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Party elite cues are among the most well-established influences on citizens' political opinions. Yet, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, constraining the generalizability and theoretical development of party elite cues research. Understanding the causes of variation in party elite cue effects is thus a priority for advancing the field. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues being examined, through a reanalysis of data from existing research combined with an original survey experiment comprising 34 contemporary American policy issues. My estimate of the between-issue variation in effects is substantively large, plausibly equal to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds the size of the between- study variation observed in the existing literature. This result has important implications for our understanding of party elite influence on public opinion and for the methodological practices of party elite cues research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarization and participation are often connected in the political science literature, though sometimes the causality runs participation to polarization and sometimes the causality runs in the reverse direction. In some accounts there is an expectation that increasing participation and increasing polarization generate an ongoing spiral effect. In this paper we evaluate the over-time relationships between polarization and participation by assessing evidence in existing panel and aggregate data. We find that people with more extreme attitudes are more likely to participate in politics. However, only one particular form of participation—persuading others—appears to predict later levels of polarization. Therefore, only persuasion has the necessary correlation and temporal ordering for a feedback loop with more extreme ideology. The implication is that the discipline should pay more attention to interpersonal persuasion as a form of participation in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic engagement can impact politics, health outcomes, support for new policies, and the like. Research indicates that the communication infrastructure and the strength of the storytelling network, influences civic engagement outcomes. Recent community building initiatives place the impetus of community change and civic engagement on the family unit. This paper places the family unit within the storytelling network and explores how family interaction is related to civic engagement. A telephone survey of 739 new immigrant Latinos in Los Angeles was used to test the effect of family interaction on civic engagement. Regression analyses, controlling for sociodemographic factors, were used. Results indicate that family interaction leads to higher levels of civic engagement and encourages more integration into the neighborhood storytelling network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports on a new methodological technique for estimating turnout in preelection studies of voters and brings a new approach to the allocation of undecided voters. The estimation procedure utilizes a smaller number of predictors than past research, providing a more efficient method which can be used with telephone as well as personal interviews. A comparison of estimates based upon a likelihood index and probability weighting results in equivalent predictive power, and appropriate applications for each technique are discussed.
Michael W. Traugott is Senior Study Director at the Center for Political Studies at The University of Michigan. Clyde Tucker was Assistant to the Director of the CBS News Election and Survey Unit at the time this research was conducted; he currently works in Washington. The data utilized in this paper were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data for the CPS 1980 American National Election Study were originally collected under a grant from the National Science Foundation. The data for the CBS News/New York Times surveys were originally collected by the New York Times and CBS News, and processed by CBS News and ICPSR under a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. Neither the collectors of the original data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. Support from the computing facilities at The University of Michigan is gratefully acknowledged, as well as the research assistance of Frank Baumgartner. A version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Hunt Valley, Maryland, May 20-23, 1982. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on second screening for news, a hybrid media process that combines watching news on television and a second, web-connected screen (i.e., smart-phone, laptop). Based on U.S.-national, 2-wave panel data, the paper (a) examines people's motivations to engage in second screen use, and then (b) advances the relationship between second screening and online political behaviors. Discussing and pursuing further information are both central motivations for second screen use. Furthermore, results suggest second screening for news is a significant predictor of online political participation and a key link between TV news and political engagement as this relationship is fully mediated. The study advances theoretically and empirically ways in which an informed public opinion may partake of a more engaged democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the role of political ideology in shaping black voters' evaluations of political candidates' race and skin tone. Our findings challenge simplistic notions of black preference for descriptive representation. Instead, we argue that race matters to how black Americans evaluate candidates for political office, but that it does so in combination with both candidates' skin tone and voters' ideology. Specifically, our data from a set of randomized experiments show that black conservative Democrats, relative to their more liberal copartisans, express a stronger preference for black candidates relative to white counterparts and prefer darker-skinned candidates relative to lighterskinned ones. In exploring this result, we argue that conservative black Democrats, who are liberal economically but more socially conservative, use skin tone as a heuristic to help determine which candidate is most likely to match their party-atypical but race-typical political preferences. Thus, despite being less likely to support affirmative action policies, black conservatives are actually more prone to using race and skin tone heuristics in their evaluations of candidates for political office. These findings are substantively significant. As black voters have become much more ideologically diverse, their preferences with respect to candidate race and skin tone may have greater electoral consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If nothing else, democratic politics requires compromise. Mass polarization, where citizens disagree strongly and those disagreements magnify over time, presents obvious threats to democratic