J Tobin Grant
Biographic Data
| ID | 77574 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Tobin Grant |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Tobin |
| FAMILY NAME | Grant |
| SIGNATURE | GRANT J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Southern Illinois University Carbondale |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 377 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, by Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, is a well-written, thorough study of a slice of contemporary American religion. It adds detail to our understanding of the Green family, their Hobby Lobby craft store company, and the creation of the Museum of the Bible. It is great investigative journalism, but it offers little more than an interesting story for the sociologist of religion. By the authors’ own admission, they had not heard of the G…
Using Journal Impact Factor to Assess Scholarly Records: Overcorrecting for the Potter Stewart Approach to Promotion and Tenure
Promotion and tenure decisions frequently require an assessment of the quality of a candidate’s research record. Without carefully specifying what constitutes a tenurable and promotable record, departments frequently adopt the Potter Stewart approach – they know it when they see it. The benefit of such a system is that it allows for multiple paths to tenure and promotion and encourages holistic review, but the drawback is that it allows for the p…
Demand for God and Government: The Dynamics of Religion and Public Opinion
We explore the relationship between religiosity and public support for greater government services. We theorize that increases in religiosity and public opinion both reflect demands from citizens in the face of insecurity. We argue that religiosity is comprised of two factors: responses to insecurity; and long-held preferences for religion, or secularity. We show that previous studies that have observed increased religiosity leading to decreased …
How Informants Answer Questions: Implications for Reflexivity
The Tourangeau-Rasinski model of the question-answer process can inform how the authors conduct qualitative interviews by improving reflexivity. The authors outline this model and show that it both complements the literature on best practices in qualitative methods and provides a new tool to inform reflexivity. The authors use examples from our interviews with elite athletes to show how the model can improve reflexivity and discuss the implicatio…
The Referendum Conundrum: Referenda or Referendums
Scholars often use referenda as the plural for referendum . This choice is a hypercorrection—it may sound like proper Latin, but it is not. Referendums is always the correct choice. However, we maintain that there is value in using referendums for multiple events and referenda for multiple propositions
Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity
Objective. What effect does the extent of economic inequality within a country have on the religiosity of the people who live there? As inequality increases, does religion serve primarily as a source of comfort for the deprived and impoverished or as a tool of social control for the rich and powerful? Methods. This article examines these questions with two complementary analyses of inequality and religiosity: a multilevel analysis of countries ar…
Campaign Effects on the Accessibility of Party Identification
This study uses response latency, the time required for a survey respondent to formulate an answer upon hearing a question, to examine the accessibility of partisan self identifications over the course of a political campaign season. Although the aggregate distribution of partisanship remains fairly stable during the campaign, party identifications become more accessible to individuals with weaker party identifications as the election approaches.…
Legislative Productivity of the U.S. Congress, 1789–2004
We measure legislative productivity for the entire history of the U.S. Congress. Current measures of legislative productivity are problematic because they measure productivity for a limited number of decades and because they are based on different aspects of productivity. We provide a methodology for measuring (1) a Legislative Productivity Index (LPI) and (2) a Major Legislation Index (MLI). We use the W-CALC algorithm of Stimson (1999, Public o…
Measuring Aggregate Religiosity in the United States, 1952-2005
I present a method for measuring aggregate religiosity. The method allows one to combine many indicators of religiosity, even if the indicators measure only a portion of religiosity, or if the indicators are not measured every year of the series. I demonstrate the method by measuring aggregate religiosity of the US population from 1952 through 2005. The results show the sharp rise in religiosity during the 1950s, the decline beginning in the 1960…
What Divides Us? The Image and Organization of Political Science
The question “What is political science?” is nearly as old as the discipline itself. Political science continually self-examines the discipline to evaluate who we are and how we have changed. In addition, there are numerous studies of groups within political science, including political science in the U.S. South and women in political science. There are also reviews of the development and state of subfields, e.g., urban politics , international r…
The Job of Representation in Congress: Public Expectations and Representative Approval
