Volume 17, Issue 2

We examine the role of moral foundations and system justification in explaining support for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. A number of important findings emerge. First, we find that there are important partisan and ideological differences when it comes to moral foundations and system justification. Second, we find that moral foundations predict support for Trump above and beyond traditional determinants of vote choice such as ideology, partisanship, religiosity, and demographic characteristics. Third, we find that a measure of political system justification is not related to vote choice in our sample. This casts doubt on the idea that support for Trump was mostly about protesting the political system. This paper adds to the growing body of research showing that psychological concepts and theories are important in understanding voter decision-making in the 2016 presidential election and in elections more generally.

Midterm congressional elections are referenda on the president not by happenstance but by design, as the opposition party and its candidates attack the administration when political conditions provide the opportunity. Models for explaining and predicting the number of seats won by the president’s party incorporating the number of seats held before the election, prior election results, change in status of the economy, and presidential evaluation data conditioned by strategy of the opposition party are presented. These models improve upon traditional models of midterm election explanations and predictions, providing parsimonious, theory-driven, and accurate models of midterm election outcomes.

Endorsement of the party’s nominee by the vast majority of that party’s top elected officials is a foregone conclusion in most presidential campaigns. But in 2016, Republican lawmakers were slow to endorse Donald Trump, lackluster in their enthusiasm, and a substantial number never endorsed or withdrew their endorsements by the campaign’s end. What explains lawmakers’ decisions to endorse, and the timing and strength of their endorsements? I find that primary endorsements were most likely to come from anti-immigration moderates, but as the campaign wore on, conservatives and members from more Republican districts became more supportive in their endorsements. Women were highly influenced by the release of the Access Hollywood tape, while Ted Cruz’s endorsers were stingy in their support until Cruz himself issued a late September endorsement. To see if these endorsement decisions made a difference in the election, I compare the performance of endorsers and non-endorsers in the 2016 congressional elections, and I compare Trump’s performance in districts in which he was endorsed to those in which he wasn’t. Rather than the traditional presidential coattails, I find evidence of negative coattails and reverse coattails. Endorsers did about 1.7 percentage points worse than non-endorsers, while Trump did 1.4 percentage points better in districts where the incumbent Republican endorsed him.

Promotion and tenure decisions frequently require an assessment of the quality of a candidate’s research record. Without carefully specifying what constitutes a tenurable and promotable record, departments frequently adopt the Potter Stewart approach – they know it when they see it. The benefit of such a system is that it allows for multiple paths to tenure and promotion and encourages holistic review, but the drawback is that it allows for the promotion and tenure process to be more easily manipulated by favoritism and bias. Incorporating transparent metrics such as journal impact factor (JIF) would seem like a good way to standardize the process. We argue, however, that when JIF becomes determinative, conceptual disadvantages and systematic biases are introduced into the process. JIF indicates the visibility or utility of a journal ; it does not and cannot tell us about individual articles published in that journal. Moreover, it creates inequitable paths to tenure on the basis of gender and subfield, given gendered patterns of publications and the variation in journal economies by subfield.

Americans born before 1980, called Millennials, are repeatedly treated as a singular voting bloc, but much like the Baby Boomers, have been socialized across a series of very different elections. We develop a theory of millennial political socialization that argues that older Millennials are more tied to the Democratic party and more liberal than their younger counterparts. We use the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and an original survey of 1274 Americans conducted before the 2016 elections to test this theory. We find some support for our theory; in addition, we find that younger Millennials are socialized by issues of identity politics and culture – specifically on issues of immigration and the role of race in society. This implies a generation that largely favors Democrats, but whose Republicans are more culturally conservative than middle aged Republican voters.

The 2016 nomination of Hillary Clinton as the first female major party nominee for president created an unprecedented opportunity to test for evidence of explicit sexism in the electorate. Presidential elections normally produce two equally matched nominees with impressive public service resumes who behave similarly on the campaign trail. However, while Democrats were making history nominating the first female nominee, the Republicans also made history by selecting a nominee with no public service experience, a controversial personal background, and conduct that conflicted sharply with traditional norms of presidential candidates. In survey after survey, voters recognized that Clinton held a significant qualification advantage over Donald Trump. Yet, despite the fact that both men and women were more likely to rate Clinton as more qualified than her opponent overall, using an innovative approach via an original survey, we find evidence of implicit sexism in the way that some males evaluated Clinton compared to their female counterparts.

This paper explores the racial origins and legacy of the Electoral College through historical and quantitative analyses. At the Constitutional Convention, the Electoral College served the interests of Southern slaveowners by perpetuating the advantage of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Following Reconstruction, Southern states that disenfranchised African Americans received an even larger voice in the Electoral College. Republicans tried to counter these moves by admitting unusually small states into the union. The ironic consequence of this non-racial decision is that, today, these states are heavily White and have citizens with higher levels of racial resentment. A MM-regression analysis of every election from 2000 on indicates the Electoral College has consistently awarded more votes per capita to states with Whiter populations and more racially conservative attitudes. The racially-disparate power exerted by these states makes it more difficult to enact racially-egalitarian policies. This paper adds a new perspective to the normative debate over the Electoral College, which typically focuses on democratic fairness and federalism concerns.

Advocates of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) promise that it can deliver plurality electoral rule (“first past the post”) for presidential elections, at the national level, without amending the Constitution or abolishing the Electoral College. They also contend that the plan has seen bipartisan support and will pass on the strength of such cross-party attraction. In fact, the NPVIC remains a polarizing scheme, strongly appealing to most Democrats and strongly repellant to most Republicans. In turn, it is extremely unlikely that sufficiently many states will join the Compact for it to reach the next stage of legal testing.