Contact with individual lesbians and gay men leads to more positive evaluations of the group and more support for pro-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) public policies. Increasingly, gay rights activists are making "gay families" central to their communications to the public about gay issues and policies. This prompts a new question in the area of contact theory: does contact with same-sex couples have a different impact on attitudes about gays/lesbians and gay-related public policies than contact with gay/lesbian individuals? On general attitudes, the two versions of contact perform similarly, but in specific policies, divergence shows itself. Contact with couples is a stronger force in shaping support for expansion of same-sex partnership recognition. However, while contact with individual gay men and lesbians is a significant indicator, contact with couples is not on other issues raising questions about the effectiveness of the focus on "gay families" for the broader goals of the contemporary LGBT movement.1 Endogeneity is the possibility that the true lines of causality between the dependent variable and a crucial independent variable is reversed. In this area of research, it is the possibility that LGBT individuals are more likely to be open with already tolerant straight persons rather than the contact with LGBT folks promoting such tolerance.

Decades of research suggests that campaign contact together with an advantageous socioeconomic profile increases the likelihood of casting a ballot. Measurement and modeling handicaps permit a lingering uncertainty about campaign communication as a source of political mobilization however. Using data from a uniquely detailed telephone survey conducted in a pair of highly competitive 2002 U.S. Senate races, we further investigate who gets contacted, in what form, and with what effect. We conclude that even in high-profile, high-dollar races the most important determinant of voter turnout is vote history, but that holding this variable constant reveals a positive effect for campaign communication among ''seldom'' voters, registered but rarely active participants who-ironically-are less likely than regular or intermittent voters to receive such communication.

Generally speaking, campaign-related contact motivates voters. One form of such contact not much explored in the voter mobilization literature is the petitioning for ballot initiatives that occurs with considerable frequency in about half the states and even more localities. Using newly-available data that allow us to match individual petition signers with their subsequent election behavior, we explore the role of having had a hand in a ballot measure's qualifying stage in propelling individual voters to the polls. Specifically, we perform multivariate analysis on a random sample of 1,000 registered Arkansas voters, 1,100 registered Florida voters, and all 71,119 registered voters in Gainesville, Florida to measure the influence of petition-signing in spurring voter turnout. We find marginal effects in the statewide samples, but substantial and significant turnout effects in the Gainesville municipal election-an off-cycle, low-profile election. Furthermore, the effect of petition-signing-across all of our samples-is strongest among irregular, as compared to habitual, voters. These findings are in keeping with recent campaign mobilization experimental research and comport with previous findings on the ''educative effects'' of ballot measures on voter turnout. Keywords Voter mobilization Á Direct democracy Á Voter turnoutThe turnout question has occupied the attention of political scientists for decades. Early scholarship placed a heavy emphasis on resources, i.e., the higher a voter's

Just after three in four Arkansas voters endorsed a state constitutional amendment barring state recognition of same-sex marriages, a comprehensive state-level survey allowed a closer look into the attitudes of Arkansans on a variety of gay- and lesbian-related issues. When placed in the context of Arkansas's political culture and ideological patters, this serves as a case study of the relationship between public opinion, specific policy issues, and the diffusion (or nondiffusion) of policies in an individual state. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

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Objective. We test hypotheses about support for multiparty politics in the United States. We expect that individual‐level attitudes and state‐level partisan context determine who supports having more parties. Methods. Survey data are used to model attitudes about having additional parties to challenge Democrats and Republicans. Results. Self‐identified partisans are opposed to additional parties, but independents who “lean” toward a major party are most supportive. Independents who say they are closer to Democrats, as well as independents who say they are closer to Republicans, tend to support having new parties. The latter effect is contingent on a state's partisan context. Independents closer to Republicans are most receptive to additional parties in states where fewer conservative representatives are elected. Conclusions. Support for multiparty‐ism among “leaning” independents challenges our understanding of how they may be similar to partisan identifiers, and illustrates that a base for new parties may exist in the “mainstream” public if electoral rules were changed.

This research note presents the research design for an in ‐progress comparative study on women's policy offices being conducted by the Research Network on Gender. Politics. and the State. The goal of this article is to examine how this project has been integrating a combined approach into its core research design. It argues that rather than conceptualizing the research design enterprise in terms of a zero‐sum game, where a decision to use either quantitative or qualitative methodology compromises potential research findings, researchers may want to combine the strength of each approach in a single project.

The prospect of a full complement of regularly-conducted, publicly-released statelevel polls has both excited and eluded scholars of state politics and public opinion for decades. Here, we examine the current status of state-level polling in the U.S. Specifically, we rely on interviews with 51 state poll directors to investigate the location, frequency, scope, budget, purpose, content, and perceived policy impact of such projects. We also explore the still challenging prospect of greater state-to-state collaboration. We conclude that while current state polling is a robust industry, calls for greater collaboration remain unheeded largely because of limited resources and the incompatible reward structures of project directors. Still, improved dataarchiving together with regional polling projects on hot-button topics would serve to diminish such challenges. scholars of U.S. state politics have been in the data-scrounging business for decades (Jewell 1982). While basic demographic measures (e.g., annual income, educational attainment, employment rates, etc.) are widely available at the state, county, and city level, political information taken for granted at the national level (e.g., legislative roll-call votes, revenue and expenditure ledgers, campaign contributions, etc.) remained unrecorded and/or ill-organized in all but the most professionalized state capitals through the 1990s. Even now, projects requiring state-level records created prior to the spread of electronic data storage are daunting (see Brace and Jewett 1995; and, for example, Wright and Clark 2005). Public opinion data of the subnational sort have proved particularly elusive. Certainly the technological at Harvard Libraries on June 27, 2015 spa.sagepub.com Downloaded from