Political theorists have long argued that low information levels among average citizens provide the rationale for public policy to be guided by experts and elites. Other scholars counter that deference to elites perpetuates and even exacerbates the problem. Here we look at school choice programs as an environment to elucidate this important debate. Theories of school choice suggest that parents need to and can make informed decisions. Choice parents should have more incentives to gather information about their child’s schools than parents without schooling options. Alternatively, a lack of any increase in information levels among school choosers would suggest that having choices per se is not sufficient motivation to overcome the costs of information gathering. Analyzing data from an experimental evaluation of the Washington Scholarship Fund, we find that presenting parents with choices does lead to significantly higher levels of accurate information on measures of important school characteristics.
We seek to extend discourse on"the reconstructive presidency" to the edge of new frontiers in two interrelated ways. First, we argue that reconstructive presidents act within critical junctures in which they exploit periodic opportunities to revitalize enervated political regimes, but that failure to exploit such opportunities can also occur. Second, we clarify the tasks necessary for reconstructive success, contending that reconstructive presidents must (a) shift the main axis of partisan cleavage, (b) assemble a new majority coalition, and (c) institutionalize a new political regime.Through conducting typical and crucial case studies, we show how reconstructive dynamics unfold in either a straightforward or protracted manner depending on whether presidents initially handed reconstructive opportunities, via encountering enervated political conditions, succeed in accomplishing the tasks we delineate. In doing so, we depart from previous interpretations and recast the "System of 1896" as a successful reconstruction.
This study examines the impact of state legislative term limits on the candidacy decisions of challengers in U.S. House elections. Using data from 1996 to 2006, the authors show that the impact of term limits is mitigated by local political factors, such as an incumbent’s election margin. The larger the incumbent’s previous electoral margin, the lower the likelihood of facing a quality challenger. The authors also identify an unanticipated consequence of term limits: In incumbent races, term limits can generate a substitution effect; as termed out state legislators enter elections, other quality challengers from the same party stay out of the race, as they are unwilling to face a primary in addition to a general election fight. As a result, the increased number of termed out state legislators who seek Congressional office are offset by the reduced number of other quality challengers from nonlegislative offices, resulting in minimally more competitive Congressional elections.
Although emotional appeals are commonplace in political rhetoric, they are often viewed as manipulative and therefore threatening to democratic governance. Interest groups, in particular, have been blamed for relying on emotionally charged rhetoric to achieve fundraising objectives. Through a focus on 210 national-level environmental organizations, the author reevaluates this critique, postulating that groups vary the emotive content of their communications in response to different audiences and purposes of communication. Using evidence from a content analysis of group communications across several media, the author shows that groups rely much more on positive rhetoric than previous studies have indicated, especially in communications designed to encourage participation. Furthermore, negative appeals are most prevalent in groups’ efforts to encourage learning through information provision.The results suggest that emotive rhetoric can be used in ways that complement reasoning processes.
Some ideologically extreme candidates appear to generate enthusiastic support from individual donors, but previous systematic analysis has found no overall fundraising benefits accruing to extremism. I propose that the similar amount of funds raised by extreme and moderate candidates masks different fundraising coalitions. Just as senior members of Congress may have a comparative advantage in raising money from access-oriented contributors, ideologically extreme members of Congress may have a comparative advantage in raising money from ideologically motivated individual contributors. I test for this possibility by using a multilevel model to predict the proportion of funds candidates raise from individual contributions and confirm that, holding total fundraising amounts constant, extreme candidates are more likely to rely on individual contributors than are moderate candidates.
Activists and scholars argue that the election and presence of Black mayors increase Black political engagement; however, later research suggests that this diminishes over time. Furthermore, a body of research suggests that homogenous racial contexts and contextual poverty decrease political participation. In this article, we ask one question: How does demographic context and length of Black mayoral tenure influence Black political participation? Using a national data set of Black respondents, we find that participation increases as cities become "Blacker." However, simultaneously we find diminishing returns to Black political empowerment, particularly compared with new Black empowerment contexts.
Do divisive primaries hurt incumbents? If so, does the electoral calendar condition their effects? Potential challengers are predatory and estimate their electoral chances before running against an incumbent, meaning electoral prospects influence both primary divisiveness and general election performance. However, divisive primaries may waste precious campaign resources and damage the primary winner’s reputation. The evidence suggests that although divisive primaries generally hurt incumbents and help challengers as electoral prospects theory predicts, these effects wane and eventually disappear the closer the primary is to the general election.
Publication bias occurs when the probability that a paper enters the scholarly literature is a function of the magnitude or significance levels of the coefficient estimates. We investigate publication bias in two large literatures in political behavior: economic voting and the effects of negative advertising. We find that the pattern of published estimates is consistent with the presence of publication bias and that bias is more prevalent in the most influential and highly cited outlets. We consider the possible causes and find some evidence that papers systematically employ one-sided hypothesis tests in response to failure to meet the more demanding critical values associated with two-tailed tests, a practice that leads to misleading reports of the probability of Type I errors.
This article examines the way in which racial/ethnic context influences Latino support for ethnic political causes. Welch et al. argue that feelings of solidarity within the African American community intensify as the size of the African American population in an individual’s residential environment increases. We extend this hypothesis to Latinos, while also considering how other scholars have hypothesized different structural patterns of residence among Latinos to influence their political behavior. We also consider how higher levels of in-group heterogeneity within the Latino community might complicate this relationship. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1999 Harvard/ Kaiser/Washington Post National Survey of Latinos.We find that higher levels of segregation between Anglos and Latinos dampen the positive relationship between Latino group size and participation in ethnic political causes.
This article examines how a defense sector presence in sparsely populated areas influences (a) House of Representatives defense committee assignments and (2) defense procurement allocations from 1999 to 2005. Although previous work had shown that prime contracts typically flow to headquarter locations, this article goes beyond existing research by tracking the distribution of defense expenditures to major subcontracting locations. In doing so, I find a conditional relationship between defense industry presence and rural geography: Defense funds disproportionately flow to congressional districts that are more economically reliant on the defense sector of the economy. Constituency dependence on the defense sector is one of the most important factors leading members of Congress to seek representation on defense committees and to procure defense benefits. Local dependence on the defense industry may reinforce political relationships that contribute to inefficiency and excess in weapons contracting.
I test the impact of governmental corruption on generalized social trust. Based on prior research in comparative politics and criminology, I hypothesize that increasing governmental corruption leads to decreasing beliefs that others are trustworthy. To test my hypothesis, I combine aggregate state-level data on convictions for governmental corruption with American National Election Studies panel survey data with waves in 2000, 2002, and 2004. My findings show a clear impact of greater corruption on levels of generalized trust. I find that living in states with increased corruption lowers generalized trust, while controlling for other known determinants. This research expands our knowledge of how institutional actions influence generalized trust.
The power to nominate and confirm federal judges is shared by Congress and the president, yet few works explicitly address the role that Congress plays in shaping the preselection pool for judicial nominees. In this article, we illuminate this debate by exploring judicial nomination requests from Members of Congress to the Eisenhower and Ford Administrations. In explaining who is nominated, the characteristics of the nominee matter more than the characteristics of the nominator, with the party affiliation of a nominee being the strongest predictive factor. Institutional characteristics are more prevalent at the confirmation stage, where the Senate relied more heavily on its members and the judicial experience of nominees than did presidents in nominating them. Given our results, partisanship appears to have mattered earlier than presumed in judicial nominations, with even ostensibly nonpartisan presidents such as Eisenhower understanding the importance of appointing like-minded individuals to lifetime positions on the bench.
The experimental literature on voter mobilization establishes the efficacy of canvassing as a tool of voter mobilization. However, the current literature gives scant attention to the question of whether some types of canvassers may be more effective than others. This article takes the first step toward developing a positive theory of effective or ineffective canvassing. Using descriptive, qualitative data from 10 focus groups conducted in 2006, I find that voters have preferences for the types of campaign representatives they want to visit them. The results of these focus groups lay the groundwork for further experimental study and provide guidelines for practitioners instituting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts.
This article considers the process by which local economic news coverage influences individual evaluations of the economy. We improve on prior research by capturing a wider range of news sources (including national network news, national newspapers, local television news, and local newspapers) and connecting the effects of this coverage on individual level attitudes. We find that current personal financial evaluations, personal financial expectations, and short-term (12-month) expectations for the U.S. economy are related to national network coverage. Local television coverage of the economy is related to personal financial evaluations but not short-term economic expectations and local print news is important in structuring expectations of future business conditions. Overall, the findings illustrate important differences in economic coverage across media outlets and the effects of these differences on economic expectations. Exposure to different sources of economic information have significantly different effects on economic perceptions—suggesting a more complicated and nuanced role for the news media in shaping economic perceptions than indicated by previous research.
This study builds on existing literature demonstrating the conditional effects of contextual and conversion factors on the relationship between money and votes in state legislative elections. A conditional theory of the impact of spending in state legislative campaigns is developed, emphasizing that the effectiveness of expenditures should vary according to the number of "up for grabs" voters in a district, candidate quality, and strategic decisions about when to enter a race. Using an original data set of elections to state legislatures in nine states, the analysis provides evidence that the political and institutional context of a race has a significant impact on the effectiveness of campaign spending. Specifically, the percentage of registered independents in a district, the presence or absence of term limits on legislators, and the level of professionalism of a legislature each significantly condition the impact of money.
The campaign mobilization literature argues that contacting will have the most influence on individuals who are socioeconomically or politically disadvantaged. Yet evidence persistently shows that the advantaged are disproportionately contacted. This paradox is explained once one recognizes that contacting during elections serves divergent goals that are tied to the election cycle and to election competitiveness. Broadly speaking, contacting in elections should be seen as having two participatory recruitment stages: a resource gathering stage—with resources coming from the advantaged—and a mass-mobilization stage—where every vote counts only when elections are competitive. This theory is supported with the 2000 Annenberg election data. In the resource gathering stage, income, education, and strong party identification increased the likelihood that an individual was contacted by the campaigns. In contrast, only income predicted mobilization stage campaign contact in nonbattleground states. Finally, a battleground state individual’s likelihood of being contacted slightly decreased as income rose.
Using the unique circumstances of the 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate election, we report findings from survey data from a probability sample of White voters conducted in Illinois during the course of the 2004 election. In an experimental manipulation embedded in the survey, we tested four distinctive framings of Barack Obama by systematically altering the degree and content of his racialization as a Black man, and observing the effect of these treatments on evaluations of Obama. We hypothesize that more strongly racialized framings that highlight Obama’s identity and connection with African Americans would push White voters toward more unfavorable evaluations of the candidate in comparison with deracialized framings. In addition, we argue that party identification has an important moderating influence on the relationship between the racialized treatment and respondents’ evaluations of Obama.
