Leading opinion research on immigration has begun to move from size-based to change-based measures of citizens’ ethnic context. This shift is based on the theoretical assumption that over-time growth in immigrant populations is more likely to capture citizens’ attention than their current size. At present, there is no empirical evidence supporting this assumption. This article demonstrates that while the size of local immigrant populations exerts virtually no effect on perceived immigration, over-time growth strongly influences citizens’ perceptions of immigration into their community. In addition, our analyses illuminate the differential contribution of growth in local Hispanic and Asian populations to perceived immigration.

The theorization and empirical exploration of contextual effects is a long-standing feature of public opinion and political behavior research. At present, however, there is little to no evidence that citizens actually perceive the local contextual factors theorized to influence their attitudes and behaviors. In this article, we focus on two of the most prevalent contextual factors appearing in theories-racial/ethnic and economic context-to investigate whether citizens' perceptions of their local ethnic and economic contexts map onto variation in the actual ethnic composition and economic health of these environments. Using national survey data combined with Census data, and focusing on the popular topics of immigration and unemployment, we find that objective measures of the size of the immigrant population and unemployment rate in respondents' county and zip code strongly predict perceived levels of local immigration and assessments of the health of one's local job market. In addition to demonstrating that citizens are "receiving the treatment," we show that perceptions of one's context overwhelmingly mediate the effect of these objective contextual factors on relevant economic and immigration attitudes. The results from our analyses provide scholars with unprecedented evidence that a key perceptual process presumed in various contextual theories of political attitudes and behavior is, in fact, valid.

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The arrival of Hurricane Sandy within a week of the 2012 presidential election caused unprecedented disruption to the final days of the campaign and Election Day in areas that were affected. The precise impact of the storm on those areas hit hardest was not necessarily clear. Contrary to prior research on the effect of disasters on electoral outcomes, we find that the president's vote share was ultimately increased in storm-affected areas by about four percentage points, plus or minus two points. While those states most heavily affected were unlikely to give their electoral vote to Romney because of other factors, we present counterfactual analyses that show that such a storm could have had a significant impact on swing states: although the storm only affected some areas, we show that Virginia would likely have been won by Romney were it not hit at all, whereas North Carolina would likely have gone for Obama had it been directly in the storm's path.Yamil Velez is a doctoral student at Stony Brook University. His current research deals with contextual influences on public opinion and the moderating role of personality. He can be reached at yamil.velez@stonybrook.edu. David Martin is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University whose research focuses on the interaction between social identity and context in determining institutional trust and political participation. He can be reached at david.martin@stonybrook.edu.

Despite the importance of ethnic television within immigrant communities, its effects on political participation are unclear. On the one hand, ethnic media can mobilize and inform voters. On the other hand, it can serve as a source of diversion and reduce the desire to participate. To evaluate these competing possibilities, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity (GRD) approach involving Federal Communication Commission reception boundaries for Spanish‐language television stations in two states. Additionally, we replicate and unpack our GRD analyses using three nationally representative samples of Latinos. Across multiple studies, we find that access to Spanish‐language television is associated with decreases in turnout, ethnic civic participation, and political knowledge. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings on the ethnic politics, political communication, and social capital literatures.

Respondent inattentiveness threatens to undermine experimental studies. In response, researchers incorporate measures of attentiveness into their analyses, yet often in a way that risks introducing posttreatment bias. We propose a design-based technique-mock vignettes (MVs)-to overcome these interrelated challenges. MVs feature content substantively similar to that of experimental vignettes in political science, and are followed by factual questions (mock vignette checks [MVCs]) that gauge respondents' attentiveness to the MV. Crucially, the same MV is viewed by all respondents prior to the experiment. Across five separate studies, we find that MVC performance is significantly associated with (1) stronger treatment effects, and 2) other common measures of attentiveness. Researchers can therefore use MVC performance to re-estimate treatment effects, allowing for hypothesis tests that are more robust to respondent inattentiveness and yet also safeguarded against post-treatment bias. Lastly, our study offers researchers a set of empirically-validated MVs for their own experiments.