Research

Published Papers:

Alwin, Duane and Julianna Pacheco. 2010. "Levels and Correlates of Vocabulary Knowledge in the United States: Historical Trends and Contemporary Issues." In Peter V. Marsden (ed.) Social Trends in the United States, 1972-2006: Evidence from the General Social Survey. Forthcoming.

Pacheco, Julianna Sandell. 2008. "Political Socialization in Context: The Effect of Political Competition on Youth Voter Turnout." Political Behavior, 30 (4): 415-436.    

Pacheco, Julianna and Eric Plutzer.  2008. "Political Participation and Cumulative Disadvantage: The Impact of Economic and Social Hardship on Young Citizens." Journal of Social Issues, 64 (3): 571-593.

Berkman, Michael, Eric Plutzer, and Julianna Sandell Pacheco. 2008. "Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait." PLoS Biology, 6 (5): e124 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124.

Pacheco, Julianna Sandell and Eric Plutzer. 2007. "Stay in School, Don't Get Pregnant: Teen Life Transitions and Cumulative Disadvantage for Voter Turnout." American Politics Research, Vol. 35 (1): 32-56. 

Sandell, Julianna and Eric Plutzer. 2005. "Families, Divorce, and Voter Turnout." Political Behavior, 27 (2): 133-162. 

Working Papers (please do not cite without permission):

"Two New Measures of Dynamic State Public Opinion using Item Response Models" Paper presented at the New Faces Conference II and completed as a QuaSSI fellow.

This paper introduces two new measures of state public opinion over time that describes what state residents want from the government in terms of spending across a variety of domestic and international issues.  Specifically, I use a dynamic item response approach in which the number of residents who endorse additional spending on various issues in a particular year is modeled as a function of issue characteristics and a state-year latent variable trait.  This approach is useful because it overcomes two challenges faced by scholars measuring dynamic state public opinion from national surveys, such as heterogeneous state sample sizes and missing data.  The result is two dynamic measures of spending preferences at the state level.  One, which I term operational ideology, captures spending preferences on both domestic and international issues and is highly related to Stimson's national measure of policy mood (Stimson 1991) and Berry et al.'s (1998) indirect measure of state ideology.  The measure is less related to symbolic measures of ideology, such as Erikson, Wright, and McIver's (1993) measure of state ideology.  The second measure, which I call domestic spending preferences, uses responses on five domestic issues to measure public opinion in the states.  I show the applicability of both these measures in exploring the dynamic link between elite preferences, policy outputs, and public opinion at the state level. 



About Me

Julianna Pacheco
219 Pond Laboratory
Political Science Department
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802
Email Me

Recent Entries

State Ideology and Partisanship Data Posted
The yearly measures of state ideology and partisanship are now available for others to use.  Look under the Dissertation tab…
State Politics and Policy Conference
Every year (or at least for the past 3 years!) I've been attending the State Politics and Policy Conference.  This…
QuaSSI New Faces in Political Methodology Conference
I will be presenting a paper using Item Response Theory to measure dynamic state public opinion as part of the…