Presidential Contest Research Articles

The changing South in presidential elections

We examine presidential elections in the American South. Our empirical starting point is the 2008 election of Democrat Barack Obama. We discuss political dynamics leading up to this historic contest but focus our analysis on the last four elections concluding with the defeat of President Trump in 2020. Tapping into recent southern politics scholarship emphasizing partisan patterns that differ based on population growth (or lack thereof), we show how this factor affects presidential voting with an assemblage of data collected at the state-, county-, and individual-level. We first consider the prominence of presidential Republicanism across the 11 southern states. Next, we delve into these states’ counties to further assess two-party competition in presidential contests. Finally, drawing on Cooperative Election Study (CES) data, controlling for a host of factors, we examine whether varying population rates at the state- and county-level affect presidential preferences. The U.S. South is forever changing, and in presidential politics substantial alterations to its electorate generally favor an emerging Democratic Party.

Make America hate again? Before and after Trump, there were differences in how Muslims and Islam were portrayed in American media

ABSTRACT Islamophobia has historically been used to refer to racism, prejudice, and securitization, indicating that these are structural, cognitive, or cultural aspects of the issue. The term now refers to an Islamophobic social structure in the West, where people tend to act in a way that is hostile against Islam and everything that it represents, according to the current study. The prefix neo has thus been introduced by the researchers to this phrase to account for the psychological aspect of Islamophobia, which shows itself in behaviors and discourses. In order to comprehend the nature of Islamophobia in the UK and the USA, this research aims to investigate Islamophobic discourses in the media of these two Western cultures. Using the DHA analytical methodology, it examines 446 top stories from The Washington Post (The Post editorial board has supported Democratic candidates for federal, state, and municipal offices in the great majority of U.S. elections. Decisions on endorsements and the editorial board of the newspaper are made independently of journalistic activities. It wasn't until 1976 that the Post consistently endorsed candidates for president. The Post has never backed a Republican for president in the general election since it endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976. Instead, it has consistently supported Democrats in presidential contests. Despite this, the Post declined to either Republican nominee Vice President George H. W. Bush or Democratic candidate Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential contest. Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton in 2016, and Biden in 2020 were all backed by the Post editorial board (The Washington Post, 2020).) and The Independent (The Independent is typically characterized as liberal, liberal-left, and center to center. The paper's founders believed that readers from The Times and The Daily Telegraph would be its primary audience when it was first founded in 1986 and aimed for its political stance to match the middle of the British political spectrum. It is more of a rival to The Guardian because of perceptions that it leans left on the political spectrum. On economic matters, The Independent, however, leans liberal and pro-market. The Independent described itself as a proudly liberal publication on Sunday (Luce, 2019).) between November 2016 and December 2017. This study finds that although Neo-Islamophobia is more prevalent in the US, where it is considered as a challenge to the socio-political order, classic Islamophobia is more prevalent in the UK, where Islam is seen as a threat to Europe's symbolic identity. It suggests a cycle of neo-Islamophobia that starts with problematizing Islam and moves on to ultimately securitizing Muslims.

Protest, Violence, and Illiberal Populism In Turkey, 2013–2019: A Network Perspective

AbstractThis article argues protest and violence between 2013 and 2019 both strengthened Turkey's competitive authoritarian regime in the short term and significantly weakened it over time. Crises in liberal democracy create opportunities for illiberal populists to build tightly bounded, vertical networks of supporters, but public disruptions can reconfigure such informal structures and allow new opposition networks to emerge. Using process tracing, the study shows how President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's attempts at building a dominant, religious‐nationalist community failed in the face of the 2013 protests in Istanbul and the violence around the 2015 national elections. These, in turn, altered the ruling party's vertical network. In Istanbul, the opposition took advantage of these changes to create a more pluralistic network and win the 2019 mayoral vote. After a narrow loss in the 2023 presidential contest, the opposition parties ran separately in the 2024 local elections and triumphed, pointing toward a post‐Erdoğan party system. Attention to both government and opposition networks and how they change helps illustrate the dynamics of illiberal populist regimes.

