Center for the Study of Representation
Project Abstracts
The Mike Synar Graduate Research Fellowship
Catherine Barry
Military Service, the Military Institution and the Integration of First and Second Generation Immigrants
Ruth Bloch Rubin
The Strategic and Electoral Logics of Sub-Party Coalitions
Devin Caughey
Public Opinion, Ideology, and Representation in the One-Party South, 1930s-1960s
Sarah K. Cowan
Secrets, Lies, and Wishful Thinking: The Importance of Non-Truths for Sociological Theory and Practice
John Henderson
Running on the Brand: Party Reputation in Congressional Campaigns
Catherine Barry
Military Service, the Military Institution and the Integration of First and Second Generation Immigrants
Researchers suggest that for immigrants and the children of immigrants, mainstream institutions play key roles in the production and reproduction of socio-economic, political, and linguistic mobility (or lack of mobility) into the U.S. mainstream. However, they remain divided about the relationships between immigrant status and institutional context on the direction and magnitude of mobility and the mechanisms by which various outcomes occur. Therefore, I broaden the scope of institutional contexts by empirically examining the previously ignored U.S. military institution - the largest single employer in the United States with over 2.4 million active and reserve members.
My dissertation, Military Service, the Military Institution and the Integration of First and Second Generation Immigrants, tackles two broad, but interrelated questions: How does the U.S. military institution influence socio-economic mobility of immigrants and children of immigrants? And how do immigrants and their children actively engage the military institution in their search for socio-economic mobility? Thousands of immigrants and children of immigrants enlist and separate from the military each year and this population of veterans currently numbers close to 3 million.
Using in-depth qualitative interviewing and quantitative analyses of nationally representative data, this dissertation will advance our understanding of roles of institutions in immigrant integration and how immigrants and their children navigate institutional pathways in their quest for mobility. The funds provided from the Mike Synar Graduate Research fellowship are being used to purchase a digital audio recorder, Atlas.ti qualitative analysis software, transcriptions and gift cards for study participants.
Ruth Bloch Rubin
The Strategic and Electoral Logics of Sub-Party Coalitions
What accounts for the ability of some party members to challenge their leaders for control of policy outcomes in Congress, but not others? Key to understanding the power individual members of Congress wield within a coalition is to consider the degree to which those legislators are represented by a formal sub-party organization with procedures, powers, and resources akin to those of their official party leadership. My dissertation project concerns the development of these types of sub-party organizations or coalitions. Specifically, the project explores the origins and electoral significance of the Insurgent Republicans of the early 20th century, the Southern Dixiecrat Caucus, active during the middle portion of the 20th century, and the contemporary Blue Dog Coalition. I pay particular attention to the collective action dynamics underlying the development of these three groups. In brief, I argue that such organizations are established and maintained with two distinct purposes. First, sub-party coalitions coordinate the activity of pivotal legislative blocs so that potential dissidents from the party as a whole can reframe policies, avoid punishment and gain leverage with the party leadership. Second, sub-party coalitions provide legislators with an important "modifying reputation," a constituent cue to voters, to be used in concert with or in place of the national party brand.
With the generous support of the Mike Synar Graduate Research Fellowship, I will use the records at the Library of Congress to analyze the mobilization strategies adopted by Insurgent Republicans. In addition, I will travel to the University of Virginia and the Kansas Historical Society to view two of the largest holdings of materials relevant to the House insurgency. Taken together, these records represent an invaluable opportunity to understand why progressive Republicans chose to form a sub-party coalition in the first instance, and why leaders selected particular organizational mechanisms over others.
Devin Caughey
Public Opinion, Ideology, and Representation in the One-Party South, 1930s-1960s
Caughey's dissertation examines the one-party politics of the American South during the mid-20th century, the decades just before the region's transition to a fully democratic political regime. His research focuses of the sources of ideological differences among Southern members of Congress, specifically the degree to which this variation is the result of responsiveness to constituent preferences or of other factors, such as the structure of local political competition. The dissertation addresses important issues in American political development, such as the mass bases for Congressional Southerners' turn against New Deal liberalism in the late 1930s and 1940s. It also sheds light on more fundamental questions, such as how the representational relationship operates when elections and other democratic institutions are present but highly compromised. The data for this project are derived from early public opinion polls from this period as well as from archival and other sources. The Synar Graduate Research Fellowship is financing the data collection for Caughey's dissertation, particularly his research trips to historical archives in the South and elsewhere.
Sarah K. Cowan
Secrets, Lies, and Wishful Thinking: The Importance of Non-Truths for Sociological Theory and Practice
Sarah K. Cowan's dissertation examines how and when people conceal the truth about their personal lives and how the concealment affects the diffusion of information, attitudes and behavior. Models of influence assume that individuals are completely forthright whereas micro-sociology and our everyday lives, tells us that is not the case. When secrets are taken into account in these models, the exposure process becomes paramount. The Synar fellowship will pay for data collection on one test case of this inquiry – who American women tell about their abortions. Pilot data reveal that women and their confidants tell people who are already supportive of abortion. As such, people who are supportive of abortion rights hear their acquaintances secrets about abortion whereas people who are opposed to abortion do not. This patterned diffusion of information is interesting in its own right and has implications for opinion formation and change.
John Henderson
Running on the Brand: Party Reputation in Congressional Campaigns
My dissertation will investigate the choices that U.S. candidates make in their campaigns as strategic members of a collective party organization. Indeed, the project is motivated by a central question: When do congressional candidates run with or away from their party at election time?
Due to the lack of historical advertising data, we know relatively little about the kinds of issues and statements candidates typically highlight in their campaigns, especially prior to 2000. Moreover, we have only a limited understanding of the role that parties play in today's candidate-centered, but highly polarized electoral climate. This lacuna is especially troubling since much of the congressional literature relies on essentially untested assumptions about the electoral behavior of congressional candidates in good and bad party years.
To shed greater light on this question, I aim to conduct a systematic and comprehensive study of congressional campaign advertising over the last forty years of partisan polarization. I will code and analyze the content of between 10,000 to 20,000 radio and television congressional ads aired between 1968 and 2008 and housed at the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive, at the University of Oklahoma. The focus of this analysis will be to explicitly examine the strategic statements communicated directly to voters by candidates in these advertisements. I intend to use the Mike Synar Fellowship in order to support this research over four months while on-site in at the Kanter Archive in Norman, Oklahoma.
