We show evidence of prejudiced voting in the 2008 presidential election. We then go deeper to test if black threat theory explains some of this behavior. The theory finds empirical support, especially in the south. We also show that black concentration in an area works interactively with the...

While there is a strong scholarly consensus that race continues to play a central role in American politics, research on the effects of the race of candidates on electoral behavior have been decidedly mixed. Using American National Election Studies data and a non-linear systems of equations...

There is no question that racial and ethnic attitudes did matter in the 2008 presidential election. However, as the country elected its first black president, it was not feelings about African-Americans that were most important. Instead, it was attitudes toward Muslims, Arabs, and societal...

Was the Iraq War a critical issue that helped Obama and McCain win the vote in nominating contests of their respective parties? Both major-party standard bearers had made an issue of the Iraq War, albeit in sharply contrasting ways. The data for our analysis largely come from exit polls of...

By all popular accounts social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook played a tremendous role in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. To date there is little empirical work to substantiate popular claims and the national attention generated by Facebook as a tool for political engagement. This...

Since the 1940s, studies of American voting behavior have repeatedly shown that voters make ballot choices in presidential elections predominantly on the basis of long-standing party preferences inherited from families of origin. In accordance with these findings, party choices at the individual...

Correct voting (Lau and Redlawsk 1997) posits that vote choice can be evaluated in terms of its ‘quality,’ or the extent to which it aligns with an individual’s own fully-informed preferences, values, and priorities. Lau, Andersen, and Redlawsk (2008) further conclude that one’s ability...

The 2000 presidential election brought intense scrutiny to the American election process, resulting in a number of significant reforms. Some changes involved overhauling rules for audits and other administrative procedures. Others involved the ways in which voters record their votes. The latter...

This paper proposes a party-based model of the dynamics of state primaries and tests it against what we take to be the principal alternative account of the dynamics of presidential primaries, namely, the theory of momentum. We also pull together several kinds of evidence in thumbnail accounts of...