When Does Old Become Too Old?

“For Voters, When Does Old Become Too Old?”: this question heads the February 9, 2024 subscriber-only piece by Nate Cohn in The New York Times referring to the presumptive presidential contest in the U.S. between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. The answer? “Polling shows it’s a broad concern expressed about President Biden, not just one person’s opinion.” Cohn’s piece, which prompted 1236 comments that very day (they constitute my dataset for this reflection), is only one in an avalanche in the news and on social media in the U.S. and beyond that provides us with a window into attitudes toward aging in general and aging in relation to the American presidency in particular.

The communist imaginary in Indonesia’s 2014 and 2019 presidential elections

ABSTRACT This article investigates rumours of a communist resurgence as a recurring theme invoked in Indonesian politics. In both the 2014 and 2019 presidential contests, Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was accused of being a PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia) adherent, and a false narrative that he was the ‘communists’ candidate’ persisted throughout the campaigns. Despite the PKI having been banned and effectively defunct since 1966, large amounts of political disinformation that centred on its rebirth and the threat from communists dominated media narratives. The attack was expanded to include many key figures, including political elites and Jokowi’s allies and sympathizers. Using interviews with elite individuals and documentary research, this article argues that the ‘communist imaginary’ was deployed by campaign managers in the elections through the exploitation of constant anxieties regarding perceived villains. Furthermore, it has also been used as an excuse for military, as well as paramilitary factions, to grab greater power within the electoral context, as evidenced by their aggressive speeches and actions. The rumour of a communist threat, I will argue, provides a simple, effective way to distract the public from actual electoral issues.

Strategi Kampanye Arif Hamid Rahman dalam Mendapatkan Dukungan dari Anggota Persatuan Islam (PERSIS) pada Pemilihan Anggota Legislatif Jawa Barat tahun 2019

The 2019 election has captured the interest of the majority of Indonesians, particularly the dynamics and escalation of the presidential contest, in which supporters criticize each other's presidential candidates. The political symptoms that were plainly obvious, especially during the pre-campaign period, were the strengthening of political propaganda such as identity politics, particularly those related to religion. Arif Hamid Rahman, a Gerindra party cadre as well as a Persis cadre who ran for the West Java Provincial DPRD election in 2019, used community and youth organizations as tools in his success. This study was conducted in West Java Electoral District 1, specifically the cities of Bandung and Cimahi, with the goal of determining how Arif Hamid Rahman's campaign strategy to the Persis organization worked. By employing a descriptive qualitative research method to explain the phenomenon of the campaign strategy implemented using Pawito's campaign strategy theory, which includes segmenting, positioning, branding, and media strategy, as well as deepening each data and source in the form of interviews with relevant informants, documents, and reports that have a correlation with the campaign strategy implemented by Arif Hamid Rahman to gain support from members of the public. According to the findings of this study, Arif Hamid Rahman carried out each stage of the campaign strategy dimensions in accordance with Pawito's theory.

