Brian F Schaffner
Biographic Data
| ID | 226093 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian F Schaffner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian F |
| FAMILY NAME | Schaffner |
| SIGNATURE | SCHAFFNER B F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1340 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
The Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement Overstates Minority Turnout
The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies th…
Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics
Local governments play a central role in American democracy, providing essential services such as policing, water, and sanitation. Moreover, Americans express great confidence in their municipal governments. But is this confidence warranted? Using big data and a representative sample of American communities, this book provides the first systematic examination of racial and class inequalities in local politics. We find that non-whites and less-aff…
Going with the Flows: Information that Changes Americans’ Immigration Preferences
Immigration has become a salient, polarizing issue in American politics, with unusual power to shift white Americans’ partisanship (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015) and vote choice (Hooghe & Dassonneville, 2018; Mutz, 2018). The scope of political debate around immigration has expanded along with its prominence. Recently proposed legislation has included changes to the number and type of immigrants authorized to enter the US, alongside long-standing issu…
The Elusive Likely Voter
Political commentators have offered evidence that the “polling misses” of 2016 were caused by a number of factors. This project focuses on one explanation: that likely-voter models—tools used by preelection pollsters to predict which survey respondents are most likely to make up the electorate and, thus, whose responses should be used to calculate election predictions—were flawed. While models employed by different pollsters vary widely, it is di…
Reexamining the Effect of Mass Shootings on Public Support for Gun Control
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Misinformation or Expressive Responding
The public's party-driven misinformation and misperceptions about politics has drawn a great deal of attention from scholars over the past decade. While much of this research assumes that the misinformation documented by survey researchers is an accurate reflection of what individuals truly believe, other scholars have suggested that individuals intentionally and knowingly provide misinformation to survey researchers as a way of showing support f…
Rethinking Representation from a Communal Perspective
Postmaterialist Particularism: What Petitions Can Tell Us About Biases in the Policy Agenda
Groups with financial resources dominate the pool of lobbyists and political donors. Scholars and reformers often point to the outsized influence of moneyed elites when they consider economic inequality that results from public policy. Here, we expand the scope of existing work by focusing attention on the types of policy proposals placed on the issue agenda in a venue where financial resources are not a prerequisite for participation—policy-orie…
Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism
THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN FEATURED major-party candidates who both explicitly put issues of race and gender at the forefront of the discourse. Notably, 2016 also witnessed the largest gap between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-college-educated whites since 1980. While Donald Trump enjoyed just a four-point margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney’s margin o…
Misinformation and Motivated Reasoning: Responses to Economic News in a Politicized Environment
Public opinion scholars have recently focused on understanding why surveys report such high levels of misinformation among otherwise knowledgeable and engaged partisans. In this paper, we take advantage of a natural experiment involving the October 2012 jobs report announcement to gain a more complete understanding of how individuals' beliefs are influenced by new salient information in a politicized environment. We examine reactions by Republica…
The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys
Risk Attitudes and the Incumbency Advantage
Does Survey Mode Still Matter? Findings from a 2010 Multi-Mode Comparison
In this article, we present data from a three-mode survey comparison study carried out in 2010. National surveys were fielded at the same time over the Internet (using an opt-in Internet panel), by telephone with live interviews (using a national Random Digit Dialing (RDD) sample of landlines and cell phones), and by mail (using a national sample of residential addresses). Each survey utilized a nearly identical questionnaire soliciting informati…
The effects of campaign finance spending bans on electoral outcomes: Evidence from the states about the potential impact of Citizens United v. FEC
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to…
Support at Any Distance? The Role of Location and Prejudice in Public Opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque
In 2010, a debate erupted about plans to construct a mosque (as part of a larger multicultural center) approximately two blocks from Ground Zero in New York City. The main justification given by those who opposed the mosque was that building it so close to Ground Zero would appear to be insensitive. Public opinion appeared to support this notion, as large majorities of Americans registered their opposition to the mosque in surveys conducted at th…
Party Polarization
Explaining the unpopularity of public funding for congressional elections
Racial Salience and the Obama Vote
Barack Obama's successful campaign for president renewed both scholarly and popular interest in understanding the extent to which race remains a barrier for African American candidates in American elections. Despite a substantial body of work that indicates that African Americans do face significant barriers to winning White votes, initial interpretations of the 2008 election results suggest that the Obama vote was not depressed because of his ra…
Assessing the Importance of Financial and Human Capital for Interest Group Sector Strength across American Communities
One of the most profound changes in the interest group sector over the last fifty years is interest groups’ increasing need to attract financial donors in order to assure long-term sustainability. Groups’ growing propensity to attract ‘chequebook’ members is thought to compromise their ability to foster the personal involvement of individuals in their communities. Yet we know very little about the consequences of these dynamics for the strength o…
