A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face‐to‐face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self‐reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology.
The effect of voter-identification (voter-ID) laws on turnout is a hot-button issue in contemporary American politics. In April of 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Indiana's voter-ID law, the nation's most rigorous, which requires voters to arrive at the polls with a state-issued photo ID containing an expiration date (Crawford v. Marion County2008). In a famous incident highlighting how Hoosiers were dealing with their state's voter-ID law, representative Julia Carson (D-IN) was initially blocked from voting during Indiana's 2006 primary election for failing to comply with Indiana's voter-identification standard. Carson identified herself with her congressional ID card; since that card did not include an expiration date and therefore did not meet Indiana's voter-identification law, she was turned away at the polls before later being allowed to vote (Goldstein 2006). The rising wave of public, political, and legal debate crested two years later in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling and during the Indiana primaries, with reports of a dozen nuns being denied ballots at the polls due to their lack of appropriate identification (Urbina 2008).
How has the American public responded to elite partisan polarization? Using panel data from both the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the American National Election Studies, we explore the partisan consequences of the discrepancy between the one-dimensional structure of elite policy preferences and the two-dimensional structure of citizens' policy preferences. We find that those citizens with preferences that are consistently liberal or consistently conservative across both economic and social issues have responded to elite polarization with mass polarization. However, we also find that the sizable number of citizens who hold preferences on economic and social issues that do not perfectly match the menu of options provided by elite Republicans and Democrats have not responded to elite polarization; indeed, these citizens are more likely to shift their partisan allegiance in the short-term and less likely to strengthen their party identification in the long term.
Although the study of realignment is an essential component of the rich and fruitful tradition of examining long-term partisan change, questions about the usefulness of the concept persist. We seek to redirect and reinvigorate the study of lasting political change by evaluating the critiques of classic realignment theory, examining the issue evolution perspective, and assessing whether the theory of issue evolution can be used to explain recent research on the relationship between political issues and partisan change. Our review of the theoretical and empirical literature investigating political issues and party alignments sheds light on both the utility of the issue evolution perspective and the conditions under which durable changes in party alignments are most likely to occur.
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