Published in The Forum
Five models dominate academic analyses of elections for the House of Representatives. They are: (1) the surge and decline cycle of presidential elections and the successive off-year election; (2) the presidential performance model; (3) the retirement model; (4) the campaign spending model; and (5) the candidate quality model. The expected results f...
Published in The Forum
We examine Barack Obama’s influence over the Democratic Party as an ex-president from three vantage points: his popularity among partisans, his control over party nominations, and his rhetorical influence over party platform stances. The findings are somewhat mixed. Compared with other contemporary presidents, Obama is far more popular among co-par...
Published in The Forum
We examine an understudied component of partisan polarization—disagreement over whether the U.S. economy rewards merit. Drawing on data from party platforms and surveys over four decades, we illustrate large, and increasing, partisan divides in beliefs regarding whether an unequal society, or unequal behavior, is the cause of socioeconomic inequali...
Published in The Forum
This paper compares nationalist attitudes among Whites, Latinos, and African Americans. The research on nationalism and national attachment draws varied conclusions about how race and ethnicity structure such attitudes; some find that Whites have the strongest views, while others see more similarities than differences. Using the General Social Surv...
Published in The Forum
Published in The Forum
Independents who lean toward a party constitute a plurality of Americans. Despite their reluctance to identify as partisans, scholars find that “leaners” look much like partisans with respect to their voting behavior, civic engagement, and policy preferences. Yet, existing literature does not consider the possibility that different factors lead Dem...
Published in The Forum
The last decade has seen a series of high-profile battles over the rights of college athletes take place in the nation’s courthouses and state legislatures, and on the floor of the U.S. Congress. How has the public responded to these changes and how do they formulate their views on policies that seek to provide additional financial compensation and...
Published in The Forum
Scholars have extensively studied whether campaign attack advertisements –messages that attack individual candidates– mobilize or demobilize voters with mixed results. We argue that group-oriented partisan affect in campaigns –messages about the parties in general– is just as important given increasing trends of affective polarization. We use two s...
Published in The Forum
The question, “What is rural?”, has become increasingly salient to scholars of American politics over the past decade, especially after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. While social and political tensions between urban and rural residents of the United States are now widely recognized, rural cannot simply be defined as the antithesis of urban. Us...
Published in The Forum
It is widely agreed that dissatisfaction with Supreme Court decisions harms the Court’s standing among the public. However, we do not yet know how or why Court performance affects legitimacy. We examine the role that mass perceptions of the Supreme Court’s institutional nature—particularly how “political” it is—plays in assessments of its legitimac...
