Winter, Nicholas J. G., Adam G. Hughes, and Lynn M. Sanders. 2020. “Online Coders, Open Codebooks: New Opportunities for Content Analysis of Political Communication.” Political Science Research & Methods 8:4(731-746). (Prior version presentated at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting.)

Analyzing audiovisual communication is challenging because its content is highly symbolic and less rule-governed than verbal material. We describe a fully reproducible approach to analyzing video content that relies on systematically but minimally trained online workers. By aggregating the work of multiple coders, the online approach achieves reliability, validity, and costs that equal that of traditional, intensively-trained RAs, with much greater speed, transparency, and replicability. Elaborating on the unique features of visual communication and the cognitive structuring of complex concepts, we argue that measurement strategies that rely on the “wisdom of the crowd” are particularly well-suited to coding ambiguous and intricate audiovisual political content.

Online supplemental materials are available here.

Replication materials are avaible here, though the PSRM Dataverse.

Kennedy, Ryan, Scott Clifford, Tyler Burleigh, Philip D. Waggoner, Ryan Jewell, and Nicholas J. G. Winter. 2020. “The Shape of and Solutions to the MTurk Quality Crisis.” Political Science Research and Methods 8:4 (731-746).

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is widely used for data collection; however, data quality may be declining due to the use of virtual private servers to fraudulently gain access to studies. Unfortunately, we know little about the scale and consequence of this fraud, and tools for social scientists to detect and prevent this fraud are underdeveloped. We first analyze 38 studies and show that this fraud is not new, but has increased recently. We then show that these fraudulent respondents provide particularly low-quality data and can weaken treatment effects. Finally, we provide two solutions: an easy-to-use application for identifying fraud in the existing datasets and a method for blocking fraudulent respondents in Qualtrics surveys.

Winter, Nicholas J. G. 2010. “Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans’ Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties” Political Behavior. 32(4):587-618.

During the past three decades Americans have come to view the parties increasingly in gendered terms of masculinity and femininity. Utilizing three decades of American National Election Studies data and the results of a cognitive reaction-time experiment, this paper demonstrates empirically that these connections between party images and gender stereotypes have been forged at the explicit level of the traits that Americans associate with each party, and also at the implicit level of unconscious cognitive connections between gender and party stereotypes. These connections between the parties and masculinity and femininity have important implications for citizens’ political cognition and for the study of American political behavior.

Winter, Nicholas J. G. 2006. “Beyond Welfare: Framing and the Racialization of White Opinion on Social Security.” American Journal of Political Science 50(2):400-420.

In this article I argue that the framing of Social Security in political discourse has associated it symbolically with race. The linkages are subtle and symbolic, and they serve to associate Social Securitywithwhiteness in a mirror image of the association of welfare with blackness. In turn, these associations have racialized white opinion on the program. After discussing the theoretical mechanism by which issue frames can unconsciously associate policies with citizens’ racial predispositions, I review the frames surrounding Social Security. Then, drawing on two decades of nationally representative survey data, I demonstrate the racialization of opinion among whites. Using a variety of measures of racial predispositions, I find that racially conservative whites feel more positively about Social Security than do racial liberals. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for our understanding of racialized politics and for the connections between race, whiteness, and contemporary American politics.

Full tables for the paper are available here.

Winter, Nicholas J. G. 2005. “Framing Gender: Political Rhetoric, Gender Schemas, and Public Opinion on U.S. Health Care Reform.” Politics & Gender 1(3):453-480.

Although gender plays an enormous role in structuring personal relationships, society, politics, and culture, we know relatively little about when people’s gender ideologies will influence their opinions on issues that do not trade directly on matters of gender. This paper lays out a theory of “group implication,” which defines the conditions under which elite political discourse can lead citizens to perceive and evaluate issues in terms of their gender schemas—their cognitive representations of gender beliefs. In the heart of the paper, I apply this framework to an analysis the 1993-94 health care reform effort, and demonstrate how elite frames structured the issue in a way consistent with the gender schema. This structuring was subtle and symbolic, and served to associate, at an unconscious level, people’s gender ideology with their thinking about health care reform. The paper concludes with consideration of the implication of these findings for our understanding of the political impact of gendered rhetoric, and for our conceptual understanding of the relationship between gender and public opinion.

Full tables for the paper are available here.

The measurement appendix for the paper is available here.

Kinder, Donald R. and Nicholas Winter. 2001. “Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy.” American Journal of Political Science 45(2):439-56.

Black and white Americans disagree consistently and often substantially in their views on national policy. This racial divide is most pronounced on policies that intrude conspicuously on the fortunes of blacks and whites, but it is also apparent on a wide array of social welfare issues where race is less obviously in play. Our analysis takes up the question of why blacks and whites differ so markedly, distinguishing among four alternative interpretations: one centers attention on underlying differences of class, another on political principles, a third on social identity, and the fourth on audience. Our results are complicated but coherent. We discuss their implications for the meaning of group interest, speculate over the conditions under which the racial divide might close (or widen) in the foreseeable future, and suggest why we should not wish racial differences in opinion to disappear.

Stewart, Abigail J., Isis H. Settles, and Nicholas J. G. Winter. 1998. “Women and the Social Movements of the 1960s: Activists, Engaged Observers, and Nonparticipants.” Political Psychology 19(1):63-94.

Many women in the generation that attended college during the 1960s have reported that they were influenced by the social movements of that era, even women who did not participate in them. In addition to political activists, social movements also appear to include "engaged observers"-individuals who are attentive to movement writings and activities, and express moral and even financial support for them, but who take no other action. Although activism in a movement may be the best predictor of future political action, engaged observation may be related to other indicators of political socialization, such as a powerful felt impact of the movement and well-developed political attitudes. Evidence to support this notion is drawn from studies of three samples of college-educated white and black women.