Amber Wichowsky
Biographic Data
| ID | 4179952 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amber Wichowsky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amber |
| FAMILY NAME | Wichowsky |
| SIGNATURE | WICHOWSKY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Marquette University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9590-9457 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 274 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Soberanas de nuestros cuerpos: Networked framing of abortion legalization in Argentina
This study presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the networked frames built in Twitter trending hashtags by proponents and opponents of abortion legalization in Argentina. The online discourses exemplified the dynamics of networked framing, where activists reshaped their framing of issues through crowdsourcing practices. While both sides focused their attention on defining violence and deservingness, the impact of abortion on democracy,…
The Size and Structure of the Gender Gap in Economic Evaluations
Gender gaps in partisanship, vote choice, and opinion are well documented in the American electorate. In 2016, men’s and women’s subjective economic evaluations—of their own circumstances and the broader economy—also diverged considerably. We investigate the size, structure, and explanations of this gap. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel data, we show that the gap widened to historic levels following Trump’s election, driven by increased optim…
Economic anxiety among contingent survey workers
The Obligation Mosaic: Race and Social Norms in Political Participation by Allison P. Anoll
Although the disparity in voting participation rates between Black Americans and non-Hispanic White Americans has shrunk considerably over the last six decades, Latino and Asian American turnout continues to lag. In The Obligation Mosaic, Allison Anoll takes up the question of these racialized patterns of participation. Building upon previous work on how norms and social pressure motivate political behavior, she offers a compelling new theory of …
Creative Placemaking and Empowered Participatory Governance
Creative placemaking has become a popular strategy to revitalize distressed neighborhoods. Who is empowered to participate in these projects and in what capacity? Do such efforts reduce or reinforce existing race-class inequities in community development? Drawing on three years of participant observations, interviews with stakeholders, and analyses of project reports, we use Archon Fung's “Democracy Cube” framework to evaluate a creative placemak…
The effects of partisan framing on Covid-19 attitudes: Experimental evidence from early and late pandemic
Political polarization has dominated news coverage of Americans’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this research note, we report findings from two experimental studies, in which we present respondents with news stories about COVID-19 mitigation measures that emphasize partisan difference or accord. The stories present the same numeric facts about public opinion, but highlight either the partisan gap that existed at the time of the study, or …
Call and Response? Neighborhood Inequality and Political Voice
Over the past 20 years, many cities across the United States have adopted a range of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to make it easier for residents to get informed, communicate their preferences, and hold public officials accountable. In this paper, we ask two questions. First, are service requests and responses illustrative of existing neighborhood differences across a city? Second, do patterns of request and response differ b…
Getting Tough on China: Are Campaign Ads a Signal of Future Policy or Just Cheap Talk
Is tough‐on‐China campaign rhetoric cheap talk or a signal of policy attention? Analyzing China‐related campaign advertisements during the 2010 midterm elections and subsequent cosponsorship of China‐related bills, we find that campaign ads are a noisy predictor of legislative attention. Challengers who attacked on China were more likely to cosponsor China‐related legislation, while incumbents who were attacked for being soft on China took toughe…
Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination
Inequality in the Social Mind: Social Comparison and Support for Redistribution
Income inequality is fundamentally relational in nature, but research on the American public’s response to it tends to examine individuals in isolation, concluding that support for redistribution is unresponsive to inequality. We focus instead on perceptions of relative socioeconomic position, which we manipulate experimentally through imagined social interactions with high- or low-status others. We find that subjects who make social comparisons …
The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination
Civic Life in the Divided Metropolis: Social Capital, Collective Action, and Residential Income Segregation
Social capital is presumed to help individuals who lack financial or human capital achieve collective action through their social ties and networks of relationships. But does it help individuals overcome their socioeconomic disadvantages relative to their wealthier neighbors, or does the accumulation of social capital merely reproduce socioeconomic disparities, particularly in economically segregated places? Leveraging data from the Current Popul…
Foreclosure’s Fallout: Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout
External influence on exchange rates: An empirical investigation of US pressure and the Chinese RMB
Trade imbalances have often led to accusations of ‘currency manipulation’ and efforts to remedy the purported effects of exchange rate misalignment. This paper investigates the impact of US pressure on China to revalue the RMB. Using vector autoregression (VAR) to analyze an original dataset of US statements and actions between 2005 and 2012, we examine the over-time dynamics between US pressure and the nominal RMB/USD exchange rate. A case study…
Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment
Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare po…
Same blueprint, different bricks: Reexamining the sources of the gender gap in political ideology
Since the 1990s the ideological gap between men and women has grown, but scholars debate whether this difference is driven by diverging opinion on individual issues or differences in ideological reasoning. Utilizing Item Response Theory, we test for gender differences in multiple aspects of ideological thinking: ideological constraint, stability, the importance of individual issues to ideology, and the degree to which people base their self-repor…
Attacks without Consequence? Candidates, Parties, Groups, and the Changing Face of Negative Advertising
Prior work finds that voters punish candidates for sponsoring attack ads. What remains unknown is the extent to which a negative ad is more effective if it is sponsored by a party or an independent group instead. We conducted three experiments in which we randomly assigned participants to view a negative ad that was identical except for its sponsor. We find that candidates can benefit from having a party or group “do their dirty work,” but partic…
Economic Discontent as a Mobilizer: Unemployment and Voter Turnout
Published scholarship argues that a poor economy depresses voter participation in the United States. This troubling result suggests that incumbents are "underpenalized" for bad economic performance. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that a worsening economy has a disruptive effect that prods worried citizens to voice concern and seek remedies. Empirically, we analyze county-level data and find tha…
Does It Matter Who’s Behind the Curtain? Anonymity in Political Advertising and the Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosure
Despite the Supreme Court’s acceptance of disclosure requirements, some donors have been able to remain anonymous through a combination of regulatory gaps, complicated financing schemes, and lags in when information is made public. As a first examination of the potential consequences of increased anonymity in political advertising we designed an experiment that varied the amount and format of information about the interests behind an attack ad sp…
Competition, Party Dollars, and Income Bias in Voter Turnout, 1980–2008
The conventional wisdom is that turnout is higher in competitive contests and that electorates are more representative when more people vote. But whether more competition produces a more representative electorate remains unclear. Using measures of income bias that improve measurement equivalence across states, I show that income biases in voting participation tend to shrink as the state’s party system becomes more competitive and as the Democrati…
District Complexity and the Personal Vote
Incumbents tend to win with higher margins in less ideologically constrained districts. I argue that incumbents are advantaged by this electoral landscape in part because they work harder to cultivate a personal vote. Utilizing data on earmarks, I find that despite winning with a larger margin of victory, these incumbents act much like their colleagues who narrowly escaped electoral defeat. By more accurately measuring perceptions of electoral vu…
Narrow Victories and Hard Games: Revisiting the Primary Divisiveness Hypothesis
The 2008 presidential election offers a unique opportunity to revisit the hypothesis that a divisive primary exacts a tolls on the party’s general election performance—neither party had a sitting president or vice president seeking the nomination, the Democratic nomination was contested all the way to the end, and advertising data provide a way to gauge both the intensity and tenor of the campaigns. In this article, we take advantage of these cir…
Voting the Gender Gap
Lois Duke Whitaker, ed. (2008). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 232 pp., $20.00, ISBN: 978‐0‐252‐07525‐4. The 2008 presidential election, from Hillary Clinton's historic run for the De
The Nomination and the Election: Clearing Away Underbrush
The politics of presidential selection in 2008 reinvigorated an old argument from democratic theory about the relationship between nominating politics and the general election. Now that the latter is over, it is possible to return to these debates and ask how candidate fortunes at the nominating stage were linked to performances in November. For 2008, the strongest of these relationships proved to be perverse, with nominees performing best in sta…
Institutional Structure and Democratic Values: A Research Note on a Natural Experiment
The presidential nominating contest of 2008 resurrected an earlier debate about the democratic impact of the main institutional alternatives for delegate selection. This time, however, the debate came packaged with a major 'natural experiment' comparing the impact of primaries versus caucuses, courtesy of the Democratic Party of Texas which actually used both institutions on the same day to select different parts of the Texas delegation. Evidence…
Economic Discontent as a Mobilizer: Unemployment and Voter Turnout
Published scholarship argues that a poor economy depresses voter participation in the United States. This troubling result suggests that incumbents are "underpenalized" for bad economic performance. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that a worsening economy has a disruptive effect that prods worried citizens to voice concern and seek remedies. Empirically, we analyze county-level data and find tha…
Attacks without Consequence? Candidates, Parties, Groups, and the Changing Face of Negative Advertising
