MASS POLITICAL BEHAVIOR - FACULTY

Graduate Studies

The graduate field in Mass Political Behavior is interdisciplinary. It builds upon the research interests and instruction of the following core and affiliated faculty members:

Core Faculty

David Barker ∙ Steven Finkel ∙ Jon Hurwitz ∙ Barry Ames ∙ Wenfang Tang

Affiliated Faculty

Chris Bonneau ∙ Susan Hansen ∙ Scott Morgenstern ∙ Martin Greenberg

William Klein ∙ John Levine ∙ Richard Moreland ∙ Janet Schofield ∙ John Markoff

Core Faculty

Professors whose work is either primarily or exclusively focused on mass political behavior include:

Professor David Barker: Professor Barker’s research focuses on political ideology and public opinion, specifically as it pertains to voting behavior in the United States. Within that framework, his interests are quite eclectic. In particular, he has examined, among other things, (1) the role of persuasion in campaign environments, (2) the way new media (such as talk radio) affect the political landscape, (3) the influence of systematic thinking on the ability of citizens to cast meaningful votes, (4) the role of religious beliefs as attitude determinants, and (5) the role of fundamental definitions of morality in determining ideological thinking. He has published numerous articles in journals such as American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Behavior. His book, Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior (2002: Columbia University Press), has been widely cited and was nominated for several awards.

Professor Steven E. Finkel (Daniel Wallace Professor): Professor Finkel's research interests are in the areas of political participation, voting behavior, and the development of democratic attitudes and values. He has conducted research extensively on these topics in the United States, as well as in new and established democracies such as Germany, South Africa, Kenya, Sri Lanka and the Dominican Republic. In his earlier work, he has examined issues such as the causes and consequences of political protest, and the effects of election campaigns and campaign advertising on voter choice. More recently, he has focused on how democratic orientations emerge in new democracies, with emphasis on the impact of civic education programs on political participation and democratic values, and the relationship between democratic orientations and the peaceful resolution of ethnic conflict in divided societies. He has published numerous articles on these topics in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Democracy.

Professor Jon Hurwitz: Professor Hurwitz has been on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh since 1986 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is broadly interested in political behavior and, more specifically, in topics such as public opinion, attitude formation and change, and political psychology. After completing a number of studies on how the mass public conceptualizes foreign policy, he has, for the past decade, studied American public opinion on racial issues, paying particular attention to racial stereotyping and how individuals’ stereotypes of the other race affect their attitudes toward various policies such as crime control, welfare, and affirmative action. He is now working on a book on race and the criminal justice system, which examines Blacks’ and Whites’ experiences with, and attitudes toward, various agents of the justice system including judges and police officers. His work has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science. Professor Hurwitz is also the Co-Editor of the journal Political Behavior, which is the official journal of the American Political Science Association Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior.

Professor Barry Ames (Mellon Professor): Professor Ames is interested in the effects of social context on attitude formation, partisanship, and voting behavior in countries where political parties and partisan ties are weak. He is currently engaged in a long-term study of Brazilian electoral behavior, focusing on the effects of neighborhood context and political conversation/discussion as forces driving vote choice and especially the high degree of volatility in voting found in Brazil. He has recently published a study of conversation networks entitled "Social Context and Voter Volatility in New Democracies: Networks and Neighborhoods in Brazil's 2002 Elections." (May, 2006), American Journal of Political Science. In the future, he is interested in exploring the microdynamics of contextual effects by doing experiments on conversation and persuasion in Latin American countries that have differing kinds of party systems.

Professor Wenfang Tang: Professor Tang specializes in public opinion and political behavior in contemporary China. He was involved in conducting several national public opinion surveys in China, supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Freeman Foundation and the Hoover Institution. His research covers a wide range of topics including political participation, legal behavior, regime support, political trust, labor relations, ethnic relations, and more. His book on Public Opinion and Political Change in China (Stanford, 2005) focuses on the conditions that shape public opinion and the impact of public opinion on regime change in China. He is particularly interested in designing surveys and using existing data to compare political attitude and behavior in different societies.

Affiliated Faculty

Professors at the University of Pittsburgh who have a strong secondary interest in mass political behavior include:

Department of Political Science

Professor Chris Bonneau: Professor Bonneau's primary research interests lie at the intersection of judicial politics and political behavior. He studies judicial elections as well as the impact of campaign spending on these elections and judicial decisions. Specifically, he asks questions such as: Do voters have meaningful choices in these elections? Can judicial elections be "bought"? What factors promote (or inhibit) the ability of candidates to raise funds? What factors promote electoral competition? His research on these topics has been published in such places as American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and American Politics Research. He is currently working on a book that examines judicial elections from 1990-2004.

