Paul Sniderman

Stanford University | SU · Department of Political Science

This is a study on the inclusion of Muslims in liberal democracies in the presence of value conflict. We focus on handshaking controversies that appear to pit gender equality against religious freedom. The possible outcomes seem mutually exclusive: either conservative Muslim minorities must conform to the norms of the majority culture, or non-Musli...

An autobiography of the introduction of a method, computer-assisted survey experiments, and an attitude towards science, as iterative, at each step figuring out the next best step to take, learning as you go are the topics. Along the way, Paul M Sniderman presents thoughts on the distinction between prejudice and discrimination, strangers as partne...

The Ithiel de Sola Pool Award is for work throughout my career—work that I have done with many and with the help of so many more. I thank the committee for this honor and, with it, the opportunity to honor another: Merrill Shanks.

What are the signature features of the reactions of mass publics to terrorist attacks? We argue that the available empirical evidence suggests a general pattern of reactions: The peaks of mass reactions to terrorist attacks are limited in size and duration and their end states marked by a return to baselines values of tolerance. We label this pertu...

Most Americans support liberal policies on the social welfare agenda, the dominant policy cleavage in American politics. Yet a striking feature of the US party system is its tendency to equilibrium. How, then, does the Republican Party minimize defection on the social welfare agenda? The results of this study illustrate a deep ideological asymmetry...

In 2005, twelve cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, igniting a political firestorm over demands by some Muslims that the claims of their religious faith take precedence over freedom of expression. Given the explosive reaction from Middle Eastern governments, Muslim clerics, and some Danish politic...

This chapter explains why, even in the cauldron of a crisis over the claims of Islam, fear of and anger toward Islamic fundamentalists did not spill over to Muslims in Denmark. It focuses on the support for the civil rights of Danish Muslims and advances a theory of group categorization and civil rights. The theoretical premise is that it is not po...

The inclusion of immigrants in general and Muslim immigrants in particular is straining liberal democracies in western Europe. This chapter re-examines an earlier and more expansive understanding of tolerance. To be tolerant, it is now agreed, means to be willing to put up with others that one dislikes or ideas that one disagrees with. So understoo...

This chapter presents the broader lessons learned from the present analysis, covering the categorization paradox, covenant paradox, and inclusive tolerance. It considers the reasons for the divergence between the authors' (relatively) optimistic picture of democratic citizenship and the decidedly pessimistic one of previous research. It discusses h...

This chapter presents a theory of the covenant paradox, i.e., the moral covenant underpinning the welfare state that simultaneously promotes equal treatment for (some) immigrants and provides a platform for discrimination against (other) immigrants. It first discusses under what conditions and why the moral premises of the welfare state favor the e...

This chapter aims to bring to light how—and why—the ideological foundations of party systems in western Europe pose a potentially explosive threat to the inclusion of immigrants. It has, of course, long been recognized that right-wing ideological values are a major force propelling anti-immigration politics. Though by no means the only symptom, the...

This book presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the traditional idea that voters identify with a political party out of blind emotional attachment, this pioneering book explains why party identification in contemporary American politics enables voters to make coherent policy choices....

This chapter focuses on how to think more productively about the democratic experiment and political competence. It begins by summarizing this study's theory and findings. It then looks at the implications of both theory and findings for a supply-side theory of political competence. Finally, it presents a nice irony of democratic politics. It is we...

This chapter explores a candidate-centered choice, creating an experimental setting biased in favor of candidate-centered spatial reasoning—removing any reference to political parties or their programs. The prediction is that, in spite of the absence of any reference to parties, many party supporters will nonetheless take into account the parties'...

This chapter presents a theory of candidate positioning. The key to this account is the policy reputations of the two political parties. Candidates must take positions consistent with the policy reputations of their parties to collect a reputational premium. The chapter's job is twofold. The first task is to demonstrate that programmatic party iden...

This chapter examines the party-centered theory of spatial voting. Party identification is essentially an emotional attachment to a political party. Typically, this affective attachment is acquired early in life, most commonly from one's parents but not infrequently from one's peers. Characteristically, party supporters' identification with their p...

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...

Laboratory experiments, survey experiments and field experiments occupy a central and growing place in the discipline of political science. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science is the first text to provide a comprehensive overview of how experimental research is transforming the field. Some chapters explain and define core conce...

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...

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on a busy Amsterdam street. His killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan offended by van Gogh's controversial film about Muslim suppression of women. The Dutch government had funded separate schools, housing projects, broadcast media, and community organizations f...

The purpose of this study is two-fold. A central divide in the race-in-politics literature concerns whether people openly profess racially prejudiced statements or confine themselves to subtle racism. Our first objective is to examine this debate using new data from the 2008 election. Our second - and central - objective is to bring out the opposin...

