Some commentators claim that white Americans put prejudice behind them when evaluating presidential candidates in 2008. Previous research examining whether white racism hurts black candidates has yielded mixed results. Fortunately, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama provides an opportunity to examine more rigorously whether prejudice disadvantages black candidates. I also make use of an innovation in the measurement of racial stereotypes in the 2008 American National Election Studies survey, which yields higher levels of reporting of racial stereotypes among white respondents. I find that negative stereotypes about blacks significantly eroded white support for Barack Obama. Further, racial stereotypes do not predict support for previous Democratic presidential candidates or current prominent Democrats, indicating that white voters punished Obama for his race rather than his party affiliation. Finally, prejudice had a particularly large impact on the voting decisions of Independents and a substantial impact on Democrats but very little influence on Republicans.

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The use of survey experiments has surged in political science. The most common design is the between-subjects design in which the outcome is only measured posttreatment. This design relies heavily on recruiting a large number of subjects to precisely estimate treatment effects. Alternative designs that involve repeated measurements of the dependent variable promise greater precision, but they are rarely used out of fears that these designs will yield different results than a standard design (e.g., due to consistency pressures). Across six studies, we assess this conventional wisdom by testing experimental designs against each other. Contrary to common fears, repeated measures designs tend to yield the same results as more common designs while substantially increasing precision. These designs also offer new insights into treatment effect size and heterogeneity. We conclude by encouraging researchers to adopt repeated measures designs and providing guidelines for when and how to use them.

Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support. In recent years, however, government has increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, which are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet, these policies also garner substantial support from the public. Given that programs aiding the homeless are so popular, why are these counterproductive policies also popular? We argue that disgust plays a key role in the resolution of this puzzle. While disgust does not decrease support for aid policies or even generate negative affect towards homeless people, it motivates the desire for physical distance, leading to support for policies that exclude homeless people from public life. We test this argument using survey data, including a national sample with an embedded experiment. Consistent with these expectations, our findings indicate that those respondents who are dispositionally sensitive to disgust are more likely to support exclusionary policies, such as banning panhandling, but no less likely to support policies intended to aid homeless people. Furthermore, media depictions of the homeless that include disease cues activate disgust, increasing its impact on support for banning panhandling. These results help explain the popularity of exclusionary homelessness policies and challenge common perspectives on the role of group attitudes in public life.

Some states treat a same-sex marriage as legally equal to a marriage between a man and a woman. Other states prohibit legal recognition of same-sex marriages in their constitutions. In every state that has a constitutional restriction against same-sex marriage, the amendment was passed by a popular vote.The conventional wisdom about allowing voter participation in such decisions is that they yield constitutional outcomes that reflect attitude differences across states. We reexamine the attitude-amendment relationship and find it to be weaker than expected. We then develop an alternate explanation that focuses on procedural variations in how states amend their constitutions. Integrating this institutional information with attitudinal data yields an improved explanation of why states differ in their constitutional treatment of same-sex marriage today. Our findings have distinct implications for people who wish to understand and/or change the future status of same-sex couples in state constitutions.The legal status of a marriage between two men or two women is the subject of one of the most visible social debates in America today (Segura 2005). Some people see the matter as a moral issue and seek to protect traditional marriage norms by withholding legal recognition from same-sex marriages. Others see the legality of same-sex marriage as a civil rights issue. Many of these people seek equal recognition for such marriages so that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered citizens may enjoy the same benefits of marriage as heterosexual couples (Herek 2006).In the United States, the legal status of same-sex relationships varies across states. Some states, like Massachusetts, accord all of the legal advantages of marriage to same-sex couples.Other states write into their constitutions language that prohibits same-sex unions from receiving equal treatment. The number of states writing such restrictions into their constitutions surged in the decade spanning from Election Day 1998 to Election Day 2008. 1The constitutional status of same sex marriage is important because a constitutional amendment is the most powerful legal statement that a state can make about the issue. To see why, note that while state officials are obligated to enforce both statutes and constitutional amendments, the two forms of law differ in how they can be challenged in a state's legal system. Statutes can be challenged and overturned when they are found to be inconsistent with a state's constitution (indeed, how state-level judges have interpreted same-sex marriage statutes are an important part of the current debate Matsusaka 2007 a,b). But amendments are constitutional by definition. Hence, their legality is more difficult, and often impossible, to challenge in state courts. 1 The precipitating events of this era were decisions of State Supreme Courts in Hawaii and Massachusetts. These courts, in different ways, offered formal marriage rights to same-sex couples. These decisions, in turn induced states (who typically recognized marriages...