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"Conroy, Meredith"
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It Takes a Motive: Communal and Agentic Articulated Interest and Candidate Emergence
More women ran for office in 2018 than any previous election year. This represents progress toward parity, but it remains unclear whether this surge in women’s political ambition signals an easing of the candidate emergence path, which has typically favored men. We leverage over ten thousand intake forms of prospective candidates provided by Run for Something, a candidate recruitment nonprofit founded in 2017, to examine patterns in candidate emergence based on articulated interest through the lens of “communion” and “agency,” two basic behavioral orientations with gendered significance. We find that differences in articulated interest along the dimensions of communion and agency are greater between candidates and noncandidates than they are between men and women, supporting previous findings of similarities in men and women who emerge as candidates. Our results suggest the candidate emergence path is still easier for women (and men) whose motives are congruent with agency, and therefore the “masculine ethos” of politics.
Journal Article
Strength, Stamina, and Sexism in the 2016 Presidential Race
On September 11, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, Hillary Clinton attended the 9/11 memorial service in New York City. Reportedly, Clinton left the event early, and as she was getting into her SUV, she fainted. A bystander caught on camera a wobbly Clinton needing assistance getting into her vehicle, which he posted to Twitter, where it immediately circulated (Kafka 2016). News media outlets soon picked it up and were quick to air the footage. Initially, the Clinton campaign explained that Clinton had been “overheated.” Later that afternoon, however, the campaign announced that two days prior, Clinton had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and despite being advised to rest, she had attended the memorial event.
Journal Article
Something to Run for: Stated Motives as Indicators of Candidate Emergence
Patterns in candidate emergence affect who voters can choose from, and thus the quality of representative democracy. Despite extensive work considering factors that contribute to political ambition and factors that contribute to candidate emergence separately, we know less about the transition from the former to the latter. We investigate the role of motives using a novel dataset of over 10,000 open-ended statements of interest collected by Run for Something, a progressive non-profit that encourages political amateurs to run for state and local office. We find that politically ambitious future candidates talk about their interest in running differently than politically ambitious future non-candidates, suggesting that stated motives provide meaningful signals of likely candidate emergence. Respondents who articulated their motives in terms of general political interest, core values, and personal background were less likely to run than respondents who emphasized specific issues, political opportunity, or progressive populist sentiments, respectively. We further find that white and male respondents were likelier to articulate their interest in terms negatively associated with candidate emergence, consistent with prior work showing that members of underrepresented groups wait longer, until they are more qualified, before expressing their interest in running for office.
Journal Article
A psychology of framing: The effects of personality on susceptibility to media frames
The leading edge of research on framing, which is one of the most widely known general phenomena in the social sciences, is presently focused squarely on questions of individual-level variation. This dissertation explores an individual characteristic that is new to the literature on framing: personality. Research has shown that personality traits may to be linked directly to certain behaviors that in turn might be associated with framing effects. Also, some personality traits are tied to information processing mode, which has been linked directly to framing effects and decision-making more generally. Beyond these theoretical clues, there is a good deal of face validity to the expectation that a trait such as agreeableness might be tied to how people respond to framed messages. To address this I ask and attempt to answer the following question: Does susceptibility to framing effects vary across major personality traits? The theoretical expectation I develop here is that personality type will mediate individual framing susceptibility. I operationalize personality using the Big-Five personality traits, and I develop an experimental design in which subjects are exposed to varying frames across several issue areas: civil liberties, medical research and treatments, energy, affirmative action, and gun control. The data for this analysis come from a Web-based experimental survey that I designed and that was administered by Knowledge Networks in the Spring of 2010 to a national sample of 809 participants. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, through a cooperative agreement with the University of California, Santa Barbara. The results show that that certain personality traits, particularly openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness mediate framing effects. These findings open a new direction for research on variation in susceptibility to framing effects.
Dissertation
News Media Frame Novel Technologies in a Familiar Way
In an era of rapid technological and social innovation, those who are typically outside the development of these innovations-the public-confront a flood of new technologies with many societal consequences, few of which can be anticipated much in advance. Through individual choices and social processes conditioned by culture, through market forces, and through the actions of the state, the public absorbs or occasionally rejects new technologies. Over the last two decades, much of the attention to social effects of innovation has focused on technologies of information and communication, which clearly define many aspects of the contemporary period. However, other technologies, especially those broadly termed \"nanotechnology,\" also present important possibilities for social change. Nanotechnology is less deeply diffused into daily life, and far less salient publicly, but it has the potential for lasting consequences. Nanotechnologies present the public with potentially novel issues of risk and uncertainty, combined with disparate benefits for many groups of citizens. They have already been the target of a considerable investment of public funds.
Book Chapter
March For Our Lives SLC goes viral; will the movement influence the 2018 midterms?
SALT LAKE CITY — Over the weekend, March For Our Lives Salt Lake City organized a demonstration at the Wallace Bennett Federal Building after their request to arrange a town hall with members of Utah’s congressional delegation, failed. The town hall effort was a national one — in partnership with Town Hall Project, March For Our Lives organizers established the April 7 date and encouraged gun safety activists around the country to attend already scheduled town halls and raise their issues; where meetings were not scheduled, March for Our Lives encouraged activists to either pressure their representatives to meet, or hold “empty chair” meetings to call attention to their absence. Perhaps frustrated by their limited recourse for fighting for gun safety because they are too young to vote, these young protesters are increasingly turning to creative outlets to air their frustrations, or inspire others.
Newspaper Article
Trump’s proclamations rolling back Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalate are met with legal challenges
According to a study of presidential proclamations from 1977 through 2005, only 12 percent of proclamations issued were policy-based. The first president to establish a national monument was Teddy Roosevelt. Since Roosevelt, most presidents, with the exception of Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush, have issued proclamations establishing a national monument. [...]this same study found that from 1942-98 there were just 83 cases that challenged presidential executive orders, and in only 14 cases did those challenges prevail. [...]the other branches of government have been complicit in presidents’ tendencies to rely on unilateral actions to move their policy agenda forward.
Newspaper Article