How does the racial environment influence mass political participation? The power—threat hypothesis predicts that a larger out-group population in the surrounding environment increases citizen participation, whereas the relational goods hypothesis predicts that it decreases participation. I attempt to reconcile these conflicting arguments into a single hypothesis positing that citizens’ decisions to participate in politics are simultaneously shaped by the power—threat and relational goods effects. I conclude that the racial environment plays a significant role as a determinant of mass participation but in ways more complicated than what simple models of contextual effects suggest.
We argue that citizens distinguish the tone of a campaign from the quality of information that it provides and that evaluations on each dimension respond differently to positive and negative political advertising. We test these claims using survey and advertising data from the 2000 presidential campaign and two 1998 gubernatorial races. In each race, citizens separate judgments about the tone of a campaign from judgments about the quality of information they have received. Furthermore, negative campaigning affects the former, but not the latter, set of evaluations. These results have implications for the debate over the impact of negative advertising and for how citizens perceive campaigns as political processes.
Political relations between racial/ethnic groups in America have (a) been commonly examined in terms of the degree of "cooperation" or "conflict" and (b) have most frequently been studied in the arena of urban politics; this has been especially so in the case of Hispanics/Latinos and African Americans. This article represents the first effort to pose and to systematically assess the question of inter—minority group relations in Congress by examining roll call behavior in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using Black and Latino interest group ratings and associated roll call votes from the 104th to 108th Congresses as indicators of Black and Latino interests, we show that Black representatives have voting records very supportive of the most salient concerns of Latinos and that Latino representatives have voting records at least modestly supportive of the most salient concerns of Blacks. At minimum, the findings suggest that Black and Latino representatives support the "other" group at the same level (or higher) than party affiliation alone would suggest and also indicate an absence of conflict that is found in local-level studies.
Following the Civil War, the Democratic Party enjoyed almost complete dominance in southern electoral politics. Democratic hegemony was particularly acute in gubernatorial elections: In most southern states, more than a century elapsed before the first Republican governor was elected. Gubernatorial electoral success is a fundamental question, given the prominence of governors in state politics and the importance of states in the federal system. Here, we develop a model that explains the election of Republican gubernatorial candidates. We find that election of Republican governors in the South was delayed because of a comparative lack of quality Republican gubernatorial candidates in that region throughout much of the 20th century. Our research clarifies the contradictions reported in prior work by demonstrating that the effect of candidate quality varies by party and region. Interestingly, the competitive advantage once enjoyed by the Democratic Party in the South is now firmly held by the Republican Party.
Although classic Downsian theory predicts that candidates should converge to the ideological position of the median voter in the electorate, American elections generally feature major party candidates who offer divergent policy positions. Employing a survey and statistical estimation technique that allows for the estimation of the ideological position of candidates on the same scale as the distribution of voter ideology among voters, the author characterizes the actual degree of candidate divergence in the 2008 presidential election looking at the estimated stances of Barack Obama and John McCain. The results reveal that these candidates took positions that were closer to, and likely even more extreme than, the positions of their partisan and primary constituencies than to the nationwide voter median.
As with the other presidential elections from this decade, the 2008 election was followed by considerable speculation as to how new efforts to mobilize voters affected the eventual outcome. Although the conventional wisdom implies that "Democrats benefit from higher turnout," previous research in political science demonstrates that such a conclusion applies to actual election results inconsistently. In this article, we outline the difficulties involved with assessing turnout effects within a particular election and proceed to test the hypothesis that the Obama campaign benefited from higher turnout using three different methods. The evidence suggests that the Obama campaign benefited substantially from voter turnout, particularly in comparison with the Kerry campaign in 2004, yet they also were successful in changing the minds of already mobilized voters. Although various data difficulties suggest the presence of some bias in our estimates, the consistency of the results across tests supports the general conclusion.
The 2008 Democratic primary was marked by divisiveness as notable as its historic candidates. And while Barack Obama won the general election,political scientists would be remiss in studying divisive primary effects only when they are electorally decisive. Accordingly, we examine this largely forgotten storyline, searching for these effects throughout different segments of the electorate. Our analysis pursues evidence at multiple levels, focusing on the illustrative case of Franklin County in the bellwether state of Ohio. First, we use aggregate data and ecological inference to ascertain levels of abstention and defection among Clinton supporters, noting patterns in precincts. Next, we analyze original survey data drawn from individuals observed displaying yard signs, examining rates of participation within this engaged population. Overall, the evidence suggests that the primary produced lasting effects in terms of turnout, defection, and other participatory acts—effects that might have cost Obama the presidency under different circumstances.
In this article, we examine the role that in-migration played in contributing to the 2008 Democratic presidential victory in North Carolina. Prior to Barack Obama, the last time the Tar Heel State was carried by a Democrat was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Since the late 1980s, North Carolina has undergone tremendous demographic change. In addition to a growing Hispanic population that is primarily comprised of noncitizens, the state has witnessed a very large increase in the number of residents who were born and raised in Northern states such as New York. Historically, in much of the postwar South, Northern migrants helped grow the Republican Party. We find that in North Carolina this pattern no longer holds. In contemporary North Carolina, migrants born outside the South are more likely to identify and register as politically unaffiliated, and their growing share of the state’s electorate directly contributed to Obama’s narrow win.
The 2008 presidential election was historic in many respects. The campaign included the first African American major-party candidate, and neither candidate was an incumbent president or vice president. In addition, one candidate took public funding and the other candidate did not. This latter disparity resulted in an imbalance of resources across the two campaigns, especially in the purchase of political advertising. But did that imbalance matter for who won? Did advertising move voters, and if so, by how much? This article examines patterns of presidential ad buys in 2008 and compares them with presidential ad buys in 2004. It also examines the impact of advertising on county-level vote returns in both years. The results demonstrate some important differences in advertising patterns across years, especially in terms of ad sponsorship and market-level advertising advantages. We also find significant and strong advertising persuasion effects in 2008.
To what extent do vice presidential candidates affect individual-level vote choice for president? The accepted wisdom is that vice presidential candidates are of minor importance to most voters. Yet much energy was spent discussing the potential impact of Biden and Palin as vice presidential candidates. Here, the impact that attitudes toward Palin and Biden had on vote choice in the 2008 election are compared with the role of vice presidential candidates historically. Although feelings about vice presidential candidates typically play little role in vote choice, there are exceptions. When vice presidential candidates draw media attention, feelings about them become much more important to vote choice. Whereas Biden represents the general rule of vice presidents garnering little media attention and having relatively little impact on vote choice, Palin_s candidacy drew an abnormally high level of media interest, and feelings about her exerted a stronger impact on vote choice, especially among Independent voters.
During the 2008 presidential election, the authors submitted letters to the editor at 100 major U.S. newspapers as part of a field experiment to test whether interest in the letter depended on which candidate the letter supported. The authors find, contrary to what charges of a liberal media bias would suggest, that newspapers expressed more interest in pro-McCain letters than pro-Obama letters. Furthermore, it was found that papers were most likely to be interested in letters supporting the candidate they did not endorse, a result that is consistent with the idea that editors seem to be using their gatekeeping powers to allow dissenting opinions to be heard.
Using a question-order experiment, half the respondents in a national RDD (random digit dial) likely voter survey taken just prior to the 2008 Presidential Primary election were primed to think about President Bush and the war in Iraq before making their candidate choice. Results show that the priming had a significant effect on their candidate choice, and that priming individuals to think about the war significantly aided the candidacy of eventual Democratic nominee Barack Obama, more than doubling his support, and hurt then Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani, cutting his support almost in half.
Since Beck, Katz, and Tucker (1998), the standard method for modeling time dependence in binary data has been to incorporate time dummies or splined time in logistic regressions. Although we agree with the need for modeling time dependence, we demonstrate that time dummies can induce estimation problems due to separation. Splines do not suffer from these problems. However, the complexity of splines has led substantive researchers (1) to use knot values that may be inappropriate for their data and (2) to ignore any substantive discussion concerning temporal dependence. We propose a relatively simple alternative: including t, t2, and t3 in the regression. This cubic polynomial approximation is trivial to implement—and, therefore, interpret—and it avoids problems such as quasi-complete separation. Monte Carlo analysis demonstrates that, for the types of hazards one often sees in substantive research, the polynomial approximation always outperforms time dummies and generally performs as well as splines or even more flexible autosmoothing procedures. Due to its simplicity, this method also accommodates nonproportional hazards in a straightforward way. We reanalyze Crowley and Skocpol (2001) using nonproportional hazards and find new empirical support for the historical-institutionalist perspective.
Randomized experiments commonly compare subjects receiving a treatment to subjects receiving a placebo. An alternative design, frequently used in field experimentation, compares subjects assigned to an untreated baseline group to subjects assigned to a treatment group, adjusting statistically for the fact that some members of the treatment group may fail to receive the treatment. This article shows the potential advantages of a three-group design (baseline, placebo, and treatment). We present a maximum likelihood estimator of the treatment effect for this three-group design and illustrate its use with a field experiment that gauges the effect of prerecorded phone calls on voter turnout. The three-group design offers efficiency advantages over two-group designs while at the same time guarding against unanticipated placebo effects (which would undermine the placebo-treatment comparison) and unexpectedly low rates of compliance with the treatment assignment (which would undermine the baseline-treatment comparison).
There has been no attention to circular (purely cyclical) data in political science research. We show that such data exist and are mishandled by models that do not take into account the inherently recycling nature of some phenomenon. Clock and calendar effects are the obvious cases, but directional data are observed as well. We describe a standard maximum likelihood regression modeling framework based on the von Mises distribution, then develop a general Bayesian regression procedure for the first time, providing an easy-to-use Metropolis-Hastings sampler for this approach. Applications include a chronographic analysis of U.S. domestic terrorism and directional party preferences in a two-dimensional ideological space for German Bundestag elections. The results demonstrate the importance of circular models to handle periodic and directional data in political science.
A wide range of potentially useful data are available for election forecasting: the results of previous elections, a multitude of preelection polls, and predictors such as measures of national and statewide economic performance. How accurate are different forecasts? We estimate predictive uncertainty via analysis of data collected from past elections (actual outcomes, preelection polls, and model estimates). With these estimated uncertainties, we use Bayesian inference to integrate the various sources of data to form posterior distributions for the state and national two-party Democratic vote shares for the 2008 election. Our key idea is to separately forecast the national popular vote shares and the relative positions of the states. More generally, such an approach could be applied to study changes in public opinion and other phenomena with wide national swings and fairly stable spatial distributions relative to the national average.
