Honors Theses, Ohio Dominican University, 2022, Honors Theses

This thesis covers the multi-variant reasons for extensive hyper-partisanship in both the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as how they compare on this topic. Both nations are currently in a period of polarization, with the US suffering from the effects of a divisive leader, and the UK still conflicted over the issue of their exit from the European Union. This thesis explains how the different issues like the role of media, leadership, and political structures, have had an impact on the political climate of today, and which nation is experiencing the highest levels of hyper-partisanship.

Committee: Ronald Carstens Dr. (Advisor); Harry McKnight Prof. (Other); Martin Brick Dr. (Other) Subjects: Demographics; European Studies; History; International Relations; Modern History; Political Science; Public Administration; Public Policy

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2007, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2023, Political Science

For a comprehensive understanding of attitudes toward the death penalty, it is crucial to examine the historical backdrop of racial inequality in the criminal justice system. By delving into the history of incarceration and influential policies from the abolition of slavery to the present day, this study seeks to uncover the potential connections between these policies and death penalty attitudes. Utilizing data from the Pew Research Center, bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to investigate the interplay among various variables, including race, partisanship, religion, age, and gender. The results revealed significant associations between all independent variables and attitudes toward the death penalty. Females exhibited a negative relationship, indicating a lower likelihood of supporting capital punishment compared to males. Religious denomination displayed a statistically significant relationship across all three categories, with Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons more inclined to support the death penalty. Party affiliation exhibited a statistically negative relationship, indicating that Democrats were less likely to support capital punishment compared to Independents and Republicans. Notably, race was found to be negatively associated with the death penalty, suggesting that black individuals are less likely to support it compared to their white counterparts. This finding can be attributed to the historical mistreatment and discriminatory practices faced by African Americans within the criminal justice system. Given the pervasive inequalities experienced by African Americans throughout history due to governmental policies, it is unsurprising to observe a substantial disparity in death penalty attitudes between African Americans and white individuals.

Committee: Staci Rhine (Advisor); Scott Rosenberg (Committee Member); Rob Baker (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Criminology; Ethnic Studies; Political Science; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Political Science

A large body of research points to evidence that the U.S. is in an era of strong party government, characterized by internally homogenous and externally heterogeneous parties. In a three article dissertation, I find that parties are not invariably strong and polarized. The first chapter finds evidence of surprising patterns of bipartisanship in state legislatures. The second chapter develops a methodology and produces a data set of scores reflecting members' influence in their party's constituent communication. The third chapter uses those scores to test whether party influence extends beyond formal legislative activities.

Committee: William Minozzi (Committee Chair); Skyler Cranmer (Committee Member); Janet Box-Stefensmeier (Committee Chair) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Public Policy and Management

Climate change, also referred to as global warming, is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Despite considerable evidence that climate change is occurring and has severe consequences, many Americans remain skeptical and are impeding efforts to address the problem. The purpose of this dissertation is to build an understanding of the determinants of climate change perceptions among climate skeptics. Specifically, this research explores the extent to which political communication affects climate skeptics' perceptions of the phenomenon. In total, three separate analyses were conducted using a national sample of climate skeptics (N = 4,001). The first analysis provides a profile of the average climate skeptic. Using descriptive data and responses from an open-ended question, the study provides a bird's-eye view of the factors that might contribute to individual perceptions of climate change. The findings confirm those of existing research; particularly that climate skepticism is more prevalent among Republicans, older populations, low-income individuals, and those who identify as evangelical. Individuals report being skeptical of climate change because they believe that the narrative around climate change only advances the interests of elites. Individuals also cite factors such as media coverage, awareness of historical data, first-hand experiences with local weather, knowledge of the phenomenon (or lack thereof), and belief in a higher power as reasons for their climate skepticism. The second analysis employs a randomized survey experiment to examine whether framing climate messages as optimistic or fatalistic (i.e., the phenomenon is unstoppable by human action) affects the perceptions of climate skeptics (N = 827). The results show that the framing of an issue does not influence climate skeptics' beliefs that (1) climate change is occurring or (2) that the phenomenon poses a risk of personal harm. Partisanship, however, does appear to moderate th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stéphane Lavertu (Advisor); Christopher Rea (Committee Member); Vladimir Kogan (Committee Member) Subjects: Behaviorial Sciences; Climate Change; Environmental Education; Environmental Science; Environmental Studies; Experimental Psychology; Political Science; Public Administration; Public Policy; Social Psychology; Sustainability

PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Sociology and Criminology

Animosity between American partisans has been rising for decades, producing governmental dysfunction, uncertainty, and even political violence. Theory and research on social identity processes imply that as antagonism rises, it may erode a shared sense of what it means to be American. I argue that to minimize the resulting psychological uncertainty, partisans will be drawn to outrage-driven media that castigates political opponents. Specifically, partisans will find vitriolic messages about members of the other political party reassuring, provoking the opposing party to respond with similar messages. That same search for psychological certainty will undermine support for political opponents' legal rights and encourage partisans to punish their own relatively moderate in-group members that are not sufficiently hostile to the opposition. To test these predictions, I use crowd-sourced survey experiments in fictitious social media environments that expose participants to high or low levels of partisan conflict. Outgroup aggression consistently fails to provoke retaliatory responses, but predictions about how social identity processes themselves would produce extreme responses were supported.

Committee: Will Kalkhoff (Advisor); Susan Fisk (Committee Member); Ryan Claassen (Committee Member); Richard Serpe (Committee Member); Carla Goar (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science; Social Psychology; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Political Science

The twenty-first century in Latin America was, and remains, a period of dramatic changes. The economic crises and austerity policies of the 1980s and 1990s were replaced in the early 2000s by a "Pink Tide" of left-wing governments, windfall revenues from commodities exports, and expansions of social programs that reduced poverty and inequality. However, the commodity boom ended, the political right reemerged, and now right-wing populism along with democratic dissatisfaction are increasingly prevalent. In this dissertation, across a series of three papers, I analyze these nuances of contemporary Latin American politics, with a thematic focus on protection. I examine: why governments of different partisan varieties expand or retrench, in contrasting economic environments, social assistance programs that protect against poverty; why the political left's commitment to social assistance precipitated a class-based political backlash that led to the resurgence of the political right; and why individuals experiencing various types of insecurity aim to protect themselves from these threats by supporting attitudes and actors aligned with the authoritarian populist political right. To accomplish this, I utilize a variety of data—at the country and individual levels, as well as varying over time—and empirical approaches, including causal inference strategies. First, I find that the political left, rather than the political right, retrenched social assistance following the end of the commodity boom, due to—I argue—the pressures the left faces from investors to reduce spending during economic downturns, whereas the right is more restricted by domestic opposition to welfare retrenchment. Second, despite these empirical patterns, the left's perceived ideological commitment to redistribution and the lower socioeconomic classes alienated its former, more-privileged constituencies, who supported the political right in greater numbers throughout the 2010s. Third, people experiencing gr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sarah Brooks (Committee Chair); Philipp Rehm (Committee Member); Marcus Kurtz (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Communication

Several of the most important constructs in political communication research appear to be quite stable over time: media use, political discussion, and partisanship. If these constructs change only very rarely, it would cast doubt on theories presuming that they affect one another. On the other hand, it may be the case that they are only conditionally stable, such that if some factor or factors were altered, change in these constructs would be expected. This project explores the possibility that communication can both promote and undermine consistency in identity, a little-appreciated type of effect in communication research. The apparent stability of attitudes and behaviors has figured prominently in several prominent scholarly findings and debates in the discipline. I describe some ambiguity in how researchers define stability and provide a clear framework and definition for stability and communication effects. From there, I demonstrate how stability can be analyzed in the context of quantitative research designs. My approach to modeling stability can seamlessly integrate both the individual-level predictors of stability while still allowing for the discovery of the more familiar type of media effect that change the mean level of a variable. Furthermore, a technical analysis of the statistical evidence claiming to demonstrate high stability of communication and identity reveals that such claims are likely overstated. Using insights from social identity research, the project shows how there may be more variability than meets the eye when it comes to partisan identity. Rather than categorical shifts between Republican and Democrat, this variability comes in the form of changes in the strength of the identity as well as the impact of the identity on one's self-esteem. It was expected that identity motivates communication, yet communication also affects identity. Rather than cause extreme identities and excessive communication, however, people generally achieve an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: William P. Eveland Jr. (Advisor); Gerald M. Kosicki (Committee Member); Michael D. Slater (Committee Member); Christopher R. Browning (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Communication

The internet era allows unprecedented choice when selecting between political messages. The current analysis integrates cognitive dissonance theory, the social identity perspective, and the spiral of silence perspective to identify factors that promote or constrain partisan selective exposure and political polarization. Across two studies, including a student sample (N = 95) and an adult panel survey sample (N = 762), participants browsed forum posts on controversial political topics attributed to male and female Republican and Democrat users. Attitudes and perceptions of public opinion were captured before and after. Additionally, the relative centrality of partisan versus gender identity centrality was manipulated pre-exposure. When partisans held political attitudes that were aligned with those of their political party, multi-level modeling revealed patterns of partisan selective exposure associated with polarization. When partisans held political attitudes that were divergent from those of their political party, an attitude-based confirmation bias was associated with maintaining these deviant political attitudes. However, these partisans also experienced greater ambivalence, as they saw strong arguments on both sides. Relative partisan versus gender identity centrality had weak impacts on selective exposure, in the student sample only. No clear impacts of public opinion perceptions were discovered.

