H Gibbs Knotts
Biographic Data
| ID | 3877142 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Gibbs Knotts |
| GIVEN NAMES | H Gibbs |
| FAMILY NAME | Knotts |
| SIGNATURE | KNOTTS H G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Carolina University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 168 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Population change, racial settlement patterns, and the newest southern electorate
Recent scholarship on the American South emphasizes how changing settlement patterns affect party politics. Specifically, places with high population growth are shifting toward the Democratic Party whereas localities shedding residents favor Republicans. This insight is important but also in need of empirical refinement. In this study, we examine settlement patterns and changes in the racial composition of the southern electorate at three differe…
Intraparty Republican Factionalism as Identity in the Modern American South
Party factions are central to our understanding of American politics, but what role do party factions play within the electorate? With an August 2022 survey of the American South, we investigate factions within the modern GOP. We find evidence that faction identities overlap, as most Republicans hold some degree of identification with multiple factions. We also employ multivariate analyses to show that, despite evidence of overlap, Make America G…
Heritage Versus Hate: Assessing Opinions in the Debate over Confederate Monuments and Memorials
Objective This study evaluates factors that might explain southerners’ opinions toward Confederate monuments. Method We conduct a series of multivariate analyses of opinions toward Confederate monuments based on a poll of 789 respondents who live in the American South. Results The majority of southerners surveyed want to leave Confederate monuments where they are, place a marker next to them for historical context, or place them in a museum. Sout…
Switching sides but still fighting the Civil War in southern politics
It is well-established that the realignment of the past half-century sorted southern whites into the Grand Old Party (GOP) while southern blacks have remained stalwart Democrats. Surprisingly, however, there has been little systematic investigation of the relationship between party identification and opinions toward the South’s Confederate legacy. If it is indeed the case that race played the dominant role in the partisan sorting of southern whit…
What’s in a name? An experimental test of marital name change on perceptions of female political candidates
Stereotypes about female candidates can affect voters’ perceptions, particularly when candidates violate gender role norms. We focus on a potentially important but overlooked characteristic: whether a woman keeps her last name after getting married. Using a survey experiment that asked respondents to assess candidates who did and did not have the same last name as their husband, we find that this decision has no overall effect on electability or …
Do I Have to Take the GRE? Standardized Testing in MPA Admissions
Graduate-program decision makers face a similar challenge: how to design an admissions process that screens out applicants who are unlikely to succeed but does not provide too high an entry barrier for students who can be successful. This study catalogs the use of standardized testing in Master of Public Administration admissions and finds that less than one third of programs require standardized tests for all applicants. Moreover, program presti…
The politics of marital name change
Each year, millions of women face the decision whether or not to change their names after marriage. One study found that region, gender role traditionalism, career orientation, and educational attainment predicted name changes (Johnson and Scheuble, 1995). Another line of research discovered that women who changed their names were perceived as less ambitious and less competent, but more caring than women who did not change their name (Noordewier …
The Southern Accent as a Heuristic in American Campaigns and Elections
Are political candidates perceived differently based on the presence or absence of a southern accent? To address this question, we employ an experimental design that explores reactions to political candidates with a southern accent and a regionally neutral accent. We focus on perceptions of three general categories of candidate characteristics: candidate traits, candidate affect, and candidate issue positions. Overall, we discover that candidates…
Furling the Flag: Explaining the 2015 Vote to Remove the Confederate Flag in South Carolina
Public policy scholars have long recognized the importance of focusing events in shaping policy change. We argue that the 2015 Charleston church shooting served as a focusing event that opened a policy window, leading to the vote to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. While Democrats voted unanimously to remove the flag, we employ logistic regression models to explore the determinants of the decision to remove …
Down with the Southern Cross: Opinions on the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina
A HORRIFIC MASS SHOOTING IN A BLACK CHURCH in Charleston, South Carolina, became the mobilizing force for taking down the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds in Columbia. In this article, we chronicle disputes over the Confederate flag in the American South and then turn our attention to the case of South Carolina. Using survey data from the Winthrop Poll (WP), we evaluate the opinions of South Carolinians toward the Confederate …
Similarities and Differences in Support of Minority and White Republican Candidates
