Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysisof voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election.Twenty-two percent of voters picked "moral values" from a listof "issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, morethan selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpretedthis single data point to conclude that moral values are anascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christiangroups with turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeatin 2000 into his three million–vote margin of victoryin 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values arecritical in informing political judgments, they represent personalcharacteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far morethan any discrete political issue. First by conflating moralsand values and then by further conflating characteristics andissues, the exit poll’s "issues" list distorted our understandingof the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flawsin the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s "most importantissue" question and explore the presumed rising electoral importanceof moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelminglyselected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moralvalues item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed asa discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that itsimportance to voters has not grown over time; and that whencontrolled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues listin predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll dataalso show that the voting behavior of conservative Christiansis relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarilyresponsible for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.     

The Language of the Presidential Election Campaign in Ukraine

The objective of the article is to trace and analyze Ukrainian language use in the recent presidential election campaign, paying particular attention to lexical innovations, neologisms, and satirical allusions. These changes are presented as the continuation of a steady process of democratization or liberalization of the Ukrainian language, a phenomenon some researchers previously attributed only to Russian. The language practices of the "Kuchma-Yanukovych regime" is presented and analyzed. The view of Yushchenko by his supporters as the narodnyi kandydat/prezydent (the people’s candidate/President) finds its antipode in political neologisms coined by Yanukovych’s camp (e.g., nashysty/nashysts’kyi), which were designed to attribute fascist tendencies to Yushchenko’s bloc, Nasha Ukraina ’Our Ukraine’. The egg farce during the campaign showed the vulnerability of Yanukovych’s camp to satire.     

Pollsters Under Attack: 2004 Election Incivility and Its Consequences

The 2004 election was remarkable for a number of reasons, includingthe harsh, personal attacks from all parts of the politicalspectrum on a number of media pollsters. The idea of "killingthe messenger" has been around long enough for the phenomenonto have its own name, but it appears to have intensified muchmore than in the past. The article details the experiences oftwo polls and their pollsters, one national and one statewide.These attacks are part of a growing practice of trying to mitigateperceived damage by any message in the political marketplace.The article suggests that while there are positive effects fromthese developments, including heightened awareness among votersof polling methods, negative effects can damage the credibilityof specific polls and their sponsors, as well as the professionin general, including market and other public opinion research.The article ends with a call for researchers to be more openwith their methods and measures, and to strongly defend properlydone research against critics; for journalists to be more discerningin evaluating poll criticisms before publishing them; and forprofessional organizations to help the public better understandpolling, market research, and other public opinion researchand their benefits to society.     

Image Myths in the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Election Campaign

This paper discusses the phenomenon of inculcating myths into the electorate’s consciousness and analyzes the 2004 presidential campaign in Ukraine in order to conclude whether the classification of electoral myths proposed by American political scientists D. Nimmo and J. Combs, and broadened by K. S. Jonson-Cartee and G. A. Copeland, can be applied for studying political mythology in post-Soviet countries. The analysis of television political advertisements on the main state Ukrainian channel, which were broadcast during free TV time provided by the Central Election Commission, makes it possible to conclude that some of the myths described by American scientists were used in Ukraine in their original version, others were adapted to Ukrainian realities, and only elements of some were found in candidates’ ads. Close study of TV political commercials shows that some of the candidates (mainly representatives of financial-industrial and business circles) based their campaigns on a single myth, while the majority preferred to influence voters using a “myth mosaic.”     

Women's Success in Academic Science: Challenges to Breaking Through the Ivory Ceiling

Although a greater number of women are entering academic science than ever before, women remain underrepresented and are perceived as less successful than men in their fields. The reasons behind this are complicated and debatable. In this paper, I review the challenges that women continue to face in the natural and social academic sciences. Women continue to face barriers toward obtaining academic positions and securing promotions. A crucial aspect of the problem lies in the subjective definition of “success,” which creates subconscious biases as well as gendered processes within institutions. These processes include biased evaluations of success in academia, limited mentorship for women in science, limited networking opportunities, and lack of institutional support for mothers. Future research should look more closely at the gendered definition of success, and related constraints within academia that keep women from breaking through the ivory ceiling.     

The Accuracy of the National Preelection Polls in the 2004 Presidential Election

The 2004 presidential election campaign provided a venue fora wide variety of polling, and it was not without its controversies.In the end, the final estimates of the preelection polls, thebread and butter of the polling industry, were very good atsuggesting it would be a close race, with Bush the likely winner.In historical perspective, the overall performance was aboveaverage for the period since 1956. Issues raised in the medialeading up to the end of the campaign and the final estimates,however, created some controversy, especially about the likelyvoter methodology used by different organizations. There werealso some anomalies at the end of the campaign as some firmsand collaborators ended up producing different estimates ofthe outcome depending on likely voter definitions or the modeof data collection.     

