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The conventional wisdom about negative political advertisements holds that no one likes them, but they work, that is, they have the consequences their sponsors intend. Moreover, many analysts have expressed concern over the detrimental effects of such negativism on the American political system. We examine the accuracy of the conventional wisdom and the legitimacy of the fears about the consequences for the political system via meta-analysis, a systematic, quantitative review of the literature. The data do not support either contention. Negative political ads appear to be no more effective than positive ads and do not seem to have especially detrimental effects on the political system. Eleven subsidiary hypotheses about particular circumstances in which significant effects are likely to be found are tested and rejected. Discussion focuses on why negative political advertisements have become so popular in practice when there is so little evidence that they work especially well.

Summarizing the major findings of literature on hook-up culture, we propose a new research agenda focusing on when and why this sexual subculture emerged. We explore a series of hypotheses to explain this sexual paradigm shift, including college and university policies, the gender distribution of students, changes in the nature of alcohol use, access to and consumption of pornography, the increased sexual content of non-pornographic media, rising self-objectification and narcissism, new marriage norms, and perceptions of sexual risk. We then recommend new directions for research, emphasizing the need to explore structural and psychological as well as cultural factors, the role of discrete events alongside slowly emerging social change, the need for intersectional research and studies of non-college-attending and post-college youth, and the benefits of longitudinal and cross-college designs.

This paper clarifies the theoretical bases for expecting women to be more supportive of government programs than are men. We identify several factors not developed in past literature: (1) differences in emotional responses to social problems, (2) gendered differences in the awareness of those problems among one's own kin, (3) differences in the perceived fairness of existing social institutions, (4) differences in the perceived efficacy of government programs, and (5) variations in the preferred form that those programs should take. Testing hypotheses using data from a 1995 survey of public opinion covering five policy domains, we find that the gender gap in these domains is substantial, comparable to that associated with race and partisanship. These differences are attributable in part to factors identified previously in the literature-such as gendered differences in perceived opportunity-but are also affected by differences between men and women in the perceived efficacy of government programs (e.g., the extent of fraud and abuse) and differences in the preferred form those programs should take.Since the early 1980s, indications of a "gender gap" in the American electorate have consistently captured public attention. The election of 1996 was marked by media reports that differences in political attitudes between men and women had significant consequences for both congressional and presidential outcomes . Although a recent fixture of popular debate, the study of differences in the political assessments and voting choices of women and men has an historical pedigree dating back to the early twentieth century (Renfrew 1994).

This paper examines the role of self-interest and symbolic attitudes as predictors of support for two domestic policy issues-guaranteed jobs and incomes and national health insurance-in the American National Election Survey (ANES) between 1972 and 2004. As was the case in 1976 when Sears, Lau, Tyler, and Allen (1980) first explored this topic, symbolic attitudes continue to be much more important predictors of policy attitudes than various indicators of self-interest over the 30 years we analyze. We explore this finding further to determine whether any individual/internal and external/contextual variables affect the magnitude of self-interest effects on policy support. Five possible internal moderators of self-interest effects are examined: (1) political knowledge, (2) issue publics, (3) political values, (4) social identifications, and (5) emotions, but none are found to boost the magnitude of the self-interest effect. However, we do find some evidence that contextual variables representing the social/information environment moderate the impact of selfinterest on public opinion.

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