Public Opinion

Ubiquitous access to internet has resulted in more and more people going online to get their daily dose of news. In a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 41% of the respondents said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. A lot of socio-technical factors have contributed to this phenomenal rise in adoption of online news in recent years. One of the biggest reasons why people are increasingly reading news online is because it facilitates discussion with peers (Nguyen 2010), offering different viewpoints which aid in forming a rounded personal opinion about the news story. The Pew survey found that 37% of online news users (and 51% of 18-29 year olds) think that commenting on news stories is an important feature to have. A lot of people tend to shape their opinion by reading discussion comments, reflective articles, blogs and even tweets about the news. Hence, an increasing number of people rely on online sources of news – be it news websites or news aggregator services like Digg, Reddit, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse etc. The problem with these news websites and aggregators is that the only way people can gather public opinion is by actively searching through the endless stream of comments and feeds, filtering out spam (which is a growing problem) and then reading the relevant posts. A top trending story on Twitter will typically see multiple tweets per second, and keeping up with the rapid flow of incoming tweets is quite cumbersome and cognitively taxing. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming for someone who wants to get the pulse of the people affected by a news story. Furthermore, in certain scenarios people might want to look at more fine grained opinions. Currently, there is no elegant way to extract geographic and demographic impact of a news story. What is the public sentiment in Indonesia about the Arab Spring? How did the public opinion about the Wikileaks disclosures change as the story unfolded during the course of a year? It is very difficult and tedious to observe such patterns using the currently available news providers. This work attempts to solve these problems by proposing a news aggregator platform which pulls news stories from various sources and also aggregates public responses, reflections, opinions and sentiments associated with those stories. This data is presented in ways that are easily understandable so readers can make better sense of the stories unfolding across the globe. Such a news aggregator platform that gathers and display public opinion and sentiments about a story, must deal with various challenges – 1. Opinions are very subjective. Different people feel about a story in different ways. With such an enormous amount of diverse opinions and subjectivity, how can we possibly aggregate the responses into something that makes sense as a whole? ________________________________ Acknowledgements: Prof. Yardi, S. for the guidance Sethi, P. (2013). Public opinion aggregation by annotation and tagging of online news stories. iConference 2013 Proceedings (pp. 891-894). doi:10.9776/13453 Copyright is held by the author. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 892 2. There isn’t really a unified web standard for expressing opinion (in textual form). Some people tweet in 140 characters, while others write elaborate blog posts. Some websites employ tags which a reader can use to define and classify their public opinion, while others rely on threaded comments and comment ranking systems. How can a platform be flexible enough to adapt to all these varied standards so that it can extract valuable data from various sources? Perhaps the platform can create a new standard of expression on the web which is flexible and comprehensive enough to be used to express diverse views about every news story in the world. 3. How to filter out spam while extracting public opinion? 4. Once the platform has access to the data it needs, how should it be displayed to the reader in a way that makes sense? What forms of visualizations, illustrations and graphical representations can be employed to give the reader a holistic view of how people feel about a story? 5. How can the platform determine and convey effects of geographical, demographic and temporal variations as the story unfolds? These are just a few out of possibly many issues which must be dealt with. Previous research on similar public opinion aggregation services has greatly focused on natural language processing, data mining and text categorization and clustering. Xiaojun (2010) proposed a framework for crawling the web for comments and applying various data mining algorithms on the data to extract relevant information. Diakopoulos and Shamma (2010) used tweets posted in conjunction with the live presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain to gauge public opinion. Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) studied the use of word lengthening to detect sentiment in microblogs. This research proposes a solution – The Opinionated Reader, which relies on sentiment tags and annotations associated with a news story. The essential idea is to create a commenting, discussion and sharing plug-in which can be used by news websites and aggregators as a commenting solution for their news pages. Users wanting to share or comment on a news story through the plug-in are asked to tag the news story with sentiment tags and annotate the story with their reaction (happy/positive or sad/negative). These tags and annotations are stored, aggregated and linked to each news story. A mobile application provides the front-end interface for users to access the news stories and the aggregated sentiment associated with each story. The basic architecture is explained as follows: The Opinionated Reader – Mobile/Tablet App The app fetches news articles from various web sources, based on the interests and preferences configured by the user. In every news article, a portion of the screen real estate is reserved for Opinions which shows graphical visualizations and illustrations of the public opinion surrounding the news story. These visualizations include: A Sentiment Graph indicating the popular tags associated with the story (E.g.: “Shocking”, “Inspiring”, “Amusing” etc.). See Figure 1 for example visualization. A Positivity Graph which plots the level of positivity associated with the story on a time scale from when the news broke. See Figure 2 for example visualization. Figure 1. Example Sentiment Graph Figure 2. Example Positivity Graph iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 893 The user can choose to see these visualizations for a particular time period in the evolution history of the news story, or for a specific country. The app also facilitates people to tag and annotate news articles from within its interface. The Opinionated Reader – Commenting and Sharing Web Plug-in These days, a common way of adding discussion and commenting functionality to news websites is by using 3 rd party services (like DISQUS). The Opinionated Reader is a similar service which can be embedded into the news articles of various news websites to enable commenting and sharing. When someone wishes to comment on an article, the comment is directed through this plug-in, which allows the users to annotate the article with the sentiment tags and reactions along with their comments. The Opinionated Reader saves this information along with the commenter’s location and date of comment (See Figure 3). Figure 3. The Opinionated Reader Web Plug-in 'Add Comment' dialog mockup The Opinionated Reader – Back-end The Back-end maintains a database of news items extracted from RSS feeds of various news websites. Each news article is linked with the sentiment tags and reaction/positivity annotations extracted from the comments and annotations gathered by the commenting plug-in. This data is used by the mobile/tablet app to generate visualizations (Sentiment Graph and Positivity Graph). The back-end also performs data mining on the tags and annotations for geographies and tracks the opinions across time. The back end system responds to queries received from the mobile app with the news story and associated tags and annotations, which are then rendered by the mobile app for the user. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 894 Discussion and Conclusion This design idea is still in a nascent state and has long hours of research, brainstorming, designing and development to go before it can be realized into something tangible. Twitter has grown exponentially in importance as a news source and it would be vastly valuable to integrate Twitter with The Opinionated Reader. Possibilities include use of special hash tags and natural language processing of tweets to extract public sentiment. The current design supports only two reaction annotations – positive and negative. Not every news story fits this annotation paradigm. Further research about human reactions to news stories might unveil interesting insights which would help zero in on a more robust annotation rubric. Lastly, since this service is envisioned to be non-curated and non-moderated, the value served by the app depends on the users themselves. Greater adoption will lead to more annotations and tags, which translates into a more accurate public opinion as presented to the user.

