Newswise — While many pundits are looking to Ohio for answers on how Pennsylvania will vote next week, giving Sen. Hillary Clinton a clear edge, Brian Schaffner, research fellow in American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies (CCPS), believes that cultural indicators show that Pennsylvania voters most closely relate to voters in Wisconsin, a state Sen. Barack Obama won by 17 points.
Schaffner's research, which is available on the CCPS blog, looks at indicators such as the percentage of people who shop at Wal-Mart, own a pickup truck, watch PBS regularly, own stocks, own guns or like Jon Stewart. Schaffner believes these percentages in Pennsylvania, when looked at in comparison to other states, give a glimpse into how Pennsylvania voters may cast their ballots.
Using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which included interviews with 35,000 voters across the country in 2006, Schaffner analyzed cultural indicators in all 50 states to see which states Pennsylvania most closely resembles. In all six measures, Wisconsin was consistently close to Pennsylvania, while Ohio, whose primary Clinton won handily, ranked far different in indicators such as stock ownership and PBS viewers.
Schaffner, an assistant professor of government in AU's School of Public Affairs, is an expert on the role of local media in covering members of Congress and the role of parties in the electoral system. His work on political communication has appeared in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly and Political Communication, and his research on political parties has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly and Public Opinion Quarterly. He also won the State Politics & Policy Quarterly award for the best paper on state politics in 2002.
American University's School of Public Affairs offers public affairs education on the undergraduate, graduate and executive levels. The school is also home to research centers and institutes in the fields of political science, public administration, public policy, organization development and justice. American University's School of Public Affairs is the only school of its kind with three accredited graduate degrees: MPA, MPP and Executive MPA. Graduates of the school are active in global policy legislation, advocacy and in the nonprofit and private sectors.
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