John Transue, Assistant Professor

Contact Info:

Education:

PhD, University of Minnesota, 2001

B.A. with High Distinction, University of Michigan, 1991

Specialties:

American Politics

Research Interests: Political Behavior and Research Methods

His research focuses on American public opinion and political psychology. His current research interests focus on the sources of support for racial equality, generalized trust, social capital, political participation, and political tolerance. His overall research program concentrates on how groups' interactions can change from conflict to cooperation. He is especially interested in how group boundaries weaken and cease to influence politics. His articles have appeared in Political Psychology, Public Opinion Quarterly, The Annual Review of Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Curriculum Vitae

Recent Publications

1. John E. Transue, Identity Salience, Identity Acceptance, and Racial Policy Attitudes: American National Identity as a Uniting Force, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 51 no. 1 (January, 2007), pp. 78-91 .
2. John L. Sullivan and John E. Transue, The Psychological Foundations of Democracy: A Selective Review of Research on Political Tolerance, Interpersonal Trust and Social Capital, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 50 (1999) (Reviewed recent empirical literature on tolerance and social capital and suggested promising areas for future research.) .
3. Burgess, Diane J., Beth Haney, Mark Snyder, John L. Sullivan, and John E. Transue, Rocking the Vote: Using Personalized Messages to Motivate Political Participation, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 64 no. 1 (2000) (When Rock the Vote, an organization dedicated to increasing political participation by young Americans, changed the format of pledge cards that reminded young voters to turn out, it created a natural experiment. We found that when personalized messages are used as reminders, the youth targeted by Rock the Vote were more likely to vote.) .
4. Lavine, Howard, Diana Burgess, Mark Snyder, John E. Transue, John L. Sullivan, Beth Haney and Stephen H. Wagner, Threat, Authoritarianism, and Voting: An Investigation of Personality and Persuasion, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 25 no. 3 (1999) (By combining a controlled experiment with the actual voting records of the subjects, we show that when people high in authoritarianism receive threatening messages, a causal chain is set in motion that leads to higher turnout. This extends research on authoritarianism, which has been largely attitudinal, to American voting behavior.) .
5. Rahn, Wendy, and John E. Transue, Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976-1995, Political Psychology, vol. 19 no. 3 (1998) (Using 20 years of surveys of American high school students, this paper shows that one important and previously neglected source of the steep decline in generalized social trust among young people is the large increase in materialistic values. The paper discusses how this explanation is congruent with the expectations of Durkheim and Tocqueville regarding the influence of materialism on the health of societies.) .