Heather Marie Rice

Much political science research has focused on the unique characteristics of the subset of American policy known as morality policy.  Morality policy is defined as public policy that involves a conflict over fundamental core values as opposed to economic self-interest.  My dissertation investigates the impact of state-level morality policy on public opinion toward the target group of those morality policies.  Focusing on protective policies toward the gay community, I argue that a top-down social learning process occurs in the American states such that citizens take cues from both their state elites and the policies they enact and, in turn, become more supportive of the targets of those policies.  For example, if a favorable policy toward the gay community is in place in a state, citizens within that state will hold more favorable attitudes toward the gay community than citizens living in a state with no such protective policy.  I plan to contrast the morality policy findings with that of an economic policy, government spending on the environment.  I hypothesize the opposite relationship for economic policies: state-level policy follows the will of the people.

Using state-level data from multiple sources, I model attitudes toward morality outgroups (here, the gay community) as a multilevel model which includes a variety of individual and state characteristics (specifically, whether state-specific morality policies are in place).  Modeling attitudes in this way takes significant steps toward creating methodological models that are a closer reflection of reality than traditional methods.  Further, my dissertation will address three significant shortcomings in past research on morality policy.  Past research often claims that morality policy is distinct from economic policies, but scholars rarely compare morality and economic policy side-by-side.  Further, scholars assume that the causal arrow of influence flows from citizens to elites because of the demands of democracy.  However, this assumption is rarely tested.  I theorize the opposite causal relationship and plan multiple rigorous methodological tests of my theory.  Lastly, targets of morality policy are largely ignored in the literature.  Policy responsiveness is often analyzed in a vacuum, without acknowledging the influence of such policies on public perceptions of the community they most intimately affect.  Since morality policies rest on first principles, it should be assumed that attitudes toward the moral act in question (e.g., homosexuality) must change before policy attitudes (e.g., gay marriage) will change.

The implications of my dissertation are three-fold.  First, our traditional view of representation (citizens influence elites) may not hold in the realm of morality policy.  Democracy demands that citizens express their will to the elites who then make their constituents’ opinions expressed in policy.  Second, my dissertation has implications for scholars studying attitudes toward policy at-large.  If studying attitudes toward state-level policies, then scholars need to be sure they are including state-level variables in their models.  Citizens are not islands; they are influenced by a large host of factors, many of them from the state in which they reside.  Lastly, my dissertation has implications for those who favor progressive morality policies.  If, as I hypothesize, citizens are influenced by the state policy and the elites, then lobbyists and grassroots organizations should focus on changing policy and elite attitudes, rather than changing citizen attitudes.

Impartial Judges?  Race, Institutional Context, and State Supreme Courts (with Chris W. Bonneau).  Forthcoming in State Politics & Policy Quarterly.

In this article we address a fundamental question in judicial politics:  other things being equal, do black judges behave differently than white judges?  It has long been presumed that white judges differ from their minority counterparts in terms of sentencing, deliberation, and propensity to overturn decisions.  However, to date, there is little empirical evidence on whether there are systematic differences in behavior between these two groups of judges.  Here, we utilize the newly created judge-level State Supreme Court Database to assess whether judicial decisionmaking is affected by race.  Looking at all criminal cases decided by state supreme court judges from 1995-1998, we find evidence of differences between white and nonwhite judges, but only in states where there is no intermediate appellate court.  This suggests the effects of race on judicial decisionmaking are conditioned by the institutional structure of the court system.

Last Update 03.02.2009