Peer-Reviewed Publications
Stephanie Ternullo. 2024. “Place-Based Partisanship: How Place (Re)produces Americans’ Partisan Attachments.” American Journal of Sociology.
How does place shape and sustain Americans’ partisan attachments? This paper takes up this question by drawing on four rounds of interviews with residents across two Midwestern cities, which share several demographic characteristics but have voted differently in presidential elections for decades. These cases pose a puzzle to existing scholarship, which often argues that place-based politics is rooted in local structural characteristics – economic conditions and demographic composition. Instead, I argue that local organizational arrangements mediate residents’ experiences of local structural conditions and national politics, leading them to cohere around shared understandings of their social problems and how their social identities fit into national party politics. This can lead similar people to identify with different political parties. By identifying local organizations as a key mechanism linking place to partisanship, this paper contributes to classic and growing literatures on the relationship between place and politics, and also sheds new light on political variation across the industrial Heartland.
Stephanie Ternullo, Ángela Zorro-Medina, and Robert Vargas.* 2024. “How Political Dynasties Concentrate Advantage within Cities: Evidence from Crime and City Services in Chicago.” Social Forces. *Ternullo and Zorro-Medina are joint first authors
Classic models of urban inequality acknowledge the importance of politics for resource distribution and service provision. Yet, contemporary studies of spatial inequality rarely measure politics directly. In this paper, we introduce political dynasties as a way of integrating political economy approaches with ecological theory to better understand the political construction of urban spatial inequality. To do so, we examine the case of political dynasties within the Chicago city council. We show that, from 2011-2018, blocks in dynastic wards saw fewer homicides, assaults, robberies, and thefts relative to those in non-dynastic wards. We then leverage the 2015 ward redistricting to provide evidence that dynastic effects play some role in producing these outcomes: blocks annexed into dynastic wards experienced a decline in assaults and robberies and an increase in pothole coverings. While dynastic politicians improve outcomes for blocks they annex, they also withdraw power from those they displace; and displaced blocks had relatively higher levels of crime than annexed blocks in 2015. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that dynastic politicians are contributing to spatial inequalities within Chicago.
Stephanie Ternullo & Simon Yamawaki Shachter. 2024. “Old Patronage in the New Deal: Did Urban Machines use Work Relief Programs to Benefit the Democratic Party?” Studies in American Political Development.
What role did urban machines play in national politics during the New Deal? To what extent did they serve as facilitators in a local-national patronage system, converting the flow of federal funds into their cities into votes for federal Democratic candidates? To answer these questions, we bring together data on urban machines and work relief spending, the New Deal programs that received the most public and political scorn for their supposed patronage uses. Despite longstanding claims that FDR and other New Dealers funneled extra work relief funds to urban machines, and that machines converted those funds into votes for the national Democratic Party, we find little evidence of this exchange relationship. Machines did not receive a disproportionate share of work relief funds, but they did see large influxes of federal funds, just like other cities with high levels of economic need. And yet, based on two-way fixed effects models and synthetic control analyses, we find no evidence that they succeeded at using those funds to turn out votes for President Roosevelt. We find evidence for just one dimension of a local-national patronage system: Democratic Senate candidates did see larger increases in vote share in machine counties vs. non-machine counties with similar increases in work relief expenditures.
Stephanie Ternullo. 2024 “The Local Politics of National Realignments: U.S. Political Transformation from the New Deal to the Religious Right.” Journal of Historical Political Economy.
How did local factors shape the political trajectories of White, working-class communities amidst the national breakdown of the New Deal coalition? This paper takes up this question by combining a quantitative, descriptive analysis of political change among White, working-class New Deal counties from 1932 to 2016 — including the Racial Realignment, the rise of the Religious Right, and the decline of unions — as well as a comparative-historical analysis of two of cities that were part of that New Deal coalition but took different political pathways after the Racial Realignment. I find that as cities confronted national political–economic developments, their responses were conditioned by local organizational contexts — which were often products of a previous period of response to national change. My findings suggest that New Deal counties that had both a pre-existing history of evangelicalism and organized anti-Black sentiment prior to the Racial Realignment and turned away from unions early in the deindustrialization period, were most open to late 20th century Republican politics. More broadly, the analysis offers a new theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between local and national processes of political change.
Stephanie Ternullo. 2022. “‘I’m Not Sure What to Believe’: Media Distrust and Opinion Formation during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Political Science Review.
Social scientists have documented rapid polarization in public opinion about COVID-19 policies. Such polarization is somewhat unsurprising given experimental stuides that show opinions on novel issues can diverge quickly in the presence of partisan frames. In this paper I describe a different process that operates alongside polarization: not centrism but a lack of opinion formation. Drawing on four rounds of in-depth interviews with 86 Midwesterners, conducted between June 2019 and November 2020, I take an inductive approach to understanding variation in the processes by which people gathered and interpreted information about COVID-19. I find that those with universal distrust in all media struggled to adjudicate between conflicting interpretations of reality, particularly if they also had low political knowledge. The result was that they felt little confidence in any opinions they formed. These findings suggest that deteriorating trust in media is an important and understudied factor shaping trajectories of opinion formation.
