Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: Much of the research on voter decision-making in American politics focuses on the partisanship of the individual voter. While federal elections in the US, and most state-level elections, continue to be conducted in a partisan environment, local elections are increasingly conducted in nonpartisan environments. Proponents of nonpartisan elections envision a world in which voters abandon their “standing decisions” and make decisions based on careful consideration of the issues. The appeal of nonpartisan elections relies on the assumption that voters in nonpartisan elections do not frame their choice in partisan terms, but instead cast ballots in nonpartisan elections in a different manner than they do in partisan elections. In this paper, I ask whether voters in a nonpartisan campaign environment recast the election in partisan terms. To answer this question, I review the research on voter decision making in a nonpartisan electoral environment. My general thesis is that certain types of voters in a nonpartisan environment behave as if they were in a partisan environment. To test the hypotheses stemming from this argument, I use an experimental design explicitly exposing subjects to a nonpartisan mayoral candidate. I find certain types of individuals, such as political sophisticates, strong partisans, and ideologues, have little trouble attributing a partisan affiliation to a nonpartisan candidate based only on his positions on a given set of issues. These findings suggest that nonpartisan elections likely matter most for those least likely to vote in nonpartisan elections: political non-sophisticates, weak partisans or independents, and moderates.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although they have garnered popular notice as both outspoken rebels and racial sell-outs, very little scholarly attention has been devoted to contemporary African American Republicans. This paper examines the factors associated with Republican affiliation among African Americans. Specifically, the paper explores whether African American Republicans have lower levels of racial identification. Using data from the 1996 National Black Election Study, the findings suggest racial identification alone is not a good predictor of partisan choice among African Americans. Furthermore, outside of age, individual level factors are not strongly correlated with Republican affiliation among African Americans. The findings suggest that future research must be sensitive to the possibility that the political relevance of racial identity might vary across members of the same racial group, and turn attention to the processes through which racial identification becomes relevant for political decision making.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Gay Republican groups face significant obstacles in promoting their own visibility as the primary media representation of gay Republicans focuses on the litany of gay sex scandals that have emerged in the last several years. The dominance of the closeted gay Republican besieged by scandal presents a growing problem for those who attempt to promote LGBT rights from within a party whose conservative values they share while
those values often serve to exclude them. Media discourses of “gay Republicans” construct an essentialist gay identity that reduces politics for gay people to gay issues only. Furthermore, the conflation of gay Republican with Republican sex scandal foregrounds discourses of the closet and self-loathing that serve to preclude the legitimacy of gay republican identities.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: The legislative behavior literature finds strong support for religious influence on legislator behavior in relation to moral issues, foreign policy, and general ideological orientation. In this paper, we examine religious influence on previously neglected domestic social issues, with a particular focus on Catholics. This focus is apt because Catholic Social Thought offers explicit teachings on domestic issues and because they may conflict with the selfinterest of upwardly mobile Catholics and with the ideological preferences of Republican Catholics. After a brief review of partisan conflicts with CST, we analyze roll call votes in the 109th Congress. We find that Catholic identification is associated with support for CST, as the previous literature would predict, but both younger Catholics and Republican Catholics are found less supportive. In follow-up interviews with a small sample of Catholic Republicans, they justify not supporting CST by seeing its application to most domestic social issues as less authoritative than Church moral teachings on issues like abortion.