History has shown that voters tend to support candidates of their own race. This reality has proven particularly challenging for black candidates who have often had difficulty running for office in majority white electorates. However, the vast majority of research on this topic has focused on minority Democrats, not minority Republicans. In this study, we take advantage of a unique set of circumstances in South Carolina's (SC's) 2014 elections wh…
Pre-Law Advising and the Political Science Major: Evidence from Pre-Law Advisors
Political science is one of the most popular majors for law school applicants, and studies show that political science majors have high rates of law school admission. In addition, many political science departments have a pre-law advisor. However, little is known about the status of pre-law advising on college campuses or the views of pre-law advisors on political science. This article presents the results of a February 2015 survey of 313 college…
The Constrained Governor: Exploring Gubernatorial Decision Making on Senate Appointments
In the vast majority of American states, governors have unrestricted authority to fill Senate vacancies, and in an average decade, one-third of all Americans have been represented by an appointed senator. Despite the importance of Senate appointments both theoretically and substantively, no published study has investigated the dynamics of gubernatorial selection. In this paper, we compile an original data set of Senate appointees as well as the l…
History Made: The Rise of Republican Tim Scott
In a time of unprecedented racial polarization in partisan voting, and in a staunchly Republican Deep South state, one black Republican managed to reach the pinnacle of public office. This article examines Tim Scott’s rise by analyzing precinct-level data to better understand his 2010 election to the US House and data from the Winthrop Poll to explore his more recent US Senate victory. To better understand support for Scott, we also report result…
Major Competition? Exploring Perceptions of International Studies Programs among Political Science Department Chairs
Given the growth of international studies (IS) programs and the reciprocal relationship between political science and IS, this article explores perceptions of IS among political science department chairs. We found that the relationship between political science departments and IS programs is largely positive—that is, a majority of chairs supports the existence of IS at their institution, believes the job prospects for political science and IS maj…
Overlapping identities in the American South
Despite the extensive literature on southern identity, we know surprisingly little about how regional identity competes with potential loyalties toward other groups in the South. We investigate the prevalence and predictors of four overlapping identifies—Appalachian, Southern, North Carolinian, and American. We find that people identify primarily as Americans, followed by North Carolinians, Southerners, and finally Appalachians. We also examine t…
Taking Personality Seriously: The Five-Factor Model and Public Management
This study documents the use of personality assessment in public administration and examines the relationship between personality and job outcomes among public managers. The limitations and problems with the most popular personality assessment framework, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, are discussed. The authors then present the five-factor model of personality as an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is widely accepted wit…
Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em? Changing Racial and Regional Differences in Opinions Toward Southerners, 1964–2008
Objective We determine whether A mericans have reevaluated opinions toward southerners following the transformation of the region in the decades following the c ivil r ights m ovement, focusing specifically on how opinions toward southerners vary across racial and regional groups. Methods We use both descriptive and multivariate methods to evaluate opinions toward southerners using A merican N ational E lection S tudy ( ANES ) data from 1964 to 2…
Career Preparation and the Political Science Major: Evidence from Departments
We know little about the amount of career preparation offered to students in political science departments. This lack of information is particularly troubling given the state of the current job market and the growth of applied degree programs on university campuses. To address this issue, this article presents the results of a December 2010 survey of 279 political science department chairs that asked questions about the level of career preparatio…
Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South
We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed's classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence of the words “Dixie” and “Southern” in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of “Dixie” have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word “Southern” has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative num…
Scholarly Productivity in Non-Ph.D. Departments
Political scientists hail from large, research-intensive universities like the Ohio State University, regional comprehensive schools like Western Kentucky University, and small teaching-intensive institutions like Mars Hill College. Despite this diversity, most studies of the political science discipline overlook the contributions of individuals from non-Ph.D. departments. To address this oversight, we compare the publishing rates of scholars wit…
Picturing Political Science
What do political scientists study? As part of a larger project, we coded every article in 25 leading journals between 2000 and 2007. We then created a word cloud of the 6,005 titles using http://www.wordle.net . The 150 most-used words appear in the word cloud. The size of each word is proportional to the number of times the word is mentioned. Draw your own conclusions