Few concepts are more central to democratic theory than that of representation. Theories of representation are commonly premised on the belief that citizens' expectations of their representative are politically consequential, yet we know little about the nature of these expectations and precisely how they matter. Using individual‐level data from a recent national survey, we investigate the influence of constituents' job expectations on their appr…
Value Conflict, Group Affect, and the Issue of Campaign Finance
Response Latency Methodology for Survey Research: Measurement and Modeling Strategies
In public opinion research, response latency is a measure of attitude accessibility, which is the ease or swiftness with which an attitude comes to mind when a respondent is presented with a survey question. Attitude accessibility represents the strength of the association in memory between an attitude object and an evaluation of the object. Recent research shows that attitude accessibility, as measured by response latency, casts light on a wide …
Value Conflict, Group Affect, and the Issue of Campaign Finance
The issue of campaign finance reform creates a potential conflict between the democratic values of expression and equality. Using a unique experiment embedded in a national survey of the American electorate, we examine the extent to which group affect influences citizens' commitment to these values and how it contributes to the resolution of value conflict. We find that citizens' commitment to the values of expression and equality in the campaign…
Tax Policy Attitudes and the 1996 Presidential Election
This study examines whether voters employ a collectively based evaluation of tax policies when voting. We model public opinion toward Bob Dole’s 15% income tax cut proposal and assess the issue’s impact on presidential vote choice in 1996. A preelection survey experiment offered two versions of a question about tax cuts: One presents the issue in terms of what is right or wrong for the country (collective version), whereas the other poses a “favo…
An Attributional Model of Economic Voting: Evidence from the 2000 Presidential Election
In this article we propose and test an attributional model of economic voting. Exploiting an innovative responsibility instrument to analyze the 2000 U.S. presidential election, we find that the incumbent party's can- didate did benefit from the belief that economic conditions had improved, but only among voters who attributed responsibility for that improvement to the president. Moreover, we find that by explicitly mod- eling the effects of resp…
To Give or Not to Give: Modeling Individuals' Contribution Decisions
Measuring Religious Commitment Among Catholics and Protestants: A New Approach
Researchers using survey data to study religious commitment often create additive indices in which respondents receive a 'point' on the scale for each behavior in which they engage, implicitly assuming that each activity is equally normative in each religious tradition. This has led some scholars to suggest that these scales can be 'biased' in favor of evangelicals. In this paper, we introduce a unique series of survey questions asking respondent…
Religious Institutions and Political Participation in America
Previous research on religious institutions and political participation finds that churches can increase participation among their members through the development of civic skills and the distinct political histories of religious traditions. This paper examines the various ways religious institutions promote the political participation of their members. We utilize the 1990 Citizen Participation Study to test seven hypotheses about the connections …
Virtual Field Trips: Bringing College Students and Policymakers Together through Interactive Technology
n a democratic society, education in the values and operation of the political system takes on a high level of importance. Citizens must be made conscious of the system within which policy is created and, as instructors at the college level, we face the task of presenting students with facts, theories, and opinions about government. Although instructors can introduce students to important ideas through lectures, readings, and discussions, many st…
Question Wording and the House Vote Choice
Since 1978, the vote reported for House incumbents in the American National Election Studies (NES) has been significantly higher than the actual incumbents' vote in the districts surveyed; in NES surveys before 1978, the reported vote was much closer to the actual vote. The prime suspect for the source of this bias is the new question format introduced in 1978 and used in all subsequent studies. We document the problem and review the results of s…
All in a Day's Work: The Financial Rewards of Legislative Effectiveness
Religious Institutions and Political Participation in America
Previous research on religious institutions and political participation finds that churches can increase participation among their members through the development of civic skills and the distinct political histories of religious traditions. This paper examines the various ways religious institutions promote the political participation of their members. We utilize the 1990 Citizen Participation Study to test seven hypotheses about the connections …
An Attributional Model of Economic Voting: Evidence from the 2000 Presidential Election
