Sociology

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4969

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 209

Online and Network Sampling Methods for Survey Research: A Total Survey Error Framework
(2026-04-20) kahveci, ihsan; Almquist, Zack W
Survey research faces an existential crisis. Response rates for major surveys have declined steadily over several decades, and the costs associated with maintaining high-quality probability sampling panels have become prohibitive for all but the most well-resourced organizations. Populations of increasing scientific and policy relevance, such as individuals experiencing homelessness and those who use drugs, are systematically excluded from address-based sampling frames. These challenges necessitate the development of non-probability methods that support valid population inference. This dissertation extends the Total Survey Error (TSE) framework to evaluate two alternatives: population estimates derived from algorithmically targeted online samples and survey data collected through network sampling and aggregated relational data. Application of the TSE framework to these methods demonstrates that each introduces distinct error sources that require careful attention to design and statistical adjustment. Social media recruitment via advertising platforms can rapidly yield large, low-cost samples; however, algorithmic optimization for engagement introduces selection bias, leading to samples that overrepresent certain demographic groups, such as college graduates. Propensity score adjustment combined with calibration using a probability sampling reference survey can substantially correct these biases, but its effectiveness depends on the relationship between selection mechanisms and the outcome of interest. Adjustment performs well for time-invariant measures, such as chronic health conditions, but less effectively for time-variant measures, such as health behaviors that may correlate with social media use and information exposure. Survey mode, whether interviewer-administered or self-administered, shapes measurement error in population-specific ways. Interviewer presence improves response rates but can influence response content, and the direction of this influence depends on the social expectations associated with the population. Among individuals experiencing homelessness, social desirability bias appears to reverse: the socially expected role of demonstrating need may create pressure to report worse health when an interviewer is present. These findings support a hybrid approach in which interviewers administer questions where completeness is paramount, while respondents complete sensitive questions independently. Network-based data collection methods, particularly those using aggregated relational data, offer a cost-effective approach to characterizing the social networks of hidden populations. When combined with social media recruitment, these methods can produce diverse samples at a competitive cost, provided that researchers attend to design decisions and post-adjustment strategies. The resulting network data reveal that participants maintain broad acquaintance ties to other people who use drugs but report far fewer trusted contacts, a distinction with direct implications for how harm reduction resources might be disseminated. However, the overrepresentation of highly active users remains a limitation. As traditional probability sampling becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, online and network sampling methods are likely to continue to grow in adoption. The central question is no longer whether researchers will use these methods, but how to use them effectively and responsibly. This dissertation provides practical tools and conceptual clarity to support this effort, while recognizing that translating the TSE vocabulary into practice requires ongoing methodological development across survey methodology, demography, public health, and the social sciences.
Islamophobia: Towards an Empirical Understanding
(2026-04-20) Mabruk, Aminah; Harris, Alexes
Compelled by rising Islamophobia in the U.S. and the dearth of extant research examining Islamophobia as understood by Muslims, this research centers the following questions: How do Muslim adults conceive of Islamophobia and their experiences with it? How do they perceive and make sense of these experiences? How does Islamophobia impact their daily lives? A total of 51 interviews were conducted with self-identified Muslim adults (i.e. 18 years or older) living in the U.S. exploring these questions through a mix of verbal survey questions and free-response interview questions. While the broader study also examines the potential health effects of Islamophobia, this thesis focuses on how the study participants understand and experience Islamophobia empirically and centers their interview responses in this analysis. Developing an empirical understanding of Islamophobia represents a crucial first step before exploring the relationship between Islamophobia and health that will be examined in my future work.
Randomized Respondent Driven Sampling: A Cellphone Based Approach
(2026-02-05) Visokay, Adam; McCormick, Tyler H; Almquist, Zack W
Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is a widely used method for accessing hidden populations when more traditional survey techniques may not be feasible. However, the reliance on non-random peer recruitment introduces substantial bias, particularly in the presence of homophily. This paper introduces Randomized Respondent-Driven Sampling (RRDS), a novel, cellphone-based adaptation that incorporates researcher-controlled randomization into the recruitment process. RRDS preserves the network-based advantages of RDS while mitigating selection bias by decoupling recruitment from respondent preferences. Through simulation on synthetic networks with high homophily and an empirical application among Bangladeshi garment workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, RRDS demonstrates superior performance in sample representativeness, recruitment efficiency, and convergence to population parameters. The empirical study also reveals gendered constraints in referral behavior, underscoring the importance of context-sensitive implementation. RRDS offers a scalable, remote-compatible alternative for sociological research in hard-to-reach populations, or in populations that are not traditionally hard to reach, but become temporarily inaccessible, such as the case of garment workers during the pandemic.
