Political Science Scholarly Works

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  • Publication
    ‘Now More Than Ever, Survivors Need Us’: Essential labouring and increased precarity during COVID-19
    (Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), 2023-09-29) Schwarz, Corinne; Britton, Hannah; Nay, Eden D. E.; Holland, Christie
    During the earliest waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, much media and public discourse focused on the effects of increasing precarity on already vulnerable populations. As in-person work added a layer of viral risk and unemployment drastically exacerbated economic precariousness, the category of ‘essential worker’ gained new prominence in these conversations. In this paper, we focus on the complicated relationship between two groups of workers depicted as marginalised and exploited to different degrees during COVID-19: trafficked persons and anti-trafficking service providers. Though media coverage did not conflate these groups, it applied a capacious understanding of precarious labour and structural inequalities that encapsulated different types of essential work. We draw on media produced by frontline anti-trafficking and sex workers’ rights organisations between March and May 2020. Even with renewed attention to macro-level harms, many publications still emphasised individualism over collectivity. This emphasis on singular organisational representatives—frontline workers—as heroic rescuers mirrored larger, normative anti-trafficking discourses. At the point at which the ‘new normal’ was nowhere in sight, COVID-19 served as a flashpoint to reconsider current intervention strategies and instead emphasise a critique of precarious labour along multiple vectors.
  • Publication
    Understanding Risk and Prevention in Midwestern Antitrafficking Efforts: Service Providers' Perspectives
    (Reading Room, 2020-06-22) Britton, Hannah E.
    Since the 2000 passage of both the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the U.N.’s Palermo Protocols, human trafficking has gained a notable global presence as a human rights concern. Community organizations, nonprofits, scholars, policymakers, and service providers have developed programs to identify and address human trafficking. Despite these efforts, finding reliable methods to document and quantify the instances of human trafficking continues to challenge researchers. Moreover, many believe trafficking is a problem primarily located in urban areas or along national borders. Drawing from seven years of interviews with service providers who work in this sector, combined with survey results from an additional 722 service providers, this project adds to the growing body of research on human trafficking, specifically in the Midwestern United States. The findings of this study indicate that place and location matter in antitrafficking, especially with regard to availability of and access to resources across urban and rural areas. However, these service providers also identify similar concerns across regions with regards to trafficking warning signs and risk factors—for both sex and labor trafficking—as well as community resources that could prevent trafficking or alleviate vulnerability. These findings point toward the benefit of research that is geographically focused and involves both qualitative and quantitative research. Additionally, this research has uncovered unexpected groups of community members that may be vital in the identification and prevention of human trafficking. Though there is a growing body of research about the role of medical practitioners, law enforcement, foster care workers, and social workers in the struggle to address trafficking, there are other groups that also have important insight into the risks their communities face. Interviews revealed that firefighters have particular relationships with the communities they serve and may be ideally positioned to address human trafficking, exploitation, and vulnerability because of these relationships.
  • Publication
    A Prototype Comparison of Human Trafficking Warning Signs: U.S. Midwest Frontline Workers’ Perceptions
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-11-01) Schwarz, Corinne; Xing, Chong; Britton, Hannah E.; Johnson, Paul E.
    Guided by the cognitive prototype approach, this article examines the prototype structure of the frontline workers’ perceptions concerning warning sign indicators in human trafficking. Online survey responses across a range of workplace sectors were analyzed using multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) for three groups. These groups were based on respondents’ self-reported human trafficking experiences: no witness (no encounter of human trafficking), sex trafficking witness, and labor trafficking witness. The MG-CFA analysis revealed a three-factor structure – physical condition, reproductive health, and personal risk – representing the participants’ perceptions of the warning signs. Further analysis showed group-level mean (latent intercept) and variance differences between the prototype structures of the three witness groups. The final structural model results indicate that these group-level prototype differences can be explained by two organizational resource variables: identification protocol and training. The results are discussed in light of the current empirical literature on human trafficking identification, stereotypical frames of victimhood, and policy practices.
