Corwin D Smidt
Biographic Data
| ID | 702841 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Corwin D Smidt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Corwin D |
| FAMILY NAME | Smidt |
| SIGNATURE | SMIDT C D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4760-1087 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 171 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
On Polarization and Partisan Attachments: Greater Consistency but not Greater Strength
Are Americans more strongly attached to their political parties than ever before? Despite partisanship’s stronger associations across politics, inter-election panel surveys show that the durability of partisan attachments has slightly weakened. After bringing attention to this fact, I propose that this discrepancy exists because comparisons across time are mostly a product of greater consistency in mass partisan behavior, not the strengthening of…
Waiting to Vote in the 2016 Presidential Election: Evidence from a Multi-county Study
This paper is the result of a nationwide study of polling place dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. Research teams, recruited from local colleges and universities and located in twenty-eight election jurisdictions across the United States, observed and timed voters as they entered the queue at their respective polling places and then voted. We report results about four specific polling place operations and practices: the length of the che…
Evaluating Legislative Districts Using Measures of Partisan Bias and Simulations
A well-developed body of research offers ways to measure the partisan advantages that result from legislative districting. Although useful to researchers and legal practitioners, those studies also suffer from theoretical, empirical, and legal limitations. In this essay, we review measures of partisan bias and methods for both simulating election results under existing maps and simulating hypothetical maps. We start by describing the concept of p…
The Coup de Grâce to the Sanders Campaign: Michigan, Momentum & Viability
A Uniter and a Divider: American Presidential Campaigns and Partisan Perceptions of the National Economy
Do American presidential campaigns polarize or unify partisan perceptions? I propose that they do both, where the balance of these countervailing forces varies by context. Campaign messages enable partisan differences, especially in battleground states, but campaigns also promote social contexts that foster accuracy motives and reduce the effects of partisan biases nationwide. After documenting panel data evidence of campaign trends toward unity,…
The Consequences of Elite Party Politics for American Macropartisanship
Studies of macropartisanship exclusively focus on presidential performance’s role in driving partisan updating. Performance may determine which party benefits from updating, but I propose that the occurrence of mass updating more so depends on whether there are changes to the substance of elite party divisions. The greater the change in what characterizes party differences in Washington the more likely a portion of Americans update their partisan…
Pedagogical Value of Polling-Place Observation by Students
Good education requires student experiences that deliver lessons about practice as well as theory and that encourage students to work for the public good—especially in the operation of democratic institutions (Dewey 1923; Dewy 1938). We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 Gen…
Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter
The observed rate of Americans voting for a different party across successive presidential elections has never been lower. This trend is largely explained by the clarity of party differences reducing indecision and ambivalence and increasing reliability in presidential voting. American National Election Studies (ANES) Times Series study data show that recent independent, less engaged voters perceive candidate differences as clearly as partisan, e…
Following the Money: Super PACs and the 2012 Presidential Nomination
The entrance of Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs ), outside groups with no caps on fundraising or independent expenditures, prompts a reexamination of the role of money in campaigns and elections. We investigate the influence of Super PAC expenditures in the 2012 Republican nomination contest. A compressed calendar makes nomination campaigns expensive and money crucial, especially for lesser‐known candidates, such that outside expend…
Dynamics in Partisanship during American Presidential Campaigns
Despite their potential importance, little is known about the nature and prevalence of party identification dynamics within American presidential campaigns. This study reviews existing research to propose three basic contrasting models. It then introduces multivariate state space methods that account for sampling error and survey design effects to evaluate each model’s relative support within daily national survey data of the 1984, 2000, 2004, an…
Deus ex Machina: Candidate Web Presence and the Presidential Nomination Campaign
Using data from the 2008 presidential nomination contest, we offer systematic tests of the relationships between traditional campaign factors, the Internet and campaign performance. We find that claims of the Internet’s relevance to modern campaigns are warranted, as it is a unique facet of campaigns and significantly improves candidates’ financial and electoral support. The Internet is especially helpful to candidates in generating small-donor c…
Analyzing the Robustness of Semi-Parametric Duration Models for the Study of Repeated Events
Estimators within the Cox family are often used to estimate models for repeated events. Yet, there is much we still do not know about the performance of these estimators. In particular, we do not know how they perform given time dependence, different censoring rates, and a varying number of events and sample sizes. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the performance of a variety of popular semi-parametric estimators as these data aspect…
Prelude to populism: Mass electoral support for the Grange and Greenback parties
This article uses underutilized individual-level data to examine who supported two third parties, the Grange and Greenbackers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. We find that Greenbackers attracted individuals employed in non-agrarian occupations and others who were wealthier compared to major party voters. However, the Grange principally appealed to farmers, indicating third parties that are believed to have appealed to similar cons…
