In today’s data-driven campaigns, presidential targeting strategies rely on detailed perceptions about the political leanings and policy positions of Americans to decide which registered voters to contact and which messages to emphasize in their outreach. However, identifying supporters and opponents of a candidate’s policy positions is far from foolproof. This reality results in some citizens encountering political message(s) on congruent issues, where their issue stance aligns with the messaging candidate, and others encountering incongruent issue message(s), where the candidate and message recipient do not share the same position. Examining official contact records from the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, I find evidence that Romney’s campaign had some success when targeting Democrats with congruent issues. Messaging Democrats with an issue where they and Romney share common ground is associated with decreased support for Obama, increased abstention, and increased support for Romney. Contacting Democrats with an incongruent message and contacting Republicans with either an incongruent or congruent issue message had minimal effects on the voting behavior of the recipient.

This study investigates the effects of social network disagreement on candidate preferences. Although much research has explored the effects of disagreement on political tolerance and disengagement, less work has examined the relation between disagreement and political reasoning. We predicted that because disagreement reveals conflicting points of view and motivates people to consider these views, it should promote more effortful reasoning—and thus increased reliance on policy preferences and decreased reliance on party identification when choosing between candidates. Using panel data from the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections, we find that respondents in high-disagreement networks tend to shift their candidate preferences to align with their policy preferences regardless of their party identification. In low-disagreement networks, respondents tended to follow party over policy. In sum, the determinants of candidate preferences differ depending on individuals’ social networks. In some cases, disagreement may promote more normatively desirable political decision-making.

The congressional incumbency advantage reflects an inequity in competition—candidates receive an electoral edge simply because they hold office. Scholars have identified an array of factors that contribute to the incumbency advantage; however, the role of electoral campaigns has been largely ignored. We argue that campaigns are a mechanism through which the incumbency advantage works. All else constant, incumbents focus their campaigns on factors that reflect their standing position, such as their familiarity to voters and actions taken for their district/state. Voters consequently rely on such incumbency factors when making their decisions. The outcome is challengers are at an extreme disadvantage, and campaigns offer scant substantive engagement. We offer evidence for these dynamics with a large-scale content analysis of campaign websites and an experiment. In so doing, we highlight a challenge to theories of democratic representation that focus on equal competition and/or substantive campaign engagement.

Many scholars expect that the “party decides” on presidential nominees who are both electable and willing to pursue an agenda acceptable to the supporting coalition. By most accounts, the nomination of Donald Trump does not fit these expectations. Did most party insiders view Trump as unelectable and unacceptable? If so, how did the Republican Party coalition react to his unlikely nomination? To address these questions, we content analyze endorsements of Trump and construct an endorsement network of the coalition behind Trump’s candidacy. We show that Trump received little support from party insiders prior to his nomination, and that policy considerations were relatively unimportant to Trump supporters throughout the election. Instead, when faced with an undesirable nominee, party insiders reacted by supporting Trump for electoral reasons. Our results suggest that party insiders are not immutable arbiters in presidential primaries and that most will prioritize partisan ambitions over policy goals.

The concept of ambivalence is important to the study of political psychology and behavior. We examine the causes of partisan ambivalence following the passage of major civil rights legislation to test our argument that the correlates of ambivalence will change following the alteration of long-standing party positions on a highly salient issue. We find support for this hypothesis for White Southerners during this time period—Indeed, our results demonstrate that the strength of one’s partisan attachment is unrelated to partisan evaluations for such individuals immediately following the passage of major civil rights legislation, but is again a predictor by the early 1970s.

Perhaps no separation of powers issue receives as much scholarly attention as the near monopoly modern presidents exert over foreign policy. Yet, despite an extensive literature on the subject, scholars have drawn different conclusions as to the causes of this change, finding that lawmakers either defer to the president or are equal and coordinate actors on foreign policy. Using the separation of powers as a guide, I attempt to rectify these differences and demonstrate instances in the roll call record where examples of both explanations are most evident. Recovering ideal point estimates between the 87th and 112th Congress on votes highlighting competing governmental objectives, findings show that the chamber median frequently shifts toward the president on foreign policy votes in the final passage stage and during the treaty process. However, evidence also shows Congress is less likely to defer to the president on domestic legislation and appropriations.

In October 2017, the Supreme Court heard an appeal of a November 2016 ruling striking down Wisconsin’s State Assembly districts as a Republican gerrymander that illegally dilutes the weight of Democratic votes. We take the opportunity to revisit this litigation to evaluate three proposed methods of detecting gerrymanders: the “efficiency gap,” a count of Assembly districts carried by statewide candidates, and the difference between the district-level partisan median and mean. The first two measures figure either centrally or peripherally in the plaintiffs’ case in Wisconsin, while the third is the approach we favor. We expand on the analysis offered at trial by evaluating how these measures fare across a variety of elections in Wisconsin and with the aid of 10,000 alternative Assembly maps drawn by computer. The alternative maps provide the appropriate baseline with which to gauge the level of vote dilution in Wisconsin and distinguish between the effect of residential geography and the Legislature’s actions. The results show that Wisconsin’s Assembly map is a substantial gerrymander according the median–mean comparison across all elections, while the two tests relied upon by the plaintiffs provide mixed results. We examine the measurement qualities of each test and show that the efficiency gap and districts-carried count both capture elements beyond partisan bias. We find no similar ambiguity with the median–mean comparison and conclude that the plaintiffs’ claim that Wisconsin’s Assembly map systematically dilutes the weight of Democratic votes is correct.

We assess the importance of the public’s policy agreement with the Supreme Court on public approval of the court. Using survey data on a range of recent court cases, we measure respondents’ perceived ideological closeness to the court. Then, we test various theories of court approval (doctrinal, functional, attitudinal). People who believe the court has decided recent cases as they themselves would have done, or that judges share their partisanship, report higher court approval than those who perceive the court as ideologically distant from them. We compare these findings with similar effects of policy agreement on Congressional and Presidential approval.

Public opinion on high-visibility election rules can be expected to reflect elite-level party divisions. We explain how partisanship affects support for, and opposition to, low-visibility convenience voting reforms. We find state-level factors such as quality of polling-place voting and party polarization explain some variance in support. However, individual-level factors are paramount. Attitudes about election reforms are strongly conditioned by partisan predispositions, with Democrats more supportive and Republicans more opposed. In addition, we find younger people, those with lower incomes, nonvoters, and people with disabilities were more likely to support proposals that might make voting easier. Although this cannot demonstrate that increased convenience voting would alter the composition of the electorate, it shows that, above and beyond partisanship, people who faced greater barriers to voting were most supportive of making voting easier. However, the dominant role of partisan predispositions suggests limits to rules changes that might make voting easier.

In today’s polarized and often uncivil political environment, how does political disagreement influence the political participation of youth? In this article, we compare the relationship between political disagreement and the political behavior of youth in online and face-to-face settings. Using a unique sample of U.S. youth age 15 to 25 ( N = 1,112), we find that exposure to disagreement, especially online, has a positive relationship with traditional and online forms of political participation. In addition, we find that engaging in disagreement online predicts higher levels of online participation. These findings suggest that engaging with political disagreement in the online setting may provide a way for youth to grapple with complex issues in a manner that leads to higher levels of political engagement overall.