with Steven Stern
We model attitude stability and constraint, using a dynamic discrete choice framework for multiple attitudes, to identify influential attitudes within attitude systems. Its value-added includes insights about different sources of (in)stability, the direction of causation between attitudes, and their relative degree of influence; capturing time-invariant individual traits with a multiple factor structure; and addressing the ordinal nature of attitudinal measures, together with heterogeneity in time intervals between interviews, across waves, and people. We examine five core political attitudes concerning how people view the political world and their role in it. Most of their variance reflects infrequently-changing individual characteristics and time-specific effects. Permanent heterogeneity plays a modest role. External efficacy is most influential concerning evaluations of the external political world, while internal efficacy is influential for views on one's role in politics. Another application examines the role of ideological and party identification on attitudes towards government spending and immigration. The attitudes form a weakly constrained attitude system. Party identification is the most influential, through spillovers to ideological identification. Party and ideological identifications are stable, time-invariant traits explaining most of their variance, with transitory shocks that hint at measurement error and/or expressive responding. Issue attitudes are unstable, driven mainly by transitory shocks.
General political interest is at the core of many of the central questions concerning people’s political habits, knowledge, and voting patterns, as well as candidates’ mobilization efforts. In this paper, I advance the proposal that political interest is inherently multidimensional, that people can be interested in politics in multiple ways, and that individuals will differ in the mix of types of interest they exhibit. I distinguish between three kinds of dispositional interest: utility, attainment, and intrinsic. People are disposed to being interested in politics because it could further their short- or long-term goals (utility), because it might be part of their (ought-)self-image or because it might deliver social rewards (attainment), or because politics itself is enjoyable or engaging, perhaps not unlike a hobby or supporting one’s favorite sports team (intrinsic). I develop and validate measures for the three dimensions of dispositional interest, field them in four survey samples, and find that my measures uncover novel patterns across socio-demographic groups, including respondents’ propensity to engage in various forms of participation. Two factorial vignette survey experiments allowed me to assess the impact of respondents’ configuration of political interest on their perception of the effectiveness of addressing a political issue by either posting on social media or by contacting one’s representative in a way that is independent of the experimentally manipulated characteristics of the action and the behavioral context. I find that the way people are interested in politics influences their assessment of the effectiveness of these two forms of participation and influences which characteristics of the action and behavioral context are considered when evaluating a specific action. Taken together, these results point to substantial heterogeneity in how people take an interest in politics, with salient implications for participation, perceptions of the effectiveness of political actions, and the role of demographic and socio-economic factors in driving inequalities in participation and representation.
with Kerri Milita and Elizabeth Simas
[ABSTRACT]
My research statement (PDF)