Polls and Elections: Still Part of the Conversation: Iowa and New Hampshire's Say within the Invisible Primary
We propose that the extant literature has underestimated the central roles of Iowa and New Hampshire within the invisible primary and, thus, party nominations. Since candidates and the news media focus disproportionately on these states early in the nomination season, impressions of candidate performance within these states have a disproportionate influence on the invisible primary long before their actual outcomes are observed. Using a Bayesian …
Not All News Is the Same: Protests, Presidents, and the Mass Public Agenda
Few studies examine whether the public agenda responds to different types of issue coverage in the same way. After outlining why such differences are likely, this study takes advantage of daily polling data and a rare sequence of news cycles surrounding the issue of gun control to compare how coverage of different political actors and events drives an issue's placement on the public agenda. Coverage generated by the citizen activist group, the Mi…
More Bang for the Buck: Campaign Spending and Fundraising Success
Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending’s influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraising-related efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prior to the primaries, increases in spending have an eq…
Riding the Waves of Money: Contribution Dynamics in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaign
The 2008 primary was the most nuanced and expensive nomination contest in history. We investigate how this massive battle for contributions played out over 2007 and the first half of 2008 by analyzing the daily dynamics of candidate contributions using the Federal Elections Commission's collection of individual contributions. Not surprisingly, Giuliani and Clinton were the leaders in contribution momentum during the latter parts of the so-called …
The dynamic properties of individual-level party identification in the United States
Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congress by Patrick Sellers
Journal Article Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congress by Patrick Sellers Get access Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congressby Patrick Sellers. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 240pp. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $24.99. Corwin D. Smidt Corwin D. Smidt Michigan State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 125, Issue 4, W…
Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter
The observed rate of Americans voting for a different party across successive presidential elections has never been lower. This trend is largely explained by the clarity of party differences reducing indecision and ambivalence and increasing reliability in presidential voting. American National Election Studies (ANES) Times Series study data show that recent independent, less engaged voters perceive candidate differences as clearly as partisan, e…
Waiting to Vote in the 2016 Presidential Election: Evidence from a Multi-county Study
This paper is the result of a nationwide study of polling place dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. Research teams, recruited from local colleges and universities and located in twenty-eight election jurisdictions across the United States, observed and timed voters as they entered the queue at their respective polling places and then voted. We report results about four specific polling place operations and practices: the length of the che…
The dynamic properties of individual-level party identification in the United States
Deus ex Machina: Candidate Web Presence and the Presidential Nomination Campaign
Using data from the 2008 presidential nomination contest, we offer systematic tests of the relationships between traditional campaign factors, the Internet and campaign performance. We find that claims of the Internet’s relevance to modern campaigns are warranted, as it is a unique facet of campaigns and significantly improves candidates’ financial and electoral support. The Internet is especially helpful to candidates in generating small-donor c…
Not All News Is the Same: Protests, Presidents, and the Mass Public Agenda
Few studies examine whether the public agenda responds to different types of issue coverage in the same way. After outlining why such differences are likely, this study takes advantage of daily polling data and a rare sequence of news cycles surrounding the issue of gun control to compare how coverage of different political actors and events drives an issue's placement on the public agenda. Coverage generated by the citizen activist group, the Mi…
The Consequences of Elite Party Politics for American Macropartisanship
Studies of macropartisanship exclusively focus on presidential performance’s role in driving partisan updating. Performance may determine which party benefits from updating, but I propose that the occurrence of mass updating more so depends on whether there are changes to the substance of elite party divisions. The greater the change in what characterizes party differences in Washington the more likely a portion of Americans update their partisan…
Following the Money: Super PACs and the 2012 Presidential Nomination
The entrance of Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs ), outside groups with no caps on fundraising or independent expenditures, prompts a reexamination of the role of money in campaigns and elections. We investigate the influence of Super PAC expenditures in the 2012 Republican nomination contest. A compressed calendar makes nomination campaigns expensive and money crucial, especially for lesser‐known candidates, such that outside expend…
Analyzing the Robustness of Semi-Parametric Duration Models for the Study of Repeated Events
Estimators within the Cox family are often used to estimate models for repeated events. Yet, there is much we still do not know about the performance of these estimators. In particular, we do not know how they perform given time dependence, different censoring rates, and a varying number of events and sample sizes. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the performance of a variety of popular semi-parametric estimators as these data aspect…
