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The American flag is a prominent symbol in American politics, yet this prominence has not translated into considerable research attention. Of those who have considered the American flag in political science, it is generally thought that the flag is important because it conveys a candidate's patriotism, which causes voters to consider the candidate to be more desirable. In this way, the American flag is similar to other valence issues, which give candidates an added advantage that is separate from his/her issue stances. In this study, I contend that the flag's valence component is only part of the story. Specifically, social psychology literature suggests that the American flag is influential because it increases the salience and vividness of a given campaign message, which increases the amount of viewer attention. Using NES data I have found evidence that is consistent with the theory outlined above, which I plan on supplementing with an experiment of undergraduate students, in which the American flag is added to political ads taken from 2006 Congressional campaigns. If additional statistical support is found, it would add considerable depth to our understanding of the importance of valence issues and the American flag. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that constructivist thought inadequately analyzes the processes through which identity is constructed. I develop an alternative model I call "empirical constructivism" in which identity functions as a dialectic of strategy and structure. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between Turkey and the European Union in terms of identity using the core assumptions of the constructivist approach in international relations. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that one’s racial/ethnic identity is not the immutable product of one’s bloodline, phenotype, or some other biologistic notion, is no longer controversial in academic circles. At the same time, many social scientists persist in measuring race and ethnicity empirically as a categorical variable, usually using the fixed categories of black, white, Asian, Latino, and other. Much of what we know about racial attitudes, race relations, and interracial politics is based on an analysis of such static categories as explanatory variables. This gap between theory and practice is especially disconcerting given studies that suggest that the racial and ethnic categories we use can have profound implications for race relations, organizational practices, and the distribution of social policies. This paper aims to narrow this gap between theoretical discourse and research practice on race by taking contingent variations in the articulation of “race” and “ethnicity” as the dependent variable. In particular, there has been almost no quantitative, survey-based work that attempts to measure the empirical significance of the constructivist view of race. The paper proposes to test existing categorical measures of race and ethnicity in opinion surveys against a more continuous and potentially contingent means of asking respondents about their racial and ethnic identification. The alternative measure shares the same spirit as the idea of cumulative voting in debates over electoral reform. Namely, respondents are given a fixed number of points to allocate as they choose over a range of identity categories. This measure is tested in three contexts: ascriptions of race to others; racial identification of oneself; and self-identification across a multiple, competing social identity categories (specifically, race/ethnicity, gender, class, political party, ideology, and sexual orientation). The paper seeks to answer two questions. First, do individuals generally think of themselves and others, racially speaking, in categorical or continuous terms? Second, what are the background conditions that incline towards a more continuous view of identity categories? The data are designed expressly for this project and are part of the 2003 Golden Bear Omnibus Survey, a 1,000 respondent telephone interview conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]