In this article we propose and test an attributional model of economic voting. Exploiting an innovative responsibility instrument to analyze the 2000 U.S. presidential election, we find that the incumbent party's can- didate did benefit from the belief that economic conditions had improved, but only among voters who attributed responsibility for that improvement to the president. Moreover, we find that by explicitly mod- eling the effects of resp…
All in a Day's Work: The Financial Rewards of Legislative Effectiveness
Value Conflict, Group Affect, and the Issue of Campaign Finance
The issue of campaign finance reform creates a potential conflict between the democratic values of expression and equality. Using a unique experiment embedded in a national survey of the American electorate, we examine the extent to which group affect influences citizens' commitment to these values and how it contributes to the resolution of value conflict. We find that citizens' commitment to the values of expression and equality in the campaign…
To Give or Not to Give: Modeling Individuals' Contribution Decisions
Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity
Objective. What effect does the extent of economic inequality within a country have on the religiosity of the people who live there? As inequality increases, does religion serve primarily as a source of comfort for the deprived and impoverished or as a tool of social control for the rich and powerful? Methods. This article examines these questions with two complementary analyses of inequality and religiosity: a multilevel analysis of countries ar…
The Job of Representation in Congress: Public Expectations and Representative Approval
Few concepts are more central to democratic theory than that of representation. Theories of representation are commonly premised on the belief that citizens' expectations of their representative are politically consequential, yet we know little about the nature of these expectations and precisely how they matter. Using individual‐level data from a recent national survey, we investigate the influence of constituents' job expectations on their appr…
Legislative Productivity of the U.S. Congress, 1789–2004
We measure legislative productivity for the entire history of the U.S. Congress. Current measures of legislative productivity are problematic because they measure productivity for a limited number of decades and because they are based on different aspects of productivity. We provide a methodology for measuring (1) a Legislative Productivity Index (LPI) and (2) a Major Legislation Index (MLI). We use the W-CALC algorithm of Stimson (1999, Public o…
Measuring Religious Commitment Among Catholics and Protestants: A New Approach
Researchers using survey data to study religious commitment often create additive indices in which respondents receive a 'point' on the scale for each behavior in which they engage, implicitly assuming that each activity is equally normative in each religious tradition. This has led some scholars to suggest that these scales can be 'biased' in favor of evangelicals. In this paper, we introduce a unique series of survey questions asking respondent…
Response Latency Methodology for Survey Research: Measurement and Modeling Strategies
In public opinion research, response latency is a measure of attitude accessibility, which is the ease or swiftness with which an attitude comes to mind when a respondent is presented with a survey question. Attitude accessibility represents the strength of the association in memory between an attitude object and an evaluation of the object. Recent research shows that attitude accessibility, as measured by response latency, casts light on a wide …
Campaign Effects on the Accessibility of Party Identification
This study uses response latency, the time required for a survey respondent to formulate an answer upon hearing a question, to examine the accessibility of partisan self identifications over the course of a political campaign season. Although the aggregate distribution of partisanship remains fairly stable during the campaign, party identifications become more accessible to individuals with weaker party identifications as the election approaches.…
Question Wording and the House Vote Choice
Since 1978, the vote reported for House incumbents in the American National Election Studies (NES) has been significantly higher than the actual incumbents' vote in the districts surveyed; in NES surveys before 1978, the reported vote was much closer to the actual vote. The prime suspect for the source of this bias is the new question format introduced in 1978 and used in all subsequent studies. We document the problem and review the results of s…
Measuring Aggregate Religiosity in the United States, 1952-2005
I present a method for measuring aggregate religiosity. The method allows one to combine many indicators of religiosity, even if the indicators measure only a portion of religiosity, or if the indicators are not measured every year of the series. I demonstrate the method by measuring aggregate religiosity of the US population from 1952 through 2005. The results show the sharp rise in religiosity during the 1950s, the decline beginning in the 1960…
Demand for God and Government: The Dynamics of Religion and Public Opinion
We explore the relationship between religiosity and public support for greater government services. We theorize that increases in religiosity and public opinion both reflect demands from citizens in the face of insecurity. We argue that religiosity is comprised of two factors: responses to insecurity; and long-held preferences for religion, or secularity. We show that previous studies that have observed increased religiosity leading to decreased …
