Put Your Money Where Your Party Is: Alumnus Patrick Stewart to Present
I know what you’re thinking. No, it isn’t that Patrick Stewart, but Patrick A. Stewart Ph.D ’88, is an accomplished University of Central Florida alumni. (We even did a spotlight on his various achivements last year.) He is coming to speak about the 2012 preprimary donations in Florida, how they influenced recent electoral outcomes and the potential implications for the 2016 election.
Friday, February 21, 2014
UCF Main Campus
UCF Student Union, Room 218CD
11:00AM
Red Tide, Blue Skies, or Purple Reign: Partisan donations during the 2012 Florida presidential preprimary
While presidential election years capture the attention (if not the imagination) of the press and the public, as Republicans and Democrats jockey to select their candidate and then place them in the White House, arguably it is the year before the primaries and general election that has the greatest influence on electoral outcomes. Specifically, donations during the preprimary period indicate not only the strength and cohesion of the respective political parties, geographic patterns of donations identify partisan strongholds.
In this presentation we consider the geographic distribution of campaign contributions in one of the four major electoral states, Florida (with California, Texas, and New York comprising the others). We focus on county-level data during the 2012 preprimary campaign considering the proportion of the county population donating (number of donors/2010 population) and the average contribution given (total dollars/number of donations). This will give us an overview of the nature of Florida partisanship during an election when the Republican Party was searching for a viable candidate and the Democratic Party rallied behind President Obama. We then focus on the Orlando metropolitan statistical area (MSA) by looking at zip-code level data, in turn allowing us to identify what is arguably the most important of partisan activity within neighborhoods – that of giving money.
About Patrick A. Stewart Ph.D ’88
Patrick A Stewart (B.A. University of Central Florida, 1988; M.A. University of Central Florida, 1991; Ph.D. Northern Illinois University, 1998) currently teaches classes in the Masters of Public Administration (M.P.A.) Program. His classes focus on public policy theory, public budgeting, environmental policy, and nonverbal communication in public organizations.
In addition to his book Debatable Humor: Laughing Matters on the 2008 Presidential Primary Campaign (2012), he has published research concerning nonverbal communication by politicians in the journals Political Psychology, Motivation and Emotion, Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, White House Studies, The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, and Politics and the Life Sciences. His work on nonverbal communication by political leaders has been reported on by such popular outlets as The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Wired, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, amongst others.
He is a certified Facial Action Coding System (FACS) coder whose current research concentrates on the emotional response of followers to leaders (and potential leaders). Specifically, he is researching audience laughter and applause in response to comments by candidates during presidential debates, how individuals respond to different types of facial displays by presidential candidates, and how the emotion of disgust influences political attitudes and opinions.