The overwhelming majority of Congresspersons engage in the acquisition of pork projects, also known as earmarks. In the aggregate, the general public overwhelming opposes pork-barrel spending, yet scholars and Members of Congress both contend that earmarked projects make for grateful constituents. This work attempts to explain this discrepancy. Using experimental data, I show that general discussions of earmarks are not universally beneficial. Recipients are only moved when they are made aware of projects in policy arenas of individual importance. Thus, pork is a nuanced policy tool that must be wielded strategically to gain electoral reward from specific subsets of a constituency.

Recent scholarly work has discovered that modest changes in the framing of the titles and summaries of ballot measures can have dramatic effects on voter approval. This work expands upon these findings by exploring the effect of language specificity on support for ballot propositions that require the voter to pay for the measure with tax dollars. Although extensive research has explored ballot measure language complexity (e.g., position on the ballot, electoral effects, and prepossessed knowledge have all been shown to play a role in the outcome for propositions), left unanswered is the role of detailed language in altering support. Utilizing original experimental data, this work explores the framing effects of increasing specificity of proposed use of tax expenditures on support for ballot questions. Ultimately, this research finds that propositions providing more information to voters substantially increases the likelihood of support for those measures. Moreover, this increased specificity also bolsters certainty as to how the money will be spent, and intensifies how strongly voters feel about the issues being considered.

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Academia has become an increasingly common political target, particularly the institution of academic tenure, which many conservative politicians accuse of helping to perpetuate the ideological indoctrination of students. This study focuses on students' perceptions of professors' ideology by examining the link between student ideology, professor favorability, and perceptions of professors' ideology. We employ an original survey instrument and find that, rather than forming perceptions of their professors' political views based on their professors' actual positions, students tend to project their own ideology onto their professor, based on the extent to which they like their professor.