Several studies of the post-war American political economy find that Democratic presidents have been more successful than Republicans. Most recently, Bartels (2008) found that economic growth had been greater and that unemployment and income inequality had been lower under Democratic presidents since 1948. If true, these findings combined with the frequent success of Republicans in presidential...

Four studies investigated whether activating a social identity can lead group members to choose options that are labeled in words associated with that identity. When political identities were made salient, Republicans (but not Democrats) became more likely to choose the gamble or investment option labeled "conservative." This shift did not occur in a condition in which the same options were unl...

Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democ...

Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psychology and public opinion research. Research on framing has traditionally relied on controlled experiments and manually annotated document collections. In this paper we present a method that allows for quantifying the relative strengths of competing linguistic frames based on corpus analysis. This met...

Title of Dissertation: SOCIAL POLICY AND SOCIAL SERVICES IN WOMEN’S PREGNANCY DECISIONMAKING: POLITICAL AND PROGRAMMATIC IMPLICATIONS Laura Selena Hussey, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor James G. Gimpel, Department of Government and Politics This dissertation empirically evaluates the argument that welfare state expansion will reduce abortion. Its central question concerns the...

In a country where only two political parties — the Democrats and Republicans — have dominated electoral politics since the Civil War, any electoral headway by a third party or candidate is a noteworthy event. Setting aside Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party effort, Perot’s 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 was the largest third party popular vote since the Civil War. By running again in 1996 a...

Background The voting behaviors of elected officials shape the public's health. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of elected officials who vote in concordance with public health policy recommendations. This article presents the results of study conducted with the aims of: 1) testing the hypothesis that US Democrat Senators vote in concordance with American Public Health Associ...

Political scientists have acknowledged the importance of nationalism as a constitutive element radical-right politics but typically empirically reduced phenomenon to specific out-group sentiments. Sociologists, in contrast, devoted more attention theorizing and operationalizing only sporadically engaged debates about institutional politics. The present study brings these literatures together by...