Committee: Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick PhD (Advisor); Robert Garrett PhD (Committee Member); Gerald Kosicki PhD (Committee Member); Jason Coronel PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Communication

Over the past three decades, partisanship has become an increasingly salient social identity for Americans, resulting in an electorate that is affectively polarized. An electorate characterized by affective polarization cuts against normative models of democracy, as party loyalists tend to dislike members of other parties, prefer confrontation to compromise, and distrust government when their preferred party is out of power. The commercial US media environment has been a frequent culprit in theories of the origins of affective polarization. Cross-national comparisons find that the United States may have experienced the most rapid gains in affective polarization but Americans' fixation on party identity is far from unique. This comparative analysis categorizes 14 countries' national media systems and tests whether news media consumption in commercial media systems, such as the United States, predicts higher levels of partisan animus and party loyalty in vote choice than media consumption in other types of media systems. The results indicate that television consumption in commercial media systems is associated with higher levels of partisan affect than in public-service or hybrid media systems.

Committee: Erik Nisbet Ph.D. (Advisor); R. Kelly Garrett Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Political Science

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Communication

In the media, partisans are often portrayed in constant conflict and detrimental to the democratic process in the United States. If this is the case, partisans may engage in techniques to disguise their partisan affiliation, especially online. This study examines partisan identity expression through social identity theory, impression management, and willingness to self-censor. Utilizing two different samples, participants answer survey questions, read an article, then create an online profile for an imaginary discussion site. Results demonstrate that even if partisans are portrayed negatively, they will continue to identify with their party on their discussion site profile, counter to the hypotheses presented.

Committee: Robert Bond PhD (Advisor); William Eveland PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2019, Psychology

Inducing people to conceptualize their preference as a matter of opposition to the rejected option (versus support for the chosen option) tends to increase its strength, but how do people naturally frame their preferences and what are the consequences of this framing? These issues are examined in three studies. Two studies used subjective and objective measures of preference frames to test whether those with an affirmational self-categorization (i.e., who identify with the group represented by one choice alternative) would tend to conceptualize their preference as a matter of support for the preferred group, whereas those with a negational self-categorization (i.e., who identify with neither group represented by the choice alternatives) would tend to conceptualize their preference as a matter of opposition to the non-preferred group. Study 1 provided some support for the hypothesis, as political partisans thought of themselves as supporters of their party but opposed as strongly as they supported, whereas independents opposed more strongly than they supported but thought of themselves as balanced between support and opposition. In Study 2, subjective and objective measures both showed that fans of the teams competing in the 2019 Super Bowl emphasized support for their team, whereas fans of teams not playing in the Super Bowl emphasized opposition to their non-preferred team. Study 3 explored the implications of these findings for persuasion by presenting messages that were either support-framed or opposition-framed and took either a proattitudinal or counterattitudinal position. The extremity of recipients' preferences was unaffected by the messages; however, partisans and independents reported greater receptiveness to the message, perceived processing of its arguments, and interest in further engagement with it when its valence-frame (support/opposition) matched the valence of their self-categorization (affirmational/negational). Tying together research on valence- (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Petty (Advisor); Russell Fazio (Committee Member); Duane Wegener (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science; Social Psychology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, History

Early American attitudes toward Marie Antoinette as found in print culture and correspondence illustrates how factions came to understand her as exemplifying the threat politicized women appeared to pose to their republican experiment. Despite differing opinions about the course of the French Revolution and the queen's role within it, Federalists and Republicans believed she exacerbated France's difficulties and disapproved of her conduct. In a time when American women were increasingly engaged in the public sphere, both parties used Marie Antoinette as a counterexample to define American women's proper role within the new republic. Partisans suggested the queen's absolutist agenda undercut French reform and/or hindered the people's liberty and that American women should avoid political activity in order to be spared a similar disastrous fate. This instruction helped both parties devise an ideal republican society that promoted exclusive male political participation and female domesticity while protecting against feminine and monarchical depravities.

