Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz

The Conspiracy of Silence: Context and Voting on Gay Marriage Ballot Measures

Gay marriage bans have received widespread support in the past decade in states across America. The authors evaluate the extent to which context mitigates or exacerbates support for gay rights. Their question is grounded in the debate over whether exposure to out-groups creates acceptance through contact or whether exposure induces hostility through threat. Using data from twelve marriage ban elections, the authors find conditional support for the threat hypothesis. While the presence of a gay population is unimportant to the majority of the population, evangelical Christians who live proximate to larger gay populations are more likely to support bans on gay marriage.

Authoritarianism and American Political Behavior from 1952 to 2008

Using American National Election Studies (NES) data from 1952 to 2008—a longer timespan than any analysis to date—we evaluate the leading claims about growing polarization along authoritarian/nonauthoritarian lines and the reasons for that growth. We find authoritarianism’s impact has grown for partisanship and voting but has been consistent for policy attitudes—usually present for “social” and defense issues, but less so for social welfare and foreign policy. This suggests that authoritarianism’s importance is related to strategic politicians advancing issues that touch on the authoritarian/nonauthoritarian divide, and varies across election years.

The Limits of the Homogeneity Model Segregation and Civic Engagement in Latino Communities

Until recently, Latinos generally were well integrated geographically and did not live in concentrated Latino neighborhoods. That is changing. Latinos now are more likely than ever before to live in isolated Latino areas. If this trend continues, Latinos soon will surpass African Americans as the most segregated minority group in the United States. For decades, political scientists, sociologists, and historians have tracked the perils of residential segregation in the African American community, but the consequences of segregation for Latinos in the United States are far from clear. Using the Social Capital Benchmark 2000 survey, this article investigates the civic consequences of segregation. The data suggest that living in a segregated area decreases the likelihood that Latinos participate in community-building activities. These findings directly challenge previous research that purports to find benefits from living in racially homogeneous areas.

Perpetuating the Myth of the Culture War Court? Issue Attention in Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Supreme Court Nominations

Using digital text analysis methods, we analyze over 3800 newspaper articles covering U.S. Supreme Court judicial appointments between 1981 and 2009 to measure the level of (in)congruence between the Court’s agenda and the issues emphasized by the media. We find that newspapers highlight “culture war” issues at the expense of other important issues addressed much more frequently by the Court. Moreover, abortion in particular receives attention in more articles and in much greater depth than any other issue. With a few minor deviations, these patterns are consistent across nominations. These findings raise normative concerns regarding the didactic function of the print media in American democracy and shed empirical light on positive theories of media behavior.

The Changing Role of Race in Social Welfare Attitude Formation: Partisan Divides over Undocumented Immigrants and Social Welfare Policy

Growth in the U.S. Latino population has prompted speculation that the “racialization” of welfare with respect to African Americans would eventually extend to Latinos. The authors assess this prediction, analyzing public attitudes toward welfare spending and national health insurance and their linkages to attitudes about Latinos and undocumented immigrants. The authors find significant relationships between affect for “illegal immigrants” and social welfare attitudes, conditional on party identification. The findings indicate that Americans view undocumented immigrants as the beneficiaries of social welfare policies, not the wider Latino population. Furthermore, the framing of social service utilization by undocumented immigrants could threaten the Democratic coalition.

Going positive: The effects of negative and positive advertising on candidate success and voter turnout

Given the depth of research on negative advertising in campaigns, scholars have wondered why candidates continue to attack their opponents. We build on this research by considering real-world campaign contexts in which candidates are working in competition with each other and have to react to the decisions of the opposing campaign. Our results suggest that it is never efficacious for candidates to run attack ads, but running positive ads can increase a candidate’s margin of victory. These results are conditioned by two factors: candidates must both stay positive and out-advertise their opponent. Second, the effects of positive advertising are strongest in areas where the candidate is losing or winning by a large margin—areas where they might be tempted to not advertise at all.

Partisan Mountains and Molehills: The Geography of U.S. State Intraparty Factionalism

We examine whether the geographic distribution of a political partys electoral support affects the divisiveness of statewide primaries. In spite of V.O. Key, Jr.s (1956) original insight that geography might be a relevant predictor of contested statewide primaries, this hypothesis has received little attention from political scientists. We test Keys hypothesis using data on gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections to identify the effects of electoral geography on the structure of competition in primary elections. We contend that dispersed bases of electoral support greatly increase the costs associated with maintaining party cohesion. Our findings support the theory that a geographically dispersed electorate heightens the potential for intraparty factionalism. These results are robust across several measures of the dependent variable.