My work on public opinion and elections is less unified than some of the other research streams. Much of this work is single articles on topics with co-authors, typically former graduate students and colleagues of mine.
My most recent article in this project is "The Dynamic American Dream," co-authored with Jennifer Wolak and forthcoming at the American Journal of Political Science. We develop a new quarterly measure of the electorate's belief in the attainability of the American Dream and show that the dynamics of this time series are driven by long term factors that are connected to the actual viability of the dream (inequality, social mobility, homeownership) and short term economic forces (the index of consumer sentiment).
I worked with a former ISU undergraduate (Max Allamong) on the article "Screw Those Guys: Polarization, Empathy, and Attitudes About Out-Partisans" published in Political Psychology. In this paper, we show that a person's empathic ability shapes attitudes about people and policies, but that the effects are contingent upon the respondent’s partisanship, the target’s partisanship, and an interaction of the two. Empathic ability produces more positive affect and policy support among Democrats but reduces positive affect among Republicans. The divergent effects of empathic ability on Democrats and Republicans are further exacerbated when the target is an out-partisan.
I have also recently published the book Ignored Racism with Mark Ramirez. Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on White attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost exclusively on attitudes toward immigration. This book changes that. It argues that such accounts fundamentally underestimate the political power of Whites' animus toward Latinos and thus miss how conflict extends well beyond immigration to issues such as voting rights, criminal punishment, policing, and which candidates to support. Providing historical and cultural context and drawing on rich survey and experimental evidence, the authors show that Latino racism-ethnicism is a coherent belief system about Latinos that is conceptually and empirically distinct from other forms of out-group hostility and from partisanship and ideology. Moreover, animus toward Latinos has become a powerful force in contemporary American politics, shaping White public opinion in elections and across a number of important issue areas - and resulting in policies that harm Latinos disproportionately.
The earliest of this work focuses on the connection between religion and minor party candidates. This agenda started when I was an undergraduate, working with Chris Gilbert at Gustavus Adolphus College and two of my fellow GAC alums, Tim Johnson and Paul Djupe. We were interested in the nature of support for three third party candidates: George Wallace, John Anderson, and Ross Perot. In our initial look at the survey data, we discovered that there was a consistent negative relationship between religiosity and third party voting. We hypothesized that religious communities served as ties to the traditional political structure and that in addition to the legal and psychological hurdles that third party candidates faced, there was a social barrier as well. Our article (“The Religious Roots of Third Candidate Voting”) and book (“Religious Institutions and Minor Parties in the United States”) show that unless a third party candidate makes an explicitly religious appeal, the more religious a person or area is, the less support the third party candidate receives.
In “Public Opinion Reactions to Repeated Events: Citizen Response to Multiple Supreme Court Abortion Decisions” (Co-authored with Danette Brickman), we examine the impact of a Supreme Court decision on public opinion. We show that the influence has less to do with the number of times the Court has ruled on this policy area and is dependent on the accessibility of considerations about the policy at the time of the decision. If public opinion is not well formed at the time, then the decision will crystallize opinion and polarize the public.
My co-authors (Sean Nicholson-Crotty and Mark Ramirez) and I explore the nature of the linkage between public opinion and policy in our paper “Dynamic Representation(s): Federal Criminal Justice Policy and an Alternative Dimension of Public Mood.” In this article, we demonstrate that federal policymakers alter the punitiveness of federal criminal justice policy in response to changes to the second (and not first) dimension of Stimson’s public mood measure. This demonstrates that the dynamic representation of the federal government is more nuanced than previously believed. They can discern differences in public opinion across policy areas and respond to the appropriate ones.
My second paper on the nature of macro public opinion focuses on the differences in the dynamics of public policy attitudes between men and women. In our paper “The Macro Politics of a Gender Gap”, my co-authors Mark Ramirez and Paul Kellstedt and I show that the gender gap in preferences for the amount of government activity is driven by differential response to public policy. As the government becomes more conservative, the public becomes more liberal. Our results, however, show that men are more fickle than women. Men respond more and more quickly than women and these changes are responsible for the shifts in the public opinion gender gap.
The final published paper in this agenda examines how people emotional state changes the ways they form racial policy preferences. The debate on the nature of racial policy attitudes has focused on the distinction between race and policy. The argument is if people oppose policies like affirmative action because of their attitudes about race or because of their attitudes about government involvement. In “Taking Threat Seriously: Prejudice, Principle, and Attitudes about Racial Policies” (co-authored with Christina Suthammanont, Chris Owens, and Jan Leighley) we show that both of these matter, but the explanatory power of race and policy on opposition to affirmative action depends on the level of anxiety you feel. Note that this isn’t anxiety about race or politics. Our experimental manipulation changed the level of anxiety due to an act of eco-terrorism. This seemingly unrelated activation of fear made race more salient to our subjects and strengthened the connection between racial attitudes and attitudes about affirmative action.