well-being. The overwhelming presumption is that if polarization is occurring, a substantial portion of it is attributable to the fragmentation attendant an increasingly choice-laden media environment where individuals expose themselves only to opinion-reinforcing information. Under what conditions does mass opinion polarization occur? Through two over-time laboratory experiments involving information choice behavior, this paper considers, first, the effects of slant in one’s information environment on over-time opinion dynamics and, second, the moderating role of attitude importance on those effects. The experiments reveal that, despite similar information search behavior, those with strong attitudes are dogmatic, resisting even substantial contrary evidence; those with weak attitudes, by contrast, hear opposing arguments and develop moderate opinions regardless of the prevalence of those arguments in their environment. Evaluations of information, rather than information search behavior per se, explain why individuals with strong attitudes polarize and those with weak attitudes do not. Polarization therefore seems to require more than media fragmentation and, in fact, a more important factor may be the strength of citizens’ prior attitudes on particular issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates how motivations that drive news use affect the process of learning political information from the news. A model that traces the influence of motivational factors on following news about general public affairs is proposed. Tests conducted with nationally representative surveys revealed that motivations for following general public affairs in the news are conceptually and empirically distinct. Results showed that certain psychological needs drive motivations toward following general news, and that various types of motives have independent effects on exposure and attention to news. Finally, we found that motivations have significant indirect effects on knowledge about politics. Implications on theoretical developments in political knowledge and learning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much study has been conducted into the attitudes of Mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical, and Peace Church members concerning various public policy issues, less attention has focused on organized efforts of those faith communities to influence public policy. In this paper, I provide a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of six religious political action organizations that actively advocate for social change before the Indiana General Assembly: the Lafayette Urban Ministry, the Indiana Catholic Conference, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Indianapolis, Advance America, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Indiana Family Institute. I evaluate each organization's assets and the effect of those assets upon the organization's effectiveness in achieving its goals. I offer specific recommendations to improve the effective- ness of religious political action organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

s paper explores to what extent secondary policy issues are influenced by electoral incentives. We develop a two- dimensional political agency model, in which a politician decides on both a frontline policy issue and a secondary policy issue. The model predicts when the incumbent should manipulate the secondary policy to attract voters. We test our model by using panel data on environmental policy choices in the U.S. states. In contrast to the popular view that secondary policies are largely determined by lobbying, we find that there are strong effects of electoral incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether rising polarization in Americans' partisan judgments has positive implications for political participation. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel survey data, we find evidence that polarized judgments are related to pre-election intent to vote, as well as to post-election self-reported voter turnout. Polarized evaluations also predict greater reporting of participation in campaign activities beyond voting. Polarization in candidate evaluations consistently has more of an impact than affective polarization. However, our results suggest that polarization in evaluations of both parties and candidates includes an expressive component that does not necessarily translate into political action. Roughly one-quarter to one-third of the actual change in turnout can potentially be attributed to polarization in evaluations of Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we employ a method of examining the misreporting of year-round forms of political activity at the local level, activity other than registration and voting. Our focus is on three forms of political participation directed toward local officials: signing petitions, participating in public hearings before the city council, and contacting elected officials through the mayor and council answering service. The research site is a southwestern urban community of 300,000 and a metropolitan population of over 500,000.
The paper provides a method for examining the differences between people who actively participate in politics as contrasted with those who are not participants, and those who misreport their level of participation. Application of this method shows that the participants and the misreporters share numerous characteristics that set them apart from nonparticipants. The main distinguishing characteristic of the misreporters is their significantly higher exposure to television. The results lend support to the theory that one effect of television is to depress routine forms of political participation, while simultaneously distorting people's perception of their actual participation in political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the period in the development of issues before crystallization takes place and attempts to discover some of the causes making for a fast or a slow process of definition. The formation of "public opinion" by advertising methods and the skillful, if often conscienceless, use of propaganda are common enough phenomena of every political campaign. But the popularization of ideas upon which political action is to be based has too often waited for the inspiration and interpretation of a popular leader. The art of creating widespread demand for such reforms as the outlawry of war, the entrance of the United States into the League (or a League) of Nations, or the release of political prisoners--to use current examples--has too often been based on traditional methods and an accepted technique without sufficient attention to the changed and changing aspects of contemporary society. The most significant change from this point of view is the increase, in this country, during the past three or four generations, in economic stratification with the consequent sharpening of intellectual frontiers. The growth in "class consciousness" has not been confined to the manual workers.

