Are Teens “Post-Gay”? Contemporary Adolescents’ Sexual Identity Labels

Recent reports suggest that historically typical sexual identity labels—“gay,” “lesbian” and “bisexual”—have lost meaning and relevance for contemporary adolescents. Yet there is little empirical evidence that contemporary teenagers are “post-gay.” In this brief study we investigate youths’ sexual identity labels. The Preventing School Harassment survey included 2,560 California secondary school students administered over 3 years: 2003–2005. We examined adolescents’ responses to a closed-ended survey question that asked for self-reports of sexual identity, including an option to write-in a response; we content analyzed the write-in responses. Results suggest that historically typical sexual identity labels are endorsed by the majority (71%) of non-heterosexual youth. Some non-heterosexual youth report that they are “questioning” (13%) their sexual identities or that they are “queer” (5%); a small proportion (9%) provided alternative labels that describe ambivalence or resistance to sexual identity labels, or fluidity in sexual identities. Our results show that lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities remain relevant for contemporary adolescents.     

Conditional Cash Transfers and the Effect on Recent Murder Rates in Brazil and Mexico

This article examines whether conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have had a significant effect on reducing murder rates in Mexico and Brazil, using time‐series municipal‐level data on murders in both countries. The findings, over the period 2005–8, show that the greater the proportion of beneficiaries enrolled in a CCT program in each municipality, the lower the number of murders. There are, however, important differences between the two countries, with a much larger effect in Brazil than in Mexico. This holds even when controlling for GDP and levels of development.     

How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States?

We compare two approaches for estimating state-level public opinion: disaggregation by state of national surveys and a simulation approach using multilevel modeling of individual opinion and poststratification by population share. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of each and give practical advice about when and how each method should be used. To do so, we use an original data set of over 100 surveys on gay rights issues as well as 1988 presidential election data. Under optimal conditions, both methods work well, but multilevel modeling performs better generally. Compared to baseline opinion measures, it yields smaller errors, higher correlations, and more reliable estimates. Multilevel modeling is clearly superior when samples are smaller—indeed, one can accurately estimate state opinion using only a single large national survey. This greatly expands the scope of issues for which researchers can study subnational opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking.     

Rejoinder to “The social sub-optimality of competitive elections: comment”

Holcombe’s critque does not contradict the fundamental argument of my original paper. Even if a competitive electoral system is a necessary condition for optimal election results, a competitive election is at best a byproduct of that system rather than the cause of optimal results. Furthermore, a competitive system must still produce non-competitive elections in order to create incentives for candidates to adopt optimal platforms.     

The Obama Administration's Challenges after the “War on Science”: Reforming Staffing Practices and Protecting Scientific Integrity in the Executive Branch

In this article, we examine the difficult leadership position President Barack Obama inherited as he took office with respect to science and technology policy making and implementation, particularly following the Bush administration and years of the so‐called “war on science.” We contend that the Obama administration's challenge is not only to take substantive policy action, but also to reform certain administrative practices, particularly in light of the previous administration's practice of the politics of strategic vacancies, a managerial technique that rearranges an agency's ideological inclinations not through the usual forms of active politicization (i.e., by filling the appointee ranks with like‐minded ideologues) but instead by “starving” the agency of staff and co‐opting its agenda that way.     

Whites’ Racial Resentment and Perceived Relative Discrimination Interactively Predict Participation

Political Behavior - Scholarship in American politics finds whites’ racial resentment and status threat predict their vote choice. However, research in social identity indicates that such...     

The public salience of crime, 1960–2014: Age–period–cohort and time–series analyses†

The public salience of crime has wide-ranging political and social implications; it influences public trust in the government and citizens’ everyday routines and interactions, and it may affect policy responsiveness to punitive attitudes. Identifying the sources of crime salience is thus important. Two competing theoretical models exist: the objectivist model and the social constructionist model. According to the first, crime salience is a function of the crime rate. According to the second, crime salience is a function of media coverage and political rhetoric, and trends in crime salience differ across population subgroups as a result of differences in their responsiveness to elite initiatives. In both theories, period-level effects predominate. Variation in crime salience, however, may also reflect age and cohort effects. Using data from 422,504 respondents interviewed between 1960 and 2014, we first examine the nature of crime salience using hierarchical age–period–cohort (HAPC) models and then analyze period-level predictors using first differences. We find that 1) crime salience varies mostly at the period level; 2) crime salience trends are parallel (cointegrated) across demographic, socioeconomic, and partisan groups; and 3) crime salience trends within every population subgroup are most consistent with the constructionist model. The crime rate does not exert a significant effect in any subgroup.