Objective: Legislation is an effective strategy for reducing road-related fatalities and injuries. Public opinion can be an impetus for passing new laws and can affect the success of their implementation, but little is known about the current state of public opinion toward existing and proposed road-related policies in the United States. This review describes the scope and results of research on public support for state- and local-level evidence-based motor vehicle– and bicycle-related policies. We identify gaps in our understanding of public support for these policies. Methods: Published U.S. literature and all reports from the NHTSA from the past decade (2003–2012) were searched for data on opinions about existing or proposed policies related to motor vehicle or bicycle injury prevention. Twenty-six studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In all, studies reported public opinion about 7 injury prevention topic areas: all-terrain vehicles (n = 1), automated enforcement with red light and speed cameras (n = 5), distracted driving (n = 4), drinking and driving (n = 5), graduated driver licensing (n = 7), helmets (n = 7), and seat belts (n = 4). Twenty-three studies focused only on one topic, and 3 sought public opinion about multiple topic areas. Results: The studies revealed generally high levels of support for injury prevention policies in all topic areas. Fifteen studies collected information from national samples, and only 7 studies reported data from the state (n = 5) or local (n = 2) level. Conclusions: There is a relatively small evidence base on public opinion related to motor vehicle– and bicycle-related evidence-based policies; even less is less known for state- or county-specific policies. The findings of this review suggest that the public's opinion toward injury prevention legislation is generally favorable. This information can be used to communicate with the media and policy makers to reinforce the need for effective policy solutions to continuing motor vehicle injury problems. More research is needed to understand the perspectives of those who do not hold favorable opinions, to understand opinions toward local or state-level policies, and to monitor trends in public opinion over time. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Traffic Injury Prevention to view the supplemental file.

