Benjamin J. Newman

Politics at the Checkout Line: Explaining Political Consumerism in the United States

Political consumerism is the intentional buying or abstention from buying specific products for political, social, or ethical purposes. We develop and test hypotheses regarding the individual sources of political consumerism in the United States. Analysis of survey data shows that similar to voting, education, political interest, and citizen duty promote political consumerism. Akin to protest behavior, political consumerism is enhanced by political distrust and general discontent. In contrast to turnout, political consumerism significantly decreases with age. Given the extraelectoral and self-initiated nature of political consumerism, citizen initiative and a proclivity for individualized forms of activism are significant sources of political consumerism.

Immigration Crackdown in the American Workplace: Explaining Variation in E-Verify Policy Adoption Across the U.S. States

Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important and prevalent type of control policy that has received little scholarly attention is worksite employment eligibility enforcement, otherwise known as E-Verify Laws. In the present article, we analyze variation in E-Verify policy adoption across the U.S. states, approaching the topic from multiple theoretical perspectives and testing several hypotheses pertaining to policy enactment. Our analysis points to the critical role of proportionate change in a state’s immigrant population, as well as the political activity of immigrant-employing industries, in leading to policy adoption. Despite the use of multiple objective indicators, we fail to find strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that economic distress within a state increases its likelihood of enacting E-Verify legislation. Overall, our analysis contributes to an underdeveloped area of immigration policy research and sheds light on an important contemporary immigration issue, while drawing broader conclusions concerning the factors influencing the emergence of anti-immigration policies more generally.

The "Daily Grind": Work, Commuting, and Their Impact on Political Participation

Past research demonstrates that free time is an important resource for political participation. We investigate whether two central drains on citizens’ daily time—working and commuting—impact their level of political participation. The prevailing “resources” model offers a quantity-focused view where additional time spent working or commuting reduces free time and should each separately decrease participation. We contrast this view to a “commuter’s strain” hypothesis, which emphasizes time spent in transit as a psychologically onerous burden over and above the workday. Using national survey data, we find that time spent working has no effect on participation, while commuting significantly decreases participation. We incorporate this finding into a comprehensive model of the “daily grind,” which factors in both socioeconomic status and political interest. Our analysis demonstrates that commuting leads to the greatest loss in political interest for low-income Americans, and that this loss serves as a main mechanism through which commuting erodes political participation.

Group Size versus Change? Assessing Americans' Perception of Local Immigration

Leading opinion research on immigration has begun to move from size-based to change-based measures of citizens’ ethnic context. This shift is based on the theoretical assumption that over-time growth in immigrant populations is more likely to capture citizens’ attention than their current size. At present, there is no empirical evidence supporting this assumption. This article demonstrates that while the size of local immigrant populations exerts virtually no effect on perceived immigration, over-time growth strongly influences citizens’ perceptions of immigration into their community. In addition, our analyses illuminate the differential contribution of growth in local Hispanic and Asian populations to perceived immigration.

Easing the Heavy Hand: Humanitarian Concern, Empathy, and Opinion on Immigration

The bulk of the public opinion research on immigration identifies the factors leading to opposition to immigration. In contrast, we focus on a previously unexplored factor yielding support for immigration: humanitarianism. Relying upon secondary analysis of national public opinion survey data and an original survey experiment, we demonstrate that humanitarian concern significantly decreases support for restrictive immigration policy. Results from our survey experiment demonstrate that in an information environment evoking both threat and countervailing humanitarian concern regarding immigration, the latter can and does override the former. Last, our results point to the importance of individual differences in empathy in moderating the effects of both threat and humanitarian inducements.

My Poor Friend: Financial Distress in One’s Social Network, the Perceived Power of the Rich, and Support for Redistribution

In exploring the impact of economic problems on public opinion, scholarship has nearly exclusively focused on personal and national economic experiences. At present, little to no research analyzes the impact of economic distress within one’s social network on an individual’s attitudes. Drawing upon network and contact theories, it is argued that financial hardship experienced vicariously through one’s friends should influence an individual’s views about the political economy, and ultimately, their economic policy preferences, such as support for redistribution. Utilizing national survey data, this article demonstrates that having economically distressed friends heightens perceived class-based bias in the political system—namely, that the rich have undue influence over politics. Further, moderated regression analysis reveals that this effect depends upon the prevalence of political discussion within one’s friendship network. Finally, mediation analysis reveals that, by heightening perceived class-based bia...

Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood Across Space and Time

While classic theories suggest that growing inequality will generate mass support for redistribution, recent research suggests the opposite: increases in inequality in the United States are associated with decreases in support for redistribution among both low and high income citizens. We reconsider this conclusion. First, we examine the methods of this research, and find that the claims made are not robust to important corrections in model specification. We then utilize a distinct methodological approach, leveraging spatial variation in local inequality, and examine average differences in preferences across geographic context. Here we find a small, but positive relationship of inequality to support for redistribution. In both our reexamination of previous work and our extensions, we find little support for the claim that inequality reduces the demand for redistribution.

Ethnic Change, Concern over Immigration, and Approval of State Government

The popularity and approval of a governor among their state citizenry is a central form of political capital that animates the informal power key to their legislative success and bolsters their prospects for reelection. Within the extant literature exploring the sources of approval of state executives, the lion’s share of the work focuses on the deleterious effects on approval of a poorly performing national and state economy. In the present article, we rely on the same logic underlying the economic-centered research—namely, that unhappy citizens blame governors and state governments for their discontent—but focus on the impact on approval of an entirely separate and relatively unexplored domain of life in a state: ethno-demographics. This article advances the hypothesis that citizen discontent over drastic ethnic change in their local environment is politicized as concern over immigration, which in turn serves as a concrete political issue through which personal discontent over increased ethnic diversity is translated into lower approval of state government. This hypothesis is tested within the context of the state of California using pooled statewide survey data. Our analyses demonstrate that growth in the Hispanic population within a respondent’s county of residence significantly increases concern over immigration within the state, and that concern over immigration significantly decreases approval of state government across the board, including the governor, the state legislature, and one’s local state representatives.

A Crisis in Context Local Conditions, National Events, and Economic Policy Mood

The effect of economic distress on public opinion is well studied in political science. This research, however, tends to focus on one’s personal economic situation or national economic conditions, with considerably less scholarly attention directed toward understanding how intermediate levels, such as citizens’ local economic environment, shapes mass economic policy preferences. In response, this article develops a theory of the effect of local economic context on policy preferences which posits national economic events as a moderating factor and views toward the fairness of the economic system as an intervening factor. Drawing upon over a decade of survey data, and focusing on the 2008 Financial Crisis and public views toward business corporations, this article demonstrates that the Crisis polarized citizens across affluent and poor areas with respect to perceptions of corporate-led maldistribution, which in turn, had an indirect polarizing effect on economic policy mood.

Measuring Aggregate Social Capital Using Census Response Rates

Despite the importance of social capital to political science research, conventional means of measuring it are subject to a range of problems, including nonresponse bias, declining validity over time, and/or a lack of conceptual coherence. We argue that, in the case of the United States, rates of response to the decennial census represent a powerful yet overlooked measure for aggregate social capital. In this research note, we elaborate a theoretical rationale for the measure and empirically validate it, showing across multiple data sets and levels of geographic aggregation that census response rates (CRR) strongly predict various dimensions of social capital. Our findings highlight an important opportunity for social capital scholars to use existing governmental data to better measure geospatial variation in a key social science construct.