Suchergebnisse

In an attempt to understand the extent to which racism and sexism influenced affect toward Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, we analyze data from a national survey conducted in October 2008. Situating our investigation in previous examinations of modern racism and modern sexism, we test competing hypotheses about the role of these attitudes in the 2008 presidential election. Our results suggest that racism had a significant impact on candidate evaluations while sexism did not. We find that respondents who hold racist attitudes expressed negative attitudes toward Obama and positive attitudes toward Palin. When interacted with party identification, racism continued to exert a strong effect, indicating findings that are robust across partisan affiliations. Sexism, on the other hand, did not significantly influence evaluations of either Palin or Obama.

Our understanding of the impact of party conventions on opinion regarding presidential candidates is based largely on aggregate-level analysis. Extant individual-level investigation has been limited by the assumption that conventions are monolithic information events that exercise uniform effects. Using panel data, we show for the first time that conventions exercise two independent effects, which can counteract or reinforce each other depending on individual characteristics and information consumption. First, we demonstrate how exposure to speeches exercises a persuasive effect that benefits the convening candidate, even when partisanship is controlled. Second, we demonstrate how conventions exercise an atmospheric effect that activates general partisan bias. We find that observed postconvention changes are attributable to the combination of these separate but simultaneous effects. We also explore how individual partisanship conditions speech effects and find evidence that partisanship influences the decision to listen but is unlikely to influence the impact of a message already heard. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Our contribution sheds light on the dramaturgies of evaluation that precede candidate selection in academic organizations. The dramaturgies unfold across committee meetings, reviews, and reports that funnel the pool of candidates into a shortlist of prospective members. Because they are prolonged and not all stages involve copresence, the continuity and consistency of evaluative processes is a central dramaturgical problem. It highlights the constitutive role of written documents for the continuity and consistency of organizational evaluation processes. We marshal evidence from a comparative study on academic candidacy in two organizational settings: grantmakers, who select candidates for funding, and universities, who select candidates for professorships. Drawing on archived records produced in the context of research grant applications and professorial recruitments between 1950 and 2000, we distinguish two regimes of textual agency throughout the processes of evaluation: documents structure the process of candidate selection throughout dramaturgical stages, and they act as relays that transfer assessments of human actors across dramaturgical stages and time. In addition, by focusing on organizational access and showing how organizations make people before even hiring them, we draw attention to the emergence of a highly scripted dramatic figure in academic life: the candidate.

Although Barack Obama's entrance into the 2008 presidential campaign has been warmly received by Whites, Blacks have been somewhat ambivalent. Some even have claimed that Obama is not "Black." The case of Barack Obama brings to the forefront the prospect of intragroup identity differences that exist among Blacks and the potential importance of a candidate's racial background in elections. Consequently, the authors ask the following questions: (a) Does the racial background of a political candidate affect Black voters' support and evaluation of a candidate's personal attributes (i.e., trust, concern, strength, and qualification)? and (b) Focusing purely on the treatment groups separately (White, biracial, and Black candidates), does Black identity affect Blacks' support and evaluation of a candidate's personal attributes? The experimental results of this exploratory study find race does make a difference on candidate support, and Black identity influences the way in which Black respondents perceive White, biracial, and Black candidates. As a result, these findings suggest that differences in how Blacks feel about a candidate will depend on the candidate's racial background, their own attitudes and beliefs about being Black, and where they fall on various demographic and political measures.

The common assumption that female candidates on the campaign trail should not go on the attack, because such tactics contradict gender stereotypes, has not received consistent support. We argue that in some circumstances gender stereotypes willfavorfemale politicians going negative. To test this proposition, this study examines how gender cues affect voter reactions to negative ads in the context of a political sex scandal, a context that should prime gender stereotypes that favor females. Using an online experiment involving a national sample of U.S. adults ($N=599$), we manipulate the gender and partisan affiliation of a politician who attacks a male opponent caught in a sex scandal involving sexually suggestive texting to a female intern. Results show that in the context of a sex scandal, a female candidate going on the attack is evaluated more positively than a male. Moreover, while female participants viewed the female sponsor more favorably, sponsor gender had no effect on male participants. Partisanship also influenced candidate evaluations: the Democratic female candidate was evaluated more favorably than her Republican female counterpart.

This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity—hegemonic masculinity (HM)—accounted for unique variance in men's and women's support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women's and men's endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of Trump, over and above political party affiliation, gender, race, and education. These effects held when controlling for respondents' trust in the government, in contrast to a populist explanation of support for Trump. In addition, as conceptualized, HM was associated with less trust in the government (Study 3), more sexism (Study 4), more racism (Study 5), and more xenophobia (Study 6) but continued to predict unique variance in evaluations of Trump when controlling for each of these factors. Whereas HM predicted evaluations of Trump, across studies, social and prejudiced attitudes predicted evaluations of his democratic challengers: Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. We replicate the findings of Studies 1 through 6 using a nationally representative sample of the United States (Study 7) 50 days prior to the 2020 presidential election. The findings highlight the importance of psychological examinations of masculinity as a cultural ideology to understand how men's and women's endorsement of HM legitimizes patriarchal dominance and reinforces gender, race, and class-based hierarchies via candidate support.

Our understanding of the impact of party conventions on opinion regarding presidential candidates is based largely on aggregate-level analysis. Extant individual-level investigation has been limited by the assumption that conventions are monolithic information events that exercise uniform effects. Using panel data, we show for the first time that conventions exercise two independent effects, which can counteract or reinforce each other depending on individual characteristics and information consumption. First, we demonstrate how exposure to speeches exercises a persuasive effect that benefits the convening candidate, even when partisanship is controlled. Second, we demonstrate how conventions exercise an atmospheric effect that activates general partisan bias. We find that observed postconvention changes are attributable to the combination of these separate but simultaneous effects. We also explore how individual partisanship conditions speech effects and find evidence that partisanship influences the decision to listen but is unlikely to influence the impact of a message already heard.

The use of the proximity model to represent the relationship between citizens' policy attitudes and the positions of candidates on the issues of the day has considerable appeal because it offers a bridge between theoretical models of political behavior and empirical work. However, there is little consensus among applied researchers about the appropriate representation of voter behavior with respect to the measurement of issue distance, candidate location, or whether to allow heterogeneity in the weight that each individual places on particular issues. Each of these choices suggests a different, and reasonably complicated, nonlinear relationship between voter utility and candidate and voter issue positions which may have a meaningful influence on the substantive conclusions drawn by the researcher. Yet, little attention has been given to the best way to represent the proximity model in applied work. The purpose of this paper is to identify which forms of the proximity model work best, with particular consideration given to the identification of functional forms that are invariant to the choice of scale for the independent variables.

We test the effects of a popular televised source of political humor for young Americans: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. We find that participants exposed to jokes about George W. Bush and John Kerry on The Daily Show tended to rate both candidates more negatively, even when controlling for partisanship and other demographic variables. Moreover, we find that viewers exhibit more cynicism toward the electoral system and the news media at large. Despite these negative reactions, viewers of The Daily Show reported increased confidence in their ability to understand the complicated world of politics. Our findings are significant in the burgeoning field of research on the effects of "soft news" on the American public. Although research indicates that soft news contributes to democratic citizenship in America by reaching out to the inattentive public, our findings indicate that The Daily Show may have more detrimental effects, driving down support for political institutions and leaders among those already inclined toward nonparticipation.