Book Reviews 669 Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process. By Susan Herbst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; pp. χ + 256. $16.00. Following her much acclaimed 1993 book, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling has Shaped American Politics, Susan Herbst seeks to broaden our conceptions of public opinion and its role in democratic governance. She goes beyond simple public opinion polling to consider the many ways in which political professionals and activists assess and understand citizens' preferences. Through depth interviews and surveys, she analyzes the "lay theories" of the politically active and reveals how polled opinions play only a minor role in democratic policy making. Herbst draws from a wide range of past scholarship, including early studies of public opinion and group formation, postmodern theories, cultural studies, political science, and communications in order to lay the foundation for her argument that public opinion is socially constructed and affected by institutions, technology, and political culture. In contrast to much of the experimentally based literature on political cognition which fails to take account of culture, language, and experience, Reading Public Opinion employs a rhetorical psychological approach and depth interviews which clearly demonstrate the pragmatic ways political actors evaluate public opinion. Herbst's data come from a case study of Illinois state government. She conducted depth interviews with 44 working political professionals and party activists: legislative staff members, reporters who covered the Illinois capitol, and Illinois delegates to the 1996 Democratic and Republican party conventions. These rich qualitative data were supplemented with a survey of 528 convention delegates from across the United States. Using interpretive methods for querying her informants and analyzing their discourse , Herbst convincingly demonstrates the sharply contrasting views of public opinion held by these three differently situated groups of participants in the policymaking process. For the staff members interviewed in this study, two indicators of public opinion were particularly relevant: interest group communications and the content of the mass media. The journalists, on the other hand, talked about public opinion in terms of interpersonal dialogue and conversations with citizens. The party activists relied on yet another conception of public opinion and were more comfortable with public opinions expressed through polls and through conversations with friends and acquaintances. Drawing on the language of her informants, Herbst adeptly demonstrates how one's location in the social and political world constrains the ways in which public opinion is constructed. Her informants view public opinion in very pragmatic, instrumental terms that are shaped by their professional roles. For example, staffers discuss public opinion in terms of "which segments of the public will react to a legislative maneuver and how such reactions will become manifest" (153). Public opinion , as measured by polls, is not particularly useful. Polls are not conducted 670 Rhetoric & Public Affairs regularly on statewide issues. Moreover, polls capture only a fleeting snapshot of the public mood and fail to communicate the intensity, directional dynamic, and organization of opinion which are necessary to formulate politically successful policy. Interest groups and journalists are far better situated to articulate public sentiments for staff members because they are informed, accessible, and perceived as able to persuade an otherwise amorphous and indifferent public. Interestingly, staff members rely on interest groups and media to convey public opinion despite their acknowledged biases. Staffers think of themselves as knowledgeable enough to "'see through' media bias and still glean some useful data about public opinion" (72). The political roles of journalists and party activists are quite different from those of legislative staff members, as are their conceptions of public opinion. Herbst argues, however, that understanding each actor's position in the democratic process explains the observed variations in definitions of public opinion. Journalists' views of public opinion as conversation with citizens/readers fit in with their anti-authority bias in political coverage. Party activists see public opinion as aggregations of individual opinions either through conversations or polling. The activists' disregard for interest group and media related expressions of public opinion is completely consistent with their roles as delegates representing citizens' opinions to the political leadership of their respective parties. Although convention delegates' views on public opinion are interesting to examine and help to broaden the inquiry beyond the...