This paper describes an attempt by Pittsburgh's Community Action Program agency to put the idea of citizen power into operation through confederating the city's eight neighborhood citizens' councils and providing them with professional leadership. An encounter between this new confederation and the Pittsburgh board of Public Education over two programs provides many lessons regarding the constraints to and dilemmas of citizen participation under the sponsorship of a community action agency. What came out of the experience was that although the citizens' group did exert some influence on the board's decisions, It was primarily on nonbasic Issues on which the two groups' Interests did not clash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1913 to 1963 the Republicans held continuous sway over the Board of Supervisors in Dutchess County, New York. In the November election of 1963 party control changed. This paper describes an attempt, by means of interviews with both candidates and voters, to discover the forces motivating voters to abandon their traditional voting habits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the relations of voters to parties in France and the U.S. which follow different courses of political development. Profound ideological cleavages in France, the occasional threat of civil war, rather strong voter turnout, the instability of governments and republics, and the rise and fall of "flash" parties like the R.P.F. in 1951, the Poujadists in 1956, and the U.N.R. in 1958 have all contributed to the impression of a peculiar intensity in the tenor of French political life. Demographically, French society differs from the American in its lesser urbanization and lower mean formal education. Intranational studies have persistently shown higher political involvement among urban residents and, more strongly still, among people of more advanced education. An attempt has been made in this paper to examine comparative data on the French and American publics in an effort to determine more precisely the locus of Franco-American differences in these matters. Locus will be considered in qualitative terms, covering an extended series of political characteristics which run from expressions of involvement, acts of participation and information seeking to orientations whereby the voter links party alternatives to the basic ideological issues in the society.

Eight months after his much publicized defense of Little Rock school segregation, Orval Faubus won his most convincing primary nomination for the Governor of Arkansas. This paper analyzes this election in detail and notes differences between it and three previous Faubus primaries and a 1956 Arkansas vote on segregation. These differences suggest that the prosegregation areas responded differently to Faubus in 1958. More specifically, the less prosperous, more rural counties that favored segregation in 1956 responded most strongly for Faubus in 1958, other counties that favored segregation tended to increase their support of Faubus in 1958 but not as much. The "common man appeal" of Faubus demonstrated in earlier primaries probably made him more acceptable in the rustic regions. It appears, then, that a consideration of economics as well as segregation sentiment is necessary to understand fully the voting pattern of Faubus's fourth primary.

The article describes a study on the political ecology of Louisiana. The basic political tendencies have been persistent over long periods since their support is in distinct social strata and their strongholds are in certain geographic regions of the state. The study also shows that these tendencies correspond to the major parties on the national scene and that in certain crucial federal elections they find expression through defections from the party which dominates the Solid South. In this research paper, the author shows that these basic tendencies continued to prevail during the presidential and gubernatorial elections of 1952 and to demonstrate how they influenced the result of the presidential election. The theme may be stated as the continuity of basic political tendencies in a situation of change. In political ecology, one proceeds on the assumption that in the political system an analysis of the geographical distribution of support for a party or candidate enables one to find out what social classes and what other categories of voters make up that support.

We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associated with right-wing political identification and cultural values and policy preferences, particularly among politically engaged citizens. In the economic domain, however, we find that needs for certainty and security are typically associated with left -wing values and policy preferences among politically unengaged citizens. It is only among politically engaged citizens that such needs are associated with right-wing economic values and policy preferences. Our findings confirm the importance of heterogeneity across both ideological domain and political engagement for how psychological needs translate into political ideology in the American mass public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when both the internal and global movements against apartheid in South Africa were at low ebb, African- American tennis star Arthur Ashe was successful in focusing the attention of the American public, the Nixon White House, and the international sporting community on South Africa. Ashe was also able to focus the attention of the South African government on the concerns of the anti-apartheid movement. Through his confrontation of apartheid, Ashe also underlined the anti-apartheid movement's struggle over how best to confront South Africa, through engagement or isolation. While Ashe strove to visit South Africa, other forces within the anti-apartheid movement championed boycotts and protests. These two competing visions led to much strife within the movement, and were an important component of the international debate over how to deal with apartheid and racial injustice in South Africa. Ashe traveled across several borders-both real and imagined-to emerge as a crucial transnational actor within the anti-apartheid movement in the early 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annual business meeting was held at Carson Inn-Nordic Hills in Illinois, on May 31, 1975. President Herbert Abelson. The Secretary Treasurer commended the new Administrator, Dede Barnes, who took over from Hanna Benzwie at NORC/New York in midseason, and Assistant Administrator Robert Surabian, who had virtually completed the computerization of AAPOR's membership records. She also thanked Ronald Gatty of the City University of New York for making available computer time and expertise to help develop the system. The 1975 Directory of Members was based largely on computer information. It was mailed out in mid-May this year, before the conference, as it was a Special Edition in honor of the 30th Annual Conference.

