Cassese, Erin C., Heather L. Ondercin, and Jordan Randall. 2025. Abortion Attitudes and Polarization in the American Electorate. Cambridge University Press.

About two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in many or all circumstances, and this group finds itself a frustrated majority following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned the legal precedent set in Roe v. Wade. Previous scholarship argues intense minorities can secure favorable policy outcomes when facing off against a more diffuse and less motivated majority, creating incongruence between public opinion and policy. Int his Element, we focus on the ways that preference intensity and partisan polarization have contributed to the current policy landscape surrounding abortion rights. Using survey data from the American National Election Studies, we identify Americans with intense preferences about abortion and investigate the role they play in electoral politics. We observe a shift in the relationship between partisanship and preference intensity coinciding with Dobbs and speculate about what this means for elections and policy congruence in the future.

Conroy, Meredith, Erin Cassese, Dhrumil Mehta, Ciera Hammond, Linda Beail, Al Johri, Sean Long, and Dominik Stecula. 2025. “Mayor Pete is Smart and Elizabeth Warren is Unlikable? Coverage of Warmth and Competence Traits in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary.” Politics & Gender: 1-30. 

Past work on media coverage of candidates for political office has explored gender differences in quantity, substance, and tone with mixed results depending on the office, race, and context. We draw on the stereotype content model (SCM) to examine gendered patterns of media coverage of candidates on the trait dimensions of warmth and competence in the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. Combining Natural Language Processing and manual analysis of news, we find that female candidates receive more negative than positive warmth coverage, while male candidates receive more tonally balanced warmth coverage, which suggests that female leaders are penalized on the dimension of warmth. Additionally, white women received more warmth coverage than women of color and women of color receive more competence coverage than white women. The findings suggest news media may portray white women and women of color candidates as lacking gender congruent traits like warmth but may portray white women as possessing role congruent traits like competence.

Cassese, Erin C., and Amanda Friesen. 2025. “A Look Back At 20 Years of Research on Gender and Voting in Politics & Gender.” Politics & Gender 21(1): 51-65.

We argue that hostile sexism and racial resentment play an important and somewhat underappreciated role in American elections through their influence on voter turnout and engagement with political campaigns. The effects of these attitudes are not straightforward but depend on partisanship. We evaluate whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism cross-pressure Democratic partisans, resulting in lower levels of political participation. We further consider whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism bolster participation among Republicans. We find evidence of these divergent effects on the political mobilization of white voters using the 2016 American National Election Study. The results support our expectations and suggest that cuing resentment-based attitudes was an important strategy for engaging voters in the 2016 presidential campaign and will likely play an important role in future campaigns as well.