William D. Nordhaus: In a democracy, one might suppose, the decisions of elected politicians are to some extent influenced by public opinion. This is the motivation for the question, which Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger address in this paper, of how public opinion and, specifically, public opinion about economic affairs is determined. Blinder and Krueger investigate the state of economic knowledge and preferences among the general public by tracking down a random sample and asking them a battery of fact questions (to determine their knowledge), personal questions (to determine their self-interest), and economic policy questions (to see where they stand on the issues of the day). No one should be surprised to learn that the authors have gone about this task in a thoughtful manner and have produced many interesting findings. The survey has been carefully administered, and the response rate is high. My comments will raise a number of questions about their questions, which leave me thinking that survey research is even harder than I originally imagined. To begin with, one might ask whether the respondents behave like the textbook homo economicus classicus. Somewhere, someone probably believes that economic policy opinions are formed by continuous-time maximization of a consistent preference function maximizing the present value of the utility of consumption using Bayesian updating in light of the constant inflow of data from the Internet, several televisions tuned to the financial channels, and a live feed from the Brookings Panel. But anyone who still entertains that notion will quickly discard it after reading this paper. What do we learn about the public's economic opinions? In reality, public opinions about the economy in a democracy are the outcome of a very complex process in which people try to sort through conflicting accounts and theories, often provided by unreliable narrators. The news contains much factual reporting (including the Dow Jones average to seven significant digits), but very little analytical reporting. Analyses are often shaded by political motives (if by public figures), by profit motives (if by companies), or by desire for publicity (if by private individuals). Even a good news source such as PBS's Jim Lehrer NewsHour feels it has to present a point of view, where balanced means someone is there to defend supply-side economics. Americans report that, of all professions, they trust nurses most and car salesmen and HMO managers least. (1) Canadians report that they trust pharmacists most and national politicians least (only 9 percent of Canadians trust the latter). (2) Yet people get much of their economic knowledge from national politicians and little from nurses and pharmacists. I suspect that most people view getting economic information somewhat akin to extracting a referral from their HMO. Given the difficulties of knowing whom to trust and the contentiousness of most policy discussions, it would not be surprising if the public is confused at best and ill informed at worst. How do Blinder and Krueger attack this issue? They administer a battery of nine fact questions to see how their respondents have sorted through the varieties of conflicting opinions. I admit that I found some of the questions vaguely unsatisfying, partly because recall of numerical facts is not identical with sound economic analysis. In addition, I found myself constantly worrying about the questions. For example, on taxes the question was About what percentage of the American family's income do you think goes to paying taxes--including all levels of government? This is actually a very hard question. Does typical mean median or average or what the respondent thinks is a nuclear family? Should I be economically sophisticated and include production taxes and business taxes in the numerator, as a good public finance theorist would recommend and a good Chicago economist would predict? …

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a large, initially uncontrollable, public health crisis both in the United States and across the world, with experts looking to vaccines as the ultimate mechanism of defense. The development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines have been rapidly advancing via global efforts. Hence, it is crucial for governments, public health officials, and policy makers to understand public attitudes and opinions towards vaccines, such that effective interventions and educational campaigns can be designed to promote vaccine acceptance.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate public opinion and perception on COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. We investigated the spatiotemporal trends of public sentiment and emotion towards COVID-19 vaccines and analyzed how such trends relate to popular topics found on Twitter.MethodsWe collected over 300,000 geotagged tweets in the United States from March 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021. We examined the spatiotemporal patterns of public sentiment and emotion over time at both national and state scales and identified 3 phases along the pandemic timeline with sharp changes in public sentiment and emotion. Using sentiment analysis, emotion analysis (with cloud mapping of keywords), and topic modeling, we further identified 11 key events and major topics as the potential drivers to such changes.ResultsAn increasing trend in positive sentiment in conjunction with a decrease in negative sentiment were generally observed in most states, reflecting the rising confidence and anticipation of the public towards vaccines. The overall tendency of the 8 types of emotion implies that the public trusts and anticipates the vaccine. This is accompanied by a mixture of fear, sadness, and anger. Critical social or international events or announcements by political leaders and authorities may have potential impacts on public opinion towards vaccines. These factors help identify underlying themes and validate insights from the analysis.ConclusionsThe analyses of near real-time social media big data benefit public health authorities by enabling them to monitor public attitudes and opinions towards vaccine-related information in a geo-aware manner, address the concerns of vaccine skeptics, and promote the confidence that individuals within a certain region or community have towards vaccines.

For all their faults, public opinion polls are of great importance to public policymaking, especially on issues that are highly visible and controversial. In the context of capital punishment, researchers have repeatedly documented the strong relationship that exists among public, judicial, and legislative opinion. During the past two decades, popular public opinion poll results in the United States have shown considerable growth in the support of capital punishment. Although criticized as grossly overly simplistic, these polls are often employed to show that legislative and judicial decision making is “grounded” in consensual public opinion. A number of studies have questioned the validity of opinion polls as measures of attitudes on this issue—with apparent support for capital punishment dropping precipitously when alternative options, such as life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole, are provided. The present article suggests that we are misinterpreting poll information in a more basic way—by effectively dissuading a “no opinion“ response through the use of a standard “no filter” question format. Even without providing additional information or alternatives to respondents, the present research suggests that reliance on standard questions that simply seek a favor/oppose response can overestimate support for and opposition to the death penalty. More important, the number of people with no clear opinion on this issue can almost double, simply by employing a different question format. Put simply, one of the most important determinants of public opinion on the death penalty is the way in which we pose the question.