ABSTRACT This paper examines conventional explanations as to why many lower status persons in the United States are less inclined than others to participate in politics. Such explanations typically treat lower status nonparticipation as the result of SES-related personality traits and therefore as an inevitable consequence of stratification. We present two lines of analysis. First, a review of comparative data suggests that such explanations ignore characteristics of U.S. political institutions-especially the programs and recruitment strategies employed by the major political parties-which are important sources of lower status political disinterest and nonparticipation. Second, in contrast to previous studies, we examine the effects of political party recruitment patterns on voting and campaign activity. Using the 1976 CPS election study, we find that: (1) voter contact by a political party or candidate increases the likelihood of voting and campaign activity, although it made no difference which party made the overture; (2) voter contact by the two major parties did not reduce the greater likelihood that high SES citizens would participate more in politics; and (3) the impact of contact was the same across social status and political party lines. The implications of these findings for theory and research on social class and political participation are discussed in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates fallout from a subtle but important conceptual disagreement over the nature of political parties that challenges a key measure of mass political sophistication. The American Voter 's typology assumes that sophisticated citizens notice the ideological abstractions defining parties. Alternatively, The Party Decides defines parties as group-based coalitions. The distinction is crucial for the "levels of conceptualization" measure, which considers ideological party views superior to group-oriented ones. Few people make ideological remarks about parties; many more describe links between parties and groups. Converse and colleagues take the scarcity of "ideologues" as evidence against mass sophistication, but a measure that might classify Party Decides –type comments in a lower tier may be invalid. How many citizens are misclassified? I parse decades of survey data to test whether sophistication in some group-centric citizens has gone unrecognized. It hasn't. Despite the conceptual threat, several tests show no evidence of hidden sophistication among these respondents overall or in subgroups, affirming the measure's rank-order. Group-centric citizens are right about parties, but even their brightest are no "ideologues." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has considered how network composition influences the extent to which one is willing to engage in politics with others. Yet much of this work has focused on composition rather than context and on public forms of political expression rather than ones that occur outside the public eye. Dissent in rural communities may be especially risky, because residents lack anonymity and rely on local patronage. This study offers evidence that challenges existing theories and concepts of opinion expression and political organizing, suggesting that when faced with an opposing community, rural residents may organize and express their opinions in secret. Through a series of in-depth interviews, this research examined the experiences of a secret political organization of 136 registered members in rural Texas. This study explored how members expressed their opinions and organized in secret, why they do so, and the effect this had on their political engagement in public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists and political pundits have characterized the 2016 presidential campaign as one featuring unusually high levels of political involvement among the mass public. This article subjects such claims to more systematic assessment, by comparing levels of political involvement in the 2016 presidential election campaign to those of previous election cycles. Through analyses of turnout statistics, survey questions by the Pew Research Center and the American National Election Studies measuring political interest, and Nielsen audience estimates of television viewing, the article finds that the public's interest and engagement in the fall of 2016 were actually quite similar to those of other recent elections. (It was during the primaries that political involvement in 2016 stood out more.) Acknowledging that aggregate analyses may obscure countervailing subgroup changes, the article examines subgroups that figured prominently in accounts of the 2016 campaign or were thought to have been particularly energized by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012: men without a college education, African Americans, and young people. Those analyses turn up limited evidence for differential political interest trends. African Americans' campaign interest and turnout did drop compared to 2008 and 2012. But in the opposite direction of the prevailing narrative, young people showed relatively high political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) opposition to the U.S. policy towards the Vietnam War in 1961-1975. It discusses IPS's call for a reduction in U.S. foreign aid to nations guilty of human rights abuses and its contribution to the debate over war, democracy and bureaucracy. It looks at IPS's efforts to eliminate the divide between theory and activism, and IPS intellectuals's arguments over the rising fortunes of technocrats within the bureaucracy. It also examines IPS calls for direct involvement of U.S. citizens in governance.

