Edward G. CarminesIndiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Political Science
Edward G. Carmines
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (104)
The past few decades have witnessed increasing levels of hostility among partisans, a phenomenon labelled affective polarisation. This study examines how partisan affective polarisation compares to the racial divide. We examine these differences by looking at ratings of partisan, ideological and racial outgroups on intelligence, morality, trustwort...
Objective
Immigration attitudes have become increasingly polarizing in recent years with Democrats becoming less likely to support restrictionist policies and Republicans more likely to favor such policies. This paper examines the impact of social desirability bias on such attitudes.
Method
Using a list experiment, we examine whether Democrat (and...
Using list experiments on the 2008 and 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, we investigated whether respondents are more likely to vote against presidential candidates from marginalized groups. We show that conservative and Republican respondents are disinclined to support Muslim and gay candidates. However, neither Right- nor Left-leaning r...
This paper argues that our increasingly polarized politics has led to political stalemate and policy gridlock in Congress which, in turn, have contributed to a change in the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government; specifically, executive power has increased at the expense of a diminished legislature. The paper...
The policies of Republican Governor Scott Walker have come to symbolize a resurgent assault on the public sector, and on public employee unions in particular, by the Republican Party. The fact that this is happening in Wisconsin, the state that in the last century was considered the “laboratory of Progressivism,” makes the politics surrounding thes...
In the days after the 2016 election, a variety of explanations has been offered to explain Donald Trump’s unique ascendancy in American politics. Scholars have discussed Trump’s appeal to rural voters, his hybrid media campaign strategy, shifts in voter turnout, Hillary Clinton’s campaign advertising strategy, economic anxiety, differences in sexis...
The standard model of partisan change emphasizes the role of critical elections in bringing about dramatic and quickly realized changes in the party system. In contrast, the model of issue evolution focuses on more gradual and incremental change in the party system – change that is driven by issue competition among partisan elites, which eventually...
Two fundamental aspects of political life in advanced industrial democracies the world over are people's ideological preferences and their economic orientations. The interaction between these two factors helps organize citizens’ value orientations and issue beliefs since there are several different ideological perspectives that people can have abou...
The idea of decision-making shortcuts, or heuristics, originated in psychological work explaining why individuals diverged from rational behavior. Political scientists have viewed shortcuts more positively. Applied to research on voter decision-making processes, scholars have discovered the ubiquitous use of shortcuts by voters. These shortcuts are...
The past 50 years of research into political ideology has left scholars with a contested paradigm. One side, founded on the research of Philip Converse, argues that the mass public is distinctly nonideological in their thinking. The other side argues that ideological thinking is not, in fact, beyond the public and can be found in forms similar to t...
Over 50 years of research into American political ideology have left scholars with a contested paradigm. One side argues that the mass public is distinctly nonideological. The other side argues that ideological thinking is not beyond the public. The way forward for research in political ideology does not lie in rehashing this debate but in advancin...
Research on U.S. congressional elections has placed great emphasis on the role of competitiveness, which is associated with high levels of campaign spending, media coverage, and interest group and party involvement. Competitive campaigns have been found to increase citizens' participation, engagement and learning. However, little is known about whe...
How has the American public responded to elite partisan polarization? Using panel data from both the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the American National Election Studies, we explore the partisan consequences of the discrepancy between the one-dimensional structure of elite policy preferences and the two-dimensional structure of citizens...
Are Americans ideological, and if so, what are the foundations of their ideology? According to Converse's seminal view, whatever the case in other western democracies and despite its centrality to traditional versions of textbook democracy, the American public is distinctly non-ideological. Our objective is to compare the standard and by far most w...
Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all...
This chapter offers a new perspective on political participation that has its roots in an elite-driven theory of political behavior. It argues that as the parties have become increasingly ideologically distinct from one another, there is an increased tendency for voters with issue preferences that match certain party positions to engage in a higher...
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class is both a work of political science and a contribution to broad public discussion of distributive politics. Its topic could not be more relevant to a US polity wracked by bitter partisan disagreements about taxes,...
A new racism, it is claimed, has become a dominant feature of contemporary American politics. According to the theory’s originators, the new racism has largely replaced the old racism, which was based on the alleged biological inferiority of blacks. The new racism, referred to as “symbolic racism” or, more recently, “racial resentment,” by contrast...
That Democrats are widely perceived as a pro-choice party while Republicans are generally perceived as a pro-life party seems apparent to even the most casual observer of American politics. Yet, this perception was not always as clear as it is today. Our understanding of the partisan evolution of the abortion issue in the United States is informed...
Although the study of realignment is an essential component of the rich and fruitful tradition of examining long-term partisan change, questions about the usefulness of the concept persist. We seek to redirect and reinvigorate the study of lasting political change by evaluating the critiques of classic realignment theory, examining the issue evolut...