Professor Susan B. Hansen: Professor Hansen's behavioral research interests include the impact of female candidates on women's political involvement, gender differences in evaluation of presidential candidate traits, cognitive processing in electoral decision-making, evaluation of governors' job performance, prospects for electing a woman president, and the dynamics of support for the women's movement and for gay rights. She directed the Career and Location Decisions study, a large-scale telephone and Internet survey of recent Pittsburgh-area college graduates. She has also written about theoretical and methodological issues involved in interviewing political elites. Relevant publications include "Talking about Politics" (Journal of Politics, Feb. 1997), "All Things Considered" [with David Barker], Journal of Politics May 2005), and "A Woman for US President?" (forthcoming in Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy [with Laura Wills Otero]).

Professor Scott Morgenstern: Professor Morgenstern has published work concerning both mass and legislative behavior, with a focus on Latin America. His work on mass behavior used data from a study of the Mexican electorate, in which he investigated the relationship between voters’ acceptance of risk and their voting preferences. On the legislative side, his work has focused on the relationship between legislators’ ideological perspectives (based on their responses to survey questions) and their voting discipline.

Department of Psychology

Professor Martin Greenberg: Professor Greenberg received his Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Houston (1963) and conducted post-doc research at the University of Michigan with Herb Kelman (1963-1965). He held an appointment as Assistant Professor at Washington University (1965-1968). He has been a member of the Psychology Department at the University of Pittsburgh since 1968. He currently offers two courses on the psychology of attitudes. The first is an advanced undergraduate course and the second is a graduate seminar. The graduate seminar is a core course for social psychology graduate students and usually attracts students from multiple disciplines, including political science, education, history, and business. Dr. Greenberg's research focuses on the role of social influence in dyadic interaction. He has applied this perspective to crime victim decision making and social support for crime victims. He is currently working on a grant proposal concerning the notion of "suffering" in a medical context.

Professor William Klein: Professor Klein is interested in the effects of social comparison, motivated reasoning, and self-affirmation processes on self-judgments, decision-making, and behavior. Much of this work is conducted in the domain of health, with an interest in how people arrive at personal risk perceptions, and how such perceptions are related to health behaviors and decisions. Dr. Klein teaches courses in social cognition, social psychology and health, and health judgment and decision-making. He has published in outlets such as the Journal of Health Communication, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Professor John M. Levine: Professor Levin is both a member of the Department of Psychology and a Senior Scientist, Learning Research and Development Center, at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. His research focuses on small group processes, including innovation in work teams, group reaction to deviance and disloyalty, temporal processes in groups, and majority and minority influence. Professor Levine has served as Editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Executive Committee Chair of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Additionally, he has published in: Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.); Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; and The Social Psychology of Inclusion and Exclusion (Psychology Press).

Professor Richard Moreland: Professor Moreland received his B.A. degree from the University of Colorado in 1973, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978. Dr. Moreland is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and a Fellow of Division 8 (Personality & Social Psychology), Division 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues), and Division 49 (Group Psychology & Group Psychotherapy) in the American Psychological Association. He has served as President of Division 49. Dr. Moreland is interested in many aspects of groups and their members. Most of his work, however, has focused on temporal changes in groups. Such changes include the formation and dissolution of groups, group development, and group socialization. He is the author of Small Groups (Psychology Press) and numerous other publications, which can be found at: www.pitt.edu/~cslewis/.

Professor Janet Schofield: Professor Schofield is a member of the Department of Psychology as well as a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also served as a faculty member at Spelman College and as a visiting scholar in Germany and Singapore. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972. Professor Schofield has published over three dozen papers as well as two books on school desegregation. Her book Black and White in School: Trust, Tension or Tolerance? was awarded the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize. She is a former member of the governing body of the American Psychological Association and she has served on numerous boards and committees at the National Academy of Sciences. She has given invited presentations or served as a consultant on issues related to race to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, the US Attorney General, and the Clinton White House. Her work in her other major area of interest, the impact of computer technology on classroom processes, has led to numerous publications including two books, Computers and Classroom Culture and Bringing the Internet to School: Lessons from an Urban District.

Department of Sociology

Professor John Markoff: Professor Markoff is the University Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and has been at the University of Pittsburgh since 1972. His research addresses the history of democratization, thought of as a multicontinental process across several centuries involving social movements and powerholding elites. He has published extensively on the French Revolution as well as on Latin America and the world history of democracy.

More information on the graduate program in general can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook.

Revised: September 14, 2007