Laura Stoker

Designing multi-level studies: sampling voters and electoral contexts

Every two years in the US, 435 congressional elections take place that scholars study using data from the National Election Studies (NES) survey of the American electorate. With a focus on sampling, this article explores two issues: (1) How best to design a national election study if the aim is to understand voting behavior within and across subnational contexts; and (2) How, by comparison, the existing NES surveys have been designed. Although our arguments specifically address how one should sample individuals and congressional districts in the US, our conclusions apply to any situation where one is sampling micro-level units nested within diverse and influential macro-level contexts.

The Effects of Social Class Identification on Participatory Orientations Towards Government

This article calls into question the common claim that class identity does not matter for American political behaviour. Using panel-study data spanning thirty-two years and two generations, we investigate the effects of social-class identity on five participatory orientations towards government. As expected, working-class identifiers in both generations consistently display lower levels of involvement in politics than do middle-class identifiers. Significantly, however, these differences typically persist when the analysis controls for objective indicators of class and are always enhanced among those who retain the same class identity over time. Rather than sustaining a conclusion that class identification has little relevance for Americans, the results suggest that class may be particularly important in the present political context.