Stephanie Ternullo. 2022. “The Electoral Effects of Social Policy: Expanding Old-Age Assistance, 1932-1940.” The Journal of Politics.
Under what conditions do means-tested programs increase beneficiaries’ political participation? Recent scholarship has begun to shed light on this question through a series of causal studies of Medicaid expansion. This article builds on those analyses by exploring an additional case, the US expansion of Old-Age Assistance (OAA) programs between 1932 and 1940. It provides new evidence that means-tested programs can mobilize their beneficiaries and also sheds light on how these effects emerge. Exploiting state-by-state variation in expansion, I find that increases in OAA generosity increased turnout in elderly counties but increases in the OAA coverage rate did not. These findings show that resource effects are crucial to generating positive feedback and can do so even in the case of a highly stigmatizing, means-tested program. I further find that by mobilizing elderly Republican recipients, OAA cost FDR votes in Republican-leaning counties, suggesting that even positive participatory effects may undermine social programs’ entrenchment.
Jeffrey Parker and Stephanie Ternullo. 2022. “Gentrifiers Evading Stigma: Social Integrationists in the Neighborhood of the Future.” Social Problems.
How does the moral calculus of gentrification change for self-conscious newcomers in neighborhoods with a reputation deemed unworthy of preserving? In pointing to a set of practices distinct from “pioneering” accounts of gentrification, Brown-Saracino (2007) identified social preservationists as figures who seek to preserve authentic community and the marginalized old-timers who embody it. Using the deviant case of Bridgeport—a historically White neighborhood in Chicago with a deeply historical and persistent reputation for racism —we examine how self-conscious newcomers orient themselves to the gentrification process when the old-timers are not considered a marginalized group worth protecting, but rather a powerful group with problematic racial views. Whereas Brown-Saracino identified the importance of “selecting the old-timer” among a set of potential representatives of a valorized past, we suggest that in this case, newcomers fight to redefine a neighborhood based on a socially desirable future. Drawing on two distinct sets of ethnographic and interviewbased data, we outline how this process has unfolded. We conclude that Bridgeport’s story points to the importance of examining how gentrification ideologies emerge from the collision of personal commitments and neighborhood context, as neighborhood newcomers balance their ethics, concerns over personal reputation, and salient aspects of their new homes, including place reputation.
Works in Progress & Papers Under Review
Stephanie Ternullo. “Opinion Change in Nonpartisan Contexts: The Case of Residential Zoning Reform”
How do voters form policy preferences in nonpartisan contexts? This paper answers this question using the case of residential zoning, one of the central policy domains of largely nonpartisan local governments. Drawing on fieldwork during a 2022 residential zoning initiative in Menlo Park, CA, I show how a local campaign shaped residents’ opinions by providing them with (1) ideological information that allowed them to connect their existing predispositions to zoning issues and (2) nonpartisan group cues about how other people like them, other members of their community, were voting on the issue. I then turn to data from ballot measures across California from 2010-2018, alongside a survey experiment with a sample of Democratic homeowners, to show that both kinds of political information are commonplace in residential zoning campaigns and that their effects generalize beyond the case of Menlo Park. These findings contribute to growing research on local political behavior. Although information is typically scarce in local politics, this paper shows that local political mobilization can and does provide nonpartisan ideological and group cues during elections, and further, that this information is consequential for voters’ policy preferences at precisely the time when those preferences matter most — before they vote.
Stephanie Ternullo. “The Politics of Concentrated Advantage.”
The local policies that sustain the “concentration of advantage” in the suburbs remain a durable feature of American political geography. While scholars have explained the historical emergence of these policies, existing research offers less insight into how and why they have persisted over time. As such, this paper asks: What are the contemporary political processes that sustain concentrated advantage in America’s suburbs? To answer this question, I draw on a mixed-methods study of residential zoning practices. I argue that there is a spatial dimension to density preferences, meaning that suburbanites are distinctly opposed to density and therefore frequently mobilized to preserve the restrictive status quo. First, through survey and in-depth interview evidence, I show that contemporary suburbanites hold distinctly anti-density preferences because of both latent opposition – a sense that pro-density policies do not address suburban homeowners’ subjective conceptions of the housing crisis – and active opposition – concerns that pro-density policies represent urban encroachment into historically protected “suburban” ways of life. Second, drawing on an original dataset of residential zoning ballot measures in California and a Regression Discontinuity design, I illustrate the policy consequences of suburban opposition: less housing. Taken together, the findings reveal the importance of this previously overlooked spatial dimension of density preferences: suburbanites continue to oppose density, and when residents with anti-density preferences are concentrated within municipal boundaries, they can mobilize to prevent density, thereby sustaining spatial inequalities between suburbs and cities.
Stephanie Ternullo and Anna Berg. “Toward a Qualitative Study of the American Voter.” Revise and Resubmit.