Martin Gilens
Biographic Data
| ID | 263350 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin Gilens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | Gilens |
| SIGNATURE | GILENS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5485-6275 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2463 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Can Deep Canvassing Promote Anti‐Carceral Attitudes? A Field Experiment
Passing and implementing policies that will advance racial equity requires adequate levels of public support. Yet, interventions designed to inform citizens and cultivate such support are rarely successful, especially on highly salient, racialized issues like incarceration and policing. This challenge is further amplified when explicitly discussing racism, which often triggers adverse reactions or backlash. We conducted a pre‐registered, randomiz…
Race- and Class-Based Messaging and Anti-Carceral Policy Support
Strategic messaging can be used to build support for racial equity policies, but most research has found that linking issues to race is ineffective. What if using strategic messages to increase support for racial equity policies is not simply a matter of whether racial appeals are present in a message, but how they are framed? Evidence from an original survey experiment conducted among a highly diverse group of 2,320 randomly sampled voters in Lo…
Racial Attitudes and Views of Disaster
As disasters become more frequent and costly, understanding attitudes toward government disaster policy becomes critically important. Scholars have explored the racialized nature of specific disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. But studies of general disaster policy preferences have not attended much to race, focusing instead on dimensions like partisanship and perceived deservingness. We use two original national surveys to assess the role of ra…
The Politics of Disaster Prevention
Despite the importance of effective disaster policy, governments typically fail to produce it. The main explanation offered by political scientists is that voters strongly support postdisaster relief but not policies that seek to prevent or prepare for disaster. This study challenges that view. We develop novel measures of preferences for disaster prevention and postdisaster relief. We find strong support for prevention policies and candidates wh…
Response to Erik J. Engstrom and Robert Huckfeldt’s Review of Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It
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
Campaign Finance Regulations and Public Policy
Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court'sCitizens Uniteddecision. This exogenously imposed change in the regulation of independent expenditures provides an advance over the identification stra…
Doing Well and Doing Good
Previous research has identified nonmaterial considerations as especially important in shaping the political views of affluent Americans. While other scholars have focused on social issues like abortion or gay rights, or on collective goods like environmental protection, we explore the role of altruism in shaping the economic policy preferences and partisan identification of high-income Americans. We argue that altruistic concern for the well-bei…
Democracy in America?
Chapter 7 Racial Attitudes and Race-Neutral Social Policies
In almost every aspect of social and economic well-being, black Americans remain worse off than whites. African Americans ’ median income today is 74 % that of whites, a feeble improvement of only five percentage points in the past 25 years. Racial differences in high school completion rates and achievement scores on standardized tests have narrowed dramatically in the past two decades. But the racial gap in college education remains large, with …
Apsa Active and Award Committees
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Democracy in America
Simulating representation
This note is a response to Omar Bashir’s 2015 paper “Testing inferences about American politics: A review of the ‘oligarchy’ result,” Research & Politics 2(4)
Books by Our Readers
Bankruptcy law is a major part of the American legal landscape. More than a million individuals and thousands of businesses sought relief in the United States' 93 bankruptcy courts in 2014, more than 27,000 of them in the Eastern District of Michigan. Important business of great consequence takes place in the courts, yet they ordinarily draw little public attention. In Adversity and Justice, Kevin Ball takes a closer look at the history and evolu…
Apsa Committees
The Committee on Teaching and Learning develops and promotes activities within APSA and the political science community regarding political science and the practices and policies of higher education, including undergraduate
The Insufficiency of “Democracy by Coincidence”
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
Descriptive Representation, Money, and Political Inequality in the United States
In a democracy, policy decisions are expected to reflect, at least in broad measure, the interests and preferences of the citizens. But recent research shows that government policy in the United States reflects affluent citizens' preferences much more than those of the middle-class or the poor. To what extent does this representational inequality result from the affluent status of policymakers themselves? Over half the members of the U.S. Congres…
Testing Theories of American Politics
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-o…
Affluence and Influence
Affluence and Influence
Preference Gaps and Inequality in Representation
In a recent article in PS, Soroka and Wlezien (2008) argue that the policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans rarely differ, and therefore that “regardless of whose preferences policymakers follow ... policy will end up in essentially the same place” (325). In this article, I analyze a much larger and more diverse set of policies than those examined by Soroka and Wlezien and show that income-based preference gaps are much larger and mo…
