Elections

Social issues — and the associated “culture war” in America — continue to play prominent roles in politics. There is an ingrained notion of a static political standoff: To many, the country seems split into two camps that have stubbornly dug in on issues. But survey data suggests that public support for some social issues has fluctuated significantly over recent history.

Public policy issues such as taxation, health care and the deficit are enormously complex, and political organizations compete to define the “correct” positions on issues. While it is often assumed that citizens take their cues from political party leaders, little research has been done on these dynamics of influence.

From the Scholars Strategy Network, written by Michael Leo Owens, Emory University

Exit polls are surveys conducted as voters leave their polling place on Election Day. Reaching voters at that moment is important because it overcomes the problem pollsters have conducting telephone polls: people tend to misreport whether they voted or not. The “who won and why did they win” coverage on election night, of course, comes mainly from these exit poll results.

With the first-ever election of an African-American president, a debate began immediately about what this signaled in terms of American racial progress, and whether or not a “post-racial” society might be closer to realization. To test attitudes about the meaning of this event in real time, researchers at the University of Michigan surveyed the same random representative sample of the population directly before and after President Obama’s election.

Many take for granted the idea that, in all cases, an influx of new immigrants to an area will appear threatening to established residents and such close contact helps explain racial tensions. Though this notion of “racial threat” helped explained previous chapters in American history, it remains an open question whether or not this theory applies to newer situations, with other ethnic dynamics. The most salient such situation now in American life relates to the movement of Latinos into many new areas.