The 2016 Presidential Election: The Causes and Consequences of a Political Earthquake critically analyzes the 2016 presidential election. The chapters in this book identify key factors behind the election of Donald J. Trump, explore the unconventional campaign, analyze the unexpected election result, evaluate the forecasting models, and speculate on the effect of the election outcome on politics and governance in the Trump Administration.

This text starts by explaining the fundamental goal of good political science research—the ability to answer interesting and important questions by generating valid inferences about political phenomena. Before the text even discusses the process of developing a research question, the authors introduce the reader to what it means to make an inference and the different challenges that social scientists face when confronting this task. Only with this ultimate goal in mind will students be abl...

What are the consequences when politicians make prejudiced statements? Theories about the suppression of prejudice argue that people are likely to express more prejudice when they believe that norms are more permissive than they may have otherwise assumed. Using a series of experiments carried out during and since the 2016 campaign, Brian Schaffner shows that being exposed to Donald Trump's prejudiced rhetoric causes people to express more prejudice themselves. Notably, this is not merely ...

Local governments play a central role in American democracy, providing essential services such as policing, water, and sanitation. Moreover, Americans express great confidence in their municipal governments. But is this confidence warranted? Using big data and a representative sample of American communities, this book provides the first systematic examination of racial and class inequalities in local politics. We find that non-whites and less-affluent residents are consistent losers in loc...

How did Donald Trump secure the Republican nomination when nearly all the available research suggested it should have been impossible? What can we learn about the factors that drove turnout among key voting blocs? And what issues did voters find important in 2016?Get a big picture understanding of what happened in the 2016 elections and why. Designed to be used as a supplement to American politics texts, this brief overview from Brian Schaffner and John Clark provides a co...

Today's politicians and political groups devote great attention and care to how their messages are conveyed. From policy debates in Congress to advertising on the campaign trail, they carefully choose which issues to emphasize and how to discuss them in the hope of affecting the opinions and evaluations of their target audience. This groundbreaking text brings together prominent scholars from political science, communication, and psychology in a tightly focused analysis of both the origins...