  • Publication
    Frontline Workers’ Perceptions of Human Trafficking: Warning Signs and Risks in the Midwest
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2018-12-26) Schwarz, Corinne; Xing, Chong; Daugherty, Ryan; Watt, Sierra; Britton, Hannah E.
    Research on human trafficking in the U.S. has centered overwhelmingly on coastal regions, border states, and urban hubs. In an attempt to understand perceptions of exploitation and human trafficking more broadly, this paper focuses on frontline workers in the Midwest. Service providers in the legal/law enforcement, medical, non-profit, social service, and foster care sectors often encounter exploited or trafficked persons in their work. Their perceptions offer a unique insight into how trafficking may manifest and how frontline workers interface with vulnerable, exploited, or trafficked persons seeking resources or assistance. Using survey data from 667 participants across two Midwestern states, we find important similarities in perceived trafficking warning signs and risk factors, as well as differences in how these providers can address their clients’ immediate needs. We present these findings through both descriptive statistical summaries of questions regarding micro-level and macro-level trafficking factors and qualitative data from a set of open-ended survey questions. Results indicate the need for better site-specific policy to address the nuances of anti-trafficking work across the Midwest.
  • Publication
    A Tale of Two Pandemics: Economic Inequality and Support for Containment Measures in Peru
    (SAGE Publications, 2021-08-11) Carreras, Miguel; Vera, Sofia; Visconti, Giancarlo
    Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately affected poor communities. However, relatively little is known about how this differential impact affected support for, and compliance with, COVID-19 lockdown policies. This article examines the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities and public opinion towards COVID-19 containment measures in Peru. Despite the strict quarantine measures adopted by the government of Peru, the country struggled to contain the spread of the disease. We designed and implemented a nationally representative survey in Peru and found that economically vulnerable sectors are more likely to oppose the quarantine and are more likely to defy the stay-at-home recommendations to leave home and go to work. Our contribution highlights that poor citizens’ housing and economic conditions can explain why the poor are more likely to react negatively to COVID-19 lockdown policies.
  • Publication
    Antidiscrimination Interventions, Political Ads on Transgender Rights, and Public Opinion: Results From Two Survey Experiments on Adults in the United States
    (Frontiers Media, 2021-08-19) Flores, Andrew R.; Haider-Markel, Donald P.; Lewis, Daniel C.; Miller, Patrick R.; Taylor, Jami K.
    Political advertisements can shift attitudes and behaviors to become more exclusionary toward social out-groups. However, people who engage in an antidiscrimination exercise in the context of an experiment may respond differently to such ads. What interventions might foster inclusive attitudes in the presence of political communications about social policy issues like transgender rights? We examined two scalable antidiscrimination exercises commonly used in applied settings: describing a personal narrative of discrimination and perspective-taking. We then showed people political ads that are favorable or opposed to transgender rights to determine whether those interventions moderate how receptive people are to the messages. Relying on two demographically representative survey experiments of adults in the United States (study 1 N = 1,291; study 2 N = 1,587), we found that personal recollections of discriminatory experiences did not reduce exclusionary attitudes, but perspective-taking had some effects, particularly among those who fully complied with the exercise. However, both studies revealed potential backfire effects; recalling a discriminatory experience induced negative attitudes among a subset of the participants, and participants who refused to perspective-take when prompted also held more negative attitudes. Importantly, political ads favorable toward transgender rights consistently resulted in more positive attitudes toward transgender people. Future work needs to carefully examine heterogeneous responses and resistance to antidiscrimination interventions and examine what particular aspects of the political ads induced the attitude change.