What Divides Us? The Image and Organization of Political Science
The question “What is political science?” is nearly as old as the discipline itself. Political science continually self-examines the discipline to evaluate who we are and how we have changed. In addition, there are numerous studies of groups within political science, including political science in the U.S. South and women in political science. There are also reviews of the development and state of subfields, e.g., urban politics , international r…
Virtual Field Trips: Bringing College Students and Policymakers Together through Interactive Technology
n a democratic society, education in the values and operation of the political system takes on a high level of importance. Citizens must be made conscious of the system within which policy is created and, as instructors at the college level, we face the task of presenting students with facts, theories, and opinions about government. Although instructors can introduce students to important ideas through lectures, readings, and discussions, many st…
All in a Day's Work: The Financial Rewards of Legislative Effectiveness
Virtual Field Trips: Bringing College Students and Policymakers Together through Interactive Technology
n a democratic society, education in the values and operation of the political system takes on a high level of importance. Citizens must be made conscious of the system within which policy is created and, as instructors at the college level, we face the task of presenting students with facts, theories, and opinions about government. Although instructors can introduce students to important ideas through lectures, readings, and discussions, many st…
Question Wording and the House Vote Choice
Since 1978, the vote reported for House incumbents in the American National Election Studies (NES) has been significantly higher than the actual incumbents' vote in the districts surveyed; in NES surveys before 1978, the reported vote was much closer to the actual vote. The prime suspect for the source of this bias is the new question format introduced in 1978 and used in all subsequent studies. We document the problem and review the results of s…
Measuring Religious Commitment Among Catholics and Protestants: A New Approach
Researchers using survey data to study religious commitment often create additive indices in which respondents receive a 'point' on the scale for each behavior in which they engage, implicitly assuming that each activity is equally normative in each religious tradition. This has led some scholars to suggest that these scales can be 'biased' in favor of evangelicals. In this paper, we introduce a unique series of survey questions asking respondent…
Religious Institutions and Political Participation in America
Previous research on religious institutions and political participation finds that churches can increase participation among their members through the development of civic skills and the distinct political histories of religious traditions. This paper examines the various ways religious institutions promote the political participation of their members. We utilize the 1990 Citizen Participation Study to test seven hypotheses about the connections …
Tax Policy Attitudes and the 1996 Presidential Election
This study examines whether voters employ a collectively based evaluation of tax policies when voting. We model public opinion toward Bob Dole’s 15% income tax cut proposal and assess the issue’s impact on presidential vote choice in 1996. A preelection survey experiment offered two versions of a question about tax cuts: One presents the issue in terms of what is right or wrong for the country (collective version), whereas the other poses a “favo…
An Attributional Model of Economic Voting: Evidence from the 2000 Presidential Election
In this article we propose and test an attributional model of economic voting. Exploiting an innovative responsibility instrument to analyze the 2000 U.S. presidential election, we find that the incumbent party's can- didate did benefit from the belief that economic conditions had improved, but only among voters who attributed responsibility for that improvement to the president. Moreover, we find that by explicitly mod- eling the effects of resp…
To Give or Not to Give: Modeling Individuals' Contribution Decisions
Value Conflict, Group Affect, and the Issue of Campaign Finance
Response Latency Methodology for Survey Research: Measurement and Modeling Strategies
In public opinion research, response latency is a measure of attitude accessibility, which is the ease or swiftness with which an attitude comes to mind when a respondent is presented with a survey question. Attitude accessibility represents the strength of the association in memory between an attitude object and an evaluation of the object. Recent research shows that attitude accessibility, as measured by response latency, casts light on a wide …
Value Conflict, Group Affect, and the Issue of Campaign Finance
The issue of campaign finance reform creates a potential conflict between the democratic values of expression and equality. Using a unique experiment embedded in a national survey of the American electorate, we examine the extent to which group affect influences citizens' commitment to these values and how it contributes to the resolution of value conflict. We find that citizens' commitment to the values of expression and equality in the campaign…
The Job of Representation in Congress: Public Expectations and Representative Approval