Health Care and Public Opinion

Evolution mechanism and influencing factors of multidimensional public opinion dissemination from the perspective of game theory

In the context of the new era, teachers and students in colleges and universities, as well as the general public, rely more on the Internet and social media to obtain news, express their opinions, and share information, and the dissemination of public opinion events in colleges and universities is not only related to the physical and mental health of teachers and students but also to the reform and development of colleges and universities. In this study, we took campus public opinion events as the main research object in which we selected three recent campus public opinion events to be analyzed. The public opinion data used in the research was collected from Weibo social media platforms. Firstly, we analyzed the dissemination cycle and regional dissemination patterns of a college food safety public opinion hot event through the popularity and regional distribution of public opinion data, thus revealing its formation and evolution patterns. Secondly, the LDA topic mining method is used to mine the themes of the three hot public opinion events, and then analyze the hot factors of the dissemination of each public opinion event from the massive public opinion data. This is crucial for the management department to grasp the dynamics of public opinion. Then, we used the SKEP sentiment classification method to analyze the emotional factors of the public opinion data of the three events to obtain the overall public opinion sentiment situation of the events. Finally, based on the characteristics of time, region, and gender, the evolution and diffusion rules of public topics and emotional distribution under different types of events are analyzed. The precision of the analyses associated with this paper may be limited to the effects of current mainstream as well as state-of-the-art analytical models. The analysis methods and conclusions in this paper provide a scientific theoretical basis and improvement measures for campus public opinion management, which helps to enhance the level of campus public opinion management and safeguard campus stability and public order.

Social media platforms have become a major tool for information dissemination, political communication, and political civic discussion nowadays. However, the prompt transmission of fake news and misinformation on Facebook has raised severe concerns about public trust and opinion formation. This study examines the proliferation of fake news on Facebook and its impact on individuals' trust levels and perception in Punjab, Pakistan. By employing Agenda-Setting Theory and the Two-Step Flow Model of Communication, the research conceptualizes misinformation as a mediated influence that shapes the prominence of an issue and public attitude through opinion leaders and AI-driven visibility. A quantitative research design was employed using a random sampling survey administered to 100 respondents, including faculty and administrative staff members and students of the University of Gujrat (Hafiz Hayat Campus), and individuals from different educational backgrounds from different areas of Punjab, Pakistan. The study further integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based verification of content/news to cross-check and identify patterns in misinformation dissemination, thereby linking advanced technological intervention with Communication Theory. The findings of this research study reveal a significant relationship among exposure to fake news on Facebook, changes in opinion formation, and reduced trust. The study enriches the current body of literature on social media, Public Opinion, Misinformation, Agenda-Setting, and Digital Trust in developing countries.

Law is one of the social sciences and a field that citizens most frequently encounter in their daily lives. Despite this, legal research methods are primarily limited to literature reviews, and it is challenging to find quantitative research methods such as surveys that meticulously capture and reflect the thoughts, opinions, and intentions of the public. Legal scholars may believe that their thoughts and opinions sufficiently represent those of the public, but this can be considered intellectual arrogance. Since the overall thoughts and opinions of the public are constantly changing, laws must be created or interpreted based on frequent and comprehensive understanding of these changes. Only then will the public accept and respect the law. Of course, introducing surveys as a legal research method does not mean that all legal issues can be resolved solely based on survey results. Adjustments must be made considering the specialized theories of law and fairness with other issues. However, the current research methods that do not reflect the public's opinions at all must be improved. For this to happen, scholars and practitioners of law need to explain legal terms in simple and clear language so that the general public can understand them. Then, they should ask the public for their opinions on these explanations. Additionally, law must be approached and understood as a field accessible to everyone. The current research methods, which make law seem inaccessible to the general public through complex and difficult terminology and explanations, are both arrogant and inefficient. Legal research methods need to become more democratic and open. The public should be able to think and deliberate on legal issues so that the law can be democratic, reasonable, and truly authoritative. This way, the law can become more approachable, gaining trust and acceptance from the public. Moreover, the introduction of surveys in legal research goes beyond merely collecting public opinions; it can serve as a crucial means of developing law as a ‘science.’ Surveys systematically collect and analyze the opinions and experiences of various social groups, providing empirical evidence for legal research. This significantly contributes to enhancing the validity and acceptability of the law. Quantitative data obtained through surveys play a critical role in analyzing the correlations and causalities between social phenomena. These data, combined with advanced statistical techniques, can offer precise interpretations of social phenomena. For example, statistically analyzing the impact of a specific law after its enactment can evaluate the law's effectiveness. This approach goes beyond mere textual or theoretical analysis, enabling a concrete understanding of the law's role and impact through actual social outcomes. Even though law has normative characteristics, these norms must be based on reality, requiring the reflection of the public's actual thoughts and behaviors. Surveys allow legal scholars to verify abstract theories within concrete and realistic contexts. By collecting and analyzing diverse public opinions, legal research can yield more objective and reliable results. This process aids in making more reasonable and fair decisions during the enactment, amendment, interpretation, and application of laws. For instance, by investigating public perceptions of actions on the boundary between crime and non-crime, the alignment of legal norms with reality can be evaluated. Additionally, surveys are essential for understanding the various issues addressed by law within social and cultural contexts. By systematically collecting and analyzing public opinions, legal research can adopt a more comprehensive and multifaceted perspective. This enables the law to respond more sensitively to social changes and demands, enhancing its legitimacy and effectiveness. Consequently, surveys can play a vital role in developing law into a more scientific disci

