Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced religious and partisan conflict over cultural issues such as abortion that was described as a “Culture War.” Recent, highly salient battles over religious liberty and transgender rights have led the media to characterize these issues as “new fronts in the culture war,” thereby giving reason to revisit the culture wars debate. In this article, I test whether the public is polarized on religious liberty and transgender rights, as well as whether these issues share the same underlying structure of public opinion as traditional culture wars issues. Using a dataset from the Pew Research Center, I find that a substantial subset of Americans hold polarized views on these issues, and that religion and party are important factors in explaining that polarization. The results suggest that the religious and partisan divides that fueled the original “culture wars” remain an important factor in American politics.

Conventional wisdom holds that the #MeToo movement increased awareness of sexual harassment and drove sympathizers, particularly women, to increased participation in the 2018 midterm elections. In this paper, we assess whether #MeToo increased awareness of sexual harassment, as well as whether #MeToo increased self-reported interest in various forms of political participation. Using an original dataset from October 2018, we find that although the #MeToo movement increased awareness and concern about sexual harassment and sexual assault, it did not affect interest in political participation among most Americans. We also find that the people most likely to report being aware of and mobilized by the movement were Democrats, those with high levels of political interest, and those who have personally experienced sexual harassment in professional settings. Surprisingly, in most of our models, women were no more likely to report that #MeToo increased their interest in participating than men. The results suggest that the primary effect of #MeToo may have been increasing the salience of sexual harassment and interest in political participation in 2018 among those who possessed the resources to participate and who were ideologically predisposed to support the movement’s goals from the beginning.

Because identification with and affect toward social groups is a primary heuristic for citizens

Objectives. Media effects research has generally ignored the possibility that popular films can affect political attitudes. This omission is puzzling for two reasons. First, research on public opinion finds the potential for persuasion is highest when respondents are unaware that political messages are being communicated. Second, multiple studies have found that entertainment media can alter public opinion. Together, this suggests that popular films containing political messages should possess the potential to influence attitudes. Methods. We develop a laboratory experiment where subjects were randomly assigned to watch a control movie with no political messages, a movie with subtle political messages, or a movie with strong and explicit political messages. Results. We find that popular movies possess the ability to change political attitudes, especially on issues that are unframed by the media. Furthermore, we show such influence persists over time and is not moderated by partisanship, ideology, or political knowledge. Conclusions. Our key findings suggest that a renewed scholarly interest in the political influence of popular movies is clearly warranted.

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