Despite the growing scientific consensus about the risks of global warming and climate change, the mass media frequently portray the subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate. And yet previous studies of the mass public's subjective assessments of the risks of global warming and climate change have not sufficiently examined public informedness, public confidence in climate scientists, and the role of personal efficacy in affecting global warming outcomes. By examining the results of a survey on an original and representative sample of Americans, we find that these three forces-informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy-are related in interesting and unexpected ways, and exert significant influence on risk assessments of global warming and climate change. In particular, more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. These results have substantial implications for the interaction between scientists and the public in general, and for the public discussion of global warming and climate change in particular.

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Economic conditions, the story usually goes, influence consumer confidence, which in turn influences both political evaluations and votes. But we have little sense of the origins of consumer confidence itself. It is generally assumed that monthly reports of the nation's level of consumer confidence respond to objective economic conditions. We argue that politics is important for understanding consumer sentiment beyond what we know from economic conditions. Specifically, we demonstrate a direct effect of political evaluations of the president's management of the economy, the party of the president, extraordinary political events, and monetary policy, as well as an indirect effect of media coverage of the economy, on consumer sentiment, after controlling for economic conditions. When news coverage is positive, citizens give favorable evaluations, leading to more positive sentiment. Our findings suggest that understanding the political economy requires an emphasis on the causal effect of politics as well as economics.

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This article presents evidence that both micro (individual level) and macro (aggregate level) theories of public opinion overstate the importance of political sophistication for opinion change. It is argued that even the least politically sophisticated segment of society receives messages about the economy and uses this information to update attitudes about political issues. To test this hypothesis, the authors have used General Social Survey data to construct a 31-item measure of policy mood, disaggregated by political sophistication, that spans from 1972 to 2004. They found that all the subgroups generally changed opinion at the same time, in the same direction, and to about the same extent. Furthermore, they show that groups at different sophistication levels change opinions for predominantly the same reasons.