Marisa Abrajano is an assistant professor in the department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in politics from New York University in 2005. Her research is in the field of American politics, particularly in the areas of campaigns, mass electoral behavior, and race/ethnic politics. She is the author of two books: Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Television Advertising to Latinos (Stanford University Press) and New Faces, New Voices: The Hispanic Electorate in America (with R. Michael Alvarez) published by Princeton University Press. Her other work has been published in several journals in the discipline.
She is interested in examining whether the traditional theories of mass political and electoral behavior can be applied to and are appropriate for an increasingly diverse American electorate. While the demographic characteristic of race/ethnicity has been established in the literature as an important predictor of mass political behavior, it has mostly been examined from a Black-White perspective. But with the large influx of Latino and Asian immigrants over the past three decades, it is unclear how their political behavior fits into this pre-existing framework. Thus a large part of her research agenda investigates whether the discipline's established theories on voting, campaigns, and public opinion need to be reassessed in light of the changing racial and ethnic composition of the American public.
Publications
Books
1. Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Advertising to Latino Voters. 2010. Stanford University Press.
2 . New Faces, New Voices: the Hispanic Electorate in America. 2010. Princeton University Press.
Journal Aritcles
1. “Are Blacks and Latinos Responsible for the Passage of Proposition 8? Analyzing Voter Attitudes on California's Proposal to Ban Same-Sex Marriage in 2008" Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming.
2. Agenda Setting, Public Opinion, and the Issue of Immigration Reform. (with Johanna Dunaway and Regina Branton) Social Sciences Quarterly, forthcoming.
3. “Assessing the Causes and Effects of Political Trust Amongst U.S. Latinos” (with R. Michael Alvarez), American Politics Research, 2010, 38(1): 110-141.
4. Examining the Link Between Issue Attitudes and News Source: The Case of Latinos and Immigration. (with Simran Singh) Political Behavior, 2009, 31(1):1-30
5. “The Hispanic Vote in the 2004 Presidential Election: Insecurity and Moral Concerns" (with R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler), The Journal of Politics, April 2008, 70(2): 368-382.
6. “Race Based vs. Issue Voting: A Natural Experiment'' (with Jonathan Nagler and R. Michael Alvarez), Political Research Quarterly, June 2005, 58:203-218.
7. “Who Evaluates a Presidential Candidate by Using Non-Policy Campaign Messages?” Political Research Quarterly, March 2005, 58:55-67.
Working Papers
A Method of Linking Surveys Using Affective “Signatures
with an Application to Racial/Ethnic Groups in the
U.S.” (with Keith Poole)
Abstract: This paper addresses a concern often
faced by social scientists who study subgroups within a
given population, as they are frequently limited in the
scope and breadth of their research questions due the
quality of available survey data (i.e. inadequate
sample size or lack of comprehensive questions). To
address this problem, we develop a procedure for
linking respondents from different surveys based on
their internal (subjective) utility to political
stimuli, which we capture by using an individual’s
responses to a set of feeling thermometer questions.
Feeling thermometer questions, as demonstrated in
previous research, are an accurate measure of an
individual’s subjective utility
because they are measures
of affect. We apply this technique to the 2004
National Annenberg Election survey and the 2004
American National Election Studies survey. Linking
survey respondents based on their thermometer scores
not only recovers the distributions on group
demographics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and
education but it also recovers the distributions of
these groups’ preferences across a wide array of issues
and policies as well.