Christopher A Cooper
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122777 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher A Cooper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher A |
| FAMILY NAME | Cooper |
| SIGNATURE | COOPER C A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Carolina University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7309-5771 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 237 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Incursion and Reclamation in U.S. House Midterm Elections
Not all midterm election gains are created equal. When Republicans swept 63 seats in 2010, they were mostly taking back districts that already leaned in their favor. When Democrats flipped 41 seats in 2018, they were doing something harder – winning in Republican territory. I call these two types of flips reclamation and incursion, and show that the distinction matters for understanding what electoral waves mean and predicting what might happen i…
Much Ado About Nothing: The Birth, Life, and Death of the No Labels Party in a Purple State
The No Labels Party emerged with claims that it could interrupt the traditional two-party system in the United States. The political science literature on third parties would seem to challenge this assertion, highlighting the difficulty of altering the party ecosystem. In this article we use behavioral and attitudinal data to better understand the life cycle of the No Labels Party in North Carolina. We find that, although it became the second-lar…
Blame games, problem denial, and relational distance
Lobbying the executives: Differences in lobbying patterns between elected politicians, partisan advisors and public servants
Research from parliamentary countries suggests that lobbyists tend to focus their attention on public office holders within the executive government more than those within the legislative branch. To date, however, research studying executive-lobbying relations tends to treat “the executive” and “lobbyists” as two homogenous groups. Yet importantly, not all executive personnel and lobbyists are the same. The executive is made-up of popularly elect…
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…
The 11th: Politics, Polarization, and Partisan Change in a Southern District, 1972–2022
What can be learned from analysis of a single congressional district? This paper uses the experience of North Carolina’s 11th congressional district to understand the political changes that have defined the last half-century in the American South. The story of how this once politically inconsequential southern Appalachian district found itself in the middle of the national political maelstrom is, in many ways, the story of southern politics over …
Towards a Measure of Local Legislative Professionalism
Municipal policy leadership is shared between managers, city councilors, and mayors, all of whom vary in institutional power and resources across municipalities. Corresponding with their importance, scholars have established consistent measures of professionalism for Mayors and City Managers. Unfortunately, there is no parallel measure of professionalism for city councils. After reviewing the role of councils in local policy leadership and establ…
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…
Vaccine hesitancy and respect for public health measures: Citizens’ trust in politicians and public servants across national, subnational and municipal levels of government
Research shows that citizens' trust in government is associated with lower vaccine hesitancy and an increased willingness to follow public health measures. Thus far, however, the population health literature has largely conceptualized "government" as a unitary actor. This article furthers our understanding of this relationship by examining two important features of modern governance that have largely gone unexamined: (1) that governing involves p…
Democracy, impartiality and the online political activity of Aotearoa New Zealand’s public sector employees: Similarities and differences with other Westminster countries
While some hail social media as improving political participation, some governments have received social media with a touch of trepidation; concerned that public servants' online political activity might threaten the public service's reputed impartiality. Recent research from some Westminster countries where government messaging about social media have been especially cautious have found a negative relationship between public sector employment an…
Growing and distinct: The Unaffiliated voter as unmoored voter
Objective We examine the size, characteristics, and attitudes of Unaffiliated party registrants as they compare to registrants from the two major parties. Methods We analyze voter registration files, voter history files, and public opinion data from North Carolina. Results Unaffiliated registrants are not simply shadow partisans but, on average, are distinct from two major parties in terms of demographics, political behavior, and political attitu…
Impartiality and public sector employees’ online political activity: Evidence from three Australian elections
The politics of senior bureaucratic turnover in the Westminster tradition: Trust and the choice between internal and external appointments
The extent to which new governments appoint and dismiss senior public servants is widely claimed to be influenced by their country’s underlying administrative tradition. This is particularly the case within the Westminster tradition where such turnover is limited in nature, with most appointees coming from within the ranks of the public service. This article challenges the assertion that turnover in the Westminster tradition is homogeneously inte…
Politicization of the Bureaucracy across and within Administrative Traditions
It is frequently claimed within the politicization literature that while governments around the world are increasingly politicizing senior public service appointments, the nature and extent of this politicization varies across administrative traditions. To date, however, differences across administrative traditions have received little empirical scrutiny; research tends to be more comparable than comparative. Using data from an expert survey syst…
Lobbying and Democratic Governance in Canada
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…
Lobbying and governance in Canada
The Phoenix pay system and intention to quit the federal public service