Patterns and Trends of Deportations to Mexico: The Unequal Distribution of Deportability
(2026-02-05) Vignau Loria, Maria; Quinn, Sarah L.
A growing body of research has examined how the local contexts, policy settings, and institutional dimensions of immigration enforcement in the United States influence the outcomes and rates of immigrants’ apprehension, detention and removal. While scholars have argued that the risk of deportation is unevenly distributed among the immigrant population, much remains unknown about how that risk varies across demographic profiles and contextual features. In this dissertation, I study deportation risk through a demographic approach that centers the analysis on deportees’ characteristics and their population-level composition. Specifically, I utilize data sources collected at different sides of an international border to answer the following questions: (1) Who is being deported from the United States? (2) How do the characteristics of those deported influence their susceptibility to deportation?, and (3) To what extent do changes in the characteristics of the immigrant population explain differences in deportation risk across immigration enforcement regimes? The findings of this study highlight the heterogeneity of the Mexican deported population across time, geographies, and enforcement contexts; shed light on the discretionary application of immigration enforcement along racial and cultural lines; and disentangle the temporal and spatial variations in the population at risk of deportation from changes that result from the evolution of America’s deportation machine.
Can an App Close the Pleasure Gap?: Changes in Gendered Patterns of Sexual Pleasure, Closeness, and Emotional Labor After a Digital Intervention
(2025-10-02) Velotta, Nicholas; Schwartz, Pepper J
Persistent gender disparities in sexual satisfaction and orgasm frequency remain a hallmark of inequality in heterosexual relationships, rooted less in biology than in entrenched cultural scripts and inequitable distributions of emotional and sexual labor. This study examines whether a digitally guided intimacy intervention can begin to recalibrate these patterns. The first "scene" of a mobile intimacy app (Arya) was evaluated using a mixed-methods, pre–post design with 180 participants in relationships. Quantitative measures captured changes in sexual satisfaction, relational closeness, and outlook; qualitative open-ended responses were thematically coded with attention to constructs from Self-Expansion Theory, Social Learning Theory, and feminist scholarship on emotional labor. Findings indicate that women experienced larger gains in sexual satisfaction than men, narrowing the "pleasure gap" modestly. Increases in satisfaction were often—but not universally—paired with greater closeness, particularly among couples who began with lower baseline intimacy. Many women described relief from the cognitive burden of planning intimacy, suggesting that digital guidance might redistribute relational labor. While exploratory and not generalizable, these results highlight the potential for technology-based interventions to disrupt entrenched sexual scripts and promote more equitable intimacy at scale.
Between Homelessness and Housing: On the Frontlines of the Housing Process
(2025-10-02) Brydolf-Horwitz, Marc; Beckett, Katherine
This dissertation examines how housing happens for people surviving street homelessness in Seattle. It focuses on the JustCARE coalition – a pandemic-era intervention that offered low- barrier lodging and intensive case management in lieu of government inaction and police-led encampment sweeps. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and local documents and reporting, the dissertation traces how housing is orchestrated across intersecting layers of society. The dissertation conceptualizes housing as a multilevel process shaped by macro, mezzo, and micro forces. The findings show that the transition from homelessness to housing is produced through political and economic decisions, administrative policies, organizational structures, and human interactions and relationships. The dissertation argues that reducing homelessness to either a structural or individual issue – or a housing, drug, mental health, or governance problem – obscures the interdependence of these factors. Ultimately, the study offers a layered account of why housing is so hard to obtain for the most marginalized, revealing how human agents and systemic constraints collide in the governance of unsheltered homelessness.
