Changing Ideological Boots: Adaptive Legislator Behavior in Changing Districts

Congressional roll-call votes are often used to investigate legislative voting behavior. To depict adaptive roll-call behavior in response to demographic changes that occur during redistricting, I use issue specific interest group scores from the ADA, NFU, and COPE. This exploits the bias in the selection of the issues that interest groups utilize to rate U.S. representatives, by using them to reflect changes in response to significant demographic fluctuations in the constituency population. The findings indicate that while party is the most significant factor in whether legislators adapt their voting in favor of certain groups, they do notice group composition changes within district and adapt their voting accordingly. This illustrates the impact of redistricting on policy and legislators' adaptation to changes in district composition

Smartphone-size screens constrain cognitive access to video news stories

Smartphones are expanding physical access to news and political information by making access to the internet available to more people, at more times throughout the day, and in more locations than ever before. But how does the portability of smartphones – afforded by their small size – affect cognitive access to news? Specifically, how do smartphone-size screens constrain attentiveness and arousal? We investigate how mobile technology constrains cognitive engagement through a lab-experimental study of individuals’ psychophysiological responses to network news on screens the size of a typical laptop computer, versus a typical smartphone. We explore heart rate variability, skin conductance levels, and the connection between skin conductance and the tone of news content. Results suggest lower levels of cognitive access to video news content on a mobilesized screen, which has potentially important consequences for public attention to current affairs in an increasingly mobile media environment

What makes the news? The institutional determinants of the political news agenda

Mass media is the major source of information citizens use in forming their political opinions. As such, decisions made by the media define the scope of what we know about the political world. This dissertation argues that what the media decides to cover is a result of its own institutional and organizational structures, and that this has important implications for the information citizens are left with to make political decisions. Like any institution in a political context, the media is subject to its own internal pressures and organizational dictates. Institutional factors operate in media organizations as they do in any organization, with norms, rules and incentives shaping decisions and behaviors. Interestingly, how these factors work to shape the news agenda has not often been studied by political scientists. Though many acknowledge the vital role of the media as an institution within our political system, we lack any complete empirical investigation of the institutional factors by which the behavior of media outlets is governed. This work addresses the following research question: How do the institutional and contextual features of local media outlets affect their coverage of local political issues? Using election 2004 news coverage of two major competitive statewide races, I examine the election coverage of 40+ individual news media outlets as a function of their institutional characteristics and market context

Preregistrations Temple Protocol Spring 2018

Here are the pre-analysis plans stored

Elites are people, too: The effects of threat sensitivity on policymakers’ spending priorities

<div><p>Recent research suggests that psychological needs can influence the political attitudes of ordinary citizens, often outside of their conscious awareness. In this paper, we investigate whether psychological needs also shape the spending priorities of political elites in the US. Most models of policymaking assume that political elites respond to information in relatively homogeneous ways. We suggest otherwise, and explore one source of difference in information processing, namely, threat sensitivity, which previous research links to increased support for conservative policy attitudes. Drawing on a sample of state-level policymakers, we measure their spending priorities using a survey and their level of threat sensitivity using a standard psychophysiological measure (skin conductance). We find that, like ordinary citizens, threat sensitivity leads even state-level policymakers to prioritize spending on government polices that are designed to minimize threats.</p></div

Replication Data for: Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior

Replication data and code for "Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior", published online November 5, 2018 in the Journal of Communication