The Consistent Attributes of the Ideal Presidential Candidate in an Increasingly Divided Electorate

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith S. Trent ◽  
Cady Short-Thompson ◽  
Paul A. Mongeau ◽  
Maribeth S. Metzler

Political image is a transactional process between candidates’ actions and how voters assess them with their own individual ideas of the ideal presidential candidate. This 28-year longitudinal study of political communication serves to address the following four research questions. First, what attributes do voters find most important or desirable for a candidate to possess—in other words, what makes him or her an ideal presidential candidate? Second, how do these evaluations of ideal characteristics change across time and a different field of candidates? Third, how important are the candidates’ demographic variables? Fourth, how do the evaluations of ideal characteristics differ across the age, gender, and political party affiliation of the voters? These questions are posed and answered across 1988 to 2016 presidential campaign cycles in one of the longest research studies in the discipline of political communication.

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-244
Author(s):  
Tina C. DeMarco ◽  
Anna-Kaisa Newheiser

How do people cope with group members who insult the in-group? The 2016 U.S. Presidential election provided an opportunity to examine this question among group members experiencing unprecedented within-group strife. Participants read an essay written by an in-group or out-group member (Study 1, university affiliation; Study 2, U.S. political party affiliation, conducted at the height of the 2016 Presidential campaign), in which the author insulted his or her in-group. Participants reported the extent to which and reasons why they wanted to confront and avoid the target. Desire to rebuke the target, but not desire to protect oneself and the in-group, mediated the relationship between exposure to in-group (vs. out-group) deviance and confrontation. Desires to rebuke and protect jointly mediated the relationship with avoidance. Whereas people may differ on how they react to in-group deviance, they are primarily motivated by wanting to reprimand deviants, with implications for coping with intragroup conflict.


2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (03) ◽  
pp. 723-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie E. Artis ◽  
Andrew V. Krebs

Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in‐depth interviews with judges in twenty‐five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody—a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.


2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Czech ◽  
Rena Borkhataria

Species conservation via the Endangered Species Act is highly politicized, yet few data have been gathered to illustrate the relationship of political party affiliation to species conservation perspectives. We conducted a nationwide public opinion survey and found that Democrats value species conservation more highly than do Republicans, and that Democrats are also more strongly supportive of the Endangered Species Act. Republicans place higher value on property rights than do Democrats, but members of both parties value economic growth as highly as wildlife conservation. The results imply that the Democratic propensity to value species conservation reflects a biocentric perspective that does not bode well for practical conservation efforts. Species conservation will depend upon the success of academicians and progressive political leaders in educating students and members of all parties about the fundamental conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindiso Mafico

Does social class affect political party affiliation in the African-American community? Drawing on two contrasting theories: the theory of group interests and class-based theories of stratification put forth by Wilson and Shelton (2006), I propose that African -Americans who report being of a high socio-economic class are more likely to be Republican than African Americans of a lower socio-economic class. Through secondary analysis of data provided by the General Social Survey (GSS), I investigate the relationship between political party affiliation and social class in the African-American community. By combining data across 20 years between 1996 and 2016, the sample size is 1557 African-Americans. Measures of socio-economic status are limited to a single variable that asks respondents about their subjective social class, while the dependent variable was operationalized by a variable that inquires the respondent's political party affiliation. Multiple regression analysis reveals that there is no statistically significant relationship between social class and political party affiliation. There is however, a relationship between political party affiliation and another measure of social class, specifically the respondents' level of education. The strongest predictor of political party affiliation is the age of the respondents which gives insight on future voting patterns in the African-American community. While the hypothesis is not supported, the results shed light on the potential reasons for increased support for the Republican Party among African-Americans and could be used to predict voting outcomes among African-Americans for future elections.


Social Forces ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 145 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Stanley Eitzen ◽  
Gary M. Maranell

Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian

Chapter 4 investigates Armenians’ stance in the 1957 elections and in the ‘general’ Lebanese and the intra-Armenian mini-civil war of 1958. Armenian parties participated in, and contributed to, political tensions in Lebanon. Simultaneously, they used their position in the Lebanese political system to jostle for power within their own community – a development that turned violent and ended only in December 1958, almost two months after the Lebanese mini-civil war had ended. This tension and violent confrontation between Armenian parties and their armed men had a crucial spatial effect: it unprecedentedly territorialized certain neighborhoods of Beirut. Whereas parts of Lebanon were organized by sects and classes, by relative contrast, it was according to political party affiliation that in 1957/1958 many Armenians of Mar Mikael, Sin el Fil, Bourj Hamoud, and Corniche el-Nahr were re-sorted and relocated, often by force. Lebanese Armenians aligned along the right-left fault lines that divided Lebanese politics and society— more than other confessions, indeed. Vice versa, the Lebanese state was Armenianized, as it were, in that it started to pay more attention to Armenian matters than before, intervening directly and by military force in Armenian neighborhoods in order to finally end the internecine Armenian confrontation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 179-211
Author(s):  
Todd A. Eisenstadt ◽  
Karleen Jones West

Chapter 6 focuses on polycentric pluralism, mostly at the international and national levels, sidelining vulnerability as a principal cause of environmental attitudes. After briefly introducing rationales behind the interaction between international and domestic policy positions, we show that while there is consensus among Ecuadorians that foreign extractive interests are threats to the Amazon, Ecuadorians are divided along party lines regarding the government’s pursuit of extraction, illustrating the political—rather than cultural—nature of the extractive debate in Ecuador. The upshot is that the Correa administration tried but failed to maintain both its international and domestic images as an environmental force, funding discretionary programs (including “green” ones) through oil drilling. Furthermore, consistent with our argument that polycentric pluralism has been the form that interest articulation takes, variations in approval of policies are more readily explained by cleavages defined by vulnerability and political party affiliation rather than by ethnic identity.


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