Melissa R Michelson
Biographic Data
| ID | 652855 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa R Michelson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa R |
| FAMILY NAME | Michelson |
| SIGNATURE | MICHELSON M R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Menlo College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8533-7926 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 680 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Motivating High School Seniors to Register to Vote with Registrars’ Visits
In Spring 2024, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in Latino-majority communities in Arizona and Texas to test the impact and effects of voter registration campaigns run by local Registrars in high schools. We theorized that bringing election officials into schools dispels informational uncertainty, cultivates positive political attitudes and emotions, and ultimately boosts voter registration rates. Two partner schools were identified in …
Politics Should Be a Drag: Why Political Science Needs to Take Drag Seriously
Drag has a long history in the LGBTQ community as a means of political engagement, activism, protest, and community building. Today, drag is popular in the LGBTQ community and in the rest of society. At the same time, it is routinely a target of conservative backlash against the LGBTQ community. Despite drag’s inherently political nature, political science has failed to engage substantially with the influence of drag. This article offers a justif…
Getting Out the (Newly-Enfranchised) Vote: Encouraging Voter Registration After Rights Restoration
Motivating student voter registration
College student voter turnout reflects the degree to which students are being taught to support and protect democracy, long a core mission of the U.S. higher education system. Yet, college student voter turnout is generally very low. In 2020–2021, campuses around the country participated in a coordinated program to increase college student voter registration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey and focus group data collected in spring 2021,…
Sexual orientation and vote choice: How race affects support of openly-gay candidates
The increasing number of Black LGBTQ candidates and elected officials suggests that voters are being asked to evaluate their candidacies more often. These scenarios raise the question about how voters—particularly white voters—respond to these candidates, including in non-partisan races such as primaries. In this study, we test how sharing information about a candidate's racial and sexual identity affects support from white and Black voters. Data…
The Political Consequences of Racialized Ethnic Identities
Racial classifications are a social construct with no basis in biology; yet, race is an omnipresent and powerful factor in U.S. politics, shaping electoral boundaries, disbursement of resources, and political alliances (Omi and Winant 1994, Haney López 1994). Race, then, is a malleable construct wielded by varying interests, with racial definitions changing in response to social and political battles. Some new immigrant groups initially classifie…
Best Practices in Diversifying Political Science
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Educating Students for Democracy: What Colleges Are Doing, How It's Working, and What Needs to Happen Next
In the U.S., we have historically looked to our educators to prepare citizens for full participation in our democracy as engaged and informed voters. We examine the student voting movement that has taken root in colleges and universities across the country-a movement that offers a promising way forward in forming a new generation of engaged citizens. We detail what we know about how to increase student turnout, suggest ways to strengthen voter mo…
Ties that Bind: The Effects of Transgender Contact on Transphobia
Allport's Theory of Interpersonal Contact suggests that coming into contact with a member of an outgroup should increase support for that outgroup. Previous studies find mixed results when applying Allport's theory to reported contact with transgender people. We posit that this is due to imprecise and aggregated measures of contact and a lack of attention to the differences between contact that is ephemeral or ongoing and voluntary or obligatory.…
Cultivating a Beginner’s Mind: How Textbook Writing Improves Our Undergraduate Teaching
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You Better Vote: Drag Performers and Voter Mobilization in the 2020 Election
Drag has long been part of the LGBTQ rights movement. Drag performers play an important role as community leaders and political activists. Today, drag performers are also popular celebrities in the rest of society. This article explores the role of drag performers as community leaders and celebrities in the context of the 2020 presidential election. To understand this, we interviewed drag performers about their experiences using drag to mobilize …
LGBTQ Scholarship: Researcher Identity and Ingroup Positionality
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Making activists out of environmentalists: New Experimental Evidence
Among the many goals of advocacy organizations is motivating supporters to engage in actions that help move forward the policy goals of the group. This might include signing a petition, sending an email to an elected official, or attending a local government meeting. These actions are important for the maintenance of democracy, but also very rare; most people are not activists. How best to encourage supporters to engage in that necessary advocacy…
Sports elites, counter‐stereotypical statements, and immigration attitudes
Objective Political and social elite rhetoric can have a robust impact on individuals’ policy stances, particularly when recipients of persuasive messages share an in‐group identity with the messenger and when the information is counter‐stereotypical. In this study, we build on Harrison and Michelson's (2017) theory of dissonant identity priming (TDIP) and examine an understudied topic, the effectiveness of National Football League (NFL) elite pr…