  • Publication
    Morality Politics and New Research on Transgender Politics and Public Policy
    (De Gruyter, 2019) Haider-Markel, Donald; Taylor, Jami; Flores, Andrew; Lewis, Daniel; Miller, Patrick; Tadlock, Barry
    Recent political debate over transgender military service and gendered bathroom use highlights a dramatic increase in salience over transgender issues in the US. In this essay, we examine a potential new front in the culture wars by reviewing recent empirical research in social science on the politics of transgender rights in the context of morality politics. Research on morality politics has often focused on LGBT rights, with an emphasis on gay and lesbian rights and little attention to transgender issues. We highlight the progress of research on transgender issues in the US, focusing on the study of attitudes about transgender people and rights, transgender rights in states and localities, and broader findings affecting transgender populations. Although there is ample research still needed, the current state of empirical social science on transgender issues has made great advancements in the past decade and shows that morality continues to shape LGBT politics and policy.
  • Publication
    Transgender prejudice reduction and opinions on transgender rights: Results from a mediation analysis on experimental data
    (SAGE Publications, 2018-03-19) Flores, Andrew R.; Haider-Markel, Donald P.; Lewis, Daniel C.; Miller, Patrick R.; Tadlock, Barry L.; Taylor, Jami K.
    Fears, phobias, and dislikes about minorities should be strong determinants of whether Americans support policies protecting such minorities. Studies suggest that discussions and information about transgender people can reduce transphobia. However, these studies also indicate that experimental treatments do not necessarily affect individual attitudes on policies concerning transgender rights. Scholars contend that durably reducing prejudice should increase public support for minority rights. In this study, we examine this causal mechanism utilizing an experiment. We find that reducing transphobia is a reliable mechanism to increase public support for transgender rights. These results are robust to causal identification assumptions, suggesting that this mechanism provides a clear avenue for stigmatized groups to increase public support of rights for those groups.
  • Publication
    Public Attitudes on Transgender Military Service: The Role of Gender
    (SAGE Publications, 2019-07-11) Lewis, Daniel C.; Tadlock, Barry L.; Flores, Andrew R.; Haider-Markel, Donald P; Miller, Patrick R.; Taylor, Jami K.
    Policy regarding the inclusion of transgender soldiers in the U.S. military has shifted back and forth in recent years, with public opinion likely a significant factor shaping the eventual policy outcome. As such, this study examines the factors that shape public attitudes toward military service by transgender people. In particular, we examine the influence of sex, social gender roles, and attitudes toward gender in shaping transgender military service attitudes. Further, we hypothesize that personal experiences with the military and with transgender people, along with values, personality predispositions, and religion, are likely to influence individual attitudes. We test these hypotheses using data from a unique October 2015 national survey of American adults. The results suggest that personal experiences, attitudes toward gender roles, and religion have substantial, but sometimes conditional effects on attitudes towards military service by transgender people.
  • Publication
    Motivated Innumeracy: Estimating the Size of the Gun Owner Population and Its Consequences for Opposition to Gun Restrictions
    (Wiley, 2018-11-20) Joslyn, Mark R.; Haider-Markel, Donald P.
    Past research suggests that people substantially overestimate the size of minority populations. Labeled “innumeracy,” inflated estimates of minority populations can have a negative impact on intergroup relations and influence policy attitudes toward minority groups. Our research examines people’s estimates of the gun owner population in the United States. We discover that people vastly overestimate gun ownership and similarly misjudge its future growth. Estimations of size are influenced by several determinants including gun ownership and affective orientations toward gun owners. Gun owners, compared to nongun owners, reported higher estimations of the gun owner population. In addition, positive feelings toward gun owners were associated with increased estimates of gun ownership. Affective orientations toward minority populations are in fact a key predictor neglected by prior innumeracy studies. Finally, estimations of the gun owner population, and judgments about its future growth, were both significant determinants of gun policy preferences.