Introduction: the article considers ultra-liberal, ultra-radical and realistic views on the punishment of persons convicted of economic (business) crimes and malfeasance in office. The article analyzes public and professional opinion on this problem using the results of specific sociological studies conducted in 2018–2019 by Tkachevsky Research and Education Center “Problems of Penal Law” under Lomonosov Moscow State University. Research materials and methods: the research is based on the application of the specific sociological research method. The materials for our research include the results of the study of public and professional opinion on the punishment of those convicted of economic crimes and malfeasance in office, and on the places and conditions of their imprisonment. Empirical research includes surveys of three types of respondents: citizens of the Russian Federation; persons convicted of economic crimes and malfeasance in office who are serving sentences in correctional institutions; correctional officers. We also investigate proposals on sending the convicts under consideration to correctional institutions located in remote regions of Russia, and the prospects for the construction and opening of so-called private prisons for them. We analyze the practice of keeping persons convicted of economic crimes and malfeasance in office together with other categories of convicts. Results: we conclude that the public and professionals do not tend to hold extreme positions (ultra-liberal or ultra-radical) in the punishment of persons convicted of economic crimes and malfeasance in office. The public and professionals assess quite realistically the criminal policy of the state and judicial practice at the present stage of the state's development and allow, within certain limits, the application of punishment in the form of imprisonment to economic and official criminals. We emphasize that both categories of respondents (citizens and convicts) are more inclined to use imprisonment in relation to persons who have committed malfeasance in office than to those who committed economic crimes. We argue that public opinion is dissatisfied with the fact that persons convicted of malfeasance in office and economic crimes are kept together with other categories of convicts. There is no such dissatisfaction in the professional opinion: the majority of interviewed correctional officers do not support the idea of sending those convicted of economic crimes and malfeasance in office to separate correctional institutions. We put forward a proposal concerning the implementation of the idea that persons convicted of economic crimes and malfeasance in office should be held in separate correctional institutions in the course of modernization provided for by the Concept for development of the penal system of the Russian Federation until 2030, which consists in opening joint correctional institutions.