This study presents a survey-based method for conducting inference into the determinants of sensitive political behavior. The approach combines two well-established literatures in statistical methods in the social sciences: the randomized response (RR) methodology utilized to reduce evasive answer bias and the generalized propensity score methodology utilized to draw inferences about causal effects in observational studies. The approach permits one to estimate the causal impact of a multivalued predictor variable of interest on a given sensitive behavior in the face of unknown interaction effects between the predictor and the confounders as well as nonlinearities in the relationship between the confounders and the sensitive behavior. Simulation results point to the superior performance of the RR relative to direct survey questioning using this method for samples of moderate to large size. The utility of the approach is illustrated through an application to corruption in the public bureaucracy in three countries in South America.
Signaling models are ubiquitous in political science. An essential characteristic of these models is that actors can update their beliefs about their opponents. An actor observes the behavior of his opponent, and this behavior functions as a signal that allows the actor to learn more about his opponent's true "type." As a result, the actor is able to adapt his own behavior. Current statistical models of strategic choice based on perfect Bayesian equilibrium, however, allow for very little, if any, belief updating. I explain why current models allow for little updating and offer in their stead a new, fully strategic choice estimator that calculates the correct amount of belief updating.
We look at conventional methods for removing endogeneity bias in regression models, including the linear model and the probit model. It is known that the usual Heckman two-step procedure should not be used in the probit model: from a theoretical perspective, it is unsatisfactory, and likelihood methods are superior. However, serious numerical problems occur when standard software packages try to maximize the biprobit likelihood function, even if the number of covariates is small. We draw conclusions for statistical practice. Finally, we prove the conditions under which parameters in the model are identifiable. The conditions for identification are delicate; we believe these results are new.
Ideal point estimators are typically based on an assumption that all legislators are equally responsive to modeled dimensions of legislative disagreement; however, particularistic constituency interests and idiosyncrasies of individual legislators introduce variation in the degree to which legislators cast votes predictably. I introduce a Bayesian heteroskedastic ideal point estimator and demonstrate by Monte Carlo simulation that it outperforms standard homoskedastic estimators at recovering the relative positions of legislators. In addition to providing a refinement of ideal point estimates, the heteroskedastic estimator recovers legislator-specific error variance parameters that describe the extent to which each legislator's voting behavior is not conditioned on the primary axes of disagreement in the legislature. Through applications to the roll call histories of the U.S. Congress, the E.U. Parliament, and the U.N. General Assembly, I demonstrate how to use the heteroskedastic estimator to study substantive questions related to legislative incentives for low-dimensional voting behavior as well as diagnose unmodeled dimensions and nonconstant ideal points.
Although sample selection bias is a frequent problem of applied research, there has been no generalization of sample selection models with binary dependent variables of interest to data with temporal error correlations. We suggest a generalized estimating equation approach to panel data selection models, considering binary responses in both equations. We demonstrate the utility of this model by a simulation study and by analyzing highly unbalanced annual panel data taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study covering two decades of Green party support.
The Cox proportional hazards model is widely used to model durations in the social sciences. Although this model allows analysts to forgo choices about the form of the hazard, it demands careful attention to the proportional hazards assumption. To this end, a standard diagnostic method has been developed to test this assumption. I argue that the standard test for nonproportional hazards has been misunderstood in current practice. This test detects a variety of specification errors, and these specification errors must be corrected before one can correctly diagnose nonproportionality. In particular, unmodeled nonlinearity can appear as a violation of the proportional hazard assumption for the Cox model. Using both simulation and empirical examples, I demonstrate how an analyst might be led astray by incorrectly applying the nonproportionality test.
The polity2 variable from the Polity IV project is the most popular measure of a country's political regime. This article contends that the coding rules employed to create a polity2 score during years of so-called interregnum and affected transitions produce a measure of democracy that lacks face validity. Using both single and multiple imputation methods, we construct and evaluate several variables that offer alternative measures to polity2 during such periods. We recommend that scholars using polity2 test whether their results are robust to using our alternatives and using multiple imputation techniques instead. Where robustness cannot be established, scholars need to theoretically justify the choice of either polity2 or one of the alternatives.
This paper extends the Calculus of Voting of McKelvey and Ordeshook, providing the first direct derivation of the conditions under which voters will vote strategically: choose their second-most preferred candidate in order to prevent their least-preferred candidate from winning. Addressing this theoretical problem is important, as nearly all empirical research on strategic voting either implicitly or explicitly tests hypotheses which originate from this seminal model. The formal result allows us to isolate the subset of voters to which strategic voting hypotheses properly apply and in turn motivates a critical reevaluation of past empirical work. In making this argument, we develop a unified and parsimonious framework for understanding competing models of tactical voter choice. The typology helps to elucidate the methodological difficulties in studying tactical behavior when faced with heterogeneous explanatory models and suggests the need for both theoretical caution and more precise data instruments in future empirical work.
Political science researchers typically conduct an idiosyncratic search of possible model configurations and then present a single specification to readers. This approach systematically understates the uncertainty of our results, generates fragile model specifications, and leads to the estimation of bloated models with too many control variables. Bayesian model averaging (BMA) offers a systematic method for analyzing specification uncertainty and checking the robustness of one’s results to alternative model specifications, but it has not come into wide usage within the discipline. In this paper, we introduce important recent developments in BMA and show how they enable a different approach to using the technique in applied social science research. We illustrate the methodology by reanalyzing data from three recent studies using BMA software we have modified to respect statistical conventions within political science.
Political scientists lack methods to efficiently measure the priorities political actors emphasize in statements. To address this limitation, I introduce a statistical model that attends to the structure of political rhetoric when measuring expressed priorities: statements are naturally organized by author. The expressed agenda model exploits this structure to simultaneously estimate the topics in the texts, as well as the attention political actors allocate to the estimated topics. I apply the method to a collection of over 24,000 press releases from senators from 2007, which I demonstrate is an ideal medium to measure how senators explain their work in Washington to constituents. A set of examples validates the estimated priorities and demonstrates their usefulness for testing theories of how members of Congress communicate with constituents. The statistical model and its extensions will be made available in a forthcoming free software package for the R computing language.
In this paper, we discuss an estimator for average treatment effects (ATEs) known as the augmented inverse propensity weighted (AIPW) estimator. This estimator has attractive theoretical properties and only requires practitioners to do two things they are already comfortable with: (1) specify a binary regression model for the propensity score, and (2) specify a regression model for the outcome variable. Perhaps the most interesting property of this estimator is its so-called "double robustness." Put simply, the estimator remains consistent for the ATE if either the propensity score model or the outcome regression is misspecified but the other is properly specified. After explaining the AIPW estimator, we conduct a Monte Carlo experiment that compares the finite sample performance of the AIPW estimator to three common competitors: a regression estimator, an inverse propensity weighted (IPW) estimator, and a propensity score matching estimator. The Monte Carlo results show that the AIPW estimator has comparable or lower mean square error than the competing estimators when the propensity score and outcome models are both properly specified and, when one of the models is misspecified, the AIPW estimator is superior.
Many social processes are stable and smooth in general, with discrete jumps. We develop a sequential segmentation spline method that can identify both the location and the number of discontinuities in a series of observations with a time component, while fitting a smooth spline between jumps, using a modified Bayesian Information Criterion statistic as a stopping rule. We explore the method in a large-n, unbalanced panel setting with George W. Bush's approval data, a small-n time series with median DW-NOMINATE scores for each Congress over time, and a series of simulations. We compare the method to several extant smoothers, and the method performs favorably in terms of visual inspection, residual properties, and event detection. Finally, we discuss extensions of the method.
The increased use of models with limited-dependent variables has allowed researchers to test important relationships in political science. Often, however, researchers employing such models fail to acknowledge that the violation of some basic assumptions has in part difference consequences in nonlinear models than in linear ones. In this paper, I demonstrate this for binary probit models in which the dependent variable is systematically miscoded. Contrary to the linear model, such misclassifications affect not only the estimate of the intercept but also those of the other coefficients. In a Monte Carlo simulation, I demonstrate that a model proposed by Hausman, Abrevaya, and Scott-Morton (1998, Misclassification of the dependent variable in a discrete-response setting. Journal of Econometrics 87:239–69) allows for correcting these biases in binary probit models. Empirical examples based on reanalyses of models explaining the occurrence of rebellions and civil wars demonstrate the problem that comes from neglecting these misclassifications.
Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about how people think. One such assumption, that political actors use identical conjectures when assessing others’ strategies, is nested within applications of widely used game-theoretic equilibrium concepts. When empirical findings call this assumption into question, the self-confirming equilibrium (SCE) concept provides an alternate criterion for theoretical claims. We examine applications of SCE to political science. Our main example focuses on the claim of Feddersen and Pesendorfer that unanimity rule can lead juries to convict innocent defendants (1998. Convicting the innocent: The inferiority of unanimous jury verdicts under strategic voting. American Political Science Review 92:23–35). We show that the claim depends on the assumption that jurors have identical beliefs about one another's types and identical conjectures about one another's strategies. When jurors’ beliefs and conjectures vary in ways documented by empirical jury research, fewer false convictions can occur in equilibrium. The SCE concept can confer inferential advantages when actors have different beliefs and conjectures about one another.
Although estimating the revealed preferences of members of Congress is straightforward, estimating the position of the president relative to Congress is not. Current estimates place the president as considerably more ideologically extreme than one would expect. These estimates, however, are very sensitive to the set of presidential positions used in the roll call analyses for the 103rd through 109th Congresses. The president often obtains more moderate ideal point estimates relative to Congress when including positions based on signing bills into law.
Survey researchers have long speculated that there may be a link between nonresponse and measurement error—that is, people likely to become nonrespondents to a survey are also likely to make poor reporters if they do take part. Still, there is surprisingly little evidence of such a link. It could be that nonresponse is generally the product of one set of factors and reporting errors, the product of an unrelated set, or both nonresponse and reporting errors may be item-specific so that no general relationship between the two is likely to emerge. Our study examined a situation in which we thought there would be a link between response propensities and the propensity to give inaccurate answers. We asked samples of voters and nonvoters to take part in a survey that included items about voting. Past research shows that nonvoters misreport that fact and that they are less likely than voters in general to take part in surveys. We thought we could heighten the differences between voters and nonvoters in both response rates and levels of misreporting if we characterized the survey as being about politics. However, only nonresponse biases were larger when the topic of the survey was described as political, and this difference was only marginally significant. These two ways of framing the study had even smaller effects on estimates derived from other items in the questionnaire. The overall biases in estimates derived from the voting items are very substantial, and both nonresponse and measurement error contribute to them.