The Mass Media and the Public's Assessments of Presidential Candidates, 1952–2000
Media critics blame contemporary news for increasing levels of apathy and ignorance among the electorate. We agree that the amount of policy-oriented information in news coverage of presidential campaigns has declined and the level of news consumption has fallen. Yet, based on 50 years of data on media content and public attitudes, we find that over this period of time Americans have just as much to say about the major-party presidential candidat…
Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness
By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set o…
Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability
Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn about Politics
Why Americans Hate Welfare
Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences
In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public's political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views differ…
Testing Theories of American Politics
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-o…
Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness
By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set o…
Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences
In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public's political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views differ…
"Racial Attitudes and the "New South
An abundance of survey research conducted over the past two decades has portrayed a "new South" in which the region's white residents now resemble the remainder of the country in their racial attitudes No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice. Using a new and relatively unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes designed to overcome possible social desirability effects, our study finds racial prejudice to be still high in the South and…
"Race Coding" and White Opposition to Welfare
Crime and welfare are now widely viewed as "coded" issues that activate white Americans' negative views of blacks without explicitly raising the "race card." But does the desire of whites to combat crime or curtail welfare really stem from their dislike of blacks? Are these not pressing problems about which Americans rightly should be concerned-apart from any associations these issues may have with race? In this paper I assess the extent to which…
Racial Attitudes and Opposition to Welfare
This article examines the role of racial attitudes in shaping white Americans' opposition to welfare. Past research on welfare views has focused on economic self-interest, individualism, and egalitarianism. Using a covariance structure model, I confirm the significance of these factors, but find that racial attitudes are in fact the most important source of opposition to welfare among whites. In addition, racial attitudes influence the pattern of…
Race and Poverty in America
Over the past decades, the black urban poor have come to dominate public images of poverty. Surveys show that the American public dramatically exaggerates the proportion of African Americans among the poor and that such misperceptions are associ ated with greater opposition to welfare. In this article I examine the relationship between news media portrayals and public images of poverty. I find that network TV news and weekly newsmagazines portray…
Gender and Support for Reagan
This article examines the sources of differences in approval of President Reagan's job performance. Employing data from the I982 National Election Study survey, a comprehensive model of presidential approval is developed. Analyses are conducted separately for men and women and then compared item by item to locate the demographic and attitudinal sources of Reagan's gender gap. The results indicate that military and social welfare issues are the mo…
Affirmative Action and the Politics of Realignment
Over the past thirty years, the Democratic party has carried the mantle of racial liberalism. The party's endorsements of equal rights, fair housing laws and school busing have cost it the support of some whites, but these losses have been concentrated at the periphery of the party, among those least committed to its guiding principles or most unsympathetic to its efforts on behalf of racial equality. We argue that with the rise of affirmative ac…
Preference Gaps and Inequality in Representation
In a recent article in PS, Soroka and Wlezien (2008) argue that the policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans rarely differ, and therefore that “regardless of whose preferences policymakers follow ... policy will end up in essentially the same place” (325). In this article, I analyze a much larger and more diverse set of policies than those examined by Soroka and Wlezien and show that income-based preference gaps are much larger and mo…
Racial Attitudes and the “New South
An abundance of survey research conducted over the past two decades has portrayed a "new South" in which the region's white residents now resemble the remainder of the country in their racial attitudes No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice. Using a new and relatively unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes designed to overcome possible social desirability effects, our study finds racial prejudice to be still high in the South and…
Corporate Ownership and News Bias
The purpose of this study is to assess the influence of corporate media owners over news content. In particular, we address the claim that the financial interests of corporate owners lead America's news bureaus to downplay the significant issues surrounding the growing concentration of ownership of the country's mass media. To do so we examine newspaper coverage of one aspect of the 1996 Telecommunications Act: the loosening of restrictions on te…