The Phoenix pay system has been mired by an unending string of problems negatively affecting hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and costing billions of dollars to fix. This article studies whether Phoenix’s negative consequences might also be weakening a core component of good governance: a permanent public service. Using data from the 2017 Public Service Employee Survey, this article finds that the greater the problems an employee has endured …
Innumeracy and State Legislative Salaries
What do citizens know about state legislative salaries and how does correct information change opinions of legislators and what citizens believe to be their proper levels of compensation? Through an original experiment with more than 2,000 registered voters from four heterogeneous states, this paper provides evidence that the degree of innumeracy regarding state legislative salaries exceeds innumeracy regarding many other political facts. Further…
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…
Assessing the State of Mandatory Fees in America's Public Colleges and Universities: Causes and Consequences
Objectives Mandatory fees in American's public universities and colleges are ubiquitous. While many of these fees provide for essential university functions, others provide particularized benefits for small groups of students. Despite importance of the topic, we know very little about how universities assess fees. Methods In this article, we catalog every university fee at every U.S. public college and university during academic year 2014–2015 an…
Politics and the permanency of permanent secretaries: Testing the vitality of the Westminster administrative tradition, 1949–2014
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…
Lobbying and uncertainty: Lobbying's varying response to different political events
Does political uncertainty affect whether lobbyists contact government officials? We suggest that the answer depends on the type of uncertainty introduced. Distinguishing between policy objective uncertainty—where organized interests and lobbyists are uncertain about the policy intentions of decision makers—and issue information uncertainty—where policymakers are uncertain about the technical details of issues—we hypothesize that whereas an incre…
Consultant Lobbyists and Public Officials: Selling Policy Expertise or Personal Connections in Canada
Recent research suggests that there are two different types of lobbyists: those specializing in providing access to their personal connections with public office holders, and those specializing in a particular policy sector. This article advances this research by examining the actual behaviour of consultant lobbyists with data gathered from the Canadian Lobbyist Registry. Specifically, we probe two questions. First, using four indicators found wi…
Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure
Judicial decision-making is contingent on a case’s salience, meaning that scholars who wish to understand how judges make political decisions must have adequate measures of salience. Unfortunately, existing measures of salience have met with some skepticism. After discussing the limitations with the most common measures of salience, we construct a new measure of case salience that avoids many of these problems. Through examine newspaper coverage …
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…
Legislative Representation in a Single-Member versus Multiple-Member District System: The Arizona State Legislature
Most research on legislative decisionmaking has focused on legislatures with single-member district systems, but much less is known about legislatures with multiple-member district systems. This study compares a multiple-member legislative chamber, the Arizona House of Representatives, to a single-member system, the Arizona Senate. First, we examine the ideological preferences across the two chambers, and we find that the House system produces mo…
Consultant Lobbyists and Public Officials: Selling Policy Expertise or Personal Connections in Canada
Recent research suggests that there are two different types of lobbyists: those specializing in providing access to their personal connections with public office holders, and those specializing in a particular policy sector. This article advances this research by examining the actual behaviour of consultant lobbyists with data gathered from the Canadian Lobbyist Registry. Specifically, we probe two questions. First, using four indicators found wi…
Bureaucratic Identity and the Resistance of Politicization
Explanations of politicization tend to focus on historical trends, administrative traditions, and government preferences. Absent from this literature are the actions of bureaucrats themselves. Drawing on theories of employee resistance from organization studies suggesting that changes threatening the financial security and professional identity of employees may be resisted, this article explores whether bureaucrats resist, and seek to deter, effo…
The Rise of Court Government? Testing the Centralisation of Power Thesis with Longitudinal Data from Canada
Whether there has been a centralisation of power towards the first minister and her entourage of courtiers during the 20th century is a contentious issue among scholars of parliamentary systems. A principle reason for the endurance of this debate is the absence of empirical indicators that can be compared over time. This article contributes to this research by examining a primary means the centre is believed to have increased its control: the app…
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…
Institutions and Representational Roles in American State Legislatures
What is the impact of a legislature's institutions on the representational roles its members adopt? We address this question by examining the role orientation of state legislators in eight states, explaining why some legislators identify more with a trustee model of representation and others identify more with the delegate model. Using ordinal logistic regression analysis on data from a survey of 447 legislators, we test for the effects of multim…
Encouraging civil servants to be frank and fearless: Merit recruitment and employee voice
Recruiting civil servants on the basis of merit is believed to improve the quality of governance because it increases the bureaucracy's expertise, leads bureaucrats to develop distinct preferences and encourages them to candidly voice their opinions to others. Yet, to date, the reason why merit recruitment positively affects employee voice remains theoretically vague and has received little empirical scrutiny. This article advances this research …
Making the Cases “Real: Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Supreme Court Cases 1953–2004
