Josh Sides
Biographic Data
| ID | 790366 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Josh Sides |
| GIVEN NAMES | Josh |
| FAMILY NAME | Sides |
| SIGNATURE | SIDES J |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1268-6612 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1828 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Body Politic
In Memoriam
In April 2023, we lost Natale “Nat” Zappia, a passionate humanist who was also an extraordinary scholar, teacher, and community leader—and a loyal friend to California History, serving on the journal’s editorial board throughout my time as editor. Nat’s academic bona fides were impeccable. A graduate of Cornell (BS), Claremont Graduate University (MA), and UC Santa Cruz (PhD), he was a leading scholar of American environmental history, focusing o…
The Effect of Television Advertising in United States Elections
We provide a comprehensive assessment of the influence of television advertising on United States election outcomes from 2000-2018. We expand on previous research by including presidential, Senate, House, gubernatorial, Attorney General, and state Treasurer elections and using both difference-in-differences and border-discontinuity research designs to help identify the causal effect of advertising. We find that televised broadcast campaign advert…
On the Representativeness of Primary Electorates
Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the o…
Identity Crisis
The Muted Consequences of Correct Information about Immigration
Previous research shows that people commonly exaggerate the size of minority populations. Theories of intergroup threat predict that the larger people perceive minority groups to be, the less favorably they feel toward them. We investigate whether correcting Americans’ misperceptions about one such population—immigrants—affects related attitudes. We confirm that non-Hispanic Americans overestimate the percentage of the population that is foreign-…
Identity Crisis
How Trump Lost and Won
The 2016 campaign ended with a surprising and inconclusive outcome: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote comfortably but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump. We identify three factors that help explain this outcome. First, fundamental economic and political trends favored a Democratic popular vote win. Second, the party coalitions had become more polarized by race and education during Obama’s presidency. Third, Trump’s focus on issues conn…
The Ground Game in the 2012 Presidential Election
Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices …
Stories or Science? Facts, Frames, and Policy Attitudes
How much do factual information and other kinds of frames affect policy attitudes? And whose attitudes are most malleable? I address these questions via two original survey experiments about the estate tax. I demonstrate that correct information about who is potentially subject to the estate tax increased support for the estate tax. Furthermore, this information did not appear any less persuasive than pro- or antitax arguments that emphasized val…
The Electoral Landscape of 2016
As 2015 got underway, most Americans were poised for another Bush vs. Clinton presidential election, but by the middle of the year it was clear something unexpected was unfolding in the race for the White House. In this article, we illuminate the political landscape heading into the 2016 election, paying special attention to the public's mood, their assessments of government, their attitudes about race and members of the other party, and the heal…
Engaging Political Science Alumni Networks
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Evaluations of the 2014 Midterm Election Forecasts
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Apsa as Amplifier
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Constitutional Design and 2014 Senate Election Outcomes
A common observation about the 2014 Senate elections is that one advantage the Republicans had was that the set of states holding elections tilted Republican in partisanship. In this article, we quantify that advantage and demonstrate that the constitutional requirements of equality for state representation in the Senate plus the division of seats into three classes were critical elements in the Republicans’ pickup of nine seats and retaking part…
The consequences of political innumeracy
The prevalence of political innumeracy – or ignorance of politically relevant numbers – is well-documented. However, little is known about its consequences. We report on three original survey experiments in which respondents were randomly assigned to see correct information about the racial composition of the US population, median income and educational attainment, and the unemployment and poverty rates. Although estimates of these quantities wer…
Four Suggestions for Making Election Forecasts Better, and Better Known
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Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans
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The Victory Lab
Sasha issenberg'sThe Victory Lab is the history of how campaigns got smart by using better models, better methods, and social science.it is and likely will always be the definitive book on this subject.it is lively, fun, and packed with fascinating detail.Full disclosure: it is hard for a political scientist to dislike a book in which political scientists are main characters-even if we can't all have the "Ken-doll looks" of the University of Texa…
Stereotypes of Muslims and Support for the War on Terror
We investigate Americans’ stereotypes of Muslims. We distinguish specific dimensions of stereotypes and find that negative stereotypes relating to violence and trustworthiness are commonplace. Furthermore, these stereotypes have consequences: those with less favorable views of Muslims, especially in terms of violence and trustworthiness, are more likely to support several aspects of the War on Terror. Our findings contrast with some previous rese…
Watching From Afar
Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring-related content using a unique data se…
One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case…
How Political Science Can Help Journalism (and Still Let Journalists Be Journalists)
Political scientists frequently lament the media s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in nature. In this article, we propose an approach that w…
