Michael D. Martinez

Core Values, Value Conflict, and Citizens' Ambivalence about Gay Rights

Recent research has recognized that many people simultaneously hold positive and negative attitudes about important political issues. In this article, we review the concept of attitudinal ambivalence and propose a survey-based measure of ambivalence adapted from the experimental literature. Extending our earlier work on abortion, analysis of a statewide telephone survey of Florida residents reveals that (1) many people have ambivalent attitudes about issues related to gay and lesbian rights; (2) the amount of ambivalence varies according to the specific rights in question (military service, gay marriage and adoption, membership in youth organizations such as Boy Scouts, and others); (3) ambivalence on gay rights is to some extent a function of conflict among citizens’ underlying core values; and (4) under certain circumstances, ambivalence appears to mediate the relationship between a person’s issue preferences with regard to gay rights and his or her evaluation of political leaders and institutions.

Winners, Losers, and Election Context: Voter Responses to the 2000 Presidential Election

Elections are sometimes seen as legitimizing institutions, promoting system-level support among citizens by allowing them to have input into the political process. However, prior research has found that this is less true among supporters of losing candidates, who often exhibit lower levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy. We analyze NES survey data from 1964 to 2004, as well as surveys from Florida and the nation following the controversial presidential election of 2000, and find that (1) losers exhibit lower levels of political trust, satisfaction with democracy, confidence that government is responsive to citizens, and in early 2001 were less inclined to extend legitimacy to the newly elected president; (2) losers also are more likely to endorse “rationalizations” as explanations of the election outcome, to be less satisfied with the choice of candidates offered in the election, and to perceive the electoral process as unfair; and (3) voter interpretations of the election mediate the relationships between winning/losing on the one hand, and trust, responsiveness, and satisfaction with democracy on the other. These findings suggest that the so-called legitimizing function of elections is far from a universal phenomenon.

The Effects of Turnout on Partisan Outcomes in U.S. Presidential Elections 1960–2000

It is commonly believed by pundits and political elites that higher turnout favors Democratic candidates, but the extant research is inconsistent in finding this effect. The purpose of this article is to provide scholars with a methodology for assessing the likely effects of turnout on an election outcome using simulations based on survey data. By varying simulated turnout rates for five U.S. elections from 1960 to 2000, we observe that Democratic advantages from higher turnout (and Republican advantages from lower turnout) have steadily ebbed since 1960, corresponding to the erosion of class cleavages in U.S. elections.

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut, Sometimes You Don't: Citizens' Ambivalence About Abortion

Recent research has recognized that many people simultaneously hold positive and negative attitudes about important political issues. This paper reviews the concept of attitudinal ambivalence and introduces a survey measure of ambivalence adapted from the experimental literature. An analysis of two statewide telephone surveys of Florida voters reveals that (1) a number of voters have ambivalent attitudes about abortion rights; (2) the amount of ambivalence varies according to the circumstances (elective versus traumatic) under which an abortion is obtained; (3) ambivalence about elective abortions is essentially unrelated to ambivalence about traumatic abortions; (4) voters who support abortion rights are more ambivalent about elective abortions than about traumatic abortions, whereas the pattern is reversed for abortion rights opponents; and (5) extreme views in support of or opposition to abortion rights can sometimes mitigate the amount of ambivalence felt by voters.

Did Motor Voter Work

This article examines the impact of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act on turnout and the composition of state electorates in the 1996 elections. We address two questions regarding the effect of this new law: (a) Did the law increase overall turnout, and (b) did the law decrease the class and racial inequity in the U.S. electorate? Using turnout and exit poll data from the states, we find that the new law had no significant impact on overall state-level turnout, and it appeared to slightly increase the class and racial inequality in state electorates.

Evangelicalism Meets the Continental Divide: Mloral and Economic Conservatism in the United States and Canada

One of the most prominent ideas subsumed within the “American exceptionalism” literature is that evangelical Protestantism has always had an unusually powerful influence on U.S. political culture. In contrast, more recent literature points to the transnational influence of social movments, including those based in evangelicalism and other religious traditions. We examine the extent to which evangelical influences on moral conservatism and economic conservatism are similar in the United States and Canada. We employ regression models with slope dummy variables on data collected from comparable telephone surveys conducted in the two countries in 1996. Evangelical Protestantisms influence on moral conservatism and value priorities is transnational, but its influence on economic conservatism is distinctively American. Compositional analysis shows this pattern is largely shaped by the greater influence of self-identified fundamentalists among evangelical Protestants in the United States.

What Happens When We Simultaneously Want Opposite Things? Ambivalence about Social Welfare

Since the New Deal, issues relating to social welfare policy have created a divide in the United States. This divide has been a defining characteristic of party politics at both the elite (Sinclair 1978; Barrett and Cook 1991; Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001) and mass levels (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; more recently, see Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Stonecash 2000; Layman and Carsey 2002) for over seven decades. It has been suggested, however, that many Americans are internally torn between the contending sides of governmental activism versus governmental restraint, especially with regard to spending programs that provide benefits to individual citizens, disadvan-taged or otherwise (Cantril and Cantril 1999; Feldman and Zaller 1992; Hodson, Maio, and Esses 2001). The present study takes a closer look at this ambivalence, which is said to exist whenever someone simultaneously possesses both positive and negative evaluations of an attitude object (Alvarez and Brehm 1995; Zaller 1992; Zaller and Feldman 1992; Eagly and Chaiken 1993).

The irrelevance of negative campaigns to political trust: Experimental and survey results

Abstract Previous research on negative political advertising has been confined to voters ‘ evaluations of those ads and their effects on voters ‘ evaluations of candidates. We examine the effects that negative political advertisements have on the general attitude of trust in government. Do mutual accusations by competing candidates in a campaign affect voter attitudes about the political system? Evidence from both an experiment and a survey suggests that they do not. Experimental subjects exposed to a very negative campaign had similar levels of trust in government as those exposed to a less negative campaign. A statewide survey of registered voters in 1988 showed only a modest correlation between perceived negativity of the presidential campaign and low trust. Both studies find evidence that trust conditions the relationship between negativity and candidate evaluation. Voters with lower levels of trust in government are more affected by the degree of negativity in the campaign.

Jewish Religiosity and Political Attitudes in the United States and Israel

Does religious commitment have a common political impact across national frontiers? To date, that question has been explored empirically only for Roman Catholics, who might be expected to behave similarly because of centralizing resources in their tradition. This article explores the extent of transnational political attitudes among Jews in the United States and Israel, two groups with less centralized authority structures and radically different religious situations. Parallel surveys of Jews in the United States and Israel, analyzed by OLS regression with the slope dummy approach, indicate that Jewish religiosity has a common influence on most political issues but often has much sharper effects in one society than the other. Given our expectation that Jews would exhibit lower levels of transnational similarity than Roman Catholics, the findings reinforce scholars who perceive religion as a potent transnational political factor.

Political involvement and the projection process

The politically involved members of the mass public have commonly been described as having more sophisticated awareness of political issues and a greater ability to use issues in forming their evaluations of candidates. This paper briefly reviews the issue-voting literature which comes to that conclusion, and proposes that the politically involved people might also be more subject to projection in the formation of their political perceptions. A model of perception that includes both projection and inference processes is estimated using data from the 1972–74–76 CPS Panel Study. Separate estimations for the involved and uninvolved strata reveal higher projection coefficients for the more involved on the more ambiguous issues.