 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Despite its widespread use in studies of race and ethnic politics, there exists a long-standing debate about whether racial resentment primarily measures antiblack prejudice or ideological conservatism. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this debate by examining racial resentment’s role in shaping white opinion on a “racialized” policy issue that involves no federal action and no government redistribution of resources: “pay for play” in college athletics. Using cross-sectional and experimental data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we find evidence not only that racial resentment items tap racial predispositions but also that whites rely on these predispositions when forming and expressing their views on paying college athletes. More specifically, we demonstrate that racially resentful whites who were subtly primed to think about African Americans are more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes when compared with similarly resentful whites who were primed to think about whites. Because free-market conservatism, resistance to changes in the status quo, opposition to expanding federal power, and reluctance to endorse government redistributive policies cannot possibly explain these results, we conclude that racial resentment is a valid measure of antiblack prejudice.

"Viral videos"-online video clips that gain widespread popularity when they are passed from person to person via e-mail, instant messages, and media-sharing Web sites-can exert a strong influence on election campaigns. Unfortunately, there has been almost no systematic empirical research on the factors that lead viral videos to spread across the Internet and permeate into the dominant political discourse. This article provides an initial assessment of the complex relationships that drive viral political videos by examining the interplay between audience size, blog discussion, campaign statements, and mainstream media coverage of the most popular online political video of the 2008 campaign-will.i.am's "Yes We Can" music video. Using vector autoregression, I find strong evidence that the relationship between these variables is complex and multidirectional. More specifically, I argue that bloggers and members of the Obama campaign played crucial roles in convincing people to watch the video and in attracting media coverage, while journalists had little influence on the levels of online viewership, blog discussion, or campaign support. Bloggers and campaign members, in other words, seem to occupy a unique and influential position in determining whether an online political video goes viral.

ABSTRACT. This paper makes an initial attempt to situate political blogging alongside other forms of political participation by asking the question: how do political bloggers actually use their blogs? More specifically, this paper relies on a detailed content analysis of 5,000 less popular and 5,000 A-list political blog posts over the course of the 2004 campaign in order to determine whether political bloggers use their blogs primarily as "soapboxes," "transmission belts," "mobilizers," or "conversation starters." The results presented here suggest that although political blogs are used to make opinion statements far more often than they are used to mobilize political action, to request feedback from readers, or to pass along information produced by others, blog use changes significantly in response to key political events. To be more precise, less popular political bloggers were significantly more likely to mobilize political action on Election Day, and all bloggers-regardless of popularity-showed a greater propensity to seek feedback from their readers on the days of the presidential debates and in the weeks immediately following the election. Political blogging, in short, is a complex form of political participation that blends hypertext links, opinionated commentary, calls to political action, and requests for feedback in different ways at different moments in time.

Objective Do the public declarations of religious leaders concerning immigration influence American public opinion on immigration reform? Methods In answering this question, we use the 2004 National Politics Study and employ ordered logistic regression techniques to test hypotheses derived from elite opinion theory. Results We find that exposure to elite messages from religious leaders on immigration leads respondents to more strongly support increasing immigration to the United States, allowing immigrants to serve in the military, and allowing immigrants who serve in the military to gain citizenship. Conclusion Taken together, these results provide evidence that members of America's largest religious denominations are communicating support for liberal immigration reforms to their parishioners and, more importantly, that these signals subsequently influence the preferences of the parishioners exposed to these messages.