Reviewed by: Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Smoking: The Transformation of American Attitudes and Cigarette Use, 1890–2016 by Thomas R. Marshall Mark Parascandola Thomas R. Marshall. Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Smoking: The Transformation of American Attitudes and Cigarette Use, 1890–2016. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. xiii + 209 pp. Ill. $85.00 (978-1-4985-0432-4). The rise and subsequent fall of tobacco use in the United States ranks among both history’s greatest public health disasters and its greatest victories. But how informed were Americans about the health risks of cigarette smoking? How have their awareness and attitudes changed over this time period? And how much have these attitudes been reflected in public policies to control tobacco use? [End Page 215] In Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Smoking, Thomas R. Marshall, professor of political science at the University of Texas–Arlington, draws on over half a century of public opinion polling to understand the evolution of Americans’ attitudes toward tobacco. Changing public opinion, he argues, was a key driving force in decreasing tobacco use and advancing tobacco control policies. Mass public opinion polling emerged just in time to capture the publicity over cigarette smoking and cancer in the mid-twentieth century. Since the late 1940s, American pollsters have asked over five thousand poll questions on smoking and health. The shift was gradual but persistent. The proportion of Americans who believed that smoking was a cause of lung cancer increased steadily, from 43 percent in 1954 to 62 percent in 1964, 70 percent in 1972, and 91 percent in 2013 (p. 51). “In magnitude,” Marshall suggests, “these belief changes are among the largest ever reported in modern survey research” (p. 51), comparable to changes in attitudes around racial segregation or same-sex marriage. The one event that did have an immediate, measurable impact on Americans’ beliefs (if not on their tobacco use habits) was the release of the 1964 report of the Surgeon General on “Smoking and Health.” The proportion of Americans believing smoking to be a cause of lung cancer jumped from 47 percent in 1962 to 62 percent in 1964 (p. 59). Meanwhile, the tobacco industry pursued an organized public relations campaign to sow doubt around the science of smoking and health. Marshall concludes that industry efforts appear to have had a limited impact on public opinion. For example, the industry’s 1954 “Frank Statement” questioning the link between cigarette smoking and cancer was not followed by a measurable change in beliefs. However, Marshall does not address the possibility that the industry campaign may have slowed what would have otherwise been a more rapid recognition of the health hazards of smoking. Changes in public awareness of health risks did not immediately translate into support for government intervention around tobacco use. It was not until the 1970s that grassroots efforts pushed for separate smoking sections and restrictions on smoking in public places, such as airplanes, buses, restaurants, and theaters. By 1986, 83 percent of never smokers and 73 percent of current smokers agreed that smoke from someone else’s cigarette was annoying (p. 85). Attitudes toward the tobacco industry also shifted, as Americans became more distrustful of the industry. Marshall also describes an innovative analysis to match fifty-nine federal tobacco control policy proposals with nationwide polls from the 1960s to the 2000s to assess the degree of consistency between policy and public opinion. Overall, American public opinion was out in front of federal policy making—while fewer than half of the proposals reviewed were adopted, 70 percent had majority public support. Marshall notes this is consistent with other areas of public policy, but it is more remarkable here given the well-organized and well-funded opposition from the tobacco industry to many tobacco control proposals. Marshall’s book is especially innovative in focusing on what the public knew or believed and how public opinion shifted over time. Other recent historical [End Page 216] accounts of this period have focused largely on scientific knowledge and on what scientists, health officials, and the tobacco industry knew or believed. Nevertheless, Marshall’s analysis would be strengthened by further historical context in some sections. In particular, Marshall neglects to...

A systematic literature review on the main factors for public acceptance of drones

In the Internet business era, online public opinion has had an important impact on the operation of e-commerce companies. In order to obtain a good corporate image, reduce the negative impact of online public opinion on the operation of e-commerce companies, strengthen public opinion risk early warning, and conduct crisis public relations have become an important issue for the development of e-commerce companies in the Internet era. The main research content of this project includes the following aspects: The first part is about the relationship between online public opinion and the operating performance of e-commerce companies. It mainly analyzes the positive and negative effects of online public opinion on the business performance of enterprises, and points out that enterprises should establish a risk warning mechanism for online public opinion to guide the development of public opinion in a direction that is beneficial to the enterprise. The second part is the handling mechanism of online public opinion of e-commerce enterprises. The network public opinion handling mechanism is mainly established from the aspects of public opinion to research and judgment, public opinion management, and public opinion prevention and recovery. The third part is the public opinion public relations strategy of e-commerce enterprises. Establish crisis public relations strategies from within the enterprise, the enterprise and the government, the enterprise and the third party, and the enterprise and the media. For example, the establishment of corporate internal crisis public relations team, the use of the self-media platform to improve the internal crisis management system, turn passive to active, build a socialized multi-party trusted data sharing platform, and strengthen the cooperation between the enterprise and the government, the media and third-party industries, etc. By constructing an efficient online public opinion processing mechanism for e-commerce companies, this project promotes high-quality and valuable analysis and judgment of online public opinions, and promotes effective solutions to practical problems; in the process of guiding public opinion, it protects corporate reputation, brand image, and Financing environment, etc. The project research results have reference significance and promotion value for the development of e-commerce enterprises in the Internet era.