The article discusses the U.S. foreign alliance with Iran under the Iranian leader Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from the 1950s through the 1970s, including in regard to modernization and human rights in Iran. An overview of the influence that Iranian students had on U.S. policy towards Iran, including Iranian students' encourage of the U.S. government under President John F. Kennedy to pressure Iran to reform, is provided. The U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's relationship with Iranian students in the U.S. is discussed.

Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self-promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyn's drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public deliberation on the Internet is a promising but unproven practice. Online deliberation can engage large numbers of citizens at relatively low cost, but it is unclear whether such programs have substantial civic impact. One factor in determining their effectiveness may be the communicative features of the online setting in which they occur. Within a Media Richness Theory framework, we conducted a quasiexperiment to assess the civic outcomes of interventions executed online by nonprofit organizations prior to the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The results assess the impact of these interventions on issue knowledge and civic attitudes. Comparisons of the interventions illustrate the importance of considering media richness online, and our discussion considers the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the vast majority of minority candidates run under the Democratic label and minority voters are more supportive of the Democratic Patty, in recent years a nontrivial number of minority candidates have won Republican Party nominations in high-profile elections (i.e., governor and US Senate). In this study, we assess the level of support that white conservative voters give to minority Republican candidates. We are interested in seeing whether these voters are less supportive of the Grand Old Party (GOP) standard-bearer when the candidate is not white, since the vast majority of Republican candidates and Republican identifiers are non-Hispanic whites. Our data come from the 2006,2010, and 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) surveys-election years with minority Republican nominees for governor and US Senate. Controlling for various factors, we consistently find that white conservatives are either more supportive of minority Republicans or just as likely to vote for a minority as they are a white Republican (a null result). Although we hesitate to dismiss the presence of racial prejudice in voting behavior, in the case of white conservatives our analyses suggest that the base of the GOP does not discriminate against minority nominees in high-profile contemporary general elections. At a minimum, the level of ideological polarization in American politics masks racially prejudiced voting behavior, and at a maximum, it renders it inoperable, because white conservatives view recent minority Republican nominees as at least as conservative as white GOP nominees and their level of support reflects this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relies on U.S. 2-wave panel data to examine the role of social media as a sphere for political expression and its effects on political participation. Informational uses of social media are expected to explain political expression on social media and to promote political participation. This study clarifies the effect of using social media for social interaction in fostering political expression and participation processes. Results indicate that social media news use has direct effects on offline political participation and indirect effects on offline and online political participation mediated via political expression. Furthermore, social media use for social interaction does not have direct influence in people's political engagement, but rather an indirect effect by means of citizens expressing themselves politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective action has been examined in studies of worker insurgency, homeless protest, the Civil Rights movement and white backlash against racial minorities. Relatively few studies, however, focus on noncontentious forms of immigrant collective action. Utilizing a new data set comprising over 1,000 immigrant civic events, we examine whether the civic and political environment within metropolitan areas affect civic engagement. Our results indicate that political opportunities and resources did not have uniform effects, but that institutional threats to immigrants deterred civic activity. Furthermore, we find that local restrictive efforts instigated solidarity events, while outreach efforts directed at immigrants facilitated community improvement projects. These findings suggest that conditions intensifying group boundaries between immigrants and natives and encouraging collective efficacy are important predictors of immigrant civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International migration yields pervasive cross-border social engagements, yet homeland political involvements are modest to minimal. This contrast reflects the ways in which the distinctive characteristics of expatriate political life impede participation in the polity that emigrants have left behind. As polities are bounded, moving to the territory of a different state yields political detachment: diminishing awareness of home country political matters and weakened ties to the home state's electoral institutions. To assess this argument, we use a representative survey of the Mexican-born population in the United States to analyze two critical conditions for participation in expatriate elections: emigrants' ability to demonstrate eligibility to vote and their knowledge about voting procedures. We find clear signs of detachment. Most Mexican emigrants are not in a