This article reports new empirical evidence on probabilistic polling, which asks persons to state in percent-chance terms the likelihood that they will vote and for whom. Before the 2008 presidential election, seven waves of probabilistic questions were administered biweekly to participants in the American Life Panel (ALP). Actual voting behavior was reported after the election. We find that responses to the verbal and probabilistic questions are well-aligned ordinally. Moreover, the probabilistic responses predict voting behavior beyond what is possible using verbal responses alone. The probabilistic responses have more predictive power in early August, and the verbal responses have more power in late October. However, throughout the sample period, one can predict voting behavior better using both types of responses than either one alone. Studying the longitudinal pattern of responses, we segment respondents into those who are consistently pro-Obama, consistently anti-Obama, and undecided/vacillators. Membership in the consistently pro- or anti-Obama group is an almost perfect predictor of actual voting behavior, while the undecided/vacillators group has more nuanced voting behavior. We find that treating the ALP as a panel improves predictive power: current and previous polling responses together provide more predictive power than do current responses alone.
Prior research suggests that the attribution of individual and group differences to genetic causes is correlated with prejudiced attitudes toward minority groups. Our study suggests that these findings may be due to the wording of the questions and to the choice of response options. Using a series of vignettes in an online survey, we find a relationship between racial attitudes and genetic attributions when respondents are asked to make causal attributions of differences between racial groups. However, when they are asked to make causal attributions for characteristics shown by individuals, no such relationship is found. The response scale used appears to make less, if any, difference in the results. These findings indicate that the way questions about genetic causation of behavior are framed makes a significant contribution to the answers obtained because it significantly changes the meaning of the questions. We argue that such framing needs to be carefully attended to, not only in posing research questions but also in discourse about genetics more generally.
What explains the dynamic movement in the gender gap in public opinion toward government activism over the past 30 years? The thermostatic model of politics suggests that aggregate public opinion adjusts to liberal changes in public policy by preferring less government and to conservative changes in policy by preferring more government. Given the cross-sectional differences in policy preferences between men and women, we argue that the dynamic movement in the gender gap in policy preferences for more or less government spending is a function of asymmetrical responses by men and women to changes in public policy. We find that both men and women respond to changes in public policy by shifting their policy preferences in the same direction. But men appear more responsive to policy changes than do women. It is this asymmetrical response to changes in public policy that is responsible for the dynamics of the gender gap in policy preferences across time. Our results show that the gap increases when policy moves in a liberal direction, as men move in a conservative direction at a faster rate than women. In contrast, when policy moves to the right, the opinions of both men and women will respond by moving to the left, but the greater responsiveness among men will decrease the gap, bringing male preferences closer to the preferences of women.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, journalists and pundits debated the electoral consequences of the prolonged and hard-fought nomination contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Previous research, typically using aggregate vote returns, has concluded that divisive primaries negatively impact the electoral prospects of the winning candidate. It is thought that supporters of the losing candidate are less likely to vote and more likely to defect because of psychological disaffection, or "sour grapes." Using a new panel dataset that traces individual candidate preferences during the primary and general election campaigns, we are able to explicitly examine individual-level decision making in the general election conditioned on voting behavior in the primary. Although "sour grapes" had a modest effect on eventual support for the party nominee, fundamental political considerations—especially attitudes on the War in Iraq—were far better predictors of the vote decision among thwarted voters. Moreover, we find that supporters of losing Democratic candidates were far more likely to vote for Obama if they lived in a battleground state.
Many have been concerned about the ability of citizens to ground their specific political preferences in more general principles. We test the longstanding intuition that political elites, and political parties in particular, can help citizens improve the quality of their political opinions—understood as the consistency between citizens’ specific opinions and their deeper political values. We integrate two major areas of research in political behavior that rarely speak together—political parties and framing—to argue that the structure of party competition frames issues by signaling what political values are at stake and hence enables citizens to take the side most consistent with their basic principles. With a unique experimental design embedded in a nationally representative survey, we find strong support for this argument. Our findings imply that low levels of value-opinion consistency are driven not only by citizens’ lack of interest in politics but also by parties failing in providing clear signals.
We discover and document errors in public-use microdata samples ("PUMS files") of the 2000 Census, the 2003–2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004–2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men age 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15 percent from counts in published data tables. Moreover, an analysis of labor-force participation and marriage rates suggests the PUMS samples are not representative of the population at individual ages for those age 65 and over. PUMS files substantially underestimate labor-force participation of those near retirement age and overestimate labor-force participation rates of those at older ages. These problems were an unintentional byproduct of the misapplication of a newer generation of disclosure-avoidance procedures carried out on the data. The resulting errors in the public-use data could significantly impact studies of people age 65 and older, particularly analyses of variables that are expected to change by age.
Results from a number of U.S. public opinion polls collected in the past two decades are used to examine trends in attitudes about the American Dream. Trends are examined in the following areas: "What is the American Dream?" "Is the American Dream achievable?" and "What is the role of government and politics in the American Dream?" Findings suggest that a majority of Americans consistently reported that the American Dream (for themselves and their family) is more about spiritual happiness than material goods. However, the size of this majority is decreasing. Most Americans continued to believe that working hard is the most important element for getting ahead in the United States. However, in some surveys, an increasing minority of Americans reported that this hard work and determination does not guarantee success. A majority of respondents believe that achieving the American Dream will be more difficult for future generations, although this majority is becoming smaller. Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the opportunity for the working class to get ahead and increasingly optimistic about the opportunity for the poor and immigrants to get ahead in the United States. Although trends show consistency in Americans blaming Blacks for their condition (not discrimination), a majority of Americans consistently support programs that make special efforts to help minorities get ahead.
In this article, we juxtapose the ways "Muslim women" and "foreign prostitutes" are commonly constituted as victims in media and politics. We analyze the functions of these two prototypical female victims in terms of the role they play in epitomizing "the problems of globalization" and in reinforcing the existing social and political structures. Victim discourse, when tied to the transnational proliferation of the sex industry and of (radical) Islam, has depoliticizing effects because it places nonindividual causes of victimization outside of "our" polity and society and casts the state as protector and neutral arbiter of national and global inequalities, marginalization, and social conflict.
This article discusses the regulation of marriage migration to Norway through an analysis of the subsistence requirement rule which entails that a person who wants to bring a spouse to Norway must achieve a certain level of income. Policy-makers present two main arguments for this regulation. First, the subsistence requirement is a means to prevent forced marriage. Second, its aim is to prevent family immigrants from becoming a burden on welfare budgets. The major concern of both these arguments is that of dependency, either on the family or on the welfare state. The article investigates the representations of the "problems" underpinning this specific policy proposal and argues that the rule in question, and immigration policy more generally, needs to be analyzed with reference to the broader concerns and aims of welfare state policy and gender equality policy.
Adopting a transnational perspective has become essential in understanding the contemporary practices taking place across borders, especially with respect to migrants. In this article, I argue that we can distinguish two theoretical orientations within transnational migration studies: one theorizing the complexity of transnational processes and focusing on established migrants settled in host countries; and the second theorizing transnational practices on the basis of different but continuous forms of mobility. Using the example of cabaret dancers in Switzerland, I show how they develop a very specific form of transnationality, which corresponds at first sight to the second theoretical orientation. Some of them are genuinely "world travelers"—they work in erotic clubs in Switzerland, Japan, or Lebanon, go home regularly to visit their families, or continue their studies. As such, their transnational morphology is highly influenced by gender as well as by the (transnational) nature of the sex industry and the opportunities and legal structure in Switzerland. Nevertheless, to remain in circulation, the dancers need to develop a kind of mobility capital, which involves, paradoxically, becoming "sedentarized" to a certain degree in Switzerland. The article thus advocates a theoretical framework that better captures the experiences of settled as well as of circulatory migrants.
On the basis of a close reading of popular and medical texts which address a debate over the ethics of clinical drug trials funded by the United States and designed mainly for sub-Saharan Africa, I argue that international public health discourse about infant HIV infection in that region reflects and legitimates a neo-imperialist, anti-reproductive justice ideology. Participants share a fetal-centered logic that US-funded biomedicine must shoulder the burden of rescuing sub-Saharan Africa from itself by using the bodies of HIV-positive pregnant women to transmit biomedicine's magic bullet—antiretroviral drugs—to the next generation. The survival of the fetus, disguised as the well-being of the HIV-positive woman and accomplished by the magic of biomedical research, becomes the survival of a region otherwise doomed by its present state of economic, political, and medical incapacity. This version of what queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) calls "reproductive futurism" redounds to the benefit of the more explicitly women-hating and nationalist ideologies of still-powerful right-wing movements against reproductive and sexual rights.
This article looks at how Europe matters in the development of policies against domestic violence, a gender equality field outside the core European Union (EU) conditionality criteria. By analyzing the concrete workings and uses of Europe's domestic violence policy-making in five Central and Eastern European countries, it identifies three mechanisms of Europeanization in the field and shows how together they work to expand the reach of the EU to this policy realm. The findings point toward an understanding of Europeanization based on social learning and dynamic, interactive processes of constructing what membership in the EU means in terms of domestic violence policy processes.
The movement against domestic violence has achieved a number of successes in challenging violence between intimate or formerly intimate partners and in providing services for survivors of domestic abuse. It has, in effect, mainstreamed the message that domestic violence is common and dangerous to women of all backgrounds. In this article, we look closely at statistical evidence around prevalence, gender, ethnicity, and poverty to investigate this claim. We argue that the framing of domestic violence could be advanced through the use of a social movement frame that draws on issues of intersectionality.
Integrating insights from a problem representation approach and a feminist bargaining framework, I explore the "lived effects" of Canada's anti-wife abuse policy frameworks. The policy frameworks are premised on protection, which requires removal from danger. In effect, anti-violence policy problematizes the behavior of women, constructing women's resistance to abuse as only exit, falsely classifying the women who leave as "resistors" and those who stay as either "helpless victims" or "willing participants". Where the "helpless victims" are constructed as policy problems, the other women are defined away from the policy frameworks, offered no protection from the state. The analysis reveals that anti-violence policy, far from protecting women, actually increases their vulnerability to abuse.
Two social changes that have taken place within the Israel Defense Forces—feminism and religiosity—are marching toward a confrontation. It is a clash between two groups that have significantly increased their presence in the combat units since the 1990s. Central to this dispute is the rabbis' demand that men and women be kept separate in combat units, a demand that may reset barriers to the equal integration of women into these units. Using an interpretative methodology, this paper argues that this clash is a multilayered conflict, which is nurtured by institutional interests, cultural symbols, and hidden agendas. It is an asymmetric conflict in which religious groups have a definite advantage.