The Impact of Cell Phone Noncoverage Bias on Polling in the 2004 Presidential Election

Despite concerns that the accuracy of preelection telephonepolls would be harmed by the omission of voters who could bereached only by cell phone, most national polls performed wellin predicting President George W. Bush’s reelection in2004, and state polls were generally accurate as well. The nationalexit poll conducted by the National Election Pool found that7 percent of Election Day voters had cell phone service butno land line; younger voters were far more likely to be cell-only:19 percent among those age 18–24 and 20 percent amongthose age 25–29. Within these two youngest age cohorts,cell-only voters were significantly more likely to be singleand childless. While cell-only voters were more supportive ofJohn Kerry than voters overall, they were similar to other voterswithin their own age cohort. Because of this, preelection telephonesurveys that weighted their data appropriately by age were notsignificantly biased by the absence of the cell-only voters.     

College Student Suicide in the United States: 1990-1991 Through 2003-2004

Suggestions that there is a growing epidemic of suicide among college students in the United States are false. The National Survey of Counseling Center Directors reports 1,404 student suicides over a 14-year period and an adjusted suicide rate of 6.5, half the rate of the general US population (12.6 for all races) during this period when matched for gender and age. Counseling centers appear effective in treating suicidal students, for although the suicide rate for students who were currently or previously clients at campus counseling centers is 3 times the rate of other students, student clients have 18 times the risk of suicide compared to students in general. Identifying and referring students at elevated risk for suicide could further reduce the crude and relative rate of student suicide. However, even programs that do this only moderately well may require substantial increases in counseling staffing.     

From Agenda Setting to Refusal Setting: Survey Nonresponse as a Function of Media Coverage Across the 2004 Election Cycle

Past research suggests that there is a relationship betweensurvey response and topic salience, namely that individualsresponding to a survey are likely to find the survey topic moresalient than nonrespondents do. For election surveys, nonresponseresulting from a lack of salience can influence findings becauserespondents may be more interested in politics than nonrespondents.The agenda-setting model suggests that media coverage shouldheighten salience. Thus, as media coverage of political campaignsincreases over the course of an election, refusals to a politicalsurvey should decline. Using data from the National AnnenbergElection Survey (NAES), which was conducted nearly continuouslyin 2004, this study investigates the issue of nonresponse ina random digit dial telephone survey across the election cycleby examining daily changes in the refusal rates using time-seriesanalysis. Content analyses of the frequencies of presidentialcampaign stories mentioned in the New York Times and three networknews broadcasts were matched against a time series from theNAES to demonstrate that increases in media coverage of theelection were negatively related to the survey refusal rate. Received for publication January 15, 2005. Revision received March 18, 2007. Accepted for publication May 14, 2007.     

Trauma management: Chernobyl in Belarus and Ukraine

Although the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened in the Soviet Union in 1986, we still do not know how the most affected states – Ukraine and Belarus – have managed this tragedy since independence. Drawing on the concept of cultural trauma, this article compares Chernobyl narratives in Belarus and Ukraine over the past 28 years. It shows that national narratives of Chernobyl differ, representing the varying ways in which the state overcomes trauma. Our understanding of post‐communist transformations can be improved by analysing trauma management narratives and their importance for new national identity construction. These narratives also bring new insights to our vision of cultural trauma by linking it to ontological insecurity. The article demonstrates how the state can become an arena of trauma process as it commands material and symbolic resources to deal with trauma. In general, it contributes to a better understanding of how the same traumatic event can become a source of solidarity in one community, but a source of hostility in another.     

Reaching the Breaking Point:

This study was designed to examine the phenomenon of mistreatment associated with mood disturbance of the caregiver in elder caregiving situations. The data were obtained from 110 caregivers aged 55 and over caring for a physically or mentally ill elder at home. A causal model was developed to examine the effects of personal and situational variables on mistreatment by abuse or neglect. Results indicated there were seven predictors of potential to mistreat: total mood disturbance, an external locus of control orientation, a low level of social support, income inadequacy, poor physical health, and two emotional coping strategies. These variables accounted for 46% of the variance.     

Preface: Foresight in 2020: Race and Gender in the Upcoming Election

This essay introduces contributions to a special issue of Sociological Forum titled “Foresight in 2020: Race and Gender in the Upcoming Election.” All articles in the issue can be accessed at the journal’s website, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15737861 . They will first appear under the “Early View” tab, and later in volume 35, supplement I.     

Election 1994: Legitimation and multiple identities in the south African media

The 1994 election was a turning point in South African political discourse concerning identity politics and an important period for research on legitimation processes and political discourse. Until the election, the racial and ethnic conflicts were the main issue in political discourse, causing violent riots and tension. But as the new political order was envisaged and the election was confirmed, the need for legitimation of collective identities and identity politics changed. In the political discourse leading up to the 1994 election, issues and conflicts on race and collective identity were silenced by media, thereby contributing to a kind of collective amnesia to reconcile the political conflicts of the past. Both the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP) used evaluative campaign research to develop their main strategies. While the ANC tried to downplay the role of cultural diversity in South Africa, the NP found it effective to stress minority rights and defence for ethnicity in its communication campaigns. Other smaller parties also chose this strategy. Since the 1994 election, a rhetoric of unity across multicultural cleavages has emerged.