The election of Democrats alone is not enough to ensure gay rights

Although Congressmen are elected to represent their districts and states, they will occasionally defy majority opinion to support the rights of a minority group. Drawing on data from House Democrats that voted against the popular Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Benjamin G. Bishin and Charles Anthony Smith determine that favorable district composition, membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, and competitive elections were associated with opposition to DOMA. They conclude that the difficulty of passing legislation to protect minority rights leaves the courts as the best option for such advancement

The Political Discussion Networks of Immigrants and Native Born Voters

Despite that fact that political discussion has become a more common topic of research in political science, and despite the fact that immigrants have begun to comprise a larger portion of the United States population, the content and effect of immigrant political discussion networks have not yet been examined. In this paper we examine whether engaging in political discussion is a means by which to encourage immigrants to participate in political activities. Our evidence shows that while immigrants are as likely as native born citizens to engage in political discussions, immigrants are less likely to share politically-relevant information during such conversations. Further analysis shows that immigrants are less likely to exchange information because they have weaker political predispositions than native born citizens. As a consequence, the relationship between political talk and political participation is not statistically significant for immigrants, suggesting that political discussion is not a sufficient means by which to encourage foreign born citizens to participate in civil society

Granting gay rights does not lead to public opinion backlash, even among evangelicals.

More than a year ago, the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples across the country had the right to marry. Ahead of that ruling, many commentators were concerned that there might be an anti-gay backlash if the right to marry was upheld by the Court. In new research using online survey experiments, Benjamin G. Bishin, Thomas J. Hayes, Matthew B. Incantalupo, and Charles Anthony Smith found no evidence of any backlash against same-sex marriage, even among more conservative groups such as Evangelical Christians

. The Political Discussion Networks of Immigrants and Native Born Voters

This is a work in progress; please do not cite without permission. We thank Scot

Replication Data for: “Issue Salience, Subconstituency Politics, and Legislative Representation”

To what extent are citizens able to control their elected officials? Does representation improve when issues become visible? Conflicting results in studies of legislative representation are frequently attributed to issue salience or subconstituency politics. However, most conclusions about the effect of issue salience rely on studies of responsiveness on issues held to be either important or visible. Consequently, we have little idea of how changes in salience serve to alter the representational relationship. To examine this question, we employ a natural experiment to exploit the sudden increase in issue visibility surrounding the consideration of the Armenian Genocide Resolution. We are unable to detect any evidence that salience (as measured by visibility) enhances responsiveness to majority preferences. Instead, salience appears to alter legislators’ sensitivity to different intense subconstituency groups in their districts

Deceit, diversity, or mobilization? Intra-ethnic diversity and changing patterns in Florida's Hispanic Vote

What explains President Bush's increased vote in the State of Florida in the 2004 election? A common perception is that implementation of electronic voting machines and a surge in GOP registration increased Bush's vote margins relative to the 2000 election. In this paper we offer an alternative explanation: massive Puerto Rican immigration combined with successful Republican mobilization of this group explains about 14% of the increase in Bush's margin of victory-approximately 50,000 votes. Scholars' failure to account for intra-ethnic diversity, by employing a "panethnic" approach that treats Latinos as having identical political preferences, leads scholars to overlook the important role of Hispanic subconstituencies in the 2004 election