Polls and Elections: Still Part of the Conversation: Iowa and New Hampshire's Say within the Invisible Primary
We propose that the extant literature has underestimated the central roles of Iowa and New Hampshire within the invisible primary and, thus, party nominations. Since candidates and the news media focus disproportionately on these states early in the nomination season, impressions of candidate performance within these states have a disproportionate influence on the invisible primary long before their actual outcomes are observed. Using a Bayesian …
More Bang for the Buck: Campaign Spending and Fundraising Success
Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending’s influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraising-related efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prior to the primaries, increases in spending have an eq…
Riding the Waves of Money: Contribution Dynamics in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaign
The 2008 primary was the most nuanced and expensive nomination contest in history. We investigate how this massive battle for contributions played out over 2007 and the first half of 2008 by analyzing the daily dynamics of candidate contributions using the Federal Elections Commission's collection of individual contributions. Not surprisingly, Giuliani and Clinton were the leaders in contribution momentum during the latter parts of the so-called …
Evaluating Legislative Districts Using Measures of Partisan Bias and Simulations
A well-developed body of research offers ways to measure the partisan advantages that result from legislative districting. Although useful to researchers and legal practitioners, those studies also suffer from theoretical, empirical, and legal limitations. In this essay, we review measures of partisan bias and methods for both simulating election results under existing maps and simulating hypothetical maps. We start by describing the concept of p…
A Uniter and a Divider: American Presidential Campaigns and Partisan Perceptions of the National Economy
Do American presidential campaigns polarize or unify partisan perceptions? I propose that they do both, where the balance of these countervailing forces varies by context. Campaign messages enable partisan differences, especially in battleground states, but campaigns also promote social contexts that foster accuracy motives and reduce the effects of partisan biases nationwide. After documenting panel data evidence of campaign trends toward unity,…
Pedagogical Value of Polling-Place Observation by Students
Good education requires student experiences that deliver lessons about practice as well as theory and that encourage students to work for the public good—especially in the operation of democratic institutions (Dewey 1923; Dewy 1938). We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 Gen…
Dynamics in Partisanship during American Presidential Campaigns
Despite their potential importance, little is known about the nature and prevalence of party identification dynamics within American presidential campaigns. This study reviews existing research to propose three basic contrasting models. It then introduces multivariate state space methods that account for sampling error and survey design effects to evaluate each model’s relative support within daily national survey data of the 1984, 2000, 2004, an…
Prelude to populism: Mass electoral support for the Grange and Greenback parties
This article uses underutilized individual-level data to examine who supported two third parties, the Grange and Greenbackers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. We find that Greenbackers attracted individuals employed in non-agrarian occupations and others who were wealthier compared to major party voters. However, the Grange principally appealed to farmers, indicating third parties that are believed to have appealed to similar cons…
Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congress by Patrick Sellers
Journal Article Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congress by Patrick Sellers Get access Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congressby Patrick Sellers. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 240pp. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $24.99. Corwin D. Smidt Corwin D. Smidt Michigan State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 125, Issue 4, W…
Riding the Waves of Money: Contribution Dynamics in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaign
The 2008 primary was the most nuanced and expensive nomination contest in history. We investigate how this massive battle for contributions played out over 2007 and the first half of 2008 by analyzing the daily dynamics of candidate contributions using the Federal Elections Commission's collection of individual contributions. Not surprisingly, Giuliani and Clinton were the leaders in contribution momentum during the latter parts of the so-called …
The dynamic properties of individual-level party identification in the United States
Polls and Elections: Still Part of the Conversation: Iowa and New Hampshire's Say within the Invisible Primary
We propose that the extant literature has underestimated the central roles of Iowa and New Hampshire within the invisible primary and, thus, party nominations. Since candidates and the news media focus disproportionately on these states early in the nomination season, impressions of candidate performance within these states have a disproportionate influence on the invisible primary long before their actual outcomes are observed. Using a Bayesian …
Not All News Is the Same: Protests, Presidents, and the Mass Public Agenda
Few studies examine whether the public agenda responds to different types of issue coverage in the same way. After outlining why such differences are likely, this study takes advantage of daily polling data and a rare sequence of news cycles surrounding the issue of gun control to compare how coverage of different political actors and events drives an issue's placement on the public agenda. Coverage generated by the citizen activist group, the Mi…
More Bang for the Buck: Campaign Spending and Fundraising Success
Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending’s influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraising-related efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prior to the primaries, increases in spending have an eq…