Foreword, Representative Lee Hamilton 1. The Context for Defeat, Dona-Gene Mitchell and Jeffery J. Mondak 2. Did the Media Do It? The Influence of News Coverage on the 2006 Congressional Elections, Edward G. Carmines, Jessica C. Gerrity and Michael W. Wagner 3. Polarization, Attribution, and Communication Networks in the 2006 Congressional Election...
Although uncompetitive races for the House of Representatives produce formidable challenges to long-held democratic ideals regarding popular control and meaningful citizen involvement, little is known regarding the significance of variance in district-level competitiveness for the perceptions and behaviors of voters. Do citizens know that the outco...
Two fundamental aspects of political life in advanced industrial democracies the world over are people's ideological preferences and their economic orientations. The interaction between these two factors helps organize citizens' value orientations and issue beliefs since there are several different ideological perspectives that people can have abou...
Two features of citizen response to Congress can be taken as grounds for concern. First, Americans know relatively little about Congress, and especially about congressional procedures and policy output. Second, Congress typically emerges as the least respected political institution. Although these matters are troubling when viewed individually, mor...
This article examines the role of party activists in the partisan evolution of the abortion issue. Previous research indicates that party elites—specifically members of Congress—and partisans in the mass public have become more differentiated in their abortion attitudes during the last several decades with Democrats becoming more pro-choice and Rep...
A test of alternative interpretations of the contemporary politics of race : a critical examination of divided by color
This paper examines two interpretations of the contemporary politics of race. One emphasizes the persisting power of racism ; the other, the centrality of politics and political values. Each interpretation, to this point, has reli...
If white Americans could reveal what they really thought about race, without the risk of appearing racist, what would they say? This book aims to illustrate aspects of white American thinking about the politics of race previously hidden from site. Follow-up analysis points the way towards public policies that could gain wide support and reduce the...
Recent trends indicate that American politics is becoming more “cultural” or “value-based.” However, the leading account of cultural conflict in advanced industrial democracies—Ronald Inglehart's theory of Postmaterialism—has received relatively little attention from students of American politics. The present paper argues that cultural orientations...
A wealth of comparative scholarship indicates that a transformation in the value priorities of Western publics has been occurring during the last quarter century, and that value-based cleavages are increasingly coming to structure Western political behavior. The United States, however, has been conspicuous by its relative absence from this research...
Scholars argue that the social structural basis of the party system in the United States developed during the New Deal era has weakened, resulting in an increasing tendency for ideology to shape partisan support. We test this proposition by examining the role of ideology in the formation of partisanship in the United States over the last two decade...
L'ouvrage collectif de Sniderman, Tetlock et Carmines, aborde le racisme dans une perspective interdisciplinaire - associant psychologues, démographes, politistes et sociologues - et comparative, confrontant le regard des Blancs sur les Noirs à celui que portent les Noirs sur les autres minorités et les Blancs en général. Les diverses contributions...
Theory: The theory of policy particularism attributes the greater popularity of race-neutral policies compared to race-specific policies not to the fact the former only benefit blacks or minorities but to the fact they target only a particular segment of the population. The theory, moreover, points to a neglected distinction - between how a policy...
This article examines the relationships among several political phenomena that have characterized American politics during the post-Second World War era: Republican success in presidential politics, Democratic success in controlling the House of Representatives, and the political mobilization of African-American citizens. We argue that the logic of...
The theory of value change suggests not only that materialists and postmaterialists make different political choices but that, more fundamentally, they use different criteria for making those choices. Specifically, it is argued that materialists rely mainly on economic criteria to make political decisions whereas postmaterialists are motivated prim...
Despite the increasingly liberal cast of the national Democratic Party, self-identified conservatives continue to represent a significant segment of the party. At least 25 percent of Democratic identifiers considered themselves to be conservatives during the 1972–1988 period. This paper explores the puzzle of why significant numbers of political co...
The purpose of this analysis is to provide a practical approach to the assessment of reliability. In particular, we examine the impact of random measurement error upon the magnitude and interpretation of standardized regression coefficients (or path coefficients) and the specification of regression models. With the proper research the relationship...
This paper examines the partisanship of a neglected segment of the American electorate—white northerners. Like their southern counterparts, northern whites have moved toward the GOP (Grand Old Party) and away from the Democratic party during the last two decades. In fact, a substantial plurality of northern whites now identify with the Republican p...
This paper examines the relationship between adolescent's personal competence and their political involvment. Focusing on self-esteem and locus-of-control, the study shows that both dimensions of personal competence affect affective, cognitive and participatory modes of political involvement. More importantly, the evidence indicates that political...
This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing change in party alignments that highlights their underlying logic and dynamic evolution. The framework is based on three analytical concepts - opportunity, motive and means. The opportunity for partisan change increases as party alignments age because aging alignments include a growing propo...
