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On March 1, 2018, President Trump declared a 25% tariff on certain steel imports by invoking Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. Despite the extraordinary tariff measure, my research with logit regression and negative binomial regression analysis finds that the Trump Administration in its tariff exclusion process favored constituencies with a higher share of the president’s supporters and allowed import products from China more likely to receive the exclusions. I argue that the Trump Administration took these contradictory trade actions to achieve multiple goals at the same time: to pressure foreign trade partners and to protect vulnerable domestic industries on the one hand and to avoid hurting domestic users of the tariffed products on the other hand. Prioritizing supporters maximizes the electoral utility of each tariff exclusion. The favorable treatment of Chinese steel imports particularly suggests that domestic electoral concerns were at least as important as foreign policy considerations in the Trump Administration’s processing of tariff exclusion requests.

Struck by the paucity of studies on vice presidential rhetoric, the omnipresence of social media, and its centrality in politics, I analyzed the tweets of the vice president of the US, Kamala Harris, and the vice president of Ghana, Dr. Bawumia, after their respective elections in 2020. Taking a multimodal rhetorical analysis guided by a theoretical self-presentational framework centered around gender, personalization, and authenticity. I contribute to the broader discourse of how politicians communicate on social media to construct their public image. Taking a cue from the rhetorical approaches used by the two vice presidents, I argue that vice-presidential communication is a rich source of gauging an administration’s policy priorities, embodies critical national issues, is analogous to presidential communication, and can be crucial to public opinion formation. I also posit that a socio-cultural context may influence how politicians present themselves to their audiences. Politicians who make these issues salient strategically build social and political capital, ultimately endearing themselves to the voters. In addition, how politicians communicate on social media can collectively have immediate and long-term ramifications for individual politicians as well as their political parties, as it serves as a source of public memory, which can form the basis of evaluation by citizens. Findings highlight how politicians’ self-presentation on social media reinvigorates stereotypical societal constructs such as gender and authenticity. This dissertation empowers researchers and social media practitioners by providing insights to avoid generalizing politicians’ use of social media because it takes a critical comparative approach to arrive at its findings.

More than ever, Americans disagree on what issues are important. This diversity in the public agenda has received scant attention in recent years. Consequently, our understanding of why agenda diversity developed relies on a single analysis method, and we know next to nothing about the consequences for the American polity. Using a novel approach to measuring agenda diversity and an advanced experimental design, this dissertation demonstrates the causal connection between issue-based selective exposure to news and higher agenda diversity. Concerning its consequences, this work investigates congressional responsiveness. Results from a complex analysis of constituency public opinion, Congress bill sponsorship, and press releases show strong support for an expansion hypothesis. Overall, agenda diversity is growing with time and that growth is caused by increased opportunities for citizens to select their news. While diversifying the public agenda could threaten the government's responsiveness, officials are expanding their activity to accommodate public demands.

This dissertation evaluates the interconnection between health and political behaviors in a polarized context such as the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic unveiled the current political polarization and the structural health disparities among racial communities. Using the system theory delineated by David Easton, this dissertation demonstrates that health attitudes and behaviors in the electorate can influence voting behaviors, as was the case with the 2020 US presidential election. An evaluation of the 2021 African American COVID-19 Vaccine Polls (AACVP), and the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey (CMPS) demonstrates that factors such as public health compliance, trust in federal health institutions, and health policy preferences explain political behaviors such as vote choice. While public health compliance, trust in federal health institutions, and support for Medicare for all are positively related to voting for Biden, these variables are all negatively related to voting for Trump. As health attitudes/behaviors explain vote choice, political and structural factors resulting from the power dynamics of the political system influence and shape health attitudes and behaviors. This dissertation shows that political factors such as partisanship and trust in local members of Congress can explain health behaviors such as COVID-19 vaccination uptake. Besides, policy factors such as access to healthcare and health insurance coverage are also significant predictors influencing COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that race-related discrimination, trauma, and policy issue help explain COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among communities of color.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) cemented itself as one of the most controversial pieces of legislation of the decade. Public opinion polls find Americans are often evenly split in support of the ACA. This dissertation explores the roles of self-interest, group identity, and racial resentment on attitudes toward the ACA and healthcare reform. The dissertation centers our attention on variation by race and the impact racial tensions beyond the Black-White paradigm on these attitudes. I find group identity shapes attitudes Blacks’ and Latinos’ attitudes toward the ACA but not Whites’ and racial resentment, directed toward Blacks, Latinos and Immigrants, plays a strong role when people evaluate the ACA but not when they consider healthcare reform broadly. The landscape of healthcare reform is constantly shifting. Having an accurate pulse on attitudes toward healthcare reform is essential to ensuring the system is responding to citizens needs and expectations.

This dissertation project focuses on dynamics of mobilization and repression in the Occupy movement. This movement emerged in late 2011 in the United States and sought to protest the growing economic inequality and the growing influence of corporations in politics. This project focuses on Occupy chapters which emerged in 74 out of the 100 largest cities in the United States. The first empirical chapter of this project focuses on dynamics which affect differences in protest size, measured in terms of protest turnouts relative to population. This chapter first demonstrates the importance of large student populations and greater numbers of universities in making large turnouts more likely, then focuses on accounting for the aspects of student populations and colleges which play a role in affecting protest size. The findings show that larger protests are more likely in cities with smaller, more liberal colleges, but also with low academic rankings, with institutional support from Chicano Studies and with proportions of economically disadvantaged students. The second part of the dissertation focuses on duration. In particular, this chapter seeks to explain the causes behind relative levels of duration of Occupy protest encampments. The findings show that protest size has an inverse relationship with protest duration: therefore, smaller movements are more likely to last. The findings also show that Occupy chapters can last longer by retaining key logistic resources as well as avoiding elected leader criticism in the media. The third and final empirical chapter of this dissertation focuses on the role of the media in making violent repression more likely. This chapter first analyzes the role of different types of threat (including protest turnouts and protester violence and property damage) in making overall, positive and negative media coverage more or less likely. The findings show that all types of threat have a positive effect on positive and negative coverage but o