Prior work finds that voters punish candidates for sponsoring attack ads. What remains unknown is the extent to which a negative ad is more effective if it is sponsored by a party or an independent group instead. We conducted three experiments in which we randomly assigned participants to view a negative ad that was identical except for its sponsor. We find that candidates can benefit from having a party or group “do their dirty work,” but partic…
Inequality in the Social Mind: Social Comparison and Support for Redistribution
Income inequality is fundamentally relational in nature, but research on the American public’s response to it tends to examine individuals in isolation, concluding that support for redistribution is unresponsive to inequality. We focus instead on perceptions of relative socioeconomic position, which we manipulate experimentally through imagined social interactions with high- or low-status others. We find that subjects who make social comparisons …
Does It Matter Who’s Behind the Curtain? Anonymity in Political Advertising and the Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosure
Despite the Supreme Court’s acceptance of disclosure requirements, some donors have been able to remain anonymous through a combination of regulatory gaps, complicated financing schemes, and lags in when information is made public. As a first examination of the potential consequences of increased anonymity in political advertising we designed an experiment that varied the amount and format of information about the interests behind an attack ad sp…
Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment
Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare po…
Narrow Victories and Hard Games: Revisiting the Primary Divisiveness Hypothesis
The 2008 presidential election offers a unique opportunity to revisit the hypothesis that a divisive primary exacts a tolls on the party’s general election performance—neither party had a sitting president or vice president seeking the nomination, the Democratic nomination was contested all the way to the end, and advertising data provide a way to gauge both the intensity and tenor of the campaigns. In this article, we take advantage of these cir…
Competition, Party Dollars, and Income Bias in Voter Turnout, 1980–2008
The conventional wisdom is that turnout is higher in competitive contests and that electorates are more representative when more people vote. But whether more competition produces a more representative electorate remains unclear. Using measures of income bias that improve measurement equivalence across states, I show that income biases in voting participation tend to shrink as the state’s party system becomes more competitive and as the Democrati…
District Complexity and the Personal Vote
Incumbents tend to win with higher margins in less ideologically constrained districts. I argue that incumbents are advantaged by this electoral landscape in part because they work harder to cultivate a personal vote. Utilizing data on earmarks, I find that despite winning with a larger margin of victory, these incumbents act much like their colleagues who narrowly escaped electoral defeat. By more accurately measuring perceptions of electoral vu…
Foreclosure’s Fallout: Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout
Civic Life in the Divided Metropolis: Social Capital, Collective Action, and Residential Income Segregation
Social capital is presumed to help individuals who lack financial or human capital achieve collective action through their social ties and networks of relationships. But does it help individuals overcome their socioeconomic disadvantages relative to their wealthier neighbors, or does the accumulation of social capital merely reproduce socioeconomic disparities, particularly in economically segregated places? Leveraging data from the Current Popul…
Same blueprint, different bricks: Reexamining the sources of the gender gap in political ideology
Since the 1990s the ideological gap between men and women has grown, but scholars debate whether this difference is driven by diverging opinion on individual issues or differences in ideological reasoning. Utilizing Item Response Theory, we test for gender differences in multiple aspects of ideological thinking: ideological constraint, stability, the importance of individual issues to ideology, and the degree to which people base their self-repor…
The Illusion of Technique: How Method‐Driven Research Leads Welfare Scholarship Astray
Creative Placemaking and Empowered Participatory Governance
Creative placemaking has become a popular strategy to revitalize distressed neighborhoods. Who is empowered to participate in these projects and in what capacity? Do such efforts reduce or reinforce existing race-class inequities in community development? Drawing on three years of participant observations, interviews with stakeholders, and analyses of project reports, we use Archon Fung's “Democracy Cube” framework to evaluate a creative placemak…
The effects of partisan framing on Covid-19 attitudes: Experimental evidence from early and late pandemic
Political polarization has dominated news coverage of Americans’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this research note, we report findings from two experimental studies, in which we present respondents with news stories about COVID-19 mitigation measures that emphasize partisan difference or accord. The stories present the same numeric facts about public opinion, but highlight either the partisan gap that existed at the time of the study, or …
Getting Tough on China: Are Campaign Ads a Signal of Future Policy or Just Cheap Talk
Is tough‐on‐China campaign rhetoric cheap talk or a signal of policy attention? Analyzing China‐related campaign advertisements during the 2010 midterm elections and subsequent cosponsorship of China‐related bills, we find that campaign ads are a noisy predictor of legislative attention. Challengers who attacked on China were more likely to cosponsor China‐related legislation, while incumbents who were attacked for being soft on China took toughe…
External influence on exchange rates: An empirical investigation of US pressure and the Chinese RMB