position to participate in homeland politics. Social ties, while pervasive, are associated with more knowledge only for the very small segment of the most engaged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the effect of union membership on civic and political participation in the late 20th century in the United States. We discuss why and how unions seek to mobilize their members and where mobilization is channeled. We argue that union membership affects electoral and collective action outcomes and will be larger for low socioeconomic status individuals. Statistical analyses find that union membership is associated with many forms of political activity, including voting, protesting, association membership, and others. Union effects are larger for less educated individuals, a group that otherwise exhibits low levels of participation. Union membership is not associated with outcomes distant from union political agendas, such as general volunteering and charitable giving, suggesting that unions generate political capital rather than generalized social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies of the U.S. Congress have demonstrated a substantial difference between the level of partisan polarization displayed by legislators’ votes and that shown in citizens’ survey responses about those votes. Perhaps public polarization would increase if citizens were more attentive to political debates in Congress. Using natural variation in citizens’ levels of political information, I show that citizens who are informed about the partisan alignment of issues have a preference distribution similar to that of Congress, even after the sample is reweighted to resemble the entire public in their political, social, and demographic characteristics via matching. In contrast, using a survey experiment, I show that cue and argument treatments only partially reduce the discrepancy between the views expressed by the public and the voting behavior of Congress on the same issues. Both experimental and observational studies have significant limitations for measuring counterfactuals involving public opinion, and so our understanding of the polarization gap remains unfortunately limited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The degree of psychological engagement in political campaigns is a key factor influencing participation in U.S. elections. Unfortunately, no resources exist that offer comparable over time survey measures of campaign engagement in the electorate. Results from a diverse array of U.S. public opinion surveys administered from 1952 through 2010 are used to explore trends about interest in elections, attention to campaigns, and enthusiasm for the candidates. Trends are examined both over the course of a single campaign and across election cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Few scholars have examined perceptions of electoral competition, and those who have (Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974) find no link between perceptions and voting behavior. We find that individuals’ perceptions of electoral competition are related to exposure to a close race in their U.S. House district but do not match reality. This is because perceptions are colored by “wishful thinking” in that individuals believe their favored candidate will win a close election (Uhlaner and Grofman 1986). Once we control for wishful thinking, we find that perceptions of electoral competition are associated with political participation, while actual levels of competition in one’s House district are not. Although numerous studies find that higher levels of actual electoral competition are associated with increased turnout, this is the first to find evidence of links between actual electoral competition, perceived electoral competition, and voting behavior. Measuring perceptions—and understanding how they differ from reality—may be important for scholars of public opinion and political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We investigate the role of economic perceptions in macropolitical analyses, with a particular focus on the role that partisanship might play in shaping consumer sentiment. Instead of taking consumer sentiment at the fully aggregated level, as is customary, we disaggregate by party in order to see the effects of partisanship on over-time evaluations of the economy. Analyzing four presidential administrations' worth of public opinion data, we find that differences in Republicans' and Democrats' beliefs about the changing economy do not cancel in the aggregate. Furthermore, our macroanalysis shows that the endogeneity of consumer sentiment to partisanship leads to a clear overestimate of the role of consumer sentiment on approval of the president's handling of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents an examination into the dynamics of immigrant political action in the United States. Comments are given challenging the traditional research focus on electoral and citizenship data, suggesting such a paradigm ignores the large non-citizen immigrant population. Attention is then given to the activities of immigrant political protest for both citizens and non-citizens. Conclusions reached suggest larger means of immigrants to access political power through mobilization and stresses between citizen and non-citizen ethnic minority groups. Suggestions are also given aiming to improve the collective identity and cooperation of such groups.

The article presents an examination of abolitionist Dinah Nevil and the founding of the world's first anti-slavery organization. It examines the political and moral decisions involved in the American nation building process as well as in the transatlantic antislavery movement. It addresses the history of antislavery activism, discusses the idea that the American Revolutionary War was a necessary precondition for the abolition of slavery and examines how Nevil's case suggests that the war interrupted an ongoing effort to abolish slavery.

