Objective. The proliferation of voter identification (ID) laws in the American states has spawned a growing literature examining their causes and effects. We move in a different direction, focusing on public opinion toward these laws. Methods. Drawing on a battery of questions in the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we explore why some respondents believe these laws prevent fraud while others believe they disadvantage political participation. Results. We find that partisanship shapes respondents' attitudes about the effects of voter ID laws, but in different ways. Democrats, whose opinions vary according to ideology, education, attention to politics, and racial resentment, are divided. Republicans, however, are markedly more united in their support of voter ID laws. Conclusions. These differences, we argue, are consistent with an elite-to-mass message transmission reflecting the current context of polarized party politics and the variation in the voter coalitions comprising the Democratic and Republican parties.
Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior in the United States has become much more nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become more one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing literature finds that citizens have only weakly and belatedly mimicked elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens, but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using biennial estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state over the past six decades, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across senators' partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress. Overall, our findings contradict the reigning consensus that polarization in Congress has proceeded much more rapidly and extensively than polarization in the mass public.
An atomic beam polarized ion source, used heavily since 1989 for producing polarized H± and D± beams for experiments between 25 keV and 20 MeV, has been modified to accept a Lamb shift, spin-filter polarimeter. In this source, polarized ground-state H or D atoms enter an electron cyclotron resonance ionizer where they are stripped to produce an outgoing positive polarized ion beam. When negative ions are desired, cesium vapor is introduced into a downstream charge-exchange canal. The polarimeter, based on an atomic physics concept first developed to produce nuclear-spin-polarized beams at Los Alamos, is designed to monitor the polarization of 2S1/2 metastable H or D atoms emerging from the cesium canal. Metastable 2S1/2 atoms created by electron pickup in a collision with cesium are ‘‘filtered’’ by the polarimeter according to magnetic substate, as the magnetic field imposed on the polarimeter cavity is tuned between 53 and 61 mT. Photons produced by subsequent quenching of these filtered atoms to their ground state are monitored downstream by a phototube to reveal the magnetic substate population of the incident positive beam. To install the polarimeter cavity and phototube assembly, the existing polarized ion source was lengthened by 30 cm. Installation is complete, and comparisons with calibrated nuclear polarimeters have shown agreement to better than 0.023. Principles of operation, a description of the hardware, measurements for cross calibration, and impressions gained from its use are all presented.
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