Tech Boom to Tax Boom: Urban Power and Redistribution in 21st Century Seattle
(2025-10-02) Guler, Selen; Quinn, Sarah
Local governments in the United States are tasked with meeting the basic needs of their residents, from public health and safety to economic development. But these "basic" services have become increasingly complex for local actors, as federal and state governments disinvest in urban policy and the provision of social care. At the same time, economic resources, opportunities, and taxable revenue consolidate in select urban regions, making post-industrial cities like Seattle sites of both prosperity and precarity. Under these conditions, how do the local policies and politics of redistribution evolve? Weaving together organizational, relational, and strategic accounts, my dissertation theorizes the evolving role of local governments in political life as subnational state formation. Through a case study of Seattle, I investigate how local actors navigate structural constraints to build autonomous fiscal capacity. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and video recordings of municipal meetings, I examine how Seattle passed an innovative and progressive tax on big businesses. While existing studies emphasize the limits imposed by private corporations, capital flight threats, and higher levels of government, I argue that cities can engage in progressive statecraft by cultivating long-term coalitions, building institutional capacity, and experimenting with policymaking. I trace the evolution of tax campaigns, coalitions, and political imaginaries, from failed, controversial, "unconstitutional" tax initiatives to the passage of the JumpStart, which funded large investments in affordable housing. Thus, this dissertation sheds light on how tech-driven growth, political shifts and realignments shape the boundaries of the possible. In a context of deepening inequality and federal gridlock, understanding what cities can achieve is vital for scholars and anyone asking how redistribution is being reimagined in and through cities.
Policing Homelessness: Enforcing Neighborhood Change
(2025-08-01) Morande, Brandon Scott; Almquist, Zack
US cities have long embraced spatial removal to manage the visibility of homelessness, yet the determinants of these tactics remain understudied. Extant literature often excludes vehicle residents, focuses on formal legal sanctions, and fails to account for the prevalence of homelessness. Addressing such gaps, this study leverages administrative and street outreach data to interrogate the relationship between contemporary removal practices and urban change in Seattle, WA. Spatiotemporal models suggest that increases in neighborhood property value predict more encampment sweeps and vehicle impoundments. Both interventions positively correlate with homelessness-related complaints and crime, while vehicle removals seem further associated with higher concentrations of Black residents and lower population densities. These findings extend prior theories on neoliberal urbanism and social control, suggesting that order maintenance policing may disproportionately target neighborhoods experiencing economic expansion.
Second-Generation Immigrants and Queer Identity
(2025-08-01) Honkanen, Imma; Williams, Nathalie
The population of openly queer second-generation immigrants is rising and its increasingly necessary to understand their experiences and identity formation processes. Though several studies offer theories about second-generation immigrants or queer young adults, this intersection of identities is less understood, especially in more recent contexts. Thus, it is critical to examine how queer second-generation immigrants interact with competing and cross-border cultural frameworks now, given recent cultural and political shifts in U.S. culture. In this study, I ask: how do queer second generation immigrants navigate their sexuality or gender identity within the context of their immigrant families? Further, how does this cultural negotiation influence the processes and timing of acceptance of identity and coming out? To understand these questions, I completed 25 in-depth interviews with 14 queer Mexican second-generation immigrants and 11 queer non-second-generation immigrant participants for a comparison group. My study reveals three key themes that exemplify the competing tensions participants experience: 1) national political and cultural landscape; 2) nuclear family dynamics; and 3) the role of extended family. Ultimately, these findings indicate a certain level of cultural transnationalism among participants, and emphasize the need for social resources during young adulthood that are attuned to these cultural distinctions.
Patient Nexus Typologies and Care Management Behaviors: A Case Study of Youth with Cystic Fibrosis
(2025-08-01) Castillo, Jenna Renee Hope; Harris, Alexes
This study applies and expands Mark Tausig’s patient nexus theory to examine how social support systems influence chronic illness management in youth with Cystic Fibrosis (CF), a life-limiting genetic disease requiring intensive daily care. While social science research recognizes the role of social context in health, less attention has been given to how disparities in social resources shape care management and health outcomes. Patient nexus theory, which views the “caregiving social network around the patient” as central to care behaviors, offers a framework for addressing this gap. Drawing on 21 virtual dyadic interviews with children with CF and their parents across three U.S. care centers, this study explores daily care routines, support systems, and experiences navigating CF. Qualitative analysis reveals five distinct patient nexus typologies: unique configurations of support, agency, and trust in care teams that shape adherence. Youth with greater support and agency demonstrated stronger care management behaviors, while those with limited support and lack of agency faced more challenges. These results underscore the importance of designing interventions that extend beyond individual-focused models to address the broader social and relational contexts impacting care. This is the first empirical application of patient nexus theory to pediatric chronic illness management.
