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As the Baby Boomer generation ages, the number of senior citizens as a proportion of the overall electorate is going to reach record numbers. This fact prompted Brittany Bramlett to ask: When senior citizens make up a large proportion of the local population, are they politically more powerful, or are they perhaps more powerless? In Senior Power or Senior Peril, Bramlett examines the assertions that the increasing number of older adult-concentrated communities across the United States form a growing bloc of senior power that will influence the redistribution of particularized welfare benefit

As the Baby Boomer generation ages, the number of senior citizens as a proportion of the overall electorate is going to reach record numbers. This fact prompted Brittany Bramlett to ask: When senior citizens make up a large proportion of the local population, are they politically more powerful, or are they perhaps more powerless? In Senior Power or Senior Peril, Bramlett examines the assertions that the increasing number of older adult-concentrated communities across the United States form a growing bloc of senior power that will influence the redistribution of particulariz.

Past work emphasizes the decline of cognition into older age. Recent work suggests that living in an aged community provides ample opportunity for social interaction with peers and that these older residents perform better cognitively than more isolated seniors. I test whether this relationship is evident for the political cognition of older residents with NAES data from 2000 and 2004. Findings indicate higher levels of political knowledge among seniors living in aged communities compared with their peers living in places without the same social context.

This article examines the influence of two cross‐pressures, religion and contact with gay individuals in the United States, on same‐sex marriage opinion. Close relationships with gays and lesbians may influence people of varying faiths differently or not at all. Results indicate that despite religious teachings against homosexuality, people of most religious traditions are more likely to support same‐sex marriage when they have a close relationship with a gay individual. The effects are the greatest for black Protestants and Latino Catholics. However, white Protestants with close relationships with gay people are just as opposed to same‐sex marriage as those without similar contact.Este artículo examina la influencia de dos opiniones incompatibles, la religión y el contacto con personas homosexuales en la opinión sobre los matrimonios del mismo sexo en los estados unidos. El contacto cercano con gays o lesbianas puede influenciar la opinión de personas creyentes en cierto grado o nada en lo absoluto. Los resultados muestran que a pesar de las escrituras religiosas en contra de la homosexualidad, las personas pertenecientes a la mayoría de las tradiciones religiosas son más probables de apoyar matrimonios del mismo sexo cuando éstas tienen una relación cercana con un individuo gay. Los efectos son mayores en afroamericanos protestantes y católicos latinoamericanos. Sin embargo, estadounidenses blancos protestantes relacionados con personas gay se oponen a los matrimonios del mismo sexo tanto como aquellos que no tienen un contacto similar.Related Articles:"Changing Public Opinion on Same‐Sex Marriage," (2011, free): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00092.x/full"The Impact of Contact with Gay and Lesbian Couples," (2009): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00160.x/abstract"Limitations of the Contact Hypothesis," (2010) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00262.x/abstract

AbstractDissemination of journal submission data is critical for identifying editorial bias, creating an informed scholarly marketplace, and critically mapping the contours of a discipline's scholarship. However, our survey and case study investigations indicate that nearly a decade after the Perestroika movement began, political science journals remain reserved in collecting and releasing submission data. We offer several explanations for this lack of transparency and suggest ways that the profession might address this shortcoming.

AbstractThis article analyzes the politics of older Americans in the 21st century. Older Americans have been significantly involved in American politics, relative to younger generations. Political participation typically increases with age, even ramping up during the early period of older adulthood. However, past work has indicated that political participation drops off due to frailty and loss of cognition in the latest years of the life span. And, yet, people are living longer than in previous decades when much of the past research on this relationship was conducted. We want to know whether these relationships remain consistent and want to especially analyze the old–old, a growing age group that has been difficult to study in the past due to their low numbers in traditional surveys. With tens of thousands of respondents, survey data from the Cooperative Election Studies from 2008 to 2020 allow us to analyze these older groups in recent years, across types of participation and party affiliation. We find that there is not much of a dip in political activity among the old–old. They are still quite active, particularly when it comes to donating money to campaigns and voting. Additionally, through analyzing birth cohorts, we find that political activity gradually increases as people age through their 60s and 70s and does not notably decline when they move into the old–old age group.

AbstractThis article analyzes the use of religious language on Twitter by members of the U.S. Congress (MOCs). Politicians use various media platforms to communicate about their political agendas and their personal lives. In the United States, religious language is often part of the messaging from politicians to their constituents. This is done carefully and often strategically and across media platforms. With members of Congress increasingly using Twitter to connect with constituents on a regular basis, we want to explain who uses religious language on Twitter, when, and how. Using 1.5 million tweets scraped from members of Congress in April of 2018, we find that MOCs from both major political parties make use of a "religious code" on Twitter in order to send messages about their own identities as well as to activate the religious identities of their constituents. However, Republicans use the code more extensively and with Judeo-Christian-specific terms. Additionally, we discuss gender effects for the ways MOCs use "religious code" on Twitter.

The "proximate casualties" hypothesis holds that popular support for American wars is undermined more by the deaths of American personnel from nearby areas than by the deaths of those from far away. However, no previous research has tested the mechanisms that might produce this effect. This omission contributes to three areas of lingering uncertainty within the war support literature: whether national or local losses have a greater effect on war support, whether the negative effects of war deaths are durable or temporary, and whether the negative effects of war deaths have a greater influence on the most or least attentive citizens. Analysis of Iraq War data shows that local losses have a greater effect on war support than national losses, that these casualty effects decay rapidly, and that citizens who closely follow news at the national and local levels are least affected by new information about war costs. These findings run contrary to the prevailing cost-benefit calculus model of war support. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

The "proximate casualties" hypothesis holds that popular support for American wars is undermined more by the deaths of American personnel from nearby areas than by the deaths of those from far away. However, no previous research has tested the mechanisms that might produce this effect. This omission contributes to three areas of lingering uncertainty within the war support literature: whether national or local losses have a greater effect on war support, whether the negative effects of war deaths are durable or temporary, and whether the negative effects of war deaths have a greater influence on the most or least attentive citizens. Analysis of Iraq War data shows that local losses have a greater effect on war support than national losses, that these casualty effects decay rapidly, and that citizens who closely follow news at the national and local levels are least affected by new information about war costs. These findings run contrary to the prevailing cost–benefit calculus model of war support.

Major campaign donors are highly concentrated geographically. A relative handful of neighborhoods accounts for the bulk of all money contributed to political campaigns. Public opinion in these elite neighborhoods is very different from that in the country as a whole and in low-donor areas. On a number of prominent political issues, the prevailing viewpoint in high-donor neighborhoods can be characterized as cosmopolitan and libertarian, rather than populist or moralistic. Merging Federal Election Commission contribution data with three recent large-scale national surveys, we find that these opinion differences are not solely the result of big-donor areas' high concentration of wealthy and educated individuals. Instead, these neighborhoods have a distinctive political ecology that likely reinforces and intensifies biases in opinion. Given that these locales are the origin for the lion's share of campaign donations, they may steer the national political agenda in unrepresentative directions. Adapted from the source document.