Trade imbalances have often led to accusations of ‘currency manipulation’ and efforts to remedy the purported effects of exchange rate misalignment. This paper investigates the impact of US pressure on China to revalue the RMB. Using vector autoregression (VAR) to analyze an original dataset of US statements and actions between 2005 and 2012, we examine the over-time dynamics between US pressure and the nominal RMB/USD exchange rate. A case study…
Call and Response? Neighborhood Inequality and Political Voice
Over the past 20 years, many cities across the United States have adopted a range of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to make it easier for residents to get informed, communicate their preferences, and hold public officials accountable. In this paper, we ask two questions. First, are service requests and responses illustrative of existing neighborhood differences across a city? Second, do patterns of request and response differ b…
Institutional Structure and Democratic Values: A Research Note on a Natural Experiment
The presidential nominating contest of 2008 resurrected an earlier debate about the democratic impact of the main institutional alternatives for delegate selection. This time, however, the debate came packaged with a major 'natural experiment' comparing the impact of primaries versus caucuses, courtesy of the Democratic Party of Texas which actually used both institutions on the same day to select different parts of the Texas delegation. Evidence…
The Illusion of Technique: How Method‐Driven Research Leads Welfare Scholarship Astray
Measuring How Administration Shapes Citizenship: A Policy Feedback Perspective on Performance Management
Governments increasingly require administrators to develop outcome measurements that reflect a program’s impact on society. But standard approaches to performance measurement have neglected the impact on citizenship outcomes—the individual civic capacities and dispositions and social bonds of civic reciprocity and trust. The concept is adapted from the growing policy feedback literature in political science, which offers strong empirical evidence…
The Nomination and the Election: Clearing Away Underbrush
The politics of presidential selection in 2008 reinvigorated an old argument from democratic theory about the relationship between nominating politics and the general election. Now that the latter is over, it is possible to return to these debates and ask how candidate fortunes at the nominating stage were linked to performances in November. For 2008, the strongest of these relationships proved to be perverse, with nominees performing best in sta…
Institutional Structure and Democratic Values: A Research Note on a Natural Experiment
The presidential nominating contest of 2008 resurrected an earlier debate about the democratic impact of the main institutional alternatives for delegate selection. This time, however, the debate came packaged with a major 'natural experiment' comparing the impact of primaries versus caucuses, courtesy of the Democratic Party of Texas which actually used both institutions on the same day to select different parts of the Texas delegation. Evidence…
Narrow Victories and Hard Games: Revisiting the Primary Divisiveness Hypothesis
The 2008 presidential election offers a unique opportunity to revisit the hypothesis that a divisive primary exacts a tolls on the party’s general election performance—neither party had a sitting president or vice president seeking the nomination, the Democratic nomination was contested all the way to the end, and advertising data provide a way to gauge both the intensity and tenor of the campaigns. In this article, we take advantage of these cir…
Voting the Gender Gap
Lois Duke Whitaker, ed. (2008). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 232 pp., $20.00, ISBN: 978‐0‐252‐07525‐4. The 2008 presidential election, from Hillary Clinton's historic run for the De
Competition, Party Dollars, and Income Bias in Voter Turnout, 1980–2008
The conventional wisdom is that turnout is higher in competitive contests and that electorates are more representative when more people vote. But whether more competition produces a more representative electorate remains unclear. Using measures of income bias that improve measurement equivalence across states, I show that income biases in voting participation tend to shrink as the state’s party system becomes more competitive and as the Democrati…
District Complexity and the Personal Vote
Incumbents tend to win with higher margins in less ideologically constrained districts. I argue that incumbents are advantaged by this electoral landscape in part because they work harder to cultivate a personal vote. Utilizing data on earmarks, I find that despite winning with a larger margin of victory, these incumbents act much like their colleagues who narrowly escaped electoral defeat. By more accurately measuring perceptions of electoral vu…
Does It Matter Who’s Behind the Curtain? Anonymity in Political Advertising and the Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosure
Despite the Supreme Court’s acceptance of disclosure requirements, some donors have been able to remain anonymous through a combination of regulatory gaps, complicated financing schemes, and lags in when information is made public. As a first examination of the potential consequences of increased anonymity in political advertising we designed an experiment that varied the amount and format of information about the interests behind an attack ad sp…
Economic Discontent as a Mobilizer: Unemployment and Voter Turnout
Published scholarship argues that a poor economy depresses voter participation in the United States. This troubling result suggests that incumbents are "underpenalized" for bad economic performance. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that a worsening economy has a disruptive effect that prods worried citizens to voice concern and seek remedies. Empirically, we analyze county-level data and find tha…