Committee: Lindsay Schakenbach Regele PhD (Advisor); P. Renée Baernstein PhD (Committee Member); William Brown PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Sociology

In the past forty years, the United States has engaged in a punishment system reliant on mass incarceration. Although legislative policies and crime control initiatives that increased imprisonments were established during a period of high crime rates, America has continued to incarcerate at a high rate even as crime rates have declined. Scholars have attempted to explain what accounts for U.S. exceptionalism when it comes to imprisonments and find that a combination of factors including partisanship, race, sentencing severity, and inequality may account for this incarceration (Alexander 2012; Greenberg and West 2001; Keen and Jacobs 2009; Tonry 1999). Scholars have also examined the consequences of locking up so many people such as the effects on state budgets, families, unemployment, citizenship and inequality (Alexander 2012; Behrens, Uggen and Manza 2004; Clear 2009; Wacquant 2001; Western 2006). This dissertation consists of three associated essays that analyze both the determinants and consequences of mass incarceration. In my first essay I examine state spending on corrections. Corrections expenditures have become one of the fastest growing budget items for most states in the past forty years. Yet, few studies focus on the social and political factors tied to these spending increases. This paper uses a panel analysis to examine the determinants of corrections expenditures from 2000 through 2010. Three main relationships are tested: racial threat, partisanship, and death row populations. Even when crime rates and economic factors such as unemployment, median household income, and union strength are held constant, the results show that racial threat and death row inmate populations are associated with increasing corrections expenditures. The findings suggest that large or increasing African American populations continue to be a reliable predictor of criminal justice system expansions, especially in the South. Additionally, the pronounced effect of death ro (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Jacobs (Advisor); Ryan King (Committee Co-Chair); Paul Bellair (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Sociology

Master of Arts in Economics, Youngstown State University, 2007, Lariccia School of Accounting and Finance

The United States federal government has a substantial budget every year for various programs in the public interest. The money for these programs must come from somewhere: usually, either taxes or deficit spending. The concern of this paper is the latter element. Specifically, it is the goal of this paper to uncover whether annual budget deficits are affected by the partisan makeup of the institutions that decide how to spend money and how to obtain it: namely, Congress and the presidency. Does a Democratic president tend to cause higher deficits than a Republican? Is the behavior of a party any different in Congress than it would be in the presidency? These questions will be explored. After an historical overview and a literature review, I formulate a simple theoretical model to provide a basis for what I am trying to find. Then, I frame the questions of the paper into hypotheses and test manifold empirical models. After establishing which I find to be most fitting and subsequently revising that model, I discuss its implications and suggest areas for future research.

Committee: Joseph Palardy PhD (Advisor); Tod Porter PhD (Other); Yogesh Uppal PhD (Other); Peter Kasvinsky (Other) Subjects: Economics, General

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2011, Arts and Sciences: Political Science

This dissertation uses spatial analyses to examine several contemporary issues within the field of political science. Overall, the bulk of information used within the field of political science to draw conclusions about the electorate has primarily come from survey data. This dissertation not only uses survey data but also relies on election data. Using precinct-level election data as opposed to county data, allows for a higher level of detail than is typically found in previous research. Conclusions from this dissertation rely on a spatial analysis of precincts in the fifteen counties of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Statistical Area. Within the field of political science, survey data provide the means by which voting patterns and beliefs are most commonly analyzed, particularly among and between the groups in society. The data collected from surveys continues to provide critical information and trends in the electorate, however it has not been able to provide conclusive results about polarization and there remains much disagreement over the level of polarization within the electorate, whether there is a link between ideology and party and the degree of that link, and whether people who vote and think alike politically are living in close proximity to one another or dispersed amongst each other. Academics and pundits on opposite sides of the issue have produced empirical evidence from survey data to support their points of view on the matters. These same camps use state and county level data with inconclusive results. However, with the additions of spatial statistics in Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, there is an opportunity empirically analyze and provide new and statistically sound findings to lend new conclusions to old arguments. This dissertation, using spatial analysis, examines the phenomena of geographic clustering of like-minded people, polarization, and ideological sorting within the American electorate using several sources. First, an analysi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephen Mockabee PhD (Committee Chair); Barbara Bardes PhD (Committee Member); Colleen McTague PhD (Committee Member); Kevin Raleigh PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : Political Science