The Content of Political Participation: Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them
Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information contained in a state voterfi…
The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning
Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens’ willingness to ce…
Ideological Realignment in the American Electorate: A Comparison of Northern and Southern White Voters in the Pre‐Reagan, Reagan, and Post‐Reagan Eras
This article builds on the work of Abramowitz and Saunders (1998) by exploring the ideological realignment theory among northern and southern whites in the pre‐Reagan, Reagan, and post‐Reagan eras. Our findings indicate that among conservative southern whites there has been a steady movement toward the Republican Party during the last three decades. For other groups, Republican gains have been largely limited to the Reagan era. Overall, these res…
Location, Location, Location: Precinct Placement and the Costs of Voting
This article provides a new measure of voting costs by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to calculate the distance between the residence and polling place for registered voters in the city of Atlanta. Using this measure to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small differences in distance from the polls can have a significant impact on voter turnout. We also find that moving a polling place can affect the decision …
Region, Race, and Support for the South Carolina Confederate Flag
Objective. Existing research suggests that conservative racial attitudes are one of the strongest factors explaining support for the Confederate flag, but this conclusion has been reached by examining the attitudes of only white southerners. We provide a more complete understanding of this issue, focusing on both white and black opinion from across the country. Methods. We use a rolling cross‐sectional survey with a large sample size to model sup…
Taking Personality Seriously: The Five-Factor Model and Public Management
This study documents the use of personality assessment in public administration and examines the relationship between personality and job outcomes among public managers. The limitations and problems with the most popular personality assessment framework, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, are discussed. The authors then present the five-factor model of personality as an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is widely accepted wit…
The Southern Accent as a Heuristic in American Campaigns and Elections
Are political candidates perceived differently based on the presence or absence of a southern accent? To address this question, we employ an experimental design that explores reactions to political candidates with a southern accent and a regionally neutral accent. We focus on perceptions of three general categories of candidate characteristics: candidate traits, candidate affect, and candidate issue positions. Overall, we discover that candidates…
The Impact of Gentrification on Voter Turnout
Objective. The goal of this article is to test between two competing theories (mobilization vs. destabilization) about the impact of gentrification on political participation. Methods. Using geographic information systems (GIS) software, Census data from 1990 and 2000, and a voter file for the City of Atlanta, we estimate a multilevel model of voter turnout. Results. Controlling for relevant individual and contextual factors, we find that gentrif…
Heritage Versus Hate: Assessing Opinions in the Debate over Confederate Monuments and Memorials
Objective This study evaluates factors that might explain southerners’ opinions toward Confederate monuments. Method We conduct a series of multivariate analyses of opinions toward Confederate monuments based on a poll of 789 respondents who live in the American South. Results The majority of southerners surveyed want to leave Confederate monuments where they are, place a marker next to them for historical context, or place them in a museum. Sout…
Down with the Southern Cross: Opinions on the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina
A HORRIFIC MASS SHOOTING IN A BLACK CHURCH in Charleston, South Carolina, became the mobilizing force for taking down the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds in Columbia. In this article, we chronicle disputes over the Confederate flag in the American South and then turn our attention to the case of South Carolina. Using survey data from the Winthrop Poll (WP), we evaluate the opinions of South Carolinians toward the Confederate …
The Constrained Governor: Exploring Gubernatorial Decision Making on Senate Appointments
In the vast majority of American states, governors have unrestricted authority to fill Senate vacancies, and in an average decade, one-third of all Americans have been represented by an appointed senator. Despite the importance of Senate appointments both theoretically and substantively, no published study has investigated the dynamics of gubernatorial selection. In this paper, we compile an original data set of Senate appointees as well as the l…
Ideological Realignment in the American Electorate: A Comparison of Northern and Southern White Voters in the Pre‐Reagan, Reagan, and Post‐Reagan Eras
This article builds on the work of Abramowitz and Saunders (1998) by exploring the ideological realignment theory among northern and southern whites in the pre‐Reagan, Reagan, and post‐Reagan eras. Our findings indicate that among conservative southern whites there has been a steady movement toward the Republican Party during the last three decades. For other groups, Republican gains have been largely limited to the Reagan era. Overall, these res…