The Political Scientist as a Blogger
In November 2007, I helped found a blog, The Monkey Cage , with two of my colleagues, David Park and Lee Sigelman. This site joined a nascent political science blogosphere that is now composed of at least 80 blogs (Farrell and Sides 2010). The goals of The Monkey Cage are to publicize political science research and use this research to comment on current events. Although blogging is a promising way for scholars to promote their work to a larger a…
Do Campaigns Drive Partisan Turnout
European Opinion About Immigration
This article assesses the influence of material interests and cultural identities on European opinion about immigration. Analysis of respondents in twenty countries sampled in the 2002–03 European Social Survey demonstrates that they are unenthusiastic about high levels of immigration and typically overestimate the actual number of immigrants living in their country. At the individual level, cultural and national identity, economic interests and …
Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States
Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration. We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower leve…
The Origins of Campaign Agendas
Why and how do candidates choose the issues on which their campaigns are based? Drawing on a large database of candidate advertisements from the 1998 House and Senate campaigns, extant theories of issue emphasis, which focus on factors such as party ownership and candidate record, are tested here and these theories are expanded by examining in more detail the role of constituency characteristics. Most notably, party ownership's impact is demonstr…
The Muted Consequences of Correct Information about Immigration
Previous research shows that people commonly exaggerate the size of minority populations. Theories of intergroup threat predict that the larger people perceive minority groups to be, the less favorably they feel toward them. We investigate whether correcting Americans’ misperceptions about one such population—immigrants—affects related attitudes. We confirm that non-Hispanic Americans overestimate the percentage of the population that is foreign-…
Stereotypes of Muslims and Support for the War on Terror
We investigate Americans’ stereotypes of Muslims. We distinguish specific dimensions of stereotypes and find that negative stereotypes relating to violence and trustworthiness are commonplace. Furthermore, these stereotypes have consequences: those with less favorable views of Muslims, especially in terms of violence and trustworthiness, are more likely to support several aspects of the War on Terror. Our findings contrast with some previous rese…
What if Everyone Voted? Simulating the Impact of Increased Turnout in Senate Elections
The conventional wisdom among journalists and politicians is that higher turnout would benefit Democrats, although extant scholarly research suggests otherwise. We adopt a new approach to assessing the partisan impact of higher turnout. We use state‐level exit polls and Census data to estimate the partisan preferences of nonvoters in Senate elections and then simulate the outcome of these elections under universal turnout. While nonvoters are gen…
Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics
Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers. We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ide…
Can Institutions Build Unity in Multiethnic States
We investigate whether political institutions can promote attachment to the state in multiethnic societies. Building on literatures on nationalism, democratization, and conflict resolution, we discuss the importance of attachment, understood as a psychological identification with, and pride in, the state. We construct a model of state attachment, specifying the individual-, group-, and state-level conditions that foster it. Then, using cross-nati…
How Trump Lost and Won
The 2016 campaign ended with a surprising and inconclusive outcome: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote comfortably but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump. We identify three factors that help explain this outcome. First, fundamental economic and political trends favored a Democratic popular vote win. Second, the party coalitions had become more polarized by race and education during Obama’s presidency. Third, Trump’s focus on issues conn…
One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case…
The consequences of political innumeracy
The prevalence of political innumeracy – or ignorance of politically relevant numbers – is well-documented. However, little is known about its consequences. We report on three original survey experiments in which respondents were randomly assigned to see correct information about the racial composition of the US population, median income and educational attainment, and the unemployment and poverty rates. Although estimates of these quantities wer…
The Consequences of Campaign Agendas
Theories of candidate agendas suggest two potentially conflicting imperatives for candidates: focus on issues that their party “owns” or on issues that are salient to the public. The implication is that candidates may ultimately lose votes for ignoring either or both of these imperatives. However, no systematic test of either theory exists. This article provides a fuller test using candidate advertising data from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 House an…
What Voters Want From Political Campaign Communication
Conventional wisdom holds that the public dislikes campaigns for their negativity and superficiality, preferring a cleaner, substantive, and more deliberative process. By contrast, the implication of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse's (2002) Hibbing, J. and Theiss-Morse, E. 2002. Stealth democracy: Americans' beliefs about how government should work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] Stealth Democracy is that, while cit…
The Effect of Television Advertising in United States Elections
We provide a comprehensive assessment of the influence of television advertising on United States election outcomes from 2000-2018. We expand on previous research by including presidential, Senate, House, gubernatorial, Attorney General, and state Treasurer elections and using both difference-in-differences and border-discontinuity research designs to help identify the causal effect of advertising. We find that televised broadcast campaign advert…