Getting out the Black Vote in Washington DC: A Field Experiment
Scholars and practitioners have long understood the importance of mobilization for increasing voter turnout, particularly the power of personal contact to increase voter participation in low-propensity communities of color. Compared to research focused on other communities, however, less is known about how Black voters respond to encouragements to vote. This lacuna in the literature can be attributed both to the political capture of Black voters …
Disbanding the Old Boys’ Club: Strategies for Departmental Gender Equity
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Evaluating Resistance toward Muslim American Political Integration
Muslims in the United States are often constructed as anti-American and are perceived to have little engagement with politics. Moreover, Arab and Muslim identity is often conflated in the public mind. In this note, we introduce results from a randomized survey experiment conducted in three states with varying Muslim populations—Ohio, California, and Michigan—to assess how trustworthy respondents rate a local community leader calling for unity whe…
Firme
Most social movements take years to bring change, and many activists burn out or age out of activism over time. The literature suggests that individuals are often motivated to take action when they feel attacked and decrease their engagement when the threat abates. These expectations are belied by the persistent activism of many millennial Latino immigrants. In 2012, we interviewed fifty Latino undocumented youth in California and Texas about the…
Elusive Inclusion: Persistent Challenges Facing Women of Color in Political Science
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School Satisfaction Among Low-Income Urban Parents
We examine the views of low-income urban parents toward their neighborhood school. Policymakers must understand the attitudes of these individuals, particularly because they represent some of the most vulnerable groups in our education system. As national education policies have made it easier for parents to choose schools, attention has increasingly focused on parental satisfaction and its predictors. Using a unique survey of low-income urban re…
What is the impact of bilingual communication to mobilize Latinos? Exploratory evidence from experiments in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia
I feel like I was born here: Social identity, political socialization, and deAmericanization
Building Our Communities: Women of Color Workshops in Political Science
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Gender, Masculinity Threat, and Support for Transgender Rights: An Experimental Study
The Power of Visibility: Advances in LGBT Rights in the United States and Europe
Getting Out the Latino Vote: How Door-to-Door Canvassing Influences Voter Turnout in Rural Central California
The Corrosive Effect of Acculturation: How Mexican Americans Lose Political Trust
Objective. Existing research establishes that political trust is not only an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness, but may also measure the health of civic society. This article looks specifically at trust among Latinos of Mexican descent, demonstrating that acculturation is corrosive of political trust. Methods. Logit and ordered logit models are used to simultaneously test two theories of accultura…
Turnout, Status, and Identity: Mobilizing Latinos to Vote with Group Appeals
The rise of micro-targeting in American elections raises new questions about the effects of identity-based mobilization strategies. In this article, we bring together theories of expressive voting with literature on racial and ethnic identification to argue that prior studies, which have found either weak or null effects of identity messages targeting minority groups, have missed a crucial moderating variable-identity strength-that varies across …
Meeting the Challenge of Latino Voter Mobilization
Latino political participation rates are consistently lower than those for other racial/ethnic groups. While some of the disparities can be attributed to low levels of Latino citizenship, socioeconomic status, and age, lack of mobilization by political parties and candidates also contributes to the problem. Field experiments in voter mobilization have found that personal canvassing can have a significant effect on turnout. This article reviews fo…
Text Messages as Mobilization Tools: The Conditional Effect of Habitual Voting and Election Salience
Dale and Strauss’s (DS) noticeable reminder theory (NRT) of voter mobilization posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS show that text messages substantially boost turnout, challenging previous claims that social connectedness is the key to increasing participation. We replicate DS’s research design and extend it in …
Gender, Masculinity Threat, and Support for Transgender Rights: An Experimental Study
Political Trust among Chicago Latinos
Existing research establishes that political trust is not only an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness, but may also measure the health of civic society. This article presents evidence that assimilation is corrosive of political trust, focusing specifically on the incorporation of Latinos in Chicago. Various strands of assimilation theory predict that as Mexicans naturalize and join the electorate, a…
Heeding the Call: The Effect of Targeted Two-Round Phone Banks on Voter Turnout
All in-text\treferences\tunderlined\tin\tblue\tare\tlinked\tto\tpublications\ton\tResearchGate, letting you\taccess\tand\tread\tthem\timmediately
Emails from Official Sources Can Increase Turnout