This article examines a developing trend in the prostitution industry in the western world, the boom in escort prostitution. Escort prostitution, operating through mobile phones and the Internet, is supplanting the brothel as the major form in which prostituted women are delivered to male buyers. Policy-makers who promote the legalization of the prostitution industry have argued that this policy will make prostituted women and girls safer and combat organized crime. These assumptions are based upon the idea that prostitution will take place in brothels which can institute health and safety codes, and enable easy identification of the illegal brothel industry which can be closed down. Escort prostitution provides particular challenges to the regulation of prostitution because there is no way in which it can be controlled or made "safe." Alongside the other harms associated with prostitution which are exacerbated in legalized regimes, this development provides a significant reason why the policy of legalization is doomed to fail in achieving its objectives. The problems associated with the escort boom will be examined in relation to the state of Queensland in Australia, and the Netherlands, jurisdictions in which the prostitution industry has been legalized.
Is gender inequality in unpaid work within households implicated in falling fertility rates? This paper investigates whether the likelihood couples with one child will have more children is affected by: (i) the amount of household labor they each perform or (ii) the way they divide household labor between themselves. Drawing a sample of partnered couples with one child (n = 573) from the longitudinal Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey, we conduct multivariate regression analysis and find the more housework that Australian women do, the less likely they are to have more children. Neither fathers' time allocation to housework, nor relative shares of housework, were found to have an effect on subsequent fertility. Thus, mothers' own domestic workloads negatively impacted upon fertility, but shares of housework did not.
This paper explores policy and legal debates over same-sex marriage in the United States, focusing on the indirect effects of the struggle over same-sex marriage and how these implicate the interests of women, including women in heterosexual relationships. The paper highlights the effects of the institutional structures of American politics, which have shaped the same-sex marriage debate in particular ways, privileging an incremental path of policy evolution across the states. This has forced US state courts to engage repeatedly with the legal arguments over same-sex relationship recognition and marriage and, in doing so, courts have increasingly cast the heterosexual nuclear family as a fragile edifice in need of state protection. The paper argues that we must move beyond thinking of same-sex marriage and relationship recognition as struggles that pit allegedly normalized or assimilated same-sex couples against queer politics and sensibilities and, rather, recognize the increasingly complex gender politics of same-sex marriage and relationship recognition, a politics that implicates groups beyond the LGBT community. In doing so, the paper argues that struggles over same-sex marriage are much more than simply struggles for recognition by LGBT communities but, rather, that they are the canary in the mineshaft of broad and profound shifts in gender relations.
This article highlights the need in migrant research for a holistic approach that addresses migrants' reconciliation of work and care in the context of their evolving employment, career, and family circumstances. With a focus on these three central spheres of migrants' lives, in an Irish context, it demonstrates the complexities of female migrant care workers' transnational obligations, which together with immigration status and limited opportunities in their home and host countries serve to curtail career aspirations. The article considers how future ambitions are dependent on changing family circumstances and employment prospects in the "receiving" or "sending" country and argues that the inter-connectedness of these circumstances points to the need for greater co-ordination of migration, labor market, and care policies.
This article analyzes the role of soldiers' income compensation in the development of Swiss social policy. Introduced in 1940, compensation for wage losses incurred during militia duties (Erwerbersatzordnung, EO) became the forerunner of old age pensions, the cornerstone of the postwar welfare state. Yet, by entrenching links between citizenship, military service, and social rights, the EO also contributed to delaying programs such as family protection measures and maternity benefits. Besides underscoring the EO impact on the gendering of social policy, this article explores how this program was shaped by public–private partnerships and business interests.
The thrust of federal educational policies in the United States is to treat differences between school children as marks of neediness and/or disability. Although these policies were developed to correct disturbing inequalities, we argue that they distort needs and portray them as exceptional and stigmatized. To demonstrate this distortion, we examine a "difference" among children with which many people are uncomfortable and thus reluctant to acknowledge—academic giftedness. Arguing that the education of children is a practice of care, we apply the theoretical insights and normative commitments of a feminist ethic of care.
Critical feminist reviews of gender mainstreaming suggest a widespread disillusionment with gender and development. The literature has been dominated, however, by accounts of gender mainstreaming in international development institutions and in Western countries. There is a shortage of studies on how developing countries conceptualize, design and manage gender mainstreaming in development policies and programs in specific political and economic contexts. This paper focuses on Indonesia which made gender mainstreaming a national policy while battling the impacts of the Asian economic crisis and experiencing a political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. This strategic moment created some opportunities and challenges for government, NGO, and international gender and development advocates to integrate gender into the national poverty reduction policy. An analysis of the policy drafts and interviews with key players in the policy process shows that gender expertise, institutional capacity, organizational resistance, and leadership at the national level were important factors. Broader political concerns such as the diminished standing of World Bank and the IMF in post-crisis Indonesia also played a role in the long-winded policy process that produced the Indonesia's National Poverty Reduction Strategy. One important lesson drawn from this case study is the need to indigenize gender mainstreaming, by building gender analysis capabilities in national women's machineries and forging stronger links with national and local gender-concerned NGOs and research institutions. Secondly, translating gender-aware poverty reduction policies into gender-responsive action remains a great challenge not only in Indonesia but elsewhere due to paucity of relevant gender-disaggregated data.
Rational choice models of voter turnout try to account for why people vote by including on the ‘benefits’ side of the cost-benefit calculus some term representing either the collective benefits of voting or the satisfaction the individual derives from the very act of voting, a strategy subject to a number of telling criticisms. After a background discussion of three competing perspectives on this rational choice strategy, which we term the ‘accepter,’ ‘yes, but’ and ‘rejecter’ views, we address the following issues. First, how one’s view of ‘rationality’ affects the appropriateness of including ‘satisfaction from voting’ and related concepts in the rational choice model. Second, as a formal analytical matter, can a ‘sense of civic duty to vote’ be comfortably incorporated into the rational choice model of turnout? What other recent related embellishments have been made to that model? Third, even if ‘civic duty’ can be formally incorporated, would this defeat the efficacy of the rational choice model? Fourth, why the answer to the previous question might differ for economists versus political scientists. Fifth, what significant issues are raised by expanding the rational choice model to include civic duty? The analytical contribution of this article is showing how ‘civic duty’ can be incorporated into the rational choice model; the broader conceptual contribution is to evaluate whether and how that innovation advances our understanding of the efficacy of the rational choice approach for understanding voter turnout.
The goal of this paper is to examine the incentives to vote insincerely, other than those created by rounding, faced by voters in systems of proportional representation (PR). We rigorously investigate two models of voter behaviour. The first model assumes that a voter is primarily interested in the distribution of seats in the post-election parliament (seat maximizer) while the second considers a voter who is concerned with the distribution of power in it (power maximizer). We show that under pure PR, seat maximizers do not have any incentives to manipulate, which justifies the Bowler and Lanoue (1992) claim, and that such incentives for seat maximizers appear with the introduction of a threshold. We show that, even in the absence of a threshold, there will always exist circumstances where a power maximizer would have an incentive to vote insincerely. We demonstrate that her incentives to make an insincere vote depend on her attitude towards uncertainty. The introduction of a threshold creates new and stronger opportunities for strategic voters regardless of their attitude towards uncertainty. Finally we discuss the overshooting/undershooting phenomenon, when either too many or too few like-minded voters attempt to manipulate. We use the two models to explain voters’ behaviour at the 2005 New Zealand general election and demonstrate that rounding creates not only incentives but also disincentives for strategic voting.
In this paper we analyze a two-candidate electoral competition in which a candidate can either lie about his private policy preference in order to get elected, or pander to post-election external influences in choosing a policy to implement. Both the pre-election announcement and post-election implementation are a candidate’s strategic choices. We show that, in equilibrium, different types of candidates can cluster at different points around the median voter position, as long as the pandering type and the lying type coexist in the candidate pool. The pooling of all types of candidates at the median voter position is also an equilibrium. Thus, despite pressure towards the median (as all candidates want to win the election), both convergence and divergence in candidate announcements are normal outcomes of electoral competition.
In this paper I argue that reform capacity, defined as the extent to which political institutions facilitate the adoption of socially efficient reforms, is not primarily determined by the number of veto players in the political system, but by the availability of institutional mechanisms that allow political agents to solve commitment problems associated with bargaining over reform. Specifically, I argue that power sharing is compatible with high reform capacity if policy areas involved in package deals are all controlled by the central government (or whatever level of government makes the reform), and if the ‘losers’ are confident that they will remain veto players in the future.
This study examines the effect of news priming, which refers to the media’s influence on the standards by which the public evaluates political figures. Linking survey data to an analysis of issue coverage, we look into whether television news in South Korea affects the way citizens evaluate the president. Our findings provided support for the priming hypothesis. There was a close correspondence between prominent issues in the news and important dimensions of presidential evaluation among the respondents. We also found that priming effects were largely a function of recent, rather than cumulative, news coverage. Finally, findings indicated that people with different levels of news exposure were responding to the media within different time frames.
Studies concerning the impact of the length of response scales on the measurement of attitudes have primarily focused on the method bias associated with question format. At the same time another line of research has focused on the issue of response styles that affect how respondents answer to attitude questions. So far, research has paid less attention to the issue of whether the length of the response scales is related to response styles. In this study, we explore if differences in length of the response scale (i.e., method factor) have differential effects in evoking extreme and midpoint response style behavior (i.e., style factor). Our hypotheses read as follows. As the number of response categories increases, we expect subjects to be more likely to exert extreme response style. Furthermore, we expect subjects to be more likely to adopt a midpoint response style when they are offered a middle response category. To investigate these hypotheses we developed a split ballot experiment in which the number of response categories is manipulated from 5 to 11 categories. Data are collected by a random sample, large-scale web survey which allows for random assignment to the experimental conditions. The results show clear evidence of extreme response style and moderate evidence of midpoint response style. Extreme response style is not affected by the length of response scales, whereas the exertion of midpoint response style only popped up in the longer scale versions.
This study examines whether perceptions of media influence and perceptions of media hostility towards one’s views predict taking "corrective" actions to ensure that one’s views are "heard" in the public sphere. Controlling for demographics, political interest, efficacy, knowledge, ideological extremity, and Internet use, this study provides evidence that both third-person perceptions and hostile media perceptions are consistently related to a series of offline and online behaviors that seek to enrich public debate and "correct" what are seen as potential biases in the public sphere. Based on a national probability sample collected in Colombia, these results offer a strong case of behavioral consequences for third-person perceptions outside the realm of willingness to censor.