Which U.S. Supreme Court cases are deemed newsworthy enough to appear on the front page of a major newspaper? Which are covered, but do not appear on the front page, and which are not covered at all? We answer these questions using a unique data set of newspaper coverage of Supreme Court cases in four newspapers from 1953 to 2004—a data set spanning more than 6,200 observations, 25 natural courts, and the tenure of three Chief Justices. We find t…
Media Tactics in the State Legislature
Do state legislators use media tactics in policy-making? If so, which legislators, how often, and to what ends? Despite a number of recent studies asserting the importance of the media in American politics, we still have not answered these basic questions. Using a survey of state legislators from California, Georgia, and Iowa, I find that state legislators frequently use media tactics in policy-making, although they still prefer traditional forms…
Lobbying and uncertainty: Lobbying's varying response to different political events
Does political uncertainty affect whether lobbyists contact government officials? We suggest that the answer depends on the type of uncertainty introduced. Distinguishing between policy objective uncertainty—where organized interests and lobbyists are uncertain about the policy intentions of decision makers—and issue information uncertainty—where policymakers are uncertain about the technical details of issues—we hypothesize that whereas an incre…
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…
Public servants, anonymity, and political activity online: Bureaucratic neutrality in peril
Various actors have recently expressed concern that by threatening anonymity, social media places the bureaucracy’s neutrality in jeopardy. Yet, empirically, little is known about the online political activities of public servants. Drawing upon the public service motivation literature, this article develops contrasting hypotheses between public sector employment and online political activity. Testing hypotheses with survey data from Canada, the r…
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…
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…
Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies
Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies. By Michael A. Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 227p. $34.95. In his seminal essay on state legislatures (“The State of U.S. State Legislative Research,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 6 [February 1981]: 1–25), Malcolm Jewell seemed puzzled that our knowledge of state legislative representation was so limited. After all, there was a long and productive h…
The politics of senior bureaucratic turnover in the Westminster tradition: Trust and the choice between internal and external appointments
The extent to which new governments appoint and dismiss senior public servants is widely claimed to be influenced by their country’s underlying administrative tradition. This is particularly the case within the Westminster tradition where such turnover is limited in nature, with most appointees coming from within the ranks of the public service. This article challenges the assertion that turnover in the Westminster tradition is homogeneously inte…
Politics and the permanency of permanent secretaries: Testing the vitality of the Westminster administrative tradition, 1949–2014
Does it Matter Who Works at the Center? A Comparative Policy Analysis of Executive Styles
This article develops the concept of executive style to explore how variations in the relationships between politicians, career civil servants, and political appointees affect the types of policy outputs. A comparative analysis of home care policies in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia finds that the former’s civil service executive style – where professional civil servants work in close partnership with politicians in all phases of the policy proces…
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…
Impartiality and public sector employees’ online political activity: Evidence from three Australian elections
Rural mountain natives, in-migrants, and the cultural divide
Conventional wisdom suggests that different views held by native and in-migrant rural residents lead to a division that ultimately damages community. Using a sample of rural residents in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, we seek to (1) determine whether these groups differ and, if they do, (2) explain the predictors of the difference. Our results suggest that there are demographic and attitudinal differences between natives and in-migrants, alt…
Internet Use in the State Legislature: A Research Note
Using a survey of state legislators in Iowa, Georgia, and California, this article examines how often legislators use the Internet as a source for policy information, and which legislators tend to make more frequent use of the Internet to gather information. The author finds that there is tremendous variation as to how often state legislators use the Internet to gather policy information. The author did not find evidence of a digital divide as it…
Money Well Spent: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Advertorials on Citizen Opinion
Organized interests employ a number of tactics to get what they want. One of the least understood of these tactics is running advertorials—issue advocacy advertisements that are designed to influence citizen opinion. Using a pretest-posttest control group experimental design, the authors examine the effects of advertorials on individual opinions. The authors find that advertorials have an effect on individual opinions but that their effects are d…
Rigid Personality and Rigid Thinking
S ummary . Tests of rigid thinking and rigid personality were administered to a sample of 173 undergraduates. Correlations, factor analysis and canonical analysis all indicated that there was little relationship between these two sets of variables
Depictions of Public Service in Children's Literature: Revisiting an Understudied Aspect of Political Socialization
Objective . Scholars who have investigated depictions of public service in children's literature have come to a mix of conclusions regarding the portrayal of public figures in children's literature. We revisit these studies, attempting to answer the question of how public servants are portrayed in children's literature. Methods . We perform content analysis of 93 books and examine 868 characters for benevolence and competence. Results . We find t…
Media Tactics in the State Legislature