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler

Reviewed by: True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler Wendy Hamand Venet True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Clayton J. Butler. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 228. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7662-7.) In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Clayton J. Butler makes an important contribution to our understanding of Unionists in the Deep South during and after the Civil War. Butler asks several key questions. Who were these white men? Why did they remain loyal to the Union? How were they viewed in the North and the South? What roles did they play during and after the war? He seeks answers to these questions by focusing individual chapters on three Unionist military units: the First Louisiana Cavalry, the First Alabama Cavalry, and the Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. While acknowledging that his approach undervalues the important role played by Unionist women during the war, Butler notes that “donning a blue Federal uniform represented the most unambiguous expression of national allegiance one could make” (p. 2). Butler finds that white Unionists came from many backgrounds and professed a variety of motivations for their unconditional loyalty. Some were slave owners, while others were laborers motivated by class resentment. In New Orleans, many Unionists were German or Irish immigrants. Although some were former Whigs, many Unionists were Democrats who had voted for Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential contest of 1860. While some Unionists disliked slavery, most did not express sympathy for slaves as a motivation to enlist. Instead, they professed a strong dedication to the United States as a nation. For these men, secession represented a violation of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founders. Butler does not make a case that Unionist soldiers influenced the outcome of the war, but he does argue that these units had a respectable military record, fighting at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in the Red River campaign, and during William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Sherman, Butler shows, understood the public relations value of having Unionists serve in his ranks. Of greater [End Page 368] interest to Butler is the role of newspapers’ support of the Union or the Confederacy through the dissemination of information about soldiers’ allegedly heroic or traitorous efforts. Butler’s impressive newspaper research encompasses big city dailies and small-town papers, and it helps broaden the relatively narrow focus of his book. Another strength of this book is Butler’s discussion of the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre, in which Confederate soldiers under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest killed close to half the garrison of 585 U.S. soldiers rather than allowing them to surrender. While not taking attention away from the massacre’s Black victims, Butler notes that Forrest’s men also killed nearly one hundred white Unionists, as well as the commander of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, Major William F. Bradford. Bradford initially escaped the bloodshed but was executed by Forrest’s men several days after the massacre. Butler argues convincingly that the episode should be understood both as an expression of Confederates’ racial hatred and as their reaction to the presence of white and Black defenders of Union. In a volume of fewer than two hundred pages of text, the book’s coverage of Reconstruction is understandably brief and largely focused on Louisiana and Alabama. Although many white Unionists ultimately endorsed emancipation during the war, in the postwar period their diverse political views reemerged. Unionists played roles during both Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, but Butler joins other scholars in emphasizing that their failure to form a long-term alliance with African Americans contributed to Reconstruction’s broader failure. In his conclusion, Butler discusses the “relatively small place” unconditional Unionists occupy in both national Civil War memory and current historiography. Small in number but consequential nonetheless, these Deep South Unionists found “their voices drowned out by the chorus of returning Confederates and their descendants” (p. 166). Clayton Butler’s book reminds us of...

Has the electoral college grown more disproportional? An analysis of election results, 1876–2020

AbstractEspecially following the 2000 and the 2016 presidential elections, some authors have denounced the legitimacy of the Electoral College as a presidential selection method. It is alleged that the college is not representative of the electorate as a whole and tends to favor one specific political party. In this article, we compare the popular vote with the composition of the Electoral College for every presidential contest since 1876 (n = 37 elections). We confirm that the college is indeed disproportional as it provides a major bonus to the winning candidate. Although this disproportionality has become slightly stronger during the 1876–2020 period, it does not specifically benefit one political party. Measured at the level of the states, there is no substantial increase in bias with regard to geographic representation. However, to the extent that electoral races become tighter, as was the case in the last quarter of the 19th century, the risk that results fall within a margin of statistical error becomes larger. This suggests that the current controversy finds its source less in the electoral rules and more in the situational and highly competitive balance of party competition.Related ArticlesArdoin, Phillip J., and Bryan M. Parsons. 2007. “Partisan Bias in the Electoral College: Cheap States and Wasted Votes.”Politics & Policy35(2): 342–64.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00063.x.Crow, Deserai, and Laura Wolton. 2020. “Talking Policy in Congressional Campaigns: Construction of Policy Narratives in Electoral Politics.”Politics & Policy48(4): 658–99.https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12369.McKenzie, Mark. 2009. “Attitudes toward Electoral College Reform: Understanding Opinion Formation on Complicated Public Policy Issues.”Politics & Policy37(2): 265–88.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00172.x.

