Suchergebnisse

Many instructors face challenges in engaging students in lecture
courses. In the fall of 2004, we incorporated innovative, real-time
polling technology into an upper-division political science course
on Public Opinion. The polling technology channeled students'
technological savvy in the service of several pedagogical goals. The
technology increased student engagement and reinforced the substance
of the course material. It also provided students with topically
relevant experiences in answering survey questions and allowed
students to feel more comfortable in expressing their opinions
during discussions. We thank Victoria
Cross, James Fowler, Ethan Scheiner, Walter Stone, and Elizabeth
Zechmeister for helpful suggestions. Funding for the technology
was generously provided by the Undergraduate Instructional
Improvement Program, supported by the vice provost–undergraduate
studies at the University of California, Davis.

Ethnocentrism-our tendency to partition the human world into in-groups and out-groups-pervades societies around the world. Surprisingly, though, few scholars have explored its role in political life. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam fill this gap with Us Against Them, their definitive explanation of how ethnocentrism shapes American public opinion. Arguing that humans are broadly predisposed to ethnocentrism, Kinder and Kam explore its impact on our attitudes toward an array of issues, including the war on terror, humanitarian assistance, immigration, the sanctity of marriage, and the refo

Research on racial resentment has been meticulously developed, tested, and analyzed with white Americans in mind—yet black Americans have also responded to this battery for the past three decades. To date, little to nothing is known about the implications of responses to the racial resentment battery among black Americans. A burgeoning literature on blacks' intragroup attitudes suggests that over time, black Americans have increasingly attributed racial inequality to individual failings as opposed to structural forces. As such, unpacking blacks' responses to the canonical racial resentment battery may provide further insight into the micro-foundations of black public opinion. Using survey data from 1986 to 2016, we engage in a systematic quantitative examination of the role of racial resentment in predicting black and white Americans' opinions on racial policies, "race-coded" policies, and nonracialized policies. Along the way, we highlight the existence of wide heterogeneity among black respondents and call for further investigation that identifies similarities and differences in the foundations of white and black public opinion.

The mass media devote a great deal of attention to high‐profile elections, but in American political life such elections are the exception, not the rule. The majority of electoral contests feature candidates who are relative unknowns. In such situations, does name recognition breed contempt, indifference, or affection? Existing work presents modest theory and mixed evidence. Using three laboratory experiments, we provide conclusive evidence that name recognition can affect candidate support, and we offer strong evidence that a key mechanism underlying this relationship is inferences about candidate viability. We further show that the name‐recognition effect dissipates in the face of a more germane cue, incumbency. We conclude with a field study that demonstrates the robustness of the name‐recognition effect to a real‐world political context, that of yard signs and a county election.

Faced with a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama, voters in 2008 were swayed by the familiar play of factors—party identification, policy preferences, and economic conditions—but also, we find, by ethnocentrism, a deep‐seated psychological predisposition that partitions the world into ingroups and outgroups—into "us" and "them." The effect of ethnocentrism was significant and substantial, and it appeared over and above the effects due to partisanship, economic conditions, policy stances, political engagement, and several varieties of conservatism. Two features of Obama were primarily responsible for triggering ethnocentrism in 2008: his race and his imagined Muslim faith. As such, we demonstrate that ethnocentrism was much more important in 2008 than in the four presidential elections immediately preceding 2008, and we show that it was much more important in the actual contest between Senator McCain and Senator Obama than in a hypothetical contest between Senator McCain and Senator Clinton.