Do state legislators use media tactics in policy-making? If so, which legislators, how often, and to what ends? Despite a number of recent studies asserting the importance of the media in American politics, we still have not answered these basic questions. Using a survey of state legislators from California, Georgia, and Iowa, I find that state legislators frequently use media tactics in policy-making, although they still prefer traditional forms…
Legislative Representation in a Single-Member versus Multiple-Member District System: The Arizona State Legislature
Internet Use in the State Legislature: A Research Note
Using a survey of state legislators in Iowa, Georgia, and California, this article examines how often legislators use the Internet as a source for policy information, and which legislators tend to make more frequent use of the Internet to gather information. The author finds that there is tremendous variation as to how often state legislators use the Internet to gather policy information. The author did not find evidence of a digital divide as it…
Legislative Representation in a Single-Member versus Multiple-Member District System: The Arizona State Legislature
Most research on legislative decisionmaking has focused on legislatures with single-member district systems, but much less is known about legislatures with multiple-member district systems. This study compares a multiple-member legislative chamber, the Arizona House of Representatives, to a single-member system, the Arizona Senate. First, we examine the ideological preferences across the two chambers, and we find that the House system produces mo…
Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies
Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies. By Michael A. Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 227p. $34.95. In his seminal essay on state legislatures (“The State of U.S. State Legislative Research,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 6 [February 1981]: 1–25), Malcolm Jewell seemed puzzled that our knowledge of state legislative representation was so limited. After all, there was a long and productive h…
Money Well Spent: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Advertorials on Citizen Opinion
Organized interests employ a number of tactics to get what they want. One of the least understood of these tactics is running advertorials—issue advocacy advertisements that are designed to influence citizen opinion. Using a pretest-posttest control group experimental design, the authors examine the effects of advertorials on individual opinions. The authors find that advertorials have an effect on individual opinions but that their effects are d…
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…
Institutions and Representational Roles in American State Legislatures
What is the impact of a legislature's institutions on the representational roles its members adopt? We address this question by examining the role orientation of state legislators in eight states, explaining why some legislators identify more with a trustee model of representation and others identify more with the delegate model. Using ordinal logistic regression analysis on data from a survey of 447 legislators, we test for the effects of multim…
E‐mail Communication and the Policy Process in the State Legislature
E‐mail has changed the policy process in state legislatures because political actors now have a new way to present their message to state legislators. What little research has been conducted on this topic examines e‐mail communication generally and does not compare results by policy actor. Using an original survey of state legislators in eight states, we test for systematic effects of variables on general e‐mail views and for effects specific to …
Interest Groups and Journalists in the States
Interest groups have many tactics to choose from in pursuing their policy goals. While inside tactics have received considerable scholarly attention, outside tactics have been adopted increasingly by groups of all kinds. We explore one such lobbying tactic by examining the relationship between interest groups and journalists in the American states. Through a survey of statehouse reporters, we find that lobbyists are useful sources of information …
Reassessing Conference Goals and Outcomes: A Defense of Presenting Similar Papers at Multiple Conferences
As Nelson Dometrius's opening essay suggests, academic standards, like other occupational standards and practices, change over time. These changes may draw fire from both established and younger scholars trained in the classical tradition. Shifting norms in political science range from different publication standards over time (few would doubt that the number of publications required for tenure has increased in most schools), to changing ideas ab…
Rural mountain natives, in-migrants, and the cultural divide
Conventional wisdom suggests that different views held by native and in-migrant rural residents lead to a division that ultimately damages community. Using a sample of rural residents in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, we seek to (1) determine whether these groups differ and, if they do, (2) explain the predictors of the difference. Our results suggest that there are demographic and attitudinal differences between natives and in-migrants, alt…
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
Representative Reporters? Examining Journalists' Ideology in Context
Objective. We investigate the ideological orientations of U.S. statehouse journalists, asking whether reporters hold similar political ideologies to their audiences, and under what conditions reporter ideology diverges from audience ideology. Methods. We use an original survey of statehouse journalists, and employ both traditional OLS regressions and a heteroskedastic regression. Results. We find that reporters tend to reflect the political leani…
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…
Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure
Judicial decision-making is contingent on a case’s salience, meaning that scholars who wish to understand how judges make political decisions must have adequate measures of salience. Unfortunately, existing measures of salience have met with some skepticism. After discussing the limitations with the most common measures of salience, we construct a new measure of case salience that avoids many of these problems. Through examine newspaper coverage …
Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II, by Christopher Waters
Political science (56 works) · Law (49 works) · Politics (45 works) · Law (38 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (31 works) · Public Administration (29 works) · Public Administration (24 works) · Public relations (22 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (17 works)