The Mass Media and the Public's Assessments of Presidential Candidates, 1952–2000
Media critics blame contemporary news for increasing levels of apathy and ignorance among the electorate. We agree that the amount of policy-oriented information in news coverage of presidential campaigns has declined and the level of news consumption has fallen. Yet, based on 50 years of data on media content and public attitudes, we find that over this period of time Americans have just as much to say about the major-party presidential candidat…
Interregional Migration and Political Resocialization
Journal Article Interregional Migration and Political Resocialization: A Study of Racial Attitudes Under Pressure Get access JAMES M. GLASER, JAMES M. GLASER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MARTIN GILENS MARTIN GILENS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 61, Issue 1, May 1997, Pages 72–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/297787 Published: 01 May …
Doing Well and Doing Good
Previous research has identified nonmaterial considerations as especially important in shaping the political views of affluent Americans. While other scholars have focused on social issues like abortion or gay rights, or on collective goods like environmental protection, we explore the role of altruism in shaping the economic policy preferences and partisan identification of high-income Americans. We argue that altruistic concern for the well-bei…
Why Americans hate welfare
Drawing on surveys of public attitudes and analyses of more than forty years of television and newsmagazine stories on poverty, Gilens demonstrates how public opposition to welfare is fed by a potent combination of racial stereotypes and misinformation about the true nature of America's poor. But white Americans don't oppose welfare simply because they think it benefits blacks; rather, they think it benefits "undeserving" blacks who would rather …
Campaign Finance Regulations and Public Policy
Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court'sCitizens Uniteddecision. This exogenously imposed change in the regulation of independent expenditures provides an advance over the identification stra…
Descriptive Representation, Money, and Political Inequality in the United States
In a democracy, policy decisions are expected to reflect, at least in broad measure, the interests and preferences of the citizens. But recent research shows that government policy in the United States reflects affluent citizens' preferences much more than those of the middle-class or the poor. To what extent does this representational inequality result from the affluent status of policymakers themselves? Over half the members of the U.S. Congres…
Personality and labor force participation across the life course
The Insufficiency of “Democracy by Coincidence”
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
Simulating representation
This note is a response to Omar Bashir’s 2015 paper “Testing inferences about American politics: A review of the ‘oligarchy’ result,” Research & Politics 2(4)
Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability
Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn about Politics
Can Deep Canvassing Promote Anti‐Carceral Attitudes? A Field Experiment
Passing and implementing policies that will advance racial equity requires adequate levels of public support. Yet, interventions designed to inform citizens and cultivate such support are rarely successful, especially on highly salient, racialized issues like incarceration and policing. This challenge is further amplified when explicitly discussing racism, which often triggers adverse reactions or backlash. We conducted a pre‐registered, randomiz…
Response to Erik J. Engstrom and Robert Huckfeldt’s Review of Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It
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
Gender and Support for Reagan
This article examines the sources of differences in approval of President Reagan's job performance. Employing data from the I982 National Election Study survey, a comprehensive model of presidential approval is developed. Analyses are conducted separately for men and women and then compared item by item to locate the demographic and attitudinal sources of Reagan's gender gap. The results indicate that military and social welfare issues are the mo…
The Unchanging American Voter. Eric R. A. N. Smith
Personality and labor force participation across the life course
Racial Attitudes and Opposition to Welfare
This article examines the role of racial attitudes in shaping white Americans' opposition to welfare. Past research on welfare views has focused on economic self-interest, individualism, and egalitarianism. Using a covariance structure model, I confirm the significance of these factors, but find that racial attitudes are in fact the most important source of opposition to welfare among whites. In addition, racial attitudes influence the pattern of…
Race and Poverty in America
Over the past decades, the black urban poor have come to dominate public images of poverty. Surveys show that the American public dramatically exaggerates the proportion of African Americans among the poor and that such misperceptions are associ ated with greater opposition to welfare. In this article I examine the relationship between news media portrayals and public images of poverty. I find that network TV news and weekly newsmagazines portray…
"Race Coding" and White Opposition to Welfare
