published_or_final_version / Geography / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

<p>Environmental attitudes have interested scholars for decades, but researchers have insufficiently appreciated the low salience of the environment, and the enormous complexity of this issue area. In this dissertation, I investigate how these features influence the way ordinary citizens think about the environment.</p><p>Research into the dynamics of public opinion has found a generic relationship between policy change and public demands for activist government. Yet, less is known about the relationship between policy and attitudes in individual issue areas. In the first chapter, I investigate the influence of a variety of factors on public opinion in a particularly complex policy area---the environment. To study the short-run and long term dynamics of environmental public opinion, I generate an annual metric of environmental attitudes running from 1974 to 2011. Consistent with prior research, I find the economy and major environmental disasters play an important role in aggregate environmental opinion. However, actual policy innovations are found to play only a limited role in attitude formation. Instead, the party label of the president appears to affect demand for environmental activism, when other factors are held constant.</p><p>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 the second chapter, 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 chapter concludes that local support for drilling often arises only after focusing events make the issue salient.</p><p>Previous research into place effects has provided mixed evidence about the effect of geography on public opinion. Much of the work finding a relationship is susceptible to methodological criticisms of spuriouness or endogeneity. In the third chapter, I leverage a unique research design to examine the influence of residential setting on environmental attitudes regarding water use. The findings indicate that local drought conditions increase individuals' level of concern about the nation's water supply. In addition, drought conditions are related to public attitudes towards water use regulation, with those living in drought-afflicted counties more likely to support government regulation. This chapter provides a firm foundation for research attempting to demonstrate that local conditions have a causal effect on public opinion.</p> / Dissertation

With the growing popularity and availability of opinion-rich resources such as social media platforms and networks, new opportunities arise as people can now share their opinions and also seek or understand the opinion of others about a specific topic or event. This growth has fuelled interest in opinion mining which seeks to understand opinions, attitudes, judgements and evaluations with respect to an entity or its aspects. The proliferation of reviews, ratings and online expressions have turned into a valuable asset to businesses seeking to manage their reputation, market their products, or identify new opportunities through opinion analysis. On the side of consumers, opinion mining serves as an information source that can support decision making. In this research, we focus on some fundamental challenges in opinion mining and make three contributions. First, we develop a curated corpus for training and evaluating opinion mining models. This corpus annotates sentiment and topic information at both sentence and review levels. It also captures the sentiment and topic time-variance information of the reviews. We demonstrate through experiments that this dataset supports opinion mining tasks such as contrastive opinion mining, and joint sentence and document level sentiment and topic analysis. As the corpus has a time-variance characteristic, it could also support studies in sentiment/topic dynamic analysis. Second, we propose a model for mining contrastive opinion from textual data (contraLDA). Unlike existing models that require input data to be separated into different collections beforehand, contraLDA models contrastive opinion from both single and multiple text collections. The model can also be flexibly trained in weakly-supervised and fully-supervised settings. In addition, the contraLDA model not only mines contrastive opinion but also quantifies the strength of opinion contrastiveness towards the topic of interest. The contraLDA model extracts relevant sentences related to the topics, making sentiment-bearing topics more interpretable. Third, we present an aspect extraction method which integrates a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm and word embedding model to identify implicit and explicit aspect expressions from texts. Unlike existing systems, the proposed approach also maps aspect expressions to their corresponding aspect categories. This process allows easy identification of sentences about different aspects of a product. We demonstrate that this unsupervised approach is comparable to state-of-the-art models.

Not available

Thesis (PH. D.)--Bryn Mawr college, 1919. / Vita. "Reprinted from the Smith college studies in history, volume V." Bibliography: p. [133]-138. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

This project takes an in-depth look at the role that media coverage of both individual members of Congress and Congress as a whole plays in shaping approval of legislators and the legislative branch. I argue that by examining what the media choose to cover and how the media cover it, we can learn more about the standards by which judgments of political performance take place. As such, I also contend that differences between the tone and substance in which the media cover individual legislators compared to how they cover the legislative branch go a long way to explaining why Americans cast favor upon those they send to Congress and cast doubt on Congress itself. The essential dichotomy examined in the project, based on Thomas Patterson's (1993) assessment of the changing nature of how the mass media cover campaigning, splits reporting on Congress into governing coverage and game coverage. Governing coverage deals more with substantive issues, policy problems, and signals that business is taking place. Game coverage, on the other hand, is more concerned with the parliamentary struggles between actors and parties to pass legislation and accrue power; it treats politicians as strategic actors always competing for advantages. Game coverage also focuses heavily on winning and losing. I argue that the over time focus on either game or governing aspects of legislating and representing will drive assessments of members of Congress and Congress itself. More specifically, I analyze how game frame coverage is likely to spur negative job approval, while governing frame coverage drives positive assessments of job performance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-223).

Thesis (Diplomarbeit)--Universität Konstanz, 2006, under the title: Die Geschichte der Umfrageforschung von den 1930er bis in die 1970er Jahre. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-172).

Thesis--Hamburg. / Lebenslauf. "Literatur-verzeichnis": p. v-ix.