Note from the Co-Editor
Digital Divide or Just Another Absentee Ballot: Evaluating Internet Voting in the 2004 Michigan Democratic Primary
The use of Internet voting in public elections has been challenged based on claims that it is biased against minorities and lower income voters. Although previous research has supported these claims, we find that race and other socioeconomic factors do not affect the choice of Internet voting when it is used as an absentee voting method. Using individual-level vote data from the 2004 Michigan Democratic Primary, we model the two-stage decision-ma…
Exit, Voice, and Interest Group Governance
Interest groups constitute critical mediating institutions linking citizens and political elites, thereby enhancing participation and representation at all levels of government. But to what extent are citizens connected to the organizations to which they belong? In this article, we demonstrate that some voluntary organizations are structured more democratically than others and examine the reasons for these differences. Analyzing the bylaws of a r…
Winning Coverage in the U.S. Senate
Most scholars agree that news coverage of politics is the product of complicated interaction between journalists and politicians. Yet, we know little about how the interaction affects the coverage. Our analysis examines U.S. senators' press events and subsequent national network coverage from 1980–1996. Our evidence suggests that all senators can increase journalists' interest in their press events by carefully choosing the type of event and whic…
Political Parties and the Representativeness Of Legislative Committees
What role do parties play in determining which interests committees represent? In this article, I compare committee organization and representativeness in Nebraska's nonpartisan legislature with those in the partisan senates of Kansas and Iowa. I demonstrate that when parties do not organize legislative conflict, committees are less representative of the full chamber. I argue, however, that committee representativeness does not necessarily result…
Does Survey Mode Still Matter? Findings from a 2010 Multi-Mode Comparison
In this article, we present data from a three-mode survey comparison study carried out in 2010. National surveys were fielded at the same time over the Internet (using an opt-in Internet panel), by telephone with live interviews (using a national Random Digit Dialing (RDD) sample of landlines and cell phones), and by mail (using a national sample of residential addresses). Each survey utilized a nearly identical questionnaire soliciting informati…
Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism
THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN FEATURED major-party candidates who both explicitly put issues of race and gender at the forefront of the discourse. Notably, 2016 also witnessed the largest gap between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-college-educated whites since 1980. While Donald Trump enjoyed just a four-point margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney’s margin o…
Tearns Without Uniforms: The Nonpartisan Ballot in State and Local Elections
The use of a nonpartisan ballot was one of the many Progressive reforms introduced around the turn of the century that is still heavily used today. The intent of the change to a nonpartisan format was, and still is, to remove party cues from a voter's decision, thereby causing the voter to seek out other information about a candidate. This study seeks to examine the effects of nonpartisan elections on patterns of voter decisionmaking. We examine …
The Influence of Party: Evidence from the State Legislatures
American legislative studies in recent years have been occupied to a large degree with the question of the effects of political parties on the policy behavior of elected legislators, with most of the research focusing on the U.S. Congress. We undertake a comparative analysis of state legislatures for a window into the character and extent of party's effects. Specifically, we compare the impact of party on the partisan polarization and dimensional…
The Partisan Heuristic in Low-Information Elections
Journal Article The Partisan Heuristic in Low-Information Elections Get access BRIAN F. SCHAFFNER, BRIAN F. SCHAFFNER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MATTHEW J. STREB MATTHEW J. STREB Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 4, February 2002, Pages 559–581, https://doi.org/10.1086/343755 Published: 01 February 2002
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to…
Party Polarization
Misinformation or Expressive Responding
The public's party-driven misinformation and misperceptions about politics has drawn a great deal of attention from scholars over the past decade. While much of this research assumes that the misinformation documented by survey researchers is an accurate reflection of what individuals truly believe, other scholars have suggested that individuals intentionally and knowingly provide misinformation to survey researchers as a way of showing support f…
Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections
The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely …
Teams without Uniforms: The Nonpartisan Ballot in State and Local Elections
Misinformation and Motivated Reasoning: Responses to Economic News in a Politicized Environment
Public opinion scholars have recently focused on understanding why surveys report such high levels of misinformation among otherwise knowledgeable and engaged partisans. In this paper, we take advantage of a natural experiment involving the October 2012 jobs report announcement to gain a more complete understanding of how individuals' beliefs are influenced by new salient information in a politicized environment. We examine reactions by Republica…
The Structural Determinants of Local Congressional News Coverage
Political observers have extensively documented the national media's focus on committee and party leaders. Legislators' local coverage, in contrast, remains largely unexplored and unexplained. This article examines 40 local newspapers to explore how these factors may influence legislators' local newspaper coverage. We find that local newspapers do not provide more coverage to congressional leaders and that independent papers write more frequently…
Racial Salience and the Obama Vote