Focusing on foreign policy, this study formulates a theory of contingent reasoning. Choices between alternative courses of action, we show, are a function of the interaction of ideological dispositions and asymmetries in causal attributions. In a series of experiments embedded in a national survey we find that liberals and conservatives differ in t...

Racism, Xenophobia, and Distribution: Multi-Issue Politics in Advanced Democracies. By RoemerJohn E., LeeWoojin, and Van Der StraetenKarine. Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2007. 432p. $69.95. - Volume 6 Issue 2 - Henry E. Brady, Paul M. Sniderman

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on a busy Amsterdam street. His killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan offended by van Gogh's controversial film about Muslim suppression of women. The Dutch government had funded separate schools, housing projects, broadcast media, and community organizations f...

Can citizens learn from talking politics with one another? To bring out the logic of deliberation, we focus on a simplified model of political discussion: a one-exchange argument. Our model rests on three conditions, all commonly satisfied in real life: (1) that only two alternatives are open for choice—support or opposition to a policy; (2) that a...

I NCUMBENCY A DVANTAGE A ND informational asymmetries go to- gether in campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives. It is an uncon- troversial proposition that challengers do less well on Election Day in large measure because fewer citizens know who they are and because those cit- izens that do so know less about the challenger than the incumbe...

Prepared for presentation at the 2006 Annual Meetings of the Southern Political ScienceAssociation. Atlanta, GA, January 5-7, 2006.

Previous research finds that the political views of citizens exhibit minimal constraint: it is difficult to predict the position citizens take on one issue, given their position on another. We show that constraint is much higher than previously recognized. In the world of real politics, parties and elites attach brand names (e.g. "Democratic" and "...

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This paper examines the bases of opposition to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, focusing on The Netherlands. The specific aim of this study is to test the validity of predictions derived from two theories - realistic conflict, which emphasizes considerations of economic well-being, and social identity, which emphasizes considerations of iden...

In the last decade a revolution has occurred in the design of public opinion surveys. The principal breakthrough has been to combine the distinctive external validity advantages of the representative public opinion survey with the decisive internal validity strengths of the fully randomized, multifaceted experiment. The availability of computer-dri...

In dit artikel gaat het om een conflict. Het is niet zozeer een conflict tussen personen, maar tussen levenswijzen. Eerst gaan we in op vooroordelen en bespreken we de gangbare Amerikaanse verklaring van vooroordelen en groepsconflicten. Dit noemen we het standaardmodel. Vervolgens geven we aan waarom dit model niet zomaar kan worden toegepast op d...

Abstentions record, monte des partis anti-système, mouvements sociaux répétition, rejet des lites, les indices de mécontentement se multiplient en France. Annoncent-ils pour autant la faillite du politique, voire une crise de la démocratie ? Pour le savoir, cette enquête innove, en ajoutant aux questions classiques de sondage, des petites histoires...

The notion that beliefs and attitudes are flexible and often inconsistent has become a commonplace in social and political psychology. Beliefs and attitudes adapt to varying circumstances, issues and argumentative positions. This was the starting point for a Dutch survey on prejudice towards immigrants carried out in 1998. Measures of beliefs and a...

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements,...

Although it has become common to suggest a conceptual distinction between traditional and contemporary forms of prejudice, Pettigrew and Meertens have actually attempted to distinguish the two empirically and developed measures to gauge each. Replication of their study, on the distinction between blatant and subtle prejudice, discloses a number of...

Two questions have dominated the modern study of politics. How do political systems become democratic? And how, supposing they have managed to become democratic, do they manage to remain so? As yet, there is no agreement on the answer to the first question. For a generation, however, there has been consensus on a core part of the answer to the seco...

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...

Nouvelles perspectives sur l'opinion publique. Paul Sniderman [123-175]. Un paradigme - communément désigné sous le nom de minimalisme - a dominé la recherche sur l'opinion publique dans les années soixante et soixante-dix. Ce programme de recherche a principalement insisté sur l'absence de compétence, l'incohérence des attitudes et l'instabilité d...

Over the past thirty years, the Democratic party has carried the mantle of racial liberalism. The party's endorsements of equal rights, fair housing laws and school busing have cost it the support of some whites, but these losses have been concentrated at the periphery of the party, among those least committed to its guiding principles or most unsy...

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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...

We examine the relationship between blatant racial prejudice and anger toward affirmative action. (1) Blatantly prejudiced attitudes continue to pervade the white population in the United States. (2) Resistance to affirmative action is more than an extension of this prejudice. (3) White resistance to affirmative action is not unyielding and unalter...