The Changing Political Economy of Music in Presidential Campaigns

Music has been a part of US presidential contests since George Washington first campaigned across the newly independent nation. In time, the country grew, the voting public was augmented, and new technologies and industries were invented. In the midst of these changes, both small and profound, music remained constant, but its role and uses underwent transformation. This article examines three advertisements in Presidential campaigns during the mass media age, from 1960 to the present, where music culture was an essential element of the message. These examples, a pro-Civil Rights ad featuring Harry Belafonte for John F. Kennedy in 1960, Will.i.am’s “Yes, We Can” for Barack Obama in 2008, and a tweet by Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media coordinator in 2020, all differ in their media platform, content and relationship to voters. Each analysis centers the socio-economic changes that accompanied each period and examines the relationship between the production of knowledge in industrial and post-industrial capitalism. These ads, their content, appeal, and codes are read through theories of industrial and post-industrial epistemology. Here, music serves as an entry into understanding the effect that economic change has on cultural production and reception. Music is a necessary feature of campaigns, but as the production and reception of knowledge change, so does the use of music by campaigns. The efficacy of these three ads depends on different relationships among campaigns, voters, and cultural products, and this relationship is always affected by dominant modes of production.

Heavy Lifting: Emotional Labor and Election Administration

The American democratic system depends on the regular execution of free and fair elections, delivered by front-line public workers. Local election officials (LEOs), their staff, and temporary election workers are tasked with providing excellent constituent service and expertise with a high degree of professionalism. Following the 2020 U.S. presidential contest, the very institution of elections has been under attack. This exploratory study investigates the impact of emotional labor on election workers in this atmosphere. The authors uncover the presence and nuances of emotional labor in election administration and raise questions about what this means for the future of election administration.

What's Local about Local Television News?

Because capturing and analyzing local television news broadcasts is difficult, most research on campaign ocverage by local television stations centers on a single candidate race and a limited number of news broadcasts. This article expands existing research by examining all prime time election coverage by Philadelphia's four network affiliates in the final 30 days of the 2004 campagin. These stations virtually abandoned coverage of local and statewied races in favor of the presidential contest. Most coverage focused on campaign stategy rather than issues, but there is little evidence of direct bias favoring either Democrats or Republicans. Although stations generally ignored nonpresidential elections, they gave a fair amount of coverage to the mechanics of voting, which may provide voters with valuable locally based election information.

Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney

Reviewed by: Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney Michael D. Robinson (bio) Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy. By William L. Barney. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 392. Cloth, $34.95.) Over the past five decades, William L. Barney has written extensively on secession, the Old South, and the Confederate experience, richly enhancing our understanding of how and why the nation plunged headlong into civil war in 1861. Barney's unparalleled expertise in the movement for disunion in the fifteen slaveholding states sparkles throughout Rebels in the Making. Primarily focusing on the period between the presidential campaign of 1860 and the summer of 1861, when the Middle South states of Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee exited the Union and joined the seven Lower South states in the nascent Confederacy, Rebels in the Making offers a fast-paced yet carefully argued narrative of the secession crisis. Familiar themes from Barney's earlier scholarship resonate in this book. Categorizing the push for secession as "a slaveholder-driven movement from the top" (4), the author emphasizes the anxieties, fears, and suspicions that increasingly worried white southerners in the 1850s and allowed an often-marginalized cadre of fire-eaters to make inroads in several slaveholding states after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860. Economic strains drove white southern angst: the price of land and enslaved persons steadily increased over the decade, distressing aspiring planters and limiting the opportunities for the South's landless population to achieve economic independence through the acquisition of real property. The frustrations of white workers in southern cities grew during the 1850s as free Black people and European immigrants offered business owners alternative labor options. Elites worried that the bubbling economic discontent from the lower classes in towns and cities might upset their carefully ordered society and used the pulpit, the press, and their own political power to channel the ire of the white populace toward meddling outsiders, such as abolitionists and Republicans. Barney scrupulously delineates the various opinions in the South about how to respond to these growing anxieties. Older, established planters who enjoyed greater economic stability normally stressed moderation, praised the safeguards for slavery within the Union, and, after Lincoln's election, preferred cooperation among the southern states to rectify the South's grievances. Outside of South Carolina—where depleted soil and soaring out-migration had produced nearly unanimous support for disunion among white elites—younger, aspiring slaveholders who came of age during the 1850s and confronted dwindling economic opportunities provided the vanguard for immediate, separate state secession. The younger [End Page 118] radicals calling for immediate secession may have been stymied were it not for a major drought that ravaged the South during the campaign of 1860. The failure of much of the South's corn crop caused food prices to soar and, along with the caustic presidential contest, placed the white southern populace on edge. Paranoia prevailed by the end of 1860: rumors of slave insurrections abounded, unknown strangers were branded as dangerous abolitionists, and pro-secession militias mobilized. "With the economy at a standstill, food shortages, unprecedented unemployment, insurrection scares, and continued reports of slave resistance," Barney writes, "conditions could not have been more favorable for secession" (135). With these circumstances converging toward the end of 1860, secessionists still had their work cut out for them, even in the Lower South. Barney chronicles how fire-eaters utilized propaganda, spectacle, and coercion to push the seven states of the Cotton South out of the Union between December 1860 and February 1861. The author credits South Carolinians Robert and Henry Gourdin, rather than such firebrands as Robert Barnwell Rhett, with charting a path forward for the disunion movement in the heady days following Lincoln's election. Through their 1860 Association, the Gourdins mobilized public support for secession and eased the concerns of southerners who dreaded following the South Carolina agitators who had led their state to disunionist dead-ends in 1833 and 1850. "The whole approach of the 1860 Association centered on structuring secession as a peaceful, law-abiding movement that would regain the...