This study suggests a general theoretical framework for explaining the decision to participate in surveys, and tests its applicability to the Arab minority in Israel. The theory of reasoned action is proposed as a conceptual framework that can explain the willingness of respondents to participate in surveys. Although the model tested here refers to a specific population (Israeli Arabs), a specific topic (coexistence) and a specific context (a deeply divided society), it is proposed as a theoretical framework that can be applied to the understanding of different aspects of survey behavior among different populations. A reasoned action model for predicting survey response intention among the Arab minority was validated in two face-to-face representative surveys in 2002 (N = 688) and in 2003 (N = 701). The basic structure of the model, postulating that attitude and subjective norm are the direct determinants of behavioral intention with behavioral beliefs as antecedents of the attitude, was supported in both studies.
Political efficacy constitutes an important component in various rationalist social psychological models of protest participation which treated the latter as the result of cost-benefit calculations based on people’s existing beliefs, norms, and values. This study attempts to contribute to this literature by further explicating the formation and influence of collective efficacy on protest participation. Collective efficacy refers to an individual’s perception of whether a collective actor to which the individual belongs is capable of achieving desired outcomes. Theoretically, collective efficacy is treated as a form of cognitive judgments people make by drawing upon and integrating existing information, observations, and perceptions. The empirical analysis, which focuses on a recent wave of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, illustrates how people’s perceptions of the political environment contribute to the formation of collective efficacy beliefs. The analysis also examines whether perceptions of the possibility of movement success would mediate and moderate the impact of collective efficacy on protest participation. The results provide an elaboration of the distinctiveness of collective efficacy and its role in protest mobilization.
This article illustrates the challenges involved in preparing a systematic comparison of two federal countries. It examines questions as to what explains similarities and differences in federal systems. It rejects any single-variable approach to explaining federalism but gives primacy to ideas and to institutions. While there are fundamental differences in founding ideas and historical legacies, there are major similarities between these two federations. We conclude this analysis by underlining the value of comparison. Comparison helps clarify explanations for both variation and similarity, corrects misconceived perceptions of differences, and suggests areas of learning from one another.
While there are many important points of comparison and contrast between the American and Canadian foundings, perhaps none is more important than the role of political theory. Both the United States and Canada share much in common historically, structurally, and theoretically, yet each established a very different form of federalism that has in turn developed in strikingly different ways. Starting from a common British inheritance, different theoretical applications resulted in divergent conceptions of sovereignty and representation that affected the system of federalism in each country. Our findings demonstrate the crucial importance for understanding the political philosophy of the founding relative to the ongoing dialectic of the Great Conversation. In these two nations, the federalism that developed resulted in substantive differences in representation and constitutional structures.
Canada is generally recognized as having more decentralized federalism than the United States. Even though the content of tobacco control policy in the two countries has been similar, the United States has had a more decentralized process, with policy usually led by the state level, while Canada has had a centralized process, with most initiatives coming from the federal government. This article examines this anomaly, utilizing two different approaches to intergovernmental relations, Kelemen’s "comparative federalism" and Hooghe and Marks’ "multi-level governance" (MLG). Overall, MLG is a better explanation for tobacco control policy in both countries, especially in the U.S. Discretionary implementation from the central level in parliamentary systems, unitary or federal, may be more broadly applicable than the legalistic implementation of separation-of-powers systems.
Contributing to the gender and federalism debate, this article explores how characteristics and historical legacies of the Canadian and U.S. federations shape women’s activism. Following discussion of three positions gender scholars and activists hold regarding federalism, their shared view that federalism is gendered is explored. Reversing the causal arrow to compare how organized women circumvent or change obstructive federal arrangements, the text uses abortion rights campaigning to illustrate. It shows that the weaker pan-Canadian women’s movement succeeded in effecting constitutional and judicial change because of a favorable division of powers and preoccupation with Quebec. But a negative historical legacy and division of powers, counter-movements and partisan polarization limited the stronger U.S. movement to circumvention strategies.
This article builds upon previous research that indicates that multilevel governance, especially at subnational levels and in the private sector, has the greatest potential to address the problem of climate change. Specifically, this article updates the study of climate change efforts among the Canadian provinces and the American states through case analysis. We identify two longitudinal strategies found in both the provinces and the states—a fragmented response to portions of the climate change problem, and a comprehensive strategy based on stakeholder education and participation. Institutional variations between the provinces and the states lead to some differences in the process of policy development, but not in the resulting policy tools used to address the issue.
Research on interest group strategies in federal systems is converging with the venue shopping and multilevel lobbying literature in the European Union. Drawing on both literatures, the article compares the lobbying strategies of U.S. and Canadian interest groups during the economic crisis of 2008–2009. The impact of political institutional and political partisan factors on venue choice is analyzed in a comparative crucial case study of Michigan and Ontario. Statistical analysis of original survey data from ninety-eight business, trade, and professional associations indicates that neither interest group financial resources nor the severity of the crisis predict lobbying frequencies or targets. Two factors strongly influence where interest groups lobby: the relative importance of the government levels and the partisan control of government.
Federations exist to divide power and to promote diversity. Nonetheless, in federations interdependence requires degrees of policy coordination across governments. We examine two means of coordinating policies in the U.S. and Canadian federations: administrative and jurisdictional federalism. The former, with its centralized coordinative mechanisms, is thought to produce more uniform national policy outcomes; the latter, operating in the context of non-hierarchical relationships, greater policy variation. An analysis of cases in three policy areas in both countries indicates that despite contrasting coordinative practices, outcomes in actual policies implemented in the two federations are relatively similar. Hierarchical administrative federalism in the United States does not always produce the degree of coordination one might anticipate while a decentralized non-hierarchical system in Canada can achieve surprising degrees of coordination.
The potential for vertical tax competition is strongest when different levels of government share the same base. Because there is greater sharing of common tax bases in Canada than in the United States, we expect vertical tax competition to be weaker in the United States than in Canada. Econometric analysis of US data supports this hypothesis. Taking account of the deductibility-related endogeneity of federal tax burdens by state, federal income tax burdens have no effect on average state income tax burdens. Introducing distributional considerations into the vertical tax competition model, we do find a significant displacement effect for higher income taxpayers, with higher federal burdens associated with lower state income tax burdens in the highest income quintile. For low-income taxpayers, federal and state tax burdens are complementary.
This article examines government power over elementary and secondary education policy in Canada and the United States. The study distinguishes between federal government policy and national policy that results from subnational governments adopting similar policies voluntarily. The analysis identifies factors that encourage development of national education policy. Federal policy appears to have greater potential for success than national policy due to federal resources and enforcement authority. However, there are constitutional constraints on federal power over education in Canada, and political and technical constraints in both countries. Subnational governments in both countries actively safeguard federalism and protect their autonomy. The study indicates that subnational commitment is essential for the success of both national education policy and federal education policy.
This article presents a comparison between two models of publicness (one based on a type of television firmly anchored in the center, another depending on media that blur all distinctions between centers and peripheries) and asks what sort of sharedness do these two models allow? The article also explores the notion of "monstration." Through what sorts of displays do contending media call on public attention? Can one speak of "acts of showing" the way one speaks of speech acts? What is the impact of such acts on a sociology of collective attention? Third, the article examines the coexistence between television of the center and new digital media. Is their relation agonistic or, paradoxically, cooperative? The present situation may echo many earlier cases in which old media learned to coexist with new media by starting unexpected dialogues and practicing a division of labor. Today’s situation might be a (reluctant) partnership in a multitiered public sphere.
The rise of mass television allowed hundreds of millions of people to closely watch other people and places on a regular basis, anonymously and from afar. Television watching altered the balance of what different types of people knew about each other and relative to each other, blurred the dividing line between public and private behaviors, and weakened the link between physical location and access to social experience. In these ways, television contributed to the reshuffling of previously taken-for-granted reciprocal social roles, including those related to age, gender, and authority. In cultivating its viewers into the normalcy of the acts of watching and of being watched, television experience also stimulated the widespread use of more recent interactive visual media, including the displays of self on social networking sites. Moreover, familiarity with television as a watching machine has fostered the otherwise surprising level of tolerance for increasingly pervasive government, corporate, and populace surveillance.
This article explores the institutional adjustments that have altered the operation of the U.S. television industry over the past twenty years. The author first chronicles those industrial norms that characterized television during its "network era" (1952 to mid-1980s) and upon which most ideas about the role of television in society are based. She then explores the ways in which adjustments in technologies, industrial formations, governmental policies, practices of looking, and textual formations have redefined the norms of television in the United States since the mid-1980s. Analysis of the shifts in the institutional and cultural functions of television reveals the articulations between the dominant industrial practices and the forms, texts, and cultural role of the medium. Such a conception of shifts of the medium allows us to understand recent changes as an evolution of this central cultural medium rather than its demise.
Programming scarcity that characterized the broadcast era, or what this article refers to as constraint , served very different goals. Often intertwined, these goals ranged from the formation of an ideologically coherent national public, to the protection of economic self-interest, to the explicit promotion of products and messages. They were deployed rather differently in the commercial American and state/public European spaces of television. The article explores a number of assumptions regarding the institution and medium of television that have persisted from the broadcast era into our own and that might well, given the very different structures of contemporary television, be repositioned. It outlines the contours of that repositioning, sketching the implications for some of our theoretical and methodological defaults.
Analysis of early time-diary studies suggests that television has had more impact on daily time than any other household technology in the past century. In the United States, viewing time has steadily increased from roughly ten weekly hours in the 1960s to sixteen hours today, encompassing almost half of all "free time" reported in the diaries. A prominent recent TV casualty has been time spent reading the newspaper, providing further support for the functional equivalence argument. This article shows that, so far at least, viewing time seems little affected by the Internet and other recent new technologies. Studies of the public’s satisfaction with various activities suggest that viewers find TV to be more enjoyable in the doing rather than in general, even though it may not be particularly challenging or demanding of concentration. Viewing time is also shown to be significantly related to long-term personal unhappiness.
This article proposes some physiognomic speculations regarding three visual characteristics of television in its pre-digital-broadcasting form: (1) the importance of the head shot as a staple technique for representing the human figure and, hence, the primacy of the human face as a televisual image; (2) the mirrorlike reflective surface of the cathode-ray tube television screen, which makes the viewer’s reflected image appear to emanate from the depths of the television set; and (3) the box-like design of television sets that turns them into miniature containers of the pictures they show. It argues that these three characteristics amounted to an integrated communicative structure that made television a key mechanism for the social construction of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century, a mechanism whose future is uncertain in the age of new digital platforms.
The self-presentation of ordinary people on TV took some time to develop. An early game show from British ITV demonstrates the many pitfalls encountered in developing even the most basic of self-presentational codes. So the presentation of sincerely felt emotions did not develop as a style until the late 1980s with the changes in daytime talk and the growth of reality TV. The cult of sincerity, however, has had profound cultural effects, reaching into the political sphere.