Barack Obama's successful campaign for president renewed both scholarly and popular interest in understanding the extent to which race remains a barrier for African American candidates in American elections. Despite a substantial body of work that indicates that African Americans do face significant barriers to winning White votes, initial interpretations of the 2008 election results suggest that the Obama vote was not depressed because of his ra…
Local News Coverage and the Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. House
Much of the incumbency advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives is attributed to incumbents' efforts to address constituents' needs. Yet House members do not win reelection simply by performing well in office, but also by informing constituents of how well they are doing their jobs. I examined the value of local news coverage for legislators seeking to publicize their legislative work on behalf of constituents. I found that incumbents who w…
Risk Attitudes and the Incumbency Advantage
Winning Coverage in the U.S. Senate
Most scholars agree that news coverage of politics is the product of complicated interaction between journalists and politicians. Yet, we know little about how the interaction affects the coverage. Our analysis examines U.S. senators' press events and subsequent national network coverage from 1980–1996. Our evidence suggests that all senators can increase journalists' interest in their press events by carefully choosing the type of event and whic…
Reexamining the Effect of Mass Shootings on Public Support for Gun Control
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys
The effects of campaign finance spending bans on electoral outcomes: Evidence from the states about the potential impact of Citizens United v. FEC
The Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement Overstates Minority Turnout
The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies th…
Exit, Voice, and Interest Group Governance
Interest groups constitute critical mediating institutions linking citizens and political elites, thereby enhancing participation and representation at all levels of government. But to what extent are citizens connected to the organizations to which they belong? In this article, we demonstrate that some voluntary organizations are structured more democratically than others and examine the reasons for these differences. Analyzing the bylaws of a r…
Going with the Flows: Information that Changes Americans’ Immigration Preferences
Immigration has become a salient, polarizing issue in American politics, with unusual power to shift white Americans’ partisanship (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2015) and vote choice (Hooghe & Dassonneville, 2018; Mutz, 2018). The scope of political debate around immigration has expanded along with its prominence. Recently proposed legislation has included changes to the number and type of immigrants authorized to enter the US, alongside long-standing issu…
Reinforcing Stereotypes? Race and Local Television News Coverage of Congress
Objective. Despite the increasingly diverse legislative records of African‐American members of Congress, much of the population continues to believe that African‐American legislators are interested only in minority issues. If African‐American House members are becoming more like their nonblack colleagues, then why do many citizens continue to hold these stereotypes about African‐American legislators? Methods. We examine local television news cove…
Tactical and Contextual Determinants of U.S. Senators' Approval Ratings
This paper focuses on U.S. senators and their home‐state approval ratings from 1981 to 1997. We examine these ratings to assess the relative impacts of tactical factors, such as the senators' bill sponsorship and media activity, and contextual influences, such as economic performance, state population size, and the evaluations and behavior of other elected officials. We find that the senators' own tactical behavior affects the approval ratings, b…
The Elusive Likely Voter
Political commentators have offered evidence that the “polling misses” of 2016 were caused by a number of factors. This project focuses on one explanation: that likely-voter models—tools used by preelection pollsters to predict which survey respondents are most likely to make up the electorate and, thus, whose responses should be used to calculate election predictions—were flawed. While models employed by different pollsters vary widely, it is di…
Tearns Without Uniforms: The Nonpartisan Ballot in State and Local Elections
The use of a nonpartisan ballot was one of the many Progressive reforms introduced around the turn of the century that is still heavily used today. The intent of the change to a nonpartisan format was, and still is, to remove party cues from a voter's decision, thereby causing the voter to seek out other information about a candidate. This study seeks to examine the effects of nonpartisan elections on patterns of voter decisionmaking. We examine …
Teams without Uniforms: The Nonpartisan Ballot in State and Local Elections
The Partisan Heuristic in Low-Information Elections
Journal Article The Partisan Heuristic in Low-Information Elections Get access BRIAN F. SCHAFFNER, BRIAN F. SCHAFFNER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MATTHEW J. STREB MATTHEW J. STREB Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 4, February 2002, Pages 559–581, https://doi.org/10.1086/343755 Published: 01 February 2002
The Influence of Party: Evidence from the State Legislatures
American legislative studies in recent years have been occupied to a large degree with the question of the effects of political parties on the policy behavior of elected legislators, with most of the research focusing on the U.S. Congress. We undertake a comparative analysis of state legislatures for a window into the character and extent of party's effects. Specifically, we compare the impact of party on the partisan polarization and dimensional…
The Structural Determinants of Local Congressional News Coverage
Political observers have extensively documented the national media's focus on committee and party leaders. Legislators' local coverage, in contrast, remains largely unexplored and unexplained. This article examines 40 local newspapers to explore how these factors may influence legislators' local newspaper coverage. We find that local newspapers do not provide more coverage to congressional leaders and that independent papers write more frequently…
Tactical and Contextual Determinants of U.S. Senators' Approval Ratings