This article focuses on the neglected side of congressional elections–voting in Senate contests. We summarize and discuss the extant literature on voting in Senate elections, comparing it to the much more well developed research on House contests. We then suggest a future research agenda for studies of Senate elections–an agenda that can take advan...
This paper examines identification and estimation in recursive linear models. After developing the main result on identification of recursive models, the paper considers estimation in models subject to overidentifying constraints. A particularly simple, but quite general and efficient, approach to estimating constrained recursive models is develope...
This paper examines the transfer of partisanship from parents to children, and in particular the extent to which intergenerational differences in partisanship are motivated by attitudes toward policy issues. In harmony with recent studies of intraindividual changes in partisanship, we find that young voters cling to or stay from their parents' affi...
This paper outlines and discusses Wesley Salmon's S-R model of explanation, and commends it to the favorable attention of political scientists. The discussion undertaken here proceeds in three general sections. The first recounts Hempel's account of deductive-nomological (D-N) and inductive-statistical (I-S) explanation. The discussion will particu...
This paper develops a theory of partisan dealignment from which it examines the contemporary dealignment of the American electorate. The theory specifies three factors: the vividness of the existing alignment, the stability of the issue agenda, and the ambiguity of party issue positions, which condition the extent to which new voters are socialized...
The conventional wisdom in political science seems to hold that simply increasing the length of scales automatically increases their reliability and that validity supposedly increases merely as the result of increased reliability. This paper shows analytically and by way of example that—despite their status as conventional wisdom—neither of these s...
How do political issues arise, and come to affect political party politics? We develop a theory and model of issue evolution, illustrating both by examining the dynamic evolution of the issue of racial desegregation. Our modeling concerns two central problems: (1) the structure of the evolution--a pattern of dynamic causality between the early poli...
This paper focuses on the difference in political efficacy found between black and white pre-adults, and assesses a specific explanation of this racial difference, one that combines elements of the intelligence explanation with aspects of the social-deprivation explanation as outlined by Paul Abramson. The explanation suggests that the racial diffe...
This paper discusses a general method for the analysis of covariance structures that provides a coherent and unified strategy for estimating models containing unobserved variables. The method, developed principally by Karl G. Jöreskog, provides for the simultaneous estimation of both the relationships among the hypothetical constraints and the rela...
Designed to bridge the gap between theorists and methodologists by presenting an integrated approach to measurement. It differentiates between random and systematic error thus conveying both statistical techniques and their theoretical underpinnings. The book is written at a level accessible to students of social sciences with some statistical trai...
Students of American political behavior have usually turned to @'critical election@' realignment theories to explain the dynamics of long-term change in the party system. These theories are problematic on both theoretical and empirical grounds. A theory that can account for change within the context of a stable electoral system is required. We prop...
By consideration and analysis of the dimensional nature of areal space, this article provides a useful perspective from which to consider the dimensionality of data used in teaching about social science concepts. We start from the perspective of a dimensional structure that is already known and describe it. We then strata sample items from this dom...
Both implicit democratic norms and the reconstructions provided by theorists of rational choice suggest that issue voters are more sophisticated--educated, informed, and active in politics--than other voters. But some issues are clearly more difficult than others, and the voters who respond to @'hard@' and @`easy@' issues, respectively, are assumed...
Designed to bridge the gap between theorists and methodologists by presenting an integrated approach to measurement. It differentiates between random and systematic error thus conveying both statistical techniques and their theoretical underpinnings. The book is written at a level accessible to students of social sciences with some statistical trai...
Explains how social scientists can evaluate the reliability and validity of empirical measurements, discussing the three basic types of validity: criterion related, content, and construct. In addition, the paper shows how reliability is assessed by the retest method, alternative-forms procedure, split-halves approach, and internal consistency metho...
This paper focuses on the interpretational difficulties that confound polynomial regression analysis. While polynomial regression is statistically sound, it produces awkward equations which "describe" a curve with a series of linear slopes. An example illustrates the technique and the awkward properties of regression coefficients in the quadratic c...
The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence that psychological predisposi tions have on political attitudes. In particular, the study focuses on the linkage between self-esteem and the political attitudes of adolescents. It is hypothesized that adolescents' self-esteem should influence their awareness and comprehension of political stimul...
The purpose of this paper is to reformulate the linkage between interparty competition and welfare policies in the American states. Specifically, it is hypothesized that this linkage should be substantially greater among states with strong, effective legislatures than among states with weak, ineffective legislative systems. When legislative effecti...
the wide gap between rather high levels of white support for ideals and lower levels of white approval of governmental actions to implement these ideals has been a persistent feature of contemporary American racial attitudes / explores several explanations of this gap / these explanations assert that either racial prejudice, antipathy to the power...