Objective. We reexamine the issue of phenotypic discrimination against Mexicans in the U.S. labor market, originally studied by Telles and Murguía (1990) and later by Bohara and Davila (1992). We also seek to explain this topic with respect to the Puerto Rican and Cuban populations in the United States. Methods. Instead of using household income as a dependent variable, we use occupational ranking scores computed by Hauser and Warren (1996) in combination with data from the 1990 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS). The occupational rankings more accurately reflect the level of labor market discrimination faced by individuals. Furthermore, the use of the more recent LNPS allows us to update the work of previous scholars and extend the analysis to two previously unexamined Latino groupsPuerto Ricans and Cubans. Results. Our findings indicate that darker-skinned Mexicans and Cubans face significantly lower occupational prestige scores than their lighter-skinned counterparts even when controlling for factors that influence performance in the labor market. However, we find no conclusive evidence that skin-color differences impact occupational prestige scores for Puerto Ricans.

Despite the rapid growth of online political advertising, the vast majority of scholarship on political advertising relies exclusively on evidence from candidates’ television advertisements. The relatively low cost of creating and deploying online advertisements and the ability to target online advertisements more precisely may broaden the set of candidates who advertise and allow candidates to craft messages to more narrow audiences than on television. Drawing on data from the newly released Facebook Ad Library API and television data from the Wesleyan Media Project, we find that a much broader set of candidates advertises on Facebook than television, particularly in down-ballot races. We then examine within-candidate variation in the strategic use and content of advertising on television relative to Facebook for all federal, statewide, and state legislative candidates in the 2018 election. Among candidates who use both advertising media, Facebook advertising occurs earlier in the campaign, is less negative, less issue focused, and more partisan than television advertising.

Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre-existing levels of political information.C entral to most notions of representative democracy is the simple idea that citizens ought to participate in the process of choosing leaders and expressing opinions on matters of policy. Engaged, attentive, and informed citizens, it is widely held, should be able to select representatives and make other meaningful political choices consistent with their preferences and interests. Key to this exercise of informed democratic decision making is the assumption that there will be sufficient, relevant data available in the political environment and that citizens will be able and inclined to draw on this information in making their choices.Democratic reality, of course, falls far short of this ideal, and the project of saving democracy from the shortcomings of the American citizen has been an ongoing challenge for political science. How is it that a disengaged, ill-equipped, and poorly informed citizenry has managed to maintain a democracy? Specifically, how can people with little interest in and even less knowledge about politics arrive at more or less reasoned political judgments? While a number of alternative solutions have been proposed, we suggest that over the last several decades the informational needs of the American citizen have been subsidized by an important but overlooked source: the thirty-second television campaign advertisement.Although much maligned by scholars and popular commentators alike, television campaign advertising actually fulfills a vital democratic function. To be sure, it is easy to identify particular ads that are silly, offensive, uninformative, or even misleading and to argue that such ads have a detrimental effect on democratic citizenship. Nevertheless, political advertising has the potential to bring about a more attentive, more informed, and more participatory citizenry. We show that exposure to campaign advertising can produce citizens who are more interested in a given election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and are ultimately more likely to vote. And importantly, these effects tend to be concentrated among those citizens who have the greatest need: those wh...

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Well over $1 billion was spent on televised political advertising in the U.S. in 2004. Given the ubiquity of the 30 second spot, one might presume that ads must affect viewers' vote choices. Somewhat surprisingly, though, scholars have yet to make much progress in confirming this claim. In this paper, we leverage a comprehensive dataset that tracks political ads in the nation's top media markets and a survey of presidential and U.S. Senate voters in 2004. We ask whether exposure to presidential and Senate advertising influences voters' evaluations of candidates and the choices that they make at the ballot box. In the end, we find considerable evidence that advertising persuades-and that its impact varies depending on the characteristics of the viewer.