This dissertation is an effort to explore the fundamental basis of American electoral psychology. It challenges and augments the psychological approach of partisanship and the theory of rational choice, and agrees partially with the retrospective and economic voting theory and goes beyond it with the analyses that are based on the poll data of the National Election Studies of five decades, from 1948 through 2000, especially that of the 1980s and the 1990s. The theoretical framework absorbs useful factors of information-processing approach of psychology, personality psychology of Freudianism, humanistic perspective and realistic conflict of interest theory in psychology, and pluralist theory of interest group in political science, and forms new theoretical approaches. It seeks profound explanation for the seemingly contradictory phenomena in the behavior and psychology of American voters. The discoveries include: (1) the cognition of American voters concerning the bipartisan politics is periodically and contingently enhanced by the political mobilization and intensity of political competition of the presidential elections based on information provision and absorption; (2) the judgment of American voters on presidential personalities is of duality, using different standards to assess the natural and acquired traits and the traits related to politics; and (3) American voters behave differently in national politics than they do in group conflicts, and base their choice of a president on three benchmarks, i.e., economic prosperity, group compatibility and national security, which form three vulnerable points in the psychology of electorate. The third discovery is the main melody of this research, which is strengthened by the discovery that the result of an American presidential election can be largely predicted by the American voters' perceptions on the presidential candidates and their parties in terms of the three policy fields of economy, group relation and national s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Michael Margolis (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Political Science

While several studies have explored the impact of constituency opinion on representative behavior, few studies have adequately engaged the concept of subconstituency as first posited in Fenno (1978). His elaboration of the district as “a nest of concentric circles” provides a useful construct for thinking about how members can (and often do) sustain different relationships with different constituency subgroups. Relying on one of the few data resources available with sufficient sample sizes from each state to explore these ideas – the Senate Election Study – this study divides the district population into groups based on level of partisanship and income and investigates the influence of constituent opinion from these subgroups on Senator ideology. Though it is a closer representation of the concentric circles analogy presented by Fenno, the results of the partisanship model indicates that a Senator's co-partisans are not any more represented than at-large district residents. The income model suggests that Senators better reflect the opinions of middle- and high-income constituents, while low-income opinion is largely ignored by Senators of both parties. Assessment of opinion differences across these different subgroups indicates that disparities in representation found for some citizens may be attenuated by a common opinion shared with groups that are more represented.

Committee: Craig Volden (Committee Chair); Kathleen McGraw (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Political Science

How citizens ascribe credit and blame for national conditions can have large electoral and policy effects. Yet despite this clear importance, the relationship between issue perceptions and responsibility attributions has not been fully examined. Using national economic conditions and the Iraq War as examples, I propose three distinct types of responsibility attributions based on a citizen's comparison of current conditions to reference points in the past or expectations for the future. Previous work fails to appreciate how past events shape citizens' attributions; including both current and former office holders in the response set corrects this oversight and allows for the study of how responsibility is assigned following a governmental transition. I employ attribution theory and theories of motivated reasoning to individuals' responsibility attributions based on partisanship and issue perception. I hypothesize that individuals' desire for consistency between their party identification, issue perception, and responsibility attribution lead them to credit copartisan politicians for perceived successes and blame members of the opposite party for perceived failures. Using existing data sources, an original survey, and two experimental designs, the results show that individuals can and do differentiate between the three proposed types of responsibility attributions. Respondents frequently engage in motivated reasoning when ascribing responsibility following a governmental transition. The research design also examines the effects of responsibility attributions on important forms of political behavior, along with confirmation of the causal effect of party identification's impact on responsibility attributions.

Committee: Herbert Weisberg (Advisor); Paul Allen Beck (Committee Member); Kathleen McGraw (Committee Member); Anastasia Snyder (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Political Science

This dissertation seeks to determine if, and to what extent, federal judges behave in a partisan manner when deciding politically salient election law cases. Specifically, do judges favor the interests of their political party, after controlling for judicial policy preferences? The main hypothesis that I seek to test is the relationship between case votes and the interests of a judge's political party in a given election law case. I posit that when the judge's political party benefits from a ruling for the plaintiff/defendant, a judge will be more likely to rule for the plaintiff/defendant. I also test four additional hypotheses, all of which should moderate the relationship between partisan interests and case votes. I test the effects of political career experience, age, court of appeals membership, and partisan panel composition on the likelihood of a judge ruling in favor of her political party. To test these hypotheses, I model the case votes of federal district court and court of appeals judges in campaign finance, political party right to association, and redistricting cases from 1962 through 2007. To control for a judge's policy preferences, I impute first and second dimension common space scores for all federal judges in my dataset. Of the three categories of election law cases examined in this dissertation, only the campaign finance models consistently produce a statistically significant partisanship effect. There is also evidence of a conditional partisanship effect in redistricting cases, which is contingent on the partisan composition of a three-judge district court. Additionally, judicial policy preferences are statistically significant predictors of judicial behavior in political party right to association and redistricting cases, and campaign finance cases that do not involve the interests of the Democratic and Republican Parties. While most political science models of judicial behavior emphasize policy preferences or a combination of law and policy p (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lawrence Baum PhD (Advisor); Gregory Caldeira PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Nelson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science