Race, Reform, and Recalls: The Movements for and against “Progressive” Prosecutors
(2025-08-01) Goldberg, Allison; Beckett, Katherine
In the United States, prosecutors are locally elected and enjoy significant discretion at the front-end of the criminal legal system, including over charges, bail recommendations, and plea deals. Advocates for criminal legal reform have increasingly focused on the power of the prosecutor as a potential instrument of reform. The term “progressive prosecutor” is used to refer to those who are elected on campaign pledges to combat mass incarceration and its racial disparities while pursuing accountability for system harm and police violence. Progressive prosecutors have been elected in growing numbers since 2016, a timeframe scholars tie to Black Lives Matter (BLM). Existing research examines individual progressive prosecutor offices and their aggregate effects. This study marks the first known empirical investigation of the movements for and against progressive prosecutors. Through a novel prosecutor database, media data, and campaign finance archives, I analyze the actors, strategies, and goals in the contest over the power of prosecutors and their potential to advance reform. The findings indicate that although progressives made gains at the ballot box and contributed to reform, their efforts have been stifled by highly organized and well-funded countermovements. I argue that these attacks on progressive prosecutors constitute novel movement repertoires – including extra-electoral challenges to remove elected officials from office or constrain their power outside of regularly scheduled elections – to thwart racial justice efforts following BLM. I show how these countermovements employ the language of law, order, and public safety reminiscent of earlier backlashes against racial justice in the United States, including following Reconstruction and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. I also suggest that campaigns against progressive prosecutors provide templates for future efforts to oust officials with whom right-wing politicians and donors disagree. In this way, the movements for and against progressive prosecutors shed light not only on the potential and limits of current criminal legal reform efforts, but also on our contemporary era defined by racialized polarization and democratic contraction.
Leverage over Life Outcomes: Measuring Agency among College Quarterbacks
(2025-08-01) Hock, Edward Lucas; Crowder, Kyle
The sociological literature has produced a litany of definitions for agency. These ideas are diverse, hotly debated, and have become increasingly elaborate as theorists have attempted to reconcile often incompatible concepts. This theoretical morass has made it difficult for scholars to conduct research related to agency, namely to investigate the impact of key life choices on key life outcomes. In this paper, I present a framework to untie this particular knot, establishing the concept of “leverage,” a measure of how much difference a particular actor’s choices make on an outcome in the social world. Using high quality data from college football, I conduct a study on the impact players’ choice of college program has on their eventual probability of being drafted into the NFL. I show that leverage is distributed heterogeneously across the population of highly recruited quarterbacks, and I present strong evidence that the “middle class” of talented but non-elite players have the most leverage over their desired outcome in this case. I discuss the implications of these findings for sociological thinking about agency in general, and suggest social milieux where research into leverage may be relevant.
Cancer Death Disparities and Uranium Mine Waste on Indian Reservations
(2025-08-01) Andronicos, Aidan; Greiner, Patrick; Crowder, Kyle
The United States experienced a uranium mining boom during the Nuclear Arms Race, with much of the mining activity occurring in and around Indian Reservations. Abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) and tailings dumps are spread throughout the territory of Indian reservations, and many have not been environmentally remediated. Mine waste and drainage pose an ongoing environmental and public health threat. This type of mining releases carcinogens into the natural environment. Although there is existing literature on the topic of uranium mining waste, a sociological analysis of the problem has not yet been performed. In this paper, I evaluate the impact of mining on public health throughout the contiguous US since uranium mining occurred elsewhere in the US. I used a fixed effects regression model to determine whether people living in Indian reservations with AUMs are more likely to experience negative health outcomes. I explore the relationship between deaths from kidney and stomach cancers compared to non-native communities with abandoned uranium mines. The dependent measure is the age adjusted death rate per 100,000 people from stomach cancer or kidney and renal-pelvis cancer. The key findings in my models demonstrate that the effects of the dependent variable are most strongly influenced by health behaviors, whether or not the county contains reservation land, and median household income.