The Content of Political Participation: Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them
Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information contained in a state voterfi…
Major Competition? Exploring Perceptions of International Studies Programs among Political Science Department Chairs
Given the growth of international studies (IS) programs and the reciprocal relationship between political science and IS, this article explores perceptions of IS among political science department chairs. We found that the relationship between political science departments and IS programs is largely positive—that is, a majority of chairs supports the existence of IS at their institution, believes the job prospects for political science and IS maj…
Switching sides but still fighting the Civil War in southern politics
It is well-established that the realignment of the past half-century sorted southern whites into the Grand Old Party (GOP) while southern blacks have remained stalwart Democrats. Surprisingly, however, there has been little systematic investigation of the relationship between party identification and opinions toward the South’s Confederate legacy. If it is indeed the case that race played the dominant role in the partisan sorting of southern whit…
The politics of marital name change
Each year, millions of women face the decision whether or not to change their names after marriage. One study found that region, gender role traditionalism, career orientation, and educational attainment predicted name changes (Johnson and Scheuble, 1995). Another line of research discovered that women who changed their names were perceived as less ambitious and less competent, but more caring than women who did not change their name (Noordewier …
Furling the Flag: Explaining the 2015 Vote to Remove the Confederate Flag in South Carolina
Public policy scholars have long recognized the importance of focusing events in shaping policy change. We argue that the 2015 Charleston church shooting served as a focusing event that opened a policy window, leading to the vote to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. While Democrats voted unanimously to remove the flag, we employ logistic regression models to explore the determinants of the decision to remove …
Population change, racial settlement patterns, and the newest southern electorate
Recent scholarship on the American South emphasizes how changing settlement patterns affect party politics. Specifically, places with high population growth are shifting toward the Democratic Party whereas localities shedding residents favor Republicans. This insight is important but also in need of empirical refinement. In this study, we examine settlement patterns and changes in the racial composition of the southern electorate at three differe…
History Made: The Rise of Republican Tim Scott
In a time of unprecedented racial polarization in partisan voting, and in a staunchly Republican Deep South state, one black Republican managed to reach the pinnacle of public office. This article examines Tim Scott’s rise by analyzing precinct-level data to better understand his 2010 election to the US House and data from the Winthrop Poll to explore his more recent US Senate victory. To better understand support for Scott, we also report result…
Overlapping identities in the American South
Despite the extensive literature on southern identity, we know surprisingly little about how regional identity competes with potential loyalties toward other groups in the South. We investigate the prevalence and predictors of four overlapping identifies—Appalachian, Southern, North Carolinian, and American. We find that people identify primarily as Americans, followed by North Carolinians, Southerners, and finally Appalachians. We also examine t…
Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em? Changing Racial and Regional Differences in Opinions Toward Southerners, 1964–2008
Objective We determine whether A mericans have reevaluated opinions toward southerners following the transformation of the region in the decades following the c ivil r ights m ovement, focusing specifically on how opinions toward southerners vary across racial and regional groups. Methods We use both descriptive and multivariate methods to evaluate opinions toward southerners using A merican N ational E lection S tudy ( ANES ) data from 1964 to 2…
Career Preparation and the Political Science Major: Evidence from Departments
We know little about the amount of career preparation offered to students in political science departments. This lack of information is particularly troubling given the state of the current job market and the growth of applied degree programs on university campuses. To address this issue, this article presents the results of a December 2010 survey of 279 political science department chairs that asked questions about the level of career preparatio…
Grassroots Republicanism: Evaluating the Trickle Down Realignment Theory in North Carolina
The trickle down realignment theory provides a compelling explanation for partisan change in the American South. However, few researchers have evaluated the trickle down realignment theory in the context of local office holding, and few scholars have compared the theory to alternative explanations of partisan change. This study evaluates the trickle down realignment theory's ability to explain county-level Republican office holding in North Carol…
Teaching Ph.D. Students to Teach Political Science: The Emory Tatto Program
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Teaching Ph.D. Students to Teach Political Science: The Emory Tatto Program
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Grassroots Republicanism: Evaluating the Trickle Down Realignment Theory in North Carolina
