Tasha S. Philpot

Views from Inside the Net: How Websites Affect Young Adults' Political Interest

We use multiple methods to examine how individual websites affect political interest (i.e., citizens’ willingness to pay attention to politics at the expense of other endeavors). Our model clarifies necessary conditions for a website to increase political interest. A survey then reveals age-related and site-specific interest changes that are consistent with the models logic. Respondents of all ages report greater political interest after viewing sites that they rate as effective and efficient than they do after viewing other sites. Age-related interest effects occur because young and old disagree about which sites have these desired attributes. This work makes two contributions: our methods offer a template for understanding the influence of participatory appeals while our finding can help political entrepreneurs engage young adults more effectively.

FEELING THE PAIN OF MY PEOPLE Hurricane Katrina, Racial Inequality, and the Psyche of Black America

In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the U.S. Gulf Coast region causing a subsequent cycle of evacuation, relocation, and rebuilding. The storm exposed in its wake vast racial and class differences in how the hurricane and its aftermath affected individual citizens. Using two public opinion polls conducted immediately after Katrina, the authors demonstrate that African Americans in this country were much more likely than Whites to experience feelings of anger and depression in response to the events surrounding the hurricane. They also show that these feelings of anger and depression held by African Americans are respectively explained by their perception of racial discrimination by the federal government and complacency on the part of President Bush in response to Katrina. These results provide additional support for the idea that African Americans have a racially group-centric view of society that powerfully shapes how they respond to political events.

Racial Cues in Campaign News: The Effects of Candidate Strategies on Group Activation and Political Attentiveness among African Americans

Decades of scholarship in the field of electoral behavior have established that the chief influence of campaigns is to reinforce or activate latent predispositions so that voters behave consistently with their underlying interests (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; Finkel 1993; Gelman and King 1993; Klapper 1960; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; Patterson and McClure 1976; Petrocik 1996; Zaller 1992). Little attention, however, has been devoted to identifying the specific process by which activation occurs. In particular, we have yet to identify specific catalysts, in the swirling confusion of campaign communication, for activating latent preferences.

Introduction: Defining African-American Political Psychology

Recently, political science has experienced an upsurge in the number of volumes devoted to the study of political psychology. Bridging theories of cognition, personality, and intergroup relations with the study of the way individuals interact with the political world, this line of research has furthered our knowledge of the psychology of political decision-making, socialization, opinion formation, and behavior. Nevertheless, most of the findings yielded from extant studies are based on White Americans. Decades of research in both political science and psychology have demonstrated that external, environmental factors influence individuals’ mental processes, especially as they relate to politics. Inasmuch as such factors vary systematically across racial and ethnic groups, the political psychology of these groups warrants study. Thus, we begin the extension of the current literature by applying it to African Americans.

African Americans, Ideology, and Consequences for the Two-Party System

One of the basic tenets of representative democracy rests on the premise that citizens are presented with choices when selecting political leaders. As Ranney explains, “popular control over government which is the essence of democracy can best be established by the popular choice between and control over alternate responsible parties; for only such parties can provide coherent, unified sets of rulers who will assume collective responsibility to the people for the manner in which government is carried on” (Ranney 1962, 12). In the United States, voters are usually offered a dichotomous choice between the Democratic and Republican Parties. Although some scholars and political elites argue that the two-party system in which we function is less than democratic (e.g., Guinier 1994), few would disagree that some choice is better than none at all. Yet, throughout history, African Americans have essentially operated in a one-party system (Gurin et al., 1989; Walton and Smith 2003; Frymer 1999).