Staying for Opportunity: Industry Trajectories as Place-Based Stratification
(2025-01-23) Haskett, Breon Jonathan; Catron, Peter
Local governments in the U.S. are increasingly diversifying the industries in theirarea. This push is in response to many of the problems brought by the specializations in the recent past. Concentration into private industries wrought many problems for locals, including lower wages and difficulty retaining residents. Concentration, once seen as a foundation, is now partly to blame for the stagnated growth of many of the mid-sized and smaller towns in the U.S. In this dissertation, I examine the trajecto- ries of industry composition to improve our understanding of how the transition to varied industry arrangements comes about and, more importantly, how they impact residents. I contribute to a growing body of literature on the spatial distribution of local economic arrangements by highlighting the place of industry–what we do, with outcomes–how we are. In the first paper, I build a typology of industry trajectories. I constructed a data-driven strategy for assessing the transitions between primary industries over the past forty years. The typology uncovers the simultaneity of industry composition and particular work characteristics to allow for a unified language for comparing deindustrialized Rust Belt towns to the emerging tech towns of the West Coast. In the second, I apply this typology as a pathway to understanding the wages of service sector workers. The wages in the service industry are spatially distributed, and I test how much this distribution is tied to work trajectories. In other words, were some labor markets primed to manage a national shift to service work? And are those prime markets giving higher wages? I find evidence that places with a history of service work have modest wage gains compared to their counterparts in other industry trajectories. In the final paper, I examine this question of population growth by assessing recent changes to internal migration due to the push for diversifying the industries in a local labor market. I find that economic diversification may be one of the few factors promoting internal migration in the U.S. amid slowing rates for the past few decades.
Carceral Structures in Schools and the Carceral Continuum
(2025-01-23) Abdulkarim, Omar; Herting, Jerald; Harris, Alexes
The new and limited studies around the existence of a carceral continuum and carceral structures within schools deserves further analysis and studies. The carceral continuum argues that Black and poor individuals navigate and experience carceral practices across various facets of their daily life extending beyond direct interactions with law enforcement. Current literature explores the carceral continuum through qualitative field work, focusing predominantly on the lived experiences and internalization of those who experience the carceral continuum. Particularly within schools, literature has focused on students’ relation with carceral policies predominantly through interaction with sworn law enforcement in schools and the use of metal detectors or drug searches in large city schools among others. This study aims to build on this literature by assessing the validity of the presence of varied carceral cultures using a nationally representative school sample. Additionally, the relationship between carceral structures, school characteristics, and school discipline was analyzed to better understand the existence and impact of carceral structures in schools. The results indicate a varied existence of carceral structures across the country, and that region, grade level, size, and racial demographics of the school were all significant in their association with carceral structures. Larger schools, higher grade level of the school, schools in the south, and schools that had greater percentages of low income and students of color (notably Black and Hispanic students) were more likely to have high levels of carceral structure. Similarly, the results showed carceral structure and all of these aforementioned categories are significant in the overall count of disciplinary actions occurring within schools. There were slight differences in the impact of region and student demographics, notably that schools in the west region and the percentage of Hispanic students was negatively related with disciplinary counts.
Cheapos and Aunties: Status Threats in the Age of Government-Led Self-tracking Campaigns
(2025-01-23) Choong, Carmen; Quinn, Sarah
Critical social analyses on digital health technologies and related gamification techniques have pointed to how the lives of users have become datafied and atomized as these technologies surveil, exploit or inform them. However, the ways people engage with these technologies in large-scale public health settings is less understood. We should not assume that key dynamics – like questions of surveillance, health and social status – work in state programs the same way they work in the private programs studied in previous research. As governments around the world adopt these technologies, it is crucial that we understand how people engage with digital health technologies when their data flows to their government. Using Singapore’s National Steps Challenge as a case study, I examine the stories participants narrate to rationalize their participation in the program in 24 semi-structured interviews. My study reveals that fitness trackers are not just sources of health information on the body, but also signifiers of status and social position; when distributed by the government, these digital health technologies can classify participants in undesirable ways. I unpack the various rhetorical claims and practices program participants engage in to manage these classed status threats according to their social position. This study shows that when governmentality works through objects of consumption, matters of distinction become a matter of public health policy.