The trickle down realignment theory provides a compelling explanation for partisan change in the American South. However, few researchers have evaluated the trickle down realignment theory in the context of local office holding, and few scholars have compared the theory to alternative explanations of partisan change. This study evaluates the trickle down realignment theory's ability to explain county-level Republican office holding in North Carol…
Location, Location, Location: Precinct Placement and the Costs of Voting
This article provides a new measure of voting costs by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to calculate the distance between the residence and polling place for registered voters in the city of Atlanta. Using this measure to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small differences in distance from the polls can have a significant impact on voter turnout. We also find that moving a polling place can affect the decision …
Ideological Realignment in the American Electorate: A Comparison of Northern and Southern White Voters in the Pre‐Reagan, Reagan, and Post‐Reagan Eras
This article builds on the work of Abramowitz and Saunders (1998) by exploring the ideological realignment theory among northern and southern whites in the pre‐Reagan, Reagan, and post‐Reagan eras. Our findings indicate that among conservative southern whites there has been a steady movement toward the Republican Party during the last three decades. For other groups, Republican gains have been largely limited to the Reagan era. Overall, these res…
Region, Race, and Support for the South Carolina Confederate Flag
Objective. Existing research suggests that conservative racial attitudes are one of the strongest factors explaining support for the Confederate flag, but this conclusion has been reached by examining the attitudes of only white southerners. We provide a more complete understanding of this issue, focusing on both white and black opinion from across the country. Methods. We use a rolling cross‐sectional survey with a large sample size to model sup…
The Impact of Gentrification on Voter Turnout
Objective. The goal of this article is to test between two competing theories (mobilization vs. destabilization) about the impact of gentrification on political participation. Methods. Using geographic information systems (GIS) software, Census data from 1990 and 2000, and a voter file for the City of Atlanta, we estimate a multilevel model of voter turnout. Results. Controlling for relevant individual and contextual factors, we find that gentrif…
The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning
Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens’ willingness to ce…
Picturing Political Science
What do political scientists study? As part of a larger project, we coded every article in 25 leading journals between 2000 and 2007. We then created a word cloud of the 6,005 titles using http://www.wordle.net . The 150 most-used words appear in the word cloud. The size of each word is proportional to the number of times the word is mentioned. Draw your own conclusions
The Content of Political Participation: Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them
Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information contained in a state voterfi…
Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South
We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed's classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence of the words “Dixie” and “Southern” in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of “Dixie” have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word “Southern” has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative num…
Scholarly Productivity in Non-Ph.D. Departments
Political scientists hail from large, research-intensive universities like the Ohio State University, regional comprehensive schools like Western Kentucky University, and small teaching-intensive institutions like Mars Hill College. Despite this diversity, most studies of the political science discipline overlook the contributions of individuals from non-Ph.D. departments. To address this oversight, we compare the publishing rates of scholars wit…
Overlapping identities in the American South
Despite the extensive literature on southern identity, we know surprisingly little about how regional identity competes with potential loyalties toward other groups in the South. We investigate the prevalence and predictors of four overlapping identifies—Appalachian, Southern, North Carolinian, and American. We find that people identify primarily as Americans, followed by North Carolinians, Southerners, and finally Appalachians. We also examine t…
Taking Personality Seriously: The Five-Factor Model and Public Management
This study documents the use of personality assessment in public administration and examines the relationship between personality and job outcomes among public managers. The limitations and problems with the most popular personality assessment framework, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, are discussed. The authors then present the five-factor model of personality as an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is widely accepted wit…
Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em? Changing Racial and Regional Differences in Opinions Toward Southerners, 1964–2008
Objective We determine whether A mericans have reevaluated opinions toward southerners following the transformation of the region in the decades following the c ivil r ights m ovement, focusing specifically on how opinions toward southerners vary across racial and regional groups. Methods We use both descriptive and multivariate methods to evaluate opinions toward southerners using A merican N ational E lection S tudy ( ANES ) data from 1964 to 2…
Career Preparation and the Political Science Major: Evidence from Departments