Crime and welfare are now widely viewed as "coded" issues that activate white Americans' negative views of blacks without explicitly raising the "race card." But does the desire of whites to combat crime or curtail welfare really stem from their dislike of blacks? Are these not pressing problems about which Americans rightly should be concerned-apart from any associations these issues may have with race? In this paper I assess the extent to which…
"Racial Attitudes and the "New South
An abundance of survey research conducted over the past two decades has portrayed a "new South" in which the region's white residents now resemble the remainder of the country in their racial attitudes No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice. Using a new and relatively unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes designed to overcome possible social desirability effects, our study finds racial prejudice to be still high in the South and…
Racial Attitudes and the “New South
An abundance of survey research conducted over the past two decades has portrayed a "new South" in which the region's white residents now resemble the remainder of the country in their racial attitudes No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice. Using a new and relatively unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes designed to overcome possible social desirability effects, our study finds racial prejudice to be still high in the South and…
Interregional Migration and Political Resocialization
Journal Article Interregional Migration and Political Resocialization: A Study of Racial Attitudes Under Pressure Get access JAMES M. GLASER, JAMES M. GLASER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MARTIN GILENS MARTIN GILENS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 61, Issue 1, May 1997, Pages 72–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/297787 Published: 01 May …
Affirmative Action and the Politics of Realignment
Over the past thirty years, the Democratic party has carried the mantle of racial liberalism. The party's endorsements of equal rights, fair housing laws and school busing have cost it the support of some whites, but these losses have been concentrated at the periphery of the party, among those least committed to its guiding principles or most unsympathetic to its efforts on behalf of racial equality. We argue that with the rise of affirmative ac…
Why Americans Hate Welfare
Why Americans hate welfare
Drawing on surveys of public attitudes and analyses of more than forty years of television and newsmagazine stories on poverty, Gilens demonstrates how public opposition to welfare is fed by a potent combination of racial stereotypes and misinformation about the true nature of America's poor. But white Americans don't oppose welfare simply because they think it benefits blacks; rather, they think it benefits "undeserving" blacks who would rather …
Corporate Ownership and News Bias
The purpose of this study is to assess the influence of corporate media owners over news content. In particular, we address the claim that the financial interests of corporate owners lead America's news bureaus to downplay the significant issues surrounding the growing concentration of ownership of the country's mass media. To do so we examine newspaper coverage of one aspect of the 1996 Telecommunications Act: the loosening of restrictions on te…
Why Americans Hate Welfare
Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences
In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public's political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views differ…
Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability
Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn about Politics
Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness
By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set o…
The Mass Media and the Public's Assessments of Presidential Candidates, 1952–2000
Media critics blame contemporary news for increasing levels of apathy and ignorance among the electorate. We agree that the amount of policy-oriented information in news coverage of presidential campaigns has declined and the level of news consumption has fallen. Yet, based on 50 years of data on media content and public attitudes, we find that over this period of time Americans have just as much to say about the major-party presidential candidat…
Preference Gaps and Inequality in Representation
In a recent article in PS, Soroka and Wlezien (2008) argue that the policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans rarely differ, and therefore that “regardless of whose preferences policymakers follow ... policy will end up in essentially the same place” (325). In this article, I analyze a much larger and more diverse set of policies than those examined by Soroka and Wlezien and show that income-based preference gaps are much larger and mo…
Affluence and Influence
Affluence and Influence
Testing Theories of American Politics
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-o…
The Insufficiency of “Democracy by Coincidence”
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
Descriptive Representation, Money, and Political Inequality in the United States
In a democracy, policy decisions are expected to reflect, at least in broad measure, the interests and preferences of the citizens. But recent research shows that government policy in the United States reflects affluent citizens' preferences much more than those of the middle-class or the poor. To what extent does this representational inequality result from the affluent status of policymakers themselves? Over half the members of the U.S. Congres…
Simulating representation
This note is a response to Omar Bashir’s 2015 paper “Testing inferences about American politics: A review of the ‘oligarchy’ result,” Research & Politics 2(4)
Political science (30 works) · Politics (23 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Economics (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)