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When people trust the government, they are more likely to support its policies, especially those that require sacrifice (Hetherington 2005). However, "the government" is a complex and amorphous set of institutions. Depending upon what parts of the government become salient, the public's understanding of the nature and functions of it changes. Following the New Deal and the Great Society, people most often thought of government in terms of its ability to deal with race and welfare policy policies. We find, however, that the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Bush administration's response ushered in a new era in which people began to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. As a consequence, we witness a change in how trust matters. Political trust ceased to affect attitudes about redistribution and race-targeted programs and started to affect foreign policy preferences. Our analysis of the 2000-2004 ANES Panel Study and the 2004 ANES Time Series Study shows this change transformed political trust from a reservoir of support for programs that serves the least well off to a factor leading people to favor interventionist and hawkish foreign policy. These results contribute to a somewhat new understanding of political trust. Specifically, the policy domains that become salient determine which policy preferences political trust affects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a theory of presidential campaign persuasion as a valence dimension. From 1976-2004, we find that presidential oratorical skills cause moderate voters to vote contrary to issue preferences, while more extreme voters vote based on issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the political sorting of churches in the U.S. It states that political scientists believe that religion is static at the individual level but exogenous at the political level. It further states that people make choices based on the acceptance of religious organization which reflects their values, attitudes and worldviews but this ultimately results in formation of politically polarized churches.

Beliefs in the prophecies of Doomsday help predict the foreign policy opinions of the electorate in the contemporary United States. I analyze several national public opinion surveys to show that theology drives the foreign policy evaluations of many Christians. Specifically, adherence to Christian apocalyptic theology leads to support for a wide-range of issues related to interventionist foreign policies in the Middle East. Those who literally believe in the Book of Revelation’s Armageddon narrative display more distrust of Muslims and of the United Nations. They are also more likely to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that the United States was justified in entering Iraq. Further, Doomsday believers are more likely to show support for Israel and support for George W. Bush. These relationships hold in multivariate contexts controlling for partisanship and other demographic factors. These findings inform a broader understanding of the psychological and theological mechanisms linking religion to public opinion and political behavior in general. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can a candidate's non-policy valence advantages over his or her opponent cause voters to vote contrary to their ideological preferences? More specifically, can superior rhetoric or linguistic skill from a presidential candidate communicated during the course of a campaign cause voters to cast ballots contrary to their ideological preferences? Scholars have long argued that the power of persuasion is a critical one for presidents, though the differential in rhetorical skills between competing presidential candidates has rarely been examined. We offer a theory of presidential campaign persuasion as a valence dimension, arguing that voters prefer skillful communicators in their presidential candidates in addition to standard vote predictors such as ideological distance and partisanship. Theoretically, this desire for skillful speakers is partly a preference for presidential competence, though the voters may also simply prefer good communication skills as an end in and of itself. Using NES data paired with scaled estimates of presidential rhetoric quality, we examine citizen vote decisions in all presidential elections from 1976-2004. Our results suggest that the effects of valence traits (presidential oratorical skills) do cause some voters to choose the candidate further from them ideologically. However, voters extremely close to one candidate, though distant from the other, are not persuaded by presidential speaking. To measure presidential oratorical skills, we scale presidential debates for (1) reading ease and (2) the grade level of speaking of each presidential candidate (e.g., one of Ross Perot's debate performances in 1992 was at a 7th grade reading level, while Ronald Reagan's 1980 debate performance measured in at over an 11th grade level). Voters are more likely to vote for the candidate who speaks at the grade level that most closely matches their own educational backgrounds, with highly educated voters more likely to vote for those with complex rhetoric and less educated voters more likely to vote for those with simpler rhetoric. We conclude by discussing implications for voting behavior, presidential persuasion, and the relative importance of ethos versus logos in voter decision-making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do white individuals, exposed to the fact that nationwide, the minority population is growing and will in a few decades surpass the white population, respond to the changing balance of power that may accompany changing demographics? We believe this question is particularly salient given 1) the 2008 census projections that by 2042, non-Hispanic whites will be less than 50% of the total United State's population; 2) the presence of a record number of blacks and Latinos in positions of local, state and federal positions of power; and 3) the election of the first black man as the nation's Commander in Chief. We will probe the saliency of these phenomena through a survey experiment. We hypothesize that white individuals exposed to a "racial threat" questions referencing 1) whites becoming a numerical minority and 2) increases of blacks and Hispanics in positions of political power will be a) less likely to support federal policies like affirmative action and b) more likely to support "strict" immigration policies than white individuals not exposed to the "racial threat" cue. We believe our project will make a timely addition to public opinion literature as well as shed light on race relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]