Ruining Murray Chotiner: A Forgotten Chapter in the Rivalry Between the Kennedys and Nixon

AbstractMurray Chotiner began working for Richard Nixon in his first congressional race in 1946 and managed Nixon's successful 1950 senatorial campaign and 1952 vice‐presidential campaign as well as handling the vice president's campaign schedule in the 1954 mid‐term elections. Despite Nixon's trust in Chotiner, the latter played no role in Nixon's 1960 presidential contest against John Kennedy. This was in part due to JFK's younger brother, Robert Kennedy, who not only managed his brother's successful 1960 presidential campaign but, four years earlier, used his position as chief counsel of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee (aka the Senate Rackets Committee) to sully Chotiner's political reputation. This article explores this forgotten chapter in the rivalry between the Kennedys and Nixon.

The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976

The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976

Division, discord, and democracy: A forum on the 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign

ABSTRACT This forum examines the rhetoric of the 2020 U.S. presidential contest, assessing the health of U.S. democracy in the wake of the vicissitudes of the Trump era. The election of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and the defeat of Donald Trump amidst a global pandemic and following a summer of racial reckoning after the high-profile police killing of George Floyd, among others, created a divisive campaign environment that, as in 2016, included attacks against women, immigrants, and people of color. The essays illustrate the resilience of racist, sexist, and xenophobic rhetoric in political culture—even during a campaign cycle that resulted in progressive change. The authors’ reflections reveal how even when we try to disrupt these rhetorical currents in our politics, they persist: in the dismantling of presidential rhetorical norms; in how we understand democracy; in the selection of vice presidential running mates; and in rhetorical responses to disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976. By Daniel K. Williams

The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976. By Daniel K. Williams

Old Tip vs. The Sly Fox: The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation

Sophisticated political history is comprised of three overlapping but conceptually distinct elements—the unique, giving to the story its special flavor and identifying detail; the systematic, offering generalized context and causal explanation; and the original, indicating breaks in the time series and a precedent for future developments. Ellis’ account of the 1840 U.S. presidential election masterfully combines all three elements. The resulting volume is well-written and documented, articulate in presentation, rigorous in evidence, and plausible in argumentation.The 1840 presidential election is most often remembered for huge, raucous, popular demonstrations and distorted campaign appeals. The Whig Party portrayed its nominee, William Henry Harrison, as a great war hero from humble, log-cabin origins and denounced the Democratic incumbent, President Martin Van Buren, as pompous and out of touch. In the conventional version of the story, Van Buren’s defeat, ending twelve years of Democratic dominance, demonstrates the political potency of distracting hoopla and partisan vitriol.Ellis does not neglect the dynamics of 1840 presidential campaigning. In enormous detail, supported by more than 100 pages of endnotes, he traces the personal motivations and strategic calculations of the candidates and their supporters, from the struggle for nomination to the party conventions and ultimately to the presidential contest with its propaganda barrage by “cartoonists and wordsmiths” and a “veritable army of political speakers” (213). Nevertheless, Ellis’ explanatory emphasis lies elsewhere, in systematic rather than transitory factors. “All the songs and speeches, merriment and mud-slinging, mattered little,” he writes; by the time the American people became attentive, “the election, for all intents and purposes, had already been decided” (233). As shown in much social-science research, subjective party identification tends to be the most important determinant of voting preference. Few voters know, or even care, about the specifics of public policies. The causal arrow generally goes from party allegiance to policy stance and from party allegiance to symbolic assent, not the other way around (262).Significant deviation from partisan regularity is most often the consequence of economic expansion or contraction. Retrospective voting theory posits that elections are, to a large extent, referenda upon incumbents, attributing to them responsibility for national successes or failures. Unfortunately for Democratic Party prospects, the financial Panic of 1837 was especially painful. Ellis carefully correlates the downs and ups of economic depression, partial recovery, and renewed recession with the results garnered by the competing political parties at the polls, examined across the large number of state and district elections preceding the national contest. His first-rate analysis—a model of how to leverage the available historical data—concludes that the outcome in 1840 was rigorously predictable, depending less on deluded voters than on retrospectively calculating ones.Finally, the book highlights those political trends first appearing, or appearing to the perceptive observer, during the 1840 election. The study of interdisciplinary history has often focused upon situating events in time, investigating patterns, regularities, innovations, and breakpoints in a sequence. As featured in Ellis’ account, 1840 saw the first nominating conventions that did more than simply ratify the decisions by party leaders. For the first time, candidates abandoned the ostensible passivity of their back porch to pursue votes actively. Party organization strengthened, and populist appeals expanded. Slavery showed the first signs of disrupting intersectional party alliances. Voter turnout was much higher than ever before, for first time surpassing that of state and local elections. The 1840 election, beyond mere carnival-style entertainment, provided a distinct step in the development of a more presidentially centered U.S. politics.If the book is subject to any criticism, it would be that most of the formal social science is confined to the endnotes. This choice seems mistaken. Ellis may have felt that excursions into the language of contemporary social science might have disrupted the narrative flow. If so, he could have placed the formal analysis in boxed inserts or chapter appendixes. The study of interdisciplinary history entails the subtle merging of academically separate subfields. An adjustment to their balance in this book would have added yet another dimension to an otherwise excellent analysis.

What to Expect in the Wake of the 2020 U.S. Elections

The 2020 U S elections produced a close, but clear, victory for Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the presidential contest, a surprisingly slim majority for the Democratic party in the House of Representatives, and an even 50-50 split between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate 1 Newly elected Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris holds the deciding vote for party control in the Senate Thus, the Democratic party now controls the executive branch of the federal government and both Houses of Congress - a huge shift in the balance of political power

When does inequality demobilize? New evidence from the American states

Income inequality has been rising throughout the industrialized world, particularly in the United States. This long been thought to depress turnout, but extant research has yielded mixed findings. Here, I argue that the inequality-turnout relationship is conditional, depending crucially on election salience. I test this by using three decades (1984–2014) of panel data from the U.S. states and by leveraging the fixed and exogenous occurrence of presidential (higher-salience) and midterm (lower-salience) elections. Overall, I find a negative and statistically significant relationship between income inequality and voter turnout in midterm election years, but a substantively small and non-significant relationship in presidential election years. I attribute this to the ability of presidential contests, relative to midterms, to counteract the demobilizing influence of high inequality, by piquing voters’ interest and activating citizens who would otherwise abstain. Overall, these findings help us to better understand of the politics of electoral participation in an era of high, and rising economic inequality.

The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976 by Daniel K. Williams

The Election of the Evangelical: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and the Presidential Contest of 1976 by Daniel K. Williams