Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This article examines the cause of the voters? vote choice change which leads to realignment in American presidential election and its durability in terms of party policy and its attitude toward issues.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Multiracial Americans are often forced to choose a single racial category on surveys. This paper investigates the patterns of single-race identification for those who chose a multiracial identity on the May 1995 Current Population Survey’s Race and Ethnicity Supplement. This research finds that the “one-drop rule” often used by researchers to allocate multiracial Americans to minority groups does not closely reflect the identity choices that multiracial Americans make for themselves when forced to choose a single race. Ancestral groups, community context and family factors will be investigated to test their relationships with self-identification on forced-choice surveys.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Using the NCES SASS 1999-2000 data and white flight theories, we analyze charter school racial composition. Previous research gives conflicting results regarding who is actually best served with the charter school option, either affluent whites or disenfranchised minority populations. Our main research question seeks to remedy this unknown and asks if charter schools segregate districts and fragment communities or provide viable choices for people who have been historically disenfranchised. We focus our work on charter schools within its school distirct context. We argue that the level of integration of the school district influences charter school composition, and thus white flight theories can be applied to charter school enrollment. We find that charter schools may be used as a public school option for white flight without residential mobility. Whites may be sending their children to charter schools as a way to escape their integrated school districts in much the same way they moved to suburbs to escape bused students during the 1970s.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, we compare choice set analysis to traditional models of electoral choice in multi-party systems. Traditional models of electoral choice typically model choice as a selection process among K discrete alternatives. Such an approach is characteristic of both multinomial logit and probit, which are the dominant choice models in political science. While these models have proved useful, it is often more realistic to view electoral choice as a two-stage process whereby K alternatives first are grouped into M

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Theorists have long argued that the prospects for democratic politics depend on the ability of citizens to make reasoned choices. Nevertheless, since the pioneering work of Phillip Converse (1964), empirical research has consistently found that average American's know little about politics and policy. The crux of the debate concerns whether citizens with little political knowledge can, despite their ignorance, make reasoned political choices (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). Our interest is in how citizens with varying levels of political and substantive knowledge make choices when faced with potentially hazardous environmental policies, using the case of nuclear waste disposal in New Mexico. As the host to the world's only operating permanent nuclear waste disposal facility, New Mexico has long been the stage for debates over the risks and benefits of nuclear waste disposal options. We employ data from statewide New Mexico RDD telephone surveys (n=1001) collected in the spring of 2001 to model policy preferences regarding the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) using a set of possible decision heuristics as independent variables: perceived risks, political ideology, trust in political elites, and perceptions of the accountability of relevant policy officials. We then test to see whether the ability to use the differing heuristics to make policy choices is affected by the political and substantive policy knowledge of the respondents. We find that substantive knowledge has a greater influence than political knowledge, and that the effect of knowledge varies across the different types of heuristics. These results indicate that, depending in part on the issue context, publics may have recourse to an array of heuristics, and that some may be readily accessible to even the least knowledgeable citizen. More knowledgeable members of the public, in turn, have access to a richer array of heuristics for making decisions about policy preferences