This article shows how British television has lost cultural authority due to social shifts in British society whereby no single moral voice can expect to find an audience. The author argues that there is no longer a moral language by which to address moral issues nor any common agreement about the rightful constitution of the cultural and moral universe. The central point is that technological development leading to increase in television channel proliferation did not fragment the audience, as is often assumed, but that it was the fragmentation of the audience that allowed the uptake of the varied and various channels.
The proliferation of popular television genres in which the public are key participants (talk shows, reality TV, and makeover and lifestyle television) on the surface may seem less to do with engagement and more to do with entertainment and voyeurism. However, this article explores an alternative to the idea that popular television based on personal experience is a marker of the end of television in general and the weakening of the public service tradition in particular. Two programs, Oprah! and Little Angels, are shown to address the agendas of reflexive modernity and governmentality and potentially to contribute to a normative social order based on the project of the self. The fact that both traditional public service providers and commercial channels are engaging with these social issues suggests that new ways of legitimizing television in the public interest are emerging, with implications for the character of public service television.
Images of women, work, and family on television have changed enormously since the heyday of the network era. Early television confined women to the home and family setting. The increase in working women in the 1960s and 1970s was reflected in television’s images of women working and living nontraditional family lives. These images gave way, in the postnetwork era, to a form of postfeminist television in the 1990s when television undercut the ideals of liberal feminism with a series of ambiguous images challenging its gains. Women’s roles in the workplace, increasingly shown, were undercut by a sense of nostalgic yearning for the love and family life that they were seen to have displaced. Current television presents a third-wave-influenced feminism that picks up where postfeminism left off, introducing important representations more varied in race, sexuality, and the choices women are seen to make between work and family.
The quintessential image of the television audience is of the family viewing at home—sitting together comfortably in front of the lively set. Accompanying this happy image is its negative—a child viewing alone while real life goes on elsewhere. This article reviews evidence over five decades regarding the changing place of television in children’s lives. It argues that, notwithstanding postwar trends that have significantly changed adolescence, the family home, and wider consumer society, there was time for the 1950s family experiment to spawn the 1960s and 1970s family television experiment, thereby shaping normative expectations—academic, policy, and popular—regarding television audiences for years to come. At the turn of the twenty-first century, we must recognize that it was the underlying long-term trend of individualization, and its associated trends of consumerism, globalization, and democratization, that, historically and now, more profoundly frame the place of television in the family.
This article reflects upon the ways television changed the political landscape and considers how far new media, such as the Internet, are displacing television or reconfiguring the political communications ecology. The analysis explores opportunities and challenges facing media producers, politicians, and citizens. The authors conclude by suggesting that the television-politics relationship that emerged in the 1960s still prevails to some extent in the digital era but faces new pressures that weaken the primacy of the broadcast-centered model of political communication. The authors identify five new features of political communication that present formidable challenges for media policy makers. They suggest that these are best addressed through an imaginative, democratic approach to nurturing the emancipatory potential of the new media ecology by carving out within it a trusted online space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations, and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance.
The golden age of television news gave a large majority of otherwise diverse Americans a unified, seamless, and clear-cut image of their nation, its central players, and its agenda. Carefully scheduled, edited, sequenced, and branded, heard and seen simultaneously across America, it provided a pretense of order to the chaos that is news. The permanence and stability of the nation, as expressed in a complex way by TV news, provided Americans with an all-important sense of existential security experienced on an unarticulated emotional level. Today, a disjointed news environment is crushing the nature of network news as a transitional object. Television news no longer reassures viewers by connecting them to a surmountable world out there but carries them on a loop from themselves to themselves.
The transformation of television has altered the capacity of the state to control the agenda for making war, convening peace, and otherwise exercising its foreign policy options. In the age of the state gatekeeper, there was at least the illusion (and often the reality) that the government could substantially control the flow of images within its borders. With transformations in television systems, national systems of broadcast regulation have declined, replaced by transnational flows of information where local gatekeepers are not so salient. The rise of satellites with regional footprints and the spread of the Internet give governments the ability to reach over the heads of the state and speak directly to populations. Both receiving and sending states will have foreign policies about the meaning of the right to receive and impart information and the extent to which satellite signals can be regulated or channeled.
Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.
The article reviews the key question of the effects of television as proposed by Elihu Katz in his introduction and the various responses to it in the contributions to this volume. It argues that the question is a proper concern of sociology, engaged as it is with the politics of the present and immediate, short-term effects. The question of long-term effects, however, is beyond the scope of a social science methodology concerned with the impact of the new. Long-term effects only show up with the passing of time and are the concern of historical studies. As television begins to have a history, it begins to be possible to examine its historical record to try to tease out its long-term impact on the world—so far!
Do parties that represent ethnic minorities tend to exclude women? There are several reasons to think that this may be the case. First, the comparatively smaller size of ethnic parties could exclude women, especially under proportional representation. Second, the subcultures of many ethnic minorities are often more patriarchal than the majority culture, and thus parties representing such groups may include fewer women. Finally, an ideological fixation on ethnicity within ethnic parties may marginalize subminorities within the target group. Using a new cross-national data set, the authors examine the degree to which ethnic parties represent women, controlling for party size, electoral systems, gender quotas, ideology, and democratic development. Findings show that ethnic parties, particularly those appealing to a religious minority, tend to elect fewer women, but only under proportional representation electoral systems.
A large literature attributes independent courts to intense political competition. Existing theories, however, have a previously unrecognized boundary condition— they apply only to consolidated democracies. This article proposes a strategic pressure theory of judicial (in)dependence in electoral democracies, which posits that intense political competition magnifies the benefits of subservient courts to incumbents, thus reducing rather than increasing judicial independence. The theory’s predictions are tested through quantitative analysis of electoral registration disputes adjudicated by Russian and Ukrainian courts during the 2002-2003 parliamentary campaigns. Selection models show that in Ukraine, progovernment candidates have a higher than average probability of winning in court, whereas in Russia the political affiliation of the plaintiff does not predict success at trial. Thus, the data show that judicial independence is lower in the more competitive electoral democracy (Ukraine) than in the less competitive electoral democracy (Russia).
The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s offered governments opportunities to deliver public services more effectively to their citizens. Yet national and subnational authorities have employed such technologies in highly uneven ways. Drawing on a new data set of technology policy adoption by Indian states, the author argues that political calculations drive variation in the timing and scope of technology policies. Politicians weigh the expected electoral benefits from providing new goods to citizens against the expected electoral costs of reduced access to corrupt funds because of increased transparency. The author shows that the level of bureaucratic corruption in a state is the best predictor of both when states implement policies promoting computer-enabled services and the number of services made available.This finding contrasts with arguments that posit economic or developmental conditions, or alternative electoral and institutional characteristics, as the major drivers of technology investment.
The growing empirical literature on political corruption shows trust (interpersonal and political) to be both cause and consequence of corruption: a conclusion that largely builds on studies using cross-national measures of corruption based on perceptions of corruption rather than actual experience, raising questions of endogeneity. The lack of trust fed by corruption is considered critical in that it undermines government efforts to mobilize society to help fight corruption and leads the public to routinely dismiss government promises to fight corruption. After disaggregating the major concepts, this article empirically explores the relationship linking corruption and trust in Mexico based on data from the 2004 Americas Barometer survey. The authors discover a powerful mutual causality between perceptions of corruption and trust in political institutions that suggests that rooting out perceptions of corruption or shoring up trust in public institutions will be an extremely difficult project for anyone who takes on the task.
Information has become a core input for many companies. This article examines how this affects firm policy preferences. In contrast to national typologies of capitalism or microeconomic expectations, it uses information economics and historical institutionalism to construct a deductive model positing two basic logics. Firms with significant information assets view data as a private good, supporting policies that constrain information access and distribution. Companies with few information assets face a network effects economy and thus call for policies that promote a liberal data environment. The information asset argument is examined in the context of initial data privacy legislation passed in the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in the 1970s and early 1980s. The finding of the article contributes to literature interested in the political economy of services-based economies, underscores the significance of sociohistorical processes for preference formation, and calls attention to the boundary conditions of historically derived causal propositions.
America was an attractive destination for European scholars and social scientists— their contacts, observations, experiences, and thoughts often became a subject of interest in itself to many other sociologists. Poles are no exception. Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas and their classic Polish Peasant in Europe and America, first published in 1918—20, is symbolic of contacts and influences between Polish and American sociology in the first half of the twentieth century. However, sociologists other than Znaniecki and their transatlantic journeys remain somehow in the shadows to this day. This article presents a more recent and yet less known chapter of Polish— American relations—Polish sociologists visiting American universities in the 1950s and 1960s.
The religious thought of Václav Havel is examined in the context of Czech and American intellectual and spiritual traditions. The line begins with the worldview canonized by T. G. Masaryk. Masaryk drew inspiration from the American tradition of religious thought, rooted in the Enlightenment deistic interpretation of Christianity, embodied in Unitarianism. It was this line of thought that was passed down to Václav Havel by his father V. M. Havel. Masaryk’s "Unitarian" style of thinking about religion was developed by Havel in his Letters to Olga. During the 1970s, this influence merges with another intellectual stream, the "Kampademia" group. This line of thought combines Patocka’s tradition of phenomenology with new philosophical approaches to Catholicism and stimulated by the American "New Science". According to Masaryk’s "enlightened" and "Unitarian" tradition, old religion, expressed with the aid of rituals, was to be surpassed and replaced by a "scientific" and "progressive" religion. For the tradition of Kampademia, on the other hand, it is this old religion, with its myths and rituals, that should be revived. Thus, Havel takes seriously the basis of all ancient spiritual traditions—Christian, Jewish, "heathen," hermetic. It is in this public and symbolic appeal to "old" religious traditions before the eyes of a secular Czech society, this readiness to learn from the experiences of other traditions, and the declared humility to not attempt a synthesis of these traditions (as according to "classic" New Age) that Havel’s primary contribution to the spiritual thought of the present can be found.
In the twentieth century, nationalism has become an unwritten yet strong hegemonic rule that prescribes and defines cultural configurations of statehood. In the context of post-socialist and post-colonial transformations in "expanding" Eastern Europe, nation building is a complicated and incoherent process: the nation’s canonic attributes may contradict the cultural and historical "circumstances" of the development of a particular nation. This article questions a complicated dynamic between theoretical frameworks of nationalism and their applications in Eastern European states, such as in Belarus. More specifically, it argues against the discursive conceptualization of Belarus as a "nonexistent" or "undeveloped" nation. This article suggests rethinking nation building in Belarus in relation to the notion of major/minor developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The author implies that the unusual mode of Belarusian nationalism is not only a part of a struggle for domination between different intellectual groups in Belarus; it is also an issue of relying on traditional scholarly paradigms of nationalism that may no longer suffice.