Theory: Social psychological theories of social stereotyping are used to generate a series of predictions about how and when whites' stereotypes of African-Americans are likely to bias their evaluations of blacks in the areas of welfare and crime. Hypotheses: The degree to which whites endorse negative stereotypes of blacks not only tends to bias t...

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...

Political Persuasion and Attitude Change defines and introduces a new field of research, one that investigates the alteration of people's attitudes: when people can be moved, and when they cannot. Each chapter synopsizes a major area of political persuasion and provides an update on the latest findings as well as overviews of past research in each...

Everything I have published, apart from some ghost-written school speeches for my children, I have written as a social scientist. Having persuaded myself that I had discovered something worth reporting, I have attempted to persuade others that it was worth knowing. I have taken this to be consistent with the spirit of science, perhaps naively; a sp...

As against purportedly true-to-the-fact accounts of how science is not true-to-the-facts, I suggest that there is no place outside science from which one can judge science. From this, it follows that a concern for why a person has done an aspect of science is irrelevant to judging the validity of the science he or she has done. Political psychology...

Bien que nous ayons porté beaucoup d'attention sur l'exode rural, notre connaissance de ce phénomène reste encore insuffisante, vu les types de recherches méthodologiques employés. Dans ce mémoire, nous analysons les données dérivées d'une étude longitudinale (1964–1975) de la jeunesse rurale manitobaine afin d'indiquer les types, le nombre de mouv...

Drawing on a multitude of data sets and building on analyses carried out over more than a decade, this book offers a major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary citizens figure out what they favour and oppose politically. Reacting against the conventional wisdom, which stresses how little attention the general public pays to political issues...

Drawing on a multitude of data sets and building on analyses carried out over more than a decade, this book offers a major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary citizens figure out what they favour and oppose politically. Reacting against the conventional wisdom, which stresses how little attention the general public pays to political issues...

Since the seminal studies of Stouffer and McClosky it has become accepted that political elites are markedly more committed to civil liberties and democratic values than is the public at large; so much so that political elites should be recognized, in McClosky's words, as ‘the major repositories of the public conscience and as carriers of the Creed...

This study combines the methodological advantages of a fully experimental design and a genuinely representative survey sample to explore the nature and workings of contemporary racial prejudice. The correlational results both replicate and extend the findings of earlier work. Political conservatism, for example, was found once again to be correlate...

The roots of conflict over language are deep and tangled. C. Michael MacMillan has taken the time to examine and comment on our initial analysis, for which we are grateful.1He has cast his comments as a critique of our argument, but they actually are in agreement with it, one crucial misunderstanding aside. Accordingly, we will present a summary of...

Epidemiological studies have shown disproportionately elevated risk rates of AIDS among Hispanics and blacks, particularly among the heterosexual population. Intense preventive education has resulted in dramatic infection reduction among the gay population. Yet these educational efforts aimed at the gay population failed to reach many of the minori...

Language rights represent claims of entitlement not only on behalf of individuals, but also on behalf of linguistic communities. As such, they raise deep questions of identity and affinity for Canadians. This study, the first report of the Charter Project, investigates mass and elite attitudes toward language rights in Canada. Beginning with the pr...

Americans appear to be more tolerant of deviant opinions and life-styles now than they were a generation ago. Recent research by Sullivan and his colleagues suggests, however, that this apparent change is largely illusory – a product not of an increase in principled support for tolerance, but rather of shifts in public dislike for, and hence intole...

The purpose of this article is to present a methodology for better gauging the nature and dynamics of social and political attitudes. Starting from a particular view of attitude assessment, we show how computer-assisted interviewing can help transform the survey interview from a passive to an interactive process. Since the ultimate test of a method...

Citizens do not choose sides on issues like busing or abortion whimsically. They have reasons for their preferences – certainly they can give reasons for them. But how is this possible? Citizens as a rule pay little attention to politics, indeed take only a modest interest in it even during election campaigns when their interest in politics is at i...

Research on symbolic racism attempts to identify the underlying psychological sources of public resistance to policies designed to promote racial equality. This research program has been built on the fundamental idea that, although old-fashioned, overt forms of racism have lost much of their appeal in American politics, new, more subtle and symboli...

In response to Kinder's critique of our assessment of the symbolic racism research program, we cite both the research procedures and actual writings of symbolic racism researchers, paying particular attention to contradictions between positions previously taken by Kinder and those he now takes in response to our paper. We also maintain the followin...

This article shows that citizens can estimate what politically strategic groups--liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and blacks and whites--stand for on major issues. These attitude attributions follow from a simple calculus, a likability heuristic. This heuristic is rooted in people's likes and dislikes of political groups. Than...