During the past decades, tensions have emerged between a relatively new, highly popular theology focused on material prosperity and individual accountability, known as the prosperity gospel, versus a traditional African American doctrine that emphasizes humanitarianism and racial consciousness. Despite the diversity of interests and experiences within the African American community, none of these divisions have manifested themselves systematically in the political arena. I argue that considering the importance of the church in shaping African American political views, values, and norms, a significant shift in church doctrine could dramatically alter not only congregants’ own political values, but also could lead to a significant change in how the church interacts with its surrounding community. The prosperity gospel may be that significant shift. Based on interviews with community and church leaders, participant observation, sermon content analysis, and archival research, I present evidence to suggest that not only do churches that espouse the prosperity gospel reinforce humanitarianism and racial consciousness, in certain circumstances, they do so more aggressively than their traditional counterparts. This dissertation supports numerous scholars’ claims that the prosperity gospel emphasizes individualism and individual versus collective level solutions to societal problems; however, this bias toward individualism and self-accountability is found in all of the younger ministers who participated in the study, even when categorized as a traditional church. I argue that this is evidence of the global trend of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideas into religious institutions. The prosperity gospel provides an effective conduit for neo-liberal ideals, but no longer monopolizes the dispersion of these values.

This dissertation concerns the US presidential use of heroic framing in connection with foreign policy. I identify "heroic framing" as speech which describes policies in terms evoking the heroic narrative, either explicitly or implicitly through references to heroic characters. The technique of heroic framing both encourages audiences to view a situation in terms of stark moral absolutes and normalizes casualties and violence as an aspect of these heroic conflicts. This rhetorical technique thereby combines fear appeals with important dimensions of inspiration and reassurance. To develop this concept, I draw primarily on Jungian archetype, social psychology, organizational leadership and feminist international relations theory. My ultimate aim is to see whether the president's heroic framing of foreign policy heightens domestic support of and foreign attention to those policies. Extending Samuel Kernell's theory of "going public" and James Fearon's theory of audience costs, I hypothesize that presidents use heroic framing as a multivocal signal. First, by using heroic framing, presidents seek to increase domestic support for politically contentious policies. Meanwhile, by speaking forcefully about a subject in heroic terms, presidents also cue foreign leaders to the seriousness of their intentions.

To test the hypothesis that presidents use heroic framing strategically and do gain greater domestic and foreign attention as a result, I employ a multi-modal research design. I first use a content-analytic and statistical approach to measure the impact of the president's rhetorical choices on the media, on congressional action, and on public opinion polls for every month from 1981 through 2005. I then perform two historical case studies to examine the impact of the president's use of heroic imagery on domestic and foreign response to US foreign policies during 1983 and during the 2001-2004 period. Along the way to testing my main hypotheses, I use the extensive database I created of the presidential use of heroic rhetoric to explore differences in the use of heroic imagery across individual presidents, across policy domains, in response to presidential popularity crises, and in the context of war. Through statistical analysis, I determine that the president's use of heroic imagery does increase domestic attention to foreign policy subjects. Similarly, presidential speech patterns suggest that foreign policy targets would do well to respond to the US president's increased use of heroic framing, since it does generally signal commitment to conflict. These statistical findings of the significance of heroic framing are supported by an examination of the cases of 1983 and 2001-2004. In 1983, Ronald Reagan's use of heroic framing for policy advocacy and for public reassurance was misinterpreted by the USSR as a signal of conflict commitment - a misperception which very nearly led to nuclear war. Meanwhile, in the period 2001-2004 George W. Bush made extensive use of heroic framing to promote the War on Terror and the Iraq War. Through an analysis of opinion polls, I determined that even after the US failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush's intensive use of this technique led to an increase in domestic support for his Iraq War policy, which provided a critical boost to his 2004 re-election effort.

This paper revisits the linked questions of attitudinal crystallization and generational formation in an attempt to nudge the understanding of these matters forward. Our goal, put most generally, is to bring ideas about the formation of political generations into an analysis of the long-term dynamics of attitude crystallization. Although scholars have quite often tried to trace the long-term development of political generations, and often employ comparison groups (e.g., Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb 1991, Cole, Zucker, and Ostrove 1998, Elder 1974, Fendrich and Lovoy 1988, Jennings 1987, Markus 1979, Stewart, Settles, and Winter 1998), less common are analyses of attitudinal crystallization that bring ideas about political generations to bear. We do this in the paper in two ways.

First, our analysis distinguishes within an age-cohort between those who were politically engaged and those who were politically unengaged during their early adult, and presumably politically formative, years. The former resemble the "generational unit" Mannheim (1952) described far better than does the age-cohort as a whole. We explore the importance of this distinction to how attitudinal stability and constraint develop over time.

Second, we compare age cohorts to suggest how the crystallization process produces age-related differences in the response to political events. Age, in this analysis is treated as a marker both of political experience and of political generation. This effort demonstrates how the unfolding of political history can influence the extent to which attitudes crystallize within a political generation.

Research on gender in politics has long emphasized the gender gap—the number or proportion of women in office—as its chosen measure of women’s attainment. When women win elections at rates equal to men, as they do in the U.S., many scholars thus conclude that candidate sex must play little or no role in voters’ decisions. Yet the question of which women win should interest scholars of gender as much as how many women win—and tells us a great deal more about how politics is gendered.

How then does candidate gender enter into voters’ decisions? Modern theories of voting behavior, observing that acquiring information about candidates is costly, often conclude that supplying voters with more information about the candidates would obviate reliance on cognitive shortcuts with known biases. This dissertation stakes a different claim: while heuristics and stereotypes do enable voters to “fill in” incomplete information, they also allow voters to simplify overwhelming information. Gender, as one of the simplest and most ubiquitous organizing principles of human behavior, helps us address the difficult task of voting in a candidate-centered electoral system by reducing a multidimensional task to a simple set of guidelines. This ensures biases in how we vote not only in low-information settings, but in high-information settings as well.

In this dissertation, I use experiments and election data to test whether our decision-making process affects the descriptive representation of women in the U.S. I present evidence that voter reliance on gender as a cue affects the type of women elected at every level of office. In Chapter 1, I examine state legislative elections in Oregon and find that voters winnow the field by selecting women with attractive, stereotype-congruent appearances, even though voters have a great deal of information and partisan cues in such races. In Chapter 2, I show that in local elections in California, where voters often know little about candidates, women fare better when they run for offices that fit feminine stereotypes (city council and school board) and worse in stereotype-incongruent offices (mayor). In Chapter 3, I show that even in high-information and high-salience national elections, partisan voters feel more favorable towards women who exhibit gendered leadership styles congruent with their party’s preferences: feminine for Democrats, masculine for Republicans.

The familiarity and simplicity of gender as an organizing principle suggests the use of gendered heuristics and stereotypes is inherent to any political system in which voters evaluate individual candidates. This holds whether voters have a great deal of information about candidates or only a little, in elections of high- and low-salience, and across both partisan and non-partisan races. Even when women win elections at rates equal to men, women who run counter to stereotype—in appearance, in office type, in party—are at a disadvantage compared to women who fit stereotypes.