On the Representativeness of Primary Electorates
Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the o…
Messages that Mobilize? Issue Publics and the Content of Campaign Advertising
Does the issue content of campaign appeals mobilize particular subsets of voters? We examine whether issue content interacts with the interests and agendas of “issue publics,” focusing on the relationship between campaign messages and the turnout of senior citizens, veterans, and parents. Our analysis matches Current Population Survey respondents to media markets and then to relevant campaign advertising data in the 1998, 2000, and 2002 elections…
Stories or Science? Facts, Frames, and Policy Attitudes
How much do factual information and other kinds of frames affect policy attitudes? And whose attitudes are most malleable? I address these questions via two original survey experiments about the estate tax. I demonstrate that correct information about who is potentially subject to the estate tax increased support for the estate tax. Furthermore, this information did not appear any less persuasive than pro- or antitax arguments that emphasized val…
Straight into Compton
This article traces the historic evolution of the California city of Compton, both as a physical place, and as a popular cultural idea. A recipient of the coveted All-American Cities Award in 1952, the almost exclusively white city of Compton quickly integrated after the landmark Supreme Court housing desegregation cases of the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, Compton was a symbol of black middle class achievement, and by the 1970s it would become…
Do Voters Perceive Negative Campaigns as Informative Campaigns
We argue that citizens distinguish the tone of a campaign from the quality of information that it provides and that evaluations on each dimension respond differently to positive and negative political advertising. We test these claims using survey and advertising data from the 2000 presidential campaign and two 1998 gubernatorial races. In each race, citizens separate judgments about the tone of a campaign from judgments about the quality of info…
The Ground Game in the 2012 Presidential Election
Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices …
The Electoral Landscape of 2016
As 2015 got underway, most Americans were poised for another Bush vs. Clinton presidential election, but by the middle of the year it was clear something unexpected was unfolding in the race for the White House. In this article, we illuminate the political landscape heading into the 2016 election, paying special attention to the public's mood, their assessments of government, their attitudes about race and members of the other party, and the heal…
Do Campaigns Drive Partisan Turnout
Intergenerational Warfare
Most accounts portray the 1890-1910 period of congressional history as an exemplary instance of highly centralized party government. However, we contend that this interpretation obscures other important forces driving institutional development during this time. In 1899, the Senate approved a rule change dispersing jurisdiction over appropriations bills. This change added a significant centrifugal element to the Senate committee system. Taking adv…
Remaking the House and Senate
Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case,…
Watching From Afar
Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring-related content using a unique data se…
You Understand My Condition
Research Article| May 01 1998 "You Understand My Condition": The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American Community, 1946-1952 Josh Sides Josh Sides Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1998) 67 (2): 233–257. https://doi.org/10.2307/3641563 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter …
Intergenerational Warfare
Most accounts portray the 1890-1910 period of congressional history as an exemplary instance of highly centralized party government. However, we contend that this interpretation obscures other important forces driving institutional development during this time. In 1899, the Senate approved a rule change dispersing jurisdiction over appropriations bills. This change added a significant centrifugal element to the Senate committee system. Taking adv…
L.A. City Limits
In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass—embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South—is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at…
What If Everyone Voted? Simulating the Impact of Increased Turnout in Senate Elections
Remaking the House and Senate
Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case,…
What if Everyone Voted? Simulating the Impact of Increased Turnout in Senate Elections
The conventional wisdom among journalists and politicians is that higher turnout would benefit Democrats, although extant scholarly research suggests otherwise. We adopt a new approach to assessing the partisan impact of higher turnout. We use state‐level exit polls and Census data to estimate the partisan preferences of nonvoters in Senate elections and then simulate the outcome of these elections under universal turnout. While nonvoters are gen…
Straight into Compton
This article traces the historic evolution of the California city of Compton, both as a physical place, and as a popular cultural idea. A recipient of the coveted All-American Cities Award in 1952, the almost exclusively white city of Compton quickly integrated after the landmark Supreme Court housing desegregation cases of the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, Compton was a symbol of black middle class achievement, and by the 1970s it would become…
L.A. City Limits
What Voters Want From Political Campaign Communication
Conventional wisdom holds that the public dislikes campaigns for their negativity and superficiality, preferring a cleaner, substantive, and more deliberative process. By contrast, the implication of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse's (2002) Hibbing, J. and Theiss-Morse, E. 2002. Stealth democracy: Americans' beliefs about how government should work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] Stealth Democracy is that, while cit…
Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco
This article traces the emergence of the postwar sex district in San Francisco, in particular, and in the metropolitan United States, in general. The author argues that the sex district of the 1960s and 1970swas not simply a relic from the first half of the twentieth century but rather a fundamentally newphenomenon. Infused by the libertinism of the sexual revolution, the eroding legal criteria of “obscenity,” and the immense profitability of por…
New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen by Philip N. Howard
The Origins of Campaign Agendas
Why and how do candidates choose the issues on which their campaigns are based? Drawing on a large database of candidate advertisements from the 1998 House and Senate campaigns, extant theories of issue emphasis, which focus on factors such as party ownership and candidate record, are tested here and these theories are expanded by examining in more detail the role of constituency characteristics. Most notably, party ownership's impact is demonstr…
European Opinion About Immigration
This article assesses the influence of material interests and cultural identities on European opinion about immigration. Analysis of respondents in twenty countries sampled in the 2002–03 European Social Survey demonstrates that they are unenthusiastic about high levels of immigration and typically overestimate the actual number of immigrants living in their country. At the individual level, cultural and national identity, economic interests and …
The Consequences of Campaign Agendas
Theories of candidate agendas suggest two potentially conflicting imperatives for candidates: focus on issues that their party “owns” or on issues that are salient to the public. The implication is that candidates may ultimately lose votes for ignoring either or both of these imperatives. However, no systematic test of either theory exists. This article provides a fuller test using candidate advertising data from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 House an…
Can Institutions Build Unity in Multiethnic States
We investigate whether political institutions can promote attachment to the state in multiethnic societies. Building on literatures on nationalism, democratization, and conflict resolution, we discuss the importance of attachment, understood as a psychological identification with, and pride in, the state. We construct a model of state attachment, specifying the individual-, group-, and state-level conditions that foster it. Then, using cross-nati…
Immigration and the Imagined Community in Europe and the United States
Both Europe and the United States are confronting the challenges of economic and cultural integration posed by immigration. This article uses the ESS and CID surveys to compare transatlantic public opinion about immigrants and immigration. We find more tolerance for cultural diversity in the United States, but we also find that Americans, like Europeans, tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their countries and tend to favor lower leve…
Messages that Mobilize? Issue Publics and the Content of Campaign Advertising
Does the issue content of campaign appeals mobilize particular subsets of voters? We examine whether issue content interacts with the interests and agendas of “issue publics,” focusing on the relationship between campaign messages and the turnout of senior citizens, veterans, and parents. Our analysis matches Current Population Survey respondents to media markets and then to relevant campaign advertising data in the 1998, 2000, and 2002 elections…
Erotic City
Since the 1960s, San Francisco has been America’s capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars. In this highly original book, Josh Sides explains how this happened, unearthing long-forgotten stories of the city’s sexual revolutionaries, as well as the legions of longtime San Franciscans who tried to protect their vision of a moral metropolis. Erotic dancers, prostitutes, birth control advocates, pornographers, free lovers…
D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields. The Persuadable Voter
Presidential campaigns involve nothing more than “mobilizing the base.” The Republican and Democratic parties toss red (blue?) meat to their respective faithfuls, and then these voters, enthused about their candidate and enraged by the opponent, march to the polls on Election Day. No matter who wins, the electorate appears polarized—two opposing armies staring at each other from their own trenches. This portrait of contemporary campaigns is gross…
Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs
We argue that political science blogs can link conversations among political scientists with broader public debates about contemporary issues. Political science blogs do this by identifying relevant research, explaining its findings, and articulating its applicability. We identify strategies besides blogging that individual scholars and the discipline could undertake to enhance its public profile
Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics
Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers. We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ide…
Do Voters Perceive Negative Campaigns as Informative Campaigns
We argue that citizens distinguish the tone of a campaign from the quality of information that it provides and that evaluations on each dimension respond differently to positive and negative political advertising. We test these claims using survey and advertising data from the 2000 presidential campaign and two 1998 gubernatorial races. In each race, citizens separate judgments about the tone of a campaign from judgments about the quality of info…
How Political Science Can Help Journalism (and Still Let Journalists Be Journalists)
Political scientists frequently lament the media s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in nature. In this article, we propose an approach that w…
The Political Scientist as a Blogger
In November 2007, I helped found a blog, The Monkey Cage , with two of my colleagues, David Park and Lee Sigelman. This site joined a nascent political science blogosphere that is now composed of at least 80 blogs (Farrell and Sides 2010). The goals of The Monkey Cage are to publicize political science research and use this research to comment on current events. Although blogging is a promising way for scholars to promote their work to a larger a…
Do Campaigns Drive Partisan Turnout
Political science (43 works) · Law (35 works) · Politics (31 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (27 works) · Law (27 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Economics (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works)