Framed in the introduction and conclusion by an analysis of U.S. Congressional hearings about Hurricane Katrina and its socio-political aftermath, this article explores the theo-political significance of narrative in order to give a feminist theological interpretation of political participation and personhood. It attends to and expands on the role of narrative at the intersections of moral philosophy, feminist theory, sociology, and public and women's liberation theologies, retrieving key insights from these sources to highlight some of the heretofore neglected implications of subaltern narratives as an alternative form of political engagement in U.S. public life. Especially when viewed through a richly textured feminist, womanist, and mujerista theological lens, this article provides a theological perspective on narrative as one rhetorical practice of public engagement utilized by marginalized groups for prophetic justice. It concludes by showing how a feminist theology of narrative provides an innovative index to measure the efficacy of public engagement on the grounds of increasing solidarity rather than shaping public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the consumer culture of gay men in the 1960s. The author outlines a history of gay patterns of mass consumption from 1945 to 1969. The author explains how the purchase of a consumer item acted as means of sexual self-identification and acted as an entryway into the gay community. The article looks at how the magazine publishers utilized a rhetoric of legal rights and collective action. The author argues that before there was a national gay political community there was a national gay commercial market. The article also discusses gay entrepreneurs as part of the rise of a gay movement in America.

We demonstrate that the use of self-reported turnout data often results in misleading inferences about racial differences in turnout. We theorize about the mechanism driving report of turnout and, utilizing ANES turnout data in presidential elections from 1976 to 1988 (all years for which comparable validated data are available), we empirically model report of turnout as well as the relationship between reported and actual turnout. We apply the model to the two subsequent presidential elections in which validated data are not available, 1992 and 1996. Our findings suggest that African Americans turned out almost 20 percentage points less than did Whites in the 1992 and 1996 U.S. presidential elections—almost double the gap that the self-reported data indicates. In contrast with previous research, we show that racial differences in factors predicting turnout make African Americans less likely to vote compared to Whites and thus increase their probability of overreporting. At the same time, when controlling for this effect, other things equal, African Americans overreport electoral participation more than Whites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines if Facebook, one of the most popular social network sites among college students in the U.S., is related to attitudes and behaviors that enhance individuals' social capital. Using data from a random web survey of college students across Texas (n = 2,603), we find positive relationships between intensity of Facebook use and students' life satisfaction, social trust, civic engagement, and political participation. While these findings should ease the concerns of those who fear that Facebook has mostly negative effects on young adults, the positive and significant associations between Facebook variables and social capital were small, suggesting that online social networks are not the most effective solution for youth disengagement from civic duty and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The REAL ID Act requires states to adopt standardized procedures and formats for state driver's licenses and IDs. Twenty-one states have passed a law or resolution in formal challenge to REAL ID; only seven states have not initiated a formal challenge. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that relatively less populous and less wealthy states, which are likely to be more impacted by unfunded mandates and more conservative states, which are more likely to be concerned about retaining state control, were more likely to oppose REAL ID. States with stronger privacy orientations also were more likely to pass statutes or resolutions in opposition. Our qualitative analysis also implies that social advocacy coalitions and state associations played important roles in facilitating and leading state resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the influence of discussion frequency, network size, and 3 variables that together entangle the often misunderstood concept of network heterogeneity: discussion frequency with like-minded individuals (“safe” discussion), discussion frequency with nonlike-minded individuals (“dangerous” discussion), and diversity of discussion based on the proportion of safe and dangerous discussion. Data were gathered via a postelection random-digit dial telephone survey of residents of a battleground state ( N = 600) in November 2004. Three central dependent variables were measured: factual political knowledge, political knowledge structure density, and political participation. The results support the argument that different aspects of political discussion have different implications for different democratic outcomes-and that different conceptualizations and measures of discussion “heterogeneity” produce different results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the effects of job displacement, an involuntary event associated with socioeconomic and psychological decline, on social participation. Using more than 45 years of panel data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we find that job displacement is associated with significant, long-term lower probabilities of subsequent involvement with various forms of social participation for workers displaced during their prime earnings years; displacement is not associated with lower probabilities of involvement for workers displaced in the years approaching retirement. We also find that post-displacement socioeconomic and psychological decline explain very little of the negative effect of job displacement on social participation, and that a single displacement event, rather than a series of multiple displacement events, is most strongly associated with lower probabilities of social involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why some black Southerners but not others were politically active during the early stages of the civil rights movement. Using a survey of more than 600 black Southerners in 1961, we investigate whether perceptions about opportunity and threat, politicized social capital and individual orientations toward social change shaped voting in the 1960 Presidential election. Perceptions of solidarity in the black community and repression against politically active blacks encourage voting, while the perception of white support for integration does not. Participating in civic and religious organizations and discussing politics with friends and co-workers (but not family members) increase the likelihood of voting. Our findings extend political opportunity and social capital theories in important ways while offering new insights into this historically important case of civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]