THE 2008 American presidential election was notable for many reasons, including ethnic, gender, and financial components (Federal Election Commission, 2009) as well as a robust Democratic primary contest and the highest turnout rate in 40 years (McDonald, 2008). Also, during this campaign, ratings remained competitive among many print and broadcast media (Stelter & Pérez-Peña, 2008) despite the...

0022-1031/$ see front matter 2009 Published by doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.11.001 * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 (919) 962 2537. E-mail address: [email protected] (B.K. Payne). The 2008 US presidential election was an unprecedented opportunity to study the role of racial prejudice in political decision making. Although explicitly expressed prejudice has declined dramatically during the last four decad...

In the week before the 2008 United States presidential election, 1,057 registered voters reported their choice between the principal contenders (John McCain and Barack Obama) and completed several measures that might predict their candidate preference, including two implicit and two self-report measures of racial preference for European Americans (Whites) relative to African Americans (Blacks) and

We analyze individual probabilistic predictions of state outcomes in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Employing an original survey of more than 19,000 respondents, we find that partisans gave higher probabilities to their favored candidates, but this bias was reduced by education, numerical sophistication, and the level of Obama support in their home states. In aggregate, we show that indiv...

In 1960, John F. Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon in an extremely close US presidential election. Kennedy, an adroit politician if ever there were one, made the ‘missile gap’ into his major campaign issue. After his successful election, this disingenuous issue was never heard from again; the gap was suddenly gone. We were recently confronted with a gap of a different nature or rather lack of o...

Automatic thread extraction for news events can help people know different aspects of a news event. In this paper, we present a method of extraction using a topical N-gram model with a background distribution (TNB). Unlike most topic models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which relies on the bag-of-words assumption, our model treats words in their textual order. Each news report is ...

1 National School of Tropical Medicine and Department of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America, 2 Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Houston, Texas, United States of America, 3 American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Deerfield, Illinois, United States ...

The 2008 presidential election brought the partisan divide between U.S. Republicans and Democrats to the forefront. In such contested situations, people who identify with the parties and their candidates experience pressure to adhere to their group’s core beliefs and behaviors. This research hypothesized that providing individuals a chance to affirm their self-integrity would relieve some of th...

In this article I examine whether turnout in the 2000 presidential election was influenced by closeness and candidate expenditures. Evidence that closeness affects turnout supports the theory that voters assign more weight to their votes in close elections. Evidence that expenditures increase turnout provides support for the argument that greater mobilization efforts increase turnout in close e...

In the aftermath of 2020 US Presidential election, argument was raised that because Joseph Biden's county vote totals in Pennsylvania do not follow Benford's law but Donald Trump's do, Democratic voter fraud occurred Pennsylvania. We use recent presidential election data to investigate whether this holds water. statistical tools such as chi squared goodness-of-fit tests and hypothesis for propo...