This paper focuses on U.S. senators and their home‐state approval ratings from 1981 to 1997. We examine these ratings to assess the relative impacts of tactical factors, such as the senators' bill sponsorship and media activity, and contextual influences, such as economic performance, state population size, and the evaluations and behavior of other elected officials. We find that the senators' own tactical behavior affects the approval ratings, b…
Reinforcing Stereotypes? Race and Local Television News Coverage of Congress
Objective. Despite the increasingly diverse legislative records of African‐American members of Congress, much of the population continues to believe that African‐American legislators are interested only in minority issues. If African‐American House members are becoming more like their nonblack colleagues, then why do many citizens continue to hold these stereotypes about African‐American legislators? Methods. We examine local television news cove…
Incumbents Out, Party In? Term Limits and Partisan Redistricting in State Legislatures
How do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the success of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with and without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines …
Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections
The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely …
Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections
The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely …
The political geography of campaign advertising in U.S. House elections
Local News Coverage and the Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. House
Much of the incumbency advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives is attributed to incumbents' efforts to address constituents' needs. Yet House members do not win reelection simply by performing well in office, but also by informing constituents of how well they are doing their jobs. I examined the value of local news coverage for legislators seeking to publicize their legislative work on behalf of constituents. I found that incumbents who w…
Winning Coverage in the U.S. Senate
Most scholars agree that news coverage of politics is the product of complicated interaction between journalists and politicians. Yet, we know little about how the interaction affects the coverage. Our analysis examines U.S. senators' press events and subsequent national network coverage from 1980–1996. Our evidence suggests that all senators can increase journalists' interest in their press events by carefully choosing the type of event and whic…
Political Parties and the Representativeness Of Legislative Committees
What role do parties play in determining which interests committees represent? In this article, I compare committee organization and representativeness in Nebraska's nonpartisan legislature with those in the partisan senates of Kansas and Iowa. I demonstrate that when parties do not organize legislative conflict, committees are less representative of the full chamber. I argue, however, that committee representativeness does not necessarily result…
Digital Divide or Just Another Absentee Ballot: Evaluating Internet Voting in the 2004 Michigan Democratic Primary
The use of Internet voting in public elections has been challenged based on claims that it is biased against minorities and lower income voters. Although previous research has supported these claims, we find that race and other socioeconomic factors do not affect the choice of Internet voting when it is used as an absentee voting method. Using individual-level vote data from the 2004 Michigan Democratic Primary, we model the two-stage decision-ma…
Exit, Voice, and Interest Group Governance
Interest groups constitute critical mediating institutions linking citizens and political elites, thereby enhancing participation and representation at all levels of government. But to what extent are citizens connected to the organizations to which they belong? In this article, we demonstrate that some voluntary organizations are structured more democratically than others and examine the reasons for these differences. Analyzing the bylaws of a r…
Note from the Co-Editor
Party Polarization
Explaining the unpopularity of public funding for congressional elections
Racial Salience and the Obama Vote
Barack Obama's successful campaign for president renewed both scholarly and popular interest in understanding the extent to which race remains a barrier for African American candidates in American elections. Despite a substantial body of work that indicates that African Americans do face significant barriers to winning White votes, initial interpretations of the 2008 election results suggest that the Obama vote was not depressed because of his ra…
Assessing the Importance of Financial and Human Capital for Interest Group Sector Strength across American Communities
One of the most profound changes in the interest group sector over the last fifty years is interest groups’ increasing need to attract financial donors in order to assure long-term sustainability. Groups’ growing propensity to attract ‘chequebook’ members is thought to compromise their ability to foster the personal involvement of individuals in their communities. Yet we know very little about the consequences of these dynamics for the strength o…
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to…
Support at Any Distance? The Role of Location and Prejudice in Public Opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque
In 2010, a debate erupted about plans to construct a mosque (as part of a larger multicultural center) approximately two blocks from Ground Zero in New York City. The main justification given by those who opposed the mosque was that building it so close to Ground Zero would appear to be insensitive. Public opinion appeared to support this notion, as large majorities of Americans registered their opposition to the mosque in surveys conducted at th…
Risk Attitudes and the Incumbency Advantage
Does Survey Mode Still Matter? Findings from a 2010 Multi-Mode Comparison
In this article, we present data from a three-mode survey comparison study carried out in 2010. National surveys were fielded at the same time over the Internet (using an opt-in Internet panel), by telephone with live interviews (using a national Random Digit Dialing (RDD) sample of landlines and cell phones), and by mail (using a national sample of residential addresses). Each survey utilized a nearly identical questionnaire soliciting informati…
Political science (34 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (12 works)