Previous research by Nickerson (2007a) testing 13 email get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns concludes that email from third parties is not an effective method of increasing voter turnout. We conducted three rounds of email GOTV experiments in San Mateo County, California, in cooperation with the local registrar, the elected official responsible for administering elections. Unsolicited emails sent from the registrar consistently increased turnout am…
Local Canvassing: The Efficacy of Grassroots Voter Mobilization
This article offers empirical evidence supporting a relationship between social influence and voter turnout by comparing the effectiveness of face-to-face get-out-the-vote visits by canvassers living in a voter's local neighborhood against visits by canvassers from other neighborhoods. We analyze data from a randomized campaign conducted by a local community outreach group during the 2006 general election. We utilize natural variations in the ass…
Does Ethnicity Trump Party? Competing Vote Cues and Latino Voting Behavior
It is well known that voters prefer candidates of their own race or ethnicity, but in general this preference does not have to compete with partisanship. In other words, most voters are given consistent voting cues from both race or ethnicity and partisanship. But in rare cases the partisanship of minority candidates is out of sync with those of most voters of their shared race or ethnicity, e.g., a Republican Mexican-American or a Democratic Cub…
What Do Voters Need to Know: Testing the Role of Cognitive Information in Asian American Voter Mobilization
Previous field experiments have found that indirect methods, particularly direct mail, are not effective in increasing voter turnout. Most of the mail used in these experiments provided procedural information regarding voting and a message encouraging the voter to turn out. Yet, in his review of efforts to increase voting, Berinsky (2005) concluded that it was the cognitive costs of voting—the effort needed to formulate political opinions—that co…
Mobilizing the Latino Youth Vote: Some Experimental Results
Objectives. The objectives of this article are to test whether Latino canvassers are more effective than non‐Latino canvassers at increasing voter turnout among young Latinos, and to test whether young Latinos are more receptive to a mobilization message that stresses ethnic group solidarity or one that emphasizes civic duty. Methods. A randomized field experiment, conducted in Fresno, California in the fall of 2002, is the basis for the results …
Wired to mobilize: The effect of social networking messages on voter turnout
Recent scholarship has documented the effect of online social networking on political participation, a relationship hypothesized to be due to the generation of social capital. This paper tests the hypothesis that impersonal get-out-the-vote messages delivered via an online social network can increase voter turnout. Specifically, this study uses a field experiment of randomly assigned students from a large southern public university to test the ef…
The Power of Visibility: Advances in LGBT Rights in the United States and Europe
Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That: The Effect of Personalized Appeals on Marriage Equality Campaigns
All Roads Lead to Rust
Political trust is an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness and an indication of the health of civil society. Declining trust among Americans is well documented. Surveys of Latino immigrants indicate that they are also cynical about government,but it is not clear whether this distrust takes the same form or is distinctive due to a racialized outlook and experience. This essay analyzes a set of 56 inte…
Trumped up challenges: Limitations, opportunities, and the future of political research on Muslim Americans
With the election of Donald J. Trump as president, Muslim Americans may face the most pronounced threat to their collective political well-being in history. Unfortunately, while scholars have generated insights into the dynamics that affect members of this very diverse community in U.S. politics, assessment of Muslim Americans lags other religious and ethnic groups in terms of data and hypothesis testing. In this essay, we review the basic politi…
The Effect of National Mood on Mexican American Political Opinion
In 1996, there was a pervasive anti-immigrant, anti-Latino mood in the country, caused by passage of Proposition 187 in California and national welfare reform and immigration reform bills. But a few years later attitudes toward Latinos had shifted; laws were reversed and both major political parties were pursuing Latino votes. Substantial research on the general public has demonstrated that events influence public opinion; correspondingly, this s…
Using experiments to understand public attitudes towards transgender rights
While lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans have seen recent legal victories and declining explicit discrimination, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals (TGNC) remain astoundingly vulnerable. An area of recent public debate is the right of transgender individuals to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth. Little is known, however, about how the public forms their v…
Por Quién Votará? Experimental evidence about language, ethnicity and vote choice (among Republicans)
In the summer of 2012, two candidates faced off for the Republican nomination to the US Senate from Texas: a Cuban-American with limited Spanish-language skills and a bilingual Anglo. How important were these counter-stereotypical language skills? Does fluency in Spanish (or the lack thereof) matter to voters? Does the degree to which language ability matters depend on the ethnicity of the candidates, or of the voters? We explore these questions …
I feel like I was born here: Social identity, political socialization, and deAmericanization
What’s Love Got To Do With It: Emotion, Rationality, and Framing LGBT Rights
