I use this page to make available some of my current research. Below, I list the most current versions of papers (with abstracts). If you click on the paper title, you will be taken to a PDF version of the manuscript. You will need Acrobat to read the files, available free from Adobe.
I'm completed my book manuscript, Silent Voices (Princeton University Press, 2004). Click here for a pre-copy edited version of the introduction and table of contents.
I am finishing up a new project which examines public opinion during wartime, with a focus on World War II. I have links to some relevant materials here
Rolling the Dice on Election Day: Risk Seeking and Political Participation
A large body of work in the political science literature has taken up the question of the risk preferences of the public. This work, while valuable, has been informed by a common assumption: citizens behave in a risk-averse manner. Though the assumption of risk aversion may be reasonable, there is reason to suspect that individuals differ in their propensity to undertake risky actions. In this paper, I propose a direct measure of inter-individual variation in risk-acceptance and show how this measure can inform the study of political behavior. I first develop a scale of the propensity to take risks using items from the 1972 National Elections Study (NES) that measure an individual’s propensity to gamble. I then demonstrate that this scale predicts the propensity to take risky behaviors outside the realm of gambling. Finally, I demonstrate the utility of examining heterogeneity in risk-taking proclivities by demonstrating how variation in risk-seeking affect rates of political participation among the general public
Turbulent Times: An Individual-level Analysis of the Nation’s Most Important Problem, 1964-1971 (with Christopher Karpowitz)
In this paper, we examine how the public came to decide which issue was the “most important problem” facing America from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Using twenty-five polls from Gallup’s MIP series conducted between 1964 and 1971, we begin the process of describing how particular groups of individuals came to determine which issues were important and how different kinds of individuals responded to changes in the social and political world. We are able to explore the effects of changes in real-world conditions by incorporating a content analysis of major news stories in the period. Specifically, we trace how developments in the political world changed the structure of individual decisions about the most important problem question over time, and see how those effects differed for particular groups in the population. We find that as the percentage of news devoted to a given subject increased, the probability of an “average” person picking the corresponding topic as the nation’s most important increased as well. We also find that groups at all levels of cognitive sophistication are receptive to changes in real-world events. However, in different issue areas, different dynamics appear. Individuals with higher levels of sophistication are more sensitive to changes in foreign affairs, the economy, and discussions of social control. Those with lower levels of sophistication are most responsive to changes in the major issues of Vietnam and race. Finally, we find that those groups with most at stake in a given issue area are more sensitive than others to developments in that area. Specifically, we find that blacks are more sensitive than whites to changes in events relating to race and the young are more sensitive than the old to an increased focus by the media on Vietnam.
Public Opinion During the Vietnam War: A Revised Measure of the Public Will
(Note:
The material presented in this paper has been incorporated into my book, Silent
Voices. I am leaving the original paper on this website for those
who are interested in a more complete version of the research (e.g. excessive
tables))
The conception of opinion polls as “broadly representative”
of public sentiment has long pervaded academic and popular discussions of polls.
In 1939, polling pioneer George Gallup advanced the virtues of surveys as a
means for political elites to assess the collective “mandate of the people.”
More recently, Verba argued, “sample surveys provide the closest approximation
to an unbiased representation of the public because participation in a survey
requires no resources and because surveys eliminate the bias inherent in the
fact that participants in politics are self-selected … surveys produce
just what democracy is supposed to produce – equal representation of all
citizens”(1996, 3). Thus, while surveys may be limited in several respects
they appear to provide a requisite egalitarian compliment to traditional forms
of political participation. Through opinion polls, the voice of “the people,”
writ broadly, may be heard. Or maybe not. In this paper, I reconsider this conventional
wisdom. Specifically, I demonstrate that the imbalance in political rhetoric
surrounding the Vietnam War disadvantaged those groups who were the natural
opponents of the War. I investigate the effect of accounting for “don’t
know” responses on the shape of public opinion on the Vietnam issue using
a number of datasets from the 1960s and early 1970s and find that analyses that
use very different data sources converge to the same conclusion. The process
of collecting opinion on Vietnam excluded a dovish segment of the population
from the collective opinion signal in the early part of the war. However, this
bias shrank over time as anti-war messages became more common in the public
sphere. To use the language of Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, the “voice”
of those who abstained from the Vietnam questions was different from those who
responded to such items. So while there may indeed have been a “silent
majority” – as President Nixon maintained during the early years
of his presidency – it was a majority that opposed, rather than supported,
the war.