We know little about the amount of career preparation offered to students in political science departments. This lack of information is particularly troubling given the state of the current job market and the growth of applied degree programs on university campuses. To address this issue, this article presents the results of a December 2010 survey of 279 political science department chairs that asked questions about the level of career preparatio…
Major Competition? Exploring Perceptions of International Studies Programs among Political Science Department Chairs
Given the growth of international studies (IS) programs and the reciprocal relationship between political science and IS, this article explores perceptions of IS among political science department chairs. We found that the relationship between political science departments and IS programs is largely positive—that is, a majority of chairs supports the existence of IS at their institution, believes the job prospects for political science and IS maj…
Similarities and Differences in Support of Minority and White Republican Candidates
History has shown that voters tend to support candidates of their own race. This reality has proven particularly challenging for black candidates who have often had difficulty running for office in majority white electorates. However, the vast majority of research on this topic has focused on minority Democrats, not minority Republicans. In this study, we take advantage of a unique set of circumstances in South Carolina's (SC's) 2014 elections wh…
Pre-Law Advising and the Political Science Major: Evidence from Pre-Law Advisors
Political science is one of the most popular majors for law school applicants, and studies show that political science majors have high rates of law school admission. In addition, many political science departments have a pre-law advisor. However, little is known about the status of pre-law advising on college campuses or the views of pre-law advisors on political science. This article presents the results of a February 2015 survey of 313 college…
The Constrained Governor: Exploring Gubernatorial Decision Making on Senate Appointments
In the vast majority of American states, governors have unrestricted authority to fill Senate vacancies, and in an average decade, one-third of all Americans have been represented by an appointed senator. Despite the importance of Senate appointments both theoretically and substantively, no published study has investigated the dynamics of gubernatorial selection. In this paper, we compile an original data set of Senate appointees as well as the l…
History Made: The Rise of Republican Tim Scott
In a time of unprecedented racial polarization in partisan voting, and in a staunchly Republican Deep South state, one black Republican managed to reach the pinnacle of public office. This article examines Tim Scott’s rise by analyzing precinct-level data to better understand his 2010 election to the US House and data from the Winthrop Poll to explore his more recent US Senate victory. To better understand support for Scott, we also report result…
Furling the Flag: Explaining the 2015 Vote to Remove the Confederate Flag in South Carolina
Public policy scholars have long recognized the importance of focusing events in shaping policy change. We argue that the 2015 Charleston church shooting served as a focusing event that opened a policy window, leading to the vote to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. While Democrats voted unanimously to remove the flag, we employ logistic regression models to explore the determinants of the decision to remove …
Down with the Southern Cross: Opinions on the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina
A HORRIFIC MASS SHOOTING IN A BLACK CHURCH in Charleston, South Carolina, became the mobilizing force for taking down the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds in Columbia. In this article, we chronicle disputes over the Confederate flag in the American South and then turn our attention to the case of South Carolina. Using survey data from the Winthrop Poll (WP), we evaluate the opinions of South Carolinians toward the Confederate …
The politics of marital name change
Each year, millions of women face the decision whether or not to change their names after marriage. One study found that region, gender role traditionalism, career orientation, and educational attainment predicted name changes (Johnson and Scheuble, 1995). Another line of research discovered that women who changed their names were perceived as less ambitious and less competent, but more caring than women who did not change their name (Noordewier …
The Southern Accent as a Heuristic in American Campaigns and Elections
Are political candidates perceived differently based on the presence or absence of a southern accent? To address this question, we employ an experimental design that explores reactions to political candidates with a southern accent and a regionally neutral accent. We focus on perceptions of three general categories of candidate characteristics: candidate traits, candidate affect, and candidate issue positions. Overall, we discover that candidates…
Do I Have to Take the GRE? Standardized Testing in MPA Admissions
Graduate-program decision makers face a similar challenge: how to design an admissions process that screens out applicants who are unlikely to succeed but does not provide too high an entry barrier for students who can be successful. This study catalogs the use of standardized testing in Master of Public Administration admissions and finds that less than one third of programs require standardized tests for all applicants. Moreover, program presti…
Political science (29 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (24 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · History (7 works) · Public relations (7 works)