Peer-Reviewed Publications
Stephanie Ternullo. “Place-Based Partisanship: How Place (Re)produces Americans’ Partisan Attachments.” Conditionally Accepted at American Journal of Sociology.
How does place inform people’s partisan attachments? Drawing on a longitudinal, comparative study of two similar Midwestern cities that have voted differently in presidential elections for decades, I argue that places contain organizational arrangements that mediate residents’ experiences of local structural conditions and the national political-economic context, leading them to cohere around shared understandings of their social problems and how their social identities fit into national party politics. In developing a theoretical account of how places contribute to the production and reproduction of Americans’ partisanship, I show that city- and national-level politics are not just the aggregate of individuals’ political commitments, but emerge as voters make sense of party politics from within their social contexts.
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. 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 (equal co-authors). 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.
Stephanie Ternullo. “The Local Politics of National Realignments: U.S. Political Transformation from the New Deal to the Religious Right.” Conditionally accepted at 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 1932-2016—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.
Works in Progress & Papers Under Review
Stephanie Ternullo. “‘It makes me sound like I’m a NIMBY; I’m not:’ Local Political Norms and Liberal Support for Housing.” Under Review.
Under what conditions do Americans vote in line with their political commitments over their self-interest? Specifically, under what conditions do homeowning liberals prioritize their own interests over their ideological commitments when it comes to local zoning regulations? Several recent studies have sought to address this question by examining how different development characteristics or framing devices tip liberal homeowners in one direction or another. In this paper, I take an inductive approach to understanding how local contexts shape the way liberal homeowners think about new housing in their communities. To do so, I draw on a mixed-methods study, including in-depth interviews, local ballot measure data from California, and a survey experiment to show that local political norms influence how liberal homeowners think about residential zoning issues. My argument is that homeowners in liberal areas are more likely to support pro-density measures, not just because of individual political commitments, but because residents wish to conform to local political norms and during the campaign season they learn where zoning issues fall vis-à-vis those norms. As I show through both the qualitative evidence and the survey experiment, local norms serve as powerful tools that help liberal homeowners resolve their ambivalence by choosing to side with their in-group and maintain their self-conception as a particular kind of political actor. These findings emphasize the importance of considering how voters navigate not just between economic and political pressures, but also social ones.
Elizabeth Thom and Stephanie Ternullo. “From Place to Populism: How Local Organizational Decline Shapes Political (Dis)Engagement.” Under Review.
How do postindustrial communities shape their residents’ politics? We answer this question by drawing on two independent, qualitative studies of postindustrial counties in the Midwest and Appalachia. Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 82 people across the two field sites, we argue that postindustrial places are defined not only by their material losses, but also by the decline in local civic and organizational leadership. This is politically relevant, because it leaves residents not only feeling a sense of loss as jobs and population eb away, but feeling threatened by external forces and abandoned by political leadership. Although we find that this can draw some people into the politics of right-wing populism, we also show that at the extreme experience of abandonment, residents view the Republican Party as just another force that is ignoring them, and disengage from politics entirely. These findings contribute to our understanding of the development of right-wing populism in the U.S. and broader research on how contextual factors shape political behavior.
Stephanie Ternullo. “The Political Consequences of Concentrated Advantage.”
The policies that sustain spatial inequalities – the concentration of advantage in suburbs and the concentration of disadvantage in cities – are a durable feature of American political geography. This remains true despite the fact that many of the features that have historically defined suburbs – relatively Whiter, more affluent, and more conservative than cities – have changed as suburbs have grown more politically liberal and more racially diverse. As such, this paper asks: What can explain this durable link between place and political behavior despite demographic change? And what are the contemporary political consequences of these ongoing spatial concentrations of advantage? To answer these questions I draw on a mixed-methods study examines the durability of the place-to-politics link through the case of restrictive zoning. I first draw on survey evidence from Marble and Nall (2021) to show that suburbs and less-dense neighborhoods concentrate opposition to future densification policies: suburban homeowners are far less supportive of policies to densify housing than are their counterparts in cities. Next, I draw on more than 200 in-depth interviews with residents of three California suburbs to show that this opposition is composed of both active opposition to density – which is seen as urban encroachment into historically protected “suburban” ways of life – and passive opposition – a sense that pro-density policies do not appear to address suburban homeowners’ subjective conceptions of California’s housing crisis. Finally, I provide evidence that this spatial concentration of political behaviors likely emerges through both residential sorting \textit{and} place effects, but regardless of the mechanism, the policy consequences are important: drawing on a dataset of 554 residential zoning ballot measures in California from 1990-2020 and using a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design, I show that restrictive victories have systematically limited the supply of multi-family housing, declines in population density, and growth in the proportion of the population that is White. These outcomes set the stage for the recursive process to repeat itself, further attracting people who are willing to fight to defend suburban boundaries.
Stephanie Ternullo and Anna Berg. “Toward a Qualitative Study of the American Voter.” Under Review.