Newly available documentation from the State Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina indicates that the majority of sites where Muslim civilians were killed during the Second World War remained unmarked as late as the mid-1980s. The existing scholarship, most of which argues that Yugoslavia’s communist regime sought to "de-ethnicize" the remembrance of all of the interethnic violence of the war, has failed to notice and explain this apparent bias against Muslim civilian war victims. This article seeks to answer the question of why so many sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina where Muslim civilians were killed remained unmarked after the war. It does so through the reconstruction and analysis of the wartime and postwar history of Kulen Vakuf, a small town located in northwestern Bosnia. The analysis of the dynamics of mass killing in the region reveals that the communist-led Partisan movement absorbed large numbers of Serbian insurgents who had murdered Muslims earlier in the war. The transformation of the perpetrators of the massacres into Partisans created a postwar context in which the authorities, to avoid implicating insurgents-turned-Partisans as war criminals, and the Muslim survivors, out of fear of retribution and a desire to move on, agreed to stay silent about the killings. The end result was the absence of monuments for the victims.
Throughout the Second World War and the post-war period, the city of Chernivtsi was transformed from a multiethnic and borderland urban microcosm into a culturally uniform Soviet socialist city. As the Soviets finally took power in this onetime capital of a Hapsburg province in 1944, they not only sponsored further large-scale population transfers but also "repopulated" its history, creating a new urban myth of cultural uniformity. This article examines the connection between war commemoration in Chernivtsi in the era of post-war, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and the formation of collective memory and identities of the city’s post-war population. The images of homogeneously Ukrainian Chernivtsi and Bukovina were created through the art of monumental propaganda, promoting public remembrance of certain events and personalities while making sure that others were doomed to oblivion. Selective commemoration of the wartime events was an important tool of drawing the borders of Ukrainian national identity, making it exclusivist and ethnic-based. Through an investigation of the origins of the post-war collective memory in the region, this article addresses the problem of perceived discontinuity between all things Soviet and post-Soviet in Ukraine. It demonstrates that it is, on the contrary, the continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet eras that defines today’s dominant culture and state ideology in Ukraine and particularly in its borderlands.
Reading Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society as targeting Rousseau insinuates continuity between Burke’s preoccupations in that work and his later opposition to Rousseau as supposedly also based on radical state-of-nature arguments. But neither contextual nor intra-textual evidence supports any Rousseau—Vindication connection, and the putative link implicitly misreads Burke’s preoccupation in the Vindication , the grounds of his critique of Rousseau, and the role Burke ascribes to the latter in the revolution. The real target of the Vindication was Bolingbroke’s application of philosophical rationalism to religion. This kind of argument he only later came to see applied to politics. Burke’s later opposition to Rousseau is based not on the revolutionaries’ (dubious) claim that Rousseau endorsed their radical state-of-nature and natural rights discourse, but on Rousseau’s espousal of a new moral psychology opposed to Christian deontology. This was the ‘revolution in manners’ which made the revolution possible and for which Rousseau provided a philosophical underpinning.
During the autumn of 1949, Hannah Arendt completed the manuscript of The Origins of Totalitarianism. On 1 October of the same year, the People’s Republic of China was founded under the leadership of Mao Zedong. This article documents Arendt’s claim in 1949 that the prospects of totalitarianism in China were ‘frighteningly good’, and yet her ambivalent judgment, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, about the totalitarian character of the Maoist regime. Despite being the premier theorist of totalitarian formations, Arendt’s interest in China was half-hearted and her analysis often wildly inaccurate. The concern of this paper, however, is less with the veracity of her remarks, than with a counterfactual question. If Arendt had known what we know now, would she have considered Maoist China to be a totalitarian regime? Put another way: to what extent is our modern picture of Mao’s regime consistent with Arendt’s depiction of the Soviet Union under Stalin or Germany under Hitler? While Arendt got many of her facts wrong, her theory of totalitarianism — as shapeless, febrile, voracious of human flesh, and endlessly turbulent — was in good measure applicable to Mao’s regime, even though she failed to recognize it.
It has often been noted that Leo Strauss developed his understanding of political philosophy through a critical engagement with Heidegger. Yet most analyses focus on Strauss’s American works while neglecting his earlier response during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic. The article seeks to overcome this limitation by ‘deconstructing’ Strauss’s American definitions of political philosophy in light of both his Weimar understanding of politische Wissenschaft and his 1922 discovery of Heidegger’s Aristotle. I argue that Strauss’s conception of political philosophy originated in Heidegger’s subversion of the traditional distinction between theory and praxis. I thus propose a way to read Strauss from the start following his own changing views of that distinction.
The purpose of this article is to respond to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s laws of hospitality and to offer a deeper exploration into Kant’s separation of a cosmopolitan right to visit ( Besuchsrecht) and the idea of a universal right to reside ( Gastrecht). Through this discussion, the various laws of hospitality will be examined, extrapolated and outlined, particularly in response to the tensions articulated by Derrida. By doing so, this article will offer a reinterpretation of the laws of hospitality, arguing that hospitality is not meant to capture all the conditions necessary for cosmopolitan citizenship or for a thoroughgoing condition of cosmopolitan justice as Derrida assumes. This is because hospitality could be understood as the basic normative requirement necessary to establish an ethical condition for intersubjective communication at the global level, where discursive communication regarding the substance of a future condition of cosmopolitan justice is to be subjected to global public reason.
To respond to the charge of context-insensitivity, discourse ethics distinguishes justification discourses, which only require that we consider what is equally good for all, and subsequent application discourses, in which the perspective of concrete others must be adopted. This article argues that, despite its pragmatic attractiveness, the separation of justification and application neglects the co-constitutive role that applicability plays for the meaning of normativity. Norms that do not, in a machine-like fashion, produce their cases, cannot already contain their appropriateness to the cases that nonetheless alone justify the existence of norms in th first place. The higher-order norm of appropriateness that enters normativity with th dependence on applications is one that remains implicit, and impossible to determine in advance. Thus, the justification of a norm is always incomplete for conceptual and not merely empirical reasons, as fallibilism typically has it.
Typologies of political regimes in general and of democracy in particular proliferate in the literature. However, few efforts have been devoted to systematically scrutinizing the empirical relationship between the constitutive components of liberal democracy. In this article, we reassess the most promising such attempt, namely, the research agenda on "defective democracies." Doing so, we identify a more general problem, which we term the "radial delusion." This problem has to do with discarding the notion of a hierarchy among the attributes, thus creating empirically empty, diminished subtypes. We solve this by constructing an alternative typology that embraces well-established theoretical constructs and assigns referents to all relevant types. Furthermore, the empirical distribution virtually conforms to the hierarchical logic of a perfect simple order scale which justifies the construction of a democracy scale.
The present study examines the determinants of individual support for the European Union’s (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Using data from the 2005 Eurobarometer survey, I specified models that test whether gender, subjective economic evaluations of the European integration, and attachment to Europe affect how EU citizens view the CFSP and a possible rapid European military force. My findings show that there is no gender gap in EU foreign policy attitudes: women are not less pacific than men. Individuals base their evaluations of the EU on their experience of the economic integration and their feelings for Europe.
We test the commonly stated, but rarely investigated, assertion that making political institutions more transparent is an effective method for combating corruption. This assertion is confirmed with cross-national data, but also specified and qualified in several respects. Most importantly, we find that looking only at average effects gives a misleading picture of the significance of transparency for corruption. Just making information available will not prevent corruption if such conditions for publicity and accountability as education, media circulation and free and fair elections are weak. Furthermore, we find that transparency requirements that are implemented by the agent itself are less effective compared to non-agent controlled transparency institutions, such as a free press. One important implication of these findings is that reforms focusing on increasing transparency should be accompanied by measures for strengthening citizens’ capacity to act upon the available information if we are to see positive effects on corruption.
Through the examination of the interplay between the deepening process of European integration and the domestic politics of EU member states, this article seeks to show how the former affects the latter and ultimately leads to the reshaping of EU members’ preferences over time. The two cases examined here (agricultural policy preference shifts in France and Germany during the MacSharry reform negotiations) illustrate that European integration over time generates institutional feedback in which European policies become not just outputs but also major inputs of the political process of EU member states.The critical factor in this preference change is the domestic policy coalition shift, which is provoked by positive expectations regarding the national benefits to be gained from deeper integration.
Existing research on the political-economic determinants of coup d’état events has not explored the role of property rights protection in decreasing the likelihood of their global and regional incidence. Case studies confirm that the military institutions of the developing world began to represent elite class values that reacted adversely to state attempts at the redistribution of wealth and the expropriation of property after the 1970s. Thus far, no empirical analysis has tested the assertions made by these cases. Using Binary Times Series Cross-Section models from the period 1970—90, this article investigates the impact of the Contract Intensive Money ratio and International Country Risk Guide measures, which are tapped as property rights proxy variables, on decreasing the likelihood of a coup. The findings show that developing states that secure their property rights (as a function of these measures) are more likely to experience a decreased likelihood of a coup. The effect of property rights protection on the decreased likelihood of a coup shows statistical significance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The results hold true even when the global model is subjected to a sensitivity analysis where lagged coup events over a six-year period are included as a control variable.
The semantics of left and right provide an efficient heuristic to understand and organize political information. Most studies on the left—right schema have focused on established democracies, but the anchoring function that it serves for party systems may be particularly relevant in new democracies where partisanship has not taken root. This article investigates the heuristic value of left and right in East Asian democracies by examining survey data from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Data from Australia and New Zealand are also included for comparative purposes. These countries offer useful contrasts for hypotheses testing because they cover a wide range of democratic experiences and party-system stabilization. The following questions will be addressed: (1) Are publics in East Asian democracies familiar with the left—right dimension? (2) Can the publics locate the positions of political parties and consistently rank them on the left—right spectrum? (3) To what extent do the publics’ left—right self-placements affect their party preference? Left— right cognition, consistency of party rankings, and correlations between self-placements and attitudes toward parties for each of the six cases are presented and discussed in detail. Similarities and differences between older and newer democracies in patterns of cognition and party ranking are also discussed.
Persian Sufi and poet Muhammad Jalal al-Din Balkhi, 1207—73 (also known as Rumi) presents one of the most extensive and vigorous Islamic theories of toleration.1 This article examines Rumi’s theory by placing it in its historical context, and examining its various arguments. It suggests that toleration, not only as a policy but also as a language, preceded liberalism. It also provides evidence that Rumi’s defense is by far more inclusive than most early modern theories of toleration.
