Donald Trump dominated the 2016 Republican primary despite the fact that he was not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. Bernie Sanders came just shy of winning the Democratic nomination despite the fact that he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Democrat only three months before the election. Why did two candidates with no formal ties to the political parties fare so well? One possibility is that primary voters are more ideologically extreme and that ideology drives support for these candidates. However, another possibility is that concerns about government process drives support for insurgent candidates. We test the proposition that distrust was the primary motivator of primary voting for these two insurgent candidates using two datasets: a poll of New Hampshire voters fielded a week before their primary and a national poll taken in June 2016. Results confirm the hypothesis that distrust drove intraparty vote choice in the 2016 presidential primaries.

In recent years, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contraception mandate associated with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a contentious issue that has created clash-of-rights claims between advocates of reproductive freedom and advocates of religious freedom. Americans differ considerably in their views toward whether religiously affiliated institutions that object to the use of contraceptives should be granted an exemption to the HHS contraception mandate. This article explores the determinants of Americans’ support for or opposition to the religious exemption. We focus particularly on the effects of individuals’ religious orientations, gender, and political attitudes that generate support for competing rights claims. Using data from a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, we (surprisingly) find little evidence of a gender effect. Rather, we find that support for the religious exemption is driven largely by church attendance and moral conservatism, with adherence to specific religious traditions having relatively minor effects. We also find that support for the religious exemption to the HHS contraception mandate is influenced by political variables (i.e., partisanship and ideology, attitudes toward President Obama, and Tea Party support) and demographic attributes (i.e., number of children in a given household, racial/ethnic identity, education, and age). We conclude that the clash of values over the contraception mandate is driven largely by religion and political attitudes.

Political scientists, analysts and journalists alike have long believed that the degree of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy determines voter turnout. We use survey data from 24 panel studies to demonstrate that this causal relationship is actually reversed: voter turnout affects satisfaction with democracy. We also show that this reversed relationship is conditioned by election type, electoral system, and election outcomes. These findings are important because: (1) They question conventional wisdom and a large body of scientific literature; (2) They invite a more nuanced approach towards the study of the relationship between evaluations of regime performance and political participation; and (3) They emphasize the vital role of elections in shaping citizens’ perception of the democratic process.

This article presents the results of the first-ever survey that captures how political scientists view peer-reviewed law journals with regard to overall impact, familiarity, and article quality, as well as reading and submission preferences. In addition, it examines the extent to which the evaluation of journal quality differs depending on a researcher’s methodological approach. I find that scholars generally agree on a set of top peer-reviewed law journals, although some differences do exist based on the methodological approach of the respondent. These results can be used by a wide range of scholars to formulate publication strategies and evaluate the scholarly productivity of their peers.