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Americans born before 1980, called Millennials, are repeatedly treated as a singular voting bloc, but much like the Baby Boomers, have been socialized across a series of very different elections. We develop a theory of millennial political socialization that argues that older Millennials are more tied to the Democratic party and more liberal than their younger counterparts. We use the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and an original survey of 1274 Americans conducted before the 2016 elections to test this theory. We find some support for our theory; in addition, we find that younger Millennials are socialized by issues of identity politics and culture – specifically on issues of immigration and the role of race in society. This implies a generation that largely favors Democrats, but whose Republicans are more culturally conservative than middle aged Republican voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. In this article we theorize that partisanship is such a strong filter of information that it can affect how individuals make sense of their lived environment and how the geographic experience informs policy attitudes. As a result, although "independents" tend to be less politically knowledgeable and have less developed policy opinions, their policy attitudes on gun control are more informed by their lived experience than partisans. Methods. Weuse data fromanoriginal survey of American adults about crime and gun control linked to crime statistics from the FBI. Results. We find that stronger partisanship leads to resistance to information from the lived environment in the development of policy attitudes about gun control. Conclusion. Democrats and Republicans have very different views about guns and, generally, these priorities are relatively unaffected by contextual experience; however, gun policy attitudes of independents are highly correlated with the level of gun crime in their geographic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Many studies investigating contact theory have suggested that contact effects are not universal but rather conditional. In this article, we test one form of conditional contact effects. Our approach posits that contact with out-groups produces support for pro-minority public policies only when in-group members are not subject to contrary messages from co-partisans. Methods We use data from an original survey to test this theory in the immigration policy domain. Results We find strong confirmatory evidence that the emergence of contact effects on support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is dependent on party identification. Conclusion When information from the social environment and that from the party coincide, they reinforce each other, producing more tolerant policy preferences. However, when the two are not congruent, individuals may use partisanship to help interpret contextual information, thus canceling out the positive effects of intergroup contact on policy opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses empirically-based scholarship about direct democracy, policy, citizens, and the legal process. Topics covered include ways in which direct democracy enters the American form of government, the initiative impacts policy's effect on political parties, interest groups and citizens, and whether the possibility of direct democracy may threaten minorities. Also mentioned are types of policies that pass through direct democracy and concerns about the ballot initiative.

Gay marriage bans have received widespread support in the past decade in states across America. The authors evaluate the extent to which context mitigates or exacerbates support for gay rights. Their question is grounded in the debate over whether exposure to out-groups creates acceptance through contact or whether exposure induces hostility through threat. Using data from twelve marriage ban elections, the authors find conditional support for the threat hypothesis. While the presence of a gay population is unimportant to the majority of the population, evangelical Christians who live proximate to larger gay populations are more likely to support bans on gay marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current research has argued that direct legislation makes democracies better by helping to encourage better democratic citizenship. In this study, the author tests whether these effects are conditional on the diversity of the electorate. Theoretically, he argues that policy making by majority rule will create conflict because of the perceived threat of large numerical minorities by majority groups. The author hypothesizes that in areas of greater diversity, democratic citizenship socialization effects can be mitigated, especially as it relates to trusting strangers. Using pooled data from the American National Election Study, the author demonstrates the diversity conditional effects of ballot initiative context on generalized trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Party identification is notoriously “sticky,” yet over the last three decades the California electorate has changed tremendously. A once red state has become one of the most reliable Democratic strongholds in the nation. What explains this change? One common explanation rests with population shifts and macropartisan trends. Another claims the combination of a rapidly expanding Latino electorate and a series of high-profile anti-immigrant ballot initiatives supported by the state’s Republicans drove partisan change in California. Building off of previous research, we seek to reconcile the differential impacts of these factors on the state’s Latinos and non-Hispanic Whites. Our analyses partially confirm and clarify previous findings regarding Latino partisan change, while directly challenging findings regarding partisan change among non-Hispanic Whites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past thirty years, the cumulative effects of direct democracy have served to decrease both levels of taxation and spending in the American states. Yet conservative budgetary policy measures passed during this time period were likely to occur in liberal states. Using data on over thirty separate ballot issues, the author offers a solution to this puzzle, demonstrating that distrusting government serves as a consistently robust predictor of conservative policy choice. The implication of this finding is that citizens often choose conservative policy outcomes because they believe that government is functionally incapable of giving them what they want. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. A number of recent studies find that direct democracy increases voter turnout. In this article, we ask: Who does direct democracy mobilize to vote and how are they mobilized? We distinguish between long-term and short-term effects on voter turnout, noting that much of the current literature has focused on participatory theory. Methods. Our research design harnesses the power of geographic information systems and examines turnout in special initiative-only elections using registered voter lists. Our model draws on individual and Census tract data, incorporated using a hierarchical generalized linear model. Results. The findings demonstrate how partisan context mitigates the potential for direct democracy to mobilize from the middle, and clarifies the dominance of short-term as opposed to long-term effects in increasing voter participation in ballot initiative elections. Conclusion. Mobilization via direct legislation occurs mostly because voters are actively mobilized by partisan campaigns, not because of an increase in participatory fervor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When white Americans think about welfare, they are likely to think about black Americans. The most prominent explanation for this phenomenon offered has been media coverage--newsmakers have presented welfare as an overwhelmingly black and overwhelmingly bad social program. Most of the data used in studies that reach these conclusions, however, predate welfare reform. Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare has lost its place among America's most controversial issues. While there are many critics of the reform, many more declare it a success, and these elites are both Republican and Democrat. Opinion polls indicate that a majority of the public is favorably inclined toward the passed reforms. In this paper, we provide systematic evidence that the information environment surrounding welfare policy has changed. Given this, we pose the following research question: do negative attitudes about blacks continue to color people's willingness to spend money on welfare programs? We address this question by examining the predictors of opposition to welfare spending in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies. The evidence suggests that despite the changing information environment, welfare attitudes are as strongly racialized in 2004, as they were a decade earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines how distance factors into the costs associated with political participation. We hypothesize that the political geography of a voter's residence affects not only the likelihood that he or she will vote, but whether the voter will choose between traditional Election Day voting or nontraditional means, such as casting an absentee ballot by mail, or going to an early-voting site. Using a geographic information system (GIS), we calculate Manhattan-block distances between voter residences and their respective precinct and nearest early-voting sites in Clark County, NV for the 2002 mid-term election. We then use these calculated distances to predict, with multinomial logistic regression, the likelihood of nonvoting, precinct voting, and nontraditional voting. Our evidence suggests that the cost of traveling to reach a traditional voting site is associated with nonvoting to a point, but the relationship between distance and participation is nonlinear. Distance to traditional voting sites is also highly associated with choosing to vote by mail. Would-be nonvoters are more inclined to use proximate election-day sites than proximate early-voting sites, probably because they decide to vote so late in the campaign. Our findings have important implications for democratic theory, ongoing efforts to reform the electoral process, and the practice of voter mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]