Prelude to populism: Mass electoral support for the Grange and Greenback parties
This article uses underutilized individual-level data to examine who supported two third parties, the Grange and Greenbackers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. We find that Greenbackers attracted individuals employed in non-agrarian occupations and others who were wealthier compared to major party voters. However, the Grange principally appealed to farmers, indicating third parties that are believed to have appealed to similar cons…
Following the Money: Super PACs and the 2012 Presidential Nomination
The entrance of Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs ), outside groups with no caps on fundraising or independent expenditures, prompts a reexamination of the role of money in campaigns and elections. We investigate the influence of Super PAC expenditures in the 2012 Republican nomination contest. A compressed calendar makes nomination campaigns expensive and money crucial, especially for lesser‐known candidates, such that outside expend…
Dynamics in Partisanship during American Presidential Campaigns
Despite their potential importance, little is known about the nature and prevalence of party identification dynamics within American presidential campaigns. This study reviews existing research to propose three basic contrasting models. It then introduces multivariate state space methods that account for sampling error and survey design effects to evaluate each model’s relative support within daily national survey data of the 1984, 2000, 2004, an…
Deus ex Machina: Candidate Web Presence and the Presidential Nomination Campaign
Using data from the 2008 presidential nomination contest, we offer systematic tests of the relationships between traditional campaign factors, the Internet and campaign performance. We find that claims of the Internet’s relevance to modern campaigns are warranted, as it is a unique facet of campaigns and significantly improves candidates’ financial and electoral support. The Internet is especially helpful to candidates in generating small-donor c…
Analyzing the Robustness of Semi-Parametric Duration Models for the Study of Repeated Events
Estimators within the Cox family are often used to estimate models for repeated events. Yet, there is much we still do not know about the performance of these estimators. In particular, we do not know how they perform given time dependence, different censoring rates, and a varying number of events and sample sizes. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the performance of a variety of popular semi-parametric estimators as these data aspect…
Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter
The observed rate of Americans voting for a different party across successive presidential elections has never been lower. This trend is largely explained by the clarity of party differences reducing indecision and ambivalence and increasing reliability in presidential voting. American National Election Studies (ANES) Times Series study data show that recent independent, less engaged voters perceive candidate differences as clearly as partisan, e…
The Consequences of Elite Party Politics for American Macropartisanship
Studies of macropartisanship exclusively focus on presidential performance’s role in driving partisan updating. Performance may determine which party benefits from updating, but I propose that the occurrence of mass updating more so depends on whether there are changes to the substance of elite party divisions. The greater the change in what characterizes party differences in Washington the more likely a portion of Americans update their partisan…
Pedagogical Value of Polling-Place Observation by Students
Good education requires student experiences that deliver lessons about practice as well as theory and that encourage students to work for the public good—especially in the operation of democratic institutions (Dewey 1923; Dewy 1938). We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 Gen…
A Uniter and a Divider: American Presidential Campaigns and Partisan Perceptions of the National Economy
Do American presidential campaigns polarize or unify partisan perceptions? I propose that they do both, where the balance of these countervailing forces varies by context. Campaign messages enable partisan differences, especially in battleground states, but campaigns also promote social contexts that foster accuracy motives and reduce the effects of partisan biases nationwide. After documenting panel data evidence of campaign trends toward unity,…
Waiting to Vote in the 2016 Presidential Election: Evidence from a Multi-county Study
This paper is the result of a nationwide study of polling place dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. Research teams, recruited from local colleges and universities and located in twenty-eight election jurisdictions across the United States, observed and timed voters as they entered the queue at their respective polling places and then voted. We report results about four specific polling place operations and practices: the length of the che…
Evaluating Legislative Districts Using Measures of Partisan Bias and Simulations
A well-developed body of research offers ways to measure the partisan advantages that result from legislative districting. Although useful to researchers and legal practitioners, those studies also suffer from theoretical, empirical, and legal limitations. In this essay, we review measures of partisan bias and methods for both simulating election results under existing maps and simulating hypothetical maps. We start by describing the concept of p…
The Coup de Grâce to the Sanders Campaign: Michigan, Momentum & Viability
On Polarization and Partisan Attachments: Greater Consistency but not Greater Strength
Are Americans more strongly attached to their political parties than ever before? Despite partisanship’s stronger associations across politics, inter-election panel surveys show that the durability of partisan attachments has slightly weakened. After bringing attention to this fact, I propose that this discrepancy exists because comparisons across time are mostly a product of greater consistency in mass partisan behavior, not the strengthening of…
Political science (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Presidential system (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works)