Recent years have a seen a dramatic and rapid shift in attitudes about same-sex marriage—quite possibly one of the largest shifts in public opinion ever recorded. Another shift has occurred regarding the framing of persuasive appeals by gay rights advocacy organizations. Earlier campaigns focused on rationality by highlighting the idea of equal rights for Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender individuals; more recent campaigns have focused on lo…
Mobilization by Different Means: Nativity and Gotv in the United States
We compare the impact of 15 randomized get-out-the-vote (GOTV) field experiments on naturalized and U.S.-born voters. We find that mobilization increased turnout among U.S.-born Latinos, but had no measurable effect among Latino naturalized citizens. In contrast, GOTV increased turnout among naturalized Asian Americans but had no measureable effect among U.S.-born Asian Americans. Race politics scholars have long argued that the terms we use to d…
The Political Consequences of Racialized Ethnic Identities
Racial classifications are a social construct with no basis in biology; yet, race is an omnipresent and powerful factor in U.S. politics, shaping electoral boundaries, disbursement of resources, and political alliances (Omi and Winant 1994, Haney López 1994). Race, then, is a malleable construct wielded by varying interests, with racial definitions changing in response to social and political battles. Some new immigrant groups initially classifie…
Explorations in Public Opinion-Presidential Power Linkages: Congressional Action on Unpopular Foreign Agreements
This article explores the effect of public opinion on congressional action on foreign agreements, focusing on the Panama Canal treaties of 1977 and the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993. The two agreements are highly suited to comparison, and provide an excellent test of how shifts in public opinion influence shifts in congressional support. Two types of opinion are included: (1) the general rating of the President's job performance, an…
Political Trust among Chicago Latinos
Existing research establishes that political trust is not only an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness, but may also measure the health of civic society. This article presents evidence that assimilation is corrosive of political trust, focusing specifically on the incorporation of Latinos in Chicago. Various strands of assimilation theory predict that as Mexicans naturalize and join the electorate, a…
The Effect of National Mood on Mexican American Political Opinion
In 1996, there was a pervasive anti-immigrant, anti-Latino mood in the country, caused by passage of Proposition 187 in California and national welfare reform and immigration reform bills. But a few years later attitudes toward Latinos had shifted; laws were reversed and both major political parties were pursuing Latino votes. Substantial research on the general public has demonstrated that events influence public opinion; correspondingly, this s…
The Politicization of Chicago Mexican Americans
This article examines the politicization of Mexican Americans in the time period surrounding the 1996 national elections. Two sets of survey data for Chicago Latino neighborhoods are examined, including an exit poll from 1996 and a telephone survey from the spring of 1997. Analysis of that data reveals that (1) recently naturalized Mexican American voters are significantly more concerned with racism and discrimination than are native-born Mexican…
The Black Reparations Movement: Publicc Opinionc and Congressional Policy Makingc
The Corrosive Effect of Acculturation: How Mexican Americans Lose Political Trust
Objective. Existing research establishes that political trust is not only an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness, but may also measure the health of civic society. This article looks specifically at trust among Latinos of Mexican descent, demonstrating that acculturation is corrosive of political trust. Methods. Logit and ordered logit models are used to simultaneously test two theories of accultura…
Getting Out the Latino Vote: How Door-to-Door Canvassing Influences Voter Turnout in Rural Central California
Constructing Identities in Mexican-American Political Organizations: Choosing Issues, Taking Sides
What's in a Name: The Power of Fusion Politics in a Local Election
New York State allows minor parties to cross-endorse major party candidates, who can add their votes on multiple party lines to their overall total. In a recent special election to fill a seat in the Nassau County legislature, the winning candidate received 48.5 percent of the vote on the Democratic line, 4.9 percent of the vote on the Working Families Party (WFP) line, and 4.6 percent on the lines of other minor parties. We find that the WFP vot…
Does Ethnicity Trump Party? Competing Vote Cues and Latino Voting Behavior
It is well known that voters prefer candidates of their own race or ethnicity, but in general this preference does not have to compete with partisanship. In other words, most voters are given consistent voting cues from both race or ethnicity and partisanship. But in rare cases the partisanship of minority candidates is out of sync with those of most voters of their shared race or ethnicity, e.g., a Republican Mexican-American or a Democratic Cub…
Meeting the Challenge of Latino Voter Mobilization
Latino political participation rates are consistently lower than those for other racial/ethnic groups. While some of the disparities can be attributed to low levels of Latino citizenship, socioeconomic status, and age, lack of mobilization by political parties and candidates also contributes to the problem. Field experiments in voter mobilization have found that personal canvassing can have a significant effect on turnout. This article reviews fo…
Mobilizing the Latino Youth Vote: Some Experimental Results
Objectives. The objectives of this article are to test whether Latino canvassers are more effective than non‐Latino canvassers at increasing voter turnout among young Latinos, and to test whether young Latinos are more receptive to a mobilization message that stresses ethnic group solidarity or one that emphasizes civic duty. Methods. A randomized field experiment, conducted in Fresno, California in the fall of 2002, is the basis for the results …