Few concepts are more central to democratic theory than that of representation. Theories of representation are commonly premised on the belief that citizens' expectations of their representative are politically consequential, yet we know little about the nature of these expectations and precisely how they matter. Using individual‐level data from a recent national survey, we investigate the influence of constituents' job expectations on their appr…
What Divides Us? The Image and Organization of Political Science
The question “What is political science?” is nearly as old as the discipline itself. Political science continually self-examines the discipline to evaluate who we are and how we have changed. In addition, there are numerous studies of groups within political science, including political science in the U.S. South and women in political science. There are also reviews of the development and state of subfields, e.g., urban politics , international r…
Legislative Productivity of the U.S. Congress, 1789–2004
We measure legislative productivity for the entire history of the U.S. Congress. Current measures of legislative productivity are problematic because they measure productivity for a limited number of decades and because they are based on different aspects of productivity. We provide a methodology for measuring (1) a Legislative Productivity Index (LPI) and (2) a Major Legislation Index (MLI). We use the W-CALC algorithm of Stimson (1999, Public o…
Measuring Aggregate Religiosity in the United States, 1952-2005
I present a method for measuring aggregate religiosity. The method allows one to combine many indicators of religiosity, even if the indicators measure only a portion of religiosity, or if the indicators are not measured every year of the series. I demonstrate the method by measuring aggregate religiosity of the US population from 1952 through 2005. The results show the sharp rise in religiosity during the 1950s, the decline beginning in the 1960…
Campaign Effects on the Accessibility of Party Identification
This study uses response latency, the time required for a survey respondent to formulate an answer upon hearing a question, to examine the accessibility of partisan self identifications over the course of a political campaign season. Although the aggregate distribution of partisanship remains fairly stable during the campaign, party identifications become more accessible to individuals with weaker party identifications as the election approaches.…
The Referendum Conundrum: Referenda or Referendums
Scholars often use referenda as the plural for referendum . This choice is a hypercorrection—it may sound like proper Latin, but it is not. Referendums is always the correct choice. However, we maintain that there is value in using referendums for multiple events and referenda for multiple propositions
Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity
Objective. What effect does the extent of economic inequality within a country have on the religiosity of the people who live there? As inequality increases, does religion serve primarily as a source of comfort for the deprived and impoverished or as a tool of social control for the rich and powerful? Methods. This article examines these questions with two complementary analyses of inequality and religiosity: a multilevel analysis of countries ar…
How Informants Answer Questions: Implications for Reflexivity
The Tourangeau-Rasinski model of the question-answer process can inform how the authors conduct qualitative interviews by improving reflexivity. The authors outline this model and show that it both complements the literature on best practices in qualitative methods and provides a new tool to inform reflexivity. The authors use examples from our interviews with elite athletes to show how the model can improve reflexivity and discuss the implicatio…
Demand for God and Government: The Dynamics of Religion and Public Opinion
We explore the relationship between religiosity and public support for greater government services. We theorize that increases in religiosity and public opinion both reflect demands from citizens in the face of insecurity. We argue that religiosity is comprised of two factors: responses to insecurity; and long-held preferences for religion, or secularity. We show that previous studies that have observed increased religiosity leading to decreased …
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, by Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, is a well-written, thorough study of a slice of contemporary American religion. It adds detail to our understanding of the Green family, their Hobby Lobby craft store company, and the creation of the Museum of the Bible. It is great investigative journalism, but it offers little more than an interesting story for the sociologist of religion. By the authors’ own admission, they had not heard of the G…
Using Journal Impact Factor to Assess Scholarly Records: Overcorrecting for the Potter Stewart Approach to Promotion and Tenure
Promotion and tenure decisions frequently require an assessment of the quality of a candidate’s research record. Without carefully specifying what constitutes a tenurable and promotable record, departments frequently adopt the Potter Stewart approach – they know it when they see it. The benefit of such a system is that it allows for multiple paths to tenure and promotion and encourages holistic review, but the drawback is that it allows for the p…
Political science (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works)