Amy Fried

This recording features a panel of faculty who have successfully navigated promotion and tenure processes at the University of Maine offering strategies, tips and their best advice to colleagues preparing for promotion and/or tenure.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/risingtide_videos/1002/thumbnail.jp

This paper argues that distrust in government is not an inadvertent byproduct of economic change, scandals, and cultural and identity politics, but rather grows out of strategic efforts to promote and harness it for political purposes. Elites encouraging distrust interact with grassroots movements, which they can only loosely direct and control. Identifying four strategic benefits of distrust: organizational, electoral, institutional and policy, the paper discusses how Republicans and conservative movement organizations in the Tea Party age used distrust to develop groups and achieve coherence, try to influence primaries and win elections, argue for the constitutional powers of institutions they control, and seek to influence public policy. Paying special attention to health policy, we examine how, after distrust was successfully used to thwart President Bill Clinton’s proposed reforms, it was employed to try to stop and then to exact a price for President Barack Obama’s passage of ...

Page 1. Patriotism, Politics, and the Presidential Election of 1988* John L. Sullivan, University of Minnesota Amy Fried, Colgate University Mary G. Dietz, University of Minnesota Recent circumstantial and journalistic evidence suggests that the patriotism issue may have ...

This paper focuses on U.S. government monitoring of racial tensions during World War II. Using a historical-institutionalist view of the development of public opinion research, the paper focuses on institutional goals and political contexts and contributes to literature on race and the New Deal coalition. With particular attention to studies in agricultural areas in the South, polls comparing black and white workers, analyses of reactions to Detroit’s Sojourner Truth housing project for black workers and responses to the pamphlet “Negroes and the War,” the paper shows that public opinion studies were among the technological toolkit of concerted policy planning and implementation that were crafted in the context of racial segregation and white supremacy. While distaste for racial animus existed within the administrative state, bureaucrats had limited power to influence how policies and programs developed and, ultimately, to maintain support for their endeavors. Reactions to the opini...

1. Building the Polls 2. Media, Markets and Men from Mars 3. From the Fields of Hunger through the Cauldron of War 4. Pols, Politics and Polls 5. "Survivors of the More Recent Wreck" 6. A Defense Against "Extensive and Unjustified Repercussions" 7. Diverging Paths

Maine's 2016 elections brought a good deal of change that attracted national attention, including its casting an electoral vote for a Republican for the first time since 1988. Maine's ballot initiatives brought new policies that attracted widespread attention as well. But what did not change is how Governor Paul LePage has found himself at loggerheads with the state legislature, and also with voters over their choices in the 2016 election. In fact, while a lot of change may have seemed to be in the air both during and after the election, so far what's remarkable is what hasn't changed-with the notable exception of Maine's vote for president.2016 Presidential RaceIn every election since 1992, Maine had given all four of its electoral votes to the Democratic presidential candidate. The presidential election of 2016 marked a break from this pattern when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took one of Maine's four electoral votes. Hillary Clinton, who ...

AbstractIn recent years, many states passed laws restricting voting. Maine followed suit in 2011 but, unlike those states, the law-which ended election-day registration-was reversed at the ballot box. This paper explains what happened in Maine by pointing to a series of cultural and political factors, some of which interacted. Key elements were Maine's civic culture and pride in high levels of civic participation, the existence of the referendum option, the creation of an effective coalition and organizational structure to restore the practice, messaging choices, and extensive publicity about unproven fraud allegations. Supporters of the law were less well-funded and organized and received their strongest support in areas of the state where Governor LePage had received his highest proportions of the vote in the 2010 election. Future analyses of activities involving state-level voting laws should take account of political culture, organizational efforts, and political dynamics.Vo...

This paper examines the two different routes to endorsing marriage equality at the ballot box taken by Maine and Washington states. We argue that the states’ pro-marriage equality campaigns mattered. These were more intensive endeavors than many campaigns. They drew from applied social science attitude research, used such knowledge in training staff and volunteers, and made modifications based on its persuasive results. Communication across states promoted commonalities even as each campaign organization created local variations. Likewise the sequence of previous gay-rights efforts in each state established its own particular path to marriage equality. Diffusion and learning and intensive person-to-person techniques were key contributors to these successful campaigns.

In recent years, many states passed laws restricting voting. Maine followed suit in 2011 but, unlike those states, the law—which ended election-day registration—was reversed at the ballot box. This paper explains what happened in Maine by pointing to a series of cultural and political factors, some of which interacted. Key elements were Maine's civic culture and pride in high levels of civic participation, the existence of the referendum option, the creation of an effective coalition and organizational structure to restore the practice, messaging choices, and extensive publicity about unproven fraud allegations. Supporters of the law were less well-funded and organized and received their strongest support in areas of the state where Governor LePage had received his highest proportions of the vote in the 2010 election. Future analyses of activities involving state-level voting laws should take account of political culture, organizational efforts, and political dynamics.