Same blueprint, different bricks: Reexamining the sources of the gender gap in political ideology
Since the 1990s the ideological gap between men and women has grown, but scholars debate whether this difference is driven by diverging opinion on individual issues or differences in ideological reasoning. Utilizing Item Response Theory, we test for gender differences in multiple aspects of ideological thinking: ideological constraint, stability, the importance of individual issues to ideology, and the degree to which people base their self-repor…
Attacks without Consequence? Candidates, Parties, Groups, and the Changing Face of Negative Advertising
Prior work finds that voters punish candidates for sponsoring attack ads. What remains unknown is the extent to which a negative ad is more effective if it is sponsored by a party or an independent group instead. We conducted three experiments in which we randomly assigned participants to view a negative ad that was identical except for its sponsor. We find that candidates can benefit from having a party or group “do their dirty work,” but partic…
Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment
Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare po…
External influence on exchange rates: An empirical investigation of US pressure and the Chinese RMB
Trade imbalances have often led to accusations of ‘currency manipulation’ and efforts to remedy the purported effects of exchange rate misalignment. This paper investigates the impact of US pressure on China to revalue the RMB. Using vector autoregression (VAR) to analyze an original dataset of US statements and actions between 2005 and 2012, we examine the over-time dynamics between US pressure and the nominal RMB/USD exchange rate. A case study…
The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination
Civic Life in the Divided Metropolis: Social Capital, Collective Action, and Residential Income Segregation
Social capital is presumed to help individuals who lack financial or human capital achieve collective action through their social ties and networks of relationships. But does it help individuals overcome their socioeconomic disadvantages relative to their wealthier neighbors, or does the accumulation of social capital merely reproduce socioeconomic disparities, particularly in economically segregated places? Leveraging data from the Current Popul…
Foreclosure’s Fallout: Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout
Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination
Inequality in the Social Mind: Social Comparison and Support for Redistribution
Income inequality is fundamentally relational in nature, but research on the American public’s response to it tends to examine individuals in isolation, concluding that support for redistribution is unresponsive to inequality. We focus instead on perceptions of relative socioeconomic position, which we manipulate experimentally through imagined social interactions with high- or low-status others. We find that subjects who make social comparisons …
Call and Response? Neighborhood Inequality and Political Voice
Over the past 20 years, many cities across the United States have adopted a range of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to make it easier for residents to get informed, communicate their preferences, and hold public officials accountable. In this paper, we ask two questions. First, are service requests and responses illustrative of existing neighborhood differences across a city? Second, do patterns of request and response differ b…
Getting Tough on China: Are Campaign Ads a Signal of Future Policy or Just Cheap Talk
Is tough‐on‐China campaign rhetoric cheap talk or a signal of policy attention? Analyzing China‐related campaign advertisements during the 2010 midterm elections and subsequent cosponsorship of China‐related bills, we find that campaign ads are a noisy predictor of legislative attention. Challengers who attacked on China were more likely to cosponsor China‐related legislation, while incumbents who were attacked for being soft on China took toughe…
The effects of partisan framing on Covid-19 attitudes: Experimental evidence from early and late pandemic
Political polarization has dominated news coverage of Americans’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this research note, we report findings from two experimental studies, in which we present respondents with news stories about COVID-19 mitigation measures that emphasize partisan difference or accord. The stories present the same numeric facts about public opinion, but highlight either the partisan gap that existed at the time of the study, or …
Economic anxiety among contingent survey workers
The Obligation Mosaic: Race and Social Norms in Political Participation by Allison P. Anoll
Although the disparity in voting participation rates between Black Americans and non-Hispanic White Americans has shrunk considerably over the last six decades, Latino and Asian American turnout continues to lag. In The Obligation Mosaic, Allison Anoll takes up the question of these racialized patterns of participation. Building upon previous work on how norms and social pressure motivate political behavior, she offers a compelling new theory of …
Creative Placemaking and Empowered Participatory Governance
Creative placemaking has become a popular strategy to revitalize distressed neighborhoods. Who is empowered to participate in these projects and in what capacity? Do such efforts reduce or reinforce existing race-class inequities in community development? Drawing on three years of participant observations, interviews with stakeholders, and analyses of project reports, we use Archon Fung's “Democracy Cube” framework to evaluate a creative placemak…
Political science (25 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Demographic economics (8 works) · Democracy (7 works)