  • Publication
    Immigrant legislation, across and within the United States
    (SAGE Publications, 2017-11-26) Reich, Gary
    State governments are now the principal source of immigrant legislation in the US. Existing research presents contradictory findings concerning the sources of pro- and anti-immigration state legislation. However, research has not adequately accounted for the multidimensional nature of immigrant legislation and the fact that many variables hypothesized to affect state legislation encompass both within-state, time-varying effects and time-invariant, cross-sectional effects. Measurement and research design strategies to address these problems are applied to a dataset of state immigrant legislation approved between 2005 and 2012. The findings are important because they show that partisan, demographic, and economic effects are often different within versus across states and may differently affect the volume versus the relative tenor of legislative output.
  • Publication
    The direct and moderating effects of mass shooting anxiety on political and policy attitudes
    (SAGE Publications, 2018-08-27) Joslyn, Mark R.; Haider-Markel, Donald P.
    In this article, we examine the effects of individual anxiety after the 2016 Orlando, Florida, mass shooting, which killed 49 people and wounded 58 others. Similar to prior research on the influence of anxiety, after the Orlando shooting anxious citizens supported policies and institutions perceived as protective and capable of minimizing future risks. In addition, anxiety counteracted ideology. Anxious citizens largely abandoned ideological processing, which resulted in a sharp reduction of differences between liberals and conservatives on essential beliefs and preferences associated with mass shootings. However, the degree of ideological abandonment turned on the alignment of ideology and anxiety. When anxiety about the Orlando shooting encouraged support for policies inconsistent with ideological preferences, the influence of ideology on subsequent preferences diminished notably. Conversely, when anxiety prompted support for policies consistent with ideological preferences, anxiety reinforced those preferences. The identification of ideological abandonment after Orlando, and the asymmetric influence of anxiety on political attitudes across ideology, are important contributions to theories of emotion and for research on tragic events.
  • Publication
    Amitai Etzioni: Communitarian Centrist and Principled Pluralist
    (Elsevier, 2018-03) Schumaker, Paul
    During his 60 year career at Columbia and George Washington Universities, Amitai Etzioni has made many contributions to interdisciplinary understandings of social movements, become a respected public intellectual addressing many American and trans-national contemporary issues, and been a founder and leader of the Commununitarian Network.
  • Publication
    Policy Responsiveness to Protest Group Demands
    (University of Chicago Press, 1975-05) Schumaker, Paul
  • Publication
    Aligned Across Difference: Structural Injustice, Sex Work, and Human Trafficking
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) Schwarz, Corinne; Kennedy, Emily J.; Britton, Hannah E.
    Feminist scholars and activists engage in meaningful, contentious debates about the relationships among sex, gender, power, and society. One of the most recent iterations of these arguments reinscribes the pleasure of sex positivity and danger of patriarchal exploitation onto new subjects: sex work and human trafficking. This paper brings together two separate empirically based research projects, one working with sex workers and the other working with members of the anti-trafficking community. As scholars working across these topics, we provide new normative propositions that may bridge these different approaches to resilience, survival, danger, and risk. We find that the real threat identified by our participants was the wide reach of the carceral state onto migrating, working, and trafficked bodies. Our projects find unexpected commonality in shared perceptions of pleasure, agency, and danger among sex workers, human trafficking survivors, and service providers working with trafficked persons. Current debates ignore the lived experiences of our participants, who attempt to find pleasure in context-specific agency and survival, and who locate danger in the looming forces of the security state, criminality, and structural inequalities.
  • Publication
    Islam and power legitimation: instrumentalisation of religion in Central Asian States
    (Taylor and Francis, 2016-03) Omelicheva, Mariya Y.
    How can Islam play multiple and contradictory roles as a source of violence and peace, and a marker of identity differences and national unity? This study argues that religion, as a system of beliefs, manifests itself through discourses, which not only render intelligibility to religious practices and beliefs but also serve as the instruments of social control and regulation. An infinite variety of organizational and ideological differences within Islam presents the possibility for instrumentalisation of religion by stakeholders interested in accomplishing distinctive political aims connected to political legitimation. The study offers an empirical analysis of instrumentalisation of Islam by governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and uses this evidence for developing a framework linking various discursive representations of religion to their political uses.
