Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project Research Articles

The Political Consequences of an Optimistic Personality

Optimists hope for the best possible outcome, while pessimists plan for the worst. We investigate how people’s predispositions to be optimistic versus pessimistic shape how they approach politics. We argue that an optimistic personality is a psychological resource that contributes to the practice of good citizenship behaviors. Using responses from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that people with optimistic personalities are more politically engaged and participatory than those with pessimistic dispositions. Optimists express more positive views of the American people, the government, and national symbols as well. Because optimists have a more positive outlook toward the nation’s future, they help contribute to levels of diffuse support for government and its symbols. While we might worry that optimists hold an unrealistic view of the political world, we find little evidence that dispositional optimism is associated with less accurate perceptions of political realities.

Prejudice and Tolerance in US Presidential Politics: Evidence from Eight List Experiments in 2008 and 2012

ABSTRACTUsing list experiments on the 2008 and 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, we investigated whether respondents are more likely to vote against presidential candidates from marginalized groups. We show that conservative and Republican respondents are disinclined to support Muslim and gay candidates. However, neither Right- nor Left-leaning respondents are significantly opposed to female candidates. Surprisingly, we uncovered asymmetric prejudices toward Mormons and African Americans. In both 2008 and 2012, Republicans were far more uncomfortable with gay or Muslim candidates than with African American candidates (per se). However, Democrats in 2012 were deeply uncomfortable with Mormon candidates. These findings illustrate that prejudice in presidential politics is not confined to right-wing pathologies alone but is present on both sides of the partisan–ideological divide.

Gender, race, and stereotypes in the 2008 presidential primary

ABSTRACT To better understand the role of local news in voters’ opinions of candidates, we ask whether candidate coverage in local news sources readily activates race and gender stereotypes in voters’ opinions of presidential primary candidates? We conduct an original content analysis of local newspaper coverage of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential primary season. We code 1,849 news articles in 11 battleground and early primary states to evaluate how local news coverage frames issues of race and gender for each candidate. Then we utilize the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) to match primary voters with their local news content. We find considerable variation in local news coverage of candidates’ race and gender across states. While local news coverage frames Obama and Clinton in terms of race and gender issues, we find that race is covered more frequently. In addition, we find that as news coverage of gender issues increases, voters are not less likely to characterize Clinton as a strong leader. However, as local news focuses more readily on Obama’s race, voters are less likely to consider him trustworthy. These findings illustrate the power of local news media to activate stereotypes related to race and gender.

Floating policy voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Much of the political science literature is skeptical that issue content matters for presidential voting behavior, with partisanship, social identity, and group attitudes providing the vast majority of explanatory power for two-party vote choice at the individual level. This literature stands in contrast with work on issue cross-pressuring, which argues that voters who disagree with their party on salient issues they care about are more likely to either vote for the opposing party's candidate or not participate in the two-party contest at all. Using the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project's 2016 survey, which includes within-subject responses from early June and November–December of 2016, I find support for both of these literatures in the context of the 2016 presidential election. Group attitudes, particularly with respect to race, were strongly associated with changes in voting behavior between 2012 and 2016. However, some voters, in some cases, seem to have deviated from their 2012 voting behavior based on policy issues they considered important to their vote. While issue cross-pressuring as measurable on the 2016 CCAP was relatively rare, I find that those who were cross-pressured were significantly more likely to change their voting behavior in 2016 relative to 2012.

The Upside of the Long Campaign

We theorize that the “long campaign” provides the impetus to motivate people to engage in campaign politics. We rely on panel survey data from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project to evaluate ...

Experience Versus Expectation: Economic Insecurity, the Great Recession, and Support for the Death Penalty

Scholars have theorized that people who report past economic hardship and those who forecast future economic instability will be more likely to support punitive criminal justice policies than those who do not. Only recently have researchers begun to empirically examine this association, and the findings from this small literature have been highly inconsistent. The current study contributes to this line of inquiry by investigating a uniquely rich set of economic insecurity measures included in a very large national survey (N = 9,060) fielded during a time period of special theoretical salience: the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Specifically, using survey data from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, we explore the effects of experienced and expected personal, vicarious, and societal economic insecurity on support for the death penalty. Contrary to the hypotheses, expectations of future economic insecurity are negatively associated with death penalty support, but this relationship is conditional on respondents’ demographics.

