Samuel J. Abrams
Government
Department
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CGIS-North |
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Graduate
Associate,
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Research
Fellow |
Research
Affiliate |
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Center for Basic Research in the Social
Sciences, Harvard University |
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Latest News:
Culture War has been
featured in the LA Time’s weekend magazine, West: Over
the Hedge
Culture War has been featured in the Jewish World Review: Fed Up with Partisan Warfare?
New working
paper: The
Senate Electoral Cycle and Bicameral Appropriations Politics (with Kenneth A. Shepsle, Robert P. Van Houweling
and Peter C. Hanson)
My work on SATs has been featured in The Boston Globe: More time for SATs a concern
My work on SATs has been featured in Slate Magazine: Flag on the Field: Should colleges know when a student takes the SAT untimed?
My work on the SATs has been featured on Nightline: Does
Loophole Give Rich Kids More Time on SAT?
CBS News just called Culture
War? an “indispensable book.” Dan Meyer, America
vs. Third Parties.
Culture War? has been featured in Ending Polarization : The good news about the culture wars by John Gastil, Dan M. Kahan, and Donald Braman
-The second edition of Culture War? The Myth of Polarized America is due out in November. The new cover.
- Culture War? has been featured in the London Telegraph: Travel 2,500 miles in any direction and see if you
can find two more similar cities
-Culture War? has been featured in the LA Times: Red
plus blue equals purple
-Culture War? has been featured in the Guardian: Is
America Still Red Vs. Blue, or Purpler?
-Culture War? is featured in a journal
symposium: The Forum-A Journal of
Applied Research in Contemporary Politics.
-My article showing systematic abuse of the SATs was just released by Education Next: Unflagged SATs: Who benefits from special accommodations?
-I am referenced by ReligionLink: Can the Democrats find religion?
-My latest paper, presented at the 63rd
Midwestern Political Science Association meeting in
-Culture War? has been featured in a
Philadelphia Inquirer story: Americans staying on
the sidelines of political showdown
-Culture War? has been featured in USA Today
story: What’s
a governor like you doing in a state like this?
-Culture War? has been featured in CBS News
story: Polls
Filibuster Voters' Will
-Culture War? has been featured in The
Wilson Quarterly by Alan Wolfe: The
Referendum of 2004
-I was fortunate to be interviewed for NPR’s Day to Day program:
NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates discusses the new book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America with its co-author, Samuel Abrams. Abrams argues that the "red vs. blue" cultural divide repeated by American media is inaccurate shorthand, and that Americans agree more than disagree about many important issues.
-Culture War? has been featured in a CBS.com story: Meyer's
Book On Year's Books
I read (okay, tried to read) far too many political
books in 2004 but, again, I can only recommend one enthusiastically:
"Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris Fiorina with
Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope. This thin book guts the prevailing
political paradigm that
-Culture War? has been featured in the Atlantic’s State of the Nation Report: Jonathan
Rauch’s Bipolar Disorder?
-Culture War? has been featured by the John
Locke Foundation: Culture
War?: Dispeling the Media's Hyperbole
-Culture War? has been featured on MSNBC: Who are you calling divided, buster? Are Americans really
bitterly split? No, they aren’t.
-Culture War? has been featured in Newsday: Bush's
harder sell- The president may dominate in foreign affairs, but he's out of
step at home
-Culture War? has been reviewed by the Harvard Political Review: What Culture War?
-Culture War? has
been featured in a FindLaw story: A Closer Look At The
Red/Blue Cultural Divide: It Is Mostly
Hokum
-Please see a related op-ed piece dealing with the culture war issue: The Future of the Democratic Party in the United States: A Move Toward Party Definition, Not Religion
-I was fortunate to be on CBC Radio’s The Current: The Polarization Debate (November 1st) and then on The 2004 Post-Election Roundup.
-Paul
Samuelson of Newsweek did an about face
regarding Culture War? in his latest column: The
Politics of Self-Esteem
-Culture War? has
been featured in a Washington Times
story: America’s
Religious Camps
-Culture War? has been featured in a San Diego Union-Tribune story: There are really two Americas.
-Culture War? has
been featured in a San Francisco Chronicle
story: Post-Election
Perspectives: ‘Holy War’ over moral values or contempt for opinion?
-Amitai Etzioni mentions Culture War? in his Forward piece: Red State, Blue State, Light Meat, Dark Meat.
-Culture War? has been featured in a Cleveland Plain Dealer story: U.S.
divided, but analysts don't expect culture war
-Culture War? has been featured in a Christian Science Monitor story: How the lines of the culture have been redrawn.