Student Parents, Decision-Making, and Role Strain
(2025-01-23) Omar, Audrey; Brines, Julie
Within much of the world, an increase in the number of years of education coincides with a delay in childbearing, and a reduction in the number of total children. But millions of student parents have made the decision to do these two bottomless tasks at the same time. Extant research has not fully explored the decision-making process for student parents—both how the decision is made to become a student parent, but also what decisions are made on a daily basis in order to succeed as a student parent. Forty-four student parents at the University of Washington were interviewed and surveyed. Findings suggest that student parents make the decision to become a student parent when they are ready, willing, and able to make the transition from student (or parent) to student parent. Broader contexts, such as institutional support, and city or statewide programs have a larger impact on the subsequent daily decisions student parents must make more than on the anchoring decision.
Through Thick and Thin: Reexamining r/The_Donald's Quarantine Using Network Methods
(2024-10-16) Brown, Zachary Philip-Taylor; Almquist, Zack
The subreddit r/The_Donald was a popular political forum that supported the Trump campaign and presidency through stimulating talking points, combating online detractors, and generating memes utilized by right-wing figures. After subreddit users continuously disregarded site rules regarding threats of violence, Reddit administrators first restricted and then banned the community in 2019 and early 2020. Previous efforts to understand how this sudden change to communication pathways led to declines in activity on r/The_Donald in the long run as well as shorter run drops in hate speech on subreddits that community members turned to after losing access to their previous home. This approach misses the importance of social ties between prominent members of the r/The_Donald community and cannot answer how enmeshed these accounts remained after the restriction. Utilizing social network analysis techniques, I analyze how the interactions between frequent r/The_Donald commenters changed after the quarantine. I find that recurring users were more densely connected in the three weeks after the quarantine than they were before it, that users posted in similar subreddits in July that they had in June, and that pre-quarantine in-degree was highly predictive of post-quarantine in-degree. In this paper I employ a network analysis framework to describe this important shift in platform activity, lending credence to the importance of communication ties on social media sites and posing new questions about the future of online moderation and the resiliency of new forms of social politics.
TOO QUEER FOR THE DEAF AND TOO DEAF (OR DISABLED) FOR THE QUEERS: IDENTITY BASED STIGMA AMONGST DEAF-LGBTQ+ FOLK IN THE UNITED STATES
(2024-10-16) DeCarsky, Ryan; Howard, Judith; Evans, Heather D.
Deaf and Queer identities are stigmatized and are often on the margins of society. As a result, Deaf-LGBTQ+ folk face compounding, intersecting forces of stigma and marginalization. This thesis asks if and how Deaf-LGBTQ+ folk describe experiences of their Deaf identity compared to their LGBTQ+ identity. It explores if experiences vary by situation (with whom, where), and if any (potential) patterns arise along lines of race, age, or disability status. I conceptually focus on the idea of stigma, looking at indicators of stigma and resistance to stigma. To illustrate this, I analyze thirty-one responses to a bilingual online survey by Deaf-LGBTQ+ folk in the United States. My results suggest two important findings: 1) the race and generation of my participants are key factors in understanding experiences and indicators of stigma within the lives of Deaf-LGBTQ+ folk; and 2) navigating life as a Deaf-LGBTQ+ individual appears to be more complicated with family and romantic/sexual partners than with other common categories of social interaction (such as interactions with: friends, teachers, doctors, gov. employees, coworkers, etc.). These two primary findings suggest future research on identity-based stigma should take an intersectional perspective to better understand how the situation one is in and the combination of identities one holds shape experiences of identity. Future qualitative work is especially well suited to do so and may reveal important mechanisms in use by multiply marginalized communities to combat and resist overlapping systems of oppression embedded within forces of stigmatization.
Searching for the Center: an investigation into the political center in American politics
(2024-10-16) Karceski, Steven M; Kiser, Edgar V
This dissertation explores the contemporary meanings of the political center within the American political discourse, as used in academic research, through the various accounts of selfdescribed advocates for the political center, according to public opinion, and through selfidentification in social surveys. It contains three chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion. One chapter creates a typology of the different meanings of the political center. The typology groups meanings into categories of the depoliticized center, the citizen center, the political actor center, and the elite consensus center. The next chapter explores in detail the meanings of the center when it is determined by public opinion: when the median or net support represent the center, or when quantitative ideological measures are used to determine the center. Finally, the last chapter uses rare survey data that asks respondents whether they identify with the political center. The frequency of identification with, and the demographic and political characteristics associated with, the terms "centrist" and "moderate" are investigated. I conclude with a proposed theoretical model of the political center and suggestions for additional research on the topic.

Browse

Recent Submissions