Awardee Interview: Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book Award (2023)

Award won:

• APSA Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book Award

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Daniel J. Hopkins

 

Project title:

• The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized

 

Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

• https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo27596045.html

 

Tell us something about you and how and why you decided to focus on this research

• This project was something I had been thinking about for years. In part, it grew out of a question I had in graduate school: why weren’t more scholars studying American state and local government? So, beginning with the premise that scholarship on the U.S. takes a disproportionate interest in federal politics, I then started to wonder whether scholarship was mirroring a deeper trend in political behavior.

 

In 280 characters or less, summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• America has a federalist system but a highly nationalized electorate, an electorate that is focused disproportionately on federal politics. The book documents that nationalization and points to two explanations: the changing media environment and shifts in the political parties.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• One of the key explanations for the nationalization of Americans’ political behavior is the changing news media environment. The book documents that state politics has never gotten extensive coverage from media outlets, but as the American news audience shifts online and away from print newspapers, what little information we used to get about state and local politics has dwindled.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? 

• There’s been great research on this topic since my book, and I frequently find myself thinking, “I wish I thought of that.” The answer is something that I am now working to remedy: I wish I had approached this from a more comparative perspective to begin with. The experiences of countries like Germany and the U.K. can teach us a lot about whether story of nationalization is specific to the U.S.

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

• This field has been burgeoning, so it’s hard to summarize briefly. My book focused pretty heavily on state-level politics, so research on what this means for local elections is a great direction for future research. In a multiparty system, the basic measures of nationalization that I use can break down, but there’s been valuable recent work on measuring nationalization. It’s also exciting to see cutting-edge experiments and other research designs that can assess the causal role of changes in the media. It’s harder, though, to assess the causal role of audience preferences.

 

What’s next? 

• I hinted at this before, but with Frederik Hjorth and Gall Sigler, I’ve been asking the same questions of about ten countries outside the U.S. While measuring nationalization in multi-party systems presents new challenges, the general story is that most countries haven’t nationalized to the same extent as the U.S. In some cases, the countries have long been nationalized, while in others, even recent changes in media markets haven’t had a nationalizing effect.

 

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