-Culture
War? has been featured in a Newsweek story: Bush Could Bring Us
Together
-Culture
War? has been featured in the Baltimore Sun story: The
Parties, Not the People, Are Furious.
-Culture War? has been featured in The National Journal: How
Our Political System Elevates The Wrong People
-Culture War? has
been featured in a Chronicle of Higher
Education story: Religion
and Culture: Views of 10 Scholars
-Culture War? has been featured in an Arizona Republic story: Polarized
America in eyes of beholder. Some are challenging idea of divided nation
-Culture War? has been featured in a CBS News
story: Divided
We Stand, United We Fall.
-Culture War? has been featured in a Guardian-Observer piece in the
-Culture War? has been featured in The Economist: The politics of values
-Culture War? has been featured in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article: Exploding the myth of "deep divisions"
-Culture War? has been featured in a story by Matt Miller: THE MYTH OF THE GREAT AMERICAN DIVIDE
-Culture War? has been featured in a Chicago Sun-Times story: Time for a campaign reality check
-Commentary: "A nation
divided? Maybe the gap isn't that wide, after all"
- USNews and World Report’s latest issue features a series of articles on “The Deep Divide.”
Culture War? has been featured in the issue: How deep
the divide? Scholars and pundits don't agree on the
meaning of red and blue--or whether the nation is deeply split
-Please see a recent article, Tarred
`L' word in the Charlotte Observer, which
mentions my thoughts on “liberalism” and the current state of political parties
in the
-My book, Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America, was recently profiled in The Stanford Report.
-Culture War? has been written up by Joel Klein in Time Magazine and by Louis Menand (article) in The New Yorker magazine. An abstract of the book can be found in the Hoover Digest.
-BookTV covered a lecture
given by Morris Fiorina on Culture War.
-My Oxford Analytica piece summarizing the findings
in Culture War: Political
Polarisation is a Myth
-Pictures
from my trip to
-Pictures from my trip to
Stanford and the
-Pictures from my trip to
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Works in Progress:
Bicameral Effects on Federal Outlays: The U.S. Senate and the Distribution of Pork
Kenneth
A. Shepsle, Robert P. Van Houweling, and Samuel Abrams
March
2004
Publications:
“The
Demand for Special Accommodations” in Education
Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research.
Fall 2003. Vol. 3:4
Available in HTML or PDF format. Presents a look at the changing nature of SATs and accommodations for disabled persons. For a related story, please see the Carolina Journal’s New Disability Policy Clouds SAT Picture article.
“The Indirect Effects of Ballot Initiatives on State Fiscal Policy”
(with Michael J.
New,
Presented at the
2004 Midwestern Political Science Association Meeting.
Abstract:
Most studies that
examine the impact of ballot initiatives on state fiscal outcomes examine their
direct effects. However, it is possible that the mere presence of the
initiative may also have an impact on state fiscal policy. In this paper, we
will test this hypothesis by examining state fiscal behavior during the recent
budgetary shortfalls. If initiative states were more likely to resolve their
shortfalls through spending cuts rather than tax hikes, that will provide solid
evidence that ballot initiatives are having an indirect effect on state fiscal
policy.
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America
Press Release and Sample Chapter
With Morris P. Fiorina (
We have been written up in the New York Times (The Week in Review: A Nation Divided: Who Says?), The New York Sun, The Anniston Star, The Columbia Journalism Review, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Sunday Herald, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, MSNBC.com, The Baltimore Sun, The New Yorker, KCBS, and others. Additionally, we were featured on CBS Sunday Morning on July 4th.
(CBS) Recap: July 4, 2004
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
Just a little bit more than four months from the presidential election, with
polls showing President Bush and Sen. John Kerry in a dead heat, we're hearing
more and more about how America is a land divided between the "Red,"
or Republican states, and the "Blue," or Democratic states.
Are we really that divided? Are there really two distinct visions of
A copy of the transcript from the piece is available here.
A related piece by Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post supports our argument.
A member of that tiny elite that comments publicly about political currents (probably some fraction of 1% of a population) spends most of his time in informal communication about politics with others in the same select group.
He rarely encounters a conversation in which
his assumptions of shared contextual grasp of political ideas are challenged..
. . It is largely from his informal communications that he learns how “public
opinion” is changing and what the change signifies, and he generalizes facilely
from these observations to the bulk of the broader public.
Philip
Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter (New York: Free
Press, 1964): 206–261