Apsa Fund Successfully Mentoring Latino Scholars
Recent census estimates place the percentage of Americans who are of Latino/Hispanic origin at more than 14%, up from 12.5% in the 2000 census. Despite comprising this large and increasing proportion of the population, Latinos continue to be severely underrepresented in the discipline. Today Latinos comprise fewer than 2% of all political scientists in the United States. This significant under-representation reflects the many barriers that contin…
All Roads Lead to Rust
Political trust is an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness and an indication of the health of civil society. Declining trust among Americans is well documented. Surveys of Latino immigrants indicate that they are also cynical about government,but it is not clear whether this distrust takes the same form or is distinctive due to a racialized outlook and experience. This essay analyzes a set of 56 inte…
Diagnosing the Leaky Pipeline: Continuing Barriers to the Retention of Latinas and Latinos in Political Science
Despite comprising a large and increasing proportion of the United States population—about 14.7%, according to March 2006 Census Bureau estimates—Latinos continue to be severely underrepresented in political science, and today comprise less than 2% of the academy (Census Bureau 2006; Michelson 2007). Increased recent attention to the issues of recruitment and retention of Latino political scientists by professional associations such as the Americ…
Heeding the Call: The Effect of Targeted Two-Round Phone Banks on Voter Turnout
All in-text\treferences\tunderlined\tin\tblue\tare\tlinked\tto\tpublications\ton\tResearchGate, letting you\taccess\tand\tread\tthem\timmediately
What Do Voters Need to Know: Testing the Role of Cognitive Information in Asian American Voter Mobilization
Previous field experiments have found that indirect methods, particularly direct mail, are not effective in increasing voter turnout. Most of the mail used in these experiments provided procedural information regarding voting and a message encouraging the voter to turn out. Yet, in his review of efforts to increase voting, Berinsky (2005) concluded that it was the cognitive costs of voting—the effort needed to formulate political opinions—that co…
Transforming Racia Identity, Transforming Racial Politics
Text Messages as Mobilization Tools: The Conditional Effect of Habitual Voting and Election Salience
Dale and Strauss’s (DS) noticeable reminder theory (NRT) of voter mobilization posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS show that text messages substantially boost turnout, challenging previous claims that social connectedness is the key to increasing participation. We replicate DS’s research design and extend it in …
Participant Observation and the Political Scientist: Possibilities, Priorities, and Practicalities
Surveys, experiments, large- N datasets and formal models are common instruments in the political scientist's toolkit. In-depth interviews and focus groups play a critical role in helping scholars answer important political questions. In contrast, participant observation techniques are an underused methodological approach. In this article, we argue that participant observation techniques have played and should continue to play a key role in advan…
Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns
Which get out the vote efforts actually succeed in ethnoracial communities, and why? Analyzing the results from hundreds of original experiments, the authors of this book offer a persuasive new theory to explain why some methods work while others do not. Exploring and comparing a wide variety of efforts targeting ethnoracial voters, the authors present a new theoretical frame: the social cognition model of voting, based on an individual's sense o…
Emails from Official Sources Can Increase Turnout
Previous research by Nickerson (2007a) testing 13 email get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns concludes that email from third parties is not an effective method of increasing voter turnout. We conducted three rounds of email GOTV experiments in San Mateo County, California, in cooperation with the local registrar, the elected official responsible for administering elections. Unsolicited emails sent from the registrar consistently increased turnout am…
Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That: The Effect of Personalized Appeals on Marriage Equality Campaigns
Por Quién Votará? Experimental evidence about language, ethnicity and vote choice (among Republicans)
In the summer of 2012, two candidates faced off for the Republican nomination to the US Senate from Texas: a Cuban-American with limited Spanish-language skills and a bilingual Anglo. How important were these counter-stereotypical language skills? Does fluency in Spanish (or the lack thereof) matter to voters? Does the degree to which language ability matters depend on the ethnicity of the candidates, or of the voters? We explore these questions …
Local Canvassing: The Efficacy of Grassroots Voter Mobilization
This article offers empirical evidence supporting a relationship between social influence and voter turnout by comparing the effectiveness of face-to-face get-out-the-vote visits by canvassers living in a voter's local neighborhood against visits by canvassers from other neighborhoods. We analyze data from a randomized campaign conducted by a local community outreach group during the 2006 general election. We utilize natural variations in the ass…
Political science (63 works) · Law (55 works) · Politics (54 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (38 works) · Law (38 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Psychology (33 works) · Social Media and Politics (29 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Voting (24 works)