College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item American Populism, Political Information, and Trade Opinion(2022) Campana, Robert David Louis; Gimpel, James G.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Trade policy is a complex issue that involves economics and international politics. Traditionally, Americans have not often expressed opinions on trade policy due to its high issue complexity and because Democrats and Republican politicians since the later part of the 20th century have been inconsistent in their support for neoliberalism or protectionism. Despite this, populist candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have repeatedly used their support for protectionist policies to differentiate themselves from more mainstream candidates. Using multiple public opinion surveys and survey experiments, this project explores how populism, anti-expert sentiment, anti-capitalism, diversity anxiety, and ethnonationalism influence American’s views on free trade policy and shows that all these factors are associated with greater support for protectionist policies. Additionally, this project examines and adjusts for the unusually high level of non-response regarding questions about trade policy.This project also analyzes what causes Americans to think trade policy (specifically, the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership) is more important. This project finds that Americans who believe themselves to be strangers in their own country are more likely to believe the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific partnership is important. Meanwhile, Americans who believe the United States is less respected than in the past are less likely to believe the Trans-Pacific Partnership is important. Two survey experiments are conducted to see how the presence of “don’t know” responses in trade opinion questions and patriotic framing shift attitudes on trade policy. In both cases, issue framing does not significantly shift opinion on trade policy. This project carries out a longitudinal study to see how the same group of Americans shift their attitudes on trade policy over a multi-year time frame. Generally, these shifts are very small; however, Americans with differing views on regulation displayed the greatest attitudinal shift. Initially, Americans who wanted more government regulation were the most protectionist while Americans who wanted less government regulation were the least protectionist. Over the multi-year period, this association became significantly less visible. Finally, this project analyzes how economic attitudes, immigration attitudes, economic identity, immigrant identity, local immigrant populations, and local economic data influence views on trade policy. The study finds that immigration attitudes are closely aligned with views of trade policy.Item REVISITING THE ROLE OF DELINQUENT ATTITUDES ON CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR(2015) Thomas, Kyle J.; McGloin, Jean; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By employing global attitude measures, which ask respondents to evaluate the abstract idea of a behavior absent of context, rather than specific measures that inquire about the appropriateness of a behavior under various circumstances, prior work has failed to capture the complexity of delinquent attitudes. As a result, research has: 1) not adequately assessed the dimensionality of the attitude construct; 2) potentially mis-specified the attitude-delinquency relationship and; 3) been unable to investigate the intersection between attitudes and situational contexts in the emergence of delinquent behavior. This dissertation seeks to address these gaps using two sources of data. The first comes from a sample of 11th graders (n = 223) from a large public high school in the Pacific Northwest and the second comes from four waves of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) Evaluation, a longitudinal study of around 1,400 adolescents from six cities across the United States. The results raise questions about the conclusions that have been made from studies using global attitude items. First, in both data sets attitudes form multidimensional, crime-specific constructs (e.g., attitudes towards fighting and attitudes towards theft). Second, for most models, the factors constructed using specific attitude items have a larger standardized effect on behavior and behavioral intentions and lead to better model fit than do the global items. Third, specific attitudes towards fighting demonstrate discriminating effects on behavioral intentions, indicating that behavior in context is related to the attitude toward that behavior, in that specific context. There was minimal evidence for discriminating effects with theft attitudes, however. Collectively, these results call for a renewed focus on the complex relationship between attitudes, situations, and delinquent behavior.Item Organizational Characteristics as a Justification of Employment Discrimination(2010) Siegel, Eric Forrest; Stangor, Charles; Hanges, Paul J.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research explores the processes behind discrimination within organizations using the Justification-Suppression (JS) model. According to the JS model, internal cognitions, called justifications, can disinhibit prejudice and cause discrimination. The policies and characteristics of an organization can be a source of the justifications that lead to discrimination within organizations. To explore this hypothesis, participants completed a hiring simulation task. In this experiment, the racial makeup of the company was manipulated so that the company was either homogeneously White or racially diverse. In addition, company communications, in the form of e-mails, were manipulated to change the company's tolerance for discrimination. Both the demographics and communications manipulations led the participants to discriminate in their hiring decisions. When both demographics and communications indicated discrimination was acceptable, the degree of discrimination was greater than when there was a single source of justification. This implies that an organization's characteristics can lead to increased discrimination.