A Team of Political Scientists, a Convention Like No Other, and a Search for One Good Protest

A protester is blocked after holding up a "No Racism, No Hate" sign during the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Tuesday, July 19, 2016. / Photo by Antonella Crescimbeni

A protester is blocked after holding up a “No Racism, No Hate” sign during the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Tuesday, July 19, 2016. / Photo by Antonella Crescimbeni

A group from Penn State are attending both the Republican National Convention (RNC) and the Democrat National Convention to conduct research on protests. Their work at the RNC is featured in at article at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read some excerpts of this article below:

“The Pennsylvania State University delegation — a professor, three graduate students, and 10 undergrads — arrived here at the Republican National Convention full of excitement suffused with dread.”

“Political junkies of all stripes were descending on Cleveland to reckon with the once-unthinkable coronation of the businessman Donald J. Trump as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The candidate’s showmanship, combined with rumblings of a possible mutiny among the delegates, promised a spectacle inside the heavily guarded Quicken Loans Arena. But the Penn State group was not here for the party. They were here for the party-crashers.”

“The team, led by Lee Ann Banaszak, a professor of political science, came to collect data for a study of the protesters — not just what they want and when they want it but also: Where are they from? How long are they staying? What do they care about?”

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Preliminary research: Race inequality, candidate choice top issues for RNC protesters

 

Activist Kathy Wray Coleman, of Cleveland, who was handcuffed by police during a protest at the Republican National Convention on Monday, is transported to an ambulance after she complained of chest pains. Coleman is a leader of the Imperial Women's Coalition. (Photo by Antonella Crescimbeni/Penn State College of Communications)

Activist Kathy Wray Coleman, of Cleveland, who was handcuffed by police during a protest at the Republican National Convention on Monday, is transported to an ambulance after she complained of chest pains. Coleman is a leader of the Imperial Women’s Coalition. (Photo by Antonella Crescimbeni/Penn State College of Communications)

Preliminary findings from political science Professor Lee Ann Banaszak and Penn State students who are polling protesters at the Republican National Convention show that racism and racial equality and Trump as the Republican Party nominee are the top reasons people are taking to the streets in Cleveland.

On Monday — the group’s first day at the convention — the researchers surveyed three events: “End Poverty Now March,” “Stop Trump March” and “America First Movement Rally.”

RNC Preliminary Protester Issues

Very preliminary results showed that “people outside the convention were slightly less diverse than the American population, with fewer Latinos/Latinas and African-Americans than we find in the general population,” Banaszak said. “Nonetheless, racism and racial inequality was the most often mentioned issue among the people sampled outside the convention.”

Lee Ann Banaszak

Lee Ann Banaszak

Additionally, Banaszak said that fewer people turned out for the events on the first day of the convention than originally expected. The event sizes ranged from about 200 to 500 or 600 people and original estimates of predicted turnout had been between 5,000 and 15,000 people, she said.

Members of the research group spoke with 111 individuals on Monday, and 70 percent agreed to be interviewed for the research project. Their work will continue through the end of the RNC convention and into the Democratic National Convention on July 25-28 in Philadelphia.

Banaszak said that the researchers’ survey method is different from past polling methods in that it helps take the personal bias out of the polling. Additionally, some preliminary data will continue to be available quickly because the researchers are submitting their findings through iPhones to a cloud-based database.

Research: Donor’s company is best predictor of political leanings

Image: Public domain

Image: Public domain

Even the most casual political observers know that candidates track red and blue states, but new research from the Penn State Smeal College of Business suggests that savvy fundraisers should pay closer attention to the companies for which individuals work when attempting to raise campaign funds.

“If it makes any sense to think in terms of red states or blue states, it makes even more sense to speak in terms of red companies and blue companies,” said Donald C. Hambrick, co-author of the forthcoming “Red, Blue, and Purple Firms: Organizational Political Ideology and Corporate Social Responsibility” in the Strategic Management Journal. “If I want to predict whether one of these gifts goes blue or goes red, knowing who your employer is allows me a much better prediction.”

Donald C. Hambrick

Donald C. Hambrick

In conducting their research, Hambrick and co-authors Forrest Briscoe and Abhinav Gupta initially set out to discover what drives the degree to which companies commit to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in their operations as exhibited by factors such as advances in domestic partner benefits; proportion of female executives; and metrics around environmental stewardship, product quality and human rights.

Prior research has suggested that companies engage in CSR when under external pressure to do so or when their CEOs have liberal values.

Forrest Brisco

Forrest Brisco

To explore the possibility that prevailing political beliefs among rank-and-file employees — known as the body politic — also influence CSR, the researchers pored over a database of 1.4 million donations of $200 or more from employees in Fortune 500 companies over the course of multiple election cycles.

Their research reveals that organizations frequently act as magnets that attract workers with similar political ideologies, that the body politic’s ideology influences CSR action more than that of the CEO or top management team, and that liberal-leaning employee populations drive CSR more than conservative-leaning populations.

“When we drill down on industries like tech and finance, for example — the so-called human capital industries, where there’s an ongoing debate about progress on gender diversity — you find a major liberal-conservative divide in how fast firms add women to their senior ranks,” Briscoe said. “Over a 10-year period, it’s the equivalent of four more female executives being added in the liberal tilting firms.”

Briscoe, Hambrick, and Gupta’s research illustrates that while political discussion may be taboo in many workplaces and companies do not explicitly hire or fire according to politics, self-selection among employees is a reality.

“A further implication is that these big economic powerhouses exert political influence,” Hambrick said. “Firms are ideology-laden microcosms that help to advance or retard various forms of societal and corporate practices. Their ideologies shape the world beyond their boundaries.”

Forrest Briscoe is the Mary Jean Smeal Research Fellow and associate professor of management and organization. Donald C. Hambrick is the Smeal Chaired Professor of Management and Evan Pugh University Professor. Abhinav Gupta received his Ph.D. from Smeal in 2015 and is now assistant professor of strategic management at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

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More information:
Read the full research study here.

Contact:
Donald C. Hambrick can be reached at dch14@psu.edu and Forrest Briscoe can be reached at fsb10@psu.edu. Contact the Penn State News and Media Relations office at 814-865-7517.

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