History museums communicate the past and thereby contribute to a society's collective memory. In the past, curators used their professional standing to convey information and analysis. However, history museums increasingly take account of individuals' and groups' views of the past and are ever more wary of politically charged criticism. Drawing from interviews with key museum staff members, internal assessments and other writings about the exhibit and its creation, and observations of the exhibit, this article analyzes the Smithsonian's September 11 exhibit and the process of its development. Curators designed an exhibit that cast all, including museum visitors, as " witnesses " to events within a sharply delineated time period. By personalizing this traumatic day, this approach averted political pressure. At the same time, the September 11 exhibit delivered implicit and explicit political messages rallying citizens around national symbols and key leaders. The exhibit's combination of a focus on the individual person and the nation as a whole is consistent with Tocqueville's assessment of American norms. Curators' choice to avoid larger geopolitical contexts to September 11 shows how a personalized approach seems to respect citizens but ultimately impov-erishes public knowledge and collective memory. Entering the museum from the National Mall and then passing through security screening, visitors carrying cameras and water bottles saw the large flag in the rotunda. Coming closer to read the placard, they learned that the flag flew from the Pentagon for a month, " unfurled from the roof of the building by soldiers and firefighters " on September 12, 2001, when " President George W. Bush came to view the damage…. On October 11, 2001, the flag was lowered and folded with full military honors. " In larger print are the words of a New Jersey middle school student: " After what happened on September 11, the flag seems to mean more to everyone. " Turning right, down a hall, across from an exhibit on First Ladies, people could glimpse images of horror, large pictures of people looking up with fear and pain at the damaged Twin Towers, as well as a picture of President Bush hearing whispered news about the first plane to hit. This was the portal to the exhibit

This article examines terrorism as a context in the major newsmagazines' coverage of Iraq in the prewar period. Contexts and associated issues help create news frames, which can affect judgments of events and policies. This investigation relies on the issues of Time and Newsweek published in September 2002 and from the first issue of January 2003 through the March 24, 2003, issue and includes analysis of the issues' cover art, graphics within news stories, and Iraq and terrorism stories. During this period, newsmagazines frequently juxtaposed terrorism and Iraq and used graphics that linked Iraq to terrorism and terrorists.

Although contemporary American political discourse often refers to heroic action, scholars have paid little attention to the concept of heroism Because individuals' understandings of politics are constituted and reflected by the prosaic terms at their disposal, inattention to the concept of heroism interferes with our ability to comprehend citizens' values and the political culture. In addition, although Tocqueville is often

This paper argues that distrust in government is not an inadvertent byproduct of economic change, scandals, and cultural and identity politics, but rather grows out of strategic efforts to promote and harness it for political purposes. Elites encouraging distrust interact with grassroots movements, which they can only loosely direct and control. Identifying four strategic benefits of distrust: organizational, electoral, institutional and policy, the paper discusses how Republicans and conservative movement organizations in the Tea Party age
used distrust to develop groups and achieve coherence, try to influence primaries and win elections, argue for the constitutional powers of institutions they
control, and seek to influence public policy. Paying special attention to health policy, we examine how, after distrust was successfully used to thwart President Bill Clinton’s proposed reforms, it was employed to try to stop and then to exact a
price for President Barack Obama’s passage of the Affordable Care Act. While Tea Party rhetoric and current streams of distrust are often associated with racialized messages and anti-Obama sentiment, we contend they are likely to persist after
Obama leaves office, particularly given the Tea Party’s comfort with ungovernability and long-standing conservative use of government distrust.

The US environmental movement has borne a number of fruits, from an array of legislative accomplishments to a new, widely commemorated holiday ‐ Earth Day. Theoretical insights based in literatures on symbolic politics, collective memory, political socialisation, and the sociology of time suggest that the regular observance of this holiday inserts environmental values into the national consciousness on a regular basis, socializes children and adults, and unobtrusively legitimizes environmental interest groups. However, Earth Day demonstrates the US environmental movement's limitations and problems. A number of environmental groups consider the holiday's very popularity to be its own undoing, as corporate and business groups use Earth Day as an opportunity to define themselves as supportive of the environment. Drawing from textual sources and a survey of US environmental group leaders and staff, this article demonstrates how the holiday has proved to be a mixed legacy, reflecting the schisms permeating American environmentalism.