Authoritarianism and Public Opinion on Church and State in the United States

AbstractDespite the continued debate over the relationship between church and state in American politics, our understanding of the sources of attitudes on controversies over religious establishment and religious free exercise is limited. I argue that authoritarianism is an unrecognized but important predictor of mass-level attitudes on church and state. I argue that individuals with higher levels of authoritarianism are more likely to support religious establishment as a means of maintaining social conformity and reinforcing the existing social order. Likewise, those with higher levels of authoritarianism should exhibit reduced support for religious free exercise when minority groups are in question as a means of imposing greater costs on social out-groups. Using data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, I find strong support for my theory. Even after controlling for a variety of alternative explanations, authoritarianism remains an important factor in attitudes toward both religious establishment and religious free exercise.

The Electoral Impact of Public Opinion on Religious Establishment

While previous work has examined the structure of public opinion on church and state, to date there has been little effort to connect public opinion on this group of issues to vote choice. I begin by hypothesizing that attitudes on religious establishment are distinct from attitudes on more often studied issues like abortion and gay marriage. Second, I argue that religious establishment meets the conditions for partisan voting: the parties and candidates have taken distinct, highly public stands on religious establishment, and the issue is highly salient among a certain segment of voters. Finally, I develop a theory that establishment attitudes should exert a greater impact among those individuals who feel that their values are threatened in contemporary society because such individuals may see religious accommodation as a means of returning to their understanding of traditional values. I test these hypotheses using data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, and I find considerable support for my argument.

Cooperative Survey Research

The rise of the Internet has radically altered survey research by changing how we think about sampling, driving down the cost of interviewing, and creating new ways of asking questions. This technology has also opened the way to a new style of cooperatively organized survey research. Projects such as the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) involve collaborations of dozens of research teams that can collect very large samples and many smaller surveys tailored to the research questions of particular teams. This review examines the organization and key findings of these projects as well as their sampling methodology and its validity. Of particular importance, this article offers a direct comparison of the CCES with actual election results and the American National Election Studies (ANES), showing that the new survey approach yields highly accurate results that replicate the correlation structure of the ANES.

Who Fits the Left-Right Divide? Partisan Polarization in the American Electorate

How has the American public responded to elite partisan polarization? Using panel data from both the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the American National Election Studies, we explore the partisan consequences of the discrepancy between the one-dimensional structure of elite policy preferences and the two-dimensional structure of citizens’ policy preferences. We find that those citizens with preferences that are consistently liberal or consistently conservative across both economic and social issues have responded to elite polarization with mass polarization. However, we also find that the sizable number of citizens who hold preferences on economic and social issues that do not perfectly match the menu of options provided by elite Republicans and Democrats have not responded to elite polarization; indeed, these citizens are more likely to shift their partisan allegiance in the short-term and less likely to strengthen their party identification in the long term.

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry: List Experiment Misreporting*

Objective. List experiment respondents may misreport the number of list items that they associate with in order to associate themselves with a socially desirable test item or to disassociate themselves from a socially undesirable test item. Tests for such misreporting were conducted. Methods. List experiments from the 1991 National Race and Politics Survey, the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project were analyzed or reviewed. Results. Evidence suggested that some respondents deflated their report more than necessary to avoid association with a socially undesirable test item. Conclusions. List experiments may provide inaccurate estimates of the percentage of the population to which the test item applies, but the direction of bias is predictable.

Primary Politics: Race, Gender, and Age in the 2008 Democratic Primary

Despite Barack Obama’s momentum in the early phase of the Democratic nomination, the process of selecting a nominee took longer than usual. Obama’s momentum, it seems, got stuck, and the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination was an unusually drawn out affair. Even when it appeared Barack Obama would win the nomination, many Clinton supporters said they would support John McCain in the general election. Why were some Democrats unwilling to join the Obama bandwagon once he emerged as a viable front‐runner – and ultimately the Democratic nominee? In this paper we bring a unique set of panel data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) to bear on questions about primary vote choice, examining the evolution of preferences over the unusually long and intense 2008 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. Attitudes about race predict vote choice in partisan contests; here we show that (conditional on the presence of a black candidate) these attitudes help explain the dynamics of candidate support over the prolonged intra‐party contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.