Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: How did lesbian and gay voters respond to the unprecedented attention given to gay issues during the 1990s, and the increasingly wide divide on gay issues that opened up between the Democratic and Republican parties? I examine this question with exit poll data collected by the Voter News Service over the six national elections conducted from 1990 through 2000 in a first-ever multivariate, longitudinal study of lesbian and gay voting behavior. In every election, gay voters were overwhelmingly liberal, strongly identified as Democrats, and supported Democratic presidential and congressional candidates at levels significantly higher than the general population. Gay voters are a distinct group in the electorate, and their strong support for Democratic Party candidates means that factors that play important roles in determining the vote in the general population—such as party identification, race, and economics—do not have as large an effect on the gay vote. After controlling for other deeply stable factors such as sex, race, age and religion, being gay raised a voter’s probability of voting for Democratic presidential candidates by 19 percentage points, give or take seven percentage points. But it also appears that gay voters’ loyalty to the Democratic Party peaked in the early 1990s, and that by the end of the decade gay voters showed signs of becoming less distinct, more conservative and more Republican.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper presents the results of qualitative telephone interviews with ten leading authors in the family. The aim was to assess the views of the scholars about their careers and changes in the family field in the past 20 to 40 years in which they have been active. The authors were selected for study based on being the most published authors in the 1990s in Family Relations, Journal of Marriage and the Family, and Journal of Family Issues. The top eight males from the list were interviewed. Two widely published women were added instead of the last two males of the top ten publishers. No authors who were members of racial or ethnic minorities were among these top ten. These researchers, who have become identified with many of the important directions in the family field, primarily collected their own data or applied a distinctive approach to already gathered data. Contrary to earlier decades when symbolic interactionism was the most commonly used perspective, five of the ten authors identified themselves as using the life course perspective in their work. The majority did not feel that theory had developed much in recent years nor did they feel that theory was used as much as a focus for the research of others. The authors identified new directions and approaches that they felt were becoming important in the family field.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Drawing on integrated analysis of Israeli statistics and social research (including the 2001 survey among 800 Russian Israelis), this article explores the birth of a transnational community of Russian Jews living in Israel and in other branches of the post-Soviet diaspora. Theoretical focus of the paper is the relationship between transnationalism and immigrant integration in the host country. It is shown that due to its timing and composition, Russian Aliyah of the 1990s was readily transnational at the outset. Transnational activities among Russian Israelis lie mainly in socio-cultural realm and are intertwined with cultural separatism from the host society. During the 1990s, Russian-speakers, making 20 percent of the Jewish population, have created a thriving subculture of their own. It is shown that reliance on co-ethnic networks plays a double role in the life of Israeli Russians. On one hand, it empowers the weakest and the least integrated segments of the Russian community, attenuating their dependency on the host society. Yet, at the same time, it hampers economic success and social integration of many other immigrants, and reinforces cultural conflict between the newcomers and old-timers in Israel.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We utilize variation across the U.S. states to examine determinants of poverty during the 1980s and 1990s. We attempt to investigate causal
mechanisms more carefully than is often the case in poverty analyses, and we consider both absolute and relative measures of poverty. Our results suggest that economic growth, inequality, education, female-headed households, and government redistribution each played a role in influencing poverty. We find considerable overlap but also some noteworthy differences in the determinants of absolute poverty and those of relative poverty.