  • Publication
    Not a Woman, but a Soldier: Exploring Identity through Translocational Positionality
    (Springer Verlag, 2016-08-09) Doan, Alesha E.; Portillo, Shannon
    Recent debate over integrating women into U.S. military combat units presents an opportunity to examine the gender identities and experiences of women in the military. Here, we examine the context-dependent prominence of intersecting identities including work role and gender ascribed to female soldiers in Special Operations. Using a mixed methods approach, based on 28 focus groups with 198 soldiers and a survey conducted with 1701 men and 214 women, we argue that female soldiers’ experiences refute their male colleagues’ assumptions regarding their ability to serve in combat units. The experience of identity in the workplace is different for men and women because women experience fluidity in their identity depending on with whom they are interacting and where interactions occur, whereas men experience and understand gender identity as a fixed, static trait. Although women experience the fluidity of their gender identity based on context, their male colleagues remain oblivious to the contextual nature of gender identity while also maintaining their authority in policing the boundaries of gender in the military context. Our research adds nuance to literature on identity, demonstrating the fluctuating nature of ascribed identity, which shines light on the socially constructed, artificial barriers to women’s ascension in the workplace.
  • Publication
    John Rawls, Barack Obama, and the Pluralist Political Consensus
    (University of Chicago Press, 2016-10-01) Schumaker, Paul
    To counter partisan polarization, political theorists like John Rawls and political leaders like Barack Obama have sought to locate and express consensual elements of American culture that can appeal to or at least be accepted by people having political, religious, moral, and philosophical differences. While orthodox pluralism previously recognized the need for a normative consensus to regulate political struggles, a new principled pluralism expands on the contents of the American consensus by proposing many political principles and philosophical assumptions that are articulated at an intermediate level of abstraction, that express the emerging (though not always present) common sensibilities of most Americans, and that can be used to justify political policies and practices.
  • Publication
    Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media
    (SAGE Publications, 2015) Miller, Patrick R.; Bobkowski, Peter S.; Maliniak, Daniel; Rapoport, Ronald B.
    This study examines the relationship between political discussion on Facebook and social network location. It uses a survey name generator to map friendship ties between students at a university and to calculate their centralities in that network. Social connectedness in the university network positively predicts more frequent political discussion on Facebook. But in political discussions, better connected individuals do not capitalize equally on the potential influence that stems from their more central network locations. Popular individuals who have more direct connections to other network members discuss politics more often but in politically safer interactions that minimize social risk, preferring more engaged discussion with like-minded others and editing their privacy settings to guard their political disclosures. Gatekeepers who facilitate connections between more pairs of otherwise disconnected network members also discuss politics more frequently, but are more likely to engage in risk-tolerant discussion practices such as posting political updates or attempting political persuasion. These novel findings on social connectedness extend research on offline political discussion into the social media sphere, and suggest that as social network research proliferates, analysts should consider how various types of network location shape political behavior.
  • Publication
    Women's Activism in South Africa: Working Across Divides
    (University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009-03-19) Britton, Hannah E.; Fish, Jennifer N.; Meintjes, Sheila
    Women's Activism in South Africa provides the most comprehensive collection of women's experiences within civil society since the 1994 transition. This book captures South African women's stories of collective activism and social change at a crucial point for the future of democracy in the country, if not the continent. Pulling together the voices of activists and scholars, South Africa's path to democracy and the assurance of gender rights emerge as a complex journey of both successes and challenges. The collection elucidates a new form of pragmatic feminism, building upon the elasticity between the state and civil society. What the cases demonstrate is that while the state itself may not be a panacea, it still represents a key source of power and the primary locus of vital resources, including the rights of citizenship, access to basic needs, and the promise of protection from genderbased violence - all central to women's particular needs in South Africa.