DECISION MAKING, COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE

My primary line of research focuses on how citizens process political information in order to make a voting decision. Much of the work I do is experimental. My experiments are designed to trace the information search and acquisition process as voters learn about candidates. Richard Lau, of Rutgers University, and I have built a unique dynamic information board in order to carry out these process-tracing studies. At the moment I am using this technique to examine the role of both affect and cognition is the decision process.

Books from this project:

Rick Lau and I have published a book, How Voters Decide, with Cambridge University Press in 2006 that provides lots of information about this project. Information on the paperback version of the book is available here, and it can be ordered from Amazon. This book won the Alexander George Book Award for best book in political psychology from the International Society of Political Psychology.

I also have an edited volume, Feeling Politics, Published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. It's on the Palgrave site and Amazon as well, though only available in hardback. This book came out of a conference on affect and politics I held at the University of Iowa in 2003.

Motivated Reasoning and Voter Decision Making: Affect and Evaluation
Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association and at the International Society of Political Psychology, 2004.

The Role of Memory in Voter Decision Making
Paper presented at the 1996 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

ATTITUDES TOWARDS POLITICAL CORRUPTION

I am working with Jay McCann (Purdue) on a project to tease out the attitudes voters and citizens have towards political corruption. The project started with an exit poll in the 2000 presidential election carried out in a number of cities across the country. In the end we had six cities where the exit poll resulted in enough data to make assessments of corruption attitudes. These cities include three small Midwestern places - Iowa City, IA, West Lafayette, IN, and Kenosha, WI, along with three large cities - New Orleans, Miami, and New York. The results provided a baseline to understand how voters condition their views of corruption on the actions being taken and how those perceptions impact voting decisions. Since that time, Jay and I have gathered additional data in a New Hampshire primary (2004) and through a national sample survey based experiment using TESS.

Papers from this project include:

A LOCAL ANGLE

I carried out exit polls in the Iowa City/Coralville area since 2000 with the help of students in my classes. Some of the interesting local questions/issues for 2002 are presented here in an Adobe PDF format. This presentation focuses on the US House race in IA-2, and three issues of local Iowa City/Coralville interest. We also did the poll again (with a few changes) in 2004. Some results of that poll, focused on the Iowa City area can be found here. Some more results with a focus on gender are here. And here are some local findings from the November 7, 2000, exit poll in Iowa City and Coralville (Powerpoint slides.)

Service Learning

I have always incorporated"hands-on" learning in many of my classes. For example, students in my campaigning class must actually work in a campaign. Students in several of my classes have carried out exit polls. And so on. Recently though I have become more involved in the pedagogy of "service learning" or "civic engagement." In Summer 2005 I was a participant in the first UI Service Learning Institute put on the the UI Center for Teaching. In February 2006 I presented a paper (see below) at the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference discussing some of the challenges in doing service learning/civic engagement courses in political science. This paper was presented with an undergraduate student, Nora Wilson, who worked on the project with me. Some of my interests in service learning were recently posted on the UI Year of Engagement website. And I am now working with Jennifer New, Teresa Magnum, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies on a graduate student civic engagement institute planned for Winter 2006/07.

The paper I presented with Nora Wilson, Local Political Involvement and Service Learning is now available by clicking on the link (PDF).

Tom Rice (also an Iowa political scientist) and I are editing a volume on civic engagement and state and local government to be published by Jossey-Bass. The current timetable aims for a fall 2008 publication date.

The Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy was held in January 2007 with a second institute in January 2008. Teresa Magnum, Jennifer New, and I put it together. There is lots of information about the institute and the fifteen grad students who were selected to be part of it on the Obermann website. .

Earlier projects:

THE ROLE OF OUTSIDE MONEY AND GROUPS IN CAMPAIGNS:

During the Iowa Caucus process in 1999-2000, I was engaged in a research project to track the role of outside money in the nominating process, as part of a five state team coordinated out of Brigham Young. The results were published in a monograph David Magelby, Editor, Getting Inside the Outside Campaign. You can read it online.

For 2002 Art Sanders of Drake Univ. and I again worked with Magelby's group tracking the role of money and interest groups in the Iowa Congressional and Senate elections. In particular I followed the 1st & 2nd CD races, while Art followed CD's 3 & 4. The resulting paper was part of an E-Symposium in the journal PS, July 2003.

HATE SPEECH

In 1997, with Milton Heumann and Tom Church, I edited a volume called Hate Speech on Campus. It is still available at Amazon, and includes a chapter of mine examining the way Duke University addressed multicultural education in the early 1990's.