Obama Indicates Strong Support for Science

The Dynamic Political Economy of Support for Barack Obama

The Dynamic Political Economy of Support for Barack Obama During the 2008 Presidential Election Campaign In recent years, students of voting behavior have become increasingly interested in valence politics models of electoral choice. These models share the core assumption that key issues in electoral politics typically are ones upon which there is a widespread public consensus on the goals of p...

How Obama is using the science of change.

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a worldfamous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scriptin...

Below Top Status Indicates Mediocrity When Social Influence Is Strong

Is higher status necessarily a signal of higher quality? Prior research on how status and quality can become decoupled has shown that social influence processes can lead to a low correlation between status and quality. Here we show that having high but not top status can be an indication of medium rather than high quality, even if top status indicates top quality. A formal model shows that such...

Responsive partisanship: public support for the clinton and obama health care plans.

We examine the contours of support for the Clinton and Obama health care plans during the 1990s and 2000s based on our own compilation of 120,000 individual-level survey responses from throughout the debates. Despite the rise of the Tea Party, and the racialization of health care politics, opinion dynamics are remarkably similar in both periods. Party ID is the single most powerful predictor of...

Digital Rx: Obama pushing for paperless prescriptions.