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"This book provides unprecedented information about the rising tide of Evangelical political activists on the right and the rising tide of Secular political activists on the left. "God gap" scholarship argues that Evangelicals and Seculars captured opposing parties, and created a religious divide between the "Godless" and the "pious." This book introduces a new paradigm for understanding change among political activists - the representation-based model. This model offers a new way of looking at recent trends that reveals that basic demographic forces matter far more when it comes to understanding the rise of Evangelical Republican activists and Secular Democratic activists, and that mobilization matters far less"--

Many attribute the demise of the solid South, and changes in party attachments outside the South, to elite-level changes in the parties' positions on racial issues and an issue evolution of the party system. Support is also growing for the notion that, as the Republican Party became an acceptable alternative to the Democratic Party for racial issues in the South, a resurgence of class-based partisanship further fueled the exodus. By investigating whether political awareness mediates responsiveness to changes in the political environment, evidence that partisan evolution is concentrated among more aware citizens is uncovered, and the implications are examined. Adapted from the source document.

Revisionists demonstrate campaigns mobilize, educate, activate predispositions, and change minds. Attention has turned from the "minimum effects" thesis to questions about the conditions under which campaigns matter and questions about which types of people are susceptible to campaign effects. Focusing on whether campaign effects are mediated by chronic political awareness, I find that current scholarship on this question is mixed. Some find that campaigns affect the politically unaware most, some find bigger effects among more aware citizens, and some find similar effects across the awareness distribution. Noting the possibility that awareness mediates different types of campaign effects differently (e.g. priming, persuasion, or learning), Zaller's Receive-Accept-Sample framework is consulted to develop expectations. I test the RAS generated predictions using the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey pre/post panel. The results support the theory that awareness mediates different campaign effects differently. Adapted from the source document.

Many attribute the demise of the solid South, and changes in party attachments outside the South, to elite-level changes in the parties' positions on racial issues and an issue evolution of the party system. Support is also growing for the notion that, as the Republican Party became an acceptable alternative to the Democratic Party for racial issues in the South, a resurgence of class-based partisanship further fueled the exodus. By investigating whether political awareness mediates responsiveness to changes in the political environment, evidence that partisan evolution is concentrated among more aware citizens is uncovered, and the implications are examined.

Scale limitations, endogeneity problems, and observational equivalence in observational studies render many tests of the proximity and directional models inconclusive. Fortunately, the task of designing experimental tests has proven tractable and the small, but growing, body of experimental evidence sheds new light on directional and proximity motivated behavior. The experiment described in this article was designed to reexamine the role of ideology structuring candidate evaluations in the general population and test the models in two new policy areas: opinion about military spending and opinion about abortion. The results indicate that ideology and opinions about military spending stimulate proximity behavior whereas opinions about abortion stimulate directional behavior. It is also found that abortion-based evaluations are more strongly directional for those who oppose abortion—which is consistent with the notion of policy balancing. The article concludes by considering the possibility that some issues lend themselves to proximity comparisons whereas others lend themselves to directional comparisons and discussing the implications for democratic politics.